Mary, who was born in 1925, was the only daughter of Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlings and his wife Loveday, of Lancarfe, near Bodmin in Cornwall. She came to Downe House in 1938, having returned with her family from two years in Japan where her father had served as Naval Attache at the Embassy in Tokyo.  She was at the school until the summer of 1943;  she was in the shooting teasm, played lacrosse for the 1st team and cricket for the 1st XI, and received colours for dancing.  In her final year she was a senior and head girl. 

On leaving Downe House Mary volunteered to join the Wrens (WRNS) but, to her dismay and despite her father's unsuccessful intervention, she had been selected by ballot to be a 'Bevin girl', the much less well-known female equivalent of the Bevin boys, who were drafted into the mines in place of military service. Mary was assigned to making parachutes, and lived for the remainder of the war above its premises in the Tottenham Court Road.  She always said it was perhaps the most important part of her education!  

After the war she began a course at Bristol University, but her studies were abandoned when she met former Battle of Britain pilot John Beazley D.F.C., the son of His Honour Sir Hugh Beazley (Common Serjeant of London).  Mary and John were married in the King's Chapel of the Savoy in 1947, the start of a devoted union that lasted 64 years until John's death in 2011. 

After the war John joined the Colonial Service, and for ten years he and Mary were in Nigeria, where John became a Senior Resident.  After Nigeria was granted its independence they returned to the UK, and  took up residence in Hertfordshire, where John's family had lived for five generations.  However, they re-established together a close link with Cornwall, acquiring Clerkenwater Lodge, with sixty acres of beautiful and ancient woodlands , which had formerly been part of the Lancarfe estate on the edge of Bodmin Moor.  

Mary took an active part in local affairs in Hertfordshire, serving for many years as a magistrate and chairman of the juvenile court;  on her retirement she was appointed M.B.E. 

Mary had three children and five grandchildren. Her elder son Richard is currently Vice Lieutenant of Hertfordhire.  She died in January 2013 aged 87,  Her funeral took place the following month at St Petroc's Priory Church in Bodmin, where Mary had been a bellringer at the end of the war and a muffled peal of its bells was rung in her memory. She is buried with John's ashes in the Churchyard at Helland, the hamlet close to Clerkenwater.  

John Pattisson (Mary’s nephew) 

June 2013