Cockburn, Patricia Evangeline Anne (1914–89), author and artist, was born 17 March 1914 at Derry House, Rosscarbery, Co. Cork, youngest among six children of Maj. John Bernard Arbuthnot , and his wife Olive, daughter of Sir Henry Arthur Blake (qv), colonial governor. The family was wealthy – Maj. Arbuthnot served in the Scots Guards during the first world war but otherwise lived a life of leisure, and his wife was heir to the Blake fortune after her parents cut her brothers out of their will. Although Patricia's grandmother, the redoubtable Edith Blake (qv), was a close friend of Anna Parnell (qv), her nationalism did not carry through to the next generation. Both Patricia's parents were conventional imperialists; Maj. Arbuthnot, a talented if dilettante painter and journalist, wrote (under the pseudonym ‘Sassenach’) a book, Arms and the Irishman (1875), which caricatured the Irish.
In 1916 the family moved into Lady Blake's house, Myrtle Grove, a beautiful Elizabethan mansion in Youghal and former home of Sir Walter Ralegh (qv). Two years later they moved to London, but left Patricia with her grandmother. She spent four years horse-riding and doing no lessons before moving to London for school – while there, she witnessed the murder of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson (qv). She hated school and missed the countryside; so, inspired by the example of Terence MacSwiney (qv), she stopped eating and won her point; she returned to Myrtle Grove with a governess. Morning lessons were interrupted by a daily glass of port with her grandmother. After the latter's death (1926), Patricia's parents moved into Myrtle Grove, but lived there only periodically. Patricia however remained throughout her childhood; aged fourteen, she stopped school lessons and concentrated on riding. However, a throw from a horse on her sixteenth birthday broke her back. As part of her convalescence she was sent to Algiers, where she moved into the house of Clare Sheridan (1895–1970), sculptor, novelist, courtesan, and daughter of the politician and failed entrepreneur Moreton Frewen (qv).
Returning to London, Patricia was launched as a debutante (1931) and attended the Westminster School of Art. Though in later life she was acclaimed for her pictures made with shells, she wrote of her student career that she soon discovered that she was no Michelangelo, so switched to a course in design. During this period she met Arthur Byron, a Lloyds underwriter and cousin of Robert Byron, the writer and historian. They married 10 October 1933, and lived briefly in Clarendon Place, Bayswater, before embarking on a world tour. On their return to London, Patricia gave birth (1936) to a son, Darrell, but soon grew restless. Accepting a brief from the Royal Geographical Society to compile an etymological report on the dialects of central Africa, she left her son with her parents, and went with her husband on a prolonged trip to the Congo, where she met different tribes and constructed a language map. Her linguistic skills were limited – her assets in the task were good powers of observation and marked practicality.
Back in London, she prepared to join her son in Myrtle Grove, but before her arrival Darrell had an accident, resulting in blood poisoning. Grief over his death and guilt for leaving him cast her into depression, partially alleviated by a commission in early 1939 from the Evening Standard for a series of articles on Ruthenia, which had just declared independence from Czechoslovakia. In London, her marriage over, she met and fell in love with the radical left-wing journalist and humorist Claud Cockburn (1904–81). Her parents, appalled by Cockburn's politics and private life – he had an illegitimate daughter – cut Patricia off when she married him in 1940. There was a family tradition of parental opposition to marriages – Lady Blake had been cut off, and had in her turn cut off a son. When Patricia became pregnant, her parents relented and resumed contact, but it is unclear whether they reinstated her allowance. From the time of her marriage to Claud she was financially strapped; a reversal in fortune from her wealthy formative years, but a challenge she met with resilience and humour. Her financially chaotic husband delighted in his capable wife, while her son Patrick also termed practicality the key to his mother's character.
For six weeks in 1945 Patricia edited her husband's seminal, avant-garde newspaper The Week while he was abroad. By 1947 she was sick of London and wished to return to Cork, where her parents and a brother had settled. After a period living in Myrtle Grove, the Cockburns found a nearby Georgian house, Brook Lodge, which they rented at a nominal sum as it was almost derelict. Patricia built a cesspit, created gardens, and schooled ponies, which she bought from travellers and sold on to England. In 1956 the family had a near brush with tragedy – a polio epidemic, the last of its kind in western Europe, attacked her two youngest sons. The elder escaped without lasting effect, the younger, Patrick, was left with a limp and was fortunate not to suffer greater disability. In his memoirs, Patrick, though essentially forgiving, expresses astonishment at his parents’ decision to return the family from the safety of London to Cork that summer. However, disability did not stand in his way; he followed his parents and both brothers into journalism, becoming foreign correspondent with the Financial Times and then with the London Independent.
Patricia developed a late career as artist. She made shell pictures – a fashionable practice in the eighteenth century but since obsolete – that so impressed her friends Desmond Guinness and Norah McGuinness (qv) that she turned professional and had exhibitions in Ireland and New York. In 1980, the lease on Brook Lodge up, she and Claud bought a smaller house in Ardmore, Co. Waterford, six miles from Youghal, but Claud died the following year. Patricia lived the rest of her life in Ardmore, becoming president of the local Irish Countrywomen's Association (ICA), and publishing in 1985 her memoirs, Figure of eight. This was her second book; the first, The years of The Week (1968), about her husband's newspaper, suffered in comparison to Claud's treatment of the same subject. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer wrote (23 May 1968) that, though obviously a talented journalist, she could not rival her husband's rococo fantasy. She did better with Figure of eight; Dervla Murphy in the TLS (30 Aug. 1985) saluted her for her ‘buccaneering ingenuity, uncommon fortitude, and surprising patience’. She died in Mercy hospital, Cork city, on 6 October 1989, and was survived by her three sons.