Alec Paterson died on Friday 7th November 1947 at his home in Chelsea. The cause of death, as certified by Dr R.L. Symes, was myocardial degeneration and arterio-sclerosis. He had just failed to reach his sixty-third birthday. His wife had been unstinting in her care of her ailing husband, and Barclay Baron assiduous in his attendance. He was at his friend's bedside in his last hours.

If there were indeed many mansions in His Father's house, then Alec's new task would surely be to turn one into an open borstal to train those imprisoned in Purgatory.

There was widespread sorrow at his passing, and an opportunity for obituarists to out-do themselves in apotheosizing ‘one of the greatest prison reformers’. He had become the third person in the Holy Trinity of penal reform, alongside John Howard and Elizabeth Fry. Once again, Maxwell eulogised the ‘practical idealist whose grasp of reality was as firm as his aspirations were lofty’, and to whose ‘imagination and inventive force almost all the schemes of penal reform which have been developed in the last twenty-five years’ can be attributed.