 Whitelaw was born at the family home, "Monklands", on Thurlow Road in Nairn in northeast Scotland.He never knew his father, William Alexander Whitelaw, born 1892, a member of a Scottish family of the landed gentry, who died in 1919 after service in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in the First World War, when his son was still a baby.Whitelaw was raised by his mother, Helen (daughter of Major-General Francis Russell, of Aden), a local councillor in Nairn, and paternal grandfather, William Whitelaw (1868–1946), of Gartshore, Dunbartonshire, an Old Harrovian and alumnus of Trinity College, Cambridge, landowner, MP for Perth 1892–1895, and chairman of the London and North-Eastern Railway Company.