 Veronica Nell Fraser was born in London on 2 December 1920, the fourth of five children of the 16th Lord Lovat.After service in a mobile ambulance unit in France at the start of the Second World War, she met and married Lt. Alan Phipps in 1940, who after serving with distinction on the Arctic Convoys and in the Mediterranean was killed ashore at Leros in 1943.In 1946 she married Fitzroy Maclean, who had served as an officer with her cousin David Stirling in North Africa at the foundation of the SAS.