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 in 1940 Lieutenant Alan Phipps, who — after serving with distinction on the Arctic Convoys and in the Mediterranean — was killed ashore at Leros in 1943, leaving his wife a widow at 23 with two children. 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. After serving as MP for Lancaster from 1941, Maclean was made a baronet in 1957, in turn making his wife Lady Maclean. Maclean then served as MP for Bute and North Ayrshire from 1959 until the February 1974 general election.