These were turbulent times and her father, Major General Roy Urquhart, was away fighting in World War II. Aged six months she was taken by her 22 year-old mother, Pamela, back to Britain. The circuitous journey took two months as ships had to join a naval convoy out in the Atlantic for the final approach. Mother and baby sat on the deck wearing life jackets as ships were torpedoed around them; no one was allowed to stop to help the sinking victims.

Elspeth remembers little of the war, most of which was spent in relatively peaceful Devon with her great-grandmother. She does, however remember her father arriving back from the battle of Arnhem in September 1944 and a council of war being held on the lawn. She recalls an idyllic childhood. After the war her father was posted to Scotland and, when she was 10 years old, to Malaya. By now she had two younger sisters and a brother. Flag Staff house in Kuala Lumpur was permanently guarded by armed Ghurkha guards and everywhere they went they either travelled in armoured vehicles or were surrounded by tanks. The terrorist war in Malaya was known as the ‘emergency’ and Elspeth says she felt fear for the first time.

After two years the family moved to peaceful occupied Austria and her photo albums show a large sugar pink house beside Lake Woethersee, where the children skied, swam, played tennis and rode. Her father had an official train and there were trips to Vienna to watch the changing of the guard at Shoenbrunn Palace, between the French, Russians, Americans and British.

Elspeth was sent to a convent school in Devon near to her grandparents who had retired from India. She says she was never ambitious but that she became head girl and always came top of her class, which surprised her. At 16 she had passed sufficient A levels to qualify her for a place at Oxford.

‘Father was horrified at the idea.’ He said: ‘Nobody likes a bluestocking’ and she was packed off to finishing school to learn not only shorthand, typing and etiquette, but how to open fetes and polish the skills required to be ‘wife to a successful husband’.

Elspeth’s first job was at Tory Central office earning £8.50 a week and she remembers Rab Butler and Ian McLeod coming round and shaking hands with the staff – her first taste

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