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No one who met Mary Waldegrave at any stage of her life would doubt being in the presence of an unusual character. The looks, the limp, the enchanting smile and the ready laughter were striking and rare.
She was born on Christmas Day 1909, the eldest of four daughters of Lt- Col Arthur Grenfell by his second wife, Hilda, daughter of General Sir Neville Lyttelton. She competed easily with the demands of a beautiful mother and of her three sisters, Mrs Patrick Lort-Phillips, Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, and the late Lady Ballantrae. The limp she owed to an attack of poliomyelitis in her teens. She never allowed it to handicap her, though it gave her considerable pain in her last years.
In 1928 she won a history scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford, from St Paul's Girls' School, but disappointed her tutors by cutting short her academic career in order to marry Geoffrey Waldegrave in 1930, six years before he inherited the title of Earl Waldegrave. She gave him five daughters, and in the Second World War, when their house in Somerset was requisitioned for troops, made the difficult decision to take them to Canada. Then she added a son to their family, James, the present Earl, in 1940 and after their return to England, in 1946, a second son, William, the Tory minister. She was happy to end her exile before the war ended, and to...