He was baptised on 1 September 1914 at his parents' home[2] and his godparents were King George V (his maternal great-uncle and his father's paternal cousin), King Alfonso XIII of Spain (for whom Lord Farquhar, a Lord in Waiting to King George, stood proxy), Queen Alexandra (his maternal great-grandmother), the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (his paternal grandfather, for whom the Duke's equerry Major Malcolm Murray stood proxy), Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll (his great-aunt), and Princess Mary (his cousin).

On 14 July 1939, Lord Macduff was promoted to lieutenant[4] and was later assigned to Ottawa as aide-de-camp to his kinsman the Earl of Athlone, then Governor General of Canada; his own grandfather had held the same post during the First World War.

"[6] Theo Aronson, in his 1981 biography of Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, simply stated that the Duke "was found dead on the floor of his room at Rideau Hall on the morning of 26 April 1943.

"[7] The diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, King George VI's private secretary, published in 2006, recorded that both the regiment and Athlone had rejected him as incompetent,[8] and he fell out of a window when drunk and perished of hypothermia overnight.

[12] His first cousin, James Carnegie (23 September 1929 – 22 June 2015), succeeded as 3rd Duke of Fife and Earl of Macduff upon Princess Alexandra's death on 26 February 1959.