[3][4][5] She grew up at the family seats at Oxenfoord and at Lochinch Castle, a 75,000-acre estate in Wigtownshire—where she learned to drive at age 12—as well as in London, where her father represented Wigtownshire as an MP (1906–14).
[1][7][8] At age 18, Lady Jean insisted on working and became part of the editorial staff at the weekly Queen magazine—"a fairly racy thing to do" at the time for a teenager of her background.
[11] She frequently accompanied the Queen Mother to private dinner parties until 1994, when declining health necessitated her retirement from court life and a move into a nursing home in Edinburgh.
[1][2] On 10 October 1931, she married Lt-Col. Arthur Niall Talbot Rankin (1904–1965), an ornithological photographer and writer who was a Scots Guards officer in the Emergency Reserve.
In 1937, they purchased the 1,900-acre Treshnish estate in Calgary on the Isle of Mull, which included a 320-acre chain of uninhabited islands on which they pursued their interest in birds, establishing a collection of rare geese and ducks.