Her father, Rev (later Canon) Arthur Henry Fletcher, was a scion of a family of Church of Ireland clergymen from County Waterford; her mother was the former Alice Hodgson.
[1] She met Patrick Hore-Ruthven during a stag hunt on Exmoor in 1932; he had been rusticated from the University of Cambridge due to a youthful indiscretion – he had bitten a policeman's nose.
Leaving her infant son with her parents in Dublin, she followed her husband to Cairo, where she became friends with Freya Stark and Jacqueline Lampson, and worked in Intelligence with the Brotherhood of Freedom.
Her husband, by then ranked Temporary Major and serving with the newly created SAS, died in an Italian hospital in north Africa on 24 December 1942, from wounds sustained in a raid against a fuel dump near Tripoli.
He had served with the Second Household Combined Regiment in Europe during the Second World War, and then with the Life Guards in Palestine, where he won the Military Cross and developed strong feelings for the plight of the Palestinian Arabs.
[citation needed] The Coopers moved to Dunlewey, a village in the district of Gweedore (Gaoth Dobhair) in County Donegal in the west of Ulster, living there until 1974.
Both enjoyed skiing, and the County Donegal "season" centred on Glenveagh Castle, the summer residence of American art collector Henry McIlhenny, and Derek Hill.
Her granddaughter, Chloe Ruthvens filmed and released a personal documentary The Do-Gooders in 2012 where she revisited her grandmother's humanitarian work in Palestine & Jordan.