Rachel, Lady MacRobert
Lady MacRobert's sons all pre-deceased her: the eldest in a flying accident in 1938, and the other two died in action during the Second World War serving with the Royal Air Force.
To commemorate her sons, Rachel paid for a Short Stirling bomber named "MacRobert's Reply", and four Hawker Hurricanes.
[10] Fanny's preference for travelling over the responsibilities of motherhood intensified a few months after the funeral[10] and Rachel was despatched to England to be educated at The Cheltenham Ladies' College.
[11] After Cheltenham, Rachel attended Royal Holloway College, an institution founded to provide a university education for women.
[11] In 1911 she graduated with a second class Honours degree in geology having spent a year, 1907 until 1908, undertaking a special study of the subject at the University of Edinburgh.
[15] Thirty years older than Rachel, he was born in 1854; when they met he was a widower who had already made a significant fortune building up woollen mills in Cawnpore, or Kanpur as it is now known,[15] where he had worked since early 1884.
[16] MacRobert received a knighthood in the New Year's Honours list in 1910 by which time the pair had an established relationship; Rachel refused to attend the ceremony with him at Buckingham Palace declaring: "I will bow to no man.
[22] Her husband devoted most of his time continuing to build his conglomerate in India but eventually Rachel would not live there and referred to it as "that nasty land".
[22] She soon predominantly divided her time between her studies, European travel and managing the estate at Tarland in Aberdeenshire,[23] which Sir Alexander had acquired in 1905[24] to complement the small farm he bought nearby in 1888.
[15] Legal difficulties arose over the settlement of Sir Alexander's will due to unrest in India combined with a lengthy acrimonious disagreement with tax inspectors in the UK.
[40] The three boys did not enjoy robust health;[41] this led to Rachel founding a herd of Friesian dairy cattle at Douneside to produce better quality milk for them.
