Pam Cooper was deliciously glamorous and Major Derek Cooper sported a dramatic moustache

Pam Cooper was deliciously glamorous, and Major Derek Cooper sported a dramatic moustache of a kind that I had seen only in Second World War films. His soft voice betrayed a gentleness of character that contrasted with Pam’s greater determination and ferocity. (I never understood, apart from those vast blue eyes, why her family called her Frog.)Although 40 years my senior, the Coopers seemed like contemporaries. It continued through the massive Iranian earthquake of 1962 and took them back again and again to the Middle East to help the Palestinians.Michael Adams, the Guardian Middle East correspondent who founded the magazine Middle East International to redress the anti-Palestinian bias in the British press, introduced me to the Coopers in 1976. It began with Save the Children during the Hungarian revolution of 1956, when they went to the border at Andau and spent months rescuing refugees. But their real passion was bringing help to victims of war, disaster and revolution.

Not only did Princess Alice disapprove of Pam’s marriage to a divorced man, but her husband was colonel of Derek’s regiment. Pam moved out of Windsor Castle and Derek resigned his commission. They married in 1952 and moved to Dunlewy in County Donegal, where they lived until 1974.Both loved skiing and the Donegal “season” surrounding the American art-collector Henry McIlhenny and the painter Derek Hill. While there, she met the second love of her life – another war hero, Major Derek Cooper of the Life Guards. Cooper had served in France and Belgium, where he won the Military Cross. He had also served in Palestine, where he felt strongly the British betrayal of the Palestinian Arabs who had been driven out in 1948.His status as a divorced man put Pam into conflict with King George VI’s uncle by marriage the Earl of Athlone and his wife, Princess Alice.

Pat died from wounds in a raid on the Italians in the Western Desert at Christmas 1942.Her father-in-law was serving as Deputy Governor of Windsor Castle, and Pam Hore-Ruthven came to live there as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth, with her two young sons. When Pam Hore-Ruthven conceived her second son, Malise, she embarked on a hazardous journey dodging U-boats in the Atlantic to give birth in Ireland. Hore-Ruthven’s father would in 1945 earn back the ancient Scots title of Earl of Gowrie, abolished by James VI of Scotland after the famous “Gowrie conspiracy”, through his service as Governor-General of Australia. “In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far,” sang The Buggles in their hit “Video Killed The Radio Star”, the 1981 track that launched a phenomenon known as music television.

A quarter of a century later, MTV is an enterprise that reaches 400 million viewers in 167 countries through a roster of presenters who collectively speak 22 languages. Yet now that the MTV generation has grown up, the media landscape has changed in a way that would have the Buggles mastermind Trevor Horn wiping the lenses of his enormous spectacles in disbelief.
The music video most certainly has not killed the radio star – not when Terry Wogan can still command a UK audience of seven million on Radio 2, while music television cannot reach 500,000. Pam followed Pat to Cairo, where he left his grandfather’s old regiment to join the new SAS. Among her friends in Cairo were the travel writer Freya Stark and Jacqueline Lampson, young wife of the British ambassador. This was because I disliked organs and knew the choir would sing unaccompanied.The first of their two sons, Greysteil, was born soon after the Second World War began.