Lady Carrington

She was born Iona McClean on March 19 1920, younger daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Francis Kennedy McClean, AFC, who learned to fly with the Wright Brothers, held flying licence No 21, and founded the Fleet Air Arm. She was educated at Owlstone Croft School, Cambridgeshire (now Hatherop Castle School in Gloucestershire), and in the early years of the Second World War worked as a translator.

She married Lord Carrington, who had succeeded to his peerage in 1938 and was serving with the Grenadier Guards, at the Guards Chapel on April 25 1942. Their honeymoon at the Lygon Arms, Broadway, almost bankrupted the groom: accommodation, food and wine cost him £19.10s.

Their first home was in part of his battalion's butcher's shop, in a semi-detached house on the outskirts of Warminster.

Wartime restrictions meant that it was often difficult to be together, and on one occasion Iona managed to get into her husband's billet at Hove by passing herself off as the wife of a local taxi driver.

Iona Carrington went on to give her husband what he called "untiring support" throughout his long and distinguished career, which included a spell as British High Commissioner in Australia (1956-59) and culminated in his service as Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher (1979-82).

On his many overseas tours, his wife often travelled with him, invariably keeping a diary.

Lord Carrington later reflected: "The usefulness of being able to share human impressions with the person one knows best is beyond price... There is also the more selfish point that on travels which can be extraordinarily tiring and sometimes exasperating, the presence of one's partner provides an essential safety valve, reassurance and prop. Iona was all this and more. She also had exceptional powers of observation."

In 1943 the Carringtons took over part of the Manor House, Bledlow, in Buckinghamshire, an almost derelict house on the family's estate, half of which was then occupied by a tenant and half by evacuees. (The village of Bledlow was later the setting for some of the episodes of the television series Midsomer Murders). They set about renovating the house, finally moving in in 1946.

Lady Carrington was especially fond of the garden which she and her husband created at Bledlow, where she was invariably deep in some gardening book or catalogue. In the late 1960s, during a period when Lord Carrington was Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, a fire, which started in an old barn, devastated part of the grounds, giving them an opportunity to design and redevelop a garden which eventually covered some 10 acres. Wooden bridges were constructed to span the ponds, which were fed by springs that in turn flowed into the river Lyde.

"My wife," Lord Carrington always said, "is the plantswoman," adding (in a reference to her encyclopedic knowledge of botanical names): "She doesn't really talk English, she talks Latin."

The Carringtons, who had a son and two daughters, celebrated their golden wedding in 1992 with a special private performance in London of one of their favourite operas, Donizetti's L'Elisir d'amore, which is about the triumph of love.

Lady Carrington, a woman of great charm who invariably wore a welcoming smile, died on June 7, the day after her husband's ninetieth birthday.

Published June 24 2009