When in 1946 Margaret “Squeak” Dunlop met Murray MacLehose, who lived only six miles from her in Culroy, Ayrshire, she had only the slightest inkling of the path ahead in marriage to a political adviser, diplomat and the longest-serving governor of Hong Kong. She later joked that if she had written a memoir it would have been called Walking Three Feet Behind.
For Squeak, a shy person, her life would be largely spent hosting cocktail parties, dinners and attending engagements abroad. She was, however, of a breed that “rolled up one’s sleeves and got on with the job”. When chefs walked out on dinners, she took over; when a maid failed to appear for her husband’s all-male dinners in Belgravia, she plastered her hair back