HAD SHE not found herself, as she put it in her autobiography, “stranded with a tall, slim Life Guards officer whose pale unhappy face stood out against the mirthful figures surrounding us”, the Honourable Mrs Patrick Hore-Ruthven might have passed her life as a country socialite with a passionate interest in the arts and travel. As a 39-year-old war widow with two young sons, she was scarcely seeking a life of sacrifice and deprivation, but the Life Guards officer danced well at the Galway Blazers Hunt Ball where they met. They married, eventually, and circumstances drew them into the harsh world of bringing aid to refugees.

Her second husband was Major Derek Cooper, who had served with the 2nd Household Cavalry Regiment in north-west Europe and Palestine, where he won the Military Cross. Profoundly disturbed by what he had seen in Palestine, he retained the haunting memory of the Irgun Zwai Leumi loudspeakers stridently warning the Arabs they were driving out of Jaffa, “Get out with the British. Remember Deir Yassin”, referring to the village where, a month earlier, the population had been massacred as an example to those who resisted Israeli seizure of Arab land.

Derek Cooper’s falling in love with the beautiful Mrs Hore-Ruthven, while he was still married to someone else, cast a cloud over his future in the Life Guards. All might have been dealt with sympathetically had he not lost patience and resigned his commission. Once he was divorced, they married and set up home in Donegal.

Seldom can a couple who might have lived a quiet life in the countryside they loved have given more of themselves for the sake of others. Although the Anglo-French intervention at Suez put the Middle East on centre stage in 1956, the Hungarian uprising provided the inspiration for them to leave Ireland for the first time. The stream of humanity pouring into Austria from Hungary convinced them that they must do something, so they bought a long-wheelbase Land Rover and set out under the auspices of Save the Children Fund for the Burgenland frontier region and spent the winter helping to ferry refugees across the Danube frontier at night. Their next mission, in the spring of 1960, was to northern Jordan, where the SCF was having immense difficulty tending the thousands of Palestinian Arabs in the refugee camps around Irbid. With conditions, at best, rudimentary, the Coopers administered the Irbid district clinics for more than 18 months until December 1961.

When the Iran earthquake of September 1, 1962, killed more than 12,000 people and made 22,000 homeless, the Coopers took charge of the SCF involvement until the following February. While her husband administered the distribution of aid, she pushed her way into Iranian government offices, demanding the co-operation essential to their cause. She found that her smile was her most persuasive ally. Iranian officials appeared to trust a humorist and they appreciated the courtesy she showed in her humanitarian work.

In 1975 she and her husband were asked to carry out a survey of Palestine refugee conditions for the International Committee for Palestine Human Rights. Their persistence led to conflict with the Israeli authorities and they were deliberately separated in a police headquarters while he was interrogated at length.

Whatever the tribulations endured by the Coopers to bring aid to refugees, they were as nothing compared with the hazards encountered after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In June 1982 they went to Beirut as the representatives of Oxfam. By then she was aged 72 and he 70, so it might have been thought they had already done all that could reasonably be asked of them. However, they abandoned their agreeable life in Ireland and became involved in the saving of lives in their struggle to organise the survival of those under immediate threat.

On August 10 Pamela Cooper led a women’s march of the International League of People’s Rights to the green line dividing the city, where a crossing point had been closed by the Israeli army. At the barrier she read out the declaration of the women of West Beirut concluding: “More than two-thirds of the casualties [of the civil war] are women and children. We beg women around the world to use their influence to stop this crime and call for an end to the siege.”

Shortly afterwards exhaustion obliged the couple to leave Beirut, but they remained passionate supporters of the Palestinian Arab cause, in particular during the subsequent Intifada. In 1995, long after they were no longer able make any personal contribution, they returned to Israel to see how matters stood. After enjoying a quiet lunch in Bethlehem with an Arab veteran of the British Mandate, Derek Cooper reflected: “We gave away the freehold when we only had a leasehold.”

Pamela Margaret Fletcher was the daughter of Canon A. H. Fletcher. She was born in Chelsea, but her education at Guildford High School was interrupted when, for the sake of his health, her father was sent to take over two English churches at San Remo.

An almost impossibly glamorous young woman, with dazzling blue eyes, she met her future husband, the Honourable Patrick Hore-Ruthven, son and heir of the Earl of Gowrie, when the pair of them were stag-hunting on Exmoor. He was a wild young man who had just been sent down from Cambridge. The attraction, she recalled in her memoir A Cloud of Forgetting, which appeared in 1993, was instant. “We fell for each other straightaway, in what I think is the best way to marry someone — a recognition.”

She was in many ways unsuitable — she had no money. But nor did he, and on January 4, 1939, they were married in Westminster Abbey. Their first son Alex (Grey) was born that November.

As soon as she could, she left him, aged three months, with his Irish grandparents near Dublin to join her husband in Cairo. There, bored by the spit-and-polish routines of normal soldiering, he sought to join the SAS. By that time she had become pregnant with her second child, which meant she was immediately, in accordance with military regulations, shipped home to give birth.

Her husband was killed in action, dying of wounds sustained on a raid on an Italian petrol dump in the Western Desert in December 1942. Shortly afterwards, the Queen offered her an appointment as a Lady-in-Waiting and a house in Windsor for herself and two sons.

After the war, she found it difficult to settle down, and travelled to Italy with her children, driving across a war torn Europe with them in a battered Bedford tilly van. Later they recalled her as an impossibly beautiful mother visiting at prep school, and turning heads. But in 1949 she met her future second husband, thereafter to embark on a very different sort of life.

Ultimately she and he sold their property in Ireland, living first in Wales until they moved into the Country House Association Pyt House near Tisbury, and then to a flat in the village.

She is survived by her second husband, whom she married in 1952, and by the two sons of her first marriage, the elder of whom is the present Earl of Gowrie.

Pamela Cooper, worker for the cause of refugees, was born on October 24, 1910. She died on July 13, 2006, aged 95.