Countess Mountbatten of Burma, godmother to the Prince of Wales

Born Patricia Mountbatten, the Countess was the Duke of Edinburgh’s first cousin and the daughter of Charles’s beloved “Uncle Louis”, actually his great-uncle, Earl Mountbatten.

Upon her death at 93, the prince said he would miss her presence “most dreadfully”.

The Countess’s father, her 14 year-old son Nicholas Knatchbull and her mother-in-law, the Dowager Lady Brabourne, were all murdered by the IRA in 1979 when their boat was blown up off the coast of Sligo.

The Countess, then known as Lady Brabourne, suffered serious injuries, but survived the blast, as did her husband, Lord Brabourne, and Nicholas’s twin brother, Timothy.

A local boat boy, 15 year-old Paul Maxwell, also died.

Her husband was the producer of films such as A Passage To India and Death On The Nile, and they had six surviving children.

The then Princess Elizabeth, her third cousin, was one of her bridesmaids at her wedding in 1946.

The Countess once recalled how she cried every morning on waking for about six months after the IRA bomb attack.

In a book by a bereavement charity, she referred to “the seemingly endless black tunnel” through which those left behind have to pass to reach “the light that truly does appear at the end, and which we eventually found ourselves”.

For more than 30 years she used her own personal experience of loss to help other bereaved parents, through her support of the charities Child Bereavement UK and Compassionate Friends.