Iain Macleod
Macleod met Evelyn Hester Mason, "née" Blois, (1915–1999) in September 1939 whilst he was waiting to be called up for army service and she interviewed him for a job as an ambulance driver. After her first husband was killed in the war, they married on 25 January 1941. The Macleods had a son and a daughter, Torquil and Diana, who were born in 1942 and 1944 respectively. They had a somewhat stormy marriage in which they retained a strong bond despite Macleod conducting a number of what his biographer describes as "romances" with other women (he quotes love letters written by Macleod but does not specifically say they went as far as sexual affairs). As was common for MPs' wives of the era, Eve looked after constituency matters whilst her husband concentrated on his career at Westminster.
Iain Macleod
Contemporaries began to record him saying that autumn that he planned to enter politics and become prime minister. He continued to serve in France and the Low Countries until November 1944 when the 50th Division was, due to a highly critical shortage of manpower in the British Army at this stage of the war, ordered to return to Yorkshire, to be reconstituted as a training division. Macleod ended the war as a major.