Daška Marija Ivanović-Banac Kennedy McLean was a British woman of Serbo-Croatian descent who made headlines in Europe and America when she made her 18-year-old daughter a ward of the court in the United Kingdom after she eloped with her fiancé in 1957.
Background
Ivanović (pronounced "Ivanovich") was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary (present-day Croatia) on 26 January 1915, the daughter of Doctor Ivan Rikard Ivanović, one of the founders of the National Progressive Party (NNS) and a deputy in Croatia"s Sabor (Assembly), who had helped to form the state in 1918.
Career
Daška"s mother, Milica Popović, was a sister of Dušan Popović, a leading Serb politician in the ruling Croato-Serb Coalition. Her brother, Vane Ivanović, was the Consul General of Monaco. As a young woman she was considered to be one of the loveliest of Yugoslavia"s society girls and was known locally as "The Pearl of Dubrovnik."
Geoffrey Kennedy came from a leading family of civil and electrical engineers and was the son of Sir John Macfarlane Kennedy, and grandson of Sir Alexander Blackie William Kennedy.
The marriage ended in divorce after a decade.
At the end of the war he served in the Consulate in Sinkiang in China for a while as military adviser before joining MI6 to work on operations against Enver Hoxha. In 1954 he became the Member of Parliament for Inverness, which he represented for a decade.
He died in 1986. Daška McLean was widowed in 1986 and died in London, England in 2004 at age 89.