Yvonne, Lady Cochrane (née Sursock; 18 May 1922 – 31 August 2020) was a Lebanese philanthropist, advocate of the arts and member of the
Sursock family. She died on 31 August 2020, from injuries sustained in the Beirut explosion on 4 August 2020.
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Personal life
Yvonne Sursock was born on 18 May 1922, in Naples, Italy. She was the only daughter of Alfred Sursock, a Lebanese aristocrat, and Maria Theresa Serra di Cassano, the daughter of Francesco Serra, 7th Duke of Cassano. Her father owned thousands of tracts of land which included much of Jezreel Valley, the Western Galilee, Haifa, and Jaffa.
She studied at Les Oiseaux in Paris as well as in southern England, and was fluent in Italian, French, and Lebanese Arabic. In 1946, she married Desmond Cochrane. When her husband's father died, the couple inherited the Woodbrook estate outside of Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland, and moved into the home in 1952. They had three sons and a daughter. The couple separated in the 1960s, and Desmond moved to Cyprus where he died in 1979.
After her family sold much of the land to the newly formed Israel, she retained some properties and land in the territory and embarked on a long legal battle to have her assets released from Israel after the declaration of state. She was repeatedly turned down under the Absentees' Property Laws, but with added support from the then president of Lebanon, Camille Chamoun, in 1980 the court ruled in her favor and financial compensation for land around Jaffa and Haifa was agreed upon. At the time she was one of the richest people in Lebanon and was well known for her support of Pierre Gemayel's Kataeb Party.