Pandora: told her father-in-law exactly what she thought.

THREE strong women stood by the Maxwell brothers through the miserable years following their father's death.

The long-running legal proceedings which followed the collapse of Robert Maxwell's media empire put a huge strain on the marriages of sons and close aides Kevin and Ian.

In the case of Ian Maxwell and his wife Laura, that strain was finally to prove too much for the marriage.

The tone for the second generation of Maxwell wives was set by Robert Maxwell's widow Elizabeth. The elegant, intelligent matriarch's message to her daughters-in-law was to be loyal, and be brave.

Neither Kevin's wife, Pandora, nor Ian's wife, Laura, could have known what they were getting themselves into when they wed the sons of the founder of what appeared to be one of the world's richest family firms.

Ian married blonde Laura Marie Plumb, who comes from a wealthy Chicago family, on his 35th birthday.

The former fashion model, described by her father as ``a sweet and sensitive person'', overcame any temptation to flee back to the United States to escape the ghastly saga of the collapsed Maxwell empire.

The forthright Pandora entered media folklore by telling early-morning visitors to her home - ``Piss off! We don't get up till 7.30'' - only to find they were from the Serious Fraud Office, not the journalists she thought them to be.

Neither did she hold back from saying exactly what she thought to her father-in-law.

When the workaholic tycoon kept his son at the office night after night, Pandora, herself a former accountant, would ring up and say: ``Tell Kevin, if he doesn't come home now, we won't be here when he gets back.'' The two wives were close friends, supporters for each other as well as their men.

On the day police arrested their husbands, it all became too much for Laura who, trailed by photographers and reporters, wept tears of shock and strain. It was Pandora who went to her aid.

Laura Marie Plumb met Ian Maxwell in London when she was training to set up a London bureau for a TV cable channel.

In June, six months after Ian was cleared at his fraud trial and the SFO announced it was dropping all further charges against him, it emerged that the couple had separated.

Kevin's wife, who described herself as ``just an ordinary housewife'', had to cope for a long time with the possibility that she would be raising five children on her own for a number of years.

Pandora Warnford-Davis, the daughter of a manufacturer of car number plates and snooker balls, took Kevin's background of Heathfield, Eton, and Oxford in her stride.

Robert Maxwell quickly realised his son was involved with someone who could not be browbeaten.

Pandora's refusal to be bulldozed or manipulated fanned his fierce objections to the marriage and led to father firing son - though Kevin was lured back to the family's corporate fold less than a year later.