Elizabeth Mantell was born in Africa in 1941. The family moved to MacDuff in 1952. She became a missionary nurse at the Mulanje Mission Hospital in Malawi, where she developed high quality nursing and midwifery between 1966 and 1971. She returned to Scotland but went back to Malawi where she was a nursing sister and nurse-tutor at Ekwendeni. Ill-health forced her to return to MacDuff in 1996 where she died two years later.