Stevan Kosta Pavlowitch was born in Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 7 September 1933,[3][4] into a well-known Serbian family of diplomats from the Kingdom of Serbia and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.[2] His father Kosta St. Pavlović was a diplomat, who was personal secretary of Vojislav Marinković, the Yugoslav Foreign Minister;[5] his grandfather, also named Stevan K. Pavlović, was an influential lawyer, interpreter and diplomat who had served with the Ministry of Foreign affairs, was a member of the Yugoslav delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919–1920, and had received the Legion of Honour.[1] His great-grandfather Kosta Pavlović was the first mayor of Niš and a member of the Liberal Party.[6]
Pavlowitch began his schooling in Bucharest, where his father was stationed as a diplomat.[7] Following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the family followed the Yugoslav royal government to the United Kingdom[8] where his father was appointed chief of the Cabinet of the Prime Ministers Dušan Simović, Slobodan Jovanović[a] and Miloš Trifunović then in 1943 First Secretary of the Yugoslav Embassy.[7] After the war Pavlowitch's father completed postgraduate magisterial studies at the University of Cambridge where he became in 1961, permanent member of the Faculty for Contemporary and Medieval Languages and permanent member of the Regent House of the University of Cambridge,[6][8]
^Jovanović was cousins with Pavlowitch's father.[9] Jovanović and Pavlowitch's family remained friends in exile. When Jovanović died in December 1958, he was buried on the Pavlowitch family's burial plot in London.[10]