The Dukes (31 page)

The Duke would have agreed with his ancestor Lord William Russell, who in 1839 wrote: "I sometimes see much weakness and hypocrisy in those who are honoured, and such firmness and good­ness in those who are reviled, that I lose all respect for human judgement."
¹⁸
Hastings was reviled, and he certainly had no respect for human judgement. He knew that he was considered a heretic and a crank, but took comfort in the knowledge that he was right and everyone else was wrong. It is a comfort which has sustained the Russells for centuries, making political leaders of some, and martyrs of others.

His deep suspicion of human motives and his fear that everyone was intent upon his humiliation ultimately led Duke Hastings into the very humiliation which he wanted most to avoid. Obstinacy, stubbornness, vanity and self-righteousness were to blame for his dis­tasteful court case in
1935,
when his estranged wife petitioned him for restitution of conjugal rights. She claimed that he had deserted her. He admitted that he had left her, but maintained that he was justified in refusing to cohabit with her, as she had displayed an "intimate and clandestine affection" for the children's tutor, Mr Cecil Squire. (There were three children.) It was typical of Hastings that he accused his wife not of adultery, but, in effect, of being dis­loyal and unkind to him. He and his wife, who were Marquess and Marchioness of Tavistock at this time, had lived in the same house with Mr Squire for some years. Their eldest son, Ian, was now a teenager. Squire had been an old acquaintance of the Marquess, and it was he who had introduced him into the family home. At first, they lived together quite well, but then Squire's influence over Lady Tavistock began to irk Lord Tavistock, and aroused his jealousy. Lady Tavistock was converted by Squire to Anglo-Catholicism, in direct opposition to her husband's wishes. Struggling hard to be reasonable, he accepted this as an expression of justifiable religious independence. Then Squire objected to some of Tavistock's weird friends (and he was surrounded by the most unscrupulous sycophants who exploited his shortcomings and flattered his misanthropy by loudly asserting that he was right and wise to distrust human duplicity; they told him what he most wanted to hear). Squire had gone so far as to refuse entry to the house to some of these objection­able people, who had been invited by Tavistock himself. Tavistock never smoked or drank, and would not allow tobacco or alcohol into the house; Squire introduced them both, further irritating the long- suffering Marquess.

Poor Hastings was certainly difficult to handle. His colossal sense of Christian duty, his piety and self-pity, were like the rock of Sisyphus to his family. His wife was not allowed pretty clothes because they were "worldly". To have a meal with him was an ordeal: as he would not allow smoke or drink, could not indulge in small talk, had no sense of humour, the hours dragged by in long silences interrupted by pious utterances. It is little wonder that Mr Squire took pity on the deprived Marchioness and strove to usher some more human lightness and cheerfulness into the house. But it is also no surprise that the deeply vulnerable Hastings should become more and more tetchy as his once adoring wife was taken from him to obey the counsel of another. He felt hurt and betrayed. Life between them became impossible. He received anonymous letters suggesting that his wife was having an affair with Squire, and that he was being made a fool of. He said in court that she refused him intercourse. Eventu­ally, he left her.

Letters from Lord Tavistock to his wife and to Squire were read out in court. He conquered his jealousy when writing to Squire, and forced himself to be rational and calm. He enjoyed self-sacrifice. But his letter to his wife was less well controlled; he was obviously very hurt, lonely, and abandoned. It is a pathetic letter, crying out for gentleness. In court, Lady Tavistock refused to cease her friendship with Squire, a condition for the return of her husband, and her petition was dismissed. Hastings had won, but at what cost to his emotions. He was thereafter embittered and disillusioned. The black despair which ran through all his public speeches and led ultimately to his death was fuelled by this public betrayal, itself made inevitable by his quirky personality. The hearing had taken six days.
¹⁹

Much later, his son wrote to him: "Underneath your Christian cloak lies a small, narrow, mean mind, incapable of forgiveness, generosity or feeling."
²⁰
This is itself an ungenerous assessment. Poor "Spinach" was a tortured introspective misfit. His grandson, the present Lord Tavistock, has fond memories of his impulsive, impres­sive generosity towards children.

The Russells' desire to protect themselves from enemies, usually near rather than far, has engendered a family propensity towards hypochondria. When trouble brews, the first remedy of a Russell is to fall ill. The 7th Duke (1788-1861) was doing it all the time. His brother wrote in 1823 : ". . . as for Tavistock it is shocking to see him, he is a perfect skeleton, I never saw a man so altered in my life," and then adds, significantly, "Yeats thinks it is disordered functions - nothing organic."
²¹
Nowadays, we might make the same diagnosis with a different word - psychosomatic.

His son, the 8th Duke (1809-1872), was such a hypochondriac that he cloistered himself away from the world, refusing all contact, and hardly ever went out of the house. It has already been noted that the last years of his life were so heavily protected that no one saw him. His cousin, Hastings 9th Duke of Bedford (1819-1891), actually shot himself in a fit of depression over a bout of pneumonia; the inquest recorded a verdict that he killed himself while "temporarily insane".
²²

His namesake, Hastings 12th Duke of Bedford, once again repre­sents the extreme point to which this obsession with disease may lead. Woburn Abbey was permanently sprayed with a germ-killer during his dukedom, so that it smelled antiseptic. His fear of contamination by germs had some risible results. He changed his underclothes three times a day, and carried a huge bottle of T.C.P. tablets in his pocket; whenever anyone coughed or sneezed he immediately sucked a lozenge.
²³
His mother, Mary Duchess of Bedford, was so fascinated by disease that she became nurse and surgeon, and founded a hospital at Woburn, where she spent most of her waking hours. She would eagerly take visitors to see her latest "case".

So withdrawn have the Russells been from affectionate human contact that they have tended to look to animals for a more trust­worthy response. Animals do not let you down, they do not betray or use you, they are not responsible for the evil which pervades the world, they will not tell you your faults or find you wanting; in short, they are safer. Duke Hastings was constantly writing letters to news­papers on such abstruse subjects as the house fly, the caterpillar, moles, or pigeons; he collected spiders; he was said to recognise by sight every one of the 300 deer at Woburn with whom he communed on long solitary walks, and he formed close ties with the golden carp whom he amused regularly.
²⁴
When disgusted with human treachery, or what he saw as blind human adhesion to mistaken concepts, Hastings would repair to his animals; he would trust any creature more readily than he would a man. Nor was this a mere dilettante interest; he was an accomplished writer in the fields of animal and insect welfare. His father, Duke Herbrand, loved and cherished his herd of rare deer at Woburn, and was President of the Royal Zoo­logical Society. Meetings of the Society were the only events which would tempt him to leave Woburn, where he, too, lived secluded and remote from the hustle and danger of human contact. The present Duke has made Woburn into one of the country's most famous safari parks, in which he shows an interest which cannot be merely commercial. He, too, is a Russell.

After the war, Hastings the 12th Duke withdrew more and more from the public eye, whose gaze he never enjoyed anyway, and betook himself to his lonely retreat at Endsleigh, the family property in Devon. There he communed with his animals and insects, and occasionally went for an early-morning shoot. "Spinach" had been fond from childhood of shooting, as had all his ancestors, and the paradox of killing creatures whom he professed to love did not appear to trouble him. He was an expert shot. One autumn morning in 1953 he went for his usual shoot and did not return. The next day he was found dead, lying in thick undergrowth with a 12-bore shotgun across his chest. The safety-catch was in the firing position, and the right barrel had been fired. At the inquest, the family solicitor, Connolly Gage, suggested that the Duke must have been sitting cross-legged waiting for something, have pulled the gun towards him, caught the trigger on some branches and been unable to prevent its firing. This hypothesis was heard, and a verdict of acci­dental death was returned. It is, to say the very least, improbable, and few people would now accept it.

The Duke was known to be depressed. The few friends in whom he had placed his trust, against the vociferous advice of everyone else, were revealed to be unworthy. His life had been a succession of disillusionments, as the fundamental duplicity of human kind impressed itself upon his sensitive soul. His marriage had been a disaster, his son a disappointment. In true Russell style, he had severed all connection with this son, save for the occasional distant letter. Even his religion ceased to be a solace. He was not the sort of man to shoot himself by accident, even supposing he could have done so in a sitting position. Suicide must remain the most logical and likely verdict.

Had he lived another eleven weeks, the seven-year term necessary to prevent prohibitive death duties devolving upon his unfortunate son would have expired. He cannot have been ignorant of this important fact, though his son thinks he simply miscalculated and got his dates wrong; he killed himself thinking that all arrangements were in order. He was vague about such matters anyway. On the other hand, I have heard it said in other ducal families that he left a note indicating spite as his motive.

The 12th Duke of Bedford was the last in the family to meet with a violent end, although the family history is not wanting in prece­dents. His daughter-in-law, the Marchioness of Tavistock (first wife of the present Duke before he succeeded to the dukedom), died as the result of an overdose of sodium amatol tablets, self-administered, in 1945. Her husband testified that she had not slept properly for ten days. An open verdict was recorded.
²⁵

The 12th Duke's mother, Mary Duchess of Bedford, also died in mysterious circumstances. She was an unconventional duchess, dis­carding the family jewels early in her married life to plunge into a life of active nursing. She established, staffed and ran a cottage hospital at Woburn, and turned it into a war hospital in 1914, with the grudging financial support of her strange and brooding husband. She became a skilled radiologist and sometimes surgeon as well as nurse, noting with satisfaction in her diary: "I here place on record that I today amputated a toe and excised a painful scar in the sole of the foot for Leslie Coop, of Handsworth, Birmingham."
²⁸
The present Duchess is quoted on the subject of her pioneering predeces­sor - "Anyone 'ave a leetle pain, she open 'im up and 'ave a leetle look. Very medical."
²⁷

The Duchess suffered from the most appalling buzzing in the ears which rendered her almost totally deaf. She attributed this affliction to a youthful attack of typhoid fever in India. Whatever the cause, her deafness accounted for her loud, clear and commanding voice, which made her lonely son tremble so, and for her apparent indif­ference to his existence; what he thought was remoteness derived simply from her inability to hear him when he spoke to her. It was not until her husband told their son that he never wanted to see him again that she showed him how much she loved him by bursting into tears; he was shocked and dismayed, having thought such emotion utterly foreign to her.
²⁸

One day, the Duchess discovered that high altitudes in aeroplanes brought relief to the buzzing pain in her head which she described as "like railway trains rushing through stations";
²⁹
that was the beginning of a new passion which was to make her famous through­out the land. Already in her sixties, the Duchess of Bedford became, of all things, a pilot. Duke Herbrand did not approve; this was worse, if possible, than cutting people up in hospital. But he acquiesced under protest, reserving the right to cut out every account of an air disaster from his newspaper, which he would place silently on her desk. His gentle remonstrance was not effective, however, and she flung herself with joy into her new pursuit. She built runways at Woburn, she flew with a co-pilot to South Africa and back, her adventures were avidly collected by the newspapers. She was some­thing of a folk-heroine. She belonged to the British public, while her isolated son grew further and further away.

In 1937 Duke Herbrand told her that he could no longer afford to finance the hospital which was so dear to her heart. (He could, of course, have afforded a hundred hospitals, with wealth which would now appear fabulous.) The news depressed her terribly. It is not known what conversations passed between them, but she was seen to be unhappy for days afterwards. She was seventy-one years old, and still deaf. Her only son was a stranger to her, and an enemy to his father. When she took off in her de Havilland Gipsy from the hangar at Woburn on 22nd March she waved goodbye to her flight lieutenant and to her rigger, a gesture she had never before made, and which was not customary among flyers. She was not seen again.

The Duchess was no amateur pilot. She had experience of flying in all kinds of weathers, and had completed almost 200 hours of solo flying. There was no reason why an accident should occur. There had been an occasion three years earlier when she and her flight lieutenant had come close to death in Morocco. She afterwards recorded in her diary: "I am persuaded that, when faced with apparently certain death in this way, one does not experience the terror which those who do not live to tell are supposed to feel ... I thought it quite an agreeable way of finishing up compared with most ends which are the lot of man, and certainly the one I had most desired; for, with not a boat in sight and a very rough sea, the process could not have lasted long."
⁵⁰