\"14th Duke of Bedford\" Robin Russell Hand Written Letter Dated 1984 for Sale

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\"14th Duke of Bedford\" Robin Russell Hand Written Letter Dated 1984 For Sale

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\"14th Duke of Bedford\" Robin Russell Hand Written Letter Dated 1984:
$349.99

Up for sale a RARE! "14th Duke of Bedford" Robin Russell Hand Written Letter Dated 1984.

ES-7438E

(Henry) Robin Ian Russell,

14th Duke of Bedford (21 January 1940 –

13 June 2003) , DL, of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, was a British peer,

stockbroker and animal conservationist. He became well known to the public by

appearing in three series of the BBC reality television programme Country House. During his childhood he was styled by the courtesy title Lord Howland, one of his grandfather's lesser titles, and from 1953

(following his father's inheritance of the dukedom) and for most of his adult

life was styled by the courtesy title Marquess of Tavistock, his father's senior subsidiary title, and as he survived

his father by only 7+1⁄2 months,

he himself held the dukedom for that short period during 2002–2003. He was born on 21 January 1940 at

the Ritz Hotel in London,

the son and heir apparent of John Ian

Robert Russell, Lord Howland (1917–2002) (from August 1940

Marquess of Tavistock and from 1953 13th Duke of Bedford), by his first wife

Clare Gwendolyn Bridgman (1903–1945), who died of an overdose of sedatives, formerly the wife of Major Kenneth Chamney

Walpole Hollway, MC. His father emigrated

to South Africa in 1948

to farm in the Paarl area and the future 14th Duke was educated there at

Western Province Preparatory School and then at the Diocesan College. He completed his education at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and at Harvard University in

the United States. The vast

historic estates of the Dukes of Bedford included Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire,

the Bedford Estate in

London's Covent Garden and Bloomsbury and estates in Devonshire around the town

of Tavistock, with a residence at Endsleigh Cottage. In 1974, while working as a stockbroker at de Zoete & Bevan

and living in Suffolk, he took over the running of the Woburn Estates

from his father, a pioneer of the commercialisation of country houses, who then retired as a tax-exile to Monaco. Robin, then styled Marquess of Tavistock,

continued with the modernisation of the Woburn estate and Woburn Safari Park established

by his father, and himself established the Woburn Golf and Country

Club, a successful business on the Woburn estate. However, his plans

to develop a major theme park at Woburn failed to come to fruition. He suffered

a severe stroke on 21 February 1988 when he was aged just 48, which he was not expected to survive, which

curtailed his powers of speech and movement and led him to pursue a more

relaxed lifestyle and to be much less of a workaholic during his later years.

With his wife, Henrietta Tiarks (Marchioness of Tavistock and later Duchess of

Bedford), he appeared in the BBC series Country House, detailing

the daily life and estate management at Woburn Abbey, the ancestral seat of the Russell family. He

succeeded his father in the dukedom on 25 October 2002, but died just 7. After

the extirpation in 1900 of the Chinese population of Père David's deer (or