Known to the press as "The Flying Duchess" after she took up flying in her sixties, Mary established world record flight times to India and the Cape. But her real success lay in her medical career.
She left Cheltenham Ladies' College at 16, without qualifications, to join her family in India. Her marriage to Lord Herbrand Russell, heir to a Dukedom and to Woburn Abbey, one of the most magnificent houses in England, propelled her into a world still rooted in the 18th century, with a liveried footman behind every guest's chair. Mary found the atmosphere stultifying. With her husband's support, she took up activities from shooting to ice skating, canoeing to bird watching, with such enthusiastic determination that she soon excelled at all.
A lifelong interest in matters medical led her to establish the Cottage Hospital in Woburn. In 1914 she found her true vocation. The first war wounded patient was admitted just five weeks after the declaration of War. A second hospital in the Abbey grounds opened soon after, administered by Mary and funded by the Duke. Mary became Theatre Sister for every operation and ran the new X-ray department. The hospital won national acclaim for its standards.
More attuned to the 21st century than Victorian times, this amazing woman overcame her debilitating deafness to become almost as dearly loved by her nurses and patients, her pilots and eventually the general public, as she was by her husband. Only her son remained aloof.
Shot at by tribesmen, overcome by fumes, with engine trouble enforcing emergency landings in perilous places, she cheated death a hundred times in the air but eventually mysteriously disappeared in her plane.
She left Cheltenham Ladies' College at 16, without qualifications, to join her family in India. Her marriage to Lord Herbrand Russell, heir to a Dukedom and to Woburn Abbey, one of the most magnificent houses in England, propelled her into a world still rooted in the 18th century, with a liveried footman behind every guest's chair. Mary found the atmosphere stultifying. With her husband's support, she took up activities from shooting to ice skating, canoeing to bird watching, with such enthusiastic determination that she soon excelled at all.
A lifelong interest in matters medical led her to establish the Cottage Hospital in Woburn. In 1914 she found her true vocation. The first war wounded patient was admitted just five weeks after the declaration of War. A second hospital in the Abbey grounds opened soon after, administered by Mary and funded by the Duke. Mary became Theatre Sister for every operation and ran the new X-ray department. The hospital won national acclaim for its standards.
More attuned to the 21st century than Victorian times, this amazing woman overcame her debilitating deafness to become almost as dearly loved by her nurses and patients, her pilots and eventually the general public, as she was by her husband. Only her son remained aloof.
Shot at by tribesmen, overcome by fumes, with engine trouble enforcing emergency landings in perilous places, she cheated death a hundred times in the air but eventually mysteriously disappeared in her plane.
