Hastings Russell, 12th Duke of Bedford

Who was Hastings Russell, 12th Duke of Bedford?

Hastings William Sackville Russell, 12th Duke of Bedford, nicknamed Spinach Tavistock, was the son of Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford.

Educated at Eton College, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a Master of Arts. In November 1914 he married Louisa Crommelin Roberta Jowitt Whitwell; the couple had three children:

John Ian Robert Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, who supplied a detailed and hostile portrait of him in the 1959 memoir A Silver-Plated Spoon;

Lady Daphne Crommelin Russell;

Lord Hugh Hastings Russell, a conscientious objector in the Second World War, married Rosemary Markby and had issue.

A keen naturalist, he arranged a 1906 expedition to Shaanxi, China to collect zoological specimens for the British Museum, during which Arthur de Carle Sowerby discovered a new species of jerboa.

He gained the rank of Lieutenant in the 10th Battalion, Middlesex Regiment, but never fought in the First World War owing to ill health. His subsequent advocacy of pacifism during the 1930s, and his attempt to mediate a truce in the Second World War by visiting the German legation in Dublin, led to his name being placed on a list of persons to be arrested in the event of a German invasion. He went on to be patron of the British People's Party based in Covent Garden, an anti-war party that was accused of having fascist sympathies. Despite this, he contributed articles on Social Credit and pacifism to Guy Aldred's journal, The Word, between 1940 and his death. He was also an ornithologist, specialising in parrots and budgerigars, to whom he would feed chocolates, although his eldest son was often reduced to eating them; his other pets included a spider to whom, according to Nancy Mitford's The English Aristocracy, he would regularly feed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. His cohort included John Beckett, a former Labour Member of Parliament whom other fascist groups complained siphoned away his monies, which could have been spent on more worthy causes.