Robin Ian Russell, 14th Duke of Bedford , 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 programmeCountry House. During his childhood he was styled by the courtesy titleLord Howland, one of his grandfather's lesser subsidiary titles, and from 1953 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 2002-3.
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, 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 1/2 months later on 13 June 2003 after another stroke in the Tavistock Intensive Care Unit, National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, London, which he had been instrumental in establishing. This made him the shortest-lived Duke of Bedford. He had already handed over control of Woburn Abbey to his eldest son Andrew, Lord Howland, in 2001.
After the extirpation in 1900 of the Chinese population of Père David's deer, Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford, was instrumental in saving the species, having acquired the few remaining deer from European zoos and formed a breeding herd in the deer park at Woburn Abbey. Robin Russell, then Marquess of Tavistock,, the 11th Duke's great-grandson, was instrumental in re-establishing the species in China, having donated to that country two drafts from the Woburn herd, one in 1985 and the other in 1987. The deer were released into the Nan Haizi Garden, later re-named Milu Park, in southern Beijing, the former imperial hunting grounds of the Ming and Qing emperors where the deer were last known in China. In 2005 the Beijing authorities erected a statue of the 14th Duke at Nan Haizi to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Milu reintroduction, in the presence of his widow and three sons.
