A Fortean fascinating, fragile, and fascist.
Hastings William Sackville Russell was born 21 December 1888 to Mary du Caurroy Tribe and Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford. Both parents were avid naturalists, Herbrand Russell saving Pere David’s deer from extinction, Mary studying birds. She was also a suffragette and, late in life, an aviator. Hastings was their only son, heir to a title which had been established in the 1500s and the family seat Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, where Herbrand raised the last herd of Pere David’s deers, collected from European zoos after the animal could no longer be found in China.
Russell graduated from Eton, then Balliol College, Oxford—which had also educated Adam Smith. He, too, became a naturalist, organizing a 1906 expedition to China. Like his mother, he was a lover of birds, particularly parrots and their kin. He wed Louisa Crommelin Roberta Jowitt Whiwell in 1914, Russell served in the military, but ill health kept him out of World War I. Instead, he did charitable Christian work, prompted by an interest in Pacifism, which set him at odds with his father, who had a distinguished military career, and, in his fifties was involved in war. Father and son broke over Hastings’s turn toward Pacifism; the two did not speak for decades. In the years after the War, the elder Russell established the Tavistock Foundation to study the consequences of shell shock. The Foundation would become an important institution in later theories about the New World Order and fears that a financial elite ran the planet.
Hastings William Sackville Russell was born 21 December 1888 to Mary du Caurroy Tribe and Herbrand Russell, the 11th Duke of Bedford. Both parents were avid naturalists, Herbrand Russell saving Pere David’s deer from extinction, Mary studying birds. She was also a suffragette and, late in life, an aviator. Hastings was their only son, heir to a title which had been established in the 1500s and the family seat Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, where Herbrand raised the last herd of Pere David’s deers, collected from European zoos after the animal could no longer be found in China.
Russell graduated from Eton, then Balliol College, Oxford—which had also educated Adam Smith. He, too, became a naturalist, organizing a 1906 expedition to China. Like his mother, he was a lover of birds, particularly parrots and their kin. He wed Louisa Crommelin Roberta Jowitt Whiwell in 1914, Russell served in the military, but ill health kept him out of World War I. Instead, he did charitable Christian work, prompted by an interest in Pacifism, which set him at odds with his father, who had a distinguished military career, and, in his fifties was involved in war. Father and son broke over Hastings’s turn toward Pacifism; the two did not speak for decades. In the years after the War, the elder Russell established the Tavistock Foundation to study the consequences of shell shock. The Foundation would become an important institution in later theories about the New World Order and fears that a financial elite ran the planet.