| • | The High-Flying Duchess
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| • | Biography |
BUY SIGNED FIRST EDITION
“Meriel Buxton has written an engrossing account of the life and times of the Duchess of Bedford. She was an extraordinary woman whose singular achievements are recorded with skill and perception. The Duchess represented all that was admirable in the now almost defunct notion of noblesse oblige.”
Professor J. E. Spence
“Coherent, composed and well organized… opens up windows on vanished worlds.”
Ashley Stokes
David St. John Thomas Charitable Trust Writing Awards
THE HIGH-FLYING DUCHESS: WINNER: SELF PUBLISHED BOOK OF THE YEAR 2008
MERIEL BUXTON: WINNER OF WINNERS PRIZE
What was her life in India like?
How different was life at Woburn Abbey at the time?
Read about her extraordinary range of interests and how she excelled at them all
Her memorial reads: Whose work was in the Hospitals, whose delight was in the Birds - Read about her work and her delight.
Why did she become famous as the Flying Duchess?
How did this book come to be written?
At the age of ten, Meriel was a bridesmaid at Woburn Abbey at the wedding of Lord and Lady Hugh Russell. Lord Hugh was a grandson of Mary, wife of the 11th Duke of Bedford, who became known as the Flying Duchess. Towards the end of his life, he often talked about his grandmother, whom he had adored. He felt that, whilst her flying had received excessive attention from the press, her other achievements had never been fully appreciated. Mary’s own priorities were summed up in the words on her memorial window:
“Whose work was in the Hospitals, whose delight was in the birds.”
That is how Meriel came to write this book.
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‘ Cs 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.
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.