Mary Du Caurroy Russell, Duchess of Bedford, (née Tribe; 13/26 September 1865 – ca. 22 March 1937) was a British aviator and ornithologist. She was honoured for her work in founding hospitals and working in them during the First World War. She later financed and took part in record breaking flights to Karachi and Cape Town. Early and personal life Born at Stockbridge, Hampshire, she was the daughter of Walter Harry Tribe, Anglican Archdeacon of Lahore, and his wife, Sophy Lander. On 30/31 January 1888, she married Lord Herbrand Russell at Barrackpore, British Raj. When Lord Herbrand inherited his childless brother's titles in 1893, she was styled as the Duchess of Bedford. Her only child, Hastings, was born on 21 December 1888. During the early 1900s she became one of the first Western women to study the Japanese martial art of jujutsu, and she was featured in a series of instructional photographs for the book "The Fine Art of Jujutsu" (1905), written by Emily Diana Watts. Work and activism A major area of organisation and work for the Duchess was in founding four hospitals in Woburn and in the grounds of Woburn Abbey. The principal establishment was the Abbey Hospital that she financed and built in 1914, and where she worked as a nurse and radiographer through to the 1930s. She chartered, and later bought the yacht Sapphire from a Mr. A. L. Barbour and later bought her from him, using her in ornithological voyages to the North of Scotland and Scandinavia. The Duchess was a collector and watcher of birds, and took an interest in bird migration. Between 1909 and 1914 she spent much time on Fair Isle, often in the company of William Eagle Clarke. Her journal, A Bird-watcher's Diary, was privately published in 1938 after her death. She was a member of the Women's Tax Resistance League, a group associated with the Women's Social and Political Union that used tax resistance to protest the disenfranchisement of women during the British women's suffrage movement. Aviation Late in life at age 63, the Duchess became interested in aviation, that she claimed gave her some relief from her constant tinnitus, although she eventually became totally deaf. In 1928 a large country house, Wispers, near Midhurst in West Sussex, and its estate were bought by the Bedford Estate for Russell. She used Wispers as a weekend retreat: she was a keen