Seldom, from the inside, can the real - as opposed to the idealised - lives of the British aristocracy have been regarded with such bleakly astute realism as by John Robert Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, who has died aged 85.
After the second World War, he revived the unoccupied and decrepit family seat at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, opening it to the public with numerous tourist attractions. Then he left it for a nomadic life of flats and villas centred on Monte Carlo.
Russell was singularly unsuited to his station in life. Intelligent and cultivated, he had no interest in hunting, shooting or fishing, had little use for either of his parents, found his grandfather, the 11th duke, impenetrable, and, as a young man, was more at home in the vigorously and transatlantically unconventional milieu of Lady Cunard in London.
He was well into his teens before he even saw the Inigo Jones-influenced Woburn Abbey, one of the most beautiful of the great British houses. "I was kept away from school and other children, and then more or less abandoned in a Bloomsbury students' hostel with £98 a year while my parents' marriage broke up," he wrote. "My father disinherited me when I chose to marry the woman I loved." That marriage, to Clare Hollway, took place in 1939.
John's grandfather, living virtually without benefit of human society in the then crumbling Woburn, did not even speak to his own son for 20 years.
Unsurprisingly, the 12th duke was hardly any better as a father, preferring to work for Christian and pacifist causes during the first World War, and deluging young John with moral exhortations to do good works - without explaining how he could do so on the pittance he was allowed.
The boy regarded his father as a hypocrite and, in one of their rows by correspondence, informed him: "Underneath your Christian cloak lies a small, narrow, mean mind, incapable of forgiveness, generosity or feeling." He thought his mother a bit "cracked".
Because his father had been sent to Eton and loathed it, he arranged for John to have private tutors, which the boy disliked intensely, feeling isolated.
Neither was he told anything about his family history, or his own expectations. He did not know that the famous "flying duchess" who appeared in the newspapers for undertaking long flights, some solo, was his grandmother until a parlour maid let it slip
His nanny, Didi Parsons, was the only person John remembered as having shown him affection. His tutor, the Rev Cecil Squire, whose arrival was the signal for the nanny's departure, made his life "hell". Taught boxing by an old army sergeant, he could easily have beaten the boys from a local private school who regularly bullied him - but he hated hurting people. Deposited in Bloomsbury at the age of 19, he was willingly led astray from his education by the recherche charms of Lady Cunard and the Duchess of Rutland's parties.
At this point, with war against Germany approaching, John fell in love with a wealthy German countess considerably older than himself, and was, predictably, dropped by his father and from respectable visiting lists.
The 12th duke cut his son off without even the proverbial shilling.
And so after illness put an end to his brief war service with the Coldstream Guards (1939-40), the future 13th duke found himself obliged to work, first as an estate agent, and then, at the invitation of Lord Beaverbrook, as a journalist on the Sunday Express.
Before long, he had two sons, and his first wife had killed herself, in front of him in 1945, with sodium amytal tablets. Lydia Lyle in 1947, became his second wife, and, in order to separate himself even further from his ancestors, he gratified his father by emigrating to South Africa as a fruit farmer. If the 12th duke had not been found dead with a shotgun in mysterious circumstances in 1953, John might have stayed there.
Ironically, it was Woburn, and the herculean task of restoring it, that gave a centre to his life, despite the limitations of the family trust whose agreement was needed for even trifling capital expenditure.
There was a tax debt of £4,500,000. The riding school block and the tennis courts had disappeared; so had the fronts of two wings of the great house itself. The interior was cold and desolate. Furniture was piled on top of other furniture, some of it damaged.
Not knowing what to do, John retreated to South Africa, only to be told bluntly by Lord Beaverbrook that he was now a duke and should get on with being one. This he did with a will, despite the trustees' doubts about opening Woburn to the public. But the new duke's experiences as an unhappy aristocrat and a happy journalist helped: neither a prisoner of snobbery, nor a despiser of publicity, he determined the public would be made to feel welcome.
Employing the butler as navvy and furniture mover, and doing a lot of the scrubbing and restoration work himself, he opened Woburn in April 1955, with a children's zoo, a playground with seesaws and swings, a boating lake and a tearoom.
There were 181,000 visitors in the first season, a figure that stunned the trustees. The press loved him: he knew what they were after, which, in those days, were broad, human-interest stories rather than tales of narrow sleaze. They loved his cool manner, his French third wife, Nicole Milinaire (whom he married in 1960), his willingness to preside on a stand at the ideal home exhibition, or have his chauffeur drive sight-seeing journalists around the estate in his Rolls Royce. It helped him compete, he would quip, with his motor museum rival, Lord Montagu.
After 20 years of battle, and with the furniture and art valued at £15 million - against the £250,000 at his father's succession - John handed over to his son, the Marquess of Tavistock.
The rest of the duke's life was spent in houses or flats in Monte Carlo, at his property in Portugal, or in the homes of friends.
Thinking the hereditary system imperfect, he was a stranger to the House of Lords: "One should have some elected qualifications," he said. The sentiment was characteristically modern; the style thoroughly ducal. He leaves his third wife, the two sons of his first marriage and the son of his second marriage.
John Robert Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, born May 24th, 1917; died October 25th,2000.