Born: 26 September 1865, United Kingdom
Died: 22 March 1937
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: Mary Tribe
British aviator and ornithologist Mary Russell was also the Duchess of Bedford. During World War I, she founded four hospitals in Woburn, working as a nurse and radiographer into the 1930s at the Abbey Hospital, which she financed. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross in 1918 for this work. In the early 1900s, she was one of the first Western women to study jujutsu, and was featured in the 1905 book The Fine Art of Jujutsu by Emily Diana Watts. She was also a member of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, a pro-suffrage organization.
Taking up flying at age 63, she embarked on a record-breaking flight to Karachi in eight days in August 1929. The following April, she made her first solo flight, embarking on another record-breaking voyage to Cape Town, flying 9,000 miles in 91 hours and twenty minutes over 10 days. She continued making such flights for several years before dying in a crash in 1937.