She made Woburn Abbey Britain’s most well loved stately homeNicole Milinaire-Russell, Dowager Duchess of Bedford, who has died aged 92, was, by her own account, ruefully overworked for 14 years in the cause of converting into a highly profitable business a stately house she had never wholly liked living in. “Male is the creator, woman the organiser,” she proclaimed soon after taking up residence at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, in 1960 as the wife of the 13th Duke. By 1974, when she and her husband went outside to palm over to his son Robin, the Marquess of Tavistock, Woburn had become the most well loved stately house in the nation. Robin was the eldest of the three sons from the duke’s two previous marriages, and his continuation of the enterprise was the subject of the TV series Nation House (1999-2002).In 2003 Nicole sent from her flat in Monaco a letter to newspaper editors urging them: “If you are going to inscribe one border about me in an obituary, at least it should be fair,” and confessing: “I had like for that gorgeous house, respect for its past and history, however distaste for what it did to me, unrewarded exhausting employment with incredibly extended hours and no thanks.” She felt that she had made a fantastic sacrifice by giving up her career as a film producer, which in the 1950s brought her an income of $2,000 a week, then a fortune, from American film companies including United Artists, and distinct US national television stations.As a woman in what was still, certainly in the aristocracy, largely a male’s earth – and a Frenchwoman at that – she could seem peremptory to the mark of arrogance. The circumstance that she had been a courier for the Resistance in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in her native Paris, during the second earth war, had been arrested three times and tortured once, and had been part of a collection of 18, of whom only three survived, did not dispose her to reckon that she could fail at imposing her thoughts on Woburn Abbey.She was fond of recalling that after her marriage to the 13th Duke, born John however known as Ian, he had brought down a huge desk into the ballroom, which had been converted into an office, and told her: “I will sit here, you will sit there – get to employment!” She accepted the demand to rescue the family concern from enormous death duties, though protesting that she had not known that such a task would be part of the marriage. She found “total chaos”, with no cohesion between the various human beings working at the abbey.In the crypt there were piles of broken furniture and porcelain, torn mattresses and moth-eaten pieces of carpet. Clearance was tackled by all the staff, including the maids and footmen. Marks were stuck to each item to exhibit whether they were to be repaired, place on exhibit, offered to museums or burned. The hours of employment were from early in the morning to late in the evening.The duchess then turned her attention to the restaurants, which she determined should range from cheap and cheerful to cordon bleu. The sculpture gallery was rearranged so that it could be hired outside for wedding receptions and other functions. She then built a fresh restaurant for what she called tartly “the push-your-tray crowd”, calling it The Flying Duchess after her predecessor Mary, the wife of the 11th Duke, who died in 1937 when her plane went missing over the North Sea.Tackling the stables, Nicole found a Sèvres dinner supply – given by Louis XV of France to Gertrude, wife of the 4th Duke – lying on straw on the cobblestone floor and place it on exhibit. Each stall in the stables was converted into a shop for renting outside to British or overseas antique dealers, thus converting Woburn itself into an international antiques centre with minimum financial risk. At first there were 16 shops, which rose steadily to more than 50. She herself was an expert on 18th-century French furniture. “I go for the best,” she said. “I have never seen a excellent antique go down in value … Another body, I invest in gold coins. Every age I travel I acquire 10 of them from whichever nation I visit. They are so attractive. I like to run my fingers through them.”That was characteristic. She thought there was a French peasant inside her somewhere and was not embarrassed about making money. “I have to aid the Duke to raise money,” was her invariable statement of policy, so she pioneered having paying guests to stay at Woburn for the weekend. Parties of 10 or 12, carefully checked outside beforehand, were invited to sleep in a suite and dine in state.Nicole had been given a convent-college upbringing by her parents, Paul Schneider, a businessman and decorated first earth war pilot, and Marguerite Durand. When she was 17, they arranged her marriage to a French businessman, Henri Milinaire, with whom she had four children. Her travels to promote his graphic design business led her to employment with the producer and director Sheldon Reynolds on such projects as the television series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1954-55), with Ronald Howard as the detective, and the Robert Mitchum thriller Foreign Intrigue (1956).Her marriage finished in divorce in 1956, and two years later she met the Duke of Bedford when he was visiting the locate of the TV comedy series Dick and the Duchess. Her career as an entrepreneur was eventful, and so was her private lifetime. In her autobiography, Nicole Nobody (1974), a humorous title with shades of grievance, she wrote of how, during a stay at the Midland hotel in Manchester while married to her first husband, a handsome, smiling male forced his path into her room and “raped” her for three days, to her fantastic if ambivalent satisfaction. Some reviewers did not believe a term of it, while others felt that the thought of having to leave Woburn when her husband “retired” and his heir took over had unsettled her intellect, and others still who thought the “revelations”, fair or not, were an illustration of her insensitivity to others.”Immediately I am an ancient lady, 83 on my following birthday, and on my own,” she wrote in her letter to newspapers in 2003. Some who knew her thought that, in a sense, she had always been on her own, a forceful French adventurer in alien waters. She was saved by a sense of humour. She once got the royal jewellers, Asprey, to constitute an ivory disc for her to carry, inscribed with a request that if she were found dead to immediately get in touch with Harrods’ funeral department. “When I die,” she clarified, “I desire to go to Harrods.”Nicole’s daughter Agnes died in 1998. Her husband died in 2002 and Robin, the 14th Duke, the following year. She is survived by her other daughter, Caterine, and her sons, Didier and Gilles.• Nicole Marie Charlotte Pierrette Jeanne Milinaire-Russell, Dowager Duchess of Bedford, businesswoman, born 29 June 1920; died 6 September 2012HeritageHeritageHomesDennis Barkerguardian.co.uk © 2012 Twitter News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Employ of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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