Robin Medforth-Mills

Leslie Robin Medforth-Mills (8 December 1942 – 2 February 2002) was a professor of geography at the University of Durham and a United Nations official.

Medforth-Mills was the son of Cyril Mills, a farm manager, and Nora Medforth. He married Princess Elena of Romania (born 1950) at a civil ceremony on 20 July 1983 in Durham, England, which was followed by a religious ceremony on 24 September 1983 in Lausanne, Switzerland.

The family lived at Flass Hall, Esh Winning, Durham. The couple divorced on 28 November 1991 in Sutherland, Scotland, after having two children, Nicholas Michael de Roumanie Medforth-Mills (b. 1 April 1985), who had been named a "Prince of Romania" by his grandfather King Michael, and Elisabetta Karina de Roumanie Medforth-Mills (b. 4 January 1989), whose godmother was the novelist Catherine Cookson.

After being educated at South Holderness County Secondary School, near Preston, where in 1960 he was Head Boy, he went to university. Medforth-Mills graduated with a BA degree, subsequently obtained a PhD degree, and later became a professor of geography at Durham University.

In addition to being professor of geography in Durham University at various periods in his life, he also worked for the United Nations system, serving as a UN expert in a manpower project implemented by the International Labour Organization in Sudan in the mid-1970s, in UNICEF in its fund-raising office in Geneva in the early 1990s, and later in its humanitarian operations in northern Iraq [1], in the mid-1990s after the first Gulf War. He was later posted with UNICEF again in Geneva, and also briefly in New York in the late 1990s. For several years after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, he was involved in efforts to bring humanitarian aid to institutionalized orphans and other destitute people in Romania, and was a founder-member of the North-East Relief Fund for Romania, set up with Princess Elena of Romania, and the then-Lord Mayor of Newcastle, Terry Cooney, and Harry Charrington.