Blow by Blow: The Story of Isabella Blow
Tom Sykes
Detmar Blow
A life of extreme tragedy and remarkable inspiration, the story of Isabella Blow is a dramatic and compelling tale of a courageous icon.Isabella Blow was the epitome of English eccentricity. A legendary figure in the fashion world, she nurtured and championed the talent of some of fashion’s most recognisable and important figures, all the time hiding her own personal unhappiness and severe depression. The news of her tragic death in 2007, aged 48, shocked the international fashion world.Her thirty year career in fashion began as Anna Wintour's assistant at American Vogue, and took in stints as fashion director of Tatler and Fashion Editor of The Sunday Times Magazine. But she is perhaps best-known for the iconic images of her in Philip Treacy's hats, the first of two designers to launch his career from the basement of Isabella and Detmar Blow's house. With similar passion and verve, Isabella enthusiastically displayed her admiration for young designer Alexander McQueen, buying his entire first collection after he graduated from Central St Martins, in a move that many believe launched his career.Detmar Blow was engaged to Isabella sixteen days after they first met in 1988, and the couple remained married until her death. In this visually stunning portrait, Detmar and Tom reveal the truth about the intriguing world of Isabella, providing incredible behind-the-scenes insight into the world of fashion and high-society, as well as tracing her ancestry and early childhood, offering a fresh and penetrating look at her domestic life, and celebrating her incredible achievements.
BLOW BY BLOW
THE STORY OF ISABELLA BLOW DETMAR BLOW WITH TOM SYKES
Blow by Blow is dedicated to Isabella’s memory
Contents
Chapter 1The Call (#u9831a8bd-c931-5ca0-a231-e16f58a2f40e)
Chapter 2Johnny (#ub229ab00-d350-5610-b02d-534d30a49e20)
Chapter 3The Curse of the Delves Broughtons (#u4018fb1c-52da-5d6c-8cc7-b5bd59a3fe55)
Chapter 4Evelyn (#u74b21829-d8e3-5e85-8585-4751f190984e)
Chapter 5Poor Relations (#u59134d89-1346-5361-bffd-60fe5e4a1aec)
Chapter 6Helen (#ud08c5319-5b95-5fa0-b00e-d3074e47f96a)
Chapter 7Heathfield (#u65dd39c4-7981-5663-a07d-4f11f6a64909)
Chapter 8Rona (#u35d9c127-9d54-5861-99b5-4d16157b0ba2)
Chapter 9Evelyn’s Leg (#uf142a646-eabb-55f1-924d-627855035122)
Chapter 10Eighteenth Birthday (#u1b371cfd-d50d-51e0-9b0a-8c99ab5c07e7)
Chapter 11The Lovats (#uddabb6ce-8679-56f6-bcbf-f04b2d072df0)
Chapter 12Wolf (#u83beed71-8696-514b-b6b6-d48c220c6da3)
Chapter 13Nicholas (#u868453da-55c1-5d09-b89d-61510f6f10d8)
Chapter 14The Dispoasal of Doddington (#uf36ed107-6eaa-5944-8cfc-5ffd8a480a60)
Chapter 15Texas (#u824feb5a-cfb9-5172-ba18-dc10f9ba4e48)
Chapter 16Issie ♥ NY (#u65236abb-236d-5e89-9027-b645b061a20b)
Chapter 17Anna (#u05f7347c-b207-55a1-b1a7-3cab1e845bf1)
Chapter 18André (#u1cbd8a28-ff68-5c0d-9b0b-dd8d8f5cc9d9)
Chapter 19Divorce (#u6fb04f3a-1024-5032-9453-e0c04d807720)
Chapter 20 Tatler (#u5487bee5-44d6-5b64-81d8-8b7794fc6d5a)
Chapter 21Independence (#u546cc12a-74b6-52bb-9eda-57bed5f58287)
Chapter 22Andy (#ued08716e-5430-5b4c-ad27-a88cef708dcf)
Chapter 23Inspiration (#ub17c21e4-3d59-5e21-ac7d-c25e8a09d959)
Chapter 24Meeting Issie (#ue470cec1-a686-5dac-80d8-51332fd5a2ea)
Chapter 25Falling in Love (#u44910276-fba9-53b3-aab1-cb98565b280a)
Chapter 26Courtship (#u32dde4f3-f432-5c3b-b948-23cabd0b1901)
Chapter 27Engagement (#uf7b611b8-0bb2-5428-b9f4-3f16f2af30ac)
Chapter 28The Blows (#ucc749c71-17f8-5cee-b97f-ec9740d15eea)
Chapter 29A Church Wedding (#u7694a5db-af30-5c9f-aef3-f5d8b1eae82b)
Chapter 30The Restoration of Hilles (#u0a702d45-0e97-5daf-acdb-fdade0664175)
Chapter 31Philip (#u622fb64c-07fb-5bd6-a3fe-bbb35cab00fe)
Chapter 32Duggie (#u91158936-679e-558f-8c17-f40dc526573e)
Chapter 33The Wedding (#u653f248a-c24e-5b7f-90b5-e546cb40abb3)
Chapter 34Morocco (#u532c863f-76da-5860-b33d-8882ffbe9600)
Chapter 35London Babes (#u6e33f4f2-9aa4-588c-ac07-0f6bff5ce925)
Chapter 36The Death of Evelyn (#u2ed31fe7-ed3a-5b99-ae4b-360369b116ff)
Chapter 37The Great Betrayal (#u83298df1-3b4c-53df-9a3e-150c2926465b)
Chapter 38Alexander (#u84865945-cfd8-5d75-9839-00a95ec5f2d3)
Chapter 39Elizabeth Street (#ubcbd35d1-1b11-5197-8658-51f0b5890590)
Chapter 40Sydney Street (#uea0107ef-4271-58e5-8b6e-bb75021ba80f)
Chapter 41Exotic Fruits (#u277b8131-5373-5268-9b54-50754defc9e1)
Chapter 42Highland Tragedy (#u3c9ede55-c1d6-5ccb-b57c-1353aa1c9c1f)
Chapter 43Alexander’s Betrayal (#u148dc7e1-ff73-512e-88db-26b1c0512c8e)
Chapter 44Sophie (#u513a2ff3-4eb3-5f75-974f-35a96fe3c910)
Chapter 45Freelancing (#u981fa59e-9278-5340-a961-1d56de1c2d99)
Chapter 46Theed Street (#u43350607-c47d-5953-99a3-fcf5a521bead)
Chapter 47Money Worries (#u90fcb3ff-e728-56d7-a222-272ac524e631)
Chapter 48The Sunday Times (#u64a8f096-43bc-55f6-aaff-a6ff8a1d8128)
Chapter 49Hotel du Cap (#u54871267-c806-5f1d-867f-4c38f889dd49)
Chapter 50Jeremy (#u0aa9f051-4b8a-5af6-b457-bc881b96a223)
Chapter 51Modern Art (#uafabbd4a-1bad-50c0-a15c-624187cd8adc)
Chapter 52Swarovski (#uf94ed3e6-23f7-5bec-8395-233ecb6753c5)
Chapter 53Russia (#u48fb6e0d-0a1d-5463-bab9-c790cc6053ee)
Chapter 54 ‘WOW’ (#udfb1a832-01ad-5223-a86a-2c4f3f850de7)
Chapter 55Dinner with Elton (#u26d359e9-70e0-5c27-b5a6-58b76ad85697)
Chapter 56Economy, Issie-style (#ua58a0d3b-6f2b-5d58-9596-b62551014626)
Chapter 57Helen’s Last Visit (#ua33294c1-a542-5172-a43e-6e2c4782d31f)
Chapter 58New York, via Iceland (#u885c295e-f065-596c-a445-0b372fc006d2)
Chapter 59Economy, Issie-style (II) (#u0f1210e8-0342-5286-9460-d57e18620c1a)
Chapter 60Triumph, Disaster and Recovery (#u6f6fca30-bde9-5bcc-ba16-990125515d9c)
Chapter 61The 3 Cs (#ub62733cd-c77b-5a47-95d4-ee573a93d050)
Chapter 62When Philip Met Isabella (#ub3aca7f4-ffde-5107-98a8-4bff1a193dac)
Chapter 63The Battle of Hilles (#u30218d68-37c4-5866-90ee-09889d92ded9)
Chapter 64Separation (#ubabecb36-501b-502d-95ca-dd1ea043e318)
Chapter 65Reconcilliation (#u229e99a1-0dd5-55fb-b762-596e0b85e470)
Chapter 66Eaton Square (#uc2830337-b341-5707-9c6b-5a5c1338e4cc)
Chapter 67Shock Treatment (#ue9a1154e-471e-59a4-b5f2-39f216c2641c)
Chapter 68The First Attempt (#ue9a36f84-a97a-53f7-95b3-1aa4e0267d8f)
Chapter 69‘I always hated Tesco’ (#u3b7d5561-49a5-5e52-b9c7-6f7cbb1d8c52)
Chapter 70The Overpass (#u768c0c83-b4f4-5f9f-ae44-ae8732a3f44e)
Chapter 71Battles (#u4fa2a7e4-10be-5f7e-80de-d897eb57234d)
Chapter 72India (#ufe719b2b-34fb-5b9a-b58f-23265f08c705)
Chapter 73Cancer (#u156511e7-9a97-5689-8105-697ebe38273a)
Chapter 74St Joan (#uc7806a5f-a84c-5969-8efd-96f156edaada)
Chapter 75Issie’s Farewell (#ua4fc9dae-734a-5333-98f8-ac1884042ac1)
Sources and Acknowledgements (#u3429f792-93d2-5fa0-9f65-b496b0133387)
Picture Credit (#u3f6cd1f3-2c4a-5857-b64a-4825e52b6bab)
Index (#u3be41ec3-5628-567f-a0f0-a35e645f7648)
Copyright (#u0732a1d4-eb43-5812-9ad9-6a00bdeff8f6)
About the Publisher (#u3eb32964-8937-56f3-a718-7203de7053ce)
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_437ea412-73f1-5453-894b-a103ad129570)
The Call (#ulink_437ea412-73f1-5453-894b-a103ad129570)
I was at our flat in Eaton Square in London when I got the call. It was Issie’s devoted younger sister, Lavinia.
‘Detmar, I have just come home from shopping,’ Lavinia said frantically, ‘Issie has swallowed some poison. She says not to worry, as she has sicked most of it up. She seems ok. What shall I do?’
It was my wife Isabella’s seventh suicide attempt in fourteen months, and I felt a surge of anxious nausea as I tried to process Lavinia’s words.
Maybe this was it. Maybe this time she’ll succeed.
But poison? Where the hell had she found that? Was it weedkiller, like my father had used? And if it was, then how could she possibly still be alive? Issie was only 5′2½″ and weighed 7 stone. My father – 6′1″ and 18 stone – had drunk a bottle of paraquat in 1977 and it killed him in half an hour as the liquid burned out his insides. Amaury, my curly-haired 12-year-old brother, was there. He said Dadda never cried out, but that his fists were clenched in pain.
The only thing I knew was that if I was to be of any use to Issie at all, I had to remain calm and non-hysterical. ‘Take her to hospital,’ I told Lavinia. ‘I’ll be down as soon as possible.’
In a trance I called the milliner Philip Treacy, Issie’s best friend, who was meant to be picking me up later, because we had already planned to go down to Hilles, our house in the country, that weekend. I told him what had happened and he came round with his boyfriend Stefan and picked me up and we set off in his car for Gloucester Royal Hospital.
How could she still be alive? Maybe, I found myself hoping, as we crawled at an agonizingly slow pace through west London towards the M4, it wasn’t weedkiller. But I had a dreadful hunch that it was, because just a couple of months beforehand I had taken delivery of a bottle of paraquat at Hilles, ordered by Isabella.
I had been horrified, furious, and had asked Isabella, ‘What the hell is this? What are you doing?’ She had just remained silent.
I took it back to the farm shop in Gloucester where she had ordered it and told them, ‘The person who ordered this is trying to kill herself. Never send it again.’ The poor lady I spoke to was very upset.
I stared out of the car window in a daze as we hit the motorway and finally started picking up some speed. Surely the same farm shop wouldn’t have sold her paraquat? Could it be something she had found in the garage from my father’s stack of poison, left there since the seventies, which would be 30 years out of date?
When we finally arrived in Gloucester, we got lost. The Gloucester Royal Hospital is a big 1970s building with a huge chimney. I thought you couldn’t miss it, but because of the new housing developments around it the road was obscured.
After driving around the hospital for a while and getting nowhere I said, ‘Let’s get out and walk.’ Philip and I had to scramble over a wall to get into the hospital grounds.
We went to the hospital reception and asked for Isabella, but no one knew where she was. Eventually we found out she was in the Accident and Emergency ward, so we rushed there.
And that’s where we found her. My heart went out when I saw her. She was propped up in bed, looking sallow, and wearing a thin white hospital nightgown. She was on a drip, and looked and sounded weak.
‘Hi Det,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_1511a6fe-e0ec-5656-b9a1-ef0ebd41e604)
Johnny (#ulink_1511a6fe-e0ec-5656-b9a1-ef0ebd41e604)
Why did my wife, Isabella Blow, the fashion icon, the legend, the toast of glossy magazines from London to New York, want to kill herself? To answer that question I would have to go back to the very beginning of Issie’s life, to her extraordinary childhood, to her relationship with her parents and to the great, central trauma of her life.
On 12 September 1964, her little brother Johnny, aged 2½ died in an accident in the garden when he fell into a body of water.
Issie was supposed to be looking after him. She was five years old.
‘Everything went wrong for the family after the death of that little boy,’ recalled Issie’s now 94-year-old godmother Lavinia Cholmondley (pronounced ‘Chumley’) when she was interviewed for this book at Cholmondley Castle in 2009.
Confusingly, there are conflicting versions of the events that led to Johnny’s death.
Issie had told me about it the first time we met, at a mutual friend’s wedding in 1988. She told me that Johnny was chasing a ball and followed it into the swimming pool, which had been built by her father to celebrate a good harvest that year. After inhaling water, he vomited up a half-digested baked bean – it was ‘nanny’s day off’, Issie said, so dinner had been from a tin – and choked on it. She said that she remembered the smell of the honeysuckle, and Johnny stretched out on the lawn. ‘My mother went upstairs to put her lipstick on,’ she said. ‘That explains my obsession with lipstick.’
A local press announcement about the birth of Isabella’s baby brother. In the photograph is Helen Broughton with her new son, John Evelyn, Isabella and Julia.
Issie knew this was a pivotal moment in her life, and, with typical disregard for the comfort zones of polite society, she would often describe the events of Johnny’s death – the swimming pool, the ball, the honeysuckle and, above all, the lipstick – to relative strangers. She would even talk about it to newspaper interviewers, prompting her mother, Helen, to retort that the story about the lipstick was, ‘An awful, unfounded lie.’
The version of Johnny’s death told by Issie’s stepmother, Rona, whom Evelyn married just under a decade after the accident (he and Helen were divorced in February 1974) is very different. Rona related this account at a meeting in the Sloane Club in London 2009:
Helen went inside to do something, not put on lipstick; that was a very cruel thing for Isabella to say. But she went in to do something, I don’t know what. And when she went inside, she said to Issie, ‘Keep an eye on Johnny,’ or ‘Watch out for Johnny’. So Isabella was playing with John, but then somebody who was coming down the lane stopped at the gate and called Issie over to the gate. Issie went over, and while she was over there – it happened. He choked on a piece of dry biscuit and suffocated, and then fell in a small pond, not a swimming pool. And then everybody blamed each other.
Had Issie felt responsible for what happened to Johnny?
‘No,’ replied Rona. ‘There wouldn’t have been anything she could have done anyway. She was five years old.’
But such rational reasoning doesn’t always stop people, especially small children, from feeling the emotion and burden of guilt, does it?
Rona conceded, ‘She felt blamed.’
By who?
‘She wasn’t blamed by her father,’ was all Rona, now 70, and cautious to the end, would say. ‘By someone else.’
Memory, of course, plays tricks us on all, but it is quite extraordinary how Isabella’s story and Rona’s story (presumably relayed via Evelyn) diverge. Isabella very deliberately painted her mother as self-centred and vain by constantly reiterating the detail about her not being present because she was applying lipstick. When she told me the story of Johnny’s death, it was always portrayed as a result of him falling into the swimming pool. Indeed, she added more and more detail to the story – how the pool had then been filled in by her grief-stricken father and another built to replace it. I was therefore amazed when, after we were married, Evelyn used to tell me that Issie swam like a fish as a child in the pool.
Never did Issie tell me about being called over to the gate, or about being asked to watch Johnny.
As her husband, I, of course, believe Issie’s account unquestioningly over that of her stepmother, which I never heard until researching this book. Rona was not there at the time and would have heard it secondhand, years and years after the event. And yet, when I recall how Issie recounted this horrific, defining event of her childhood, it is impossible not to notice the foundation stones on which Issie built both her personal myth and her dark aesthetic was being laid.
All the elements of the black fairy story that she told to and about herself are there: the indifferent, heartless mother, the father more interested in his drinks and his friends than his son, and the terrible irony of the fatal pool being built to celebrate the harvest.
Isabella remembered her mother blaming Evelyn, her father. Helen once told the story of Johnny’s death to a cousin of Isabella’s who herself had just been bereaved. Later, the cousin told Isabella and I that Helen blamed Evelyn – despite the fact that, even in her telling, the death of Johnny was clearly an accident.
When I was researching this book I discovered a contemporary report of the accident from The Times, dated Monday 14 September, 1964. It was headlined ‘Heir to Baronetcy found Drowned’:
John Evelyn Delves, aged two, heir of Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton and Lady Broughton, of Doddington Park, near Nantwich, Cheshire, was found drowned on Saturday in a shallow ornamental pool which was being built in the garden of his home. The boy was heir to a baronetcy dating back to 1660.
Mr Giles Tedstone, farm manager to Sir Evelyn, said today, ‘Sir Evelyn and Lady Broughton had been having tea with their children and friends on the lawn and the children wandered off afterwards to play. Lady Broughton missed young John a couple of minutes later and he was found dead in the pool.’
Artificial respiration was tried and Sir Evelyn then drove the boy to hospital but it was too late. The pool was only 18 inches deep and has now been filled in.
Lady Broughton is expecting another baby in a few months time. They have two daughters aged five and three.
The following day an inquest was held in Nantwich. Evelyn attended the inquest, and The Times also reported on it. At the inquest it was ruled that his son and heir had died of asphyxiation.
Dr John Heppleston, pathologist, said that a post-mortem showed that the death was due to a blockage of the windpipe by food, caused by vomiting which had followed immersion in water.
Questioned by Sir Evelyn, Dr Heppleston said it was possible that the boy slipped or fell into the water and the shock made him vomit. He could have been dead within part of a second.
Mr Leonard Culey, West Cheshire deputy Coroner, recording a verdict of accidental death, said by a chance in a million the shock of the water made the boy sick and he asphyxiated. It was a case that could not have been foreseen.
Isabella looking down at the grounds of St John’s Church, Doddington Park - the church where her brother John Evelyn is buried.
Whatever the exact sequence of events, there is no disputing that Johnny’s death, as well as traumatising Issie for life, destroyed the family utterly.
Evelyn’s reaction to Johnny’s death was extraordinary. Rather than trying for another son, he apparently became convinced that the death of John was a sure sign that the Delves Broughton line should come to an end with him.
The death of John, he appears to have decided, was to be the end of it all. It was a resolution from which he never wavered.
Johnny was buried in a small leather casket in St John’s Church in the grounds of Doddington Park, next to General Sir Delves Broughton, who built the church in 1837. Helen and Evelyn commissioned a stained-glass window in memory of their lost son. Isabella thought the window was ‘ugly but along the right tracks’. She respected their gesture of love.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_76e7b38a-a8cb-5196-af65-077a04c7bb28)
The Curse of the Delves Broughtons (#ulink_76e7b38a-a8cb-5196-af65-077a04c7bb28)
Tragedy ran deep in Issie’s family, and the stain on the Delves Broughton name went back to Issie’s grandfather, Jock. Sir Jock Delves Broughton had committed suicide, injecting himself with morphine in the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool after being accused of a notorious murder of a fellow aristocrat who was having an affair with his beautiful young second wife in Kenya in the 1940s (the subject of the book and film White Mischief). He was acquitted, but could not escape the smears of the press and his contemporaries, and many saw his suicide as a posthumous admission of guilt. Issie believed she had inherited her depression from Jock and was later to base one of her own unsuccessful suicide attempts closely around Jock’s successful one.
Isabella’s childhood was, by any normal standards, enormously privileged. It was, however, simultaneously defined by the economic anxiety of her father who was permanently terrified that what remained of the family fortune was about to slip through his fingers. As a boy, and later as a young man, Evelyn had watched helplessly while Jock spent, gambled and otherwise lost almost all his money.
Conversions into today’s money are notoriously unreliable, but by any reckoning the fortune Jock inherited in 1913 was staggering. In various family trusts, Issie’s grandfather was bequeathed not one but two stately homes (Broughton and Doddington Hall) and a collection of paintings, furniture and objets d’art accumulated over six centuries. There was also the not-so-small matter of 15,000 acres of prime farmland in three counties, a London residence, and a multitude of assorted stocks and shares. Isabella’s grandfather was the fortunate beneficiary of the aristocratic British tradition of concentrating all of the family wealth in the hands of the eldest son. The reasoning behind the right of primogeniture was – and is – to keep intact the great family homes and seats, the income from the land being used to ‘keep the title up’. This allows the title holder, if he so chose, to cut a dash in society, thereby adding to the lustre and importance of the family.
Jock and Vera at Royal Ascot in the 1930s.
Jock most certainly chose to do just that.
Doddington Hall was a grand house and Jock ran it on a correspondingly grand scale, retaining a large household staff. Oranges, melons and other exotic marvels issued forth from the laboriously tended (and heated) hothouses year round, and the Hall’s splendidly stocked cellar ensured the finest wines were served at dinner every night. He entertained lavishly, and his extravagance was legendary in society circles: a jazz band would frequently be engaged to play his weekend guests up on the 3½-hour train journey from Euston to Crewe.
The aristocracy were the celebrities of the day and the Broughtons enjoyed their fame. Vera – Issie’s grandmother whom she knew and adored – made particularly good copy for the era’s social diarists: amongst her many claims to fame, she held the record for the largest tuna ever caught in northern waters. She hooked it off Scarborough, in Yorkshire. Her fish weighed 317.5kg (700lb).
In Jock’s extravagance, some people discerned a desire to eclipse the events that overshadowed the beginning of his reign as the 11th baronet. For, just a year after he had inherited, in August 1914, the First World War broke out. Jock had supposedly been a professional soldier in the Irish Guards for over a decade, but was taken off the boat sailing for France to halt the invading German armies. The cause?
Sunstroke.
Jock sat out the war years at a desk in London, returning only occasionally to Doddington Hall. The Hall – which today is boarded up and languishes in a sorry state of disrepair – is a neo-classical fantasy built by Samuel Wyatt in 1770. The Hall was surrounded by a 500-acre park designed by ‘Capability’ Brown, with red and fallow deer and a 55-acre lake to the south ornamented with swans and birds. The lake boasted a banqueting hall on an island in the middle of it, which was subsequently demolished on the orders of a Broughton on account of his suffering too many hangovers. There were elegant stables designed by Wyatt, well stocked with fine horses to ride and take hunting, a tennis court and a croquet lawn.
The front of Doddington Hall. Country Life, 1950.
Doddington Hall’s circular salon with its huge chandelier. Isabella always loved the circular design - she had, at one time, a fl at in London with a circular room. Country Life, 1950.
The rear of Doddington Hall. Country Life, 1950.
Things began to go wrong for Jock when the money started to run out. Since the late nineteenth century, the British upper classes had been feeling an economic chill owing to the invention of refrigeration for container ships, which allowed imports of cheap food from abroad. In a speech in 1920 in the billiard room at Doddington to some of his angry and bemused tenants whose farms he was selling to raise £150,000, Jock explained to them that he believed that the landowning class was finished and he had no alternative but to sell their farms and look to the future.
He was far from alone in these views. The First World War had destroyed the political power of the European aristocracy and overthrown many monarchies. In Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey there had been revolutions deposing tsars, kings and sultans. Revolution was in the air, even in England.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Jock continually sold off land, investing heavily in commodities and what Isabella’s father Evelyn would later derisively refer to as a ‘tin pot gold mine’. In addition there were large, often unsuccessful horse-racing bets and other gambling debts. Broughton Hall was sold early on to a family that had made their money from reinforcing concrete with steel mesh. The economic depression of the 1930s only exacerbated Jock’s deteriorating financial situation, and, in desperation, towards the end of the decade, Jock started to make a series of fraudulent insurance claims. On one occasion he arranged for an out-of-work soldier to break into the Hall and steal some of the paintings whose insurance value he had recently increased. There were also claims on alleged thefts of jewellery, including one from the glove compartment of his car in the south of France. When Isabella was a child, a farm worker found a string of black pearls her grandfather claimed had been stolen wrapped around a branch in some farm woodland. Evelyn, his son and Issie’s father, handed them back to the insurance company.
A hand-drawn map of the Doddington estate.
By the outbreak of the Second World War the Delves Broughton family estates had been reduced to just over a thousand acres: the deer park around Doddington Hall and one nearby farm.
In 1940 Vera divorced Jock. In her divorce petition, Vera cited Jock’s affair with Diana Caldwell – a glamorous blonde divorcée, almost 30 years younger than him, who would become his second wife. With Britain desperately fighting for survival against Nazi Germany, Jock and Diana decided to leave England and go to Kenya, where Jock had acquired a beef and coffee estate.
Jock believed that his colonial adventure was going to give him a chance not only to make a fresh start with his beautiful young wife but also to allow him to contribute to the war effort with his farming. It did not hurt that it was also immensely cheap to live very well in Kenya. Jock and Diana were soon partying with the freewheeling ‘Happy Valley’ set of decadent colonials who drank heavily, took drugs and slept with each other.
Diana fell in love with Josslyn Hay, the Earl of Errol, a famous seducer of other men’s wives, who had been married three times himself. Diana and Lord Errol started a passionate and very public affair. Three months later, Errol was found, shot dead in his car, just 2½ miles from Jock’s house outside Nairobi; earlier that night, at 3 a.m., he had dropped off Diana.
Deer beside the lake in the park at Doddington.
Jock, the humiliated and cuckolded husband, was the obvious suspect and he was subsequently charged with Errol’s murder. At the trial he put in a witty and polished performance in the witness box – and was acquitted. But the blanket coverage of the trial both in Kenya and the United Kingdom and the associated scandal destroyed him. After the trial, he headed back home, and when he arrived at the dock in Liverpool he was met by agents investigating his dubious insurance claims.
A few months after his return to England, in December 1942, Jock committed suicide at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool with a morphine overdose. He left behind a tangled legacy – and, as Issie often noted, 60 pairs of shoes.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_576a7270-3be5-5e52-8600-1a614b746f59)
Evelyn (#ulink_576a7270-3be5-5e52-8600-1a614b746f59)
The upshot of all this was that what should have been a huge inheritance for Jock’s son, Evelyn (Issie’s father), was massively reduced. The vast estate was less than 10 per cent of its former size, a ‘mere’ 1000 acres. If an estate that size was to continue to support even a much reined-in Delves Broughton lifestyle, a major rethinking of how the estate functioned as a business would clearly be necessary.
The park at Doddington had been occupied by over 1100 Polish refugees in Nissen huts during the war. They stayed on for a few years afterwards, providing Evelyn with a meagre but welcome income from the government. But with the army no longer requiring Doddington Hall itself, Evelyn leased it out to Goudhurst Ladies College and in 1946 most of the contents of Doddington were sold at auction. This was a common occurrence at the time, when many stately homes were turned into prisons for young offenders, schools – or simply demolished and the contents sold off.
After the Polish refugees left, Evelyn, who was brutally practical, set about turning his remaining land into a modern farm. He killed the 300 fallow and red deer in the park, cut down many of the trees planted by ‘Capability’ Brown, now mature and valuable as hard timber in the post-war reconstruction, and then ploughed the park up and turned it into farmland.
The decision paid off. Over the next 20 years he made Doddington Park Farm into a state-of-the-art dairy, beef, corn, sheep and potato farm – and a great commercial success. Isabella described it as being run on factory lines.
Evelyn’s greatest agricultural success was growing potatoes. They became a very successful cash crop, especially after he won a contract to supply potatoes to Walkers Crisps. Once, he told me, a manufacturer desperate for potatoes had paid him £9000 in cash for a large pile of spuds. Evelyn, who had a pathological aversion to paying tax, did not pay the money into the bank, thereby obviating the need to pay any levies on the sum, which gave him great pleasure. The local bank manager in Nantwich mournfully commented, ‘Sir Evelyn, we have not seen you in here for such a long time.’
On other occasions he flew with Issie to Switzerland, where he would deposit the potato money into his Swiss bank account and return the following day. For the night Issie and her father would stay in luxury at the Palace Hotel. A Swiss bank account was a not unusual accessory for a rich man at the time – my father, far less wealthy, opened a Swiss account and deposited £250 – but it was illegal.
Evelyn’s austerity drive complemented his miserly streak. Once, Issie was invited to stay at Chatsworth, the home of the Duke of Devonshire. One of her best friends from Oxford, Anthony Murphy, had married the Duke’s youngest daughter. Issie asked her father for some money to tip the butler at the end of the weekend. Evelyn reluctantly agreed – but insisted Isabella write him a cheque for the £10 he gave her. On her return to Doddington, Evelyn plied Isabella for details on the set-up at Chatsworth, particularly wanting to know how many footmen there were. When he presented Isabella’s cheque at the bank to get his £10 advance back, the cheque was returned. Isabella recalled with glee that her father tried to re-present it several times before giving up.
Issie put a cheerful gloss on her father’s penny-pinching ways, but his habits often made life difficult or socially embarrassing for her. In 1979 she was invited by her friend Mimi Lady Manton to stay with her at her home in Yorkshire. She had a special guest coming – the unmarried Prince of Wales. She told Issie, ‘You have goofy teeth and will make him laugh.’
When Issie excitedly told her father that she was going to the same house party as Prince Charles, she asked for some money to buy an evening dress, a not unreasonable request.
Her father’s reply was, ‘Beg, steal, or borrow.’ And he meant it. He was not going to give her any money for mere fripperies.
Evelyn may have been stingy but he did have a sense of propriety – he rejoined Lloyds Insurance to pay off his father’s frauds, he claimed.
His big cut-back was to move into what had been the head gardener’s cottage, located about half a mile from the Hall. Isabella was to resent this all of her life. She described it to me as ‘a hideous pink house’ with a ‘1950s wing’ and ‘a carport’ which her father built onto it. Evelyn had decorated it with pictures bought ‘from Boots the Chemist’, according to Issie. His favourite was a painting of a scantily clad Caribbean girl weaving a basket – now in the possession of Isabella’s youngest sister, Lavinia. Issie told me that she always knew her parents had ‘bad taste’.
Isabella’s mother, Helen Shore.
Isabella’s baptism certificate. She was baptised on Thursday 12 March 1959, at the age of four months.
Evelyn admitted freely – almost proudly – that he was a cultural philistine, and this would bring him into sharp conflict with Isabella, who grew up as a child yearning for the lost beauty and glamour of Doddington Hall, ever-visible just across the fields.
By 1955, with Doddington running successfully, Evelyn, now aged 40, married Helen Shore. The daughter of a successful Manchester greengrocer family, she was ambitious and clever, and had been called to the Bar in 1951 at the age of 21. Evelyn had in fact been briefly married before, to Elizabeth Cholmondley, so he and Helen had to content themselves with a service of blessing at St Simon the Zealot’s church in Chelsea in 1955.
At the time of Isabella’s birth, Evelyn was 43 and Helen 28. Isabella was born three years after the marriage. Julia was born in 1961 – and then in 1962 the longed-for son and heir, John Evelyn, finally arrived.
The birth of a son settled all the inconvenient questions of inheritance that had been lurking unspoken in the background following the birth of the two girls, Isabella and Julia. It was quite clear now what would happen to Doddington Park – it would pass to John on his father’s death. He may not have been able to afford to live in the splendour of the big house, but the prospect of a male heir redoubled Evelyn’s determination to work at his farm. After a generation of scandal and financial disaster, it seemed that things might finally be starting to turn the corner for the Delves Broughtons.
Newborn Isabella at the London clinic with her mother, who has had her make-up and hair done, which Issie later strongly approved of.
One can understand, then, why the loss of Johnny was so devastating. Evelyn belonged to an age and a class which valued males more highly than females. He did little to spare his grieving daughter’s feelings on this account.
After Johnny’s death, he considered leaving Doddington Park to his closest male relative, Simon Fraser, Master of Lovat, the eldest son of his sister Rosie, and himself in line to inherit from his father, Lord Shimi Lovat. But then Evelyn did some research on some family assets managed by his nephew and was not impressed. Simon was struck off the list.
Another possible beneficiary, he announced to Helen when he came down to breakfast one morning, was Trinity, his old college at Cambridge. He had known happiness there, he said. His three daughters, sitting there eating their cornflakes, were not considered at all.
There was a curious dichotomy in his relationship with Isabella – and all his daughters – for while, ultimately, he betrayed them and badly let them down, there were tender moments of affection. Isabella often accompanied Evelyn on his agricultural rounds, for example, an important ritual that bonded her closely to her father and allowed her to feel loved by him. From the age of 14 she would drive along the internal farm roads to pick him up for lunch every day in the battered old farm car. And Evelyn was, to his credit, not always quite as distant to his children as many upper-class fathers of the age. As her father’s friend Major Peter Ormerod recalled, Evelyn would dress up as Santa Claus at Christmas parties at the house and distribute presents to the children – and to the mothers give ‘out of his sack a half bottle of champagne’.
Isabella with her mother and father, at the gardener’s cottage. In the background you can see the beef cattle.
Evelyn was not a bad man. His great fault was that he was weak.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_de33bbbb-a33e-506f-8703-39266a8228ed)
Poor Relations (#ulink_de33bbbb-a33e-506f-8703-39266a8228ed)
Even as a child, Isabella was bedevilled by financial insecurity. She undoubtedly picked up her almost existential anxiety about money from her father, who, when he wrote to her at boarding school, would put in brackets next to each person’s name the total number of acres of land which they owned.
Issie measured herself against the wealth of others and found she came up wanting. She keenly felt the part of poor relation. While the Cholmondleys, for example, still lived in splendour in their very own castle, with a retinue of uniformed servants, the Delves Broughtons, by comparison, were holed up in the hated gardener’s cottage while the main house was occupied by a school. There were butlers and gardeners, to be sure, but the set-up was all too obviously being run on a shoestring by comparison to their far richer neighbours. Evelyn’s proud boast that the family had once been able to walk fourteen miles without straying off their own property made matters, if anything, even worse.
The gardener’s cottage so despised by Issie was, in fact, a perfectly agreeable and spacious four-bedroom house. Yet even today, with the once-magnificent big house boarded up in the distance, it still looks out of place, a curiously suburban, almost hacienda-style structure, parked incongruously next to a tumbledown pink sandstone castle tower dating back to medieval times.
Issie loved to play in this perilous, weed-filled tower, conducting dramatic re-creations of medieval rites and myths with her sisters as willing or unwilling participants, and it was an important part of the family’s history. At the Battle of Poitiers in 1356, John de Delves fought valiantly and he was later knighted by King Edward III and granted a licence to crenellate and fortify the tower. The tower was a formative element in Issie’s medieval aesthetic. Years later, the tower would be the inspiration for a ‘castle hat’ designed by one of Issie’s most famous discoveries, the milliner Philip Treacy.
The medieval castle in the grounds of Doddington Park, where Issie spent much time playing as a child.
The Broughtons had an-old fashioned disregard for modern health concerns. Isabella grew up enjoying fresh, unpasteurised, creamy milk straight from the house cow. Their farm manager, worried about the risk of catching tuberculosis, had his milk delivered by the milkman in a sanitised bottle. Throughout her life, Isabella would insist on the richest, full-fat milk.
Another family indulgence was cigarette smoking. Evelyn and Helen smoked heavily, though Evelyn eventually had to give it up when he began suffering bad emphysema. Married to me, Isabella would start smoking at breakfast – sometimes chain-smoking five in a row – ignoring my pleas and entreaties that it was damaging her health.
‘Detmar, you cannot talk, you smoke cigars,’ she would say airily, clouds of smoke billowing out from under her latest Philip Treacy hat.
‘But not for breakfast, Issie,’ I would retort, gasping for air. ‘And anyway, cigars are good for you – look at Churchill and Castro.’
Growing up at Doddington, Isabella often heard stories from the locals of her grandmother Vera’s menagerie at Doddington. Vera had kept a dazzling array of exotic animals, including Carroway birds, ostriches and honey bears, which would often escape to the village from the cages that can be seen at Doddington House to this day. Once a bear had to be lured down from the church steeple with pots of honey.
Isabella’s last memory of her beloved grandmother Vera was being with her while watching the news coverage of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy at her first-floor flat at 51 Eaton Square. Shortly afterwards, Vera died. When Issie and I were first married we lived a few hundred yards away from Eaton Square in Elizabeth Street, and when she was upset with me Isabella would go and sulk in the doorway at 51 Eaton Square, beneath Granny’s old flat.
After Vera’s funeral, Evelyn’s sister Rosie suggested that their mother’s ashes should be buried at the family church at Doddington. Evelyn flew into a rage and refused Rosie’s request. He told his sister, ‘If our mother had not divorced our father, none of the murder trial mess would have happened.’ The scars and shame of Kenya ran very deep for Evelyn.
* * *
Isabella was six years old when Lavinia arrived, and was attending Nuthurst school, the local private primary school in Nantwich, a few miles from Doddington. The school, which has since closed down, was a red-brick Georgian house with a white portico doorway in Hospital Street. Isabella enjoyed it and was popular with the other children and the teachers.
Her friends remember Isabella for ‘her mop of blonde hair’, and described Issie enjoying doing the washing-up at a schoolfriend’s party with her sister Julia.
Midway through Issie’s career at Nuthurst, a new teacher started. Arriving for her first day, Isabella, seeing that she looked a bit lost, greeted her with the words, ‘You must be new here. Let me show you around.’ It was typical of Isabella’s kindness and thoughtfulness to people, the teacher said.
Left to right: Lavinia, Helen, Julia and Isabella, at their home in Cadogan Square, London.
Young Isabella in her Nuthurst school uniform.
Isabella was, she added, ‘A little ray of sunshine.’
To occupy her children outside of term time, Helen, who had studied medieval history at school, encouraged them to look to their medieval roots. In addition to playing fantasy games in the tower, where she would make other children worship a plaque of a ‘goddess’, Isabella was often taken to nearby Audlem church, where she would make brass rubbings of her knightly ancestors’ tombs.
Once they went on a trip to the former family house, Broughton Hall. This single visit left a lasting impression on the young Isabella. For the rest of her life, she remained intrigued by the place, a sturdy black-and-white timbered building constructed in the 1450s. During the English Civil War in the 1640s, a young Broughton boy declared to the entering enemy Parliamentarian soldiers, ‘I am for the King!’ He was shot instantly, his blood flowing down the ornately carved staircase as he lay dying. As Isabella was absorbing all this history, her mother told her, ‘Well, Isabella, it is not yours any more,’ and took her home to the former gardener’s cottage.
Two views of Broughton Hall.
In the inexplicable way of such incidents, this cruel jibe about the lost Broughton fortune became a focal point for Isabella’s hatred of her mother. And in her escalating battles with her mother Isabella was to hone in on her mother’s weak spot: her bourgeois background.
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