Tom Sykes - Blow by Blow - The Story of Isabella Blow

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.

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.