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

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.

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.