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.
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