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.
Isabella, I can say with complete confidence, loathed her mother. When Helen finally left Evelyn, she lined up her children on the gravel outside the gardener’s cottage, and shook their hands goodbye.
This disgusting act of abandonment was the culmination of a truly dreadful mother-daughter relationship.
Issie actually looked down on her mother socially. Helen’s grandfather had owned a successful greengrocery business in Manchester with several stores, so he had been able to afford to educate Helen at Roedean and King’s College London, but she had no money of her own and never completely escaped her roots.
This would not have mattered, of course, had she not so obviously sought to. Helen’s father died young and the business passed to Helen’s brother, ‘Uncle Mike’, an alcoholic who had a bar in his lounge. Helen’s mother – Isabella’s maternal grandmother, Nancy – spoke with a broad Cheshire accent and lived in Wilmslow, an expensive, sought-after suburb beloved of Mancunian business families. Issie mockingly described Nancy’s house as, ‘A marble bungalow with electric blinds, fake Louis XV furniture and a Mercedes sports car in the driveway.’
This was all marvellous material for Isabella, for it was a long way from Helen’s perception of herself as ‘Lady Broughton’. She did not care to discuss her background, although once, after a few drinks, she let her guard down and told us her grandmother was Irish, from Dublin, and one of a large family. She hinted that she was connected to an Irish peerage. When I asked her whether she was in contact with any of her grandmother’s relations, though, she drew up the drawbridge, and stared at me blankly. In the 11 years that I knew Helen, she always spoke in a clear, confident upper-class accent, but once or twice, she slipped. She caused Issie to howl with delight when she asked, ‘Are you coming on then?’ – Cheshire vernacular for ‘Are you pregnant?’
Conclusive evidence of what Isabella would see as her mother’s vulgarity were the family cars, which had personalised number plates: ‘EDB1’ for Evelyn’s Jaguar and ‘HDB1’ for Helen’s Volvo. To obtain these, Helen bought two cheap cars in the nearby county of Denbigh in north Wales and transferred the newly issued Denbigh number plates.
Isabella, did, however, believe that her interest in clothes and hats sprang from Helen. When she was around 6 years old, a photograph was taken of her standing on a chair in front of her mother’s dressing-room table, trying on a large pink hat and looking, as she said, ‘as happy as can be’. Helen would take Isabella with her to Chester to choose fur coats – and during her marriage to Evelyn she built up a large collection of mink and sable coats, which Isabella adored.
In the early 1970s Helen started to spend more and more time in London at the family flat at Cadogan Square. After 15 years with Evelyn she was becoming less and less satisfied with country life as Lady of the Manor in Cheshire: opening fêtes and sitting as a magistrate in Nantwich. Helen yearned for a more culturally and intellectually fulfilling life. Evelyn, a self-confessed philistine, was interested in little other than making money and horse racing. Apart from a shared enjoyment of parties, they had increasingly little in common. And Evelyn, neglected as a child by his socialite parents, feared loneliness.
In 1973, Helen had to go into hospital for a serious operation. Evelyn had already booked an expensive trip to the Far East, and decided that although his wife could not go, he would. After all, he had paid for it – and Helen could just get on with her operation. He was 58 years old.
Travelling on a bus in Hong Kong he met Rona Crammond, 34, a very attractive, intelligent and determined woman. Rona was born on 22 November 1939 in West Cardiff. Her father, Ernest Clifford Johns, was a bank manager – but Rona would have known who Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton was. By a curious coincidence, she had been educated at Goudhurst Ladies College at Doddington Hall when the big house was leased to the school by Evelyn.
Six years old, trying on a large pink hat. ‘As happy as can be.’
After leaving Goudhurst, Rona had trained as a nurse to work as a missionary in Africa. A beautiful young woman, she was pursued by several eligible young men, including a young Michael Heseltine, later the Deputy Prime Minister.
Rona subsequently married the flamboyant Old Harrovian property developer Donald Crammond and gave up her missionary ambitions in Africa. Like Evelyn, Rona had three young daughters, but, despite this complication, a romance between Evelyn and Rona blossomed, and developed further on their return to England. Before long, they decided to divorce their spouses and marry each other.
For most children of divorcing parents at boarding school, it is customary for the parents to come to the school and explain what is happening, but this was not to be the case for Isabella, who was at Heathfield in Berkshire. Her schoolfriend Rosie Pearson remembered the dramatic moment when Isabella discovered that her parents were divorcing: she rushed out of the dining room at Heathfield in floods of tears, holding a letter. Helen had written to Isabella telling her that Evelyn wanted to divorce her.
Up until this moment, Issie’s days at Heathfield School had been among the happiest of her life. I hated my boarding school, but Issie was one of those who thrived in the system. She found Heathfield tremendously good fun compared to the boredom of being at home. Even more crucially, at Heathfield she also experienced the unfamiliar sensation of security, which she had not known since her own family had been thrown into turmoil by the death of Johnny five years previously.
Heathfield was, and remains, an old-fashioned school, but old-fashioned in the best sense of the word, with a disproportionate emphasis on manners. Issie’s instinctive generosity and desire to help others were fostered here, developing into the generosity that would see her so ready in later life to devote such great time and personal energy to her discoveries and protégés.
Issie (bottom row, second from right) during fun times in the sixth form at Heathfield.
When Miss Eleanor Beatrice Wyatt founded the school in 1899, one of her guiding principles was, ‘My girls come here not to only to learn their lessons, but to learn how to live as well.’ The school’s main priority then, and still in Isabella’s time, was the turning out of accomplished and marriageable ‘gels’. Things have changed somewhat since then, but not too much. When I visited the school in January 2010, I was struck by the warmth and cosiness of the institution.
The school is not a big one and has 170 pupils spanning the ages of 11 to 18. Housed in an elegant late-Georgian building with white stuccoed walls and a Palladian colonnade, it is set in 36 acres of grounds with mature ornamental trees, rhododendron bushes, lawns, and the usual school facilities of science laboratories, art studios and playing fields. It is not a beautiful place, but its size and architecture give it a definite feeling of friendliness.
Academic achievement may not have been obsessively sought in Issie’s day, but