From his lofty perch in the social tree and cushioned by his family’s vast Kenyan land holdings, the 5th Baron Delamere would sometimes ruminate on his memories of the wife-swapping, cocaine-taking and ultimately tragic ‘Happy Valley’ set of colonial expats.
Were it not for a more recent and personal tragedy – the loss of his only son and heir from a heart attack – the life of Hon. Hugh Cholmondeley, who died this week aged 90, might well have been defined by the grotesque skeletons in the family cupboard involving sex, drugs and scandal.
The most spectacular skeleton was manifested in his own stepmother, the femme fatale and great beauty Lady (Diana) Delves Broughton who had been his father’s third wife.
Before she married Lord Delamere, she was at the centre of a story so shocking that it was turned into the best-selling book White Mischief, later a film starring Greta Scacchi as the libidinous socialite.
In 1941 Diana’s lover Lord Erroll, a dissolute womaniser – played by Charles Dance in the film – was shot dead at the wheel of his car on the outskirts of Nairobi.
Thomas Pitt Hamilton Cholmondeley (4th Lord Delamere) pictured with his third wife, Lady Diana Delamere (nee Diana Caldwell) at a dance at the Hyde Park Hotel
Greta Scacchi as Diana Lady Broughton in the 1987 film White Mischief
Greta Scacchi playing Diana Lady Broughton in the 1987 film White Mischief
Her cuckolded husband at the time, baronet Sir Jock Delves Broughton was put on trial for his murder.
The reports of the case with its lurid tales of alcohol-fuelled orgies and drug-taking extravagance among Kenya’s white upper classes electrified an audience in wartime Britain with its rationing and blackouts.
But there were no witnesses to the shooting and the physical evidence which appeared incriminating was circumstantial.
As the betrayed husband, Delves Broughton certainly had a motive, but he was acquitted – only to take his own life months later in a Liverpool hotel room, a broken man.
The crime remains unsolved and many are now wondering if the mystery has died with Cholmondeley.
Countless suspects have been named over the decades including elfin-faced US heiress Alice de Janze, another of Erroll’s mistresses.
Among other theories was the suggestion that he may have been the victim of a political assassination because of his fascist views. All are plausible.
But according to Delamere family lore, Hugh was said to have overheard stepmother Diana admitting the murder to his father.
If he did, he never publicly admitted it. According to a fellow aristocrat who knows the Delamere family and has long-standing Kenya connections, he never wanted it to emerge in his lifetime.
Hugh’s relationship with Diana was complex. He was a young man of 21 when the scandalous Lady Delves Broughton entered his life in 1955, after Jock’s suicide and another broken marriage.
Lady Diana Delves Broughton (pictured)
Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance in the 1987 film White Mischief
‘I found her a charming, very good-looking blonde with nice legs. She was well-spoken and seemed to have some quite nice jewellery. She collected jewellery,’ Hugh later recalled.
‘Diana was my father’s third excursion into matrimony and he was her fourth husband. Diana never married anyone she loved. She only married for money or position.
‘In my father’s case she already had the money, from her third husband, Greg Colville. She married my father for position and it was often said that he was the most expensive hobby she ever indulged in.’
He was, however, not always complimentary about his stepmother, once remarking: ‘She was the best whore in the country for 50 years.
She was a trisexual. What’s a trisexual? I thought everybody knew; she liked men; she would jump into bed with any woman that would have her; and she had a boyish body and liked seducing gays who would then enjoy her.
There, now you know as much as I do.’ On another occasion he observed: ‘Diana never told the truth about anything. She had some surgery – her gallbladder, she said, but actually she had a hysterectomy. The reason she was a nymphomaniac most of her life is because she didn’t ovulate regularly. She was quite extraordinary, but after the operation she calmed down considerably.’
His father, he said, knew all about her past. ‘He was just a hard-working farmer… but he always welcomed her old boyfriends warmly.’
Lady Diana Delves Broughton, wife of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, who died in 1987
Sarah Miles as Alice de Janze and Charles Dance as Josslyn Hay in White Mischief
He was to become the husband to whom she remained married the longest until his death in 1979, though she was not faithful.
She lived in a three-way relationship with Delamere and her lesbian lover Lady Patricia Fairweather.
For someone whose own sober life was the mirror opposite of his rakish father – he only married once – Hugh studied the hedonistic lifestyle of the figures who pirouetted around his family between the two world wars with wry detachment.
Despite its notorious reputation, the Happy Valley set was, he said, only between 12 and 20 people.
‘On Sundays they swapped wives,’ he noted. ‘The wives stayed in their own houses and the men moved around.
It was fashionable to be promiscuous. There was a lot of cocaine-sniffing and messing about.’
An elderly servant who once worked for Lady Idina Hay [Lord Erroll’s former wife] told me he had joined the household in the Twenties as a small boy.
People used to swap sometimes twice a night, he said, and the difficulty was knowing which bedroom to return the laundered underclothes to. The garments were much prettier in those days.’
Jock Delves Broughton (pictured) who died on December 5, 1942
Greta Scacchi in White Mischief (1987)
As for his stepmother, he said: ‘Diana was not really a Happy Valley-er, but during the fortnight before Erroll was shot, she had five boyfriends and two girlfriends.
On the day Erroll died, she had been to bed with one other chap and one woman twice.
She was thoroughly in favour of sex and she was up for everything.
For her part, Hugh’s wife Ann recalled of her: ‘She was not my sort of woman. I couldn’t spend six hours being beautiful. She never tried to be cosy and she never mentioned age.
‘I think she dropped her passport in a puddle when she was 30 and it stayed like that. But she had a hard life, a lot of booze and a lot of cocaine and a lot of face-lifts. She never smiled too hard.’
She did smile on one occasion – when Hugh and Ann, daughter of Kenya’s former governor, were married on the veranda of the Delamere’s 55,000-acre ranch, Soysambu, on the plains of the Great Rift Valley in 1964.
Hugh Cholmondeley (the 5th Lord Delamere) with his mother Lady Phyllis
But perhaps that was because Diana was said to have made every effort to upstage her new stepdaughter-in-law.
‘I think Diana thought she was the bride,’ remembered Lady Delamere.
‘She was dressed in white guipure lace with a big white hat while I wore dark yellow silk.’
After she died in 1987, the ghost of Diana was said to haunt the huge estate in Masai country where Hugh and his wife farmed 15,000 head of cattle and transformed 8,000 acres into a wildlife sanctuary.
They turned their hands to tourism with luxury tents on the shores of Lake Elmenteita, famous for its flamingos and pelicans, managed by their son Tom.
But disaster struck in 2005 when Tom was arrested for the killing of a Kenyan wildlife services ranger who had been working undercover posing as a buyer of illegal bushmeat at a Cholmondeley-owned slaughterhouse.
Tom claimed he had been acting in self defence, fearing the ranger was an armed robber. His case was dismissed, but a year later there was another shooting – of a poacher – and Cholmondeley was convicted of manslaughter.
Sir Henry John ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet, right, with his wife Diana and his son Evelyn Delves Broughton
Because he had been on remand so long he served five months of an eight-month sentence. The shootings reawakened colonial-era divisions and there were calls from Kenyans for Cholmondeley to be lynched and his family ‘killed in cold blood’. It was known as the Trigger Happy Valley case.
Then, in 2016 aged 48, Tom suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during hip replacement surgery.
Despite this great sadness and their disillusionment with post-colonial Kenya, Hugh said he would not leave.
‘Barring disease or politics there is no way I would leave Africa.’
His love of Kenya came courtesy of his bloodline and after Eton and Cambridge he was as drawn to the wide-open spaces of East Africa like previous generations of his family. It was a passion for hunting that took the 3rd Lord Delamere to Kenya, having arrived with a train of 100 porters and 200 camels.
By the First World War, he owned a quarter of a million acres and visitors to the ranch he established included Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh.
‘My grandfather practically invented the country,’ said Delamere.
‘He was determined that this would be the ideal place for white settlement.’ And so it proved. The money generated from this rich land ushered in the decadence of the White Mischief era.
For the 5th Lord Delamere, however, it was a passion for the land and the beauty of its great spaces that he cherished – not the sex and drugs.’