Page 79 - They Also Served

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Henry Delves Broughton 1902.
Henry John Delves Broughton was born in
Doddington Hall, Cheshire, in 1883. Commissioned
from Sandhurst into the Irish Guards in 1902, he
became the 11th baronet in 1914. Due to sail for
France as a captain in the 1st Battalion at the outbreak
of the First World War, he was taken ill and spent the
war on home service. Sir Henry, known as Jock, was
part of a syndicate that owned Ensbury Park Racecourse in Bournemouth and was an inveterate gambler who, in the 1930s, was forced to sell off over 30,000 acres of the family estate to pay his debts. Beset with financial problems, he was suspected of insurance fraud after claiming for the supposed theft of his wife’s pearls and some paintings. Shortly after, he and his wife divorced. In November 1940, he married Diana Caldwell, 30 years his junior, and the couple moved to Kenya.
Settling in Wanjohi Valley, near the Aberdare Mountains, they became part of the ‘Happy Valley’ set. This group of British and Irish colonials were infamous for their decadent lifestyle and hedonistic parties, with drug use and wife-swapping the norm. Their behaviour was not only immoral but out of kilter with the rest of the British war effort at a time when Londoners were enduring the Blitz. The self-styled ‘king’ of the valley was Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll. Abandoning a career as a diplomat, he eloped with a married woman, Lady Idina Sackville, and moved to Kenya in 1924. She grew tired of his infidelity and divorced him in 1929, after which he took up with a second married woman. Molly Ramsay-Hill’s husband famously confronted him at Nairobi station and horse-whipped the earl in front of a cheering crowd. After Molly died of a drug overdose, he turned his attention to the newly arrived Diana Delves Broughton, and the two became lovers.
On 24th January 1941, Erroll was found shot dead in his car; suspicion fell on Jock, who was arrested. Tried for murder, the case hinged on the murder weapon, which, in a possible echo of his earlier insurance fraud, he claimed to have been stolen from his home a few days before. Without a confession and a murder weapon, despite having the strongest possible motive, Broughton was acquitted. The events inspired the book White Mischief and the later film starring Joss Ackland and Greta Scacchi, with Charles Dance as the philandering Earl.
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