From his high position on the social tree and protected by his family's vast Kenyan land holdings, the 5th Baron Delamere would sometimes ruminate on his memories of wife swapping, cocaine consumption and, ultimately, the tragic set of colonial expatriates of the 'Happy Valley'.
Had it not been for a more recent and personal tragedy – the loss of his only son and heir to a heart attack – the life of the Hon. Hugh Cholmondeley, who died this week aged 90, may well have been defined by the grotesque skeletons in the family closet involving sex, drugs and scandal.
The most spectacular skeleton manifested itself 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 center of a story so shocking 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 womanizer – 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) photographed with his third wife Lady Diana Delamere (née Diana Caldwell) at a ball 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 betrayed husband at the time, baronet Sir Jock Delves Broughton, was put on trial for her murder.
Reports of the case, with their lurid stories of alcohol-fueled orgies and drug-taking extravagances 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 that appeared incriminating was circumstantial.
As a 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 now wonder if the mystery died with Cholmondeley.
Numerous suspects have been named over the decades, including American 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 due to his fascist views. All are plausible.
But, according to Delamere family lore, it is said that Hugh overheard his stepmother Diana admitting the murder to his father.
If he did, he never admitted it publicly. According to a fellow aristocrat who knows the Delamere family and has long-standing ties to Kenya, he never wanted this to come up in his lifetime.
Hugh's relationship with Diana was complex. He was a young man of 21 when the scandalous Lady Delves Broughton came into his life in 1955, following Jock's suicide and another broken marriage.
Lady Diana Delves Broughton (photo)
Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance in the 1987 film White Mischief
“I thought she was a charming blonde, very pretty and with beautiful legs. She spoke well and seemed to have some very nice jewelry. She collected jewelry,” Hugh later recalled.
'Diana was my father's third outing to marriage 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 took up.
He, however, did not always praise his stepmother, once commenting: 'She was the best prostitute in the country for 50 years.
She was trisexual. What is a trisexual? I thought everyone knew; she liked men; she would jump into bed with any woman who would have her; and she had a boyish body and liked to seduce gay men who would like her.
Okay, now you know as much as I do. On another occasion he observed: 'Diana never told the truth about anything. She had surgery – on her gallbladder, she said, but in reality she had a hysterectomy. The reason she was a nymphomaniac for most of her life is because she didn't ovulate regularly. She was extraordinary, but after the operation she calmed down considerably.
Her father, he said, knew all about her past. 'He was just a hard-working farmer… but he always gave her old boyfriends a warm welcome.'
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 would become the husband to whom she remained married the longest until his death in 1979, although she was not faithful.
She had a three-way relationship with Delamere and her lesbian lover Lady Patricia Fairweather.
For someone whose sober life was the opposite of his libertine father's – he only married once – Hugh studied the hedonistic lifestyle of the figures who pirouetted around his family between the two world wars with ironic detachment.
Despite its notorious reputation, the Happy Valley group had, according to him, only between 12 and 20 people.
“On Sundays they changed wives,” he noted. 'The wives stayed in their own homes and the men moved around.
It was fashionable to be promiscuous. There was a lot of cocaine smell and a lot of mess.
An elderly servant who once worked for Lady Idina Hay [Lord Erroll’s former wife] told me that he joined the family in the 1920s, when he was still small.
People used to change sometimes twice a night, he said, and the difficulty was knowing which room to return the washed underwear to. Clothes were much prettier back then.
Jock Delves Broughton (photo) who died on December 5, 1942
Greta Scacchi in The White House (1987)
As for his stepmother, he said: 'Diana wasn't really a Happy Valley-er, but during the fortnight before Erroll was shot, she had five boyfriends and two girlfriends.
The day Erroll died, she went to bed with another guy and a woman twice.
She was totally in favor of sex and was willing to do anything.
In turn, Hugh's wife Ann remembered her: 'She wasn't my kind of woman. I couldn't spend six hours being beautiful. She never tried to be cozy and never mentioned her age.
“I think she dropped her passport in a puddle when she was 30 and ended up like that. But she had a difficult life, a lot of drinking, a lot of cocaine and a lot of facelifts. She never smiled much.
She smiled on one occasion – when Hugh and Ann, daughter of the former governor of Kenya, were married on the verandah 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's because Diana is said to have made every effort to upstage her new stepdaughter.
“I think Diana thought she was the bride,” Lady Delamere recalled.
“She was dressed in white guipure lace and a big white hat, while I wore dark yellow silk.”
After she died in 1987, Diana's ghost is said to have haunted the huge estate in the Masai region where Hugh and his wife raised 15,000 head of cattle and turned 8,000 acres into a wildlife sanctuary.
They dedicated themselves to tourism with luxury tents on the banks 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 murder of a Kenyan ranger who was working undercover as a buyer of poached meat at an abattoir owned by Cholmondeley.
Tom claimed he acted in self-defense, fearing the guard was an armed robber. His case was dropped, but a year later there was another shooting – by a poacher – and Cholmondeley was convicted of manslaughter.
Sir Henry John 'Jock' Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet, right, with his wife Diana and son Evelyn Delves Broughton
Because he had been in pre-trial detention for so long, he served five months of an eight-month sentence. The shootings sparked colonial-era divisions and there were calls from Kenyans for Cholmondeley to be lynched and his family “killed in cold blood”. It became known as the Trigger Happy Valley case.
Then, in 2016, at age 48, Tom suffered a fatal cardiac arrest during hip replacement surgery.
Despite this great sadness and disillusionment with post-colonial Kenya, Hugh said he would not leave.
'Except for illness or politics, I would not leave Africa under any circumstances.'
His love of Kenya came through his lineage, and after Eton and Cambridge he felt as drawn to the open spaces of East Africa as previous generations of his family. It was the passion for hunting that took the 3rd Lord Delamere to Kenya, arriving with a train of 100 porters and 200 camels.
In the First World War he owned a quarter of a million acres and visitors to the farm he established included Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh.
“My grandfather practically invented the country,” Delamere said.
'He was determined that this would be the ideal place for a white settlement.' And so it was proven. The money generated by this rich land ushered in the decline of the White Mischief era.
For the 5th Lord Delamere, however, it was the passion for the land and the beauty of its great spaces that he enjoyed – not the sex and drugs.'
