FIRST THE OBITUARY & THEN SOME CONNECTIONS
Isabella Delves Broughton, fashion journalist and stylist: born 19 November 1958; married 1981 Nicholas Taylor (marriage dissolved 1983), 1989 Detmar Blow; died Gloucester 7 May 2007.
Flamboyant, fragile, yet completely, utterly fearless, Isabella Blow was the ultimate English eccentric. An unmissable sight on the fashion circuit, Blow was known for many things, but primarily for discovering the designer Alexander McQueen, nurturing new talent and obliterating the view of customers at the Paris couture shows.
Heads would invariably swivel as Blow entered any fashion arena - be it a run-down warehouse in the East End or a rarefied atelier in Paris. Her dress-code remained an elegant version of the fashion cliché " classic with a twist". Teetering on satin stiletto Manolos, wearing couture gown, feathered hat and smeared ruby lipstick,
Blow was a dishevelled bird of paradise who didn't give a damn about convention.
She discovered Sophie Dahl sobbing in a doorway; she bought Alexander McQueen's entire degree show, and had Philip Treacy design her wedding hat when she married Detmar Blow in 1988 - as well being credited with discovering Hussein Chalayan and Stella Tennant.
She also worked as Anna Wintour's assistant on American Vogue, then for Michael Roberts at Tatler, then British Vogue, then The Sunday Times - and ultimately she returned to Tatler as fashion director. Convinced she was ugly, she almost always wore a Treacy hat that would obscure her face, accessorized with her famous slash of red lipstick - MAC designed one in homage to her.
She loved to gossip, talking 20 to the dozen, dropping names, witticisms and acute observations, and invariably ending her sentences with a deafening roar of laughter. In the manner of penniless aristocrats everywhere, Blow was no good with money and identified with Oscar Wilde's assertion that "anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination".
Blow's role in the fashion industry was impossible to define. Incredibly perceptive, inventive and intuitive, she worked completely on instinct, her butterfly mind flitting from arranging a big-name fashion shoot to pursuing the unsuspecting mother of a young fashion student, aka the Next Big Thing.
Although her last official title was as Fashion Editor at Large at Tatler, Blow, flitting in and out of the office, with a life far larger - and more complex - than her job, was an agent provocateur.
She had, during her career, worked at The Sunday Times and been an unlikely consultant at Dupont, Lycra and Swarovski crystal. Her natural habitat, however, was Condé Nast. Emma Soames, former Editor of Tatler, who employed the 22-year-old Blow to work with her Fashion Editor Michael Roberts, says that she came into the world a fully formed fashion editor.
Utterly uncompromising. She just loved it. She just breathed it all. She once came in to see me wearing what could only be described as a pussy pelmet, suspenders and ripped stockings. I thought, "Oh, here we go again, creative person wants to leave." But in fact, she sat down and said, completely seriously, "I'm very, very worried about my pension." Of course, it was never mentioned again.
She was born Isabella Delves Broughton in 1958, daughter of Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton Bt and his wife Helen Shore - her grandfather was Sir " Jock" Delves Broughton of White Mischief fame, who was tried for the murder in Kenya of the Earl of Erroll (and acquitted).
Isabella was educated at Heathfield School and, after her A- levels, enrolled at a secretarial academy. In 1979 she decamped to the United States, briefly attending Columbia University to study ancient Chinese art.
In the early years of her career she led the life of a dilettante - dabbling in various jobs to make a living, eventually finding her métier when she was introduced to Anna Wintour at American Vogue. Isabella Delves Broughton became Wintour's assistant and Wintour her mentor. Wintour has described her as an "amazingly bright light in a world of increasingly corporate culture".
After a brief early marriage, Delves Broughton met Detmar Blow at a friend's wedding in 1988. She claimed he was initially attracted not to her face but to her outlandish hat. They were married in medieval style at Gloucester Cathedral in 1989.
They made an extraordinary couple at gallery openings and fashion happenings, with Detmar in bespoke pinstripe suits and Isabella a vision of aristocratic messiness, resembling a latter-day Miss Havisham.
In 1990, Blow made the transfer from Tatler to Vogue, then under the editorship of Liz Tilberis. She had already spotted and promoted the milliner Philip Treacy; he made the medieval headpiece she wore to her wedding the year before he graduated from the Royal College of Art.
Without a London workroom, Blow knew, Treacy could sink without a trace, and so she installed him in the basement of her home, secured him a contract to design for Chanel and continued to wear his outlandish concoctions for the rest of her life.
It was during this time that she not only discovered Alexander McQueen but reinvented him. Blow was sitting in the audience of McQueen's MA show at St Martin's and, taken with his collection, relentlessly pursued him.
She rang his home, his mother and his tutor, then wore his graduation collection in a Vogue shoot at the Blows' Gloucestershire estate, Hilles, in November 1992. It was she who persuaded the former Lee McQueen to change his name to Alexander (as in Alexander the Great, she said).
Although she secured financial security for McQueen - over dinner, she persuaded Tom Ford to convince the Gucci powers-that-be to back McQueen - Blow was left with nothing but reflected glory.
Despite her promotion of fledgeling fashion talent, she never made a bean. When her father died in 1993, leaving £6m, Blow discovered that she had been left only £5,000.
But she had many things that money can't buy: presence, style and legions of loyal friends.
She suffered from depression all her life, but after her separation from and then reconciliation with Detmar, the illness came to the surface with alarming regularity. She made suicide attempts, throwing herself off a bridge and trying to drown herself in a lake.
Earlier this year, she was diagnosed with cancer. Issy's sister-in-law Selina Blow told me on Friday that she had "the most star-studded visitor list in the NHS".
"There was something other-worldly about her," says Emma Soames. "I think it was a great sadness that she never had a child. Although she was from another world, essentially she was made of flesh and blood like the rest of us. The same things made her cry."
Isabella died on Sunday, May 6 2007, having been treated for cancer and severe depression for some months, at the age of 48. Philip Treacy designed a black feathered hat for her cortege and a funeral was held in The Guards Chapel where the whole fashion world descended in their most appropriate outfits to pay their respects
[Composite from: Linda Watson & Jo Craven]
MY INTEREST
The Broughtons are descended from the ancient Vernon family of Cheshire and in particular from Richard Vernon, fourth son of the 3rd medieval Baron Vernon of Shipbrook, Cheshire. Adam, his son, was of Napton, Warwickshire. Adams's grandson Roger acquired the estate at Broughton, Staffordshire, from which the surname derives, in the 13th century.
Their 'seat' Doddington Hall near Nantwich, Cheshire is a large private Grade 1 mansion designed by Samuel Wyatt built ca.1780. It is set in gardens landscaped by Capability Brown, overlooking Doddington Lake, a popular sailing venue. The 13th century castle is to the north of the Hall.
['The house is at the moment the subject of substantial building works which are being effected in four phases. Stage I (refurbishing the exterior) has been completed. Parties wishing to view the exterior (and the interior by appointment only because the site remains extremely hazardous) should write to: The Farm Manager, Doddington Park Farm, Nantwich'].
The first Baronet was the son of Thomas Broughton (died 1648) who was an ardent Royalist and supporter of Charles I and who was obliged to 'compound at a cost of £3,200', for the return of his estates following sequestration by the Parliament at the conclusion of the Civil War. His son was honoured with the Baronetcy at the Restoration of Charles II.
Isabella was the eldest child of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, a military officer, and his second wife, Helen Mary Shore, a barrister. She had three siblings: two sisters, Julia and Lavinia, and a brother, John, who drowned in the family's swimming pool at the age of two, and whose death contributed to the family's imminent fracture.
In 1972, when she was 14, her parents separated and her mother left the household, shaking each daughter by the hand. Her parents divorced two years later. Isabella did not get along with her father, who bequeathed her only £5,000 from his estate, which was worth more than one million pounds. Blow often said her fondest memory was trying on her mother's pink hat, a recollection that she explained led to her career in fashion.
I have a vivid memory of hearing the news of the death of her infant brother John in 1964, when I was 20 years old. Though, as I remembered the terribly sad story, the toddler had drowned in an ornamental pond at Doddington Hall.
Although the aristocracy was a separate breed, they provided the gossip that fuelled conversation back in the 1950s in the way that people now draw on the tabloids and trashy magazines to follow the problems and peccadilloes of Brad Pitt, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie etc. In fact seeing the frontispiece photo spread of the latest debutante in the Cheshire Life - say The Hon. Arabella Hunt-Cropper – was about as close as many people came to a pin-up at the time.
I remembered the Cheshire connection when I went to see a special exhibition of Issy's hats that was being shown at the excellent Dowse Museum, Lower Hutt about a year ago.
THE CONNECTION TO THE CHOLMONDELEYS
Issy’s grandfather Sir Henry John 'Jock' Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet (1883 - 5 December 1942) inherited the baronetcy of Broughton in 1914. Sir Jock also inherited some 34,000 acres (140 km²) of family estate in Cheshire, but was forced to sell off most of it in the 1930s to pay gambling debts.
On the outbreak of World War I, as a captain in the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, he was due to sail on the troop ship SS Novara, but was taken ill and had to be replaced before the ship sailed.
In 1939 he was suspected of insurance fraud after the theft of his wife's pearls and some paintings, on which he claimed the insurance.
He was married twice: to Vera Edyth Griffith-Boscawen in 1913, divorcing in 1940; then in 1941 to Diana Caldwell (d. 1987), daughter of Seymour Caldwell. After his death, Diana remarried twice, the second time to Thomas Cholmondeley, 4th Baron Delamere.
‘Jock’ is chiefly known for his trial in Kenya for the murder of 22nd Earl of Erroll, who had been conducting an affair with his wife Diana. These events were dramatized in the film White Mischief.
It appears that Erroll and Diana had something of a 'Some Enchanted Evening' meeting of needs 'across a crowded room' in the Muthaiga Club. One assumes that this was during an interlude in Lord Delamere's odd habit of chipping golf balls on to the roof of the Club with a 5-iron.
The Earl of Erroll was shot dead, by a single pistol bullet in the head, in his car at a crossroads outside Nairobi in 1941, the year after Sir Jock had moved to Kenya with his new wife Diana to join the Happy Valley set, a group of British colonials living in the Happy Valley region of Kenya (& 'ruled' it seems by Lord Delamere).
Alice de Janzé was initially viewed by the community as a suspect (a previous mistress of the Earl, she had shot and seriously wounded an earlier lover). But Sir Jock soon became the police's prime suspect and was tried for the murder.
He was acquitted for lack of evidence, a conclusion that hinged chiefly on the identification of the gun used. Sir Jock's pistol was a Colt with 6 rifling grooves, and Erroll was killed by a bullet with 5 grooves. No pistol was produced at the trial by Sir Walter Harragin, prosecuting attorney for the Crown, or by the defendant.
Broughton claimed that two of his pistols, a silver cigarette case and 10 or 20 shillings were stolen 3 or 4 days before Erroll's death.
Superintendent Arthur Poppy, a policeman dealing with the case, claimed that Sir Jock had stolen the guns from himself to give the impression that he had no .32 pistol at the time. Additionally, the fatal bullet's rifling was clockwise. Colts use anti-clockwise rifling.
A telegram was sent to the Colt Company in America to clear up the confusion. Another bullet also was fired at Erroll, missed and after ricocheting off a metal pillar in Erroll's car, ended up near the accelerator. It also had 5 grooves and clockwise turning.
A number of books have been written about the case, notably James Fox's investigation White Mischief: The Murder of Lord Erroll, later made into a film White Mischief (1987).
In May 2007 in the Daily Telegraph, author Christine Nicholls described taped evidence claimed to be definitive proof that Sir Jock was the murderer.
