Free White Mischief by James Fox Page A

million.
    Broughton was born in 1883 (though Who’s Who, for which he filled in the forms himself, gives the date as 1888). His mother died when he was two, and his father remarried. He could never get on with his stepbrother and stepsister, and hated his father, who kept him chronically short of money, instilling in him a lifelong sense of injury and disadvantage by comparison with his peers. There was a rumour at Eton, where he was thought both dim and overproud, that he had been forced to steal because of his tight allowance, and another that he had fits of ungovernable temper that kept his fellow pupils out of his way. After Eton he went to a crammer’s for some force-fed tutoring and joined the Irish Guards in 1902.
    In 1913 he married Vera Boscawen, who came from an impoverished branch of a good family. She was tall and blue-eyed, with outstanding good looks, and Broughton may have been in love with her—he was certainly proud of her glamour and the wonderful clothes she wore. A Cheshire neighbour said of Vera that she was hard as nails, loved nobody and was determined to get all she could out of life. She liked racing, bridge, canasta and mah-jongg—any game or sport that made conversation impossible and dull people tolerable. “She also enjoyed the adventure of killing huge, brilliant animals. She probably despised Jock but found his money comforting.”
    Broughton was thirty-one when his father died in 1914. Along with Valentine, Viscount Castlerosse, he was considered the best-looking officer in the Irish Guards. Having for years found it difficult to pay his bills at the officers’mess, he now had a princely income along with the houses and the acres.
    Just then, on August 12th, 1914, the Irish Guards (including the future Field-Marshal Alexander) sailed for France. With one exception. Kipling, whose son was killed in the same regiment, wrote in The Irish Guards in the Great-War, “Just before leaving. Captain Sir Delves Broughton, Bart, was taken ill and had to be left behind.”
    Broughton was taken off the S.S. Novara by tender, and a telegram went off to headquarters, asking for Captain Hamilton Berners to take his place. The Novara cleared at 7 p.m. As dark fell, she passed H.M.S. Formidable off Ryde and exchanged signals with her. The battleship’s last message to the battalion was to hope that they would get “plenty of fighting.”
    On the Aisne, exactly a month after his arrival, the replacement, Captain Hamilton Berners, was killed. So, too, was the Guards’ Colonel, the Hon. George Morris, and two other officers. Lord Francis Scott became Delves Broughton’s new Commanding Officer. Two more of the Guards’ wounded officers were invalided home: Captain Vesey and 2nd Lt. Viscount Castlerosse, who joined Delves Broughton at the Depot at Warley.
    What was the nature of his illness? It was described later as “sunstroke” brought on through long hours of loading, but it suggested more strongly some severe psychosomatic affliction. A survivor wrote,
    I merely heard he had gone sick. The day had not been over-strenuous for a normal fit man and there can be no question of sunstroke. He was not a very bellicose gent and he was certainly never again in a service battalion.
    Nevertheless, Broughton was treated in hospitals at Netley and Millbank, and retired from the army in 1919, with a 50 per cent disability pension. He now dragged his left foot as he walked; he had an arthritic right hand witha weak grip—the result of a motor accident in 1915—and was subject to bouts of confusion and amnesia.
    Now began the twenty-year-long innings of the thirty-six-year-old Baronet, who started to spend heavily as if to make up for lost time, to gamble, to entertain on a large scale. Haunted by the fear that he would at any moment run short of cash, despite an income of £80,000, he liquidated a large part of the estate, some 15,000 acres, almost as soon as he had inherited it. He joined the Turf Club, kept a