Free White Mischief by James Fox Page B

stable of thirty horses; and he sat on the Nantwich Bench as a Justice of the Peace. He had a passion for bridge and racing—although he was always “somewhere warm” for most of the steeplechasing season—and he was a tournament-class croquet player. Vera became a hunter of big game and in 1919–20 they made their first trip to Kenya. They went back again in 1923 and met Broughton’s old school friend, Jack Soames, who had settled in Nanyuki. Broughton bought the Spring Valley coffee estate near Nairobi. In 1928, again in Kenya, he met the Earl of Erroll at Muthaiga, and stayed with Lord Delamere and his wife, Gwladys, at Soysambu.
    At Doddington Broughton insisted that all the guest rooms were filled each weekend. He would hire the band from Ciro’s to play the guests down to Cheshire on the train and would hold up the express at Crewe if his returning guests were late getting away to the station, with a telephone call and a brace of pheasants flung into the guard’s van. Train tickets were sent round in advance to his London guests by the secretary at Hill Street. The weekend parties were often reported in the Sketch and the Tatler, the guests paraded on the gravel drive for photographs, the readers reminded that the Broughtons were an ancient family, “of consideration for centuries in the counties of Cheshire and Stafford.”
    For all his hospitality. Broughton, the sporting Baronet, was not popular among his contemporaries. Other men were suspicious of him—possibly because of his greatwealth, or because he could only unbend with women. He was certainly vain, “with his high collars and his haw-haw voice” (the false entry in Who’s Who hints at that); he was a name-dropper, and yet he could sulk for a week without giving a reason. He was distant, lonely, somewhat humourless. His guests at Doddington noticed his disconcerting habit of going into what appeared to be a trance for five minutes or more, especially at meals, staring blankly into the distance, unable to hear any remark addressed to him. “Sour!” was the adjective supplied by an elder statesman.
    “You mean cynical?”
    “No, worse than cynical. Sour.”
    “He looked as if there was always an unpleasant smell under his nose.” said a Cheshire neighbour. “He liked scatological jokes.”
    “Not a nice man,” said the Club servants, “arrogant, like the Blenheim lot. None of us liked him.” *
    “Dishonest, charmless, morose,” was the Clubmen’s view. “He was a coward, faked a sunstroke because he feared going to France.” A woman described him as a sad, rather querulous man, who never smiled, and another as “vicious, cold and cruel in more ways than one.”
    Vera went racing with Lord Carnarvon, Lord Rosebery and Sir Brograve Beauchamp, but she was often away from home on her adventures to unreachable and forbidden places, and from the mid 1930s she spent more and more time on safaris or cruises with her great friend Walter Guinness, the third son of the Earl of Iveagh, who became Lord Moyne in 1932. There was certainly an imbalance in the marriage. Vera was energetic, curious, full of vitality. Broughton, by contrast or necessity, was afflicted increasingly with boredom and world weariness. They began to go their separate ways. The Earl of Antrim, who often visited Doddington, wrote to Cyril Connolly in 1969.
    Perhaps Jock was finding life tedious; he had no intellectual tastes and although he went out hunting he never cut a dash. I believe he craved sympathy and affection and most of all to be amused. One could see how he lit up when he was enjoying himself.
    Broughton’s only son and heir, Sir Evelyn, the present Baronet, was born in 1915. By the time he was nineteen and a Cambridge undergraduate in 1934, Evelyn and his father were more or less strangers, and Evelyn’s description of his father is revealing of the man. What contact there was occurred mostly out of doors, hunting and shooting. It appeared that Broughton was