5th Baron Delamere (1934-2024)
bx...@yahoo.com
https:/www.maltagenealogy.com/LeighRayment/
https:/www.maltagenealogy.com/LeighRayment/
bx...@yahoo.com
https:/www.maltagenealogy.com/LeighRayment/
bx...@yahoo.com
Richard R
E X T R A C T
Hugh Cholmondeley obituary: Descendant of Kenya’s Happy Valley set
Fifth Baron Delamere with forthright views who was a last link to the ‘White Mischief’ murder of the Earl of Erroll
Hugh Cholmondeley’s biggest problem was zebras eating the grass on his land in Kenya. The district commissioner would not permit him to shoot them. “It’s ridiculous,” he told The Spectator in 1998. “Of course, what I should have done is shoot the district commissioner, but that’s bloody illegal too.”
Cholmondeley, otherwise known as the 5th Baron Delamere, was a tall, rake-thin figure with wispy grey hair, jagged teeth and a hooked nose. He was a descendant of the Happy Valley set, early 20th-century white settlers who indulged in wife-swapping and cocaine-sniffing. They became notorious after the 1941 murder of the 22nd Earl of Erroll. Sir Jock Delves Broughton had a motive as the betrayed husband, but was sensationally acquitted and his trial formed the basis of Michael Radford’s colonial drama White Mischief (1987) starring Greta Scacchi, Joss Ackland and Charles Dance. A broken man, Delves Broughton took his own life at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, in 1942.
In 1955 his widow, Diana, married Cholmondeley’s father. Her stepson, a man of forthright opinion, was far from complimentary…
…Cholmondeley succeeded to the peerage in 1979 and until the reforms of 1999 was entitled to sit in the Lords, though there is no record of him doing so. He lived in considerable style in Kenya, with fine paintings on the walls including a portrait of Charles I by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, though it had “been rather ruined by one of my aunts deciding that she could paint better snowballs than Brueghel, so she added some”…
…The Earl of Erroll’s murder remains unsolved. According to the Daily Mail, family lore maintains that Cholmondeley once overheard Diana admitting to his father that she was responsible. If he did, he never said so in public…
…Hugh George Cholmondeley was born in London in 1934, the youngest of three children of Thomas Cholmondeley, the 4th Baron Delamere, and his first wife, Phyllis (née Scott), granddaughter of the 6th Duke of Buccleuch and the 7th Duke of Rutland. His sisters, Elizabeth and Anne, predeceased him.
The Cholmondeleys had been shire knights in Cheshire for many centuries until Thomas Cholmondeley was raised to the peerage in 1821 as the 1st Baron Delamere. “He was an idiot … He thought he had a bargain when he paid £5,000 for it. The only problem was that the going rate was £1,200,” his great-great-grandson said…
…when Kenya became independent in 1963. Many left, but the Cholmondeleys took Kenyan citizenship…
…Cholmondeley’s parents divorced in 1944 and his first stepmother was Mary Ashley, Edwina Mountbatten’s sister, whom he described as “totally squeaky bonkers”. Diana, his second stepmother, “never married anyone she loved … only for money or position”…
…in 1964 married Anne Renison, the daughter of a former governor. They had first met at a race meeting three years earlier. “I remember thinking what a nice sort of girl she was. Most of the others I met were too flippant, too spoilt,” he said.
First there was the small problem that she was already married, to a Scot who proved unhelpful. To provide evidence for her divorce she had to be caught in flagrante delicto at an Edinburgh hotel. “We were in the ‘adultery room’ at the top of the stairs and had to have three witnesses to see us in bed the next morning — a lawyer, his secretary and the chambermaid who brought the tea,” she said. Their son, Tom, who in 2009 was convicted of manslaughter after shooting a Kenyan poacher, predeceased him…
…“Barring disease or politics there is no way that I would leave Africa,” he once said. “Anyhow, there are no buffalo to shoot in England, and I would miss that.”
Hugh Cholmondeley (5th Baron Delamere), Kenyan landowner, was born on January 18, 1934. He died on October 7, 2024, aged 90
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/hugh-cholmondeley-obituary-descendant-kenyas-happy-valley-set-z2g2g8hz6
