Helen, Lady Delves Broughton, who died 17 October, 2025, aged 95, was the former wife of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, 12th Baronet.
She was born in Stockport, 16 March, 1930, as Helen Mary Shore, daughter of John Shore, of Wilmslow, Cheshire, a well-to-do Manchester greengrocery wholesaler, and she became the youngest female barrister when she qualified aged 21, and was admitted to the Inner Temple.
On 3 March, 1955, she married, as his second wife Evelyn Delves Broughton (born 2 October, 1915). The family name will always be associated with the 'White Mischief' case in which Eveleyn's father, Sir Jock, the 11th Baronet (1883-1942), was acquitted of murdering his wife's lover the Earl of Erroll, in Kenya's Happy Valley, in 1941. Evelyn's mother was Vera Edyth Griffith-Boscawen (1894-1968).
Helen's volatile marriage to Delves Broughton ended in divorce in 1974. He went on to marry his third wife Rona Clifford-Johns, whose daughter Louise is the Duchess of Bedford, wife of the 15th Duke of Bedford.
The marriage produced three girls, Isabella (1958-2007), Julia (1961-2024), and Lavinia (born 1965), and a boy, John (born 1962), who would have been the thirteenth holder of the 17th century baronetcy, but in 1964, at the age of two, he died in a freak accident in an ornamental pond on the family's 35,000 acre Doddington Park estate.
Helen walked out of the troubled marriage in 1974 and in his biography of her daughter Isabella, her husband Detmar Blow, described how Lady Delves Broughton 'lined up her children on the gravel outside the gardener's cottage on the family estate and shook their hands goodbye. She seldom saw her children in the years after the divorce.
Her eldest daughter was the magazine editor Isabella Blow, the flamboyant and much admired fashionista, who committed suicide consuming weed killer in 2007. Her second daughter, Julia, married billionaire Hans Rausing, and they co-founded the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust in 2014, which became one of the largest philanthropic funds in the UK. Julia died from cancer in April, 2024.
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