Secret that the White Mischief killer took to his grave
Notorious Old Etonian had love-child with lifelong sweetheart just a few months before his death
HIS forbears were founder members of the notorious Happy Valley set, so it was no surprise that Tom Cholmondeley led a life of colourful and sometimes notorious excess.
Expelled from Eton, the thrillseeking heir to the 5th Lord Delamere twice killed local men on his family’s 48,000-acre estate in Kenya, and spent time in jail for manslaughter before his own unexpected death last week.
Yet there is one last twist to his controversial story, one which could almost belong in White Mischief – the book, and later film, inspired by his louche ancestors.
The Mail on Sunday has established that, while divorced from the mother of his children and then in a relationship with jeweller Sally Dudmesh, Cholmondeley, 48, had conducted a secret long-term affair with Wendy Anthony-Hoole, a former British Airways flight attendant. And the 49-year-old has recently given birth to his love child.
There is no disguising her grief as she recalls a 30-year on-off relationship, which began when the pair were teenagers at Cirencester’s Royal Agricultural College and ended with his death last week from a complication following a hip operation in Kenya.
She cuts a fragile figure in the apartment she shares with her mother and four-month-old baby. Looking slender, she has barely eaten since the news of his death. ‘He was my life,’ she sobs.
However, even now, she insists that, despite struggling for money, she will not seek any recompense from her lover’s estate.
It was in 1985 that Wendy, an 18year-old former convent schoolgirl, first met the 17-year-old, 6ft 7in Old Etonian. ‘I met him in the launderette in Cirencester,’ she smiles ruefully.
‘We were laughing because I had had a load of my knickers stolen. He kept asking me out but I thought,“You are a bit bizarre”, because he had lots of jingly, jangly bracelets around his wrists. He was not my cup of Darjeeling.’
However, the couple remained friends after leaving college. Wendy went on to work as a City commodity analyst while Cholmondeley worked briefly for the Agricultural Mortgage Corporation before returning to his homeland.
And yet there was something about the swaggering ex-public schoolboy – renowned for his love of partying in Kenya’s Rift Valley – that kept Wendy hooked. Expelled from Eton ‘for a surfeit of bad behaviour’ (he was caught smoking a joint out of a window), Cholmondeley was fluent in both Swahili and Kikuyu, a crack shot with a rifle, held a pilot’s licence and was a motor racing champion. He had been shipwrecked on Lake Victoria, sunk while boating on the Nile and been gored by a buffalo while paragliding.
Yet his troubles paled into insignificance compared with those of his ancestors’ so-called Happy Valley set, which became notorious for its louche way of life and the 1941 murder of the 22nd Earl of Erroll, played by Charles Dance in White Mischief. Wendy moved to Africa to live with Cholmondeley in 1995, after she was made redundant from her job and decided to become an air hostess. The pair lived in Flamingo House on the family’s Soysambu u Estate and travelled to o Ethiopia together. She e learned to shoot and d kept home. ‘It was just heaven,’ n,’ she says. ‘Tom wanted ed me to marry him but I wanted to find out whathat life in Africa was like. .I I started flying part-time me and was basically a housesewife, cooking for him and doing the gardenening. We were both veryery much in love.’ However, three years later, after Cholmondeley’s paragliding accident, their relationship began to disintegrate and they split up. Cholmondeley went on to marry Sally Brewerton, a doctor, while Wendy had a brief marriage to American Jeffrey Durham. It was in 2009, when Cholmondeley was jailed for manslaughter, that their relationship took another twist. By then, he was separated from his wife Sally and was dating Sally Dudmesh, a relationship which continued until his death. Nonetheless, Wendy, a ‘cause leader’ in the campaign to free him, flew out to visit her lover in jail, where he served five months of an eightmonth sentence for killing a man some claim was a poacher.
‘He was delighted to see me,’ she says. ‘That’s when he said: “Wendy. I want us to have a child together.” She says they spent the next seven years snatching precious hours together, in Britain and Kenya, and trying for a child.
It was last Christmas when, finally, Wendy discovered she was pregnant and in February she saw Tom for the last time.
Cholmondeley was in Kenya when his son was born on April 21. But, Wendy maintains, he was a proud father. ‘Rupert was our absolute miracle,’ she says.
In a tragic twist of fate, Cholmondeley was planning to visit England next month to have his hip operation and meet his son. But, at the last minute, he switched the surgery to Nairobi’s MP Shah private hospital, where he died four days ago.
‘He wasn’t my cup of Darjeeling when we met’