The REAL Colonel Mustard

IN the board game Cluedo, the character Colonel Mustard is portrayed as dapper and moustachioed: A big-game hunter with a sinister and dangerous edge.

He is believed to have been based on a member of the famous Colman’s mustard family – Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Gordon Dalziel Colman, a great-grandnephew of Colman’s founder Jeremiah.

Colonel Colman was born in Chelsea in 1882 and for much of his life kept a townhouse in St James’s Square, London.

But he also lived in a number of large country homes, and by the late 1920s was established at Scalford Hall, Leicestershire. Built in 1908, this has been suggested as a model for the Tudor House of Cluedo, with its ballroom, library and billiard room.

Its hall still boasts an ornate stone fireplace said to have been given to the colonel and his wife (pictured) by the future Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, who were frequent guests and carried on their courtship there.

Cluedo’s creator Anthony Pratt is known to have worked during the inter-war years as a travelling musician and composer, playing in recitals held in hotels, on cruise ships – and in grand country houses.

Local historian and Scalford parish councillor Robert Ingles told the Mail it was widely accepted locally that Colman was the inspiration for Colonel Mustard.

He said: ‘There are people I have spoken to who were alive when Colonel Colman was still living. They talk about the connection as a fact. Certainly Colonel Colman was widely respected and if he felt it to be wrong or trivial he would have put people straight.’