Diana Caldwell

Diana Caldwell was an English society femme fatale figure who first appeared on the London scene between the wars. She is best known for her part in the murder of Lord Erroll in 1941, dramatised in the 1987 film White Mischief played by Greta Scacchi. Early life Diana Caldwell was born in Hove in December 1913, the daughter of Major Josiah Seymour Caldwell and Marjorie, née Howell. Caldwell lived with her family in a spacious Victorian townhouse in Hove, attending a private girls' school in the same road until aged eleven, when she moved to a nearby boarding school. Caldwell's mother had been a society beauty in London in her earlier years, prompting her father to move the family to the relative social isolation of Hove. Caldwell arrived on the London scene around 1931 aged eighteen, working as a model for a fashion house in the day time and managing a jazz cocktail bar at night. The jazz scene and the bar brought her into contact with the upper classes, whom she entertained in London during the week, and mixed with in large country houses at weekends. Caldwell had a growing reputation as a fine horsewoman with a passion for piloting aircraft to social hotspots throughout Europe. Marriages What Caldwell may have lacked in classic beauty, she more than compensated for in style and boldness, attracting many proposals of marriage. By the time she was twenty-two, Caldwell was to be seen gracing society balls, fashionable weddings and charity events, attending race meetings, participating in hunts or piloting around the capitals of Europe, photographed on the arms of a string of wealthy men. When the world was worrying about German rearmament, Caldwell was coming out. In 1935, She had been photographed frequently in the company of the Austrian Vice Chancellor in Budapest. It has been suggested that Caldwell had been recruited by military intelligence through Hugh Dickinson around this time, although this has yet to be independently verified. It was in 1935 that she first met Sir Jock Delves Broughton, which was to set in motion a fateful sequence of events.