The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LORD ERROLL

THE TRUTH BEHIND THE HAPPY VALLEY MURDER

Errol Trzebinski

WITH EMMA PERY

Dedication

For the grandchildren and their childrenespecially the Hon. Harry, Amelia, Laline and Richard Hay

Epigraph

‘There’s something the dead are keeping back’

Robert Frost

‘There’s always something more to everything’

Robert Frost

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

1 Quest for the Truth

2 Gnarled Roots

3 Boyhood and Eton

4 To Hell with Husbands

5 Slains

6 Oserian

7 Blackshirts in Kenya?

8 Josh Posh on the Warpath

9 The Infernal Triangle

10 The Investigation

11 The Sallyport Papers

12 All’s Fair in Love and War

Appendix

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Notes

Other Works

Poem

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

On 24 January 1941 Captain the Hon. Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, was shot in the head. His body was discovered in a hired Buick at a crossroads on the Ngong – Nairobi road, a few miles from Nairobi. The murderer has never been found. The prime suspect was Sir Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet, whose wife Diana was having an affair with Erroll at the time. Broughton was tried for the murder, but acquitted. There the matter rested – though not exactly in peace. The shooting of Lord Erroll set off a volley of speculation that resonates to this day.

In the early 1980s James Fox’s White Mischief was published. An intriguing search for the culprit, it had all the ingredients of a classic detective story, enlivened by a cast of glamorous characters determined to be the sources of their own ruin, whether by excesses of drink, drugs or sex or general fecklessness. The main players in White Mischief were all members of Nairobi’s notorious Muthaiga Club – so snobbish that even Kenya’s governors were vetted for membership. Posterity found it convenient to regard Muthaiga almost as a stage upon which these colourful characters paraded their vices in all their glorious decadence. Broughton, the jealous old cuckold robbed of his luscious young bride, wreaked murderous revenge upon his rival. The implication was that he escaped justice thanks to his privileged position in a society that closed ranks and protected its own. Fox drew a dazzling portrait of this clique of 1930s settlers of the Wanjohi Valley – known as Happy Valley – in the Aberdare mountain range about a hundred miles north of Nairobi. His version of events was an indictment of this exclusive society, a perfect story for a post-colonial age when there was no room for sympathy for any European settlers – past or present – on the African continent. During the final years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the prevailing impression was that white settlers in Africa were simply no good.

White Mischief was rapturously received in Britain and the States. The Wanjohi Valley settlers were not best pleased with the light in which the book portrayed their forebears, however. Its publication caused a furore there – some members of this community begged the Kenya-raised writer Elspeth Huxley to go into print to defend their reputations.1 The pioneers’ lives had contained almost intolerable hardships and, for the majority of settlers, the struggle to survive the African climate and make a living continued into the generation that included Lord Erroll. Yet they all seemed to have been condemned by White Mischief for the sins of a few. Whenever the book came up in conversation among Wanjohi Valley’s European inhabitants, hackles were raised.

The 1988 film version of White Mischief – with Charles Dance, Greta Scacchi and Joss Ackland playing out the ill-fated love-triangle – reinforced the muck-raking, cinematic treatment necessitating further distillation of plot and characters at the expense of factual accuracy. The release of the film spawned an astonishing amount of hype and resentment. Letters were published afresh, reviews proliferated all over again. Cannibalised articles fomented all the inaccuracies and misrepresentations, again inflaming the second-generation settlers who had known the original characters. There was a variety of reactions from speculation on who the murderer really was to outrage at the kind of coverage the case has received ever since, in which Lord Erroll’s reputation certainly seems to have been exaggerated. He was no angel, but there is not a shred of evidence that he drank heavily; or that he indulged in orgies – accusations that have since his death been levelled at him by gossip-mongers. The only record of an orgy comes from a couple who turned up at Lord Erroll’s first wife Idina’s home Clouds in the early thirties – after she and Joss divorced. They came into the drawing-room that moonlit night to find the room ‘full of writhing bodies’.2 Joss had not even been present.

Joss’s affairs were not as numerous as the public have been led to believe since his death, and he had never impregnated women carelessly. Also, he had had the realism not to marry anybody whose feelings would be hurt by infidelity. Far from corrupting the young – another frequent allegation against him – he had only one love affair with a woman younger than himself – she was twenty-seven. He did not smoke or take drugs; in fact, as far as these habits were concerned, he was abstemious in the extreme.

Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, who married Lord Erroll’s daughter, fumed about the ‘unprovable scandal about the defenceless dead’ whose only purpose was to ‘sell a gossip column masquerading as history’. Moncreiffe’s loyalty to his father-in-law’s memory made him less impartial than most. Yet there are inaccuracies in White Mischief. Lord Erroll did not move with Idina to a house called Clouds in 1925, as described by Fox. She moved there alone after she and Lord Erroll separated. Nor had Lord Erroll ever found it necessary to close down Oserian, his second home on Lake Naivasha, after the death of his second wife Mary, owing to lack of money. ‘To hell with husbands!’ was Idina’s saying, not his, and at no time did he pose a threat to the marriage of his friends the de Janzés. Such basic inaccuracies show that there is room for other interpretations of Lord Erroll’s life and death.

It is of course by no means unusual for books to contain errors, often at the fault of the publisher. Yet all hitherto published accounts of Lord Erroll’s murder have provoked dissatisfied responses from readers, a reaction that suggests the whole story has not been told before now. As Attorney-General Walter Harragin, who prosecuted for the Crown at Broughton’s trial, observed after his acquittal: ‘Whoever murdered Lord Erroll, Broughton was innocent by law – having been found “not guilty” by the jury after a fair trial.’3 Despite the reams of material about Lord Erroll’s murder, the elementary question still begs to be answered: whodunnit?

1 Quest for the Truth

‘The great sensation locally has been the murder of poor Joss Erroll. It is indeed ironic that the Ngong road should have proved more dangerous than Tobruk.’

Nellie Grant to her daughter Elspeth Huxley, 30 January 1941

I had been living in Kenya for nine years before the Erroll murder meant anything to me. Then, in 1962, my husband and I bought a house in Miotoni Lane in Karen, today a suburb of Nairobi, near where Lord Erroll’s corpse was discovered. One of our neighbours, a rather self-important character called Colonel Clarence Fentum, implied to us that he had been in charge of the investigation of the Erroll case, Kenya’s most notorious murder. As we now lived so close to where the body had been found, my curiosity began to be aroused.

Fentum was mentioned in Rupert Furneaux’s The Murder of Lord Erroll, based on the trial evidence, published in 1961. In fact Fentum had been newly seconded into the Kenya Police as an inspector at the time of the murder and had been in charge of the station responsible for the Karen area, not in charge of the investigation itself. I discovered later that he had been the third European officer to arrive at the scene of the crime.1

For six years, my family and I lived where the scandal still thrived in people’s memories. We would frequently drive along that stretch of the Ngong road, with its wide grass verge, where Erroll’s hired Buick had come to a halt. Little had changed in that landscape except that a forest of blue gum trees had been planted along the road and St Francis’s Church stood on a hummock above the murder site. At the now infamous crossroads (more of a left-hand fork and T junction), we often took the Karen road, a red murram track, as it had been in Erroll’s day, which we locals referred to as the vlei* road.

While researching biographies of the former colony’s leading figures, I inevitably came across Lord Erroll’s circle. My unusual Christian name frequently prompted questions as to whether Erroll and I were related. We are not, but throughout my writing career those settlers I have interviewed have pressed upon me snippets of information about Erroll – in fact, the ritual continues to this day. Wary of giving away anything that might further tarnish their reputations, which had suffered so badly since Lord Erroll’s death, this somewhat esoteric group were cautious in confiding what they knew about the murder. But gradually, having lived in Kenya for so long and in some ways sharing their predicament as part of a censured society, I gained their trust and confidence. Like all biographers, not wishing to lose those final links with a fading world, I filed away their disclosures.

I met Juanita Carberry in the 1970s. She was the daughter of one of the colony’s aviation pioneers, J. C. Carberry, and her stepmother had been a close friend of Erroll’s. Swearing me to secrecy, Juanita explained how, as an adolescent in January 1941, a couple of days after Erroll’s murder she had been at her parents’ home, Seremai, alone but for the servants, when Sir Delves Broughton turned up. I kept to myself what she told me about her conversation with him, as she had requested. After all, it was one of many stories about the murder that I encountered over the years – they were as conflicting as they were numerous. One even had it that Juanita’s father, J. C., had been involved and had ‘arranged’ for Erroll to be shot while he was in South Africa, having discovered that his wife June had been unfaithful to him with Erroll. A Somali had been paid to do the shooting, apparently.2

Genesta Hamilton, a close friend of Joss’s in Naivasha, linked Erroll’s death to Germany: ‘Jock’s [Broughton’s] South African lawyer brought a ballistics expert to examine the cartridges. He said it was impossible to say for certain that these bullets had come from Jock’s gun. Jock was acquitted … My theory is different. There was a German gunsmith’s shop in Nairobi. Joss spoke good German. He never joined up. I think he was asked to watch these Germans. I think they got him murdered.’3

Elspeth Huxley was always convinced that Joss had been regarded as untrustworthy and killed by one of Britain’s Security Services. She assumed his death had somehow been linked to the top-secret Abyssinian campaign.4

Of the stories I heard about Lord Erroll many, like these, were based on supposition and theory. Some were rooted in first-hand experience, however. Sir Derek Erskine, a contemporary and great friend of Erroll’s, wrote an unpublished memoir which his daughter, a friend of mine, allowed me to read. It sheds a fascinating new light on Broughton. Erskine describes three intriguing episodes between himself and Broughton, two during the week running up to the murder, one after Erroll had been shot.

Beatrice MacWatt had lived in the Wanjohi Valley and kept diaries since 1932. She had been the object of amorous advances from Lord Erroll (which she had rejected). Her daughter Alison Jauss told me about Beatrice’s diaries in 1987. Alison claimed that everyone had been ‘barking up the wrong tree’ as to how and why Lord Erroll had been murdered, and that the truth was contained in her mother’s diaries, but not until her mother, June Carberry and Diana Lady Delamere (as Diana Broughton became) were dead could the contents be disclosed. Only then would everyone realise that the end to Erroll’s life was different from what people had been led to believe.5 By 1993 Beatrice MacWatt and the other two women had all died, but her diaries never materialised. At the end of 1994 I gave up the waiting game. But the frustration and delay had given me time to delve. Early in the New Year of 1995 I went to consult my old friend Edward Rodwell – known as Roddy – who lives half a mile away from my Mombasa home as the fish-eagle flies, across Mtwapa Creek.

Roddy has published a weekly column, ‘Coast Causerie’, in the East African Standard since the late 1940s. He had been editor of the Mombasa Times during the war when he had met Erroll briefly and liked him. Over the years he wrote many articles on the subject of Lord Erroll’s death, the last two of which were published in unusually quick succession. Following Diana Lady Delamere’s death in London in 1987 the BBC released a documentary called ‘The Happy Valley’. After the programme aired, the Standard (Nairobi) published a small piece by Sandra Maler, ‘Murder Secret Goes with Lady Delamere’. Roddy maintained that it was not only Diana who had a secret that might have altered the whole of the Erroll story. Lord Erroll’s first wife, Idina, had told him shortly before she died: ‘I know who killed Joss Erroll and before I die I will tell you who was responsible.’ However, days later Idina had slipped into a coma without revealing her secret. ‘I feel I should record my recollections of Lady Idina’s remark made so many years after the trial. It would seem that Lady Idina did not believe in Broughton’s guilt and that someone else was the culprit. Perhaps the story is not told in full,’ Roddy wrote in the East African Standard.

The usual flurry of letters had arrived in response to Roddy’s article, but this time there was a new element. Very late one Sunday night, he was woken by an anonymous long-distance phone call. Roddy told the story in a follow-up article:

A man’s voice from a far distance said that my article, the film and the book had the whole business wrong as to who the killer was … it had been well known in England that Erroll had been a member of the British Fascist party and continued to be a member after he arrived in Kenya. When it appeared that war between Germany and Britain was a possibility, he had stated that he had withdrawn his support for the Fascist Nazis. But that was incorrect. Erroll was a full-blown Nazi. The British Secret Service had noted that Erroll was involved in Kenya politics …

Here, for the first time in print, someone was pointing the finger at the British Government.

Roddy mentioned another source who blamed the same body: the Mercedes-Benz agent in Nairobi in the thirties had told him that the Chief of Police was ordered to have Erroll shot, on account of his Nazi sympathies.

After publication of his second article Roddy had received another anonymous phone call, informing him that Broughton did not kill Erroll, but this tale had a new twist: the real killer had left the country.6

Roddy looked out a file of information for me on the Erroll case – material that had come in to him over the years. One of the letters in his file had come from Mervyn Morgan – the coroner who held the inquest into Erroll’s death in 1941. Morgan had underlined certain words for emphasis and methodically numbered each point he wanted to make:

(1) Firstly, I myself had the last word. That is because I held the inquest on Broughton [sic]. The inquest of necessity had to be adjourned when Broughton was prosecuted. It was resumed after his acquittal and the only possible verdict I could bring in was murder by a person or persons unknown.

(2) The late much married Diana, Lady Delamere, was a wonderful and kind person and let no one dare to suggest otherwise. She loved all animals as her fellow human beings and she had nothing to do with Erroll’s murder. I can make that last observation with confidence since I was one of the first to see the … Buick in the ditch on my early way to work from Karen (my house was next door to the Broughton house). I am fairly confident that I know exactly how it was done, by whom, and at whose instigation, but as no one has been sufficiently interested to ask me I have never given any explanation (which I did not know at the time of holding the Inquest) to anybody and never will.

(3) Broughton after being rightly acquitted by a jury left a note for the Coroner in Liverpool at the inquest of his death.* NB The Liverpool Coroner declined to make public Broughton’s letter and wouldn’t disclose the contents to anyone – he was rightly or wrongly much criticised for his acts and omissions but a Coroner does have almost omnipotent powers.

That fact seems quite unknown to you. If you had contacted me I could have told you at least most of what I know but you didn’t think of it and may not even have known the part my humble self played – a very minor part it is true even though I did have the last word!7

Intriguing though this letter was, by the time I read it Morgan was no longer alive. Another letter in Roddy’s file proved more fruitful. Marked ‘Confidential and not for publication’, it was from an English settler called Kate Challis:

When White Mischief was being filmed in Kenya, a neighbour who worked for MI5 [sic] during and before the war told me that, as it was now over forty years ago, she felt able to say that Errol [sic] was a severe security risk and he was shot, because unlike the Oswald Mosley Nazis who could be interned, Errol’s case was much more complex.8

Further research revealed that the ‘MI5’ agent/neighbour of Kate Challis’s was a woman called Joan Hodgson.9 Three separate sources, two of whom worked or had formerly worked in Intelligence, confirmed that she was a bona fide Secret Service agent: ‘She was nondescript as are so many MI5 and MI6 personnel,’ one of the sources said.10 Another went so far as to hazard that Joan Hodgson was probably working for Section 5 – counter-espionage.11 So, with Joan Hodgson’s testimony, I had it on excellent authority that Lord Erroll had been eradicated by the British Government – but not because he was a Nazi …

I determined to scrutinise Erroll’s life as a whole, to analyse what motives there might have been to get rid of him. Two cuttings from an acquaintance, who’d sent them to me purely because they were connected with Kenya, were to prove surprisingly useful. One, ‘Tarporley Man Puts the Finger on Alice’, led me to Captain Gordon Fergusson, secretary of the Tarporley Hunt Club in Cheshire, whose enthusiasm for collecting data on the subject of Erroll’s murder was indefatigable.12 The second cutting was from the author J. N. P. Watson, a cousin of Dickie Pembroke, a friend of Erroll’s who had been infatuated with Diana. Pembroke had fired the young Watson’s imagination about the Erroll murder and, as a result, Watson had tracked down and befriended a former superintendent in the Kenya Police, Colin Imray, by then living in the south of England, who shared his keen interest in the subject. Imray had discussed the case at length with Arthur Poppy, the officer in charge of the investigation into Lord Erroll’s murder.

Imray regarded the Erroll murder as the ‘crime of the century’. He had joined the force as a ‘rookie’ in 1932, gone to West Africa as a cadet, rising steadily through the force to be awarded the King’s Medal in 1953 for his conduct during the riots in Accra in 1948.13 Imray’s obsession with the Erroll case had begun even before his posting to Nairobi, thanks to meeting Attorney-General Walter Harragin on the Gold Coast in 1948. They had often discussed the case and Harragin had revealed to Imray that he had from the outset been so convinced of Broughton’s innocence that he had considered a nolle prosequi – not proceeding with the case against him.14

In the 1950s during his stint in Kenya, Imray conducted an experiment to time how long it would have taken Broughton to cover the ground he would have needed to had he shot Erroll. Imray started to follow the route he might have taken from his house in Marula Lane to the crossroads where the Buick was found, but had been forced to abort his experiment on account of lions on the prowl – one reason why he always held that Broughton would have felt too threatened to have contemplated that solo foray.

Imray’s talk of Arthur Poppy as an extremely able officer was thought-provoking, as the investigation of Erroll’s murder had been incredibly inept. Imray pointed out that each new article on the case blamed Poppy for the oversights. Imray had never understood how Poppy – such a thorough investigator – came to give the kind of evidence that was so easily overturned by Henry Morris KC, counsel for the defence. I had sight of Arthur Poppy’s papers, passed to me by his widow, in which there were notes on Lord Erroll’s background dating back to 1927. Poppy had been obsessed with the case, and had never recovered from the damage it inflicted on his career.

Imray mentioned another officer assigned to the murder investigation, Assistant Superintendent Desmond Swayne, who had spoken of ‘a perversion of justice’. Swayne had been convinced that ‘only a very limited inner cabal knew the truth’.15 Imray could not bring himself to believe Swayne’s suggestion that ‘their guns had been spiked by a higher authority’.16 Inspector Fentum, the detective in charge of Karen police station, and Imray eventually became colleagues. By the time they met, Fentum had, according to Imray, ‘crawled to his position of Assistant Superintendent’. Like Swayne he had believed that an ‘inner cabal’ had been involved.

At one point Imray broached a subject that appeared to make him nervous. He warned: ‘this information is very near the knuckle’ and should ‘remain in the shadowlands just in case there [is] any reprisal’.17 Imray also told me about an ex-policeman who had known Diana for years, whom I might be able to persuade to meet me. But Imray cautioned me that he had encountered again and again a ‘certain disinclination’ in police colleagues in Nairobi to discuss this long-past event. At first Imray had put this reluctance down to the fact that the case had not brought credit to the force, but later, despite his own high position in the force, his own fear had prevented him from attempting to gain access to the police files or the court proceedings: ‘to do so would be inviting trouble. There would have been all sorts of complications.’18