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

Imray also informed me that after his departure from service in Kenya the possibility of recruitment to MI6 had cropped up. Following his interview, he had decided against the job, but confessed to me that at this point he too had come across the theory that Erroll had been ‘rubbed out’ by British Intelligence in Kenya.

The Erroll family have always been dissatisfied with the many salacious accounts of Lord Erroll’s life and death. Dinan, his only child, suffered greatly to see her father so misrepresented. There was even a rumour spread some time after his death that she was not Lord Erroll’s daughter – as if not satisfied with blackening his name, gossip-mongers wished to taint the lives of his progeny also. The physical likeness of her son Merlin, the 24th Earl, to his grandfather Lord Erroll put paid to that rumour.19

The Erroll family had made attempts to find out the truth about their forebear. When I visited the Earl and Countess of Erroll in August 1995 I was handed a file to scrutinise. It contained correspondence from Merlin Erroll’s father, Sir Iain Moncreiffe, going back to 1953. His fruitless search through official archives on Erroll had led him to conclude that something ominous was lurking.20 Merlin Erroll had drawn similar blanks in 1983 when he had turned to the head of the Search Department in the War Office Records for information on his grandfather. In fact, there had even been an apology from the Ministry of Defence ‘for such a negative report’, and the hope had been expressed that further information ‘might be forthcoming’.21 It was not. It was general knowledge in the family that Erroll had received a posthumous Mention in Dispatches for ‘doing something on the Eritrean border’, but when Merlin entered into correspondence with a Major A. J. Parsons to find out more about it, he did not get far. Parsons pointed out, ‘The major campaign did not start until after he was dead’, and he could confirm only the Earl’s ‘suspicion that Mention in Dispatches can be awarded for both meritorious and gallant service’.22 He had enclosed photocopies of the supplement to the London Gazette which published ‘the award to your grandfather’, and, he pointed out, ‘you will note that the preamble clearly states that awards were made to members of the Staff’, but there was no more detailed indication of how Lord Erroll had earned the Mention. Parsons had requested that the Army Records Centre trace Erroll’s personal service file. Having studied the file carefully, Parsons sent Merlin a copy of Erroll’s Army Form B199A recording his ‘intimate knowledge of France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Kenya Colony and Germany (four years)’ and stating that his French was fluent and his German was ‘fair’.23 His covering letter said, ‘Unfortunately, it is sparse in content and gives very little detail of his military career, other than those shown … It is regrettable that the file does seem to have been “weeded” quite severely.’24

The weeding of sensitive information is well known to researchers. Material in files closed under the thirty- or fifty-year rule is sometimes burnt or shredded before the files are released.25 I had been advised by one of the former secret agents I interviewed to watch out for any evidence of arson, missing documents, and papers scattered among alien files, since these could have been acts of sabotage perpetrated by agents in time of war.26 One example of this was the Public Record Office file at Kew on Sir Henry Moore, Governor of Kenya at the time of Erroll’s murder. Marked ‘secret’, its contents had obviously been shuffled as there was no discernible order to the documents inside.27 The only month for which the file contained no information was January 1941, the month of the shooting.

Among Merlin Erroll’s papers there was a 1988 article in the Glasgow Herald by Murray Ritchie: ‘Hundred-year Shroud on Happy Valley Mystery’.28 While researching his article at the Public Record Office at Kew, Ritchie had come across a file listed under the general files for Kenya, marked with an asterisk denoting ‘Closed for a hundred years’. He was informed such closures were highly unusual – normally involving security, the royal family or personal records whose disclosure would cause distress to living persons. Ritchie had taken the number of this mysterious file. In his article he describes how the file had been brought towards him at the counter, but the bearer, pausing briefly to have a word with a colleague, had then carried it away.

Following the release in the 1990s of certain colonial files, I came to see the file that had eluded Murray Ritchie. While there were matters to do with Kenya in it, there was no mention of Lord Erroll. Instead there were some two dozen folios – each stamped ‘secret’, pertaining to Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia. They and their children had been kept under house arrest on Lake Naivasha in 1941.29

I then discovered evidence of another file: it was listed in the Kenya Registers of Correspondence – under ‘Legislative Council. Death of Lord Erroll (103/3)’ – but marked ‘Destroyed Under Statute’. Fortuitously I stumbled across a document in yet another file that must have been transferred from this destroyed file – an instance of ‘papers scattered among alien files’ perhaps. It was a minute from Joss’s brother Gilbert, ‘[w]ho would be glad of any information in connection with the death of his brother’ – dated 27 January 1941.30

By August 1996, I felt that my search for governmental documents on Lord Erroll was a wild-goose chase. The Metropolitan Police Archives had redirected me to the Public Record Office at Kew. They had warned me that there were no records about the policing of Kenya, suggesting I contact the Foreign and Colonial Office, which I did in July 1996 only to discover that my request had already been automatically referred there from the Met. The Foreign and Colonial Office simply referred me back to Kew again, to what transpired to be the Prince Paul file.

I began to realise that I had as much chance of finding any official papers on Erroll, as he had of leaping from his grave in Kiambu to tell me himself what had really happened to him. Even Robert Foran’s History of the Kenya Police* is silent on the subject of the Erroll murder.31 It contains not even the names, let alone any other details, of the team investigating it. References in Foran’s book to relevant issues of The Kenya Police Review led me to believe that I would be able to locate these at least. Yet not a single copy was in the possession of any library in England. I was able to trace only one issue, through a private source. And I could not find any copies of The British Lion, a fascist publication in which, I had been assured, Erroll’s name had appeared. When I applied at Colindale Newspaper Library, I was informed that all three volumes of it that they possessed appeared to have been stolen the year before.

In 1988, Merlin Erroll had invited anyone to come forward who could throw light on his grandfather’s military or political career, observing, ‘Some say that the affair with Diana was a red herring.’32 One response came from a retired Lieutenant-Colonel John Gouldbourn, who had been with the Kenya Regiment in 1940. Gouldbourn’s view was forthright: ‘I do not doubt that there was a “cover-up” of the murder by the judiciary, the police and the military in that order. There were sufficient persons with an interest for there to be an “inner cabal” … You will appreciate the East African Colonial Forces (the KAR)* and the South African Division were poised to attack Somaliland. The dates would have been known to Joss Erroll. How discreet Erroll was is anybody’s guess.’33

When I first met John Gouldbourn in October 1995 he had whipped out his army identification papers and handed them to me – ‘so that you know that I am who I say that I am’. In all my years meeting interviewees, this procedure was a first. But for Gouldbourn, accustomed to the etiquette of the Intelligence world, proving one’s identity had become a matter of common courtesy. He provided me with names, but no addresses, of people who he thought would be helpful to my research.34

I managed to track down some of those who were still alive. I located Neil Tyfield in 1996. He had been in Military Intelligence at Force HQ in Nairobi and had had a ‘team of young ladies’ working for him there. Tyfield told me that a number of officers had been posted out of Nairobi after Erroll’s death so that they would not be able to testify at Broughton’s trial. But the most valuable contact name that Gouldbourn gave me was, ironically, that of someone who insists on anonymity but has allowed me to use his ‘official’ cover name, S. P. J. O’Mara, because ‘those few who may be interested in the identity behind it will recognise it’.35 Gouldbourn was insistent that O’Mara had had something to do with the ‘cover-up’ surrounding Lord Erroll’s death.

O’Mara had been an extremely young officer in the King’s African Rifles in 1940. Ian Henderson, the son of a Kenya settler family and he too an officer in the KAR during the war, was his commanding officer in Nanyuki in 1940. Roddy Rodwell had told me how this same man had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for MI6 after the Second World War. O’Mara knew all about Ian Henderson’s career both during and after the war, including specific dates, corroborating what Roddy had told me. O’Mara threw light on many of the twists and turns that had set Erroll’s fate. When I told him that I had encountered fear among several interviewees he responded, ‘Fear of whom? [Fifty] years later? Only an SIS operation carries such a long shadow.’36

Stymied by the lack of access to official government papers on Lord Erroll’s career, I published a request for information in the Overseas Pensioner and Jambo, the English organ of the East African Women’s League, from anyone with anecdotes or photographs of Erroll. Through Jambo I received a letter in autumn 1996 from Anthea Venning, whose father had been a Provincial Commissioner in Kenya and had worked with Erroll on the Manpower Committee when war loomed. Anthea Venning was a rich source of information. In particular she led me to an old friend of hers called Tony Trafford, whose testimony is at the heart of the account of Lord Erroll’s death propounded in this book.37

Tony’s father H. H. Trafford had been taken out of retirement on account of the war to undertake certain Intelligence duties. A former District Commissioner, he had confided to Tony that records existed in the Commonwealth Office, East Africa Section, indicating that it had been a woman that had shot Erroll. The theory that a woman pulled the trigger was well worn in Kenya. In the early 1980s H. H. Trafford had been approached by the maker of the film White Mischief and by someone at the BBC for any light he could shed on the murder. He told the latter bluntly that ‘though he had left the service there were certain matters he was not allowed to make comment on. Erroll being a case in point.’ He was similarly reticent with the White Mischief crew. Trafford had in fact been required to take the oath of the Official Secrets Act twice, once at the outset of his career and then again when he came out of retirement during the war.38 His Intelligence duties involved among other things a top-secret interrogation of Broughton in 1941 entirely separate from the police and the court proceedings.39

Tony Trafford, Kenya-born, was seconded to British Intelligence in 1940.* He had worked all over Kenya and lived in Naivasha until 1963, leaving at Independence. He now lived on the Isle of Wight. Our initial exchanges revealed a character very sure and knowledgeable. Out-of-the-way places in Nairobi, road names most of which had been changed at Independence, the layout of the Maia Carberry Nursing Home were details that only someone who had worked there would know. His knowledge of Kenya’s topography, of the idiosyncrasies of its tribes and elderly settlers – contemporaries of his father with whom I was so familiar from my own research – convinced me that he had a brilliant memory and eye for detail. I checked the details of what he told me about the battalions moved into Kenya for the preparation of the Abyssinian campaign and found these were accurate. Tony was even able to provide me with the reason why during the war the RAF had been stationed at Wilson Airfield rather than Eastleigh, the newly built aerodrome. He also knew that Joss had been up for promotion shortly before his death. This is not general knowledge; I discovered the fact only through private correspondence between the 24th Earl of Erroll and the MOD.

Throughout my dealings with Tony Trafford, he was nervous about discussing Lord Erroll’s murder on the telephone. In order to protect his identity he chose his own cover name, Mzee Kobe (which means ‘Old Tortoise’ in Swahili). He wrote a twenty-five-thousand-word document for me detailing exactly how and by whom Erroll had been shot. This document, which I shall call the Sallyport papers, took him months of effort to compile and its contents reveal an extraordinary story of intrigue. Trafford died on 25 August 1998 shortly after completing his account. Interestingly, both the Sallyport papers and O’Mara’s correspondence uphold the same theory as to why Lord Erroll was killed.

The resounding implication of my research was that a new portrait of the 22nd Earl of Erroll needed to be made, not only to redress the calumnies, errors and exaggerations which have so tarnished his reputation in the past half-century, but to make clear that there were far more compelling motives for killing Erroll than sexual jealousy.

*Vlei: in South Africa, a shallow piece of low-lying ground covered with water in the rainy season.

*Broughton was to commit suicide in Liverpool.

*In 1903, W. Robert Foran had been in charge of Nairobi police station with the help of only three other European police officers (‘The Rise of Nairobi: from Campsite to City’, The Crown Colonist, March 1950, p. 163)

*KAR = King’s African Rifles.

*Major Hamilton O’Hara, chairman of the Kenya Regiment Association, UK, confirmed this for me after Trafford died.

2 Gnarled Roots

‘A HAY, A HAY, A HAY!’

Clan slogan: armorial bearing of the Earldom of Erroll

Josslyn Victor Hay was born in London on 11 May 1901, eleven days before the first wedding anniversary of his parents, Lord and Lady Kilmarnock. Their son and heir was fair; his skin would easily turn golden under tropical sun and his blue eyes were mesmerisingly pale. Shortly after his Protestant christening, his proud parents took him to Scotland where, before he could even focus, he was introduced to Slains, the Erroll family seat, near Cruden Bay, about twenty miles north up the coast from Aberdeen. This was where his father Lord Kilmarnock, a diplomat working in Europe since 1900, had been born in 1876. Joss’s mother Lucy would regard the visit to Slains as an important initiation rite for her children, following the same procedure later with Joss’s younger brother and sister.1

Joss’s brother, Gilbert Allan Rowland Hay, was born in January 1903 at the British Legation in Brussels. Lady Kilmarnock produced her next child, a daughter, soon afterwards: Rosemary Constance Ferelith was born in Vienna on 15 May, in 1904.

The coronation of Edward VII took place when Joss was just over a year old, in August 1902. His parents were over in England for the occasion, prior to their annual holiday north of the border – they were always in Scotland in time for the start of the shooting season on the Glorious Twelfth. It could easily have struck Lady Kilmarnock that one day her son would take his ceremonial place in Westminster Abbey for a coronation, as indeed her father-in-law Charles Gore Hay, the 20th Earl, was doing in 1902: first as Master of Erroll, Page to the Lord Lyon, King of Arms, and next – directly behind the monarch – as Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland.*

From the twelfth century, when reliable records of its activities began, the Erroll family history had been tumultuous, a curious mixture of glorious heroism and despicable double-crossing. Like Joss, a number of Erroll ancestors had their lives prematurely curtailed, though many fell courageously in battle, defending their faith and their King. Joss was descended from a steadfast line of military men and diplomats whose traceable origins go back to the Norman conquest, though family lore has it that the Hays were already performing acts of heroism in Scotland in AD 980. William de Haya of Erroll, the first Chief of the Hay Clan, who came to Scotland in about 1166 as butler to the Scots king William the Lion, was sent to the newly crowned King John of England in 1199 to negotiate a truce between the battling factions, and the return of Northumberland to Scotland.

William de Haya provides the earliest example of the Hay men’s tendency to marry with a view to increasing the family fortune. He married Eva of the Tay Estuary, who brought him Pitmilly in Fife and probably the Angus lands as well as the falcon-lands of Erroll.† However, as the Hay estates seldom generated enough income to cover the costs of upkeep and family lifestyle, debts built up that were passed down the generations. Thus the Erroll family fortune gradually dwindled over the centuries and, when Joss’s turn came, ‘there would be little for the 22nd Earl to inherit’.2

Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, 5th Chief, was created Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, an office combining the functions of Secretary of State with that of Commander-in-Chief,* by King Robert the Bruce in 1314 for helping to defeat the English at Bannockburn, leading a thousand horses to the battlefield to do so. Sir Gilbert’s service to Robert the Bruce established a tradition of loyalty to the Scots Crown which earned the family many privileges and granted them much local power. They could levy taxes on their tenants, raise an army and dispense justice on wrongdoers. Gilbert was also given Slains Castle, which stood on the coast of Aberdeenshire about fifteen miles south of Peterhead, in recognition of the part he had played in the war against Edward II. The name ‘Slains’ evokes but mildly the slaughter which befell this family. For the Hays were nothing if not courageous. Eighty-seven of them fell with James IV at the battle of Flodden in Northumberland in 1513.

However, the corrupting influence of power was fully in evidence too. Plenty of scandals – beheadings, imprisonment, treason, suicide – occurred in the Erroll dynasty, but there has been only one murder.

Three strong family characteristics would surface in the Errolls over the centuries: an inclination for politics, a natural penchant for subversion and a tendency to hedge their bets, the latter a useful survival mechanism. These qualities abounded in Francis, the 9th Earl. He collaborated in the Catholic rebellion of 1594 with George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. The 9th Earl had always been a Catholic, and his father and grandfather had both been staunch supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic party. James VI was lenient towards Francis for his part in the rebellion, the quid pro quo being that Francis’s son, the 10th Earl, be educated at court as a Protestant. But that was not the end of the story. In 1594 James marched north to supervise in person the burning of Slains Castle, reducing it to a ruin and giving rise to the differentiation between ‘Old Slains’ and ‘New Slains’ used by the Erroll family ever since. After the destruction of Old Slains, the Errolls moved seven miles away, north-east of Cruden Bay, where Francis initiated the mammoth construction project that was to be their next castle.

The 10th Earl was dismissed – possibly unfairly – as extravagant. It had cost him so much to attend the coronation of Charles I that he was compelled to dispose of his ancestral estates. Attending a coronation was a costly business for families as grand as the Errolls. They would be expected to provide an impressive train of retainers, which on one occasion included ‘eight mounted esquires, four pages, ten grooms, twenty-five marshalmen … and a large body of highlanders’.3 In addition the 10th Earl was continuing the construction of ‘New Slains’, which would take a hundred years.4 It is clear that by now the precariousness of the family fortune was a feature – and a thorny issue for its scions – of the Errolls’ history.

New Slains was the Scottish seat where Joss would get to know his great-grandmother Eliza Gore and his grandparents. It had left so deep an impression on him as a boy that he would name his first home in Africa after it. Joss and his siblings would occupy Slains Castle for only a few weeks at a time, but the place was ever-present in family conversation and had obviously captured the imagination of this intelligent child. What lad could resist stories of the wagers made in times gone by within the Erroll household on the chances of walking all the way round the castle’s outer wall without falling off. It was built so close to the cliff edge that one of its walls virtually overhung the ocean. The most famous victim of this dare-devil exercise was one of the Hay butlers, who fell to his death two hundred feet below the castle.

The assumption was that Joss would inherit Slains. Therefore, like the heirs before him, he learned by anecdote of its romantic history: how Slains came to be the principal landing-place for undercover Jacobites, as well as the centre of subversive activity at the start of the eighteenth century when Scotland and England were attempting to negotiate what became the 1707 Act of Union between the two countries. The wife of the 12th Earl, née Lady Anne Drummond, was responsible for ‘victualling the French ships’ that carried Jacobite agents to Scotland – notably Captain Nathaniel Hooke.5 The 13th Earl spent time in France, scheming among intelligence gatherers and spies at court.

Machiavellian tactics, the playing-off of one side against the other while pretending to serve both, had become second nature to the Hays of Erroll. The conclusion drawn by one government spy about the 14th Countess, who inherited the title on the death of her brother, the unmarried 13th Earl, was that she was a ‘very intriguing and wily lady as is any in Britain’. Being an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause in the lead-up to their last rebellion, in 1745, whenever circumstances called for secrecy she ‘had written for concealment in milk’. Obviously, the 14th Countess’s diplomatic skills were also considerable, for she managed to keep her titles and estates, whereas many of her Hay relatives’ reputations suffered for their involvement in the Forty-five. She was also greatly admired for her physical courage: ‘that magnificent old lady … only with considerable difficulty’ was dissuaded from leading the Clan in person to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose army set off for England under the command of her chamberlain.

In 1758, when he succeeded his childless aunt, James Boyd, the 15th Earl of Erroll, took the surname of Hay. Having officiated as Lord High Constable at the coronation of George III, and while under suspicion of being both Catholic and Jacobite, he was entrusted with conducting the King’s fiancée, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, to London – which inevitably involved him in huge expense, in addition to that incurred by attending the coronation. According to the Hay family, the escort mission was deliberately and needlessly drawn out in order to ruin James financially, so much was he mistrusted.6

Nor did the 16th Earl, George, manage to inspire confidence in those who held the reins of power. Apparently, while drunk, he had blabbed about an official secret entrusted to him by Mr Pitt, the Prime Minister. Having leaked this ‘confidence ill-advisedly to a so-called friend, who promptly published it together with the source … he determined to destroy himself’ and committed suicide soon after his faux pas.7 To the Errolls who came after, George Hay’s legendary remorse was a stark warning against intoxication. Indeed, George’s descendants seem to have learned from somewhere – perhaps their forebear’s indiscretion had been but a momentary lapse in an otherwise dutiful career, or maybe his suicide had galvanised the next generation into facing responsibilities at a young age – that it was high time to clean up the Erroll family record.