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

For all his delicacy in the matter of hunting and drinking, no one ever called Joss faint-hearted. He would become an excellent shot, riding well and hard on the polo field; and by the age of seven, when in England, he rode to hounds with his parents, going out with packs such as the Marquess of Exeter’s – accompanying them at Guthrie, Lumley Castle, Burghley House and Clifton Hall. Once the choice was his alone, he preferred going out on foot with draghounds or playing ball games – polo, football, squash racquets, tennis and cricket – and he would excel at each.22

As time went by, Joss’s brother and sister could not help noticing that Joss was the apple of his mother’s eye. No doubt she loved all three deeply, but her partiality eroded any chance there might have been of Joss and Gilbert being close. Their aloofness towards one another affected Rosemary too. Joss was unshaken by their baby sister’s arrival. Nearly four years old when she was born, he was already certain of his place, tending to feel more loved, more sure and more deserving of his mother’s attention than either of his siblings. Not surprisingly, Gilbert and Rosemary grew closer, regarding themselves as a pair. Enjoined against Joss, they may actually have had an easier ride as youngsters, and they would remain close as adults, although by then Joss had disappeared to Africa. Gilbert would become a quiet, reliable family man – to an almost plodding degree – never quite managing to live down the differences between himself and the more flamboyant Joss.

Joss’s interest in clothes and dressing up was due in part to his father’s interest in things Thespian – dancing, literature, music, costume and even lighting. Naturally, all productions by the Kilmarnocks were put on for charity. Joss was the audience to everything in rehearsal at home and thus became au fait with the underpinnings of stage production. In plays such as ‘Le Cours de Danse de Monsieur Pantalon’ his parents performed the Highland schottische in kilts for ‘the assembled distinguished company of Viennese society’. Joss’s father adapted this entertainment from the classic Harlequin and it would become integral to Joss’s Christmas activities. Lady Kilmarnock’s fund-raising in Brussels was undertaken with a Monseigneur and Madame Le Comte de Flandre, with whom, heading the Committee for the Scotch Kirk, she instigated fetes, ‘fancy fairs’, dinners, balls and masquerades. Joss developed his astonishing eye for detail as a child through watching his parents as they debated issues such as: should Harlequin dress in the ‘torn’ or in the ‘patched’, or in the stylised Victorian pantomime costume?23

Joss would soon slip into playing, posing and speaking in the style of whichever country he and his family happened to be living in. At home he was encouraged to cast inhibitions away; because he was funny his parents enlisted him to mimic or join in as the adults went through their lines, singing songs and doing dance routines. The importance of make-up, lighting and – most vital of all for an actor – timing Joss learned from his father, as well as how to draw upon the classics, recasting men in drag, setting an ancient piece in modern costume, giving a fresh twist to an old theme. One day Joss would give several hundred weatherbeaten colonials the impression that they had stepped into the Opera House in Vienna.24

The effects of these theatrics learned from his parents would be revealed in many ways later on. His interest in costume would border on fetishism. His mother’s fine clothes and sophistication triggered an acute awareness of female attire and scent in Joss – always the first attributes he noticed in a woman.

Lady Kilmarnock was hardly ever far away from him during his childhood, and when she was he must have felt her absence acutely. He was seven years old when she suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown, following the miscarriage of her fourth child, a son who had been born prematurely. Lady Kilmarnock needed privacy during this period of misfortune – the family had been staying with Count Hugo and Countess Ilona Kinsky in Bohemia at the time of the tragedy. Determined never to forget the loss of her third son, she marked the infant’s passing in a sketch in purple ink – mourning the tiny ‘Sacha Louis’ suspended in a shawl from the beak of a miniature stork, and recording his name in mirror writing. Her children were quite unaware of the disaster. Their mother was confined to bed, while they were taken up with the world of the gymkhana and polo matches at the Kinskys’ at Chlumetz, Bohemia. The Kinsky family were passionate equestrians: ‘The great challenge of every year … was the steeplechase of Pardubitz.’ In Europe this competition was recognised as the world’s most difficult course and so it was an occasion when ‘they could show off their prowess on horseback to the full – in other words – the Kinskys could win outright’.25

Lord Kilmarnock played a good deal of polo himself, and on his eighth birthday Joss was among the spectators at the Parc Club in Budapest, where his father was competing. He would develop a good eye for the ball, though his reflexes were to be more mercurial. Joss would later help to improve standards of polo in Kenya, establishing and encouraging new young teams.

The event that inspired Joss’s lifelong passion for beautiful cars also occurred in Hungary, on an earlier visit to Budapest when his parents took him to the Magyar Automobile Club, an event ‘with floats and fancy dress’. Joss experienced first-hand the dramatic changeover from horse-drawn traffic to automobiles. His mother’s hats now had to be clamped on with netting and veils as they charged through Bohemia, faster and faster, a journey that was repeated the following spring when Joss found himself again sitting in the back of an open tourer en route for Lauschin Castle to stay with his parents’ friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whose later love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke in Italy at Duino inspired his Duino Elegies.26 Before going on to Pardubitz they stayed at Csazany Streczhof, attending ‘a peasant wedding’ at Ivanc where Joss’s parents are pictured with a stuffed bear.27 His father was already in the habit of buying expensive automobiles of the latest design. During the next decade motor-cars would epitomise the tremendous romantic appeal of speed, power and status. Once Joss was allowed to get behind the wheel himself, he would be as discriminating as his father – his favourite model of all was to be the 1937 black Straight Eight Buick.28

Every jaunt made by the Kilmarnocks tended now to be interpreted in mileage and horsepower. Their digressions took them on trips to Paris, Grasse, Gorges de Loup, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. Whenever in Monaco, they stayed at the Hermitage Hotel so as to have a flutter at the opulent Casino Salle. Perhaps thanks to the example set by his parents’ busy lives, as an adult Joss was always highly organised, sticking punctually to a packed routine.

Whether the loss of Sacha Louis was so mentally dislocating that Lady Kilmarnock afterwards lost all motivation for keeping records we can only surmise, but the pages in her album dwindled to emptiness at this time. The last photograph shows Joss and Gilbert with Gustav Adolph, a grandson of Gustav V of Sweden, sharing a sledge and dressed in Fair Isle caps and pullovers against the icy blast, while staying with the King’s family.29 Lady Kilmarnock seems to have been at a watershed in her life with Vic, too. The following March, 1909, he packed her off to Bournemouth for complete rest by the sea. Once she had recuperated, the pattern of Joss’s pre-bedtime audience with her resumed seamlessly. Kissing his mother goodnight would remain important to him, and their closeness may have seemed to border on the incestuous when Joss kept up these childhood routines into his twenties.30 The obsession with his mother may provide a clue as to why he was drawn towards older women. Joss was always on excellent terms with his darling mother and Lady Kilmarnock never became disillusioned with him, through all vicissitudes.

Mother and son were to be parted again in 1914, when Lord Kilmarnock was posted to Tokyo as First Secretary. If her absences were difficult for Joss to adjust to at the time, they also seem to have taught him valuable lessons. He gained more independence, and learned that love can endure absences; even after a long bleak year of separation, their mutual affection was as strong as ever. Indeed, Joss’s close relationships would tend not to be affected by distance or time, enduring for life despite long absences.

Between 1909 and 1911, Joss and Gilbert were taught by a private tutor in Stockholm. Harder parents than the Kilmarnocks could have dispatched their sons off to English boarding school at a far earlier age. However, Joss was ten and Gilbert eight by the time they were sent to A. M. Wilkinson’s School, Warren Hill, in Eastbourne, to prepare them for entry into Eton.31

In 1911, the summer before the boys started boarding, the Kilmarnocks were in London for the coronation of George V on 22 June, where Joss acted as page to his grandfather, the 20th Earl. As a doting mother, Lady Kilmarnock must have been miserable at the thought of her sons’ impending departure to Eastbourne, where rules and conditions could have come only as a rude shock to two little chaps who had never before been exposed to the bleakness of boarding school. A cousin of Lord Kilmarnock’s, part of the Foley branch of the family, who lived at Westbrook Meads near the boys’ prep school, ensured steady communication about their progress and welfare.32

In 1910 the 20th Earl took out a five-year lease on Barwell Court, a manorhouse in Surrey. He had finally admitted financial defeat: the upkeep of Slains was too much. Plans for selling it were now mooted and a drift southwards must have seemed logical. Possibly, the Earl wanted to be closer to the family, with his grandsons at boarding school in the south and his elderly mother Eliza living in her grace-and-favour apartment at Kew. At any rate the house became a base for Joss and Gilbert and was given as their home address on their school records.33

Barwell Court’s colourful history appealed to the boys. In the early sixteenth century it had belonged to Merton Priory. Then during the Reformation the manor had been surrendered to the Crown, with the rest of the Catholic priory’s possessions. Henry VIII had allegedly kept a mistress here. The cellar housed a four-foot-deep pond, or ‘underground fish larder’, where the monks had kept fish for their Friday meals. Barwell Court’s park was made for exploration by boys of Joss’s and Gilbert’s age, with its noble trees, a ‘nut walk’ and a ‘pond teeming with carp … where once upon a time, it had teemed with dace and tench’.34 While Joss was living there he became fascinated by the Foley family history. Richard Foley was a famous seventeenth-century industrial spy. Originally a village minstrel, he earned his nickname ‘Fiddler Foley’ by carrying stolen papers into England from Europe in his violin case.35 Posing as an iron-worker, he wandered through Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain, working in various foundries where he collected technical information on ‘splitting’, an iron-forging process that was a carefully guarded secret. Eventually after years of cribbing information, Foley smuggled enough technical data back home to be able to construct a ‘splitting machine’, an ‘invention’ on which the fortunes of the Foley family were founded. After his death in 1657, Fiddler Foley’s ingenuity earned him a place in the annals of British spying, as well as hoisting the Foley family into the landed gentry of Worcestershire.36 Coincidentally, a Francis Foley was the MI6 resident at Berlin in 1939. In fact he would be there with Joss in 1919, and it was Francis Foley who learned that the German Army were experimenting with a cipher machine called Enigma.37

Gerald Hemzy Foley, 7th Lord Foley, another distant cousin of Joss’s, had already been at Eton since 1909 and would be expected to guide him through some of the nastier rites when he joined the college.38

Meanwhile, Rosemary’s compensation for having had her brothers wrenched away from her was the gift from her parents of Cherry, a King Charles spaniel puppy. With them and her nanny, Rosemary boarded the SS Lutzgow, embarking in February 1913 for Tokyo and life as an only child, clutching a bevy of dolls. Perhaps the withdrawn nature she manifested in later years was formed during her separation from Joss and Gilbert; she was to become a solitary young woman.39 Lady Kilmarnock is pictured on deck of this German ship – ‘writing letters … on our way to Japan’. Much of her correspondence will have been addressed to her sons. None has survived the years. All signs of depression seem to have been banished: carrying a stylish muff of cheetah skin, she looks rejuvenated at the prospect of Tokyo. There she played tennis every afternoon, often partnered by a Captain Butt whose name features more and more frequently until, in due course, he accompanied Joss’s parents on all excursions, which tended to be dominated by temples, cherry trees in bloom, lacquered bridges and parasols. As she revelled in the company of young officers, Lady Kilmarnock was showing signs of not wanting to accept her age.40

She and her husband returned from Japan to England in the summer of 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War to see Joss into Eton for the ‘Michaelmas half’ – Eton jargon for the autumn term starting in September – for which the preparation was elaborate. The correct top-hats, black coats, white ties and shoes could be obtained only from monopolist establishments in Eton High Street. Windsor Castle stood sentinel above the town.

Joss would spend his free time wandering around Windsor’s streets with friends, buying ices in the summer half, looking for books. One of the highlights of that Michaelmas half was when he and Sacheverell Sitwell spotted some ‘Bohemians leading a bear around on a chain’ about Windsor. The boys were witnessing part of the great gypsy coppersmith invasion of those years in England.41

Eton’s aim was to prepare its pupils for the service of the British Empire abroad as administrators, soldiers or diplomats – hardly necessary in Joss’s case. Boys boarded in houses known by the initials of their housemasters – Joss’s housemaster was Raymond Herney de Montmorency.42 Activities of the house were organised by the house captain, who was assisted by a group of boys known as ‘the library’.

Joss’s own bedsitting room, in which he was supposed to do three hours of prep each day, like every other boy’s was furnished with a ‘burry’ – a desk with drawers – and one easy chair. Fagging did not begin at once, but usually by October most newcomers would have had their share of the horrors associated with bullying.43 Ablutions were bitterly cold, leaving hands and feet clean but more freezing than ever. A can of water would be delivered – the allowance was half an inch per bath – which was already cold and made icier as it hit the porcelain. Joss was left with a lifelong appreciation of luxurious bathrooms. He would select the most modern fittings for his own, insisting upon scalding-hot water in abundance.44

While no precise record of his academic achievements survives, Joss’s ability to quote liberally from the classics in later life suggests that he was an able pupil. He studied modern languages as well as Greek and Latin.45 He was astute at mathematics. He shared classes – known in Eton parlance as ‘divisions’, invariably abbreviated to divs – with children destined for a life of wealth, position and privilege: Prince George of Teck was one of his contemporaries, along with Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, Alan Colman of Reckitt & Colman, Wilfred Thesiger and Gubby Allen, ‘a great athlete and cricketer’.46

A high percentage of Old Etonians would be reunited later in Kenya, among which were Derek Erskine, Fabian Wallis and Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck.* Other Old Etonians would find themselves in Joss’s company again when he was Kenya’s Assistant Military Secretary on account of postings to Nairobi, such as Viscount Gerald Portman and Dickie Pembroke, ‘a nice P. G. Wodehouse guardsman’.47 The Highlands of Kenya had a reputation for attracting rarefied members of English society.

Eton’s claim of making boys into men would resound and backfire when Joss turned fifteen. Already good-looking and tallish for his age, he was causing comment. He had suddenly shot up in height, developing into an almost Aryan-looking youth with well defined bones, a handsome high-bridged aristocratic nose, blond hair beginning to darken, blue eyes and a strong jaw. The pellucid eyes compensated for his rather too small mouth and would always be his most distinguishing feature. His hair was brushed back from his temples, with his parting low in the fashion of the day; his hair was so fine that he could keep it tidy only by slicking it down with brilliantine, darkening it further.

Joss’s strongest asset was his gaiety. His smile and the light of enjoyment would not be kept out of his hypnotically pale gaze – nor would they fade in the memories of those who loved him. Many would remark on his playfulness. He learned early and quickly to hide his inner, vulnerable feelings and concealed them behind a knowing, adult expression which gave the impression of hauteur. This sophistication would have been seductive to boys with less self-confidence, and may well have been another factor in Joss’s popularity.

Only months into the Great War, Eton began to notice the drain on its older pupils as they enlisted. Twenty new boys, led by Joss’s friend Prince Leopold, arrived from Brussels in November 1914 to ‘fill some of the empty rooms’. His greatest friend at Eton was Hubert Buxton, who would for ever remain loyal to Joss’s memory. Hubert became head of the Eton Society, better known as ‘Pop’ – the self-electing oligarchy of senior boys who were the admiration and envy of the entire school. But Joss would not be there to benefit from Hubert’s position. In their first year, Joss and Hubert began their joint hero-worship of Pop’s former head, the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton, whose reputation for ‘athletic and intellectual prowess’ sprang from his days at Eton.48

For the duration of the war Eton’s gaudy summer rituals were to change. Plans were amended for 4 June – ‘Eton mess’, strawberries and cream mashed together, was now a thing of the past – and a quiet lunch took place instead; a game of cricket followed, but fireworks were cancelled and so was the Henley Regatta.49 St Andrew’s Day and the Harrow match became too poignant reminders of happier times. Rather than providing such gaiety as they would have done in peacetime, they cast long shadows over tradition. As the obituaries of Old Etonians increased as the war progressed, rationing tightened and it became a point of patriotic honour and discipline that the boys should eat all their food, without comment or complaint, however unpalatable it sometimes seemed. This may be why Joss never questioned the meal put in front of him. He enjoyed haute cuisine but he could live without such luxuries; he always entertained well, but without ostentation. Since food was greatly restricted, when the growing boys were ravenous their supplies were now mostly supplemented by tinned sardines and caramels from Fortnum and Mason’s.50 The shortage of fuel meant that fires were few and far between in the cold months, so that the normal rigours of school life were accentuated. In addition, a pall of gloom was evident on every page of the Eton Chronicle – hardly surprising – with a grim, industrialised war raging as the world had never before known it. By the second issue of the Michaelmas half, a list of forty fallen was published under the heading ‘Etona Non Immemor’:* when the challenge had come, Etonians, like so many young men all over England, had responded and enlisted. The life of the college was profoundly affected by so many unexpected leavers, including nine masters. Some masters were even recalled from service to step into the breach. None could forget that Eton was in the grip of the war. Every home was saddened by losses among the generation of boys above Joss. Poetic epitaphs appeared in Latin or Greek, as well as in English.51

The effect on Joss was to be lasting. He would never be able to fathom the eagerness of the young men to reach the front line – over the first five days of the war 10,626 men had enlisted. All Joss could see, at barely thirteen years old, was the meaningless waste of young and healthy lives. In the Chronicle it was not uncommon for a letter from a friend to appear, or a brief obituary by a tutor, speaking of the ‘cheerfulness’ with which some young officer had died.

During the summer half of 1915 Hubert and Joss began a lifelong passion for bridge when they started playing Pelmanism, a card game demanding, as does bridge, an excellent memory and great concentration. The deck would be scattered face down on the lawn. At each turn, the player turns over two cards, but to score a trick the upturned cards must match. Joss’s success in pairing cards off was almost impossible for Hubert to beat,52 his perfect recall on the lawns of Eton is early confirmation of his ‘photographic’ memory. The two boys also shared an interest in drama. Joss’s forte was reciting from Don Quixote and Thackeray’s Esmond at ‘speeches’. His ability to take in everything at a glance gave his parodies an accuracy that could be quite cutting. His performances for friends were spontaneous, broken up with snatches of German, gesturing, accenting, mimicking hysterical Italians or one of the pompous ‘Danish Schleswig-Holstein Sonderberburg Glucksburgs’, or fussing about in farcical parody of one of his mother’s Austrian maids.53 Joss took a delight in playing the buffoon. Making capital out of his surname, he would imitate a yokel, with bits of straw in his hair, using such phrases as ‘Neither Hay nor grass’, ‘Making Hay while the sun shines’ and ‘Hey nonny-no’. If his repartee was sometimes too quick for the slow-witted, puns such as ‘a roll in the Hay’ and ‘Haycock’ never missed the mark and could be relied upon to raise a lot of sniggering.54 Victor Perowne, editor of the Eton Chronicle, allegedly composed several poems and pieces of prose about ‘Haystacks’ for the Chronicle, although none can be found today so possibly these jottings were private. Perowne eventually became Ambassador to the Holy See. At Eton, according to Sacheverell Sitwell, Perowne had fallen for Joss ‘hook, line and sinker’. Sitwell was never able to see Joss’s appeal yet he spoke of his magnetism, witnessing him ‘more than once, followed down Keate’s Lane by a whole mob of boys’.55

Joss’s academic progress is impossible to assess, as copies of school reports were not made at Eton in those days.56 Other sources show that in 1916 he was a ‘dry bob’ (he played cricket rather than rowed in the summer term) and was ‘very keen on football, being one of the first to play the Association game at the school’.57 He also participated in the Lower Boy House Cup, ‘Ante Finals’, ‘J. V. Hay playing in De Havilland’s team for the Field Game when he was in the 28th Division’ (Hubert Buxton was in the twenty-seventh).58 However, cricket and cards were but minor pastimes that summer of 1916 compared to Joss’s discovery of sex.

There was a lot of talk about Joss being ‘very much AC/DC’ while at Eton.59 These rumours were strongly denied by his brother Gilbert and his son-in-law Sir Iain Moncreiffe. By 1916 Joss had already been a member of the Eton College Officer Training Corps for a year, where apparently there were always ‘a lot of tents heaving on the job. One young and popular boy charged £3.00 per go.’ At school he was great friends with Fabian Wallis, who was then openly homosexual, a friendship that resumed in Kenya.60 Flirting with the boys down Keate’s Lane does demonstrate his tendency at least outwardly to defy sexual conventions. He was of course attractive to women, but even those who had slept with him described him as ‘a pretty-looking man’, accepting that he might have been bisexual. As one admirer put it, ‘Etonians had a certain reputation. There was something feminine about Joss, which one could not ignore.’61

Joss’s initiation into heterosexual sex began at fifteen: in the Michaelmas half of 1916 he was caught in flagrante delicto with a maid, a woman old enough to be his mother. He had obviously confided in his great friend Hubert Buxton, but naturally the latter never elaborated beyond the fact that ‘Joss had been sent down for being a very naughty boy indeed’; he added wistfully that Joss had been ‘so attractive and so smart’, implying that he only wished that he too had had the guts and ingenuity to get himself into bed with a woman at so tender an age.62