Read the book: «The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder»

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

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.