by James Fox
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White Mischief
The Murder of Lord Erroll
James Fox
For Thomas
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE The Murder
1 The White Highlands
2 Happy Valley
3 The Fastest Gun in the Gare du Nord
4 The Bonny Earl of Erroll
5 A Spell in Masai Country
6 Sundowners to Sunrise
7 The Body in the Buick
8 One Visit Too Many
9 The Angel of Death
PART TWO The Quest
10 The Voice on the Escarpment
11 Acumen and Intuition
12 The Mayor of Nairobi
13 Bullets in the Garden
14 Miss Wilks and the Missing Hour
15 Letters from the Wanjohi
16 The Greatest Pouncer of All Time
17 Palaces and Appearances
18 Pearls and Oysters
19 A Good Racing Man
20 Blackmail
21 White Royalty
22 Abdullah and the Afghan Princess
23 Lady Delamere
24 The End of the Trail
Cast of Characters
Index
Image Gallery
Acknowledgments
About the Author
NOTE
In earlier editions of this book I mistakenly wrote that Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk had inserted in Debrett’s the information that Lord Erroll had been mentioned in despatches for his part in the Eritrean operations when Italy entered the war. In fact, there is no such insertion in Debrett’s. Burke’s, however, does link Erroll’s despatches with the Eritrean campaign, which took place in June and July 1940, at which time Erroll was a staff captain. But I believe that the mention in despatches (posthumously gazetted) was for Erroll’s work at East Africa Command in Nairobi and for his organising the troops for the subsequent Abyssinian campaign, which was launched on the day he was murdered.
February 1983 J.F.
INTRODUCTION
In the early hours of January 24th, 1941 when Britain was preoccupied with surviving the Blitz, the body of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was discovered on the floor of his Buick at a road junction some miles outside Nairobi, with a bullet through the head. The two Africans who came upon the car, lying almost on its side in the grass beside the road, found its headlights blazing but no trace of an assailant.
Lord Erroll was the hereditary High Constable of Scotland and, by precedence, the first subject in Scotland after the Royal Family. At thirty-nine, he was a leading figure in Kenya’s colonial community and had recently been appointed Military Secretary. He was notorious, locally, for his exploits with married women, and had been much praised, ever since he was at Eton, for his charm and his great good looks. It was only in the last five years that Erroll had devoted himself to anything more serious than the pursuit of pleasure. But already he was projected as the future leader of the white settlers.
There were many people in Kenya who had a motive for killing Erroll, and many who had the opportunity that night. Yet nobody was convicted of his murder, and the question of who killed him, who fired the gun at the junction, became a classic mystery. It was at the same time a scandal and a cause célèbre which seemed to epitomise the extravagant way of life of an aristocratic section of the white community in Kenya at the moment of greatest danger for Britain and the West.
Erroll was killed on the very day that the campaign was launched in Nairobi to remove Mussolini’s army from Abyssinia. It was Erroll, ironically, as Military Secretary, who had been responsible for gathering the European and African troops for that campaign. The Dunkirk evacuation in May and June 1940, and the bombing of Britain’s cities, weighed heavily on the conscience of the white community in Kenya, who were keenly aware of their isolation from the main war effort. The last thing they wanted was for Nairobi’s social elite to be paraded in court, making world headlines which competed on page one with news of the war itself. It was a source of acute embarrassment. One headline read: “Passionate Peer Gets His.”
The story confirmed the licentious image of the Colony in the popular imagination in Britain and America, and revived the legend of “Happy Valley,” an area in the White Highlands which had been notorious since the 1920s as a playground for aristocratic fugitives of all kinds.
Happy Valley originated with Erroll himself and with Lady Idina Gordon, who later became his wife, and who set up house there in 1924. Friends from England brought home tales of glorious entertainment in an exhilarating landscape, surrounded by titled guests and many, many servants.
In New York and London the legend grew up of a set of socialites in the Aberdares whose existence was a permanent feast of dissipation and sensuous pleasure. Happy Valley was the byword for this way of life. Rumours circulated about endless orgies, of wife swapping, drinking and stripping, often embellished in the heat of gossip. The Wanjohi River was said to run with cocktails and there was that joke, quickly worn to death by its own success: are you married or do you live in Kenya? To have gone anywhere near Happy Valley was to have lost all innocence, to have submitted to the most vicious passions.
With Erroll’s murder and the scandal that followed, the spirit of Happy Valley was broken for ever. For the whites in Kenya it signalled the end of a way of life which stretched back three decades. The spell was broken, the ruling confidence that underpinned their unique occupation was gone, and it was never to be the same again.
Yet the mystery of who killed Lord Erroll survived and flourished, and continues to exert a strange power over all who come into contact with it. In Kenya’s remaining white community, it is still talked about as if it had happened yesterday. The virus of speculation has become endemic, and even today the place is alive with experts. One is told of many different people who alone hold the key to it all, but who will never be persuaded to tell. Others, including a former Governor of Kenya, achieved local fame by promising to leave the solution in written testimony in their wills—but the executors have always been left empty-handed. Much of this oral history is encrusted with distortion and incestuous folklore, each version fiercely held to be the truth—a warning to anyone broaching the subject in the Muthaiga Country Club.
So compelling was the mystery that throughout the 1960s it dominated the thoughts of a man of letters as distinguished as Cyril Connolly. In the spring of 1969, twenty-eight years after the event, Connolly and I decided to investigate the story for the Sunday Times Magazine, where I worked as a staff writer.
We discovered that everything written on the subject—including the only book—depended on the public record of the trial, adding nothing new, and came no closer to a solution than the Nairobi High Court in 1941. To our surprise, no one had returned to the original sources, or had gathered and sifted the popular wisdom, or had filled in the glaring empty spaces in the evidence collected by the Nairobi C.I.D. in the weeks after the murder.
Our article, which we called “Christmas at Karen,” turned out to be the prelude to a much longer quest. It generated an unexpected response, awakening memories and producing a mass of new evidence in its wake. The trail led us on. And Connolly, the literary critic par excellence, did not take his obsessions lightly. The volumes of notes that he left me in his will testify to that. My own fascination with the story, shared with Connolly as I played Watson to his Holmes in that year when we worked closely together, was revived when I opened the notebooks again, soon after his death in 1974. I decided to pursue the trail that
we had embarked upon together.
Our joint obsession was primarily with the enigma, which Connolly approached like a novelist, believing in a solution through the study of character. But the story also touched off his social phobias and his curiosity about the beau monde of the 1930s, about the titled aristocracy and their dense network of kinship. He swotted up Debrett’s with scholarly reverence, as if it were the Old Testament itself.
One aspect that particularly appealed to Connolly was that several of the male characters in the story, including Lord Erroll, had been contemporaries of his at Eton—the Eton he described in Enemies of Promise. They had been transplanted, moreover, to the great Kenya landscape which he had so often eloquently described. The coincidence had a potent effect on his imagination, his envy, his fevered curiosity.
Beneath the surface lay another rich seam: the extraordinary story of the British aristocracy in Kenya, subjected to a tropical climate and high altitude, suspended between English traditions and African customs, answerable, more or less, only to themselves. These British colonials remained aloof, always on guard, determined that Africa conform to their needs, and accept without question an imported, heightened ideal of class privilege, with all its rules and etiquette and yearning for service and luxury. They struggled to teach their servants the crucial lessons—the setting out of the silver, the heating of the water, the Majesty of King George. The Africans responded to this invasion with infinite patience, often to the fury of the memsahibs, who mistook their attitude for sullenness and even stupidity.
In the colonial imagination, Africa was a dangerous country which inspired extremes, liberated repressed desires, insinuated violence. At the furthest end of the scale was the subconscious fear that someone might even break ranks, betray his country and his class by “going native,” though just what form this might take could never be put into words.
The colonials often shared that strange sensation common to exiled Englishmen living in groups of being “out of bounds.” Many of them had money. Many were remittance men who had been paid off by their families and sent away in disgrace. Once their spirits and sense of status had been restored by this feudal paradise, the temptation to behave badly was irresistible, and both men and women often succumbed to “the three ‘A’s”—altitude, alcohol and adultery. No wonder there was suspicion of the colonies at home, and that the Erroll case touched off a tinderbox of resentment.
The history of the quest is often inseparable from the evidence itself and lies at the heart of the main narrative. In the first part the story, which comes from many different fragments collected over a long period, is put together like a jigsaw. In Part II, which deals with the search for a solution, many gaps, quandaries, blind alleys and breakthroughs are included in the narrative where they might usefully add to the store of information and evidence and where they give momentum to the quest. There are also some detours along the route which seemed too good to be left out.
In homage to Cyril Connolly, a diligent investigator, I quote his own advice (to be taken, he would have said, before embarkation). It comes from “The Missing Diplomats,” another, though more transient, of his obsessions: the case of Burgess and Maclean.
Those who become obsessed with a puzzle are not the most likely to solve it. Here is one about which I have brooded for a year and now wish to unburden myself. Something of what I have set down may cause pain: but that I must risk because where people are concerned, the truth can never be ascertained without painful things being said, and because I feel that this account may lead to somebody remembering a fact or phrase which will suddenly bring it all into focus.
PART ONE
THE MURDER
1
THE WHITE HIGHLANDS
It is generally a benefit we confer when we take over a state. We give peace where war prevailed, justice where injustice ruled, Christianity where paganism ruled. (Whether the native looks on it in that light is another matter. I’m afraid that possibly he does not as yet appreciate his benefits.)
LORD CRANWORTH, 1912
I would add house management [to a list of hints for prospective settlers’ wives] were it not that the supervision of native servants is an art in itself. One could not, for instance, learn by experience in England when is the right time to have a servant beaten for rubbing silver plate on the gravel path to clean it, and this after several previous warnings.
LADY CRANWORTH, 1912
Lady Cranworth had been given a chapter to herself in her husband’s textbook for the new arrivals, which described the first decade of white settlement and portrayed Kenya as the white man’s heaven on earth. He called the book Profit and Sport in East Africa, and a later edition, with more restraint, A Colony in the Making. He described the sheer pleasure of the experience, the undiluted nobility of the landscape with which Englishmen and Scotsmen from landed families would instantly feel familiar; the unlimited scope for game shooting, the richness of the soil and the millions of acres of virgin grazing land waiting to be settled. Although public schoolboys, he suggested, had acquired a bad reputation as colonists elsewhere in the Empire, Kenya was different. Here they were particularly suited to local conditions. Their high opinion of themselves was shared by the natives, particularly the Masai, their ignorance, “often colossal,” of farming would give them the benefit of a fresh eye on the unusual obstructions that the tropics would put in their way, and as for their devotion to sport, there was nothing the native liked better than eating large quantities of meat. Clearly Lady Cranworth, like the strident memsahibs that Karen Blixen described later, had already succumbed to fierce measures on the domestic front.
The British Government had officially taken over the country, as East Africa Protectorate, in 1895, to compete with German imperial expansion in East Africa. The Germans were building a railway into the interior from the port of Tanga. The British raced ahead and built their own line, 580 miles long, from Mombasa on the coast to Lake Victoria. It took five and a half years and was completed in 1901, to great acclaim.
Before that, any journey inland was an Arab slaving expedition to Uganda or a gruelling Rider Haggard romance undertaken by a lonely white man, a Thompson or a Livingstone, with an army of deserting porters and under continual threat of attack by the nomadic Masai.
The Indian railway workers imported by the British died in great numbers, not on the spears of the Masai “Moran” (young warriors), who seemed to accept the railway and the superiority of British weapons, but from dysentery, malaria, Blackwater fever, tsetse fly and from the heat itself. Many others fell prey to the man-eating lions of Tsavo, who held up the work for several weeks and seemed for a time to be invincible.
The railway was a splendid and ambitious piece of engineering, undertaken in appalling conditions and with truly Victorian confidence. The track crossed deserts, wound up mountains, descended escarpments and cut through forests and across swamps. It rose from sea level to almost 8,000 feet, running across the grazing land of the Masai and the homeland of the Kikuyu tribe, who were less well disposed to this invasion. It looked absurdly unequal to the task, this clockwork toy, with its four carriages and its dumpy tank engine, on a track that looked as pliable as soldering wire. But it was a stupendous journey, for the first part in the intense heat of the Taru desert, with no relief from the clinging and caking red dust which lay in ripples on the floor of the compartment. At Voi, in the coolness of the plains, there was the unforgettable sight of the great massed herds of zebra, giraffe, kongoni, wildebeest, Grant’s and Thompson’s gazelle, grazing across the savannah or running eight or ten abreast.
Nairobi was established in 1899, on the frontier between the Masai and Kikuyu, as the last possible rail depot before the track climbed 2,000 feet up the Kikuyu escarpment, the eastern wall of the Great Rift Valley. For anyone looking down into the vast floor of the valley for the first time, the sheer scale of the landscape was over powering—something quite new to the senses.
Tea was taken at Nai
vasha station, the beginning of the highlands, and from there on, up to Gilgil and then to Nakuru, the promised land was slowly revealed, in all its immense variety and beauty. After some miles of thorn and red rock, you emerged into thousands of acres of rolling English parkland, a haze of blue lawn rising and falling to the horizon, untouched by the plough and apparently uninhabited. Some of it resembled the landscape of the west of Scotland, with the same dramatic rock formations, grazing pastures, dew-laden mists. Streams rippled through the valleys, wild fig (sacred to the Kikuyu) and olive grew in the forests; the air was deliciously bracing, producing an ecstasy of well-being, and the quality of the light was staggering. There were scents too, the indefinable flavour of peppery red dust and acrid wood smoke that never fail to excite the deepest nostalgia.
And yet unless the land was productive and profitable, there was no point to this “lunatic express,” as its opponents had described it in England. It had been built for prestige and super-power competition, and its only effect was to drain the Colony’s budget.
The Commissioner for East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, a distinguished Oxford scholar and diplomat, produced a scheme in 1901, soon after his arrival, of recruiting settlers from the Empire to farm the land. The idea was simply to make the railway pay for itself, by hauling freight from the uplands to the coast. The development of the Colony was a secondary consideration, indeed almost an accident. A recruitment drive was launched in London, and the first wave of settlers arrived in 1903 from Britain, Canada, Australia and South Africa. The photographs depict them as “Forty-niners” from the Yukon—a much rougher crowd than the later arrivals, who were drawn mainly from the Edwardian aristocracy and the British officer class. Nevertheless, there were many peers among these first arrivals—Lord Hindlip, Lord Cardross, Lord Cranworth, for example—and victims of the English system of primogeniture, such as Berkeley and Galbraith Cole, younger sons of the Earl of Enniskillen.
