by James Fox
In 1930 Carberry was married for the third time, to June Mosley, the only woman who proved able to stand up to his monstrous behaviour. Dushka Repton remembers meeting the couple in Paris that year:
At seventeen she couldn’t put two words together, and she was common as hell. J.C. introduced her as his “baby.” “That’s my dumb baby,” he said, in a broad American accent. Some baby. We went out for dinner. She had this ghastly outfit. She wore a scarlet jersey dress and a burgundy red hat and it really looked twopence halfpenny. I think she had brown shoes. I said. “Where the hell did you get that outfit?” But she was very pretty. Huge, rather à fleur de tête eyes, long lashes, long hair and very painted lips. She looked like a very pretty chorus girl. When she married Carberry she said, “I refuse to have any presents,” and she was rather careful with his money. Carberry took her up in a plane, soon after he met her. and asked her whether she would like him to do some stunts. “Now, baby, wanna do some stunts?” She undid her safety belt to show she wasn’t a coward. Luckily all the stunts were perfect, and that’s how she won his heart.
Later she was described as a “terrifyingly unnatural blonde. Deep bass voice. Tough as boots. But a wonderful person, warm hearted and totally unjealous. Cut her in half, you’d find mostly gin.”
June’s drink in fact was brandy and soda, and she drank it all day, as she chain-smoked. Carberry drank too, but never after dinner. The couple used terrible language to each other and they had violent rows, but Carberry adored his wife, and admired her tenacity. She had many affairs and Carberry usually didn’t mind. Once when June went off with Derek Fisher on a trip to Meru while Carberry was away, he came back unexpectedly. When he discovered his wife gone, he took off again and caught up with the couple driving across Cole’s plains. He had loaded the plane with medium sized rocks, with which he bombarded their car from the air.
His servants called Carberry by the Masai name, “Msharisha”—the long whip with which oxen are driven—because he was tall, and because he used to lash them on the slightest pretext. His attitude to the African race is best described by Lady Altrincham. “I took a great dislike to him. Once, when some petrol had gone missing, he said, ‘Blame it on the boy.’ I said, ‘But he didn’t do it.’ ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Carberry.”
Animals as well as humans were subjected to Carberry’s distinctive brand of sadism. Once, for example, he took a particular dislike to a hen which June had adopted and which had a privileged position in the Carberry household simply because June, who loved animals, had taken a fancy to it. It had even been allowed to lay its eggs on the sofa. This was too much for Carberry. The hen, he declared, must be subjected to a test of worthiness. He bet the manager of the Seremai estate that it would fly if he dropped it from his aeroplane, or, at least, fly well enough to survive. The guests at Seremai that day remember the hen dropping out of Carberry’s aeroplane like a stone. It was at first presumed dead, but some hours later it was found limping lopsidedly through the coffee shamba. Only then was it allowed to resume its privileges.
A table for three had been booked for lunch on the day of the Broughtons’ arrival (November 12th) at the Muthaiga Club, where they would stay while they looked for a suitable house. Their guest was Gwladys Delamere, the Mayor of Nairobi. Broughton had known her well during her first marriage in England and considered her a close friend. Gwladys was the Tsarina of Nairobi social life, and Broughton was wise to pay his first respects exclusively to her. Perhaps Gwladys, too, thought he would be arriving with Vera. Diana would require her approval.
Walking past the porter’s lodge and into the chintzy sitting rooms of the Club, Broughton, after thirteen years of absence, must have found it somewhat shorn of its former grandeur. The Club then had usually been almost empty on weekdays; now it was humming with activity, with officers up from South Africa, or shuttling between England and Cairo. Nairobi and the Muthaiga had become recreation centres for troops on leave.
Gwladys claimed the honeymooning couple for dinner as well as lunch that day, and added another guest, Broughton’s contemporary, Jack Soames, who came in from his farm at Nanyuki. There was much to talk about: Britain under the blackout, the difficulties of keeping an estate running during the war, Turf Club gossip. They ordered Bronxes before dinner, and champagne. The subject came up of why Broughton had wanted to leave England. He made a reply about a man his age not being able to find any proper war work in England. Furthermore, he thought a new life deserved a new background and he was looking forward to showing Diana this country.
Almost immediately the couple set off on an up-country journey to introduce Diana to Broughton’s old friends. They visited Lord Francis Scott, Mervyn Ridley, Soames, and “Boy” and Paula Long. It was the Longs’ first glimpse of Diana and they were surprised that the new bride should say in front of her husband and her hosts, “I’m not sharing a room with that dirty old man. I insist on having a room to myself.” This, it seemed, was the unwritten part of the pact. The couple never did share a room, either before or after the marriage. Broughton appeared to be besotted by Diana, but she had clearly already begun to find the relationship unbearable after the years of semi-freedom, of flying and dancing and escaping with her beaux to the 400 Club.
Diana’s impressions of Old Etonians abroad cannot have been improved by their visit to “Commander” Soames at Bergeret. At school he had been a contemporary of Broughton, and they had travelled on the long journey out to Kenya together in 1923—Broughton for the first time. Soames had divorced Nina Drury some ten years before the Broughtons’ arrival. But even then, although she never suffered directly from his peculiar habits and compulsions—all acted on surreptitiously—she was keenly aware of them. “He could be so charming to people that they were often never aware of the other side of it,” she said. Soames had developed a sinister and morbid imagination, and had become a voyeur with an alarming style. He would drill holes in the roof above the guest bedrooms and peer down at them.
“It was all becoming rather paramount even before I married him,” said Nina Drury, “and people had started to become wary of him.”
He had also become bad-tempered and tyrannical towards his servants. On one occasion a guest complained that the houseboy had “buggered up the bath” by omitting to fit the plug properly and thus draining the supply of hot water. Soames picked up a gun and hunted the terrified houseboy all through the property, swearing to kill him. When Gloria, his mistress, and later his wife, told the servant who brought the tea to take the remainder of the chocolate cake for himself, Soames said, “You’re not going to give the cake to those baboons, are you?”
One morning when there was nothing better to entertain his guests, Soames suggested target practice. No one needed reminding that there was a war on. Broughton was all in favour: it was essential, he felt, that Diana should learn how to defend herself with a revolver. A target was set up. Broughton, Diana and Soames, watched by other members of the house party, shot fifty or sixty rounds into the undergrowth. Diana usually hit the target, but most of Broughton’s shots went wide.
Broughton and Diana returned to Nairobi around November 25th. Broughton left again almost immediately to visit the farm in which he had an interest, on Lake Naivasha. He was away for the Caledonian Ball at the Muthaiga Club on November 30th. That was the night that Joss Erroll and Diana met for the first time.
Diana had been upstairs in her room writing letters before dinner. As she came down the staircase she saw three men sitting on the sofa, all laughing, one of them dressed in a kilt. When their eyes met, as she recalled later, “I had the extraordinary feeling, if you can understand it, that I was suddenly from that moment the most important thing in his life.” Erroll asked her to dine with him. She asked how many people would be there. She knew it would be impossible for them to meet alone without showing her own feelings. She had, after all, been married for less than one month. Erroll, on the other hand, was free. His marriages were in the past, and his
current affair with Mrs. Wirewater was conducted now by correspondence between Nairobi and Cape Town, where she had gone to install her children in school.
When they did find themselves alone for the first time, and even before the first embrace, before, as Diana described it, “there had been anything in any shape or form,” let alone a declaration of love on either side, Erroll said to her, “Well, who’s going to tell Jock? You or I?” It was in fact almost six weeks before Erroll and Broughton met to discuss the topic. In the meantime, Diana had fallen in love for the first time in her life.
When Broughton returned to Nairobi two days later, he and Diana settled in to what appeared to be a rhythm of lunches and dinners at the Muthaiga Club, of croquet games, bridge, backgammon and tea parties. Erroll was now constantly in the Club. The military headquarters, where he worked, was near by, and his house only a few hundred yards away. Broughton, who had known him slightly from previous visits, struck up a friendship with him. By the beginning of December, Broughton and Diana rarely had a meal without sharing their table with Erroll. Even when Diana had other plans, Broughton and Erroll usually lunched together.*
What did Broughton think of Erroll? He described him as an “out and outer,” but also “one of the most amusing men I have ever met,” and above all Broughton wanted to be amused. He was also flattered by the attentions of a younger man—it revived his self-image as one of the most glamorous officers in the Irish Guards.
“If you can make a great friend in two months,” he said in court, “then Joss Erroll I should describe as a great friend.” These were happy meals. Broughton could dazzle his new friend with his stories of the Liverpool Cup. the London seasons, the peculiar cases he had heard as Chairman of the Nantwich Bench, the affairs of his closest friends, and sample, in return, Erroll’s caustic wit and flashes of unashamed self-revelation.
Meanwhile, Diana had acquired two constant companions—her old friend Hugh Dickinson and a new one. Major Richard (Dickie) Pembroke, who had arrived in the course of duty. In fact, Pembroke had fallen in love with the wife of a brother officer in the Coldstream Guards, and regimental etiquette had demanded that he apply for a transfer. The lady did not follow Major Pembroke, however, and he was in the jargon of the day, something of an “extra man.” Occasionally he played bezique with Broughton. And he, too, fell in love with Diana. She thought him the dullest man she had ever met, and after their first dinner together she remembers asking him to remind her what his name was. “Dickie,” came the answer, “Dickie Pembroke.”
There was nothing astonishing to Broughton about these “sorties” of Diana’s. He had made a pact: she was allowed to enjoy herself. And yet he seemed to work his side of the bargain with a fastidiousness that was more than passivity; he seemed almost eager to concede his first claim.
Then, on December 5th, the Broughtons moved from the Club into their house at Karen, the Nairobi suburb named after Baroness Blixen. It was a solid Sunningdale Tudor structure, with twenty-two acres of grounds. Fifteen servants were engaged and put in the charge of Wilks and the head boy, Abdullah bin Ahmed, who was a “catch” from the Muthaiga Club. Broughton approached Sir Ferdinand Cavendish Bentinck, Chairman of the Production and Settlement Board, and an old acquaintance, for a job. They seemed all set for the duration.
On December 18th, Broughton suddenly went to stay with Erroll in his house at Muthaiga, near to the Club, leaving Diana at home for four nights. They were reunited on December 22nd, when Gwladys Delamere held a joint birthday party for herself and Diana at the Club with forty-four guests. There was dancing “from sundowners to sunrise,” at what turned out to be one of the last soirées of the ancien régime. The guest list must have included many of Erroll’s former girlfriends, including Gwladys herself and Alice de Janzé, and possibly Idina. Paula Long described Diana and Joss dancing “as if they were glued together.” When two people find each other supremely desirable, as Broughton said later, there is nothing to be done except give in or run away. It was wartime and there was nowhere to run to.
Over Christmas the love affair crystallised. Most of their friends noticed that by early January the new couple were inseparable—particularly Diana’s other “licensed” escorts, like Dickie Pembroke, who said, “Anyone who saw them at that time would have thought they were in love.” Some acted as accomplices, particularly June Carberry, who was to become a kind of handmaid to the romance. But Broughton’s awareness only came slowly—at least so it appeared, and so he behaved.
By January 3rd, the deception of Broughton had begun. Diana and Erroll went to June’s house at Nyeri for the weekend, June having discreetly disappeared to Malindi, on the coast. On Monday 6th they returned to Nairobi. Broughton picked up an anonymous note from his rack at the Muthaiga Club which read:
You seemed like a cat on hot bricks at the club last night. What about the eternal triangle? What are you going to do about it?
He showed it to Diana at the Club that night and said, “What do you think of this?” They all laughed. And yet Broughton knew what was happening. He had tackled Diana on the subject of their trip to Ceylon, planned for that month, and received the excuse that the decor at the Karen house would not be ready and needed her supervision.
Broughton was forced to confront the problem when he and Diana gave a dinner party at. Karen on January 12th. Around the table sat Gerald Portman, Richard Pembroke, a Miss Lampson, Erroll, the Broughtons and Gwladys. Much of the energy that evening was generated by the Mayor of Nairobi, who picked a fight early on with Major Portman about the relative contributions of Britain and the colonies to the war effort. The shouting match was unstoppable. A glass candlestick was broken by someone hammering on the table.
“Did that improve matters?” Portman was asked later.
“Not at all,” he replied. “It was a particularly heated argument. It was so heated that I think there must have been something personal.”
The Mayor at one stage commented that if Mr. Portman felt as he did, why the hell had he come out here?
“It was a very unpleasant dinner to start with,” Broughton recalled. “Lady Delamere [Gwladys] and Mr. Portman had a most frightful row and abused each other like pickpockets, which is always embarrassing for a host. We then went into the room where we dance and where the piano is. Not content with their fight in the dining room, they began all over again, which, I must say, annoyed me very much indeed. The next thing I recall is that Lady Delamere and my wife went upstairs to my wife’s bedroom where they remained about half an hour. The men downstairs were very bored as they had nobody to dance with.”
The gramophone was now playing, but Gwladys, having turned her sights away from Mr. Portman and the war effort to a more pressing topic, had effectively cleared the dance floor. First Lord Erroll had taken her aside, after dinner, in a small room on the ground floor. “He told me he was fond of Lady Broughton. Very fond,” said Glwadys, “that he would do anything for her and that he was determined to marry her; that he had never been so happy, and did I like her. He asked my advice and I advised him to make a clean breast of it to Sir Delves.” What did he say to that? “He said, ‘You are often right. I will think about it and let you know.’”
Then Diana approached her, or it may have been Gwladys herself who took Diana into the sitting room, and asked, “Do you know Joss is very much in love with you?”
Diana replied, “Yes.”
“What are you going to do about it?” enquired the Mayor. That was one of Gwladys’s favourite phrases.
Diana offered to show Gwladys around the newly decorated house and the conversation continued in her bedroom. “Does he want to marry you?” asked Gwladys. Diana replied that he did. Gwladys told Diana how fond she was of Erroll and that she would like to see him happy; that he had been unhappy with his first wife and that his second wife, Molly, had been too old for him. She suggested that this new love was Joss’s first chance of real happiness. Diana said she was fond of Broughton and didn’t want to hur
t him.
“Yes,” said Gwladys, “but he is an old man and has had his life. Take your happiness where you can find it. There is a war on.”
Finally, Gwladys gave Diana the same advice she had given Erroll—to make a clean breast of it. “He will never give you up,” she said. “It’s the best thing you can do.” Joss had tried to persuade Diana that the marriage pact should now be invoked—Broughton had given his word, and it should be taken seriously. Diana, nevertheless, was wavering; she felt she couldn’t go through with it. It was Gwladys’s official approval that finally persuaded her to go ahead.
Gwladys seemed to be promoting the affair under the veil of “sound advice.” Erroll had already told her that he was prepared to elope, and she said, “Don’t have any farewell scenes. Write a note and leave it on his pillow.” (She denied this later.) Now, after her conversation with the two lovers, she turned on Broughton and delivered the bad news.
Broughton had come upstairs to complain that the men below were very bored and had no one to dance with. “They came down,” said Broughton, “and Lady Delamere came and sat next to me. She was watching Lord Erroll and my wife dancing … I was sitting by her also watching them dancing. Lady Delamere said to me, ‘Do you know that Joss is wildly in love with Diana?’, and I’m afraid that gave me a great deal of food for thought and I became rather distrait and I did neglect my duties as a host in not being as attentive to Lady Delamere as I should have been. It confirmed my worst suspicions and I was very absent-minded afterwards.”
Despite the shock of discovering that his wife’s affair was public, Broughton now invited Erroll to stay the night. Such passivity, exaggerated friendliness, the concealing of his true feelings, was to become typical of Broughton’s behaviour; and Erroll’s lack of restraint was typical of his professional contempt for husbands. The two men even went riding together early the following morning, with Diana, in the Kikuyu Reserve.
