White Mischief

by James Fox

  Connolly became as serious about his election to Pop. the self-electing oligarchy of Eton prefects which he had lobbied for so carefully, as about his membership of White’s later on. White’s was a place where the writers among its members might justifiably have felt uneasy, and Connolly had a phobia about the place. He once told me that he had the impression that everyone stopped talking the moment he came through the door, and he was sometimes seized with the fear, according to Peter Quennell, that he might have to submit to a ritual “debagging” there: the thought of being trouserless at White’s reviving his early terrors at Eton, before he was saved by his Pop election. The passionate love-hate for athletes and philistines had pursued him throughout his life. At Oxford he had been proud of his wild friends. There were many reckless fauns in Happy Valley, like Waugh’s friend, Raymond de Trafford.

  Diana Caldwell was for Connolly the perfect complement to the males in that longed-for and detested world of upper-class glamour. There was a bloom on her, something to do with her looks, her figure and her clothes, that fascinated him. She was unlike most of the women who, surrounded Connolly, but she had a certain appeal, a sexuality that attracted and impressed him.

  Diana loved jewels, for example, and might go to considerable lengths to get them. He was intrigued by the fact that this woman, who had been jealously described as a “chorus girl,” had turned herself into exactly what is required of an “English lady,” and he thought her bold and admirable.

  There was a hint of passion and even a voyeuristic streak in his quest. The possibility that he could never know the truth about Diana drove Connolly mad with curiosity. He was like the German Prince in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus who asks Faustus, now in league with the devil, to summon up Alexander the Great’s concubine so that he can satisfy his burning, obsessive curiosity: does she or does she not have a mole on her neck? One of Connolly’s informants had told him that, as a result of a shooting incident long after the trial, Diana had been marked by a bullet which had grazed her back. He once suggested, as a joke, that I go and find out if it was true. But he badly wanted to know.

  The Erroll story contained all the right ingredients for Connolly and he approached it with the curiosity of a novelist, or a novelist manqué. To some extent he romanticised the Kenya characters in his imagination: the painstaking investigation seemed like a substitute for the serious novel he felt he ought to be writing, and about which he had always hoarded guilty feelings of unfulfilment.

  Our article was well received and judged a success, as much I suspect for its evocation of time and place as its exposition of the story in a wholly new light. We had gathered a great deal of fresh material, on which my own researches were subsequently based, and Connolly was to add much more before his death. We had, in a sense, broken off the quest because of the need to publish, and the mystery was still there to baffle us, enriched, but perhaps deepened too. Connolly received many telephone calls over Christmas, and letters afterwards, congratulating him on his masterly effort, and a cable from the writer, Quentin Crewe, also an Erroll murder aficionado, who had written up his own discoveries in his column in the Daily Mirror. His cable read, “Superb elegant amazing revealing far more than I have ever dared to hope many congratulations.”

  Letters arrived, containing peculiar memories and anecdotes, like this one:

  December 21 ’69

  Dear Mr. Connolly,

  Your account of the Erroll murder in today’s Sunday Times Magazine was compulsive reading for me. This is the reason.

  In 1945 my husband and I and two small daughters had a holiday at Westward Ho in North Devon in a guest house, name forgotten I’m afraid. Among the guests was a permanent resident, a rather faded but elegant woman, beautifully dressed—Mrs. Caldwell, the mother of Diana and Lady Willingdon.

  We talked a little: she was quite friendly and obviously lonely. One day she invited me to her bed-sitting room. It was full of photographs in silver frames, carrying the atmosphere (as she did herself) of Mayfair 1920s.

  She spoke of Diana, saying she’d married a dreadful man, presumably Delves Broughton. I recall the emphasis on “dreadful” very clearly. The case was miles away from people like my husband or 1, two professional people in a workday provincial city, so I wasn’t much interested then.

  However, two incidents have remained in my memory very vividly. Mrs. Caldwell went everywhere with a whippet dog. I love dogs and used to admire him, especially his docile temperament. “Well you see, they’re working class dogs, and used to being kept under.” said Mrs. Caldwell. It expressed perfectly the caste system she took for granted, though she loved the dog.

  Another time she left an expensive fur coat in the holiday-makers’ lounge. One of the guests, a London man with plebeian manners, and a loud voice, picked it up in scorn saying, “Well, the war’s over and so’s this sort of thing I hope.”

  I’d welcomed the Labour victory of ’45, but this fellow put me, momentarily at any rate, on Mrs. Caldwell’s side. My husband and I both agreed we hated his gesture.

  Twenty years later whippet dogs appear with glamour models in Vogue and Harper’s and anyone having a good fur coat in a guest house would be admired rather than scorned.

  This gives a chance to say how much I enjoy all you write on Sundays. I’ve never forgotten your book Enemies of Promise, either.

  Yours sincerely,

  Evelyn Ratcliff

  But others were not so impressed. On Christmas Day, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk sat down and composed the following letter to the Editor of the Sunday Times. I no longer remember his reaction to it, but it was the kind of letter that would have touched Connolly on an exposed nerve.

  Sir,

  Before regaling us with servants’ hall gossip, Mr. Cyril Connolly draws “indignant attention” to the War going on at the time of the death of Lord Erroll, whose only daughter was my first wife. It’s as a talented writer rather than a military man that we think of Mr. Connolly, which is perhaps why he forgot to mention that Lord Erroll had recently returned from the Eritrean campaign, where as a Captain he had been awarded a mention in despatches.

  It was also vinegar on a wound to read that the East African pioneers “took so much out of the world and put so little back.” Lord Erroll did not own “seats” at Slains Castle and Rosenglass. He put his few pennies into Kenya, where he was a leading elected member of the Legislative Council. And my own father lost more than nineteen twentieths of his outlay, when he put two thirds of his fortune and all his labour into clearing the virgin bush: no pun is intended to link him to those dozen or so forward looking families who were so much ahead of their time as to anticipate the permissive society so brightly hailed by our avant garde in this Day & Age.

  Yours truly,

  Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk

  It was, in fact, not the East African pioneers that Connolly had accused of taking so much out and giving little back, but those same “forward looking” families in Happy Valley that Sir Iain had linked to the landscape with his schoolboy pun. Twelve years later I arranged to meet Sir Iain—at White’s—and we spent two enjoyable hours talking about the case.

  We faced in addition a storm of complaints at the Press Council from members of the Erroll family. The layout of our piece contained a full page blow-up of Erroll’s head lying on the mortuary slab, showing the fatal bullet wound and the scorchmarks of black powder. Lord Kilmarnock, Erroll’s brother, complained that this especially, and the article in general, were in extremely bad taste; that it should not have been published without first having been shown to the Erroll family, and that the underlying suggestion of Erroll’s homosexuality at Eton was “a most damaging piece of imaginative reporting calculated to cast an aspersion on Lord Erroll’s character as a schoolboy.” Connolly replied,

  Surely the investigation of an unsolved mystery of thirty years ago, which received international attention, which has been the subject of one book, as well as innumerable articles in many countries,
and made legal history, is in the public domain.

  If all the members of the families involved were consulted, that of the accused as well as of the victim, which would now include some grown-up grandchildren, nothing would get published at all about this or innumerable other crimes or scandals, from Tranby Croft onwards … Surely the press is entitled to disregard the general wish of all families to keep their skeletons in their cupboards.

  On the “bad taste” and the photograph of Erroll, Connolly wrote,

  I do not consider the article in bad taste given what has already been written and the thirty year time lag. I do not see how one can adjudicate about bad taste: very many people whose opinion I respect enjoyed the article and wrote or said so. I was not responsible for obtaining or publishing the photo of Lord Erroll’s head but I gathered that it was published on the grounds that it brought home that an unsolved murder was not just a parlour game and that it was in itself a thing of beauty. I do think it is a tragic and moving photograph and brings out the extraordinary beauty of Lord Erroll which was to dog him through his life and lead to his undoing.

  The “imaginative” reporting on Erroll as a schoolboy was not imaginative, said Connolly, and supplied the descriptions of two Eton contemporaries, one of whom was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Curiously, Lord Kilmarnock had also objected to the adjective “fascist” which I had applied to Erroll in my own copy, despite a mention of Erroll’s apostasy from that cause. Connolly ended his long defence.

  People in Kenya are still discussing the crime as if it were yesterday. [The virus] … will continue to affect authors and journalists who come into contact with it. The bad taste is not theirs, but arises from Happy Valley itself, whose denizens never let consideration for their children prevent them from doing exactly as they pleased.

  But that was not the end of it. Connolly had pointed the finger at Gwladys Delamere as the author of the anonymous letters placed in Broughton’s box at the Muthaiga Club. Her daughter, Mrs. Rose Hodson, came to her mother’s defence at the Press Council, and said of our article, “Far from being a serious enquiry into the mystery, it is principally a salacious rehash of an old scandal.” Yet salacious rehash would surely have been more easily dismissible as yellow press tittle-tattle than our serious enquiry. Connolly’s study of Gwladys as the possible author of the letters was the result of some deep armchair reflection and was, in my opinion, an inspired piece of literary deduction—speculation, of course, but based on real evidence which he produced at greater length in his defence.

  The underlying complaint against us was that we had dared to “rake up the past”—an old stick with which journalists and biographers are often beaten in the hope that they will feel a sense of professional shame—and that in this case, although old families were involved, we weren’t prevented from doing so by some unwritten law of propriety. The attitude is a familiar one, especially from a prominent family with a notorious episode in its history. At these moments, its members will often assume a right of veto where none exists, and where the story has for years been in the public domain.

  The problem is that mystery and scandal in high places are always good copy—a truth surrounded with hypocrisy—and since they supply history with its best thrillers and its most revealing asides, they will always be kept alive. For my part I agree with the conclusion of Mark Amory, editor of the Letters of Evelyn Waugh:

  Deciding what would cause unacceptable pain or embarrassment can only be a matter of personal judgement, but I have taken the harsh view that the feelings of the children must be largely ignored; they must learn to live with the behaviour of their parents.*

  Connolly and I were, in the end, exonerated from all the charges against us, except that of bad taste in including the photograph of Erroll. Connolly was wounded by the criticism and said that he hadn’t wanted the picture, but to me it added enormous power to the story and gave a stark reminder of the horror of the moment when Erroll was killed.

  * Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise (Routledge, 1938).

  * Weidenfeld & Nieolson. 1980.

  11

  ACUMEN AND INTUITION

  As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talent into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  The Murders in the Rue Morgue

  If there was a thin man inside Connolly begging to be let out, there was a detective inside him too, who had been locked away for some time.

  In real life Connolly was perfectly, almost comically cast in the role of a fictional detective of the cerebral school, a Holmes or a Poirot or a C. Auguste Dupin. “Although no philosophic hedonist could be more deeply attached to his favourite armchair,” wrote Quennell, describing Connolly, “ever and again his armchair becomes miraculously jet-propelled. Sweeping over his contemporaries’ heads, it leaves them gaping far behind.”

  Like Holmes with his cocaine, Connolly had his own distinguishing passions and weaknesses, but he also had the vast general knowledge with its unexpected areas of specialisation common to that school. And as a literary critic, he relied entirely on his powers of deduction and analysis. Thus Inspector Connolly, bon vivant and bibliophile, could linger in his hothouse, studying his precious carnivorous plants, while the station hacks rushed about mesmerised by physical clues, destroying, as often as not, the really important evidence. No matter. Connolly already possessed the solution.

  So, while I searched for surviving witnesses, sent off telexes to faraway stringers, collected documents, raked through old newspapers and society magazines, and immersed myself in the story, Connolly resumed his detective work with an exhaustive study of Debrett’s Peerage and the Eton school list of 1918. His aversion to the study of titles was over. He took on the manner of a St. Just in his methodical manner of collecting details on his contemporaries and on characters even remotely connected with the central cast. For example:

  D.B’s servants. Fifteen + Wilks. Alfred The Personal Boy. Takes tea to DB at 7 a.m. Does not go into study. Began work on 16th December. Goes to Nyeri with DB and (hired) driver on 27th. Abdullah bin Ahmed Head boy, employed 6 months (May) obtained from club. Gets petrol from the dhobi 3 or 4 days before E’s death. No previous bonfires made. Mohamed bin Sudi. Houseboy for 4 months (study etc). Saw DB place revolvers in study. Found 3 cartridges on floor. Olei s/o Migoya. Shamba boy, had worked for Dr. Geilinger who also used pit to burn rubbish. 3 shamba boys were gathering rubbish, collecting it for 3 days. Omari bin Junta DB’s telephone boy. Same work as Mohamed. Who was Mohamed? Was he the missing Somali?

  Then there was the following exhaustive record of the marriages and liaisons of some of the characters:

  Les Affaires

  DB

  Lady (Jock) Buchanan Jardine

  Kath Carnarvon

  Phyllis Delamere

  DB

  =

  Vera

  Vera

  Lord Wharncliffe

  Ld. Moyne = Ida Rubinstein

  Hugh Sherwood (?)

  DB

  =

  Diana

  Diana

  =

  Vernon Motion, Broughton, Colville

  =

  Delamere

  Gwlad. D.

  =

  Hugh Delamere

  Erroll

  Alastair Gibb

  =

  Sir Charles Markham

  Denzl

  D of Gloucester

  P of W

  Soames

  Nina

  Gloria

  Alice

  Alice de J

  =

&
nbsp; Frédéric de Janzé

  =

  Raymond de Trafford

  Joss Erroll

  Dicky Pembroke—Diana—Paula

  Soames (unlikely)

  Lizzie

  Paula Gelybrand

  =

  Marquis de Casa Maury

  =

  Bill Allen

  =

  Boy Long

  Dickie Pembroke

  Idina Erroll

  =

  Gordon

  =

  Wallace

  =

  Erroll

  =

  Halderman

  =

  Soltau

  Mary Delamere

  =

  Cunningham Reid

  Connolly alerted his friends. He resurrected the gossip network of the 1930s, and with the generous expense accounts of the period, many lunches were arranged. He began to call me, very early in the morning from Eastbourne, for lengthy discussions on strategy. If my own mental print-outs of Debrett’s faltered during these early calls, he could be sharp and impatient as his mind raced on. I remember him snapping one morning, “You must get your card index in order.” Yet if I had fresh gossip for the files, or new evidence of any sort, his mood would instantly change.