White Mischief

by James Fox

  This was how he discovered, among other things, that there had been shooting practice at the Soames farm. Did the Bwana use his guns? No, but he had done so once at Bwana Soames’s.

  When Poppy wanted to look at the note that Broughton had dropped into Erroll’s grave, Walter Harragin, the Attorney-General, refused permission to exhume the body, on the grounds that it would involve immense problems of red tape. “Nothing, I suppose, to prevent me planting a rose tree,” said Poppy, “anywhere I like?” “No,” said Harragin. “Even if I dig rather deep?” At midnight he took six convicts from the jail to the cemetery at Limuru. They dug down to the coffin and found the note which had slipped down to one side. It had been written at the Muthaiga Club, from Diana to Erroll, and read, “I love you desperately.” Erroll had written on the back “and I love you for ever.” Poppy returned the note to Diana.

  Harragin had told Poppy that he must give the Governor, Sir Henry “Monkey” Moore, at least forty-eight hours’ notice before arresting Delves Broughton, “so that Lord Moyne could be informed.” This made Poppy deeply suspicious that the process of law would somehow be tampered with. (Lord Moyne was not only Vera’s companion, he was also Secretary of State for the Colonies.)

  Finally Poppy was ready, and on the afternoon of March 10th, armed with a warrant from the Resident Magistrate, he drove to Karen. He arrived at 6 p.m., found Broughton in the garden, touched him on the shoulder and arrested him for murder. Broughton said, “You’ve made a big mistake.” That afternoon he and Diana had been out riding. They had begun to argue once again about jewellery, and had split up, Broughton arriving home first. When Diana appeared and saw her husband surrounded by policemen, she apologised to him for the row. Broughton said to Poppy, “Do you mind if I have a whisky?” Poppy brought out his own hip flask and handed it to Broughton. By seven o’clock, Broughton was in a cell at Nairobi police station, and his lawyer was on his way to see him.

  The arrest took Broughton by surprise, even though Lazarus Kaplan, his lawyer, had been warning him for some time to expect it. He was to remain in jail for almost three months before coming to trial. June and Diana, who was now desperate to help her husband, came to visit him nearly every day; Alice de Trafford came almost as frequently. Despite the shock to his system of being suddenly at the mercy of turnkeys, the oppressive prison routine and a small cell, Broughton was a model prisoner—calm, fastidiously polite, gentlemanly. Only occasionally did he show signs of depression and claustrophobia. Otherwise he seemed almost relieved to be in jail.

  At the time Broughton was arrested there were only six Europeans among the 1,200 prisoners in Nairobi jail and three European warders out of a total of 150. Broughton’s jailer, the Chief Warder, was Victor de Vere Allen. He was an intelligent, considerate man who had been retired for thirteen years when I met him in Nairobi in 1969. He remembered above all how well Broughton stood up to the prison routine, but he touched on Poppy’s theme, too, that Broughton was hiding a growing desperation under the calm exterior.

  “He was a very nice, very fine man,” said Allen, “and a very good talker. A man who’d had a lot of interesting experiences. He was never any trouble. He was charming to all the other prisoners—listened to all their tales. They’d laugh at the old man. He’d look a bit out of place, reduced to the level of criminal, locked in his cell. Always immaculately dressed. He’d always crack a joke back and he never put anyone’s back up.

  “June Carberry and Diana came to see him two or three times a week. They were a pretty hard crowd.”

  “We talked continually,” Allen went on. “My two sisters in Australia, by coincidence, had been to school with two of the wives of the Rajah of Kooch Bahar. His brother was a great pal of mine, and we talked about the people we knew. We had been shooting around the same lake in Kashmir, with butts in the middle of the water, where the duck were driven over.”

  Broughton’s ordeal was mitigated by special privileges. Though Europeans were expected to clean their own cells, his own was swept out for him by another prisoner. He claimed he was unable to do it himself. Nor, because of his crippled hand, could he put on his high collar and tie without assistance. Because he was a prisoner awaiting trial, he could have food sent in, as well as chocolates, cigars and other luxuries from Torr’s Hotel. “He knew how to get what he wanted,” said Allen. “Ten shillings to a warder earning thirty-eight shillings a month was a lot of money in those days …”

  Each evening, Broughton and Allen would go outside the jail for exercise, a half-hour walk of a mile or so. “He got a bit depressed at times. He’d get bouts of claustrophobia and used to look forward to the walk quite anxiously,” said Allen. “A man would feel the walls closing in.

  “He told me he would commit suicide if his people at home wouldn’t accept him. It seemed that in the crowd he mixed with, once you were a part of a public scandal, you were sort of washed out.”

  Broughton wrote from jail at the end of April 1941 to an old friend, Mrs. Marie Woodhouse, a Cheshire neighbour and wife of the local doctor, with whom Broughton had developed a close platonic relationship after Vera’s departure with Lord Moyne. They had once travelled to Madeira together on holiday. His handwriting, usually small and neat, had degenerated to an expansive scrawl, unsteady and vexed. Though it contains no new information, the letter is reproduced here for its interesting presentation of the case against him. As Broughton well knew, the first person to read it would be Poppy himself.

  Nairobi Jail

  29-4-41

  My darling Marie,

  Very much touched by your cable which I thought the nicest of all that I have received. I do hope you and Jimmy are well and prosperous. I wish I had never come out to this b … y country. I seemed to have paid it one visit too many. My case comes on May 26th. I can tell you the old saying neck or nothing is very much brought home to me. I will give you a very brief outline of the case. If it is censored you will know what has happened. On the night of June 23rd Lord Errol [sic], Mrs. Carberry. my wife and myself dined at Muthaiga Club. Nairobi. After dinner Lord Errol and my wife went on to dance at a road house. Mrs. Carberry and myself stayed up talking and drinking with friends till 1:30 a.m. We then went home in my car and got to my house at Karen at 2 a.m. Ten minutes afterwards Lord Errol and my wife arrived back. He stayed 10 minutes and left in his car and was found shot through the head 2½ miles away in a murram pit just off the road. Four days previously I had my 2 revolvers, a cigarette case and some money stolen and Lord Errol was shot by a bullet which came out of one of my revolvers which were stolen. He was also involved with my wife. The police took a long time making up their minds and arrested me 7 weeks after the murder. Their grounds were 1) Motive jealousy 2) that he was killed by a bullet fired from one of the revolvers that were stolen 3) the robbery was faked. These and certain conversations they have twisted round and the fact that I had a bonfire the day after the murder make their case … However my friends have been too extraordinarily nice and thoughtful to me. Wish me luck darling. I think wistfully of Madeira now. My fondest love to both of you.

  Jock

  Poppy, meanwhile, visited “the ladies” at Karen, who had begun to tease him. “What? You here again, Popski?” said June Carberry. “Diana went on rubbing the hair from her legs with an emery board,” Poppy recalled. “They said, ‘Once a week, it’s something all we girls have to do,’ or words to that effect. They served a particularly strong home-brewed Pimms.”

  The murder made the headlines in London. Erroll’s daughter, Diana, who was called Dinan, had come to England to live with her aunt, Lady Avice Spicer, in Wiltshire, when Erroll married Molly Ramsay-Hill. Now fourteen. she first learned of her father’s death at the village shop, where she saw the news on the front page. She went home expecting an explanation, but never received one. When the newspapers were delivered each morning, she would steal downstairs before breakfast and read the almost daily news items about her father. Weeks later she would read about the trial of
Broughton before slipping back upstairs to her room. When she returned to the dining room for breakfast, she would find the papers had been clipped. Though she had not been informed of it, she was now the Countess of Erroll. The circumstances of her father’s death were never described to her.

  9

  THE ANGEL OF DEATH

  If Broughton was found guilty of the murder, and he now began seriously to worry about his chances, it was likely that he would be hanged. “In a strange country, God knows what will happen,” he had written to Mrs. Woodhouse. “There are no counsels out here …” As a colony, Kenya had the same system of jury trial as in England, yet Broughton, the former magistrate, had asked Poppy in one of their talks, “Are Europeans hanged for murder in this country?” Three weeks before the trial he was still without a defence counsel. It was impossible to get a barrister to come from England in wartime, and there was none to be had in Nairobi.

  In the end it was Diana who rescued the situation. Feeling responsible in part for what had happened, she had decided to throw all her weight behind Broughton’s defence. She flew alone to Johannesburg, on her own initiative, to hire the most gifted barrister in the South, Harry Morris K.C.—a man already notorious for his flamboyant and aggressive style of advocacy, and for some famous acquittals. Morris accepted the case immediately, sensing the crowning achievement of his career, if he could win it. He demanded a fee of £5,000, to which Diana agreed.

  The trial opened at Nairobi’s Central Court on May 26th. The opening ceremony presented an extraordinary spectacle. Under the glass dome, in a panelled room of Edwardian neoclassical sombreness, the entire colonial community seemed to have crushed its way in to watch the show. The public galleries overflowed and the spectators, many of the men in uniform, all the women dressed in their garden party best, were two rows deep along the walls. It was a gaudy spectacle of prurient anticipation; all the champagne and exhibitionism would now be accounted for, and possibly punished by the death sentence. The decent and sanctimonious contingent was opposed by the Muthaiga and Happy Valley crowd, who had rallied in support of their cause, many of them waiting in the wings to give evidence. It was a major social event that had been preceded by four months of furious pre-publicity. In that period it had been a burning topic throughout the Colony, and with little in the way of hard facts to go on, strange rumours and outlandish versions of the story had come to be accepted as the truth.

  There were many reporters filing for newspapers overseas, including a woman who had travelled from Chicago to provide her paper with daily exclusives. (Broughton smiled at her one day, on his way up from the cells, and said, “As long as you’re here, my head feels safe on my shoulders.”)

  The courtroom crackled with old class divisions. Diana, especially, the symbol of privilege and wealth, the object of sexual conjecture, was a strong target for those who felt the Colony had been shamed when the war demanded public sacrifice. She attended court every day, returning each evening to her suite in the New Stanley Hotel. On that first day, she made a spectacular entrance as the crowd twisted round to see her. To their amazement she had come dressed as a widow, in a little black hat with a black face veil, and covered in diamonds. Diana’s wardrobe was one of the wonders of the trial—it was said that she never wore the same costume twice. She took her place at the front of the court, a few feet from the Attorney-General. Then Broughton appeared from the cells, looking a little waxy, having lost some weight in jail. He shuffled to the dock, his right foot dragging, to hear the charge of murder from the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Joseph Sheridan.

  Harragin, a tall, pale man with greying hair, began his opening address by saying that the case had “created a profound and painful impression on the minds of everyone in this Colony. There can be few of you who have not discussed and possibly come to some conclusion either on the case or on the various details which have been reported …”

  What then followed for three weeks is recorded in detail in the 600 closely typewritten pages of the court record—a document of absorbing interest and a striking portrait of a confident oligarchy in the last years of its reign.

  Broughton was asked at one point, “I think Mrs. Barkas has told us how you spent the succeeding days. You played golf croquet, bridge and backgammon at the Club.”

  A: “Yes, each day.”

  Lunches, dinners and sundowners intervene.

  Mrs. Barkas was asked, “Do you recall other topics of conversation [with Broughton] that day?”

  “We were hoping it would get fine and we could play croquet.”

  “It is a very mild outdoor game, is it not?”

  “I think so.”

  “Just pushing a ball through the hoop with a light mallet?”

  “It is not light to me,” said Mrs. Barkas.

  African servants and askari policemen pass through the pages and are asked the routine question, “Can you tell the time? What time is it now by the court clock?” After each reply to this question the stenographer added the word “correct” in brackets. One African witness, Mutiso Wa Thathi, was asked, “Did you have a watch with you that night or is it just what you think?” He replied, “I had a watch with me but mine was fast because I kept it fast. It was l½ hours ahead.”

  There are the “experts”—doctors, chemists, ballistic scientists—alternating on the stand with the socialites, including the group of young officers: Portman, Pembroke, Dickinson, Llewellin, Lezard; and above all there is the remarkable performance of Broughton himself, who elected to give evidence and held the floor for several days.

  The transcript vividly records a great defence barrister at work. Harry Morris, later immortalised in a biography called Genius for the Defence, was described by a lawyer on the opposing team as “bluff, rough and impassioned, contemptuous … prone to descend to burlesque, abuse, even insolence.” From a reading of this case, that description is unfairly pejorative. Morris would never insult a witness gratuitously, although he often managed to provoke one into angry retaliation. His style in court was aggressive, and sometimes abrasive. It relied upon a rich sense of humour, a sharp wit, and a degree of sarcasm. Morris also displayed an exceptional memory and a prodigious grasp of detail which he used to greatest effect in reducing expert witnesses for the prosecution, whenever possible, to the level of confused amateurs, tangling them up in petty contradictions.

  It was in his talent for manipulation and mystification that Morris truly shone as a barrister. He believed that expert witnesses, forensic scientists and the like, with their carefully prepared evidence and their professional sureness and self-esteem, were the easiest prey for a good defence counsel. Furthermore, Morris was a leading lay authority on ballistic science—the knowledge of guns and bullets, especially the microscopic markings found on spent bullets that could identify them with the barrel of a particular gun. On his arrival in Nairobi he told both Broughton and Kaplan that he could defeat the Crown case on one simple point of ballistics alone.

  In fact Morris was perplexed that the Crown case had left him such a “simple answer” to give to the jury, namely to disprove the Crown’s contention that the murder weapon was that same Colt .32 that Broughton had used for shooting practice at Nanyuki and which had subsequently been “stolen” from his house three days before the murder. But he gave no clue about his simple answer, even to his clients.

  Linking the murder bullet to Broughton’s Colt formed the main plank of the prosecution’s somewhat flimsy case. They also maintained that live cartridges had been found in the undergrowth where Broughton and Diana were shooting, and that these were charged with black powder, which had not been manufactured since the outbreak of the First World War. There were marks of this same powder surrounding the wound on Erroll’s head.

  It was a carefully premeditated murder, claimed the Crown, the first step of which had been Broughton’s faking the theft of the revolvers. He had begun to plan it on January 18th, when Erroll had refused to go away and give up Diana. Broughton’s subse
quent actions—his magnanimous renunciation of his wife, his honouring of the marriage pact with such fastidiousness, his drunkenness on the night of the murder, his forgetfulness of details afterwards, were all an act, according to the prosecution. Instead, when Broughton saw that his marriage was threatened by Erroll, his real nature showed itself: his exceptional jealousy, his anger, his deviousness and finally his desire to kill his rival. It was Broughton’s character that was to be put on trial.

  The Crown would show that Broughton had the opportunity to do the deed, yet Harragin could never explain how Broughton got out of the house undetected by Wilks or June Carberry, so he showed that it was possible to leave by the drainpipe, or walk soundlessly down the stairs. (Poppy had masterminded both experiments, although the drainpipe climbing he had merely supervised. Hugh Dickinson, who happened to be at Karen that day, had volunteered for the task.) Neither was he able to reveal exactly how the accused had acted when he left the house. Had he hidden in the car and shot Erroll just before the junction? Or had he walked to the junction and waited for him? The Crown could only guess at Broughton’s actions. The leading evidence against Broughton came from the policemen, the African servants and the scientists. Dr. Francis Vint believed that the shots were fired by someone standing on the running board of the car, shooting through the open window, or sitting in the seat beside Erroll. From the scorchmarks on the skin, Vint concluded that the gun could not have been more than eighteen inches from Erroll’s head when it was fired. The second bullet travelled straight across the top of the spinal column from ear to ear. (The first bullet went wide, striking the metal partition between the doors.)