White Mischief

by James Fox

  But what has kept White Mischief alive and generated several further books and a movie is not the remaining chink of mystery alone. It is, perhaps primarily, the decades worth of Kenya white-tribe lore and gossip, one of the most virulent strains of rumor known to social history, a word industry that had been fuelling itself during all the years the story lay dormant to the outside world. It took off on a new flight, of course, when the book appeared. The rumor mill never depended on new evidence, and ignored anything that might have spoiled a good story. It was about “characters” and their legends. To say that someone was a “character” in the Kenyan context was usually to claim reverence for some eccentric, stranded figure who told amusing stories, a figure with links to the old pioneer settlers to whom anecdotes or scandal could be attached, with which the white hunters could entertain their safari clients. Kenya was still full of them in the late twentieth century. The book publicists for White Mischief came up with a lapel button that read, “Are you a character or do you live in London?”

  White Mischief caused annoyance in some settler circles because it was seen to have portrayed the ex-colony in a poor light. No good the several pages taken up in the beginning of the book describing the struggle of the early settlers, their courage and resilience, the immense difficulty of farming, and the setbacks—and pointing out that the Happy Valley characters were a small minority within a minority.

  “Kenya inspired an almost fierce, possessive loyalty among these white farmers, many of whom had put into their land every penny they had and a lifetime of effort challenged by drought, locust invasions, slumps in world prices and other disasters. They were jealous of the country’s good name,” wrote the distinguished Kenyan-born author Elspeth Huxley, reviewing the book. It was a problem the settlers had had since the 1920s when the gossip began about upper-class hedonists making their home in the Wanjohi Valley in the Aberdares. And it lived on into the 1970s, with the added bitterness of the “white man’s country”—as they publicly declared Kenya when local rebellion began—being no longer theirs.

  But the bad name the story brought to Kenya didn’t stop the locals from having their own theories about who had killed Lord Erroll. Forget about “that book.”

  Many of those who challenged my version hadn’t read my book anyway, which helped keep the industry going. “Bloody book,” said Hilary Hook, a very likeable army officer once of the Sudan Light Horse, about White Mischief, on the radio, in those clipped, David Niven–ish tones rarely heard on the BBC these many years, as he promoted his own memoirs. You heard “bloody book” a lot, and I took it as a compliment in a certain English way. At least it wasn’t patronizing and the book had seriously claimed their attention. It often came from non-readers in the tourism industry, some of whom had been forced to skim the contents in order to converse with those safari clients. If they hadn’t read it, they could always bluff by saying it was all nonsense anyway.

  A small shelf of books came in the wake of White Mischief, managing where possible to include my title on their covers. The best was The Bolter by Frances Osborne, about her great-grandmother Lady I dina Sackville, daughter of Earl De La Warr, “the woman who scandalized 1920s society and became White Mischief’s infamous seductress.” Lady Idina had also been married to Joss Erroll, though they had parted fifteen years before he was murdered.

  It is true that Idina almost single-handedly gave Kenya its scandalous reputation by fleeing from marital scandal in London and then practicing a sexual libertinage in the Aberdares that I underestimated in White Mischief. Sex for Idina, its introduction to her when she was a young woman, was, says her great-granddaughter, “an activity for which she not only discovered she had a talent but which she clearly found so intensely enjoyable that it rapidly became impossible for her to resist any opportunity for it.”

  It was the tales of Idina’s house parties that drifted back to London and made Kenya infamous. I had written merely about her after-dinner game of “blowing the feather” across a sheet—sexual partners were allotted by where it came to rest. But Frances Osborne describes “the sheet game” she presided over as another way of selecting a partner:

  As cocktails were sunk, the game developed further. Holes were cut into the sheet. Hands, feet, elbows, noses were stuck through for identification. More cocktails were drunk. A new sheet was pulled across the room. New holes were cut. The men unbuttoned their trousers.

  But Osborne’s book is a well-written and serious account of Edwardian and 1920s London, as well as a highly readable description of an earl’s socialite (and chinless) daughter setting up in what was then the pioneering wild of East Africa.

  Five miles away from the house Idina shared with Erroll, Slains in the Aberdares, was the Wanjohi River, where Alice de Janzé, also Erroll’s on-and-off lover, had set up with her husband Frédéric de Janzé. Thus, as White Mischief describes, the Wanjohi Valley became the imagined epicenter of abandon. The river was said to run with cocktails. By some extraordinary coincidence, as my key source Juanita Carberry revealed in her own memoir, Child of Happy Valley, “njohe” in Kikuyu means “booze,” local brew; “wa” means “people of,” making Alice and the Wanjohi crowd “People of the Cocktail River.” All the women characters have featured as suspects in various works; Diana herself in a book called Diana, Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder.

  But, as ever, no evidence emerges to enlighten us. According to Paul Spicer in his book The Temptress, Alice de Janzé—a friend of Spicer’s mother—was the murderer in “the White Mischief mystery.” When Diana came along, he says, Alice felt “ferociously jealous of Joss’s relations” with her. He had no evidence against Alice. He relies on syllogisms—illogical deductions—and a kind of nudging rhetoric. Alice had a pretty cast-iron alibi: She was sleeping with her lover, a man called Dickie Pembroke, at Muthaiga. “It is possible that Dickie slept through Alice’s departure and her return on the night of the murder,” Spicer offers. “That night Alice could easily have taken her revolver from the bedside table,” he writes, then “soundlessly” climbed into her car and “sped away.” She went to the crossroads, he writes, and waited. “Checking her revolver she would have made sure it was fully loaded.” And so on. (She might have done that before she went to all the trouble, one reflects). In fact, Alice’s moving and forlorn letters, published in White Mischief, written before she committed suicide, are proof, if any were needed, that she didn’t shoot Erroll. Spicer was not able to include these in his book.

  Spicer’s book draws on the limitless Kenyan verbal gas reserve. Different rusty guns have been dug up from streams or waterfalls and are undoubtedly the murder weapon. Only locally grown information can be considered valid. Someone knows someone who saw a confession with his or her own eyes, but the attorney general didn’t act on it, or knows that a confession was left in someone’s will and suppressed. The secret is contained in someone’s diaries that never materialized. A woman promised to tell but “slipped into a coma before she could reveal her secret.” Murmurs persist that “a woman” did it, or so suggested anonymous letters at the time. These rumors are repeated with reverence and confidentiality to this day, hardened into beliefs and orthodoxies and handed down through the generations. They will always be told; no amount of clear evidence could shift them.

  Many such tales are included in the most bizarre of these accounts, The Life and Death of Lord Erroll by Errol Trzebinski, who has been a friend for many years. Trzebinski is an arch researcher—and has written previous books about Kenya. All the more peculiar that her final seventy pages suddenly embark on a thesis that Erroll was murdered by MI6, the British secret service, because of his former connection to Oswald Mosley and the British Fascist party, because he knew too much about a cabal trying to do a deal with Hitler. There’s no evidence of that, or anything else in the thesis—for example, that the “beautiful” female agent assigned to kill Erroll at the crossroads was Cambridge educated, polylingual, a crack shot, and “sexually highly aware.�
� Despite this, the assassin “had been made up to look like an attractive middle-aged lady by Schouten’s (the Nairobi hairdresser) and a make-up artist from Nairobi amateur Dramatic Club.” In all the years, nobody, black or white, remembered or had heard of this small army of special forces buzzing around the Muthaiga Club, radios crackling, motorbikes revving up. According to Trzebinski, MI6 had recruited Broughton, and Diana, too. Trzebinski says she got it all from a man on the Isle of Wight who got it from someone else, not named. Not surprisingly one reviewer wrote, mildly, “I think someone’s been having a word in her ear.”

  The writer Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey, had no doubt in his television feature, A Most Mysterious Murder—The Case of the Earl of Erroll, that Broughton was the culprit. For me, the study of the slightly deranged Broughton has always been the key to the mystery. It is Broughton’s motive, his state of mind, a study of his actions and what he said at the time, including the confessions he made, that bring the murder into focus. His very palpable dual personality, the calm and controlled exterior and the insane rage underneath, comes so vividly to light in the last letter he wrote to Diana, which appeared after my book was published and is included below. It shows that Broughton had lied consistently in court about his feelings—a convincing, masterly performance of which, as Diana told me, he was proud. She said that Broughton had boasted to prosecutor Walter Harragin after the verdict, “I’m a very good actor.” Broughton minded that Erroll had taken his wife away, he said in court, but he had to stand by the pact he had made with her in Durban when they were married, that if she fell in love with someone younger, he would stand aside and give her £5,000 a year.

  The prosecutor asked him, “Can you explain to us why you took so placidly this robbery that was taking place under your very nose?”

  His response was, “What is the use of having a pact if you do not honour it?”

  Broughton, above all a vain man, was being publicly humiliated in a place from which he couldn’t escape. His only hope of protecting his vanity and his pride was to pretend he had accepted defeat and “cut his losses.” Otherwise he wouldn’t be able to lunch with the gang at Muthaiga every day—he would be alone. Diana told me she regretted that she hadn’t seen through Broughton—she might have been more careful. Because in fact, Broughton’s rising anger, his refusal to be pushed aside, can be seen in his ill-tempered confrontations with Diana and with Erroll before the murder. With Diana he started arguments late at night about jewels. The significance of those incidents becomes clear in a letter Broughton wrote in October 1942, fifteen months after his acquittal, in which he reveals his real feelings about the pact and an about Diana.

  The letter came to light in 1993. It is, among others things, an attempt at blackmail. It was shown to filmmakers Livio Negri and Warwick Hembry for their documentary about the case, Alcohol, Altitude and Adultery, by Peggy Pitt, who was secretary to the prosecutor at the trial, Walter Harragin. Pitt held onto the letter until 1993, hoping to write her own account. I had heard of this letter from Diana. In my interview with her at the end of the book, she said of Broughton, “He was the most evil man. He sent me a letter trying to get me to return to England with him. It was appalling. I took it straight to the attorney general.”

  Understanding the letter’s contents requires context. Broughton wrote it in Mombasa as he waited to return to England as a deck passenger on a troopship, feeling almost insane with depression. Between the trial and October 1942, when he wrote the letter, Broughton had subjected Diana to a miserable partnership during their travel to Sri Lanka, and then living in Erroll’s house on Lake Naivasha, which Broughton had purchased. And yet, in his usual disturbing, remote style, Brought on had written to his friend Lady d’ Avigdor-Goldsmid, “I decided the only thing to do was resume our life, as if nothing had happened.”

  In the letter, he tries to make out that Diana was “perfectly happy” with him on these trips. He was asking Diana to continue her marriage with a man she was sure had killed her lover, Erroll. She was trapped in Kenya, her reputation ruined, not knowing how to get rid of Broughton. She had latched onto Gilbert Colvile, their neighbor at the Djinn Palace, as described in White Mischief, and moved him in as her lover—a clever move worthy of a skilled courtesan. Broughton accepted only partial defeat and moved to Nairobi.

  The last time Diana ever saw Broughton was in front of a lawyer in Nairobi where Diana, in a formal move to make a legal break with her husband, said to his face that she thought he had murdered Erroll. Broughton said nothing and left the office. He never denied the murder, nor showed any curiosity about the identity of a killer close at hand.

  The letter begins:

  Diana, I am determined to punish you for ruining my life in the way you have done. Up to the time we left England, universally popular, respected, millions of friends and welcome everywhere, I worshipped the ground you stood on and got divorced in order to marry you. On board the boat you became a stranger to me and a completely different human being. You started a fuck with Tony Mordant under my eyes and I discovered the copy of a letter you wrote to your Italian; the most violent love letter written when living with me on “Doddington” writing paper. This was the first time I knew you had double crossed me.

  On the boat you were regretting the whole time that you had not stayed in England and married Rory More O’Ferrall. We got to South Africa where at Cape Town you were bloody to me most of the time. When being thoroughly fed up I said I should like to return to England in front of the Bailes family, you said, “I shall stay in South Africa, why don’t you return to England?” Charming for me. You made such a farce of our marriage that the Registrar almost refused to marry you. If I had not adored you I should not have been fool enough to marry you but I worshipped you. We came up to Kenya where for about six weeks I was happy. You then started double crossing me with Erroll. Do you think any woman has ever treated any man as badly as you did me? Letting him be divorced from a wife he has lived with not unhappily for 25 years and then telling him she was leaving him 2 months after she had married him because she let herself fall in love. Millions of people fall in love, but they have feelings of decency and do not behave like you did. If you had returned to England you would, of course, have got over it. Erroll was murdered. You say yourself it never even occurred to you to connect it with me, till the Police put it into your head. You then in your evidence did all in your power to get me hung. Later you say yourself you were convinced I had nothing to do with it.

  Like much else in the letter, the accusation that Diana wanted Broughton convicted was a manipulative and unfair taunt. Diana never gave evidence in court. It was she who went to South Africa to hire Harry Morris QC, who got Broughton off. Juanita Carberry, to whom Broughton confessed hours after the murder, also overheard Diana the following day screaming accusations at Broughton that he had killed her lover, and later, Broughton contradicts himself: “Can you realise what it is to live with someone who is always telling you how much they were in love with someone else and that you often thought I murdered him.”

  The letter goes on:

  After the verdict you were charming to me and were perfectly happy in Ceylon and India. We came back and were quite happy till we went on safari with Gilbert Colvile. Since that moment everything has gone wrong. You knew he was the richest settler in Kenya, could be useful to you, was easy money and laid yourself out to ensnare him, quite regardless of how you knew how unhappy and miserable it made me. You never said you did not want me to go on safari and I went. During the safari you made it clear you hated me and never took the slightest notice of me and to rub it in, made the most frightful fuss of Gilbert Colvile all the time. I began to hate you for this but took it all lying down without reproaching you.

  We have never been anything else but unhappy since we went there on March 1st. I never objected to you having people to stay but when we had rows you always dinned into me how you were still in love with Erroll. This and your very fervent fr
iendship with Colvile and your obvious dislike of being ever alone with me made me depressed, unhappy and hating the place, people, country—everything connected with it.

  I thought things were going better when you had Hugh Strickland to stay, liked him and enjoyed having him … Like the poor fool I was I had no idea of what was happening or why you put him in a room with no lock on the door opening straight out into your rooms till Chappy Bailes told me that he was seen kissing you in your bedroom at the Stanley by a highly amused crowd from Torr’s hotel. Even then, thinking you had always told me the truth about your “cold temperament” I didn’t suspect what was going on till you were so anxious to get me off to bed one night with a sleeping draught. I watched through the window of your bathroom and saw you actually go and fetch him and return to your bedroom with him, and then listened to him fucking you through the gauze in you bedroom window not more than three yards away. By the way the whole bed rocked you evidently enjoyed it, like you used to with me.

  For the next two nights, the voyeur Broughton waited and watched, “but you both had chills and I saw nothing. The next night I asked for a sleeping draught and went to bed early and watched and saw him walk into your bedroom and get into bed, and you followed and got into bed with him. I then took action.”

  Diana’s reaction was to “have the cheek to suggest” that Strickland stay another four days. “Like the fool I was, still loving you, I forgave it, but since that moment you have been more vile to me than anyone would think possible. It was of course because you were furious at being caught out red-handed.” What “maddened” Broughton, he said, “was you telling me [sex] was bad for you and hurt you when I wanted to have you and going to bed night after night with a vigorous man who certainly made your inside so bad that you had to have another operation.”