The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Hugh’s grandfather, a pioneer of note, slowly sold off his Cheshire estate, sinking his fortune into the barren land. He was responsible for – amongst many other accolades – Kenya’s first pipeline and cold store, developing successful strains of wheat and breeds of sheep, as well as working out, with much sweat, trial and error, the mineral supplements his cattle needed to survive, interbreeding them with local varieties and learning much from the nomadic Maasai, expert pastoralists with whom he enjoyed a genuine mutual respect.

  Hugh, an avid historian and botanist, is also a farmer at heart, periodically complaining about the dangers of the buffalo, which he’s not permitted to cull, not to mention all the zebra devouring the water and grazing which he feels rightly belongs to his prize-winning Boran cattle.

  The Delameres’ lifestyle is modest, with a regular but gentle routine. They are generous and hospitable – all friends are welcome irrespective of colour, class or financial standing. Dropping in before lunch finds them on their covered back patio, which was open-roofed in Diana’s day. It’s comfortable and unpretentious with plump labradors gracing the black and white floor tiles, and a battalion of vociferous starlings, doves and sparrows which perch anywhere they can while shrieking for their lunchtime serving of croutons. Occasionally they’ll engage in a dramatically low fly-past. The original house was built by Boy Long, who worked for the 3rd Baron Delamere between 1912 and 1927. Ann showed me photocopies of Long’s diaries: initially the 3rd Baron (‘D’ to his friends) lived an austere and minimalist lifestyle at the far end of the farm in a grass hut on the Meroroni River. Once the pipeline had brought water to the dry country they were able to build stores, cattle dips, boxes for horses and bulls, offices and the first version of this house, which Long then occupied. Tobina Cole sums it up when she wryly says of the 3rd Baron: ‘He didn’t live in a nice house at all – he didn’t believe in nice houses because you’d sit in them too much!’

  Various people added to the original Boy Long house over the years. Diana built the front drawing room, which overlooks the view but is seldom used today. Diana and Tom, the 4th Baron, always used it before dinner, changing for the occasion: he into a DJ and Diana, according to Ann, ‘flashing lots of jewels’.

  Diana’s friend, Lady Patricia Fairweather, had the cottage built so she could live in close proximity to Diana, on whom she allegedly had a crush – some say they were having an affair. She stayed for fifteen years. According to Ann, both Tom and Diana were heartily relieved when she left: ‘She was an alcoholic and used to set her sausage dog on Tom,’ Ann informed me. Inside the cottage hangs a portrait of Diana by Joyce Butter. It is not a particularly pleasant, nor flattering, picture. Not surprising, according to Ann, because ‘they loathed each other’. It doesn’t matter where you stand in the cottage’s living room, those ice-blue eyes glare at you. I could see why it was banished to the guesthouse.

  Near the cottage, Diana’s former racing stables, once amongst the very first farm buildings, now serve as very basic staff accommodation. There’s also a small shop selling tea, sugar and cigarettes, and a clinic where women sit patiently for hours on a bench, nursing crying babies, or lie in the dusty shade of a nearby pepper tree until the nurse, who has to make decisions that would alarm first-world doctors, can see them.

  I never met Diana, but I ended up giving a home to one of her elderly racehorses, who was looked after by her now grey-haired Kikuyu syce, as grooms are called in Kenya – a word imported from India by the colonials. James Muhia is a great deal older than the racehorse and speaks highly of Diana. Hugh is less complimentary about her, but then she was his stepmother. Diana was always ambitious: she had elocution lessons, Hugh said, back in her young and single days when she ran a bar called the Blue Goose. ‘She liked to be the only person talking,’ he added. I asked Ann if she’d got on with Diana. ‘We were never particularly cosy,’ she replied, ‘but of course we lived ten miles away . . .’ But they both admit she was fond of Hugh’s father, Tom. Ann showed me Humphrey Slade’s eulogy, read out at the 4th Baron’s memorial at All Saints’ Cathedral, Nairobi in 1979. He describes Tom’s latter years as his happiest, largely due to Diana, ‘who was a wonderful wife to him’.

  Hugh and Ann have had their own share of legal stress. In 2006 the Erroll murder was dredged up again, albeit obliquely: the onset of the Kenyan murder trial of their son, the Hon. Thomas Cholmondeley, ignited the imaginations of the press. Tenuous as the Delamere links with Happy Valley are, decadent white-settler stories were gleefully dug up and wildly embellished, as foreign journalists – apparently indifferent to accuracy – made imaginative leaps from today’s arid and dusty Delamere ranch in the Rift Valley, to the green, green pastures of Happy Valley where it was painfully obvious none of the frothing correspondents had ever been.

  This was presumably due to the Diana connection: the fact she’d died Lady Delamere was enough to satisfy a panting press, in spite of the fact that no Delameres ever attended any Happy Valley orgies. During those years of decadence the 3rd Baron was too busy trying to raise cattle, the 4th Baron was in England and the 5th Baron – Hugh – was too young.

  As Diana’s step-grandson stood in handcuffs in that historic, high-ceilinged, wood-panelled Nairobi High Court, charged with murdering a Kikuyu poacher on his Rift Valley ranch, the world was watching. It remained a high-profile trial, dogged by claims that this assumed modern-day doyen of Happy Valley, father of two young sons, might hang. It was torture for Hugh and Ann, who had to make frequent trips to Nairobi, attending court and running up unwelcome bills at Muthaiga Club, battling the Nairobi traffic in their unreliable old Mercedes. Diana had given this to Delamere’s father, who she nicknamed Bear. Today it still has Diana’s silver bear on its bonnet.

  Eventually it turned out Cholmondeley hadn’t murdered anyone. Most observers of the court proceedings concluded he’d never even fired the fatal bullet that killed the Kikuyu poacher. Tough luck: he’d been stuck for over three years behind bars in squalid conditions while the Kenyan justice system waded through the evidence (or lack of it) in super-slow motion. (Back in the days of Diana, the ‘long’ trial of her husband had been over in as many weeks.) Today there are many Kenyans, black and white, who believe that the prolonged and often farcical trial of the 5th Baron’s son with its exposure of police incompetence and corruption, not to mention the inflammatory remarks made by those in power, was a thinly disguised attempt by Kenyan politicians to grab his land, particularly the smaller but more fertile Manera Farm near Naivasha, most of which has now been sold to pay court fees.

  On another occasion I asked the Delameres if they remembered the tragedy of Buxton’s Happy Valley manager, John McLoughlin, and his suicide. They did – although they were less certain about the date: probably in the mid or late 1960s, they thought, although they didn’t see him often as he lived at the opposite end of the farm, about 15 miles away, ‘and in those days we didn’t have very good cars.’ Nor roads, I suspected, and they hadn’t improved as I’d almost got stuck in the mud driving a Land Rover to their house. Over cups of lapsang souchong, Hugh was complaining about the rain making it impossible to cut hay, not to mention the zebra breaking his cattle fences. I gently prodded him back into the past, although he went off at a tangent again, talking about his time at South Kinangop, not far from Kipipiri and Happy Valley, when he was the senior settlement officer during the early days of the million-acre scheme. He smiled: ‘£1,300 was the most any settler got for a house from the British government, so those with pretentious houses lost out!’ Hugh’s work was an interesting denouement to his grandfather’s dream of Kenya being a self-ruling white man’s country.

  As thunder rumbled in the background, threatening more heavy rain, I steered the talk back to John McLoughlin’s death. Hugh said, ‘Well – Diana was not generous with her money.’

  ‘Poor John McLoughlin – he had financial problems,’ Lady Delamere conceded.

  With McLoughlin’s house some miles to the
south, below the volcanic Eburru hills, and the rocky kopje where Galbraith Cole ended his life a few miles east, across the lake, I thought about these two men as I headed home. One had been desperately lonely and impossibly broke, the other crippled by a cruel illness. Why, I wondered, has suicide always been branded cowardly when it must take considerable courage to commit the act, even in the face of seemingly impossible challenges?

  Diana’s biographer Leda Farrant, whose book Diana, Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder was published posthumously in 1997, does not flatter Diana either, but gives an interesting account of her life. Diana Caldwell was born in 1913 (the same year Lady Idina married Euan Wallace and Muthaiga Club opened on New Year’s Eve), her father seventeen years older than her mother. Blonde, blue eyed and a fearless horsewoman from a young age, Diana was adored by her father. A nanny prepared her for boarding school, where she proved more sporty than academic, leaving her mother free to enjoy her live-in lover in a menage à trois. With this role model before her, Diana didn’t cling to her own virginity, going on a cruise at sixteen with her dog and two men – one of them a lover. She went on to enjoy a variety of lovers, many of them married, until she married Vernon Motion in 1937 – she was pregnant. It was a waste on both counts – he wasn’t wealthy as she’d imagined and she miscarried.

  One of Diana’s many lovers during her farcical marriage was the already-married Sir Jock Delves Broughton, owner of Doddington Estate in Cheshire. In the latter years of the 1930s Diana also met and had affairs with Hugh Dickinson, who would follow her to Kenya, and June Carberry, who according to Farrant was one of Diana’s lesbian lovers.

  After divorcing Motion, Diana sailed with Broughton to Cape Town in 1941 – in wartime hardly a romantic cruise. They got married in Cape Town – Farrant claims that Diana could have entered the Kenya Colony as a single woman, but it probably appealed more to arrive with a title: that of Lady Broughton. As Farrant puts it: ‘As well as men and horse riding, Diana loved money, jewels and titles.’ Diana continued to entertain lovers, even during her honeymoon. On their arrival at Muthaiga Club, she met the 43-year-old Lord Erroll, incorrectly referred to by Farrant as ‘Lord Josslyn Hay’. He was apparently deep in debt, but more obviously sexy, handsome and titled: a perfect dancing partner for the young Diana. Thus began their regular outings to Torr’s Hotel (owned by Ewart Grogan), locally known as Tart’s Hotel. Here people observed the couple dancing as if glued together, requesting songs like ‘Let’s Fall in Love . . .’ Local gossip soon branded them lovers. Oblivious of wagging tongues, on to the Claremont the glamorous couple would breeze. The better-known New Stanley Hotel – not far from the bronze statue of the 3rd Baron Delamere – was too ‘old’ for such bright young things. Every night extended into the small hours of the following morning, yet Jock appeared to be turning a blind eye. After all, Diana was only twenty-five and he was old enough to be her father – plus they had a curious marriage pact, in writing, that gave Diana an easy get-out option.

  It was all inevitable, perhaps, but doomed from the outset, Farrant believes: ‘Joss was too similar in character to Diana. With their meeting, one or other had to change!’ She asserts that Diana and Joss had a flaming row in the small hours of 24 January 1941, just after he’d delivered her home to Karen and shortly before he was shot. Farrant remained uncertain if the tiff was because Joss told Diana that Phyllis Filmer was about to return to Kenya, or because he made it clear he wasn’t marrying Diana – he needed, after all, to be kept in the manner to which he was accustomed, as his previous wives, Lady Idina and Countess Mary, had done. This argument was supposedly overheard by Diana’s husband and June Carberry – who’d both dined with Diana and Joss at Muthaiga the previous night – and the maid Wilks, from upstairs in their respective rooms. ‘Nobody ditched Diana,’ writes Farrant. ‘Predictably she was savagely and uncontrollably furious.’

  Diana’s penchant for shooting any man brave enough to thwart her was later revealed: three of her many lovers – Peter Leth, Ron Watts and Peter Kennedy – claimed she’d fired shots at them, one when he was indiscreetly having sex with another woman in Diana’s Kilifi beach house.

  Farrant also quotes the managing director of the Nation newspaper at the time, who found himself playing bridge with Diana at Muthaiga Club and had to attempt an apology for a recent article by newcomer Stanley Bonnet, who had conducted ‘in-depth’ research and drawn his own conclusions. He’d incriminated Diana as a murderess in a piece that had slipped into an early edition of the Sunday Nation before anyone stopped it. But Diana had apparently waved the embarrassed MD aside with a breezy: ‘Oh, everyone knows I did it.’ This confession, Farrant concluded, was sufficient to extinguish all former theories.

  It proved hard to find someone who knew and liked Diana: the one woman who remained loyal to her wished to remain anonymous. This lady believed it was highly probable that Diana’s comment was tongue in cheek, probably also a hint of her wish that everyone would just drop the subject. ‘Print what you like,’ she might have said to her grovelling bridge opponent, ‘I’ve been tried and found guilty by the general public already!’

  A fearless huntress and horsewoman who also piloted light aircraft and fished for marlin, Diana certainly wasn’t a shrinking violet. But was she really capable of cold-blooded murder?

  People had gossiped copiously about Diana – inevitably. Tongues had clicked when, less than three weeks after the murder, she’d gone on safari with Sir Jock and her old flame, Hugh Dickinson, and shot her first lion. That just added to the evidence that Diana had shot Erroll, they said.

  Elizabeth Watkins, whose mother took over Erroll’s seat in Kiambu constituency after his death, writes in Olga in Kenya: Repressing the Irrepressible that she, along with many others, knew exactly who’d killed him. Diana, she states, had killed her lover after being rejected by him: she’d told him she’d be free to marry him, but he didn’t want to be ‘landed with a penniless divorcee with expensive tastes’.

  Even today plenty of people still believe that Diana finished off Erroll; after all, she was cold and calculating, usually toted a gun and, as her life panned out, it was very obvious she wouldn’t hesitate to take shots at errant lovers. In mid-2010 I was at a lunch party, fittingly on Soysambu, listening to the Erroll murder theories of two middle-aged gentlemen. ‘It was Diana, without any doubt,’ they agreed, taking it in turns to expound their views over the well-spiced array of curries.

  ‘She had a row with him and she shot him before they even got to the house. Then she drove home and made Broughton drive the body away.’

  ‘I disagree: she was young and fit – she could easily have walked back from the scene of the crime!’

  As we quaffed more fine wine on Diana’s old stamping ground, I suddenly realised, with a chill of disquiet, that we were sitting on the exact veranda where John McLoughlin had shot himself. Happy Valley, still talked about almost a century on now, seemed to have extended its sinister, death-laced tentacles everywhere I turned.

  ‘Who do you think did it?’ one of the gentlemen turned to ask me. ‘You’ve read all the books!’ As if my interest would give me special insight.

  I laughed it off – saying how all those women in such fierce competition over Erroll must have exhausted their stiff upper lips, with nobody letting on who performed the final deed.

  It was tempting to imagine Erroll’s women, including MI5 agents, with the addition of more than a few disgruntled men, lining up beside a dark and lonely road to do the angry deed, Agatha Christie style. Beforehand they would have drawn straws to choose who actually pulled the trigger to keep it from being too messy. But they all would have said angrily to him – in his last moments. ‘That bullet comes straight from my heart . . .’

  The conversation turned to shooting guinea fowl.

  I was still smiling to myself, picturing an eclectic dinner party attended by all the writers about Happy Valley and any surviving descendants of the murder suspects. There might even b
e another murder – or they might just end up swapping wives and husbands.

  It was doubtless my spending so many long hours in court during the years of Tom Cholmondeley’s trial reignited my interest in that of Sir Jock Delves Broughton. The latter case had also attracted international attention, in spite of more serious matters like a world war. While we’d traipsed to the capital in old, faded farm clothes, Diana, parading her new outfits topped with black hat and veil, had worn diamonds. Many contemporaries had found this self-absorbed, even callous, although she did have the sensitivity – or squeamishness – to leave the court when Erroll’s ear was handed round in a jar as an exhibit.

  As Diana outlived the rest of the gang of Erroll fans, popular opinion was that she’d reveal all before her death. But when she died aged seventy-four in 1987, the Daily Telegraph titled its piece on Monday, 7 September: ‘Femme fatale takes Kenyan murder secret to her grave.’ Indeed she had – if she ever knew it.

  29

  Many Motives for Murder

  Joss’s murder once again had me in its grip. One night I even dreamt I was there, watching it all happen at that Karen road junction, but I couldn’t see much through the early morning mist. Yet the gunshots of my imagination were so loud I awoke with a start, my heart racing. Totally awake now, I reached for a torch and the latest book I’d found on the subject. There were more suspects than I’d realised.