A comprehensive account of the murder and its aftermath is given by Rupert Furneaux in a 1961 volume of his Crime Documentaries series, The Murder of Lord Erroll. He points out that the defence didn’t need to prove Broughton’s innocence, only to make the Crown case fail. Top lawyer Harry Morris, hired from South Africa, started off by sowing seeds of doubt and ended up so confident he’d destroyed the case that he didn’t even hang about for the verdict. Morris dwelt on Broughton’s life story, emphasising his illnesses and disabilities to prove he was unlikely to have climbed down drainpipes, jumped on to the running boards of a moving car and hiked back through lion-infested bush very late at night. Morris also mentioned Erroll’s possible Fascist associations, as well as the others who had cause to hate the late Earl. Broughton himself, when first told his wife’s lover had died in a car crash, expressed his doubt that it had been an accident.
Although police investigations of the site and the car itself were poor, much was made of some white scuff marks found on the rear seat of the hired Buick, as well as the smell of Chanel No. 5, cigarette ends and ‘wrenched off’ arm slings in the rear of the car – which, it turned out, had been unscrewed. Then there was lengthy discussion over two Colt revolvers Broughton had reported stolen a few days before and cartridges found at his friend Lord Soames’ firing range in Nanyuki. Examples of Broughton’s ‘suspicious behaviour’ included his lighting a bonfire the morning after the murder, burning amongst other things a pair of new-looking white shoes.
Crown witnesses included Gladys Delamere, who had supposedly spoken to Joss regarding his relationship with Diana and who asserted in court, ‘I was frightened for all three parties concerned.’ Others were Soames and June Carberry (whose evidence contradicted each other); Erroll’s ‘boys’ Musa and Waweru; the Broughtons’ friend, Hugh Dickinson; Lezard of the Happy Valley ‘hole in the sheet’ game; and various ballistics ‘experts’. Morris, however, was extremely clued up on ballistics, especially matters of powder, grooves and revolving directions. He ultimately got the Crown’s ‘pro’, 34th Asst Supt Harwich, to agree that the bullet which killed Erroll was certainly not fired from Broughton’s stolen guns. Broughton’s supposed murder weapon, if it existed, would be an unlicensed .32, probably a Smith & Wesson, which had now totally disappeared. He also got Fox, a government chemist, after a long stint in the witness box, to declare that the crime bullets were not from the same gun as those found at Soames’ farm.
June Carberry, when dining with Diana, Jock and Joss the previous evening, had witnessed a bizarre Champagne toast. At Erroll’s ‘last supper’ Jock wished his wife and her lover ‘every happiness’ and an heir, before they went off to dance; he was left to spend the evening with ‘Junie’, as he called her. ‘Junie’ then accompanied Jock home and had to help him upstairs as he was drunk – or so she claimed: she was a heavy drinker herself. If she can be believed, they left Muthaiga Club at 1.30 a.m. (she looked at her watch) and arrived home at 2 a.m. Broughton then looked in on her, to check on her alleged malaria, at about 2.10 a.m. (in his dressing gown) and after a short time she heard a car. She claimed that Diana had talked (or possibly argued) with Joss for ten minutes and then, after another brief period, Diana came to her room – at about 2.40 a.m., she estimated – for half an hour. Broughton returned to June’s room – to check she was all right – around 3.30 a.m., although he claimed to have no recollection of this. The Crown prosecutor pounced on Broughton’s second visit to June as his guilty attempt to prove his presence in the house. At some point before, after or during these times, somewhere between the Broughton house and the gravel pit, someone shot Erroll in the head. And all of this evidence is dependent on the honesty of the only people at the Broughton house that night – Sir Jock and June – and the two never called as witnesses, Diana and the maid called Wilks.
For the accused to give evidence is a risky business, as case histories have shown, but Broughton did. After his examination, cross-examination and re-examination, Furneaux asserts, ‘Broughton emerged from his ordeal with flying colours. He had proved himself an excellent witness and he had answered the Crown’s 1,500 questions with apparent candour and sincerity. He was never shaken.’
There were only seven defence witnesses and, amongst his conclusions while summing up, Morris asserted his conviction that there had been two to three people involved in the murder. But it was his exposure of the ballistics flaw in the Crown case that convinced the twelve-man jury to come up with their verdict of not guilty. Furneaux also concludes that Broughton was certainly no murderer: ‘He may have acted rashly, inexcusably, but if he killed to protect his marriage, he killed under grievous provocation.’
Meanwhile, Sir Jock’s life – what was left of it – and reputation had been left in pieces in spite of his acquittal. He died the following year, six months after Diana had left him, in Liverpool’s Adelphi Hotel, supposedly suicide – an act which some interpreted as an admission of guilt.
For various reasons, many writers have believed that despite the verdict, Sir Jock was indeed guilty. James Fox, in White Mischief, implicated Broughton as Erroll’s killer. His co-investigator, Cyril Connolly, latterly interviewed June Carberry’s stepdaughter, Juanita, afterwards heading his notes: ‘The end of the trial.’ Fox pursued this thread after Connolly’s death in 1974: Juanita claimed that Broughton had actually confessed his guilt to her when he arrived at her parents’ farm in Nyeri a day after the murder. Apparently he’d even told her he’d thrown the gun into the Thika Falls on the way. Only fifteen at the time, Juanita had always liked Broughton, saying he was kind to her. She felt sorry for the lonely old man, and thus kept his secret.
Sixty-one years after the murder, issue 579 of the Weekly Telegraph contained an article, ‘Solved: Mystery of White Mischief Gun’ by Neil Tweedie, supporting the Broughton theory again. The writer claimed to have had a moment of inspiration while talking to a Roger Beazley, who’d discovered the ‘truth’ from June Carberry. According to the article, Broughton had dropped the murder weapon (the absence of which would sabotage the case) into a shallow pool at the Thika Falls. It was the obvious place to stop and quickly dispose of the gun as he was on his way to the Carberrys’ Nyeri home anyway. June, on discovering this, had instructed her servants to retrieve it. The gun ended up hidden in the roof of a workshop at the Carberrys’ Eden Rock Hotel in Malindi. In the 1950s Beazley’s cousin and her husband took over the workshop and found the gun. When they took it round to June’s flat she apparently went white as a ghost, sped out to sea in a boat and dropped the offending ‘evidence’ over the reef.
The Weekly Telegraph took up the issue of the gun again in May 2007. ‘Revealed: The White Mischief Murderer’, by Judith Woods, told how Christine Nicholls, author of Elspeth Huxley’s biography, was given a tape recording and witness statements by Mary Edwards, the wife of a former deputy high commissioner to Kenya. This tape was recorded by Dan Trench, whose parents had been business partners with the Carberry family. June Carberry, he claimed, had told his family ‘the truth’, but Dan hadn’t wanted to repeat the story until he was old and frail: nor did he wish it to be made public until after his death. It was the same old gun story: June’s servant diving into the Thika Falls to retrieve the weapon and the boat rushing it out to sea all those years later, this time to be disposed of by John Carberry.
Crime writer Benjamin Bennett – who in Still Unsolved – Who Shot the Earl of Erroll? incorrectly calls the late Earl ‘Josh’ – reconstructs conversations in and out of court, concluding that Broughton did the deed with a Smith & Wesson revolver nobody knew he possessed and which he could then hastily dispose of. Dismissing suggestions of political conspiracy, he believes that the Earl’s brush with Mosley and the British Union of Fascists was ‘a passing phase’ during his impressionable younger days and that this murder was indeed a crime of passion. He points out that when defence lawyer Morris mentioned that Erroll might have been the victim of a Fascist plot, the Attorney-General dismissed
the idea of political murder as ‘absurd’. He concludes: ‘In a mystery story Sir Delves Broughton would have achieved a unique formula for murder.’
Alf Smith, Assistant Inspector of Police at the time of the murder, retold in White Roots in Africa (1997) the events of the morning of 24 January 1941, including his interrogation of the night watchman in Kiswahili. The latter claimed to have seen Broughton get into the back of Erroll’s car, later returning on foot. Smith recorded everything, but says that as Inspector Poppy, who was in charge of the case, did not speak Kiswahili the watchman did not tell him anything.
Some have argued that Broughton hired a Somali hit man to carry out the murder, a notion expanded by Colin Imray in the chapter titled ‘Murder of the Century’ of his Policeman in Africa (1995). Imray, who arrived in Kenya in 1948, confesses to having read White Mischief but never asked to see police files on the matter. Having spoken to Inspector Poppy, ‘a highly competent CID man . . . with an excellent detective brain’, he points out that Poppy was never in any doubt that Broughton was guilty. The evidence was botched by ‘a series of absurd mistakes’, but Imray maintains that Broughton was a good actor and had a very strong motive. He reaches his own ‘speculative scenario’, due to the absence of a proper investigation and ‘in the light of a very inadequate trial’, that it was Broughton’s Somali ‘boy’, Abdul, who pulled the trigger; trained at the shooting range on Lord Soames’ Nanyuki farm (where spent cartridges were found, later used in court), Abdul was then paid to disappear. Years later, the writer states, a corroded revolver was found in the bush near the crossroads.
Many people in the 1940s – and since – have agreed that there was no way ‘poor old Jock’ – unfit and walking with a limp, could have hidden in Erroll’s car and done the deed, possibly, if anyone was to believe June, while very drunk. And how would he have walked back, suffering as he did from night blindness?
The Broughton theory also surfaced in Juanita Carberry’s otherwise uninteresting autobiography, Child of Happy Valley. Her literary inspiration stems from a miserable childhood at Nyeri. Juanita was neglected by her stepmother, June, and abused by her father, John, the backdrop being the drunken parties of the Happy Valley set. Having watched them all frolic, Juanita wrote: ‘They behaved as if the Africans and I were invisible,’ further criticising the exhibitionism of the white people in front of those to whom sexual pleasure for women (who were traditionally circumcised) was an alien notion. ‘What did the Africans make of the way these people, supposedly their masters, behaved?’ asks Carberry. ‘How they retained any respect for Europeans, I can’t imagine.’
In 1980 she’d ‘confessed’ all to Fox in her Mombasa house overlooking the harbour, where those early white settlers had first glimpsed Kenya’s exotic shores as they sailed into their new homeland, unburdening herself of a secret she’d long held on to.
Tatler ran an article, ‘Silent Witness’, by David Jenkins, soon after Paul Spicer had labelled Alice the murderess. The journalist interviewed Juanita, then living in London, to be told that Spicer’s claim was ‘bollocks’. According to Juanita, her stepmother was a drunk who once tried to sexually abuse her, while her ‘father’ (and it’s debatable if he actually was) delighted in extreme mental cruelty, restricting his vicious tortures to Juanita’s pets. Juanita had a lover at fifteen, was pregnant at sixteen (and miscarried) and although she married twice, never wanted children. After seventeen years as a merchant seawoman, the tattooed and ageing Juanita still held firm that Broughton murdered Erroll. She also claimed that when the police came to question Idina, she wore nothing at all apart from high heels, while wielding a cigarette holder. If it’s true, perhaps Idina was mocking their blatantly inadequate investigations. Perhaps she suspected there was more to the story than the aggrieved husband or lover’s tiff . . .
In the article Juanita comes across as somewhat unusual: she told Jenkins of her contract to have her body plastinated or preserved. Even if this doesn’t portray her as attention seeking, verging on exhibitionist, I would also question the honesty of any teenage girl, especially one who’d been subjected to unkind (or worse) treatment and was, in all probability, more unbalanced than the average teenager. Wouldn’t she be screaming out for attention – possibly all her life?
Other people had (and still have) their theories: Erroll’s list of spurned female conquests and angry husbands was enough to invite speculation ever after. June Carberry had supposedly been having an affair with Erroll too – before Diana arrived on the scene – so some might have tried to point a finger at her. She had, after all, in a fit of what was presumably hellish fury at being scorned, smashed every gramophone record he had ever given her.
There were incriminating whispers about John Carberry: the owner of a vile temper can indeed be capable of murder. At the time he’d been away in South Africa but stories circulated about his jealousy over his wife’s ‘affair’ with Erroll. Bubbles Delap remembers Carberry as ‘very good looking – well preserved’. He was kind to her, she explained: once she had stayed at his Eden Rock Hotel for a month and gone on daily fishing trips with him, but then most men would be kind to a pretty younger woman. Initially Lord Carbery, he dropped his title and changed his name and its spelling by deed poll to John Evans Carberry. He divorced his first wife; his second wife, Maia, mother of Juanita, died piloting her plane. His third wife was June, whose claim to fame, as well as being a wicked stepmother, remains that she became a key witness at the Erroll murder trial. Their farm at Nyeri, ironically, was called Seremai, ‘place of death’. Popular rumour was that it was Carberry who had hired the Somali hit man.
Few people I’ve spoken to believe that Alice de Trafford was Erroll’s killer – even after Paul Spicer’s The Temptress ricocheted into the market in 2010, stating emphatically that it was she who murdered Erroll. She wasn’t hauled up before court, says Spicer, thanks to Dickie Pembroke, her bed partner on the night of the murder, who vouched for her. But really it’s a wonder the authorities believed any of them.
Then there was Gladys Delamere – second wife to the 3rd Baron. Delamere’s first wife, Florence, had died aged thirty-six and he’d only remarried much later, in 1928. He was thirty years older than Gladys and four years after their marriage he’d died. In 1938 she became Mayor of Nairobi, later becoming supposedly another wounded heart aching for the caddish Lord Erroll. Elspeth Huxley points out in Out in the Midday Sun: My Kenya that Gladys was sometimes painted in a bad light by contemporaries ‘as a bossy, bitchy and emotionally unbalanced woman, endlessly carousing at Muthaiga Club with Happy Valleyites, and so possessively in love with Lord Erroll that she was even suspected of having shot him’. However, Huxley adds that even though Gladys may well have been one of Erroll’s casual affairs, she doubts her involvement was that dramatic: ‘When I knew her, while she certainly caroused quite often at Muthaiga Club, the Happy Valley was not her scene.’ Gladys, formerly Lady Markham, is portrayed more kindly by Leda Farrant in Diana, Lady Delamere and the Murder of Lord Erroll (1997), who explains how she selflessly looked after Delamere in his twilight years. She was apparently highly popular and during the war she always made all ranks welcome at her Loresho home, unlike many more snobbish families.
Several others, including Broughton’s lawyer Morris, mooted the possibility of a political assassination. Joss’s political views are more understandable when seen in their historical context: plenty of other notables joined the British Union of Fascists in its early stages, seeing it as one way to keep communism at bay and ‘save’ Britain. It’s possible Joss had remained involved in a scheme to bring about a negotiated peace with Germany, in keeping with the policy of the BUF. Some members veered away from Fascism later on, but Edward, Duke of Windsor’s Nazi sympathies became an embarrassment after his abdication and marriage to the twice-divorced serial adulterer Wallis Simpson – one of whose conquests had been the German ambassador to Britain. Churchill tactfully sent Edward away to govern the Bahamas.
In 2000
, Errol Trzebinski’s biography of Erroll, The Life and Death of Lord Erroll, first went into the political assassination theory in real depth. Joss’s background and early links with the Foreign Office had laid foundations for his future political career. Add to this a friendship with Oswald Mosley, going back to the 1920s, and links with the Duke of Windsor. At the time of his murder, Joss was thirty-nine years of age, ambitious, very talented when it came to making speeches and swaying the opinions of others, and possessed an incredible mind and memory. He was also liked and respected by many prominent settlers. In the context of wartime Britain, his political leanings and knowledge made him a danger to the British government.
From the outset, enough coincidences and clues became Trzebinski’s way to inspire her research, aiming to clear the Earl’s name as well as to reveal the real story. Her good friend, Mombasa-based journalist Edward Rodwell, had received several anonymous late-night phone calls telling him that a 1987 BBC documentary The Happy Valley, Fox’s book White Mischief and a recent article written by Rodwell himself had all got it wrong: Erroll had been a full-blown Nazi, a threat to the British government and, according to the nameless caller, the real killer had left the country. Meanwhile, Trzebinski was given a 25,000-word document, known as the ‘Sallyport Papers’, compiled by former Intelligence officer Tony Trafford, revealing that Erroll’s murder was a political assassination. This story had been told to Trafford by a retired naval commander who gave his name as Edmund and who’d served in Intelligence in the early 1940s. ‘Edmund’, diagnosed as terminally ill in the late 1980s, was distressed by the stories fabricated around Erroll’s death. Thus he opened his heart to Trafford, who decided to make it public.
The Ghosts of Happy Valley Page 30