The Ghosts of Happy Valley

by Juliet Barnes

  Using the above document, Trzebinski details the story of Joss’s assassination. ‘Operation Highland Clearance’ involved two agents, one a blonde woman from South Africa, attractive enough to seduce Erroll and, via pillow-talk, to become au fait with his movements. ‘Susan Melanie’ (doubtless a false name) and her colleague, ‘James Gregory’, took instructions from Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE), a war organisation with operatives worldwide. Following instructions from Cairo and Nairobi, the female agent pretended to be broken down on the road where she already knew Erroll would be driving at that lonely hour. After he’d stopped to give her a lift, the rest was easy. Plenty of people, Trzebinski points out, believed his killer was a woman and it wasn’t difficult for MI5 to cleverly engineer the whole episode so that it looked like a crime of passion.

  The police handling of evidence after this carefully managed, top-secret assassination was too poor to be accidental. Even Broughton’s baffling behaviour can be explained, Trzebinski thought, as it’s possible he was also in on the whole thing – and of course very few documents to do with Erroll survived either. SOE Cairo’s files were burnt in 1945. There were further eliminations, including ‘Susan Melanie’ herself.

  Joss was not popular with certain members of the Italian community according to the late Cynthia Salvadori, who in 2008 wrote an article, ‘Anti-Fascists on the Equator’, about her parents for Old Africa magazine. While Erroll was ‘making speeches around the colony’ to ‘drum up support for the BUF cause’, Salvadori’s parents attended a meeting at Njoro Club at the end of 1934. Her mother wrote to her afterwards: ‘I think I told you we were going to a lecture on “British Fascism”. The noble Earl of Erroll made a rotten speech and didn’t really answer any questions, and made personal remarks in very bad taste – a vulgar, fat, little bounder.’ Salvadori concludes that Joss’s murder was likely to have been ‘a political assassination, engineered by the colonial government to whom he was an extreme embarrassment’.

  Nellie Grant also wrote to her daughter, Elspeth Huxley, about the Njoro Club session: ‘There were 198 people there, no less, and a very good-tempered meeting,’ later adding, ‘Whenever Joss said British Fascism stands for complete freedom, you could hear Mary Countess at the other end of the room saying that within five years Joss will be dictator of Kenya.’

  Further corroborating Trzebinski’s view that Erroll’s murder was no crime of passion, Old Africa ran a story in August 2012: ‘Lord Erroll Killed by MI6 Operatives’. The writer, Palle Rune, had met fellow radio ham Ray Cuthbert in 1974. The latter, now blind, had served in military intelligence in Kenya during the war, but would not comment on the subject of Erroll’s murder, even when plied with drinks. Almost twenty years later, Cuthbert, now frail and in the UK, wished to speak to Rune, with whom he’d lost contact. They met and Cuthbert explained that enough time had now passed to relieve him of his oath under the Official Secrets Act. ‘I want to tell you what happened at Karen the night of Lord Erroll’s murder and why,’ he apparently said, continuing to explain that Erroll, as Paymaster General in the British forces in Kenya, had knowledge of plans for the approaching campaign into Italian Somalia. His friendship with Mosley made this dangerous under wartime circumstances. Cuthbert confirmed that a male and a female operative were used, although he didn’t know any details of what actually happened.

  Cuthbert’s story, as told by Rune, was well received by Trzebinski, who follows this up in the same issue in her article ‘The Last Word’. She opens by pointing out that on the Saturday of Erroll’s murder, he was ‘to review the King’s African Regiment Territorial Army on Eldoret Racecourse’. This never happened and their commanderin-chief, Colonel Barkas, an undercover military contact for SOE, ordered the troops back to barracks as the Earl had been in a car accident. Trzebinski goes on to detail the tightly planned assassination – all the relevant spots in Nairobi were bristling with intelligence operatives that night. Trzebinski also mentions that, before setting sail with Diana, Broughton had dropped into the War Office in England to ask how he could help. The insinuations continue that Broughton was in some way involved in Operation Highland Clearance. And thus was his Somali chauffeur, who flagged Joss down at the gate, requesting a lift to Nairobi as he had a day off the following day: ‘This man, a crack shot, had been posing as Broughton’s driver for roughly six weeks. In fact he had been handpicked, his presence vital, lest the female operative failed in some way.’

  Joss was a threat, ‘a loose cannon’ as Trzebinski puts it. His connections with Mosley and the Duke of Windsor made his high position dangerous. Tanganyika had been German during the last war, while Mussolini was in neighbouring Abyssinia. She concludes: ‘The subject may be threadbare, but now warrants a fresh look at the past.’ She even suggests that perhaps Cyril Connolly was deployed to write about the Broughton theory, resulting in White Mischief.

  Letters continued to ignite the pages of Old Africa, between those readers supporting the Broughton theory and those who agreed with Trzebinski. Other Kenyan magazines continued to run stories too – and it seemed that the subject would never wear out. As Nicholas Best put it in 1979 in his entertainingly written book (albeit one with a misleading title), Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya: ‘Everyone in Kenya knows exactly who did it – the only trouble is, everyone’s suspect is different.’

  One puzzling detail emerging from several books is that Walter Harragin, Attorney General, also the chief prosecutor presiding over the entire affair, took little notice of the curious case of Hugh Dickinson, an adoring friend and avid admirer of Diana’s. ‘Hughsie Daisie’, as Diana called him, had allegedly been allowed into her bed, albeit occasionally, since the early 1930s. An officer in the Royal Signals (as, interestingly, was the male agent Trzebinski describes in Operation Highland Clearance), Dickinson secured himself a posting to Kenya to coincide with the arrival of the newly married Broughtons; this puzzled his family as it made no sense career-wise. He met the newlyweds in Mombasa, taking custody of the marriage contract between Broughton and Diana: this stated that she was to get £5,000 a year for seven years if the marriage was annulled due to her meeting a younger man. Dickinson moved into the Broughtons’ guesthouse in Karen, which he used as a pied-à-terre when he was in Nairobi – virtually every weekend.

  In court Dickinson actually lied, saying he’d been at the coast with a septic toe at the time of the murder. In fact, it turned out, he’d been sent to Nairobi to recover from this affliction – Kenya’s muggy coastal climate is hardly conducive to the rapid and clean healing of wounds. That the court was oblivious to this lie is puzzling, especially as Dickinson was hardly a reliable witness, having previously been embroiled with the Broughtons back in England in two insurance frauds – paintings and pearls – engineered by Sir Jock himself.

  Connolly and Fox interviewed Dickinson at the London Savoy in 1969. He described Diana as ‘wonderful’, Jock as ‘devious’ and ‘two-faced’ but physically incapable of committing murder. He lied to Connolly and Fox too, saying he was in Nyali in hospital after a cactus spine had poisoned his foot. But Fox picked up Dickinson’s ‘slip’ in the witness box. Dickinson had told Harrigan he’d been in hospital (at the coast) from around 17 January for about a month, but then told Morris he’d last seen Jock and Diana, he thought, on the last day in January – when they most definitely hadn’t been at the coast.

  Fox writes in White Mischief: ‘Dickinson did seem nervous when the murder was mentioned.’ He’d dined out on it that Christmas, though, according to Fox’s informant. He claimed to all present he knew who’d done it but was sworn to total secrecy. ‘He had not done it himself, he said, neither had Broughton, although Broughton, he said, had engineered it.’ He claimed he’d been offered £25,000 for the story he refused to tell.

  But if Dickinson could lie so easily in court, why indeed should anyone believe anything he said?

  In late 2011, I visited my old friend, the much admired East African historian
Monty Brown, who sadly died a few months afterwards. He was an octogenarian – probably the last person around who had attended Lord Baden-Powell’s funeral. Monty had always been fascinated by the Erroll murder and was kind enough to show me his archives, saying he was unlikely to do much with them himself. His attic study, overlooking a tranquil stretch of the Nanyuki River, was an archive itself. The walls neatly displayed an intriguing array of material: photographs of one-year-old Monty beside a dead lion, and aged two and a half at 16,000 feet up Mount Kilimanjaro. There was even a list of members who attended the inaugural meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on 25 March 1909, for which Monty had found photographs of all present.

  Monty sat at his father’s old desk on the worn leather seat of a Uganda Railways chair, which Monty himself had rescued from the old Maktau station. He showed me a copy of an unpublished memoir by the late writer and historian Arthur Wolseley-Lewis, who points out that on the night of Erroll’s murder, Hugh Dickinson had been staying round the corner from the Broughtons, with Wolseley-Lewis’s aunt, Molly Parker. She confirmed that Dickinson returned that night in the small hours. ‘So why on earth should he stay there when he had a guesthouse on the Broughton plot?’ Monty asked. ‘Because he wasn’t meant to be officially in Karen at all!’ Wolseley-Lewis believes that Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (also known as MI6 and which focused on foreign threats) recruited the Broughtons and Dickinson; Erroll, a known Fascist at the time the British were attacking the Italians in Abyssinia, was also Assistant Military Secretary to the East African Headquarters and thus ‘was a great security risk’. Dickinson himself pulled the trigger and drove Erroll’s body to the murram pit, then walked back. His exceptionally muddy shoes were noticed by Molly Parker’s servant, who had to clean them. Wolseley-Lewis believes that Diana, even if she was on the payroll, probably didn’t know Joss was going to be killed and had genuinely fallen in love with him, naturally arousing some jealousy on the part of both Broughton and Dickinson. The murder was actually a hushed-up disposal of a popular man who’d done much for the colony. Thus, Wolseley-Lewis believes, much was made of the playboy side of Joss and all his affairs, and ‘many “red herrings” were dragged across the road intentionally’.

  We were late for more than one delicious meal provided by his wife, Barbara, as Monty Brown explained at length his own Erroll murder theory. Having studied the relevant firearms and ballistics in depth, as well as visiting the Broughton house and the former murram pit to make meticulous calculations, he agreed with Wolseley-Lewis that Jock and Diana were highly likely to have been recruited by MI5 along with Dickinson: they were all crooks anyway, so they were ideal for the mission – to trap Erroll. Monty gave me another perpective on Errol Trzebinski’s informer, Tony Trafford: he was seconded to British Intelligence in 1940 (his father had also been in the Intelligence Service) where he would have been enjoined to keep the Official Secrets Act. Monty also took issue with some of Trafford’s details. He also explained that the ‘Sallyport Papers’ were incorrect on matters of ballistics. Susan Melanie, who Monty calls a ‘nebulous creature’, the woman whom Trzebinski details as actually shining a torch to blind Erroll and then shooting him, used a Colt PT32 Special revolver, according to Trafford’s informant. But, Monty pointed out, a detailed reading of the court proceedings show that the murder weapon was in fact a Smith & Wesson.

  According to Monty, the team strategy was simple: Diana traps Erroll, Jock feigns tolerance and Dickinson ensures he’s in Mombasa, although he actually comes back undercover, which would have been by road and which was why he stayed at Molly Parker’s. After dinner, Broughton, pretending to be drunk, insisted Diana be home by 3 a.m. – although usually he simply accepted that she would be staying at her lover’s Muthaiga house. As Diana detained Joss to bid her a fond farewell inside the house, Dickinson hid in the car – or possibly it was Broughton himself, the whitened shoes he would have worn accounting for the white scuff marks later found on the rear seat. At the junction where Erroll turned right to town, there would have been two cars. One, blocking the possible exit route to the left, would have been manned by African and European policemen; in the other would have been Dickinson – or Broughton, depending on who wasn’t in Erroll’s car – and another white policeman, who would have flagged Erroll down. Erroll would have stopped and wound down the passenger window; Dickinson would have appeared while Erroll was dazzled with a torch and pulled the trigger. On seeing the pistol, Erroll would have ducked and hit his head (accounting for the graze on his forehead), the first bullet missing him and the second hitting its target. There were plenty of men around to shove the body into the footwell, then drive and push the car through the mud to its final resting place. Broughton would then have driven home, burning the white shoes (seen by Juanita Carberry in the rubbish pit before the fire was started) the following day. The whole operation was arranged in London, while the pistol was buried somewhere in Africa.

  Monty had known Diana and didn’t like her – nor did he like what he’d heard of Jock. A female friend of Monty’s had known Diana too and had told him that Diana was frightened of Jock: she’d had threatening letters from him. Monty believed this fear was founded in Diana’s apprehension that he’d reveal her part in the murder. Monty further pointed out that while Jock’s two Colt revolvers were ‘stolen’ a few days before the murder, he also must have had, illegally, a Smith & Wesson: ‘You can tell by the ringing marks in the bullet which weapon it was fired from,’ Monty explained to me, as proved in court by Morris. Monty also showed me his Sporting Ammunition Catalogue from the 1930s, showing that in 1936 the incriminated gun was still in use.

  And thus we have an extraordinary conglomerate of murder suspects. There were those who might have killed Erroll out of jealousy, in some cases entangled with love. They included Broughton, Phyllis Filmer’s husband, Phyllis herself, Alice, Gladys Delamere, Dickie Pembroke, June Carberry, Hugh Dickinson and Diana. If the hit had been put out for tender in the 1940s, doubtless many other names would have rolled in.

  Or perhaps it was all engineered by British Intelligence, using any of Broughton, Dickinson and Diana, a combination of two of them, or all three – or none of the above. Would MI5 recruit people whose integrity was known to be dubious after the insurance frauds back in England? Or perhaps that would deem them perfect secret agent material – they’d already proved they’d do dirty deeds for money. The involvement of all three would make a lot of people partially right in their murder theories. It would also explain some of the more puzzling aspects surrounding the case – including the fact that Broughton remained so calm in court, almost as if acting. The last supper and the gun ‘theft’ would become deliberate red herrings, and this made sense of them too. The police investigations and the court case would have been intentional shams, the conclusion inevitable. Furthermore, most of the witnesses and players were dishonest. Some of them were drunks, who lied in court – some possibly because they’d been paid to keep a state secret, others (or all of them) because they were all trying to protect each other with absolutely no knowledge of who really did it.

  Then there’s the hired Somali idea. Hired by any or all of them – he could even have been back-up for a serious and tightly planned political assassination.

  There was one other curious theory I stumbled upon, probably thanks to Monty Brown. I felt I’d been ‘getting warmer’ in the hunt for the murderer and now it was time to make my own mind up, but perhaps I needed a little ‘help’. In Kenya a psychic or medium is often a muganga – the Kiswahili term for the traditional witchdoctor. Nowadays a muganga provides more services than damning – or killing off – people using potent curses, while offering those already cursed protective or healing charms. He (even she in these changing times) will often be psychic enough to see into the future – or past – and might even be a Christian to boot. Many of Kenya’s top politicians apparently consult their witchdoctor to ask important questions, seeking predictions. Some respected his
torians use them to uncover further ‘truths’ about their subject. Monty Brown is one such: his muganga had sworn that Hugh Dickinson was guilty.

  I knew of a few, supposedly powerful, muganga types and decided to ask the burning question. This muganga used ‘the energy’ from a photograph of Lord Erroll to come up with an answer, reached after my lengthy questioning. The curiously obtained verdict was that yes, MI5 had ordered the murder: a man and a woman had shot Erroll somewhere outside the Broughton gate, with the man pulling the trigger. Erroll had not recognised either of his assailants. Both agents had returned to the UK – with the gun. The reason for his assassination was political, and was also linked to the British royal family and somebody’s illegitimate son. These last unexpected revelations startled me into remembering old rumours about Beryl Markham. Had Erroll known too much about something else, as well as matters of war?

  Murmurings were rife in the 1930s about beautiful Beryl, who’d grown up barefoot in the Kenyan bush, trained many famous racehorses and been the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from Britain. It was said she’d had affairs with Edward, Prince of Wales, and Henry, his brother, Duke of Gloucester, then been paid off by Queen Mary to vanish back to Kenya.

  Less than a week later a friend happened to have an elderly gentleman staying, and asked if she might bring him out to Soysambu: ‘He’s an interesting character . . .’ When I realised how interesting, our meeting almost seemed fated. This man, whom I shall call Jack, had known Beryl very well, probably loved her too, like so many others, but it was a love that had remained unconsummated. Beryl had trusted him, he said, and thus he insisted he did not wish to be named.

  ‘The only thing she cared about was if a horse was lame,’ he insisted, ‘but after a few pink gins she’d really talk to me.’ As Jack sipped his gin and reminisced through a long afternoon, I could see how he’d shared and understood her world. He’d been as close a friend as Beryl would allow. She’d never let anybody come too close – an attitude probably rooted in having an alcoholic mother, who’d left her anyway when she was very young, and a father who’d basically sold her off to an older man to pay off debts. ‘She was virtually a child herself and her first husband was violent with her,’ Jack said.