Errol Trzebinski - The Life and Death of Lord Erroll - The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder

Nellie Grant to her daughter Elspeth Huxley, 30 January 1941

I had been living in Kenya for nine years before the Erroll murder meant anything to me. Then, in 1962, my husband and I bought a house in Miotoni Lane in Karen, today a suburb of Nairobi, near where Lord Erroll’s corpse was discovered. One of our neighbours, a rather self-important character called Colonel Clarence Fentum, implied to us that he had been in charge of the investigation of the Erroll case, Kenya’s most notorious murder. As we now lived so close to where the body had been found, my curiosity began to be aroused.

Fentum was mentioned in Rupert Furneaux’s The Murder of Lord Erroll , based on the trial evidence, published in 1961. In fact Fentum had been newly seconded into the Kenya Police as an inspector at the time of the murder and had been in charge of the station responsible for the Karen area, not in charge of the investigation itself. I discovered later that he had been the third European officer to arrive at the scene of the crime. 1

For six years, my family and I lived where the scandal still thrived in people’s memories. We would frequently drive along that stretch of the Ngong road, with its wide grass verge, where Erroll’s hired Buick had come to a halt. Little had changed in that landscape except that a forest of blue gum trees had been planted along the road and St Francis’s Church stood on a hummock above the murder site. At the now infamous crossroads (more of a left-hand fork and T junction), we often took the Karen road, a red murram track, as it had been in Erroll’s day, which we locals referred to as the vlei * road.

While researching biographies of the former colony’s leading figures, I inevitably came across Lord Erroll’s circle. My unusual Christian name frequently prompted questions as to whether Erroll and I were related. We are not, but throughout my writing career those settlers I have interviewed have pressed upon me snippets of information about Erroll – in fact, the ritual continues to this day. Wary of giving away anything that might further tarnish their reputations, which had suffered so badly since Lord Erroll’s death, this somewhat esoteric group were cautious in confiding what they knew about the murder. But gradually, having lived in Kenya for so long and in some ways sharing their predicament as part of a censured society, I gained their trust and confidence. Like all biographers, not wishing to lose those final links with a fading world, I filed away their disclosures.

I met Juanita Carberry in the 1970s. She was the daughter of one of the colony’s aviation pioneers, J. C. Carberry, and her stepmother had been a close friend of Erroll’s. Swearing me to secrecy, Juanita explained how, as an adolescent in January 1941, a couple of days after Erroll’s murder she had been at her parents’ home, Seremai, alone but for the servants, when Sir Delves Broughton turned up. I kept to myself what she told me about her conversation with him, as she had requested. After all, it was one of many stories about the murder that I encountered over the years – they were as conflicting as they were numerous. One even had it that Juanita’s father, J. C., had been involved and had ‘arranged’ for Erroll to be shot while he was in South Africa, having discovered that his wife June had been unfaithful to him with Erroll. A Somali had been paid to do the shooting, apparently. 2

Genesta Hamilton, a close friend of Joss’s in Naivasha, linked Erroll’s death to Germany: ‘Jock’s [Broughton’s] South African lawyer brought a ballistics expert to examine the cartridges. He said it was impossible to say for certain that these bullets had come from Jock’s gun. Jock was acquitted … My theory is different. There was a German gunsmith’s shop in Nairobi. Joss spoke good German. He never joined up. I think he was asked to watch these Germans. I think they got him murdered.’ 3

Elspeth Huxley was always convinced that Joss had been regarded as untrustworthy and killed by one of Britain’s Security Services. She assumed his death had somehow been linked to the top-secret Abyssinian campaign. 4

Of the stories I heard about Lord Erroll many, like these, were based on supposition and theory. Some were rooted in first-hand experience, however. Sir Derek Erskine, a contemporary and great friend of Erroll’s, wrote an unpublished memoir which his daughter, a friend of mine, allowed me to read. It sheds a fascinating new light on Broughton. Erskine describes three intriguing episodes between himself and Broughton, two during the week running up to the murder, one after Erroll had been shot.

Beatrice MacWatt had lived in the Wanjohi Valley and kept diaries since 1932. She had been the object of amorous advances from Lord Erroll (which she had rejected). Her daughter Alison Jauss told me about Beatrice’s diaries in 1987. Alison claimed that everyone had been ‘barking up the wrong tree’ as to how and why Lord Erroll had been murdered, and that the truth was contained in her mother’s diaries, but not until her mother, June Carberry and Diana Lady Delamere (as Diana Broughton became) were dead could the contents be disclosed. Only then would everyone realise that the end to Erroll’s life was different from what people had been led to believe. 5 By 1993 Beatrice MacWatt and the other two women had all died, but her diaries never materialised. At the end of 1994 I gave up the waiting game. But the frustration and delay had given me time to delve. Early in the New Year of 1995 I went to consult my old friend Edward Rodwell – known as Roddy – who lives half a mile away from my Mombasa home as the fish-eagle flies, across Mtwapa Creek.

Roddy has published a weekly column, ‘Coast Causerie’, in the East African Standard since the late 1940s. He had been editor of the Mombasa Times during the war when he had met Erroll briefly and liked him. Over the years he wrote many articles on the subject of Lord Erroll’s death, the last two of which were published in unusually quick succession. Following Diana Lady Delamere’s death in London in 1987 the BBC released a documentary called ‘The Happy Valley’. After the programme aired, the Standard (Nairobi) published a small piece by Sandra Maler, ‘Murder Secret Goes with Lady Delamere’. Roddy maintained that it was not only Diana who had a secret that might have altered the whole of the Erroll story. Lord Erroll’s first wife, Idina, had told him shortly before she died: ‘I know who killed Joss Erroll and before I die I will tell you who was responsible.’ However, days later Idina had slipped into a coma without revealing her secret. ‘I feel I should record my recollections of Lady Idina’s remark made so many years after the trial. It would seem that Lady Idina did not believe in Broughton’s guilt and that someone else was the culprit. Perhaps the story is not told in full,’ Roddy wrote in the East African Standard.

The usual flurry of letters had arrived in response to Roddy’s article, but this time there was a new element. Very late one Sunday night, he was woken by an anonymous long-distance phone call. Roddy told the story in a follow-up article:

A man’s voice from a far distance said that my article, the film and the book had the whole business wrong as to who the killer was … it had been well known in England that Erroll had been a member of the British Fascist party and continued to be a member after he arrived in Kenya. When it appeared that war between Germany and Britain was a possibility, he had stated that he had withdrawn his support for the Fascist Nazis. But that was incorrect. Erroll was a full-blown Nazi. The British Secret Service had noted that Erroll was involved in Kenya politics …

Here, for the first time in print, someone was pointing the finger at the British Government.