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

I managed to track down some of those who were still alive. I located Neil Tyfield in 1996. He had been in Military Intelligence at Force HQ in Nairobi and had had a ‘team of young ladies’ working for him there. Tyfield told me that a number of officers had been posted out of Nairobi after Erroll’s death so that they would not be able to testify at Broughton’s trial. But the most valuable contact name that Gouldbourn gave me was, ironically, that of someone who insists on anonymity but has allowed me to use his ‘official’ cover name, S. P. J. O’Mara, because ‘those few who may be interested in the identity behind it will recognise it’. 35 Gouldbourn was insistent that O’Mara had had something to do with the ‘cover-up’ surrounding Lord Erroll’s death.

O’Mara had been an extremely young officer in the King’s African Rifles in 1940. Ian Henderson, the son of a Kenya settler family and he too an officer in the KAR during the war, was his commanding officer in Nanyuki in 1940. Roddy Rodwell had told me how this same man had tried unsuccessfully to recruit him for MI6 after the Second World War. O’Mara knew all about Ian Henderson’s career both during and after the war, including specific dates, corroborating what Roddy had told me. O’Mara threw light on many of the twists and turns that had set Erroll’s fate. When I told him that I had encountered fear among several interviewees he responded, ‘Fear of whom? [Fifty] years later? Only an SIS operation carries such a long shadow.’ 36

Stymied by the lack of access to official government papers on Lord Erroll’s career, I published a request for information in the Overseas Pensioner and Jambo , the English organ of the East African Women’s League, from anyone with anecdotes or photographs of Erroll. Through Jambo I received a letter in autumn 1996 from Anthea Venning, whose father had been a Provincial Commissioner in Kenya and had worked with Erroll on the Manpower Committee when war loomed. Anthea Venning was a rich source of information. In particular she led me to an old friend of hers called Tony Trafford, whose testimony is at the heart of the account of Lord Erroll’s death propounded in this book. 37

Tony’s father H. H. Trafford had been taken out of retirement on account of the war to undertake certain Intelligence duties. A former District Commissioner, he had confided to Tony that records existed in the Commonwealth Office, East Africa Section, indicating that it had been a woman that had shot Erroll. The theory that a woman pulled the trigger was well worn in Kenya. In the early 1980s H. H. Trafford had been approached by the maker of the film White Mischief and by someone at the BBC for any light he could shed on the murder. He told the latter bluntly that ‘though he had left the service there were certain matters he was not allowed to make comment on. Erroll being a case in point.’ He was similarly reticent with the White Mischief crew. Trafford had in fact been required to take the oath of the Official Secrets Act twice, once at the outset of his career and then again when he came out of retirement during the war. 38 His Intelligence duties involved among other things a top-secret interrogation of Broughton in 1941 entirely separate from the police and the court proceedings. 39

Tony Trafford, Kenya-born, was seconded to British Intelligence in 1940. * He had worked all over Kenya and lived in Naivasha until 1963, leaving at Independence. He now lived on the Isle of Wight. Our initial exchanges revealed a character very sure and knowledgeable. Out-of-the-way places in Nairobi, road names most of which had been changed at Independence, the layout of the Maia Carberry Nursing Home were details that only someone who had worked there would know. His knowledge of Kenya’s topography, of the idiosyncrasies of its tribes and elderly settlers – contemporaries of his father with whom I was so familiar from my own research – convinced me that he had a brilliant memory and eye for detail. I checked the details of what he told me about the battalions moved into Kenya for the preparation of the Abyssinian campaign and found these were accurate. Tony was even able to provide me with the reason why during the war the RAF had been stationed at Wilson Airfield rather than Eastleigh, the newly built aerodrome. He also knew that Joss had been up for promotion shortly before his death. This is not general knowledge; I discovered the fact only through private correspondence between the 24th Earl of Erroll and the MOD.

Throughout my dealings with Tony Trafford, he was nervous about discussing Lord Erroll’s murder on the telephone. In order to protect his identity he chose his own cover name, Mzee Kobe (which means ‘Old Tortoise’ in Swahili). He wrote a twenty-five-thousand-word document for me detailing exactly how and by whom Erroll had been shot. This document, which I shall call the Sallyport papers, took him months of effort to compile and its contents reveal an extraordinary story of intrigue. Trafford died on 25 August 1998 shortly after completing his account. Interestingly, both the Sallyport papers and O’Mara’s correspondence uphold the same theory as to why Lord Erroll was killed.

The resounding implication of my research was that a new portrait of the 22nd Earl of Erroll needed to be made, not only to redress the calumnies, errors and exaggerations which have so tarnished his reputation in the past half-century, but to make clear that there were far more compelling motives for killing Erroll than sexual jealousy.

* Vlei : in South Africa, a shallow piece of low-lying ground covered with water in the rainy season.

*Broughton was to commit suicide in Liverpool.

*In 1903, W. Robert Foran had been in charge of Nairobi police station with the help of only three other European police officers (‘The Rise of Nairobi: from Campsite to City’, The Crown Colonist , March 1950, p. 163)

*KAR = King’s African Rifles.

*Major Hamilton O’Hara, chairman of the Kenya Regiment Association, UK, confirmed this for me after Trafford died.

‘A HAY, A HAY, A HAY!’

Clan slogan: armorial bearing of the Earldom of Erroll

Josslyn Victor Hay was born in London on 11 May 1901, eleven days before the first wedding anniversary of his parents, Lord and Lady Kilmarnock. Their son and heir was fair; his skin would easily turn golden under tropical sun and his blue eyes were mesmerisingly pale. Shortly after his Protestant christening, his proud parents took him to Scotland where, before he could even focus, he was introduced to Slains, the Erroll family seat, near Cruden Bay, about twenty miles north up the coast from Aberdeen. This was where his father Lord Kilmarnock, a diplomat working in Europe since 1900, had been born in 1876. Joss’s mother Lucy would regard the visit to Slains as an important initiation rite for her children, following the same procedure later with Joss’s younger brother and sister. 1

Joss’s brother, Gilbert Allan Rowland Hay, was born in January 1903 at the British Legation in Brussels. Lady Kilmarnock produced her next child, a daughter, soon afterwards: Rosemary Constance Ferelith was born in Vienna on 15 May, in 1904.

The coronation of Edward VII took place when Joss was just over a year old, in August 1902. His parents were over in England for the occasion, prior to their annual holiday north of the border – they were always in Scotland in time for the start of the shooting season on the Glorious Twelfth. It could easily have struck Lady Kilmarnock that one day her son would take his ceremonial place in Westminster Abbey for a coronation, as indeed her father-in-law Charles Gore Hay, the 20th Earl, was doing in 1902: first as Master of Erroll, Page to the Lord Lyon, King of Arms, and next – directly behind the monarch – as Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland. *