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

Joss’s childhood, however, was very secure. Whether at Huy or touring in Italy, where Castello di Tersatto, Monte Maggiore, was their watering hole, the company that Lord and Lady Kilmarnock kept was wealthy, aristocratic and powerful. Inevitably, their hosts and hostesses held influential positions in Europe or in Britain, and conversation with old money oiled the wheels of diplomacy. From an early age Joss learned the importance of communication, and at his father’s elbow absorbed the workings of the Foreign Office, which endowed him with every advantage when he eventually followed in Lord Kilmarnock’s footsteps. The ‘right’ castles, the ‘right’ schools, the ‘right’ reputations, the ‘right’ clubs, the ‘right’ expectations – all these influences bolstered Joss’s confidence such that he never felt bound by convention. His independence led him later to break with social constraints, taking him into other worlds far beyond the confines of his noble roots. In Joss’s book, the rules of the aristocracy were there to be broken.

A formal photograph of Lord Kilmarnock, taken in the year of Joss’s birth, shows a severe man whose preoccupations were often melancholy and who took his responsibilities seriously. 13 But he was not as forbidding a husband and father as he looked. His writing shows that he lacked neither humour nor perception. Thanks to his love of literature and his imagination, his children learned all the family traditions and legends before they could read. Indeed, encouraging them to learn about the historic struggles of the Hays for themselves would probably have been a good way of introducing them to reading. One wonders whether Joss felt any need to live up to his heroic ancestors. His initiation into Latin and Greek was undertaken early by his father, and it was from him that he inherited his lively sense of beauty – although perhaps at first he would be too readily inclined to see beauty in mere decoration. His sense of the theatrical was an appetite whetted and nurtured by both his parents.

Joss’s mother was handsome and big-boned, given to flirtation, prone to flattery, and of the sort who improved in looks as she grew older. She tended to keep press cuttings about herself, as if requiring proof of her own persona; often such entries were restricted to remarks about her jewels ‘… a superb tiara and necklace of diamonds and pearls’. It was she who taught Joss that pearls must be worn next to the skin, for otherwise they lose their lustre, a statement he repeated often as an adult. 14 Lady Kilmarnock’s coiffure, her gowns and her hats were intended to catch the eye. As a small boy, Joss would stand in her dressing room while the maid brushed her long dark hair, piling it elaborately on to her head, before she dressed and departed for dinner with his father by horse-drawn carriage. 15 Watching his mother’s toilette, handing the hairpins to the maid as she worked, mesmerised Joss as a small boy and sparked a lifelong fascination with this private ritual. Before going to bed, the well scrubbed little Joss would arrive in her rooms to kiss Lady Kilmarnock goodnight. She would playfully check that his face, neck, hands and teeth were clean. Extracting a promise that he had done his ablutions properly, before dispatching him to the nursery to say his prayers she would occasionally insist, out of principle, that he wash his face again. Joss loved the smell of his mother’s soap on the sponge or flannel hanging over her wash-basin, and would breathe in the scent. 16 His mother’s maxim, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’, had a lasting effect on him. He was to become fastidious to a degree and like a Continental male, would pay particular attention to his hands and feet, undergoing regular professional manicures and pedicures. 17

For the first eight years of their marriage Joss’s mother doted on her husband and her children, with whom they both believed in sharing everything. Even in Europe, Slains would never be far from the conversation. All three children visited their Scottish home regularly, and Lady Kilmarnock kept their memories of it alive through postcards. Like all children, Joss and his siblings loved to be terrified as long as they knew that they were perfectly safe, and while in Scotland they enjoyed their introduction to the turbulent family history, with its legends of ghosts and mistletoe, brought to life during walks to local beauty spots made famous by Johnson and Boswell. They would stand on former battle sites and on the lofty cliff at Port Erroll, four miles north of the earlier Slains stronghold. Earthy smells permeated the grasses and flowers through which wild rabbits scampered among the dunes as the sun rose over the icy North Sea. They would go to look at a local curiosity, a strange rock near the shore, where sea-fowls congregated, or peer into ‘Bullers o’Buchan’, ‘a huge rocky cavern open to the sky, into which the sea rushes through a natural archway’. Or they would clamber along the bed of a small stream called the Cruden that fell into the sea at Slains, giving its name to the neighbouring bay – Cruden Bay means ‘Blood of the Danes’, an epithet through which the children learned of the slaughter said to have taken place in the days of Malcolm and Macbeth. As Bram Stoker had discovered, the history of the Errolls was as ‘full of dark rituals, rumours of fertility cults and blood sacrifice as anything that he might have dreamed up for Dracula’. 18

Victor Kilmarnock’s dramatic inclinations would have helped him to convey to his children the family’s mistletoe legend – mistletoe was the Hays’ ‘plant badge’. * According to Thomas the Rhymer’s prophecy, recorded in Frazer’s The Golden Bough , it had grown upon an ancient oak that stood on the Erroll land in Perthshire, and the fate of the family was held to be bound up with the mistletoe that grew on this great oak. For centuries the Hay family had danced around the tree at Hallowe’en. Soon after the 10th Earl’s death in 1636, his Perthshire lands had to be sold off to pay his debts, and somewhat symbolically the oak collapsed.

Lady Kilmarnock’s hoard of cuttings from The Times and other newspapers constitutes more than milestones in the professional life of Joss’s father: they are indications of her pride and affection, her steadfast interest in everything undertaken by ‘Vic’, be it the landing of a fine salmon, speaking well in public, shooting the largest stag of the season or receiving a good book review. Their annual interludes in Scotland contrasted sharply with life on the Continent. Once the royals had departed for Balmoral and Parliament was in recess, just before the Glorious Twelfth, Joss’s family partook of gentlemanly pursuits, taking to the glorious tracts of heather to stalk, to shoot and to fish – luxuries that drained the Hay purses like those of other old Scottish lairds. 19 Joss’s father went deerstalking at Braichie Ballater, a village on Deeside near Balmoral. His wife faithfully recorded Vic’s prowess and annual bag: ‘Spittal Beat 1 stag 13 stone 13 pounds = 6 points’ or ‘Horne Beat 1 stag 15 stone = 7 points’. 20

Blood sports would leave Joss cold – one cannot help but wonder whether his repulsion for killing began in Scotland with the display of these huge dead beasts. He was never squeamish, but unlike his father or his contemporaries he would never kill for the sake of killing.

In the sincere belief that he was preparing his son for the wilder excesses of the Scottish calendar – ‘Burns’ Night, the St Andrew’s Ball at Grosvenor House, the Caledonian Ball, and of course Hogmanay – Lord Kilmarnock introduced him to whisky before he was six. ‘Have a sip,’ he would say whenever the decanter was lifted while Joss was in the room. But Joss did not want a sip.