Joss’s affairs were not as numerous as the public have been led to believe since his death, and he had never impregnated women carelessly. Also, he had had the realism not to marry anybody whose feelings would be hurt by infidelity. Far from corrupting the young – another frequent allegation against him – he had only one love affair with a woman younger than himself – she was twenty-seven. He did not smoke or take drugs; in fact, as far as these habits were concerned, he was abstemious in the extreme.
Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk, who married Lord Erroll’s daughter, fumed about the ‘unprovable scandal about the defenceless dead’ whose only purpose was to ‘sell a gossip column masquerading as history’. Moncreiffe’s loyalty to his father-in-law’s memory made him less impartial than most. Yet there are inaccuracies in White Mischief. Lord Erroll did not move with Idina to a house called Clouds in 1925, as described by Fox. She moved there alone after she and Lord Erroll separated. Nor had Lord Erroll ever found it necessary to close down Oserian, his second home on Lake Naivasha, after the death of his second wife Mary, owing to lack of money. ‘To hell with husbands!’ was Idina’s saying, not his, and at no time did he pose a threat to the marriage of his friends the de Janzés. Such basic inaccuracies show that there is room for other interpretations of Lord Erroll’s life and death.
It is of course by no means unusual for books to contain errors, often at the fault of the publisher. Yet all hitherto published accounts of Lord Erroll’s murder have provoked dissatisfied responses from readers, a reaction that suggests the whole story has not been told before now. As Attorney-General Walter Harragin, who prosecuted for the Crown at Broughton’s trial, observed after his acquittal: ‘Whoever murdered Lord Erroll, Broughton was innocent by law – having been found “not guilty” by the jury after a fair trial.’3 Despite the reams of material about Lord Erroll’s murder, the elementary question still begs to be answered: whodunnit?
‘The great sensation locally has been the murder of poor Joss Erroll. It is indeed ironic that the Ngong road should have proved more dangerous than Tobruk.’
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,