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 When it appeared that war between Germany and Britain was a possibility, he had stated that he had withdrawn his support for the Fascist Nazis.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.
Roddy mentioned another source who blamed the same body: the Mercedes-Benz agent in Nairobi in the thirties had told him that the Chief of Police was ordered to have Erroll shot, on account of his Nazi sympathies.
After publication of his second article Roddy had received another anonymous phone call, informing him that Broughton did not kill Erroll, but this tale had a new twist: the real killer had left the country.6
Roddy looked out a file of information for me on the Erroll case – material that had come in to him over the years. One of the letters in his file had come from Mervyn Morgan – the coroner who held the inquest into Erroll’s death in 1941. Morgan had underlined certain words for emphasis and methodically numbered each point he wanted to make:
(1) Firstly, I myself had the last word. That is because I held the inquest on Broughton [sic]. The inquest of necessity had to be adjourned when Broughton was prosecuted. It was resumed after his acquittal and the only possible verdict I could bring in was murder by a person or persons unknown.
(2) The late much married Diana, Lady Delamere, was a wonderful and kind person and let no one dare to suggest otherwise. She loved all animals as her fellow human beings and she had nothing to do with Erroll’s murder. I can make that last observation with confidence since I was one of the first to see the … Buick in the ditch on my early way to work from Karen (my house was next door to the Broughton house). I am fairly confident that I know exactly how it was done, by whom, and at whose instigation, but as no one has been sufficiently interested to ask me I have never given any explanation (which I did not know at the time of holding the Inquest) to anybody and never will.
(3) Broughton after being rightly acquitted by a jury left a note for the Coroner in Liverpool at the inquest of his death.* NB The Liverpool Coroner declined to make public Broughton’s letter and wouldn’t disclose the contents to anyone – he was rightly or wrongly much criticised for his acts and omissions but a Coroner does have almost omnipotent powers.
That fact seems quite unknown to you. If you had contacted me I could have told you at least most of what I know but you didn’t think of it and may not even have known the part my humble self played – a very minor part it is true even though I did have the last word!7
Intriguing though this letter was, by the time I read it Morgan was no longer alive. Another letter in Roddy’s file proved more fruitful. Marked ‘Confidential and not for publication’, it was from an English settler called Kate Challis:
When White Mischief was being filmed in Kenya, a neighbour who worked for MI5 [sic] during and before the war told me that, as it was now over forty years ago, she felt able to say that Errol [sic] was a severe security risk and he was shot, because unlike the Oswald Mosley Nazis who could be interned, Errol’s case was much more complex.8
Further research revealed that the ‘MI5’ agent/neighbour of Kate Challis’s was a woman called Joan Hodgson.9 Three separate sources, two of whom worked or had formerly worked in Intelligence, confirmed that she was a bona fide Secret Service agent: ‘She was nondescript as are so many MI5 and MI6 personnel,’ one of the sources said.10 Another went so far as to hazard that Joan Hodgson was probably working for Section 5 – counter-espionage.11 So, with Joan Hodgson’s testimony, I had it on excellent authority that Lord Erroll had been eradicated by the British Government – but not because he was a Nazi …
I determined to scrutinise Erroll’s life as a whole, to analyse what motives there might have been to get rid of him. Two cuttings from an acquaintance, who’d sent them to me purely because they were connected with Kenya, were to prove surprisingly useful. One, ‘Tarporley Man Puts the Finger on Alice’, led me to Captain Gordon Fergusson, secretary of the Tarporley Hunt Club in Cheshire, whose enthusiasm for collecting data on the subject of Erroll’s murder was indefatigable.12 The second cutting was from the author J. N. P. Watson, a cousin of Dickie Pembroke, a friend of Erroll’s who had been infatuated with Diana. Pembroke had fired the young Watson’s imagination about the Erroll murder and, as a result, Watson had tracked down and befriended a former superintendent in the Kenya Police, Colin Imray, by then living in the south of England, who shared his keen interest in the subject. Imray had discussed the case at length with Arthur Poppy, the officer in charge of the investigation into Lord Erroll’s murder.
Imray regarded the Erroll murder as the ‘crime of the century’. He had joined the force as a ‘rookie’ in 1932, gone to West Africa as a cadet, rising steadily through the force to be awarded the King’s Medal in 1953 for his conduct during the riots in Accra in 1948.13 Imray’s obsession with the Erroll case had begun even before his posting to Nairobi, thanks to meeting Attorney-General Walter Harragin on the Gold Coast in 1948. They had often discussed the case and Harragin had revealed to Imray that he had from the outset been so convinced of Broughton’s innocence that he had considered a nolle prosequi – not proceeding with the case against him.14
In the 1950s during his stint in Kenya, Imray