White Mischief (30 page)

His family has been bound up with that of Scotland and has several times intermarried with Royalty and goes far back into the mists of Scottish history.

Is Broughton bragging? There is no mention of the tragedy of Erroll’s death, or a hint of sadness at the loss of a “great friend,” or even a reference to the unexplained circumstances of the shooting.

In his covering letter to Lady d’Avigdor-Goldsmid. Broughton wrote.

Diana has been loyalty itself to me since my misfortune overtook me, and what happened about her was largely my fault and bad
temper … [He added here the line about Diana’s “disillusionment” with Erroll and the “revelations” that had since come out about him.] So I decided the only thing to do is to resume our life as if nothing has happened, and am quite happy. We are on our way to Ceylon where I have a job of work to do …

He ended the letter on a note of anxiety—with a standard question that occurs in each of his letters of that period that I have seen:

Do write to me darling and tell me truthfully how people have reacted to my case at home and whether you think I shall be able to come back after the war and resume my normal life or not. The worst feature of this b … y case has been having all my private affairs broadcast to the world …

After Diana’s supreme effort during the trial, her rallying to her husband’s cause, the prospect of Broughton reviving his plans to visit Ceylon, subjecting them both to a long sea voyage, must have been unbearable. By now their relationship was paralysed by guilt and suspicion, and Diana was not only frightened of him, she despised him as well. She had no choice but to go with him. Yet Broughton must have been aware, in view of all that had happened, that for Diana such a trip amounted to a form of torture.

Towards the end of August, at a moment when the war in Europe and North Africa looked particularly bad for the allies, Broughton wrote from India to a friend in England:

The Nawab of Bhopal was the best polo player in the World the last time I was in India in 1927 and is a Mohamedan. We stayed at Bhopal and then down to his country Palace 45 miles out where he had a very cheery party (all Indians). It has two lovely swimming pools and he has masses of ponies. Tennis courts etc.. and they all danced out of doors on a laid down floor after dinner about 16 of them. I sat next to the “Begum” (his wife) on one
side at dinner and a really lovely |word omitted) on the other, about 20. They all speak English perfectly. We came on here by train. This is a lovely “Palace” and we have 6 huge rooms and 4 servants to look after us. We have lunch and dinner with His Highness, who takes us out motoring and to see his other 3 palaces and on the lake in a motor launch. This lake is about 30 miles away, and we saw 2 tiger and … 3 leopards coming down to drink. This place might be a million miles away from any War. There are no Europeans and life goes on in exactly the way it did a thousand years ago, except for H.H.’s motors and the motor launch and every modern comfort in his Palaces. I should have said amongst the people. The town is most picturesque with cows (which are sacred animals) all over the streets. Peacocks everywhere, and monkeys everywhere. His Highness has the finest collection of Pearls in the World [Broughton’s capitals], and studs of other priceless jewels. He showed them all to us last night. The collection is valued at 8 millions.

By the end of September Broughton and Diana were back in Kenya and Broughton had begun to write frequently to Mrs. Woodhouse. In November 1941 he wrote:

Darling Marie,

I haven’t heard a word from you since your cable of congratulations. Did you get a long letter I wrote you with notes on my Trial. I went to Ceylon and India after my case was over to do a job of work and came back here end of September last. I had a lovely time in both countries and was entertained lavishly. It appealed to my delicate sense of humour in Ceylon as being just out of jail that the person who entertained me most was the Lord Chief Justice of Ceylon who most respectfully called me “Sir” all the time. I went out and back by the “Bank” Line. Very comfortable boats with very good food, cabins and stewards. Do you remember the effect that baby lobster we had at Southampton on the boat at the beginning of our trip to Madeira had on you. I have taken to farming on a large scale out here, and have put in a thousand acres of wheat, and sell £200 worth of milk a month and have guaranteed the Government to produce a thousand pigs this year and a ton of vegetables a week. I
therefore work all and every day. The difficulties of farming nowadays are awful. One can get no spare parts and there is practically nothing in the shops. Luckily this is a perfect climate and labour is cheap. I pay my labourers 8£ a month so you can have about 20.

I have a very nice small house 10 miles from Nairobi with a really divine garden. Labour is so cheap that I can have 20 gardeners for the cost of one in England. I have 20 acres of grounds with tennis court (hard), swimming pool, 3 ponies. 6 dogs, 2 monkies [sic], 2 mongeese [sic] and peacocks, It has a divine view of the Ngong hills.

I am frightfully homesick. Do write to me tell me what people think of my case at home. I do long to hear from you and all about your dear self.

Give my love to Jim.

My fondest love to you darling.

Jock

Broughton’s worry about re-establishing his position was now becoming an obsession. He had already told his jailer that he would commit suicide if his friends at home rejected him. Two weeks after the murder, some time before his arrest, he had seen the first signs of his ostracisation. He told the court, “Mr. Wheelock [his agent], Mr. Hopcraft [his partner], and Mr. and Mrs. Carberry came to see me, but none of the friends I thought would come to see me came near me.” Soames, as we have seen, had left the country. The Carberrys had also left for Johannesburg soon after the trial. Dickinson had been sent to Abyssinia, Pembroke and Lezard to Cairo. There was no question of speaking to Gwladys after what she had said in court.

And as Carnarvon was cabling his congratulations from White’s, so, across the street at Brooks’s Club, debts were being settled. The Brooks’s betting book records the following entry on May 25th, 1941:

His Grace the Duke of St. Albans bets Sir Mark Grant Sturgis £5 that Sir Delves Broughton will be hanged for the murder of the Earl of Erroll.

Yet Broughton felt the acquittal had changed all that. On his return from Ceylon, he hoped to be both a popular hero and a celebrity. Instead both he and Diana were ignored and shunned, “cut by everyone,” as Kaplan remembered it. Diana was seen as the scarlet woman who had shamed the community. She was now verbally scorned in public, and not only by the officials. The whole gang of public school ex-officers, with one or two exceptions, had now turned against her. Broughton, surrounded with suspicion, was dropped like a hot potato. Bill Allen, on leave from Addis Ababa in June 1941, wrote, “I gathered that consorting with the Broughtons was looked on with an unfavourable eye by Lord Francis Scott, who was then Military Secretary.”

The excommunication was swift and businesslike. The committee of the Muthaiga Club was the first to do its duty and ban them both from its precincts. This extract from a proposed history of the Club, written by a former member who has asked for anonymity, comes from the minutes of the meeting that decided on cancelling the Broughtons’ membership:

Before the committee met in 1941 and before the Annual General Meeting. Lord Erroll was murdered. He was living at the Club at the time and was found shot in a motor car. on his way back from Karen where he had been dining [sic]. In his younger days his career was chequered and he was often in trouble with the Club Committee: latterly he had done an outstanding job of work as Secretary of the Kenya Manpower Committee. The circumstances of Lord Erroll’s death, the titled and well known people involved, plus the fact that he was, a member of the Muthaiga Country Club committee, brought it a great deal of unwelcome, lurid and inaccurate publicity. This went on for some months and reached a crescendo during the subsequent trial of Sir Delves Broughton for murder.

A picture was painted of a Kenya society which, even in a desperate war, could not stop from behaving in a frivolous and lax manner. The Club committee was, not unnaturally, extremely perturbed by events which it was powerless to influence.

However, when a party was given at the Club following the acquittal of Sir Delves Broughton, the Committee, after a Special Meeting, did act strongly about what they considered behaviour which brought the club into disrepute.

Whatever his good intentions, the author cannot cloud history with such discretion. The fact is that the Broughtons were told that they were no longer welcome at the Muthaiga Country Club. The main objection, as the author told me separately, was that “the acquittal of a person for the murder of a member of the Club Committee was being celebrated at the Club.”

Thus life changed dramatically for them both. Broughton was now faced with the very things he dreaded most—loneliness and obscurity—and in his letters the signs of depression began to show. Significantly, perhaps, he began to talk about Erroll. He wrote to Marie Woodhouse, “I always had the sympathy of the general public as he was a professional breaker-up of homes with lots of enemies, and the popular saying in Kenya was, ‘whoever had done it deserved a medal’”—a theme he was to repeat later on. And he began to regret his parting with Vera, echoing the conversation with Gwladys on the day of the funeral. To another English friend he wrote, “I have never had any luck after Vera and I parted after 27 years of married life. It has brought neither of us any luck.” (Broughton is referring to Moyne’s persistent unwillingness to marry her.)

The job of work that Broughton describes was in reality not very demanding—a light routine of office work in Nairobi, while his agent, Wheelock, and his partner, Hop-craft, managed the Lake Naivasha estate and the coffee plantation at Spring Valley. Indeed, Broughton’s office routine came to a halt towards the end of 1941. As he began to talk about Erroll, so he made the one move that showed that neither he nor Diana could ever put his memory away. Broughton, incredibly, moved into Erroll’s house. He rented the Djinn Palace on Lake Naivasha, which had
been empty since Erroll’s death. He even tried to buy it from the trustees’ agents, but he couldn’t find the money. Enroll’s portrait in his Coronation robes was still at the top of the stairs. And there is, to this day, a picture in the hall of Molly Ramsay-Hill reclining on a
canapé
.

Broughton’s fanning land on Lake Naivasha was hardly a convincing reason for such a reckless move. The house, whose garden slopes steeply to the water, and its surroundings are hauntingly beautiful. But Lake Naivasha, then and now, is also a strange and lonely spot which gives off a sense of isolation and of danger as well. A cold breeze blows off the Aberdares, and there is always fresh news of drowning, though the water itself, which gets deeper year by year, looks harmless and placid. It was as if Broughton had gone there on purpose to confront his own desperate loneliness. He was to become intensely unhappy in the house, while his marriage to Diana entered the final stage of its painfully slow death.

One day Broughton went to visit Paula Long, who was recovering in hospital from a serious car accident. He confided to her his main worry, that he would have to resign from his clubs (the Turf, the Guards’, etc.) on his return. She found this odd, but “typical of the vain and sociable.” He said that he thought a service had been performed when Erroll was shot (a repeat of his new theme), that Erroll had “had it coming to him.” She noticed the way he expressed it and decided that he was trying to justify
himself
—and, in effect, confessing to the murder. This finally convinced her that Broughton had done it—a suspicion she had already formed during the trial. She had often walked with him and found him “a perfectly good walker.” But for her the crucial piece of evidence concerns the golf stocking found, charred and blood stained, in the bonfire. Broughton had said he had never worn golf stockings. Mrs. Long not only remembers him wearing them “the whole time,” but even had a photograph to prove it.

Broughton, she said, was a pathetic figure whose
pride had revolted at his humiliations at the hands of Diana and Joss Erroll and at the miserable uncertainty of never knowing what was being planned against him. He was besotted by Diana, she said, even after the trial, and wildly jealous. She described Erroll and Diana dancing, “glued together as if they were making it. It was a
coup de foudre,
and Broughton looked on miserably.”

So, she surmised, Broughton got into the car. wanting to continue discussing the divorce (on one other occasion—the day before the murder—he had also chosen the close quarters of Erroll’s car for an identical discussion). He rode beside Erroll, who may then have said “something cutting,” got out of the car and shot him, either with the car door open, or through the window. He would have had no problem, in her opinion, running or walking back home. In fact, because June almost certainly invented Broughton’s alibi, he could have taken as long as he liked to get back to the house.

These recollections from Paula Long carry considerable weight in the final analysis. Much of what she told Connolly, and me some years later, revealed an uncanny intuition and perception about the events and personalities of the period—qualities for which she is well-known by her acquaintances.

The Broughtons knew almost nobody on the lake and even in that small and interdependent community they were treated as pariahs by everybody, except for one extraordinary man called Gilbert Colvile.

Colvile—only son of Major-General Sir Henry Colvile of Lullington Hall, Derby, and “patron of one living”—had been at Eton with Broughton and Lord Francis Scott. He had become one of the most Africanised of Masai-lovers, and he was among the biggest cattle ranchers in the country. A small, awkward, chinless man, he was also a miser and a hermit, who lived in comparative squalor
with his many dogs, and whose house had the sour, wood-smoke smell of the Masai
boma
. He dressed with conspicuous shabbiness and knew as much about cattle as the Masai themselves. Before long he had turned into Diana’s official protector, not so much against the hostile community as against Broughton himself, who had become miserable and aggressive and whose drinking had begun to dominate his moods.