The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder
Errol Trzebinski
The true story of the life and mysterious murder of the most talked-about and glamorous member of Kenya’ s notorious Happy Valley set.Since Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, was discovered dead in his car with a bullet through his head just outside Nairobi in 1941, speculation has not ceased as to the culprit and motive for his murder. The authorities seemed satisfied with the highly sensationalised trial of the only suspect, Jock Broughton, the cuckolded husband of Erroll’s last lover, Diana. A not-guilty verdict was returned after a baffling display of confusing evidence and clumsy police work. Trzebinski, who has lived in Kenya for 30 years, was not satisfied with the conflicting gossip on the case, none of whose evidence adds up, including that of the celebrated White Mischief by James Fox. In this gripping evocation of a glamorous, decadent and sinister life, Trzebinski uses her renowned biographer’s skill to unlock the mystique surrounding the man, and the mystery enveloping his death. Her investigations lead her to astonishing conclusions about the true motive for his murder and a conspiracy of confusion that finds its source in Whitehall’s War Office.
THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LORD ERROLL
THE TRUTH BEHIND THE HAPPY VALLEY MURDER
Errol Trzebinski
WITH EMMA PERY
Dedication (#ulink_188227f1-1808-5e97-afbc-e105f5cf1137)
For the grandchildren and their childrenespecially the Hon. Harry, Amelia, Laline and Richard Hay
Epigraph (#ulink_b0a17e04-2565-5c90-b575-662293c6a3ae)
‘There’s something the dead are keeping back’
Robert Frost
‘There’s always something more to everything’
Robert Frost
Contents
Cover (#u098c5008-bd12-51e7-ae17-84f412214dfd)
Title Page (#ua1f36a43-2af9-5c0f-b3b4-c813bf484d6c)
Dedication (#uf06bf0db-6601-55d5-8544-a9148b9bc494)
Epigraph (#ua7ed0298-214d-553a-89dc-d638d2dd9b58)
Prologue (#ufc67b488-2435-5090-94f3-83d3f9e8798c)
1 Quest for the Truth (#u6e07b670-d956-5cda-b728-da1ed6d8c7ea)
2 Gnarled Roots (#ue72ca745-90ec-52de-9214-f317cd4467d3)
3 Boyhood and Eton (#ubeb8d0db-068d-5dbf-881c-d5cf1e093439)
4 To Hell with Husbands (#u9ccfe98d-f42c-5154-89d3-13e5d50a434d)
5 Slains (#u6fdd9510-b3b6-5e48-8d8a-2502626de655)
6 Oserian (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Blackshirts in Kenya? (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Josh Posh on the Warpath (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Infernal Triangle (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The Investigation (#litres_trial_promo)
11 The Sallyport Papers (#litres_trial_promo)
12 All’s Fair in Love and War (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)
Poem (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_317f33f0-afa0-5c0e-9c33-80bb9aefeaa1)
On 24 January 1941 Captain the Hon. Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, was shot in the head. His body was discovered in a hired Buick at a crossroads on the Ngong – Nairobi road, a few miles from Nairobi. The murderer has never been found. The prime suspect was Sir Delves Broughton, 11th Baronet, whose wife Diana was having an affair with Erroll at the time. Broughton was tried for the murder, but acquitted. There the matter rested – though not exactly in peace. The shooting of Lord Erroll set off a volley of speculation that resonates to this day.
In the early 1980s James Fox’s White Mischief was published. An intriguing search for the culprit, it had all the ingredients of a classic detective story, enlivened by a cast of glamorous characters determined to be the sources of their own ruin, whether by excesses of drink, drugs or sex or general fecklessness. The main players in White Mischief were all members of Nairobi’s notorious Muthaiga Club – so snobbish that even Kenya’s governors were vetted for membership. Posterity found it convenient to regard Muthaiga almost as a stage upon which these colourful characters paraded their vices in all their glorious decadence. Broughton, the jealous old cuckold robbed of his luscious young bride, wreaked murderous revenge upon his rival. The implication was that he escaped justice thanks to his privileged position in a society that closed ranks and protected its own. Fox drew a dazzling portrait of this clique of 1930s settlers of the Wanjohi Valley – known as Happy Valley – in the Aberdare mountain range about a hundred miles north of Nairobi. His version of events was an indictment of this exclusive society, a perfect story for a post-colonial age when there was no room for sympathy for any European settlers – past or present – on the African continent. During the final years of the apartheid regime in South Africa, the prevailing impression was that white settlers in Africa were simply no good.
White Mischief was rapturously received in Britain and the States. The Wanjohi Valley settlers were not best pleased with the light in which the book portrayed their forebears, however. Its publication caused a furore there – some members of this community begged the Kenya-raised writer Elspeth Huxley to go into print to defend their reputations.
(#litres_trial_promo) The pioneers’ lives had contained almost intolerable hardships and, for the majority of settlers, the struggle to survive the African climate and make a living continued into the generation that included Lord Erroll. Yet they all seemed to have been condemned by White Mischief for the sins of a few. Whenever the book came up in conversation among Wanjohi Valley’s European inhabitants, hackles were raised.
The 1988 film version of White Mischief – with Charles Dance, Greta Scacchi and Joss Ackland playing out the ill-fated love-triangle – reinforced the muck-raking, cinematic treatment necessitating further distillation of plot and characters at the expense of factual accuracy. The release of the film spawned an astonishing amount of hype and resentment. Letters were published afresh, reviews proliferated all over again. Cannibalised articles fomented all the inaccuracies and misrepresentations, again inflaming the second-generation settlers who had known the original characters. There was a variety of reactions from speculation on who the murderer really was to outrage at the kind of coverage the case has received ever since, in which Lord Erroll’s reputation certainly seems to have been exaggerated. He was no angel, but there is not a shred of evidence that he drank heavily; or that he indulged in orgies – accusations that have since his death been levelled at him by gossip-mongers. The only record of an orgy comes from a couple who turned up at Lord Erroll’s first wife Idina’s home Clouds in the early thirties – after she and Joss divorced. They came into the drawing-room that moonlit night to find the room ‘full of writhing bodies’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss had not even been present.
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.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite the reams of material about Lord Erroll’s murder, the elementary question still begs to be answered: whodunnit?
1 Quest for the Truth (#ulink_8bf61b6a-ed0d-548b-aa6d-904fd0415e43)
‘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.
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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
(#ulink_f4594e58-cdd5-5015-9a49-47435ad22c0e) 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.
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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.’
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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.
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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, and that the truth was contained in her mother’s diaries, but not until her mother, June Carberry and Diana Lady Delamere (as Diana Broughton became) were dead could the contents be disclosed. Only then would everyone realise that the end to Erroll’s life was different from what people had been led to believe.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1993 Beatrice MacWatt and the other two women had all died, but her diaries never materialised. At the end of 1994 I gave up the waiting game. But the frustration and delay had given me time to delve. Early in the New Year of 1995 I went to consult my old friend Edward Rodwell – known as Roddy – who lives half a mile away from my Mombasa home as the fish-eagle flies, across Mtwapa Creek.
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.
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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.
(#ulink_839dfd2e-8826-5033-8abd-6c20b797d507) 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!
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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.
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Further research revealed that the ‘MI5’ agent/neighbour of Kate Challis’s was a woman called Joan Hodgson.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) Another went so far as to hazard that Joan Hodgson was probably working for Section 5 – counter-espionage.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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In the 1950s during his stint in Kenya, Imray conducted an experiment to time how long it would have taken Broughton to cover the ground he would have needed to had he shot Erroll. Imray started to follow the route he might have taken from his house in Marula Lane to the crossroads where the Buick was found, but had been forced to abort his experiment on account of lions on the prowl – one reason why he always held that Broughton would have felt too threatened to have contemplated that solo foray.
Imray’s talk of Arthur Poppy as an extremely able officer was thought-provoking, as the investigation of Erroll’s murder had been incredibly inept. Imray pointed out that each new article on the case blamed Poppy for the oversights. Imray had never understood how Poppy – such a thorough investigator – came to give the kind of evidence that was so easily overturned by Henry Morris KC, counsel for the defence. I had sight of Arthur Poppy’s papers, passed to me by his widow, in which there were notes on Lord Erroll’s background dating back to 1927. Poppy had been obsessed with the case, and had never recovered from the damage it inflicted on his career.
Imray mentioned another officer assigned to the murder investigation, Assistant Superintendent Desmond Swayne, who had spoken of ‘a perversion of justice’. Swayne had been convinced that ‘only a very limited inner cabal knew the truth’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Imray could not bring himself to believe Swayne’s suggestion that ‘their guns had been spiked by a higher authority’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Inspector Fentum, the detective in charge of Karen police station, and Imray eventually became colleagues. By the time they met, Fentum had, according to Imray, ‘crawled to his position of Assistant Superintendent’. Like Swayne he had believed that an ‘inner cabal’ had been involved.
At one point Imray broached a subject that appeared to make him nervous. He warned: ‘this information is very near the knuckle’ and should ‘remain in the shadowlands just in case there [is] any reprisal’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Imray also told me about an ex-policeman who had known Diana for years, whom I might be able to persuade to meet me. But Imray cautioned me that he had encountered again and again a ‘certain disinclination’ in police colleagues in Nairobi to discuss this long-past event. At first Imray had put this reluctance down to the fact that the case had not brought credit to the force, but later, despite his own high position in the force, his own fear had prevented him from attempting to gain access to the police files or the court proceedings: ‘to do so would be inviting trouble. There would have been all sorts of complications.’
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Imray also informed me that after his departure from service in Kenya the possibility of recruitment to MI6 had cropped up. Following his interview, he had decided against the job, but confessed to me that at this point he too had come across the theory that Erroll had been ‘rubbed out’ by British Intelligence in Kenya.
The Erroll family have always been dissatisfied with the many salacious accounts of Lord Erroll’s life and death. Dinan, his only child, suffered greatly to see her father so misrepresented. There was even a rumour spread some time after his death that she was not Lord Erroll’s daughter – as if not satisfied with blackening his name, gossip-mongers wished to taint the lives of his progeny also. The physical likeness of her son Merlin, the 24th Earl, to his grandfather Lord Erroll put paid to that rumour.
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The Erroll family had made attempts to find out the truth about their forebear. When I visited the Earl and Countess of Erroll in August 1995 I was handed a file to scrutinise. It contained correspondence from Merlin Erroll’s father, Sir Iain Moncreiffe, going back to 1953. His fruitless search through official archives on Erroll had led him to conclude that something ominous was lurking.
(#litres_trial_promo) Merlin Erroll had drawn similar blanks in 1983 when he had turned to the head of the Search Department in the War Office Records for information on his grandfather. In fact, there had even been an apology from the Ministry of Defence ‘for such a negative report’, and the hope had been expressed that further information ‘might be forthcoming’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was not. It was general knowledge in the family that Erroll had received a posthumous Mention in Dispatches for ‘doing something on the Eritrean border’, but when Merlin entered into correspondence with a Major A. J. Parsons to find out more about it, he did not get far. Parsons pointed out, ‘The major campaign did not start until after he was dead’, and he could confirm only the Earl’s ‘suspicion that Mention in Dispatches can be awarded for both meritorious and gallant service’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had enclosed photocopies of the supplement to the London Gazette which published ‘the award to your grandfather’, and, he pointed out, ‘you will note that the preamble clearly states that awards were made to members of the Staff’, but there was no more detailed indication of how Lord Erroll had earned the Mention. Parsons had requested that the Army Records Centre trace Erroll’s personal service file. Having studied the file carefully, Parsons sent Merlin a copy of Erroll’s Army Form B199A recording his ‘intimate knowledge of France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Kenya Colony and Germany (four years)’ and stating that his French was fluent and his German was ‘fair’.
(#litres_trial_promo) His covering letter said, ‘Unfortunately, it is sparse in content and gives very little detail of his military career, other than those shown … It is regrettable that the file does seem to have been “weeded” quite severely.’
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The weeding of sensitive information is well known to researchers. Material in files closed under the thirty- or fifty-year rule is sometimes burnt or shredded before the files are released.
(#litres_trial_promo) I had been advised by one of the former secret agents I interviewed to watch out for any evidence of arson, missing documents, and papers scattered among alien files, since these could have been acts of sabotage perpetrated by agents in time of war.
(#litres_trial_promo) One example of this was the Public Record Office file at Kew on Sir Henry Moore, Governor of Kenya at the time of Erroll’s murder. Marked ‘secret’, its contents had obviously been shuffled as there was no discernible order to the documents inside.
(#litres_trial_promo) The only month for which the file contained no information was January 1941, the month of the shooting.
Among Merlin Erroll’s papers there was a 1988 article in the Glasgow Herald by Murray Ritchie: ‘Hundred-year Shroud on Happy Valley Mystery’.
(#litres_trial_promo) While researching his article at the Public Record Office at Kew, Ritchie had come across a file listed under the general files for Kenya, marked with an asterisk denoting ‘Closed for a hundred years’. He was informed such closures were highly unusual – normally involving security, the royal family or personal records whose disclosure would cause distress to living persons. Ritchie had taken the number of this mysterious file. In his article he describes how the file had been brought towards him at the counter, but the bearer, pausing briefly to have a word with a colleague, had then carried it away.
Following the release in the 1990s of certain colonial files, I came to see the file that had eluded Murray Ritchie. While there were matters to do with Kenya in it, there was no mention of Lord Erroll. Instead there were some two dozen folios – each stamped ‘secret’, pertaining to Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia. They and their children had been kept under house arrest on Lake Naivasha in 1941.
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I then discovered evidence of another file: it was listed in the Kenya Registers of Correspondence – under ‘Legislative Council. Death of Lord Erroll (103/3)’ – but marked ‘Destroyed Under Statute’. Fortuitously I stumbled across a document in yet another file that must have been transferred from this destroyed file – an instance of ‘papers scattered among alien files’ perhaps. It was a minute from Joss’s brother Gilbert, ‘[w]ho would be glad of any information in connection with the death of his brother’ – dated 27 January 1941.
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By August 1996, I felt that my search for governmental documents on Lord Erroll was a wild-goose chase. The Metropolitan Police Archives had redirected me to the Public Record Office at Kew. They had warned me that there were no records about the policing of Kenya, suggesting I contact the Foreign and Colonial Office, which I did in July 1996 only to discover that my request had already been automatically referred there from the Met. The Foreign and Colonial Office simply referred me back to Kew again, to what transpired to be the Prince Paul file.
I began to realise that I had as much chance of finding any official papers on Erroll, as he had of leaping from his grave in Kiambu to tell me himself what had really happened to him. Even Robert Foran’s History of the Kenya Police
(#ulink_4a2d535b-0402-592d-94f4-f31feb907aa7) is silent on the subject of the Erroll murder.
(#litres_trial_promo) It contains not even the names, let alone any other details, of the team investigating it. References in Foran’s book to relevant issues of The Kenya Police Review led me to believe that I would be able to locate these at least. Yet not a single copy was in the possession of any library in England. I was able to trace only one issue, through a private source. And I could not find any copies of The British Lion, a fascist publication in which, I had been assured, Erroll’s name had appeared. When I applied at Colindale Newspaper Library, I was informed that all three volumes of it that they possessed appeared to have been stolen the year before.
In 1988, Merlin Erroll had invited anyone to come forward who could throw light on his grandfather’s military or political career, observing, ‘Some say that the affair with Diana was a red herring.’
(#litres_trial_promo) One response came from a retired Lieutenant-Colonel John Gouldbourn, who had been with the Kenya Regiment in 1940. Gouldbourn’s view was forthright: ‘I do not doubt that there was a “cover-up” of the murder by the judiciary, the police and the military in that order. There were sufficient persons with an interest for there to be an “inner cabal” … You will appreciate the East African Colonial Forces (the KAR)
(#ulink_646c86d8-468e-50a5-8289-fed07d54e13c) and the South African Division were poised to attack Somaliland. The dates would have been known to Joss Erroll. How discreet Erroll was is anybody’s guess.’
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When I first met John Gouldbourn in October 1995 he had whipped out his army identification papers and handed them to me – ‘so that you know that I am who I say that I am’. In all my years meeting interviewees, this procedure was a first. But for Gouldbourn, accustomed to the etiquette of the Intelligence world, proving one’s identity had become a matter of common courtesy. He provided me with names, but no addresses, of people who he thought would be helpful to my research.
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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’.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.’
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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.
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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.
(#litres_trial_promo) His Intelligence duties involved among other things a top-secret interrogation of Broughton in 1941 entirely separate from the police and the court proceedings.
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Tony Trafford, Kenya-born, was seconded to British Intelligence in 1940.
(#ulink_29cadcff-42ed-542e-b494-17e293290318) 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.
* (#ulink_5937dc41-3718-53b7-8736-a9b690333839)Vlei: in South Africa, a shallow piece of low-lying ground covered with water in the rainy season.
* (#ulink_1baf60ed-30a6-5e92-8f14-fe7444333be3)Broughton was to commit suicide in Liverpool.
* (#ulink_9fc5da5f-6c02-5df2-a90c-ac09a7766736)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)
* (#ulink_ed6c1bc4-f08e-57bb-b9e7-358906f353e2)KAR = King’s African Rifles.
* (#ulink_93e2da73-4e20-529f-a8c7-0e3f230a04aa)Major Hamilton O’Hara, chairman of the Kenya Regiment Association, UK, confirmed this for me after Trafford died.
2 Gnarled Roots (#ulink_b62fc9f9-b404-5cf3-a7ac-60472b5b6124)
‘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.
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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.
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From the twelfth century, when reliable records of its activities began, the Erroll family history had been tumultuous, a curious mixture of glorious heroism and despicable double-crossing. Like Joss, a number of Erroll ancestors had their lives prematurely curtailed, though many fell courageously in battle, defending their faith and their King. Joss was descended from a steadfast line of military men and diplomats whose traceable origins go back to the Norman conquest, though family lore has it that the Hays were already performing acts of heroism in Scotland in AD 980. William de Haya of Erroll, the first Chief of the Hay Clan, who came to Scotland in about 1166 as butler to the Scots king William the Lion, was sent to the newly crowned King John of England in 1199 to negotiate a truce between the battling factions, and the return of Northumberland to Scotland.
William de Haya provides the earliest example of the Hay men’s tendency to marry with a view to increasing the family fortune. He married Eva of the Tay Estuary, who brought him Pitmilly in Fife and probably the Angus lands as well as the falcon-lands of Erroll.
(#ulink_7c84cd98-a27b-5580-bb9e-5ab8dbb05f4c) However, as the Hay estates seldom generated enough income to cover the costs of upkeep and family lifestyle, debts built up that were passed down the generations. Thus the Erroll family fortune gradually dwindled over the centuries and, when Joss’s turn came, ‘there would be little for the 22nd Earl to inherit’.
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Sir Gilbert Hay of Erroll, 5th Chief, was created Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, an office combining the functions of Secretary of State with that of Commander-in-Chief,
(#ulink_4ad39c71-0278-59a2-89e2-bb49a82614f5) by King Robert the Bruce in 1314 for helping to defeat the English at Bannockburn, leading a thousand horses to the battlefield to do so. Sir Gilbert’s service to Robert the Bruce established a tradition of loyalty to the Scots Crown which earned the family many privileges and granted them much local power. They could levy taxes on their tenants, raise an army and dispense justice on wrongdoers. Gilbert was also given Slains Castle, which stood on the coast of Aberdeenshire about fifteen miles south of Peterhead, in recognition of the part he had played in the war against Edward II. The name ‘Slains’ evokes but mildly the slaughter which befell this family. For the Hays were nothing if not courageous. Eighty-seven of them fell with James IV at the battle of Flodden in Northumberland in 1513.
However, the corrupting influence of power was fully in evidence too. Plenty of scandals – beheadings, imprisonment, treason, suicide – occurred in the Erroll dynasty, but there has been only one murder.
Three strong family characteristics would surface in the Errolls over the centuries: an inclination for politics, a natural penchant for subversion and a tendency to hedge their bets, the latter a useful survival mechanism. These qualities abounded in Francis, the 9th Earl. He collaborated in the Catholic rebellion of 1594 with George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. The 9th Earl had always been a Catholic, and his father and grandfather had both been staunch supporters of Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic party. James VI was lenient towards Francis for his part in the rebellion, the quid pro quo being that Francis’s son, the 10th Earl, be educated at court as a Protestant. But that was not the end of the story. In 1594 James marched north to supervise in person the burning of Slains Castle, reducing it to a ruin and giving rise to the differentiation between ‘Old Slains’ and ‘New Slains’ used by the Erroll family ever since. After the destruction of Old Slains, the Errolls moved seven miles away, north-east of Cruden Bay, where Francis initiated the mammoth construction project that was to be their next castle.
The 10th Earl was dismissed – possibly unfairly – as extravagant. It had cost him so much to attend the coronation of Charles I that he was compelled to dispose of his ancestral estates. Attending a coronation was a costly business for families as grand as the Errolls. They would be expected to provide an impressive train of retainers, which on one occasion included ‘eight mounted esquires, four pages, ten grooms, twenty-five marshalmen … and a large body of highlanders’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In addition the 10th Earl was continuing the construction of ‘New Slains’, which would take a hundred years.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is clear that by now the precariousness of the family fortune was a feature – and a thorny issue for its scions – of the Errolls’ history.
New Slains was the Scottish seat where Joss would get to know his great-grandmother Eliza Gore and his grandparents. It had left so deep an impression on him as a boy that he would name his first home in Africa after it. Joss and his siblings would occupy Slains Castle for only a few weeks at a time, but the place was ever-present in family conversation and had obviously captured the imagination of this intelligent child. What lad could resist stories of the wagers made in times gone by within the Erroll household on the chances of walking all the way round the castle’s outer wall without falling off. It was built so close to the cliff edge that one of its walls virtually overhung the ocean. The most famous victim of this dare-devil exercise was one of the Hay butlers, who fell to his death two hundred feet below the castle.
The assumption was that Joss would inherit Slains. Therefore, like the heirs before him, he learned by anecdote of its romantic history: how Slains came to be the principal landing-place for undercover Jacobites, as well as the centre of subversive activity at the start of the eighteenth century when Scotland and England were attempting to negotiate what became the 1707 Act of Union between the two countries. The wife of the 12th Earl, née Lady Anne Drummond, was responsible for ‘victualling the French ships’ that carried Jacobite agents to Scotland – notably Captain Nathaniel Hooke.
(#litres_trial_promo) The 13th Earl spent time in France, scheming among intelligence gatherers and spies at court.
Machiavellian tactics, the playing-off of one side against the other while pretending to serve both, had become second nature to the Hays of Erroll. The conclusion drawn by one government spy about the 14th Countess, who inherited the title on the death of her brother, the unmarried 13th Earl, was that she was a ‘very intriguing and wily lady as is any in Britain’. Being an ardent supporter of the Jacobite cause in the lead-up to their last rebellion, in 1745, whenever circumstances called for secrecy she ‘had written for concealment in milk’. Obviously, the 14th Countess’s diplomatic skills were also considerable, for she managed to keep her titles and estates, whereas many of her Hay relatives’ reputations suffered for their involvement in the Forty-five. She was also greatly admired for her physical courage: ‘that magnificent old lady … only with considerable difficulty’ was dissuaded from leading the Clan in person to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie, whose army set off for England under the command of her chamberlain.
In 1758, when he succeeded his childless aunt, James Boyd, the 15th Earl of Erroll, took the surname of Hay. Having officiated as Lord High Constable at the coronation of George III, and while under suspicion of being both Catholic and Jacobite, he was entrusted with conducting the King’s fiancée, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, to London – which inevitably involved him in huge expense, in addition to that incurred by attending the coronation. According to the Hay family, the escort mission was deliberately and needlessly drawn out in order to ruin James financially, so much was he mistrusted.
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Nor did the 16th Earl, George, manage to inspire confidence in those who held the reins of power. Apparently, while drunk, he had blabbed about an official secret entrusted to him by Mr Pitt, the Prime Minister. Having leaked this ‘confidence ill-advisedly to a so-called friend, who promptly published it together with the source … he determined to destroy himself’ and committed suicide soon after his faux pas.7 To the Errolls who came after, George Hay’s legendary remorse was a stark warning against intoxication. Indeed, George’s descendants seem to have learned from somewhere – perhaps their forebear’s indiscretion had been but a momentary lapse in an otherwise dutiful career, or maybe his suicide had galvanised the next generation into facing responsibilities at a young age – that it was high time to clean up the Erroll family record.
The 17th Earl’s son and heir died honourably – in the typical fashion of his ancestors, defending king and country – at the battle of Quatre-Bras in 1815 at the age of only seventeen. Also contributing to the reversal of the Erroll fortunes, Joss’s great-great-grandfather, the 18th Earl of Erroll, William George Hay, agreed to marry one of the future King William IV’s illegitimate daughters. In 1820, through this match at the age of nineteen, the Earl re-established favour with the English monarchy. Joss’s great-great-grandmother, Eliza Fitzclarence, was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Clarence and his mistress Mrs Jordan. Eliza was one of ten children, all given the surname Fitzclarence, but popularly known as the ‘Great Illegitimates’. Several beguiling aspects of Mrs Jordan’s character would turn up in Joss; besides his gift for the theatrical, he would possess her ability to charm for ever those who fell in love with him. Friends and lovers alike would remark that he was the most entertaining of companions, as much for his joie de vivre as for his bawdiness.
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The Duke of Clarence acceded to the throne in 1830 as William IV and thereupon improved the status of the ‘Great Illegitimates’. His eldest son was given the title Earl of Munster; the rest were awarded the style and precedence of children of a marquess. In the hand-out of honours, as Eliza’s husband, Joss’s great-great-grandfather was made a peer of the United Kingdom, styling himself Baron Kilmarnock, and was appointed Master of the Horse to Queen Adelaide. The Errolls stayed at court until the King’s death in 1837.
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Joss’s great-grandfather, the 19th Earl, married another Eliza, whom he met in Montreal. This Eliza, the daughter of General the Hon. Sir Charles Gore, was a person of enormous spirit. She accompanied her husband to the Crimea, and throughout the campaign they slept rough, forgoing even the simple comfort of a campbed. Battle-weary, they both returned to Slains to face the daunting task of keeping the estate from bankruptcy. Eventually, in 1872, Eliza became Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Victoria. When her husband died at Slains in 1891, she buried him at Cruden, outliving him by twenty-five years. Joss got to know her on his intermittent visits to Scotland and also while he was at Eton. Towards the end of her life Eliza occupied a grace-and-favour dwelling at Kew, where she died in 1916.
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A portrait of the 19th Earl which hung over the chimney-piece at Slains inspired a character in a Bram Stoker novel. Bram Stoker visited Slains at least twice and, having hiked along the two-hundred-foot cliffs to visit Joss’s great-grandfather, found at Slains ‘the furious contentment he wanted’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Inspired by meeting the Hay family, Stoker chose the original castle Slains, then in ruins, as the setting for his Dracula book.
(#litres_trial_promo) With so vivid a past on which to draw, small wonder that the Hays bobbed up in literature. Joss, too, would appear en passant – posthumously – in works of fiction. In Justine, the first volume in the Alexandria Quartet set in Egypt just before the Second World War, Lawrence Durrell features ‘Erroll’ as a member of a dawn duck-shooting expedition, during which a political assassination occurs.
Over the centuries the Errolls played host to many distinguished visitors at Slains, just as Joss would do one day in Africa. The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson visited Slains with Boswell during their tour of the Highlands. Johnson concluded that ‘the situation was the noblest he had ever seen’.
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By the time Joss was born, Slains, whose 4,249 acres produced in 1903 an annual income of £9,599, was still the principal residence of his grandfather the 20th Earl. The Erroll family also owned Walls, at Ravenglass in Cumbria, a home with a landholding of its own – which, in the long-held Erroll tradition of wealth-increasing marriages, had originally come into the Erroll family through Joss’s grandmother – and an estate in Northumberland known as Etal.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss’s grandfather was Lord-in-Waiting to King Edward VII, and during his reign lived at Carlton Terrace in London.
The picture that emerges of Joss’s father shows a responsible and pensive young man. Married at twenty-four, he set out on his career as a diplomat. His first posting was to the British Legation in Brussels, as an attaché. He also harboured literary ambitions and had quietly taken up writing fiction in his last year at Eton. Inspiration seems to have followed Bram Stoker’s first visit to Slains. After the novelist left, Victor began ‘sloping off’ to work in his father’s library, writing away, drawing on images of his own ancestral pile for his fictional ‘Glamrie Castle’. During his time at Cambridge, when the Diplomatic Corps already beckoned, he never gave up his dream of becoming a writer. His first novel, Ferelith, was published in 1903 and was warmly received.
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Many family characteristics showed up in the 22nd Earl. His genetic inheritance, at least, was rich, even if in material terms he was heir to little. His creativity and the easy handling of power that had been bred into him would serve him well when he assumed political responsibilities in Kenya, even if his atavistic defiance of authority did not. Indeed his life was to be yet another colourful and dramatic chapter in the family history – but with important departures from family tradition. Like his ancestors he would enjoy political intrigue, but unlike them he had no taste for bloodthirsty solutions. By an ironic twist of fate, he would die in military uniform as did his ancestors, though not in the front line nor by public execution.
* (#ulink_f014116d-f5fd-5105-a882-246a920a7b8a)The Earl of Erroll takes precedence in Scotland before dukes and every other hereditary honour, after the Blood Royal. Joss’s grandson, Merlin, 24th Earl of Erroll, still holds the hereditary titles of Lord Hay, Baron of Slains, the Mac Garadh Mor and 33rd Chief of the Clan Hay. He also holds the office of 28th Lord High Constable of Scotland.
† (#ulink_3a953b5d-3703-590b-b0f4-99963c7b6961)Apocryphal though the legend may be, it is said that after a falcon had encompassed a circuit seven or eight miles long by four or five miles broad over a tract of land called Enrol (sic), the Hay family became lords of that barony.
* (#ulink_d90cd511-373c-50b2-b6ba-bc8496f95363)In the absence of a male heir, this title descends through the female.
3 Boyhood and Eton (#ulink_1cfe30de-e27e-5b15-8dd6-e65a4152dc01)
‘My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay.’
Edward II, Marlowe
Joss’s first word was ‘Josh’, which he liked to say over and over again. His parents, humouring him, made a pet name of it: ‘Josh Posh’. The child enjoyed the rhyming sounds, and would wander about chuffing ‘Josh Posh, Josh Posh’ like a confident, well stoked steam engine.
(#litres_trial_promo) Not much is known about his early schooldays. Fortunately, some of Lady Kilmarnock’s albums and scrapbooks – a doting pictorial record – have survived. Through these we catch glimpses of Joss’s development from birth until the age of eight along with the progress of his brother and sister, Gilbert and Rosemary. Interspersed with snapshots, Lady Kilmarnock pasted in miscellaneous scraps – raffle tickets, billets for the Ostend – Dover mail boat in which the family sailed regularly to and from Europe; picture postcards from all manner of places; the sheet of order for the ‘Blessing of the Sea’, a ceremony at the beach, La Digue at Middelkerke; old theatre programmes; invitations; press cuttings and menus. These provide an overview of her own activities with her husband, as well as those of the formative years of their offspring. Resonating through Joss’s boyhood were not only the sounds of the bagpipes and the clatter of hooves on cobbles, but the sighing of string quartets; and tempering the salty air of Scotland’s east coast was the smell of newly baked apfelstrudel – although there was never any suggestion that strudel was better than oatcakes or shortbread. The first eight years of his life are laid out in the albums – sometimes chronologically, sometimes not – as if from time to time Lady Kilmarnock has been called away suddenly, her peaceful contemplation of past events disrupted, perhaps, by the children themselves.
The Kilmarnocks did not enjoy the stability of a permanent home during Joss’s childhood. Perhaps their peripatetic existence brought the family all the closer emotionally as they followed Lord Kilmarnock’s career across Europe, having to get to know new places and make new friends at every stage. It certainly made for diversity, and Joss must have acquired a precocious polish and sophistication from such a varied exposure to life abroad. He would never settle in Britain, thanks to the wanderlust acquired in childhood.
Joss’s first home was in Belgium, from 1901 until 1904, at 8 rue du Taciturne in Brussels, where his father was 3rd Secretary at the British Legation.
(#litres_trial_promo) In May 1904 Lord Kilmarnock was posted to the British Legation in Vienna and promoted to 2nd Secretary two years later. From October 1907 he worked for some months at the Foreign Office in London and then in Stockholm until his posting to Tokyo, which came through in early 1913. He was promoted to First Secretary in July of that year, while in Japan. After his return, in 1915, he was sent back to the British Legation in Belgium, then based in Le Havre because of the war. Joss’s parents spent three years in Le Havre, then in July 1918 they were off to Copenhagen. From January 1920 until mid-1921, Lord Kilmarnock was Chargé d’Affaires in Berlin. His final posting was as British High Commissioner on the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, in Coblenz.
The Kilmarnocks’ life at the British Legations was very grand – celebrating the King’s birthday, dining with the Empress Eugénie de Winterhalter or the Habsburgs at the Vienna Hofburg, meeting the Duke of Teck or Lord Boothby on some diplomatic errand. Regular callers at the rue du Taciturne during Joss’s infancy were Prince and Princess Albert of Belgium, with their sons Princes Leopold and Charles. (Crown Prince Leopold would be in the same year as Joss at Eton and accede to the Belgian throne in 1934 when his father’s reign was cut short in a mountaineering accident.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Early exposure to the faubourg life ensured that Joss would not grow up to be a conventional Englishman. His ability to master foreign tongues came naturally, his acute ear helped along by the chatter from his mother’s maids be they Austrian, Flemish, French or Scandinavian. His sense of tone, pitch and modulation was almost faultless. He was a gifted mimic, a talent which he enjoyed showing off. If he went too far, the Kilmarnocks would remonstrate, somewhat indulgently, at his high spirits, ascribing them to ‘the Mrs Jordan coming out’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss was fluent in English, French and German even before going to school.
In Brussels, one of the earliest snapshots of Joss was taken while he was being wheeled in his pram along the Bois de la Cambre at the end of Avenue Louise, as Princess Clémentine en promenade dashes by in her carriage and pair. A swansdown and satin bonnet is tied firmly under his chin; Joss’s fine blond locks were otherwise kept off his face with a ribbon. In a photograph of him taken when he was three, dressed in white flounces and mounted on a donkey, posing for the camera, one could be forgiven for mistaking him for a little girl. Sailor suits came later. Lady Kilmarnock’s boys wore frocks of white lawn, pin-tucked, embroidered or frilled, and with puffed sleeves.
(#litres_trial_promo) A stark change in Joss’s appearance occurred when he was four when Lady Kilmarnock decided his hair could be barbered. Almost unrecognisable, he suddenly looked like a real little boy, dressed in shorts, a warm, dark double-breasted coat with silver buttons, boots and a cap.
Throughout Joss’s boyhood Lord Kilmarnock perpetually had ideas in development, from light sketches to full-length plays. In March 1903 he had staged the Dîners de Têtes at the Café Riche in Brussels, and had been working on a tragedy set in a classroom, for six men and three women, The Anonymous Letter, which would be published the following year.
(#litres_trial_promo) Few realised that Joss’s father was a published dramatist. He had always written under his nom de plume ‘Joshua Jordan’ – a tribute to his actress forebear – but now, with new-found confidence, he would publish under the name Victor Hay, Baron Kilmarnock. Two more of his titles were staged in the suburbs of London during Joss’s twenties – The Chalk Line and The Dream Kiss.7
In April 1904, Lady Kilmarnock warned her two little boys that the bulge in her stomach was a baby, so that their sister’s arrival would come as no shock. Rosemary Constance Ferelith Hay’s christening caught the imagination of the press when the entire family descended from Scotland upon Vienna. The newspapers announced that Princess Charles Fürstenberg and Lady Muncaster were her godmothers; her godfathers were her uncles, Victor Mackenzie of the Scots Guards (Lady Kilmarnock’s brother) and Lieutenant the Hon. Sereld Hay RN. ‘Ferelith, it may be remembered, is the title of the book published last year by Lord Kilmarnock,’ one columnist observed. Princess Charles Fürstenberg was the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Emperor Franz Joseph’s wife, Elisabeth. The Kilmarnocks and their children went to Hungary many times to stay with the Fürstenberg family. In due course, the Fürstenbergs’ daughter Antonia married the Duke of Schwarzenberg, whose palace in the heart of Vienna stood just round the corner from the British Legation.
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In Vienna the family occupied an apartment in an enormous house which dwarfed the tiny church next to it, standing in the quiet, tree-lined Metternichgasse. Life was more sophisticated among the Viennese than among the Belgians.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sunday mornings in Vienna would see the Kilmarnocks among the congregation at the Stefans-kirche at the same service as the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph, and they would dine at the Belvedere with him too.
(#litres_trial_promo) One of the earliest pictures of Joss in Austria shows in the background Château Neuville, where the family stayed at Huy twice a year. Joss became accustomed to café society, the cobbled streets, the Spanish Riding School and the shop windows displaying Sachertorte, a favourite Viennese delicacy. He would have walked across one of the city’s most beautiful squares, the historic Judenplatz, where the composer Mozart had once lived, with its plaque – ‘Angry flames raged through the city and atoned for the dreadful sins of the Hebrew dogs’ – marking the spot where in 1421 eight hundred Jews killed themselves following the accusation that they had used the blood of babies in religious ceremonies. Joss came to know the buildings of the Ringstrasse, returning there later as a budding diplomat, when he was saddened by the changes in its inhabitants wrought by the Great War.
Like other Edwardian children, the Hay offspring travelled with an entourage, although Lady Kilmarnock seems rarely to have left them for long periods in the sole charge of nannies. Photographs of annual gatherings at Slains display, in fading sepia, images of themselves, their friends, their maids, their cooks, their grooms, their clothes, their pets – including Bonci their father’s Jack Russell terrier.
One of Lady Kilmarnock’s own sketches of Joss stands out particularly from the pages of her albums, apparently inspired by an incident in the garden of Walls, the house in Cumbria that belonged to Joss’s grandmother, where the Kilmarnocks fetched up each year. Named after the remains of Roman ruins in the grounds of Muncaster Castle,
(#litres_trial_promo) Walls was a typically gloomy Victorian pile, all the more so for being ‘tucked away in a wood’. The sketch captures much of Joss’s impulsive nature; one of his chief characteristics was his unpredictability. Lady Kilmarnock portrays him as a cavalier in miniature, complete with sash and double lace collar.
(#litres_trial_promo) For all her adoration of him – Joss was her favourite child – she seemed to sense that his spontaneity might prove to be his undoing. In front of his outstretched toe lies a huge carved stone head, severed from its body. It looks as if Joss has just toppled this massive object, twice his own size. Her caption ‘Josh Posh on the warpath’ reinforces the idea. With uncanny maternal insight, her portrait of Joss unwittingly foreshadowed trouble ahead.
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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo)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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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.
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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’.
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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’.
(#ulink_885b18fe-a15b-5a76-8e42-d712f32d523d) 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.
(#litres_trial_promo) 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’.
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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.
‘No, thank you.’
‘Come on, just a little sip,’ cajoled his father. ‘Try.’
‘No, thank you, sir.’
‘Just try.’
His father’s ‘lessons’, while well intentioned, constituted an early conflict, and since often the first exercise of power is in denying someone something, it is not difficult to imagine Joss’s private satisfaction when he discovered that one could reject a request, even from one’s father. However, since the boy was well mannered, he would eventually give in and take a sip, just to have done with the matter. That scene was to be re-enacted many times. Joss’s acute sensitivity to smell meant that he was never able to stomach the odour, let alone the taste, of whisky. His adult drinking habits would be confined to the occasional sip of wine, and even then, more as a courtesy to others who were drinking than for his own pleasure.
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For all his delicacy in the matter of hunting and drinking, no one ever called Joss faint-hearted. He would become an excellent shot, riding well and hard on the polo field; and by the age of seven, when in England, he rode to hounds with his parents, going out with packs such as the Marquess of Exeter’s – accompanying them at Guthrie, Lumley Castle, Burghley House and Clifton Hall. Once the choice was his alone, he preferred going out on foot with draghounds or playing ball games – polo, football, squash racquets, tennis and cricket – and he would excel at each.
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As time went by, Joss’s brother and sister could not help noticing that Joss was the apple of his mother’s eye. No doubt she loved all three deeply, but her partiality eroded any chance there might have been of Joss and Gilbert being close. Their aloofness towards one another affected Rosemary too. Joss was unshaken by their baby sister’s arrival. Nearly four years old when she was born, he was already certain of his place, tending to feel more loved, more sure and more deserving of his mother’s attention than either of his siblings. Not surprisingly, Gilbert and Rosemary grew closer, regarding themselves as a pair. Enjoined against Joss, they may actually have had an easier ride as youngsters, and they would remain close as adults, although by then Joss had disappeared to Africa. Gilbert would become a quiet, reliable family man – to an almost plodding degree – never quite managing to live down the differences between himself and the more flamboyant Joss.
Joss’s interest in clothes and dressing up was due in part to his father’s interest in things Thespian – dancing, literature, music, costume and even lighting. Naturally, all productions by the Kilmarnocks were put on for charity. Joss was the audience to everything in rehearsal at home and thus became au fait with the underpinnings of stage production. In plays such as ‘Le Cours de Danse de Monsieur Pantalon’ his parents performed the Highland schottische in kilts for ‘the assembled distinguished company of Viennese society’. Joss’s father adapted this entertainment from the classic Harlequin and it would become integral to Joss’s Christmas activities. Lady Kilmarnock’s fund-raising in Brussels was undertaken with a Monseigneur and Madame Le Comte de Flandre, with whom, heading the Committee for the Scotch Kirk, she instigated fetes, ‘fancy fairs’, dinners, balls and masquerades. Joss developed his astonishing eye for detail as a child through watching his parents as they debated issues such as: should Harlequin dress in the ‘torn’ or in the ‘patched’, or in the stylised Victorian pantomime costume?
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Joss would soon slip into playing, posing and speaking in the style of whichever country he and his family happened to be living in. At home he was encouraged to cast inhibitions away; because he was funny his parents enlisted him to mimic or join in as the adults went through their lines, singing songs and doing dance routines. The importance of make-up, lighting and – most vital of all for an actor – timing Joss learned from his father, as well as how to draw upon the classics, recasting men in drag, setting an ancient piece in modern costume, giving a fresh twist to an old theme. One day Joss would give several hundred weatherbeaten colonials the impression that they had stepped into the Opera House in Vienna.
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The effects of these theatrics learned from his parents would be revealed in many ways later on. His interest in costume would border on fetishism. His mother’s fine clothes and sophistication triggered an acute awareness of female attire and scent in Joss – always the first attributes he noticed in a woman.
Lady Kilmarnock was hardly ever far away from him during his childhood, and when she was he must have felt her absence acutely. He was seven years old when she suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown, following the miscarriage of her fourth child, a son who had been born prematurely. Lady Kilmarnock needed privacy during this period of misfortune – the family had been staying with Count Hugo and Countess Ilona Kinsky in Bohemia at the time of the tragedy. Determined never to forget the loss of her third son, she marked the infant’s passing in a sketch in purple ink – mourning the tiny ‘Sacha Louis’ suspended in a shawl from the beak of a miniature stork, and recording his name in mirror writing. Her children were quite unaware of the disaster. Their mother was confined to bed, while they were taken up with the world of the gymkhana and polo matches at the Kinskys’ at Chlumetz, Bohemia. The Kinsky family were passionate equestrians: ‘The great challenge of every year … was the steeplechase of Pardubitz.’ In Europe this competition was recognised as the world’s most difficult course and so it was an occasion when ‘they could show off their prowess on horseback to the full – in other words – the Kinskys could win outright’.
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Lord Kilmarnock played a good deal of polo himself, and on his eighth birthday Joss was among the spectators at the Parc Club in Budapest, where his father was competing. He would develop a good eye for the ball, though his reflexes were to be more mercurial. Joss would later help to improve standards of polo in Kenya, establishing and encouraging new young teams.
The event that inspired Joss’s lifelong passion for beautiful cars also occurred in Hungary, on an earlier visit to Budapest when his parents took him to the Magyar Automobile Club, an event ‘with floats and fancy dress’. Joss experienced first-hand the dramatic changeover from horse-drawn traffic to automobiles. His mother’s hats now had to be clamped on with netting and veils as they charged through Bohemia, faster and faster, a journey that was repeated the following spring when Joss found himself again sitting in the back of an open tourer en route for Lauschin Castle to stay with his parents’ friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whose later love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke in Italy at Duino inspired his Duino Elegies.
(#litres_trial_promo) Before going on to Pardubitz they stayed at Csazany Streczhof, attending ‘a peasant wedding’ at Ivanc where Joss’s parents are pictured with a stuffed bear.
(#litres_trial_promo) His father was already in the habit of buying expensive automobiles of the latest design. During the next decade motor-cars would epitomise the tremendous romantic appeal of speed, power and status. Once Joss was allowed to get behind the wheel himself, he would be as discriminating as his father – his favourite model of all was to be the 1937 black Straight Eight Buick.
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Every jaunt made by the Kilmarnocks tended now to be interpreted in mileage and horsepower. Their digressions took them on trips to Paris, Grasse, Gorges de Loup, Nice, Cannes and Monte Carlo. Whenever in Monaco, they stayed at the Hermitage Hotel so as to have a flutter at the opulent Casino Salle. Perhaps thanks to the example set by his parents’ busy lives, as an adult Joss was always highly organised, sticking punctually to a packed routine.
Whether the loss of Sacha Louis was so mentally dislocating that Lady Kilmarnock afterwards lost all motivation for keeping records we can only surmise, but the pages in her album dwindled to emptiness at this time. The last photograph shows Joss and Gilbert with Gustav Adolph, a grandson of Gustav V of Sweden, sharing a sledge and dressed in Fair Isle caps and pullovers against the icy blast, while staying with the King’s family.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lady Kilmarnock seems to have been at a watershed in her life with Vic, too. The following March, 1909, he packed her off to Bournemouth for complete rest by the sea. Once she had recuperated, the pattern of Joss’s pre-bedtime audience with her resumed seamlessly. Kissing his mother goodnight would remain important to him, and their closeness may have seemed to border on the incestuous when Joss kept up these childhood routines into his twenties.
(#litres_trial_promo) The obsession with his mother may provide a clue as to why he was drawn towards older women. Joss was always on excellent terms with his darling mother and Lady Kilmarnock never became disillusioned with him, through all vicissitudes.
Mother and son were to be parted again in 1914, when Lord Kilmarnock was posted to Tokyo as First Secretary. If her absences were difficult for Joss to adjust to at the time, they also seem to have taught him valuable lessons. He gained more independence, and learned that love can endure absences; even after a long bleak year of separation, their mutual affection was as strong as ever. Indeed, Joss’s close relationships would tend not to be affected by distance or time, enduring for life despite long absences.
Between 1909 and 1911, Joss and Gilbert were taught by a private tutor in Stockholm. Harder parents than the Kilmarnocks could have dispatched their sons off to English boarding school at a far earlier age. However, Joss was ten and Gilbert eight by the time they were sent to A. M. Wilkinson’s School, Warren Hill, in Eastbourne, to prepare them for entry into Eton.
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In 1911, the summer before the boys started boarding, the Kilmarnocks were in London for the coronation of George V on 22 June, where Joss acted as page to his grandfather, the 20th Earl. As a doting mother, Lady Kilmarnock must have been miserable at the thought of her sons’ impending departure to Eastbourne, where rules and conditions could have come only as a rude shock to two little chaps who had never before been exposed to the bleakness of boarding school. A cousin of Lord Kilmarnock’s, part of the Foley branch of the family, who lived at Westbrook Meads near the boys’ prep school, ensured steady communication about their progress and welfare.
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In 1910 the 20th Earl took out a five-year lease on Barwell Court, a manorhouse in Surrey. He had finally admitted financial defeat: the upkeep of Slains was too much. Plans for selling it were now mooted and a drift southwards must have seemed logical. Possibly, the Earl wanted to be closer to the family, with his grandsons at boarding school in the south and his elderly mother Eliza living in her grace-and-favour apartment at Kew. At any rate the house became a base for Joss and Gilbert and was given as their home address on their school records.
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Barwell Court’s colourful history appealed to the boys. In the early sixteenth century it had belonged to Merton Priory. Then during the Reformation the manor had been surrendered to the Crown, with the rest of the Catholic priory’s possessions. Henry VIII had allegedly kept a mistress here. The cellar housed a four-foot-deep pond, or ‘underground fish larder’, where the monks had kept fish for their Friday meals. Barwell Court’s park was made for exploration by boys of Joss’s and Gilbert’s age, with its noble trees, a ‘nut walk’ and a ‘pond teeming with carp … where once upon a time, it had teemed with dace and tench’.
(#litres_trial_promo) While Joss was living there he became fascinated by the Foley family history. Richard Foley was a famous seventeenth-century industrial spy. Originally a village minstrel, he earned his nickname ‘Fiddler Foley’ by carrying stolen papers into England from Europe in his violin case.
(#litres_trial_promo) Posing as an iron-worker, he wandered through Belgium, Germany, Italy and Spain, working in various foundries where he collected technical information on ‘splitting’, an iron-forging process that was a carefully guarded secret. Eventually after years of cribbing information, Foley smuggled enough technical data back home to be able to construct a ‘splitting machine’, an ‘invention’ on which the fortunes of the Foley family were founded. After his death in 1657, Fiddler Foley’s ingenuity earned him a place in the annals of British spying, as well as hoisting the Foley family into the landed gentry of Worcestershire.
(#litres_trial_promo) Coincidentally, a Francis Foley was the MI6 resident at Berlin in 1939. In fact he would be there with Joss in 1919, and it was Francis Foley who learned that the German Army were experimenting with a cipher machine called Enigma.
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Gerald Hemzy Foley, 7th Lord Foley, another distant cousin of Joss’s, had already been at Eton since 1909 and would be expected to guide him through some of the nastier rites when he joined the college.
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Meanwhile, Rosemary’s compensation for having had her brothers wrenched away from her was the gift from her parents of Cherry, a King Charles spaniel puppy. With them and her nanny, Rosemary boarded the SS Lutzgow, embarking in February 1913 for Tokyo and life as an only child, clutching a bevy of dolls. Perhaps the withdrawn nature she manifested in later years was formed during her separation from Joss and Gilbert; she was to become a solitary young woman.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lady Kilmarnock is pictured on deck of this German ship – ‘writing letters … on our way to Japan’. Much of her correspondence will have been addressed to her sons. None has survived the years. All signs of depression seem to have been banished: carrying a stylish muff of cheetah skin, she looks rejuvenated at the prospect of Tokyo. There she played tennis every afternoon, often partnered by a Captain Butt whose name features more and more frequently until, in due course, he accompanied Joss’s parents on all excursions, which tended to be dominated by temples, cherry trees in bloom, lacquered bridges and parasols. As she revelled in the company of young officers, Lady Kilmarnock was showing signs of not wanting to accept her age.
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She and her husband returned from Japan to England in the summer of 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War to see Joss into Eton for the ‘Michaelmas half’ – Eton jargon for the autumn term starting in September – for which the preparation was elaborate. The correct top-hats, black coats, white ties and shoes could be obtained only from monopolist establishments in Eton High Street. Windsor Castle stood sentinel above the town.
Joss would spend his free time wandering around Windsor’s streets with friends, buying ices in the summer half, looking for books. One of the highlights of that Michaelmas half was when he and Sacheverell Sitwell spotted some ‘Bohemians leading a bear around on a chain’ about Windsor. The boys were witnessing part of the great gypsy coppersmith invasion of those years in England.
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Eton’s aim was to prepare its pupils for the service of the British Empire abroad as administrators, soldiers or diplomats – hardly necessary in Joss’s case. Boys boarded in houses known by the initials of their housemasters – Joss’s housemaster was Raymond Herney de Montmorency.
(#litres_trial_promo) Activities of the house were organised by the house captain, who was assisted by a group of boys known as ‘the library’.
Joss’s own bedsitting room, in which he was supposed to do three hours of prep each day, like every other boy’s was furnished with a ‘burry’ – a desk with drawers – and one easy chair. Fagging did not begin at once, but usually by October most newcomers would have had their share of the horrors associated with bullying.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ablutions were bitterly cold, leaving hands and feet clean but more freezing than ever. A can of water would be delivered – the allowance was half an inch per bath – which was already cold and made icier as it hit the porcelain. Joss was left with a lifelong appreciation of luxurious bathrooms. He would select the most modern fittings for his own, insisting upon scalding-hot water in abundance.
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While no precise record of his academic achievements survives, Joss’s ability to quote liberally from the classics in later life suggests that he was an able pupil. He studied modern languages as well as Greek and Latin.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was astute at mathematics. He shared classes – known in Eton parlance as ‘divisions’, invariably abbreviated to divs – with children destined for a life of wealth, position and privilege: Prince George of Teck was one of his contemporaries, along with Ian Douglas Campbell, 11th Duke of Argyll, Alan Colman of Reckitt & Colman, Wilfred Thesiger and Gubby Allen, ‘a great athlete and cricketer’.
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A high percentage of Old Etonians would be reunited later in Kenya, among which were Derek Erskine, Fabian Wallis and Ferdinand Cavendish-Bentinck.
(#ulink_ab61ddd6-9065-57db-9317-f484b65c77bc) Other Old Etonians would find themselves in Joss’s company again when he was Kenya’s Assistant Military Secretary on account of postings to Nairobi, such as Viscount Gerald Portman and Dickie Pembroke, ‘a nice P. G. Wodehouse guardsman’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Highlands of Kenya had a reputation for attracting rarefied members of English society.
Eton’s claim of making boys into men would resound and backfire when Joss turned fifteen. Already good-looking and tallish for his age, he was causing comment. He had suddenly shot up in height, developing into an almost Aryan-looking youth with well defined bones, a handsome high-bridged aristocratic nose, blond hair beginning to darken, blue eyes and a strong jaw. The pellucid eyes compensated for his rather too small mouth and would always be his most distinguishing feature. His hair was brushed back from his temples, with his parting low in the fashion of the day; his hair was so fine that he could keep it tidy only by slicking it down with brilliantine, darkening it further.
Joss’s strongest asset was his gaiety. His smile and the light of enjoyment would not be kept out of his hypnotically pale gaze – nor would they fade in the memories of those who loved him. Many would remark on his playfulness. He learned early and quickly to hide his inner, vulnerable feelings and concealed them behind a knowing, adult expression which gave the impression of hauteur. This sophistication would have been seductive to boys with less self-confidence, and may well have been another factor in Joss’s popularity.
Only months into the Great War, Eton began to notice the drain on its older pupils as they enlisted. Twenty new boys, led by Joss’s friend Prince Leopold, arrived from Brussels in November 1914 to ‘fill some of the empty rooms’. His greatest friend at Eton was Hubert Buxton, who would for ever remain loyal to Joss’s memory. Hubert became head of the Eton Society, better known as ‘Pop’ – the self-electing oligarchy of senior boys who were the admiration and envy of the entire school. But Joss would not be there to benefit from Hubert’s position. In their first year, Joss and Hubert began their joint hero-worship of Pop’s former head, the Hon. Denys Finch Hatton, whose reputation for ‘athletic and intellectual prowess’ sprang from his days at Eton.
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For the duration of the war Eton’s gaudy summer rituals were to change. Plans were amended for 4 June – ‘Eton mess’, strawberries and cream mashed together, was now a thing of the past – and a quiet lunch took place instead; a game of cricket followed, but fireworks were cancelled and so was the Henley Regatta.
(#litres_trial_promo) St Andrew’s Day and the Harrow match became too poignant reminders of happier times. Rather than providing such gaiety as they would have done in peacetime, they cast long shadows over tradition. As the obituaries of Old Etonians increased as the war progressed, rationing tightened and it became a point of patriotic honour and discipline that the boys should eat all their food, without comment or complaint, however unpalatable it sometimes seemed. This may be why Joss never questioned the meal put in front of him. He enjoyed haute cuisine but he could live without such luxuries; he always entertained well, but without ostentation. Since food was greatly restricted, when the growing boys were ravenous their supplies were now mostly supplemented by tinned sardines and caramels from Fortnum and Mason’s.
(#litres_trial_promo) The shortage of fuel meant that fires were few and far between in the cold months, so that the normal rigours of school life were accentuated. In addition, a pall of gloom was evident on every page of the Eton Chronicle – hardly surprising – with a grim, industrialised war raging as the world had never before known it. By the second issue of the Michaelmas half, a list of forty fallen was published under the heading ‘Etona Non Immemor’:
(#ulink_a3cac76a-5faa-54b1-93b6-08c297356c85) when the challenge had come, Etonians, like so many young men all over England, had responded and enlisted. The life of the college was profoundly affected by so many unexpected leavers, including nine masters. Some masters were even recalled from service to step into the breach. None could forget that Eton was in the grip of the war. Every home was saddened by losses among the generation of boys above Joss. Poetic epitaphs appeared in Latin or Greek, as well as in English.
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The effect on Joss was to be lasting. He would never be able to fathom the eagerness of the young men to reach the front line – over the first five days of the war 10,626 men had enlisted. All Joss could see, at barely thirteen years old, was the meaningless waste of young and healthy lives. In the Chronicle it was not uncommon for a letter from a friend to appear, or a brief obituary by a tutor, speaking of the ‘cheerfulness’ with which some young officer had died.
During the summer half of 1915 Hubert and Joss began a lifelong passion for bridge when they started playing Pelmanism, a card game demanding, as does bridge, an excellent memory and great concentration. The deck would be scattered face down on the lawn. At each turn, the player turns over two cards, but to score a trick the upturned cards must match. Joss’s success in pairing cards off was almost impossible for Hubert to beat,
(#litres_trial_promo) his perfect recall on the lawns of Eton is early confirmation of his ‘photographic’ memory. The two boys also shared an interest in drama. Joss’s forte was reciting from Don Quixote and Thackeray’s Esmond at ‘speeches’. His ability to take in everything at a glance gave his parodies an accuracy that could be quite cutting. His performances for friends were spontaneous, broken up with snatches of German, gesturing, accenting, mimicking hysterical Italians or one of the pompous ‘Danish Schleswig-Holstein Sonderberburg Glucksburgs’, or fussing about in farcical parody of one of his mother’s Austrian maids.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss took a delight in playing the buffoon. Making capital out of his surname, he would imitate a yokel, with bits of straw in his hair, using such phrases as ‘Neither Hay nor grass’, ‘Making Hay while the sun shines’ and ‘Hey nonny-no’. If his repartee was sometimes too quick for the slow-witted, puns such as ‘a roll in the Hay’ and ‘Haycock’ never missed the mark and could be relied upon to raise a lot of sniggering.
(#litres_trial_promo) Victor Perowne, editor of the Eton Chronicle, allegedly composed several poems and pieces of prose about ‘Haystacks’ for the Chronicle, although none can be found today so possibly these jottings were private. Perowne eventually became Ambassador to the Holy See. At Eton, according to Sacheverell Sitwell, Perowne had fallen for Joss ‘hook, line and sinker’. Sitwell was never able to see Joss’s appeal yet he spoke of his magnetism, witnessing him ‘more than once, followed down Keate’s Lane by a whole mob of boys’.
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Joss’s academic progress is impossible to assess, as copies of school reports were not made at Eton in those days.
(#litres_trial_promo) Other sources show that in 1916 he was a ‘dry bob’ (he played cricket rather than rowed in the summer term) and was ‘very keen on football, being one of the first to play the Association game at the school’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He also participated in the Lower Boy House Cup, ‘Ante Finals’, ‘J. V. Hay playing in De Havilland’s team for the Field Game when he was in the 28th Division’ (Hubert Buxton was in the twenty-seventh).
(#litres_trial_promo) However, cricket and cards were but minor pastimes that summer of 1916 compared to Joss’s discovery of sex.
There was a lot of talk about Joss being ‘very much AC/DC’ while at Eton.
(#litres_trial_promo) These rumours were strongly denied by his brother Gilbert and his son-in-law Sir Iain Moncreiffe. By 1916 Joss had already been a member of the Eton College Officer Training Corps for a year, where apparently there were always ‘a lot of tents heaving on the job. One young and popular boy charged £3.00 per go.’ At school he was great friends with Fabian Wallis, who was then openly homosexual, a friendship that resumed in Kenya.
(#litres_trial_promo) Flirting with the boys down Keate’s Lane does demonstrate his tendency at least outwardly to defy sexual conventions. He was of course attractive to women, but even those who had slept with him described him as ‘a pretty-looking man’, accepting that he might have been bisexual. As one admirer put it, ‘Etonians had a certain reputation. There was something feminine about Joss, which one could not ignore.’
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Joss’s initiation into heterosexual sex began at fifteen: in the Michaelmas half of 1916 he was caught in flagrante delicto with a maid, a woman old enough to be his mother. He had obviously confided in his great friend Hubert Buxton, but naturally the latter never elaborated beyond the fact that ‘Joss had been sent down for being a very naughty boy indeed’; he added wistfully that Joss had been ‘so attractive and so smart’, implying that he only wished that he too had had the guts and ingenuity to get himself into bed with a woman at so tender an age.
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If his peers admired his seduction skills, the authorities at Eton did not. Usual punishment procedure was followed while the decision to ‘sack’ (expel) Joss was being made. While routine offences were dealt with in the headmaster’s and lower master’s ‘bill’, and floggings were recorded in a book open only to masters, more serious matters such as stealing or sexual misdemeanours were noted in separate confidential books. Because Joss’s offence was sexual and therefore considered to be serious, the beating was to be carried out in private. A praepostor (a senior boy) extracted Joss from class. Ritual prevailed.
‘Is there a Mr Hay in the Division?’
‘There is.’
‘He is to report to the head master in lower school after 12.’
Did Joss blanch? Probably not. It was not in his nature. Nor was it in his nature to blush. Just after Lupton’s Tower chimed midday, two praepostors accompanied ‘Mr Hay’ from the twenty-eighth division to the headmaster Dr Edward Lyttleton’s schoolroom; Lyttleton had found homosexuality so prevalent in 1915 that he had denounced the practice openly. (He left Eton soon after Joss.)
(#litres_trial_promo) Dressed in a clergyman’s cassock and accompanied by the head porter, carrying a birch rod in solemn procession, Lyttleton now ordered Joss to take down his trousers and underwear and to bend over the flogging block. After reciting his offence and outlining his punishment, six strokes of the birch rod, complete with twigs and leaves, were administered. It was bad form to cry. After Joss rose from the flogging block, Lyttleton presented him with the object that had given him his painfully wealed skin.
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We do not know if Joss’s parents hastened back from Le Havre to England on account of his dismissal. As a result of his fall from grace, however, poor Gilbert’s name was withdrawn from Eton. He was educated at Cheltenham College and Cambridge instead.
Quite apart from the thorough disgrace Joss would have been made to feel over his dismissal from Eton, he had already endured a rotten few months before being caught with the maid. Worsening an already insecure situation for Joss and his siblings, Slains, along with Longhaven House which belonged to its estate – Joss’s rightful inheritance – had been sold off to Sir John Reeves Ellerman, who would dispose of these dwellings without even occupying them, a callous blow to the Erroll family.
(#litres_trial_promo) Eliza Gore, their great-grandmother, also died that year in the Royal Cottage at Kew, leaving only Sir Francis Grant’s painting as a reminder of her spirit and of the adventures that her descendants had heard from her own lips. Grant’s portrait has her standing by her grey Arab pony, a gift from the Sultan of Turkey, ever reminding them that on this steed Eliza Gore had followed her husband without complaint throughout the Crimean campaign.
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With Eliza Gore’s passing and the loss of Slains, all in one swoop Joss’s childhood had disappeared. The ruins of both Old and New Slains still stand today, there to be looked upon by his great-grandchildren even though fierce winds have torn away the last traces of plaster. They can hear the same cries from sea-birds, the echoes of gulls and puffins, swooping and screaming through the castles’ once proud corridors.
* (#ulink_28fb693d-2240-5513-97eb-9ca1a9d45f69)Plant badges were symbols used to distinguish clans.
* (#ulink_339a9a58-7960-5002-86a2-d77656efc8e3)Later the Duke of Portland.
* (#ulink_21637263-ed26-5568-aa75-de4929bcdc73)Eton does not forget.
4 To Hell with Husbands (#ulink_1586425b-f6e8-5917-81db-ebf124ac0d82)
‘Come, come,’ said Tom’s father, ‘at your time of life,
There’s no longer excuse for thus playing the rake –
It is time you should think, boy, of taking a wife’ –
‘Why, so it is, father – whose wife shall I take?’
Thomas Moore
Whereas a weaker young man might have been unable to recover from the shame of having been removed from one of England’s finest schools, Joss’s disgrace appears to have had no effect on his confidence.
(#litres_trial_promo) If his parents were livid with him, they did not let it show publicly. They allowed his education to continue at home in Le Havre, the British Legation to Brussels’ wartime base. Lord Kilmarnock found a tutor for him, a man who before the war had worked at the University of Leipzig. Through him Joss brushed up his German, and according to fluent German-speakers he spoke the language extremely well, some even claimed ‘beautifully’.
(#litres_trial_promo) (In later life, without daily practice, his command of German weakened somewhat.) His French also benefited from his return to a francophone country.
In a press interview in the 1930s Joss said of his time in Le Havre, vaguely, that he had been ‘performing liaison work with the Belgians’. Perhaps his father had pulled strings to get him some practical experience of Foreign Office work and to broaden the narrow horizons of his studies at home. When Lord Kilmarnock moved on after the war Joss too was transferred to the British Legation in Copenhagen as an honorary attaché. Lord Kilmarnock acted as Chargé d’Affaires there until August 1919.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss was eighteen by this time and, help from his father or no, he was beginning to gain some very valuable Foreign Office experience.
Meanwhile, Lord Kilmarnock was made a CMG in June 1919 and a Counsellor of Embassy in the diplomatic service three months later. His father’s impressive career was starting to awaken ambitions in Joss, for that same year he applied to sit the Foreign Office exam in London. Candidates were told to bring a protractor with them.
(#ulink_1cacc5a9-915d-5208-b3e3-73a3aa646342) The result of this strange instruction was that on the morning of the exam, outside Burlington House, ‘a multitude of officers converged with protractors in their hands’.
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Since Joss had ‘one of the best brains of his time’ he sailed through his Foreign Office examination – no mean achievement. At the time the Foreign Office exam was considered to be ‘the top examination of all’. The Kilmarnocks must have been very relieved that their son appeared to be looking to his laurels at last. On the strength of his exam results Joss was given a posting, on 18 January 1920, as Private Secretary to HM Ambassador to Berlin for three years – ‘a critical post at a critical time’.
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Two days later he reported for duty at 70–71 Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin.
For a few months it transpired that Joss was working in the same embassy as his father: a week earlier, on 10 January, Lord Kilmarnock had been appointed to Berlin as Chargé d’Affaires, to prepare for the arrival of Britain’s new ambassador now that diplomatic relations with Germany were resuming. He was the first diplomat to be sent to Berlin after the Armistice. Having got his posting on the strength of his Foreign Office exam result Joss was probably somewhat non-plussed to appear still to be working under his father’s wing. However, Lord Kilmarnock was soon appointed Counsellor to the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission in Coblenz and in 1921 was made British High Commissioner. Lord and Lady Kilmarnock were to remain in Coblenz until his death.
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Joss stayed on in Berlin for the time being. He obviously enjoyed Teutonic company. He would later socialise with the German and Austrian settlers in Kenya, and he returned to Germany on a couple of visits to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.
The British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edgar Vincent, 16th Baronet D’Abernon, was an Old Etonian; his wife, Lady Helen, was the daughter of the 1st Earl of Faversham. They were a charming couple of whom Joss was very fond. Under their auspices he would come into contact with a wide range of influential and up-and-coming personalities – figures such as Stresemann, Ribbentrop and Pétain, just three whose names would be familiar to everyone in Europe by the outbreak of the Second World War.
(#litres_trial_promo) The British Embassy stood only doors away from Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg’s Presidential Palace, which had once been occupied by ‘the Iron Chancellor’ Prince Otto von Bismarck and, in 1938, became Ribbentrop’s official residence as Foreign Minister to Adolf Hitler. Prior to that appointment, Ribbentrop was to be German Ambassador to London from 1936.
When Joss met him in 1920 Ribbentrop, six years his senior, had just recently been demobilised. He was a tall, fair-haired man who ‘held his head very high’, was very arrogant and ‘inaccessible’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He looked like a caricature of an English gentleman in a humorous magazine and ‘wore a bowler hat and carried an umbrella in spite of a cloudless sky’. At this time, Ribbentrop was ADC to the German peace delegation.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife Annlies worked extremely hard at penetrating the circle of Gustav Stresemann, a statesman of first rank who was briefly German Chancellor in 1923. D’Abernon and Stresemann were close and, after Joss left Germany, together instigated the Anglo-American Treaty and the Pact of Mutual Guarantee embodied in the Treaty of Locarno in 1924. Stresemann’s son, Wolfgang, recognised the social pushiness of the Ribbentrops and how they ‘even got into the British Ambassador’s functions’. The Ribbentrop networking technique was so effective that some of their hosts, ‘Lord D’Abernon included, were surprised to find themselves entertaining their brandy merchant’ – Annlies’s father.
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By contrast, Joss, who had no need to elevate himself socially, was an ideal candidate for D’Abernon’s needs at a sensitive time in Germany when constant communication between different countries was vital. D’Abernon was a fine diplomat with a wealth of experience. In him Joss found a man to emulate and, while he appeared to take a delight in outraging his father, he knuckled down under D’Abernon and never stepped out of line, respecting the Ambassador’s opinions on many governance matters. He also sought his views on historic battles, modern warfare, thoroughbred horses and champion tennis – subjects which were to be of continuing interest to Joss. D’Abernon’s informality endeared him to Joss and, in his friendship with the older man, he found his attention drawn to more serious aspects of life. D’Abernon had taken risks – successfully – with his own career, and Joss admired him for this adventurousness, a quality he shared. D’Abernon had at one stage been Chairman of the Royal Commission on Imperial Trade: this was to be the field that most impressed itself on Joss, whose understanding of it became almost as profound as his mentor’s. The conclusions that Joss reached at this time would enable him to argue, off the cuff, about reforms to the Congo Basin Treaties in Kenya a decade or so later. His liaison work in his capacity of Private Secretary to the Ambassador was honing his skill in retaining detail – he was becoming proficient at storing away information to use later, a habit which would pay off time after time.
In 1920 Joss accompanied his parents twice to the American Cemetery in Coblenz, in the Allied Rhineland; on 20 May they went to the Decoration Day service, then in November attended the Remembrance service. Standing on the dais, looking sombre, Joss was the youngest among dignitaries such as Monsieur Fournier, the Belgian Ambassador, Herr Delbrucke, the Austrian Ambassador, Monsieur Tirade, the French Ambassador, and Marshal Pétain. On each occasion he gazed down from the stand at the huge garden, and all that he could see stretching into the distance was row upon row of white military crosses. He would never forget this display of tragic waste.
Joss’s work involved a lot of travel from one European capital to another. Being based in the country of the vanquished provided him with a view of the war from both sides. He had witnessed the decimation of Eton’s sixth form, and Le Havre too had shown him a facet of war. Then there was the neutrality of Scandinavia: he discovered that there was also something to be learned from those who had stood back. The next three years were to provide ample time to listen to the experiences of the former enemy.
Joss’s dislike of bloodshed showed too in his reluctance to take part in blood sports. Some regarded his detachment with suspicion. According to Bettine Rundle, who knew Joss in those days, he was quite unpopular with Lord Kilmarnock’s staff on account of not joining in their hunting pursuits. However, he did play football regularly against teams formed by the various different Allied armies based in the area. Association football was particularly popular in the British Army, and on one occasion Joss captained the side that beat the American Army team.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was also a very experienced polo player by this stage.
Equally, his unpopularity with his father’s staff could have been due to jealousy; they probably resented his plum job at the Embassy and wrongly assumed he had got the post purely through his father’s influence.
Whatever feelings he inspired among embassy employees, Joss enjoyed great popularity in his social life and on his travels around the capitals of Europe. The temptations in the cities were plentiful, affording men opportunities for unrestrained pleasure – in this respect Joss was very much a player. In the society in which he had been raised, sexual mores for men were liberal. It was expected of Continental grand dukes and archdukes that they should seek to indulge their sexual fantasies with mistresses rather than their wives. During the late summer, the fashionable German spas turned into the hunting grounds of the most famous courtesans of Europe. By the standards of the day Joss did nothing that others did not do, and many indulged in far more excessive behaviour.
From 1919 onwards Joss paid regular visits to Paris, where he got to know a wealthy American socialite, Alice Silverthorne, with whom he enjoyed an intermittent affair. His girlfriends were usually blondes but Alice was dark and, also unlike the majority of his lovers, close to him in age. In 1923 she married a young French aristocrat, Frederic de Janzé. Alice was bewitchingly beautiful, rich, self-willed and neurotic. ‘Wide eyes so calm, short slick hair, full red lips, a body to desire … her cruelty and lascivious thoughts clutch the thick lips on close white teeth … No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal’ – this was her husband’s adoring and, ultimately, prophetic verdict.
(#litres_trial_promo) Alice was to become notorious as the Countess de Janzé, when she was tried for attempted murder in Paris in 1927. She had shot her lover Raymund de Trafford in the groin at the Gare du Nord. She married him five years later and they separated about three months after that. Alice and another beauty Kiki Preston – a Whitney by birth – were part of the American colony in Paris who welcomed Joss into their social circle.
The early twenties saw the Paris of Hemingway, Molyneux and Cecil Beaton.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss thrived in this glamorous climate. Beaton’s photography drew the fashionable world’s attention to the beauties of the day. Joss would get to know most of them well. One of Beaton’s ‘finds’ was Paula Gellibrand, a ‘corn-coloured English girl’ who became one of his muses. When Paula and Joss first met, she was untitled and the daughter of a major who lived in Wales. Joss’s relationship with her would surface haphazardly at distant points on the globe since she would become the wife of no less than three of his friends and, being an inveterate traveller, would appear wherever the glamorous foregathered be it Paris, Venice, New York, London or Antibes. She was tall and languid, and according to Beaton, her ‘eyelids were like shiny tulip petals … [she was] the first living Modigliani I ever saw’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Ultimately Paula would happen up on Joss’s doorstep in the Rift Valley, married to Boy Long (whose real first name was Caswell), a rancher and another neighbour of Joss’s – by then Joss and Paula had been friends for fourteen years.
Once Joss disappeared into the wilds of Africa with his first wife Idina, another eccentric socialite in Paris – she and Alice fell for Joss, separately, at roughly the same time – Kiki Preston, Frédéric and Alice, among other friends, would flock after them. The clique which became infamous as the Happy Valley set was formed in France before any of them left for Africa.
History does not relate where Joss and Idina first met. It could have been in Paris, for Idina was there in 1919, mixing with a Bohemian set that would have appealed to Joss. It is possible that they had met in more conventional society even earlier, in Helsinki, when Joss was still living in Denmark, because Idina’s younger sister Avice was then living in Helsinki with her husband Major Sir Stewart Menzies, and Idina would have visited her there. Menzies was a military man but he usually established ambassadorial contact wherever he worked. When Joss was in his thirties, he would become head of the Secret Services.
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It is likely that Joss and Idina had been circling one another for at least eighteen months before their affair started. Idina was another of the beauties who caught Beaton’s imagination – he noticed the way she ‘dazzled’ people.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her red-gold hair was styled like a boy’s and, her bosom being too ample for the dictates of fashion, she flattened it so as to look perfect in the gowns created for her by Captain Molyneux – or ‘Molynukes’, as she called him.
(#litres_trial_promo) She had been a devotee of his since he opened his house in 1918; his designs made her look taller. It was Molyneux who dressed her when Joss first met her and he would continue to adapt fashion to suit her style for nearly forty years: she had ‘a rounded slenderness … tubular, flexible, like a section of a boa constrictor … [she] dressed in clothes that emphasised a serpentine slimness’. Joss, fashion aficionado, thought that the way she looked and dressed was wonderful.
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Twice married by the time Joss knew her, Idina was eight years older than him. She was the elder of two daughters born to the 8th Earl De La Warr (pronounced Delaware). Their brother, the heir, was Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville and, by the time Joss made his maiden speech in the Upper House, had become 9th Earl De La Warr, Under-secretary of State for the Colonies and Lord Privy Seal in the House of Lords.
(#litres_trial_promo) Idina was a legendary seductress. Joss, only nineteen years old, impressionable and driven by lust, had not resisted her wiles.
(#litres_trial_promo) He pursued her from 1920 although not exclusively.
Joss called virginity a ‘state of disgrace, rather than of grace’ and was not interested in seducing virgins. Lady Kilmarnock’s view was that young men should have affairs only with married women. Joss, whom she had so bewitched as a young boy with the mysteries of her toilette, seems to have paid a lot of attention to her on this issue as well, as Daphne Fielding can testify. Daphne’s memoir, Mercury Presides, contains a forgiving description of Joss’s flirtation with her (a virgin when Joss knew her): ‘It was inevitable that he should be conscious of such wonderful good looks as he possessed, and with these he had an arrogant manner and great sartorial elegance.’ When her father learned that Daphne had sat out on the back stairs with Joss during a dance, a furore ensued. After she told Joss about the row, he sent her an ‘enormous bunch of red roses’. She had been terrified that the sight of the flowers would incur her father’s wrath all over again, and had hidden them from him – ‘in my bedroom basin until they died – the first present of flowers that I had ever received’. Her fascination with Joss grew as her father’s disapproval intensified: Joss’s scornful way of looking at people, ‘an oblique, blue glance under half-closed lids’, was impudence personified.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss, however, did not return her interest. He would without exception make a beeline for married women.
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The easygoing lifestyle – in which people exercised sexual freedom without anyone suffering – that Joss now adopted would always be attractive to him. Idina, herself an advocate of promiscuity, found Joss irresistible – and one can see why in a picture taken of him as whipper-in to the American Army drag-hounds. As the best-looking in a bunch of four young bloods, he was as usual with the prettiest girl in the group. For his part, Joss relished the element of danger in his relationship with Idina. Her reputation was to him deliciously louche. Her first husband, Captain the Hon. Euan Wallace, MC, MP, had been in the Life Guards Reserve; she produced two sons by him, but after six years the marriage was dissolved. The two boys remained with their father and Idina virtually abandoned them. The society she kept in Paris was decidedly disreputable. Only her pedigree redeemed her. But her family life had not been happy; Idina was only nine years old when her parents separated, and, like Joss, she had grown up precociously and was easily bored. Even at school, classmates had been wary. She was smarter than them. One of her school contemporaries, coming across her years later in Kenya, admitted how terrified she had been of her. On this occasion Idina was as withering as ever: ‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured on meeting her old classmate, ‘I remember you – you never powdered.’
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Joss, madly in love with Idina, was longing to share his life with her. They made secret plans to marry and Joss played the eligible bachelor as Idina waited for her divorce from her second husband, Captain the Hon. Charles Gordon of Park Hill, Aberdeen. Charles had fallen for one of her younger unmarried friends and had wanted the divorce too. There was no uproar and terms were mutually agreed. In fact, Charles and Honor Gordon would be neighbours to Idina and Joss in Kenya. Charles Gordon had benefited from Kenya’s Soldier Settlement Scheme in 1919, and he found himself with 2,500 acres in the Wanjohi Valley above Gilgil. Idina received just over half the land as part of her divorce settlement.
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Joss, meanwhile, was ‘causing tremendous consternation in the hearts of the ripe young things’ in the marriage market-places. He was much in demand where débutantes flourished. He was scanned by dukes and dowagers, among bespoke kilts and bejewelled bosoms, upon which rested heirlooms.
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1922 he played the season – Ascot, Cowes, Henley, Cowdray Park and the Royal Caledonian Ball (the biggest of the London season) – having resigned his job at the Embassy in Berlin in March that year, nine months before the posting was due to end. His father must have been aghast at such fecklessness. But though his patience must have been wearing rather thin by this stage, he seems to have done his best to get his son back on to his career path. Perhaps Lady Kilmarnock put in some persuasive words for her favourite child, for in 1923 Joss became secretary at the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission.
(#litres_trial_promo) Nepotistic though the appointment may have been, he would undoubtedly have been able to make a useful contribution to the work of the High Commission. By now, he had acquired extensive experience in the Foreign Office and could switch to another language without a moment’s hesitation.
Adding to the tension in the British residence household at the time was the recent resale of Slains. Ellerman had arranged for the estate agents Frank Knight & Rubenstein, W. D. Rutley to auction it off.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the spring of 1922 Slains was sold for scrap – a considerable humiliation for the Erroll family.
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Idina was not long in following Joss out to Coblenz for a visit during the interlude between her decrees nisi and absolute. Joss wanted his parents to meet her, but he never let on to them his intention to marry her. He obviously realised that his parents were unlikely to share his enthusiasm for Idina, and even if he believed that she ‘could have walked off the bas-relief of dancing nymphs in the Louvre’ Lord and Lady Kilmarnock would take a lot of persuading.
(#litres_trial_promo) None the less, they would welcome her as his girlfriend.
Coblenz was a picturesque town at the mouth of the Mosel River, and had long been established as the trading hub for wine-growing countries and furniture factories. It was a sociable place: racing was popular, and since there was a good theatre, everyone went to the opera at least once, if not twice, a week.
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The British residence was surrounded by tall trees; in summer the building was entirely draped in Virginia creeper but during the winter its fish-scale tiled roof was exposed. It stood in the best spot of all among the French, Dutch, Belgian and American embassies, on the edge of the Rhinelagon, directly opposite the ‘bridge of boats’ which parted to allow barges through as they sailed up and down the river.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Kilmarnock’s position as High Commissioner entitled him to a guard and a sentry-box outside the gates of the residence; a Cameron Highlander did duty, marching up and down in a kilt. One of his more ceremonial roles was to pipe out distinguished guests down the drive as they left the house. Visits by dignitaries to the residence were photographed by the firm Lindstedt & Zimmermann, who specialised in turning photographs of the more important guests into postcards.
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Idina spent a lot of her time in Coblenz shopping for furniture for the new home in Africa that she would receive through her divorce settlement, choosing table linens and ‘ordering crêpe de chine sheets and exotic bathroom equipment’ including ‘a splendid green bath which in Kenya achieved a reputation all of its own ultimately, when it was believed to have been made from onyx’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss would accompany her, not letting on to his parents that he planned to share this future home of hers.
Joss’s general behaviour towards Idina and his family in Coblenz during Idina’s stay was observed by one of his contemporaries, Bettine Rundle from Australia, who had been sent to stay with her guardian’s daughter Marryat Dobie, one of Lord Kilmarnock’s aides. Bettine found herself at the British residence for eighteen months, party to the sensation created by Idina and to the interactions between Joss’s family and the staff attached to the residence. Thanks to Joss’s and Gilbert’s kindness, Bettine was included in the young people’s social life, attending the many parties and witnessing the childish pranks perpetrated by Joss and Idina. The staff were shocked at the spectacle of Idina with her Eton crop, and at how old she was. ‘Her figure resembled that of a boy, too; very, very slim’, her breasts flattened, ‘which seemed to make Joss complement her physically … They seemed like brother and sister; there was something alike in them.’
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These partners in crime masterminded a ‘little surprise’ to mark a visit from Monsieur Tirade, the French High Commissioner. While everyone else was bathing and changing for dinner they ‘sneaked downstairs and tied numerous pairs of knickers and brassieres from the top to the bottom of the banisters of the grand staircase into the hall below, where functions were always held. They had gone to the trouble of dying the underwear like the Tricolour, stringing the garments up like bunting in a totally inappropriate manner.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Lord and Lady Kilmarnock descended and – Voila! Joss’s father was acutely embarrassed before his guest of honour; Joss looked on in glee. Apparently his elders were always fearful of what he might do next. ‘He was generally regarded as something of a loose cannon,’ Bettine said. Today Joss’s and Idina’s prank might be regarded as harmless fun, but in the old school to which Lord Kilmarnock belonged one simply did not do that sort of thing.
Idina used lingerie for maximum arousal in the bedroom and taught Joss many tricks involving its removal. His favourite was to touch the strategic four points on a skirt undoing the suspenders underneath so deftly that the wearer would notice nothing until her stockings collapsed about her ankles.
(#litres_trial_promo) Underwear would continue to be a sensitive subject during Idina’s stay. She never fell short of taking ‘delight in Joss’s near-the-knuckle jokes’. ‘Covered in hay’ did the rounds in Coblenz.
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Such mockery of decorum outraged the Kilmarnocks. Joss’s father remarked that since Idina was so much older she should have known better.
(#litres_trial_promo) If Joss involved himself with such a woman, how could he expect to move expertly as a diplomat? Lord Kilmarnock feared for him and told him so, but his warnings fell on ears tuned only to amusement. If Joss had been smarting from the telling-off, his doting mother would soon have soothed his wounded vanity.
A portrait of Lady Kilmarnock painted that year shows a stunning woman. She exuded confidence and, like Idina, ‘was very stylish, usually surrounded by a good many subalterns from Cologne – and officers of the Guard … seeming not to want to grow old’. Joss ‘seemed to cultivate a peculiarly intimate relationship with Lady Kilmarnock’, and Bettine Rundle noticed that, even while Idina was staying, he continued to appear in his mother’s dressing room before dinner for a private chat. One evening, sauntering in, Joss had picked up the flannel dangling over the side of her wash-basin and gestured as if to wipe his face, when his mother snatched it away with a shriek, ‘That’s my douche cloth!’ ‘A lot of tittering between mother and son had gone on over his mother’s washcloth.’ According to Bettine, when Joss exercised his sense of humour he ‘always had to score a point – usually it had a smutty side’.
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Joss’s smuttiness could be hurtfully embarrassing. On his father’s staff was a stenographer, a Miss Sampson, with whom Joss had flirted. Sammy, as she was known, was dark, plain and middle-class but Joss made a point of never overlooking plain girls. Sammy had been invited to attend Gilbert’s birthday party, along with fifty others. She would be returning to London on leave the next day. A risqué innuendo in Joss’s impromptu speech during dinner had horrified everyone – ‘now that Gilbert had come … of age,’ he remarked at one point.
(#litres_trial_promo) His brother had never taken his jokes easily. Worse was to follow. Strolling across to Sammy, Joss wished her a good holiday; then, in falsetto, mimicking her Essex accent and loud enough to be overheard, he said, ‘Don’t forget to take your sanitary towels, will you?’ There was a hush. His father was very upset and there had been murmurs about the ‘Mrs Jordan coming out’. Sammy, having admired Joss, took a long time to get over the indignity. On the whole, though, his own generation tended to regard him as ‘killingly funny’.
Joss may have been in love with Idina but he was too bright not to realise that she would never be a model diplomat’s wife. She would earn a reputation as a superb hostess, she would never give a damn about what other people thought. ‘To Hell with husbands’ may have been her dictum, but they both lived by it.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even before his father had had his say, Joss must have known that the Foreign Office would never have kept him on as Idina’s husband. Divorced persons were not accepted at Ascot nor at court. Lord Kilmarnock had made it his business to discover all that he could about Idina and he gathered a considerable ballast against her. Both his parents remonstrated with him, cajoled him, reminded him of what his future could entail. ‘Lord Kilmarnock begged Joss not to marry Idina. Even making him promise.’ Joss had agreed, and Lord Kilmarnock was convinced that he would comply.
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However, unbeknown to the Kilmarnocks, arrangements for their register office wedding were put in hand for 22 September 1923. Idina, Alice de Janzé and Avie Menzies were in and out of London that spring and summer. If either of the ‘Sackville sisters’ was spotted, they made news: at the Chases or the Guards point-to-point, ‘over a line at Lordland’s Farm, Hawthorn Hill’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss joined Idina in England that summer and they simply enjoyed one another’s company, participating in the dance craze which was already in full swing. George Gershwin, currently billed as ‘the songwriter who composes dignified jazz’, arrived in London for the broadcast of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ by Carroll Gibbons and the Savoy Orpheans. The Savoy was one of Joss’s favourite spots – the Orpheans and the Savoy Havana Band played simultaneously there on different floors; sometimes he and Idina would move off the dance floor to watch ‘speciality dancers’ in cabaret. They lapped up the city’s night life, going to Ciro’s to dine and dance after the theatre, to the Criterion, to the Café de Paris, to Oddenino’s and to the Piccadilly Hotel, where Jack Hylton’s band was also playing Gershwin in the ballroom. The Vincent Lopez Orchestra from the USA at the new Kit-Kat Club in the Haymarket was another hit, and since everything was within walking distance they could stay out all night, sometimes until dawn rose over the Thames. Avie was in London too, sharing Idina’s excitement while she had the chance.
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Idina’s engagement to Joss was announced in the Tatler on 19 September: ‘Lady Idina Gordon … is taking as her third husband, Mr Josslyn Hay, who will one day be the Earl of Erroll.’ The couple were on holiday at the Palazzo Barizizza on the Grand Canal in Venice when the announcement came out. Their hostess was Miss Olga Lynn, an opera singer manquée. Joss and Idina knew her as Oggie. She was not popular with everyone but had a loyal following, giving amusing and glamorous dinner parties for twenty at a time. Witty epigrams would be exchanged and ‘stunts’ performed for everybody’s entertainment. Oggie’s exotic set included Cecil Beaton, Tallulah Bankhead, Lady Diana Cooper, and Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife Cynthia – known in that circle as Tom and Cimmie. They would dine out at the Restaurant Cappello, much favoured by the Prince of Wales.
(#litres_trial_promo) Everyone knew one another. Whether swimming naked by moonlight in Venice, or attending Goodwood or Henley, their individual appearances and frolics were almost religiously recorded in the Tatler and the Sketch. This holiday in Venice cemented Joss’s friendship with Tom Mosley and ensured Joss and Idina a place in Oggie’s circle.
The Mosleys and Joss and Idina epitomised the postwar exuberance – they were highly optimistic about their own futures as well as the world’s, and they went about their lives on billows of hedonism. As Tom Mosley wrote, ‘We rushed towards life with arms outstretched to embrace the sunshine, and even the darkness … [we experienced the] ever varied enchantment of a glittering and wonderful world: a life rush to be consummated.’
(#litres_trial_promo) They were rich and they believed they could do anything. As far as they were concerned, war was over for ever.
In one photo, Joss and Idina parade on the Lido, Idina in a pleated white dress by Molyneux, as always, happy to show off her size-three feet by going barefoot. Hand in hand with his future wife, Joss follows the trend for ‘wonderful pyjamas in dazzling hues’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Tom Mosley, having been invalided out of the war, was forced to wear a surgical boot to redress an injury from an aeroplane crash. But his charisma more than compensated for his handicap, which was no impediment to attracting the likes of Idina and other beauties of the day with whom Joss had also dallied.
Mosley was the youngest Tory MP in 1919 but, within a year of meeting Joss, would leave the party in protest against the repressive regime in Ireland, switching allegiances to join Labour. Mosley would also give Neville Chamberlain ‘a terrible fright’ at Ladywood, Birmingham, contesting his seat and losing by only seventy-seven votes. Joss would emulate Tom’s style. They both fell for the same type of woman, and politically Joss’s ideas tallied with his at that time. They both believed that they could turn the world into a better place, providing they were given the power to act.
The Mosleys attended Joss’s and Idina’s wedding on 23 September. In their wedding picture, all arrogance is missing from Joss’s demeanour, replaced by a seldom seen expression of shyness or self-consciousness. Idina’s cloche hat is pulled firmly down. Wearing a brocade dust-coat trimmed with fur and her corsage of orchids, the bride looks, at best, motherly; she was thirty. Joss’s best man, the Hon. Philip Carey, and Idina’s brother Lord De La Warr were the witnesses. After the ceremony, Idina’s brother, Prince George of Russia, Tom and Cimmie Mosley and Lady Dufferin celebrated with them at the Savoy Grill.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss’s family is conspicuous by its absence. The couple cannot have been inundated with wedding presents, given the circumstances, but Tom and Cimmie gave Idina ‘a crystal-and-gilt dressing table set, personally designed by Louis Cartier, and engraved with her initials and a coronet’.
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Lord Kilmarnock went berserk when he heard the news from London that Joss and Idina were married. According to Bettine Rundle, the rumpus had to be seen to be believed. For all Joss’s defiance of his parents’ wishes, he must have had a twinge of conscience because he returned to Coblenz with Idina to make his peace early in the New Year of 1924.
(#litres_trial_promo) Despite their rage and disappointment over Joss’s squandered abilities Lord and Lady Kilmarnock appear to have forgiven the couple for when their stay at the residence ended they were piped out by Lord Kilmarnock’s sentry, Captain Alistair Forbes Anderson. This was an honour they would not have received unless they were back in Lord Kilmarnock’s favour.
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Having ruined a promising career with the Foreign Office, possessing no money, and limited by the social restrictions that marriage to a divorcee imposed, Joss must have looked on Africa as an ideal escape. It was being said that he had ‘married … because he was very young and very headstrong and because Lady Idina had considerable income from De La Warr’. If this criticism was fair, Joss was following in the tradition of his ancestors. However, the Hays inspired jealousy in those who weren’t so witty or as attractive, and these allegations of marrying for money could have been thus inspired.
(#litres_trial_promo) Idina would always have her detractors; she was too successful with men not to attract criticism. Being well read and knowing absolutely ‘everybody’ – from Diana Cooper to Florence Desmond – she did summon a certain envy. And her legendary sexual appetite did not endear her to people. Even her future son-in-law Moncreiffe, not prone to exaggeration, pointed out, ‘My mother-in-law was a great lady, though highly sexed.’
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Some time after their visit to Coblenz to make peace with the Kilmarnocks, Joss and Idina Hay sailed off with all their chattels, ready for their first home together. Joss was embarking on his first voyage to the Dark Continent with the recklessness of a schoolboy gambler. Their fellow passengers would have consisted of government officials, business entrepreneurs, missionaries and big-game hunters. During the voyage attempts were made by most of those expecting to stay in Kenya to study a slim volume called Up Country Swahili. However, Idina and Joss were up to their usual pranks, courting scandal in a manner for which they were soon to become infamous. After a week or more cooped up on board Joss found himself shoved into a lavatory in one of the state rooms with the key turned on him by his female companion, ‘in order to escape an outraged husband’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss had narrowly missed being caught in the act of fellatio when the woman’s husband had arrived at their stateroom door wondering why on earth she was taking so long to dress for dinner. She apologised coolly and promised to join him after she had completed her toilette. Meanwhile, as the sun went down, Idina had been sipping ‘little ginnies’ in the ship’s cocktail bar. She recounted the incident with evident relish and amusement to someone who, on a visit to the British residence in Coblenz, relayed the anecdote to Bettine Rundle. According to Bettine’s informant, Idina had blamed herself for Joss’s behaviour; he had learned from her how to be such a rake.
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* (#ulink_550886ed-b1e4-502b-bc52-12a7a50c51e9)In those days, applicants also had to prove they received a private income of at least £400 per annum.
* (#ulink_dd1a0dab-ef83-5308-a391-8aff38c380a3)Menzies had served with distinction in the First World War. There was a widespread belief in the services that he was the illegitimate son of Edward VII. He was certainly closely connected with court circles through his mother, Lady Holford, who was lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. He also had considerable influence in important government circles, and ‘as a ruthless intriguer’ used it shamelessly. In personal relationships Menzies was polite but never warm, ‘hard as granite under a smooth exterior’, as the wife of one of his Security Service colleagues observed. He drank heavily, loved hones and racing and was a club man (Philip Knightley, The Second Oldest Profession, p. 112). When he took over the SIS after Admiral Sinclair’s death in 1939 he was forty-nine. His successor, Sir Dick White, noticed that the file on Menzies was missing from the registry. The wartime chief had deliberately avoided any records ‘to preserve the fiction that he was the illegitimate son of Edward VII. “I paid ten shillings,” laughed White, “and got the name of his real father from Somerset House.”’ (Tom Bower, The Perfect English Spy: Sir Dick White and the Secret War 1935–90, p. 209).
5 Slains (#ulink_6fd65d8d-463d-540c-a111-4cdd8294fa05)
‘Africa – the last continent with a soul of its own’
Carl Jung
Joss decided to call his first home in Africa after his ancestral castle. This new Slains was backed by a dramatic forested ridge and watered by it streams, reminiscent of a Scottish landscape; the setting seemed to pay implicit homage to Joss’s past. Dinan, his heir, would begin her life here in the Wanjohi Valley, whose occupants were not so far removed in temperament from his ancestors: here too settlers had laboured, suffered, loved and lost. Instead of the fog that curled up from the North Sea to engulf icy ramparts, in Africa soft morning mists rose and rolled towards a rambling farmhouse to dissolve under the hot mid-morning sun.
When their ship dropped anchor off Mombasa’s old town, Joss and Idina were rowed ashore with their steamer trunks and all their heavy luggage. Two flags fluttered over the old Fort Jesus, built by the Portuguese: the Union Jack and the scarlet bandera of the Sultan of Zanzibar.
Joss was an experienced traveller in Europe, but nothing would have prepared him for the scenes in Mombasa’s old town. Its narrow streets were peopled with many different races. Women veiled in black purdah strolled among near-naked non-Muslim women, moving nonchalantly along in the heat with their unevenly shaped loads – such as bunches of green bananas or even a bottle – balanced perfectly on their heads. Commerce was noisy, shouted in many tongues as locals haggled for business; government officials, turbaned Sikhs and Indian dukawallahs
(#litres_trial_promo) seemed oblivious to the stench of fish and shark oil hanging on the air. In MacKinnon Square, another Union Jack hung limply from its flagpole above the District Commissioner’s office with its rusting corrugated-iron roof. Feathery coconut palms, blue sea and sky gave a feeling of infinite peace, yet Fort Jesus and the cannon standing resolutely beneath its low walls spoke of a history of bloodshed and strife.
The Hays spent one night at Mombasa Club, dining under the moon on its terrace, sleeping under nets as protection against mosquitoes; translucent geckos about the length of a finger darted about the walls, consuming the insects. One train per day left for Nairobi at noon, and the three-hundred-odd mile crawl on the single narrow-gauge track up country began, taking about twenty-four hours.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Penniless, dashing, titled and an accomplished sportsman’, as he was described in a newspaper profile a decade after his arrival in the colony, Joss would now make Kenya his home.
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Kenya would suit him because he was not afraid of the unexpected. Africa is nature’s Pandora’s box and the gambler in Joss would respond to its uncertainties. Idina loved everything about the colony too; she ‘could muster wholesome fury against those who she thought were trying to damage the land of her adoption’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her instinct that Joss would share her enthusiasm and strong feelings had been right. Life in the colony demanded hard work, rough living and life-threatening risks, but for an adventurer like Joss, who had all the right contacts and, thanks to Idina, plenty of money, Kenya offered the promise of the Imperial dream fulfilled. In addition, Joss had an open, inquiring mind and a willingness to seek advice from those more experienced than he was.
The Uganda Railway, by which the couple travelled to their new marital home, had been completed in 1901. The Maasai called it the ‘iron snake’ and those who opposed it the ‘lunatic line’. It ended at Port Florence (later called Kisumu) on Lake Victoria, and was a formidable achievement that took five years to complete, traversed wilderness and cost a staggering £5,500,000 without a jot of evidence to justify the expense. The Foreign Office, adept at muddling through, had then enticed out white settlers with cheap land flanking the railway-line.
Joss and Idina journeyed on the train from Mombasa in square compartments, nicknamed ‘loose-boxes’ – there were no corridors – and the train jolted ceaselessly while on the move, stopping, only for meals, at a series of Indian dak-bungalows. These breaks were refreshing on a long journey, which could be drawn out further if elephant or rhino blocked the line. Choking red dust coated every passenger. Any attempt while the train was at a standstill to remove the wire screens at the windows to get more air was met by a scolding from the invariably Goan stationmaster: ‘Bwana! Mosquito bad, Bwana. Malaria bad.’ The first stop at Samburu for tea was accompanied by toast and rhubarb jam. Menus were always the same.
Dinner was taken at Voi, where large hanging lamps like those suspended over billiard tables were bombarded by insects, dudus, which bounced off to lodge themselves in the butter or the lentil soup. The fish was smothered in tomato sauce to disguise its lack of freshness, and followed by beef or mutton, always curried, for the same reason. Lukewarm fruit salad or blancmange rounded off the meal, with coffee.
(#litres_trial_promo) Stewards made up bunks for the night with starched sheets, pillows and blankets, and in the dark, as the train rattled onward and upward, occasionally a cry would intrude in the night: ‘All out for Tsavo!’ Joss could mimic the sing-song Goan accent perfectly.
(#litres_trial_promo) At dawn everyone clambered on to the line to stretch their legs. Hot shaving water would materialise in jugs, produced from the steam by the engine driver and delivered with the morning tea by waiters in white uniform and red fezzes. Breakfast was taken further up the line at Makindu.
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As the journey progressed, Joss shared the excitement felt by every pioneer: at the spectacle of Kilimanjaro under its mantle of snow at sunset; at the endless scrub and the trickles of water optimistically called rivers; then disbelief, on the final approach to Nairobi, at the sheer dimensions of the Athi Plains, where mile upon mile of grassland teemed with gazelle, rhino and ostrich, and herds of giraffe, zebra and wildebeest roamed wild against the deep-blue frieze of the Ngong Hills. Seeing creatures in their natural habitat instead of behind bars was like rediscovering the Garden of Eden. And finally, beyond Nairobi, awed silence at the spectacle of the Great Rift Valley.
When Joss first laid eyes on Nairobi in 1924 it had become something akin to a Wild West frontier town patched together with corrugated iron. Windswept and treeless a quarter-century earlier, it had been unsafe after dark ‘on account of the game pits dug by natives’. Her Majesty’s Commissioner for British East Africa, Sir Charles Eliot, had embarked on a policy of attracting white settlers. When the European population amounted to 550 it was decided to build a town hall. All around was evidence of plague, malaria and typhoid as the shanty-town grew. These same diseases were still a life-threatening problem in Nairobi’s bazaar in Joss’s and Idina’s day.
By 1924, Nairobi had become a melting-pot, with settlers from all over the world bringing their different ways to the colony – their languages, their recipes, their religions, morals and social customs. Joss was no stranger to foreign languages, and before long Swahili would encroach too on his conversation: shaurie for ‘problem’; chai for ‘tea’; dudu for any form of insect life from a safari ant to a black widow spider; and barua for ‘note’ – important when there were no telephones by which to communicate. Sometimes English words with no Swahili equivalents were adopted into the language by the addition of an ‘i’ – bisikili, petroli. Indian words seasoned the mélange: syce for ‘groom’, gharrie for ‘motor-car’, dhersie for ‘tailor’. Settlers developed a local pidgin Swahili of their own, known by natives as Kisettla. When the settlers began conversing in Kisettla, notice was being given that all convention was henceforth left ‘at home’.
Beyond Nairobi the Uganda Railway traversed escarpment and volcanic ridges along the Rift Valley, with its lakes scattered like pearls; and further north, at Timboroa, the line rose to almost 8,000 feet in a stupendous feat of engineering, scaling ravines and descending again until it halted abruptly above the next large expanse of water, Lake Victoria, in Nyanza. At the railhead at Kisumu, the main crops were bananas and millet. There was still talk at the local bridge tables, of missionaries in the area who had disappeared, thanks to cannibals.
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Joss and Idina got off the train at Gilgil, about three-quarters of the way along the Uganda railway-line. A tiny dot, hardly on the map, Gilgil was so small that it boasted only a railway-siding, but it provided a vital link with Nairobi as travel by car was barely feasible because of the appalling state of the roads. The Wanjohi Valley was tucked away in the hills behind Gilgil. This broad and undulating virgin territory, where yellow-flowering hypericum bushes grew in profusion, was watered by two rivers. The Wanjohi and the Ketai, flanked by beautiful podocarpus, ran more or less parallel and fed many icy, turbulent, gravel-filled streams, crisscrossing the valley. Ewart Scott Grogan, a pioneer settler who played an important role in the development of Kenya, had stocked these with fingerlings in 1906 – brown as well as rainbow trout. As one left the valley going uphill to ‘Bloody Corner’, so called because so many vehicles got stuck in the mud there, the Wanjohi changed its name to the Melewa. Fed by the Ketai, it flowed down towards Gilgil, ‘through the plains and past an abandoned factory and former flax lands, through dust and mud, over rocks and stones, to Naivasha, the lake thirty miles away’.
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Joss’s and Idina’s new home, Slains, was situated just eighteen miles north-east of Gilgil. On arriving at the railway-siding they were met by their farm manager, Mr Pidcock, who drove them the forty-five-minute journey to the farmhouse. Slains nestled at one end of a private two-mile murram track leading in the opposite direction from Sir John ‘Chops’ Ramsden’s seventy-thousand-acre Kipipiri Estate and his home, Kipipiri House. Slains was a rambling, charming farmhouse, low-lying and beamed, with a corrugated-iron roof, open ceilings, verandas and long bedroom wings. The kitchen, as usual in Kenya, was housed separately. The rooms were vast with partitioned walls which allowed sound to travel freely, affording little privacy.
In Kenya, this style of housing, reminiscent of Provençal dwellings, was the inspiration of Chops Ramsden and unique to the district. The houses were constructed by a builder from Norfolk whom Ramsden, a hugely wealthy landowner, had initially brought to Kenya to construct Kipipiri House. This had pleased him so much that the builder stayed on and was employed to build every additional manager’s house and the neighbours’ homes as well. Before leaving for Kenya, Idina had asked Chops Ramsden to supervise the construction of Slains ready for her and Joss’s arrival. The uniformity of the Wanjohi Valley settlers’ houses reinforced the club-like atmosphere of the area.
Slains’ setting was as dramatic as its namesake in Scotland. The early-morning mists that swamped this moorland wilderness were damp enough to warrant the wearing of wellington boots. At sundown, a chill would come into the air, making night fires a necessity. Yet by day its climate was that of a perfect English summer. The equatorial sun at an altitude of 8,500 feet produced an exuberance of growth. Looking out from the front of Slains towards Ol Bolossat, which was more often a swamp than a lake, except when it was fed during the rains by the Narok River, occasionally one could see the gleaming water flowing over a two-hundred-foot shelf at Thomson’s Falls. In the distance up the valley behind the house rose the mountain Kipipiri, which joined the Aberdare range. The cedar-clad forest ridge which ran along the valley, dubbed by Frédéric de Janzé ‘the vertical land’, dwarfed everything below, and this haunt of elephant and buffalo lent grandeur to the simplicity of daily existence.
For life in Kenya in 1924 was far from an unbroken idyll. Joss was joining a community of pioneers who were still trying to redress the effects of their absence from their farms during the First World War. These early settlers might have picked up land at bargain prices but there had been a catch: every decision affecting their livelihood was made in London. Land for farms had in the early years of the twentieth century been parcelled out under ninety-nine-year leases ‘with periodic revision of rent and reversion to the Crown with compensation for improvements’, which meant that the settlers would forfeit everything unless they developed the property to prefixed standards.
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Only a few months before Joss first arrived at Slains, the Duke of Devonshire, then Colonial Secretary, had put the wind up European settlers in Kenya by declaring that ‘primarily Kenya is African territory’, and reminding them that His Majesty’s Government would pursue the ‘paramountcy of native interests’; furthermore, ‘if the interests of the immigrant races should conflict, the former should prevail’.
(#litres_trial_promo) While this meant little to Joss in 1924, he would become a champion of the European settlers’ interests in due course.
In 1920 Sir Edward Northey, the Governor, had made seven major innovations. Firstly, in that year the Protectorate graduated to Crown Colony. Secondly, a new Legislative Council was set up to represent the settler and commercial interests, and European settlers were granted the vote. The colony’s affairs could now be debated in the local parliament, ‘though it was stressed that the colony was still to be ruled from Whitehall’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In due course Joss became a member of ‘Legco’, as it was known. Thirdly, the railway was reorganised; its finances were separated from those of the Protectorate and the railway system was placed on a business footing. Four, under the control of an intercolonial council, the first big loan was raised for a new branch railway. Joss would see its construction, as well as the harbour works, begun and completed. Five, the Civil Service was reshaped. The rates of pay were raised to put them on a level with other colonial services. Six, the budget was balanced and inflated expenditure was cut drastically ‘so as to bring the country’s coat within measure of its cloth’.
(#litres_trial_promo) These innovations formed the framework of the political structure within which Joss would move and be affected as a settler.
Finally, it was under Northey that the Soldier Settlement Scheme was launched. In spite of setbacks, this was acknowledged to be the most successful postwar settlement project in the Empire. And – through Idina’s ex-husband, Charles Gordon – Joss benefited from the Government’s second attempt since the building of the Uganda Railway to fill the empty land with potential taxpayers and producers of wealth. These ex-soldiers got their land on easy terms, and Charles Gordon had been one of many applicants. Sir Delves Broughton, too, had drawn soldier settlement land, coming out initially in 1919 to inspect it. Allocation tickets could be bought in Nairobi and at the Colonial Office in London. ‘By June 1919 more than two thousand applications had flooded into Nairobi to take their chance at a grand draw held on the stage of the Theatre Royal.’ Like a lottery, the tickets were placed in barrels to decide who was to get what. ‘It took two revolving drums all day to distribute the empty acres by lottery to an audience of nail-biting would-be farmers.’
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One of the first settlers in Kenya, Hugh Cholmondeley, 3rd Baron Delamere, had trekked on foot into Kenya in 1897 with camels from Somalia, arriving with a doctor, a photographer and a taxidermist. Africa infected him with its potential. In 1903, Delamere applied for land in British East Africa on the ninety-nine-year-lease scheme and was granted a total of a hundred thousand acres at Elmenteita near Gilgil and at Njoro beyond Nakuru; he called his first home Equator Ranch. Njoro was already regarded as the cradle of European settlement by the time Joss and Idina arrived in Kenya. While D, as everyone called him, was not the first to take up land, he became the most influential of all the settlers. He was to have a powerful influence on Joss – they were virtually neighbours – and gradually Joss would find himself drawn into local politics. D’Abernon had taught Joss about the Scramble for Africa, and so he knew more than most neophyte settlers about the political machinations with foreign Imperial powers that had gone before. Joss and D, both Old Etonians, were utterly different types who stood for quite different things, but they were united in their love of Kenya and a willingness to use all possible means for their cause.
D was the leading light among the settler community. When not working his farms, he headed deputations to Government House, even taking a delegation to London in early 1923 to fight the settlers’ cause with a Government now much less in favour of colonialist expansion. He also found time to sit beside his own hearth with several Maasai who had walked for miles to chat with him at Soysambu
(#litres_trial_promo) wearing only a shuka and beads. Gilbert Colvile and Boy Long, D’s former manager – the other two in the colony’s great trio of cattle barons – would also often consort with the Maasai, who were greatly respected for their knowledge of cattle-breeding.
Gilbert Colvile was a highly eccentric character, almost a recluse. His mother Lady Colvile ran the Gilgil Hotel with her maid.
(#litres_trial_promo) The hotel was something of a focal point for European settlers, who would regularly call upon Lady Colvile. Her son would later get to know Joss when Joss moved to Naivasha. Colvile became one of the most successful cattle barons in Kenya, doing a great deal to improve Boran cattle by selective breeding. He had been at Eton with Delves Broughton and Lord Francis Scott. The latter, like Broughton, whose commanding officer he had been during the Great War, had drawn land from the 1919 Soldier Settlement Scheme. Scott was chosen to replace Delamere as Leader of the Elected Members of Legislative Council and as their representative to London after D’s death in 1931.
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Once Joss and Idina had settled in, the rhythm of life at Slains was orderly and as balmy as the daytime temperature. Their prelude to each day was a glorious early-morning ride. Their horses would be groomed and saddled, waiting for them to mount. Before the dew was burnt off the grass by the sun, they would ride out for miles over the soft, turf-like vegetation that rose up as if to meet the sky. The muffled thud of hooves would send warthog scurrying and the needle-horned dik-dik bounding away in pairs. Ant-bear holes were a hazard for their sure-footed Somali ponies, as the scent of bruised wild herbs rose from warm, unbroken soil under their unshod hooves in their jog home afterwards. Joss would change into a kilt and then breakfast on porridge and cream.
Labour was cheap after the war, but not readily forthcoming. District Commissioners had applied to the local chiefs to exert ‘every possible persuasion to young men to work on the farms’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Every servant needed training from scratch – most candidates had never set foot in a European household before. Appointing a major-domo was a complete lottery. The Hays had two Europeans on their staff, one of whom was Marie, a French maid who would become integral to Idina’s households. At times of crisis, Marie could be heard throughout the house ‘wringing her fat little hands, her voice rising higher and higher, “Cette affreuse Afrique! Cette affreuse Afrique!”, her high heels tapping out her progress on the parquet floors as she sought out Lady Hay with the latest disaster’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Then there was Mr Pidcock, their farm manager, who also ran the Slains dairy.
Butter-making was done early in the morning or late in the evening; the butter was washed in the clear river water, which gave it its wonderful texture. Every other day it would make its way to Gilgil by ox-cart, wrapped in a sheet torn from the Tatler.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Slains cuisine would never want for supplies of farm produce and, thanks to a good kitchen garden, the table there was superb. Idina’s menus were sophisticated, and Marie taught the African cook how to make soufflés and coq au vin on a blackened Dover stove fuelled by kuni.
(#litres_trial_promo) The ring of the axe was a familiar sound since wood heated the water for baths.
Waweru, Joss’s Kikuyu servant, came to work for him in 1925 as a ‘personal boy’ and may well have started life as a kitchen toto, when Joss spotted his potential. He was only a little younger than Joss – the Africans kept no precise record of the year they were born – and had never been to school. He would work for Bwana Hay until Joss’s death, and was utterly dependable. By the time he was called as a witness during the murder trial in 1941 as ‘Lord Erroll’s native valet’ this Kikuyu man had been privy to many intimacies in Joss’s life. Eventually promoted to major-domo at Joss’s next home, Waweru ran the household very capably, performing his duties with all the expertise and dignity of a seasoned English butler, making callers welcome in Joss’s absence, arranging flowers and overseeing junior staff.
(#litres_trial_promo) Waweru’s opinion of Joss as a ‘good man’ made an impression in court during the trial, and certainly debunks the rumour spread after Joss’s death that he mistreated his staff.
(#litres_trial_promo) At Slains, the African servants were given presents on Boxing Day, amid much celebration. As Joss once explained, one had to ‘budget on the basis of two to three wives, and half a dozen children per wife per family’. Nevertheless, everyone received presents.
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Another inaccurate assessment of Joss was the assumption that, because he was rich and titled, he was nothing but a ‘veranda farmer’. He certainly enjoyed life and drove around the area dangerously fast in Idina’s Hispano-Suiza with its silver stork flying over the crest of its great bonnet. His hair-raising driving earned him his Swahili name, Bwana Vumbi Mingi Sana, meaning ‘a lot of dust’. For all his high-spirited behaviour, though, Joss was serious about farming. The Hays were the first settlers to breed high-grade Guernsey cattle in Kenya, for example. And thanks to advisers such as Boy Long and Delamere, they were able to avoid the most common blunders made by newcomers, such as putting very large bulls to native heifers, which would result in calving difficulties. The pioneers had learned the hard way. Once the conformation problem was recognised, half-bred bulls were used instead and heifers fared better.
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Joss knew a lot about horses from all his polo experience, and entrusted only Captain George Marcus Lawrence, a soldier settler who had ridden for the British Olympic team, with the schooling of his polo ponies and the training of his modest string of racehorses. Marc Lawrence would oversee the estate and the staff during Joss’s absences in Europe.
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Livestock auctions were held in the Rift Valley at Gilgil, Naivasha and Nakuru, through which the only road to Nairobi passed. Each boasted a post office, a DC’s office flying the Union Jack and a police post with the usual sprinkling of Indian dukas;
(#litres_trial_promo) the only petrol to be found between Nakuru and Nairobi was at the garage Fernside and Reliance Motors Ltd in Naivasha.
(#litres_trial_promo) At the auctions Boy and Joss always stood out amongst the crowd, chatting together. Boy Long, like Joss, was good-looking and popular with women. According to Elspeth Huxley, Boy dressed ‘like an English country squire with a dash of the cowboy, accentuated by a broad-brimmed Stetson hat and a bright Somali shawl’. Joss too was establishing something of a reputation for his eccentric dress, but behind the libertine appearance of these two men were fine brains attuned to the business in hand.
On sales days just before 9 a.m., sumptuous cars would park behind the auction stand. A fine red dust with a peculiarly harsh smell would be lifted by the wind, spiralling into the sky. As the dust settled behind Joss’s Hispano-Suiza when he stepped out, it would rise again around the hooves of the Abyssinian ponies as they were trotted out for inspection, ‘thin, footsore and weary’, having been driven down by Somali herders. Joss’s polo ponies as well as his hacks were taken from Abyssinian stock, because they were exceptionally sure-footed and coped well in the rough terrain.
Wives ‘looking radiant and glamorous, smoking Egyptian cigarettes’, would gaze down at pens full of pawing, butting cattle as the bidding went on.
(#litres_trial_promo) Idina never seemed to suffer in the dust and heat – one of her least tolerable offences in the eyes of her detractors. Joss and she both seemed to tolerate African conditions effortlessly.
Joss often met up with D and Boy, whether at Soysambu or Nderit, where Boy lived, or Slains, and the three of them would discuss farming problems. Emergencies were forever cropping up: everyday shauries – crises among the African staff, thefts, sicknesses, snake bites and the sudden need for a vet.
(#litres_trial_promo) Within eighteen months of arriving in Kenya Joss, who was not a vain man, felt that he had learned enough through practical experience to describe himself as a cattle farmer.
To diversify their produce, Joss and Idina tried planting pyrethrum – in those days nobody knew for sure what would or would not grow at any altitude – a flower used in the production of crop insecticides. For this the land had to be tilled; teams of doe-eyed oxen, sixteen at a time, would drag the heavy tiller through the earth. If the wooden harness broke, it took Pidcock more than an hour to drill each hole through the hard olive-wood using a brace and bit, to make a new one. Slowly and painfully, several hundred of the Slains acres were transformed into furrow upon furrow of lacy white pyrethrum. What Joss learned here formed the basis of arguments he would later use as a member of Legislative Council, defending the high-quality production of pyrethrum for export.
Elspeth Huxley praised the Hays’ farming activities: ‘They enhanced rather than damaged the natural charms of their valley, by leaving native trees alone and … by paddocking green pastures for butter-yellow Guernseys, stocking streams.’ Idina taught her shamba
(#litres_trial_promo) boys how to lay and look after lawns, to prune, and to cultivate English spring bulbs. Her legacy survives today on Mombasa’s north coast, where a garden of exotic shrubs and trees enhances the house where she died. At Slains they grew pansies, Albertine roses and petunias with success and around the cedar trees they planted daffodil bulbs. When these bloomed the effect was that of an English country estate. Elspeth Huxley’s parents, Joss and Nellie Grant, would drive over from Gikammeh to swap yarns and exotic cuttings.
Joss’s and Idina’s neighbours ran into one another in Gilgil – everyone used the railway-siding there. The dusty main road sported one signpost, which pointed north to Nakuru and south to Nairobi.
(#litres_trial_promo) Vitalbhai’s in Gilgil was the largest in a string of iron-roofed dukas. Just outside its entrance, a dhersie
(#litres_trial_promo) toiled away on his treadle Singer sewing machine. Here, Joss and Idina bought basic provisions as well as yards and yards of corduroy in different colours on the chit system. The dhersie would stitch kanzus – long, white cotton robes rather like night-shirts – which were worn with a red cummerbund by houseboys. He also made Idina’s and Joss’s slacks in the corduroy – a fashion set by Idina, so practical that everyone followed it.
The ‘cow-town’ of Nakuru was the farming heart of the Rift Valley, and was Lord Francis Scott’s nearest shopping centre. The Scotts were never invited to Slains, though Joss and Francis Scott would become friends later. The Scotts, having met Idina first as Charles Gordon’s wife, never stopped condemning her. Eileen Scott wrote in her diary: ‘She has done a lot of harm to this country and behaved like a barmaid.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Elspeth Huxley’s description of Eileen suggests that the disapproval would have been mutual: ‘Eileen Scott lingers in my memory draped in chiffon scarves, clasping a French novel and possibly a small yappy dog, and uttering at intervals birdlike cries of “Oh François! François!”.’
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Notwithstanding her low opinion of Idina, Lady Eileen was among the first to recognise potential in Joss: once he joined the Naivasha Farmers’ Association she found him ‘much improved’. Joss’s success there came as a surprise to some, Lady Eileen continued: ‘Contrary to the expectations of most people, Joss Erroll was voted to the chair … It is a pity Joss hasn’t had a year’s more practice and experience; he has a brain like lightning and it is difficult for him to listen patiently to this slow-minded, if sound, community. However it is a very great step in the right direction, he is very able and a gentleman.’
While the Scotts were never guests at Slains, Joss and Idina did not want for extra companionship. With an eclectic flow of friends and visitors, local or from overseas, at Slains the mood of each gathering was dependent on kindred spirits – playful, debauched, sophisticated or civilised. Idina would preside, perpetually reloading her long amber cigarette-holder. The more often her glass was recharged – ‘Another little ginnies, dahling,’ she would drawl – the more amorous she became, a signal that things were about to liven up.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss, however, ‘never smoked, seldom drank, sipping wine in small quantities at dinner; he never touched spirits’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He would act as barman to his guests, topping up their glasses for hours on end without any sign of irritation. Whenever alcohol was served at parties, whether in the role of host or guest, Joss kept his glass full to avoid seeming to be a killjoy when others were knocking it back. He would decline courteously if anyone pressed him to drink more and, with a knowing twinkle, would murmur, ‘I’m not going to impair my performance.’
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Joss and Idina had their own polo ground at Slains and played at weekends, generally attracting a crowd of spectators.
(#litres_trial_promo) The polo crowd loved Joss: ‘He was a first-class player … Clever, always had a brain … and was always ready to take advice.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A typical gathering would include some of Joss’s Old Etonian friends, neighbouring settlers and a sprinkling of titled guests from abroad.
Reclining in leather-covered armchairs, with those relics of life in England, a fox’s mask and crossed whips on the wall, they would talk of ‘light things – horses and the latest gossip from Government House’. Inevitably their exchanges would include chat about any new divorcees. Since the arrival of the new Governor Sir Edward Grigg, divorcees were blacklisted. ‘Queen Mary had issued her own writ to Lady Grigg: no divorcee was to be received at Government House.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Idina could not have cared less, though the exclusion was humiliating to some.
It soon became custom in the Wanjohi Valley for each household to throw one huge annual party. Guests converged, bringing with them a bevy of servants and tents, to be erected in the gardens as accommodation. Having come from afar, they expected to spend at least three days there – longer if the rains were making the roads impassable. A visiting mpishi
(#litres_trial_promo) would usefully pick up tips for new dishes, and this practice caught on rapidly, further enhancing Slains’ excellent culinary reputation.
Visitors from abroad would be especially enchanted, after a dusty journey along a remote unpromising track, to reach such civilised surroundings. Slains was filled with comfortable old furniture, Persian carpets, family portraits, silver ornaments, and studded Zanzibar chests gleaming from applications of lime juice and salt. Unlike most homes in Kenya, however, there was not a stuffed animal trophy to be seen. There were baronial arrangements of flowers, spacious bedrooms with private bathrooms and a library – ‘huge and varied … full of biographies … No one knew more about contemporary literature than Idina.’ This room was dominated by Joss’s desk.
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According to its owner in the fifties, Slains’ principal bathroom was ‘superb … vast, and in the centre stood a bath of green onyx … Idina would bathe in champagne occasionally. She was a darling but very naughty.’ Idina’s excesses were conspicuous to all, and her reputation for outrageousness did nothing to improve opinion of Joss among serious-minded settlers. Idina had a walk-in cupboard, leading off their morning-tea room, which housed her shoes, shelf upon shelf and pair by pair – which was a puzzle to her African staff since she went about barefoot, even when riding, just as they did. Idina often suffered from chafed feet. One young woman friend, while applying a bandage to one foot which ‘was very swollen and obviously painful’, failed to see how Idina could bear her touch. Noticing that she did not flinch, the friend asked her if she was not afraid of anything: ‘“Yes,” Idina had replied, “old age.”’
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In every bedroom a bottle of whisky and tumblers stood on a tray, and on each pillow was a pair of folded silk pyjamas.
(#litres_trial_promo) This courtesy was extended to guests from overseas because they were unlikely to be accustomed to changing into glamorous dressing-gowns and pyjamas for dinner. Joss had decided to use those boldly patterned beach pyjamas from Venice where they had been all the rage as daytime wear. Since they were comfortable, attractive and practical the fashion became de rigueur as evening wear. Boy Long concluded that ‘the quality and colour of one’s pyjamas and dressing-gown worn for dinner revealed one’s social standing’.
(#litres_trial_promo) This fashion did not meet with everyone’s approval – King George V was not impressed when he heard about the habit after the Duke and Duchess of York’s visit to Kenya in 1925.
When Idina saw her guests off with her husky ‘Goodbye, my dears!’, they were always sad to leave. Often they could not expect to return for a whole year. Their only meeting, meanwhile, might be by chance at Muthaiga Club. Being separated by such great and hazardous distances, the settlers were inclined to make the most of their get-togethers, an exuberance that unfairly contributed to their reputation for debauchery.
In May 1925 Idina discovered she was pregnant – her baby was due the following January. But her condition evidently did not get in the way of her social life. Shortly after finding out about her pregnancy, the Hays invited Frédéric and Alice de Janzé to Slains – in the autumn, when the weather made Paris less appealing. They agreed to come out to Kenya for two months including Christmas. Leaving Paris in late November, the de Janzés treated this holiday as a delayed honeymoon as, in the two years since they had married, Alice had produced their two daughters, Nolwen and Paola. The girls stayed behind in France.
Frédéric and Alice were seduced by the glorious Wanjohi Valley, and no doubt by the thought of becoming neighbours with such close friends. Wanjohi Farm, about five miles from Slains, came up for sale while they were staying there, and Alice bought it. She and Frédéric did not move in until the end of 1926, however.
Idina seemed to be fully aware of, but indifferent to, Joss’s affair with Alice. She knew they had been close since Paris days and their flirtation carried on intermittently during their stay as well as when the de Janzés came to live in Kenya. Some say that Alice turned up in Kenya because she could not bear to be parted from Joss, but this theory exaggerates hers and Joss’s feelings for one another. They enjoyed hopping into bed together occasionally, but Alice had far stronger feelings for other men, such as Raymund de Trafford, and Joss found the temperamental Alice far too much trouble to become seriously committed to her. Frédéric was also unaffected by Joss’s and Alice’s sporadic affair. He would nonchalantly refer to Joss as ‘the Boyfriend’.
The de Janzés accompanied Joss and Idina to Muthaiga, an exclusive residential area about three miles from Nairobi’s centre, where they spent Christmas of 1925, so that Idina could be in Nairobi for the birth of the baby. Their daughter was born on 5 January 1926 and they called her Diana Denyse Hay. As a toddler Diana took to calling herself Dinan, a nickname she soon came to be known by.
The first ten months of 1926 would see an epidemic of the plague in Nairobi’s Indian bazaar. There were to be no fewer than sixteen deaths by November, when Dinan was ten months old. Worries over raising children were not confined to the plague. Malaria was another life-threatening disease, and at the time there was a wide-spread conviction that the altitude and the sun would have an adverse effect on growing European children. For this reason, there were few living in the Wanjohi in the twenties. Even as a toddler, Dinan was made to wear a double terai and a spine pad
(#litres_trial_promo) between the hours of eight and four. Joss, pictured in a snapshot holding his baby daughter, looks incredibly happy – even astonished by the tiny doll-like creature in the crook of his right arm. Whatever his paternal instincts, however, Dinan would be raised by a nanny, as was customary amongst the aristocracy in those days.
While Idina was still in Nairobi recovering from Dinan’s birth, Joss had stopped on his journey home to Slains at the water-splash in the Kedong Valley, where everyone took on extra water before attempting to climb the two-thousand-foot escarpment. At this bubbling stream the glade was inhabited by a pride of lions – quite uninterested in the presence of humans – whose footprints could be seen in the mud; handsome black and white Colobus monkeys leapt about among the branches above. From the splash, the more cautious would reverse their cars up the hairpin bends, to lessen the strain on the engines. Joss had Waweru with him: no European ever travelled alone in Africa then, a wisdom that has never changed. Not long afterwards, Cyril Ramsay-Hill fetched up with his gunbearer.
(#litres_trial_promo) He too was on his way home, but from safari to a newly completed house on Lake Naivasha into which he and his wife Molly had just moved. Ramsay-Hill, dying to show off its splendour, invited Joss back for the night to save him driving on up to the Wanjohi.
Though they had not met before Joss had heard of Ramsay-Hill: it was rumoured that he had made his money out of hairdressing. In fact he had been attached to the 11th Hussars. Apparently the natives, who could not pronounce the word, much less understand what a ‘Hussar’ might be, had concluded that Bwana Ramsay-Hill was a hairdresser. Frédéric de Janzé had already come across him that Christmas – a flamboyant fellow, he said, resembling Salvador Dali, replete with moustache and monocle. During conversation Frédéric discovered that he and Ramsay-Hill shared an interest in the cinema and in literature. It then transpired that Ramsay-Hill’s ‘interest’ involved a collection of classic French pornography, paintings and books, many of which were eighteenth-century originals.
(#litres_trial_promo) Next to the library in his new house was a small locked room where he housed his ‘secret library’, ‘a very special collection of books and highly erotic pictures by Boucher, Lancret, Fragonard and Watteau from the collection of the Duc de Richelieu’.
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Ramsay-Hill would live to regret his impulsive invitation by the water-splash, for it was thus that Molly Ramsay-Hill was introduced to Joss, the man who would ‘remake her world’. Their affair, which began some time later, was managed very discreetly and, just as Joss had kept his parents in ignorance about his intentions towards Idina, so here no one guessed at the outset that there was anything other than Joss’s habitual flirtation and charm in his conduct with Molly, who was nine years older than he was, the same height as Idina and ‘petite and quite a beauty, Titian-haired with green eyes and a flawlessly pale skin’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In contrast to many women of her age in the colony, whose faces were devoid of any artifice and weatherbeaten, Molly’s face was ‘deadly white as if it had been dipped into a flour bag; she wore dark red lipstick and dark red nail lacquer to match. Everyone thought her terribly exotic.’
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Kiki Preston, who had been part of the American glamour set in Paris, came back to her splendid house Mundui at Naivasha some time in 1926, having been persuaded to stay by a friend who had given her land on the lake. Frédéric called Kiki and Gerry Preston ‘Black Laughter’. The Paris clique was beginning to re-form around the shores of Lake Naivasha and along the Wanjohi Valley.
When Frédéric and Alice came to live in Kenya at the end of 1926, as before, their daughters were left behind in France. At this time the Wanjohi Valley was inhabited by less than a dozen Europeans, including the Hays and the de Janzés. Since their arrival the Hays had held court here and, with Frédéric and Alice, they would form the core of an exclusive set. As with all groups of intimate friends they developed certain rituals and habits which marked them out from others. Idina frequently held hands with Alice in the garden at Slains, illustrating how relaxed they were in their shared passion for Joss, which seemed only to bring them closer together. Alice would often sing for her three friends, accompanying herself on the mandolin.
They would go on safari together. The fact that Joss chose not to hunt, fish or shoot did not prevent Idina from doing so. Joss seemed content to be out in the field. Every evening on safari they would gather by the fire between seven and eight, before bathing and changing for dinner, to devote an hour to composing limericks and storytelling. Each took it in turn to recite to the others. This was Frédéric’s idea. He had moved in literary circles in Paris, keeping company with people like Maurice Barrès, Proust and Anna de Noailles; his standards were high. Frédéric’s creations were the cleverest, Joss’s the funniest, Idina occasionally cheated, and Alice always tried to outwit the men. A typical contribution from Joss ran:
There was a young lady from Nyeri
Whose lusts were considered quite eerie,
On the night that she came,
And we both did the same,
It was fun, until I said, Kwaheri.’
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Rules were strict when it came to the stories. First, a round of ‘cold hands’ at poker was played, to determine who should start. Whoever won must begin with ‘Once upon a time, Kenya was not Kenya but British East Africa …’ and follow with any subject except shooting.
(#litres_trial_promo) Sometimes Idina, in her low throaty voice, would declare Kenya taboo: ‘Let’s be jolly and think of Paris tonight.’ They would all shut out Africa and everyone in it until the Swahili servant interrupted their reveries – ‘Chakula tyari’ – and they would go into the camp tent for dinner.
The foursome also enjoyed jaunts to Nairobi, usually confined to race week four times a year when they would make merry like everyone else, staying at Muthaiga Club. The visits involved a drive of a hundred miles, taking six hours. The de Janzés had a Buick and they would race the Hays to Muthaiga Club, testing the qualities of the Hays’ Hispano-Suiza against the Buick.
(#litres_trial_promo) The de Janzés frequently won, which is perhaps why Joss favoured Buicks later himself.
Fernside and Reliance Motors Ltd, the garage in the ‘tiny dorp’ of Naivasha, looked after the Hay vehicles for Joss all his life. Its European mechanics would lay bets with him on whether he would break his own record time to Nairobi. ‘Bwana Hay was no remittance man, cheerful when he lost, and bills were always paid eventually, if spasmodically.’ Robert Creighton serviced all the Hay engines, including the Hispano-Suiza. Joss was the only man Creighton had ever met to leave a Rolls-Royce in a ditch after it had skidded off the road in the rains and turned over. Joss’s ignorance of car engines left Creighton baffled. ‘How could so intelligent a man learn nothing about motor-car maintenance?’
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The murram road from Naivasha to Nairobi formed easily into corrugations, shaking vehicles mercilessly and making travel for farmers with heavy loads very laborious; the Hay – de Janzé races cannot have been comfortable. It was always a relief to arrive in Nairobi. Alice, ‘in grey slacks and green jumper, and wide-spaced grey eyes’, would calmly defy all the club rules, gliding into Muthaiga Club and daring anyone to stop her bringing in her animals – ‘a tiny monkey, an Airedale and a lion cub’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Even when she was persuaded to leave them in the car, each was brought indoors to her for regular inspection.
By now Nairobi had street lights, so fewer citizens were likely to fall into the open drains at night. Rickshaws plied their trade along Government Road between graceful blue gum trees, lining both sides of the wide thoroughfare between Nairobi Station and the Norfolk Hotel. In the mid-twenties Government House was rebuilt on the orders of Sir Edward Grigg, who was Kenya’s Governor until 1930.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss, who had barely set foot in the old black and white ‘Tudor’ residence, would frequent this stately new building often in the 1930s. The cost, an astronomical £80,000, would be made much of by taxpayers, who ‘squealed indignantly and spoke of folies de grandeur’.
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Idina, coolly defying the harsh African climate itself, would appear at the Nairobi races in one of Molyneux’s latest innovations, on one occasion a brown hat covered in oiled ostrich feathers.
(#litres_trial_promo) Because Joss liked black and white, he had hit on the idea of Idina wearing unmatching earrings as a pair – one white pearl and one black pearl – a fashion she made her own.
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Joss always paid one visit to his barber Theo Schouten’s whenever up in Nairobi – men tended to visit their barber every three weeks then. His only alternative, meanwhile, was to get Idina to trim his hair. Theo Schouten was a ‘cheerful little man’ who, having been in Nairobi since 1911, was already looked upon as one of the town’s characters, running his Government Road establishment with ‘West End staff’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Schouten’s catered for both sexes in a humble wood and iron building with a corrugated roof and, like the best barbers everywhere, knew everyone and everything that was going on. Joss and Schouten came to know and like one another, and the barber’s was conveniently near to Joss’s and Idina’s lawyer, Walter Shapley of Shapley, Schwartze & Barratt. In London Joss had always used Truefitt & Hill in Bond Street, including their range of lotions known as CAR, and eventually he would persuade Schouten to stock this exclusive range. Joss’s dance partners were always aware of the pleasant scent. Men noticed it too – the distinctive aroma would pervade a changing room shared with Joss before a game of cricket or polo.
(#litres_trial_promo) Later, when Schouten moved to grander premises in the New Stanley Hotel on Delamere Avenue, and Joss was living in Nairobi, the one appointment he never missed was his massage and manicure, so as to garner information, useful gossip, about town.
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The Hays and the de Janzés took their rituals to Muthaiga Club: ‘the squash court ladder was sacrosanct’. They all began at the bottom, playing their betters, climbing rung by rung until each found his place, either to be ‘ousted by or ousting the rung just ahead’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss would always reach the top of the ladder, the champion for two seasons. He usually won at poker too, notwithstanding the fancy footwork that was going on with Alice under the table. He went along with that old poker adage – if you can’t spot the mug at your table in half an hour, it’s you! He relished that moment when the atmosphere became taut to breaking point and the game was played out in silence but for the orchestra of insects outside.
(#litres_trial_promo) Joss was of course an excellent bridge player, remembering easily which cards had gone into each trick.
The parties at Muthaiga during race week were notoriously wild. Evenings began with sundowners in the peristyle before dinner, and the celebrations lasted well into the night. According to one who saw it all for himself:
The gayest and most light-hearted community in Africa was to be found amongst the British settlers in Kenya, possibly because the Highlands, where most lived, were 7,000 feet above sea-level and this seemed to stimulate gaiety and exuberance. Many lived and worked on the farms that had developed from a country previously uncultivated and uninhabited bush. This was a community mainly of young people who worked hard and played hard and enjoyed life. The leading Muthaiga Country Club was the scene of many of the evening festivities. These would start very correctly with men and women in full evening dress gravely sipping glasses of sherry before dinner. By the end of the evening the company would probably be playing some riotous game or if an occasion such as New Year’s Eve, dancing round a bonfire in the garden. [On one occasion] six people were placed at the same table in the luncheon tent at the race meeting in Nairobi, who had by chance all been married (to one or the other) before … An air of restraint dominated until one of the men broke the ice, observing that it was quite like an old comrades’ dinner.
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After race week, back to the Wanjohi Valley the Hays and the de Janzés would go, for another month or so of isolation.
While out riding one morning, Frédéric and Alice discovered a lioness with three cubs hiding under some rocks and went regularly to the lair to observe them. Soon afterwards two young Indian princes with an older ADC called at Wanjohi Farm to invite the Hays and the de Janzés to come for dinner at their camp. They accepted gladly and discovered the camp was supplied with every luxury. The hunters displayed their trophies, ‘a greater kudu and two lion skins’. When Frédéric found out where these had been shot, he realised the princes had found their family of lions. ‘But didn’t you see any cubs?’ he asked. No, they had only seen the male and female, who had charged so they shot them both. Next morning Frédéric and Joss rode out to look for the cubs. ‘The poor little brutes had starved for three days, one was already dead, another died that night.’ Frédéric and Joss were angry with the hunters, for they believed that the killing of a female ‘of any of the species’ was a crime.
(#litres_trial_promo) Samson, the surviving cub, remained with the de Janzés, and gradually the dogs, ponies and even Valentino the baboon accepted him. Samson and Frédéric established a deep rapport. When Frederic fell ill with malaria, Samson would sit by his bed like a dog, waiting for his master to regain health.
They all had adventures with wild animals. One insistent elephant wandered up the valley from Laikipia on to Slains, trampling the Hay shamba. Joss would not allow anyone to shoot the animal but, needing a gunshot to scare it off, sent over to a neighbour for help. The neighbour appeared with a large rifle and some servants, and this shooting party succeeded in driving the elephant away, getting within a hundred yards of it, into thick forest. Then it came swiftly down wind, having heard the men, ambushing and knocking the helpful neighbour down with a side slash of its tusk. The man squirmed between the elephant’s front feet as it dug around with its trunk. He then claimed he stuck his fingers in its nostrils and was finally saved by being kicked backwards into a clump of thorns. Dr Henderson of Nakuru treated him for three broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder, ‘all in return for the kindness of loaning his gun’. He was black and blue all over.
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Samson disgraced himself at the first party that the de Janzés gave at Wanjohi Farm. The place was ‘hectic with twenty people staying, in and about the tents in front of their big veranda, and the courtyard at the back … was cluttered with cars’. The African staff loved entertaining and parties, notwithstanding all the additional work. Guests often brought their own cooks with them, who were ‘bringers of news from afar’ for the household staff. Africans are born chefs. The local staple diet is posho – maize meal – hardly varying over the years, and yet they astonished their employers with their diverse repertoire. Idina’s chef whipped up omelettes as light as air, or produced paupiettes of sole or truite meunière for as many guests as was wished, often at short notice. At Wanjohi Farm, every bench, easy chair, camp chair and dining chair had been brought into commission, and, ‘for once the table looked magnificent with a tablecloth and all necessary “adjuncts” in their place’. Samson, ‘much petted and spoiled’, soon got into the party spirit. Frédéric, changing indoors, heard the first crash: ‘I was in my bath … a towel, a leap and I was rescuing the table fittings where Samson tugged determinedly – a sparkle of fun in his eyes. A broken plate, sundry glasses on the floor – he was thoroughly enjoying himself.’
Everyone contributed to their ‘Dutch treat party’, where Joss and Frédéric, ‘mere abstainers’, handed out cocktails. Joss would mix the fashionable drinks of the day expertly, shaking up Manhattans and Martinis. Cocktails and jazz were expressions of modern life which Idina and Alice had brought from Paris. From Naivasha, the two newcomers Major and Mrs Ramsay-Hill had brought along stout and champagne because Molly’s favourite cocktail was Black Velvet, a mixture of champagne and Guinness.
(#litres_trial_promo) Idina’s tipple was gin and orange bitters. During the main course at dinner Molly Ramsay-Hill suddenly leapt to her feet and let out a wild shriek as a servant dropped a bowl of mayonnaise down her back, having tripped over Samson. Now, as Molly retreated to clean herself up, she too almost tripped over Samson’s outstretched paw. Someone leapt forward in time to prevent a heavy fall. ‘The good lady took a lot of pacifying … dinner came to an end without interruption.’
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