At the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi, the one-time headquarters of
Kenya's notorious Happy Valley set,
no topic is guaranteed to elicit more
yawns of boredom at the evening bar
than the White Mischief case. For 59
years (the body of the Earl of Erroll
was discovered on the outskirts of Nairobi on 24 January 1941), the
members of the Club have stared patiently into their gin and tonics
as an endless parade of journalists turned amateur detectives have
expounded their theories about who the murderer was. These days
they can't even be bothered to lead these aspiring Hercule Poirots
up the garden path, a diversion that once provided some amusement.
No, if truth be told, they're fed up to the back teeth with the whole
ruddy business. They want nothing more than to bury the ancient
scandal, once and for all.
Unfortunately, a local historian called Errol Trzebinski has other plans. She's about to publish a book that threatens to blow the entire case wide open once again.
In The Life and Death of Lord Erroll, Trzebinski claims to have solved the mystery surrounding Lord Erroll's murder. After half a decade of research, including several months of combing through files in the Public Record Office, this unlikely sleuth has apparently uncovered documentary proof that Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, was the victim of an MI5 plot. And if that doesn't cause the members of the Muthaiga Club to drop their copies of The Daily Telegraph, it is difficult to imagine what would.
The blurb in the publisher's catalogue states: ‘The author, who has lived in Kenya for 30 years, was not satisfied with conflicting gossip on the case and reveals a conspiracy of confusion that finds its source in Whitehall's War Office.’
Trzebinski won't reveal what her evidence is in advance of the book's publication. It says something about just how sensational the revelations are in The Life and Death of Lord Erroll that the book is being serialised by a tabloid newspaper and that Trzebinski has signed a contract forbidding her to talk about it. Indeed, she cannot even confirm that she believes Erroll was assassinated by the British government. All Trzebinski will say is that her theory is absolutely earth-shattering.
‘I've been working on this for five years,’ she confides. ‘What I've found out is truly amazing and no one has got near it. When I embarked on this book, I had absolutely no clue what I would unearth. You have no idea of the cover-up that has taken place.’
Trzebinski is the latest in a long line of writers to be mesmerised by Lord Erroll's murder. The 39-year-old Earl, and Hereditary Lord High Constable of Scotland, was the uncrowned king of the Happy Valley set, a hard-drinking, philandering rake who got a sporting thrill from cuckolding his male friends. It was the notorious antics of Erroll and his glamorous, titled friends in Kenya's White Highlands that led to the joke whereby members of British society between the wars would be asked: ‘Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?’
When Erroll's bullet-riddled body was discovered on a dirt road in Karen, an affluent suburb of Nairobi, there were enough suspects to rival an Agatha Christie murder mystery. The subsequent court case made headlines around the world and could fairly be described as having been the 0. J. Simpson trial of its day.
The first and most famous man of letters to become absorbed by the case was Cyril Connolly, who published an article about it in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1969. Rather than single out a particular suspect, Connolly held responsible the licentious atmosphere of Thirties and Forties Kenya, what he referred to as ‘the three As’: altitude, alcohol and adultery (Altitude, Alcohol and Adultery was also the title of a BBC documentary about the scandal broadcast in 1993). ‘Perhaps Africa was to blame,’ wrote Connolly. ‘It insinuates violence, liberates unacted desires.’
When Connolly died in 1974, he bequeathed all his notes on the case to James Fox, a young Sunday Times researcher who'd worked with him on the 1969 article. Fox, in turn, developed his own obsession with the murder and, in 1984, published White Mischief, a gripping account of the scandal which was subsequently made into a film starring Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance. Fox concluded that the murderer was Sir Henry John ‘Jock’ Delves Broughton, a crooked British aristocrat whose beautiful young wife, Diana, was having a very public affair with Lord Erroll at the time.
Of all the suspects in the case, Delves Broughton remains the most popular, not least because he stood trial for the murder and, after being acquitted on a technicality, committed suicide a year later. Many observers took this to be an admission of guilt on his part. Nevertheless, Fox's theory was challenged by Leda Farrant, a Kenyan writer who, in 1993, published Diana Lady Delamere and the Lord Erroll Murder in which she named Diana as the killer. Farrant's claim to be taken seriously rested on her access to Sir Jock Delves Broughton's private papers, which she was granted by his son, Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, who was anxious to clear his father's name.
Farrant's evidence, which mainly depended on unreliable eye-witness accounts, was dismissed last year by the latest writer to publish a book on the case, Juanita Carberry, author of Child of Happy Valley. Carberry, who was a 15-year-old schoolgirl living in Kenya in 1941, has the advantage of having known Sir Jock Delves Broughton. Indeed, she claims that he actually confessed to her just three days after the murder when he encountered her alone at her parents' stables.
‘Broughton told me, on the way to the stables, that the police were following him,’ recalls Carberry. ‘I was a kid and I said, “Oh, why?” and he said, “They think I killed Joss.” I said, “Oh, well,” and then, for some reason known only to himself, he said, “Well I did, actually.” He told me, but he didn't, like some of these media people say, “confess” to me. He was merely chatting away about it.’
Trzebinski parts company with all these amateur sleuths in that she doesn't believe the murder was a crime of passion. According to several sources familiar with Trzebinski's book, she claims that Lord Erroll was killed at the instigation of MI5 because he was suspected of being an Italian agent. On the face of it, this seems like a fairly far-fetched theory, but it isn't without foundation. At the time of his death, Erroll was the Assistant Military Secretary of Kenya and, at one stage, he had been a member of the British Union of Fascists. Trzebinski claims to have uncovered evidence that Erroll was targeted for assassination by the War Office on the grounds that he was a security risk. She points out that Erroll was murdered on the eve of the Abyssinian campaign in which British troops invaded Kenya's Italian-occupied neighbour. Other sources have suggested that he actively sold secrets to Mussolini's forces and was earmarked to be gauleiter of Kenya if an Italian invasion succeeded.
In addition to the various documents she claims to have discovered at the Public Record Office, Trzebinski had access to all Lord ErroIl's private papers. Merlin Hay, the current Earl of Erroll, decided to make his grandfather's correspondence available to her after she persuaded him her book would be a serious work of history, not an excuse to rehash old gossip.
‘She was interested in my grandfather's political career, not just in writing another scandal book,’ confides the 24th Earl of Erroll. ‘I thought it might make for a more interesting book.’
He is bound to get a shock when the book comes out and he discovers that Trzebinski has accused his ancestor of being a fascist traitor.
So how plausible is Trzebinski's hypothesis? James Fox refuses to comment until he has studied the book. Others are less cautious. Richard Aldrich, co-editor of a journal called Intelligence and National Security, is sceptical because, unlike their American counterparts, the British intelligence services have never endorsed assassination as a viable political strategy. ‘My immediate response is that there are almost no assassinations that we're aware of,’ he says. ‘The number of assassinations and attempted assassinations during World War II you can count on the fingers of one hand, certainly on two. In 90 per cent of cases, these theories turn out to be hogwash.’
But, according to a former Secret Intelligence Service officer – who would only speak on condition of anonymity – the claim that Lord Erroll was killed by MI5 is by no means improbable. ‘In peace-time, our guys didn't go round assassinating anybody, not even Castro, let alone a British peer,’ he says. ‘But in wartime it was different. I go on the theory that everything's fair in love and war.’
Among the European community in Kenya, where Errol Trzebinski is a much-loved figure, the rumours of her book's contents are being taken with a large dose of salt. ‘If the British Government wanted to assassinate fascists, why didn't they rub out Sir Oswald Mosley?’ asks one puzzled member of the Muthaiga Club. ‘Why would they bother with some harmless toff on the Equator?’
Lord Valentine Cecil, son of the Marquess of Salisbury and owner of a successful Kenyan telecommunications company, thinks Trzebinski's theory is complete nonsense. ‘I have no idea where Errol Trzebinski got her evidence but it's so implausible to me. I completely dismiss it,’ he says. ‘I just don't believe anything she says, though I like her and her children are great friends of mine.’
In part, how seriously Trzebinski's revelations are taken will turn on her reputation as a historian. To date, she has published three other books, the most successful of which was a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, the great white hunter who was played by Robert Redford in the Oscar-winning 1985 film Out of Africa.
Indeed, Trzebinski was hired as a consultant by Universal Pictures during the making of the movie, and her husband, a Polish émigré called Sbish, had a small role in the film. He was described in the credits as a ‘beefy drunk’.
Despite her Polish surname, Errol Trzebinski is British and, within her professional peer group, she is well regarded. Fiammetta Rocco, who in addition to being the books editor of The Economist is also the granddaughter of Mario Rocco, an Italian nobleman who lived next door to Lord Erroll in Kenya, is full of praise for Trzebinski. ‘She has become a better and better researcher with each book she has written,’ says Rocco. ‘This is going to be her last big book, a chance to really make her mark. I know that she spent a lot of time at the Public Record Office. She's very good.’
One thing that isn't clear is whether Trzebinski believes Sir Jock Delves Broughton was responsible for executing the MI5 plot. In 1997, she told The Scotsman that the real murderer was somebody ‘whose name has not come out yet’. But, in the course of her research during 1998, she appears to have changed her mind.
According to Juanita Carberry, Trzebinski now believes that Delves Broughton was the trigger man. ‘She came to see me and she said, “I've got a completely new angle on the murder now,”’ recalls the 74-year-old Carberry. ‘I said, “Oh great, so you're going to prove me a liar are you?” She replied, “Oh no, your story fits in perfectly.”’
If Trzebinski does claim that Delves Broughton shot Lord Erroll, even if she maintains he was acting on the instructions of MI5, her book won't prove very popular with the baronet's descendants, several of whom are senior members of the British Establishment. The Hon Mrs Keswick, granddaughter of Sir Jock and director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think-tank, isn't sympathetic to Trzebinski's theory.
‘Knowing his character, the idea of my grandfather being a secret agent is extremely far-fetched,’ she says. ‘He simply wasn't the kind of man to get involved with the intelligence services.’
Philip Delves Broughton, a New York correspondent for The Daily Telegraph and a distant relative of Sir Jock's, is equally unimpressed by Trzebinski's hypothesis. ‘My grandfather always used to say that this was a subject that came up every two years or so and it was something we'd have to learn to live with,’ he laments. ‘We're now so remote from these events and so many of the primary sources have snuffed it people can say almost anything they want.’
Nevertheless, if Trzebinski really has come up with documentary proof that it was Sir Jock Delves Broughton who shot Lord Erroll, the family is going to have to accept that their ancestor was a murderer.
Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of the White Mischief case is that there's still so much interest in it. Why is a tabloid newspaper serialising a book about a murder that happened 3,000 miles away and 59 years ago? Juanita Carberry ascribes it to good old-fashioned British snobbery.
‘If they'd been Mr Smith and Mr Jones it would have died long ago,’ she points out, ‘but because it was Sir Jock Delves Broughton and Lord Erroll, it lives on. Personally, I'm sick to the eyeballs with it.’
Rona Lady Delves Broughton, the widow of Sir Evelyn, puts the continuing fascination with the case down to the fact that it has never been satisfactorily solved. ‘The characters involved were well-known,’ she says, ‘and I think people still really want to know the answer.’
Maybe, in the pages of The Life and Death of Lord Erroll, the mystery will finally be solved beyond a shadow of a doubt. Fiammetta Rocco, a respected writer in her own right, believes that Errol Trzebinski may have succeeded in writing the definitive book on the case.
‘I saw a lot of the research she was doing and it had the smell of stuff that pays off,’ she says. ‘It's quite possible that she has finally nailed it.’
© 2000 Tatler