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Revealed: the White Mischief murderer
Judith Woods
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 11/05/2007
Compelling evidence from beyond the grave has enabled the final piece of the jigsaw in Kenya's Happy Valley killing to be fitted into place. Judith Woods reports
Happy Valley murder mystery is solved
It was the unsolved high society murder that fascinated the nation for more than half a century. With the decadent backdrop of the infamous Happy Valley set in Kenya, the killing of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, in 1941 was as intriguing as it was shocking.
The murder of Josslyn Hay, serial womaniser and inveterate gambler, has fascinated the nation for more than half a century
Was it a crime passionnel as a result of Erroll's notorious womanising or a political execution carried out because of his Right-wing connections? Who pulled the trigger on the gun - and where did the assassin hide the weapon, which has never been found? For 66 years the gripping, glamorous scandal, which was later immortalised in the book and film White Mischief, starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi, has shown no signs of being solved.
Now, definitive new evidence has come to light, finally revealing who shot Erroll and how this most premeditated of crimes was committed. Extraordinary tapes from beyond the grave, together with fresh witness accounts, have solved the mystery that has baffled historians and investigative authors for decades.
Back in 1941, Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton was put on trial for the murder of Erroll, who was his wife Diana's lover. Although sensationally acquitted, months later Delves Broughton committed suicide, fuelling further heated speculation.
And now, in a fateful echo of the past, the very week that Delves Broughton's granddaughter, the brilliant yet troubled fashion stylist Isabella Blow, apparently took her own life by poison at her Cotswolds home, The Daily Telegraph can disclose that it was indeed her grandfather who murdered the Earl of Erroll.
The woman behind these new revelations is Christine Nicholls, the author of Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya, a history of white colonisation in the country.
"I have spent years puzzling over the murder," says Nicholls. "I was always certain that Delves Broughton had done it, but up until now, there was no proof. At last we know what happened the night Erroll was shot - and the details are utterly compelling."
Nicholls was given tape recordings and witness statements by a fellow author, Mary Edwards, wife of the former deputy high commissioner in Kenya, who wrote a book about the country that was never published. Last year, shortly before her death, she handed her material to Nicholls. Some of the interviews date back to 1987, because the key witness on the tape had asked for the contents to be kept secret until some years after his death, which occurred in 1991.
"It's a hugely exciting discovery," says Nicholls. "Some commentators suggested that it was Diana who shot her lover when he tried to end the relationship; others that Erroll was murdered by one of his other jealous lovers, or a cuckolded husband who couldn't bear the shame.
"There have even been claims that Erroll's death was due to a secret service conspiracy, and that he was executed because he was suspected of collaborating with the Germans in wartime and belonged to a renegade group including the Duke of Windsor and Rudolf Hess. People have always been enthralled by this mystery."
This was certainly the case at the time. Even at the height of the Second World War, the trial transfixed Britain and marked the beginning of the end for Kenya's hedonistic colonial elite. But to comprehend the crime, one must understand the louche, amoral world of Happy Valley, that enclave of hedonism in the White Highlands of Kenya, notorious since the Twenties as an aristocratic playground.
As World War II raged in Europe and beyond, and Africa suffered its familiar tribulations of locusts, disease and droughts alternating with floods, the fast-living upper classes carried on as though nothing had changed from their pre-war hey-day. They drank to excess, took cocaine, abused their servants and slept with each other's wives: the only sin was being a bore.
Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll and Hereditary High Constable of Scotland, was a serial womaniser and inveterate gambler, who specialised in seducing rich married women. Himself twice-married (his second wife died of heroin addiction), the predatory Erroll was loathed and feared by husbands, but his status was assured when, at the start of the war, he was appointed assistant military secretary for Kenya, despite a previous link with the Fascists.
White Mischief: Greta Scacchi in the 1987 film
Then, in November 1940, a new couple arrived in the colony. Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton, 11th baronet and formerly patron of both Doddington Park in Cheshire and Broughton Hall in Staffordshire, was accompanied by his new wife, Diana.
Delves Broughton was 56, and the effects of a thrombosis caused him to drag his left foot. Diana was an alluring divorcée, with deep blue eyes and elegant, arched eyebrows. Aged 26, she was well aware of her powers of attraction.
Even en route to Kenya, Diana had embarked on an affair with a fellow passenger, and ignored her husband, who was too smitten to object. Not long after they arrived in Nairobi, Diana met Erroll, who was by now sporting the khaki tropical uniform of a captain in the East African forces, and, despite the fact that he already had a mistress, soon became his lover.
Their passion was shortlived. Three months later, on the night of January 24 1941, Erroll was found shot dead in his car. Shockwaves reverberated through this privileged community at the thought of a killer in their midst.
Prior to the murder, Delves Broughton appeared to have been sanguine about his wife's philandering, although given that promiscuity was de rigueur in Happy Valley, it would have been considered bad form to have behaved otherwise.
It struck no one as strange, then, that on the night of Erroll's death, Delves Broughton, Diana, Erroll and a friend, June Carberry, all dined together at the Muthaiga Club outside Nairobi. When Diana and Erroll headed off to go dancing, Delves Broughton merely told Erroll to bring his wife back by 3 am.
Erroll and Diana returned at 2.30am. He went into the house to bid her goodnight, then returned to his Buick and drove off. Half an hour later, his body was found slumped in his car several miles away by a milkman. He had been shot through the temple and there were powder burns at the side of his face. On the back seat of the car there were unexplained white scuff marks.
Delves Broughton was the obvious suspect and was brought to trial for the murder. The media coverage threw into sharp relief the extravagant lifestyles and depraved social mores of the idle rich in Africa, who revelled in cocktails and casual sex while Britain suffered the deprivations of wartime rationing and nightly raids by German bombers.
Delves Broughton was acquitted in what was widely regarded as a blatant miscarriage of justice, but there was no proof to convict him. He was never accepted back into what remained of the Happy Valley fold, however. Diana had by now taken up with another wealthy lover, whom she went on to marry. Subsequently she married for a fourth time, and became Lady Delamere.
She stayed on in Kenya while the disgraced Delves Broughton sailed home. Several days after arriving back in England he committed suicide in a bedroom at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, by injecting a lethal overdose of morphine.
No one has ever known for sure whether he killed Erroll. At his trial, his defence argued that he couldn't have committed the murder because the bullet had clearly been shot from either inside the car or from the running-board. This meant he wouldn't have had any way of returning to his house other than on foot.
Erroll had been killed some time after 2.30 am. Yet at 3.30 am Delves Broughton had knocked on June Carberry's door to check she was all right as she was known to be a heavy drinker. The scene of the crime was 2.4 miles by road from his house, or one mile through the bush, distances that, given his limp, Delves Broughton could never have covered in that time.
But according to the new evidence, Delves Broughton, who was wearing a pair of white plimsolls, had slipped into the back of Erroll's car while Erroll was seeing Diana safely indoors after they'd been dancing. When Erroll drove off and turned on to the main road back to Nairobi, Delves Broughton shot him. Then he was picked up further along the road at a pre-arranged spot by another car, which drove him home.
"The tape recording I have gives the name of the driver who collected Delves Broughton," says Christina Nicholls. "The driver was Dr Athan Philip, an ear, nose, throat and eye specialist who was a refugee from Sofia in Bulgaria. He was a neighbour of Delves Broughton and his practice wasn't going very well, so he was happy to take a generous payment for doing a pick-up.
Whether he knew exactly why he had to be at a certain place at a certain time isn't clear, but the reason Delves Broughton had told Erroll to bring Diana home by 3 am was so that he could put his plan into action." The tape itself is a recording by Dan Trench, whose parents were farming partners with June Carberry's family. Carberry told the Trenches, including Dan, how the murder was committed, but they never spoke to the police.
"Dan Trench didn't feel he could repeat the story until he was old and frail in 1987," says Nicholls. "Even then, having made the tape he didn't want it to become public until well after his death."
Nicholls has also pieced together further crucial parts of the jigsaw. Juanita, the 15-year-old daughter of June Carberry's husband from a previous marriage, visited the Delves Broughton house on the day of the murder. The atmosphere was tense and Diana cried uncontrollably.
"A servant came in to say there was a fire in the garden on the manure heap. Juanita saw clothes burning and a pair of good white plimsolls smouldering on top," says Nicholls. "Shocked at the waste, Juanita suggested they be given to an African servant, but Delves Broughton dismissed the idea. It was the white rubber soles of the plimsolls that had made the mysterious marks inside the car."
Nicholls has spoken extensively to Juanita, who is now in her eighties and lives in a flat in Chelsea. She has said that, two days later, Delves Broughton told her not to be surprised if the police turned up to arrest him for the murder of Erroll.
"Juanita was very taken aback and said: 'Oh no, you couldn't have'," says Nicholls. "Delves Broughton's response was deadpan. 'But I did, and I have just dropped the gun over the bridge into the river at Thika'."
The gun didn't stay there for long. Delves Broughton also confessed to June Carberry that he was the murderer and told her where he had disposed of the weapon. June felt there was a risk he might have been seen throwing the gun into the shallow water, and sent a servant to dive into the river to retrieve it.
"The gun was taken to Eden Roc, the hotel owned by the Carberrys in Mailindi on the coast, and concealed in the roof of the workshop," says Nicholls. "Later, the hotel maintenance engineer unearthed the weapon in a routine check and took it to the Carberrys."
Among the correspondence given to Nicholls were emails sent by the maintenance engineer's cousin, who told her the story of what had occurred.
"He said that when the gun was brought to him, John Carberry went white as a sheet, jumped in his car and took off to Malindi town. There he borrowed a big deep-sea fishing boat, headed out at top speed over the reef and dropped the gun into deep water, where it remains to this day."
It is a potent image of a terrible secret buried forever. But, 66 years later, the truth has finally come to light, conjuring up yet again the ghosts of Happy Valley and the bitter passions that drove one member of the British nobility to slay another in cold blood. Yet, despite solving the puzzle at the heart of this hitherto enigmatic crime, Nicholls feels the fascination surrounding such a singular murder will live on.
"People love a good mystery," she says. "It's such an intriguing case that I suspect that speculation about the details will continue for years to come."
Elspeth Huxley: A Biography' by C S Nicholls (HarperCollins) is available for £8.99 plus 99p p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112
Here are two crits of the Movie White Mischief:
'White Mischief' (R)
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 13, 1988
You're never out of fashion in pearls and a little black dress, even if you are Charles Dance. The strawberry-blond crumpet is the ill-fated Earl of Erroll in "White Mischief," an arch tale of decadent Brits in colonial Kenya. Though Erroll sometimes looks like the African queen here, he actually was the ultimate ladies' man.
Back home the British are enduring the blitz, while the carefree Erroll and his madcap circle are cross-dressing, swapping partners and having dubious relationships with pythons. The movie, from the nonfiction book by James Fox, portrays the consequences of too much luxury and too little imagination. The wild life had nothing to do with rhinos.
"White Mischief" is meant as a murder mystery, but it is more successful as a period "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous," with exquisite Greta Scacchi as the hostess.
She plays the dazzling Diana, who has married the 57-year-old Sir Jock Broughton (Joss Akland) for his money. Unbeknownst to her, he is going broke as they leave his English estate for another in Africa. In Europe, she was the sort of woman who wore ermine to the bomb shelter, so she fits right in with the Kenyans. First thing, her husband introduces her to Erroll, his old friend. She gives him a heavy-lidded look -- hot as noon under an elephant-chewed baobab tree -- and he gives her one right back. And one thing leads to another.
Publicly cuckolded, Sir Jock is ever the gent and graciously agrees to release Diana from their marriage. He even takes the couple out for a celebratory dinner. Alas, later that night, Erroll is found shot through the head. Sir Jock is accused of the crime, and at first he reacts with elegant reserve. But out of the blue African sky, he gets out his elephant gun and starts spattering his estate with blood. And suddenly the characters don't seem as much gentry as refugees from a Brian DePalma movie.
The women, most of whom have had torrid affairs with the incredible Erroll, have come unhinged over his untimely death. Sarah Miles, as a creepy morphine-addicted heiress, is one of the most brokenhearted. When she and the other women in weeds visit the corpse, she even engages in a rather horrifying display of necrophilia.
Frankly the British are more charming when repressed, E.M. Forster-style. "White Mischief" does sparkle with the drawing-room jibes of these idle nabobs, who except for Diana and Erroll are all slightly past their prime. Portraying them that way, director Michael Radford, as British directors are apt to do, draws parallels to the piddling away of the empire. Radford definitely has a flair for the debauched romance of it all. But even Marlin Perkins has a better sense of drama.
Copyright The Washington Post
Review/Film; 'White Mischief,' Death of a Rake
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By VINCENT CANBY
Published: April 22, 1988, Friday
It's not easy being decadent, though intelligence isn't required. One must have a certain amount of time and money (or credit), an all-consuming self-interest and, whenever possible, an exotic setting in which to misbehave. Good looks, preferably beauty, also help, as well as the constitution of a goat.
This is pretty much the sum and substance of ''White Mischief,'' Michael Radford's entertaining, sometimes perilously giddy screen variation on James Fox's 1982 investigative book. Like the book, some of whose facts it reshapes for its own purposes, the film is a recollection of a notorious murder case and the lives of a small, privileged group of upper-class colonials in Kenya in 1940 and 1941.
The basic facts are these: Early on the morning of Jan. 24, 1941, Josslyn Hay, 39 years old, the 22d Earl of Erroll and premier peer of Scotland, was found shot to death in his car a couple of miles down the road from the estate of Sir John Henry (Jock) Delves Broughton, 57, whose wife, Diana, 27, was planning to leave him to elope with the Earl.
Broughton was charged with the murder and stood trial. In Kenya at that time, virtually every other husband, and a couple of women, had compelling motives for dispatching the prowling peer, who is remembered as being as devastatingly attractive to men as he was to women, all of them married.
''White Mischief,'' which opens today at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, is like a classy, breathless backdate of ''Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.'' The movie clearly disapproves of the sorts of things it reports. It's perfectly aware that, back home, a war was going on while these negligent aristocrats were safe in Kenya, swapping wives, drinking away their days and nights, shooting up and gunning down various endangered species, including one another. However, the movie doesn't allow a social conscience to spoil the voyeuristic fun.
''White Mischief,'' adapted for the screen by Mr. Radford and Jonathan Gems, never gets bogged down in analysis or even outrage. It deals in the looks of things and in behavior, exemplified in the seductive performance of Greta Scacchi as the chilly, ambitious Diana Broughton. Miss Scacchi (''Heat and Dust,'' ''Good Morning Babylon'') is a great beauty anyway, but with the ultra-blond hair she has here, and with her bright, hard, 1940's makeup, she defines both the character and the sort of film this is: brittle and often just a little too much.
Though Mr. Radford leaves no doubt about who he thinks killed the Earl of Erroll (the book never really commits itself), the film sticks close to the known facts of the odd marriage of Diana and Broughton (Joss Ackland), who make a prenuptial pact in which each promises not to hinder the other if he, or she, falls in love with someone else.
Within a few of weeks of their marriage and arrival in Kenya, where the financially pressed Broughton plans to farm, Diana has met and fallen in love with the charming Erroll (Charles Dance), who has no money but an impressive pedigree. Diana expects Broughton to honor their agreement and, for a while, it seems that he will. The night before Erroll's murder, Broughton toasts his wife and her lover at a jolly Champagne dinner at their Nairobi club.
''White Mischief'' never attempts to turn the torrid affair of Diana and Erroll into some sort of romance-of-the-century. Instead it's far more interested in the casually cruel manners of everyone in that small society known (after the area in which they lived) as the Happy Valley set.
Among their nearest and dearest friends: a morphine-addicted American heiress (Sarah Miles), who loves Erroll and animals (she appears at a polo match with a python draped around her shoulders); a forlorn wife (Geraldine Chaplin), also one of Erroll's former mistresses, who turns to her African help for companionship; Broughton's best friend (Trevor Howard, in his last screen role), who invites guests to spend the night and then spies on them after they've retired, and a wealthy, taciturn landowner (John Hurt) who, as they used to say, ''has gone native.''
As movie orgies go, the ones in ''White Mischief'' look comically underpopulated. In one short scene, we watch Diana, Erroll, Broughton and the rest of their set kicking up at a party where both sexes are wearing drag. Everyone appears exhausted. These things are probably intentional, but the movie's voice is so understated that it seems to have no voice at all. Instead, it often speaks through shock effects that are more absurd than satiric, including Miss Miles's overheated leave-taking of her former lover's body at the morgue.
Miss Scacchi, the film's true star, receives excellent support from Mr. Dance and Mr. Ackland, and from the other members of the large, somewhat underemployed cast.
Judith Woods
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 11/05/2007
Compelling evidence from beyond the grave has enabled the final piece of the jigsaw in Kenya's Happy Valley killing to be fitted into place. Judith Woods reports
Happy Valley murder mystery is solved
It was the unsolved high society murder that fascinated the nation for more than half a century. With the decadent backdrop of the infamous Happy Valley set in Kenya, the killing of Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, in 1941 was as intriguing as it was shocking.
The murder of Josslyn Hay, serial womaniser and inveterate gambler, has fascinated the nation for more than half a century
Was it a crime passionnel as a result of Erroll's notorious womanising or a political execution carried out because of his Right-wing connections? Who pulled the trigger on the gun - and where did the assassin hide the weapon, which has never been found? For 66 years the gripping, glamorous scandal, which was later immortalised in the book and film White Mischief, starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi, has shown no signs of being solved.
Now, definitive new evidence has come to light, finally revealing who shot Erroll and how this most premeditated of crimes was committed. Extraordinary tapes from beyond the grave, together with fresh witness accounts, have solved the mystery that has baffled historians and investigative authors for decades.
Back in 1941, Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton was put on trial for the murder of Erroll, who was his wife Diana's lover. Although sensationally acquitted, months later Delves Broughton committed suicide, fuelling further heated speculation.
And now, in a fateful echo of the past, the very week that Delves Broughton's granddaughter, the brilliant yet troubled fashion stylist Isabella Blow, apparently took her own life by poison at her Cotswolds home, The Daily Telegraph can disclose that it was indeed her grandfather who murdered the Earl of Erroll.
The woman behind these new revelations is Christine Nicholls, the author of Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya, a history of white colonisation in the country.
"I have spent years puzzling over the murder," says Nicholls. "I was always certain that Delves Broughton had done it, but up until now, there was no proof. At last we know what happened the night Erroll was shot - and the details are utterly compelling."
Nicholls was given tape recordings and witness statements by a fellow author, Mary Edwards, wife of the former deputy high commissioner in Kenya, who wrote a book about the country that was never published. Last year, shortly before her death, she handed her material to Nicholls. Some of the interviews date back to 1987, because the key witness on the tape had asked for the contents to be kept secret until some years after his death, which occurred in 1991.
"It's a hugely exciting discovery," says Nicholls. "Some commentators suggested that it was Diana who shot her lover when he tried to end the relationship; others that Erroll was murdered by one of his other jealous lovers, or a cuckolded husband who couldn't bear the shame.
"There have even been claims that Erroll's death was due to a secret service conspiracy, and that he was executed because he was suspected of collaborating with the Germans in wartime and belonged to a renegade group including the Duke of Windsor and Rudolf Hess. People have always been enthralled by this mystery."
This was certainly the case at the time. Even at the height of the Second World War, the trial transfixed Britain and marked the beginning of the end for Kenya's hedonistic colonial elite. But to comprehend the crime, one must understand the louche, amoral world of Happy Valley, that enclave of hedonism in the White Highlands of Kenya, notorious since the Twenties as an aristocratic playground.
As World War II raged in Europe and beyond, and Africa suffered its familiar tribulations of locusts, disease and droughts alternating with floods, the fast-living upper classes carried on as though nothing had changed from their pre-war hey-day. They drank to excess, took cocaine, abused their servants and slept with each other's wives: the only sin was being a bore.
Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll and Hereditary High Constable of Scotland, was a serial womaniser and inveterate gambler, who specialised in seducing rich married women. Himself twice-married (his second wife died of heroin addiction), the predatory Erroll was loathed and feared by husbands, but his status was assured when, at the start of the war, he was appointed assistant military secretary for Kenya, despite a previous link with the Fascists.
White Mischief: Greta Scacchi in the 1987 film
Then, in November 1940, a new couple arrived in the colony. Sir "Jock" Delves Broughton, 11th baronet and formerly patron of both Doddington Park in Cheshire and Broughton Hall in Staffordshire, was accompanied by his new wife, Diana.
Delves Broughton was 56, and the effects of a thrombosis caused him to drag his left foot. Diana was an alluring divorcée, with deep blue eyes and elegant, arched eyebrows. Aged 26, she was well aware of her powers of attraction.
Even en route to Kenya, Diana had embarked on an affair with a fellow passenger, and ignored her husband, who was too smitten to object. Not long after they arrived in Nairobi, Diana met Erroll, who was by now sporting the khaki tropical uniform of a captain in the East African forces, and, despite the fact that he already had a mistress, soon became his lover.
Their passion was shortlived. Three months later, on the night of January 24 1941, Erroll was found shot dead in his car. Shockwaves reverberated through this privileged community at the thought of a killer in their midst.
Prior to the murder, Delves Broughton appeared to have been sanguine about his wife's philandering, although given that promiscuity was de rigueur in Happy Valley, it would have been considered bad form to have behaved otherwise.
It struck no one as strange, then, that on the night of Erroll's death, Delves Broughton, Diana, Erroll and a friend, June Carberry, all dined together at the Muthaiga Club outside Nairobi. When Diana and Erroll headed off to go dancing, Delves Broughton merely told Erroll to bring his wife back by 3 am.
Erroll and Diana returned at 2.30am. He went into the house to bid her goodnight, then returned to his Buick and drove off. Half an hour later, his body was found slumped in his car several miles away by a milkman. He had been shot through the temple and there were powder burns at the side of his face. On the back seat of the car there were unexplained white scuff marks.
Delves Broughton was the obvious suspect and was brought to trial for the murder. The media coverage threw into sharp relief the extravagant lifestyles and depraved social mores of the idle rich in Africa, who revelled in cocktails and casual sex while Britain suffered the deprivations of wartime rationing and nightly raids by German bombers.
Delves Broughton was acquitted in what was widely regarded as a blatant miscarriage of justice, but there was no proof to convict him. He was never accepted back into what remained of the Happy Valley fold, however. Diana had by now taken up with another wealthy lover, whom she went on to marry. Subsequently she married for a fourth time, and became Lady Delamere.
She stayed on in Kenya while the disgraced Delves Broughton sailed home. Several days after arriving back in England he committed suicide in a bedroom at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool, by injecting a lethal overdose of morphine.
No one has ever known for sure whether he killed Erroll. At his trial, his defence argued that he couldn't have committed the murder because the bullet had clearly been shot from either inside the car or from the running-board. This meant he wouldn't have had any way of returning to his house other than on foot.
Erroll had been killed some time after 2.30 am. Yet at 3.30 am Delves Broughton had knocked on June Carberry's door to check she was all right as she was known to be a heavy drinker. The scene of the crime was 2.4 miles by road from his house, or one mile through the bush, distances that, given his limp, Delves Broughton could never have covered in that time.
But according to the new evidence, Delves Broughton, who was wearing a pair of white plimsolls, had slipped into the back of Erroll's car while Erroll was seeing Diana safely indoors after they'd been dancing. When Erroll drove off and turned on to the main road back to Nairobi, Delves Broughton shot him. Then he was picked up further along the road at a pre-arranged spot by another car, which drove him home.
"The tape recording I have gives the name of the driver who collected Delves Broughton," says Christina Nicholls. "The driver was Dr Athan Philip, an ear, nose, throat and eye specialist who was a refugee from Sofia in Bulgaria. He was a neighbour of Delves Broughton and his practice wasn't going very well, so he was happy to take a generous payment for doing a pick-up.
Whether he knew exactly why he had to be at a certain place at a certain time isn't clear, but the reason Delves Broughton had told Erroll to bring Diana home by 3 am was so that he could put his plan into action." The tape itself is a recording by Dan Trench, whose parents were farming partners with June Carberry's family. Carberry told the Trenches, including Dan, how the murder was committed, but they never spoke to the police.
"Dan Trench didn't feel he could repeat the story until he was old and frail in 1987," says Nicholls. "Even then, having made the tape he didn't want it to become public until well after his death."
Nicholls has also pieced together further crucial parts of the jigsaw. Juanita, the 15-year-old daughter of June Carberry's husband from a previous marriage, visited the Delves Broughton house on the day of the murder. The atmosphere was tense and Diana cried uncontrollably.
"A servant came in to say there was a fire in the garden on the manure heap. Juanita saw clothes burning and a pair of good white plimsolls smouldering on top," says Nicholls. "Shocked at the waste, Juanita suggested they be given to an African servant, but Delves Broughton dismissed the idea. It was the white rubber soles of the plimsolls that had made the mysterious marks inside the car."
Nicholls has spoken extensively to Juanita, who is now in her eighties and lives in a flat in Chelsea. She has said that, two days later, Delves Broughton told her not to be surprised if the police turned up to arrest him for the murder of Erroll.
"Juanita was very taken aback and said: 'Oh no, you couldn't have'," says Nicholls. "Delves Broughton's response was deadpan. 'But I did, and I have just dropped the gun over the bridge into the river at Thika'."
The gun didn't stay there for long. Delves Broughton also confessed to June Carberry that he was the murderer and told her where he had disposed of the weapon. June felt there was a risk he might have been seen throwing the gun into the shallow water, and sent a servant to dive into the river to retrieve it.
"The gun was taken to Eden Roc, the hotel owned by the Carberrys in Mailindi on the coast, and concealed in the roof of the workshop," says Nicholls. "Later, the hotel maintenance engineer unearthed the weapon in a routine check and took it to the Carberrys."
Among the correspondence given to Nicholls were emails sent by the maintenance engineer's cousin, who told her the story of what had occurred.
"He said that when the gun was brought to him, John Carberry went white as a sheet, jumped in his car and took off to Malindi town. There he borrowed a big deep-sea fishing boat, headed out at top speed over the reef and dropped the gun into deep water, where it remains to this day."
It is a potent image of a terrible secret buried forever. But, 66 years later, the truth has finally come to light, conjuring up yet again the ghosts of Happy Valley and the bitter passions that drove one member of the British nobility to slay another in cold blood. Yet, despite solving the puzzle at the heart of this hitherto enigmatic crime, Nicholls feels the fascination surrounding such a singular murder will live on.
"People love a good mystery," she says. "It's such an intriguing case that I suspect that speculation about the details will continue for years to come."
Elspeth Huxley: A Biography' by C S Nicholls (HarperCollins) is available for £8.99 plus 99p p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4112
Here are two crits of the Movie White Mischief:
'White Mischief' (R)
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
May 13, 1988
You're never out of fashion in pearls and a little black dress, even if you are Charles Dance. The strawberry-blond crumpet is the ill-fated Earl of Erroll in "White Mischief," an arch tale of decadent Brits in colonial Kenya. Though Erroll sometimes looks like the African queen here, he actually was the ultimate ladies' man.
Back home the British are enduring the blitz, while the carefree Erroll and his madcap circle are cross-dressing, swapping partners and having dubious relationships with pythons. The movie, from the nonfiction book by James Fox, portrays the consequences of too much luxury and too little imagination. The wild life had nothing to do with rhinos.
"White Mischief" is meant as a murder mystery, but it is more successful as a period "Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous," with exquisite Greta Scacchi as the hostess.
She plays the dazzling Diana, who has married the 57-year-old Sir Jock Broughton (Joss Akland) for his money. Unbeknownst to her, he is going broke as they leave his English estate for another in Africa. In Europe, she was the sort of woman who wore ermine to the bomb shelter, so she fits right in with the Kenyans. First thing, her husband introduces her to Erroll, his old friend. She gives him a heavy-lidded look -- hot as noon under an elephant-chewed baobab tree -- and he gives her one right back. And one thing leads to another.
Publicly cuckolded, Sir Jock is ever the gent and graciously agrees to release Diana from their marriage. He even takes the couple out for a celebratory dinner. Alas, later that night, Erroll is found shot through the head. Sir Jock is accused of the crime, and at first he reacts with elegant reserve. But out of the blue African sky, he gets out his elephant gun and starts spattering his estate with blood. And suddenly the characters don't seem as much gentry as refugees from a Brian DePalma movie.
The women, most of whom have had torrid affairs with the incredible Erroll, have come unhinged over his untimely death. Sarah Miles, as a creepy morphine-addicted heiress, is one of the most brokenhearted. When she and the other women in weeds visit the corpse, she even engages in a rather horrifying display of necrophilia.
Frankly the British are more charming when repressed, E.M. Forster-style. "White Mischief" does sparkle with the drawing-room jibes of these idle nabobs, who except for Diana and Erroll are all slightly past their prime. Portraying them that way, director Michael Radford, as British directors are apt to do, draws parallels to the piddling away of the empire. Radford definitely has a flair for the debauched romance of it all. But even Marlin Perkins has a better sense of drama.
Copyright The Washington Post
Review/Film; 'White Mischief,' Death of a Rake
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By VINCENT CANBY
Published: April 22, 1988, Friday
It's not easy being decadent, though intelligence isn't required. One must have a certain amount of time and money (or credit), an all-consuming self-interest and, whenever possible, an exotic setting in which to misbehave. Good looks, preferably beauty, also help, as well as the constitution of a goat.
This is pretty much the sum and substance of ''White Mischief,'' Michael Radford's entertaining, sometimes perilously giddy screen variation on James Fox's 1982 investigative book. Like the book, some of whose facts it reshapes for its own purposes, the film is a recollection of a notorious murder case and the lives of a small, privileged group of upper-class colonials in Kenya in 1940 and 1941.
The basic facts are these: Early on the morning of Jan. 24, 1941, Josslyn Hay, 39 years old, the 22d Earl of Erroll and premier peer of Scotland, was found shot to death in his car a couple of miles down the road from the estate of Sir John Henry (Jock) Delves Broughton, 57, whose wife, Diana, 27, was planning to leave him to elope with the Earl.
Broughton was charged with the murder and stood trial. In Kenya at that time, virtually every other husband, and a couple of women, had compelling motives for dispatching the prowling peer, who is remembered as being as devastatingly attractive to men as he was to women, all of them married.
''White Mischief,'' which opens today at the Carnegie Hall Cinema, is like a classy, breathless backdate of ''Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.'' The movie clearly disapproves of the sorts of things it reports. It's perfectly aware that, back home, a war was going on while these negligent aristocrats were safe in Kenya, swapping wives, drinking away their days and nights, shooting up and gunning down various endangered species, including one another. However, the movie doesn't allow a social conscience to spoil the voyeuristic fun.
''White Mischief,'' adapted for the screen by Mr. Radford and Jonathan Gems, never gets bogged down in analysis or even outrage. It deals in the looks of things and in behavior, exemplified in the seductive performance of Greta Scacchi as the chilly, ambitious Diana Broughton. Miss Scacchi (''Heat and Dust,'' ''Good Morning Babylon'') is a great beauty anyway, but with the ultra-blond hair she has here, and with her bright, hard, 1940's makeup, she defines both the character and the sort of film this is: brittle and often just a little too much.
Though Mr. Radford leaves no doubt about who he thinks killed the Earl of Erroll (the book never really commits itself), the film sticks close to the known facts of the odd marriage of Diana and Broughton (Joss Ackland), who make a prenuptial pact in which each promises not to hinder the other if he, or she, falls in love with someone else.
Within a few of weeks of their marriage and arrival in Kenya, where the financially pressed Broughton plans to farm, Diana has met and fallen in love with the charming Erroll (Charles Dance), who has no money but an impressive pedigree. Diana expects Broughton to honor their agreement and, for a while, it seems that he will. The night before Erroll's murder, Broughton toasts his wife and her lover at a jolly Champagne dinner at their Nairobi club.
''White Mischief'' never attempts to turn the torrid affair of Diana and Erroll into some sort of romance-of-the-century. Instead it's far more interested in the casually cruel manners of everyone in that small society known (after the area in which they lived) as the Happy Valley set.
Among their nearest and dearest friends: a morphine-addicted American heiress (Sarah Miles), who loves Erroll and animals (she appears at a polo match with a python draped around her shoulders); a forlorn wife (Geraldine Chaplin), also one of Erroll's former mistresses, who turns to her African help for companionship; Broughton's best friend (Trevor Howard, in his last screen role), who invites guests to spend the night and then spies on them after they've retired, and a wealthy, taciturn landowner (John Hurt) who, as they used to say, ''has gone native.''
As movie orgies go, the ones in ''White Mischief'' look comically underpopulated. In one short scene, we watch Diana, Erroll, Broughton and the rest of their set kicking up at a party where both sexes are wearing drag. Everyone appears exhausted. These things are probably intentional, but the movie's voice is so understated that it seems to have no voice at all. Instead, it often speaks through shock effects that are more absurd than satiric, including Miss Miles's overheated leave-taking of her former lover's body at the morgue.
Miss Scacchi, the film's true star, receives excellent support from Mr. Dance and Mr. Ackland, and from the other members of the large, somewhat underemployed cast.
