The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder. Errol Trzebinski
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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.26 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.27 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.28
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.29 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.30 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.31
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.32
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.33
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’.34 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.35 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.36 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.37
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.38
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.39 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.40
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