The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder. Errol Trzebinski
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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.54 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’.55
Joss’s academic progress is impossible to assess, as copies of school reports were not made at Eton in those days.56 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’.57 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).58 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.59 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.60 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.’61
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.62
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.)63 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.64
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.65 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.66
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.
*Plant badges were symbols used to distinguish clans.
*Later the Duke of Portland.
*Eton does not forget.
‘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.1 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’.2