The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder. Errol Trzebinski
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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.39 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.40 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.41
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’.42 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.43
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.44 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.’45 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’.46 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.47 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’.48
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 1924.49 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.50
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