The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder. Errol Trzebinski
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route he might have taken from his house in Marula Lane to the crossroads where the Buick was found, but had been forced to abort his experiment on account of lions on the prowl – one reason why he always held that Broughton would have felt too threatened to have contemplated that solo foray.
Imray’s talk of Arthur Poppy as an extremely able officer was thought-provoking, as the investigation of Erroll’s murder had been incredibly inept. Imray pointed out that each new article on the case blamed Poppy for the oversights. Imray had never understood how Poppy – such a thorough investigator – came to give the kind of evidence that was so easily overturned by Henry Morris KC, counsel for the defence. I had sight of Arthur Poppy’s papers, passed to me by his widow, in which there were notes on Lord Erroll’s background dating back to 1927. Poppy had been obsessed with the case, and had never recovered from the damage it inflicted on his career.
Imray mentioned another officer assigned to the murder investigation, Assistant Superintendent Desmond Swayne, who had spoken of ‘a perversion of justice’. Swayne had been convinced that ‘only a very limited inner cabal knew the truth’.15 Imray could not bring himself to believe Swayne’s suggestion that ‘their guns had been spiked by a higher authority’.16 Inspector Fentum, the detective in charge of Karen police station, and Imray eventually became colleagues. By the time they met, Fentum had, according to Imray, ‘crawled to his position of Assistant Superintendent’. Like Swayne he had believed that an ‘inner cabal’ had been involved.
At one point Imray broached a subject that appeared to make him nervous. He warned: ‘this information is very near the knuckle’ and should ‘remain in the shadowlands just in case there [is] any reprisal’.17 Imray also told me about an ex-policeman who had known Diana for years, whom I might be able to persuade to meet me. But Imray cautioned me that he had encountered again and again a ‘certain disinclination’ in police colleagues in Nairobi to discuss this long-past event. At first Imray had put this reluctance down to the fact that the case had not brought credit to the force, but later, despite his own high position in the force, his own fear had prevented him from attempting to gain access to the police files or the court proceedings: ‘to do so would be inviting trouble. There would have been all sorts of complications.’18
Imray also informed me that after his departure from service in Kenya the possibility of recruitment to MI6 had cropped up. Following his interview, he had decided against the job, but confessed to me that at this point he too had come across the theory that Erroll had been ‘rubbed out’ by British Intelligence in Kenya.
The Erroll family have always been dissatisfied with the many salacious accounts of Lord Erroll’s life and death. Dinan, his only child, suffered greatly to see her father so misrepresented. There was even a rumour spread some time after his death that she was not Lord Erroll’s daughter – as if not satisfied with blackening his name, gossip-mongers wished to taint the lives of his progeny also. The physical likeness of her son Merlin, the 24th Earl, to his grandfather Lord Erroll put paid to that rumour.19
The Erroll family had made attempts to find out the truth about their forebear. When I visited the Earl and Countess of Erroll in August 1995 I was handed a file to scrutinise. It contained correspondence from Merlin Erroll’s father, Sir Iain Moncreiffe, going back to 1953. His fruitless search through official archives on Erroll had led him to conclude that something ominous was lurking.20 Merlin Erroll had drawn similar blanks in 1983 when he had turned to the head of the Search Department in the War Office Records for information on his grandfather. In fact, there had even been an apology from the Ministry of Defence ‘for such a negative report’, and the hope had been expressed that further information ‘might be forthcoming’.21 It was not. It was general knowledge in the family that Erroll had received a posthumous Mention in Dispatches for ‘doing something on the Eritrean border’, but when Merlin entered into correspondence with a Major A. J. Parsons to find out more about it, he did not get far. Parsons pointed out, ‘The major campaign did not start until after he was dead’, and he could confirm only the Earl’s ‘suspicion that Mention in Dispatches can be awarded for both meritorious and gallant service’.22 He had enclosed photocopies of the supplement to the London Gazette which published ‘the award to your grandfather’, and, he pointed out, ‘you will note that the preamble clearly states that awards were made to members of the Staff’, but there was no more detailed indication of how Lord Erroll had earned the Mention. Parsons had requested that the Army Records Centre trace Erroll’s personal service file. Having studied the file carefully, Parsons sent Merlin a copy of Erroll’s Army Form B199A recording his ‘intimate knowledge of France, Belgium, Scandinavia, Kenya Colony and Germany (four years)’ and stating that his French was fluent and his German was ‘fair’.23 His covering letter said, ‘Unfortunately, it is sparse in content and gives very little detail of his military career, other than those shown … It is regrettable that the file does seem to have been “weeded” quite severely.’24
The weeding of sensitive information is well known to researchers. Material in files closed under the thirty- or fifty-year rule is sometimes burnt or shredded before the files are released.25 I had been advised by one of the former secret agents I interviewed to watch out for any evidence of arson, missing documents, and papers scattered among alien files, since these could have been acts of sabotage perpetrated by agents in time of war.26 One example of this was the Public Record Office file at Kew on Sir Henry Moore, Governor of Kenya at the time of Erroll’s murder. Marked ‘secret’, its contents had obviously been shuffled as there was no discernible order to the documents inside.27 The only month for which the file contained no information was January 1941, the month of the shooting.
Among Merlin Erroll’s papers there was a 1988 article in the Glasgow Herald by Murray Ritchie: ‘Hundred-year Shroud on Happy Valley Mystery’.28 While researching his article at the Public Record Office at Kew, Ritchie had come across a file listed under the general files for Kenya, marked with an asterisk denoting ‘Closed for a hundred years’. He was informed such closures were highly unusual – normally involving security, the royal family or personal records whose disclosure would cause distress to living persons. Ritchie had taken the number of this mysterious file. In his article he describes how the file had been brought towards him at the counter, but the bearer, pausing briefly to have a word with a colleague, had then carried it away.
Following the release in the 1990s of certain colonial files, I came to see the file that had eluded Murray Ritchie. While there were matters to do with Kenya in it, there was no mention of Lord Erroll. Instead there were some two dozen folios – each stamped ‘secret’, pertaining to Prince Paul and Princess Olga of Yugoslavia. They and their children had been kept under house arrest on Lake Naivasha in 1941.29
I then discovered evidence of another file: it was listed in the Kenya Registers of Correspondence – under ‘Legislative Council. Death of Lord Erroll (103/3)’ – but marked ‘Destroyed Under Statute’. Fortuitously I stumbled across a document in yet another file that must have been transferred from this destroyed file – an instance of ‘papers scattered among alien files’ perhaps. It was a minute from Joss’s brother Gilbert, ‘[w]ho would be glad of any information in connection with the death of his brother’ – dated 27 January 1941.30
By August 1996,