The Life and Death of Lord Erroll: The Truth Behind the Happy Valley Murder

3 Boyhood and Eton

‘My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay.’

Edward II, Marlowe

Joss’s first word was ‘Josh’, which he liked to say over and over again. His parents, humouring him, made a pet name of it: ‘Josh Posh’. The child enjoyed the rhyming sounds, and would wander about chuffing ‘Josh Posh, Josh Posh’ like a confident, well stoked steam engine.1 Not much is known about his early schooldays. Fortunately, some of Lady Kilmarnock’s albums and scrapbooks – a doting pictorial record – have survived. Through these we catch glimpses of Joss’s development from birth until the age of eight along with the progress of his brother and sister, Gilbert and Rosemary. Interspersed with snapshots, Lady Kilmarnock pasted in miscellaneous scraps – raffle tickets, billets for the Ostend – Dover mail boat in which the family sailed regularly to and from Europe; picture postcards from all manner of places; the sheet of order for the ‘Blessing of the Sea’, a ceremony at the beach, La Digue at Middelkerke; old theatre programmes; invitations; press cuttings and menus. These provide an overview of her own activities with her husband, as well as those of the formative years of their offspring. Resonating through Joss’s boyhood were not only the sounds of the bagpipes and the clatter of hooves on cobbles, but the sighing of string quartets; and tempering the salty air of Scotland’s east coast was the smell of newly baked apfelstrudel – although there was never any suggestion that strudel was better than oatcakes or shortbread. The first eight years of his life are laid out in the albums – sometimes chronologically, sometimes not – as if from time to time Lady Kilmarnock has been called away suddenly, her peaceful contemplation of past events disrupted, perhaps, by the children themselves.

The Kilmarnocks did not enjoy the stability of a permanent home during Joss’s childhood. Perhaps their peripatetic existence brought the family all the closer emotionally as they followed Lord Kilmarnock’s career across Europe, having to get to know new places and make new friends at every stage. It certainly made for diversity, and Joss must have acquired a precocious polish and sophistication from such a varied exposure to life abroad. He would never settle in Britain, thanks to the wanderlust acquired in childhood.

Joss’s first home was in Belgium, from 1901 until 1904, at 8 rue du Taciturne in Brussels, where his father was 3rd Secretary at the British Legation.2 In May 1904 Lord Kilmarnock was posted to the British Legation in Vienna and promoted to 2nd Secretary two years later. From October 1907 he worked for some months at the Foreign Office in London and then in Stockholm until his posting to Tokyo, which came through in early 1913. He was promoted to First Secretary in July of that year, while in Japan. After his return, in 1915, he was sent back to the British Legation in Belgium, then based in Le Havre because of the war. Joss’s parents spent three years in Le Havre, then in July 1918 they were off to Copenhagen. From January 1920 until mid-1921, Lord Kilmarnock was Chargé d’Affaires in Berlin. His final posting was as British High Commissioner on the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission, in Coblenz.

The Kilmarnocks’ life at the British Legations was very grand – celebrating the King’s birthday, dining with the Empress Eugénie de Winterhalter or the Habsburgs at the Vienna Hofburg, meeting the Duke of Teck or Lord Boothby on some diplomatic errand. Regular callers at the rue du Taciturne during Joss’s infancy were Prince and Princess Albert of Belgium, with their sons Princes Leopold and Charles. (Crown Prince Leopold would be in the same year as Joss at Eton and accede to the Belgian throne in 1934 when his father’s reign was cut short in a mountaineering accident.)3 Early exposure to the faubourg life ensured that Joss would not grow up to be a conventional Englishman. His ability to master foreign tongues came naturally, his acute ear helped along by the chatter from his mother’s maids be they Austrian, Flemish, French or Scandinavian. His sense of tone, pitch and modulation was almost faultless. He was a gifted mimic, a talent which he enjoyed showing off. If he went too far, the Kilmarnocks would remonstrate, somewhat indulgently, at his high spirits, ascribing them to ‘the Mrs Jordan coming out’.4 Joss was fluent in English, French and German even before going to school.

In Brussels, one of the earliest snapshots of Joss was taken while he was being wheeled in his pram along the Bois de la Cambre at the end of Avenue Louise, as Princess Clémentine en promenade dashes by in her carriage and pair. A swansdown and satin bonnet is tied firmly under his chin; Joss’s fine blond locks were otherwise kept off his face with a ribbon. In a photograph of him taken when he was three, dressed in white flounces and mounted on a donkey, posing for the camera, one could be forgiven for mistaking him for a little girl. Sailor suits came later. Lady Kilmarnock’s boys wore frocks of white lawn, pin-tucked, embroidered or frilled, and with puffed sleeves.5 A stark change in Joss’s appearance occurred when he was four when Lady Kilmarnock decided his hair could be barbered. Almost unrecognisable, he suddenly looked like a real little boy, dressed in shorts, a warm, dark double-breasted coat with silver buttons, boots and a cap.

Throughout Joss’s boyhood Lord Kilmarnock perpetually had ideas in development, from light sketches to full-length plays. In March 1903 he had staged the Dîners de Têtes at the Café Riche in Brussels, and had been working on a tragedy set in a classroom, for six men and three women, The Anonymous Letter, which would be published the following year.6 Few realised that Joss’s father was a published dramatist. He had always written under his nom de plume ‘Joshua Jordan’ – a tribute to his actress forebear – but now, with new-found confidence, he would publish under the name Victor Hay, Baron Kilmarnock. Two more of his titles were staged in the suburbs of London during Joss’s twenties – The Chalk Line and The Dream Kiss.7

In April 1904, Lady Kilmarnock warned her two little boys that the bulge in her stomach was a baby, so that their sister’s arrival would come as no shock. Rosemary Constance Ferelith Hay’s christening caught the imagination of the press when the entire family descended from Scotland upon Vienna. The newspapers announced that Princess Charles Fürstenberg and Lady Muncaster were her godmothers; her godfathers were her uncles, Victor Mackenzie of the Scots Guards (Lady Kilmarnock’s brother) and Lieutenant the Hon. Sereld Hay RN. ‘Ferelith, it may be remembered, is the title of the book published last year by Lord Kilmarnock,’ one columnist observed. Princess Charles Fürstenberg was the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Emperor Franz Joseph’s wife, Elisabeth. The Kilmarnocks and their children went to Hungary many times to stay with the Fürstenberg family. In due course, the Fürstenbergs’ daughter Antonia married the Duke of Schwarzenberg, whose palace in the heart of Vienna stood just round the corner from the British Legation.8

In Vienna the family occupied an apartment in an enormous house which dwarfed the tiny church next to it, standing in the quiet, tree-lined Metternichgasse. Life was more sophisticated among the Viennese than among the Belgians.9 Sunday mornings in Vienna would see the Kilmarnocks among the congregation at the Stefans-kirche at the same service as the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph, and they would dine at the Belvedere with him too.10 One of the earliest pictures of Joss in Austria shows in the background Château Neuville, where the family stayed at Huy twice a year. Joss became accustomed to café society, the cobbled streets, the Spanish Riding School and the shop windows displaying Sachertorte, a favourite Viennese delicacy. He would have walked across one of the city’s most beautiful squares, the historic Judenplatz, where the composer Mozart had once lived, with its plaque – ‘Angry flames raged through the city and atoned for the dreadful sins of the Hebrew dogs’ – marking the spot where in 1421 eight hundred Jews killed themselves following the accusation that they had used the blood of babies in religious ceremonies. Joss came to know the buildings of the Ringstrasse, returning there later as a budding diplomat, when he was saddened by the changes in its inhabitants wrought by the Great War.

Like other Edwardian children, the Hay offspring travelled with an entourage, although Lady Kilmarnock seems rarely to have left them for long periods in the sole charge of nannies. Photographs of annual gatherings at Slains display, in fading sepia, images of themselves, their friends, their maids, their cooks, their grooms, their clothes, their pets – including Bonci their father’s Jack Russell terrier.

One of Lady Kilmarnock’s own sketches of Joss stands out particularly from the pages of her albums, apparently inspired by an incident in the garden of Walls, the house in Cumbria that belonged to Joss’s grandmother, where the Kilmarnocks fetched up each year. Named after the remains of Roman ruins in the grounds of Muncaster Castle,11 Walls was a typically gloomy Victorian pile, all the more so for being ‘tucked away in a wood’. The sketch captures much of Joss’s impulsive nature; one of his chief characteristics was his unpredictability. Lady Kilmarnock portrays him as a cavalier in miniature, complete with sash and double lace collar.12 For all her adoration of him – Joss was her favourite child – she seemed to sense that his spontaneity might prove to be his undoing. In front of his outstretched toe lies a huge carved stone head, severed from its body. It looks as if Joss has just toppled this massive object, twice his own size. Her caption ‘Josh Posh on the warpath’ reinforces the idea. With uncanny maternal insight, her portrait of Joss unwittingly foreshadowed trouble ahead.

Joss’s childhood, however, was very secure. Whether at Huy or touring in Italy, where Castello di Tersatto, Monte Maggiore, was their watering hole, the company that Lord and Lady Kilmarnock kept was wealthy, aristocratic and powerful. Inevitably, their hosts and hostesses held influential positions in Europe or in Britain, and conversation with old money oiled the wheels of diplomacy. From an early age Joss learned the importance of communication, and at his father’s elbow absorbed the workings of the Foreign Office, which endowed him with every advantage when he eventually followed in Lord Kilmarnock’s footsteps. The ‘right’ castles, the ‘right’ schools, the ‘right’ reputations, the ‘right’ clubs, the ‘right’ expectations – all these influences bolstered Joss’s confidence such that he never felt bound by convention. His independence led him later to break with social constraints, taking him into other worlds far beyond the confines of his noble roots. In Joss’s book, the rules of the aristocracy were there to be broken.

A formal photograph of Lord Kilmarnock, taken in the year of Joss’s birth, shows a severe man whose preoccupations were often melancholy and who took his responsibilities seriously.13 But he was not as forbidding a husband and father as he looked. His writing shows that he lacked neither humour nor perception. Thanks to his love of literature and his imagination, his children learned all the family traditions and legends before they could read. Indeed, encouraging them to learn about the historic struggles of the Hays for themselves would probably have been a good way of introducing them to reading. One wonders whether Joss felt any need to live up to his heroic ancestors. His initiation into Latin and Greek was undertaken early by his father, and it was from him that he inherited his lively sense of beauty – although perhaps at first he would be too readily inclined to see beauty in mere decoration. His sense of the theatrical was an appetite whetted and nurtured by both his parents.

Joss’s mother was handsome and big-boned, given to flirtation, prone to flattery, and of the sort who improved in looks as she grew older. She tended to keep press cuttings about herself, as if requiring proof of her own persona; often such entries were restricted to remarks about her jewels ‘… a superb tiara and necklace of diamonds and pearls’. It was she who taught Joss that pearls must be worn next to the skin, for otherwise they lose their lustre, a statement he repeated often as an adult.14 Lady Kilmarnock’s coiffure, her gowns and her hats were intended to catch the eye. As a small boy, Joss would stand in her dressing room while the maid brushed her long dark hair, piling it elaborately on to her head, before she dressed and departed for dinner with his father by horse-drawn carriage.15Watching his mother’s toilette, handing the hairpins to the maid as she worked, mesmerised Joss as a small boy and sparked a lifelong fascination with this private ritual. Before going to bed, the well scrubbed little Joss would arrive in her rooms to kiss Lady Kilmarnock goodnight. She would playfully check that his face, neck, hands and teeth were clean. Extracting a promise that he had done his ablutions properly, before dispatching him to the nursery to say his prayers she would occasionally insist, out of principle, that he wash his face again. Joss loved the smell of his mother’s soap on the sponge or flannel hanging over her wash-basin, and would breathe in the scent.16 His mother’s maxim, ‘Cleanliness is next to godliness’, had a lasting effect on him. He was to become fastidious to a degree and like a Continental male, would pay particular attention to his hands and feet, undergoing regular professional manicures and pedicures.17

For the first eight years of their marriage Joss’s mother doted on her husband and her children, with whom they both believed in sharing everything. Even in Europe, Slains would never be far from the conversation. All three children visited their Scottish home regularly, and Lady Kilmarnock kept their memories of it alive through postcards. Like all children, Joss and his siblings loved to be terrified as long as they knew that they were perfectly safe, and while in Scotland they enjoyed their introduction to the turbulent family history, with its legends of ghosts and mistletoe, brought to life during walks to local beauty spots made famous by Johnson and Boswell. They would stand on former battle sites and on the lofty cliff at Port Erroll, four miles north of the earlier Slains stronghold. Earthy smells permeated the grasses and flowers through which wild rabbits scampered among the dunes as the sun rose over the icy North Sea. They would go to look at a local curiosity, a strange rock near the shore, where sea-fowls congregated, or peer into ‘Bullers o’Buchan’, ‘a huge rocky cavern open to the sky, into which the sea rushes through a natural archway’. Or they would clamber along the bed of a small stream called the Cruden that fell into the sea at Slains, giving its name to the neighbouring bay – Cruden Bay means ‘Blood of the Danes’, an epithet through which the children learned of the slaughter said to have taken place in the days of Malcolm and Macbeth. As Bram Stoker had discovered, the history of the Errolls was as ‘full of dark rituals, rumours of fertility cults and blood sacrifice as anything that he might have dreamed up for Dracula’.18

Victor Kilmarnock’s dramatic inclinations would have helped him to convey to his children the family’s mistletoe legend – mistletoe was the Hays’ ‘plant badge’.* According to Thomas the Rhymer’s prophecy, recorded in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, it had grown upon an ancient oak that stood on the Erroll land in Perthshire, and the fate of the family was held to be bound up with the mistletoe that grew on this great oak. For centuries the Hay family had danced around the tree at Hallowe’en. Soon after the 10th Earl’s death in 1636, his Perthshire lands had to be sold off to pay his debts, and somewhat symbolically the oak collapsed.

Lady Kilmarnock’s hoard of cuttings from The Times and other newspapers constitutes more than milestones in the professional life of Joss’s father: they are indications of her pride and affection, her steadfast interest in everything undertaken by ‘Vic’, be it the landing of a fine salmon, speaking well in public, shooting the largest stag of the season or receiving a good book review. Their annual interludes in Scotland contrasted sharply with life on the Continent. Once the royals had departed for Balmoral and Parliament was in recess, just before the Glorious Twelfth, Joss’s family partook of gentlemanly pursuits, taking to the glorious tracts of heather to stalk, to shoot and to fish – luxuries that drained the Hay purses like those of other old Scottish lairds.19 Joss’s father went deerstalking at Braichie Ballater, a village on Deeside near Balmoral. His wife faithfully recorded Vic’s prowess and annual bag: ‘Spittal Beat 1 stag 13 stone 13 pounds = 6 points’ or ‘Horne Beat 1 stag 15 stone = 7 points’.20

Blood sports would leave Joss cold – one cannot help but wonder whether his repulsion for killing began in Scotland with the display of these huge dead beasts. He was never squeamish, but unlike his father or his contemporaries he would never kill for the sake of killing.

In the sincere belief that he was preparing his son for the wilder excesses of the Scottish calendar – ‘Burns’ Night, the St Andrew’s Ball at Grosvenor House, the Caledonian Ball, and of course Hogmanay – Lord Kilmarnock introduced him to whisky before he was six. ‘Have a sip,’ he would say whenever the decanter was lifted while Joss was in the room. But Joss did not want a sip.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Come on, just a little sip,’ cajoled his father. ‘Try.’

‘No, thank you, sir.’

‘Just try.’

His father’s ‘lessons’, while well intentioned, constituted an early conflict, and since often the first exercise of power is in denying someone something, it is not difficult to imagine Joss’s private satisfaction when he discovered that one could reject a request, even from one’s father. However, since the boy was well mannered, he would eventually give in and take a sip, just to have done with the matter. That scene was to be re-enacted many times. Joss’s acute sensitivity to smell meant that he was never able to stomach the odour, let alone the taste, of whisky. His adult drinking habits would be confined to the occasional sip of wine, and even then, more as a courtesy to others who were drinking than for his own pleasure.21