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

4 To Hell with Husbands

‘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 (In later life, without daily practice, his command of German weakened somewhat.) His French also benefited from his return to a francophone country.

In a press interview in the 1930s Joss said of his time in Le Havre, vaguely, that he had been ‘performing liaison work with the Belgians’. Perhaps his father had pulled strings to get him some practical experience of Foreign Office work and to broaden the narrow horizons of his studies at home. When Lord Kilmarnock moved on after the war Joss too was transferred to the British Legation in Copenhagen as an honorary attaché. Lord Kilmarnock acted as Chargé d’Affaires there until August 1919.3 Joss was eighteen by this time and, help from his father or no, he was beginning to gain some very valuable Foreign Office experience.

Meanwhile, Lord Kilmarnock was made a CMG in June 1919 and a Counsellor of Embassy in the diplomatic service three months later. His father’s impressive career was starting to awaken ambitions in Joss, for that same year he applied to sit the Foreign Office exam in London. Candidates were told to bring a protractor with them.* The result of this strange instruction was that on the morning of the exam, outside Burlington House, ‘a multitude of officers converged with protractors in their hands’.4

Since Joss had ‘one of the best brains of his time’ he sailed through his Foreign Office examination – no mean achievement. At the time the Foreign Office exam was considered to be ‘the top examination of all’. The Kilmarnocks must have been very relieved that their son appeared to be looking to his laurels at last. On the strength of his exam results Joss was given a posting, on 18 January 1920, as Private Secretary to HM Ambassador to Berlin for three years – ‘a critical post at a critical time’.5

Two days later he reported for duty at 70–71 Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin.

For a few months it transpired that Joss was working in the same embassy as his father: a week earlier, on 10 January, Lord Kilmarnock had been appointed to Berlin as Chargé d’Affaires, to prepare for the arrival of Britain’s new ambassador now that diplomatic relations with Germany were resuming. He was the first diplomat to be sent to Berlin after the Armistice. Having got his posting on the strength of his Foreign Office exam result Joss was probably somewhat non-plussed to appear still to be working under his father’s wing. However, Lord Kilmarnock was soon appointed Counsellor to the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission in Coblenz and in 1921 was made British High Commissioner. Lord and Lady Kilmarnock were to remain in Coblenz until his death.6

Joss stayed on in Berlin for the time being. He obviously enjoyed Teutonic company. He would later socialise with the German and Austrian settlers in Kenya, and he returned to Germany on a couple of visits to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

The British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edgar Vincent, 16th Baronet D’Abernon, was an Old Etonian; his wife, Lady Helen, was the daughter of the 1st Earl of Faversham. They were a charming couple of whom Joss was very fond. Under their auspices he would come into contact with a wide range of influential and up-and-coming personalities – figures such as Stresemann, Ribbentrop and Pétain, just three whose names would be familiar to everyone in Europe by the outbreak of the Second World War.7 The British Embassy stood only doors away from Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg’s Presidential Palace, which had once been occupied by ‘the Iron Chancellor’ Prince Otto von Bismarck and, in 1938, became Ribbentrop’s official residence as Foreign Minister to Adolf Hitler. Prior to that appointment, Ribbentrop was to be German Ambassador to London from 1936.

When Joss met him in 1920 Ribbentrop, six years his senior, had just recently been demobilised. He was a tall, fair-haired man who ‘held his head very high’, was very arrogant and ‘inaccessible’.8 He looked like a caricature of an English gentleman in a humorous magazine and ‘wore a bowler hat and carried an umbrella in spite of a cloudless sky’. At this time, Ribbentrop was ADC to the German peace delegation.9 Joachim von Ribbentrop and his wife Annlies worked extremely hard at penetrating the circle of Gustav Stresemann, a statesman of first rank who was briefly German Chancellor in 1923. D’Abernon and Stresemann were close and, after Joss left Germany, together instigated the Anglo-American Treaty and the Pact of Mutual Guarantee embodied in the Treaty of Locarno in 1924. Stresemann’s son, Wolfgang, recognised the social pushiness of the Ribbentrops and how they ‘even got into the British Ambassador’s functions’. The Ribbentrop networking technique was so effective that some of their hosts, ‘Lord D’Abernon included, were surprised to find themselves entertaining their brandy merchant’ – Annlies’s father.10

By contrast, Joss, who had no need to elevate himself socially, was an ideal candidate for D’Abernon’s needs at a sensitive time in Germany when constant communication between different countries was vital. D’Abernon was a fine diplomat with a wealth of experience. In him Joss found a man to emulate and, while he appeared to take a delight in outraging his father, he knuckled down under D’Abernon and never stepped out of line, respecting the Ambassador’s opinions on many governance matters. He also sought his views on historic battles, modern warfare, thoroughbred horses and champion tennis – subjects which were to be of continuing interest to Joss. D’Abernon’s informality endeared him to Joss and, in his friendship with the older man, he found his attention drawn to more serious aspects of life. D’Abernon had taken risks – successfully – with his own career, and Joss admired him for this adventurousness, a quality he shared. D’Abernon had at one stage been Chairman of the Royal Commission on Imperial Trade: this was to be the field that most impressed itself on Joss, whose understanding of it became almost as profound as his mentor’s. The conclusions that Joss reached at this time would enable him to argue, off the cuff, about reforms to the Congo Basin Treaties in Kenya a decade or so later. His liaison work in his capacity of Private Secretary to the Ambassador was honing his skill in retaining detail – he was becoming proficient at storing away information to use later, a habit which would pay off time after time.

In 1920 Joss accompanied his parents twice to the American Cemetery in Coblenz, in the Allied Rhineland; on 20 May they went to the Decoration Day service, then in November attended the Remembrance service. Standing on the dais, looking sombre, Joss was the youngest among dignitaries such as Monsieur Fournier, the Belgian Ambassador, Herr Delbrucke, the Austrian Ambassador, Monsieur Tirade, the French Ambassador, and Marshal Pétain. On each occasion he gazed down from the stand at the huge garden, and all that he could see stretching into the distance was row upon row of white military crosses. He would never forget this display of tragic waste.

Joss’s work involved a lot of travel from one European capital to another. Being based in the country of the vanquished provided him with a view of the war from both sides. He had witnessed the decimation of Eton’s sixth form, and Le Havre too had shown him a facet of war. Then there was the neutrality of Scandinavia: he discovered that there was also something to be learned from those who had stood back. The next three years were to provide ample time to listen to the experiences of the former enemy.

Joss’s dislike of bloodshed showed too in his reluctance to take part in blood sports. Some regarded his detachment with suspicion. According to Bettine Rundle, who knew Joss in those days, he was quite unpopular with Lord Kilmarnock’s staff on account of not joining in their hunting pursuits. However, he did play football regularly against teams formed by the various different Allied armies based in the area. Association football was particularly popular in the British Army, and on one occasion Joss captained the side that beat the American Army team.11 He was also a very experienced polo player by this stage.

Equally, his unpopularity with his father’s staff could have been due to jealousy; they probably resented his plum job at the Embassy and wrongly assumed he had got the post purely through his father’s influence.

Whatever feelings he inspired among embassy employees, Joss enjoyed great popularity in his social life and on his travels around the capitals of Europe. The temptations in the cities were plentiful, affording men opportunities for unrestrained pleasure – in this respect Joss was very much a player. In the society in which he had been raised, sexual mores for men were liberal. It was expected of Continental grand dukes and archdukes that they should seek to indulge their sexual fantasies with mistresses rather than their wives. During the late summer, the fashionable German spas turned into the hunting grounds of the most famous courtesans of Europe. By the standards of the day Joss did nothing that others did not do, and many indulged in far more excessive behaviour.

From 1919 onwards Joss paid regular visits to Paris, where he got to know a wealthy American socialite, Alice Silverthorne, with whom he enjoyed an intermittent affair. His girlfriends were usually blondes but Alice was dark and, also unlike the majority of his lovers, close to him in age. In 1923 she married a young French aristocrat, Frederic de Janzé. Alice was bewitchingly beautiful, rich, self-willed and neurotic. ‘Wide eyes so calm, short slick hair, full red lips, a body to desire … her cruelty and lascivious thoughts clutch the thick lips on close white teeth … No man will touch her exclusive soul, shadowy with memories, unstable, suicidal’ – this was her husband’s adoring and, ultimately, prophetic verdict.12 Alice was to become notorious as the Countess de Janzé, when she was tried for attempted murder in Paris in 1927. She had shot her lover Raymund de Trafford in the groin at the Gare du Nord. She married him five years later and they separated about three months after that. Alice and another beauty Kiki Preston – a Whitney by birth – were part of the American colony in Paris who welcomed Joss into their social circle.

The early twenties saw the Paris of Hemingway, Molyneux and Cecil Beaton.13 Joss thrived in this glamorous climate. Beaton’s photography drew the fashionable world’s attention to the beauties of the day. Joss would get to know most of them well. One of Beaton’s ‘finds’ was Paula Gellibrand, a ‘corn-coloured English girl’ who became one of his muses. When Paula and Joss first met, she was untitled and the daughter of a major who lived in Wales. Joss’s relationship with her would surface haphazardly at distant points on the globe since she would become the wife of no less than three of his friends and, being an inveterate traveller, would appear wherever the glamorous foregathered be it Paris, Venice, New York, London or Antibes. She was tall and languid, and according to Beaton, her ‘eyelids were like shiny tulip petals … [she was] the first living Modigliani I ever saw’.14 Ultimately Paula would happen up on Joss’s doorstep in the Rift Valley, married to Boy Long (whose real first name was Caswell), a rancher and another neighbour of Joss’s – by then Joss and Paula had been friends for fourteen years.

Once Joss disappeared into the wilds of Africa with his first wife Idina, another eccentric socialite in Paris – she and Alice fell for Joss, separately, at roughly the same time – Kiki Preston, Frédéric and Alice, among other friends, would flock after them. The clique which became infamous as the Happy Valley set was formed in France before any of them left for Africa.

History does not relate where Joss and Idina first met. It could have been in Paris, for Idina was there in 1919, mixing with a Bohemian set that would have appealed to Joss. It is possible that they had met in more conventional society even earlier, in Helsinki, when Joss was still living in Denmark, because Idina’s younger sister Avice was then living in Helsinki with her husband Major Sir Stewart Menzies, and Idina would have visited her there. Menzies was a military man but he usually established ambassadorial contact wherever he worked. When Joss was in his thirties, he would become head of the Secret Services.*

It is likely that Joss and Idina had been circling one another for at least eighteen months before their affair started. Idina was another of the beauties who caught Beaton’s imagination – he noticed the way she ‘dazzled’ people.15 Her red-gold hair was styled like a boy’s and, her bosom being too ample for the dictates of fashion, she flattened it so as to look perfect in the gowns created for her by Captain Molyneux – or ‘Molynukes’, as she called him.16 She had been a devotee of his since he opened his house in 1918; his designs made her look taller. It was Molyneux who dressed her when Joss first met her and he would continue to adapt fashion to suit her style for nearly forty years: she had ‘a rounded slenderness … tubular, flexible, like a section of a boa constrictor … [she] dressed in clothes that emphasised a serpentine slimness’. Joss, fashion aficionado, thought that the way she looked and dressed was wonderful.17

Twice married by the time Joss knew her, Idina was eight years older than him. She was the elder of two daughters born to the 8th Earl De La Warr (pronounced Delaware). Their brother, the heir, was Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville and, by the time Joss made his maiden speech in the Upper House, had become 9th Earl De La Warr, Under-secretary of State for the Colonies and Lord Privy Seal in the House of Lords.18 Idina was a legendary seductress. Joss, only nineteen years old, impressionable and driven by lust, had not resisted her wiles.19 He pursued her from 1920 although not exclusively.

Joss called virginity a ‘state of disgrace, rather than of grace’ and was not interested in seducing virgins. Lady Kilmarnock’s view was that young men should have affairs only with married women. Joss, whom she had so bewitched as a young boy with the mysteries of her toilette, seems to have paid a lot of attention to her on this issue as well, as Daphne Fielding can testify. Daphne’s memoir, Mercury Presides, contains a forgiving description of Joss’s flirtation with her (a virgin when Joss knew her): ‘It was inevitable that he should be conscious of such wonderful good looks as he possessed, and with these he had an arrogant manner and great sartorial elegance.’ When her father learned that Daphne had sat out on the back stairs with Joss during a dance, a furore ensued. After she told Joss about the row, he sent her an ‘enormous bunch of red roses’. She had been terrified that the sight of the flowers would incur her father’s wrath all over again, and had hidden them from him – ‘in my bedroom basin until they died – the first present of flowers that I had ever received’. Her fascination with Joss grew as her father’s disapproval intensified: Joss’s scornful way of looking at people, ‘an oblique, blue glance under half-closed lids’, was impudence personified.20 Joss, however, did not return her interest. He would without exception make a beeline for married women.21

The easygoing lifestyle – in which people exercised sexual freedom without anyone suffering – that Joss now adopted would always be attractive to him. Idina, herself an advocate of promiscuity, found Joss irresistible – and one can see why in a picture taken of him as whipper-in to the American Army drag-hounds. As the best-looking in a bunch of four young bloods, he was as usual with the prettiest girl in the group. For his part, Joss relished the element of danger in his relationship with Idina. Her reputation was to him deliciously louche. Her first husband, Captain the Hon. Euan Wallace, MC, MP, had been in the Life Guards Reserve; she produced two sons by him, but after six years the marriage was dissolved. The two boys remained with their father and Idina virtually abandoned them. The society she kept in Paris was decidedly disreputable. Only her pedigree redeemed her. But her family life had not been happy; Idina was only nine years old when her parents separated, and, like Joss, she had grown up precociously and was easily bored. Even at school, classmates had been wary. She was smarter than them. One of her school contemporaries, coming across her years later in Kenya, admitted how terrified she had been of her. On this occasion Idina was as withering as ever: ‘Oh, yes,’ she murmured on meeting her old classmate, ‘I remember you – you never powdered.’22

Joss, madly in love with Idina, was longing to share his life with her. They made secret plans to marry and Joss played the eligible bachelor as Idina waited for her divorce from her second husband, Captain the Hon. Charles Gordon of Park Hill, Aberdeen. Charles had fallen for one of her younger unmarried friends and had wanted the divorce too. There was no uproar and terms were mutually agreed. In fact, Charles and Honor Gordon would be neighbours to Idina and Joss in Kenya. Charles Gordon had benefited from Kenya’s Soldier Settlement Scheme in 1919, and he found himself with 2,500 acres in the Wanjohi Valley above Gilgil. Idina received just over half the land as part of her divorce settlement.23

Joss, meanwhile, was ‘causing tremendous consternation in the hearts of the ripe young things’ in the marriage market-places. He was much in demand where débutantes flourished. He was scanned by dukes and dowagers, among bespoke kilts and bejewelled bosoms, upon which rested heirlooms.24 In 1922 he played the season – Ascot, Cowes, Henley, Cowdray Park and the Royal Caledonian Ball (the biggest of the London season) – having resigned his job at the Embassy in Berlin in March that year, nine months before the posting was due to end. His father must have been aghast at such fecklessness. But though his patience must have been wearing rather thin by this stage, he seems to have done his best to get his son back on to his career path. Perhaps Lady Kilmarnock put in some persuasive words for her favourite child, for in 1923 Joss became secretary at the Inter-Allied Rhineland High Commission.25 Nepotistic though the appointment may have been, he would undoubtedly have been able to make a useful contribution to the work of the High Commission. By now, he had acquired extensive experience in the Foreign Office and could switch to another language without a moment’s hesitation.

Adding to the tension in the British residence household at the time was the recent resale of Slains. Ellerman had arranged for the estate agents Frank Knight & Rubenstein, W. D. Rutley to auction it off.26 In the spring of 1922 Slains was sold for scrap – a considerable humiliation for the Erroll family.27

Idina was not long in following Joss out to Coblenz for a visit during the interlude between her decrees nisi and absolute. Joss wanted his parents to meet her, but he never let on to them his intention to marry her. He obviously realised that his parents were unlikely to share his enthusiasm for Idina, and even if he believed that she ‘could have walked off the bas-relief of dancing nymphs in the Louvre’ Lord and Lady Kilmarnock would take a lot of persuading.28 None the less, they would welcome her as his girlfriend.

Coblenz was a picturesque town at the mouth of the Mosel River, and had long been established as the trading hub for wine-growing countries and furniture factories. It was a sociable place: racing was popular, and since there was a good theatre, everyone went to the opera at least once, if not twice, a week.29

The British residence was surrounded by tall trees; in summer the building was entirely draped in Virginia creeper but during the winter its fish-scale tiled roof was exposed. It stood in the best spot of all among the French, Dutch, Belgian and American embassies, on the edge of the Rhinelagon, directly opposite the ‘bridge of boats’ which parted to allow barges through as they sailed up and down the river.30 Lord Kilmarnock’s position as High Commissioner entitled him to a guard and a sentry-box outside the gates of the residence; a Cameron Highlander did duty, marching up and down in a kilt. One of his more ceremonial roles was to pipe out distinguished guests down the drive as they left the house. Visits by dignitaries to the residence were photographed by the firm Lindstedt & Zimmermann, who specialised in turning photographs of the more important guests into postcards.31