Authors: James Fox
Diana had recovered enough of her composure to shoot the first lion. She even took three photographs of her trophy before taking aim. Broughton claimed a lion and a small antelope, and Dickinson two lions.
It was an energetic safari. Broughton shot with a double-barrelled rifle weighing eleven pounds, and helped haul the carcass of a 450-pound lion into the truck. One day he walked for seven miles, in the heat of the day, after buffalo.
8
ONE VISIT TOO MANY
I hope I have never looked like a murderer. I think all my friends know it is not exactly my line of country. However, in a strange country, God knows what will happen.
S
IR
J
OCK
D
ELVES
B
ROUGHTON
Like most of his colleagues, Superintendent Poppy was already convinced of Broughton’s guilt, even before he had uncovered what he considered his two most important strands of evidence. A tall man, with an unhurried, friendly manner and keen eyes, Poppy was a mixture of benign predator and paragon of British fair play. He had been with Scotland Yard for ten years, where he was a member of the Flying Squad before being sent to Kenya in 1935 to organise the fingerprint department. By 1940 he was Chief of Police in Kenya and head of the Criminal Investigation Department.
When Connolly and I met Poppy in 1969, twenty-eight years after the murder, he remembered finding Broughton outwardly pleasant and confident and without affectation, but inwardly he had judged him to be cold, vindictive and vain; the sort of man who always wanted a return for his money, who never forgot an injury and would eventually look for his revenge. But Poppy got on
well with him, found him always friendly and hospitable on his many visits to the house even though, he said, Broughton must have known where his thinking was leading. He saw him as a proud man, very pleased with his position, and felt he would have been a nasty customer if he didn’t like you.
In general Poppy disapproved of this new crowd. They were different from the older settlers like Francis Scott, Grogan and Delamere, who got drunk like gentlemen. He thought this group ruthless, like Broughton himself, rather than passionate. June Carberry, who called him “Popski,” he considered feckless; she had manners but no morals. Furthermore, she drank too much brandy and soda and couldn’t be relied on for accuracy. Poppy had already put her husband in jail for eighteen months for currency offences, and had no use for him, either. As for Diana, Poppy found her hard and haughty, and acquisitive. In his opinion Erroll would let her down sooner or later. Poppy found Dickinson very agreeable, but characteristically he also regarded him with suspicion. He was too smooth, a little too obsequious, too clever by half.
He had perhaps more sympathy for Wilks, “a typical lady’s maid”; he called her “Miss Wilks,” which pleased her. She was having “the change” and had a fierce crush on Broughton. She even told Poppy that she had spent the night with him, and when Poppy challenged Broughton with this he lost his temper—a rare lapse in his otherwise calm composure. Wilks, with no prompting from Poppy, became a police spy from the start, and was especially helpful with information on Diana. She was the only one who volunteered statements, of which she made about six. But Poppy didn’t need a spy: he had planted the house with informers among the servants early on in his investigations.
This was how he discovered, among other things, that there had been shooting practice at the Soames farm. Did the Bwana use his guns? No, but he had done so once at Bwana Soames’s.
When Poppy wanted to look at the note that Broughton had dropped into Erroll’s grave, Walter Harragin, the Attorney-General, refused permission to exhume the body, on the grounds that it would involve immense problems of red tape. “Nothing, I suppose, to prevent me planting a rose tree,” said Poppy, “anywhere I like?” “No,” said Harragin. “Even if I dig rather deep?” At midnight he took six convicts from the jail to the cemetery at Limuru. They dug down to the coffin and found the note which had slipped down to one side. It had been written at the Muthaiga Club, from Diana to Erroll, and read, “I love you desperately.” Erroll had written on the back “and I love you for ever.” Poppy returned the note to Diana.
Harragin had told Poppy that he must give the Governor, Sir Henry “Monkey” Moore, at least forty-eight hours’ notice before arresting Delves Broughton, “so that Lord Moyne could be informed.” This made Poppy deeply suspicious that the process of law would somehow be tampered with. (Lord Moyne was not only Vera’s companion, he was also Secretary of State for the Colonies.)
Finally Poppy was ready, and on the afternoon of March 10th, armed with a warrant from the Resident Magistrate, he drove to Karen. He arrived at 6 p.m., found Broughton in the garden, touched him on the shoulder and arrested him for murder. Broughton said, “You’ve made a big mistake.” That afternoon he and Diana had been out riding. They had begun to argue once again about jewellery, and had split up, Broughton arriving home first. When Diana appeared and saw her husband surrounded by policemen, she apologised to him for the row. Broughton said to Poppy, “Do you mind if I have a whisky?” Poppy brought out his own hip flask and handed it to Broughton. By seven o’clock, Broughton was in a cell at Nairobi police station, and his lawyer was on his way to see him.
The arrest took Broughton by surprise, even though Lazarus Kaplan, his lawyer, had been warning him for some time to expect it. He was to remain in jail for almost
three months before coming to trial. June and Diana, who was now desperate to help her husband, came to visit him nearly every day; Alice de Trafford came almost as frequently. Despite the shock to his system of being suddenly at the mercy of turnkeys, the oppressive prison routine and a small cell, Broughton was a model prisoner—calm, fastidiously polite, gentlemanly. Only occasionally did he show signs of depression and claustrophobia. Otherwise he seemed almost relieved to be in jail.
At the time Broughton was arrested there were only six Europeans among the 1,200 prisoners in Nairobi jail and three European warders out of a total of 150. Broughton’s jailer, the Chief Warder, was Victor de Vere Allen. He was an intelligent, considerate man who had been retired for thirteen years when I met him in Nairobi in 1969. He remembered above all how well Broughton stood up to the prison routine, but he touched on Poppy’s theme, too, that Broughton was hiding a growing desperation under the calm exterior.
“He was a very nice, very fine man,” said Allen, “and a very good talker. A man who’d had a lot of interesting experiences. He was never any trouble. He was charming to all the other prisoners—listened to all their tales. They’d laugh at the old man. He’d look a bit out of place, reduced to the level of criminal, locked in his cell. Always immaculately dressed. He’d always crack a joke back and he never put anyone’s back up.
“June Carberry and Diana came to see him two or three times a week. They were a pretty hard crowd.”
“We talked continually,” Allen went on. “My two sisters in Australia, by coincidence, had been to school with two of the wives of the Rajah of Kooch Bahar. His brother was a great pal of mine, and we talked about the people we knew. We had been shooting around the same lake in Kashmir, with butts in the middle of the water, where the duck were driven over.”
Broughton’s ordeal was mitigated by special privileges.
Though Europeans were expected to clean their own cells, his own was swept out for him by another prisoner. He claimed he was unable to do it himself. Nor, because of his crippled hand, could he put on his high collar and tie without assistance. Because he was a prisoner awaiting trial, he could have food sent in, as well as chocolates, cigars and other luxuries from Torr’s Hotel. “He knew how to get what he wanted,” said Allen. “Ten shillings to a warder earning thirty-eight shillings a month was a lot of money in those days …”
Each evening, Broughton and Allen would go outside the jail for exercise, a half-hour walk of a mile or so. “He got a bit depressed at times. He’d get bouts of claustrophobia and used to look forward to the walk quite anxiously,” said Allen. “A man would feel the walls closing in.
“He told me he would commit suicide if his people at home wouldn’t accept him. It seemed that in the crowd he mixed with, once you were a part of a public scandal, you were sort of washed out.”
Broughton wrote from jail at the end of April 1941 to an old friend, Mrs. Marie Woodhouse, a Cheshire neighbour and wife of the local doctor, with whom Broughton had developed a close platonic relationship after Vera’s departure with Lord Moyne. They had once travelled to Madeira together on holiday. His handwriting, usually small and neat, had degenerated to an expansive scrawl, unsteady and vexed. Though it contains no new information, the letter is reproduced here for its interesting presentation of the case against him. As Broughton well knew, the first person to read it would be Poppy himself.
Nairobi Jail
29-4-41
My darling Marie,
Very much touched by your cable which I thought the nicest of all that I have received. I do hope you and Jimmy are well
and prosperous. I wish I had never come out to this b … y country. I seemed to have paid it one visit too many. My case comes on May 26th. I can tell you the old saying neck or nothing is very much brought home to me. I will give you a very brief outline of the case. If it is censored you will know what has happened. On the night of June 23rd Lord Errol [sic], Mrs. Carberry. my wife and myself dined at Muthaiga Club. Nairobi. After dinner Lord Errol and my wife went on to dance at a road house. Mrs. Carberry and myself stayed up talking and drinking with friends till 1:30 a.m. We then went home in my car and got to my house at Karen at 2 a.m. Ten minutes afterwards Lord Errol and my wife arrived back. He stayed 10 minutes and left in his car and was found shot through the head 2½ miles away in a murram pit just off the road. Four days previously I had my 2 revolvers, a cigarette case and some money stolen and Lord Errol was shot by a bullet which came out of one of my revolvers which were stolen. He was also involved with my wife. The police took a long time making up their minds and arrested me 7 weeks after the murder. Their grounds were 1) Motive jealousy 2) that he was killed by a bullet fired from one of the revolvers that were stolen 3) the robbery was faked. These and certain conversations they have twisted round and the fact that I had a bonfire the day after the murder make their case … However my friends have been too extraordinarily nice and thoughtful to me. Wish me luck darling. I think wistfully of Madeira now. My fondest love to both of you.
Jock
Poppy, meanwhile, visited “the ladies” at Karen, who had begun to tease him. “What? You here again, Popski?” said June Carberry. “Diana went on rubbing the hair from her legs with an emery board,” Poppy recalled. “They said, ‘Once a week, it’s something all we girls have to do,’ or words to that effect. They served a particularly strong home-brewed Pimms.”
The murder made the headlines in London. Erroll’s daughter, Diana, who was called Dinan, had come to England to live with her aunt, Lady Avice Spicer, in Wiltshire, when Erroll married Molly Ramsay-Hill. Now fourteen.
she first learned of her father’s death at the village shop, where she saw the news on the front page. She went home expecting an explanation, but never received one. When the newspapers were delivered each morning, she would steal downstairs before breakfast and read the almost daily news items about her father. Weeks later she would read about the trial of Broughton before slipping back upstairs to her room. When she returned to the dining room for breakfast, she would find the papers had been clipped. Though she had not been informed of it, she was now the Countess of Erroll. The circumstances of her father’s death were never described to her.
9
THE ANGEL OF DEATH
If Broughton was found guilty of the murder, and he now began seriously to worry about his chances, it was likely that he would be hanged. “In a strange country, God knows what will happen,” he had written to Mrs. Woodhouse. “There are no counsels out here …” As a colony, Kenya had the same system of jury trial as in England, yet Broughton, the former magistrate, had asked Poppy in one of their talks, “Are Europeans hanged for murder in this country?” Three weeks before the trial he was still without a defence counsel. It was impossible to get a barrister to come from England in wartime, and there was none to be had in Nairobi.
In the end it was Diana who rescued the situation. Feeling responsible in part for what had happened, she had decided to throw all her weight behind Broughton’s defence. She flew alone to Johannesburg, on her own initiative, to hire the most gifted barrister in the South, Harry Morris K.C.—a man already notorious for his flamboyant and aggressive style of advocacy, and for some famous acquittals. Morris accepted the case immediately, sensing the crowning achievement of his career, if he could win it. He demanded a fee of £5,000, to which Diana agreed.
The trial opened at Nairobi’s Central Court on May
26th. The opening ceremony presented an extraordinary spectacle. Under the glass dome, in a panelled room of Edwardian neoclassical sombreness, the entire colonial community seemed to have crushed its way in to watch the show. The public galleries overflowed and the spectators, many of the men in uniform, all the women dressed in their garden party best, were two rows deep along the walls. It was a gaudy spectacle of prurient anticipation; all the champagne and exhibitionism would now be accounted for, and possibly punished by the death sentence. The decent and sanctimonious contingent was opposed by the Muthaiga and Happy Valley crowd, who had rallied in support of their cause, many of them waiting in the wings to give evidence. It was a major social event that had been preceded by four months of furious pre-publicity. In that period it had been a burning topic throughout the Colony, and with little in the way of hard facts to go on, strange rumours and outlandish versions of the story had come to be accepted as the truth.