Authors: James Fox
For a Nairobi hostess, the Erroll murder was a topic that always promised sparkle. Indeed, it was the only topic guaranteed, for the last twenty-five years, to keep the guests in thrall, a topic at which the locals could excel, and at which they could compete as historians. A knowledge of the affair, of the inner story, was a measure of how well you knew the country, and Diana’s formidable and continuing presence added the spice of indiscretion. Neither was it remotely parochial gossip, to make you look provincial to the metropolitans on their way to the game reserves: it had acquired cultural edge, on a par with stories about Karen Blixen and Hemingway.
Diana publicly suffered from it, from time to time. Once in the mid-1960s at a lunch with the late Duke of Gloucester, who was visiting Kenya, and with several local politicians including Kenya’s former Attorney-General, Charles Njonjo, the topic turned to the recent murder of a local nurse. A former colonial politician, looking in Diana’s direction, said in a loud voice, “At least we don’t have white murders any more.” Njonjo was irritated. He had already managed to laugh off the Duke’s remark to a prominent Kikuyu politician: “Do you buy your wives one at a time, or by the dozen?” Njonjo is reportedly fond of Diana and has offered her some protection by joining the board of her management company.
Her rise to wealth and, in a way, to fame, had been purposeful and dramatic. After the murder, bitterly down on her luck, and shunned by the rest of that smugly censorious colonial community, her future had looked decidedly uncertain. She did receive a letter of commiseration from Nancy Wirewater in Cape Town, and Mark Pilkington, her old boy friend, wrote to say that he was coming to be near her, but he was killed in North Africa soon after Diana read his letter. The worst of it, perhaps, was that for a while she had to stay near to her husband.
But then Gilbert Colvile entered her life; the man whom nobody could remember having even talked to a woman before, and who had certainly never had an affair.
There is a scurrilous legend current around Lake Naivasha that Diana asked Broughton’s partner, John Hopcraft, with a view to her next conquest, “Who is the richest man in Kenya?” At that time the Delamere estates were only just beginning to recover from the ravages of the inter-war years, many acres had been sold to pay Lord Delamere’s bad debts, and Colvile (who sat as the Chairman of
LEGCO
when Delamere was away) was certainly near the top of the list.
“He was the most boring man in the world,” said his neighbour on Lake Naivasha, a trophy-hunting Austrian called Baron Knapitsch. “He could only talk about cattle and rain.” “He didn’t drink or smoke cigarettes,” said my Somali acquaintance. “The only thing he was interested in was the Masai. He had so many dogs it was like the grass.”
Colvile, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, formerly a lieutenant with the Grenadier Guards, and a member of the Guards’ Club, was looked down on by the Somalis I spoke to—possibly because of his love for the Masai—and when Diana married him, all her servants left, knowing his reputation for parsimony. But there were more snobbish reasons. The Somali had various charges to lay against Colvile:
“Colvile’s mother lived at Gilgil and ran a hotel.”
“She wasn’t like a Mazungu [white person].”
“She didn’t have English customs [she was partly French] and used to carry milk [on her head].”
“She had little respect from us because she didn’t play tennis, polo or bridge, and Colvile was the same.”
“The cows used to come into his house.” (An exaggeration.)
“He used to drive a car with a Masai Moran carrying a spear in the front seat.” (Translator: “Note the distaste in his voice.”)
Perhaps Colvile was a misanthropist. He was a lonely, taciturn, dour man, according to Sir Michael Blundell. “He would appear at the Meat Board, on which Tom Delamere also sat, in a large, wide, pork pie hat, crushed on top. No socks, of course, and a rumpled, lightweight tweed suit. When I tried to call him Gilbert, he said ‘My name’s Colvile.’”
An acquaintance of Diana’s saw it like this: “During and after the trial no one would speak to her. She had to give up all the clubs, and couldn’t stay in any hotel. Colvile was a great woman hater. He met Diana and thought, ‘This woman is really tough.’ He felt about her as if she was a man. He wrote to her and said he would do anything for her; that he belonged to every club in Africa as a founder member and with his money he could fight the lot.”
As soon as Broughton was out of the way, Diana brought Colvile to the Djinn Palace, cleaned him up, and in January 1943, a month after Broughton’s suicide, married him. Colvile was only five years younger than Broughton. “He bought her Erroll’s house, the Djinn Palace,” said an acquaintance, “and he gave Diana his family jewels. He
loathed
Delves Broughton.” Diana told a friend, Dushka Repton, that she was down at the bottom; nobody would talk to her; Colvile picked her up and she would never forget the gesture.
True to his word, Colvile not only let up on his legendary meanness—Diana, for example, was allowed to spend money on a string of racehorses at Nairobi, and a large part of the estate was given over to her on her marriage—he also encouraged her social life elsewhere. Diana was often seen at parties as her social life blossomed again, with a steady dancing partner. Jack Hilton. Colvile didn’t mind—a social life required a dancing partner. Diana and Colvile were, nevertheless, said to be deeply devoted to each other. She called him “my little monster.” “No, darling,” a friend remembers her saying, “I can’t come tonight, I promised to take Pooey [her nickname for him]
to the cinema.” (Had he ever been to the cinema before?) But few people could understand the combination—how Diana could stand this man, and why Colvile had given up the habits of a lifetime and devoted himself to a young and fashionable woman from whom he expected nothing.
To Poppy, Colvile had been an odd fellow indeed, and he concluded that his strange existence before Diana’s arrival was due to a homosexual obsession with his favourite tribe, especially with its young warriors. There was not much room for unconventional behaviour on the frontier, apart from an acceptable degree of drunkenness and promiscuity, but “going native,” which was what Poppy suspected of Colvile, was of course unforgivable. For Poppy it could be explained only in terms of sexual aberration.
By the early 1950s, Diana’s moment of purdah was over and she began to attend every social event. Soon enough a race meeting at Nairobi was not the real thing—not a truly
royal
event, you might say—if Diana wasn’t there. There was a 400 Club in Nairobi too, and Diana was often seen there with Jack Hilton. Her comings and goings were written up relentlessly in the local gossip column, “Miranda’s Merrier Moments.” A woman remembers seeing her at the 400 Club during this period. “She wore a beautiful black dress and splendid emeralds. She had a beautiful figure. One couldn’t do other than just gape.”
But there had been a tragedy in their lives. Diana lost two children—the first lived for ten days, the second was stillborn. Diana and Colvile adopted a daughter, Sarah, known as “Snoo.”
When Diana first met Tom Delamere, son of the pioneer, with his red hair and small stature, she didn’t like him. Colvile and Delamere, however, were close friends, despite the fact that Tom’s father, Hugh Delamere, had shown a marked preference for Colvile, whom he had treated with more kindness than his own son. Diana, Col
vile and Delamere began to be seen out and about together, moving as a trio between the Djinn Palace and Soysambu, the Delamere ranch.
Diana, who had felt, she said, nothing for any man since Erroll’s death, now fell in love with Tom. The unwritten pact was genuine this time and Colvile, although unhappy to lose Diana, never let it disturb his friendship with her or with Tom. He agreed in 1955 to an amicable divorce, even promising Diana that she would inherit all his remaining estates when he died. In that same year the Hon. Mary Delamere sued her husband for divorce, citing Diana, and Diana married Tom Delamere, whom she nicknamed “Bear” and “Buzzer.”
At the wedding, Diana said to Kaplan, “Third time lucky.” (She was overlooking Vernon Motion, her first husband, the support player for Carroll Gibbons’s Savoy Orpheans.)
The Emergency came and went and independence under Kenyatta arrived. When Colvile died, he left everything to Diana. The most conservative estimate of the proceeds of Diana’s sale of Colvile’s property, to raise death duties, was £2.5 million.
I first laid eyes on Diana at Nairobi racecourse one day in 1966 when I was working on the
Daily Nation
. She was smallish, like English Royalty, and she dressed and seemed to behave like Royalty too. She wore the grandest chic that Hardy Amies could produce, yet in her puffy white melon of a hat and her fabulous jewellery she had a dazzle that in Royalty would have been considered excessive. It came as much from her striking face and ice-blue eyes as from her costume. I thought that perhaps she was overdoing it—that even at Ascot, let alone Nairobi, she would have stood out; that she was not, you might say,
discreetly
rich in her appearance.
I felt that if she were not so conspicuously adorned,
projecting as she does an air of great wealth, of power, always attracting attention as if she were permanently on parade, there would be none of the speculation that exists about her origins. It is firmly believed in Nairobi, for instance, and quite incorrectly, that Diana “came from nowhere.” Chorus girl and mannequin are the most generous suggestions in the Muthaiga Club bar. “She has made herself very respectable,” said a woman member, “because she
wasn’t,
you know.” And yet Diana is proudly thought of by most whites as the most fascinating woman in Kenya, the symbol of white survival and profitable co-operation with the black ruling class after independence.
On that afternoon she was presented with an enormous silver racing trophy, the Uhuru Cup (she and Delamere always had the finest horses), by Jomo Kenyatta. The two great survivors smiled conspiratorially together and I remember thinking that once again Diana had managed to charm a rich and powerful man.
The Somalis were amazed that she never took off her many pieces of jewellery before lowering herself into her swimming pool at Kilifi. She clearly felt “undressed” without them—yet for them the impression she gave was of somebody stepping into a whirlpool fatally weighted down with bright stones.
A friend of mine once saw her in the Muthaiga Club wearing a cape fastened with powerful magnets, and was fascinated to watch her pull these apart and then let them snap together. He noticed that she had borrowed several books from the library at the Club in a series called “Real Life Murders.” At independence, the statue of Lord Delamere was removed from Delamere Avenue in Nairobi when it was renamed after Kenyatta, and brought to the garden at Soysambu. There the peacocks were provided with mirrors which encouraged them, in their vanity, to peck at their own image. Diana would say, “Go on.”
Antonia Fraser wrote to Cyril Connolly,
I have always been obsessed by the case. Obviously everyone sees something different in it: in my case it was not so much Jock Broughton as Diana, the
femme fatale,
and how some women are accident prone, something I often brood about (Mary Queen of Scots fitted into this). Imagine my excitement on sitting in the Muthaiga Club in about 1958 and seeing a leopard of a woman stalk by in pale gold jersey (everyone else in tatty cotton) with hair and skin the same colour, and even a fur coat on her arm (the temperature was about 75) and hearing a murmur, “Diana Delamere.” One of my theories about
a femme fatale
is that she often feels rather
cold,
compared to everyone …
“Cold” and “hard” were epithets often ascribed to Diana, and yet people close to her would praise her loyalty and warmth towards her friends. “She is very nice to ordinary dull people,” I have heard it said.
She is always surrounded by ladies-in-waiting. She is frightened of being alone. It is not always easy, I was told, for the ladies-in-waiting to devote so much of their time to her, but in the case of Diana, “an order is an order.”
“She was always faithful and kind to Tom, who was a difficult man, and ill for a long time,” said a friend of Diana. “She was patient with him, and he was rather strict. He didn’t want her running around.”
“Soysambu was rather gloomy,” said the friend. “They lived extremely well; not vulgarly, but they didn’t play down their riches. Their servants were always immaculately dressed in green fezzes, boots and white breeches. One day I was sitting alone in the drawing room, and one of these wonderfully dressed servants came in. He can’t have noticed me. He went to the drinks tray, picked up the whisky decanter, took a long gulp, put it back in its place and walked out of the room. I was very impressed by that.
“Diana bothered about her clothes. There was tremendous preparation for Ascot, and the moment it was over they were planning the next one, drawing up the
costumes with Hardy Amies and so on. She has one great quality as a woman, Diana. She would make you feel that you were
the
chap she would dominate.”
Her friend’s description of the servants’ uniforms is not quite correct: at Soysambu they do wear green fezzes, but their uniforms are long khaki tunics with green cummerbunds and long khaki trousers. On the coast at Kilifi they are dressed in plain white, and the “boat boys” wear trousers or shorts of navy-blue drill and navy-blue tee-shirts with the name of Diana’s boat—
White Bear
—on the chest. On special occasions the boat boys also wear white.
Another feature of Soysambu life—and one of special luxury—is the breakfast arrangements. In the evening, as the guests change for dinner, a printed menu card with a gilt surround lies on the table of the bedroom, with a rose beside it for a buttonhole. An enormous variety of tropical fruits and cooked dishes are listed, for the guests to tick their preference. Breakfast may only be taken in the bedroom. A friend of mine who once stayed there said, “I gathered that Diana didn’t like the idea of young men wandering about early in the morning. One was not encouraged to emerge with too much haste.”