Forbidden History - Death in the Happy Valley: The Murder of the Earl of Erroll

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

What happened to Josslyn Hay, the controversial 22nd Earl of Erroll who moved to Kenya in 1920s to join a promiscuous, hedonistic group of UK expat elite known as ‘the Happy Valley set’? In this e...pisode of the Forbidden History podcast, we look into the life of Lord Erroll and his mysterious murder... Cast List: Guy Walters: Author & Historian Juliet Barnes: Author  Nicholas Best: Author, Happy Valley, The Story of the English in Kenya  Christine Nicholls: Author, A Kenya Childhood James Sherwood: Writer and Royal Correspondent  Solomon Gitau: ‘Happy Valley’ resident  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. On the 24th of January 1941, the body of Jocelyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Errol, was discovered in the early hours of the morning at a deserted crossroads in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, found slumped in his car with a single bullet wound to the head. His murder would send shockwaves through Kenya's notorious Happy Valley set,
Starting point is 00:00:42 a colonial community made up of aristocracy and society's wealthy elite. You have all these figures who are all assembled there because for one reason or another, none of them are in a position to hack it back in Britain. Who had killed him? And what reason did they have for wanting him dead? It was in trying to get to the bottom of this crime that the lid was lifted on how this African outpost of the British Empire had become a playground for royalty and the aristocracy, notorious for its lethal mix of drink, drugs and sex. This was a seriously racy, seriously naughty place. With the drug addictions, the morphine, the cocaine, with the alcohol, with the wife swapping. To this day, the murder.
Starting point is 00:01:33 of the Earl of Errol has officially remained unsolved, with his killer escaping justice and the death penalty. But there are those who believe they have uncovered new hard evidence that proves exactly who it was that murdered the Earl of Errol. I've kept them at home here because they're quite inflammatory. What's said on the tapes, it does name somebody as implicated in the murder. Just how did the 22nd Earl of Errol come to be found shot dead his car on a remote road in the Kenyan capital.
Starting point is 00:02:15 Known for his lavish party lifestyle, sexual promiscuity and countless infidelities, the Earl was no stranger to making enemies. Could it have been one of the wealthy women whose money he had frittered away? An obsessed former lover? Or perhaps the husband of one of the many wives that Lord Errol had seduced? Jocelyn Victor Hay was the 22nd Earl of Errol, one of Scotland's most distinguished titles. Educated at England's prestigious Eton College, Hay carved a controversial image from a young age and was expelled from school after only two years of attendance.
Starting point is 00:02:59 His father held the post of High Commissioner in Berlin, and Jocelyn was expected to follow in his footsteps and seek out a political career. It's hard to think of a better connected person in British society than the Earl of Errol. The Errol family are an incredibly old family. As the high constables of Scotland, this honourific title they hold, they've been walking immediately behind the monarch in coronations since 1315. That's 600 years at the very apex of British society. And in the form of Jocelyn Hay, the Earl of Errol in this story,
Starting point is 00:03:34 you've got the very embodiment of the lushe, glamorous figure. He'd had a very checkered school career, and subsequently, he was a very wild child, wild young man into women, and his family didn't really want him around. At the age of 22, Lord Errol had become infatuated with a wealthy married woman, several years his senior. In 1923, the Earl of Errol married a most unsuitable woman. Lady Edina Sackville, who'd been married twice before.
Starting point is 00:04:10 Very attractive and very experienced, twice married, older than him. The couple scandalised English society. They weren't welcome at Royal Asca. They weren't really welcome anywhere. Finding themselves ostracized, the couple looked for ways to escape the judgmental eyes of British society. So when the opportunity arose, they jumped at the chance to start a new life abroad. Supposedly in her divorce settlement, she was getting half of a 2,500-acre farm that she was going to move back to to the Kenya colony. And so I should think that was rather
Starting point is 00:04:52 an attractive proposition for him. If you had divorced twice, you couldn't basically stay in the United Kingdom. So where's the obvious choice? Go to the colonies. What's the best place to go? Well, happy valley. So that's where this couple end up. and Lady Edina moved to Kenya in 1924. As he was penniless at this time, the move was financed entirely by Edina. Before long, the pair were enjoying all the trappings that Kenya had to offer,
Starting point is 00:05:26 and were soon well established among the notorious community of expats, known as the Happy Valley set. Happy Valley was a name given to a very remote valley in the Aberdeer Mountains called the One Juhi. called the One Juhi Valley. Hapabee said was a group of mainly aristocratic people. It is this sort of kind of enclave at the time of Britishness. And it's therefore, it's a place where you have all these figures,
Starting point is 00:05:57 these very loose figures like Errol, who are all assembled there, because for one reason or another, none of them are in a position to hack it back in Britain. Well, it was Idina mainly who threw the wild parties, which they went to, which were sort of orgies of drugs and swapping husbands and wives and alcohol. And so her parties were infamous. Happy Valley, as it became known, is roughly 100 miles from the Kenyan capital of Nairobi. Here, Lord Errol and Edina built a house which they named Slanes, after his family came. castle in Scotland.
Starting point is 00:06:41 Juliet Barnes is a Kenyan-born author, who grew up surrounded by the stories and legends of the wild parties that took place there. So this is Slains. Idina began her Happy Valley parties here, so this was where they swapped partners and took drugs and drank too much and everything got a bit out of hand. Most of the house has now been lost to time and the elements, but the stories of what took place here have still managed. to survive. I dare say everybody arrived with a few crates of champagne and Idina probably got the
Starting point is 00:07:17 booze and drugs in beforehand. She apparently had a green onyx bathtub in the center of the room, which was the beginning of the evening's games. She would take her bath and she'd invite her guests in for cocktails and they'd all sit round while she took her bath. So that was the warming up for the night ahead. Lord Errol and Edina became infamous for the party they threw at Slanes, which were known for their abundance of alcohol, drugs, and sexual freedom. Some of the most regular guests there were the likes of Countess Alice de Jonseil, Molly Ramsey Hill, and Dickie Pembroke. If these walls could talk, I should think what they say would be X-rated.
Starting point is 00:08:02 Apparently there weren't any roof partitions, there weren't any ceilings, so you could kind of hear everything that went on in these old houses. nothing was very private, which is quite a frightening thought considering the sort of parties they got up to. One of the highlights of their parties were the games that Adina would insist on playing. Lady Adina had almost complete sexual control
Starting point is 00:08:27 over the Happy Valley set. And she did it through playing this game with a feather. She just had this very light, small feather, which she had hold on her hand, and she'd stand in the middle of a circle, and she'd just blow the feather into the air. And whichever way that feather blew and landed, whoever's feet had ended up, that's the person she would sleep with that night.
Starting point is 00:08:51 Edina was the ringmaster of the Happy Valley set. That was her role. In many ways, it's just kind of like a 1970s, you know, spin the bottle or car key game. But of course, this is Happy Valley. And everyone there is in black tie. They're good looking. They're glamorous. They're rich.
Starting point is 00:09:08 So therefore, it seems far more glamorous. kind of not quite as seedy as one might imagine. The Happy Valley set had started to become known for their hedonism and complete disregard for the strict moral rules of polite society. I think they were very self-absorbed as well. Very few of them actually did anything serious like farming. It was all about having a good time, the next party, drinking, dancing, and that was their life.
Starting point is 00:09:38 It was said famously that there were three vices that all the happy Valizette succumb to. Altitude, alcohol, and adultery. And people like Errol did all that in spades. Lord Errol had garnered a reputation for sleeping with other men's wives, a habit that would go on to have fatal consequences. This was a seriously racy, seriously naughty place. By day, you'd be playing polo. By night, you'd be sleeping with your friend's wife. You might be injecting yourself with cocaine, you'd be getting raringly drunk, and you would be burning down the piano in the club. I think the Happy Valley set were notorious because they were so unashamed about the wife swapping, certainly, and I don't think it was just wife swapping with the Earl of Errol.
Starting point is 00:10:29 You know, there was stories about him in the Mutega Club, the social club in Nairobi, that he was having mothers and daughters on billiard tables. This would not go down well at Government House in Nairobi. and Edina was blacklisted several times, you know, that she wasn't welcome in certain places that were classed as quite respectable. The majority of people in the colony were just trying to get on with farming
Starting point is 00:10:55 and worked really hard and thoroughly disapproved them. They were quite different from the rest of the British in Kenya. Farming in Africa is a very difficult business and a lot of farmers went broke in the Depression, and it was a very hard life. hard life. Farmers worked hard, vets, schoolteachers, engineers, all sorts of British work very hard, and they tended to look askance at all these people known as veranda farmers, people who just sat on the veranda and never actually did anything, and they were not liked at all for that reason.
Starting point is 00:11:29 But endless parties and keeping up with that kind of lifestyle wasn't cheap. The Earl quickly ran up debts. His wife, Edina, also believed that her husband had been cheating her. out of money and divorced him in 1930. Errol's first marriage to Edina broke up because he was a terrible womanizer and he spent all her money and after which she got fed up with it. I mean, I think it was actually not entirely his fault. She got utterly fed up with his philandering, but she was doing the same. And, you know, she was very, as they said, handy with the needle.
Starting point is 00:12:12 You know, they were importing and taking cocaine. And it was quite a drug-fueled society that that little group had. I think it's fair to say that Edina split from Jos Errol rather than vice versa. She said that she could forgive affairs. But what she couldn't really forgive was him falling in love. And he fell in love with a married lady. and it was all very public and would have been quite humiliating to somebody like Edina Errol, who was a very beautiful woman.
Starting point is 00:12:52 But it didn't take him long to find comfort and financial support elsewhere. He soon married Molly Ramsey Hill, a wealthy divorcee and fellow member of the Happy Valley set. Together they continued their lifestyle of promiscuity and decadent excess. He married Molly Ramsey Hill, I think, for her money because he was actually running short of funds at the time. But he didn't find her a satisfactory or particularly attractive wife. She wasn't particularly beautiful. He liked beautiful women.
Starting point is 00:13:28 So it was a very unhappy marriage that one. It was apparent almost from the moment that the Earl of Errol married Molly Ramsey Hill, that it wasn't going to go well. You know, she was a wealthy woman that he went after. wealthy women he had to because he didn't have too much capital himself. The fact that he drained her money in a very short time, the fact that she drank and was seen to drink herself stupid and also take heroin. It's a very extreme response to your husband treating you badly, but he must have treated
Starting point is 00:14:07 her very badly. She wanted to give birth to a new earl, but she couldn't do that, so she took to drink and drugs and Errol got so fed up that he told the house servants to give her all the drink she wanted in the hope that she might die. And the sad thing is, in August 1939 she did die of drink and drugs. The doctor said that her room smelled of vomit and champagne, which is probably quite indicative of the Happy Valley set. You know, there is the glamour that we all adore the champagne, and then there's really the
Starting point is 00:14:50 the quite seamy side that was most unpleasant. Single once again, Lord Errol turned his attentions to another married woman, the wife of a fellow peer and newest member of the Happy Valley set, Sir Jock Delves Broughton. Jock Broughton was a hereditary baronet, old Etonian, ex-guards officer, very rich and immensely stupid. He was an old man of 58 when he fell in love with Diane. Caudwell, who was a young blonde in her 20s.
Starting point is 00:15:28 Lady Diana Delves Broughton was a beautiful divorcee who had met Sir Jacques in South Africa before moving with him to Kenya. He was entranced by her youth and good looks. She was impressed equally by his money, and it was a marriage that was never going to last. She, of course, was coming along as his pretty young wife, coming along for the ride, but Diana was said to be a bit of a fortune seeker
Starting point is 00:16:00 and a title seeker. I would imagine that Diana Coldwell saw in Jock, she saw pound signs in her eyes. Perhaps wanted the title, wanted to be Lady Delves Broughton, which she became. Diana had first met Lord Errol at the Muthagha Club,
Starting point is 00:16:20 an exclusive country club in the heart of Nairobi. They were introduced by Sir Jock himself, and it was an instant attraction and the start of a series of events that would result in Lord Errol's murder. Diana's affair with Errol almost starts as soon as these two meet each other. Diana says of that meeting, I was suddenly aware that I'd instantly become the most important thing in his life. So it was obvious that they had immense physical attraction towards each other. He sidled up to she and said, who's going to tell Jock, you or me? And this was before they'd even dance, touch, kissed anything at all.
Starting point is 00:17:04 Lord Errol soon set about trying to seduce Lady Diana. And it didn't take long for her to succumb to his advances. They were soon involved in an illicit affair. And so they start this very, very passionate relationship that Sir Jock, Diana's husband, is 100% aware of. Now, under the mores of the time, you could have an affair in Happy Valley with someone else's husband or wife, but what you shouldn't do was rub the third party's nose in it. You know, the gentlemanly or ladylike polite thing to do would be to do it discreetly. Everyone knows it's going on, but don't show off about it. Sir Jock was being publicly humiliated by his young wife and her new lover.
Starting point is 00:17:49 However, before their marriage, Jock had agreed to a rather unusual agreement with Diana. He was a rich old man, she was young, and so he agreed with her that if she fell in love with a younger man, he wouldn't stand in the way of a divorce, and he would provide her with an income of £5,000 a year, which was an enormous sum at the time for seven years. It was almost as if he was simply paying her while she was on his arm to be his attractive young wife in tow. And it may be that he made that offer in order to persuade her to marry him in the first place. Not only was Sir Jock losing his wife to a younger man, but he was going to have to pay her for the privilege. But true to his word, Sir Jock did not stand in their way. Jock Delves brought and had suffered many humiliations already.
Starting point is 00:18:53 You know, bearing in mind he'd only been married for about two months to Diana. He'd had, you know, anonymous notes posted at the Mutega Club saying there's no fool like an old fool. So you can do one of two things. You can either put on a brave face and pretend to support this, you know, catastrophe actually for him, that the marriage had broken up in a couple of months, or you could behave as any red-blooded Melwood and, you know, ask Josh Errol for a duel. He chose the former. He chose to put on a brave face. Jock was an enormous fan of horse racing and he would use a horse racing metaphor
Starting point is 00:19:32 to describe the fact that he had lost Diana to Errol. He'll said, I'll cut my losses. He knew that physically and probably in bed he could not compete with Errol and could not bring Diana the sexual satisfaction she clearly desired and received from Errol. Jock was aware of this, knew his own shortcomings in that department
Starting point is 00:19:53 and decided to try and do the gentlemanly thing On the night the Earl of Errol died, Errol, Broughton, Lady Broughton and June Carberry all had dinner together in the Methaga Club, as if nothing awful was happening. And Jock made a toast saying to Joss and Diana, I wish them every happiness in the future and may their union be blessed with an heir. The end of the dinner in the Mothaga Club, Broughton and June Carbara, He stayed on at the club to drink. And that's odd in itself because Broughton wasn't usually a drinker. Errol and Lady Broughton went off to a nearby Nairobi nightclub to go dancing, because she loved dancing.
Starting point is 00:20:41 And it was agreed that after the evening was over, the Earl of Errol would drive Diana back to Broughton's house in the Nairobi suburb of Karen. Errol is as good as his word. and brings Diana back by half-past two in the morning. Lord Errol drove Diana back home and escorted her into the house. After saying his goodbyes, he returned to his car to make the journey back. What happened next has never been fully explained. All that is known for certain is that early the next morning, a local dairy worker made a shocking discovery at a remote crossroads,
Starting point is 00:21:25 just two miles from Sir Jock and Diana's house. It was Lord Errol. His body slumped inside the car with what seemed to be a bullet wound to the side of his head. The police were called to the scene, but they found no witnesses. And what little forensic evidence there was
Starting point is 00:21:48 had been lost to a series of mistakes during their recovery. I think that there was quite a botched situation. They took the car into a garage in Nairobi, by which time everybody was. fingerprints were upon it. A lot of evidence had been destroyed all around the car scene, everybody's footprints. It's really important for crime scene to be left untouched because anybody that goes into
Starting point is 00:22:17 it could alter it and could change the evidence for the investigators to look at later in the future. All that now remained of the evidence were the bullets from the 32-caliber murder weapon, gunpowder residue on Lord Errol's face, and a series of scuff marks in the back of the car. They were the Kenyan police and they were dealing with a colonial murder of an Earl. So there would have been certain protocols not stepping on certain feet and it would have been incredibly sensitive for the Kenyan police to be, you know, sort of sticking their noses into a world that the white settlers would have said was above them.
Starting point is 00:23:03 Due to the press attention that the crime received, the police were under increasing pressure to fine the murderer. But surprisingly, the first suspect to be investigated was not Sir Jacques, but one of Lord Errol's former lovers, Alice de Jonsei. Alice de Jolze was a most interesting character, a very glamorous young American married to a French count. She was a friend of Idina and Joss, and she and her first husband, Count Frederick de Jansy,
Starting point is 00:23:37 came out to visit Idina and Joss, and decided they liked the Happy Valley lifestyle so much, or Alice certainly did. I think he was more of a respectable count, but Alice loved all the wild parties and everything, and they bought a small farm, one Johie Farm, not far away from Slanes, where Idina and Errol were. Alice de Jonse was called the Wicked Madonna by the Happy Valley set, and by their standards, that's really saying something.
Starting point is 00:24:09 In what is now a school in the Kenyan town of Gilgill, stands all that is left of Alice de Jonse's former house. But back when Alice lived here, you would have got a very different kind of education. Alice and her husband, Count Frederick de Jansay, lived here while they were building the main house. It would have been wild parties. Alice did drugs quite seriously.
Starting point is 00:24:36 But she was obviously a great party animal, and probably like Idina, I think she, She was quite cultured and well-read and good conversation and good fun. Her biographer certainly says there was a very manic-depressive side to her and she used to get very unhappy, very black moods. Local conservationist Solomon Gittal grew up on Alice's farm. He knew many of her servants and remembers the stories they told him about what happened at the house.
Starting point is 00:25:15 He is in no doubt that Alice DeJonze was Lord Errol's murderer. To me, she is the first suspect. I think about that because Alice was very jealousy. At one day, Alice was very upset. I don't know the reason why she was upset about. And when she was in the kitchen, he started complaining about Laudel and say, one day I shall kill him.
Starting point is 00:25:59 Suspicion first fell on Alice when she was reported to have acted very strangely when viewing Lord Errol's body at the mortuary. Alice did something very unusual after Errol's death. She went to the morgue to view his body. She kissed Errol on the lips. Anne told him now he was hers forever. I think probably that helped to make her a suspect. But the police's main reason for questioning Alice
Starting point is 00:26:31 was that it would not have been the first time she had shot someone. Alice de Jainze was pulled in for one very simple reason. She had previous. A few years before, she had got out a pistol in the Gardinot in Paris and shot her lover and also shot herself in the stomach. Now, neither of them died, but it was clear that this was a woman who was very happy to shoot people. Alice de Jonse had made headlines around the world for the shooting of her lover, Raymond de Trafford. Raymond survived, and Alice was handed a suspended sentence on the grounds of her diminished mental state.
Starting point is 00:27:13 That previous conviction alone was enough to put her in the frame. Could Alice have been responsible for Lord Errol's murder? She admitted that she had done the deed, and she also wrote in the fly leaf of a book that she had done it. But she was a bit addled at the time, and I don't think the police believed her. They didn't see how she could have been at the scene of the crime at the corner and shot him,
Starting point is 00:27:39 and how did she know when he would be passing by in the car, and how would she get there? So I think they just dismissed it as insubstantial evidence, not to be trusted. The investigation into Alice de Jonsei ceased when she was able to provide an alibi. The focus of the investigation was then swiftly moved to Sir Jock Broughton. Bearing in mind it was, I think, seven weeks after the ill was shot, that Jock Delves Broughton was arrested and charged with the murder. which seems to be in an ordinately long time to come to the obvious suspect,
Starting point is 00:28:24 because various members of the Happy Valley sect did blab, you know, and did say that he didn't take it quite as well as people expected or people thought that he took to his wife being stolen by the Earl of Errol. So I'm only surprised he wasn't arrested immediately. Sir Jock was taken into custody and tried for the murder of Lord Errol. During the proceedings, his defense argued that June Carberry had stayed at Sir Jock's house that night and confirmed that she had seen him at home at 3.30 a.m., just one hour after the murder had taken place. They also tried to suggest that Jock had hidden in the back of the car and shot Errol and then walked back,
Starting point is 00:29:12 and it's actually quite a distance to walk. They brought in a lot of medical evidence about how it would have taken him two hours. to walk back to the house. Plus if June Carberry is to be believed he was very drunk that night, so it's all just so unlikely. Unable to place him at the scene of the crime, the prosecution now needed to link Sir Jock to the murder weapon. He had reported the theft of two of his revolvers
Starting point is 00:29:43 two days before the murder, without any sign of a break-in at his house. house, which suggested to the police that he may have been setting up an alibi for why he didn't have the gun anymore. Prosecution went back to the evidence recovered from the crime scene and tried to make a match. The police case against Jock Grawton rested on one crucial thing, which was that the bullet that had killed the Earl of Errol matched the striation marks that showed up on other bullets that had been fired from Broughton's gun previously.
Starting point is 00:30:21 The police had picked up some old bullets that Broughton had fired, and they had compared them, and they were convinced that the marks were the same, and therefore it was Broughton's gun that had killed Errol. But the prosecution was no match for Sir Jock's experienced legal team. Morris, the lawyer that Diana had hired to defend Jock, was a ballistic expert. Broughton's lawyer was able to prove in court that the bullet that killed Errol had not come from any coat revolver.
Starting point is 00:31:01 The case collapsed and he walked from court a free man. To this day, no one has ever been convicted for the murder of the Earl of Errol, and the case remains unsolved. There was one person, however, who claimed they knew exactly who had done it. Juanita Carberry was just 15 years old at the time of the murder. She was the stepdaughter of June Carberry, one of Jocks and Diana's close friends, who was with them at the Muthagha Club, the night of the murder. She claims to have visited Jock with her stepmother June on the day that Lord Errol's body was discovered. Juanita was left with Jolp and apparently she asked him if he wanted to go and see her horse.
Starting point is 00:31:51 her horse. When she was taking him to see her horse, he confessed to her that he had actually done the crime. But apparently when June Carberry found out about this, she swore Juanita's a secrecy. She did seem absolutely genuine about it. I couldn't see why she was making it up. But Juanita also witnessed something else that day. The story about Jock Delves Broughton, lighting a bomb fire at home, the morning after the Earl of Aril had been found. She said that she went into the garden and saw Jock burning these white plimsels on a fire in the garden. What reason did Jock have for wanting to destroy a pair of his shoes? The evidence they gathered was that in the back of the...
Starting point is 00:32:50 car, there were a lot of white scuff marks. Now, people wore what we used to call tackies, which have white plimsels, and we used to make them white with blanco, which scuffed off on any surface, actually, you'd get white scuff marks. They found a lot of those in the back of the car. If those were Sir Jock's shoes that made the scuff marks in the back of Lord Errol's car, surely it proves that he was indeed the murderer. But what about his does? defense in court, which conclusively proved that he would not have had time to shoot Lord Errol and walk back to his house by 3.30 a.m. Christine Nichols is an author who grew up in Kenya in the 1940s. Christine began looking into the murder for a book she was writing, and her research
Starting point is 00:33:40 turned up an unexpected piece of evidence. The new information that came up was in the tape of Dan Trench. Maxwell Trench had told his son Dan that he knew about the murder. Dan Trench was born in Kenya in 1919. His parents were close friends with June Carberry, who had apparently divulged to Dan's father exactly what had happened that night. Well, Dan claims that his father had told him
Starting point is 00:34:11 that Delves Broughton had a lift back from the murder scene. to his house, and that the chap who had given him the lift was an ear, nose, throat, and eye specialist in Nairobi called Athen Philip, who lived nearby. Dan Trench gave the interview in 1986 on the agreement that it would only be released after his death. The murder took place just over two miles from Broughton's home. Broughton in court pointed out that he was an old man and had a walking problem. he claimed that he couldn't possibly have shot Errol
Starting point is 00:34:54 and then walked all the way home and been in bed and that it was just physically impossible. With both Dan Trench and Dr. Athen Philip having passed away, is there any way to verify the contents of this tape? Well, it does name somebody as implicated in the murder and he's dead now. He can't speak for himself. His daughter doesn't believe, what's been said.
Starting point is 00:35:24 So it is really very difficult to decide whether this is true or not. Dan Trench certainly believed what he said was true. If we are to believe the evidence against Sir Jacques Delves Broughton, it would seem clear that he was indeed guilty of Lord Errol's murder. But how did he do it? At about 2.30, Errol returns back to the Delves Broughton house, bringing back, as he promised Diana. Errol then gets into his car, his Buick.
Starting point is 00:35:56 But unbeknown to him, there's someone in the back, and that person is Sir Jog, who's waiting and waiting for his moment. And the Buick is driving along on the road back to Nairobi. And just as the car approaches a junction, Delves Broughton, pulls out his pistol, and shoots him, and shoots him dead. Does the new evidence conclusively prove once and for all, Who really killed Jocelyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Errol? I'm quite sure that Jock Broughton killed the Earl of Errol.
Starting point is 00:36:30 Who else knew where Errol was in the small hours of the morning on a dark road in the middle of Africa? Broughton was the only man who knew he was there. Of course he did it. I think it's been conclusively proved that Jock Delves Broughton did shoot the Earl of Errol, that he was helped to and from the scene of the crime, that he wasn't drunk. It suggests with the alleged burglary,
Starting point is 00:37:01 the theft of the gun two days before and the increased heavy drinking two or three days before that he decided quite suddenly that he was going to kill the Earl of Errol, but that he'd given it two or three days and found the opportunity and set it up. I don't know who killed. the Earl of Errol. I really don't. I suspect it might have been Delves Broughton.
Starting point is 00:37:32 Could have been Diana, could have been DeGoncée. No one involved in the case ever spoke about it publicly after the trial. And it seems that in Happy Valley, one tragedy follows another. Alice committed suicide. She made two attempts and the second one was successful. She shot herself, but first she made up her bed with her. best linen, which had the family crest on it, and she filled her room with flowers, and she shot herself, and this time she was successful. She requested a cocktail party be held at her grave, but unfortunately there weren't
Starting point is 00:38:11 many people around, so it never happened. But even though he was found not guilty of the murder, the court case had proved too scandalous, and Jock returned to England, in disgrace, shortly afterwards. Well, Jock Delbs-Borton's story is that has a very sad end that he almost limped back from Nairobi to the United Kingdom and he killed himself in a hotel in Liverpool and it was an injection of morphine that finished him off which, again, strongly suggests that he was the killer of the Earl of Ayrl.
Starting point is 00:38:50 He had medical issues, he wasn't very well and he left two notes when he died, one was to say, that he couldn't stand the physical pain of his illnesses anymore, and the other was to say that he couldn't stand any more strain about the trial. And in my opinion, killing himself was the last act of a guilty man. As for Lady Diana, she stayed on in Kenya, marrying a further two times before her death in 1987 at the age of 76. I think Diana's grief was genuine after,
Starting point is 00:39:33 to her lover was killed. But amazingly enough, she actually remarried quite soon afterwards. She married Gilbert Colville, who was an eccentric, rather reclusive farmer, very big landowner, a very nice man, apparently. And she married him, and they were very happily married for 12 years. And she then married again, his best friend, who was Lord Delamere, the fourth Baron Delamere, and she became Lady Delamere. So she got what she wanted, which was a lot of money, a lot of land,
Starting point is 00:40:08 and titles, which was what people said Diana was always after, although I'm sure there was more to Diana than that. There is now little to remind us of the hedonistic lives once lived in these picturesque Kenyan landscapes. But the murder of the Earl of Errol continues to fascinate through the generations. I don't think we'll ever find out what happened to the Earl of Errol. It's too long ago. Not enough evidence was gathered at the time.
Starting point is 00:40:41 The prosecution was botched and it's too late to find out anything now. But it will run and run this story. People will continue to have theories because it's interesting, exciting.

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