You're Dead to Me, Sir Jock Delves Broughton
5th December 1942.
It's always tempting to regard the Edwardian period as one of stiff-collared, rigid-backed, post-World War, moralistic sternness, but if one was a wealthy colonial in the upper regions of the Wanjohi Valley in Kenya, one's life was a whirligig of drugs, promiscuity, drink and hedonism. No wonder, then, that the area became known as 'Happy Valley'.
Things were not so happy for Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll, when, on the 24th of January 1941, he was found slumped over the wheel of his Buick at a crossroads outside Nairobi with a bullet in his head. The initial suspicion fell on Erroll's former lover, Alice de Janzé, but instead, Sir Jock Delves Broughton was arrested for the murder. Sir Jock's wife, the devastatingly glamorous Diana Caldwell, had been carrying on openly with Erroll right under Sir Jock's nose.
Sir Jock was sent for trial where the Crown failed to prove their case. All the physical evidence was in Sir Jock's favour - his pistol didn't match the suspected murder weapon, and the fatal bullet had been fired from a barrel with five grooves, whereas Sir Jock's Colt had six.
Although he was acquitted, the police and the residents of Happy Valley went on suspecting that Sir Jock had managed to fool the jury. He was never accepted back into the Kenyan social set, and with Diana already fucking her way merrily through the remaining male population of Happy Valley, he reluctantly returned to England.
He took rooms at the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, and it was there, on 5th December 1942, that he was found dying from a morphine overdose. He was 59. The inquest returned a verdict of suicide whilst his mind was unbalanced. The Baronetcy was passed to his son, Sir Evelyn, whilst Diana remarried twice, firstly to the richest man in Kenya and then, when she'd had enough of him, the 4th Baron Delamere. By the time of the Baron's death in 1979, she had become the most influential white woman in Africa, the last vestige of a questionable colonial past. She retired to Berkshire, England, where she died, aged 73, in 1987.
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