White Mischief (19 page)

Furneaux’s book was a slim volume in a crime documentary series, a useful textbook which gave a readable, dramatised account of the trial, but little more.

There were at least two main strands to Connolly’s obsession with the case, which came out clearly in the article. The first was the pure fascination of an unsolved murder mystery.

Broughton had occupied the limelight, and yet there were too many missing links in the chain to believe that the police had been right to arrest him. Who else, of that gallery of characters, was at the crossroads that night? Or was Erroll dead long before he got to the crossroads? Was it certain that he even came back to the house at Karen with Diana? The alibis of all four characters in the house depended on each other; only two of them were called, June Carberry and Broughton, and Broughton remembered, so he said, little of the evening. Was there a conspiracy between them? Was there a hired killer? Why were the armstraps lying on the seat of the car, when they had clearly been in place the previous day? What of the hairpin, the bloodstained cigarette end, the marks of shoe-white on the back seat? Who could have written the anonymous notes? There were so many unexplained details.

Connolly’s first reference to the Erroll case in print was in a review in the
Sunday Times
in 1960 of Julian Symons’s
A Reasonable Doubt
.—a collection of unsolved murder cases. Connolly wrote.

Does it appeal to our vanity, the notion that logic or intuition or knowledge of the human heart can jump to the conclusion which
has escaped all the experts and baffled the police? Or is it the fear that injustice has been done and the wrong person convicted? Or that a murderer may still be at large? I believe those old teamsters, vanity and curiosity, play the strongest part, and that we all feel we can complete these jigsaws with human pieces.

The other strand lay deeper, and was much older. 1938, the year June Carberry’s voice came floating over the escarpment at Eden Roc, was also the year that
Enemies of Promise
was published. Its later section deals with Eton and its teachings and the upper-class glamour that fascinated Connolly and also repelled him.

Even in College, among the seventy “scholars,” “sapping” [swotting] was discredited and we were infected by the fashion from without, behind which lay the English distrust of the intellect and prejudice in favour of the amateur. A child in Ireland, a boy at St. Wulfric’s, a scholar at Eton, I had learned the same lesson. To be “highbrow” was to be different, to be set apart and so excluded from the ruling class of which one was either a potential enemy or a potential servant. Intelligence was a deformity which must be concealed: a public school taught one to conceal it like a good tailor hides a paunch or a hump. As opposed to ability it was a handicap in life.
*

Arriving at Eton from a faded Irish family on one side, middle-class on the other, very clever but thinking himself ugly and “set apart,” Connolly was overwhelmed by the peculiar aura of the English upper-class. He looked feverishly into his own Irish progeny. (“Such were these early excesses that today I cannot listen to any discussion of titles, or open a peerage without feeling sick … I shall never be able to breathe again until they are abolished.”)

The male characters in the Erroll drama were “all from the old school list.” Connolly suggested this at the time of our article. He wrote,

I arrived in College at Eton in 1918. Oddly enough my earliest friend was another new boy. Randall Delves Broughton. a cousin of the Baronet’s family. Eton publishes a list of all the boys with their home addresses and the names of their parents or guardians, and these we used to study with fascination as the assemblies in School Yard, to be called over, brought out all the boys, athletes in their splendid plumage, scholars in their gowns, new boys in their short jackets.

Although we were supposed not to be snobs, except about those who were good at games, some of these addresses were unforgettable: “c/o H. M. King of the Belgians”; “Duke of Hamilton. The Palace. Hamilton”; “Sirdar Charanjit. Singh of Kapurthala. Charanjit Castle. Jullundur City. India” … and several people from our story were there too: “Hay. Hon. J. V.. absent”; “Cholmondeley. Hon. T. P. H.”: “Portman. G. W. B.”—the future Lords Erroll. Delamere and Portman.

Connolly became as serious about his election to Pop. the self-electing oligarchy of Eton prefects which he had lobbied for so carefully, as about his membership of White’s later on. White’s was a place where the writers among its members might justifiably have felt uneasy, and Connolly had a phobia about the place. He once told me that he had the impression that everyone stopped talking the moment he came through the door, and he was sometimes seized with the fear, according to Peter Quennell, that he might have to submit to a ritual “debagging” there: the thought of being trouserless at White’s reviving his early terrors at Eton, before he was saved by his Pop election. The passionate love-hate for athletes and philistines had pursued him throughout his life. At Oxford he had been proud of his wild friends. There were many reckless fauns in Happy Valley, like Waugh’s friend, Raymond de Trafford.

Diana Caldwell was for Connolly the perfect complement to the males in that longed-for and detested world of upper-class glamour. There was a bloom on her, something to do with her looks, her figure and her clothes, that fascinated him. She was unlike most of the women who,
surrounded Connolly, but she had a certain appeal, a sexuality that attracted and impressed him.

Diana loved jewels, for example, and might go to considerable lengths to get them. He was intrigued by the fact that this woman, who had been jealously described as a “chorus girl,” had turned herself into exactly what is required of an “English lady,” and he thought her bold and admirable.

There was a hint of passion and even a voyeuristic streak in his quest. The possibility that he could never know the truth about Diana drove Connolly mad with curiosity. He was like the German Prince in Marlowe’s
Dr. Faustus
who asks Faustus, now in league with the devil, to summon up Alexander the Great’s concubine so that he can satisfy his burning, obsessive curiosity: does she or does she not have a mole on her neck? One of Connolly’s informants had told him that, as a result of a shooting incident long after the trial, Diana had been marked by a bullet which had grazed her back. He once suggested, as a joke, that I go and find out if it was true. But he badly wanted to know.

The Erroll story contained all the right ingredients for Connolly and he approached it with the curiosity of a novelist, or a novelist
manqué
. To some extent he romanticised the Kenya characters in his imagination: the painstaking investigation seemed like a substitute for the serious novel he felt he ought to be writing, and about which he had always hoarded guilty feelings of unfulfilment.

Our article was well received and judged a success, as much I suspect for its evocation of time and place as its exposition of the story in a wholly new light. We had gathered a great deal of fresh material, on which my own researches were subsequently based, and Connolly was to add much more before his death. We had, in a sense, broken off the quest because of the need to publish, and the mystery was still there to baffle us, enriched, but perhaps deepened too. Connolly received many telephone
calls over Christmas, and letters afterwards, congratulating him on his masterly effort, and a cable from the writer, Quentin Crewe, also an Erroll murder aficionado, who had written up his own discoveries in his column in the
Daily Mirror
. His cable read, “Superb elegant amazing revealing far more than I have ever dared to hope many congratulations.”

Letters arrived, containing peculiar memories and anecdotes, like this one:

December 21 ’69

Dear Mr. Connolly,

Your account of the Erroll murder in today’s
Sunday Times
Magazine was compulsive reading for me. This is the reason.

In 1945 my husband and I and two small daughters had a holiday at Westward Ho in North Devon in a guest house, name forgotten I’m afraid. Among the guests was a permanent resident, a rather faded but elegant woman, beautifully dressed—Mrs. Caldwell, the mother of Diana and Lady Willingdon.

We talked a little: she was quite friendly and obviously lonely. One day she invited me to her bed-sitting room. It was full of photographs in silver frames, carrying the atmosphere (as she did herself) of Mayfair 1920s.

She spoke of Diana, saying she’d married a dreadful man, presumably Delves Broughton. I recall the emphasis on “dreadful” very clearly. The case was miles away from people like my husband or 1, two professional people in a workday provincial city, so I wasn’t much interested then.

However, two incidents have remained in my memory very vividly. Mrs. Caldwell went everywhere with a whippet dog. I love dogs and used to admire him, especially his docile temperament. “Well you see, they’re working class dogs, and used to being kept under.” said Mrs. Caldwell. It expressed perfectly the caste system she took for granted, though she loved the dog.

Another time she left an expensive fur coat in the holiday-makers’ lounge. One of the guests, a London man with plebeian manners, and a loud voice, picked it up in scorn saying, “Well, the war’s over and so’s this sort of thing I hope.”

I’d welcomed the Labour victory of ’45, but this fellow put me, momentarily at any rate, on Mrs. Caldwell’s side. My husband and I both agreed we hated his gesture.

Twenty years later whippet dogs appear with glamour models in
Vogue
and
Harper’s
and anyone having a good fur coat in a guest house would be admired rather than scorned.

This gives a chance to say how much I enjoy all you write on Sundays. I’ve never forgotten your book
Enemies of Promise,
either.

Yours sincerely,

Evelyn Ratcliff

But others were not so impressed. On Christmas Day, Sir Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk sat down and composed the following letter to the Editor of the
Sunday Times
. I no longer remember his reaction to it, but it was the kind of letter that would have touched Connolly on an exposed nerve.

Sir,

Before regaling us with servants’ hall gossip, Mr. Cyril Connolly draws “indignant attention” to the War going on at the time of the death of Lord Erroll, whose only daughter was my first wife. It’s as a talented writer rather than a military man that we think of Mr. Connolly, which is perhaps why he forgot to mention that Lord Erroll had recently returned from the Eritrean campaign, where as a Captain he had been awarded a mention in despatches.

It was also vinegar on a wound to read that the East African pioneers “took so much out of the world and put so little back.” Lord Erroll did not own “seats” at Slains Castle and Rosenglass. He put his few pennies into Kenya, where he was a leading elected member of the Legislative Council. And my own father lost more than nineteen twentieths of his outlay, when he put two thirds of his fortune and all his labour into clearing the virgin bush: no pun is intended to link him to those dozen or so forward looking families who were so much ahead of their time as to
anticipate the permissive society so brightly hailed by our
avant garde
in this Day & Age.

Yours truly,

Iain Moncreiffe of that Ilk

It was, in fact, not the East African pioneers that Connolly had accused of taking so much out and giving little back, but those same “forward looking” families in Happy Valley that Sir Iain had linked to the landscape with his schoolboy pun. Twelve years later I arranged to meet Sir Iain—at White’s—and we spent two enjoyable hours talking about the case.

We faced in addition a storm of complaints at the Press Council from members of the Erroll family. The layout of our piece contained a full page blow-up of Erroll’s head lying on the mortuary slab, showing the fatal bullet wound and the scorchmarks of black powder. Lord Kilmarnock, Erroll’s brother, complained that this especially, and the article in general, were in extremely bad taste; that it should not have been published without first having been shown to the Erroll family, and that the underlying suggestion of Erroll’s homosexuality at Eton was “a most damaging piece of imaginative reporting calculated to cast an aspersion on Lord Erroll’s character as a schoolboy.” Connolly replied,

Surely the investigation of an unsolved mystery of thirty years ago, which received international attention, which has been the subject of one book, as well as innumerable articles in many countries, and made legal history, is in the public domain.

If all the members of the families involved were consulted, that of the accused as well as of the victim, which would now include some grown-up grandchildren, nothing would get published at all about this or innumerable other crimes or scandals, from Tranby Croft onwards … Surely the press is entitled to disregard the general wish of all families to keep their skeletons in their cupboards.

On the “bad taste” and the photograph of Erroll, Connolly wrote,

I do not consider the article in bad taste given what has already been written and the thirty year time lag. I do not see how one can adjudicate about bad taste: very many people whose opinion I respect enjoyed the article and wrote or said so. I was not responsible for obtaining or publishing the photo of Lord Erroll’s head but I gathered that it was published on the grounds that it brought home that an unsolved murder was not just a parlour game and that it was in itself a thing of beauty. I do think it is a tragic and moving photograph and brings out the extraordinary beauty of Lord Erroll which was to dog him through his life and lead to his undoing.

The “imaginative” reporting on Erroll as a schoolboy was not imaginative, said Connolly, and supplied the descriptions of two Eton contemporaries, one of whom was Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Curiously, Lord Kilmarnock had also objected to the adjective “fascist” which I had applied to Erroll in my own copy, despite a mention of Erroll’s apostasy from that cause. Connolly ended his long defence.