History does not reach us only in classrooms and via textbooks; movies, novels, songs, and even video games have shaped how we understand what came before the present for generations. Lapham’s Quarterly is exploring the history and allure of pop culture’s period pieces, artifacts that captivated audiences with their conceptions of the past—and the political and cultural contexts that made these historical fictions so compelling.
In February 1990 Ralph Lauren launched his latest perfume, Safari for Woman, with an ad campaign fronted by the statuesque blonde Kim Nye. A TV commercial featured the American model in pristine white jodhpurs and a loose, tucked white shirt as she disembarked a small plane on a golden savannah, rode her horse under a sunset, and gazed serenely at a flock of birds taking flight over a purplish sky. The Safari woman, a publicist told the press, is a “fantasy of what colonial life might have been like, as interpreted by modern times.” Lauren himself elaborated that Safari evoked “women who dress in white suits and fly off to Paris first and then on to Nairobi. The woman would have breeding and background.” And she would wear, apparently, a heady floral scent with undernotes of vetiver and sandalwood.
It was a fitting climax to a decade where the reenvisioning of British-ruled Kenya—designer perfume being the last word in Madison Avenue stagecraft—left indelible cultural traces. By his own admission Lauren had never visited Africa, but his command of the zeitgeist was, as ever, faultless. Throughout the Reagan-Thatcher years, as Western imperialism experienced its last gasp and the struggle against South African apartheid began to succeed, lavish depictions of Empire were big business. India under the Raj featured in the 1983 Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust, David Lean’s 1984 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, and the 1984 TV series The Jewel in the Crown, based on Paul Scott’s novels. But among Britain’s former colonies, none was quite as mythologized as interwar Kenya—thanks, in no small part, to its original notoriety as a playground for louche toffs. The Happy Valley group of settlers, so called for their lifestyle of freewheeling luxury in the Kenyan highlands, were synonymous with oblivious privilege, sexual libertinism, and androgynously elegant dressing. Lauren, by alluding to Nairobi specifically, cannily signaled this aura of roguish glamour.
The first Safari by Ralph Lauren fashion collection debuted in 1984—not long before, as the print ads touted, the 1985 theatrical release of Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa. In this loose adaptation of a 1937 memoir by Isak Dinesen (Karen von Blixen’s pen name), Meryl Streep plays the Danish baroness, who in 1914 goes to Kenya to marry, run coffee plantations, and fall in love—with the land, the Kenyan people, and Robert Redford’s Denys Finch Hatton, a charming and elusive big-game hunter. The nearly three-hour film melodramatizes their doomed affair, conducted against an exquisitely shot backdrop of the Kenyan natural world. Nominated for eleven Oscars, it won seven, including awards for cinematography and art direction. Though the costume designer, Milena Canonero, missed out to Emi Wada for Ran, the Out of Africa wardrobe—devised, Canonero said, with meticulous attention to period accuracy—imbued safari chic with an unshakable allure. Fashion icons come and go, but Streep as Blixen, in her epauletted white shirts, utilitarian khaki jackets, and brown leather accessories, is a mood-board perennial.
Along with Out of Africa, the colonial Kenya narrative with the strongest retrospective stamp is the 1982 book White Mischief, by British journalist James Fox. Setting out to solve the 1941 murder of Josslyn Hay, an army captain in the Kenya Regiment and the de facto king of Happy Valley, Fox combined scrupulous fact-finding with a New Journalism–style depiction of his quest. The result was an exceptional feat of literary reportage, hailed as an instant true-crime classic. For Fox, it was the culmination of work spanning over a decade. He originally began investigating the case for a Sunday Times Magazine piece, written in collaboration with critic Cyril Connolly and published in 1969. For years, the mystery had obsessed Connolly, a frequent visitor to Kenya who, it so happened, had gone to Eton with the murder victim. “The coincidence,” Fox writes, “had a potent effect on his imagination, his envy, his fevered curiosity.”
After Connolly’s death in 1974, Fox delved back into his late colleague’s notes, expanded with new information elicited in response to the piece, and “decided to pursue the trail we had embarked upon together.” By the time Fox had researched and written White Mischief, it was the perfect moment to publish.
True-crime writers were entering a golden age, with books such as Ann Rule’s A Stranger Beside Me and Joe McGinnis’ Fatal Vision selling millions of copies. The film tie-in edition of White Mischief carried the era-defining tagline “They brought so much to Africa. Glamour, greed, decadence—and murder.”
Josslyn Hay, who held the hereditary Scottish title Earl of Erroll, had quite the pedigree—Queen Victoria was his father’s godmother—and immense confidence in his appeal to women. (Joss’ Eton education had ended abruptly when, aged fifteen, he was caught having sex with a housemaid.) What he didn’t have was much money. Luckily, his first wife was rich enough for both of them. Lady Idina Sackville, the storied socialite who appears in Nancy Mitford’s novels as “the bolter” due to her habit of fleeing marriages, was twenty-seven and on her second husband when she met Joss in 1923. He was twenty-one and about to begin a career in the Foreign Office. Less than a year later they scandalously eloped to Kenya, where Idina had lived for a brief spell between 1919 and 1920. The new couple’s destination, Fox explains, “launched the Colony’s reputation as a place beyond the reach of society’s censure, and so beyond the pale.”
For his first chapter, Fox chose epigraphs from a 1912 book titled A Colony in the Making, or Sport and Profit in East Africa by Lord Cranworth, one of the first white settlers in Kenya. A household management tip, supplied by Lady Cranworth and quoted by Fox, advises, “One could not, for instance, learn by experience in England when is the right time to have a servant beaten for rubbing silver plate on the gravel to clean it.” White Mischief’s tenacious haunting of our culture may be seen most readily in the frivolous—Vogue fashion spreads and romantic novels—but for this Fox cannot be held responsible. Keenly attuned to the racism and entitlement of the aristocrats and adventurers whose exploits he put under the microscope, he glamorized them only inadvertently.
White Mischief’s reception was colored, inevitably, by the era’s burgeoning nostalgia for the historical moment Fox captured—a fondness stimulated by echoes of that past in the present. The Happy Valley set came to channel (not unjustifiably) the pervasive 1980s mores of materialism, hedonism, and amorality. At the same time, as emblems of empire’s last halcyon days, they carried the reassuring, and escapist, message that colonialism’s iniquitous excesses were history. The Daily Telegraph literary editor David Holloway described White Mischief as fascinating for “the repellent nature of almost all the people involved.” As David Caute put it in his review for the Observer, in Happy Valley
the jeunesse dorée squandered fortunes, drank themselves to death, raced their horses, walloped their servants, played croquet, bridge, and backgammon, abandoned their children, dropped hens from aeroplanes to see if they would fly, stole their own paintings and pearls to collect the insurance, loved animals and killed them in prodigious quantities. As for their view of marriage, it was far in advance of Hollywood’s.
The elevator pitch to potential financers of the film adaptation, to be written and directed by Michael Radford, was “Out of Africa with added raunchiness, the ultimate AIDS-generation movie. At the beginning everybody’s doing it. At the end almost everybody’s dead.” Yet if the essential darkness of the story chimed with contemporary readers and critics, that darkness has clung to these figures far less durably than their association with fun and frolics. After Frances Osborne published her excellent 2008 biography of Idina—her great-grandmother—the New York Times reported that American “literary hedonists” were throwing modern-day “Bolter parties,” where they paid wistful tribute to Happy Valley bacchanals. “Long strings of pearls encouraged, but not required,” advised one invitation.
The takeover of the land that became Kenya began in earnest in 1888, when it was earmarked by the newly formed Imperial British East Africa company, a commercial entity with a royal imprimatur. For a few years, Germany had been making incursions in the region, leasing land from the sultan of Oman in what is now Tanzania. Not to be outdone, in 1895 the British declared rule over the East Africa Protectorate (EAP), an area encompassing nearly a quarter-million square miles from the southeastern shoreline of the Indian Ocean up to Uganda. According to the commissioner of the EAP, Sir Charles Eliot, it would be “a white man’s country in which native questions would present but little interest.” As an elaborate show of mastery to the Germans, work began on an ambitious railroad. Starting at Mombasa on the coast, the new track traversed deserts, mountains, and forests; cut through the land of the Maasai and Kikuyu peoples; and eventually reached Lake Victoria, a source of the Nile and thus an important trading link.
Dubbed “the lunatic express” by disapproving government officials back home, the railway was completed in 1901 at a total cost of £5.5 million, the equivalent of around £500 million today. The human cost was also great. Indian workers, who had experience from building their own country’s vast rail infrastructure, were employed in the thousands. Many died, either from disease or, more gruesomely, from encountering lions. The only way to recoup the investment, the British decided, was to cultivate the fertile swathes of highlands. Maasai elders were persuaded to put their thumbprints to a treaty relinquishing their claim to the land, which was divided into parcels and doled out to white farmers from Britain and its colonies in exchange for financial investment and a yearly rent. In 1907 Winston Churchill, then undersecretary of state for the colonies, announced that “one of the most romantic and wonderful railways in the world” was beginning to pay its way.
“At the height of the British rule in Kenya,” the Kenyan author and journalist Peter Kimani pointed out in a 2008 Guardian piece, “less than a thousand white farmers held more than eight million acres of the nation’s best land—virtually all the available arable land—acquired through brute force or shrewd conning.” And careful planning: in 1919, the year before Kenya was so named (after the country’s highest mountain) and officially designated a British Crown Colony, the Soldier Settlement Scheme called for immigration by Europeans who had fought for the British Empire in the Great War. As in the first phase of settlement, many of the new arrivals to the Rift Valley, just north of Nairobi, were British and upper-class. To quote Evelyn Waugh, thus was “a community of English squires established on the equator.”
Waugh had traveled around East Africa after covering the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I, emperor of Ethiopia, for the London Times. His impressions are recounted in the 1931 travel memoir Remote People and satirized in his 1932 comic novel Black Mischief (a title Fox found suggestive). As a passenger on the lunatic express, Waugh experienced three derailments. Managing to alight at Nairobi in one piece, he joined the Happy Valleyites at a luncheon and then for some gambling at the horse races. In the evening, he and Raymond de Trafford, a hard-drinking baronet’s son, were invited to a dinner party at Torr’s Hotel. “On the way up we stopped in the bar to have a cocktail,” Waugh recalled. “A man in an orange shirt asked if either of us wanted a fight. We both said we did. He said, ‘Have a drink instead.’ ”
Even Waugh, that most cynical of observers, romanticized the Kenya settlers, who, he mused, “are not cranks of the kind who colonized New England, nor criminals and ne’er-do-wells of the kind of who went to Australia, but perfectly normal, respectable Englishmen, out of sympathy with their own age, and for this reason linked to the artist in an unusual but very real way.” Frédéric de Janzé, a French count who lived in Happy Valley with his American wife, Alice, described his fellow expatriates as “indefatigable amusement seekers weary or cast out from many climes, many countries. Misfits, neurasthenics, of great breeding and charm, who lacked the courage to grow old.” At around seven thousand miles above sea level, the altitude was said to induce euphoria—or, as one army major put it, “stimulate gaiety and exuberance.”
The Kikuyu, who had lived on and near Mount Kenya for centuries, were forced to pay taxes to the colonial government, banned from exporting their own crops, and employed as low-waged farmhands and servants. Meanwhile, British aristocrats set about re-creating the kind of feudal environment they could no longer aspire to in the shires of England. Idina and Joss annexed two thousand acres of forest and grazing land at the foot of the Aberdare Range, leased from the British government at the bargain price of fifteen shillings an acre, to be paid over a term of ten years. The house they built, Slains, was named after the Scottish ancestral home of the Earl of Erroll, which had inspired the castle in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. To Joss’ regret, it had recently been sold off by his grandfather, but at least now there was still a Slains in the family. Slains of Kenya was whitewashed and cedar-shingled, with cottage-style bay windows, verandas, and rolling lawns. A French housekeeper was hired to supervise the Kenyan staff, and Idina filled the rooms with inherited antiques and treasures picked up on her travels. The vast principal bathroom featured a specially made green onyx bathtub, from which Idina greeted weekend party guests. Since she liked everyone to swap partners at the end of the evening, it set the tone.
Other than Idina’s house parties, settler Kenya’s social hub was the Muthaiga Club, in the Nairobi suburb of the same name. At this salmon stucco mansion, the posher colonials played golf, tennis, and croquet; drank champagne and pink gin; dined and danced. Membership was strict: mid-rank government officials were not welcome, while a suggestion that Jews might be admitted was met with vehement protests. Nor was money allowed to visibly change hands. “When I wanted to pay for my round,” Waugh wrote, “the barman gave me a little piece of paper to sign and a cigar.” Drugs were taken freely, as the Prince of Wales discovered at a dinner party in 1928. When Edward VIII was invited to partake by everyone’s favorite gentleman dealer, said gentleman was swiftly ejected from the club. A member explained, “Well, there is a limit, even in Kenya, and when someone offers cocaine to the heir to the throne, something has to be done about it.”
As reviewers of White Mischief marveled, Agatha Christie couldn’t have come up with a better whodunit. Suspects for Joss’ murder were far from lacking; nor were potential means, motives, and opportunities. A political assassination was one possibility. In 1934 Joss had joined Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, whose cause he proselytized, though he renounced his membership the following year. By the time war broke out, he was vocally against appeasement with Germany. He had a senior position in the military and was an elected member of the Legislative Council for his local district—might he have been the victim of a fascist plot? (Or perhaps, as has been argued more recently, he was offed by British intelligence as a wartime security risk due to his past affiliations.) The most plausible motive, by some measure, was good old sexual jealousy. Joss was a serial adulterer with a preference for married women, to whom he was supposedly irresistible. It is not immediately obvious why. As Juliet Barnes, an author who lives in the Rift Valley, writes, “In the photographs he’s a slightly podgy man with those effeminate looks that had been fashionable in the twenties…you evidently had to meet him in the flesh to experience his fatal charms.”
After divorcing Idina in 1930, Joss married another wealthy heiress, Mary Ramsay-Hill. While he spent her money, she drank and took drugs. “I don’t mind if she dies,” Joss told their servants. “Give the woman as much as she wants to drink.” Obligingly, she did die. His next big love affair—his last—was with a newcomer to Happy Valley, twenty-eight-year-old Lady Diana Broughton. The femme-fatale air of this bottle-blond former fashion model, the daughter of a dental surgeon from Sussex, was conjured by Connolly’s hard-boiled prose in the Sunday Times Magazine: “Her large pale eyes would always be called cold by those on whom they had not smiled, her mouth hard by those who had not kissed it.”
Diana had recently married a baronet several decades her senior, John “Jock” Delves Broughton, whom she accompanied to Kenya in late 1940. For Diana and Joss, it was lust at first sight, and they immediately began sneaking off to hotels. Jock seemed to accept Diana’s new relationship and agreed to a divorce. He even toasted the couple at the Muthaiga Club the very evening before Joss’ body was discovered in the early hours by two dairymen. The 22nd Earl of Erroll, not yet forty years old, was slumped in his Buick, gunpowder around his ear where he’d been shot in the head.
Jock’s ostensible lack of rancor over losing his wife of mere months didn’t shield him from suspicion. He was arrested for murder, remanded in custody, and tried in front of a jury at the Nairobi High Court in late May and June 1941. At a time when war was demanding unspeakable sacrifice, the careless debauchery of the Happy Valleyites stood trial alongside the defendant. People enduring food shortages and air raids received regular newspaper updates on, as the New York Daily News put it, the “gray-haired baronet” accused of slaying the “rakehell nobleman” over a romantic squabble in their equatorial paradise.
Jock was ultimately acquitted due to lack of evidence—but pretty much convicted by the facts as presented by Fox in White Mischief—and died by suicide eighteen months later. Alice de Trafford (formerly de Janzé, she had swapped her French count husband for Waugh’s drinking buddy), who was Idina’s close friend, Joss’ on-off lover for many years, and some say his real murderer, also killed herself a few months after the trial. Alice’s former housekeeper told Paul Spicer, her biographer, that “with her belief in the occult and her firm belief about the other side, it is possible that she thought that if she could send Erroll to heaven, where he might have just qualified for entry, she could join him there.” Idina, who had remained close to Joss, blamed Diana. It didn’t matter who actually shot him; if it weren’t for his latest mistress, her beloved ex-husband would still be alive. In 1943 her grief was compounded by the death of her twenty-eight-year-old son, who had been serving in the Royal Air Force. Idina’s subsequent move to Mtapwa Creek, on the coast near Mombasa, dropped the final curtain on the era. In Happy Valley, the party was over.
One ex-lover of Joss’ who escaped suspicion was the aviator Beryl Markham. Not only was she working in Hollywood at the time, but her list of conquests, which included Prince Edward and his brother Henry, put Joss in the shade. Markham, who lived in Kenya for most of her life, is now best known as the first person to pilot a solo nonstop flight from Europe to North America in 1936. A close friend of Blixen (which didn’t stop her from sleeping with Denys Finch Hatton) as well as all the Happy Valleyites, she also became famous in the 1980s. The circumstances have a curious fated quality: in the summer of 1981, Jack Hemingway recommended a new volume of his father’s letters to a friend, restaurateur George Gutekunst. From a 1942 letter Hemingway sent to his editor Maxwell Perkins, Gutekunst learned that Markham had written “a bloody wonderful book.”
This was West with the Night, Markham’s transporting, lyrical memoir of her unconventional Kenyan childhood and equally unorthodox young adulthood as a horse trainer and bush pilot. First published in 1942, it was long out of print, although Fox had recently optioned the film rights after seeing a mention of Markham in Connolly’s notes and, in 1979, visiting her in Nairobi. Seventy-seven-year-old Markham, Fox wrote in a 1984 Vanity Fair profile, “was attentively flirtatious, with restless movements like an impatient teenager’s, and she clearly loved the presence of men. She described the aristocratic adventurers of her past as if they were horses. Lord Erroll was ‘a wonderful creature’; Finch Hatton ‘brilliantly bred.’ ”
Fox prepared a movie treatment, but the project hadn’t progressed when Guteskunst, in hearty agreement with Hemingway’s assessment of West with the Night, persuaded North Point Press in Berkeley to republish it in 1983. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Markham and her masterpiece. In 1986 a documentary produced by Gutekunst was released, followed in 1988 by a biography by Mary S. Lovell and a miniseries starring Stefanie Powers, written by Fox and Allan Scott. A few months before Markham’s death in 1986, Lovell spent time with her in Nairobi and mentioned the “tremendous success” of West with the Night. “It’s astonishing,” the eighty-three-year-old replied. “I’d forgotten all about it, you know.” By the summer of 1988, she had been on the New York Times best-seller list for more than eighty weeks.
If Markham was delighted by her belated stardom, the sudden revival of old associations came as an unwelcome surprise to the more straitlaced settlers of the Rift Valley. On White Mischief’s initial publication, the Muthaiga Club refused to have a copy in its library. The white community, writes the Kenya-based author Errol Trzebinski, “were not best pleased with the light in which the book portrayed their forebears.” When the glossy screen adaptation began filming on location in Kenya in 1987, one elderly white Kenyan spoke for many in wondering, “Why drag it all up again?” The film, starring Greta Scacchi as Diana and Charles Dance as Joss, was released to widespread, if mixed, review coverage. The New York Times found it “sometimes perilously giddy” and “like a classy, breathless backdate of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Fox’s reaction was ambivalent. In becoming a noirish screen thriller, the story had lost some nuance, he felt. But the filmmakers had Hollywood investors to please. At an early script conference, an exasperated Cineplex executive accused executive producer Michael White of “subtle-ing me to death.”
A 1987 BBC drama, The Happy Valley, tonally bleaker but no less salacious, looked at the same events from the point of view of Juanita Carberry, a teenager to whom Jock, she maintained, had confessed his guilt. “Juanita often told me,” her friend Felicia Ruperti remembered in her 2013 Guardian obituary, “how bored she was with people’s incessant interest in the unpleasant aristocrats of her childhood.” But incessantly interested they were. When Diana died aged seventy-four, not long before production wrapped on White Mischief, it made international headlines. last clue to 1941 kenya murder dies with aristocrat, lamented the Associated Press. A Reuters obituary described Diana, who married four times and ended her days fabulously rich, as the “queen of white Kenyan society” and “the last person alive to know the full story of the unsolved murder of her lover, Lord Erroll.” Maybe, some surmised, Diana had killed Joss when he backed away from the relationship, having got more than he bargained for when Jock let her go without a fight. Idina, said her neighbor in Mtapwa, promised to name the killer before she died. In 1955, after refusing to be hospitalized for cancer, sixty-two-year-old Idina fell into a fatal coma. She took her secret with her, allowing speculation and intrigue to forever sustain the legend of Happy Valley.
Yet legends, however resilient, cannot entirely eclipse the realities of history. In August of this year, members of the Talai and Kipsigis tribes of the Rift Valley filed a case against the British government with the European Court of Human Rights, alleging land theft, eviction, and torture between 1902 and 1962—the year before the Kikuyu-led Mau Mau insurgency movement led to Kenya’s independence. Among the few white colonials who stayed after 1963 were Thomas Cholmondeley, 4th Baron Delamere, and his wife Diana, formerly Lady Broughton. The most prominent settler family in the region since 1901, the Delameres became known as the Kennedys of Kenya—possibly the ultimate double-edged comparison. The 5th Baron Delamere, Hugh Cholmondeley, still controls a fifty-thousand-acre estate in the central Rift Valley, which he has stubbornly defended from the Maasai’s claims of rightful ownership. A person of forthright views, he once called his late stepmother “the best whore in the country for fifty years,” while Blixen was “that wretched Danish woman.”
In 2005 the image of volatile British aristos in Kenya was renewed when Lord Hugh’s son, Thomas Cholmondeley, shot dead a wildlife officer, Samson ole Sisina, on the family estate. Murder charges were dropped after Cholmondeley said he mistook the man for a robber. The following year, in an eerily similar incident, he killed a poacher, Robert Njoya. This time, Cholmondeley was found guilty of manslaughter, served three years in prison, and inspired a new name for the region: Trigger-Happy Valley. Two TV documentaries about the case, 2009’s Kenya Murder Mystery and 2011’s The Last White Man Standing, aired in both Kenya and the UK. “Several white Kenyans told me of their uncanny sense that history, even destiny, might have caught up with Cholmondeley,” the cultural anthropologist Janet McIntosh writes in her 2016 book Unsettled: Denial and Belonging Among White Kenyans. “It was so peculiar, so ironic, for this man who already embodied a history of colonial excess to have been caught up twice in the same scenario.”
Tom Cholmondeley died unexpectedly in 2016 while undergoing hip surgery. A few years on, the Kenyan white minority’s reputation for arrant licentiousness has begun to fade again. In the town of Kiambu, nine miles north of Nairobi, Joss’ headstone is also decaying, its carved inscription receding one letter at a time. The eighty-one-year-old grave, into which Jock, at Diana’s behest, threw a love note passed between her and Joss (later retrieved by police), is one of the Rift Valley’s only permanent monuments to the White Mischief set. Many regard its location in St. Paul’s churchyard as incongruous, given Joss’ unbridled sinning. “However questionable the grave is, we can’t change anything,” church leader Njuguna wa Kamanda reflected, his rueful words seeming to resonate far beyond the matter of one man’s resting place.
Read past entries in this series: Caroline Wazer on Assassin’s Creed, Kristen Martin on orphan trains, Dylan Byron on E.M. Forster’s Maurice, and Jeremy Swist on heavy metal’s fascination with Roman emperors.