In the early hours of January 24, 1941, the lifeless body of Lord Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, was found slumped behind the wheel of his Buick at a quiet junction near Ngong Road in Nairobi. A bullet wound near his ear told a chilling story.
The man once considered the king of Nairobi’s scandalous aristocracy had been murdered—and the entire British colonial establishment was rocked.
Lord Erroll’s death became one of the most sensational and enduring murder mysteries in Kenya’s colonial history, a dark chapter intertwined with sex, power, betrayal, and the strange aristocratic world of the so-called Happy Valley Set.
Lord Erroll, 39 at the time of his death, was no ordinary nobleman. Charismatic, elegant, and deeply embedded in Kenya’s white settler elite, he served as a government official and was a decorated soldier.
But it was his reputation as a seducer that defined him. Within the close-knit ex-pat circles of colonial Nairobi, he was both admired and feared especially by husbands.
Erroll had tragically lost his first wife, Lady Molly, to a heroin and alcohol overdose.
In the years that followed, he plunged deeper into the decadent lifestyle of the Happy Valley Set—a group of wealthy British settlers infamous for their indulgence in alcohol, drugs, wild parties, and sexual escapades.
By late 1940, Erroll had begun a passionate affair with Lady Diana Broughton, a glamorous and much younger woman recently arrived in Kenya with her husband, Sir Henry “Jock” Broughton, a retired British baronet.
Lady Diana, 26, was known for her beauty and ambition. Her marriage to 56-year-old Jock had already begun to unravel when she met Lord Erroll.
The two quickly fell in love and were openly seen together in Nairobi society. According to many accounts, they were planning to marry.
Despite his heartbreak, Sir Jock gave the couple his blessing during an engagement dinner at Muthaiga Club, a place synonymous with the Happy Valley lifestyle. But witnesses recalled a tense exchange between him and Lord Erroll that night.
Just hours later, Erroll was dead.
Sir Jock Broughton was arrested and charged with Lord Erroll’s murder. The trial, held in Nairobi, became a spectacle that attracted widespread attention from both the local and international press.
The prosecution struggled to present conclusive evidence. There were no eyewitnesses, no murder weapon, and no clear motive beyond speculation about jealousy and betrayal. In July 1941, after a high-profile trial, Sir Jock was acquitted.
But the acquittal did little to clear his name. He returned to England, a broken man, and just five months later in December 1942, he died by morphine overdose at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool a suspected suicide.
Lady Diana remained in Kenya and, in January 1943, married Gilbert Colvile, a wealthy Kenyan landowner. Their marriage ended in divorce in 1955, after which she married again.. this time to Lord Thomas Delamere, a prominent figure among Kenya’s white settler elite.
She became known as Lady Delamere and continued to live in Kenya for years. Rumors surrounded her personal life including alleged unconventional relationships but none were ever confirmed. She died in 1987.
To this day, the murder of Lord Erroll remains unsolved. Historians, authors, and filmmakers have returned to the case repeatedly, each drawing their own conclusions.
The most famous account, James Fox’s book White Mischief, and the 1987 film of the same name, reimagined the events with dramatic flair but offered no definitive answers.
What is certain is that the death of Lord Erroll exposed the dark underbelly of colonial high society in Kenya, a world of privilege and indulgence, where passion could turn deadly, and justice remained elusive.
