Sex, money and power in the Happy Valley: Why British aristocrats love Kenya

 

The Laragai House in Laikipia Conservancy built by Lord Valentine Cecil.(Photo: Courtesy)

“Given the high statistical incidence of murder, police brutality, unfortunate accidents and wrongful arrests, Kenya is undoubtedly the most dangerous country in the world for the male British aristocrat,” says Lord Monson.

We are drinking large gin and tonics in the drawing room of Lord Monson’s house, overlooking a canal on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, while discussing the death of his 28-year-old son and heir, Alexander, in Kenya. Alexander, who had been living in Kenya with his mother, fell unconscious in a police cell in the coastal city of Mombasa in 2012 after being arrested for smoking cannabis.

He died handcuffed to his bed in hospital the next day. Local police claim Alexander died from a drug overdose; a post-mortem later revealed he died from a blow to the head caused, probably, by the butt of a gun.

British Baron Lord Nicholas Monson (in glasses) follow proceedings as his former wife Hillary Martin. (Photo: Gideon Maundu/Standard)

Lord Monson, a 61-year-old financial consultant who is divorced from his first wife, says it’s murder and is waiting for an inquest to be revived in Nairobi after it was postponed last July, but the legal process in Kenya is lethargic and he could be waiting for months. He has written to Boris Johnson urging him to use his powers as foreign secretary and intervene, but he has yet to receive a reply.

White mischief

Meanwhile, there’s another headline-making case involving a young British man ?in Kenya. Jack Marrian, 31, is the grandson of the 6th Earl Cawdor and was arrested in August for alleged cocaine smuggling. He is a sugar trader who went to Marlborough and then to Bristol University before moving to Kenya for the British sugar company ED&F Man, and was awaiting a sugar consignment from Brazil.

When it arrived in Mombasa, the Kenyan authorities searched it, acting on a tip-off. They found 220 pounds of cocaine wrapped in polythene and hidden inside bags of sugar. Jack, as head of trading for the region, was arrested on charges of trafficking. He has since been released on bail of £530,000 (Sh68.7 million) paid by his company. The trial began in November.

Jack, his friends and his family say he’s been set up. “I believe the Americans and the Spanish have an investigative document which they’ve handed to the Kenyan police detailing how the deal was done and who was involved, and it proves Jack’s innocence,” says a British friend of Jack’s. “But the Kenyans have refused to release this document — if there’s one thing Kenyans hate, it’s being bullied by higher powers.”

Inevitably, both Alexander’s and Jack’s cases have revived talk of Happy Valley and the exploits of the British expats who drank, drugged and fornicated into oblivion from the 20s until the 40s. Heroin and morphine were as rife as the sex, and a favourite after-dinner game saw men poke their manhoods through a hole cut in a white sheet for guests to decide who it belonged to.

The scene climaxed in 1941, when the Happy Valley set’s heartbreaker-in-chief Josslyn Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, was murdered in Nairobi. By Sir Jock Delves Broughton, the husband of his latest conquest? By a spurned lover? By MI6? Over 70 years later, there is no definitive answer, despite various parties insisting otherwise.

The scandal spawned James Fox’s 1982 book White Mischief — Fox concludes that Delves Broughton was behind the killing — and the film of the same name, starring Charles Dance and a peachy-bottomed Greta Scacchi. It also encouraged our ongoing obsession with the expat aristocrats and their antics in Africa.

The sudden death of Tom Cholmondeley in August last year has fuelled further reminiscing. Tom, who died, aged just 48, after a routine hip-replacement operation in Nairobi, was the great-grandson of the original white settler in Kenya, the 3rd Lord Delamere. Known as ‘D’ to his friends, Lord Delamere fell in love with the country when he went there on a lion-hunting expedition with 200 camels and 100 porters in 1891.

Chip off the old block

He promptly sold his Cheshire estate and bought 100,000 acres of land to the north of Nairobi. He then encouraged several of his friends to do the same, and they formed the basis of the gin-swilling Happy Valley gang, so called because the area they colonised was in a hilly sliver of the Wanjohi Valley, 60 miles north of Nairobi.

‘D’ once rode his horse into the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi and jumped the dining-room table while shooting out the lights; on another occasion, he gave a party for 250 people who managed to drink 600 bottles of champagne between them. Cyril Connolly referred to the ‘three As’ of the place: alcohol, altitude and adultery.

And after visiting Kenya ?in the 30s, Evelyn Waugh described the group as “a community of English squires established on the Equator”, although even Waugh, no slouch when it came to a party, baulked at their behaviour. He described Raymond de Trafford, one of the set, as “v. nice but so BAD and he fights and gambles and gets D.D. [disgustingly drunk] all the time”.

On the face of it, Tom Cholmondeley looked like a chip off the old block. He was accused of murder twice, once in 2005 after he shot an undercover wildlife ranger on? his land and again in 2009 after he shot ?a poacher. He was cleared of the first charge but convicted of manslaughter for the second shooting and spent three years in detention. But Tom’s friends say the real truth has yet to come out, and that while Tom might have been eccentric, he was a good and loyal man.

“At the funeral, there was a nice bit read out by a man who had been in Kamiti Prison with Tom,” says one friend. “And thanks to Tom’s help, he’d qualified as a lawyer while there, and he gave a very heartfelt tribute? to what Tom did, working on the prison’s water and electricity systems and that sort of thing. I was really very upset by the obituaries, calling him a relic of the colonial era. They traduced Tom.”

For all the apparent parallels with the Happy Valley set, the truth about modern Kenya is mostly very different. What was once a bulwark of the British Empire (from the 1880s, when the European powers began slicing and dicing Africa, until 1963, when Kenya gained its independence from Britain) is now a modern, thrusting country with a booming middle class and a busy capital city where Uber Chopper has just launched a helicopter service.

Oil was discovered there in 2012, so expats are pouring in for work, as are plenty of those in the security world, given Kenya’s ongoing hostilities with its eastern neighbour, Somalia. Kenyan troops crossed the country’s border with Somalia in 2011 to try and quash Al Shabaab militants and there have been reprisals ever since, most notably the attack on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall in 2012 and, in 2015, the attack on Garissa University in northern Kenya, in which 148 people died.

“There are loads of posh twats here who work in security,” says an Old Etonian who lives in Nairobi.

Mention the words “Happy Valley” to any of them, however, and their eyes will swivel in their heads like marbles. “The cliché is as worn out as a tyre retread down to its canvas,” says Errol Trzebinski, an 80-year-old writer who was born in Britain and moved to Kenya when she was 18. She then spent 12 years living on the farm that had belonged to Karen Blixen (the Danish author of Out of Africa), before marrying a Polish aristocrat and architect who also lived in Kenya.

“Parties spawn affairs,” Trzebinski says when I ask if certain antics still go on today. “Generations of youngsters here have grown up with the sort of hospitality that’s a way of life, and any stranger trekking in out of the blue has always been invited in for the night as a matter of course.”

All very breezy, but Trzebinski herself is embroiled in legal matters over the death of her son, Antonio. He was found dead beside his car in Nairobi in 2001 — an unsolved murder that has also drawn Happy Valley comparisons because ‘Tonio’, as he was known, was also caught up in a love triangle between his wife, Anna, and a glamorous Danish game-hunter named Natasha Illum Berg.

Trzebinski insists that Tonio was killed by a hitman hired by? his mother-in-law, and so a new inquest has opened; Berg and her family deny it and say the idea they’d hire a hitman is especially preposterous because Tonio’s mother-in-law was herself involved in a ménage à trois at the time. It brings to mind an old joke: “Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?”

Today, there are around 30,000 Brits living in Kenya, admittedly a very small number in a land of 45 million (although that count may be slightly inaccurate, since many of the descendants of the original British settlers have by now become Kenyan).

And the country retains a special link with Britain. Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton on Mount Kenya while on holiday there in 2010, and both he and Prince Harry have holidayed at the 62,000-acre Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, founded by the Craigs, another big British-turned-Kenyan family. Kenya remains one of Britain’s big bilateral trading partners and is also a country into which we pour aid — a total of £150 million (Sh19.4 billion) for the year 2016-17.

Lord Valentine Cecil is the brother of the Marquess of Salisbury and lives in Chelsea. But he spends as much time as he can at ?a Kenyan lodge north of Nairobi that he built in the 90s. It’s called Laragai House and has eight bedrooms and a helipad. Valentine, 64, is a charming, gung-ho Old Etonian and retired Army major who always wears a carnation in his buttonhole - he flies himself up in a plane from Nairobi when he’s there.

“Everybody has a plane,” says Lady Tatiana Mountbatten, the Marquess of Milford Haven’s 25-year-old daughter. A professional rider, she trains horses on the Borana estate, which is adjacent to the Craigs’ land and owned by the Dyers, another of the original big white settler families. Also nearby is the Wildenstein family’s 62,000-acre estate, Ol Jogi, as well as a ranch built by ICAP boss Michael Spencer (Tatiana’s stepfather), which another Brit tells me is “enormous”.

Work hard, play hard

Valentine has been coming to Kenya for 46 years, “the first time with the Army, on my way to [what was then] Rhodesia”. When he left the Army, he bought a telecommunications business based in Nairobi.

“When I first went there, just eight years after independence, an awful lot of the white-settler community were thinking that this was the end and were advising their children to leave. But now, nearly half a century on, their children and grandchildren are still there, for much the same reasons that their parents went — they liked the life”.

There is little danger of a Zimbabwe-style land grab, he suggests, in part because the big white-settler families stay out of Kenyan politics. There’s a “work hard, play hard” ethos among expats, he adds, and the lifestyle is a big draw. “You can play polo at a fraction of the cost you could at home,” he says, before going on to laud the safaris, the game-hunting, the fishing, the climate, the coastline and the dinner parties.

“It’s much easier to be hospitable when you have staff,” he adds. “I asked some neighbours for dinner the week after New Year, not realising they’d still have most of their guests staying. So I said to my cook, ‘We’re going to be 14 for dinner tomorrow night’. And then he came to see me the next day to discuss what we would be having, and I said, ‘We’re no longer 14, Joseph. We’re 48’. Well, you can imagine saying that in England. But it worked very well.”

The downside to modern Kenya, says Valentine, is corruption in the police, because they’re not paid a living wage. People, he says, are often stopped by the traffic police and forced to pay some spurious fine. And according to Valentine, it’s this corruption that has ensnared Jack Marrian. “As I understand it, shipping drugs in sugar has been used quite a lot in recent years, and Mombasa is a tremendous drug-shipping point.

A lot of drugs come into the port and are sent elsewhere. The sums of money are huge, and a local official might be paid $300 (Sh31,170) a month. So if you go to him and say, ‘I don’t want you to look in this container and here’s $1,000 (Sh103,900),’ you can understand how difficult it is”.

Like most people, Valentine is confident that Marrian will be released but thinks that it may take time for him to be cleared. The figure bandied around by Marrian’s friends in Kenya is three years, a period during which Marrian cannot work or leave the country. “My guess is that he’ll get off,” says Valentine. “The Kenyans have been under a lot of pressure from the ?US for not doing anything about the narcotics trade, so I can see why they might have arrested him. It’s a high-profile case — they wanted to be seen to be reacting to it. But now there’s a bit of embarrassment and loss of face”.

The other current issue in Kenya is security, with tourism still suffering after kidnappings of visitors along the coast in 2011. The British Foreign Office still advises against all but essential travel to certain parts of the coastline and areas close to the Somalian border.

“I arrived in Nairobi the day Westgate happened,” says Sandip Patel, an Old Harrovian who moved to Kenya to work in the textile business. Patel still shops there, whereas established expats, he says, tend to avoid it. He’s sanguine about security. “If you get robbed, it’s probably 3am, you’re a bit pissed and in a dodgy area. It’s the same in London. Worse, actually. I’ve had a knife pulled on me twice at home”.

And while some expats are gloomy about the security situation and the threat of unrest over the upcoming presidential election, Patel is optimistic about Kenya, and will shortly be opening a ‘Nikki Beach’-style club on the coast in Diani, south of Mombasa.

There is, he says, a pulsating social life in the capital: “I went out in Westlands, a big expat area, and out of 20 under-35s, 16 were Old Etonians or Harrovians. All in chinos and shirts. If you go to the Purdy Arms on a Saturday night, you wonder, ‘Am I in Kenya or am I in Fulham?’”

Like many other expats, Patel says the 21st-century pioneers making inroads into Kenya are the Chinese, who are cutting huge energy and transport deals with the Kenyan government. “People are very unhappy with the influx of Chinese workers,” says Juliet Barnes, a white Kenyan who is writing? a book about the Delameres. “It’s believed they are partly responsible for the increase in poaching. But Kenya’s an extraordinary country. So I daresay we’ll end up being friends with the Chinese as well.”

Meanwhile, the Marrian and Monson families await their respective verdicts. “Britain and Kenya have always had a dysfunctional relationship,” says Lord Monson. And, like most dysfunctional relationships, this one will take time to sort out.

– tatler.com