On a hot January evening in 1941, an ivory invitation arrived at a colonial farmhouse in the Wanjohe Valley in Kenya. The handwriting was familiar. By morning, the man who had sent it lay dead at the wheel of his Buick on a road outside Nairobi, a single bullet through his head. Twelve years earlier, the woman who read that invitation had been his wife.
Her name was Idina Sackville, the Countess of Erroll, once the most photographed woman of her generation and the unofficial queen of a private aristocratic colony in the Kenyan Highlands. The body in the car was only the beginning of what she was about to lose. Idina was eight years old in the autumn of 1901 when her father walked out of the dining room of the family’s London townhouse and did not come back for 40 years. Gilbert Sackville, the eighth Earl De La Warr, left his wife and two daughters for a young actress.
Her mother, Muriel, wrote to him for three months, begging him to return. The letters went unanswered. The divorce came through in 1902, with the actress named in the proceedings. A pamphlet of Muriel’s pleading letters was published anonymously and passed around London society, humiliating the family at every dinner table they were likely to sit at.
Idina learned two lessons that year that would shape the rest of her life. The first was that a man of her class could simply leave, with no force in heaven or in the King’s Bench able to hold him to his word. The second was that the woman who begged, who wrote the letters, who appealed to duty, was the one who would be humiliated. She made a decision so early it could hardly be called a decision.
She would never be left in a dining room again. She would do the leaving, and she would do it first. Idina’s family background was vast. Her grandfather’s house, Knole in West Kent, was a small town built of gray ragstone with seven courtyards, 52 staircases, and a recorded 365 rooms.
The house held the only complete set of surviving Stuart royal furniture in the world, including state beds of silver, green silk, and crimson velvet, and a set of silver toilet articles weighing over 600 ounces. The estate was run by 30 to 40 indoor staff, with a wage bill of roughly £1,500 a year and a total running cost near £4,000 a year, roughly half a million pounds in modern money. This was the standard of normal Idina grew up with. When she later walked into an iron-roofed bungalow in colonial Kenya, she did not feel she had walked into a smaller house.
She felt she had walked into a freer one. In November 1913, she married Captain David Euan Wallace, a 21-year-old guards officer and heir to a Scottish industrial fortune. The wedding at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, had 240 guests.
Two sons were born in the first 18 months. Then the war took Euan to France. Left alone in London through the war years, Idina had affairs. By the time Euan came home in 1919, determined to begin the marriage again, she had already gone.
She told him over breakfast that she did not love him and wanted a divorce. The divorce was granted in 1920. Under the convention of the time, a wife divorced on the grounds of her own adultery forfeited her children. The custody hearing took seven minutes.
The judge noted that the petitioner had served his country with distinction while the respondent had not served anyone at all. Sole custody went to her husband. Idina was given a single afternoon a month to see her sons, supervised by her ex-husband’s sister. The boys were four and five years old.
She broke down alone in her bedroom afterwards, with a chambermaid weeping outside the locked door. The next morning, she got up and began to plan the rest of her life. She would leave England. She had read about Kenya, and she had met a widowed colonial settler named Charles Gordon at a dance in London.
She married him in 1920 and sailed for East Africa. Kenya was then a colony of less than 15 years standing, with millions of acres of Highland land set aside for European farmers. The land was taken on long leases from the people who had used it for centuries, with the Kikuyu pushed to the eastern slopes of the Aberdare and the Masai pushed south to a reduced reserve. Gordon’s farm sat at about 7,000 feet on a south-facing slope.
After a single night in the tin-roofed hut that served as the homestead, Idina said she could not live in a hut. Gordon, who had loved her since the dance in London, built her a proper house. The new bungalow, called Slains, had eight principal rooms, a deep covered veranda, and a paneled drawing room opening onto a view of Mount Kenya. Inside, it was hung with Sackville miniatures and furnished with a mahogany table from her London house.
In the principal bedroom, she installed a long oval mirror flat in the ceiling, so that anyone in the bed could see themselves and the room reflected from above. The bathroom was finished in green travertine marble shipped from Italy, with a sunken bath large enough for two. There were three African staff in the main house: a head houseboy named Kamau, a cook named Joseph, and a kitchen boy called Mwangi, who was about 12 when she met him and would be the last person to leave the house after her funeral 35 years later. By the time Slains was finished, Idina had already met Josslyn Hay, a tall, fair 20-year-old former diplomatic clerk who was eight years younger than she was.
She fell for him across a dinner table at the Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi, decided within a week she would have him, and within six months told Gordon she was leaving. She married Hay in 1924. When his father died in 1928, he became the 22nd Earl of Erroll, and Idina briefly became the Countess of Erroll. Slains became the unofficial court of the most photographed couple in the colony.
Guests arrived on the Friday afternoon train from Nairobi. Idina greeted them on the veranda, usually wearing a long silk wrap over nothing else. She would show them to their rooms and tell them the bath would be filled in 20 minutes, that she would be using it first, and that anyone who wanted to join her was welcome. After dinner, the drawing room rugs were rolled back and the gramophone went on.
Cocaine in a silver box and morphine in a small Wedgwood dish were available to anyone who wanted them. Around midnight, Idina would propose what she called a small game, in which the men drew straws and the winner chose his partner for the night. By 2:00 in the morning, every guest had ended up in a bedroom that was not the one they had begun the evening in. It was, in a sense, a parody and an inversion of every value the Edwardian country house had stood for.
At Knole, the central ritual had been the family dinner, with the husband at the head of the table and the wife at the foot. At Slains, the central ritual was the dissolution of every marriage in the room. The peak of all this was 1928. Idina was 35, the chatelaine of Slains, the center of every party in the colony.
Then, in the early spring of 1929, Josslyn Hay began an affair with the wife of an English settler in the next valley. By the autumn, he had left Slains and was living openly with her. The divorce came through in 1930. The divorce coincided with the Wall Street crash.
The Brassey Trust, which paid her income, cut its quarterly payments by half. Coffee prices in Kenya fell from two shillings a pound in 1929 to seven pence by 1932. Between 1930 and 1934, an estimated one in five European farms in the Highlands changed hands under forced sale. Idina did not lose the farm, but she lost the easy assumption that the money would not run out.
She married Donald Carmichael Haldeman, an American railway heir with a fortune that had survived the crash, in 1930. They built a larger second house called Clouds, two miles up the valley. The marriage lasted less than five years. Haldeman, like Hay, found the Slains arrangement intoxicating for the first 18 months and intolerable thereafter.
He left in 1935. In 1939, six months after the Haldeman divorce, she married Flight Lieutenant Vincent Soltau of the Royal Air Force, a regular officer with no money and no aristocratic background. He was 34. She was 46.
The big parties had stopped by then, with petrol rationing and the war thinning the Happy Valley world. The marriage lasted seven years. He left her in 1946. In the early morning of January 24, 1941, Josslyn Hay was found dead in his Buick at a road junction outside Karen.
He had been shot in the head at close range while seated at the wheel. The murder became one of the most documented crimes in the history of colonial Kenya, the subject of James Fox’s book White Mischief and a 1987 film. Hay had spent the evening at a dinner at the Muthaiga Country Club with Diana Broughton, the young wife of Sir Henry Delves Broughton, and the affair between them had been open since the previous October. Hay left the Broughton house at about 2:15 in the morning and was found dead about an hour later, half a mile from the gates.
The police arrested Jock Broughton and charged him with the murder. The defense argued he was physically incapable of committing the crime in the time available. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Broughton returned to England, broken by the trial, and killed himself in a Liverpool hotel by overdose in 1942.
Idina gave evidence at the trial as a character witness. Her testimony survives in a transcript of 22 lines. She described Hay as a charming man, a complicated man, a man who had made enemies because he could not, in her phrase, leave the wives of other men alone. In the months after the trial, the Happy Valley network collapsed.
Alice de Janzé, one of Idina’s closest friends, overdosed at her farm in 1941. Of the principal regulars at Slains in the summer of 1928, fewer than half were still alive at the end of 1942. Idina narrowed her life. She gave up the formal parties and the long weekends.
She kept Clouds open for small lunches with the few neighbors she still saw. She rode in the early mornings, walked through the coffee in the afternoons, and sat in her drawing room in the evenings with a book and a glass of claret. In September 1943, a telegram from the War Office arrived at Clouds. It informed her that her son, Gerard Euan Wallace, a captain in the Welsh Guards attached to the Long Range Desert Group, had been killed in action in North Africa.
His body had not been recovered. She had not been his next of kin since the custody ruling of 1919. The telegram had been sent to her only as a courtesy. Almost exactly a year later, a second telegram arrived.
Her son, David John Wallace, a major in the Welsh Guards serving as a liaison officer to the Greek resistance, had been killed in action on August 8, 1944. He was 29 years old and had been awarded a posthumous Military Cross. She tore up both telegrams. She did not speak of either son for the rest of her life to anyone who was not African.
The reconciliation with David John had only just begun. He had come out to Kenya in 1938, stayed at Clouds, ridden with her in the mornings. He had been careful, polite, and very nervous, not yet ready to call her mother. He had called her Errol Flynn.
He had written on his return to England that he hoped to come back. The war had come instead. Idina was diagnosed with cancer of the stomach in 1953, by then too far advanced for surgery. She continued to live at Clouds with her three African staff.
She rode in the mornings as long as she could, read in the evenings, and used the morphine more freely, both for the cancer and for the pain that lay below it. She died at 9:20 on the evening of November 5, 1955, in a private ward at the European Hospital in Mombasa. She was 62 years old. Her last words, according to the African nurse who was with her, were spoken in Kiswahili, addressed to no one in particular, and were too quiet to record.
The funeral was held the next afternoon at Mbaraki Cemetery near the harbor. The mourners numbered 11: Mwangi, Kamau, Joseph, a small group of African friends, and three Europeans. No member of her family attended. The grave was simple, a plain rectangle of concrete with a headstone giving her name as Edina Sackville.
A smaller additional inscription was carved at the request of Mwangi, who paid for it out of his own savings. It commemorated her son Gerard, killed in action in 1943, whose body had never been recovered. The grave was tended for the next 27 years by Mwangi, who walked down to the cemetery every Sunday for as long as he could. After his death in 1982, it was looked after by his daughter, who had grown up at Clouds and remembered the cool, light voice of the woman she called Bibi Edina.
Three houses survive from her life. Knole is now a national monument visited by over 200,000 people a year, with her portrait hanging in a small side room labeled only by her maiden name. Clouds is a working farmhouse owned by a Kenyan family. Slains is a ruin on a slope, its drawing room paneling gone, its principal bedroom open to the sky.
The pattern of her life was complete. The wound that the eight-year-old child had taken in the dining room in 1901 had not closed. It had simply traveled around the world with her until at last there were no more rooms to walk into.