For decades, people wondered whether Diana Caldwell had helped her husband get away with murder. The question followed her name long after she was gone, whispered in London drawing rooms and Nairobi bars alike. Then, decades after her death, a voice recording surfaced, and the ugly truth finally came to light. Diana Caldwell was born on December 22, 1913, and grew up in Hove, England.
Her mother, Marjorie Caldwell, was a striking beauty and a respected figure in London society. Her husband, Major Josiah Seymour Caldwell, moved the family away from the capital, supposedly to keep Marjorie safe from its temptations. But the Major had temptations of his own. The title before his name was more honorary than earned.
He had no real career to speak of, and he spent his days gambling away the family fortune. Diana inherited her father’s lack of self-control. At eighteen, she finished her schooling and moved straight to London, where the real noise was. She loved fashion and dressed with obsessive care, a skill that landed her first job as a mannequin in a fashion house.
By day, she posed in elegant gowns. By night, she ran a jazz cocktail bar called the Blue Goose. She was barely an adult, but she had a way about her that made people enjoy themselves. That quality helped her behind the bar, and it helped her climb the social ladder even faster.
The bar brought her into contact with clients from the upper classes. She charmed them so effortlessly that invitations began pouring in. They wanted her at their country estates for weekends of hunting and dancing. Her time in the countryside earned her a reputation as a skilled horsewoman and a graceful dancer.
Her days of living quietly were over. Tatler magazine, which tracked the lives of the rich and fortunate, began following her every move. Readers saw her at parties, at lavish weddings, at horse races, at charity events. They even photographed her shooting game.
Of course, she was also hunting men. Diana Caldwell was having the time of her life, and she had no intention of settling down with any single man. The magazine printed photos of her with different gentlemen, all of them connected by one thing: money. But England and its men soon bored her.
She turned her gaze elsewhere in search of pleasure. At some point, she picked up an expensive new hobby and learned to fly airplanes. When England became too dull, she flew across Europe to places where she could enjoy herself more freely. Those travels led her into the company of powerful men across the continent.
One of them was the Austrian vice-chancellor, whom she met on a trip to Budapest. There was a mysterious reason for her interest in him. Rumours suggested Diana was spying. Some said a former lover, Hugh Dickinson, had hired her to gather military intelligence.
Her relationships with men like the Austrian vice-chancellor certainly placed her close to interesting information. Meanwhile, back in Hove, her father decided his daughter had grown too rebellious and needed to be reined in. His plan was simple. He arranged a marriage for her.
The chosen man was John Sidney Tabor, and Diana agreed to the engagement, at least for a while. A few months later, she called it off and fled back to Budapest, where she could return to her carefree ways. She was also on the lookout for a new man. When she was not partying in Budapest, Diana was a frequent guest at Tingewick Hall in Buckinghamshire, England.
Jazz was the order of the day there, and she crossed paths with the pianist Vernon Motion. There was mutual attraction, but there was also a problem. Diana was pregnant, and she was certain Motion was not the father. That might explain why she proposed marriage only days after meeting him.
She was looking for a father for her child. What needs explaining is why Motion agreed to such a hasty wedding. Diana was probably looking for a man with money to help support the baby. Ironically, Motion was looking for money too.
Neither of them had much, but the wedding went ahead anyway. The two fortune hunters were destined to be stuck with each other, at least briefly. Two weeks after the wedding, the marriage was over. Both parties cited adultery, and apparently each had enough evidence to convince the judge.
Diana still had her unborn child to worry about. With no husband, she decided to end the pregnancy. The big question remained: who was the father of that child who never came into the world? In 1935, Diana Caldwell met Sir Jock Delves Broughton.
Broughton was older than her usual conquests. He was thirty-one years her senior, and some people nicknamed him the Homicide. To make matters worse, he was already married. But he had one advantage.
Broughton was a baron. That title did not make him a good husband, though. One of his many vices was gambling. In fact, he had been forced to sell the family lands just to pay off his growing debts.
He also took his wife’s pearls and paintings, then told his insurance company they had been stolen. Despite his marriage and his bad reputation, Broughton and Diana became a couple. Some say Broughton divorced his wife to be with Diana. Others believe his wife found another man and divorced him.
Whatever the reason, both became free to marry if they wished. Diana probably saw Broughton as her ticket to a life of luxury, but she was about to receive a shock. The more she learned about Broughton, the more she realized his fortune was very limited. His debts were growing again, but he had a proposal for her.
They could move to Kenya, where he had bought a property and a coffee farm. That way, they could escape his creditors and live in peace. Diana hardly hesitated. She was on her way to Africa.
During their romantic voyage to Kenya, Diana used her particular charm. She convinced Broughton to agree to a prenuptial contract. If the marriage failed, she would receive five thousand pounds a year. She had secured herself before the ship even reached land.
But before the vessel made port, Diana had time on her hands. Some reports claim she did not even reach Kenya before betraying her future husband. She got her prenuptial agreement and then began an affair with another passenger on the voyage. Diana was playing a dangerous game, and her reputation was already well known.
Baroness Blixen, the second wife of Bror Blixen, met Diana and Broughton in Johannesburg. She sized Diana up quickly. She said Diana was certainly charming, but she also described her as a fortune hunter and accused her of having a heart of stone. She made Diana sound like a film femme fatale.
That femme fatale was about to arrive in her own paradise. It is hard to know what Diana Caldwell expected from her life in Kenya, but she was likely pleased when she reached Happy Valley. This was a region in Kenya where British aristocrats lived. Since Diana loved parties, she probably flew with joy when she realized the residents of Happy Valley had a good reason to be happy.
It was a special place to live. The group was famous for its dissolute lifestyle, which many described as pure hedonism. The crowd was steeped in recreational drugs and pornography. When Diana and Broughton reached Kenya, they married immediately.
Diana apparently had no intention of sleeping with her new husband. She told a friend, cruelly, that she would not share a room with that dirty old man. Reports say the couple spent their marriage in separate bedrooms. If she was not sharing her bed with her husband, who was she sharing it with?
Soon after arriving in Happy Valley, Diana began an affair with the Earl of Erroll. Erroll was almost at the centre of every immoral activity happening in the valley. The strange thing is that Diana and the Earl did not have to hide their relationship. Nobody in Happy Valley cared about that at all.
But Diana had one thing to worry about. The Earl had a former lover, and she could easily lose her temper. That former lover was Alice de Janzé. Imagine a 1930s-era Drew Barrymore, and you have her.
Her father made her attend parties while she was still a teenager. Unlike Barrymore, de Janzé never straightened out her life. The residents of Happy Valley called her the Evil Madonna. She had once tried to shoot her lover, Raymond de Trafford, at a Paris train station.
To add to the proof of her madness, she ended up marrying him anyway. De Janzé might have been angry about the affair between Diana and Erroll, but another resident may have been even angrier. On the surface, Broughton seemed indifferent to Diana’s antics with a much younger man. His problem was not their bedroom antics.
It was the amount of time the two spent together. He must have felt like he had no wife at all. Broughton tried to stay calm, but one night may have pushed him over the edge. Three months after her affair with the Earl began, Diana felt comfortable enough to have dinner with her husband and her lover together.
The plan was that after dinner, the Earl would take Diana dancing while old Broughton went to bed. That part of the evening went according to plan. What happened after the dancing was horrific. After a night of dancing, the Earl drove Diana home in his Buick.
They said their goodbyes, and Diana went inside to be with Broughton. The Earl drove off into the night alone. It was the last time anyone saw him alive. Shortly after dropping Diana off, Erroll ran into trouble.
All we know is that on January 24, 1941, his car was found at a crossroads just outside Nairobi. It was a grisly sight. The Earl’s lifeless body was inside the vehicle. Someone had shot him in the head at close range.
Diana seemed to be one of the last people to see him alive, but she was not the first suspect. Most of the Happy Valley group thought Erroll’s unstable ex-lover Alice de Janzé was responsible. She had already tried to shoot one lover, and her history made her a likely culprit. But de Janzé was not the only suspect.
Another likely suspect was Diana’s husband, Broughton. Perhaps the affair had gotten to him after all, and he took his revenge on the Earl. It took some time, but Broughton eventually faced a jury and a judge on May 26, 1941. There were no eyewitnesses and no conclusive evidence to convict him, but they had a possible weapon.
Broughton owned a pistol, but the defence lawyers pointed out discrepancies between his gun and the weapon used on January 24. When the prosecution claimed Broughton owned other weapons, he said someone had stolen them from the house he shared with Diana. The missing gun seemed highly suspicious. At the trial, Diana Caldwell backed up her husband’s story no matter what he told the court about Erroll’s murder.
Because of her testimony and the lack of evidence, Broughton walked free. It probably did not hurt that the foreman of the jury was Broughton’s personal barber. Unfortunately for Broughton, the place he returned to was not very happy. He left the courtroom a free man, but when he went back to Happy Valley, he found no warm welcome.
Not only were his old friends unwilling to accept him, but Diana had already started an affair with another lover. The humiliated Broughton returned to England, and as soon as he got off the boat, he took a fatal overdose of morphine. Diana’s happy days in Happy Valley were coming to an end. Of course, the media treated this case like a moth drawn to a flame.
Because of the murder, the press quickly put Diana and the residents of Happy Valley under the microscope. Back in England, there was food rationing and German air raids. And here were these aristocrats, living a life of luxury and ignoring all decency and morals. Then the media turned its attention directly to Diana.
The authorities never solved the murder of the Earl of Erroll. They could not convict Broughton, and the other main suspect, Alice de Janzé, had an alibi. Of course, some pointed the finger at Diana herself. One theory suggested the Earl had tried to end their relationship, so she shot him dead.
But the Earl’s many mistresses and angry husbands weakened the case against her. The case may have gone cold, but Diana was anything but calm. It did not take long for Diana to get over the loss of her husband. After Broughton left Kenya, she asked her business partner, John Hopcroft, who the richest man in Kenya was.
Hopcroft answered that it was Gilbert Colville. Diana got the information she wanted and got to work. It did not take long for the manipulative Diana to become Colville’s wife. She was now married to the richest landowner in Kenya.
He did not seem to have a single friend. Fortunately, the only friend he needed was Diana, and the two actually lived a happy marriage. But tragedy hung over this union. While married to Colville, Diana became pregnant.
Sadly, ten days after giving birth, the tiny child died. There was another tragedy with the death of a baby at birth. To make up for their losses, Diana and Colville adopted a baby girl. They named her Sarah and called her Snow.
But this little home was not destined to be happy. While living contentedly with Gilbert Colville and raising her adopted daughter, Diana met another Happy Valley resident, Tom Delamere. Delamere, who was actually a friend of Colville, was with his second wife, but he somehow fell in love with Diana. She returned his feelings, and Colville seemed happy to step aside and grant his wife a divorce.
Of course, there was the problem of Delamere’s wife. They had to get rid of her. Diana was dating a married man, and he wanted to end his current marriage and wed her. When Delamere’s wife discovered her husband was cheating with Diana, she wanted out.
The grounds for divorce were simple. She blamed Diana. Both divorces went through, and Diana married Delamere in 1955. But this marriage was not traditional.
When she married Delamere, Diana may not have known he did not come to the wedding alone. The Lady Patricia Fairweather, daughter of the Earl of Inchcape, joined Diana’s marriage as a third party. This menage à trois managed to stay together for a reasonable amount of time. After that, Diana’s fortune would improve dramatically.
Although she had left Gilbert Colville for another man, they remained on good terms. When Colville died in 1966, he left her vast tracts of land in Kenya. Diana was clever, and she used that land to raise her status and importance in Kenya. People noticed, and they gave her a special nickname.
They called her the White Queen of Africa. But only tragedy lay in the queen’s future. In 1979, Diana’s husband Delamere died. Diana had built a small cemetery on the land she inherited from Colville.
She buried Delamere next to Colville, who was buried beside the baby she had lost. Delamere was Diana’s fourth and final husband. It seemed like the right time to go home. Eventually, the White Queen of Africa left Kenya and returned to England.
Diana lived her final days in her home in Berkshire. At the age of seventy-three, she died in London. Many believed the cause of death was heart failure. The following year, serious accusations surfaced.
White Mischief is a British thriller that tells the story of the Happy Valley set, specifically the murder of the Earl of Erroll. The son of Sir Jock Delves Broughton felt the film portrayed his father too clearly as the killer. He said his father was too drunk that night to have murdered the Earl. His theory pointed to a different guilty party.
He said it was Diana. It seemed we would never get a definitive answer. Then new information emerged. With Diana dead, it seemed we would never find out who ended the Earl’s life.
However, in 2007, a voice recording surfaced. The son of one of the witnesses who provided evidence for Broughton said he knew Broughton had hidden in the back seat of Erroll’s car and shot him. Broughton was never convicted, and the reason is now perfectly clear. Diana lied to keep him out of prison.
But one mystery remains unsolved. What was it about Diana that inspired such passion? Speaking of Diana, she was a true femme fatale. Her eyes were cold and her mouth was hard.
But once she let you get closer, those features changed and became irresistibly attractive. She also had what some call a joie de vivre. When Diana Caldwell lived in Kenya, she had a maid who often saw her in the bathtub. The maid said Diana’s skin looked as if it had never seen the sun.
She also could not help noticing something else in the tub. Diana wore pearl necklaces worth ninety thousand pounds around her neck. When the maid offered to remove the pearls to keep them safe, Diana looked at her and laughed.
Safety and security rarely concerned Diana Caldwell.