The public sensation of flat, sun-washed Nairobi, capital of Britain's Kenya Colony, is the drawn-out trial of one of its first citizens for the murder of another. This week, in a hot, crowded courtroom, Major Sir Henry John Delves ("Sir Jock") Broughton was awaiting the verdict of a jury of his peers. For a full month he had seen the Crown Counsel, witness by witness, put together a damning picture of the murder of his friend, Josslyn Victor Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll (TIME, March 24).
Familiar indeed to readers of Somerset Maugham was the story's plot, a simple, violent tale of British mannerliness upset by tropic passions. Last December 57-year-old Sir Jock married young Diana Caldwell in London, brought her out to his Kenya estate. At the smart Muthaiga Country Club she had met the dashing earl, fallen violently and very publicly in love with him less than a month after her marriage. Sir Jock had tried to persuade her to go with him to Ceylon to forget the earl. When she refused he even offered to go away himself. Then, early on the morning of Jan. 24, after a party at the club, the earl's body was found on a lonely road, slumped over the wheel of his car. There was a bullet hole in his head. Some weeks later Sir Jock was arrested for the murder.
In his own defense Sir Jock testified for 22 full hours. The earl, he said, was "a very great friend, whose brain and sense of humor I admired." He also told of a two-line dialogue between himself and the earl:
"Diana tells me she is in love with you."
"She never told me that, but I'm frightfully in love with her."
Damning to Sir Jock was the testimony of his African houseboy, who had seen him take two pistols from his bedroom to his study shortly before the murder; the story of the policeman who found part of a bloody golf stocking and bits of charred sacking in a bonfire Sir Jock built the morning after the murder; his own question to a police inspector: "If you found your wife in bed with a man and shot him, would you be hanged for murder?"
Case for the Crown is that on the night of the murder, the earl brought Lady Broughton home after Sir Jock had retired, that Sir Jock later climbed out of his bedroom by a balcony or drain pipe, met the earl, killed him.
In Sir Jock's behalf a prison doctor testified that his right side was paralyzed, that he had two bones missing from his right wrist. The doctor doubted that he would have been able to do any climbing.
But the Crown had been prepared for this defense. Professional Hunter J. A. Hunter testified that three weeks after the murder he had taken Sir Jock and Lady Broughton on an eight-day safari. Said Hunter Hunter: "Sir Delves shot several small antelope. He shot one lion with a heavy double-barreled rifle, . . . walked seven miles a day stalking game, . . . never appeared fatigued. . . . He also helped to pull the dead lions aboard a lorry."