Much has been written about the aristocratic colonial life in 1920s Kenya – the hedonistic days of sex, secrets, and scandal. And the most scandalous person of all was the owner of the Wanjohi Valley estate known as Happy Valley, a 100 kilometres from Nairobi. Idina Sackville (1893-1955) was a famous divorcee – and the wife of Joss Hay, the 22nd Earl of Erroll, whose murder near Nairobi in 1941is still a mystery. Osborne disputes the ear-to-ear bullet trajectory that killed Joss, saying the bullet “passed between the first vertebra and the base of the skull, through the medulla of the brain from left to right and out of the spinal canal.” But she throws no further light on the mystery.
The Bolter (2008) refers to Idina and her short romances with many lovers and five
marriages in brisk succession: David Euan Wallace (married 1913, divorced
1919), Charles Gordon (1919-1923), Joss Hay (1923-1929), Donald Haldeman
(1930-1938), and Vincent Soltau (1939-1945).
The
difference between this book and the many others is that the author, Francis
Osborne, is Idina’s great grand-daughter, born 13 years after Idina’s death.
The author’s mother was Cary Davina whose father was David John Wallace, the
oldest child of Idina to her first marriage. Idina had three children to two
husbands – David John, Gerard, and Diana.
The
biography commences at the outbreak of World War I in Edwardian London at the
age of 21 with her first marriage to Scottish-born Euan Wallace. Thirty-two
years after divorcing him she said he was her most loved husband, regretting
her decision to marry Charles to start a new life on a farm in Kenya. It wasn’t
long before she took a lover: she “didn’t have to marry Joss, she could simply
have continued as his lover.” Her greatest sin was not her sexual appetite, but
that she “insisted upon marrying her boyfriends.” To society she was an
outlawed femme fatale, marrying younger men (“truly shocking”) and being
serially unfaithful. But so were her husbands and lovers.
With
her short boyish bob haircut, dressed to perfection, and inclination for
throwing parties “designed to shock”, she lit up any room she entered. Even
before the divorce to her third husband, she was in love with Boy Long,
although she married Donald. It was six months before the start of World War II.
Leaving Wanjohi Valley, Donald and Idina built a magnificent mountainous ranch –
called Clouds – in Kenya’s Rift Valley. It was here that she established one of
the strongest dairy herds in Africa.
The
deaths of her first husband (from a morphine overdose) and third husband
(murdered) close together in 1941 brought about “the beginning of a serious
decline for Idina.” In 1943 her son Gerard died when the plane he piloted
crashed near Mombasa, and exactly a year later her son David John died in World
War II. Idina physically “fell apart” from neuritis blamed on prolonged (2
years) high altitude in her Clouds estate at 8,000 feet above sea level. She
moved near Mombasa on the coast after divorcing her fifth husband. She vowed
never to marry again.
Idina
died from cancer at 62 years of age with her young lover, James Bird, by her
side.
This
is more than a biography and historical account of Osborne’s great
grandmother’s scandalous life. It is also a history of 1920s to 1950s British
East Africa before Kenya’s independence, and the lives of wealthy well-bred
Europeans and their absurdly eccentric lifestyles where they did as they wished
with virtual impunity. Racy, pacy, and sometimes hardly believable, but indeed that is the life of sex, excess, and noblesse when they are far removed from their homeland.
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