by Andrew Rose
The Ancasters’ next guest shift, running from 26 August to 1 September, produced a crop of autographs from the Prince, his brother Prince George (later Duke of Kent), ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, his future wife Alexandra (‘Baba’) Curzon, Bruce Ogilvy, J. J. Astor, Violet and Kathy Menzies (from a prominent Perthshire family), with Audrey and Dudley Coats completing the assembly.397
The Prince used his stay at Drummond Castle to pursue ‘little Audrey’, much to the annoyance of her husband, exceedingly rich from the profits of the Coats cotton spinning empire. Undeterred by the jealousy of her spouse, the Prince continued to take pleasure in Audrey for some years. ‘Personally I don’t think the Prince cares two straws about her except for purely physical reasons,’ wrote Joey Legh’s wife in 1925.398
On the last day of the house party, the Prince replied to ‘a very sweet letter’ from Fredie Dudley Ward, now reduced to the role of confidante (it seems, from available correspondence, that the Prince did not meet Fredie on the night of his flying visit). Though concerns about Marguerite had been somewhat allayed, the Prince desperately needed a sounding-board. ‘Please come up to London either 3rd or 4th Septr to give me that hiding,’ he wrote enigmatically, mindful also of his impending journey to Canada, ‘I just must see you before I sail … cos I’ve got so much to tell you.’ The air at Drummond Castle had been ‘electric … never have I had such an exciting week as this … & should be lucky if I escape without a hell of a row’. Perhaps mindful of past careless correspondence, the Prince added, ‘no more on paper darling!!’ Hoping that Fredie would see him in London ‘tho’ I don’t deserve it at all’, he was ‘in a queer state of mind just now … very lost and all muddled up’.399
The Prince spent part of the weekend with his parents at Balmoral, the kind of sojourn that usually encouraged gloomy thinking. An undated letter to Fredie may date from this time and, if so, suggests severe depression felt about the consequences of his wartime liaison with Marguerite, as well as more recent traumas. Admitting that his relationship with Fredie could now never be ‘absolutely satisfactory’, the Prince succumbed to despair. ‘I once lost my head over a crazy physical attraction. Look at the result. Just made a fool of myself. Nothing left of it but nausea.’400
The Prince managed to get away from the stifling atmosphere of Balmoral by the mid-morning train from Ballater on Sunday 2 September. His express drew into King’s Cross at 6 p.m., three hours before the Dover Pullman arrived at Victoria Station. On board was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, returning from a three-week ‘cure’ at a French spa, Bagnoles-de-l’Orne in Normandy.
These were leisurely times for politicians. Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, began his usual vacation at Aix-les-Bains on 27 August and was not minded to return to London – whatever the reason – for at least a month. Unfortunately Signor Mussolini (the new Italian Prime Minister) unsportingly bombarded the Greek island of Corfu on 27 August in revenge for the death of an Italian general, supposedly murdered by Albanian bandits. The Daily Mail’s headline proclaimed ‘ITALY IS RIGHT’ and Lord Rothermere’s press flagship once again saluted ‘the great Italian leader for whom we in this country entertain so well-deserved an admiration’.
In the absence of senior government figures, the Foreign Office struggled to divine the government’s intentions in the crisis. Should the dispute be referred to the League of Nations? Should the British Government argue for a bilateral resolution between Italy and Greece? In the event, Curzon reluctantly agreed to break off his holiday.
Waiting to greet the Marquess on the platform, in a small compound railed off from crowds of reporters, photographers and onlookers, stood Sir William Tyrell, Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, accompanied by two junior colleagues, Harold Nicolson and Alan Leeper. Both Nicolson (already making his name as the author of books on Verlaine and Tennyson) and Leeper were bright stars at the Foreign Office, close advisers of Curzon during tortuous negotiations at the Lausanne conference of 1922–3. That evening, Curzon’s train was an hour behind time and the three Foreign Office officials were obliged to dine in the station buffet.401
The Marquess was in pain, partly from his chronic back condition, but also from phlebitis. In no mood to stay for long in his London residence, Curzon spent the night at 1 Carlton Gardens, receiving the Italian Ambassador the following morning in a brief attention to official duty. Soon the ailing Marquess was on the way to Kedleston, his much loved Palladian country seat in Derbyshire. Nicolson and Leeper accompanied him to St Pancras.402 The latest developments in the crisis were summarised on the short journey, but there was time to wait before the train left for Derby. ‘He sat there in his compartment at St Pancras,’ wrote Nicolson, ‘his foot outstretched on its green baize rest reading the telegrams which had arrived overnight.’403
Although the ramifications of the Corfu incident dominated conversation, the Marquess was open to diversion. His interest would have been aroused by a piece of gossip, most likely imparted by Harold Nicolson, who, as we know, dined with Archie Clark Kerr on 23 August, while Curzon was away in Normandy. Back in Kedleston and on the eve of Marguerite’s trial, Curzon scribbled a note to his wife (Grace Curzon disliked Kedleston, preferring to stay in Hackwood, their country house in Hampshire). What Curzon wrote, in the early hours of 9 September 1923, amounted to a leak of information which would have severely disturbed the Royal Household had they known of it. The letter, a classic ‘smoking gun’, is hard evidence of the deal struck with Marguerite in Holloway, awaiting trial for the murder of her husband:
My Darling Girl
… In London the other day I heard a piece of news which may amuse you if you do not know it already. The French girl who shot her so-called Egyptian prince in London and is going to be tried for murder, is the fancy woman who was the Prince’s ‘keep’ in Paris during the war … and they were terribly afraid that he might be dragged in. It is fortunate that he is off to Canada and his name is to be kept out.404
The Marquess would stay on at Kedleston (always notoriously reluctant to answer the single telephone kept in his butler’s pantry) until his return to London on 21 September. This remarkable letter shows that Curzon, Foreign Secretary, number two in the government, and an immensely important public figure, had been wholly unaware of these sensitive matters until a few days before the trial started, fully a month and a half after the Savoy shooting. Although, in the case of Daisy Warwick, Stamfordham had seen fit to consult the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, about problems posed by compromising royal letters, no such approach seems to have been made to Stanley Baldwin. The Royal Household had been content to keep the elected government of Britain in the dark about serious malfeasance on the part of the heir to the throne.
By the time the Foreign Secretary had put pen to paper, the Prince was already at sea. A night or so before his departure, as requested, Fredie Dudley Ward had visited the Prince at York House for a heart-to-heart. ‘I feel so much better having got all that off the chest to the one and only soul I can or care to,’ he wrote from his suite aboard the Empress of France, shortly before sailing from Southampton on 5 September, ‘I’ve taken a pull already & am going to try not to take life so seriously and not to worry … my life is worry…’405
19
The ‘Great Defender’
Within a short time of her arrival at Holloway, Marguerite had also been visited by Freke Palmer and Collins, his managing clerk, continuing the lengthy process of taking instructions in preparation for September’s murder trial. Freke Palmer must have worked in French. His briefs to counsel was punctilously prepared and Marshall Hall’s clerk considered that defence counsel had been ‘magnificently instructed’.406
Freke Palmer, after taking Marguerite’s instructions at Holloway, and with the dry-runs of inquest and committal behind him, knew that this was to be no easy case to defend, despite what he had already gleaned about Ali’s background and character.
There was no doubt, too, that Marguerite had kept a
pistol for some time, well before she came to England. It might be difficult to persuade a jury that she had not known how to use a pistol bought with the express intention of protecting her jewellery. And why had she fired that first shot? Was it, as she said, to discourage Ali from assaulting her, or was it to establish that her gun was in working order before she used it to fatal effect? Moreover, there was the dangerous evidence of John Beattie, apparently supported by the post-mortem report, which suggested that Marguerite had shot her husband from behind, as he was trying to call the lapdog back into their suite.
The state of the criminal law in 1923 also seemed to put Marguerite at a disadvantage. The general rule, then as now, was that the prosecution, having brought the case against a prisoner, had to prove that case ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, so that at the end of a trial the jury would only convict if they were sure that the defendant was guilty. At that time, however, there was a presumption in law that all homicide was murder, ‘unless the contrary appears from circumstances of alleviation, excuse or justification’.407 In Marguerite’s case, there could be no reasonable doubt that (for whatever reason) she had fired the three shots which killed her husband. That being so, the presumption applied and it was then for her to satisfy the jury that, in the circumstances (classically described in 1762 as ‘accident, necessity, or infirmity’), she was not guilty of murder.
With all these considerations in mind, but happily freed from worry about financial constraints, Freke Palmer’s first choice as leading counsel had been Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett KC. Marguerite’s friends, however, were insistent that the defence team should be headed by an even more famous name. Accordingly, Palmer telephoned Edgar Bowker, head clerk at 3 Temple Gardens, the chambers of Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Negotiations between solicitor and barrister’s clerk for the instruction of leading counsel in a serious case resemble a complex mating dance. Fees are the major preoccupation, amid a welter of backstage bargaining in which the barrister plays no overt role. Significantly, Marshall Hall had not accepted a brief in a capital case since 1921. Lucrative civil work had taken up the intervening months and, as a result, such important murder trials such as those of Herbert Armstrong and Bywaters and Thompson took place without his forceful presence. All three defendants were hanged.
Marshall Hall had several times expressed his reluctance to be instructed in sensational murder cases, but, true to form, the great man soon relented under his clerk’s pressure and a fee was agreed. The agreed ‘marking’ on the brief was 652 guineas, one of the highest fees he ever earned at the Bar. During the negotiations, Freke Palmer had been anxious to impress upon Bowker that the Fahmy affair was no run-of-the-mill murder case, one that might be defended by an Old Bailey hack. Indeed, no less than three counsel were eventually retained in Marguerite’s defence. Marshall Hall would have the assistance of Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, with Roland Oliver (later to be an abrasive High Court judge) as junior counsel.
Marshall Hall had enjoyed a professional relationship with Freke Palmer for thirty-five years, from the day the solicitor had first seen the young, white-wigged barrister on his feet in the dingy surroundings of Marylebone Crown Court in 1888. He had then marked Hall down as a ‘winner’ and, despite the vicissitudes of the other man’s tempestuous career, rarely had reason to change his original view.
Nearing the age of 65 in the late summer of 1923, Marshall Hall was at the height of his fame and fortune, literally a household name. He looked every inch the great advocate. A handsome, comparatively youthful-looking and well-built 6' 3'', he had a commanding presence that dominated the courtroom. Yet in many ways his character, ‘childlike, uncontrolled and mercurial’,408 was a far remove from the popular conception of the lean, ascetic lawyer coldly and dispassionately expounding his case.
Never an academic lawyer, he was first and foremost an advocate. In his criminal work, he was at his finest as a defender. His attempts at prosecution were half-hearted, when not actually disastrous. Too often, when prosecuting, he would act as a ‘supplementary counsel for the defence … and once he seems to have suppressed a most damaging piece of evidence against a prisoner…’
Edward Marshall Hall was born in Brighton in 1858, son of a well-known local physician. Described as ‘sulky, rebellious and disobedient’, he spent two years at Rugby School, where he would ‘barter revolvers and guns and jewellery’. After matriculating at St John’s College, Cambridge, he took a two-year sabbatical and bummed around Paris, living ‘an amusing life with the students and artists of the Quartier Latin’ and learning to speak excellent French.
In his unconventional early life, he developed two useful attributes. One was a skill at dealing in jewellery and precious stones, a useful supplement to his earnings at the Bar; the other was an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of firearms, which he was able to employ to great advantage in a number of criminal trials. He was a keen shot and in his early days at the Bar most of his winter weekends were spent shooting.
His reputation as the ‘Great Defender’ began with the unpromising Marie Hermann in 1894. This skinny, miserable-looking London prostitute of 43 had battered one of her few remaining clients over the head with an iron bar and deposited the body in a large trunk. ‘Take care of that box,’ she had told removal men, ‘it contains treasures of mine.’
Marshall Hall persuasively argued that the fatal blows had been struck in the course of a struggle with her client, a burly, drunken man. Against the odds, he secured a verdict of manslaughter and the emotional force behind his submissions helped to secure a favourable verdict. Melodramatic as his words and actions seem today, they created a strong emotional atmosphere in court which propelled the jury far beyond a quiet assessment of the issues.
‘Remember,’ he implored, tears streaming down his cheeks at the end of a three-hour speech, ‘that these women are what men make them; even this woman was at one time a beautiful and innocent child.’ Right on cue, the prisoner began to sob in her place in the dock as Marshall Hall, with histrionic deliberation, gravely challenged the jury: ‘Gentlemen, on the evidence before you, I almost dare you to find a verdict of murder.’ Then, pointing to his client’s pathetic form, he added the deathless plea, ‘Look at her, gentlemen of the jury. Look at her. God never gave her a chance – won’t you?’, and sat down to tumultuous applause.
To modern eyes, this episode possesses all the risible qualities of the death of Little Nell, but a jury of the 1890s would have been used to such a florid, declamatory style in popular fiction, in the newspapers, and, above all, in the theatre. Anyone who has heard early recordings by turn-of-the-century actors such as Irving and Beerbohm Tree will immediately detect this tone. Such exuberance would become an essential part of the Marshall Hall repertoire, and went on, too long, into the years after the Great War, when juries were less ready than their Victorian counterparts to accept theatrical ham served up before them in court.
‘My profession and that of an actor are somewhat akin,’ said Marshall Hall, proud of his membership of the Garrick Club. ‘There is no backcloth … there is no curtain, but out of the vivid dream of somebody else’s life, I have to create an atmosphere, for that is advocacy.’ He seemed to identify himself with his client, going beyond the strict role of advocate, ‘speaking as if the prisoner’s thoughts, actions and impulses were his own’.
He would nurse his juries, selecting ‘the most intelligent or the most amenable member’, addressing himself particularly to this figure until he was satisfied that that person had been won over, before moving on to the next, and so on, through the twelve. Another facet of Marshall Hall’s character, however, was demonstrated by his petulant aside. The Great Defender was vain, hot-tempered and indiscreet. He had no scruples about bullying witnesses and cut more than a few ethical corners. Clashes with the judiciary had on occasion brought his practice near to ruin.
In addition to these undoubted character defects, his working method was largely intuitive: ‘He never had a plan of campaign, or, if
he had, he never was faithful to it. So far from preparing his speeches, he scarcely knew what the next sentence was to be himself…’409
For forty years, Marshall Hall had battled his way through the courts and in the late summer of 1923 he was instructed to appear in possibly the most sensational trial of them all. His reaction, upon reading Freke Palmer’s immaculately prepared instructions, was to agree with the solicitor that this could be an uphill struggle, yet it was a fight in which the old warrior could identify with his client’s predicament. Marshall Hall had his own bitter experience of marriage. His first wife had announced during their honeymoon in Paris that she did not love him: the couple separated in 1888 after five years of constant bickering. A few months later, she died from the effects of an illegal abortion, after an affair with an army officer.
Although he lived happily with his second wife, Marshall Hall was always prone to recall the misery of earlier years. ‘Marriage,’ he said late in life, ‘can be one of the most immoral relationships in the world.’ His impulsive nature immediately sympathised with Marguerite Fahmy, seemingly vulnerable and alone in a foreign country. She needed a champion and Marshall Hall would be her man. Furthermore, they shared another painful experience. For years, Marshall Hall had been a martyr to piles.
Back at Scotland Yard, Divisional Detective Inspector Grosse was preparing his case. Information began to flow in from Egypt. An unsigned, vituperative attack on Ali and his family, written from Cairo, was sent directly to Grosse. It may have been written by a disaffected ex-employee, who appears not to have been a native English speaker and whose disparaging references to Islam suggest that he was a Coptic Christian:
Dear Sir
Aly Fahmy made the acquaintance of his wife at the Semiramis Hotel … where she was staying with her daughter, a very pretty girl of sixteen [sic]. Here is the motive for his death. As a rich Mussulman he would try for the daughter as mistress by the side of the mother. Mahomedan morality.