The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder

by Andrew Rose

  In childhood, some of the jury’s complement of twelve would have had the Thousand and One Nights as nursery reading, with exotic tales of the court of Haroun al-Raschid, magic carpets, and the journeying of Sinbad the Sailor. In the expurgated version available to Victorian youngsters, readers would have missed the earthy humour and scatological wit of the complete series, but there would have been much to excite the imagination, even if the stories were a poor guide to contemporary realities in the Near and Middle East.

  There was a distinct possibility, too, that one or more of the jurymen had done war service in the eastern Mediterranean. Before the fiasco of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, many British troops had been stationed in Egypt and, further east, the Arabian subcontinent, Mesopotamia and Palestine had all been theatres of war against the Turks. Troopships bound for India would have had to pass through the Suez Canal, putting into Port Said or Ismailia.

  Anyone who had spent time in Egypt while serving in the armed forces or who had travelled there as an English civilian would have been exposed to the prevailing prejudice against things Eastern in general and against nearly all things Egyptian in particular. Egyptians were regarded, by and large, as a shifty bunch. The Daily Mail lambasted them as ‘the most volatile and feather-headed race in the world’, a statement that reflected the view that Egyptians were not only incapable of running their own affairs, but were thoroughly ungrateful to Britain into the bargain.438 Nevertheless, the British in Egypt continued to believe in their mission. That they had never begun to understand, let alone accept, the ways of the native population is evident from contemporary press coverage.

  It would be surprising if this pervasive contempt for the Egyptian people had not found its way into the minds of those who comprised the jury in the Fahmy case. Their outlook would have been, in all probability, a hopeless mishmash when it came to anything Middle Eastern.

  The recent triumphs of Lawrence of Arabia had given substantial, supposedly unwanted publicity to the strange little man who had fought for his beloved Arabs in the Great War. The slick salesmanship of Lowell Thomas, an American journalist, had much to do with the creation of the Lawrence legend in the years after 1918. The image of Lawrence in his spectacular white, flowing Arab costume was striking enough, but this breathlessly romantic impression of ‘the East’ was by no means the first manifestation of the English public’s interest in such things. At least since the turn of the century, there had been a glut of novels written about dusky sheiks, women innocent or ‘fast’, desert sands, cool oases and searing passion. Stuffy, puritanical England went wild about the desert myth.

  One of the most successful exponents of this genre was Robert Hichens, who had originally made a name for himself in the mid-1890s with The Green Carnation, an exploitative novel inspired by the world of Oscar Wilde, written just before his fall. Hichens had travelled extensively in the Arabic-speaking world and was a prolific author. The Garden of Allah, set in Morocco, ran to forty-three editions between 1904 and 1929 and was made into a film in 1917. Probably his best-known work was Bella Donna, published in 1909.

  The setting of the novel is Egypt and there are parallels with the Fahmy case. The sinister Mahmoud Baroudi, ‘of mixed Greek and Egyptian blood’, embodies a dangerous combination of Western manners and Eastern deceit. ‘[Baroudi] was remarkably well-dressed in clothes … which he wore with a carelessness almost English, but also with an easy grace that was utterly foreign … Probably he was governed by the Oriental’s conception of women as an inferior sex…’ Hichen’s description of Baroudi had been read by a wide public for nearly fifteen years by the time H. V. Morton made his slighting references to Ali Fahmy in 1923 as an Egyptian, ‘too well dressed to look right’ and whose ‘dangerous magnetism’ attracted white women.439

  Ruby Chepstow, ‘a woman with a past’ and married to the virtuous Nigel Armine, slips aboard Baroudi’s dahabeeyah on the Nile, falling helplessly in love with the brutal Easterner, attended by ‘a huge Nubian’. ‘[Baroudi] acknowledged calmly that he had treated her as a chattel. She loved that … She felt cruelty in him and it attracted her.’ In this regard, Bella Donna exemplifies the myth of the potent sheik, an unbridled sexual animal with rape perpetually in mind.

  Baroudi’s target was the white woman. Marshall Hall’s condemnation of Ali Fahmy could have sprung directly from the pages of Bella Donna. Baroudi, ‘… like a good many of his smart, semi-cultured, self-possessed and physically attractive young contemporaries had gloried in his triumph among the Occidental women … [striking] a blow at the Western man’. He was ‘one of those Egyptians who go mad over the women of Europe … their delicate colouring and shining hair’.

  Baroudi’s evil influence prompts Ruby to poison Nigel, but the plot is discovered in time to save his life and, ruined, Ruby wanders off alone into the desert night. Bella Donna, forgotten today, was a popular success for some twenty years after its publication. In September 1923, just as Marguerite’s trial was starting, news came that Pola Negri, the smouldering Hollywood film star, would be appearing in a film of the novel.

  Elinor Glyn (then mistress of Marquess Curzon) had employed a desert theme in His House (1909) and during the next decade Katherine Rhodes wrote stories of ‘the fire and passion of the relentless desert’. Another blockbuster from the Mystic East first appeared in 1921, perhaps the greatest (or most notorious) of them all. Promoted by an elaborate hype, The Sheik, by E. M. Hull, had gone through a hundred editions in English by mid-1923 (‘E. M.’ stood for Edith Maud, the wife of a Derbyshire pig farmer). An accompanying dance tune, The Sheik of Araby, had sold 250,000 copies as sheet music in England alone, where gramophone recordings of it were made by four different bands between March and August 1922.440

  The film based on the book was a sensation, at any rate in the Western world. Starring Rudolph Valentino, The Sheik, as the Evening News reported in July 1923, ‘has been shown in 1260 cinemas in Great Britain’, where the Paramount Film Corporation estimated that five million people had paid to see it.441

  In the novel The Sheik, tomboyish Diana Mayo unwisely contemplates ‘an expedition into the desert with no chaperone … only native camel drivers and servants’. There she is captured by Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan, ‘the handsomest and cruellest face she had ever seen…’ and taken to his tent. Breathlessly, she asks, ‘Why have you brought me here?’ Prompted by the classic reply, ‘Are you not woman enough to know?’, Diana succumbs to ‘the flaming light of desire burning in his eyes … the fierce embrace … [of] the man’s pulsating body … the touch of his scorching lips’. He was an ‘Oriental beast … in his Oriental disregard of the woman subjugated’, presenting ‘a hideous exhibition of brute strength and merciless cruelty…’ This purple prose might have come from Marshall Hall’s opening address to the jury in the Fahmy case.

  Having thus far lived their ordinary lives amid this welter of misinformation about Egypt and the Arab world, Marguerite Fahmy’s jury were unlikely to have taken a detached, dispassionate view of her relationship with the dead man. For good measure, the Tut-Ankh-Amun discoveries highlighted Eastern exoticism, a distant remove from the humdrum world of suburban London in which most of the jury lived.

  The first would-be spectator to arrive, at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, was young Mr James Stewart of Lancing, who told the Pall Mall Gazette’s reporter that he had been a ship’s steward in charge of the Fahmys’ suite, when they had travelled aboard the SS Nile, possibly before Christmas 1922. Mr Stewart was determined to see the show. At 2.30 he had refused £5 from a ‘well-dressed man’ for his place and later a woman unsuccessfully offered him ‘£3 and 50 cigarettes’.442 The police soon started to break up the queues that were forming in Newgate despite a very chilly wait, but not before another young man received the day’s best offer, ‘to keep him for a week at one of the best hotels in London’, made in vain by a prosperous-looking gentleman.

  The Daily Telegraph reported that Marguerite seemed ‘brighter and more alert’
when she entered the dock, which she did for once without the assistance of a prison officer.443 The start of her evidence was delayed by legal wrangling, during which the jury were sent out of court. Percival Clarke, very properly, had told Marshall Hall that he intended to cross-examine Marguerite ‘as to whether or not she had lived an immoral life’, to show that she was ‘a woman of the world, well able to look after herself ’. The judge would now have to make a ruling about the issue of Marguerite’s past character.

  Marshall Hall made a show of resisting a damaging attack. ‘The only effect,’ he told the judge, ‘… would be to prejudice the jury unfavourably against this woman. I have not opened the case that she is a woman of moral character…’ Clarke, mindful of the dirt about Marguerite set out in ex-Chief Inspector Stockley’s confidential report, said that he wanted to dispel the idea that this was ‘a poor child practically domineered over by this man’. He was entitled, he felt, to ask how she treated other men and in any case defence counsel had opened that she was an immoral woman.

  Since 1898, when, for the first time, a prisoner had been allowed to give evidence on his or her own behalf (as opposed to merely making an unsworn statement from the dock, which had little evidential value), an accused had been shielded from questions about character and background. That protection could be lost, at the judge’s discretion, depending on how the defendant’s character was being presented at the trial and also if imputations of bad character had been levelled by the defence against prosecution witnesses.

  The judge, aware of the danger that the Prince’s name would emerge, declared emphatically that the jury should not be told much about Marguerite’s eventful past, ruling that prosecuting counsel would have to confine himself to questions about Marguerite’s relations with Ali Fahmy, which was to say, since mid-1922. ‘Sir Edward has said that she was a loose woman,’ he observed, ‘but he said it in such a way that he gave the impression … that she was an innocent and most respectable lady. It is a difficult thing to do, but Sir Edward, with all that skill we have admired for so long, has done it…’ The judge, ignoring the savage attack on Said Enani’s character, passed over the accusation of homosexuality. ‘Although I thought there was going to be an attack…,’ said the judge, flying in the face of plain fact, ‘there really was no attack made on his character.’ Relying on inside information, just before the trial started, Lord Curzon had been absolutely right to predict that the Prince’s name would be kept out of evidence at the trial.444

  The jury filed back in, to be told that they were now to be deprived of newspapers for the duration of the trial, since they would report the substance of the legal argument. ‘I am sorry to deprive you of them,’ said the judge, sympathetically. ‘It must be very boring to be shut up all the evening without a newspaper, but I am bound to do it.’

  Marguerite was then called to give evidence in her own defence. She was seen to falter as she approached the witness-box and required the help of a wardress to complete the short journey. Rigby Swift intimated that Marguerite could give her evidence from a chair and as she took her seat, it was possible for most of those in court to see her clearly for the first time. The Evening Standard thought that Marguerite ‘was not so much beautiful as interesting looking. Small, mobile features; a rather petulant mouth, large expressive eyes – such was the picture framed by a black mushroom hat and flowing black veil.’445 The Daily Sketch saw her as ‘dark haired and lustrous eyed’,446 an altogether more flattering description than that afforded readers of the Daily Mail, which ungallantly claimed that Marguerite was not ‘the handsome woman of the photographs’, but rather ‘of a pronounced Latin type’.447

  When Marguerite stood up to take the oath, Marshall Hall, recalling his recent, very effective destabilisation of Said Enani, prudently suggested that, as Marguerite was now a Muslim, she should be sworn on the Koran. As before, the judge said the witness could be sworn in any way that was binding in conscience and Marguerite took her oath on the Bible. Unlike in the case of the unfortunate Said, nobody seems to have thought the worse of her for doing so. But then Marguerite was European.

  Harry Ashton-Wolfe, the official court interpreter, a stocky man with close-cropped hair and a luxuriant black moustache, stepped forward to translate the oath into French. In barely a whisper, Madame Fahmy declared, ‘Je jure’ (‘I swear’). Marguerite was again demurely dressed in black: it struck Ashton-Wolfe, he later wrote, as a peculiar thing that a woman should be mourning for a man she had herself killed.448

  Marguerite’s evidence began with some very brief personal details. She told the court that she had divorced Charles Laurent after his desertion, but the jury were never to be aware of Marguerite’s blunt words to old Madame Denart in 1918, that she would ‘kick him out’ after six months of marriage. She claimed that she had lost an annual allowance of 36,000 francs (£450) from Laurent when she married Ali. Marshall Hall then read out the civil contract of marriage to Fahmy, including the provision that he should pay her a dowry of £2,000. Ali had only paid her £450, she said, conveniently forgetting the jewellery and other costly gifts made to her both before and after the wedding, estimated to be worth 200,000 francs (£2,500).

  The pace began to hot up when Marguerite started to describe her life as a Muslim bride. ‘Her low, musical voice carried well as she answered in rapid French the questions put to her. Now and then there was just the ghost of a shrug of the shoulders. Occasionally, the black-gloved hands toyed with a grey silk handkerchief … sometimes pressed to eyes or mouth.’449

  After her sister Yvonne had returned to Paris (possibly because she and Ali had been getting on rather too well), Marguerite was left alone with Fahmy bey. ‘There were twelve black men as servants in the house,’ she said, ‘but no other white women apart from my maid and I.’ After a quarrel, Ali had sworn on the Koran to kill her, an allegation that enabled Marshall Hall to make a second dramatic reference to the document Marguerite had composed on 22 January 1923.

  Although the trial process had been subject to outside interference to protect the reputation of the Prince of Wales, the appearance of due process had to be maintained and such blatant over-egging by Marshall Hall was too much for the judge. Rigby Swift tetchily intervened to express disapproval of mysterious documents that did not properly form part of the evidence. ‘This court,’ he said portentously, ‘is not a receptacle for waste paper…’ Marshall Hall responded by claiming that he had simply wanted to show that ‘on a particular day this woman wrote a particular document and I wanted her to identify it’. ‘Quite irrelevant,’ declared the judge. ‘You might as well say that on Christmas Day 1920 she sent a Christmas card to her lawyer.’ On that abrasive note, the matter ended, at least for the moment.

  Marshall Hall wisely shifted attention to the scenes on the Nile en route for Luxor. ‘The first day,’ said Marguerite, ‘[Ali] tried to frighten me and fired a revolver several times above my head. He had three revolvers.’ She had often tried to leave him, but each time she did so, he would cry and beg her to stay, promising to reform. Once he had got her aboard the dahabeeyah, however, Ali’s attitude had changed. He had frequently struck her, saying ‘You can never leave me any more’, eventually locking her into her cabin, evidence that Marguerite gave ‘in a choking voice’.450

  Marguerite’s letter to Maître Assouad was read out, providing an opportunity for more racial mileage. ‘I was terrified,’ Marguerite claimed, ‘I was alone on board and surrounded by black men.’ She described her ‘horror’ of the ‘black valet’, who was ‘always following her’, even to the extent of coming into her room while she was dressing. Her complaints to Ali had met with a dismissive response, distinctly resembling dialogue from The Sheik: ‘He has the right. He does not count. He is nothing.’

  She claimed that she had been forced to take the tram to visit a Cairo cinema, because Ali had denied her the use of a car. In the presence of ‘Said Enani and four black men’, Fahmy had delivered an unprovoked blow to her chin on
her return to the mansion with Mukhta bey. ‘I fell against the door, suffering excruciating pain … next day I was treated for a dislocated jaw.’

  All this neatly led to revelations of the sexual decadence of non-white society. ‘Madam Fahmy proceeded in a faltering and hesitating voice to describe her relations with her husband…’451 The press drew a veil over these intimate details, though it was noted by the Evening Standard that ‘only three women got up and left [the public gallery] when Madame Fahmy was being asked questions of such a nature that she finally buried her face in her hands’.452 After she had endured this sexual abuse, said Marguerite, Fahmy had again threatened to kill her with a pistol in Cairo, crying, ‘I am all powerful; I shall be acquitted.’

  In Paris, Ali had refused to pay her Chanel dress bill of 18,000 francs (£225). ‘He told me to get a lover to pay for them,’ she sobbed, ‘he said he would call me the worst name in the French language – and it hurt.’ After a visit to the Folies Bergère (where unknown to the jury, Marguerite had once solicited for custom), her decadent husband had proposed to visit a ‘notorious place’. Taking a higher moral stance than circumstances justified, ‘she refused as it was not a fit place for her and her sister’.453

  Marguerite recounted further argy-bargy, including an absurdly melodramatic incident during which, she alleged, Ali had seized her by the throat and threatened to horsewhip her. Yvonne Alibert had come to her elder sister’s rescue, brandishing a pistol in her hand.

  At this point, the fatal Browning was passed to Marguerite by the interpreter, Harry Ashton-Wolfe, who ‘fully expected that she would shrink and hesitate … As unconcernedly as if it had been a toy, she took the deadly, blue [sic] weapon in her hand…’454 The Daily Telegraph, however, reported a ‘strained face’ as she briefly let it slip on to the ledge of the witness-box: ‘… in the tense silence it seemed that some great weight had crashed on the wood’.455