by Andrew Rose
CLARKE: While you were in Paris before he went to Germany, were you leading a very gay life – I do not mean immorally gay – but going to theatres, dining etc.?
MARGUERITE: Yes, we were going out every evening.
CLARKE: When your husband went to Stuttgart on 17 or 18 June, why did you not leave him while he was away?
MARGUERITE: [Giving a slight shrug] Where could I have gone to? If I had gone to my flat, Said Enani would have come to fetch me back the next day.
CLARKE: But you had lived in Paris all your life and had many friends there of influence and wealth?
MARGUERITE: I did not want my friends to know all about my sorrow, because I thought they would laugh at me. Except for two or three intimate women friends, I have always tried to save appearances.
Marguerite’s stated reasons for not leaving Fahmy were manifestly weak and Clarke pressed home his advantage by putting questions about the document, containing ‘improper phrases’ and supposedly giving Marguerite the right to commit adultery. Fahmy, she said, had dictated it, ‘because he was always so brutal when he wanted a thing to be done…’
CLARKE: Did you write that letter in order to assist in your divorce?
MARGUERITE: I never produced it. It was so degrading.
Amid this demonstration of modesty, her voice began to quaver. Gesticulating wildly, she related an unconvincing story that Ali had insisted that she wrote the letter, as he was unable to form the French characters.
CLARKE: If this were a genuine document, why did he not write it himself?
MARGUERITE: It was 2 o’clock in the morning and I did not wish to prolong the scene which preceded the writing … He said ‘write’ and I wrote.
It seems to have been at this stage in cross-examination when Clarke’s feeble prosecution was at last appearing to make some progress, that Marshall Hall’s mischievous spirit again asserted itself. Robert Churchill, the firearms expert, was still in court, sitting at the exhibits table. While Clarke was putting questions to Marguerite, Marshall Hall left his seat, a conspicuous progress in which he was obliged to disturb several other barristers, and went over to where Churchill was sitting.
Marshall Hall quietly asked Churchill to dismantle the pistol, also whispering some questions about partridge shooting which had started on 1 September that year. In what seems to have been a carefully calculated exercise the jury was distracted from concentrating on a particularly weak part of Marguerite’s testimony.469
Marshall Hall would not have felt the need for distraction when Clarke came to question Marguerite about the sexual side of her marriage. Madame Fahmy coped very well with what was probably a fairly discreetly worded inquiry into the allegations she had made about her husband’s amorous inclinations. Tears could be seen in her eyes as she declared that her relations with Ali had ‘never been quite normal’.
CLARKE: I take it that from the time of his first objectionable suggestion you hated your husband bitterly?
MARGUERITE: I loved my husband and, when he had been so bad, I despaired and I told him I hated him. I did not hate him, but only what he wanted me to do.
Clarke’s cross-examination was beginning to nosedive. The trend was accelerated by some very awkward questioning about knowledge of the pistol’s mechanism. It is a golden rule of cross-examination that counsel should not, if at all possible, reduce a witness to tears. To be fair, Marguerite had tended to the lachrymose from the moment she had stepped into the witness-box, but Clarke went over the previous day’s old ground in far too much detail, even to the extent of putting the pistol back in her unwilling hands.
Calmness gave way once more to emotion. ‘She wept while speaking, supporting her head with one hand and with the other made gestures deprecatory, emphatic, disdainful…’,470 reported the Evening Standard, and, when Clarke put to her that she must have known that there were other cartridges in the gun, she cried out, ‘I don’t know anything of its mechanics. I…’ before breaking off in distress. She burst into loud sobbing and fell back into her chair.
The effect of Clarke’s heavy-handed questioning was to rob many of the prosecution’s stronger points of their force. If she had, as she said, fired the first shot out of the window early in the morning, how was it that no one, apart from her maid, had heard it? The thunderstorm was not then raging. ‘Did you not fire that first shot to see that the pistol was in working order,’ Clarke had asked, but she maintained that she had only been trying to get the bullet out of the gun, using the pistol only to frighten Ali.
The white Chanel evening dress was passed to her, and tears again welled up in her eyes as she pointed to the back of the garment, where Ali had torn off some of the small beads in the course of the struggle. She affected to shudder as the dress was handed back to a court usher, but had sufficient composure to parry Clarke’s next question:
CLARKE: Did you know that your husband was completely unarmed when you pointed the revolver [sic] at him?
MARGUERITE: I did not know; he often had a pistol in the jacket of his dressing-gown. The thunderstorm was so awful and I was in such a terrible state of nerves I do not know what I thought of it at the time.
Soon afterwards, Clarke came to the end of his cross-examination in a distinctly downbeat way:
CLARKE: Were you not fully aware that when your husband attacked you, you could immediately have rung the bell and got assistance?
MARGUERITE: I could not speak English. What could I say?
CLARKE: Could you not have got your maid to stay with you that night?
MARGUERITE: She had gone to bed and was on the eighth floor. I had no telephone to her.
Marshall Hall’s short re-examination was largely taken up with Rigby Swift’s ‘waste paper’, the declaration that Marguerite had written in January 1923, and that she had left, sealed, with her lawyer, Maître Assouad, ‘only to be opened in case of her death’. It had, in truth, virtually no evidential value, merely reiterating what Marguerite had been saying in evidence, but, predictably, Marshall Hall was able to maximise its dramatic effect. Without objection from judge of prosecuting counsel, the whole of the document was put before the jury, a useful reminder of Marguerite’s wholly uncorroborated claim that Ali had sworn on the Koran to kill her.
Yvonne Alibert gave evidence that broadly supported her sister’s case – no surprises here – as did Aimée Pain, the maid, with whom Marguerite had spoken at such length in Bow Street police station just hours after the shooting. Aimée confirmed her mistress’s story of the pistol going off between 8.30 and 9 p.m. on the night of 9 July (an incorrect time, by any reading, as Marguerite was then uncomfortably seated in Daly’s Theatre), but had somehow forgotten to mention this to the police, because she was ‘so upset’.
Eugéne Barbay, Marguerite’s faithful chauffeur, came close to over-egging the pudding on his mistress’s behalf:
CLARKE: What do you mean when you say she was always crying?
BARBAY: She had her handkerchief to her eyes.
CLARKE: Even at the dressmaker’s or dinner or the theatre?
BARBAY: She always had red eyes. She was always trying to stop.
CLARKE: Oh, she did try to stop sometimes?
BARBAY: Yes, but for never more than half an hour at a time.
With descriptions of Marguerite’s bruised face in Paris, given by Hélène Baudry, the concert singer well known in France (if not in England) and protégée of the Prince’s friend, François de Breteuil,471 the defence evidence closed. It remained for Marguerite’s advocate to make the speech of his lifetime.
Marshall Hall, rising painfully from his seat, began his closing address just before 3.30 in the afternoon, not the best time to start a keynote speech. The jury had already been subjected to nearly four hours of evidence that day and concentration inevitably tends to slip after lunch.
As was his custom, he began quietly. There were only two issues in the case: ‘Either this was a deliberate, premeditated and cowardly murder, or it was a sho
t fired by this woman from a pistol which she believed to be unloaded at a moment when she thought her life to be in danger.’ Mindful of the ruins of Clarke’s cross-examination, counsel dared to assume that the jury were already well disposed towards his client: ‘You must not allow your sympathy for this poor woman to interfere with returning a proper verdict,’ he adjured. ‘Do not descend to little, minor or petty details, but take a broad view of the facts…’ That ‘broad view’ would become, as the speech progressed, a projection of Ali Fahmy as a monster of Eastern depravity and decadence, whose sexual tastes were indicative of an amoral sadism towards his helpless European wife.
‘She made one great mistake, the greatest mistake any woman can make: a woman of the West married to an Oriental,’ said the Great Defender, turning the jury’s attention to the slight figure in the dock, so quietly dressed in black, her chin resting on her hands, calm now after the tears and emotion of her evidence.
‘I daresay the Egyptian civilisation is and may be one of the oldest and most wonderful civilisations in the world. I don’t say that among the Egyptians there are not many magnificent and splendid men’ – here came the sting – ‘but if you strip off the external civilisation of the Oriental, you get the real Oriental underneath and it is common knowledge that the Oriental’s treatment of women does not fit in with the idea the Western woman has of the proper way she should be treated by her husband…’
And that husband was not the ‘nervous, retiring young man’ of Percival Clarke’s instructions (Marshall Hall had given his jejune opponent a clever backhanded compliment to ‘the way he had performed a difficult and thankless task’). Not at all: the ‘mysterious document’ that Marguerite had composed herself in January 1923 showed how afraid she was that some of Fahmy’s ‘black hirelings’ would do her to death.
‘In 1923, in the midst of civilised London, it seems odd that such a threat should have had any effect on the woman. But think of Egypt,’ he contrasted. ‘It is the curse of this case that there is something we can’t get at, that is, the Eastern feeling.’ The dead man’s personal private secretary had possessed that ‘Eastern feeling’ in abundance. ‘One almost smiles when my friend asks “Why did you not get Said Enani to protect you?”,’ said Marshall Hall, appearing to take the jury into his confidence. ‘You have seen Said Enani and have heard something about him. Is he the kind of man you would have as the sole buffer between yourselves and a man like Fahmy?… Do you believe anything said by Said Enani that was hostile to this unfortunate woman?’ Defence counsel was now in full xenophobic flight, with no sign of a rebuke from the judge. ‘I suggest that it is part of the Eastern duplicity that is well known.’
Spicing his argument with gratuitous references to colour, he continued, ‘Do not forget Costa [sic], that great black Hercules, who came day after day for orders, and who was ready to do anything. Don’t you think she had ground for fear of this great black guard who owed his life to Fahmy?’
It had all been an Easterner’s plot to lure Marguerite into a kind of white slavery. ‘Picture this woman,’ he invited the jury, ‘inveigled into Egypt by false pretences, by a letter which for adulatory expression could hardly be equalled and which makes one feel sick … At first, all is honey and roses. He shows her his beautiful palace, his costly motor-cars, his wonderful motor-boat, his retinue of servants, his lavish luxuries, and cries “Ah, I am Fahmy Bey; I am a Prince.” This European woman became more fascinated and attracted to this Oriental extravagance…’
As the end of the court day approached, Marshall Hall, knowing that he would be unable to finish his speech in one piece, developed his ‘Eastern feeling’ theme, giving the jury something to mull over that evening in the close confines of the Manchester Hotel.
‘The curse of this case … is the Eastern feeling of possession of the woman, the Turk in his harem, this man who was entitled to have four wives if he liked – for chattels, which to we Western people, with our ideas of women, is almost unintelligible, something we cannot quite deal with.’
Overnight, a massive police operation outside the Old Bailey prevented any queues forming, but, as ever, the courtroom was crowded almost beyond capacity when the trial resumed. Even some barristers were content to stand during the proceedings. Public interest in the trial was now intense; it attracted press attention throughout the world and was one of the first major criminal trials to have been the subject of news reports on the radio. British listeners had to wait until 7 p.m. each day for their information, a restriction imposed on the BBC to protect the interests of newspaper proprietors.
Most people thought that Friday 14 September would bring the jury’s verdict on Marguerite’s innocence or guilt of murder and there was a perceptible tension in Court Number One when Marshall Hall resumed his final address to the jury that morning. He soon came to a consideration of Fahmy’s character, a central feature of his speech. Ali might have been only 22 or 23 but he had ‘learned a lot and had many mistresses’. Referring to the time Marguerite had come home with Mukhta bey, after the visit to a Cairo cinema, Sir Edward’s voice rang with indignation as he told of the blow in the face given to Madame by Fahmy before an Egyptian friend to whom he laughed and joked after having shown his ‘mastership of this Western woman’.472
This brutal behaviour extended into the bedroom. Fahmy was ‘a great, hulking muscular fellow’ who was able to force his will upon his wife. Before launching into his attack on Ali’s depravity, Marshall Hall eyed the public gallery. ‘If women choose to come here to hear this case, they must take the consequences. It is a matter of public duty that I must perform.’ In the event, none of the women spectators left court while defence counsel wrestled with the vexed question of sodomy.
‘The whole sex question is one of mystery,’ announced Marshall Hall, in a curiously worded passage. ‘… Nature gave us the power to get morphia from the seed of the poppy, gave us alcohol, and cocaine from the seed of the coca plant in Peru. Probably there are no better things than these in their proper places. Probably thousands in the War had cause to bless them. Just as they are the greatest boon to men and women, so probably these three things taken together are three of the greatest curses that are in the world at the present moment. It is not their legitimate use; it is the abuses of morphia, alcohol and sex that give all the dreadful trouble in the world.’ Fahmy, declared counsel, had ‘developed abnormal tendencies and he never treated Madame normally’.
There had been no direct evidence before the court to prove that Ali had taken drugs, but these references to morphia and cocaine were most probably designed to create the image of Ali as a drug-crazed sex fiend. The more sensational newspapers regularly printed stories about the ‘drug menace’, a threat commonly imputed to the activities of ‘black’ people.
The thrust of Marshall Hall’s untidy, emotionally charged argument was that Ali Fahmy, an ‘Oriental’, effectively a black man in the eyes of the all-white jury, had disqualified himself from their consideration, mainly by reason of his race and his sexuality. Employing a popular canard, Marshall Hall implied that, because Ali had been bisexual, he would invariably practise sodomy as his preferred mode of intercourse with women.
Viewed dispassionately, Marguerite’s defence was less than coherent. Did she shoot Ali in the hotel corridor because she thought he was going to kill her or because she feared that he would force himself sexually upon her again? How did this fit in with the virtually unchallenged evidence of John Beattie? The Great Defender would simply pass that by.
Rational argument went out of the window. Marshall Hall would choose to rely on rough patriotism and homely sentiment. ‘… Maybe she thought she would be safer in London than in Paris. There are people who even in 1923 … have a high opinion of English safety and English law. She may have thought that it would be a little more dangerous for these black emissaries to work their fell purpose at the bidding of their master.’ Tugging hard at the jury’s heartstrings, he added, ‘I wonder how many mothers hav
e braved a great many dangers to see the child they loved. Because her child was illegitimate, maybe Madame Fahmy loved it all the more.’
Visibly sweating now and in great pain, Marshall Hall turned up the dramatic pressure as he came to the night of the shooting and the great thunderstorm. ‘You know the effect of such a storm when your nerves are normal. Imagine its effect on a woman of nervous temperament who had been living such a life as she had lived for the past six months – terrified, outraged, abused, beaten, degraded – a human wreck … Imagine the incessant flashes of lightning, almost hissing, as you remember, it seemed so close … She saw her husband outlined by a vivid flash in the doorway and there to her hand on the valise she saw the pistol – harmless, she thought…’
Then came one of the great moments of Old Bailey mythology. ‘They struggle in the corridor. She kicks him and he takes her by the throat. Do you doubt it? The marks are spoken of in the prison doctor’s report.’ From his seat in counsel’s benches, Marshall Hall physically imitated how, according to the defence, Ali had ‘crouched like an animal, crouched like an Oriental and then it was that the pistol went off ’.
He had picked up the gun, the very gun Marguerite had used to kill her husband, and pointed it at the jury as he made submissions about its mechanism, with a view to establishing, contrary to the facts, that very little pressure on the trigger would discharge several shots. Marshall-Hall repeatedly manipulated the pistol, keeping the jury’s attention, with the aim of emphasising his argument. To represent the fatal shots, he gave three loud raps on the wooden shelving in front of him and, ‘amid a tense silence, the pistol rattled to the floor as it had fallen from the hands of Mme. Fahmy’.473 Causing some people in court to shout out in surprise. (In fact, the gun had slipped out of his hand.)474