by Andrew Rose
Almost exactly an hour later, an usher returned to court, indicating that a verdict had been reached. Marshall Hall and his corpulent sidekick, Curtis-Bennett, hurried back into court, closely followed by the Clerk of Arraigns. Three sharp knocks again rang out to mark Rigby Swift’s return to his place on the Bench.
Marguerite, ‘very composed’, dressed still in deep mourning, with a black, low-brimmed hat and veil, moved slowly into the dock, where she sat awaiting her fate, her head resting on her hands. Asked to stand, she stared straight ahead at the judge, not venturing to look at the jury as they returned. Some women sitting behind the dock stood up, ‘trembling visibly’, noted the Evening Standard, as the Clerk inquired: ‘Members of the jury, are you agreed upon your verdict?’ ‘We are’, said the foreman. ‘Do you find Marguerite Fahmy guilty or not guilty of the murder of Ali Kamel Fahmy bey?’
Marguerite ‘raised her hands to her chin in an attitude of prayer’.478 The official court interpreter, Ashton-Wolfe, was surely not the only spectator to have waited, with thumping heart, during the momentary but profound silence.
‘Not guilty,’ replied the foreman. A woman shrieked and the court erupted into cheering, stamping feet and tumultuous applause. Marguerite, giving what the Daily Mail described as ‘a little gurgling cry’, collapsed into her seat and wept, black-gloved fingers pressed against her face. Her two wardresses fought back the tears; both women on the jury were visibly moved and one, Mrs Austin, broke down completely, covering her face with her handkerchief as she sobbed aloud.
‘Clear the court,’ shouted Rigby Swift above the pandemonium. It took nearly five minutes before order could be restored and the jury asked if they found Marguerite guilty or not guilty of manslaughter. The foreman’s reply was the same as it had been to the previous question and Rigby Swift, beckoning to Ashton-Wolfe, said brusquely, ‘Tell her that the jury have found her not guilty and that she is discharged. Let her go.’ Marguerite was helped downstairs, to be seen by the prison doctor, while the young and vivacious Mlle Simon was thanked by the judge for her assistance and the jury were discharged from further service, if they so wished, for ten years.
Marshall Hall, as an old campaigner, would have known the likely verdict from tell-tale signs as the jury returned. Generally speaking, if juries are going to convict, they appear solemn and do not look towards the dock. The evident expressions of relief on the faces of some of the male jurors, even, here and there, a slight smile, showed that this was to be yet another notch on Marshall Hall’s forensic gun.
His triumph, however, was tarnished by physical distress and pain. Feeling too ill to see Marguerite, he was helped to the robing-room by Bowker, his clerk, and said that he felt ‘all in’. He had committed more than his usual share of nervous energy to the Fahmy case and, drenched in perspiration, was given a good towelling down and change of clothes by his clerk, before slipping out of a side door to avoid the waiting crowds.
People who had been cleared from the court milled around in the Main Hall on the first floor of the Old Bailey, waiting vainly for Madame Fahmy to appear. But she remained below and the crowd mistook Yvonne Alibert for her sister as she emerged, weeping tears of joy, after a brief embrace with Marguerite in the room underneath the dock. A foolish woman, smartly dressed, who pushed her way over to Yvonne, kissed her on the cheek and breezily exclaimed, ‘Bravo, I’m so glad you’re free as I’ve often been to Paris’, was rightly awarded first prize in the Daily Sketch’s ‘Imbecility Stakes’.479
Helped by Maître Assouad, Yvonne made her way with difficulty down the broad marble staircase, smiling through her tears and exclaiming, according to the English press, ‘Mon dieu! Mon dieu! C’est magnifique, c’est terrible.’ Outside, a solicitor’s young clerk had broken the news to the waiting throng, shouting ‘She’s acquitted!’ As Yvonne reached the steps leading into the street from the Old Bailey’s main entrance, the crowd rushed forward, shouting ‘Bravo the Madame’, and Yvonne, now relishing the impersonation, responded with her arms outspread in triumphant gesture. Hats were thrown into the air and weeping women clutched at her body, in the mistaken belief that this was indeed the sensational Madame Fahmy.
Yvonne managed to scramble into a waiting car, where she joined some of Marguerite’s Parisian friends. After police had cleared a path, Yvonne leant out of the car window, blowing kisses to the crowd and shouting ‘les anglais sont très bien’, as people climbed on to the cars and taxis trapped in the crush, waving handkerchiefs, walking-sticks and umbrellas.
Marguerite, now a free woman, remained in the Old Bailey for three-quarters of an hour, as anxious as her defender had been to avoid the ordeal of recognition. Police obligingly lined up outside the barristers’ entrance in Newgate Street, successfully diverting the crowd. Marguerite gave a last hug to one of her wardresses before finally quitting the scene of her trial. Almost unnoticed, she left by the Lord Mayor’s entrance at the rear of the building, her small, limp form lying motionless against the back seat of a cab.
Travelling with the weary Marguerite in the back of the taxi was Maître Odette Simon, who had rapidly advanced from being volunteer interpreter to the status of friend and confidante. A suite had been reserved for Madame Fahmy, not at the Savoy, with its tragic associations, but at the more discreet Princes’ Hotel, which then stood at 190–96 Piccadilly. Some six years earlier, the Prince of Wales – agog to hear the latest salacious stories about Paris ‘tarts’ – had joined intimate friends there to celebrate the Duke of Westminster’s birthday.
Waiting for Marguerite’s arrival were her Egyptian lawyer, Maître Assouad, her sister Yvonne, Dr Gordon and numerous French well-wishers. Steps were taken at once to secure the maximum commercial advantage from Marguerite’s notoriety. The press thronged the hotel lobby, desperate for the chance to interview Madame. Representatives came from all over the world: one large syndicate of American newspapers sent an open cheque. Despite the fact that the Weekly Dispatch and the Evening News claimed to have had an exclusive right of interview, accounts of Marguerite’s first words in freedom appeared in several other papers, though the Sunday Pictorial, obliged to disappoint its readers, made out that Madame Fahmy had been ‘forbidden to pose or interview by her medical advisers’.480
Dr Gordon was on hand to supervise his patient’s welfare and almost her first action on reaching the hotel, after wiring the good news to Raymonde, safely in Paris, was to telephone Dr Morton, the prison doctor, with whom she seems to have struck up a close friendship. While the newshounds crowded around her (no doubt after suitable financial arrangements had been made with Maître Assouad on his client’s behalf), she sat quietly in her Egyptian-style armchair, occasionally sipping a small glass of Benedictine and smoking cigarettes, which, from time to time, she generously pressed upon the reporters. Still dressed in black, she wore a single string of pearls and bracelets on each wrist. It was noticed that Marguerite, hatless for the first time since her trial began, was wearing her hair ‘caught up with side curls’, not bobbed as she had been in July. She looked wan and drawn.
‘Je n’ai aucun plan pour l’avenir’ (‘I have no plan for the future’), she began, tactfully adding, ‘… je dois render homage à la justice anglaise’ (‘I must pay my respects to English justice’). She still felt dazed and ‘abroutie [stupefied]’ from the effects of the sedative injection she had received in prison. ‘Laissez-moi ajouter que j’ai souffert atrocement durant les débats de ne rien pouvoir comprendre de ce qui se disait autour de moi, alors que ma vie était un jeu…’ (‘Let me add that I suffered terribly during the trial from not being able to understand what was said about me, when my life was just a [courtroom] game…’)
‘Maggie Meller’ could now afford to relax a little. Unable to follow much of the evidence, her thoughts had wandered, she recalled, causing her to muse on the jury, ‘what we French call “bourgeois” – people who had left quiet lives in quiet homes, their simple pleasures and their businesses, to sit in judgement …
What did they think of Marguerite Fahmy, I wonder, and the life so different from their own? Were they shocked at … the simple, brutal truth?’ She also remembered how Percival Clarke had fidgeted with his gown, how his wig had gone awry, and how he had punctuated those bloodless questions with a nervous cough.
From time to time, she had understood a word or a phrase. The judge’s use of the word ‘murder’ had scared her terribly, but she was downright annoyed when she heard prosecuting counsel scornfully describe her as ‘that woman of 32’. ‘Voyons, messieurs’, said Marguerite tartly, ‘a woman of 32 is not old!’ She was also unhappy at the contrast drawn between her age and that of her young husband. ‘Surely his youth did not excuse his violence, his wickedness and, shall I say, his terrible abnormalities?’
It was those very ‘abnormalities’ and the controversial issue of interracial marriage that was the subject of much of the home-grown press comment on the Fahmy case in the next few days, now that the papers were free from reporting constraints operative during the trial. The Evening Standard censured ‘the readiness with which the French inter-marry with coloured people … with whom we hardly mix at all’ and, in the same edition, ‘A Barrister’ warned that ‘… white women take serious risks in marrying outside their own race and religion…’, mooting the possibility of forbidding ‘mixed marriages’ altogether. ‘Where a white woman weds a coloured man,’ adjured the sleazy Reynold’s News, ‘… she does so at her peril.’
The Sunday Pictorial warned parents of young English girls about the dangers lurking in Continental resorts such as Deauville, where ‘a considerable proportion of the holidaymakers live East of Suez … the men are often handsome, frequently rich and entertaining…’ (It was obviously safer to stay in Bognor.) ‘A woman who marries a man not of her own race is taking a step that leads … to disaster … As a slave she has been taken and as a slave she will be held.’ The Daily Mirror, too, emphasised ‘the undesirability of marriages which unite Oriental husbands to European wives’ and, without naming E. M. Hull and her school, roundly condemned ‘women novelists, apparently under the spell of the East, [who] have encouraged the belief that there is something especially romantic in such unions. They are not romantic. They are ridiculous and unseemly.’
Concern was expressed about the interest taken in the case by women, who had loitered about or queued for hours for the chance of a seat in the public gallery. To the Manchester Guardian, the ‘blend of squalor and cheap glamour of great wealth provides exactly the mixture which stimulates a Central Criminal Court crowd. The sightseers seem to be equally divided between the seedy hangers-on who specialise in murder trials and fashionable women in furs…’ The Law Journal, noting that many of these richer women had secured their seats with the help of connections in the City of London, wondered if the Corporation ‘might consider whether the most important criminal court in the country ought to be reduced to the level of a playhouse…’
The allegations made in respect of Ali Fahmy’s sexual behaviour could only be hinted at, but, even with the prudery of the time, hints could be broad ones. The Illustrated Sunday Herald informed its readership that Fahmy was ‘master from boyhood of satiating his eastern voluptuousness…’, while Reynold’s News produced a ‘SECRET HISTORY OF THE TRIAL – WHERE THE NEWSPAPER REPORTS STOPPED SHORT’, written by ‘One Who Was There’. The text did not live up to its titillating title. ‘Nobody who was not present [sic] at the trial can have any idea of the horror … too dreadful even to be hinted at … the abnormal and extraordinary relationship between man and wife…’ This sort of behaviour was foreign to our shores, as the Daily Chronicle soothingly confirmed: ‘[Fahmy’s] particular vices are commoner in the East than here.’
In John Bull the usual mixture of racism and sexual prurience was laid on with a trowel. ‘From the desire for many wives and for women of a certain class, he [Ali] now developed a … sexual perversion which should have unfitted him for human friendship.’ Homosexuality was not directly mentioned, but Ali was supposed to have become ‘completely unsexed … all became as nothing to him beside the one mad desire to live unnaturally’.
Perhaps the most telling commentary, certainly the most self-righteous, came from a Sunday Express editorial headed ‘THE CHRISTIAN ETHOS’: ‘It must not be imagined that this just verdict opens the door to the perilous anarchy of sentimental pity and maudlin compassion in cases of murder by a wife of her husband … on the contrary, it closes the door upon it. If Ali Fahmy had been a normal husband, the jury would not have acquitted his wife.’ The verdict Not Guilty was ‘a vindication of womanhood against the vices that destroyed Rome … the horrors which brought down fire from heaven upon the cities of the plain…’ Forty years later, the writer Macdonald Hastings put the argument more crudely: ‘The reason why Madame Fahmy shot her … husband … was because he was a sodomite.’481
The Sunday Express was convinced that ‘the status of women in our Western civilisation is immeasurably higher than it is in the Orient’. One contemporary snippet of news was overlooked by the sanctimonious commentators. Rose Little was a young woman who had been married in February 1923. Three days later, her husband had knocked her down. Thereafter he did so every Sunday, without fail. These were ‘little tiffs’, the man told Sittingbourne magistrates, who ordered him to pay his wife maintenance at the rate of just £1 per week.482
A feeling that there was more than a whiff of humbug in English reactions to moral issues raised in the Fahmy trial was fanned into a blaze in Egypt, already in political ferment after the return from exile on 17 September 1923 of the veteran nationalist leader Zaghloul. The British had packed him off to the Seychelles two years earlier and his homecoming was, inevitably, a triumph, coming a month before the first elections of the semi-independent Egyptian state.
Nationalist sentiments were especially prickly at this time: the Foreign Office gravely minuted that the Fahmy trial was being used to stir up anti-British feeling in, of all places, Switzerland. Reports of Marshall Hall’s comments and the judge’s summing-up, which appeared to endorse what the defence counsel had said, were received with indignation in Cairo and Alexandria.
The Bâtonnier of the Egyptian Bar sent a long cable of complaint to the British Attorney-General, Sir Douglas Hogg. Marshall Hall’s response was a sorry apologia: ‘Any attack I made was … on the man Ali Fahmy and not on the Egyptians as a nation … The only thing I remember saying that might be misunderstood was that it was a mistake for the Western woman to marry this Eastern man … If, by any chance, in the heat of advocacy, I was betrayed into saying anything that might be construed as an attack on the Egyptians as a nation, I shall be the first to disclaim any such intention…’
Almost alone among the English press, the Daily Chronicle saw merit in the Egyptian protest. ‘The impression might be gained,’ it wrote, ‘that English opinion, in condemning the depravities of Ali Fahmy, was led to regard these as characteristics of Egyptian society…’ Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner in Egypt between 1914 and 1916, shared this balanced, unsensational view of the East: ‘It is a mistake to imagine … that women in Moslem countries are regarded as intellectually negligible. In numerous cases, they have claimed and obtained high positions…’
In Egypt, the Mokattam spoke for other Arabic newspapers (patronisingly referred to as the ‘native press’ in the Egyptian Gazette): ‘The error which was committed by Sir Marshall Hall [sic] and Mr Justice Swift … is not, however, the first mistake committed by Westerners … as the majority of people in England are ignorant of family life in Egypt…’ Recalling the Russell divorce case of earlier that year, a juicy saga of aristocratic bedroom fun, the Mokattam forcefully pointed out how easy it would be to judge ‘the highly civilised English community, relying on the reports of crimes and the cases of divorce which appear daily in the London press’.
Ali Fahmy’s reputation was a casualty amid all these outpourings of justified wrath. In the light of the unpalatable allegations made
at the trial, the Egyptian government felt bound to issue a statement, which claimed that although Ali had enjoyed the reputation of being a ‘notable and personal friend of King Fuad…’, this was incorrect. His only meeting with the monarch had been at the foundation-stone ceremony at the Maghagha hospital. Ali was described, ungenerously and inaccurately, as having been ‘of modest extraction and practically uneducated, except for the veneer acquired in the demi-mondaine [sic] … a libertine of the cosmopolitan type’. A more measured epitaph came from the newspaper Al Lataig Al Musarawa: ‘Those who surrounded him … called him the Prince of Youth. The public, high and low, was a spectator of his prodigality and they regretted deeply that his great wealth brought such little profit to his … countrymen.’
Marguerite, heavily veiled, caught the boat-train at Victoria on 23 September. Wearing a black crêpe gorgette, black cloak and hat, and clasping a bunch of white roses, she travelled back to Paris with her sister Yvonne. Le Figaro commented wistfully, ‘Elle a quitté Londres et ses brouillards où elle a tant souffert’ (‘She has left London and its fogs, where she has suffered so much’). In the meantime, she had received shoals of congratulatory telegrams, several offers of marriage (one from an earl, another ‘in perfect French’, from a professional man in northern England) and a theatrical agent had tempted her, but without success, to appear on the Paris stage.
Before she left, she afforded the People a second interview in which, unbelievably, she expressed herself ‘too distracted to think of any fortune which her Oriental husband might have left her’. Reflecting on her awkward religious position, ‘her wonderful eyes grew dim with tears … “I am afraid of what our Church will say”,’ she murmured.