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

by Andrew Rose

  The French press, preoccupied that summer with recurrent domestic political crises and with France’s ill-advised occupation of the Ruhr, had largely ignored Marguerite’s fate until the start of her trial. At first, some of the references to her were disparaging, as when Le Temps spoke of ‘Madame Marguerite Fahmy Bey, mieux connue à Paris sous le nom de Maggie Meller…’ (‘… better known in Paris as…’), but the mutual distrust between England and France soon surfaced.

  The Manchester Guardian’s Paris correspondent reported that ‘the execution of Mrs Thompson gave a shock to French public opinion’. Indeed, no woman had been guillotined in France since 1887, whereas in Britain a dozen women had been hanged in the same period. English juries were described as ‘si rigoureux [so harsh]’ by L’Intransigeant; while L’Illustration commented, ‘En matière d’homicide, on sait que les jurys anglais se montrent toujours impitoyables’ (‘With regard to murder, one knows that English juries always show themselves to be merciless’).

  The schoolboy prurience of the English press was absent in France and the racial element less evident. Ali had been ‘un despote maladif [a morbid tyrant]’, but the emphasis was on the shattered dreams of this elegant Parisian woman. ‘LE MIRAGE DE MAGGIE MELLER’ was front-page news in Le Gaulois: ‘Pauvre petite princesse des mauvaises mille et fois nuits! Tout ce malheur est né d’un mirage…’ (‘Poor little princess of the unlucky Thousand and One Nights! All her ill-fortune was caused by an illusion…’) Marguerite had been ‘L’esclave de son mari, le jouet de ses caprices’ (‘The slave of her husband: the plaything of his whims’).

  From being regarded as an unlucky demi-mondaine, Madame Fahmy was fast becoming a latter-day St Joan, a symbol of French womanhood, on trial for her life before a tribunal of the flint-hearted and sexually repressed English. Percival Clarke’s faltering cross-examination was transformed by Le Temps into an interrogation ‘fourmillant de pièges extrêmement difficiles à éventrer’ (‘swarming with traps extremely difficult to break out of ’). The presence of Mlle Simon, ‘une jeune et jolie Parisienne’ had, in France at least, just the effect that her defender had hoped, ‘prêtant son concours à une compatriot malheureuse assise sur le banc des accusés’ (‘giving her help to an unfortunate compatriot seated in the dock’). Though Marshall Hall had delivered ‘une brillante plaiderie’ (‘a sparkling address’), prosecuting counsel had responded with ‘une réplique froide et monotone’ (‘a cold and monotonous reply’).

  The perils of dictation over the telephone were exemplified in the reporting of the judge’s name; several newspapers referred to him as ‘Ribby Swist’, whose summing-up was regarded by Le Figaro as ‘extrêmement severe pour l’accusée’ (‘extremely hard on the accused’). The verdict was a surprise to many. L’Intransigeant reported a conversation between two astonished travellers in a Paris commuter train, shortly after the news of Madame Fahmy’s acquittal had reached the Paris newsstands at 4 p.m. on 15 September. One said ‘C’est extraordinaire … Jamais je n’avais cru les Anglais capable de cela’ (‘It’s extraordinary … I never thought the English capable of it’), while the other replied, ‘Avec leur rigorisme – C’est inoui!’ (‘With their severity, it’s unheard of!’).

  Le Canard Enchaîné took a sideways look at the trial and at Marguerite herself, about whom the satirical weekly nursed no illusions. A spoof interview with Marguerite began, in deadpan style, ‘C’est avec une joie patriotique que la France entire l’acquittement de Mme Fahmy…’ (‘The whole of France has greeted the acquittal of Mme Fahmy with patriotic joy…’) – an absurd exaggeration followed by a dig at Madame herself. ‘Mme Fahmy, qui quelques confrères appellant Mme Maggie Meller – car elle n’a jamais épousé M. André Meller … était Mme Grandjean avant de devenir Mme Fahmy’ (‘Mme Fahmy, who some friends call Mme Maggie Meller, because she wasn’t married to Mr André Meller … was Mme Grandjean before becoming Mme Fahmy’). The reference to ‘Grandjean’ may have been to her former lover, Jean d’Astoreca.

  ‘Maggie Meller’ had come to symbolise, wrote Le Canard, the virtues of the French race: gaieté, esprit de détente (si l’on peut dire), en opposition avec le sérieux hypocrite des Anglais [gaiety, spirit of relaxation (so to speak), as opposed to the solemn hypocrisy of the English]’. ‘Détente’ was a play on words: it also means ‘trigger’. Marguerite, ‘notre illustre compatriote’, confided her plans for the future. She was thinking of going back to the Folies Bergère. With waspish humour, Le Canard gives her supposed reply: ‘Mais, cette fois, sur la scène et non plus au promenoir’ (‘But this time on the stage and not walking about again’), a jibe at the days before the Great War when she had plied her trade as a good-time girl at the Folies.

  The parallel with Jeanne-Marguerite Steinheil, a woman of loose morals also widely thought to have escaped justice after murdering her husband,483 was not overlooked. By this time, Mme Steinheil had become Lady Abinger and was living in England. Marguerite, supposed by Le Canard to have met her there, calls her ‘une copine [a close mate]’.

  The article ended on a savagely accurate note. ‘Will you be inheriting your husband’s fortune?’, she is asked. The reply is perfect. ‘Grands yeux étonnés, délicieusement ingénus, “Certainement, puis qu’il est mort?”’(‘With great astonished eyes, deliciously innocent, “Of course. He’s dead, isn’t he?”’)

  After leaving the Old Bailey and the scene of one of the greatest triumphs of his long career, Marshall Hall had gone straight down to his country cottage at Brook in Surrey to rest. The telegraph boy brought the old campaigner a pleasant surprise that Saturday evening, a cable from Madame Fahmy, who had resumed her maiden name for the occasion: ‘De tout mon Coeur je vous suis profondément reconnaissante – Marguerite Aliber.’ (‘With all my heart, I am deeply grateful to you.’)

  The next day was Marshall Hall’s sixty-fifth birthday, which he marked by replying gallantly and at some length to Marguerite’s wire. Paying tribute to her testimony, ‘bravement donnée [bravely given]’, he apologised for not having personally congratulated her after the verdict, excusing himself on the ground of her manifest exhaustion. ‘J’espère que l’avenir vous donnera beaucoup de moments heureux pour remplacer les misères passes. C’est encore une fois que “la vérité est triomphante”…’ (‘I hope that the future will give you many happy times to replace the sad occasions. “Truth is triumphant” once again…’)

  Marguerite’s telegram was soon followed by a letter, elegantly expressed and written from Princes’ Hotel:

  Septembre 15me 1923

  CHER MAÎTRE – J’arrive et dans cette ambiance de Bonheur un regret m’attriste, celui de n’avóir pu vous prendrer la main et de vous dire merci. Mon emotion était si grande que vous me pardonnerez d’avoir fermé les yeux et de m’être laisser emmener. – Votre profondément reconnaissante M. FAHMY.

  [DEAR MASTER – I arrive and in this happy atmosphere one regret saddens me, that of not being able to take your hand and thank you. My emotion was so great that you will forgive me for having closed my eyes and for allowing myself to take my leave – your profoundly grateful M. FAHMY]

  Before she left, Marguerite had visited Marshall Hall in his chambers at 3 Temple Gardens. Bowker, his clerk, showed Marguerite into his comfortable room, overlooking the River Thames, with original Victorian caricatures decorating the walls, within which the Great Defender sat at his Chippendale desk, with red morocco inset. From time to time, Bowker heard ‘laughter in the room, her rather shrill voice mingling with Marshall Hall’s … measured tones’.484 Marguerite visited Marshall Hall in London on later occasions, fuelling speculation of an affair,485 though she was careful to record in her memoirs that she had been formally presented to his wife.486

  In 1924, Marshall Hall was instructed as prosecuting counsel in the murder trial of Jean-Pierre Vaquier, a Frenchman accused (and ultimately convicted) of poisoning a pub landlord in Surrey. In whimsical mood, Marguerite wrote ‘Je savais par les journaux que vous étiez
contre l’accusé et de de ce fait je me plaignais – mais oui!!!’ (‘I’ve learnt from the papers that you’ve been acting against the defendant and don’t think much of this – yes indeed!!!’).487

  The year before, just after the end of the trial, Marshall Hall had an ulterior motive beyond personally receiving the thanks of his attractive client. He dearly wanted to add her .32 Browning semi-automatic to his already extensive collection of firearms. Normally, acquitted people are given back any of their possessions that have been used as exhibits at their trial, but the pistol had been imported illegally. Marshall Hall’s first step was to get Marguerite’s disclaimer and he wrote out a note, in English, addressed to ‘The Chief of Police, Scotland Yard’, asking that the Browning automatic pistol, ‘Exhibit No.2 in the trial of Rex v. Fahmy’, might be handed to him. Marguerite obligingly appended her signature to the document.

  Shortly before she returned to France, Marguerite wrote yet another billet-doux to her saviour, saying how pleased she was that at last the English newspapers were telling the truth about her. Maître Assouad had penned a neat demolition job on Ali Fahmy for the World’s Pictorial News of 23 September and the first instalment of her own hastily cobbled together memoirs was published the following day in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, also appearing in the New York World and Le Petit Parisien.

  Marshall Hall, determined to get hold of the pistol, began a campaign. Although there was at first some official reluctance, the matter was resolved in an extraordinary way. Sir Wyndham Childs, who may have revealed confidential Special Branch information about the Prince and Marguerite to his old friend, duly minuted: ‘I think we should refuse to hand it over on Madame Fahmy’s request. It would be another matter entirely if we handed it over to Sir E. Marshall Hall as a small memento of a case in which he made such a thrilling speech.’ Two letters were sent from Scotland Yard to Marshall Hall on 11 October 1923. The first was an officially worded refusal of his request, on the grounds that Madame Fahmy had been in unlawful possession of the pistol and the Commissioner therefore could not recognise her authority to hand it over. The other, also signed by Wyndham Childs, was a personal note which made a confidential invitation: ‘… if you would like to send somebody round to see me in about a month’s time, [the Commissioner of Police] will be happy to send you the souvenir … which you desire. My only regret is that the lady did not get a “right and left”…’

  Marshall Hall’s delighted reply confirmed an ‘old pals’ act’ of sizeable proportions. Long-ago shooting expeditions to the moors of Forfar were recalled: ‘I often think of our happy times at Hunt Hill and our journey down together on that awful night…’ and ‘Fido’ Childs’s phrase, ‘right and left’ (presumably a suggestion that Ali Fahmy’s genitalia should have been blasted away), was enthusiastically echoed: ‘PS I think I know where the left barrel ought to have proved effective and I agree.’

  ‘Fido’s’ private opinion of Marguerite was not much more generous than his attitude to her husband had been. The first instalment of Marguerite’s memoirs had provided a colourfully embroidered account of her arrest and detention at Bow Street police station. ‘Naturally, one does not believe all the statements made by this hysterical woman,’ he minuted crustily, ‘but I would like to know what “E” Division have to say … about it.’

  Officialdom was anxious to tidy away the troublesome Fahmy case as soon as possible after the verdict and Madame’s very welcome return to the land of her birth, but the vexed issue of how both Ali and Marguerite had been able to get into the country, each carrying guns and ammunition, continued to worry the Home Office until well into December. One harassed official fruitlessly canvassed a faint possibility: ‘… I suppose these two had not applied for an import licence?’, but there was no doubt that the guns had been illegally imported. ‘Customs must not search persons without reasonable cause for contraband…’, responded the red-faced Customs and Excise. ‘Obviously it would not be right … to subject every person landing to a personal search…’488

  The Savoy’s management must also have harboured the wish that a very tiresome episode in its history would soon be over and forgotten. Towards the end of September, a development in the hotel’s entertainment policy provided a welcome distraction from the sordid revelations of the Fahmy trial. Wilfred de Mornys, musical director at the Savoy, announced the introduction of a second resident band, the Orpheans, which would join the already highly successful Savoy Havana Band. The Evening Standard saluted the Orpheans’ début under the title ‘LONDON’S BRIGHTER EVENINGS’. ‘Last night, I heard the Savoy Orpheans play in the splendidly re-decorated Savoy Hotel ballroom…’, wrote a correspondent. ‘They play beautifully with a swing and rhythm that set the feet stepping and tapping almost unconsciously…’ In his diary, Arnold Bennett wrote of the ‘wonder-band’, who ‘played bad music well’.489 His novel, Imperial Palace, was based on the Savoy, Bennett’s favourite hotel, not least because François Latry, the hotel’s maître cuisinier, had created the famous omelette Arnold Bennett in his honour.

  The hotel’s publicity machine was in top gear, emphasising that the band contained a number of top American musicians and had a ‘£900 piano with its double keyboard [which] is making some interesting experiments with the fox-trot rhythm…’490 The Radio Times promised listeners that the Savoy Orpheans would be a feature of the winter’s entertainment. ‘They will play at the Savoy Hotel, whence the music will be transmitted to a land wire to 2LO, and so, through the ether to your receiving sets.’

  In England, amid such gentle diversions, memories of the antics of that unwelcome pair of foreigners, Ali and Marguerite Fahmy, began to fade from the public mind, wholly unaware of the lady’s chequered history as mistress of the Prince of Wales.

  24

  Show Trial with a Difference

  Madame Fahmy had been triumphantly acquitted in a wave of popular sympathy, but in reality this had been a Show Trial. In the 1930s and 1940s, the notorious trials of supposed traitors or enemies of the people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia were fake processes, condemnation assured. In the England of 1923, the prosecuting authority (with the Royal Household hovering in the background) desperately wanted an acquittal.

  The dire consequences of a conviction for murder were only too obvious. Sentence of death was mandatory. The Home Secretary would then have to decide whether to advise the King to commute the sentence to one of life imprisonment. The agreement reached between Marguerite and the Royal Household in August, with the aim of ensuring her silence about the liaison, could be in jeopardy. Anything could happen in the weeks during which Marguerite’s life lay in the balance. Although strenuous efforts were made in the interwar years by the Home Office to prevent condemned prisoners publishing statements in the newspapers, explanations, justifications and pleas for mercy would often leech out.491 Even if Marguerite were to be reprieved, she was not the type to take incarceration meekly. Her lobby of powerful friends would ensure that Marguerite maintained her media access. The Prince could still be ‘dragged in’ to the noisome world of l’affaire Fahmy.

  Although in retrospect it is not surprising that Marguerite walked free from the Old Bailey, her defending advocate had taken a gloomy view of her chances of acquittal when he was initially instructed by Freke Palmer, in the first days after the shooting. Although he must have received an indication before the start of the trial that Marguerite was safe from cross-examination about past character, Marshall Hall knew that his client’s past life could very possibly put a noose about her neck. Evidence about her real character was kept to a minimum, a state of affairs ensured by the judge’s ruling. By imputing to her husband sexual behaviour of the very basest sort (thus shifting the moral spotlight away from the wife), Marshall Hall went a long way towards securing a favourable verdict. The sexual dimension, coupled with a crude racism, served Marguerite well, although it would be churlish to underestimate the considerable histrionic talents she demonstrated in her own defen
ce.

  When he made his eyecatching entrance into Court Number One, Old Bailey, on the morning of 10 September 1923, Marshall Hall knew that he could cross-examine Said Enani robustly, with no risk of putting Marguerite’s character in issue. He may have had a hint from Bodkin. Marguerite’s family always thought that Marshall Hall knew, before the trial, about her affair with the Prince and the importance of the love letters. Family tradition held that, on the last day of the trial, when things seemed to be going badly for Marguerite, Marshall Hall somehow brought the letters to the attention of the judge, who intervened at this very late stage to ensure acquittal.492 The nature of the trial process rules out this possibility, but there is no doubt that the letters were in play from the time of the shooting in mid-July.

  Marshall Hall may have visited Marguerite in Holloway, though there is no evidence that he did so. At this time, it was unusual for counsel, particularly Leading Counsel, to hold pre-trial conferences with clients in capital cases. Sir Patrick Hastings, a younger contemporary of Marshall Hall, made it a rule never to see an accused person in prison, the risk was that one defendant might say something to counsel directly which (perhaps confincing him counsel’s written instructions) could hamper the conduct of the defence.493

  If Marguerite had been ‘squared’ by the Royal Household (with the assistance of the DPP) in mid-August, as seems to be the case, the terms of the agreement regarding the issue of past character must have come to the attention of the defence team. Confidential information about the hidden background to the case may also have leaked out from Marshall Hall’s old friend, Sir Wyndham (‘Fido’) Childs, head of Special Branch.

  ‘Fido’ Childs, as has been shown, was aware of the Royal Household’s interest in Marguerite at an early date and, despite his very senior position in the Metropolitan Police, seems to have been a bit of a gossip. A year or two later, General Sir William Horwood, Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, would issue a sharp rebuke to his garrulous deputy. In a tartly worded minute, the Commissioner relayed concerns that had been expressed by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Childs had been ‘making a great deal too much’ about security matters ‘while attending dinners and weekend house parties’. Horwood summoned ‘Fido’ to his office at Scotland Yard, telling him that ‘he must absolutely close down discussing “shop” when outside the office’.494