by Andrew Rose
Although Marshall Hall knew that he was on safe ground with regard to Marguerite’s character, the most famous biography of Marshall Hall, published only six years after the trial and written by the Hon. Edward Marjoribanks MP (elder half-brother of Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham), contains this odd passage:
The cross-examination of the secretary [Said Enani] had been a very delicate matter; if Marshall, always excitable and indiscreet, had in any way attacked the man’s character, this would have entitled the prosecution to attack that of Madame Fahmy and it would have been a fatal mistake to attack that of his secretary … it was of vital importance that she should not be distressed by the introduction of other matters … Mr Roland Oliver [junior counsel for the defence] sat like a watch-dog … to restrain his leader … Marshall Hall obtained all that was necessary … without once attacking the witness himself.
The suggestion that Marshall Hall had not attacked the character of Said Enani is nonsense, underlined by the author’s absurd reference to Marguerite as a ‘fragile creature who had been in the power of this decadent Oriental millionaire’.495 Marjoribanks devoted eighteen pages of text to a detailed summary of the trial, written very much in Marguerite’s favour. ‘Enquiries of the most expensive kind … in Paris’, he wrote, had produced ‘two youths who had been associated with [Ali] Fahmy’, duly sitting in court,‘in case there should be any doubt as to the “prince’s” true character’. Marjoribanks, however, gave no hint that the Prince of Wales had ever played any part in the past life of ‘Madame Fahmy’.
Marjoribanks – educated at Eton and Oxford – was the son of Lord Tweedmouth, a courtier and ‘Lord in Waiting’ to George V. Given his link to the Royal Household and other contacts shared with the Prince, it is hard to believe that Majoribanks knew nothing about the Prince’s liaison with Marguerite by the time the biography was published in 1929, even if news of the love letters had been kept under wraps by the Prince’s secretaries. Marjoribanks also knew gossipy ‘Chips’ Channon,496 confidant of Grace Curzon, whose husband, Marquess Curzon, had blurted out royal secrets in a letter to her written in September 1923.497
Robert Bruce-Lockhart, the adventurer and journalist, considered Marjoribanks to be unbalanced. ‘When he became excited,’ Bruce-Lockhart noted, ‘there was something abnormal about his mentality.’498 In 1932, supposedly after a second jilting by a girlfriend, Marjoribanks committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart with a shotgun. His uneven, unreliable account of the Fahmy trial, strongly pro-Marguerite and contained in a bestselling book of the day,499 has the air of an exercise in disinformation.
With regard to the selection of witnesses for the prosecution, Archibald Bodkin had responsibility for deciding who would give evidence for the Crown at the inquest and in committal proceedings at Bow Street Police Court. His list of expert witnesses, however, omitted the name of someone whose testimony could have materially strengthened the case for the prosecution. The omission is remarkable.
Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the one and only ‘Honorary Pathologist’ to the Home Office, was the most famous pathologist of his day. Making his name in the Crippen case, he had appeared for the prosecution in a series of high-profile murder trials (Seddon, ‘Brides-in-the-Bath’, ‘Button and Badge’, Bywaters and Thompson) and had been knighted in January 1923 after his evidential triumph in the Armstrong poisoning trial the previous October. The sensational background to Marguerite’s case rendered this a true cause célèbre.
Spilsbury was a prosecutor’s dream. He cut a commanding figure in court, dealt in certainties, could put spin on the facts, and played games with the truth, sometimes even embellishing evidence in support of his propositions. Spilsbury had given evidence in several high-profile firearms cases, including Jeannie Baxter (1913), Norman Rutherford (1919) and Dunn and O’Sullivan (1922), the IRA murderers of Sir Henry Wilson. In all the circumstances, the absence of Spilsbury – who was in England and available to be instructed by the Home Office – is a glaring omission on Bodkin’s part, underlining the lack of drive to secure a conviction.
Although Robert Churchill, the firearms expert, would be called to give evidence as a witness for the Crown, the effect of his testimony was blunted by the absence of forensic evidence from Spilsbury, his frequent collaborator in controversial firearms cases.
The post-mortem on Ali Fahmy’s body should have provided the prosecution with its deadliest ammunition. It was conducted by a House Physician at Charing Cross Hospital, on the day after the shooting, who clearly lacked significant experience of forensic pathology. Examination of Ali’s body (his djellaba was quaintly described as looking ‘rather like a tennis shirt’) revealed seven different wounds collectively representing the tracks of the three bullets fired from Marguerite’s gun.
The forensic evidence manifestly supports Beattie’s account of seeing Ali, seconds before he was shot, bending down and whistling to Marguerite’s errant lapdog. The first bullet in the back brought him down, a second passed through the side of the neck, and the coup de grâce, delivered neatly through the left temple, was fired by Marguerite from a closer range, as suggested by the slight blackening around the entrance wound.
Surviving accounts of the trial suggest that, somehow or other, the effect of the post-mortem findings got ‘lost in the wash’, as lawyers say when important facts become overwhelmed in a mass of other evidence. In fact, Marguerite had shot Ali Fahmy straight through the head at point blank range. Spilsbury, at the top of his form as the country’s most famous forensic pathologist, could have exploited these known facts to deadly effect, but in this case the magic words ‘SPILSBURY CALLED IN’ would not be appearing on newspaper hoardings.
As July progressed, Bodkin began to receive advice (not always welcome) from the Fahmy family. Shocked and outraged by the shooting of their much-loved only brother and fearful of Marguerite’s designs on his fortune, Ali’s sisters joined forces to seek legal advice. They wanted to see Marguerite convicted of murdering their brother. Expensive Egyptian lawyers were recruited to the cause and, as has been seen,500 an English private detective, ex-Chief Inspector Stockley, was sent to Paris with a view to digging some dirt about Marguerite’s past life.501 Marguerite’s life as a high-class prostitute, her acquisitive streak, her cynical approach to marriage, her violent temper, even her lesbian interests, were duly recorded for the information of police and the DPP. The wording suggests that Stockley spoke no French and was wholly reliant on an interpreter for his information, most of which seems to have come from Mme Denart, the ‘old woman’ who had managed Marguerite at the start of her career.
Dr Abdul Ragai bey, an Egyptian barrister, prepared a lengthy memorandum on the case, written in reasonably clear English, highlighting the differences between English law and sharia practice. The family also instructed an English solicitor, W. Ewart Craigie of Gray’s Inn Square, in a further attempt to persuade the DPP to call ‘some witnesses proving murder premeditation’.
On 22 August, Dr Said, his wife, and Dr Ragai arrived in London, installing themselves in the Hotel Metropole, then one of London’s smartest hotels, situated in Northumberland Avenue, easy walking distance from the DPP’s office. Ragai immediately wrote to Bodkin, asking to know what was happening with regard to prospective witnesses from Egypt, ‘waiting for an answer and apologising for my bad English’. A DPP official minuted sniffily, ‘This letter was found this morning “on my doormat”. I do not think in view of my letter to Mr Craigie that we need deal with it.’
Craigie had been told that, ‘in view of the nature of the statements’, Bodkin was ‘not of the opinion that the presence of such witnesses in England need be procured’. A week later, after Ragai’s report had been submitted to an unenthusiastic DPP, Craigie wrote that his clients had ‘expressed surprise that you have not thought it necessary to interview them’, adding the forceful rider that ‘they might be able to give you information regarding the dead man…’
The Ragai memorandum cited aspects
of sharia law which would have been unacceptable in 1920s England. There was provision for ‘moderate disciplinary punishment for each disobedience [by a wife]’, quoted from a legal textbook Mohammedan Personal Law by Kadri Pacha, as well as ‘the right to forbid [the wife] to leave the house without permission’.
Ragai was on stronger ground in his submission regarding evidence of premeditation and motive. He pointed out that Marguerite could have deposited her jewels for safety with the hotel (the Savoy was quite used to that sort of thing) and did not need to carry a gun to protect them. Furthermore, if she was unhappy with Ali, she could simply have stayed in Paris. As to allegations about Ali’s sexual demands, Ragai argued plausibly that Marguerite had ‘seen many men before the deceased … some of whom might have had this perversion’.
Three witness statements were submitted to the DPP by Ragai, but their evidence would never be heard by the jury. The wording of the statements suggests that each witness was broadly credible and that they had not been schooled by the Fahmy camp. The head of the perfumery department at Cicurel’s (the most expensive store in Cairo) deposed to Marguerite’s extravagance and her ‘quite polite’ husband’s weary acceptance. A Cairo modiste remembered that Marguerite was ‘continually talking about Ali’, who, she claimed, ‘wished to indulge in unnatural vice but that he could die before she would allow him’, a declaration that does not sit well with other evidence about brothel practices in Paris. Marguerite also said that she had a ‘programme’ of her own against Ali, which she would carry out in Europe and ‘then everyone would know of it’.
The most important witness to be ignored by the DPP was Mahmoud Abul Fath. Born in 1885, Mahmoud was far from being fellaheen, enjoying a middle-class, academic background. He became Ali’s secretary for a time (later to be succeeded by Said Enani) and in 1922 joined the staff of the prominent Cairo newspaper Al-Ahram, of which he later became editor. Mahmoud had links with the nationalist Wafd Party and his media career led to interviews with leading Egyptian statesmen and international figures. As has been noted in Chapter Six, Mahmoud was with Ali during the visit to Paris in the summer of 1922. During the Tut-Ankh-Amun season, Mahmoud joined Ali and Marguerite on board the dahabeeyah for the mysterious visit made by Howard Carter and General Sir John Maxwell.
Mahmoud would have given evidence that he had once been ‘on very intimate terms’ with Marguerite, a connection that may have begun during her 1921 visit to Egypt. Marguerite told Mahmoud, who spoke fluent French, a great deal about her private and personal affairs. With a striking familiarity to what she had said to Mme Denart before marrying Charles Laurent, Marguerite admitted to Mahmoud that she was only marrying Ali for his money. Her conversion to Islam was purely to exploit rights that accrued to her under sharia law.
Marguerite knew that if Ali died childless, she would get only a quarter of his fortune, but if she had a baby, the child would get half or all, depending on its gender, and she spoke of trying to get pregnant. She expressed hatred for Ali and again boasted that she had a programme in mind. ‘You will hear of it. Everyone will,’ she said. After the fulfilment of her ‘programme’, she would sell all Ali’s property in Egypt, returning to Europe to live alone on the proceeds. ‘She gave me plainly to understand,’ Mahmoud told G. L. Moriarty, an English barrister based in Cairo, ‘that some time in the future she intended to kill him.’502
Mahmoud’s account of Marguerite’s own words, showing her growing hostility to Ali, her greed, threats and obsession with money, reads coherently and is consistent with other accounts of these disagreeable aspects of her character. The DPP was obliged to put forward witnesses whose testimony was relevant, admissible, and capable of belief by a jury. Bodkin, almost certainly for reasons connected with pressure from the Royal Household, manifestly failed that responsibility.
Thanks to the judge’s ruling, which wholly ignored the suggestions of venal conduct and of homosexuality that Marshall Hall had put to Said Enani, Marguerite’s own background escaped searching inquiry. Percival Clarke’s ill-judged question about the cab driver father had backfired on the prosecution and the jury were left with the impression that Marguerite was a divorcee who had enjoyed a number of affairs and whose love child had been legitimised by marriage to Charles Laurent. The jury were not to know the truth: that Marguerite had fifteen years’ experience of working as a high-class courtesan.
A further matter that seems not to have been canvassed was whether Marguerite had known the content of the three telegrams, each worded ‘NOTHING TO BE DELIVERED TO MY WIFE ON MY ACCOUNT DURING MY ABSENCE. FAHMY’, sent off during the interval of The Merry Widow. Marguerite had made an unsuccessful attempt to collect one of the expensive Vuitton handbags while Ali was away in Stuttgart in June. Her reaction to the discovery that Ali was pre-empting any attempt to clear those plush Paris stores of all the expensive goods held on his account was likely to have been a violent one. Clarke appears not to have made any use of these telegrams in his cross-examination of Marguerite, leaving the jury unaware of their existence.
Marguerite also escaped searching inquiry about her financial circumstances. In evidence, she claimed that she was effectively penniless in London, wholly dependent on her husband. There is no doubt that Marguerite was already an extremely wealthy woman when she married Ali. The evidence suggests that she could easily have afforded to pay for both the operation and the journey back to Paris, where, the previous month, she had bought another horse for her already considerable stable.
A more delicate topic, and one handled inadequately by the prosecution, was the vexed question of Madame’s piles. Just how long had she been suffering from this painful complaint? Because questions about Marguerite’s background were off limits, the fact that some prostitutes have practised anal intercourse from time immemorial, as the surest way of avoiding conception, was never canvassed before the jury.
Another important element that never came to the jury’s attention was Ali Fahmy’s mysterious journey from the Savoy to the Piccadilly area, made at the height of the tremendous thunderstorm. Such late-night excursions had been a feature of Ali’s life both in Cairo and in Paris. Despite this and despite compelling newspaper reportage, the DPP ignored the episode, endorsing his file, ‘What happened between 1.45 and 2.30 is not known.’503 That sweltering Monday in London must have been a time of intense emotional pressure, accompanied by a desire for relief, away from his increasingly bad-tempered wife. The relationship with Marguerite was at an all-time low: he had long doubted her fidelity, and with reason. He was now openly talking about divorce. She was accusing him of cruelty both physical and sexual; and, come hell or high water, she was going back to Paris the next day, leaving him to spend his Season in London alone and shamed.
There may have been a sexual motive for leaving the hotel, or Ali may simply have wanted to get away from his fractious wife for a while. He was away for perhaps an hour, ample time for a physical liaison or a visit to a club, and Ali was quite rich enough to have paid his cab driver to wait until he decided to return to the Savoy (Marguerite’s chauffeur, very much parti pris in her favour, is unlikely to have been roused on this occasion). Ali’s exact destination remains a mystery. It could have been any one of a number of late-night clubs in the West End, many operating illegally.
Mrs Kate Meyrick, ‘Queen of the Night Clubs’, had fallen foul of the licensing law on numerous occasions, operating drinking clubs in Gerard Street (the infamous ‘43’) and, later, in Newman Street, near Oxford Circus. Kate remembered seeing Ali, with his ‘graceful, dignified carriage, good looks and the vague air of mystery that seemed to brood over him’. On her account, Ali took French leave from Marguerite during their short London stay, entering the club around midnight with ‘some beautiful and exquisitely gowned woman’, always with a ‘wiry Egyptian’ (perhaps Said Enani) in attendance. Ali confided that he was jealous of Marguerite. ‘She fascinates me, but … I feel that she possesses a stronger personality … I’m almost frightened of
her beauty and her brilliant intellect … When I’m with her I have a feeling of intellectual inferiority.’ On the night of the shooting, a dark-eyed girl, ‘conspicuously restless’, waited for Ali, but he did not visit the club that night.504
Ali could have taken his pleasure elsewhere or spent time in one of the other seedy West End clubs. Whatever happened could very possibly have acted as a spur to the bitter row that raged in the suite immediately before Ali was killed. Clarke did not ask Marguerite about her reaction to Ali’s absence and for her part she was hardly likely to have wanted to introduce this sort of evidence into the case. Police took no steps to follow up the story. So the jury, unless they could remember July’s newspaper reports, knew nothing about that rain-sodden journey. Said Enani made no mention of the trip. Perhaps the loyal secretary, not for the first time, was covering up for his master’s indiscretion, out of regard for his surviving family.
What did happen on that stormy night in the summer of 1923? Marguerite’s story of the crouching Oriental, ready to leap on her in a hotel corridor where, even at that late hour, people were passing and re-passing, is intrinsically ridiculous, as is her melodramatic account of Fahmy demanding his favourite sexual activity, accompanied by the waving of banknotes before his wife’s helpless eyes. Much of the rest of Marguerite’s narrative was culled from self-serving material compiled with an eye to an expensive divorce settlement and to lay a foundation for her defence if, in the end, she decided to give effect to her ‘programme’ and kill her husband.