Murder | Another Nickel In The Machine

Posts Tagged ‘murder’

James Earl Ray’s Arrest at Heathrow in 1968

Saturday, November 21st, 2009

James Earl Ray's passport photos 1968

At 11 o’clock in the morning on Saturday, June 8th 1968 an immigration officer at Heathrow Airport took a look at a passenger’s Canadian passport and said;

“Would you please step into our office for some routine questions, Mr Sneyd”.

The man he called Mr Sneyd entered the office but when he saw a policeman standing there, all he could say was “Oh God, I feel so trapped” and allowed himself to be arrested.

The bespectacled Mr Sneyd was found to have a .38 caliber revolver in his back pocket and he also, rather suspiciously, had another passport on him under another name.

Scotland Yard’s Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Butler, a man not particularly shy of publicity, soon arrived at Heathrow to make the arrest. Butler had become well known to the British public after the arrest of the Great Train Robbers four years earlier. The observant immigration official’s initial suspicions were confirmed by the senior policeman and fingerprints proved that Sneyd was, in reality, Illinois-born 40 year old James Earl Ray – the escaped convict accused of assassinating Martin Luther King on April 4 in Memphis Tennessee.

Martin Luther King with Lyndon Johnson in the background

Heathrow in 1968

Air Traffic Control at Heathrow in 1968

The bloody balcony in Memphis where Martin Luther King was assassinated

Four days after he had left his fingerprints on the Remington rifle that had killed Dr King, Ray drove across the Canadian border and rented a room in Toronto. It was well-known amongst American prisoners (Ray had been an habitual but unsuccessful criminal pretty well all his adult life), that it was ludicrously easy to get a Canadian passport.

Essentially all you really had to do was swear that you were Canadian and ask for one. Ray asked for a passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd – a Toronto policeman whose name was probably picked at random from a city directory. On May 6 he flew on a BOAC plane to London, and the next day he flew on to Portugal.

The fake passport used by James Earl Ray

Ray's flight details from Toronto to London

The FBI, meanwhile, launched their biggest manhunt in its history but there seemed to be almost no leads at all. However, on June 1, there came a big break. At the FBI’s request (they were also aware of Canada’s lax passport rules), the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been checking hundreds of thousands of passport photos and eventually they came across a picture that closely resembled the escaped convict and the only real suspect for Martin Luther King’s murder – James Earl Ray

While all this was going on, Ray was in Lisbon working out his next move. He apparently attempted to change his fake passport, but only got as far as changing the ‘d’ in Sneyd to an ‘a’. He told the Canadian consul: “My name has been misspelled,” and he was issued with a new passport on May 16.

Earls Court 1968. Photographer Bill Holmes

Earls Court in 1968. Photographer Bill Holmes

The next day Ray flew back to London and anonymously stayed in one of the hundreds of back-street seedy hostels around the Victoria, Pimilico and Earls Court areas of London. On May 28 he checked into the New Earl’s Court Hotel situated at 35-37 Penywern Road – a pretty seedy and run-down street in those days. Jane Nassau the receptionist at the hotel apparently helped Ray with the confusing 5p and 10p coins that had been introduced a month or so before. She later stated that: “I recognised his southern drawl and wondered why he had a Canadian passport.”

jane Nassau, the receptionist at the New Earls Court Hotel

Room 54 at the New Earls Court Hotel

The New Earls Court Hotel in 1968

The very door key for room fifty-four used by Ray at the New Earls Court Hotel

On June 5 Ray moved again, this time staying at the Pax Hotel at 126 Warwick Way (equally seedy in the late sixties) which was run by Swedish-born Mrs. Anna Thomas. She later stated that for the next three days, Ray never left his room for more than 20 minutes, even refusing to to emerge for four telephone calls, two of them from an airline. When she brought breakfast to Ray’s door:

“He was always fully dressed. I had the idea that he never got undressed for bed.”

Mrs Thomas, the proprietress of the Pax Hotel in Pimlico

Ray's room at the Pax Hotel

The Pax Hotel, 126 Warwick Way in 1968

Although it isn’t really known how he got the number, on June 6 Ray, while he was staying at the Pax Hotel, mysteriously telephoned Ian Colvin, a senior journalist at the Daily Telegraph and asked him for a contact who could help him to become a mercenary. Colvin offered an address in Brussels and it was to there Ray was heading when he was arrested at Heathrow two days later.

FBI Wanted Poster

The police van bringing James Earl Ray to court

There must have been a rugby scrum of reporters around these phone boxes outside Bow Street Magistrates Court, June 14 1968

He was initially charged at Cannon Row police station with possessing a forged passport and having a firearm without a certificate but on June 14th James Earl Ray entered the witness box at Bow Street Magistrates Court for his extradition hearing. He flatly denied that he had killed Martin Luther King. Roger Frisby, his British lawyer asked him these questions:

“Are you the man who was arrested at London Airport?

“Yes”

“Did you know Dr. Martin Luther King?

“No Sir”

“Had you ever met him personally in your life?”

“No Sir”

“Have you ever had any grudge of any kind against him?”

“No Sir”

“Did you kill Dr. Martin Luther King?”

“No, Sir”

However, Ray almost certainly did kill him and he was quickly extradited to the States and charged with King’s murder. He confessed to the assassination on March 10, 1969, (though three days later he wrote a letter to the court asking that his plea be set aside – the judge refused the request) and was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

James Earl Ray back in America

He died in 1998 at age 70 from complications related to kidney disease, caused by hepatitis C probably contracted as a result of a blood transfusion given after a stabbing while at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary.

35-37 Penywern Road today, the former site of the New Earls Court Hotel

Bakers Hotel (formerly the Pax Hotel) at 126 Warwick Way today

Dion and the Belmonts – Abraham, Martin and John

Tags: assassination, hotel, Martin Luther King, murder, sixties
Posted in Earls Court, Heathrow, Pimlico | 10 Comments »

The Cafe de Paris, the Trial of Elvira Barney and the death of Snakehips Johnson

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Elvira Barney arriving at her parents house at 6 Belgrave Square, 7th July 1932

Visiting England apparently on a whim and a year before she made her first film late in 1925, a seventeen year-old Louise Brooks became a dancer at the Cafe de Paris in Coventry Street. It was here that she reputedly became the first person to dance the Charleston in London. The Piccadilly nightclub had quickly become the place to be seen after it opened a year earlier in December 1924, not least because the Prince of Wales soon became a regular visitor.

Brooks later wrote about the so-called ‘Bright Young Things’ she had met during her time in London and waspishly described them as a dreadful, moribund lot. She added that when Evelyn Waugh wrote Vile Bodies about them, only a genius could have made a masterpiece out of such glum material.

The Cafe de Paris in 1932

Louise Brooks in 1924

Marion Harris in London in 1932

In May 1932, and eight years after Brooks danced in front of the rich and famous at the Cafe de Paris, the celebrated American singer Marion Harris was in the middle of one of her long engagements at the Cafe de Paris. Harris was known to audiences at the time as the first white woman to sing the blues and after moving to England at the beginning of the thirties was performing to great success in the capital city. The Prince of Wales was actually a big fan and often came to see her sing. One night after she had performed, the manager came into her dressing room excitedly announcing that the Prince of Wales had been so impressed that he would like her to have a drink at his table. Miss Harris coolly declined, telling him that “If your customers get to know you too well, they don’t come back and pay money to see you. The illusion is destroyed.”

She may have been on stage singing ‘the blues’ -- the acts began their set at eleven - when just after midnight on 30th May 1932 an intoxicated couple (both of whom would have undoubtedly considered themself a Bright Young Thing, albeit slightly tarnished), entered the famous West End night for a rather late supper.

The couple were Elvira Barney and her louche bisexual lover Michael Stephen and they had travelled by cab to Coventry Street after holding one of their numerous parties at the home they shared in Williams Mews just off Lowndes Square in Knightsbridge. After they had finished their meal at the Cafe de Paris and had further drinks at The Blue Angel in Dean Street they returned back home in the early hours of that morning.

It wasn’t long before the neighbours, not for the first time, started to hear screaming and yelling from the first floor and Elvira was reported to have shouted:

“Get out, get out! I will shoot you! I will shoot you!’

Almost immediately the street heard the report of a pistol shot echoing into the night and almost immediately a neighbour heard Barney crying

“Chicken, chicken, come back to me. I will do anything you want me to.”

At about 4.50am, after a frantic call to his house just ten minutes earlier, Doctor Thomas Durrant arrived at 21 Williams Mews and came across Barney continually repeating:

“He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident. He wanted to see you to tell you it was only an accident.”

On the stairs, shot in the chest at close range, lay a distinctly moribund Michael Stephen.

‘There was a terrible barney at no. 21′, a neighbour later told the police, apparently unconscious of the pun.

Michael Stephen

21 William Mews and a dead Michael Stephen

21 Williams Mews today, the name seems to have gained an 's' in it seventies development

21 William Mews today

Macdonald Hastings wrote about the fatal evening in his book The Other Mr Churchill, (this Mr Churchill was a forgotten about firearms expert and not the prestigious Prime Minister) and he described the police being incredibly shocked when they entered the mews house:

‘Over the cocktail bar in the corner of the sitting room there was a wall painting which would have been a sensation in a brothel in Pompeii. The library was furnished with publications which could never have passed through His Majesty’s Customs. The place was equipped with the implements of fetishism and perversion.’

Shocked or not, and despite Elvira at one point striking Inspector Campion in the face saying: ”I will teach you to say you will put me in a cell, you vile swine,” after she had made her statement, the police, obviously knowing their place, simply allowed her to go back to her family home at nearby 6 Belgrave Square. She was accompanied by her parents, Sir John and Lady Mullens.

Four years previously, a twenty-three year old Elvira, despite her parents protestations, had married an American singer and entertainer called John Sterling Barney. When they met, at a society function held by Lady Mullens, he had been performing in a ‘top-hat, white-tie and tails’ trio called The Three New-Yorkers. They were relatively successful in the UK at the time and often played at the Cafe de Paris.

The Three New Yorkers at The Cafe de Paris - John Barney is on the left

The Three New Yorkers and a couple of Bell-boys

By many accounts the facile John Barney was a rather unpleasant man and a friend of Elvira’s once recalled:

“One day she held her arms in the air and the burns she displayed -- there and elsewhere -- were, she insisted, the work of her husband who had delighted in crushing his lighted cigarettes out from time to time on her bare skin.”

Violent rows started within weeks of the marriage and after a few months the American returned back to the United States never really to be heard of again. Elvira, according to her biographer Peter Cotes, went off the rails and ’started sniffing the snow…and became the demanding but generous mistress of a number of disorientated and sexually odd lovers.’ Unfortunately he doesn’t really go into any more detail but the description goes someway to explain how, at the start of 1932, she ended up sharing her bed (and her bank account) with the drug-dealing ‘dress-designer’ Michael Scott Stephen.

Sir John Mullens, with his society connections managed to persuade the former Attorney-General Sir Patrick Hastings to defend his daughter. Hastings, in his early fifties, was at the height of his fame as a Kings Council and towards the end of the trial made a final address to the jury, that the judge -- a Mr Justice Humphreys -- later called the best he had ever heard.

The Honourable Mr Justice Humphreys on the way to court

The Honourable Mr Justice Humphreys picking up a London Metro on the way to court

Sir Patrick Hastings on the cover of Time in 1924

The jury must have also been impressed with Sir Patrick’s speech and after two hours returned a not guilty verdict. On his way out of the court Mr Justice Humpheys exclaimed:

‘Most extraordinary! Apparently we should have given her a pat on the back!’

The jury had acquitted her but Fleet Street weren’t going to let her off that easily and they gleefully reported that Elvira Mullens (the name she had reverted to) had shouted on the dance floor of the Cafe de Paris soon after the court case,

‘I am the one who shot her lover -- so take a good look at me.’

Sir Patrick Hastings described Elvira during the trial as ’a young woman with the rest of her life before her’. Unfortunately the rest of her life lasted a only four short years and she was found dead in a Parisian hotel room. After a typical long night of drinking and taking cocaine she had decided to return back to her room complaining that she felt cold and unwell. She was discovered later that night half on her bed, half off, with signs of haemorrhage around her mouth. The years of drinking and drug-taking had finally taken their toll.

The police holding back the crowd at the Old Bailey during the trial of Elvira Barney

Marion Harris in New York

Not long after Elvira Barney’s death in Paris, Marion Harris retired from showbusiness and married a successful English theatrical agent called Leonard Urry. In early 1944 their home in Rutland Street (just a few hundred yards west of Williams Mews) was razed to the ground by a V1 flying bomb.

Harris returned to America completely traumatised and never really recovered from seeing her home completely destroyed. On Sunday, April 23, 1944, alone in a New York hotel room she fell asleep while smoking a cigarette. It set the room alight and it was never disclosed whether she died of burns or suffocation from the smoke.

The Cafe de Paris, unlike the majority of theatres and nightclubs in the West End, remained open at the start of the second world war. This was probably because of the rich and famous patrons having a slight influence on the wartime licensing regulations, however it was said that the dance-floor was so far underground that it would be completely safe when the air-raid sirens sounded.

Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson

On Saturday 8th March 1941 Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson and the West Indian Orchestra were playing at the Cafe de Paris as usual. While carefully not mentioning the actual club or the band leader (due to wartime censorship) Time magazine reported what happened subsequently:

The orchestra at London’s Cafe de Paris gaily played Oh, Johnny, Oh Johnny, How You Can Love! At the tables handsome flying Johnnies, naval Jacks in full dress, guardsmen, territorials, and just plain civics sat making conversational love. The service men were making the most of leave; the civilians were making the most of the lull in bombings of London.

Sirens had sounded. Most of London had descended into shelters, but to those in the cabaret, time seemed too dear to squander underground. Bombs began to fall near by: it was London’s worst night raid in weeks. The orchestra played Oh, Johnny a little louder.

Then the hit came. What had been a nightclub became a nightmare: heaps of wreckage crushing the heaps of dead and maimed, a shambles of silver slippers, broken magnums, torn sheet music, dented saxophones, smashed discs.

A special constable with the rather splendid name Ballard Berkeley was one of the first on the scene. He saw Snakehips Johnson decapitated and elegantly dressed people still sitting at tables seemingly almost in conversation, but stone dead. He was shocked to see looters, mingling with the firemen and the police, cutting the fingers from the dead to get at their expensive rings. Ballard Berkeley many years later became famous as the actor who played the major in Fawlty Towers.

Cafe de Paris, 9th March 1941

In 1929 British International Pictures released Piccadilly starring the beautiful Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong. The scene where Wong’s character Shosho performs her exotic dance in front of an adoring nightclub crowd was filmed in location at the Cafe de Paris. The film also includes a brief appearance from Charles Laughton playing a gluttonous diner -- his first feature film performance.

In 1948, the Cafe de Paris was refurbished and seven years after the tragic death of Snakehips Johnson the doors reopened. Although it was again graced by royalty, notably Princess Margaret, the club never really regained its sophisticated aura it had before the war.

The only evening of note I can find was on 29th September 1965 when Lionel Blair introduced, to an extremely grateful public no doubt, his new dance called ‘The Kick’.I’m not sure but I don’t think it was a storming success.

Lionel Blair accompanied by Cilla Black, Joe Loss and Billy J Kramer dance 'The Kick' at the Cafe de Paris in 1965

Billie Holiday -- These Foolish Things

Al Bowlly -- Dinner For One Please, James

Tags: bombs, drugs, jazz, Louise Brooks, Marion Harris, murder, WW2
Posted in Knightsbridge, Piccadilly, West End | 3 Comments »

Marie Lloyd, Dr Crippen and the Bedford Music Hall in Camden

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Marie Lloyd at home in 1921, a year before she died.

There is a strange, but rather brilliant documentary, directed in 1967 by Norman Cohen, called The London Nobody Knows, the beginning of which features a slightly incongruous James Mason, in very smart polished shoes, gingerly stepping over the literally putrefying remains of an old music hall theatre.

The building was the Bedford Music Hall on Camden High Street and it was said to be Marie Lloyd’s favourite place to perform. Unfortunately the theatre closed permanently in 1959 and the sad, rotting building was eventually demolished ten years later. Two years after nearly ruining James Mason’s brogues.

Excerpt from The London That Nobody Knows

At one point in the film James Mason mentions, with a wry smile on his face, that an early regular performer at the Music Hall may well have still been haunting the place -- a local singer called Belle Elmore.

Elmore’s stage career was relatively unsuccessful and her name is unknown to most of us today, especially as a Music Hall artiste. However, after her death in 1910 she achieved notoriety throughout the land, not as a singer, but as the murdered wife of the infamous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.

The Bedford Theatre in 1949

Belle Elmore in 1900, ten years before she was murdered by her husband.

Dr Crippen

Before the infamous Doctor had murdered Elmore and subsequently burnt her bones in the oven, dissolved her internal organs in an acid bath, buried what was left of the torso under bricks in the basement and placed her decapitated head in a handbag which was subsequently thrown overboard on a day-trip to Dieppe, the married couple lived at 39 Hilldrop Crescent. It was quite a salubrious address about a mile from the Bedford Music Hall.

Hilldrop Crescent near Holloway in 1910

Dr Crippen is notorious, of course, for being the first murderer to be arrested with the use of telephony when, during an attempted escape to Canada on the SS Montrose with his young lover Ethel Le Neve, Captain Henry George Kendall sent a telegraph back to England saying:

Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.

Chief Inspector Dew, who had already once interviewed Crippen and initially decided that he was innocent, took the faster White Line steamer -- the SS Laurentic -- to Canada. On the 31 July 1910 the Inspector greeted the couple when they met him on the ship:

Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.

After a pause, Crippen replied,

Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer.

Crippen then held out his arms for his handcuffs. Dew later recalled:

Old Crippen took it quite well. He always was a bit of a philosopher, though he could not have helped being astounded to see me on board the boat. He was quite a likeable chap in his way.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew

Dr Crippen being led off the SS Montrose, seemingly by one of the Thompson twins but more likely by Chief Inspector Dew

Ethel Le Neve circa 1910

The final resting place of a bit of Belle Elmore

The Hallway at 39 Hilldrop Crescent

Crippen and Ethel Le Neve were tried separately by the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey and Crippen, likeable philosopher or not, was found guilty after just 27 minutes by the jury and subsequently hanged at Pentonville prison in November 1910. Ethel Le Neve, however, was acquitted and only died in 1967 -- not long after James Mason was filmed exploring what was left of the Bedford Music Hall.

The Old Bailey during the trial of Dr Crippen August 10th 1910

James Mason in his piece about the old theatre in Camden failed to relate that only nine years after Marie Lloyd’s fiftieth birthday celebrations (which were incidentally held at the Bedford), and seven years after her death in 1922, the comic-actor Peter Sellers actually lived at the Bedford with his mother and grandmother in a rented flat above the entrance in Camden High Street.

Sellers’ mother was performing at the Bedford in a production called ‘Ha!Ha!!Ha!!!’ along with his father. When the revue finished, Peter’s father Bill suddenly decided to leave home forever, leaving Peter, his mother, and grandmother to totally fend for themselves while still living upstairs at the theatre. Sellers may well have been still living in the flat above the Bedford when he performed, at the age of five, with his mother in a revue called Splash Me! at the Windmill theatre in Great Windmill Street.

The Bedford Theatre’s fortunes eventually declined and, like many other theatres and converted cinemas in London, it eventually capitulated to its unavoidable fate when it fell dark completely in 1959.

Bedford House on Camden High Street in 2007

Dr Crippen’s old address, 39 Hilldrop Crescent, was spared the indignity of being demolished at the whim of a sixties Camden council planning meeting, but only because it was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War. It was replaced, like so many other buildings, by a nondescript block of flats. Another nondescript block was built to replace the Bedford Theatre. It is still known as Bedford House though.

39 Hilldrop Crescent today

Marie Lloyd and Claire Loumaine 1913

If Heat magazine, or perhaps Perez Hilton, had existed before the First World War they would have surely printed the picture above which features a 43 year old Marie Lloyd embracing and kissing a woman called Claire Loumaine. The photograph was taken on 25th April at Paddington Station where the music hall star had gone to meet Loumaine on her return from Australia.

Does anyone know who Claire Loumaine is? I can’t find anything about her at all.

Nine years after Marie Lloyd greeted her close friend off the train at Paddington the music hall star collapsed on stage during a rendition of one of her most famous songs I’m One of the Ruins That Cromwell Knocked About a Bit. The crowd continued laughing thinking that the staggering around that preceded the fall was all part of her act. Lloyd was desperately ill however, and died soon after on 7th October 1922. One hundred thousand people were reported to have attended her funeral five days later in Hampstead.

A twenty year old Marie Lloyd in 1890

Marie Lloyd -- A Little Of What You Fancy Does You Good

Tags: funeral, Metropolitan Police, murder, music hall, trial
Posted in Camden, Holloway | 17 Comments »

The Murder of Ali Fahmy At The Savoy Hotel

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

“What have I done, my dear! What have I done!”

Marguerite Fahmy

The two court cases were over seventy years apart and the LA suburb of Brentwood is a long way from the relative sophistication of London’s Savoy Hotel in the 1920s but when OJ Simpson was infamously acquitted in 1995, despite seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the shocked reaction around the world would not have been dissimilar to when Marguerite Fahmy was sensationally found ‘not guilty’ of the internationally reported murder of her Egyptian playboy husband at the hotel in 1923.

The Savoy Hotel in 1923

The Savoy Hotel had opened in 1889, and had been no stranger to scandal – it was at Oscar Wilde’s infamous trial where it came to light that he had entertained a succession of rent-boys at the hotel’s room 361. After Wilde had been arrested for gross indecency the presiding magistrate said “I know nothing about the Savoy, but I must say that in my view chicken and salad for two at sixteen shillings is very high. I am afraid I shall never supper there myself.”

However it was still the place to stay for celebrities and royalty visiting London. In 1923 the hotel was still seen as one of the finest in the world and in that year, amongst others, Walter Hagen, Fred and Adele Astaire and the opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini (as in chicken) had all stayed there.

Walter Hagen on the roof of the Savoy

Fred and Adele Astaire

A typical dismal drizzly April in London that year had only been brightened by the wedding of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon to the Duke of York, Prince Albert – known as ‘Bertie’ to his family and close friends. The house band at the Savoy Hotel – The Savoy Havana Band – made its debut on the BBC on 13th April 1923, not least because the BBC at the time was next door and shared its generator with the hotel.

A few weeks later on the morning of Sunday 1 July 1923 a limousine drove into Savoy Court and the Hotel doorman helped out a couple who were known to the hotel as the Prince and Princess Fahmy. They were accompanied by the Prince’s private secretary, Mr Said Enani. Accurately Prince Fahmy wasn’t really a prince but he did little to discourage the use of the title when away from Egypt.

Savoy Court – the only road in Britain where drivers are required to drive on the right.

The 22 year Egyptian had met his bride to be, a woman ten years his senior, in Paris the year before -incidentally the year that Egypt was granted independence, if not overall control, by the British Government. To many people Marguerite was seen, at best, as a flirtatious gold-digger and more in love with his not inconsiderable fortune than the man himself. They had married in Egypt, first by a civil ceremony on 26th December and then followed by a Muslim wedding in January 1923 where Madame Fahmy, modestly veiled, proclaimed in Arabic ‘There is one God and Mohammed is His Prophet’.

Mr and Mrs Fahmy in Egypt

After a few days in London, which was experiencing a heatwave, Marguerite Fahmy summoned the Savoy’s doctor – she was suffering badly from external haemorrhoids. She alleged to Dr Gordon, while he was treating her, that her husband had ‘torn her by unnatural intercourse’ and was ‘always pestering her’ for this kind of sex. Already thinking about possible future divorce proceedings she repeatedly asked the doctor for ‘a certificate as to her physical condition to negative the suggestion of her husband that she had made up a story’. The doctor, although respectful, ignored her request.

On the 9th July the couple went to Daly’s Theatre on Cranbourne Street off Leicester Square (where the Vue West End cinema now stands) to see, with hindsight the darkly ironic ‘The Merry Widow’. It had been an incredibly hot day and you can only imagine how uncomfortably warm the theatre must have been in those pre-air-conditioned days (although as far as a lot of the West End is concerned we’re still in those days). Not the ideal conditions for someone suffering from piles I would imagine. The main performers in Lehar’s popular operetta were the 22 year old Evelyn Laye and the Danish matinee idol Carl Brisson.

Carl Brisson

The beautiful Evelyn Laye

Daly's Theatre

The couple returned to the Savoy after the theatre for a late supper, however the meal was disrupted by a huge argument which had recently become almost a daily occurrence. Ali had even appeared in public with scratches on his face and Marguerite had been seen with dark bruises on her face ill-disguised with powder and makeup. The row this time degenerated to such an extent that Marguerite picked up a wine bottle and shouted in French ‘You shut up or I’ll smash this over your head.’ Ali replied ‘If you do, I’ll do the same to you.’ They eventually calmed down, not without the help of the head-waiter, and went to the ballroom to listen to the Savoy Havana Band. The house band no doubt would have been playing at one point Yes, We Have No Bananas or perhaps Ain’t We Got Fun both big hits that year. It wasn’t long before Marguerite, after refusing the offer of a dance with her husband, retired to her room.

Mr Said Enani, as a witness in court a few weeks later, said that Mr Fahmy, in full evening dress, had decided to take a cab in the direction of Piccadilly even though the hot balmy weather had now turned into one of the worse thunderstorms in living memory. When asked the reason why he went, he said he did not know. Although we can perhaps presume that Ali was either visiting an unlicensed nightclub or on the search for either a male or female prostitute both of which frequented the area in high numbers around that part of the West End.

At around 2.00am the hotel’s night porter passed the door to the Fahmy’s suite but heard a low whistle and looking back saw Ali Fahmy bending down apparently whistling for Marguerite’s little dog that had been following the night porter down the corridor. After continuing on his way for just three yards he suddenly heard three shots fired in quick succession.

He ran back and saw Marguerite throw down a black handgun and also saw Ali slumped against the wall bleeding profusely from a wound on his temple from which splinger of bone and brain tissue protruded. ‘Qu’est-ce que j’ai fait, mon cher?’ (what have I done, my dear?’) Marguerite kept saying over and over again.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall - The Great Defender

Marshall Hall was almost 65 at the time of Marguerite’s trial and was a household name. He was six feet three, handsome for his age, and a commanding presence in the courtroom. He was commonly known, after being responsible for several famous acquittals, as ‘The Great Defender’. Marshall Hall’s final speech to the jury in defence of Marguerite, or Madame Fahmy as the press were now calling her, slowly became a character assassination of her dead husband. he portrayed him as a monster of Eastern amoral bisexual depravity. (Not too) subtly Hall accused both Prince Fahmy and his private secretary of being homosexuals.

Ali Fahmy

The public gallery consisted of many young women some of whom were noted to be barely eighteen. Marshall Hall looked up to the gallery saying ‘if women choose to come here to hear this case, they must take the consequences’. None of them left. Meanwhile he turned the attack on Ali to sodomy. Fahmy, said Hall, ‘developed abnormal tendencies and he never treated Madame normally’ Asking them to disregard the fact that the victim was younger than his wife. ‘Yes, he was only 23 years old,’ he told them. ‘But he was given to a life of debauchery and was obsessed with his sexual prowess.’ He went on to remind them that, as an Oriental man, his wife to him was no more than a belonging and that however much he may have acquired the outward signs of urbanity and sophistication, he was forever an Oriental under the skin.

When Marguerite took the stand, she was encouraged by the Great Defender to describe her life as a Muslim bride and to a lot of observers this was when the case turned her way. She testified at one point how she had been sitting ‘in a state of undress in which her modesty would have forbidden her facing even her maid’, she had noticed a strange noise and she pulled aside the hangings that screened an alcove and ’saw crouching there, where he could see every move she made, one of her husband’s numerous ugly, black, half-civilized manservants, who obeyed like slaves his every word’. She screamed for help, but when her husband, appeared from an adjoining room he only, laughed, saying that “He is nobody. He does not count. But he has the right to come here or anywhere you may go and tell me what you are doing.”

It was like a scene from Rudolph Valentino’s The Sheik, the extraordinarily popular film released the year before, and the women in the gallery were treating it as such.

Before he summed up, the judge, referring to the public gallery said, ‘These things are horrible; they are disgusting. How anyone could listen to these things who is not bound to listen to them passes comprehension.’ However he had been swayed by Marshall Hall’s defence, that pandered to the prejudices of the tie, and during the summing up endorsed Marshall Hall by saying ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt they have not the same views…’

The jury, after less than an hour’s consideration, announced ‘not guilty’ to both the charges of murder and of manslaughter, and Madame Fahmy was discharged and was now a free woman.

The prosecution was refused by the judge, seemingly in awe as much as anyone else to the Great Defender, 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’.

If she had been cross-examined properly the jury would have found out that not only had Marguerite been a teenage common prostitute in Bordeaux and in Paris and had an illegitimate daughter when she was just fifteen, but she had also become a trained high-class courtesan (it was said that she always spoke in a rather stilted French because of elocution lessons). Not only that but Marguerite’s husband was not alone in having inclinations towards the same sex: it was found out by a private detective hired by the prosecution that it was well known in Paris that Madame Fahmy “is addicted, or was addicted, to committing certain offences with other women and it would seem that there is nothing that goes on in such surroundings as she has been moving in Paris that she would not be quite well acquainted with…”

The world’s press reported the case with undisguised glee, mostly portraying Mardame Fahmy as less than innocent in more ways than one. The French newspapers concentrated on the fact that the jury considered the case as if a crime passionnel defence was allowed in English law.

Marguerite Fahmy after the trial

After the verdict Marguerite soon left for Paris where she found out that she had no claim to her late husband’s fortune as he had left no will. After a failed, and slightly ludicrous plot where she pretended that she had been pregnant and subsequently borne a son (who would have been entitled to his father’s fortune). She was now almost a laughing stock in Parisian society and became relatively a recluse. She died on 2 January 1971 in Paris. She never remarried.

A big debt to this post is Andrew Rose’s excellent book about the notorious murder entitled Scandal at the Savoy originally published in 1991. The author has copies still available and can be contacted at andrewroseauthor@googlemail.com.

Billy Jones – Yes, We Have No Bananas!

The Savoy Havana Band - I’m Gonna Bring My Girl a Watermelon Tonight

Louis Armstrong, King Oliver and Bessie Smith – Sugarfoot Stomp (Dippermouth Blues)

Jeanette MacDonald – Merry Widow Waltz

Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra – Happy Feet

Erik Satie – Gnossiennes No. 1

Benson Orchestra of Chicago – Ain’t We Got Fun

Tags: death, Egypt, gay, murder, prostitution, sex, trial
Posted in Piccadilly, The Strand | 7 Comments »