24

‘I passed from despair to hope and hope to despair’

Central London, 1923

At the height of a thunderstorm in the early hours of 10 July 1923, night porter John Paul Beattie was carrying luggage along a corridor at The Savoy Hotel in London when a man dressed in a nightshirt, dressing gown and slippers suddenly came out of a suite and spoke to him. ‘Look at my face,’ the man demanded, ‘Look what she has done.’

Beattie saw nothing more serious than a faint red mark on the man’s left cheek. A moment later, a woman appeared, speaking rapidly in French and pointing at her eyes but Beattie, who didn’t speak or understand French, could see nothing wrong with them. When the couple began arguing, he asked them to go back to their rooms and not create a disturbance in the corridor but when the door to the couple’s suite was opened, a small dog ran out and started following the porter along the corridor. The man was bending down, whistling and snapping his fingers to the dog when suddenly three shots rang out in quick succession and Beattie turned to see the man lying on the floor. The woman was standing nearby and as Beattie watched, she threw down a smoking black gun and began to babble excitedly. He grabbed her by the wrist and held onto her tightly until the hotel’s night manager arrived to investigate the source of the shots.

As manager Albert (or Arthur) Mariani approached, the woman was still rambling. ‘What have I done? What can I do?’ she asked repeatedly, adding in French, ‘I have been married six months and it has been torture. I have suffered terribly.’

The man lying unconscious on the carpet bleeding from gunshot wounds to his head and neck was a wealthy Egyptian, Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey, and the woman was his wife, Frenchwoman Maria Marguerite Fahmy, usually known as Marguerite (Fahmy had no right to the title of prince, although he did little to discourage people from using it.) Fahmy, his wife and his entourage, which included a male secretary, a valet and a personal maid, were scheduled to remain in London until the end of the traditional ‘season’, during which all of the most prestigious social events took place.

A doctor and ambulance were immediately summoned for Fahmy but even though Charing Cross Hospital was situated only a few hundred yards away from the hotel, he died shortly after arrival. Mme Fahmy was immediately arrested and, with the assistance of an interpreter, charged with his wilful murder.

On 12 July, an inquest was opened by Westminster coroner Mr Ingleby Oddie. One of the chief witnesses was Said Enani, who worked as secretary to twenty-two-year-old Fahmy. Enani explained that his employer was a land owner and property agent, with a substantial personal income, the size of which fluctuated depending on the rise and fall of cotton prices. On 5 December 1922, he had married thirty-two-year-old divorcee Marguerite in Cairo, having first lived with her. The couple left Egypt for Paris on 18 May, staying in The Majestic Hotel there until leaving for England on 30 June.

Enani told the inquest that his employer’s marriage had been disastrous almost from the outset. ‘They quarrelled about trifles,’ he recalled, revealing that most of their arguments resulted from jealousy. They insulted each other and smacked each other frequently, often in public and, after Mme Fahmy publicly insulted her husband’s two sisters, his entire family took a dislike to her and tried to persuade him to leave.

‘Have you ever seen him strike her with his fist?’ the coroner asked the secretary.

‘Only once, in Paris,’ Enani replied, adding that he had seen Mme Fahmy hitting her husband on several occasions.

Both husband and wife possessed revolvers, revealed Enani. Prince Fahmy usually kept his locked away, although while he was in Paris it had been on his bedside table. Mme Fahmy insisted on carrying a gun whenever she went out, since she wore a lot of valuable jewellery. She habitually kept her gun on the bedside table.

Enani told the inquest that on 9 July, he had eaten lunch at the hotel with Prince Fahmy and his wife, during which the couple traded insults, seemingly oblivious to the presence of the waiters and other guests. After lunch, the prince went upstairs for a rest and Mme Fahmy, who spoke little English, begged the secretary to take her shopping. She was planning to return to France for a minor operation, which was a bone of contention for her husband, who believed she should have the surgery in England. Enani stated that Mme Fahmy talked constantly about leaving her husband, saying that she was ‘fed up’ and lived a miserable life.

The threesome went to a theatre that evening, and then ate supper together at a dinner dance, when the Fahmys continued their quarrel from lunchtime. At one point, Mme Fahmy threatened to break a bottle over her husband’s head after he tried to lay down the law, telling her that she must not leave him and insisting that she had her operation in London. When the bandmaster circulated around the dining room asking if there were any requests for particular pieces of music, Mme Fahmy snapped at him, ‘I don’t want any music. My husband has threatened to kill me tonight.’

Although Mme Fahmy danced with Said Enani, she twice refused to dance with her husband, saying that she had finished with him. Eventually, Mme Fahmy went to bed, her husband following shortly afterwards. Minutes later, Fahmy came back downstairs, telling his secretary that his wife had locked the door of their suite and refused to let him in. He and Enani sat talking for a while and Enani tried to persuade his employer to let his wife go to France but Fahmy refused to give an inch and eventually his secretary went to bed. He was woken by the telephone at 2.40 a.m. on 10 July. It was Mme Fahmy, who shouted, ‘Come quickly, come quickly, I have shot Ali. I do not know how I did it.’

When questioned, Enani agreed that Fahmy ill-treated his wife, admitting that he had seen bruises on her arms and that Fahmy had once locked Marguerite in a ship’s cabin for twenty-four hours because he was so jealous. On 9 July, Fahmy had threatened to smash a bottle over his wife’s head but she had made a similar threat to him later that day. ‘That sort of thing was continual,’ the secretary claimed.

After Enani had finished his testimony, night porter Beattie spoke of hearing three shots and later picking up three discharged cartridges and a bullet in the corridor, while Inspector Grosse, who was in charge of investigations, identified a cream beaded evening gown, which Mme Fahmy was wearing at the time of the shooting. The inspector was asked, ‘Did you notice whether her arms were bruised at all?’ but claimed he had not seen any bruising.

The next witness was Dr Edward Gordon, who had been consulted by Mme Fahmy about what was described as a ‘fairly common but painful ondition’. (Although little detail was reported in the contemporary newspapers, Mme Fahmy was suffering from piles, which she allegedly blamed on her husband’s penchant for rough anal sex.) Gordon had seen Mme Fahmy on 9 July and arranged for her to have an operation in a nursing home but the next time he saw her was on 10 July, when he was called to her hotel suite.

He described Mme Fahmy as being ‘in an excited state’ and said that she was keen to tell him what had happened since her appointment with him. According to the doctor, Mme Fahmy claimed that her husband didn’t believe there was anything wrong with her and refused to pay a penny for her operation, believing that her stay in a nursing home was an attempt to escape from him. Mme Fahmy said that she would go to Paris and see her family, having the operation while she was there and had booked a ticket to travel to France the next day, but that didn’t suit her husband either and he backtracked, insisting she stayed in England for the surgery where he could keep an eye on her. When she argued for Paris, Fahmy threatened to kill her if she left him by ‘smashing her head in’.

Mme Fahmy had told the doctor that her husband had ‘forced his unnatural attentions upon her’ and she had fired her gun out of the hotel window to frighten him. Then, thinking she had emptied it, she fired it at her husband. When Fahmy dropped to the ground, she first thought he was shamming and claimed that it wasn’t until she saw blood that she realised what she had done.

Police Sergeant Hall confirmed that Mme Fahmy seemed very dazed and confused when taken to the police station after the shooting. She repeatedly said in her native French, ‘I cannot understand what I have done,’ and, ‘They say I have shot my husband. How many shots did I fire?’ It fell to Hall to break the news to Mme Fahmy that her husband was dead and she broke down and wept on hearing the news. When Inspector Grosse charged her with murder, she said through an interpreter, ‘I have told the police I did it. It does not matter. He has assaulted me in front of many people since we have been married. He has told me many times to kill him and many people have heard him say so. I lost my head.’

It remained only for Dr Maurice Newfield of Charing Cross Hospital to confirm the extent of Fahmy’s injuries for the coroner. Fahmy was admitted to hospital at 2.55 a.m. and died thirty minutes later from severe laceration of the brain tissue, resulting from bullet wounds in the head. In all, Fahmy had seven wounds. One bullet, fired from between one and two yards away, entered his left temple and exited the right-hand side of his neck. A second caused four separate wounds in his back, armpit and left arm, while the seventh wound was caused by a glancing shot in the neck.

Having heard all the evidence, the inquest jury didn’t even feel that they needed to retire to deliberate their verdict, almost immediately returning a verdict of wilful murder against Mme Fahmy. When she was brought before magistrates at Bow Street Police Court a few days later, it was confirmed that an empty cartridge case had been picked up from the ground outside the Fahmys’ suite, supporting Mme Fahmy’s statement that she had fired the gun out of the window, before shooting her husband. Mr Freke Palmer, who had been appointed to defend Mme Fahmy, contested the translation of some of his client’s statements by the interpreter, in particular the phrase, ‘He has told me many times to kill him’, which Palmer believed was actually, ‘He has threatened to kill me many times’. Nevertheless, Mme Fahmy was committed for trial at the next assizes to be held at the Old Bailey.

The trial opened on 10 September 1923 and was presided over by Mr Justice Rigby Swift. Mr Clarke KC appeared for the prosecution, with Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC defending. Hall was rather a theatrical man, whose arrival in court was said to have been preceded by his clerk bearing a collection of medicine bottles, a throat spray, a footstool and a cushion to alleviate the excruciating agony of his haemorrhoids, a condition he and his client had in common.

One of the first witnesses was Said Enani, who admitted that his employer was not a real prince, although he did nothing to discourage people from thinking that he was. Enani claimed that his relationship with his employer was ‘friendly’ but denied having any influence over him.

‘You have known of his intimacies with many women?’ Hall asked him.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Enani.

‘Do you know that he treated them brutally, one and all,’ the defence counsel persisted.

‘No, sir, I cannot say brutally,’ Enani demurred, although he conceded that Fahmy often argued with his women friends.

It was established that, under Egyptian law, Fahmy was entitled to have up to four wives. Before their marriage, Mme Fahmy converted to the Muslim faith but had stipulated that she could continue to wear Western clothing and that she retained the right to divorce her husband. Hall suggested that Fahmy had sworn on the Koran that he would kill his wife, threatened to disfigure her so that nobody else would want her and had once punched her so hard that he dislocated her jaw, although Enani claimed not to remember any of these incidents.

Hall then produced a letter that Fahmy had written to his wife’s sister that read: ‘The question of my marriage … Ha, ho, ha. Just now I am engaged in training her. Yesterday, to begin, I did not come in to lunch or to dinner. This will teach her I hope to respect my wishes.’

On 13 September, thirty-two-year-old Marguerite Fahmy stepped into the witness box. She swooned and frequently broke down in tears as she gave her evidence and, since she spoke little English, the questions and her answers were translated by an interpreter.

Before she was allowed to speak, the judge dismissed the jury and ruled on a point of law raised by her defence counsel. Hall was concerned that the counsel for the prosecution intended to cross-examine Marguerite as to whether or not she had led ‘an immoral life’, a line of questioning which, in Hall’s opinion, was likely to prejudice the jury against her.

‘I think I should rely upon Mr Clarke not to put questions on irresponsible information,’ said the judge.

Hall was not mollified. ‘I do not know what innuendos may be thrown out,’ he protested.

Mr Clarke insisted that all he wanted to do was to dispel the idea that the defendant was a ‘poor child domineered over by the man’. He wanted to show that she had associated with men from an early age and was a woman of the world in the widest sense.

Mr Justice Rigby Swift pointed out that Hall had already said in his opening speech that the defendant was an immoral woman, although he phrased it in such a way as to give the impression that she was an innocent and most respectable lady. ‘It is a difficult thing to do but Sir Edward, with all the skill we have admired for so long, has done it.’

The judge eventually ruled that the prosecution had no right to ask about her relations with any men other than her deceased husband. Thus the jury were spared the knowledge that Mme Fahmy had been a prostitute as a teenager and had given birth to an illegitimate daughter when she was only fifteen. She had also worked as a high-class courtesan and was said to enjoy sexual relations with both men and women.

When the jury returned, Marguerite Fahmy confirmed that she had first married in 1919 and divorced her husband on the grounds of his desertion. She met Fahmy on 30 July 1922 and quickly grew very fond of him. When Fahmy returned to Egypt he sent several letters and telegrams claiming to be ill to get her to visit him. His ruse worked and when Marguerite arrived in his country, Fahmy set about showing her evidence of his great wealth. He took her to his home, which he described as his ‘palace’ and to his parents’ home in Alexandria. He also showed her his motorboat and fleet of expensive cars. ‘I loved him very much and wished to be with him,’ Marguerite protested when it was suggested to her that she was a gold digger, who married for money and prestige.

By Christmas Day, Marguerite wanted to leave Egypt but Fahmy coerced her into signing a civil marriage contract, which specified that he would pay her a total dowry of 8,000 Egyptian pounds. Marguerite claimed to have been intimidated by the number of ‘ugly, black, half-civilized manservants’ in the house, where she and her maid were the only white women.

At the end of January, Fahmy swore on the Koran that he would kill Marguerite but later begged her forgiveness and affirmed his love for her. Marguerite forgave him and agreed to sail to Luxor with him on his yacht. However, according to Marguerite, the trip turned into a living nightmare as Fahmy locked her in the cabin, quarrelled with her constantly and hit her. She claimed to have been ‘surrounded by black men’, who spied on her while she was undressing. Accusing Enani of exerting a powerful influence over her husband, she recalled remonstrating with him on one occasion for always taking her husband’s side, claiming that he offered to go away for £2,000. ‘He was not my friend,’ complained Marguerite. ‘He obeyed my husband’s orders. Each time I told him something he immediately went to my husband and told him what I said. He always did whatever he could to make things worse.’

Marguerite described other outrages by her husband, including the punch that dislocated her jaw, a beating with a horsewhip in Paris and her introduction to a mysterious man named ‘Costa’, who apparently owed Fahmy a big favour and would willingly carry out any order Fahmy gave him.

‘Why did you consent to come to London when you were so frightened?’ Hall asked. Marguerite explained that she wanted to see her daughter, who was at school near London.

‘Every time I threatened to leave him he cried and promised to alter,’ she wept. ‘I passed from despair to hope and hope to despair.’

Once in London, Marguerite recalled that her husband’s abuse worsened. There was a heatwave at the time and Fahmy was bad tempered and irritable and threatened to throw her into the Thames, saying, ‘I am tired of you.’ When she told him that she would rather be dead than live like this, he reminded her that she had a revolver and that their room was on the fourth floor of the hotel.

Questioned about the night of the murder, Marguerite claimed to have taken the gun out of the drawer. She knew that it was loaded and said that she had attempted to take the cartridge out but the gun went off, shooting a bullet through the open window and leading her to believe that this meant that the gun was now unloaded and therefore safe. When she and Fahmy began arguing, Marguerite claimed that he tore her dress, seized her by the throat, spat at her and threatened to kill her. Claiming to be afraid for her life and wanting to frighten her husband into letting her go, Marguerite aimed the gun at him and pulled the trigger. Even after the retort of the gunshot, when her husband collapsed on the floor of the hotel corridor, Marguerite still believed that he was shamming

On 13 September, Hall objected to the interpreter, who at his request was replaced by a French female barrister. Marguerite Fahmy completed her evidence by reiterating the fact that she was in fear for her life at the time of the shooting and genuinely believed that the gun was not loaded. The defence then proceeded to call several witnesses who had seen bruises on Marguerite. A letter written by Marguerite and left with a solicitor, to be opened in the event of her death, was also produced in court. Dated 23 January 1923, it stated that, should she die violently or otherwise, she accused her husband, relating that he had sworn on the Koran that she must ‘disappear by his hand’.

Sir Edward Marshall Hall rose to begin his closing speech at 3.25 p.m. on 13 September. He urged the jury not to allow their sympathy for ‘this poor woman’ to interfere with returning a proper verdict. There are only two issues – either this was a deliberate, premeditated and cowardly murder or it was a shot fired by this woman from a gun that she believed to be unloaded at a moment when she believed her life to be in mortal danger.

‘She made one mistake, possibly the greatest mistake any woman can make,’ Hall continued, in a speech that was to prompt the strongest protests from Egypt. According to Hall, Marguerite, a woman of the West, should never have married ‘an Oriental’. He expanded on his theory, saying, ‘I don’t suggest that among the Egyptians there are not many magnificent and splendid men but if you strip off the external civilisation of the Oriental, you get the real Oriental underneath and it is common knowledge that the Oriental’s treatment of women does not fit in with the idea the Western woman has of the proper way she should be treated by her husband.’ Hall’s speech continued in the same vein for two and a half hours, during which he portrayed the defendant as a woman of nervous temperament who had been repeatedly been ‘outraged, abused, beaten and degraded’ by her husband, who had the base instincts of an ‘Oriental’.

‘How easy it is to speak ill of the dead,’ responded Percival Clarke, as he began his closing speech for the prosecution, accusing Hall of creating so much prejudice against Fahmy as to make the jury think that the world would be well rid of him and he deserved to die at the prisoner’s hands. On the contrary, Fahmy was prepared to give his wife far more freedom than is known in any other family in Egypt. Before finishing his speech, Clarke reminded the jury that the hotel porter Beattie had testified that Fahmy was shot while he was bending down snapping his fingers at the dog. Was there any doubt that after quarrelling with the deceased, the accused lost both her temper and her head and, in a moment of passion, fired the pistol at her husband, knowing full well that it was loaded.

Mr Justice Swift went over the main points of the case for the jury, instructing them that this was not a case in which the accused could be given the benefit of the doubt and unless there was something specific to the contrary, the killing of Ali Fahmy was wilful murder and they were bound by law to return that verdict. ‘I am shocked and sickened by some of the things we have had to listen to,’ commented the judge, reflecting the prevailing narrow-minded attitudes of the period to the accounts of ‘unnatural’ sexual practices and suggestions that the deceased was homosexual or bisexual. The judge was sure that the jury had shared his strong feelings of repulsion but insisted that although such things are ‘horrible and disgusting’ they had to be dealt with.

The judge agreed with the prosecution, emphasising that the outcome of the case would hinge on whether the jury believed Beattie’s account of events over Mme Fahmy’s story. If she killed her husband without any struggle there was no defence to the charge against her, for the question of provocation did not arise.

It was obviously in the prisoner’s interests to make the jury believe her story, continued the judge, so he advised them to look for corroboration. A person might invent a story and even keep to it, Swift said, but Mme Fahmy had given exactly the same explanation immediately after the tragedy before she had time to concoct any story. In addition, a bullet had been found in the street and her evening dress was torn.

‘There are three alternative verdicts in this case,’ Swift concluded. ‘You may find the accused guilty of murder, guilty of manslaughter or not guilty. For a verdict of manslaughter to apply, there must have been some physical act that was so annoying or aggravating as was likely to destroy the self-control of an ordinary reasonable person and cause him or her to use a deadly weapon, which otherwise would not have been used. Mme Fahmy has alleged that her husband spat at her, tried to force her to have anal sex and gripped her throat but I should warn you that there was ample time between these events and the shooting for her to recover her self-possession,’ advised Swift. If the jury believed the killing was excusable or justifiable, they should find the defendant not guilty. If she knew the gun was loaded, was the shooting justified by the fact that she was in fear for her life? ‘You are the judges,’ Swift told the jury. ‘Has she made out to your satisfaction that she used the weapon to protect her own life?’

The jury took just over an hour to deliberate the case before returning to court to pronounce Marguerite Fahmy not guilty of murder. The verdict was greeted with a spontaneous outburst of cheering from the spectators and the judge immediately ordered the court to be cleared. When order was restored, the jury were asked to repeat their verdict. ‘Not guilty of murder and not guilty of manslaughter,’ replied the foreman.

‘Tell her that the jury have found her not guilty and that she is discharged,’ Swift instructed the interpreter, who relayed his message. Marguerite promptly fainted and was half-carried from the court by the prison wardresses, who had flanked her in the dock throughout her trial.

In the aftermath of Fahmy’s death, the Egyptian royal family was quick to distance itself from Fahmy, who had been falsely represented as a personal friend of King Fuad. ‘All here know that Ali Fahmy was of modest extraction and practically uneducated,’ announced an official statement, which went on to say that, ‘chance gave him [Fahmy] a great fortune, which he misused’. It was alleged that Fahmy promised to fund a hospital and also to pay for Egyptian students to be educated in Europe but later reneged on his promises. ‘The Oriental has the greatest respect for women,’ continued the statement, quoting from the Koran, ‘Paradise lies at the feet of the mothers’.

Abdul Rakman el Bialey Bey, a barrister who represented Fahmy’s family at the trial, was also quick to refute Hall’s speech. Although claiming to be personally against ‘mixed marriages’ the barrister asserted that Egyptians treat their wives with great respect, adding that women were beginning to take a prominent part in the country’s affairs.

Having been discharged from court a free woman, Marguerite Fahmy fled to her native France. She was soon to discover that she was not entitled to any of her late husband’s vast fortune and is said to have pretended to have given birth to a son, who would have been entitled to inherit from his father. Once that claim was disproved, she faded quietly into obscurity until her eventual death in 1971.