Edgar Lustgarten could claim with some justification to be the man who took crime reporting from the printed page to the airwaves and the screen. By the twenty-first century, coverage of crime had been a staple of television for decades but in the 1950s it was still very much the preserve of the printed press and regarded as a rather vulgar subject for the airwaves. Lustgarten was to change that perception.
A debonair barrister and actor manqué turned presenter, his radio programmes at their peak were listened to by six million people and his black-and-white B-movie reconstructions of famous Scotland Yard cases were as much a part of going to the cinema in the post-war years as a choc ice and a Player’s Navy Cut in the back stalls. His languid style and purple prose led to many imitators and he also wrote prolifically, both fiction and non-fiction. He represented, too, an era of uncritical deference towards the police. And his own life was touched by its very own bizarre mystery not long before his death.
Born in Manchester in 1907, the only son to a Latvian Jewish barrister father, Edgar Marcus Lustgarten attended Manchester Grammar School and went to St John’s College, Oxford where he became the president of the Union in 1930, no mean feat for a young Jewish student at a time when anti-semitism was rife. Fellow student Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, recalled him as urbane and witty. He followed his father in becoming a barrister on the Manchester circuit in the thirties and his legal background would prove useful and add to his air of theatrical self-confidence.
Turned down for active military service in the Second World War on health grounds, he worked instead, from 1940, on counter-propaganda at the BBC under the name of Brent Wood, a way of disguising his Jewish name. One of his tasks was to mock the Nazi radio propagandist, William Joyce or ‘Lord Haw-Haw’.
He wrote two crime novels, A Case to Answer (1947), filmed in 1951 as The Long Dark Hall with Rex Harrison and Lilli Palmer, and Blondie Iscariot (1948), before getting his breakthrough in 1952 with the BBC radio programme Prisoner at the Bar. This brought well-known trials to the airwaves for the first time and became a great success, with listening figures that shot up from two to six million within a month. Suddenly the ‘forty-five-year-old poker-faced ex-barrister’, as he was described at the time, was a household name. While detective fiction was already well established, for the first time it became clear that the British had a vast appetite for true crime.
Lustgarten’s fame spread. In 1955, Time magazine described him as ‘equipped with a sharp legally trained mind and novelist’s eye’ and a ‘top writer in the true crime field.’ Other accolades followed, not least an invitation from Roy Plomley to appear in 1957 on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs radio show. He chose as his luxury a woman’s evening gown. He was nicknamed ‘Mr Murder’.
At that time, most cinemas showed both a main feature and a shorter film and it was the latter slot that Lustgarten was to fill with his Scotland Yard Files. Made by Anglo-Amalgamated and shot at their Merton Park studios in south Wimbledon, the films provide a glorious snapshot of that era of policing and reporting. ‘Good morning, super,’ one policeman greets his senior officer. In those days, crime news on a screen, either through the BBC on television or Pathé News in cinemas, was treated with greater respect than the daily press. Lustgarten’s role, as almost an official police spokesman, was that of the all-knowing crime expert. His much-lampooned Scotland Yard series seems almost like pastiche today.
It was introduced thus: ‘London – the greatest city in the world and home of the oldest democracy. A city whose worldwide reputation for honesty and integrity is firmly based on a thousand years of the rule of law, enforced and safeguarded by a police force whose headquarters is as well-known as London itself – Scotland Yard.’
The format was for Lustgarten to talk straight to camera from behind a desk, although he might, on occasion, rise to pour himself a sherry from a decanter. Many of the films, based on actual cases but with names changed, involved a murder, always solved by the Yard’s detectives, who had to go to some dark and dangerous places, such as Soho, ‘a haunt of some of the city’s less desirable characters’. Sometimes he addressed the viewer directly: ‘Have you ever murdered anyone? Perhaps you’d rather not say.’ The tone was reassuring – Scotland Yard always get their man or woman because ‘the murderer always overlooks something’.
But Lustgarten was already out of tune with the times. In one television spoof, Stanley Baxter, imitating Lustgarten, solemnly recounted a case in which many had died from the same cause: ‘deadly boredom’. The Lustgarten character claims that his films must have caused the deaths, and vows ‘when the doors of Wormwood Scrubs open again, I shall be back to claim further victims with grainy film, pedestrian plots and sluggish direction. Goodnight.’ Robbie Coltrane’s satire, as ‘Edgar Dustcarten’, was more savage, portraying him as having a lascivious fascination with the details of murders such as the Limbless Limbo Dancer of Leytonstone and mocking the link with Scotland Yard – ‘so called because it is neither in Scotland nor is it a yard’. Indeed, his languid, mannered style now seems comically dated but he was the first person to popularise the detailed reporting of true crime, first on the radio and then on screen.
The journalist and union organiser Peta Van den Bergh knew Lustgarten as a teenager because he worked with her father, the broadcaster Tony Van den Bergh. ‘He was very charming, very kind, slightly shy,’ she said. ‘I used to see him with my father in the Marie Lloyd club (near the BBC) and he was part of a very interesting crew that included Louis MacNeice and lots of other writers. He was, as they all were at that time in the BBC, a heavy drinker, hard-living and hard-working and he had this thing for prostitutes – I remember seeing him once with this very beautiful woman in an expensive mink coat and someone saying “she’s actually a tart”. It was for all of them a very exciting time because so much of what they were doing was new.’
In 1965, he appeared on the BBC’s Any Questions and expounded his views on crime and punishment: ‘I think the way to deal with crimes of violence is to adopt not kindly treatment, not psychiatric treatment, not investigations into the minds of those that do it, but to treat them with the severity that they used to be treated with and which very often stamped it out.’ This was greeted with applause, as was his rider: ‘If I may just add, I would say quite unrepentantly . . . I would bring back the whip, I would bring back the birch.’
By the time of his interview with Peter Gillman in the Sunday Times in 1975, his views had become even stricter: ‘I’m in favour of capital punishment. Secondly, I’m in favour of corporal punishment. Thirdly, I’m in favour of much heavier sentences . . . I am quite convinced that the country is degenerate . . . The degeneracy of Rome I only read about in Gibbon. I’ve got a front row seat this time – although in a masochistic way I enjoy it.’ Gillman later recalled being ‘troubled by his moral certainty . . . Everything was black and white, there were no shades or nuances, and he admitted to no doubts about anything. The fact that he dismissed all the notorious capital cases where there were major doubts absolutely reeks of a personal and intellectual arrogance. If there was something murky in his background then that moral absolutism served as a protection against it.’
But despite his support for capital punishment, one case that troubled him was that of Edith Thompson, whom he described as ‘the only person in England in this century known to me who has been wrongly hanged’. He was not alone in this view. Thompson had been convicted with her young lover, Freddy Bywaters, of the murder of her husband, Percy, who was stabbed to death by Bywaters in Ilford in 1922. The press played their own part in this case, not least in giving her the tortuous title of ‘the Messalina of Ilford’, a reference to the promiscuous wife of the Emperor Claudius. Part of the evidence against Thompson was the inclusion in letters to her lover of cuttings from the Daily Sketch, Sunday Pictorial, Daily Mail and Daily Mirror describing different methods of killing, from putting ground glass in chocolates to using potassium and cyanide for poisoning. But the evidence against her was slim and there was a feeling that she was being hanged as much for her adultery as for the murder.
Lustgarten’s coverage of famous trials was to play its part many years later in a remarkable tale told by film critic Derek Malcolm in his memoir Family Secrets. As a schoolboy, Malcolm discovered a copy of Lustgarten’s book The Judges and the Judged in his father’s house in Bexhill-on-Sea with an entire chapter ripped out. The curious young Derek got hold of another copy of the book and found that the missing pages concerned his own father, a lieutenant and First World War hero, who had returned from service overseas to discover that his wife was having an affair with a Russian who called himself a count but was, in fact, plain Anton Baumberg. Lieutenant Malcolm, with some assistance from Scotland Yard, traced the bounder to his lodgings in Paddington and arrived there with a horsewhip and a gun, telling the housemaid who opened the door that he was ‘Inspector Quinn of Scotland Yard’. There was an altercation and Malcolm shot Baumberg dead before giving himself up to the police.
Here is how Lustgarten described the case when it reached the Old Bailey: ‘Everyone wanted the prisoner to get off. The privileged and breathless company in court, gripping their precious seats from a subconscious fear of losing them; the unlucky and disappointed throng outside, unable to tear themselves away, the unseen multitude . . . devouring each edition of the papers, and then waiting in mingled hope and apprehension for the next one, all devoutly wished Lieutenant Malcolm to go free.’ The trial was over in two days and the jury reached their verdict in half an hour. He was found not guilty of either murder or manslaughter. Derek Malcolm described Lustgarten’s coverage of the case as ‘in the manner of a bad Victorian melodrama’. Indeed, much of Lustgarten’s writing was in spectacularly florid prose, a style that would often be adopted by crime writers in the future.
Of the hundreds of cases Lustgarten covered, one had a particular resonance towards the end of his life. In his Famous Trials series, in which he would act out the main characters, there is an episode on George Joseph Smith, the Brides in the Bath murderer. Describing how Smith laid his traps, Lustgarten pronounced in classic clipped verbless style: ‘Seaside promenade. Country beauty spot. A church. A genteel boarding house. Anywhere that attracted a proportion of young or middle-aged ladies that were unattached and susceptible to gentlemen with smooth manners and bow-ties.’ He described how Smith flattered his targets by professing his love for them and proposing marriage. ‘He fixes it. He knows the ropes. He fixes the appointment with the registrar. He fixes the legal side. He fixes the honeymoon, with great concern for hygiene. No bath. No good unless I can install one. Finally the doting husband visits her in the bath and finds her lying under the water. Dead.’
Nearly sixty years after the original Brides in the Bath case, a woman was in fact found dead in Lustgarten’s own bath. She was a young woman known as Gabrielle Gilbert who it appears he was having a relationship with. She became besotted with him and gradually moved in to his flat. In a fascinating BBC profile on Lustgarten, one of a series called Radio Lives broadcast in 1992, the tale unfolded. His loyal Swiss au pair, Trudy, who had looked after him and his wife since 1953, told how she had moved out of the Lustgarten home after Gabrielle’s arrival and that he had clearly found Gabrielle a problem and wanted out of the relationship. He would ring Trudy to tell her that he couldn’t stand Gabrielle any more and did not know how he had got into the situation.
Trudy told Radio Lives that she had been rung by Lustgarten in the middle of the night to tell her that he had come home and found Gabrielle dead in the bath. Trudy sped from her home in Wimbledon to the West End to find the flat swarming with policemen and Lustgarten behaving irrationally, irritated at the time the police were taking. Lustgarten was prancing around and saying, ‘I wish they would get on with it, I want go to bed.’ He even suggested to Trudy that she should sleep in Gabrielle’s bed, an idea that appalled her. Asked by presenter Jonathan Goodman if she thought it was suicide – after all, this was a case of a woman found dead in the bath of a man who had reported in great detail on how another man had disposed of women in baths – Trudy replied: ‘Of course it was suicide.’ She said that barbiturates and alcohol had been found in her blood.
The late Peter Underwood, the writer on paranormal affairs with whom Lustgarten shared an interest in notorious murder cases, has written that ‘it was all something of a mystery but after her death Lustgarten was never the same and he rarely spoke of her or what had happened. Soon he came down in the world and his flat became dark and murky; his mind was elsewhere.’ He embarked on a chaste affair by letter with another woman, to whom he confided that he was lonely and impotent, and who later told the Daily Mail that ‘he wanted to be virile so that we could be lovers in the true sense of the word.’
On 15 December 1978, he walked from his flat to the Marylebone public library and collapsed, while reading the Spectator, and died of a heart attack. He left £8000, some of it to the Lockwood Home of Rest for Donkeys. But while Lustgarten brought murder and mayhem to British radios and screens, his newspaper colleagues in the business of crime were in their pomp.