Vosper… drowned after falling from a transatlantic liner and his death was only ruled as an accident after much media speculation, involving alleged sexual shenanigans aboard the ship. Sounds as though the bizarre and tragic episode could have provided the raw material for a fictional mystery.
Crime writer Martin Edwards
Agatha Christie granted her permission for ‘Philomel Cottage’, from the short story collection The Listerdale Mystery (1934), to be adapted for the stage. It was renamed Love From a Stranger by the dramatist, who subsequently became the focus of a real-life mystery when he either fell or jumped to his death from the porthole of an ocean liner off the coast of Devon.
The play was written by actor, producer and playwright Frank Vosper (1899-1937), then at the height of his fame having established himself as one of the most versatile members of the theatrical and film world. During the interwar years he established himself as a thespian of distinction with his portrayal of Henry VIII in The Rose Without a Thorn, and a successful dramatist with the comedy No Funny Business and crime story Murder on the Second Floor. Having made his screen debut in 1926, he appeared in many films, tending to be typecast as an urbane villain – notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).
In 1936, Love From A Stranger opened at the New Theatre, London, with Frank Vosper starring in a plot that centres on a young woman’s fear of her husband’s past and the threat posed to her life. The success of the play resulted in the first British film adaptation of a work by Agatha Christie. Starring Basil Rathbone, who would find lasting fame in the role of Sherlock Homes, and featuring a young Joan Hickson, later endorsed by Agatha Christie as the perfect choice to play Miss Marple, the screen version was released in 1937. Earlier that year, Vosper, accompanied by his close friend Peter Willes, holidayed in Jamaica and New York. Travelling back to England on the liner SS Paris, tragedy struck at an end of voyage party shortly before the ship was due to dock at Plymouth.
In the early hours of the morning on 6 March 1937, the reigning Miss Europe, Muriel Oxford, who had been visiting America for screen tests with a film studio, sought an introduction and was invited for drinks in the cabin shared by Frank Vosper and Peter Willes. At 2.45 a.m., passengers summoned a steward to interrupt the party and complain about the noise being made by the threesome who were quaffing champagne, resulting in the beauty queen taking the men to her stateroom where another large bottle of champagne was opened. Twenty minutes later, a man was heard to call out, ‘If you don’t marry me, I will jump overboard!’ Minutes later, two of the revellers realised that while they had been sitting together and chatting, their fellow partygoer Frank Vosper had disappeared from the room – but had not left by the door. The alarm was raised but the captain refused to look for a ‘man overboard’ as he did not consider it possible for someone to slip and fall out of the porthole, but a search of the ship failed to find the missing person and the drowned body of the actor was eventually washed up at Eastbourne sixteen days later. In a statement to the press, Peter Willes clarified that it was he who had jokingly suggested ‘marriage’ and ‘jumping overboard’, and that his friend must have been trying to discreetly leave the party so as not appear rude. In his opinion, the actor’s poor eyesight may have led him to believe that he could alight on the deck via the porthole. At the subsequent inquest, the coroner summarised that there was no question of an accident in the ordinary sense of a man climbing on to the ledge and falling through the window. Therefore, the only question that remained to answer was why had Frank Vosper leapt through the window? Was it with the intention of ending it all, or under the misapprehension that there was a deck on which he could land? If it was a case of suicide, then it must have been on a very sudden impulse, for there was no obvious reason to imply that the actor was considering taking his own life. If it was purely an accident, then the victim must have been attempting to leave unnoticed by the window to ensure he would not spoil the party that his ‘merry’ companions Mr Willes and Miss Oxford were so obviously enjoying.
Faced with a lack of concrete evidence, the jury returned an ‘open verdict’, although media sexual innuendo about what may have transpired between the two men and the actress prompted her to sue the proprietors of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail for articles ‘capable of casting imputations on Miss Oxford’s morality’. There was speculation that Vosper was upset that Muriel Oxford preferred Peter Willes’s company to his, although with no Hercule Poirot on the case, there was a twist to the love triangle evidently not considered during the investigation. Due to the veil of secrecy surrounding homosexual activity, which was then illegal, Vosper may well have taken his own life, not out of longing for a beautiful woman, but in a fit of jealous rage at witnessing the sight of his gay partner, Peter Willes, cavorting with the would-be starlet. In theatre circles Vosper was well known to be homosexual, and his play The Green Bay Tree was popular with those in the know, for it obliquely depicted a gay aristocrat who picks up a working-class boy and models him in his own image. Frank Vosper and Peter Willes’s relationship may well have held the key to the mysterious events of that fateful night on the liner, an aspect of the case that was summarised by the 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White. In his autobiography Flaws in the Glass (1981), the gay author and playwright remarked that it was commonly believed at the time of the tragedy that Vosper had ‘thrown himself off a liner after finding his male lover flirting with a beauty queen’.