The cover-up that
saved the Prince of Wales' murderess lover from the gallows
Prince of Wales had a relationship with
Marguerite in the First World War
The Parisian courtesan went on to marry
Prince Ali Fahmy of Eqypt
She shot him dead in the Savoy Hotel in
1923
By TONY RENNELL FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 22:01 GMT, 15 March 2013 | http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294153/The-cover-saved-Prince-Wales-murderess-lover-gallows.html
 |
Shady character: Princess Marie Marguerite
Fahmy, French wife of late Prince Ali Fahmy of Egypt
Late-night diners at the Savoy Hotel in London
At one of the tables an unseemly row had
broken out — shrieks of rage from a bejewelled French woman in a chic satin
Chanel gown, howls of anger from her youthful white-tie-and-tailed Middle
Eastern husband.
‘Shut up, or I’ll smash this bottle of wine
over your head,’ she screamed at the top of her voice.
‘And I’ll do the same to you,’ he hurled
back, until waiters intervened to try to calm them down.
To those in the know, this was just another
everyday argy-bargy in the volatile six-month marriage of 32-year-old
Marguerite, high-class Parisian hooker and notorious gold-digger, and
22-year-old Prince Ali Fahmy, effeminate, filthy-rich Egyptian playboy,
besotted with her and intensely jealous.
They were forever clawing and scratching
each other, biting and kicking.
But it was more than that this time. A few
hours later during a violent thunderstorm, that night in July 1923, there was
more loud cursing and rowing in the corridor outside their suite — followed by
the sound of three pistol shots fired in rapid succession.
 |
Enigmatic: Madame Marguerite Fahmy who was
accused of murdering her husband, Aly Bey Fahmy, in the Savoy Hotel, pictured
in
|
A hotel porter who rushed to investigate
found Ali slumped against a wall in a pool of blood, a bullet through his head,
and a hysterical Marguerite bending over his body and crying out, ‘J’ai lui
tiré’ — ‘I’ve shot him.’
 |
Murdered: Egyptian Aly Bey Fahmy was shot
dead by his wife Marguerite Fahmy in 1923
|
If ever there was an open-and-shut murder
case, this seemed it. The ambitious Marguerite — who had slept her way out of
the gutter by selling her sexual favours, reeled in scores of wealthy lovers
and landed a prince — seemed certain to be heading for a date with the hangman.
And yet, ten weeks later, after an Old
Bailey trial that had Press and public agog at all the lurid sexual details
unearthed, she was acquitted. It was one of the most sensational turnarounds in
British legal history. How could this have happened?
The answer, according to author and
barrister Andrew Rose in a new book, is equally sensational. He argues that
friends of the then Prince of Wales — the hapless Edward VIII-to-be — conspired to get her off the hook.
Why? To hush up the fact that she, a
prostitute, had bedded the Prince on numerous occasions during the last 18
months of World War I while he was serving with the Army in France
The moment the news came out that Marguerite
was under arrest in Holloway prison, a secret, high-level damage-limitation
exercise was set in motion. The Prince’s intimate entourage of toffs, toughs
and old Army chums went into overdrive to save him from embarrassment and
ridicule.
They knew that in his early 20s the young
and immature heir to the throne had enjoyed her delights — some of them had
even dallied there too and discovered how well versed she was in the tricks of
her trade.
 |
Cover up: Prince of Wales, here in 1925,
had met Marguerite in the last 18 months of the First World War while he was in
the army in
|
The Prince, a newcomer to such arts, had
been initiated, bewitched and then become more than a little obsessed with the
shapely body, auburn hair and sensuous mouth of the woman he knew as Mme Maggie
Meller. She was adept at playing the dominatrix. He pursued her with slavish
devotion at every opportunity, lavishing gifts on her.
She sent him an erotic novel with a strong
lesbian theme. Foolishly he wrote letters to ‘mon Bebe’, as he called her, 20
of them at least, intimate, possibly rude about his father, King George V,
often indiscreet about the conduct of the war, and definitely not the sort he
would ever want the world to see.
And when in 1918 he dumped her for the arms
of Mrs Freda Dudley-Ward, the first of his long-term mistresses, she pointedly
reminded him she still had them, with a hint that she wanted money for their
return.
Why Marguerite pulled back from blackmail
at this point is unclear, but in time the Prince seemed reassured that, though
‘IT in Paris’ (the ungentlemanly term he now used for the woman he’d once
adored) had not given up his billets-doux, she was not going to make trouble.
Now her arrest in London
The first thing the Prince’s men did,
according to author Rose, was to make a discreet approach to the Director of
Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald Bodkin, explain the delicacy of the
situation and get him on board. He guaranteed a date for the Old Bailey trial
in September, and they arranged for the Prince to be well out of the way then
on a two-month tour of Canada
But that wouldn’t stop Marguerite spilling
out from the dock details of her boudoir activities with the royal rake or
producing those incriminating letters if it suited her. There would have to be
a deal to silence her — and the go-between for that transaction, Rose claims,
was one Major Ernest Bald.
The debonair Bald had been one of
Marguerite’s ‘intimates’ back in France, as had the man who now enlisted his
help, his old commanding officer, ‘Bendor’ Grosvenor, the dissolute Duke of
Westminster. ‘Bendor’ was a disreputable
womaniser and heavy drinker, and among the Prince’s closest confidantes.
Bald was sent to visit his old flame in Holloway
jail and, though there is no record of what they discussed in frequent meetings
in a white-washed room with barred windows over the next five weeks — talking
in French so the watching wardress could not understand — Rose believes they
horse-traded the Prince’s bedroom secrets for some sort of guarantee that she
would get off.
From her cell, it seems Marguerite
instructed her lawyer to arrange for the Prince’s letters to be handed back.
She had stored them in Cairo and they were duly
given to the British High Commission there and
dispatched to London
But were they the real thing? Rose believes
the Prince interrupted his summer holiday in Scotland
to dash to London
The crucial part of the deal, however, was
that she would make no mention of the Prince’s name in court, and that part of
the bargain she kept in full.
A few days before the trial opened Lord
Curzon, Foreign Secretary at the time, confided to his wife some gossip he’d
heard: ‘The French girl who shot her so-called Egyptian prince in London and is
going to be tried for murder, is the fancy woman who was the Prince’s “keep” [kept
woman] in Paris during the war, and they were terribly afraid that he might be
dragged in. [But] his name is to be kept out.’
In return, Rose claims, all the other
details of her racy past would be left out of the court proceedings, too. And
that, he adds, would undermine the prosecution’s case that she was a wicked,
foul-tempered, violent woman who had killed her husband to get her hands on his
fortune.
Caught with the smoking gun in her hand,
Marguerite’s only possible line of defence was that she was a much-battered
wife in fear of her life from a vicious and perverted husband. When she told
him she was going to divorce him, he had gone berserk and she had shot him in
self-defence.
And, says Rose, with the help of the
Prince’s connections and the connivance of some leading Establishment figures,
that is what her side set out to argue.
‘This was to be a show trial,’ he states,
‘but one with a difference. The authorities wanted Marguerite to be acquitted.
A murder conviction would have been catastrophic for the Crown.’
The ground had been prepared. An
inexperienced judge was assigned to hear the case and Rose believes he may well
have been nobbled from the outset into steering the court away from Marguerite’s
steamy past.
The prosecuting counsel was lacklustre and
less than forensic in his approach, as if he knew the case was somehow stacked
against him, whereas the defence lawyer, pleading Marguerite’s innocence, was
the biggest legal star of the age. The theatrical, eye-catching Sir Edward
Marshall Hall, orator and advocate extraordinaire, was widely hailed as the
‘Great Defender’.
Marshall Hall’s tactic was to besmirch Ali
Fahmy’s reputation, appealing unashamedly to every evil racial stereotype to do
so. Playing on prejudice common at the time, he conjured up an image of a
respectable white woman falling into the
clutches of an unprincipled Arab with perverted sexual tastes.
The young Egyptian was presented as a
cruel, promiscuous, bisexual. Driven by lust, he had forced her to have
‘unnatural’ intercourse that left her ‘torn’ in the most intimate of places. He
beat her and threatened to kill her. For all his sophisticated outward appearance, he was a beast, a devil.
The judge should have stopped Marshall
Hall’s flow of unsubstantiated accusations against the dead man, but the lawyer
was allowed to proceed with his rhetoric.
In the dock, Marguerite — a consummate
actress as ever — sat with her head hanging limply forward and her black gloved
right hand supporting her forehead. Her eyes were closed and tears trickled
down her cheeks.
Similarly, Marshall Hall got away with
muddying the waters over basic facts that damned Marguerite — that Ali had also
been shot in the back and that she had pulled the trigger three times.
As for her own copious sins, her
promiscuous past (and present), her naked ambition, her greed, her violent
temper which had led her to horse-whip one ex-lover, the phalanx of wealthy men
she had snared, exploited and cast aside — these were simply never mentioned.
Witnesses who would have given evidence of her own threats to kill her husband
were never called.
Instead, she was this ‘poor, wretched
woman’, declaimed the Great Defender, ‘suffering the tortures of the damned’,
who had fired the pistol in desperation as Ali ‘crouched like an animal,
crouched like an Oriental . . .’
In his closing speech, his oratory soared
to even greater heights as he invited the jury ‘to open the gates where the
Western woman can go out, not into the dark night of the desert, but back to
her friends, who love her in spite of her weaknesses.
‘Open the gate and let this Western woman
go back into the light of God’s great Western sun.’
The judge’s summing-up took up the same
theme. ‘We in this country put our women on a pedestal: in Egypt
He declared Ali’s alleged sexual tastes
‘shocking, sickening and disgusting’. And he steered them towards a conclusion
of justifiable homicide. ‘If her husband tried to do what she says, in spite of
her protests, it was a cruel and abominable act.’
The jury took less than an hour to
pronounce her Not Guilty and set her free. She was in the clear. So too was the
Prince of Wales, his frolics with her wiped from the slate, thanks to his
friends.
Also wiped clean, Rose admits, was much of
the confirming evidence of the scheming he reckons had taken place to secure
her release.
Her surprise acquittal is a matter of
record. That it was achieved by a deliberate cover-up at the highest level has
to rest on circumstantial evidence, and perhaps not surprisingly. ‘Smart
plotters do not leave a paper trail,’ Rose writes. ‘Finding out what has been
carefully concealed by clever people is challenging.’
Yet he remains convinced that ‘the
Establishment, in the form of the Royal Household, the Director of Public
Prosecutions and the trial judge, agreed to do whatever was necessary to
preserve the reputation of the Prince of Wales, even if this meant interfering
with due process of law. ‘Arguably,’ he says, ‘this created a conspiracy to
pervert the course of justice.’
Freed, Marguerite returned to France
As for the Prince of Wales, he continued
his pursuit of unsuitable women — with consequences, as the world knows, that cost
him not only his reputation, but his crown, too.
The Prince, The Princess And The Perfect
Murder by
Andrew Rose is published by Coronet on
April 4
"Andrew Rose first published the tale
of Marguerite Alibert 12 years ago, in a book called Scandal at the Savoy London
Friday 19 April 2013 19.19 BST / http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/19/critical-eye-book-review-roundup
Getting away with
murder... and that's the author
By CRAIG BROWN FOR THE DAILY MAIL
PUBLISHED: 21:00 GMT, 6 April 2013 / http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-2304979/CRAIG-BROWNS-BOOK-OF-THE-WEEK-Getting-away-murder--thats-author-Review-The-Prince-Princess-Perfect-Murder-Andrew-Rose.html
THE PRINCE, THE PRINCESS AND THE PERFECT
MURDER by Andrew Rose
Andrew Rose first published the tale of Marguerite Alibert 12 years ago, in a book called Scandal At The Savoy. As crime stories go, it ticked all the right boxes: a sexy French adventuress shoots dead her creepy Egyptian husband at
Marguerite Alibert was born in Paris in
1890, the daughter of a cab driver and a char lady. From an early age, she was,
as they say, a bit of a goer: aged 16, she had a baby. To these 21st Century
eyes, she looks a bit dumpy, not unlike the Queen Mother, but there was clearly
something about her – ready availability, perhaps –that made gentlemen’s eyes
swivel in their sockets.
Before long, she was taken up by one of Paris
She certainly didn’t let her new expertise
gather dust. ‘She’s been the mistress of nearly all my best customers, gentlemen
of wealth and position in France, England, America and many other countries as
well,’ her old boss proudly recalled, years later.
She embarked on a seven-year affair with a
wealthy married man, who set her up in her own apartment, within which she
carried on with several other men, too. Her wealthy suitor finally had a
nervous breakdown and retreated to Bordeaux
From then on, there was no looking back,
her bank account expanding with every new gentleman caller: a Belgian
landowner, a handful of Americans, the owner of a chain of nitrate mines in Chile
In 1919, she married a serious young man
called Charles Laurent, but she soon began yearning for the nightclubs. They
were divorced within a year, leaving her
wealthy enough to expand her stable to ten horses, and to add a full-time groom
and a chauffeur to her growing roster of
staff.
To cut a long story short, in Cairo
They married in January 1923. Within days
bride and groom were threatening to kill each other, and punches were traded.
In July they moved into a suite in The
Savoy Hotel in London
Marguerite was put on trial for murder, but
was acquitted on the grounds of self-defence, thanks to a wonderfully
over-the-top xenophobic attack on her victim by her defence barrister (‘He not
only had the vilest of vile tempers, but was vile himself, with a filthy perverted
taste . . .’).
As I have already said, Andrew Rose wrote a
diverting account of this spectacular case 12 years ago. It is now, he assures
us, ‘long out of print’. In the introduction to this new book, he confesses
that soon after the publication of the original, he received a letter from
Marguerite’s grandson telling him he had missed an essential detail. The then
Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) had, he said, been one of his grand-
mother’s many lovers. This grandson then gave Rose a copy of his grandmother’s
1934 memoir, which Rose describes as ‘an essential source previously overlooked
by Royal biographers’.
And by you, too, matey! It seems
astonishing that the biographer of a famous murderer somehow never discovered
that she had published an account of the case. This oversight means that
in Scandal At The Savoy there was not a
single mention of the Prince of Wales. But Rose has now turned his incompetence
to advantage by publishing a fresh account, this time introducing the Prince of
Wales and bigging up his role to
bursting point.
Well, I say that this is a ‘fresh’ account,
but in truth most of it is exactly the same, with entire sentences, paragraphs,
pages, and even chapters copied out, word for word, from the original. All Rose
has done is to shoehorn the Prince of Wales into the narrative at every possible juncture, and
many impossible junctures too.
His thesis is that the young Prince enjoyed
sexual liaisons with Marguerite Alibert for 18 months from 1917, and that in
its anxiety to preserve his reputation,
the British Establishment conspired in a cover-up, which in turn led to
what he now describes as ‘a show trial’,
resulting in the foregone conclusion of Marguerite’s acquittal.
Sadly, he presents no evidence for this
conspiracy, other than what he calls a ‘remarkable’ letter from Lord Curzon
(whom he styles, bizarrely, ‘Marquess Curzon’) to his wife telling her he had
‘heard a piece of news which may amuse you if you do not know it already’: the
French girl who shot her husband used to be the ‘fancy woman’ of the Prince,
and ‘his name is to be kept out’ of her trial. And that’s all.
Rose describes this as ‘incontrovertible
contemporary evidence of this con-spiracy of silence’, yet Curzon clearly
regarded the story as just another piece of tittle-tattle that was doing the
rounds, and even thinks his wife may have heard it already: hardly evidence of
a ‘conspiracy of silence’, still less a ‘show trial’.
But when conspiracy theorists get the bit
between their teeth, they won’t let anything get in the way. In their
topsy-turvy worlds, lack of evidence is the
surest proof of a cover-up.
So speculation is transformed – hey presto!
– into fact by compulsive use of slippery words and phrases such as ‘perhaps’,
‘must have been’, ‘arguably’, ‘no doubt’, ‘might’, ‘possibly’, ‘may have’
‘there was a distinct possibility that . . .’
Thus, early on we are told that, at their
first meeting in a Paris
Rose inserts new phrases into the original
manuscript so as to lend weight to the idea of a conspiracy. For instance, in
the original book he wrote of the Judge: ‘Rigby Swift’s summing-up ended with a
simple question’, but here the same sentence reads: ‘Rigby Swift’s summing-up,
now heavily slanted in favour of the accused, ended with a simple question’.
Who knows where the truth lies? I would guess yes to the affair with the
Prince, no to a judicial conspiracy, and no to the ‘perfect murder’ of the
title. Rose now argues that Marguerite planned the murder in advance (‘In my
1991 study of the trial, I had described the shooting as a crime passionel. It
was nothing of the kind. This was murder for gain. An execution. A perfect
murder’). But if so, why did she do it so cackhandedly, in a hotel corridor, in
a manner that would guarantee her arrest, trial and humiliation?
Silliest of all, we hear that, after the
trial, ‘a remarkable, wholly extraordinary, reunion of the Prince and
Marguerite, the two wartime lovers, may have taken place, perhaps during the
first month of 1924’ .
And, he may have added, pigs will fly – no doubt, perhaps, possibly, arguably –
during the fifth month of 2013.
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Sir Edward Marshall Hall, KC, (16 September
1858 – 24 February 1927)
“Equally successful was the defence
Marshall Hall gave to Madame (or Princess) Marguerite Fahmy in 1923 for the
shooting death of her husband, Egyptian Prince Fahmy Bey at
( …) “A few weeks later on the morning of
Sunday 1 July
The 22 year Egyptian had met his bride to
be, a woman ten years his senior, in
After a few days in
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
The couple returned to the
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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