DRAMATIC TRIAL SCENE.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXIV, Issue 940, 9 December 1933, Page 22 (Supplement)

DRAMATIC TRIAL SCENE.

COUNSEL FLOURISHES A REVOLVER. PISTOL POINTED AT JURY —■' TENSELY GRIPPING MOMENT IN MARSHALL HALL'S ADDRESS—TRAGIC STORY OF MADAME FAHMY'S AGONISING FEAR OF EASTERN HUSBAND—STORM OF CHEERING AS ACQUITTAL VERDICT IS ANNOUNCED.

r Madame Falimy, beautiful French •wife of an Egyptian prince with colossal riches, stood in the dock of the Old Bailey, accused of the murder of her husband in a great West End hotel. She had told in evidence how Prince Fahmy was shot On the fourth day, Marshall Hall_ began his speech for the defence—and bn the fifth came one of the most dramatic scenes ever witnessed in the Old Bailey. Marshall Hall continued his speech on the fifth day of the trial. He spoke about the storm that was raging at the time of the murder, wrote Edward Marjoribanks, telling the story in his book, “Marshal) Hall’s Murder Trials.'* “Imagine,” he said, “its effect on a woman of nervous temperament, who had been living such a life as she had lived for the past six months —outraged, abused, beaten, degraded.” When he came to the actual shooting, he performed the most wonderful physical demonstration of his forensic career; he imitated the crouch of the stealthily advancing Oriental. “In sheer desperation—as he crouched for the last time, crouched like an animal, like an Oriental, retired for the last time to get a bound forward —she turned the pistol and put it to his face, and to her horror the thing went off.” As he spoke the last words he held the pistol up and isolated it towards the jury ; and, when he described how the man fell, he paused and dropped the heavy weapon so that it clattered to the floor of the Old Bailey, just as it must have clattered on to the floor of the room in the hotel. No words can describe ' the effect of this daring demonstration. But Marshall Hall always said afterwards that the actual dropping of the pistol was an accident. Then came the peroration, and the literary allusion —not this time from “Otheilo,” though this would not have been inappropriate, but from a modern best-seller. Yet there was no bathos whatever in the reference. “You will remember, all of you, that wonderful work of fiction written by Robert Hiehens. ‘Bella Donna.* . . . You will remember the final scene, where this woman goes out of the gates of the gardeD into the dark night of the desert. ‘Open the Gates.* “Members of the jury, I_ want you to ©pen the gates where this 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; back to her friends, who will be glad to receive her; back to her child, who will be waiting for her with open arms. ‘‘You will open the gate, and let this woman go back into the light of God s great Western sun.” Marshall looked up and pointed at the skylight, where the bright English September sun was streaming in, and diffusing the packed court with its warmth and brightness. . Quite unconsciously, m throwing down the revolver and in pointing to the sunlight, MarshalL Hall had reproduced in one speech the historic gestures of two great House of Commons orators, Burke and Pitt. • . _ Probably, if any other hying advocate bad done cither of these things he would have made himself ridiculous; but with Marshall it was sublime. Finally, turning towards Mr. Percival Clarke, he said: “To use the words of my learned friend's great father, in a case in which I heard him many years ago at the Old Bailey, ‘I don't ask you for a verdict: I demand it at your hands.* ” After the final speech for the prosecution, *and the summing-up by the judge, who pointed out that there were three verdicts which could be found, “Murder/ “Manslaughter,” and “Not Guilty.” the jurv were out for a little over an hour. Marshall Hall talked anxiously with Percival Clarke during this time, playing aP he did so with Madame Fahmy’a pistol. When the jury came back and the foreman announced that the prisoner was not guilty of murder, there was such a storm of cheering that the court was cleared by order of the judge. There was, therefore, a delay of some minutes before the clerk could ask if the jury found her guilty of manslaughter. Of this offence, too, the jury found the prisoner not guilty, and she was discharged. She was quite overcome by emotion, ana covered her face in her hands, and Marshall Hall, understanding completely, quietly slipped out of court without speaking to her. He. too, was utterly exhausted by his effort. On this occasion Ins client was all gratitude. Marshall Hall received a telegram from her the same evening, and as soon as she reached her hotel that evening she wrote him a letter, “My emotion was so great that you will pardon me for having shut eyes and allowing myself to be led away.” The dav after the trial was a Sunday, September 16. and Marshall Hall celebrated his sixty-sixth birthday with the knowledge that he had added one more *pr&s»t- virtoT-v- to hit* wrmrlerfnl rerorrl. TTe replied to Mme. Fabmy’s letter and telegram in his best French, in which he said: “I hope that the future will hold for you many happy moments to compensate you for your past unhappiness. Once more the truth has triumphed/* Madame Fahmy came to see Marshall Hall on several other occasions when she came to London, once having __ tea at Temple Gardens. _ and she continued to correspond with him. “Greatest Lawyer on Earth.**

Congratulations poured in from old friends and from strangers all over the world. One of these was addressed to

“Marshall Hall, the Greatest Lawyer on Earth,” and the Post Office was equal to the occasion. Everywhere the public had been profoundly moved by the trial of this Parisian woman; she indeed was a butterfly on the wheel, a butterfly who had been made to suffer for one terrible year to the utmost limit of human endurance. During the course of the trial she received innumerable messages of sympathy and “God-speed** from Englishwomen. From the moment that she married her Eastern lover until she stepped from the dock at the Old Bailey her life had been one long torture. When the case was all over, it was, no doubt, considered by many that Marshall Hall had had an easy task to perform, but this was far from true. As an English friend of the accused wrote, to Marshall Hall, “We knew her story was true, but you had to make the judge and jury understand/* Provocation, self-defence and accident are very different matters; they do not go well together in harness, and only the last two can secure an acquittal. Madame Fahmy had. on the face of it, killed with a lethal weapon an unarmed and defenceless man. Long provocation such as she had endured may eome dangerously near to proving, not self-defence, but motive/ not accident, but revenge. The manner in which Marshall Hall, bv exposing the long story of her frightful provocation, showed why she had come to seize the pistol in self-defence, and. how. owing at once to her ignorance of mechanism and her mortal terror at the moment, the pistol, which she thought harmless, was fired by accident, is beyond all praise. Ring of Truth. The three lines of defence, inconsistent is they seemed at first, could only stand with each other, and together they had the unmistakable ring of truth. The story was no afterthought, no advocate’s reconstruction long after the event. The prisoner had told, in effect, the same story immediately after her arrest. In pathetic sentences she wrote her pitiful story, •peaking of herself in the third person. Like many people in great trouble, she Seemed to see herself from outside, as another person, perhaps as a figure in

one of the great operas, most of which she could sing by heart. Who, in deep personal misfortune, is not familiar with that 6trange haunting feeling. “Could this really have happened to me?”

“In London in July,” she wrote, “we are in the presence of a woman who has suffered mentally for six months; she is weak and nervous; she sees dying, day by day. the hope she had conceived of reforming her husband. She realises that all is useless. She explains to them—to Aly and Said—her contempt, and wishes to go away, feeling herself no longer mistress of her nerves; sickness and suffering,

have got the better of her courage. She has no longer the strength to struggle. She has now only one desire —to escape.

“She loves her child. She has friends. She is young and can make her life again. If she remains with Aly Fahmy, it means either brutal death or slow agony which will lead her fatally and speedily to suicide. She realises all this, and uses her last energy in arranging her departure. . . “This woman cannot speak English, she has no friends in London; it is therefore natural that she should wish to return home, to her family and to her friends. Aly feels, this time, that the comedy is finished, that she is going to escape him, that he will not find her again. He becomes fierce. . .” “I had seen my husband load and un!oad liis revolver several times: either the Millet rose or it came out at the side . . . I wish to make the bullet come out at the lidc, to unload it.

“Unfortunately I could not succeed, lor lack of strength. I try two or three times .—impossible— the shot goes off. It was the first shot that ever has gone off in my hand in my life. . . . I believe the weapon, therefore, harmless, since the bullet lias gone out/* Imperial Repercussions.

Marshall Hall's dramatic statements concerning the marriage of a Western woman to an Eastern man, and his description of Fahmy as “crouching for his final spring—like a beast —like an Oriental,” had imperial repercussions. The Batonnier of the Egyptian Bar immediately sent a long cable, which reached tne Attorney-General ot England, complaining of Marshall Hall’s license “in allowing himself to generalise, and to ‘lash’ all Egypt and, indeed, the whole East. ... A great advocate like Hall is not ignorant that it is unjust and disloyal to judge a whole nation by the conduct of a single individual. “The Egyptian Bar protests with all its force against the principle followed by Sir Marshall Hall in his defence, as unjust and deplorable.” , Sir Douglas Hogg (now Lord Hailsham) replied: “I am quite confident that Sir Edward Marshall Hall would not willingly hurt the feelings of any foreign people, and he is far too distinguished and experienced an advocate to transgress the limits properly restraining the conduct of his client's case. I hope, therefore, that you may have been misled by a newspaper summary/*

Marshall Hall replied that any attack he made was on the man, Aly Fahmy, and not on the Egyptians as a nation.

Marshall Hall told me afterwards that a strange idea came in his head as he was demonstrating with the pistol; he was conscious that he was pointing it at the judge. “Suppose, I thought, a cartridge were still left in the magazine, and I were to pull the trigger and it were to kill the judge! “What a scene!" he said. would indeed have ended my career at the Bar in a blaze of glory. But/* he added with a mischievous smile. “I should have had a perfectly good defence. I would have said the same thing had happened to me as happened to Madame Fahmy,. and we would both have got off.” . j