Murder at the Savoy, One Night Only

Marshall Hall: A Law unto Himself
by Sally Smith
Wildy, Simmonds & Hill, 2016, 302 pages, £25

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The best-known trial lawyers of the post-war era are fictional characters. They either originated on the big screen or got there eventually. They include Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch, Paul Newman’s Frank Galvin and Richard Gere’s Martin Vail. But in much earlier days, the celebrity barristers were real men. Sir Edward Marshall Hall KC (1858–1927) combined elements of all these later heroes of American drama: Finch’s passion, Galvin’s desperation and Vail’s conviction, almost embarrassed and hidden beneath the infuriating coolness of the criminal defence lawyer, that everyone is entitled to a fair hearing.

He had none of the cynicism of the defendant lawyer portrayed by James Mason: gifted, experienced and undeniably good at his job, but relying on technical mastery for lack of any moral appeal, and treating his own client with noticeable contempt outside the courtroom, as if he need do no more for him than win his case. Marshall Hall was the precise opposite: he won not on legal expertise but by his flash and dash, and saved his clients by a dramatic performance rather than a technicality. And he never, ever regarded his clients with indifference. After all, their very lives depended on his sincerity.

As the biographer, Sally Smith QC, observes, his own rakish youth and the tragic episodes of his life, above all the death of his first wife in circumstances that make up a harrowing chapter in the book, helped him see the accused with an empathy uncharacteristic of those times. Whether the law has now tipped too far in the defendant’s favour is another matter. But in Marshall Hall’s time, a man or woman accused of a felony had few friends and few prospects. He was almost singlehandedly responsible, Smith argues, for introducing compassion to the Edwardian justice system. It is a recurring irony of the study of history that those most alien to the sentiments of their own era are recorded as its greatest emblems.

I have made reference to several films and fictional characters because, as Smith makes clear, Marshall Hall was the celebrity of his day, and he made the Old Bailey as much a place of macabre entertainment as Drury Lane. He was the inspiration for Horace Rumpole, and Gregory Peck starred as a barrister inspired by his life, in addition to his more famous role as Atticus Finch. Exhibiting qualities of gentleman, actor and flâneur, with just the right balance of public glamour and professional propriety, Marshall Hall fitted in perfectly in a place like the Garrick Club, and with friends like Arthur Sullivan and Richard D’Oyly Carte.

Smith describes his wayward journey through Rugby, Cambridge and the Inner Temple; early struggles at the Bar, dealing jewellery and even cigars on the side; a shaky beginning leading gradually to a stellar career in criminal and later divorce law, assisted by press publicity which Smith ominously refers to as “a pact with the devil”. He was a masterful trial lawyer: the whole thing was just drama. “Nowadays,” Smith reminds us, “identification with the psyche of the jury, hard though it is with the diversity they have, is commonplace. Then it was revolutionary. Marshall did not perform in front of them, he aligned himself with them.” The result, when he succeeded, was to completely repair the accused’s reputation during the trial, as the newspapers reported his performances in the Old Bailey to the country at large. A prostitute defending herself with a poker is played out in court, before the rapt jury, by the barrister himself. “The balletic agility and elegance of Marshall’s sportsman’s body made the whole thing transfixing theatre rather than the risible charade it could so easily have been.” He was still doing it towards the end of his career: unable to discharge a real .32 Browning in court during the trial of Marguerite Fahmy, charged with murdering her Egyptian playboy husband, he did the next best thing and threw the gun loudly on the table as he re-enacted the “Murder at the Savoy” for a rapt audience. This was a lawyer who could only succeed—and succeed he did—in jury trials.

Having suffered the personal and reputational setbacks that Smith so compellingly describes, Marshall Hall would have floundered if he had pursued the standard route to success. Instead, a full-time criminal law practice, unthinkable for most novice barristers, became his only hope for success. How many barristers, then or now, would have the guts to say to the jury: “Gentlemen, on the evidence before you I almost dare you to find a verdict of murder.” It paid off.

So too did one of the most daring undertakings in the history of criminal procedure. Only from 1898 was the accused permitted to give evidence in his own defence. The fear that the accused might inadvertently do himself injury, and the principle that it is the prosecution’s own responsibility to prove guilt, survive today in the privilege against self-incrimination. It was a little while before anyone dared to test the 1898 reform—and it was Marshall Hall, of course, who took the plunge.

Robert Wood was an artist who made a good start to his career by eliciting praise from William Morris, who was famous in equal measure for his socialist writings and the artichoke wallpaper that proved a best-seller among the late-Victorian middle classes. But when Mr Wood was not busy designing engraved glassware, he was cutting prostitutes’ throats. So the evidence suggested, at any rate. Emily Dimmock was murdered by her lover—her head nearly severed by the cut—and it was shown that Wood had met her, sent her a postcard, and asked several people to give false stories for his whereabouts when he was with her. His lies unravelled during the police interview. It did not look good at all.

Only pure legal oratory in the style of Demosthenes could save the day. As Smith correctly observes, Marshall Hall would not have handled appellate cases half as well, with only involved points of law and no jury to impress. He took a gamble when he examined Wood. It went terribly: hoping to inspire sympathy, he instead presented a rather snide and reserved man to an already unimpressed jury. Marshall Hall now had to play up the defendant’s vanity in order to save his life: he lied not to cover up a murder but merely to cover up the impropriety of socialising with this woman of the world, to use the old euphemism. His usual trick was to convince a jury that the defendant was a wronged and basically decent person. This time, he reminded them that they could sentence a man to hang only if he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, not just because he was a vain little fop. Against considerable probative evidence and even the own client’s inability to help himself, Marshall Hall secured a full acquittal. The cheering crowd of thousands—literally thousands—waiting outside the court were perhaps more impressed by this achievement as a magic trick than a milestone of due process.

Marshall Hall later admitted that he thought Wood was guilty. Both he and the solicitor had an uneasy feeling when they interviewed their client: so much so that they resolved not to examine him until necessity forced their hand. Smith, learned as she is in criminal law, knows how unexceptional this admission is and mentions it in passing. After all, this was only Marshall Hall’s suspicion revealed years later, not a confession made by Wood during trial. But I suspect that to most readers, especially lay readers, this passing observation is quite disturbing.

On the lighter side of trial antics, Marshall Hall would seem to be the origin of the anecdote about the judge who asks counsel if his client is familiar with the maxim res ipsa loquitur and is given the reply, “My lord, on the remote hillside in County Donegal where my client comes from, they talk of little else.” (The version given by the Hon. Peter Heerey QC in his recent Excursions in the Law is just slightly better. He has a Catholic barrister saying to a Protestant Ascendancy judge, “My Lord, in the bogs of Connemara they speak of little else.”) Humour is relatively rare in the law: there is seldom much opportunity for it in the dryness of commercial litigation, and it must be deployed carefully in a criminal trial for fear of trivialising the victim’s tragedy and the defendant’s plight. As this joke shows, Marshall Hall knew when it was just right to use it.

Smith passes quickly over Marshall Hall’s youthful trips to Paris and Australia—though no doubt more for lack of sources than lack of interest. But once the legal career is under way, there is no shortage of material for her to work with. Smith’s wonderful account of each case’s dramatis personae, the facts, the arrest, the press coverage, and of course the hearings themselves, leaves the reader desperate to know the verdict. Has Marshall Hall triumphed yet again, or is it the gallows this time for the sorry wretch? This is much more than a learned biography for law libraries. It is thrilling on every page.

Marshall Hall is the quintessence of the criminal defendant anti-hero. He is not a bad man himself; indeed, he is disliked because he sees far too much good in the defendant. It is an understandable feeling, but one all too easily had in the moral safe-house of the Crown case. He would have approved the words penned in the late 1960s by another of Britain’s greatest jurists, Sir Robert Megarry:

the path of the law is strewn with examples of open and shut cases which, somehow, were not; of unanswerable charges which, in the event, were completely answered; of inexplicable conduct which was fully explained; of fixed and unalterable determinations that, by discussion, suffered a change.

The only offending words in that passage are completely and fully; for as this gifted biographer well knows from her experience at the Bar, an expert in crime or tort must master the rules of evidence, but can seldom if ever uncover absolute truths. By opening what was permanently shut, and answering the unanswerable, and moving through an unalterable world like Heraclitus himself, it is no wonder that Marshall Hall was responsible for more gasps, cheers and fainting ladies than any magician of his day.