The great defender: Sir Edward Marshall Hall

'My profession, and that of an actor are somewhat akin except that I have no scenes to help me and no words are written for me to say.

There is no backcloth to increase the illusion.

But, out of the vivid, living dream of somebody else's life, I have to create an atmosphere; for that is advocacy.'
At the bottom of Middle Temple Lane, ont he right hand side, stands a building which, for 40 years, betwen 1888 and 1927, housed the chambers of the greatest criminal advocate of his day, Sir Edward Marshall Hall.

From 3 Temple Gardens, in the Middle Temple, Marshall Hall went out to fight for the defence in many of the most celebrated criminal cases of the late Victorian and Edwardian ages.

He was an advocate of a type which is seldom seen today.

His style was florid, theatrical and emotional.

His passionate pleading and weeping before juries would doubtless try the patience of today's judges, but in the last quarter of the nineteenth, and first quarter of the twentieth centuries, his advocacy broght him adulation from a public, which, in the days before television and radio, would follow his cases day-by-day in the newspapers.

Marshall Hall was, as he himself would always be the first to admit no great lawyer.

When, during the course of a trial, a point of law would arise, he would mutter, in an audible stage whisper, to his junior, 'You had better deal with this point, it has some law in it'.
Brighton poisoner
Marshall Hall was born in 1858, at Brighton, son of a local physician.

He was the youngest of ten children, only four of whom survived their infancy.

At an early age, he showed signs of the passion for firearms which he had all his life, once scaring away some reconnoitring burglars from the vicinity of his father's house by showing his skill in shooting off the heads of plaster statuettes in the garden.

His interest in the legal process, however, was stimulated by his attendance as a spectator at the committal proceedings in a celebrated capital trial of the 1860s.

The trial was that of Christiana Edmunds, the 'Brighton poisoner', who was alleged to have bought numerous boxes of Chocolates, injected them with strychnine, and returned them with a complaint to the shops from which they had been bought.

The chocolates were resold, numerous people fell ill, and eventually a small boy died.

Insanity was pleaded as a defence to the charge, but the plea failed and sentence of death followed.

Edmunds then pleaded that she was 'enceinte', that is, pregnant, in an attempt to stay execution.

As was the custom, a panel of 'matrons' was convened to try the issue.

The plea was found to be groundless, but the execution never took place.

As the result of an inquiry into her mental condition ordered by the Home Secretary, she was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor.
Marshall Hall was educated at a preparatory school in Dorset, and later at Rugby.

He stayed at Rugby only from 1874 to 1876, having fallen out with his housemaster, whose reporst on him became worse and worse.

His father felt that little would be gained by maintaining him at Rugby, and sent him to work for a firm of tea-merchants in the City, where he might have remained had not his father relented and allowed him to proceed, in October 1877, to St John's College, Cambridge, to study law.

His career at Cambridge did not pass without incident.

Marshall Hall fell in love with the daughter of one of his father's colleagues at Brighton, a girl named Ethel.

He proposed to her and was refused, but taking the refusal very badly, he left England for France and Australia, remaing abroad for two years.

When he returned in 1880, he attended a party, where, by chance, he met Ethel.

He proposed again and was accepted, but it would have been better for him had he not asked a second time.
Marshall Hall was now engaged, and decided to take his studies more seriously.

He returned to Cambridge, graduated in 1882, and embraked on a career at the Bar, being called at the Inner Temple in June 1883.

His first brief (provided by a solicitor relative) was to nod his head by way of consent to an injunction against his client, hardly an auspicious start.

For the next two years, Marshall Hall mostly 'devilled', that is, took the place of other, busier barristers when they were unable to attend court.

Even in these early days, he displayed a tendency to fall out with the occupant of the Bench, a trait which ws to cause him problems later in his career.

In 1887 he moved chambers to Fountain Court, to join a largely matrimonial practice, where he held a brief in the celebrated Crawford divorce suit, in which the co-respondent was a distinguished politician, Sir Charles Dilke.

Mrs Crawford told a lurid tale from the witness box of sexual misconduct involving herself, Dilke and a servant girl.

A decree nisi of divorce was granted to Mr Crawfor d on the basis of Mrs Grawford's story alone, and, although Dilke induced the Queen's Proctor to intervene in the suit, the decree was upheld at a later hearing.

Dilke was ruined politicially; he might have been Gladstone's successor, but for the case.
Marshall Hall's personal life was problematical at this time.

He married Ethel in 1882, but the marriage was never happy, because she was an erratic, highlystrung girl who was extremely difficult to please.

Marshall Hall was devoted to her, but even his devotion could not save the marriage, and in 1888 they separated.

Ethel had an affair with a young officer and became pregnant, but terrified at the prospect of childbirth, arrange for an illegal abortion to be carried out be a Dr Laermann.

The 'operation' caused her excruciating pain, and Laermann played the piano to drown her screams.

Too late, her own doctor was called in, and a telegram was despatched to Marshall Hall, who was in Paris.

Ethel died before Marshall Hall could reach her, and Laermann was convicted of her manslaughter.

Although Marshall Hall married again in 1894, the tragedy was never forgotten, and 39 years later, as Marshall Hall himself lay dying, he would still remember Ethel's birthday.
Marie Hermann
Marshall Hall's big break came in 1894 when he defended an Austrian prostitute named Marie Herrmann, charged with the murder of one of her 'clients'.

His closing speech was memorable.

Near to its close, with tears pouring down his cheeks, he turned to the prisoner, by now also moved to tears by his eloquence.

'Women are what men made them', he said.

'Even this woman was at one time a beautiful and innocent child.

Gentlemen, I almost dare you to find a verdict of murder.

Look at her, gentlemen of the jury, look at her! God never gave her a change .

.

.

won't you?' Marie Herrmann was convicted of manslaughter, for which she served six years penal servitude.

Marshall Hall's name was now made, but the following year, he contracted double pneumonia and was oof work for a year.

He faced a struggle when he returned to the Bar, but his practice flourished, with his defence of Horatio Bottomley, 'the People's Tribune', and that of Bennett, the Yarmouth murderer.

He was elected to Parliament in 1901, but his miden speech, on the Infant Temperance Bill, was a disaster.

It caused the honourable members present much amusement, and Marshall Hall, mortally offended at his reception, never really took to politics.
Setback
In 1901 Marshall Hall was briefed to appear for a Miss Chattell, an actress, in a suit for libel against Sir Alfred Harmsworth's Daily Mail.

The paper had published an article which stated that another leading actress of the day was, in fact, Miss Chattell's daughter.

Since Miss Chattell was only 28 at the time, she took offence! An apology was published, but it was considered insufficient, and a writ was issued.

No defence was delivered, so the case went to a jury for assessment of the damages, when Marshall hall made a speech violently attacking the Mail and stating that the plaintiff's reputation was as deserving of consideration asx that of Mrs Alfred Harmsworth.

The jury awarded £2500 damages, £1500 more than was claimed on the writ, and a furious Harmsworth appealed to the Court of Appeal, instructing no fewer than five counsel, with orders to attack Marshall hall's conduct of the case in the lower court.

On the Bench, unfortunately, was Lord Justice Mathew, with whom Marshall had fallen out often, and who now severely criticised his handling of the case, on the basis that the speech to the jury had been inflammatory, and hd escalated the damages to an unreasonable degree.

Considerable publicity followed this judicial criticism and this proved disastrous for Marshall Hall's practice, for no-one would brief a barrister who might win the case in the lower courts, only to have the judgment reversed on appeal, on account of his tactics.

His earnings plummeted.

At the general election of 1906, he lost his parliamentary seat.

Marshall Hall seemed to be at his lowest ebb.
The dispute with Harmsworth who had given Marshall Hall the worst publicity he could in the years after the Chattell case, was eventually resolved, when Marshall Hall discovered that what had offended Harmsworth was not the attack on his newspaper, but the remark about his wife.

Marshall Hall immediately apologised unreservedly, having made the remark in the heat of battle, and completely forgotten about it.

Another great victory was now needed to restore him to his old position at the Bar, and this came in 1907 with his defence of the young artist, Robert Wood, in the Camden Tonw murder case.
Wood was accused of the murder of a girl named Emily Dimmock, and the case against him looked strong.

A postcard making an assignation with him was found in Emily's room, and Wood had been identified as both being in Emily's company on the night of her death, and having been seen leaving the scene of the crime.

Marshall Hall managed to devalue much of the identification evidence, but a major problem was whether to call Wood himself to give evidence, since both Marshall hall and his instructing solicitor agreed that he would make an appalling witness, which, when he was called, proved to be the case.

This very fact, however, worked in Wood's favour, since he came across as a gentle, talented, and rather silly young man, whom the jury found difficulty in believing to be capable of murder.

Wood was acquitted, but his case can be interestingly contrasted with another of Marshall hall's great capital cases, the case of the Seddons.
The Seddon case
In 1910, Frederick Henry Seddon was an insurance superintendent living with his wife and five children n a large house at 63 Tollington Park, North London.

Seddon was 40 years old and had been with his company for 20 years, moving up the company ladder to his present position of trust.

He was very well off, but his weakness was love of money.

The house in Tollington Park was too large for his needs, so in July 1910 he let the top floor to a sponster of 49, named Eliza Mary Barrow.

She owned £1600 in India stock, the lease of a public house, and had £216 in a savings bank, together with a sum of some £400 in gold in a cash box.

Over the next 14 months, she gradually transferred all her money and stock to Seddon, in return for an annuity, which, of course, would terminate in the event of her death.In September 1911, she became ill, and died a fortnight later, apparently of epidemic diarrhoea.

She had relatives living nearby, with whom she had previously lived, but they were not informed of her death.

On her death Seddon went through her belongings and claimed to have found only £10 in gold, with which he paid for her funeral and interment in a common, that is, shared grave, receiving a commission from the undertaker on the business.

The relatives, when they discovered Miss Barrow's death, became suspicious, and caused inquiries to be made, which led to the exhumation of the corpse, and the discovery that it contained a fatal dose of arsenic.

Seddon and his wife, wh o had attended Miss Barrow during her last illness, were charged with her murder.
The prosecution was led by the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, who led evidence that Seddon's 15 year old daughter had purchased arsenical flypapers from a local chemist shortly before Miss Barrow's illness.

Seddon himself was a very vain man, and semed flattered that the Attorney-General himself had come to prosecute him.

He was determined to have a battle of wits with Isaacs, and indeed, under cross-examinatin seemed to have an answer for everything.

As cross-examination progressed, however, Seddon was increasingly revealed for what he was, a mean, self-centred, cold and avaricious man.

Mrs Seddon, on the other hand, also gave evidence, but came across as a simple woman, totally dominated and used by Seddon.

Seddon was convicted and sentenced to death, whilst Mrs Seddon was acquitted, and it is fair to say that, given the weakness of the prosecution evidence against him, it was his own performance in the witness-box which helped to convict him, in contrast to Wood, whose appearance in the box probably saved him.

The Seddons' case was also the occasion of one of the most famous of courtroom scenes, when Seddon, immediately before sentence of death was to be passed, made the masonic distress sign to the judge who was, like Seddon, a zealous freemason, and who was now being called upon to assist a brother mason in need.

A remarkable scene followed, with the judge, unnerved by Seddon's appeal, imploring him to make peace with 'the great architect of the universe'.

An appeal to the Court of Appeal failed, and Seddon was executed in April 1912.
Brides in the bath
In the years that followed, Marshall Hall was the 'great defender' of the criminal Bar, appearing in many celebrated cases.

He defended George Joseph Smith, in the 'brides in the bath' case.

Smith was a man who physically repelled Marshall Hall, who was convinced that Smith was trying to hypnotise him! He also defended the beautiful Madame Fahmy, wife of an Egyptian bey, who, driven to despair by her husband's continued ill-treatment of her, shot and killed him in a London hotel in the middle of a violent thunderstorm.

A plea of self-defence succeeded, after Marshall Hall vividly demonstrated the scene of the killing physically in court, using a real firearm.

In January 1927, Marshall Hall conducted the defence of some care dealers in Derbyshire, who were accused of receiving stolen goods.

When the court adjourned one Saturday afternoon, Marshall hall returned to London, in the expectation of being back in court on the Monday.

Illness, however, prevented this, and he succumbed to influenza, bronchitis, and eventually pneumonia, which caused his death, on 23 February 1927, at 69 years of age.
Marshall hall was one of the greatest advocates which the Bar has ever produced, but apart from a part-time recordership, he never attained judicial office.

He was knighted in 1916, but alwasy remained a barrister, latterly a King's Counsel, dying in harness when his powers as an advocate were as much in evidence as they had ever been.

To end on a lighter note, however, the story is told that Marshall Hall suffered from what has been described as a lawyer's occupational hazard, nemely haemorrhoids.

When he entered court, his clerk would precede him, carrying a large inflatable rubber ring for the great mat to sit upon.

As the evidence for the prosecution was given, if the case against his client looked strong, he would blow his nose loudly.

If the situation looked desperate, h e would remove the rubber ring from beneath him, and reflate it, a process which was, apparently, guaranteed to command the undivided attention of the jury.