While trawling through London's pre-war newspapers in search of a Soho slashing, James Morton came across several cases that caught his eye


Recently, since I am working on a book on the underworld of London’s Soho, I have been trawling through the pre-war newspapers trying to find when the German wrestler Carl Reginsky was slashed while working there as a doorman at a club.



I have not found it, but I did find an interesting case about him from 1938, when he was sued by a referee. Reginsky had apparently attacked Philip Meader in the dressing room after being disqualified against Joe Devalto at the Seymour Hall. The referee lost a couple of teeth and said he had been so terrified he had not been able to work again.



Various versions of the wrestling rules were read out to the court, including one – to loud laughter – that ‘seconds are not allowed to give their man cocaine or strychnine’. Eventually, the referee was awarded £150. He never received the money though because the Inland Revenue bankrupted Reginsky over unpaid tax. For those who want to read an account of the case, it is in The Times of 3 and 4 March 1938.



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Ever since I attempted to read Thomas Hardy, I have always been interesting in wife-selling and have been trying to find the last recorded case. I was therefore pleased to see that in 1930, Emmanuel Berry, formerly of the Berkshire Regiment, then living in France, sold his wife Louise for £16 to Marcel Jacquot, a taxi-owner/driver. After seven years he wanted her back, but she was happy with Jacquot and opposed the claim. His action in the French courts was defeated when she produced the signed contract. She was said to be considering divorce proceedings on the grounds of desertion. The People of 11 July 1937 has the details.


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A strange murder case took place in Hammond, Indiana in 1922. Middle-aged Frank McNally had married his housekeeper, the 26-year-old divorcee Hazel. In December 1921 she returned from hospital where she had, she said, given birth to twins, but she claimed that their eyes were too weak to be exposed to direct light and that, apart from a brief glimpse, all Frank could do was to stand outside the bedroom door and listen to the babies cry. The next month, the health of the twins deteriorated and Hazel took them to a Chicago hospital, where they apparently died. Curiously, she then persuaded him to go along with a deception of the neighbours by pretending that two dolls she had purchased were the babies. Later he would tell the court that, when he wanted to stop the deception, she hit him, stabbed him and threw an alarm clock at him. She then left McNally and went to live in South Bend, Indiana.



Suspicious that she had killed the children, Frank McNally went to the police and in October 1922 Hazel was arrested and charged with murder. The evidence was not strong. Frank said he had seen her wipe blood from the ear of one of the children; a neighbour said the same about a nose. A 17-year-old girl said she had carried one of the babies onto the street but could not say if it was alive or dead. Hazel McNally told the police there had never been twins. She had faked the pregnancy because of her husband’s constant nagging for her to have children and had purchased two dolls to make the requisite crying noises.



The prosecution claimed it would produce a doctor to say she had been pregnant. The defence said it would produce the doctor who had performed an early hysterectomy on her. The prosecution said it would produce Raymond, her seven-year-old son by a previous marriage. The defence said Raymond was adopted.



When it came to it, the crowded public gallery was sadly disappointed. No such evidence was called because the case turned on the fact that the prosecution could not produce the body of either of the twins. The English law of ‘no body, no confession, no case’ applied and on 20 October she was acquitted. When she left after being photographed shaking hands with the judge, she said she would purchase two more dolls, divorce McNally and begin to study law.



Curiously, it seems it was not the first time she had simulated pregnancy. As a teenager she had convinced her parents and the neighbours she was pregnant and purchased a doll to bolster her claim. The papers had a great time reporting the case.



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I also liked the 1906 case in which Ernest Miller was sentenced to 18 months with hard labour at London’s Clerkenwell Sessions for the theft of a watch and chain. His evening job seems to have been in the popular but phoney music hall act of Dr Walford Brodie, who pretended to cure the disabled. Miller would be carried on stage each night and hop about after being cured. As the week went on, he became worse and the doctor’s cure the greater. No one seems to have thought to prosecute the good doctor for fraud.



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I still have not found the details of Reginsky’s slashing but if anyone can recall the pre-war Soho underworld – including the solicitor said to be behind the arranged marriages by foreign prostitutes to derelict Englishmen in the 1940s and 1950s – I would be very pleased to hear from them.



James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist