Murder, fascists and Barbara Windsor – five curious things that happened in London hotels
Five curious tales involving London hotels, the FBI’s Most Wanted Criminal, Barbara Windsor, and a woman who got away with murder.
Claridge’s and Benito Mussolini
Six weeks after the March on Rome, after which he became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history, Benito Mussolini made a trip to London for an Allied conference on German reparations.
He arrived at Victoria Station on 9 December 1922, apparently on time, and no one quite knew what to make of him. One newspaper had to explain what his black-shirted supporters were doing when they ‘held high their right arms, with the hands spread slantingly forward’.
Mussolini’s choice of hotel was Claridge’s on Brook Street in Mayfair but as soon as he had arrived a loud and unseemly row broke out when the Italian delegation accused the hotel of allocating far better rooms to their French counterparts.
The next day Mussolini and his party, all wearing Fascist party badges, were received at Buckingham Palace by the King and later they visited the Italian Fascist HQ at 25 Noel Street in Soho. It sounded grand but it was really just a small office.
During his visit to the capital the Italian leader continually grumbled about the insidious London fog which he maintained not only got into his clothes but even found its way into his room at Claridge’s.
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This didn’t stop Mussolini, however, missing an important press conference while entertaining a prostitute in there.
Most of the dignitaries he met in London thought Mussolini faintly amusing and Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary remarked: ‘He is really quite absurd.’
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When Mussolini returned home he vowed he would never go back to England. For once he kept his word.
The Pax Hotel in Victoria and the FBI’s Most Wanted Criminal
On 17 May 1968 and about six weeks after he had shot and killed Dr Martin Luther King in Memphis, James Earl Ray, via Canada and Portugal, arrived in London. He found anonymity in Earl’s Court and Victoria - at the time run-down areas of London and full of boarding houses and cheap hotels.
He first stayed at Heathfield House on the Cromwell Road (now the Rockwell Hotel). But a couple of weeks later, after being turned down at the YMCA on the same road, he ended up at the Pax Hotel (now Baker’s Hotel) at 126 Warwick Way.
When the Swedish-born Anna Thomas opened the door of her hotel she came across a bedraggled Ray in a beige coat utterly soaked after a heavy rainstorm.
He had a wet cardboard suitcase in one hand and books and newspapers under his other arm - no one could have looked further from the world’s most wanted criminal and the subject of the FBI’s largest and most expensive man hunt.
A few days later Thomas knocked on Ray’s room and found that he had already packed up and disappeared. He had left a newspaper featuring Robert Kennedy’s assassination which had taken place two days before and also a Cold War spy thriller called Assignment Tangier by Cameron Rougvie. In the sink, crammed down the spout, was a plastic syringe.
Thomas later said she was quite glad to see Ray leave: ‘He was so neurotic, such a strange fellow. I felt sorry for him but he was so obviously a troubled man that he gave me the creeps.’
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At Heathrow a suspicious immigration officer noticed Ray had two passports and said: ‘I say, old fellow, would you mind stepping over here for a moment?
Ray was found to have a loaded revolver stuffed in his back pocket and when asked why replied: ‘Well, I’m going to Africa and I felt that I might need it. You know how things are, out there.’ He was immediately arrested and 40 days later extradited back to the USA.
The Mapleton Hotel on Coventry Street and Barbara Windsor at the Flamingo Club
A 21-year-old ’30 shillings a night’ pianist called Jeffrey Kruger thought the basement of the 100-room Mapleton Hotel on Coventry Street (now the Thistle Piccadilly) would be perfect for his idea of a new kind of jazz club.
He had always wondered why places catering for jazz were always a bit of a dive and once explained the strict door policy for his club which he called the Flamingo: ‘No man can be admitted without a necktie and no girl is welcomed who looks like a refugee. It is possible and preferable, I think, to be hip and keep a high social standard.’
In 1954 Billie Holiday played at the Flamingo wearing the same gold dress she had worn at the Royal Albert Hall earlier that evening and was accompanied by Ronnie Scott on saxophone. A year later Ronnie held some auditions at the Flamingo.
His singer, Annie Ross, was ill and he needed a replacement for two weeks. After all the hopefuls had tried out he pointed at a short 18-year-old East End girl and said: ‘You. Little one. Outside the Mapleton Hotel, Leicester Square. Monday morning. Nine o’clock.’
At the time Barbara Windsor couldn’t work out why she had been chosen when so many other better, more experienced singers had been auditioned but Ronnie Scott thought she was perfect. Although for some reason he always insisted she played the maracas while she sang.
A year after Windsor’s short stint as a jazz cabaret singer, the Flamingo Club moved premises to Wardour Street, the location where it made its name.
The Woman Who Got Away with Murder at the Savoy
On July 1 1923 Ali Kamel Fahmy Beh, one of Egypt’s richest men, booked into a suite of rooms on the fourth floor of the Savoy Hotel. He was accompanied by his beautiful French wife Marguerite, once a Parisian courtesan and a former lover of the Prince of Wales.
Eight days later at 2.30am, after a late supper in the restaurant during which the couple loudly and aggressively argued, Marguerite Fahmy shot her husband dead in the hotel corridor.
The night porter ran to the scene where he found, next to the door of room 42, Fahmy crumpled against the wall surrounded by a large pool of blood. Marguerite dropped a large and heavy hand gun and then stumbled towards to the porter saying over and over again in French - ‘what shall I do? I’ve shot him’.
Two months later at her trial at the Old Bailey Marguerite was defended by the Edward Marshall Hall who presented Marguerite to the jury as the victim of “brutality and beastliness” from her “oriental husband”.
The trial judge forbade any mention of Marguerite’s less than innocent past while in his summing up described Fahmy as “a monster of Eastern depravity and decadence, whose sexual tastes were indicative of an amoral sadism towards his helpless European wife”.
The jury took only an hour to return the verdict ‘not guilty’ and Marguerite was acquitted of all charges.
The Daily Chronicle wrote that the verdict was ‘one of those cases, so rare in English law, of justifiable and excusable homicide’. Marguerite Fahmy had got away with murder.
Marguerite, despite a court in Egypt rejecting her claim to her husband’s property, lived in luxury in an apartment facing the Ritz in Paris until the end of her life. She died at the age of 80 in January 1971.
The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin at the Ritz
Charlie Chaplin was woken up on the morning of 17 September 1921 while in his bed at the Ritz hotel on Piccadilly. ‘Visitors from Hoxton,’ he was told through the door, and from outside the window he could hear children singing a song over and over again:
When the moon shines bright on Charlie Chaplin
His boots are cracking, for want of blacking
And his little baggy trousers need mending
Before we send him to the Dardanelles.
The song was written originally in protest at the comedian not enlisting during World War One and had ‘scared the daylights’ out of Chaplin when he had first heard it.
But by 1921 it had lost its original connotations or at least it had to the group of children from the Hoxton School that had walked across London to see him. To much publicity Chaplin had arrived in England from America only a week earlier and it was his first visit to London since becoming famous.
Chaplin dressed and walked into the sitting room of his suite and found about fifty excited East-end children. One boy, called Charles Loughton, stepped forward and handed him a box of cigars and a letter. It read: ‘You were one of us. You are now famous over the world.
But we like to think you were once a poor boy in London as we are. You are now a gentleman, and all gentlemen smoke cigars. So we have chosen a box as a little gift to “Our Charlie”.’
Three weeks after Chaplin met the boys and girls from Hoxton School, and after a weekend spent with H. G. Wells and his family, Charlie left London, via Waterloo, back to America on the RMS Olympic.