Radio
Murder most gripping
Michael Vestey
The late, lamented Edgar Lustgarten returned from the Black Museum in the sky this week in the rotund shape of John Mortimer. Remember Lustgarten? He of the hooded eyes, the soft but suspense- filled delivery in the B-movies of the Fifties and Sixties: `Troughton thought he had committed the perfect crime but he had left behind one vital clue that sent him to the gallows . . .'
In John Mortimer Presents the Trials of Marshall Hall, on Radio Two (Tuesday), we were back in Lustgarten territory to some extent, as the creator of Rumpole narrated the first of a dramatised series about the trials of Sir Edward Marshall Hall, the leg- endary late Victorian and Edwardian advo- cate. Mortimer began by saying that if you asked barristers of his generation what made them buy a wig and gown they would say it wasn't that they thirsted after justice, it was because they had read the life and cases of Marshall Hall. 'Tall, handsome, sil- ver-tongued, he could dominate a court- room and woo a jury as no one has before or since.'
Whereas Lustgarten spoke admiringly of the Knackers of the Yard, Mortimer is clearly in awe of Marshall Hall and the days when an English murder was really something. Mortimer, a splendid story- teller himself, sets the scene for us so that we can almost smell the gas-lamps of 1894: `It's a chill spring night, an emaciated woman approaches a drunken man in the Euston Road . . .' The woman is Marie Hermann, an Austrian-born prostitute accused of murdering an elderly client, Henry Stephens, whom she'd solicited while he was drunk. Back in her room, after a dispute over her fee, there's a strug- gle and she kills him with blows to the head from a poker. She tries to smuggle his body out of the lodging-house in a trunk but the landlady calls the police when she finds blood.
Marshall Hall (Tom Baker) is given the brief and goes to see her in custody. Mor- timer says, with a touch of the Marshall Halls, 'Holloway Prison is looking particu- larly alluring in the spring sunshine though spring is not a season that penetrates far behind its walls.' The prosecuting counsel, Charles Matthews, is no George Carman, as Marshall Hall whispers to the defence solicitor, 'Dear old Matthews, the blood, he always dwells on the blood.' Nevertheless, this is a tough one for Hall as not only is Hermann a prostitute, but she lies in court. Against the odds, though, he manages to make the dead man appear a violent drunk who tried to strangle her, and the defen- dant the victim, not him. In his final address he pleads with the jury, 'Remem- ber that these women are what men make them. And do not forget, even she at one time was a beautiful and innocent child . . Look at her, gentlemen of the jury, look at her. God never gave her a chance, won't you?'
They did, finding her guilty of manslaughter and calling for leniency. She had, as Lustgarten might have put it, cheat- ed the hangman. Mortimer, though, with his long antipathy to judges, observes, 'The quality of mercy didn't come easily to Mr Justice Wells . .' He sentenced her to six years penal servitude. I don't know if Mar- shal Hall got everyone off during his career as the successes tend to make a better story, but it's a pleasure to hear Mortimer narrating these programmes, and Baker hamming up the purple passages which in those days drew applause from the public gallery at the Old Bailey. While we may recoil from reading about hideous modern crimes in the newspapers each day, there's enough distance between us and Marshall Hall's period to make this series ideal for winter evenings in front of the fire. Next week: The Camden Town murder.
My attention was held by another grip- ping dramatised documentary, this time on Radio ,Four last week, The Proud Walker (Friday) written by Keith Darvil. In 1906, it was discovered that Winchester Cathedral was collapsing into the peat bog on which it had been built after the Norman Conquest. Beech trees had been used as a foundation but the cathedral was now floating and sinking on a vast waterlogged raft. The only way to save the building was to send a diver down into 15 feet of water beneath to dig out the peat to a deeper level of gravel, pour in thousands of sacks of concrete and then pump out the water. A London diver called William Walker (John Hartley) was recruited for a year but it took more than six to complete, with Walker, wearing near- ly 200 lbs of equipment, working alone underwater day after day.
We hear Walker's stoical Cockney humour as he labours in the cold water for three shillings an hour, 'No lamp, black as Old Nick's breeches, a blind man working with his bare hands.' He is told the deeper he goes the farther back in time he has travelled . . . 'Before England.' He became the saviour of Winchester, and was con- gratulated by the King. David Blount's direction packed quite a lot into the pro- gramme and conveyed both the urgency of the operation and the stamina of a man working in hellish and unique conditions for more than six years.
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