British courts last week settled three major scandals that have kept London newspapers humming for months.
Lady Louis & Negro. Returned from Malta, Lady Louis Mountbatten, wife of King George's first cousin once removed, stood before Lord Chief Justice Baron Hewart and heard herself exonerated of the charge of consorting with a Negro. London's sensational tabloid weekly People had blurted: "Famous Hostess Exiled. ... A scandal which has shaken society to its very depths . . . concerns . . . one of the leading hostesses in the country, a woman highly connected and immensely rich. Her associations with a colored man became so marked that they were the talk of the West End.— One day the couple were caught in compromising circumstances. . . . The society woman has been given the hint to clear out of England for a couple of years, and the hint comes from a quarter which cannot be ignored. . . ."
For this indiscretion People apologized, offered heavy damages, which Lady Louis regally refused. Her counsel, Norman Birkett, explained that her departure for Malta, where her husband is in Naval service, "had given an opportunity for the lying, malignant and poisonous tongues of scandal to wag. . . . The most atrocious libel of which I have any knowledge in all my experience. . . . She had been informed of the identity of the colored man. . . . She has never even met him."
Heavily underscoring the vindication, King George & Queen Mary had Lord & Lady Louis Mountbatten to luncheon last week, not before she was legally vindicated but immediately afterward.
Mrs. Barney & Lover. Before the Hon. Mr. Justice Humphreys and a jury of ten men & two women in Old Bailey appeared Mrs. Elvira Dolores Barney, accused of murdering her lover Thomas William Scott Stephen after a cocktail party in her West End flat. One dawn last month a physician, hastily summoned, found Mrs. Barney, whose husband is a U. S. radio crooner, anxiously kissing Stephen's cooling corpse. A revolver lay nearby. While Mrs. Barney awaited trial her father. Sir John Mullens, was reported to be liquidating the Mullens gems to raise the huge fee of her defender, lean Sir Patrick Hastings, the Clarence Darrow of Great Britain. Last week Sir Patrick was in fine fettle. After witnesses had testified to Mrs. Barney's love for Stephen, and she had explained that the revolver went off while he was trying to keep her from shooting herself, Sir Patrick cried, "Her life was tragic, tied to an American brute whom she could not divorce! . . . Even one of us some day may have a daughter for whom we may have to make excuses. ... It is conclusive evidence of her innocence that her fingerprints were not found on the revolver. There is no evidence here upon which you could be asked to hang a cat."
"The finest defense speech I have ever heard," beamed Justice Humphreys. "There is not the slightest doubt that there was a struggle for this revolver." With the judge's charge in mind Old Bailey's ten men & two women promptly found Mrs. Barney not guilty, looked concerned when she and her mother simultaneously fainted from relief.