Shropshire link to sensational 1918 trial
Veteran journalist Frank Fuller has highlighted a Shropshire link to one of the most sensational court cases of the 20th century which reached its climax 100 years ago.
In the Saturday Into The Archives slot, the Shropshire Star featured the acquittal at the Old Bailey of the MP Noel Pemberton Billing who was accused of libelling Miss Maud Allan "in having imputed to her dancing in the play of Salome certain vicious features," according to the coverage of the trial in June 1918.
It caught the eye of 88-year-old Frank, from Market Drayton, and took him back to his Wellington childhood when Pemberton Billing stood for The Wrekin seat in 1941.
With it being wartime, says Frank, there was a moratorium that if a sitting MP died, the seat would not be contested by other parties.
In 1940 the sitting Conservative MP for The Wrekin, Colonel Baldwin-Webb, died when the ship in which he was crossing the Atlantic was torpedoed. The Tory chosen to follow seamlessly in his place was Arthur Colegate.
"It didn't work out because Pemberton Billing spoilt the party by getting himself nominated for the seat, which meant there had to be a by-election," said Frank.
"I would have been about 11 and I remember seeing Pemberton Billing in a very swish soft-top Rolls-Royce addressing people in the centre of Wellington, on the corner of Station Approach and Church Street, if I remember rightly.
"I didn't hear what he said and would not have taken any notice of it anyway. I remember him standing in this Rolls-Royce addressing people with a loudspeaker, but I was more interested in the car."
Pemberton Billing was standing as a National Independent but failed to take the seat. Colegate's majority was 2,825 in the by-election held on September 26, 1941. There was a third candidate, an Independent who trailed far behind.
It was one of four by-elections contested by Pemberton Billing in 1941, being beaten every time.
Pemberton Billing was a colourful character with many strings to his bow and openly expressed a preference for "fast aircraft, fast speed-boats, fast cars and fast women."
At the start of the Second World War he had produced a design for a pilotless flying bomb. The British authorities turned it down.
He died on November 11, 1948, on his motor yacht Commodore at Burnham-on-Crouch.
