Tragedy of the starlet caught in a scandal and killed in the Blitz
Last week, if you were awake at dawn and watching the Freeview movie channel talking Pictures, you might have caught a prewar comedy gem called a Fire Has Been arranged.
It featured music hall double-act Bud Flanagan and Chesney allen as a couple of hapless jewel thieves, and co- starred Mary Lawson as the woman who beats them to the hidden loot.
Mary Lawson, remember her? Probably not... But as Michael Buerk recounted in The Blitz: Britain On Fire (C5), she was a thirties celebrity, notorious for her love affairs — the motherless girl from a terrace house in Darlington, who jilted tennis superstar Fred Perry to wed an aristocrat.
More shocking, when she began an affair with Francis Beaumont, son of the seigneur of sark in the Channel Islands, he was married. His furious wife paid for a newspaper notice, announcing a divorce on the grounds of ‘ his adultery with Miss Mary Lawson’.
Imagine the gossip. and then imagine, on the first night of the Luftwaffe bombing raids on Liverpool in 1941, the amazement of families in a public air- raid shelter when they realised they were sharing their cramped quarters with Mary and her toff.
the couple, by now married
almost three years, were visiting Liverpool friends while Beaumont was home on leave from the RaF. But a gold band on her finger wasn’t going to protect Mary from the whispers and scorn of the people in the crowded shelter.
Poor Mary. she endured another night of burning embarrassment in the shelter and, when the sirens went off on the third evening, she and Beaumont decided to risk staying in their room.
It was a fatal mistake. after a direct hit on their house, the couple’s bodies were pulled from the rubble. Mary was just 30.
their story was vividly told, with plenty of film clips and photos to evoke the era, but it suffered from being just one of several heartbreaking tales unfolding together.
Instead of following each one from start to finish, Michael and his co-presenters, angellica Bell and Rob Bell, kept switching from one to the next — the beleaguered hospital staff; the captain battling a blaze aboard his ship.
the stories continue tonight and tomorrow. With so much going on, it becomes difficult to keep track of the multiple threads. But perhaps that sense of confusion, destruction and terror is the most faithful way to describe the Blitz.
By contrast, there was nothing complicated about the story of samuel Little, in Confessions Of A Serial Killer (C4).
Despite being arrested dozens of times since the seventies, for crimes that included rape and violent assault, he was able to travel through the southern U. s. for decades, murdering women. It’s thought he killed 93 victims, almost all of them black prostitutes.
this budget documentary, presented by Ben Zand, seemed impressed by claims that Little is the most prolific serial killer in U.s. history. It played tapes of his boasts, recorded during police interviews, but failed to speak to him on camera — the best Zand could do was walk past the barbed wire of the California state Prison and say: ‘He’s in there.’
He did talk to former detectives, but let them off lightly when they denied their failure to stop the killings was rooted in racism and contempt for the dead women.
shot in an annoying style, with lots of zoom, wobble and blur, this was — as its flippant title suggested — a sadly shallow piece of film.