Actress Gay’s sex session on liner with Steward

James Camb ended in her murder ... or did it?

IT WAS 1947 and the Daily Express was riding the crest of a wave when a murder case captivated the world. Circulation of the paper was around 3.9million a day; Giles was drawing two cartoons a week and Editor Arthur Christiansen was Beaverbrook’s Golden Boy.

 

The story made front page news for months and for Christiansen it was tailor-made for another circulation boost. The story of a beautiful actress; the riddle of a sex game with a handsome steward that went wrong on a liner bound for England; or was it rape?

 

The mystery of her vanished body; was it murder? Her empty cabin and a small porthole that became as famous as the ship itself, the MV Durban Castle out of Cape Town bound for Southampton.

 

It became the first murder trial in English law to be tried without a body and at the centre of it was a porthole and a cabin reconstructed in a court, that would become a theatre. The verdict was in doubt right up to today.

 

“What really happened in Cabin 126 that night?”? asked the Daily Express. Perhaps no one will ever know.

 

The case came in the shadow of the Hanging Debate in the Commons which was set to overturn capital punishment, and the fate of the alleged killer 30-year-old James Camb hung in the balance. Everyone wanted to know what former PM Winston Churchill, calling for the death penalty, would say about the verdict. They weren’t disappointed.

 

The court heard that pretty, 21-year-old, red-headed actress Gay Gibson, who had been staying with her father in Durban, had been seen dancing happily with other First-Class passengers at midnight before being escorted to her single berth cabin by steward Camb on October 18.

 

The Durban Castle was south of Freetown at 3am when a crewman answered an urgent call from 126 — but the door was slammed shut in the face of watchman Frederick Steer.

 

He later told a court: “The cabin call light was on outside but there was no answer. I pushed the door ajar and saw a man I thought was steward James standing wearing a singlet and trousers. The door was then slammed shut by the man’s right hand. I saw no sign of the girl.”

 

Her disappearance sparked a ship-wide hunt for her; police in England were called and coastguards along the route combed shorelines and beaches … as rumours of her sex life and character swept newspapers in both England and South Africa.

 

The Daily Herald reported how all shipping and aircraft 270 miles off the West Coast of Africa, were on the look-out for a female body in black pyjamas.

 

The ship’s captain interviewed Camb, who had scratches on his arms and neck, and he denied any link to the actress’s disappearance. But later he admitted that her lips turned blue, and she suddenly died having a fit and frothing at the mouth while they were enjoying sex.

 

He panicked believing he would be fired and squeezed her body through the porthole saying: “It made a helluva splash. It was hard at first but better when I got her arms through. I am sure she was dead when I did it.”

 

When the liner docked at Southampton he was arrested and later stood trial at Winchester Crown Court charged with murder by strangulation on the high seas.

Gay was stuffed through the porthole

Camb, who was married with a child, was branded in court as a philandering predator who arrogantly believed women travelling alone would succumb to his charms.

 

Gay was a seductive, sexy dresser who enjoyed attracting men wherever she went, the jury heard. A forensic examination of the linen in the cabin revealed stains consistent with death by strangulation, showing frothing at the mouth and blood flecks from linings of the throat, gums, lungs and nose.

 

Claims that Gay suffered from ill health and fits were denied by her mother, who said she was extremely healthy.

 

Camb was doomed and jurors took just 45 minutes to find him guilty. He had accosted three other women on earlier trips and was sentenced to death.

 

But at the time the no-hanging bill was being discussed by Parliament and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. An appeal against conviction was swiftly rejected.

 

Churchill said: “The House of Commons has, by its vote, saved the life of the brutal lascivious murderer who thrust the poor girl he had raped and assaulted through a porthole of the ship to the sharks.”

 

Camb’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He was released in 1959 but convicted a few years later of other sexual offences and spent his remaining years behind bars. He pleaded innocent until his grave.

 

It transpired that at the end of WWII a medical officer was called out to Gay who was in the ATS. She was on her bed with “her back arched, unable to breathe, with her tongue at the back of her throat.” She told him that she had just had “one of her turns”.

 

Actress Doreen Mantle, who later gained fame as Mrs Warboys in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave and shared a dressing room with Gay weeks before her voyage, said: “She was not a well girl. She would faint during rehearsals and her lips would often go blue.”

 

Doreen did not give evidence at Camb’s trial because her father persuaded her to stay in South Africa and not get involved.

 

ANOTHER VANISHING ACT

I AM always banging on about the silver serpent stair-rails that went missing from the Express building after the Great Exodus from Fleet Street. Trying to find out what happened to them, who has them? And I was going to crack on about the disappearing Reuters signs from their iconic building entrance too.

 

Remember them? Most of us walked by them on the way to work for years. Now they have vanished too. But at last I’ve tracked them down. They were the bronze name plates at the entrance to No.85. The iconic Reuters and Press Association HQ was built in 1935 to the designs of Sir Edwin Lutyens. But whatever became of them when Reuters sold the Portland stone building and moved to London’s Docklands?

 

Now I can reveal a little birdie told me that two are stored in the company archive in London. One of the others is on display on the wall of the 5th floor senior executive area at the company’s South Colonnade, Canary Wharf offices.

 

And the fourth? It went to Grenada. A former employee now retired to the Caribbean island asked for it and it was handed over as a memento. 

 

Perhaps Struan Coupar and Andrew Cameron were big-hearted enough to do the same with one of our staff and the serpents? I doubt it.

 

HELLO TO OUR NEIGHBOURS

I BROWSED through a wonderfully kept Post Office directory of London EC4 recently that revealed what life must have been like in Fleet Street back in 1795 and it reminded me of a village high street in England.

 

Over a century after the Great Fire, which burned as far as Fetter Lane for four days, the Street was rebuilt but the new buildings were squeezed into in the same medieval plots as the old ones and they housed a mixture of trades … drapers, tinmen, perfumers, apothecaries, art shops, hat makers, and even musical clockmakers on one side.

 

On the other side … tailors, upholsterers, cabinet makers, grocers, sword cutlers, paint makers and auctioneers. Sprinkled between them were addresses for lawyers, accountants and businessmen.

 

It looked like a bustling, sludgy thoroughfare of people, mud, dung and horses. Drawings show that many of the shops, mostly made of brick, were gabled houses with their signs swinging outside. The signs were later banned because high winds caused a fatal accident and from then on had to be flat against the wall.

 

By the early 19th century, other directories show more detail. At number 69 Fleet Street, (The Old Bell end) James Chaffin was running a glass and lamp warehouse. Across the road at number 108 in the year 1829 was Thomas Williamson, a hosier and glover. He died in 1848, aged 100, with his wife, Ann, and son, Thomas, continuing to run the business until her death.

 

Another Williamson, John, was based at 175 Fleet Street near Crane Court, where he made artificial legs and eyes, and customers travelled from far and wide to have his fitments. One bootmaker even made five pairs of boots with silver tassels for the king.

 

Finally, we come to the hacks and publications. John Bull magazine, national symbol of British patriotism, strength, and courage, representing traditional English values such as loyalty, fairness, hard work, fair play and good breeding so badly missing now, was at No.40. It was selling 500,000 a month by 1910.

 

Bell’s Messenger, a British Sunday that ran Britain’s first newspaper cartoon was at number 63; both the Sunday Times and the Kent & Essex Mercury at 72, the Dispatch at 139, the British Farmer’s Chronicle at 165, and Cobbett’s Register at 183.

 

According to the magazine Discover Your Ancestors, even at the time of the 1841 census, there was still a diverse collection of trades, in The Street’s courts and alleys. There were cheesemongers, opticians, painters, music sellers and even dentists living and working alongside warehouse or shopmen.

 

Just like today there were also those who provided food and drink; publicans and coffee house keepers such as Joseph Pursey, who lived at 88 Crown Court with his family and opened up his house.

 

Generally, the street was inhabited by those with useful trades, but writings of the time provide a glimpse of a harder life lived by the elderly such as needle makers and invalids selling in the street.

 

The sheer breadth of industries in the Street shows that it has always been a vital, busy thoroughfare where almost anything could be bought and sold. One jeweller made regalia for Freemasons, and another sold furs. Music publishers came and went along with bookshops.

 

Fleet Street was always a microcosm of life in the metropolis. Fortunes were made and bankrupts were many. Including newspapers.

 

OYEZ! TOWN CRIERS RING OUT CHANGES

BY 1900, the number of working Town Criers died out in most places following the widespread boom in newspapers and a growing number of people learning to read. Just a few hundred left.

 

Those who were, proudly held on to their heritage and tried to versify.

I found one in the 1901 census. His name was James Welch, and he rang his bell and sounded his horn in Wantage. But the tradition that began in England after the Battle of Hastings, was withering on the vine.

 

James described himself as an advertising agent among other things, such as a bill poster and an announcer of news.

 

Other town criers left in the Oxford area got together with a publisher and created a monthly journal called The Bill Poster. For a time, it sold well, going nationwide. Today a copy is worth a lot, it is very rare. But it is also surprisingly good in its coverage of subjects.

 

From 1901, I was surprised to find articles on porn in advertising: using pigs as advertising mediums; the rights and wrongs of street light advertising; horrors of newspaper adverts; artwork on buses and electric signs.

 

The role of the town crier was featured in Pearson’s Weekly, the magazine started by the Express founder Arthur Pearson and it is a fascinating take on the job.

 

An extract from 1904 reads:

“The Town Crier is a very old institution, and his occupation was practically taken away by the advent of the newspaper and other necessities of the present time; but he is useful to a certain extent.

 

“Suppose you have lost something; you have bills printed and circulated, but people usually crumple them up without reading. An advertisement in the newspaper is of little use as the paper only appears once a week. But everybody listens to the town crier because he is a novelty; he amuses and interests all who hear him, and he thus becomes the best medium of advertising things lost, concerts, and whatnot.”

 

One for the history buffs:

Two town criers appear in the Bayeaux Tapestry, which depicts the invasion of England by William of Normandy and the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

 

TERRY MANNERS

 

11 February 2025