The Prince and the Pauper

The changing of the seasons comes around again and here we are moving into autumn. We continue to live under the shadow of a virus that we all hoped would be gone by now.

With lots of wonderful help we are working away on a “Petition for Mercy” for Christine - it’s also known as an application for a pardon. At some stage in the near future I will need the services of a criminal barrister - that’s not a barrister who is a criminal but...anyway. We will need a barrister to fine tune and to present it.

Over the last few weeks I read a number of press cuttings from 1963 that report on the day’s events in court from Christine’s committal proceedings. This preliminary hearing was to assess the case against Christine for committing perjury in the earlier Lucky Gordon trial. She had denied that two witnesses had been at her assault and it was at the subsequent trial that she would be sent to prison.

What a lot of people may not realise is that these two witnesses, Fenton and Camacchio, both confirmed that Lucky Gordon had assaulted her. So Christine went to prison because she denied that the two witnesses were at the scene of crime, two witnesses who would have supported her story anyway.

Take an extreme example. You are attacked in the street then thankfully a stranger comes to help and the attacker runs away. The stranger, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to get involved. So when the police arrive you tell them what happened but you also say, “It was just me and nobody else was here.” Six months later you are the one in prison.

My mother used to tell me, “I was the first person to go to prison for not saying there was a witness who saw a crime,” and I bet she was the only person.

I cant find any pictures of Merid but this is his grandfathers. Haile Selassie the late Emperor of Ethiopia.

I was thinking of Chris and how she had a part of her life taken away and it reminded me of her friend Merid. He was the grandson of Haile Selassie, the last emperor of Ethiopia. I really liked Merid. When he came to visit he would make me stand to attention and march around the house like a soldier, show me how to salute. Merid wore a thick hospital neck brace, he was a slight man and I remember him not being very tall and he looked like his grandfather, with high cheekbones and a high forehead he would recline feline in a chair, still like a beautifully sculpted statue. He had a stillness about him and was softly spoken, there was an otherness about him. He was certainly never violent, but only ever polite, kind and generous. Still he was one of only a few men I have met who I was wary of. I felt he was a panther quietly sitting in our living room, quite serene but underneath ferocious, if you jabbed him with a stick, he would tear off your arm. I liked him.

He was a refugee in 1974 after there was a coup and his family in Ethiopia were either executed or died soon after in prison. Christine told me that Merid was rescued by the SAS. Plucked from the desert by helicopter when the coup started and his driver had been killed saving him from an angry mob, and that was how he broke his neck. He was brought to London and put in a council flat and lived in poverty, and because his rescue was a secret he didn’t really exist. He was just a man in a council flat. That’s what I was told.

Once a week he would get his state payment and he would spend it all on a small amount of luxury food like smoked salmon, olives and taramasalata and sometimes he would visit us and we would eat. I think that made him happy.

Then one day Merid was watching a TV show, it was a show about Ethiopia and man came on claiming to be Merid Beyene, the grandson of Haile Selassie the last emperor of Ethiopia, claiming to be him.

Christine told me Merid asked for help, for somebody to confirm he was the real Merid Beyene but nobody would help, because that was all secret: “We can’t tell anyone we rescued an Ethiopian prince”

Then in 1991, not long after, Merid died of a heart attack. Christine seemed to think the pressure of losing his identity, of not being believed, was probably too much.

All these years later and thanks to the internet, with a little research I found some newspaper articles that covered his death but tell a different story:

“He escaped the persecution of the royal family in the 1974 coup because by chance he was out of the country at the time.

Several months before the coup he was thrown from his horse, badly injured his back and was flown to Britain for treatment at Stoke Mandeville orthopedic hospital, 35 miles northwest of central London.

He remained in Britain as a political refugee, living in modest style in west London”

I can’t tell you which story is true, the one Merid told Christine, or the one in the papers. It occurs to me what if this isn't Merid’s story anyway? What if it’s the imposter’s story!

So remember the next time you are at the deli counter of your supermarket and there’s slight man in cheap shoes buying olives, he could be a down on his luck prince.

Link to AP report on Merdis death

Link to LA Times report on Merids Death