Title: Trial of James Camb (The Port-Hole Murder).
Publisher: William Hodge
Publication Date: 1949
Binding: Cloth
Book Condition: Very Good
Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
Notable British Trials Series. 255 pages, with 11 plates, b/w illustrations and photos. Ownership stamp in blue ink on front free endpaper. Internally in fine condition. 14.5 x 22 cm. Original red cloth, binding firm, top page edges dusty, some darkening to margins of cover, spine a little faded. Provenance:- the copy of Hugh Quennell (1902-55), with his ownership stamp. Quennell was a partner in the city Law firm of Saughter & May & SOE's senior representative in Gibraltar in 1941 controlling North Africa the Western Mediterranean and the sea communications to Southern France and recruiting a number of his legal colleagues. He set up a clandestine radio network linking Gibraltar with Tangier, French & Spanish Morocco, Algeria and Spain. At one point he blew up a German wireless station in Algeciras- and, in plotting to destroy large stocks of rubber-destined for the Germans- he claimed was targeted in the quay at Tangiers with a bomb that killed 25 and injured 60 people, but Quennell was unharmed; German propaganda insisted that the explosion was a British accident. Legal and scientific publisher, Butterworths & Co/Butterworth-Springer Ltd was set up by SIS, with Hugh Quennell a Director and later sold in 1951 to the disgraced Robert Maxwell. This copy was acquired from the descendants of Tony Hoolahan Q.C., a prominent libel lawyer who successfully prosecuted Private Eye, represented by John Mortimer (of Rumpole fame) on behalf of Desmond Wilcox (married to Esther Rantzen of "That's Life" fame) in 1982. James Camb was tried in 1948, for the murder of Eileen Gibson. The murderer pushed the body through the cabin's porthole at sea; the body was never recovered.