"I didn't like him at first," she said later. He talked of attending functions alongside Princess Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon and the broadcaster David Frost. Hakim Jamal was clever, fiery, passionate about his political ideals and kept impressive company. He was from a broken home in a black district of Boston, had started using heroin at 14, been committed to an asylum for two attempted murders, and then underwent a spiritual conversion. There, Gale met an American who called himself "Hakim Jamal", although his real name was Alan Donaldson. But the course of her life was changed completely by an encounter at a dinner party at the house of the actress Vanessa Redgrave (Corin's sister). It was 1967, she was 22 and she just wanted to get away from it all, I think."Īfter a short time, Gale came back. Her brother recalls: "I remember seeing her off. However, it was not long before the marriage began to founder and Gale went away to Argentina. The actor Corin Redgrave, a friend of Jonathan, was the best man and the newly-weds moved into a big house in Chelsea. Their wedding was reported in the papers under the frivolous headline, "Silk, satin and lace," in reference to her glamorous bridal attire. The privileged young girl's early life was typical of someone of her breeding and generation she began modelling, worked as a DJ for a French radio show and married young, at 20, to film director Jonathan Benson. Our father passionately believed that his children should learn languages and, because of that, he often insisted on a foreign language being spoken at the home dinner table and Gale was sent to the French Lycee in London." She was lively and pretty, the opposite of her blond, quiet twin. He lives in Calais and remembers his childhood with great clarity. Today, Frank, 71, is the sole surviving member of that small family unit. He and his wife, Ann, already had one son, Frank, who was eight when the twins were born. Her father was Captain Leonard Plugge, a radio enthusiast, inventor and Tory MP who had defeated future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell in 1935 to win the constituency of Chatham in Kent, which he held for a decade. Gale was born with her twin brother, Greville, in London near the end of World War II in November 1944. Or were more complex forces at play and was she actually killed, as the movie alleges, because she was a secret service agent on an undercover mission for MI6 whose cover was blown? Was she simply a wide-eyed innocent, mesmerised by the energy and passion of her boyfriend and his black militant friends? The tragedy was seen at the time as an extraordinary end for a mixed-up girl who had come under the thrall of a Trinidadian revolutionary, pimp, druggie and property racketeer.īut a new film raises disturbing new questions about why Gale was killed. Gale's murder came out in a Trinidadian court and two followers of Michael X were found guilty of her murder. Eventually the police brought those responsible to trial and the grisly details of her murder became public. It wasn't until seven weeks later that her badly decomposed corpse was discovered. Militant black Civil Rights activist, Michael X
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