When Celia Imrie set me on a search for the facts about Michel Navratil, I thought we would simply be going to find documents which backed up the hearsay version.
The “known” story was that Michel Navratil, a respected and successful tailor, was married to Marcelle Carretto, a dissolute woman and had sued her for divorce because was supposedly carrying on with a man called Henri Rey de Villari. She had managed to get custody of the children, so to protect them from her wicked ways, Michel Navratil abducted them and fled, taking a circuitous route via Paris, Calais, Dover, London, and Southampton when he could simply have travelled via Paris and boarded a ship at Cherbourg. On arrival in America, he planned to set up a tailoring business in Chicago, which he hoped would be successful.
The first thing we felt we needed was to find was the couple’s divorce file. A fingertip search of the local newspapers – which invariably reported the results of finalised divorces – turned up nothing, so we went to CADAM [Centre administratif départemental Alpes-Maritimes], the local archives in Nice.
We asked the lady behind the desk how we could find the divorce papers of Monsieur Michel Navratil. She shrugged and asked for the roll number or date of commencement of proceedings. Of course we had neither. We told her we were happy to finger through the books until we found it. She told us that this was impossible. There were literally hundreds of books, which measured about 55cm by 40cm and were 15cm thick. Each book was handwritten, in French, and a single volume covered a maximum of 3 months, usually much less. There were no indexes.
I told her we didn’t mind having a try.
‘Impossible!’ she barked, turning away.
‘How many books can we take out?’ Celia asked.
‘One per person,’ she replied. ‘They are very heavy. But no point.’
She turned away again.
I racked my brains for the most likely dates and, as she was about to disappear into the back office, called after her: ‘I’d like to order January 1912 and December 1911 please.’
Another shrug, this time with an eye roll.
She made us fill in forms, then thrust two great cushions into our arms telling us the precious books must rest on them, then ordered us to take a table each and wait.
An hour later the books arrived.
We set to work.
Celia took Oct-Dec 1911, working backwards from the end. I started at 1st January 1912, working forward.
40 minutes later Celia cried (rather loudly in the silent research room): ‘BINGO!’
Her finger was resting on the name Michel Navratil, tailor. The date 13th December 1911.
I stepped over to her table and started peering over her shoulder.
I re-read the opening statement over and over, as I couldn’t think I had got it right. “The lady, Caretto Marianne Marceline, wife of Monsieur Michel Navratil, living at rue de France, Nice” was suing her husband for divorce, not the other way around.
We read it all and took photographs, then took those to the staff of the Alliance Française, just to be sure that we had translated it correctly. We had.
21-year-old Marcelle Navratil’s case against her 31-year-old husband was:
- Michel made her work, unpaid, from 7 am to 8 pm each day; he insulted her in front of the other workers, treated her with an insulting scorn, and at other times ignored her presence completely, behaving as though she didn’t exist.
- Since October 1910, because of Michel’s excessive jealousy, he did not let her go out anywhere alone.
- On several occasions, notably 23rd December 1910 and 1 January 1911, without warning, he failed to return home all night.
- For unknown reasons, when he did come home it was mostly after 2 am.
- He refused to eat with the family. She felt he had completely abandoned his wife.
- On 10 March 1911, at noon, before several witnesses, with no reason, he threw a plate at his wife which smashed on the parquet, and insulted her, calling her a woman of the gutter, a fishwife and a woman of no substance.
Presented with this list, Michel then counter-attacked, saying that he had brought the local police commissioner to his flat on 20 October 1911, where a fully clothed man (“Sieur X”) had opened the locked door. Michel and the police commissioner burst in. They found Marcel lying in bed, undressed. Michel claimed that he had seen her kissing Monsieur X, and that a card seized at Monsieur X’s apartment left no doubt of their relationship. (The Police commissioner later swore that he had NOT found them in flagrante delicto.)
In a contested case like this, the judges needed time to make their decision and ruled that, until they finished their deliberations, the children should be taken away from the parents and put in the care of Madame Magali, dressmaker of Rue de l’Hotel Des Postes. Both parents must pay Mme Magali for food and education, and could choose days to see the children, but return them to Mme Magali.
Further genealogical and local business yearbook research showed up that the name had been misspelled in the handwritten divorce paper and that this dressmaker in Rue de l’Hotel des Postes was in fact a very respected local businesswoman, Therese Magail, a distant relative of Marcelle Navratil. [Therese Magail was also listed as “next of kin” to Rosa Bruno on the passenger manifest of the ship which carried her to the USA. Rosa Bruno worked for the Widener/Elkins family in Philadelphia, and, once Marcelle had put in her claim that they were her missing children, took the Navratil children into her care.]
A note in the margin of the divorce file shows that on 2nd January 1912, Michel put in a complaint that Marcelle had the kids on the public holidays, when he wanted them. The next public holiday was Easter, the day he took them and never brought them back.
During the unsuccessful search of the local newspapers for reports of the children from the day after they went missing, we had noted a small legal announcement, placed on the 24th April 1912. It stated that the previous day “Michel Navratil, Tailor, of 20 or 26 Rue de France, Nice” had been declared bankrupt. So, back at CADAM, we ordered the Bankruptcy files. These turned up a wealth of information.
The same police commissioner who had accompanied Michel to discover Monsieur X, was ordered to find out why Monsieur Navratil had not turned up to the pre-bankruptcy hearing in early April, and to discover Navratil’s movements from the 6th April 1912 onwards. The official police report states that “he left the shop brusquely on 8th April, without leaving any forwarding address” and that the shop’s safe was empty.
Once all the creditors had come forward, the final sum Michel Navratil owed was 31,661.18ff. The creditors were all suppliers – of sewing machines, fabrics, ribbons etc. It seems that Michel Navratil never paid a professional bill.
fTo put this sum of over 30,000ff into perspective, the rental on the Navratil’s double-fronted shop in a fashionable part of town, with a family size flat upstairs, was a mere 1,250ff per annum, payable in 2 instalments of 625ff.
Michel Navratil was summonsed on 10th April to explain how he was going to pay back these debts – if he could furnish the receiver with the means whereby he could pay them off the bankruptcy would not have been declared.
Once bankrupt, Michel Navratil would have had little or no chance of gaining custody of the children, especially when the sum owed was so enormous.
But on the very day that he was due to appear before the legal committee at the pre-bankruptcy hearing, Michel Navratil was boarding the Titanic with his kidnapped children.
The buildings in which the Navratils had their shop was owned by a young heiress, Alice Baquis, who also rented the couple the flat over the shop, which had an entrance in Rue Dalpozzo.
A search in the Nice archives for Alice Baquis found that at the same time as the tribunal was sorting out the debts of Michel Navratil, Mlle Baquis was suing the man who had taken over the Rue Dalpozzo flat from Michel Navratil – one Stefan Kozak. The bailiffs who searched the rental property found the place crammed with well-upholstered shop furniture, shop mannequins, a number of expensive sewing machines, irons, worktables, brand-new dresses and coats and rolls and rolls of luxurious fabric.
It was obvious that, before he left for Southampton, hoping to confound the imminent visit from the bailiffs, Michel Navratil and Stefan Kozak, had stashed the shop’s valuables in the flat upstairs.
Isiah Petit, the official Receiver for the Navratil bankruptcy, immediately smelled a rat, and, describing Kozak (Misspelled Stefan Cosaq) “a man of straw” and a “cover for Michel Navratil”, Petit claimed all the takings Miss Baquis was claiming for her back-rent for his own creditors.
The Titanic files at Nova Scotia back up our findings. When Navratil’s body was fished from the ocean, his pocket contained a card with Kozak’s name [misspelled Kozal] and a coded telegram he had sent to E.Stefan [Etienne is the French equivalent of Stefan, so essentially: Stefan Stefan, a name far less memorable than Stefan Kozak if anyone should suspect him!].
Isiah Petit wrote to the White Star Line, asking whether M Navratil had happened to have in his possession the sum of 30,000ff. The authorities in Nova Scotia poopooed M. Petit, but the bankruptcy files show that Petit was doing his duty and that he was on the right track.
A business card fell out of the files which itemised the sales following the bankruptcy. It belonged to the man who bought the better part of the bankrupt stock. He worked from a swanky Paris address, in Chaussée D’Antin. His name was Louis Hoffman. The same surname Navratil used when boarding RMS Titanic.
Nailing the Navratil divorce and bankruptcy was one thing, but the wedding certificate showed up further discrepancies in the official account.
The accepted story is that the Navratil’s lacked certain papers and, therefore could not marry in France and had to come to London.
However, a quick study of the Marriage Acts of France and England at the time shows that the necessary paperwork was much the same in both countries. The difference, however, was that in France, no woman under 22 years of age, could marry without the physical presence, or sworn affidavit of approval, of at least one parent or guardian. Banns had to be published twice in the local newspapers. Marcelle was only 17 (Michel 27). In other words, there was no way they could marry in Nice without Marcelle’s mother finding out. In England banns had only to be displayed outside the chosen wedding venue for three weeks. Parental consent was not required.
The Navratil’s marriage certificate from the Registry Office in Poland Street Soho, shows that the couple was staying at 10 Marshall Street, Soho, and that the witnesses were Paul Kuhn and Walter Kent. A little research turned up that Paul Kuhn owned 10 Marshall Street plus the restaurant below it, and that Walter Kent was one of his waiters. The UK Census for 1911 shows that Kuhn ran a kind of flophouse for visiting foreigners, with as many as 30 people staying in the rooms over the restaurant at any one time. It being Soho, the centre of London’s rag trade, most of the visitors were tailors.
Further research on Paul Kuhn brought up an interesting sidebar – only 5 years earlier he had been a witness at an Old Bailey trial in which another Nicoise tailor had chased another seamstress Nicoise girl, also ten years the man’s junior, to London, where (because she rebuffed his advances when she discovered he was married) the man shot her. Kuhn acted as a character witness for the accused, who was also staying at 10 Marshall Street. Luckily the girl survived, and, despite Kuhn’s help, the shooter got a sentence of 15 years penal servitude.
Among the myriads of reports which appeared in US newspapers after Marcelle turned up to claim her children, there were two very interesting interviews. In one, when asked whether she would tell the children what a bounder their father was, she told the reporter she planned to let them believe he had been a hero.
This surely explains Michel Navratil junior’s strange recollections (as a three-year-old) that his father calmly came into the cabin, dressed him and his brother warmly, and then placing them both gently into the lifeboat, while making an extraordinarily long speech about how much he loved them and how he still loved their mother and how his real plan was that they should eventually all be reunited in America.
Rather than telling her children the truth, as witnessed by several people on deck and in Lifeboat D, that during the chaos of the ship’s final moments, as the last lifeboat to safely leave Titanic slid into the sea, those children had been flung, practically naked, over the side. In the desperate melee, as people fought to get on the last lifeboat, there would certainly have been no time for long speeches. Marcelle must have given the children that story about their father’s care. For the rest of their lives, the boys believed it to be the truth.
Everything we discovered proves that Michel Navratil married Marcelle in London to evade her mother’s intervention and that a few years later, having been abusive and violent towards his wife, she tried to divorce him, while at the same time he was being hotly pursued by the authorities for massive debts. Michel Navratil knew he had no chance of winning the divorce or gaining custody of the children, so instead he stole them, and, by leaving for America under a false name with stolen money, he planned to evade his furious creditors and at the same time spite his wife by taking the only things she valued – her children.
In fact, after a few days alone with them, Michel Navratil, having never had the sole care of his children before, wrote to his mother to see whether someone else would take them off his hands!
It was only after we published Orphans of the Storm that we came across another interview Marcelle Caretto / Navratil gave in New York where, as she boarded the Oceanic bound for France on 18 May 1912, Marcelle told reporters from The Evening World that she faced an uncertain future because, before leaving Nice for the ship, Michel Navratil had also stolen her jewellery and her life savings of 8000ff.
Would Michel Navratil have made a successful business for himself in the USA? I doubt it. Once a crook always a crook, once a debtor always a debtor. Eventually, the forces of law in France would have caught up with him and claimed their money.
On the point of Marcelle’s lover, Henri Rey di Villarey, he may or may not have been Monsieur X. It is interesting that while “Sieur X” had had time to dress himself, Marcelle didn’t bother, indicating perhaps another reason she was in bed. Was she ill? Overtired? Scared of her husband? Italian nobleman, Henri Rey di Villarey, did live in Nice at the time, but in a separate flat, in another area, some way away. He did move into a flat where Marcelle lived, in east Nice, but that was in 1915.
Henri never married. Nor did Marcelle. She could never marry, as she was not divorced, and, thanks to the obstinacy of the Nova Scotia team, her husband Michel Navratil was never declared dead.
She was neither widow nor divorcee, so for the rest of her life, poor Marcelle Carretto remained Michel Navratil’s wife.
© Fidelis Morgan 2024
All this, and more, features in my appendix to the novel, Orphans of the Storm, by Celia Imrie, [Bloomsbury 2021] in which our extensive factual research is detailed.
We also do a 50-minute PowerPoint live presentation, in which we tell the real Navratil story while showing copies of the documents we unearthed. You can book us through Sheila Crowley at the Curtis Brown Agency.
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