Shanghai’s Egg Trade, Kusel Behr and a Murder in London

It’s odd to think it now but once Shanghai was at the centre of the global trade in eggs. One company that was a major player in that trade was Behr and Matthew, who had an egg factory on the Yangtszepoo Road in Shanghai’s Yangtszepoo (Yangpu) District. As well as Shanghai, the company had branches and factories in Berlin, Paris, Hamburg and London. Chinese eggs were imported to all these locations and sold as egg powder, shell and other variations. Kusel Behr was born in Lithuania to a Jewish family around 1878 and eventually, after spending time in Shanghai in the egg business (where he had come to appreciate Chinese tea particularly), settled in London having made a sizeable pot of money in partnership with the Matthew family since 1916 in the Shanghai-Europe egg trading business. The Matthew’s had been in the China egg trade for some time but Behr bought them out in 1920. Behr then moved to London with his wife and four children and lived in a large house in Hampstead overseeing the business and with few money worries. The Shanghai egg business had been good – he had a Russian governess for the children and a cook and, at his death, left the large sum of 20,000 pounds.

However in 1926 Kusel Behr died at his home in London, though doctors were unable to establish the cause of his death until they found it was strychnine poisoning. The story of the investigation into Behr’s death is told in Jonathan Oates’s book Unsolved London Murders: The 1920s and 1930s. Nobody was sure how he had come to take the strychnine – perhaps mixed in with his occasional gin, though who had brought the strychnine into Behr’s house was unknown. He had drunk Chinese tea and that seemed the only likely cause, though so had Annie, the parlour maid and Mrs Behr – they became the prime suspects. His will revealed that his fortune was split between his children and held in trust for them until they reached the age of 30. It was recorded that Mr and Mrs Behr fought a lot and Behr sometimes behaved like a “madman”.

It also transpired that, after one particularly violent, quarrel in 1925 Mrs Behr had travelled back to Shanghai from London with the intention of selling some properties in Shanghai owned by the Behrs. She left without telling Behr she was going. She was unable to transact the business due to political instability in Shanghai at the time, what has become known as the May Thirtieth Movement. She returned to London. Nobody was ever formally charged with the murder – suicide, murder by his wife, Annie the maid or someone else was never determined.

What started in Shanghai with the profitable egg business ended in North London in murder…