The Case of
Edith Jessie Thompson

This website is dedicated to the memory and innocence of Edith Jessie Thompson who died aged 29 at Holloway Prison on 9 January 1923. It argues that Edith Thompson’s execution constitutes a grave miscarriage of justice at the mercy of a profoundly male-dominated justice system.

Today seems the end of everything. I can’t think – I just seem up against a blank, thick wall, through which neither my eyes nor my thoughts can penetrate. It’s not within my powers of realisation that this sentence must stand for something which I have not done, something I did not know of, either previously or at the time. I know you both know this. I know you both have known and believed it all along. …I’ve tried to unravel this tangle of my existence, this existence that we all call life. It is only at these times that we do think about it. It has been an existence, that’s all, just a ‘passing through’, meeting trials, and shocks and surprises with a smiling face and an aching heart, and eventually being submerged and facing Death, that thing that there is no escaping – no hope of defeating.

(Edith Thompson writing to her mother and father, Boxing Day 1922)

The bestselling author and journalist Edgar Wallace was invited to cover the trial in December 1922: ‘I refused the commission. I said “I will not see this woman sentenced to death”. And when I was somewhat tritely told that the case had not been threshed out, I answered: “She is tried and condemned and there is no hope for her”.’

After the executions at Holloway and Pentonville, Wallace wrote:

Never in our history has there been so terrible a miscarriage of justice, or a verdict based so little upon evidence and so much upon prejudice, as that which sent Edith Thompson to that filthy scene in Holloway Gaol. The newspapers have not told you how beastly it was. I can tell you this, that if the true story of Edith Thompson’s execution were ever published, half the people who read it would be physically sick. And the horror is intensified by the sure knowledge of every sane man or woman, who can look facts squarely in the face … that she died innocent of the crime of murder. … There were two murders committed in the Thompson case. The first was the killing of Percy Thompson …  The second of the murders was committed at Holloway Gaol on January 9^th, a murder carried out cold-bloodedly, horridly.  …  If ever in the history of this country a woman was hanged by the sheer prejudice of the uninformed public, and without the slightest modicum of evidence to justify the hanging, that woman was Edith Thompson.

(Edgar Wallace, ‘The Murder of Mrs Thompson’)

 

Telegram to the King,

by Edith Thompson’s mother

Saturday 7 January 1923, East Ham Rail, Sent: 11.55 am; Received: 12.15

His Majesty the King

Buckingham Palace

May I humbly beseech your Majesty as last resort to exercise your Royal Prerogative of Mercy towards my Daughter Mrs Thompson now under sentence of death. I am broken hearted at the terrible injustice of her sentence caused entirely by prejudice.

Mrs Graydon

 

Let there be no misunderstanding about the matter. The hanging of Edith Thompson is the classic example of the death penalty being used by society as an instrument of revenge. Undoubtedly it was also the origin of the all-party coalitions which twice abolished the death penalty in the British parliament. … At eight [nine]  o’clock in the morning at the beginning of the week a silent mass of people stood outside the prison walls waiting for the posting of the notice on the gates that the double execution had taken place. There was a hush of horror when the notice appeared. Lord Beaverbrook called me on the telephone a few minutes after eight [nine] “Did they hang the woman?” he asked. I answered that they had duly hanged them both. “O God! O God!” he muttered. That was all. Later in the day there were rumours that the woman had collapsed and almost disintegrated as a human being, and had to be carried to the gallows. It may or may not have been true but London had become a city of horror and wild rumour. Some time later the executioner committed suicide. People who knew him said that the memory of Edith Thompson’s death had robbed him of the ability to sleep. It may or may not have been true but he did take his own life.

(Sir Beverley Baxter MP, 1959; editor of the Sunday Express in 1923)

Arguably the most eloquent and insightful tribute to Edith Thompson is A Pin to see the Peepshow (1934), a novel written about her by the journalist and author Fryn Tennyson Jesse, a great-niece of the poet Tennyson. Its lavish filming by the BBC in 1973 relaunched Edith Thompson into the public consciousness and conscience. After reading A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), Harry Hodge, the editor of the Notable British Trials series, wrote to Tennyson Jesse (15 October 1934):

Dear Fryn,

Your Pin for the Peepshow [sic] is wonderfully good. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Every now and again I had to lay it down and quieten myself with a little Bach on the piano. At night I had a sort of nightmare – dreaming about Julia. I wonder if Mrs Thompson is able to read the book in her heavenly home? Poor Julia. She should never have been hanged. What a waste of life.

Ever yours, Harry Hodge

Tennyson Jesse’s own words to a correspondent in New York City spell out further why she believed in Edith Thompson’s innocence:

I wrote my novel … not with any reference to the general question of capital punishment or otherwise but simply to write a story based on this well-known case which I (and many other people now living in England) have always considered a miscarriage of justice.

I received every possible help [for A Pin] from the Governor of Holloway [Dr John Hall Morton] and the Deputy Governor, both most merciful people who were convinced that she was innocent and should never have been hanged. A vulgar-minded judge, a jury made up largely of husbands, and her birth certificate hanged her. It is always assumed in England that if a woman takes a lover much younger than herself she rules him; the exact reverse of course is the truth.

Cicely McCall, from inside Holloway Prison after Edith Thompson’s death:

Mothers and children at Holloway Prison have a special exercise yard apart from other prisoners. There is grass for the children to play on, and as in all prison yards there are the usual concrete circular paths to walk on. The mothers walk slowly round and round, under the eye of an officer, or sit down on a seat with their children if they are tired.

At one corner of the ground stands an oblong bed of neatly trimmed evergreens. It attracts the eye at once for it stands alone, strangely out of place among the general scheme of flower beds and paths. It is in the shape of a grave. In fact it is the grave of Mrs Thompson, the last woman to be hanged in Holloway, fifteen years ago. There is no stone, or mark, on her grave. A woman convicted of murder and hanged is buried in unconsecrated ground.

But there is no mistaking the shape of that little group of evergreens, and every prisoner knows what lies beneath it. A young prisoner, who had not been in for more than a week, asked me one day if ‘what they said’ was true.

Beyond the grave and over the top of a wall one can see the roof of the new execution shed recently constructed to accommodate the next condemned woman.

(Cicely McCall, They Always Come Back (1938)

Edith Thompson was found guilty of aiding and abetting the murder of her husband Percy by her young lover Frederick Bywaters. The case against her was weak in law from the outset and the judgment passed down in December 1922 at the Old Bailey is now seen almost universally as unjust as it was gender-biased. In the view of her counsel Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, she was put to death for adultery, not murder.

The case against Edith rested largely on the evidence provided by some seventy letters that she had written to Bywaters. Her correspondence has been admired by some for its romantic ardour and vivacious intelligence, while many of her contemporaries shied away from its candid intimations of sensuality, sexual betrayal, and conjugal oppression.

These letters offer a unique insight into the workings of an overwrought romantic imagination, ultimately unable to free itself from the constraints of a respectable suburban marriage. Increasingly Edith Thompson’s at times lucent love letters have come to be seen as documents of exceptional human interest, for her fluency, her turns of phrase, her gift for evoking the rhythms of daily life in 1920s London. Her extensive discussions of novels, of the metropolis’s variety shows and cinema screenings, and above all her accounts of her failing marriage shine at times with the incandescent passions of a Sylvia Plath, though without the benefits of Plath’s class and university education:

We’ll always be lovers – even Darlint, we’ve said we’ll always be Pals haven’t we, shall we say we’ll always be lovers – even tho’ secret ones, or is it (this great big love) a thing we can’t control – dare we say that – I think I will dare. Yes I will ‘Ill always love you’ – if you are dead – if you have left me even if you don’t still love me, I always shall you. Your love to me is new, it is something different, it is my life and if things should go badly with us, I shall always have this past year to look back upon and feel that ‘Then I lived’ I never did before and I never shall again.

Edith Thompson was the Emma Bovary of Ilford, that most suburban of 1920s so-called lower middle class London suburbs. She is now widely perceived to have been the victim of a post-World War I moral climate that cast her in the role of a femme fatale: she seduced a younger man and thereby brought herself, him, and her husband to perdition.

Even at the time of the trial many observers thought she was almost self-evidently innocent. The Introduction by Filson Young to the 1923 Notable British Trials classic volume on the case – reproduced here in its entirety under Sources – eloquently bears witness to this as do other contemporary accounts, both in the press and in books.

Not only Edith Thompson’s death, but the manner of her death, have long been the subject of rumours and bitter controversy.

This website features a number of documents that bear on the case of Edith Thompson. You can explore them via the portals below, or if you are looking for a particular resource, use the navigation menu above.

All materials and images on this site marked © René Weis are free to download for private use and research. They must not be exploited commercially.