Monday 9 January 2023: City of London Cemetery, Manor Park 

Edith Thompson centenary and pardon application on the BBC 9th and 10th January 2023:

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-63561245

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-64175900

We will meet at the entrance to the City of London Cemetery shortly before 9am and then make our way at once to the grave when the gates open. New readings for the centenary of Edith’s death include the eulogy delivered at her funeral on 22 November 2018, her mother’s letter of 9 January 1923, the last letter to her by Freddy Bywaters (the one she never received), and a letter by Edith written to her parents on 26 December 1922, a day after her 29th birthday.

There will be a minute’s silence before the reading of ‘Abide With Me’.

All are welcome to join us for this special ceremony of remembrance.

EULOGY

(read by René Weis)

We are gathered here to honour the memory of Edith Jessie Thompson. We are here because her mother wanted Edith to join her one day. We are here because we believe that Edith was innocent and that her case remains a tragic blot on this country’s tradition of equitable and effective justice.

As her parents parted from Edith at Holloway for the last time, on 8 January 1923, her father said to her ‘Well now don’t worry about it: you will be home with us tomorrow night’. The hearse this morning took her past her childhood home, through the very street in which she played as a little girl, and past the church in which she was married.

Immediately after her daughter’s death Edith’s mother tried to have her daughter’s skirt and blouse returned to her, because Edith had worn them when she died. To her mother they would have been an infinitely precious connection to her daughter’s last moments, but instead they were burnt. A year later, with the first ever Labour government in power, a distinguished Holloway prison visitor petitioned the new Home Secretary: ‘I have been approached by the mother of poor Edith Thompson, whom I met under very sad circumstances, to find out whether anything could be done to get back the body of her child, or if at least she might be informed where she is buried’. The Home Office replied that, in accordance with the law, Edith Thompson ‘was buried and must remain buried within the precincts of the Prison’.

Edith’s mother died on 7 January 1938, two days before the 15^th anniversary of Edith’s death.

Edith was not a saint, but she was a talented, intelligent, kind, and generous woman, who loved her beautiful home. In due course she might well have settled into her marriage with her husband Percy. There is a telling moment when, in 1973, her sister Avis is asked about Edith eloping with Freddy Bywaters:

AVIS  No, no – what was going to happen to Percy?!

[AR  Well they were just going to run away and live together and leave Percy on his own.]

AVIS  No, not my sister!

[AR  That’s what she is talking about anyway in her letters.]

AVIS  Not my sister!

Edith had a superb head for figures, dressed elegantly, earned well, travelled to Paris for her firm, and was an avid reader. Writing about her in School for Women (1996), Professor Jane Miller of the University of London Institute of Education observed:

‘If Edith and Freddy had been born fifty years later they would probably have stayed on at school until the age of sixteen, and, given their intelligence and their interests, the chances are good that they would have taken some A levels and proceeded to university, perhaps to read English.’

At the trial the judge, who had not read Edith’s favourite novelist Robert Hichens, thought that his novels must be mischievous rubbish, that this kind of fiction was surely among the root causes of adulterous crimes. But Henry James, the greatest novelist of the age, then as now, admired Hichens just as Edith did.

She had a wonderful ear for English and wrote with quite remarkable facility. Her surviving letters to Freddy Bywaters run to over 51,000 words.

At school she had been a prize-winning girl. Writing from Holloway she recalled

‘I remember at school we used to have what was called a ‘Reading Circle’. A Dickens book was chosen by our teacher, we read it at home, not at school, and then we each chose a character from the book and wrote a little essay on him or her, as the case might be. These essays we would all take to Wanstead Park on a Saturday afternoon: we would each read our own out loud, and then it was discussed in general. We usually took our tea to the park and made a little picnic party of it. I remember an essay I was highly commended on by the teacher. It was on ‘Quilp’ [the grotesque villain of The Old Curiosity Shop].’

Edith was also a modern young woman with strong opinions including an openness towards other cultures and a modest measure of feminism. For instance, when Freddy wrote to her about an altercation with an African woman during one of his voyages, Edith remonstrated with him, saying that she objected to his derogatory phrases about the woman’s colour:

‘And after all, is she any worse for being a native? Anyway, I don’t know and I don’t think you do; and then you say ‘If it had been one of the male sex’. Why ‘it’, darlint? I thought you were beginning to think just a little more of us women than you used to.’

On this commemorative occasion today we also remember

Percy Thompson and his family.

Freddy Bywaters and his family.

Avis Graydon whose entire life after 1923 became a mournful footnote. When 50 years after the tragedy she was asked why she never married she replied ‘How could I? how could I tell a man, especially a man I loved, what had happened to my sister?’

 

LETTER

(by Edith’s mother)

[9 January 1923]

(read by René Weis)

My daughter looked so wonderful, so peaceful; her face was white with a look of quiet rest. It is the thought of the Hereafter into which our child, still beautiful, has passed, which fortifies us in these terrible moments. She cannot have suffered; her peaceful expression re-assured us as to her innocence and tranquil end.

 

LETTER

(by Edith to her aunt Edith Walkinshaw)

[December 23, 1922]

(read by Nicki Toay)

Dear Auntie – It was good of you to send me in the book; it will help to pass a good many weary hours away, when my mind is more settled.

At present I can’t think – I can’t even feel. When I was told the result of the appeal yesterday, it seemed the end of everything.

In Life, Death seems too awful to contemplate, especially when Death is the punishment for something I have not done, did not know of, either at the time or previously.

I have been looking back over my life & wondering what it has brought me – I once said “Only ashes and dust and bitterness”, and today it seems even less than this. – if there can be less.

This last ordeal seems to be the ultimate end of that gradual drifting through Life, passing each event, each disappointment, so many of which I have encountered and met with a smiling face and an aching heart.

Auntie dear, I have learnt the lesson that it is not wise to meet and try to overcome all your trials alone – when the end comes, as it has to me, nobody understands.

If only I had been able to forfeit my pride, that pride that resents pity, and talk to someone, I can see now how different things might have been, but it’s too late now to rake over ashes in the hope of finding some live coal.

When I first came into this world, and you stood to me as godmother, I am sure you never anticipated such an end as this for me. Do you know, people have told me from time to time that to be born on Christmas Day was unlucky, and my answer has always been, “Superstition is only good for ignorant people”, but now I am beginning to believe that they are right; it is unlucky.

However, what is to be will be.

I’m glad I’ve talked to you for a little while. I feel better – it seems to lift me out of this abyss of depression into which I have fallen, and I know you will understand, not only what I have said, but all my thoughts that are not collected enough to put on paper.

Thank Leonard for me for his letter. It made me laugh, and it’s good to laugh just for five minutes. I’ll write to him another day. I can’t now – but I know he will understand.

EDITH

 

LETTER

(by Edith to her mother and father)

[Boxing Day 1922]

(read by Jacqueline Hall)

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.

 

LETTER

(by Edith to her lifelong friend)

[Boxing Day 1922]

(read by Sean O’Connor)

Dear

I wanted to write to you yesterday and yet I couldn’t. I could do nothing but sit and think. Who was it said, ‘Some days we sits and thinks, and some we simply sit’? Well, yesterday was a ‘sitting and thinking day’.

I got your letter on Saturday. Yes, the result of the appeal was a great shock – I had such hopes of it – not only hopes for mercy, but hopes for justice; but I realise how very difficult it is to fight prejudice.

If you have facts to fight, and you fail, you seem more reconciled, but when it’s only prejudice – oh, it’s awful.

You talk about not having to pay the extreme penalty. Do you know that I don’t dread that at all. I feel that would be easier than banishment – wrongful banishment for life. I feel no apprehension of what might lie ahead after this life.

Yesterday I was twenty-nine; it’s not really very old, I suppose, and yet it seems so to me.

Yesterday I was thinking about everything that has ever happened, it seems to help in all sorts of way when I do this. I realise what a mysterious thing life is. We all imagine we can mould our own lives – we seldom can, they are moulded for us – just by the laws and rules and conventions of this world, and if we break any of these, we only have to look forward to a formidable and unattractive wilderness.

I’ve often thought how good it would be to talk, to pour out everything, it might have pained as well, but it would be pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable hurt.

However, I’m going to forget all that now. I’m going to hope– because everybody tells me so. I’m going to live in those enormous moments when the whole of life seems bound up in the absolute necessity to win.

Thank you so much for writing to me, and helping to keep me cheerful.

EDITH

LETTER

(by Freddy to Edith)

[Tuesday] 2 January 1923

(read by Eleanor)

Edie – I want to ask you not give up hope. I know & you know & some others know also, that you should not be in the position that you find yourself. I’m still hoping that the powers that be, will exercise some common sense & displace their suppositions with facts. I know this must be a terrible strain on you, but Peidi mia, don’t lose heart – B.B. I am keeping quite well & I’ve heard that you are a lot better. I’m glad.

I have seen Florrie today & she told me that she had written to you explaining the misunderstanding.  … If you are able, will you write? I want to say a lot, but cannot, you understand. I can only hope & trust that sometime in the future we will be able to talk to one another.

Goodbye, Peidi mia – B.B. –

Always,

Freddy

A MINUTE’S SILENCE

 

ABIDE WITH ME

(read by Jean Sykes)

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim; its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see;
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Not a brief glance I beg, a passing word,
But as Thou dwell’st with Thy disciples, Lord,
Familiar, condescending, patient, free.
Come not to sojourn, but abide with me.

Come not in terror, as the King of kings,
But kind and good, with healing in Thy wings;
Tears for all woes, a heart for every plea.
Come, Friend of sinners, thus abide with me.

Thou on my head in early youth didst smile,
And though rebellious and perverse meanwhile,
Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee.
On to the close, O Lord, abide with me.

I need Thy presence every passing hour.
What but Thy grace can foil the tempter’s power?
Who, like Thyself, my guide and stay can be?
Through cloud and sunshine, Lord, abide with me.

I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless;
Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me.

Hold Thou Thy cross before my closing eyes;
Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies.
Heaven’s morning breaks, and earth’s vain shadows flee;
In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me.