Appendices and Bibliography

• Filson Young (editor): Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson  (Notable British Trials), 1923

Filson Young witnessed the lovers’ trial at the Old Bailey. Within months his edited transcript, which included the lovers’ complete correspondence in two separate appendices, was published. His Introduction (it runs to 8,132 words) is remarkably sympathetic to the accused. He paints a famously striking picture of Edith Thompson:

She was called a hysterical woman by many people engaged in the case; but through five days of acute trial I saw no sign of hysteria in her. She was remarkable in this way: that quite above her station in life, quite beyond the opportunities of her narrow existence, she had power of a kind that is only exercised by women possessed of a high imaginative talent; she had that peculiar quality of attraction which over-rides beauty and prettiness. She was not what is called a beautiful woman, nor always even pretty; but she had a certain character, certain movements of infinite grace, a head finely poised on a beautiful neck, and the secret of looking like a hundred different women according to the nature of her environment.

 

• Edith Thompson and Emma Bovary

Edith Thompson was the Emma Bovary of the London suburbs. Like the tragic heroine of Gustave Flaubert’s classic mid-nineteenth-century novel Madame Bovary, Edith Thompson lost herself in escapist romantic fiction. She too dreamt of a great romance, of a lover who would lift her out of her humdrum married routines and transport her into a world of perpetual fantasy and bliss. According to Flaubert, ‘Emma endeavoured to find out what exactly was meant in real life by the words happiness, passion and utter abandon, which had struck her as so beautiful in her books’. Contrastingly her husband Charles’s ‘conversation was as flat as a pavement, a place in which the ideas of the entire world circulated in their everyday garb, without causing the least emotion, laughter, or dream.’ Edith and Percy Thompson were as ill-matched as Emma and Charles Bovary, a country doctor with country ways in rural Normandy.

To understand the talented wordsmith housewife and business woman from Manor Park requires imagination, something that no court of law could readily accommodate. Not least because the courts never quite believed that a woman from Manor Park, not at all self-evidently ‘one of us’, could talk, write, live, dance, dine, and earn like ‘one of us’. Edith Thompson’s aspirations were above her station, or so it seemed to her self-appointed betters, as if they were so socially by some God-given right. Yet no-one reading Edith Thompson’s shrewd analyses of fiction or her vivid evoking of daily life in the London of the early 1920s can fail to respond to her self-evident intelligence and, in spite of everything, a strong upright presence. As  Professor Jane Miller of the University of London Institute of Education observed about Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters in her book School for Women (1996),

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.

• F. Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to see the Peepshow  (1934)

The most eloquent and most insightful tribute to Edith Thompson is a novel written about her by another brilliant woman, Tennyson Jesse, criminologist, journalist, and great-niece of the poet Tennyson, A Pin to see the Peepshow (1934).

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

In Tennyson Jesse’s own words to a correspondent in New York City,

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.

Tennyson Jesse’s book reimagines Edith Thompson with extraordinary intelligence and moreover with access to information about Edith at Holloway that was not publicly available at the time. An excellent discussion of A Pin to see the Peepshow and its imaginative links to Edith Thompson can be found in Sarah Waters’s piece in the Guardian of 23 August 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/23/a-pin-to-see-peepshow-achingly-human-portrait

It was the BBC’s serialising the book in 1973, as a grand, four-part 1920s costume drama, that relaunched interest in Edith Thompson at the time. Many of the people who had known Edith, worked with her, loved her – notably her sister Avis – were still alive then. Like much of the country they read the Radio Times, which featured the fictional lovers of A Pin to see the Peepshow on its front cover, under the heading ’50 years ago we hanged Edith Thompson’.

If not an avalanche, the Radio Times coverage and programmes caused a number of people to write to them, to share their memories and photographs, and not infrequently to protest Edith Thompson’s innocence after all these years. It was as a result of the BBC programmes, Radio and Television, that Avis Graydon was traced to her home in Gants Hill, Ilford. It was Avis Graydon’s subsequent invaluable 90-minute interview with Mrs Audrey Russell of the Royal Courts of Justice that in the end filled in many of the gaps about Edith’s life left by the various accounts in the press, some more reliable than others.

• George Dilnot, Rogues’ March (1934)

(Chapter VIII: ‘Was Mrs Thompson Innocent?’, with the full text of ‘The Murder of Mrs Thompson’ by Edgar Wallace)

I was not the only man who, after a broken night, awoke sick with horror on that January morning in 1923 when they hanged Edith Thompson. There were others, not sentimentalists but hard-boiled men of the world, men who were well acquainted with tragedy, who confessed to me that they had gone through a similar experience.

For the fate of this girl provoked violent emotion among many and diverse people. You either believe that she was a scheming and callous murderess, righteously punished, or that she was the victim of a set of circumstances, sent to an infamous death by prejudice, by lack of imagination, by a wooden application of the strict letter of the law.

This much may be allowed. There was no middle course of opinion. Long before the trial ended she had been condemned by the unco good. But those who believed her guilty of a cold-blooded plot to murder her husband were not all hypocritical moralists. My friend the late J. A. R. Cairns, a magistrate of deep sympathy and great humanity, believed that she was justly doomed. A bishop wrote to me urging me not to persists in a protest against the justice of the verdict. Wensley himself, who brought about her arrest, a man of great sensibility and strict probity, insisted to me that he had no doubt about her guilt.

There were others, with whom I range myself – men like Sir Edward Marshall Hall, Edgar Wallace, Filson Young – who believed that she was a woman entirely innocent of any real murderous intent, who, in the words of that eminent judge Lord Mersey, had ‘pretended her way to the gallows’.

In a chivalrous white-hot passion Edgar Wallace wrote an article for a magazine I was then editing. It was not published at the time for reasons which it would be profitless to enter into now. But I shall quote from it from time to time in the course of this narrative. Its tone may be judged from the heading he set on it, The ‘Murder of Mrs Thompson’. 

[EDGAR WALLACE]: There were two murders committed in the Thompson case’, he wrote. ‘The first and more excusable was the killing of Percy Thompson by the infuriated, passion-maddened Bywaters, a crime which was dreadful but wholly understandable, remembering this young man’s extreme youth, his wild passion for his mistress, Percy Thompson’s wife, and the passion which Thompson’s possession of this woman’s flesh offered him.

The second of the murders was committed at Holloway Gaol on January 9^th, a murder carried out cold-bloodedly, horridly.

I wish that every man and woman, particularly every woman – and the women were the bitterest enemies of this unfortunate girl – I wish that they had been present; that they had spent the night in the condemned cell with this perfectly innocent neurotic woman; that they had also walked with her to the scaffold, and that the poor lolling head which rested on the warder’s shoulder had been on their shoulders instead.

For 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.

Strong words. Yet even at this day I am not ashamed to confess that I still feel the same sense of overwhelming indignation as Wallace must have felt when I think of that poor girl. Innocent people and people who might have been innocent have been hanged – make no mistake about that – but, oddly enough, I have never been so emotionally affected by any case as by that of Edith Thompson.

‘This,’ said the judge in summing up, ‘is a common or ordinary charge of a wife and an adulterer murdering her husband.’ ‘This essentially commonplace and unedifying case’, commented the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of Criminal Appeal.

A great deal depends upon the point of view. Passion and death may be common and ordinary in one sense. Yet here I feel is a misuse of words. One can strip the great masterpieces of all ages down till they become commonplace and unedifying. Emotion may be entirely out of place in a court of law, but the attempt to drive it out in one form may create another. I may be forgiven the paradox if I say that emotion has its part in sending Edith Thompson to the gallows.

There was really the stuff of high drama in the story of the three middle-class people who formed the triangle of this tragedy.

It really opens in 1921. Percy Thompson had, married Edith Graydon, a girl a few years younger than himself, six years earlier. They had no children, and save for a short while during the war when he was in the Army – he was discharged because he had a weak heart – they had lived together at Ilford. He was a shipping clerk; she was the book-keeper and mangers of a firm of wholesale milliners. They kept a banking account in their joint names and pooled the expenses.

After the first two years of married life, if Edith Thompson’s story is to be accepted, there were troubles between them. More than once they discussed separation, but nothing came of it. Why, it is a little difficult to understand, for each was earning an independent income, and as I have said there were no family ties.

They were living in Ilford in 1921. In that year there was staying with Mrs Thompson’s family in Manor Park a boy of about eighteen, Frederick Bywaters, a fine, upstanding young fellow, who had been at school with Mrs Thompson’s brothers, and was then a ship’s steward employed by the P. & O. Company.

Up to this time, it may be assumed, Bywaters was nothing more to Mrs Thompson than a friend of her family. She was eight years older than he was, and they do not appear to have been thrown much together. But in June 1921 Bywaters accompanied the Thompsons on a week’s holiday to Shanklin, in the Isle of Wight. There were this young, impressionable boy, the discontented wife, and perhaps a rather sulky husband.

Edith Thompson asserted that there was no question of an intrigue at this point, but it is at least likely that there was already something in the nature of a mutual attraction. But if that was so, Thompson himself must have been unsuspicious, for when they returned to Town it had been arranged that Bywaters should stay at their house as a lodger. For what it is worth the story of a happening may be given in Mrs Thompson’s words:

The first of August of that year was a Monday. I had some trouble with my husband that day; I think it originated over a pin, but eventually it was brought to a head by my sister not appearing at tea when she said she would. I wanted to wait for her, but my husband objected, and said a lot of things to me about my family that I resented. He then struck me several times, and eventually threw me across the room. Bywaters was in the garden at this time, and in the course of the disturbance he came into the room and stopped my husband. Later on that day there was a discussion about a separation. I cannot remember exactly what was said, except that I wanted a separation, and Bywaters entreated my husband to separate from me, but he said what he usually said, that he would not. At first he said he would, and then I said to him, ‘You always tell me that when I mention the subject, and later, when it actually comes, you refuse to grant it to me.’

This was most likely the beginning of the infatuation of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. As to whether Thompson was really the kind of selfish brute they pictured it must be remembered there is only their side of the story. Two people who were in love may not have judged him very dispassionately.

Within a week of this squabble Bywaters left the house. He and the girl met secretly, and on August 20^th she sent a note to him at his mother’s home at Norwood:

Come and see me Monday lunch time, please darlint. He suspects.

That was the beginning of the liaison. They met when they could and where they could, although there were difficulties. She was at her office when her husband was at his; her absence from home at other times was not simple without some explanation. They wrote to each other when they were apart, for he was frequently  absent on long voyages. He kept her letters – and so unconsciously sealed her fate. She destroyed his – and it may that that also helped to bring about her ruin. ‘No one knows what kind of letters he was writing to me’,

Those damning letters of her hers. And yet reading them as a whole, those that were not, as well as those that were, produced at the trial, they do not seem so terribly sinister. They reflected her moods, her passion, her personality, her plans, her inconsistencies. She was a girl very much in love as she poured out her heart to her lover without reserve. Edith Thompson had imagination – too much perhaps – she had intelligence and humour. She sent him newspaper cuttings, ‘Every passage in any book I read that strikes me as concerning two pals I mark – it doesn’t matter what they are about’.

These cuttings ranged over a variety of subjects. ‘The Poisoned Curate’, ‘Do Men Like Red Haired Women’, ‘Chicken Broth Death’, ‘Women on the Rack’, ‘The best Wines that I have Drunk’, were some of them.

Here is an extract that will show the manner of many of her letters. This particular one was not produced at the trial:

Darlingest boy I know,

… I am feeling very blue today darlint, you havn’t talked to me for a fortnight, and I am feeling worried, oh I don’t know how I’m feeling really, it seems like a very large pain that comes from that ceaseless longing for you, words are expressionless – darlint, the greatness, the bigness of the love I have, makes me fear that it is too good to last, it will never die, darlint don’t think, but I fear – how can I explain – that it will never mature, that we, you & I will never reap our reward, in fact, I just feel today darlint, that our love will all be in vain.

He talked to me again last night a lot, darlint I don’t remember much about it, except that he asked me if I was any happier. I just said I suppose as happy as I shall ever be, & then he frightened me by saying – oh I don’t think I’ll tell you.

I left off there, darlint – thought – thought for ½ an hour & I will tell you now. He said he began to think that both of us would be happier if we had a baby, I said ‘No, a thousand times No’ & he began to question me, and talk to me & plead with me, oh darlint, its all so hard to bear, come home to me – come home quickly & help me, its so much worse this time. He hasn’t worried me any more, except that once I told you about, darlint, do you understand what I mean? but things seem worse for all that. You know I always sleep to the wall, darlint, well I still do but he puts his arm round me & oh its horrid. I suppose I’m silly to take any notice, I never used to – before I knew you – I just used to accept the inevitable, but you know darlint, I either feel things very intensely or I am quite indifferent just cold –frozen.

But to write all this is very selfish of me, it will make you feel very miserable – you can’t do anything to help me – at least not yet, so I’ll stop.

What else can I talk about? only ordinary things darlint, but to talk about even those perhaps will help to deaden the pain. We went to the theatre in the week to see ‘Woman to Woman’ at the Globe I had the tickets given me. Darlint, it was a lovely play, I think I liked it as much as ‘Romance’ altho the plot is not the same. I have written you a description of it [the ‘description’ seems to be part of a lost letter] – I should like you to discuss it with me, but better still I should like to see it again with you, but I cant, so I have talked to you about it, that’s the next best things, isn’t it darlint?

Also I finished the book ‘The Trail of 98’ & liked it ever so much, I have also written to you about it. Darlint you have quite a lot of mail from me at Aden, I think, I do hope you will feel pleased – not too miserable, I don’t want you to, darlint, just forget all the miserable things I’ve said to you.

Its been terribly cold here & foggy – thick real old fashioned fogs for 4 days. I’ve had & still got such a bad chilblain on the back of my heel – its been there a fortnight now & I cant get rid of it. I think I’ve tried 5 different things. The worst of it is any shoes I have – the tops of them cut it – the chilblain, right in half.

Darlint, have you written to the ‘B.I.Co.’ yet, please do – I want you to, you know – if we are going to win, we must look forward understand darlint?

Yesterday I was taking a country buyer to Cooks, St. Pauls, & passing the ‘Chapter House’ he said to me ‘Would you care for a glass of wine here, its quite a nice place.’ Imagine darlint, me being told its quite a nice place. I said ‘No thanks,’ really I’d rather not’ & yet if it had been anywhere else I should have said ‘Yes.’ Do you know, darlint, when you were home last time we didnt go there once, I feel sorry when I think about it, I should like to have gone, but we will next time, say ‘yes’ darlint I do so hope you’ll be home longer than a fortnight this next time. Isn’t it funny the feeling we have about going into the places with strangers that we have been in together. I feel very strongly about it, I couldn’t no I simply couldn’t go & sit in either of those corner seats at the Strand without you nor at the Holborn, nor ‘Chapter House,’ nor the ‘Coronation’ nor anywhere else, where you & I have been & talked, really talked. Do you remember us talking in the ‘Chapter House’ one Friday night about my life being happy, living with only 2 people besides myself. I don’t remember what I answered then – Yes, I believe I do, but the answer would not be the same today, it would be with only 2 people, 2 halves, one whole, darlint, just you & me, say ‘Yes, it’s right, & it will be so,’ I want telling so many times darlint.

What do you think he is going to learn dancing – to take me out to some nice ones, wont it be fun – as the song says ‘Aint we got fun,’ while you are away.

There can be small doubt that Edith Thompson had come to regard her husband with loathing. She made it plain in her letters how fiercely repugnant she was to any physical relationship with him. The thought of a baby filled her with horror. Perhaps her love or infatuation – call it what you will – had something to do with this. The correspondence – which is given in full in the report of the trial so admirably edited by Mr Filson Young – shows between the lines that she may have made his life as miserable as she claimed that he made hers.

As the case was presented in court it was urged that throughout the correspondence there was a thread of hints and suggestions by the girl which could only bear the implication that she was plotting with her lover for the murder of her husband. But only thirty-three of the sixty-five letters were given. They were, in the words of Mr Filson Young, ‘thrown at the court’ in a very confusing way. Indeed many passages from them seemed to have been picked very haphazardly. The construction put upon them by very literal-minded people was the worst.

As far as they told against the woman they were certainly not minimised by Mr Justice Shearman. He could see nothing of beauty in them. Nothing but ‘gush’, ‘the outpouring of a silly but wicked affection’ – and incitement to murder. The words ‘he has the right by law to all that you have the right to by nature and love’ he dismissed contemptuously as nonsense. He simply could not understand. His type of mind is illustrated by his comment on novelists: ‘They write chiefly about so-called heroes and heroines, probably wicked people, which no doubt accounts for a great many of these tragedies.’

There were phrases in the letters which were quoted as of deadly purpose – phrases which it was urged by the defence had been twisted from their proper meaning, or were mere talk in the air. These may be divided into three sections; typical of the first were such things as the following:

She made a reference to a woman who had lost three husbands, and added, ‘Some people I know cant lose one.’ She spoke of having mismanaged ‘the affair’. It would have been better, she said, if she had acquiesced in everything her husband said and did, and so disarmed any suspicion in case they ‘had to use drastic measures’. And again, ‘Will you be ready with every little detail when I see you – because you know more about this thing than I, and I am relying on you for all plans and instructions – only just the act I’m not.’

The answer to this sort of thing was plausible. They had to keep the husband ignorant of their liaison. They dared not elope together, largely because they were afraid they would lose their positions and would have nothing to live on. They were planning at some future date – when they were ready – to force Thompson to the divorce which he had already refused.

The second section of quotations may be represented by the phrase: ‘All I could think of last night was that compact we made … it seemed so horrible today.’

This was declared to refer to a suicide pact.

The third section was more difficult of explanation:

It would be so easy darlint – if I had things – I do hope I shall. How about cigarettes?

Darlint, how can you get ptomaine poisoning from a tin of salmon? One of our boys Mother has died with it after being ill only three days.

Darlingest boy, this thing that I am going to do for both of us will it ever – at all, make any difference between us, darlint, do you understand what I mean. …

About the Marconigram — do you mean one saying Yes or No, because I shant send it darlint I’m not going to try any more until you come back. … He was telling his mother etc. the circumstances of my ‘Sunday morning escapade’ and he puts great stress on the fact of the tea tasting bitter ‘as if something had been put in it’ he says. Now I think whatever else I try it in again will still taste bitter — he will recognise it and be more suspicious still and if the quantity is still not successful it will injure any chance I may have of trying when you come home. Do you understand? I thought a lot about what you said of Dan. Darlint, don’t trust him — I don’t mean don’t tell him anything because I know you never would—What I mean is don’t let him be suspicious of you regarding that— because if we were successful in the action — darlint circumstances may afterwards make us want many friends — or helpers and we must have no enemies— or even people that know a little too much. Remember the saying ‘A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Darlint we’ll have no one to help us in the world now and we mustn’t make enemies unnecessarily. He says — to his people— he fought and fought with himself to keep conscious — ‘ I’ll never die, except naturally — I’m like a cat with nine lives’ he said and detailed to them an occasion when he was young and nearly suffocated by gas fumes. I wish we had not got electric light— it would be easy. I’m going to try the glass again occasionally — when it is safe. I’ve got an electric light globe this time. 

The defence declared that all this kind of thing was sheer pretence and invention. She wanted to make Bywaters believe that she was trying to get rid of her husband, when, in fact, she was doing nothing of the kind. ‘There is nothing in the letters to show anything but that Mrs Thompson was desirous of impressing on Bywaters that she was prepared to go to any length to retain his affection’, said Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett.

This explanation might have been hard to believe but for one fact. Sir Bernard Spilsbury and other experts found no trace of any kind of poison in the body of the dead man. There was not, apart from the letters, a shred of evidence of any kind that she had ever attempted to give him poison.

Let us take a glance at another of these letters which was much commented upon, and try to get nearer to the emotion and imagination of this girl.

‘It must be remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and that the same dose harmless if taken once, yet frequently repeated, becomes deadly.’

Darlingest Boy,

The above passage I’ve just come across in a book I am reading, ‘Bella Donna’ by Robert Hichens. Is it any use? In your letter from Bombay you say you asked a lot of questions from Marseilles. I hope I answered them all satisfactory Darlint. … About the Co-Optimists, I remember the song quite well and darlint, if you can only be practically true to me – I’d rather not have you at all and I won’t have you. Whats more now I’m the bully aren’t I? but it’s only fun darlint – laugh. Yes a lot pour moi. I’ve heard nothing at all from your Mother I’ve seen your sister several times. Darlingest boy you must never question me still being here. … Don’t ever doubt. I’ll always love you – too much perhaps but always, and while you say stay I shall.

I shall ask you about the laugh in the Buffet, but when shall I? I’m not clear about what you write. Do you mean me to ask you when I see you this time or to wait until things are perhaps different. You say ‘I’m not bullying I’m deciding for you Chere.’ Darlint, that’s what I like. Not that hard tone ‘You must, you shall.’ But the softer tone I know you can use especially to me. Yes, I like you deciding things for me. I’ve done it so long for myself. Its lovely to be able to leave it all to someone I know will not go wrong – will do the right thing pour moi always. You will wont you darlint. I lean on you not on myself when you are here. Now I’ll talk a bit about the books ‘Beyond the Shadow.’ I did like [it] very much, only it was hardly a possible story do you think. Marian was an ideal woman and under her circumstances too ideal too unnatural too careful of other people’s opinions. It reminded me of the book you lent me ‘The Way of these Women.’ Do you remember the man and the woman who didn’t take their fate into their own hands although they could have done so easily. Too careful of the opinions of their so-called friends and the world. When Geoffrey remembered he should have taken her away mastered all her protests and carried her off. They were made for each other, he was married to another through no fault of his own. He had plenty of the most necessary thing money and he just drifted. Darlingest, Betty wasn’t a little fool she loved as much as her nature allowed and it wasn’t her fault but fate, that Geoffrey didn’t love her and because he didn’t (and he knew himself he didn’t) why did he marry her. For sensual reasons thats all – to gratify himself. He knew she worshipped him and he was flattered. I didn’t like him very much Marian was lovely.  … I agree with you about Chambers endings darlint but the endings are not the story. The end is written to please nine out of ten people who read his books. You and I are the tenth and he doesn’t cater for us darlint, we are so few. Do as I do. Forget the ends lose yourself in the characters and the story and, in your own mind make your own end. Its lovely to do that darlint … The book I’m reading ‘Bella Donna’ is about Egypt – I’d think you’d be interested in it – although I don’t think you would like the book – at least I hope you wouldn’t – I don’t. …. Ive taken the tussore to be made up darlint and was told that it was the best quality they have ever handled. Ive also had a new navy costume made. … Darlingest boy pour moi be very very careful coming in this time. Things and people have become much more vigilant. Understand? I dont want to lose any tiny minute of you, they will probably be so few, but even a few is so much better than none at all remember that darlint. …  On Saturday darlint I did something which you would have said made me look old – gardening all day. It passes the time away. Old

Mr. Lester died last night.

All their side of the house the blinds are drawn. I havnt drawn mine and Im not going to. I think they think Im a heathen.

There was another letter in which Bella Donna was referred to:

About Bella Donna – no I dont agree with you about her darlint – I hate her – hate to think of her – I dont think other people made her what she was – that sensual pleasure loving greedy Bella Donna was always there. If she had originally been different – a good man like Nigel would have altered her darlint – she never knew what it was to be denied anything – she never knew ‘goodness’ as you and I know it – she was never interested in a good man – or any man unless he could appease her sensual nature. I don’t think she could have been happy with nothing – except Baroudi on a desert island she liked – no loved and lived for his money or what it could give her – the luxury of his yacht the secrecy with which he acted all bought with his money – that’s what she liked.

Yes she was clever – admire the cleverness – but she was cunning there is a difference darlint, I dont admire that – I certainly dont think she would ever have killed Nigel with her hands – she would have been found out – she didn’t like that did she? being found out – it was that secret cunning in Baroudi that she admired so much – the cunning that matched her own.

If she had loved Baroudi enough she could have gone to him – but she liked the security of being Nigel’s wife – for the monetary assets it held.

She doesn’t seem a woman to me – she seems abnormal – a monster utterly selfish and self living.

The lives of these three people drew near to the terrible climax when on September 23, 1922, Bywaters returned to England. There were stolen meetings between Edith Thompson and her lover. Of what they spoke there is only their own account – nothing to prove that they plotted murder together. On October 3^rd they had lunch and tea together. She told him that she and her husband were going to a theatre that evening with some relatives. They parted at half-past five, she to her home. Hr to pay a visit to her family at Manor Park. He spent the evening with them and left at about eleven o’clock.

Towards midnight Mr and Mrs Thompson were walking from Ilford station through a deserted street towards their home. Suddenly the girl was pushed violently aside. A man had rushed at her husband. There were a few seconds of altercation, and then the second man had vanished and Thompson dropped dying to the ground. The woman, hysterical and agitated, ran screaming for help.

‘O my God!’ she explained to some passers-by. ‘Will you help me? My husband is ill; he is bleeding.’

A doctor was fetched. Blood was coming from Thompson’s mouth and he was dead. It was assumed that he had had a seizure. The body was taken to the mortuary and the weeping, unstrung girl escorted to her home. Not until some little time later was it discovered that the dead man had been stabbed in the back.

The police under Detective-Superintendent Wensley were prompt to act. The girl, still distressed and incoherent, was asked to go to the police station. Nothing very definite was got from her at first. Her husband had staggered and she had supported him for a few yards, when he collapsed and she ran for help. She did not see anyone else.

She said nothing of Bywaters. But a hint had been gleaned from another source and search was made for him. Meanwhile she was detained. Her lover was found after some delay. He admitted knowing Mrs Thompson, but denied any knowledge of the murder.

Now neither knew up till then that the other had been held by the police. Suddenly, by accident it is said, she caught a glimpse of her lover through a window. Her overwrought nerves gave way.

‘O God! O God, what can I do?’ she moaned. ‘Why did he do it? I did not want him to do it … I must tell the truth’. Then she admitted that she had recognized Bywaters as the assailant of her husband.

Bywaters, when told that they would both be charged with the crime, was obviously staggered.

‘Why her?’, he asked. ‘She was not aware of my movements’. Then she went on to tell how he had intercepted the pair, thrust Mrs Thompson aside, demanded that the other man should agree to a separation, and when he refused struggled with him while the girl stood ‘spellbound’.

The reason I fought with Thompson was because he never acted like a man to his wife. He always seemed several degrees lower than a snake. I loved her and I could not go on seeing her leading that life. I did not intend to kill him. I only meant to injure him. I gave him an opportunity of standing up to me as a man but he wouldn’t.

The two were brought to trial. I have already indicated something of what happened. For Bywaters, of course, there was no real defence. He was perhaps to be pitied – indeed, public sympathy ran rather with him than with the girl – for he probably was quite sincere in picturing himself rather as a chivalrous protector than a cold-blooded murderer. All through, till practically the moment he stood on the scaffold, he insisted that Mrs Thompson knew nothing if his intention.

But with Mrs Thompson there were those to whom the verdict came as a shock. Remember how frail was the real evidence against her. Admittedly no single act of her had brought about her husband’s death. Not one word confirmed the theory that she was so incredibly foolish as to have arranged that the murder should take place in her presence in such a manner as it did.

The letters were put in to show that she had been plotting murder against her husband in another fashion, and therefore, inferentially was likely to have agreed to kill him. There was not one iota of confirmation that she had tried to poison her husband. Such evidence as there was – apart from the letters – was against it. Thompson, she said in one of her letters, had spoken to his mother of the bitterness of some tea. That incident, she declared at the trial, was invented. ‘Mr Thompson’s mother is alive’, she added simply. Why, I wonder, was not Thompson’s mother called to prove that this was not an invention. Her attitude immediately after the murder, her reluctance to inculpate Bywaters, to admit their relationship as lovers, is easily explicable apart from her distraught state of mind.

[EDGAR WALLACE] In what horrible atmosphere did that wretched woman walk to death! The shadow of Jacoby of the Greenwood trial lay on the Old Bailey. The ghost of Jacoby (an eighteen-year-old boy recently hanged) sat at the Home Secretary’s one elbow, and the smiling debonair figure of True (who was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor) at the other. And behind it all were the fierce condemnations of a thousand drawing-rooms, a thousand dinner-tables where sour and pawky women tried and condemned and hanged her before her faltering foot was lifted to the bottom stair that leads to the dock.

 I was asked to go to the trial. 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’.  

This remarkable woman was a novelist, and inventor of stories, a player of parts. She was the heroine of every erotic novel that she read. She was the wife of the British diplomat who, to please her husband, surrendered herself to the young Italian and bore him a child. She was Bella Donna, who poisoned her husband, not, one imagines, for the love of the Egyptian; she was making her dream hero more presentable than Robert Hichens’ coloured man. She was all the tragic women that she had ever read; and from the material she had gathered in these books she created Mrs Thompson, a poisoner. She had only the vaguest idea of the effect poisons had upon people. She knew that ground glass killed, and but she did not know that the particular ground glass is administered in the form of a very fine powder, so soft that it feels to the fingers like so much talc.

But the most amazing misconception is that since discovered. The letters wherein she talked about ‘big doses’ and trying that or the other drug, had reference to the administration of the noxious poisons to herself! There is no doubt that the relationship between Edith Thompson and Bywaters was of an illicit character, and that the result was something which, to use her own words, he, Thomson, was ready to accept the praise or blame for. And she took those drugs, as thousands of other women have taken drugs, with the object of preventing ‘something dreadful’. To put it plainly, she did not want to bear a child whilst she was Thompson’s wife and in Thompson’s house.

‘Why didn’t she say so?’ you ask. Why, when she was under re-examination by that most able advocate Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, did she not confess that those references had to do with herself?

In the first place, I am perfectly sure that the queer sense of modesty which overtakes such women as she, and which makes the discussion of such intimate matters a positive pain, was one of the causes. In other words, as she had made up her story on the course of her letters, so she was remaking a story in the witness-box. She was lying if you like. I would rather put it that she was romancing. Possibly she felt, as I felt, that whatever she said made not the slightest difference, that she was condemned before the swearing in of the jury. 

It is indeed much easier to understand the mentality of Mrs Thompson than it is to understand the mentality of the jurors. For here is a fact which the most strenuous opponent of Mrs Thompson cannot controvert. There was not a jot or a tittle of evidence produced at the Old Bailey to prove that Mrs Thompson struck the fatal blow, or struck any blow at all, or acquiesced in the murder when it actually occurred, or assisted Bywaters actively or encouraged him by any words. Indeed, it was proved that she did nothing of the sort. Even the police admitted that her first cry was one of terrible distress. ‘Why did he do it?’ And Bywaters’ amazement when she was condemned was pathetic.  

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 and forget that Edith Thompson was an immoral woman, that she died innocent of the crime of murder.

Lest Wallace’s indictment of the conviction as a terrible mistake should seem to be overdrawn, let me quote Mr Randal Charlton’s recollection of a conversation with Sir Edward Marshall Hall after the trial. The great criminal counsel said:

She was a comparatively ignorant and foolishly romantic woman. Her life with the incompatible Thompson must have been a martyrdom. Bywaters, of course, threated to break off the association between the two unless she got Thompson out of the way. Fed on silly plays and silly books, this was the great play-acting moment of her life. She wrote those tragically absurd letters to Bywaters pretending that she was trying to murder her husband with bits of broken glass, and other things equally grotesque, in the hope of feeding her lover’s fading passion. I have no doubt in my mind that Mrs Thompson thoroughly enjoyed writing those ghastly letters, but I feel equally sure that at the same time, she was doing her best to get her miserable husband back to a little health.

Twelve jurors – including one woman – held Edith Thompson guilty. The judge obviously believed her guilty. The Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the verdict. The Home Secretary refused to interfere with the death sentence,

And Edgar Wallace wrote of the ‘murder’ of Mrs Thompson.

• Beverley Nichols, Twenty-Five (1926)

Chapter Sixteen: ‘Hanged by the neck’ : On February, 1923 [he means December 1922], I attended the famous trial of Edith Thompson and Fred Bywaters, which created a sensation in England keener than any which had been felt since the Crippen case.

The first part I had to play in it was to go out, one wet, dreary evening, to North London, to try to persuade Grayson [Graydon], the father of the murderess on trial, to give me the story of her life. All the other newspapers were on the same job, and it was with a feeling of dismay and depression that I walked down the long sad crescent that led to the Graysons’ house, pushed open the rusty gate, and rang the bell.

The door opened, and the pale face of a little oldish man appeared. He was crying.

‘Mr. Nichols?’ he said in a voice that was half a whisper.

I nodded.

With a weary gesture he motioned me in. I found myself in a little parlour, neatly kept. It was lit by incandescent gas, which bubbled and fizzled, and cast green shadows in the corners. A little china sparkled on the mantelpiece. There was no fire and the room was very cold.

We sat down. It was all like a nightmare. I could say nothing. And then his son appeared in the doorway – pale and distracted. Somehow the presence of a third person made it easier, and, rousing myself, I tried to put, as gently as I could, the nature of my request.

He shook his head. It was impossible. All the papers had been there. They had not had a minute’s peace. They could tell them nothing. I passed that over, talking, talking – anything to prevent him again giving way to his grief. And, by and by, he seemed to cheer up a little.

Then, suddenly, without any warning, he threw out his hands, and cried in a broken voice… ‘To think that this should happen to us!’

It was the universal cry of humanity. Why should it happen to us? There were five hundred little houses, all exactly alike, in this desolate crescent. There were five thousand equally desolate crescents in London. Why had God picked out this one little house out of so many?

The scene passes to the Old Bailey, on which the eyes of all England at this time were centred.

The first sight one has of the Principal Court of Justice at the Old Bailey is not awe-inspiring. It is, of course, a completely modern building, with an air about it which makes it look as though it were designed for a cheerful lecture room at Cambridge. The light wood and plaster, the glass roof, the sunlight that floods the whole place – nothing here to promote any morbid speculations.

But as the court fills, as one by one the barristers take their places at the long tables, as the back benches are occupied by the usual array of stupid women hung with false pearls, as the Judge and jury file into place, and as, finally, the prisoner is led into the dock, then all this cheerfulness, this matter-of-fact atmosphere, this clean, modern feeling, becomes far more horrible than if the trial were conducted in a vault by black inquisitors under candlelight. For in this place, tragedy is made ridiculous. The mask of pain is moulded into a grotesque. It is almost as though an operation for life or death were taking place before one’s eyes, without any anaesthetic. Rather be tried before a howling mob, and bundled straight off in a tumbril to the guillotine, than be brought up to this clean, wholesome room, like a young man undergoing a viva voce, in which failure means hanging by the neck.

The court was already packed to suffocation, and I sat down. Five minutes to ten. In a few moments the curtain would rise on the biggest tragedy of 1922. And yet, what was the mood of the audience?  Pleasant, amused expectation apparently. From behind me came a whiff of cheap scent and the light chatter of many tongues. Looking up into the gallery one could see the fatuous faces of young girls, wearing the sort of expression you see before the lights go down at a cinema. One of them had a box of chocolates laid on the ledge in front of her, and from time to time she pushed it towards a young man by her side. Standing in the group by the door was a very bad and very popular actor, bowing ceremoniously to the scented ladies. The only people who looked at all serious were the police, and one felt that they were serious only because they had duties to perform.

Ten o’clock. The curtain rises. I shut my eyes. There is a mumble of voices, a shuffling of feet, a rustle of papers. Silence. I open my eyes again to find that the ‘female prisoner’ is already in the dock, and the play has begun.

Look at her, this ‘female prisoner’. Look at her, this Edith Thompson, née Grayson, who has spent twenty-eight passionate, unhappy years on this earth, and is now being sent to eternal darkness. (I am drifting irresistibly into the style of Carlyle, but I can’t help it.) A lovely creature, one would say. A neck like the stem of a flower. So very white, with the pallor of old lilies carved in ivory. So very tired, as though no longer could that one head support the burden of so much pain.

Oh yes. I know that she is a murderess. I know that she is an adulteress. That foully, and with felonious intent, she did, on divers occasions attempt to do to death an honest and upright man. I know all that, and a good deal more besides. But I also know that my heart is wrung with pity.

A man with a red face is cross-examining her. He leans forward, and reads from a letter in his hand. It is one of those amazing love-letters which this strange creature had sent from her dingy suburb to her boy lover.

   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 never shall again.

   Darlingest lover, what happened last night? I don’t know myself, I only know how I felt – no, not really how I felt, but how I could feel – if time and place or circumstances were different.

   It seems like a great welling up of love, of feeling, of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands to do with as you will, and I feel that if you do as you wish I shall be happy. I can’t really describe it – but you will understand, darlint, won’t you? You said you knew it would be like this one day – if it hadn’t would you have been disappointed?

And again, when he was far away:

   I’ve nothing to talk about darlint, not a tiny little thing. Life – the life I and we lead is gradually drawing near. Soon, I’ll be like the Sahara – just a desert ‘Shulamite’. You must read that book – it’s interesting, absorbing. Aren’t books a consolation and a solace? We ourselves die and live in the books while we are reading them, and when we have finished, the books die and we live or exist. Just drag on thro’ years and years until when? Who knows? I’m beginning to think no one does – not even you and I. We are not the shapers of our destiny. I will always love you, darlint.

I found myself longing for their escape, planning for it, wondering if by some miracle it could not be brought about. The main well of the court is surmounted by a glass roof. If only, I thought, some friends could land on that roof in an aeroplane, shatter the glass with a single blow, throw down a rope to the two tortured creatures in the dock, and pull them up, up, out of this hell into the clean air above. If only there could be an earthquake to rend the walls, so that the gloating crowd would rush away affrighted, and leave the lovers to themselves. If only there would be an utter darkness, to cover all this shame, and set us free. Bad reasoning of course, on my part. Bad sociology. Bad law. Justice has to be done, and all that sort of thing. But I defy any sensitive person to sit through a long trial of this description, to see a beautiful woman and a strong young man slowly done to death, without siding, heart and soul, with the accused.

During the whole of that tragic trial, through gloom to deepening gloom, I was in constant touch with the Grayson family. As I saw more of them, I marvelled that so utterly commonplace and kindly a group of individuals should have, as one of their members, the complex, passionate character of Edith Thompson. The mother I hardly recollect, save as a little, broken woman in black, whose hand was always to her eyes and who walked with uncertain steps, as though stumbling in darkness. But there was a sister whom I often saw. She seemed to have more control over herself than any other member of the family. She was cool, almost dominating, in the witness-box, and in her own home she was the one who assumed the chief burden of work and responsibility. A brother, too, I remember, with a face drained of all colour and eyes red with secret weeping. As for Grayson himself, he was just stunned. There is no other word which adequately describes his slow, mumbling speech, his downcast eyes, his dumb look of pain.

At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon during the trial, I used to meet Grayson as he came out of Holloway Prison. Do you know Holloway Prison? It is of all places the most dreary and forlorn. It lies at the end of the long and dismal Caledonian Road in North London. It has no colour save the faded advertising hoardings which peel from the dirty walls, no animation but for the noisy trams that rattle down the end of the street, and the cries of pale children playing in the gutter.

The prison itself is built of grey stone, like a fortress. It has narrow windows and high walls. Over the whole pile broods an air of monstrous cruelty and strength, from the rusted spikes that guard the outer wall’s summits to the heavy gates that shut out its inmates from the world. I would stand watching those gates for five minutes, ten minutes, half an hour, and then they would swing slowly open and through them would emerge the little sombre procession, Grayson, the brother – sometimes the sister and mother as well.

Silently I would join them and walk with them down the road, while the trams rattled by, and the newsboys shouted out the latest details of the case, and lovers jostled us, arm-in-arm. And then the cross-examination would begin.

‘How was she?’

‘She was better. Brighter.’

‘Were you allowed to go into her room?’

‘No. They put a table across the door. We spoke to her over that. We stood in the corridor. There was a warder by her side.’

‘What was she wearing?’

‘A dressing-gown. You see, she’s been in bed. Ill. Very ill. Exhausted, they say. Still, she was better, and she has been reading.’

‘What books has she been reading?’

‘Dickens, she told us. She said that she wanted life and comedy, and Dickens gave her that. Full-bloodied life – that was the word she used.’

‘Did she say anything about him?’

‘Him?’

‘Yes. Bywaters.’

‘No. His name never crossed her lips. She asked about her appeal, and she seemed quite hopeful about it. And then – she began to remember things.’

‘Remember things?’

‘Yes. Last Christmas for example. She said “Do you remember the party we had last Christmas? And all the presents I had? And the crackers? And the Christmas tree?”’

And then I would shake them by the hand, and wish them good cheer, and say that I was sure the appeal would turn out right – anything to take away that look of tragedy from their eyes. They would brighten perhaps, for a moment, and then the mask would fall over their faces again, as they turned away, and went down the windy street.

The most horrible meeting of all, as far as I was concerned, was on the day after she had been hanged. I was in the office, writing some ridiculous account of an agricultural exhibition, when word was brought that Grayson wished to see me.

It was the most difficult thing I have ever had to do. I found him sitting in the waiting-room, under a glaring electric light. Standing by his side, with one hand on his shoulder, was the son. We looked at each other in silence. What was there to say? What language was ever invented which could possibly be fitted to an occasion so forlorn?

Eventually, we did speak – or rather, I spoke. ‘Bit knocked up’, was all he could say. ‘Bit knocked up.’ Over and over again, like a child repeating a lesson it had learnt and did not understand. I told him that they must all go away to the country, to the sea, anywhere, as long as they were away from prying eyes, from the memory of the dead.

He went out. ‘Bit knocked up,’ he said again, and that was the last I heard of him.

• Beverley Baxter, Strange Street (1935) (excerpt from ‘Life Ends at Eight’)

And so, as often happens, something unthought and unforeseen emerged to send the Sunday Express leaping forward. Yet to me it was the most gruelling experience of my journalistic life, and constitutes a chapter that I can only look back upon with a shame that is not made less because it must be shared by many others.

There has never in my time in England been a trial that so gripped the public as when Frederick Bywaters, a young ship’s steward, and Edith Thompson were placed in the dock for the murder of Mrs. Thompson’s husband.

There was no question about the killing. Bywaters, home on leave from his ship, waited for the return of the Thompsons from the theatre, and stabbed the man to death. Mrs. Thompson had cried to him to stop, and there was never a suggestion that she knew the attack was to take place.

Yet they placed the two together in the dock, and both were sentenced to be hanged. She had written unnumerable letters to her lover, Bywaters, while he was at sea, and he had kept them all in his iron box, where the police found them. In these letters she let herself go with a passion and with a facility of emotional expression which might easily have earned her rich rewards if she had turned her talent into the realm of popular, uncritical fiction. She wrote as if she were the first woman and Bywater the first man. She raised the love of her suburban self and the wandering steward to the level of an epic. She urged the murder of her husband, and wrote how she had put ground glass into his food without effect. She never suggested that they should run away, because that apparently would outrage suburban respectability. It must be murder or nothing.

To the psychologist it would appear that here was a thwarted woman finding in the outpouring of words the romance that life itself denied her. She saw herself as a splendid murderess with love triumphant over all. But it was murder in terms of words only.

The words, though, took root in her lover’s sex-ridden brain, and the pavement of a suburban street ran red with the blood of a harmless, decent clerk.

The jury held, and it spoke for British public opinion, that Bywaters had killed his man, and that Edith Thompson was guilty of one death already, and would be guilty of a second when Bywaters went to the gallows.

At the time I thought the sentence on the woman was a mere formality and that a reprieve would be granted at an early date. The man, Bywaters, was doomed, but once the clamour against Edith Thompson had calmed down, the Court of Criminal Appeal would surely realise that adultery is not punishable by death and that the desire for murder, if such a desire really existed, can be punished by God, and not by Law. She herself had no doubts about a reprieve, and when her family visited her in prison she was planning to pick up the broken threads of her existence when the gates would be opened.

At such a time the power of the Press is great, but the feeling against Edith Thompson was still strong, and I held my hand for what it was worth. At length, however, we commenced a series of articles in the leader column of the Daily Express, urging that this was a clear miscarriage of justice, and that a reprieve must be granted.

If I had those days to live over again I would have thrown my protest day after day on the front page, not in the leader column, and roused the entire country. Our campaign might not come to nothing, but as a responsible publicist we would not have compromised with a duty that was stark clear to us.

On the Saturday before the hanging, which was to take place on the following Tuesday, I was working on the paper when the commissionare informed me that a woman relative of Bywaters wanted to see the Editor on a matter of urgent importance. A minute later, a nice-looking girl was shown in, and after two or three attempts to speak burst into tears.

When the paroxysm had passed, she said that she was a cousin of the condemned man, and had just been to see him in his cell.

“He is not afraid for himself”, she said, “but he asked me to do what I could for Edith Thompson. He says she had nothing whatever to d with the murder and that it is absolutely terrible for the law to hang her.”

I could see the conflict of emotions in the girl. The Thompson woman had brought her cousin to the gallows, and yet she felt bound in loyalty to carry out his last instructions.

“Why did Bywaters kill Thompson?” I asked.

“He told me that he had no intention of killing him. He always carried a knife ever since he went to sea. He went to meet them coming from the theatre, and I suppose he was going to tell her husband everything. He said that when they came up he suddenly saw red. He does not remember anything except that Thompson was lying on the ground and she was calling for help.”

Again the girl burst into tears. I gave her a cup of tea, and eventually sent her away with the promise that we would consider the whole situation as  far as a newspaper could do.

When she had gone I realised that this was a confession. That in itself was not important, as Bywater’s plea of “not guilty” was purely automatic and according to legal custom, but it was a confession which definitely cleared the woman of the charge of direct complicity.

This development so excited me that I quite forgot the journalistic side in my determination to secure a reprieve. I wrote the scene exactly as it had occurred in my office, omitting the girl’s name to save her embarrassment, and carried it on the front page, but failed to print the extra copies that were demanded by the public. So intense was the interest in the coming execution that we could have sold an extra million or even more copies, but we could think of nothing but the impending horror and our chance of preventing it.

• Beverley Baxter, ‘Memories of a famous hanging of long ago’ (Maclean’s Magazine, 8 March 1959)

It has been said many times that the British, more than any other race, have a genius for compromise. There are occasions, however, when this adaptability to circumstance gets them into an unholy mess, and certainly this is true of the Homicide Bill which was born out of much travail in the House of Commons and has now become an Act of the realm.

Let me assure you that I am not going to discuss the wisdom or unwisdom of the death penalty. It is true that twice I led a minority group of Tory abolitionists into the voting lobby where we made common cause with a large number of socialists and thus did away with the death penalty—but the Peers ultimately reversed the decision on both occasions.

Nor do I doubt that their lordships more truly expressed the feelings of the people than we abolitionists in the Commons.

However, the government could not totally ignore the decision of the Commons so the attorney-general, with the assistance of the Home Secretary, laboured and brought forth the legislation which is now in force.

Let us see what can happen under the existing law today. If Bill Sykes kills Mr. Smith, the grocer, with a blow while robbing him of the money in his cash register, and if he can prove that he only intended to commit a robbery with a quick getaway, he would serve a long sentence but would not hang.

But there is a catch in it.

If the unfortunate grocer sounds the alarm before he is murdered and Sykes kills a policeman in an attempt to make a getaway then Sykes does hang.

Just to show the difficulty, and even the absurdity of classifying the act of murder, a poisoner who has not even the excuse of uncontrollable fear does not hang. Yet of all murderers surely the poisoner is the most vile and cruel.

A few weeks ago. after the new law had come into force, the London Evening Standard sent a reporter to see me. He explained that his newspaper was going to recall and review the execution of Edith Thompson which took place in the early 1920s. In doing so they wanted to check up on the part I played, as editor of the Sunday Express, in trying to secure a last-minute reprieve for the condemned woman.

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.

Therefore I now suggest that you, the readers of Maclean’s Magazine, constitute yourselves a jury to decide in retrospect whether the hanging of Edith Thompson was according to the law or whether it was carried out because of the failure of her counsel to do full justice to her case, or whether the jury could not distinguish between the causing and the committing of a murder.

Here then is the story.

One evening a woman named Edith Thompson, together with her husband, left their modest suburban home in East London to see a play in a West End theatre. On returning to their home they were stopped in the street by a friend, Frederick Bywaters, a good – looking young fellow who was a steward on an oriental shipping line.

There were words between the men and then a shriek from the woman: “Don’t! Don’t!” The young man had driven a knife into the husband’s heart and then run away. A few hours later he was caught by the police and taken to a police station where he was charged with murder.

After a short enquiry Edith Thompson was also arrested and taken into custody.

Understandably the newspapers made a big story of it. although the drab suburban background slightly reduced the public interest. It had all the trappings of a first-rate crime story except that the three principals were no one in particular. However, newspapers have to take the material which events supply to them and they did their best with this suburban version of the eternal triangle.

In due course Bywaters and Edith Thompson were brought for trial to the

Old Bailey, which is London’s criminal court, to face the charge of murder, and I went to the grim, old place to watch the proceedings.

There they were in the dock together —the haggard woman looking years older than her age, and the youthful ship’s steward with the health of the open sea still on his cheeks.

This was the case put forward by the prosecution. Thompson, the murdered man, was a clerk in an office, married to a woman who was a complete romanticist, a woman who was the victim of her own emotionalism. Bored by the monotony of her drab life with a faithful, unexciting husband, she entered into an adulterous intrigue with Bywaters, who was much younger than herself. She was a profuse letter writer during the long absences of her lover, and it was unfortunate for her that he kept her letters. The jury would learn from this correspondence that she was trying to bring about the death of her husband by feeding him with ground glass in his food.

Here was in fact an adulteress living in pretended amity with a faithful husband while trying to get him out of the way by slowly killing him. On the evidence, it was a cold, cruel murder in its intent and culmination. Yet she did not actually commit the act of murder. That was left to the young man over whom she exerted an undoubted fascination. But the jury would be in no doubt as to her desire, her purpose and her connivance.

On the evidence there was only one possible verdict—the sentence of death. There could have been none else.

On the Saturday before the double execution, which was to take place on Monday, I was preparing the current issue of the Sunday Express when my secretary said that Bywaters’ young sister wantedto see me urgently. I said that I would see her at once and a few moments later the commissionaire brought her to my office.

She was a sweet and gentle girl of some seventeen years of age but when she tried to speak she burst into tears. Again and again she made the effort, and then through her sobs she asked my forgiveness for being so much trouble.

At last she gained control of herself and in a voice that was almost inaudible she said that she had been to the prison to say good-by to her brother. Then, trying to keep control of her tears, she said: “My brother asked me to tell you that he knows he must die but he never meant to kill Mr. Thompson. He said to tell you that he always carried a jackknife for cutting string and rope on luggage. All he knows is that when he saw Edith and her husband together he saw red and the next thing he remembered was the blood on the pavement and Mr. Thompson lying dead. Edith knew nothing about it and shrieked for help.”

What could I do? I phoned the Home Office and asked where I could get in touch with the Home Secretary. The answer was that he was staying for the weekend at a country house in Wales. When I pressed for the name and place of the house they demurred but at last gave me the information.

My news editor tried to get through to the country house on the telephone but either the line was blocked or the telephone was not being answered. So we did what was then an almost unheard-of thing in journalism. We chartered a private airplane and sent the news editor and the chief crime reporter to Wales.

Somehow the plane made a landing in the grounds of the country house but it was during the Sinn Fein outrages, and they would not open the door. We could do nothing more.

At eight 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. “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 rumors 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 rumor.

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.

Now comes a curious twist to the story. What had happened to the letters which Edith Thompson had written to her lover? Those that had been read during the trial had of course been published but what of the others? My staff got in touch with the woman’s brother and I went down to meet him at a pub in the East End.

He was a gentle and somewhat romantic young man with a soft, semi-cockney accent. “They shouldn’t have hanged Edith,” he said, but there was no bitterness in his words. The little world that he knew and understood had cracked to ruins and he could not piece it together.

“They shouldn’t have hanged Edith,” he repeated. “She wouldn’t hurt anyone. She really wouldn’t.” The other people in the pub stopped in their talk and gazed at us. The brother had become a national figure to them.

By a strange coincidence our chief Sunday newspaper rival, the Sunday Dispatch, had purchased the publication rights of the letters from the Bywaters family. When it became known that the Sunday Express had bought the rights from the Thompson relatives the Sunday Dispatch suggested that both newspapers should publish simultaneously. Then I made enquiries and discovered what I had not previously known—that the copyright of a letter belongs not to the recipient but to the writer thereof. So we had the exclusive rights.

Therefore, let us be perfectly frank. We published the letters serially in the Sunday Express and thereby increased our circulation considerably. As an editor I was glad to have secured a running feature that was of absorbing interest.

But as I read those letters which told over and over again of how Edith Thompson the adulteress tried to murder her husband with endless insertions of ground glass in his food I asked our crime reporter to try to get a record of the murdered man’s health during this long sustained cruelty.

The report that my staff gave me was that although Thompson was a man of poor health he had not been absent from his work at any time during the period when, according to the evidence in the trial, he was eating ground glass in endless quantities.

In other words it was nothing but play-acting and invention by an older woman trying to keep her hold on her lover’s affections. In the world of imagination she pretended to be a murderer without pity. In actuality she was a good suburban wife looking after her sickly husband’s health and comfort like countless other wives. There was never any ground glass—yet it hanged her.

Again I must submit to you, the jury of Maclean’s readers, that this woman was an adulteress and that she undoubtedly caused the death of her husband and her lover. But a drunken man may cause a motorist to kill a pedestrian in trying to avoid killing the drunkard. But it is not murder.

Therefore, you ladies and gentlemen who have read my account of this tragedy of suburbia, I claim that Edith Thompson was guiltless of murder or the intent to murder, that she lived in a world of frustrated romance and found expression in love letters. And further I claim that she was hanged by society in revenge, and not according to the laws of England.

It was this legalized taking of life, unjustified by the true facts, that made me twice lead the Conservative break-away group which, in alliance with a large section of the socialist party, abolished hanging in Britain.

There I rest my case. Should Edith Thompson have been executed? It is for you to give your verdict now that the full evidence has been put before you.

• Beverley Nichols, The Sweet and Twenties (1958) (excerpt from ‘Cause Celèbre)

The Thompson-Bywaters murder case was the first piece of reporting which made me feel ashamed of being a journalist. And, I believe, the last.

The shame did not come till the last act, after Edith Thompson had been sentenced to death, when I was given the job of trying to persuade her father to give me her life story. This task was so utterly distasteful that it nearly made me quit Fleet Street for good. At the beginning, however, like everyone else, I was swept away by the sheer force and impact of the tragedy. …

Perhaps, also, it was because of my own part in the Thompson-Bywaters affairs that it seemed to me the crime par excellence of the decade, with its throbbing under-current of masochism, which so aptly illustrated a theory which was beginning to be expounded by the psycho-analysts – the theory of the Death Wish. At times during the trial I certainly wished that I were dead myself, but never so much as after Edith Thompson had been sentenced to be hanged.

The telephone rang one night in my little flat in Bryanston Street … I lifted the receiver and heard the voice of Bernard Falk, my editor … As an editor he was compelled to answer the public clamour for news. Edith Thompson was to die, so we had to get her life story, and I was the one to get it. But from whom? From Mr Graydon, her father, of course. ..,

The morning was grey when I set out for North London on this hateful mission, and nowhere was it greyer than in the road called Manor Park. It was a very long road, and after I had been walking down it for some minutes I saw in the distance a group of men who clustered round the front door of one of the houses. As I came closer I realized that they were reporters. Among them there were some of the toughest types in Fleet Street.

My heart sank. What chance was there against such competition? This was an occasion when money would do the talking, and I had no definite authority to offer any sum at all. If it were not money it would be another kind of talk – loud, blustering, bullying talk. ‘Come on, Mr Graydon, you’d better give us the facts; we’ll get ‘em sooner or later.’. I was not good at that sort of thing.

I stood there, on the far side of the road, and stared. So this was the point at which one had arrived, as the result of being the bright boy at school! This was one’s academic accolade; this was the reward for burning the midnight oil at Balliol, editing the Isis and becoming President of the Oxford Union. One had become a Fleet Street scavenger … So I stood there and stared, and shivered, and felt utterly miserable.

The rest of the day passed in a sort of daze … I wandered about in the Park; I went to a cinema; and I have a vague memory of sending the Graydons a telegram. Then I went to a pub called the Argyll, near Oxford Circus, with the firm intention of getting drunk.

I did not get drunk … at least, not very drunk. But I had just enough to make me suddenly get up and put down my glass and walk across to the tube station and take the tube back to Manor Park. It was then about nine o’clock at night.

Once again I set out down the long dreary road. This time Manor Park was deserted. There was no light in the Graydons’ house, and when I rang the bell there was no reply. Perhaps they had gone – perhaps they had fled – perhaps I could be rid of the whole wretched business. Then there were footsteps. A light was switched on; the door opened, and I found myself staring into the face of a man who was weeping. There was some muttered conversation, and then, to my bewilderment, I found myself admitted into a little room which was lit by a glaring white globe hanging from the middle of the ceiling. I shall always remember that ruthless globe in the tiny room. Tragedy should be dimly lit; this globe was pitiless; it even gave a harsh sparkle to the tears on the old man’s cheeks.

I might write a touching dialogue about what transpired in that little room. I will not do so – though it would probably be reasonably accurate – because there are only two sentences which I remember, down the years, with absolute clarity, and they tell the whole story.

I spoke the first sentence. I said: ‘I only came to tell you that I am so terribly sorry.’ Nothing could have been more trite, but it happened, at that moment, to be true. Standing there under that ghastly light, with those pathetic masculine sniffs punctuating the silence, I had ceased to be a journalist, and had become a human being. I didn’t want a ‘story’, I only wanted in some fumbling way to help, and if that sounds priggish it is just too bad. Sometimes one has decent instincts  … Precisely because I had ceased to be a journalist, and because I really was distressed … the Graydons trusted me, felt that they could work with me, and eventually agreed to give me the story which they had refused to everybody else.

The second sentence was spoken by Mr Graydon, and it was a sentence that was to echo round the world. He threw out his arms in a clumsy gesture and he cried: ‘That this shoud happen to people like us!’

‘People like us’. People who had neat little houses in dreary suburban crescents. People who had a pair of Staffordshire dogs, very brightly polished, on each side of a clock with a glass case over it. People who had an upright piano with  a piece of beaded silk on the top, and a pile of songs which include Because and Friend of Mine. People with shiny linoleum on the stairs and heavy Victorian armoires in which the breast pockets of the Sunday suits were stuffed with lavender. People who were low church, and deeply interested in the royal family. People, above all, for whom respectability was a passion.

‘People like us.’

That phrase, as I said, was to echo round the world. Some years later I was telling the story to a brilliant young dramatist called Frank Vosper … When I came to the phrase ‘People like us’ he said ‘Stop! I must write a play about this and that must be the title.’ …

So I got my story after all. It was probably one or the few occasions when any journalist has ‘pulled off a world scoop’; by endeavouring to behave like a gentleman. For the next few weeks I was to see a lot of the Graydons, and always in circumstances of the most hideous vulgarity and squalor … outside Holloway Prison on Saturday afternoons. That was the time when they were allowed to see their daughter, and I used to meet them at the gate and ask them questions. How was she? How did she look? Had she hopes that her appeal would succeed? The noise of the traffic was so loud that I had to shout to make myself heard, and sometimes I could not understand their replies because they were usually crying.

• Ben Travers, A-sitting on a gate:  Autobiography (1978)

I wonder how many people nowadays remember the Thompson-Bywaters murder case? I have always longed to know what Mr and Mrs Thompson thought of The Dippers.* I don’t suppose Mr Thompson laughed much at it; for he seems to have been a morose and captious man; but I hope it provided a certain exhilaration for him in the last hour of his life before Bywaters stabbed him on his way home. As for Mrs Thompson, it obvious that unless she were definitely a party to the actual murder she should never have been executed. So, if the verdict passed upon her had the smallest iota of justification, she must have sat at the Criterion that night putting up a specious and discreet show of carefree merriment in order to conceal her Medea-like broodings over the forthcoming and pre-arranged assassination. What nonsense. It may be self-interest on my part, but I could never understand why the defence completely ignored the incredibility of her gratuitously seeking to face this frightful ordeal, which she must have imposed on herself had she really been a guilty accomplice.

Poor Edith Thompson – it has often intrigued me to reflect upon the association of her tragedy with my farce and I have journeyed specially to Ilford to have a look at the scene of the murder and at the house in which she sat and wrote her preposterous suburban fabrications. Ernest Trimmingham, a coloured disciple of Thespis who performed the extravagant duties of the leader of The Dippers’ ‘coon band’, propounded a theory that the Thompson murder resulted in a hoodoo [white or black magic] affecting the farce. After it, he declared, business was never so good either on stage or in front. I sometimes wonder whether Edith Thompson ever found cause to reflect on the last play she was ever destined to see and to decide that The Dippers had been a bit of a hoodoo to her. I hope not.

[The farce The Dippers by Ben Travers (1886-1980) was the play that Edith and Percy Thompson saw at the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly on 3 October 1922, the night of the murder. They were accompanied by Edith’s aunt and uncle Lillie and Jack Laxton. Avis Graydon was also meant to be of the party that night, but pulled out at short notice, probably to be with Freddy Bywaters, who saw her that night at her parents’ home at 231 Shakespeare Crescent, Manor Park. It seems likely that someone called Edith’s ‘lifelong friend’ took Avis’s ticket. Certainly the ‘lifelong friend’ will claim in the press that she was present that night even though there is no corroborative evidence for her presence. Who she was and whether or not she was present at the theatre on the night of the 3 October 1922 is one of the remaining mysteries of the Thompson-Bywaters story.

• Laura Thompson, Rex versus Edith Thompson (2018)