On 3 April 2024 René Weis’s solicitors, Nicholas Brown and Cheryl Fletcher of BDB Pitmans, served a Letter of Claim for Judicial Review on the CCRC and the Secretary of State for Justice, challenging the CCRC’s decision not to recommend a Free Pardon to Edith Thompson under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (RPM).

The full text of the Letter can be found here, with the substantive points of challenge set out under paragraph 10:

Letter of Claim to CCRC & SofS for Justice – 3 April 2024(30745105.1)

On 24 April 2024 the Ministry of Justice informed Professor Weis’s solicitors that Edith Thompson was being referred back to the CCRC for a fresh consideration. The text of the letter can be read here:

Weis – Pre-action protocol response 24.04.2024 (1)

See also BBC News 27 April 2024:

Edith Thompson: CCRC told to revisit hanged woman’s pardon case
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68904052

Below is the first report by the CCRC of 8 December 2023, followed by Professor Weis’s response of 27 February 2024:

CW-F-56 Section 16 Report (Thompson)

COMMENTS ON THE 8 DECEMBER 2023 CCRC REPORT ON EDITH THOMPSON

Professor René Weis

27 February 2024

For the first time since 1922 the British government, through the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has formally addressed the case of Edith Thompson.

The CCRC report acknowledges that Edith Thompson may not have been prosecuted or, if so, found guilty today:

It is acknowledged by the CCRC that by modern standards of fairness, the letters written by Mrs Thompson to Mr Bywaters may have been ruled inadmissible by the trial court …. Had this happened the case against her may not have proceeded. (CCRC: 50)

In spite of this, and notwithstanding further concessions by the CCRC regarding the trial judge’s lack of impartiality, the CCRC has felt unable to recommend a Free Pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (RPM).

We find their conclusion disappointing and surprising and believe they are wrong.

AN UNFAIR TRIAL WITH AN OPENLY BIASED JUDGE

The CCRC’s repeated emphasis, across their response, on ‘modern standards of fairness’ wrongly implies that, in law, lower standards of impartiality than today were acceptable in 1922 when Edith Thompson was tried. The CCRC notes that

by modern standards of fairness it could be argued that the trial judge’s summing up contained inappropriate judicial comment and lacked fairness and impartiality (51).

The fact that the judge’s summing up was widely perceived to be unconscionably biased at the time of the trial is well documented, to the point that his address to the jury was seen as a misdirection. The distinguished journalist and writer Edgar Wallace was there in 1922. In his words, echoing the sentiments of many of his contemporaries:

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 official published transcript of the trial in1923 also references the prejudicial nature of the trial and voices major concern over the treatment of John Webber’s important evidence. The judge sought to undermine the credibility of John Webber, the one key witness to the murder. In the trial judge’s words:

There is one other very curious piece of evidence to which I want to call your attention, and that is the evidence of Mr Webber. He says he heard a noise, and these are his words; he heard those words — ‘Oh, don’t, oh, don’t’ – in piteous tones. You know he is some way off; I am not saying it is true; it is for you to say whether it is accurate, or whether it is imaginary, or whether he has made a mistake; but there is the evidence.

The CCRC goes so far as to concede that the bias of the judge may constitute ‘new evidence’: ‘it is acknowledged that the argument the trial judge’s summing up was lacking in balance and fairness is new.’ (43) But the CCRC then proceeds to note that ‘it is considered that the admissibility and fairness arguments, while potentially going to the safety of the conviction, are not indicators of Mrs Thompson’s innocence’. (45)

The logic of this, in plain language, seems to be that even if the trial was unfair and the conviction unsafe, Edith Thompson was still guilty as charged. This runs counter to all instincts of fairness and natural justice, and particularly in a capital case where blatant untruths by the Crown and a biased judge colluded to take the life of a young woman.

A SHOCKING LIE BY THE CROWN

In this connection the CCRC failed to address what constituted arguably the most serious flaw in the Crown’s case against Edith Thompson, the fact that the Solicitor-General told a direct falsehood in court that was intended to implicate Edith Thompson in the manner, time and place of the murder. It was highlighted prominently in our submission to the Ministry of Justice on 7 July 2022:

Despite the fact that there was no evidence of any kind in the letters that Edith knew that her husband would be assaulted that night in that particular place and in that manner, the Solicitor-General stated, in his opening address to the jury, that ‘there is the undoubted evidence in the letters upon which you can find that there was a preconcerted meeting between Mrs Thompson and Bywaters at the place’. The Solicitor-General’s statement is false and misled the jury as to the content and relevance of the letters. (7 July 2022: 23)

The jury could not assess the truth of the Solicitor-General’s statement, as fewer than half of Edith Thompson’s letters were admitted into evidence. They had little choice but to take his falsehood for the truth, particularly because the trial judge did not see fit to correct this falsehood. Had the jury been allowed to see all the letters, they would have seen that the Solicitor-General was lying about their content.

There is no reference anywhere in Edith Thompson’s letters to the place, time or manner of the murder. This is fact, not argument, and should count as evidence of her innocence. The CCRC is silent on this, seemingly accepting that in spite of serious flaws in the direction of the jury and proven falsehoods by the Crown the trial of Edith Thompson nevertheless yielded a just result, albeit only by the standards of 1922.

‘ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE’ = PROOF OF EVIDENCE?

The CCRC admits that by contemporary standards of fairness to the accused ‘letters written by Mrs Thompson to Mr Bywaters may have been ruled inadmissible by the trial court’. But the CCRC fails to deal with the trial judge’s emphasis to the jury on the evidential value of the letters. The sole purpose of the letters at the trial – they were read out by counsel – was to prejudice the jury against Edith Thompson, by their intimacy and sexual candour. Nowhere in Edith Thompson’s letters is there a reference to the time, place or manner of Percy Thompson’s murder. Nevertheless, in his address to the jury the judge remarked that

what I may call the necessary absence of evidence makes these letters of so much importance.

Here the judge is openly supporting the prosecution case. He is suggesting that the absence of any evidence against Edith Thompson increased the evidential value of the letters. But the letters were not relevant to the indictment being tried. There was moreover objective evidence from the post-mortem examinations which supported her innocence regarding attempts to poison her husband.

The judge morally annotated passages from the letters in his address to the jury, noting that some of Edith Thompson’s declarations of love to Bywaters would fill the jury’s minds, ‘like any other right-minded persons … with disgust.’

It is astounding that in his summing up the trial judge saw fit to refer to Edith Thompson’s alleged intention to poison her husband 27 times but did not once mention the post-mortem examinations, which found no trace of poison, past or present, in Percy Thompson’s system.

EDITH THOMPSON AND DEREK BENTLEY

A key part of our Letter of Claim of 20 December 2022 was the exercise of RPM in the case of Derek Bentley and the ruling by Lord Justice Watkins. (8.4.1; 8.4.3; 8.4.5; 10.2; 10.3) The Bentley case is the one with the closest parallels to Edith Thompson’s for the purpose of RPM in the sense that neither Bentley nor Edith carried out the physical act of murder. Part of the prosecution of Bentley was that he was alleged by the police to have said ‘Let him have it, Chris’. This counted heavily against Bentley. Edith Thompson’s screams of ‘Oh don’t, oh don’t’, at the time of the stabbing, were heard by an independent witness, John Webber. Webber’s wife and a nurse lodging with the Webbers also heard Edith Thompson’s screams, as did two further witnesses living close to the scene of the murder. Of those five witnesses only John Webber was called to testify, and the judge effectively dismissed his testimony (20 December 2022: 8.3.3)

It is a matter of concern that the CCRC does not even mention the important case of Bentley from our Letter of Claim. Instead it refers to the cases of Alan Turing, also highlighted in our Letter of Claim, and Timothy Evans, not referenced in it.

EDITH THOMPSON AND ALAN TURING

With regard to Alan Turing, the CCRC concedes that the case for a pardon did not meet the required criteria for RPM but notes that it was exceptional. The CCRC states that, regarding Turing’s conviction, there has been ‘a moral transformation’ regarding attitudes to homosexuality since Turing’s conviction in 1952, ‘that his conviction and sentence would now be considered unjust and discriminatory’.

Edith Thompson is deserving of the same enlightened exercise of RPM. She was convicted of murder because she was an adulteress, the only moral offence revealed by her letters and irrelevant to the indictment being tried; moreover, she was an adulteress involved with a much younger man whose fate was sealed after he confessed to the murder of another. In the moral climate of 1922, four years after the end of World War I, Edith Thompson counted as a ‘surplus woman’, a term resuscitated in the aftermath of the Great War to reflect the gender imbalance in the country after the losses of young men in Flanders. With one man dead and a twenty-year-old to die, she became a victim of the moral climate of the time. The court was there to do her justice, not to collude with the public hysteria that surrounded the case.

Attitudes towards adultery, as towards homosexuality, have changed radically since Edith Thompson’s trial in 1922. If seismic changes towards mores are accepted as a legitimate part of Alan Turing’s pardon, then the same understanding should be extended to Edith Thompson. Alan Turing was guilty of an offence that was then, however repugnantly, on the statute book. Edith Thompson was found guilty of murder because of her adultery: there is universal agreement on this in the vast literature on her case.

EDITH THOMPSON’S CASE = ‘EXTRAORDINARY’ AND ‘EXCEPTIONAL’

The CCRC uses the concepts of ‘extraordinary’ and ‘exceptional’ as legitimate tests to be applied in considering RPM. Edith Thompson’s case merits ‘exceptional’ status on a number of counts:

1. The prosecution lied about there being ‘undoubted evidence’ in the letters of a preconcerted meeting between Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters at the place of the crime.

2. The judge quite wrongly cast doubt on the witness John Webber’s crucial testimony, inviting the jury to find it mistaken.

3. The judge implied that Percy Thompson’s body was not entirely free of poison, blatantly misquoting the pathologist’s report which said there was no trace of poison at all.

4. In their determination to get Edith Thompson convicted, the judge and prosecution used the word ‘evidence’ in a number of places where it was quite clear that there was no such thing. It is almost as if the Crown and judge knew full well that there was no evidence against Edith Thompson, so they had to keep mentioning it wherever they could. A striking instance of this conceptual twisting of ‘evidence’ is the judge’s bizarre statement that the fact that there was no evidence against Edith Thompson was itself evidence: ‘what I may call the necessary absence of evidence makes these letters of so much importance [as evidence]’. Whatever else ‘necessary absence of evidence’ means it has to mean ‘no evidence’ rather than open the door to manufacturing evidence.

The CCRC did not seem to think that such injustices, which amounted to efforts by the prosecution and the judge to make up for the actual lack of evidence against Edith, could be regarded as ‘exceptional’.

The case of Edith Thompson has been contested more extensively and for longer, in legal and related studies, than any other historic miscarriage of justice of the last 100 years. At least in part because it was so openly prejudicial and gendered.

EDITH THOMPSON’S IMPACT ON THE DEATH PENALTY IN BRITAIN

The impact of her conviction and death on British society is, however tragically, exceptional, since her case more than any other may be the reason for the suspension and eventual abolition of the death penalty.

In the words of Sir Beverley Baxter, addressing in 1959 the two first suspensions of the death penalty in Britain:

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. …     

It was profound unease about Edith Thompson’s case, referenced repeatedly during the debates in the House of Commons, that more than any other perceived miscarriage of justice twice prompted the Commons to suspend the death penalty: first in 1948, and then again in 1956.

The CCRC notes that ‘the sentence of capital punishment offends all modern standards and would be considered unconscionable by those standards’ (CCRC: 3). The more the reason, it is argued, that the one case that above all others contributed to the abolition of capital punishment should be revisited for the purpose of RPM.

As of 14 February 2024 we have been in discussion with our lawyers at BDB Pitmans to consider our next steps. We will look at all options.

 

CW-F-56 Section 16 Report (Thompson)

COMMENTS ON THE CCRC REPORT ON EDITH THOMPSON

Professor René Weis

27 February 2024

For the first time since 1922 the British government, through the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), has formally addressed the case of Edith Thompson.

The CCRC report acknowledges that Edith Thompson may not have been prosecuted or, if so, found guilty today:

It is acknowledged by the CCRC that by modern standards of fairness, the letters written by Mrs Thompson to Mr Bywaters may have been ruled inadmissible by the trial court …. Had this happened the case against her may not have proceeded. (CCRC: 50)

In spite of this, and notwithstanding further concessions by the CCRC regarding the trial judge’s lack of impartiality, the CCRC has felt unable to recommend a Free Pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (RPM).

We find their conclusion disappointing and surprising and believe they are wrong.

AN UNFAIR TRIAL WITH AN OPENLY BIASED JUDGE

The CCRC’s repeated emphasis, across their response, on ‘modern standards of fairness’ wrongly implies that, in law, lower standards of impartiality than today were acceptable in 1922 when Edith Thompson was tried. The CCRC notes that

by modern standards of fairness it could be argued that the trial judge’s summing up contained inappropriate judicial comment and lacked fairness and impartiality (51).

The fact that the judge’s summing up was widely perceived to be unconscionably biased at the time of the trial is well documented, to the point that his address to the jury was seen as a misdirection. The distinguished journalist and writer Edgar Wallace was there in 1922. In his words, echoing the sentiments of many of his contemporaries:

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 official published transcript of the trial in1923 also references the prejudicial nature of the trial and voices major concern over the treatment of John Webber’s important evidence. The judge sought to undermine the credibility of John Webber, the one key witness to the murder. In the trial judge’s words:

There is one other very curious piece of evidence to which I want to call your attention, and that is the evidence of Mr Webber. He says he heard a noise, and these are his words; he heard those words — ‘Oh, don’t, oh, don’t’ – in piteous tones. You know he is some way off; I am not saying it is true; it is for you to say whether it is accurate, or whether it is imaginary, or whether he has made a mistake; but there is the evidence.

The CCRC goes so far as to concede that the bias of the judge may constitute ‘new evidence’: ‘it is acknowledged that the argument the trial judge’s summing up was lacking in balance and fairness is new.’ (43) But the CCRC then proceeds to note that ‘it is considered that the admissibility and fairness arguments, while potentially going to the safety of the conviction, are not indicators of Mrs Thompson’s innocence’. (45)

The logic of this, in plain language, seems to be that even if the trial was unfair and the conviction unsafe, Edith Thompson was still guilty as charged. This runs counter to all instincts of fairness and natural justice, and particularly in a capital case where blatant untruths by the Crown and a biased judge colluded to take the life of a young woman.

A SHOCKING LIE BY THE CROWN

In this connection the CCRC failed to address what constituted arguably the most serious flaw in the Crown’s case against Edith Thompson, the fact that the Solicitor-General told a direct falsehood in court that was intended to implicate Edith Thompson in the manner, time and place of the murder. It was highlighted prominently in our submission to the Ministry of Justice on 7 July 2022:

Despite the fact that there was no evidence of any kind in the letters that Edith knew that her husband would be assaulted that night in that particular place and in that manner, the Solicitor-General stated, in his opening address to the jury, that ‘there is the undoubted evidence in the letters upon which you can find that there was a preconcerted meeting between Mrs Thompson and Bywaters at the place’. The Solicitor-General’s statement is false and misled the jury as to the content and relevance of the letters. (7 July 2022: 23)

The jury could not assess the truth of the Solicitor-General’s statement, as fewer than half of Edith Thompson’s letters were admitted into evidence. They had little choice but to take his falsehood for the truth, particularly because the trial judge did not see fit to correct this falsehood. Had the jury been allowed to see all the letters, they would have seen that the Solicitor-General was lying about their content.

There is no reference anywhere in Edith Thompson’s letters to the place, time or manner of the murder. This is fact, not argument, and should count as evidence of her innocence. The CCRC is silent on this, seemingly accepting that in spite of serious flaws in the direction of the jury and proven falsehoods by the Crown the trial of Edith Thompson nevertheless yielded a just result, albeit only by the standards of 1922.

‘ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE’ = PROOF OF EVIDENCE?

The CCRC admits that by contemporary standards of fairness to the accused ‘letters written by Mrs Thompson to Mr Bywaters may have been ruled inadmissible by the trial court’. But the CCRC fails to deal with the trial judge’s emphasis to the jury on the evidential value of the letters. The sole purpose of the letters at the trial – they were read out by counsel – was to prejudice the jury against Edith Thompson, by their intimacy and sexual candour. Nowhere in Edith Thompson’s letters is there a reference to the time, place or manner of Percy Thompson’s murder. Nevertheless, in his address to the jury the judge remarked that

what I may call the necessary absence of evidence makes these letters of so much importance.

Here the judge is openly supporting the prosecution case. He is suggesting that the absence of any evidence against Edith Thompson increased the evidential value of the letters. But the letters were not relevant to the indictment being tried. There was moreover objective evidence from the post-mortem examinations which supported her innocence regarding attempts to poison her husband.

The judge morally annotated passages from the letters in his address to the jury, noting that some of Edith Thompson’s declarations of love to Bywaters would fill the jury’s minds, ‘like any other right-minded persons … with disgust.’

It is astounding that in his summing up the trial judge saw fit to refer to Edith Thompson’s alleged intention to poison her husband 27 times but did not once mention the post-mortem examinations, which found no trace of poison, past or present, in Percy Thompson’s system.

EDITH THOMPSON AND DEREK BENTLEY

A key part of our Letter of Claim of 20 December 2022 was the exercise of RPM in the case of Derek Bentley and the ruling by Lord Justice Watkins. (8.4.1; 8.4.3; 8.4.5; 10.2; 10.3) The Bentley case is the one with the closest parallels to Edith Thompson’s for the purpose of RPM in the sense that neither Bentley nor Edith carried out the physical act of murder. Part of the prosecution of Bentley was that he was alleged by the police to have said ‘Let him have it, Chris’. This counted heavily against Bentley. Edith Thompson’s screams of ‘Oh don’t, oh don’t’, at the time of the stabbing, were heard by an independent witness, John Webber. Webber’s wife and a nurse lodging with the Webbers also heard Edith Thompson’s screams, as did two further witnesses living close to the scene of the murder. Of those five witnesses only John Webber was called to testify, and the judge effectively dismissed his testimony (20 December 2022: 8.3.3)

It is a matter of concern that the CCRC does not even mention the important case of Bentley from our Letter of Claim. Instead it refers to the cases of Alan Turing, also highlighted in our Letter of Claim, and Timothy Evans, not referenced in it.

EDITH THOMPSON AND ALAN TURING

With regard to Alan Turing, the CCRC concedes that the case for a pardon did not meet the required criteria for RPM but notes that it was exceptional. The CCRC states that, regarding Turing’s conviction, there has been ‘a moral transformation’ regarding attitudes to homosexuality since Turing’s conviction in 1952, ‘that his conviction and sentence would now be considered unjust and discriminatory’.

Edith Thompson is deserving of the same enlightened exercise of RPM. She was convicted of murder because she was an adulteress, the only moral offence revealed by her letters and irrelevant to the indictment being tried; moreover, she was an adulteress involved with a much younger man whose fate was sealed after he confessed to the murder of another. In the moral climate of 1922, four years after the end of World War I, Edith Thompson counted as a ‘surplus woman’, a term resuscitated in the aftermath of the Great War to reflect the gender imbalance in the country after the losses of young men in Flanders. With one man dead and a twenty-year-old to die, she became a victim of the moral climate of the time. The court was there to do her justice, not to collude with the public hysteria that surrounded the case.

Attitudes towards adultery, as towards homosexuality, have changed radically since Edith Thompson’s trial in 1922. If seismic changes towards mores are accepted as a legitimate part of Alan Turing’s pardon, then the same understanding should be extended to Edith Thompson. Alan Turing was guilty of an offence that was then, however repugnantly, on the statute book. Edith Thompson was found guilty of murder because of her adultery: there is universal agreement on this in the vast literature on her case.

EDITH THOMPSON’S CASE = ‘EXTRAORDINARY’ AND ‘EXCEPTIONAL’

The CCRC uses the concepts of ‘extraordinary’ and ‘exceptional’ as legitimate tests to be applied in considering RPM. Edith Thompson’s case merits ‘exceptional’ status on a number of counts:

1. The prosecution lied about there being ‘undoubted evidence’ in the letters of a preconcerted meeting between Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters at the place of the crime.

2. The judge quite wrongly cast doubt on the witness John Webber’s crucial testimony, inviting the jury to find it mistaken.

3. The judge implied that Percy Thompson’s body was not entirely free of poison, blatantly misquoting the pathologist’s report which said there was no trace of poison at all.

4. In their determination to get Edith Thompson convicted, the judge and prosecution used the word ‘evidence’ in a number of places where it was quite clear that there was no such thing. It is almost as if the Crown and judge knew full well that there was no evidence against Edith Thompson, so they had to keep mentioning it wherever they could. A striking instance of this conceptual twisting of ‘evidence’ is the judge’s bizarre statement that the fact that there was no evidence against Edith Thompson was itself evidence: ‘what I may call the necessary absence of evidence makes these letters of so much importance [as evidence]’. Whatever else ‘necessary absence of evidence’ means it has to mean ‘no evidence’ rather than open the door to manufacturing evidence.

The CCRC did not seem to think that such injustices, which amounted to efforts by the prosecution and the judge to make up for the actual lack of evidence against Edith, could be regarded as ‘exceptional’.

The case of Edith Thompson has been contested more extensively and for longer, in legal and related studies, than any other historic miscarriage of justice of the last 100 years. At least in part because it was so openly prejudicial and gendered.

EDITH THOMPSON’S IMPACT ON THE DEATH PENALTY IN BRITAIN

The impact of her conviction and death on British society is, however tragically, exceptional, since her case more than any other may be the reason for the suspension and eventual abolition of the death penalty.

In the words of Sir Beverley Baxter, addressing in 1959 the two first suspensions of the death penalty in Britain:

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. …     

It was profound unease about Edith Thompson’s case, referenced repeatedly during the debates in the House of Commons, that more than any other perceived miscarriage of justice twice prompted the Commons to suspend the death penalty: first in 1948, and then again in 1956.

The CCRC notes that ‘the sentence of capital punishment offends all modern standards and would be considered unconscionable by those standards’ (CCRC: 3). The more the reason, it is argued, that the one case that above all others contributed to the abolition of capital punishment should be revisited for the purpose of RPM.

As of 14 February 2024 we have been in discussion with our lawyers at BDB Pitmans to consider our next steps. We will look at all options.

 

Since 9 January 2024 two new pages have been added to the website.

One of them, under RESEARCH & MISSION, concerns the identity of the mysterious ‘lifelong friend’, who wrote repeatedly in support of Edith in Lloyd’s Sunday News. https://edithjessiethompson.org/edith-lifelong-friend

The other, under EDITH THOMPSON IN THE PRESS reproduces, in their entirety, three pieces her father wrote about Edith for the WEEKLY DISPATCH between 17 and 31 December 1922  https://edithjessiethompson.org/primary-source-texts/newspaper-article-1#article-3

Tuesday 9 January 2024

City of London Cemetery, Manor Park 

Edith Thompson ceremony of remembrance

All are welcome to join us for this ceremony

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. Readings include the eulogy delivered at Edith’s 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’.

This year René Weis’s eulogy will be preceded by an update about the result or progress of the CCRC’s 2023 report to the Ministry of Justice ensuant on the 2002/23 pardon application submitted on behalf of Edith Thompson; and her subsequent referral by the Secretary of State to the CCRC as a suspected miscarriage of justice.

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 Monday 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]

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]

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]

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)

(read by Eleanor)

[Tuesday] 2 January 1923

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.

 

 6 February 2023 

 

Mr Nicholas Brown

BDP Pitmans

Your Ref: CYG/LUB/104312.0002

Our Ref: RPM / Thompson

 

By email: NicholasBrown@bdpitmans.com

Date : 6 February 2023

 

Dear Mr Brown,

FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF AN APPLICATION FOR AN EXERCISE OF THE ROYAL  PREROGATIVE OF MERCY (RPM) FOR EDITH THOMPSON

I write further to my consideration of your application of 7 July 2022 and letter of 17 November 2022 with  regard to the application for an exercise of the Royal Prerogative of Mercy (RPM) in the case Edith  Thompson. You make this application on behalf of Professor Rene Weis, who is the heir and executor to the estate.

Section 16 of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 provides the Secretary of State for Justice with the power to  refer to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) “any matter which arises in the consideration of  whether to recommend the exercise of His Majesty’s prerogative of mercy in relation to a conviction” on  which he desires the CCRC’s assistance. The Secretary of State for Justice has asked that Professor  Weis’ application be referred to the CCRC to allow a full investigation of your application to take place and  for the CCRC to give a statement of their conclusions on it. Please note that it may take a number of  months for them to reach their conclusions.

We will be in contact with you when we have received a formal response from the CCRC.  Yours sincerely,

C Timmins

Royal Prerogative of Mercy

E MOJAS@Justice.Gov.UK Post Point 5:22  102 Petty France

London

SW1H 9AJ

BBC NEWS 7 March 2023

Edith Thompson: Commission to re-examine hanged woman’s case

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64879662

 

 

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.

 

VERBATIM TRIAL TRANSCRIPT DECEMBER 1922

The verbatim transcript of the trial, from the official court shorthand, is now up on the website. The source is the unpublished Home Office file HO 144 /  2685 in the National Archives in Kew. Unlike the authorised published account of the trial, Notable British Trials (1923) ( NOTABLE BRITISH TRIALS 1923 ) the transcript preserves the authentic voice of the five-day trial, including the judge’s multiple interjections, many of them hostile to the accused, witnesses’ requesting page numbers, judge and counsel asking witnesses to speak up, the cut-and-thrust of the Q & A of the court room.

This is the spoken trial as it happened moment-by-moment, unedited, warts and all, rather than the trial as it was written down after the event. The opening address by the Crown is missing from HO 144 /  2685 as are the defences by Cecil Whiteley and Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett. These are inserted into the transcript from Notable British Trials.

IMAGES

Three new photographs have been added to the IMAGES section and been inserted into the relevant place of THE STORY (Chapter 1) and in the AVIS GRAYDON INTERVIEW. The first one concerns the wedding in the summer of 1920 of the milliner Lily Goodwin to Norman Vellender. Lily Goodwin and Edith Graydon, as they were known at work, were friends at Carlton & Prior, and Edith and Percy attended Lily’s wedding.

Lily’s nephew long ago shared one of his photos of the occasion with me. It shows Edith and Percy in the back row and has featured in Chapter 1 of THE STORY for a while. A chance search on ancestry.co.uk threw up a further photo taken shortly before or after the other one. This time Edith and Percy are in the front row. The owner of the photograph kindly shared it with me and moreover identified several of the other people in it. This new photo now appears immediately after the other one in Chapter 1.

The next two photographs concern the Manning family from Tulse Hill, south London. They were close friends of the Graydons. They feature in Edith Thompson’s letters and, prominently, in the AVIS GRAYDON INTERVIEW, where Tom and Jane Manning appear alongside another photo of the extended Manning clan. This includes the Beatrice mentioned by Edith in a letter of 13 March 1922:

When we were at Mrs. Manning’s her sister [Beatrice] asked him to go over there the following Sat., and when she asked me I hesitated, so she said I’ve already asked Percy, and he said ‘Yes’, so of course I did I’ve mentioned this to him in front of all at 231, and he didn’t question it, but a few days later said ‘he wasn’t going’ – he wouldn’t have me making arrangements to go anywhere without first consulting him, and obtaining his consent. The next morning I sent Beatty a card saying it was impossible to keep our promise to see her on Sat. In the afternoon I went home and had a general clean up everywhere. The sun was shining in the windows beautifully – it was a typically English spring day and I did so want to be in the park with you darlint.

The friendship between the two families lasted well beyond the tragedy. The Mannings were wealthy and the Graydons are remembered in their will.

New Page

KENSINGTON AVENUE SCHOOLS LOGBOOK

On 13 December 2021 a transcript of the LOGBOOK of Edith Thompson’s school was added to the site under SOURCES.

It covers the 1904-1909 period of the school, when both Edith and Avis Graydon were scholars there. It features scanned copies of the three entries mentioning the Graydon girls by name. It also shows a photograph (boys’ section) of one of the classrooms the way it looked at the time, and an Edwardian photo of the school and its playground. Edith Thompson’s School Logbook

FURTHER NEW PHOTOS: Recent additions to the site (under IMAGES and in the relevant text under THE STORY) concern photographs of the Manchester Hotel at the top of Aldersgate Street (opposite Aldersgate / Barbican tube station) frequented by Edith and other buyers. It is mentioned in her letters. The jury who tried her in December 1922 were put up in this hotel.

Other new photos on the site include several previously unpublished ones of Shanklin; of 16 Derby Road, Bournemouth, where Edith, Percy, and Avis spent their summer holiday of 1922; of the tennis courts and green in front of Derby Road; of the inside of 231 Shakespeare Crescent from the mid-1980s; of East Ham Station and the East Ham Palace; of Sibley Grove and Westcliff; and a number of production photos from The  Dippers at the Criterion, the play Edith and Percy saw on the night of 3 October 1922; of Ilford High Street and Hippodrome; of the Hotel Cecil where she danced and dined in January 1922 at a formal dinner hosted by London businesses; of the Co-Optimists at the Palace Theatre.

Several contemporary recordings of songs referred to by Edith, or otherwise popular at the time, have been inserted in chapters of THE STORY. This includes the first ever recording, on piano by John Snelson, of the lead song (Ivor Novello & Ben Travers) of The Dippers. 

PAGES added in the course of  2020 under SOURCES on the site are:

Notable British Trials

a complete, and corrected, version of the 1923 Notable British Trials volume, edited and introduced by Filson Young, with illustrations. Young’s volume contains the official, fully authorised transcript of the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. NOTABLE BRITISH TRIALS 1923

 

 

 

 Percy Thompson Autopsy and post-mortem reports

the complete autopsy report on Percy Thompson, conducted by the shortly to be knighted pathologist Dr Bernard Spilsbury; the tissue analysis by the Home Office pathologist John Webster; and the post-mortem report by the police surgeon Dr Percy James Drought. Also included are extracts from Spilsbury’s biography, and intimations in it about Edith Thompson’s innocence. Autopsy Report Percy Thompson (Sir Bernard Spilsbury)

 

 

 

The Ilford Murder, by James Douglas

an important pamphlet by a leading newspaper editor of the period. Douglas covered the trial and wrote extensively about it. The pamphlet appeared on 17 December 1922, after the trial and sentencing but before the Appeals were heard. The Ilford Murder: The Case for and Against a Reprieve, by James Douglas

 

 

 

Witness to a Murder: John Webber

a detailed analysis of the testimony given by John Webber at the trial. Webber heard Edith Thompson scream during the assault. The judge tried to discredit his evidence given in court. Webber’s testimony is here set in the context of the twelve other witnesses who heard the screams, or else were drawn into the immediate aftermath of the murder by being near the scene of it. Four witnesses (including Webber) of the thirteen from that night testified at the Old Bailey; two others gave accounts of what they heard to the police. The judge’s ‘summary’ of Webber’s evidence is tendentious in the extreme and was profoundly unfair to the accused. The extent of his hostility is evident from a close comparison of his ‘summary’ with Webber’s testimony, which is borne out extensively by other witnesses. Witness to a Murder: John Webber

 

 

A Month in Holloway Gaol

a brilliant, detailed account of a month spent in the north London women’s prison in 1909 by the twenty-three-year-old Marguerite Sidley of the Women’s Freedom League. The prison described by the young suffragist in 1909 was essentially identical to the one Edith Thompson knew thirteen years later. The prison chaplain in 1909 was the same Glanvill Murray who was instructed to look after Edith Thompson. Marguerite’s disdainful response to Murray tallies almost exactly with Edith’s, both women objecting to his priggishness: he had little sympathy for female emancipation and he kept pressurising Edith to confess to a crime she did not commit. A Month in Holloway Gaol

 

 

The Murder of Mrs Thompson, by Edgar Wallace

Edgar Wallace’s passionate defence of Edith Thompson, in his 1920s essay The Murder of Mrs Thompson, is quoted prominently on the Home Page of edithjessiethompson.co.uk. In his time Wallace was a bestselling author of detective novels, as popular then as Agatha Christie would be later. Long after his death an entire generation would rediscover his novels though forty-seven black and white films that became a staple of British television nights in the early 1960s.

Wallace declined the invitation to cover the trial for a major newspaper because he was convinced that Edith Thompson was already convicted and that her trial would be a mere charade: for the full text of Wallace’s defence, see George Dilnot 1934  Appendices and Bibliography

 

 

 

 

Thursday 9 January 2020: City of London Cemetery 

 

LETTER (by Edith to her aunt Edith Walkinshaw)

[Holloway Prison]

(read by Nicki Toay)

December 23, 1922

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 Bessie)

[Date: Boxing Day 1922]

(read by René Weis)

Dear [Bessie]

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

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.

 

Edith Thompson Annual Memorial Ceremony

9 am: 9 January 2020,

City of London Cemetery

Aldersbrook Rd, Manor Park, London E12 5DQ

 

The service was started by Edith Thompson’s sister Avis Graydon in St Francis of Assisi’s RC Church in Stratford. It transferred to St Barnabas in Manor Park in the early 1990s, at the suggestion of the Reverend Barry Arscott together with René Weis. Edith Thompson attended St Barnabas and was married there on 15 January 1916. The service was held in this church annually for twenty-six years. It was taken first by Barry Arscott and then, for many years, by the Reverend James Ramsay. A copy of the service can be seen on this website. The last Edith Thompson service at St Barnabas was held on 9 January 2019. Now that Edith has been buried alongside her parents, it was deemed more appropriate to gather at her graveside in the City of London Cemetery in the future. The first such gathering will be on Thursday 9 January 2020.