CRIMINAL JUSTICE

1

The Girl From Manor Park

© René Weis

For William and Ethel Graydon the last weeks in Advent 1893 proved a time of anxious and excited anticipation. Their first baby was due any moment, and the signs were that it would come on Christmas Day. 97 Norfolk Road, the little terraced house in Dalston where they lived, could barely contain the bustle of activity.

Ethel Graydon was born Ethel Jessie Liles of Sidney Villa, Stamford Hill, on 17 December 1872. Her father was police constable Alfred Cooper Liles. In those days he had been a strong man. Now, retired and diagnosed consumptive, he and his wife Deborah planned to retire permanently to the country after their daughter’s marriage. But with the young couple’s setting up home in Norfolk Road and the rapid announcement of Ethel’s pregnancy in early April, the parents had remained at 16 Osterley Road from where, just over a year earlier, Ethel had left as a bride.Like all the Liles women, Ethel was tall and handsome, with a finely shaped, slightly oval face which in middle age would yield an impression of restrained and melancholic severity.

If she lacked the quite remarkable beauty of her elder sister Edith, her proud and lively carriage and her intelligent determination to move up in the world made her a much sought-after bride in the neighbourhood. This had not been lost on William Eustace Graydon, the wiry and dynamic young man from 16 Dalston Lane. He was born in 1867, the son of an engineer. At the age of twenty-five on his wedding day, he was well established as a clerk with the Imperial Tobacco Company. Among the things which had impressed Miss Liles about him, he was also a superb dancer.

On Monday 25 December, a mild and wet day, the baby arrived. It was a girl. They christened her Edith Jessie, after her aunt Edith and her mother’s middle name ‘Jessie’ She was baptised at St Mark’s, Hackney, on 11 March 1894. As the proud parents and happy relatives admired her sound and healthy looks, it was immediately apparent that she was a Liles girl. Little Edith, or as her parents soon called her, ‘Edie’, took her first tentative steps outside her home in the summer and winter of 1895. A photograph taken on her second birthday shows her as a bonny toddler, thickly wrapped in an Eskimo fur coat. A twinkle of mischief lingers in her dark and deep-set eyes as she archly poses for the camera. The faintly rounded cheeks, the high forehead and the inwardly arched eyebrows on either side of a slightly too wide nose were to stay with her throughout her life.

On 24 September 1895 Edith was presented with a little sister, Avis Ethel. If she was naturally jealous of this newcomer, she quickly overcame her unease. The ‘rival’ could be a source of pleasure, a helpless doll to be mothered. The relationship between the two sisters would follow this pattern through adolescence into adulthood, with the elder ever more confident and enterprising than her junior.

Life at No. 97 marked a happy period for the Graydons. With two healthy daughters, a stable income and intimate ties with the larger family circle, the prospects for the future were good. Furthermore, enough was left after the bills to be put aside for a mortgage. For some time now the young couple had planned on buying their own house; more space was needed and as the family was spreading north – Lillie back to Stamford Hill and Edith to Highbury – Dalston was losing its residual appeal as the focal point for the clan. It was time to move on the more so since Ethel Graydon was once again pregnant. The couple’s sights were set on Manor Park, and particularly on the new houses which were springing up all over Poets’ Estate, the string of streets embedded in the bulge formed by the High Street and Shakespeare Crescent, which arches north-east from the station at East Ham. Housing here was cheap, the area was rising. It was not quite Ilford, and it lacked a Town Hall. It was short on schools, but a brand new one was projected and intended to start functioning by the end of 1901.

In the spring or later summer of 1898 the Graydons and their two daughters moved to a new home, 231 Shakespeare Crescent. The parents would live here for forty years. Newenham (‘Newnie’) was born at No, 231 shortly after the move, followed two years later by William (known as ‘Bill’, ‘Billie’, or ‘Willie’) and, in the spring of 1902, by Harold (‘Towser’), the youngest in the family. The three boys were all registered in West Ham as East Ham still had no Town Hall. For the children the traffic-free streets of Manor Park became their playground. The splendid resonance of the literary street names, Shakespeare Crescent, Byron Avenue, Shelley Road, and Sheridan Road defined the feel of the area, of which Shakespeare Crescent was the smart residential part.

Today there is little to choose between the various streets in Manor Park. The uniformly grey and tawdry look of the immediate post-World War II period has never departed. The elaborate railings of cast-iron lace work which once adorned the Crescent were swallowed by the war effort and never replaced. Gone too are the laburnum trees which once blossomed here, huddled between sturdy planes and craning gaslights. The rolling music of the barrel organ and occasionally the organ grinder’s monkey were familiar sounds and sights, as were the winkle man on Sunday afternoons and the muffin lady who travelled from door to door in the winter. The postman always called three times daily, and seven cream and jam slices bought at the baker’s on top of Ruskin Avenue cost sixpence the lot. The rag lady came every day, as did the horse-drawn milk carts. Coal delivery was weekly. Everyone knew the names of the grocer, the tobacconist, the baker, the newspaper lady and the doctor.

231 Shakespeare Crescent was a terraced building with three bedrooms, cellar and loft. The main parlour opened on the Crescent and the Graydons’ bedroom ran over it. The girls shared the room at the back, or else the middle room over the scullery. The view from either took in the sheds and gardens beyond the embankment, and the conservatories and outdoor lavatories of the drab backs of Chesterford Road some sixty yards off. One of the clinching factors in the Graydons’ decision to purchase No. 231 may have been the prospect of a deep, if narrow, garden for their children to play in. They were not prosperous, but the little red-brick villa which they acquired was home, and it was comfortable.

Edith was now five years old and about to start kindergarten in Manor Park. It was at the meetings of the Sunday school at St Barnabas in Manor Park that she met Ida Burton, who would romp through childhood and school into adolescence with her. As the nineteenth century was closing, Britain and her empire had for two generations seemed untouchable. The new century, however, augured otherwise. In southern Africa the Boer War had ignited, but as yet had failed to make The Times headlines. The terrible conflagration which was to plunge Europe and Britain into a new age, in the troglodyte world of Flanders and Picardy, was fourteen years off in the future. In the meantime, the first year of the twentieth century presented Edith with a further brother, named William Eustace after his father.

The following year a momentous event for all the people of Manor Park took place. In the morning of Monday 26 August 1901 Miss Fanny Florence Ketcher, Head Teacher, twenty-four years old, entered the following sentence in LOG BOOK No. 1, in neat handwriting: ‘Today, the Kensington Avenue Schools are open for the purpose of admitting new children and arranging the stock and apparatus.’ By Friday 30 August she recorded that ‘205 children have had their names entered on the books this week’. The newly completed school was the talk of the neighbourhood. The twenty-four-year-old Miss Ketcher was an inspired choice to head the schools. By the time Edith and her sister Avis attended at Kensington Avenue in 1905, Miss Ketcher commanded a staff of seventeen teachers and an estimated five hundred scholars. Along with her playmates from the kindergarten and Sunday school, little Edith witnessed the opening ceremony of the formidable-looking building, whose twin bell-towers to this day lord it over an area without high-rise blocks of flats.

Edith Graydon was now an eight-year-old tomboy with a shock of auburn-red hair and a knack of getting her way. A contemporary described her as ‘slight and reedy of figure, with supple body and pale dark-eyed face, and dark hair … vivacious, quick-witted, and insinuating in manner’. It was about this time that she ran into the mercurial Dr Preston Wallis whose surgery was conveniently sited at the intersection between the Crescent and Browning Road. Wallis was doing his visiting round when he encountered the friendly little Miss Graydon. As the family physician he greeted her cheerily, whereupon she started moaning about a tooth that had grown loose. He asked her to open up and without much ado pulled it out there and then in the middle of the road. His path and Edith’s were to cross once more in twenty years’ time, after he had moved from Manor Park to Lingfield in Surrey, in circumstances stranger than any fiction could supply.

Edith’s brother Harold Albert was born late in the spring of 1902. The family was now complete: two girls and three boys. The youngest would be distinguished by his irrepressible appetite. His mother affectionately called him ‘Towser’ because he ‘ate like a dog’. Harold performed legendary feats on occasions like Christmas and New Year.

While Mrs Graydon was expecting Harold, a Mrs Lilian Bywaters and her somewhat younger husband Frederick Sam were preparing for the arrival of their second child at 72 Rectory Road, just round the corner from Shakespeare Crescent. The baby was born on 27 June 1902. They christened him Frederick Edward Francis, after the royalties of Europe and Great Britain, as was customary in their family.

The boy was soon known at home by the nicknames of ‘Freddy’ and ‘Mick’, and, at school, by his nickname ‘Bido’. His elder sister Lilian had been born the year before. His younger sister Florence May (‘Florrie’) followed in 1904 and a much younger brother Frank William (‘Frankie’) in 1912. Unlike the Graydons, the Bywaters family had to struggle to make ends meet. The father was in employment, but the mother undertook part-time knitting and mending chores for the family to remain solvent. The smartly dressed and pert little Edith Graydon would not have cared even to notice the Bywaterses then. As it was, the Kensington Avenue Schools brought together her brothers and Freddy Bywaters as playfellows and schoolmates.

Edith Graydon was in her tenth year when she joined the Kensington Avenue Schools at Upper Infant level in 1903.

On the day she left, 20 April 1909, she was aged fifteen years, three months and twenty-seven days. During this period, the school experienced its share of routine triumphs, human minidramas, excursions, inspections, festivals, vacations and visits from pompous officialdom. Because of its excellence it suffered from overcrowding, unlike its rivals on Monega Road and Essex Road. Worried by the risk of epidemics, the inspectors advised the Council to determine geographical boundaries for the school’s catchment area.

Infectious diseases such as measles and scarlet fever were not the Council’s only worry: a memo of September 1905 recommends to the head the use of ‘the Relieving Officer for relief in cases of children sent to School insufficiently fed.’

Prominent on the school’s visiting agenda were the Tower of London and the Royal Mint, the National and Tate Galleries and Westminster Abbey.The scholars also paid regular visits to the public baths at East Ham and on fine days would occasionally be taken on naturalist expeditions to Wanstead Park. Edith Graydon was fond of these visits. She loved the outdoors and what could be more congenial than the infinite opportunities for romping about afforded by these thickly wooded and mysterious nooks and ponds. If ever the children were searching for a lost domain, they found it here in this thrilling, dark parkland redolent with echoes of the past and the sounds of herons and rooks in the surrounding elms and sycamores. The outings to Wanstead Park integrated fun and work in the best tradition. The children were taught to identify trees and to write short essays on them over their picnic. Edith proudly produced one of her several prize-winning essays in the park:

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’.’

Her father’s preferred essay was an imaginative little piece on a penknife which was duly honoured by the award of a school prize.

For the parents as for the scholars Shakespeare Day marked an unusual occasion. The school timetable for 23 April 1906 for example, when both Edith and Avis Graydon were present, stipulated that ‘ordinary lessons have been suspended’. Instead, the time was spent as follows:

11am -12 noon Lessons on St George and ‘Good old England’
2pm – 3.30pm Lessons on Shakespeare and his works
3.30 – 4.15pm Long Play

Invariably Shakespeare Day produced recitations held at the weekend to which the parents were welcome. Edith appeared in two such recitative performances. Her first part was as a ‘quaintly dignified little’ Hippolyta in an excerpted school recitation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Hippolyta’s part in the play is important but curtailed. Replying to Theseus’ rational and sceptical dismissal of the imaginative metamorphic power of love, she states:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur’d so together
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

If any lines of Hippolyta’s in the play deserve close attention for the purpose of a dramatic recitation, it is these. In Shakespeare’s fiction and, in this case, in the life of the child-actress, ‘fancy’s images’ extend a very real challenge to the comprehension of reason. Many years later, Friday 17 March 1922, Edith Thompson wrote:

We ourselves die & live in the books we read while we are reading them & then when we have finished, the books die and we live – or exist – just drag on thro years & years, until when? – who knows – I’m beginning to think no one does – no not even you & I, we are not the shapers of our destinies.

Little Edith Graydon may still have been in the Infants Department when she played Hippolyta. She must have been well into the elementary curriculum by the time she acted or recited the hugely demanding part of Portia in The Merchant of Venice. Her reportedly memorable delivery of the lines on the unstrained ‘quality of mercy’ left her with a lifelong affection for the stage. Soon after leaving the school she was to be on the stage again. In fact Edith Graydon acted in amateur theatricals almost continuously from 1905 to 1913.

If Edith’s progress at school was distinguished by sparks of imaginative composition and theatrical excellence, her academic record seems more varied. Thus on 6 March 1906 she is listed along with thirty-five of her contemporaries who all won medals in the calendar year 1905. Like several of her peers, she fails to make the Honours chart for the second-year class of 1906 (which shows her younger sister as a first-year medallist), nor is she mentioned ‘for special consideration being away on account of an epidemic’. That Edith may nevertheless have fallen a victim to the scarlet fever epidemic which caused serious concern during the latter half of 1906 is indicated by the fact that she didn’t make the grade at all; for the Honours of 1907 she and Avis, in the company of fifteen other girls, appear as second years. The unusually high casualty rate among otherwise demonstrably able candidates points to the disruptive effect of illness rather than delinquency.

During her years at kindergarten and subsequently school, from 1900 to 1909, Edith’s home life was comparatively untroubled. As the oldest child in the family she assisted her mother in the arduous task of looking after three little boys, the youngest of whom was still only a toddler when she reached puberty. She discharged her duties good-humouredly. The boys looked up to their big sister who of necessity had developed a way with children early on. Above all she was a popular schoolgirl with an attendant posse of female friends. Consequently 231 Shakespeare Crescent was frequently resorted to after school for a mug of tea, hot chocolate, or a bun. Her parents were known to be welcoming. Christmas, always a special treat, was even more so for Edith Graydon; and as her friends multiplied and she grew older her parents generously treated her to a yearly party. Snap-Dragon was one of her favourite games as were the endless contests of Hunt-the-Slipper and Blind Man’s Buff. She excelled at charades and instructed the younger children in this favourite Christmas pastime.

Well before leaving school and starting work Edith Graydon had become an accomplished dancer. As improvised dance bands were springing up at virtually every street corner and swamping the big music-halls, the small pubs, and the tiny gazebos and bandstand kiosks of the metropolis, popular dancing at last caught up with the formal and widely practised Viennese dances, particularly the waltz. From their first year in the Crescent, and possibly before, Edith’s father had known H. McCollin Warren of Hollington Road, West Ham. Warren and eventually his two sons ran a well-advertised dance academy in the Assembly Rooms at 1 Holme Road. Mr Graydon helped out at the Academy till the two boys were of age; and it may have been Warren who secured a job as part-time instructor at the Cripplegate Institute for his friend Bill Graydon, which in turn led to the post of occasional Master of Ceremonies at the Savoy in the Strand. Warren was certainly impressed by the eldest Graydon girl’s remarkable and precocious facility and took her on. By the time she was sixteen, Edith was an indispensable help to her father at the Cripplegate; and Avis would join them before too long.

At about the same time as Edith transferred from Infants to Elementary school, a family called Thompson, in search of better living standards moved up from cramped quarters in the swampy and insalubrious dockland into Manor Park. There was a widowed mother, two teenage sons and two daughters. Twenty-five years earlier the parents had arrived in London when the father, a master mariner, found employment in the merchant navy. The precipitate arrival of four children in the 1890s kept the family’s budget always tilting to the red, in spite of the father’s quite reasonable salary. Then he was fatally injured on duty and left a family scarcely provided for by a widow’s meagre pension. The mother bravely shouldered this new found responsibility. How she coped, whether by dint of washing and scouring floors, or cleaning in a local seamen’s home, is impossible to establish. It must have been very hard, the more so since she was not of a sound constitution and would be an invalid before long.

Mrs Thompson’s eldest boy, Percy, stepped in as best he could. He was still at school when his father died and may have been one of the 200,000 British schoolchildren recorded in 1908 as working in odd jobs outside school hours. He was not academically inclined and would without regret leave school after reaching the compulsory minimum age of twelve. He was thirteen in 1903, in law old enough to embark on full-time adult employment. What he lacked in imagination, intellect and spirit, he supplied by a dogged determination to make a living and help his mother. Some time in 1904 he became employed with a shipping company in Bishopsgate. As another salary was now regularly flowing in, the mother could ease off. By 1907, after the eldest had been working for over a year, it was decided to move away from the river. Not long after the family’s arrival at 87 Clements Road, Manor Park, the eldest son, now the head of the family, secured a new job as junior clerk with O.J. Parker & Co., shipping agents with offices also in Bishopsgate. Eventually the company moved their business premises to Peek House at 20 Eastcheap. From this it appears that Percy Thompson’s adolescence in the London dockland and in East Ham was marked by a continuous struggle for subsistence. Unlike his father he had decided to make a dry living, but one nevertheless still connected with the sea.

In fact virtually all the characters in this story participate in the rhythms of the imperial trading routes from Tilbury to China, Japan and Australia. The Thompsons, the Graydons and the Bywaterses furnished the crews, sailors, pursers, stewards, writers and other non-commissioned personnel of ocean-going companies like the Peninsular and Oriental (P & O), the White Star, Red Star, and Cunard Lines. While their men were at sea, the women were anxiously following the shipping news which every local paper carried. The land staff held the less glamorous desk jobs of junior and senior clerks. The sailors marvelled at their seeming lack of gumption, their unadventurous contentment with routine chores. Had they never heard of the aurora borealis, of the women who made themselves so cheekily available in every port, of the immense longing which only the sea can feed? When Freddy Bywaters, a mere fifteen-year-old, sailed to India at the height of war in 1917 without parental consent, he acted true to his daring and reckless nature. Young Bywaters never considered that he might be in danger at sea; as a result by the time he was twenty he had been sailing all the oceans of the world for five years.

The first decade of the new century was drawing to a close. People wondered in mild surprise that the new century had come and failed to deliver either the millennium or Armageddon. There was a new king, it is true. But old, time-honoured customs, ‘Victorian’ as they came to be called now, were dying hard and reassured the country of its links with the traditions of the past.

When therefore two ‘baby farmers’ were sentenced to death at the Central Criminal Court, the news did not create much of a stir. In judicial death Victorian men and women had generally been almost equal. The announcement that the executions would be a simultaneous double hanging and the first one ever at the now exclusively female prison of Holloway in Tufnell Park held however some special appeal. It was Henry A. Pierrepoint who hanged the two women, the middle-aged Annie Walters and the much younger Amelia Sach (twenty-nine) on the morning of Tuesday 3 February 1903. Sach was in an almost continuous swoon and had to be propped up on the scaffold by Pierrepoint. The prison governor and his deputy were very concerned by the state of the victims and particularly by the toll exacted on the wardresses who attended them and who came away crying from the gallows.

That same year Emily Swann was hanged at Leeds and, in August 1907, a red-haired woman in early middle age called Rhoda Willis / Lascelles (alias Leslie James) spent an agonising death vigil in Cardiff prison. In a fit of despair she had suffocated a baby adopted for money whom she probably never intended to raise. After a respectable middle-class private education and two families by her husband and lover, Rhoda Willis had plummeted to the depths of the Cardiff slums, where she solicited till she was incapacitated by spirits. She bitterly repented of the baby’s death and assumed full responsibility for her fate.

Rhoda Willis became the last woman hanged in Britain for a long time. Public sentiment was increasingly troubled by the cold-blooded judicial killing of women. Accordingly, between 1907 and 6 January 1923, successive Home Secretaries would pliantly be reprieving condemned female prisoners from the gallows. It is almost as if the killing of a woman had suddenly become un-English. It was the French who executed Mata Hari and the enemy Germans who shot the field nurse Edith Cavell. And during the war women had become an essential asset to all the home work-forces; it was now they who ‘manned’ the factories.

After the war the story changed dramatically. In the 1920 women became the nation’s surplus commodity

The big dramas of the world were not the immediate concern of the schoolgirl from Manor Park and her peers. Little Daisy Gibson’s accident, caused by her reckless swinging round the support poles in the school’s shed, or Sibyl Lammas’s misadventure in the playground which left ‘a deep cut in her forehead’, circumscribed the limits of the girls’ experience. Naturally they were romantic, and naturally they were discovering sex. In the adjacent boys’ school in the same building Edith Graydon had plenty of admirers, and there were several brief childish romances. It is likely that Edith’s mother explained the facts of life to her daughter early on, because she was needed as an assistant parent with her little brothers.

It was probably at about this time that Edith made the acquaintance of young Harry Renton, who in his boyish way fell in love with her. His letters to her were filled with adolescent ardour and Edith eagerly shared their contents with Avis. When Avis asked her finally, ‘Are you going to marry Harry?’, her sister archly replied: ‘Well, I might.’ But Harry remained a ‘boy’ to her, even after suffering a crippling injury in the trenches. Years later Edith Thompson would still see Harry, flirt with him, and find him a flat in Moscow Court, Kensington, and be concerned about his war wound. In her hour of need Harry, who then was still a bachelor, would stick by her.

The spring vacation of 1909 was Edith Graydon’s first complete break from mandatory school since she had attended the little kindergarten in 1899. Now she would need to find work. It was not long before the increasingly attractive and bright Graydon girl secured employment as a junior clerk with a wholesale clothiers in the City. By the end of the year, however, she had left and moved south of the river into Southwark, with a firm of cardboard manufacturers. Here she would also spend a brief spell only. By the middle of 1910 she was back in the City, this time as a book-keeper with Louis London, ‘Wholesale Clothing Manufacturers’ in Little Alie Street, southwest of Aldgate station.

Edith’s here became friends with Bessie Akam who was head clerk of the office. Louis London was an unattractive but respectable firm; at least it meant dealing in fashion – much more the line of the fastidious Edith – rather than in cardboard. But even this new job did not assuage Edith’s restlessness. She was looking elsewhere.

Late in 1911 she presented herself at Carlton & Prior, wholesale milliners with premises situated on the north side of the Barbican, not far from Aldersgate station in view of the Manchester Hotel at the Corner of Long Lane. At her interview with Mr Herbert Carlton and his partner Miss Ellen Prior, Edith performed strikingly. They were impressed by her manner and by the ease with which this ordinary girl from Manor Park in moment of animation effortlessly shed background and accent. She would be a potential buyer and she clearly understood the workings of figures and knew about book-keeping. She was taken on for a probationary period. She stayed there for the rest of her life and rose swiftly in the firm.

By the time Edith had secured a position at Carlton & Prior she had met Percy Thompson and was active in the Stepney Elocution Class.

No-one quite knows how Percy Thompson and Edith Graydon first met. The five extant testimonies are at variance. The fact is that in the summer and winter of 1909 Edith was for the first time commuting regularly into the City from East Ham station.

As for Percy Thompson, he needed to use the District Railway from East Ham to Mile End to connect with Bishopsgate. It is therefore likely that Edith and Percy first met on the platform of East Ham station on their way to work. Their relationship – even if it did not start there – was certainly cemented during the countless waits for trains and the third-class carriage rides through the desolate tangle of points, sheds and cinder of Bromley and Bow. Still not yet sixteen years old, Edith Graydon was amused and impressed by the attentions paid her by this smart-looking and good-natured nineteen-year-old boy. He spoke to her in a reassuringly firm voice, he dressed well, and earned a reasonably good salary. Among their shared interests were the theatre, the music-hall and the Sunday League concerts. She mentioned dancing excitedly, but he demurred. Physical exertions such as dancing, swimming and football were not among his favoured activities. He enjoyed singing, as did Edith. Unlike her, however, Percy was blessed with a fine light baritone voice and, if coaxed, would give impromptu performances of his favourite songs, particularly ‘Maire, my Girl’ by George Aitken or Emilie Clarke’s ‘Sincerity’.

It is to be doubted that he offered recitals to Edith on the Tube in and out of East Ham. But he did propose to chaperone her out of Stepney Green to share in the Thompsons’ Thespian and other activities as members of the Elocution Class at Stepney. Edith was undeniably much taken with this solid earnest boy, while he was falling in love with the shapely, vivacious and nimble-witted Miss Graydon. As Christmas neared, the two decided that they ought to introduce each other to the respective parents. Percy particularly wished to do the proper thing, and Edith’s birthday was to be the pretext. With Christmas just round the corner Edith asked her parents’ permission to bring Percy Thompson round and introduce him. The parents readily concurred, though they voiced surprise and some anxiety in view of Edith’s extreme youth.

On Christmas Eve, Friday 24 December 1909, Percy Thompson visited 231 Shakespeare Crescent for the first time. If the father had harboured any lingering anxieties over the propriety or wisdom of this budding relationship, they were dispelled by Percy’s sound appearance and frank demeanour. He overcame his customary awkwardness and briskly explained to Mr Graydon, ‘between men’, that he was very fond of Edith and wished to be allowed ‘to continue to pay her his addresses.’ Because of Edith’s age there was no question of marriage, Mr Graydon gently remonstrated. But Percy was an honourable man. He had a sense of duty and head early learned to be responsible. He would not get his girl into trouble.

On Christmas Day, again at No.231, Percy Thompson for the first time encountered the Christmas ritual of the Graydons. There were eight partakers of the dinner in all: Mr and Mrs Graydon, Edith aged sixteen, Percy nineteen, Avis fourteen, Newenham eleven, Billie eight, Harold six. Mr Graydon rose and said grace, then he toasted ‘Mater’, a tribute which drew tears ever year from the usually unsentimental Mrs Graydon. This was followed by ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to Edith. The Christmas meal consisted of sardines on toast, followed by soup, the traditional poultry, Christmas pudding, nuts and wine. The welcome extended to him here, compounded by the buoyancy of the family and the cheery spiritedness of young Edith, formed a stark contrast to Percy’s own home, presided over by an invalid mother who already was jealous of the girl from Shakespeare Crescent and had urged her son to let her go. But Percy was not a man to disown his mother. Although he would never tolerate malicious talk about his flashy sweetheart, not even from the mother, he remembered the hardship of the early days after his father’s death when his mother coped wholly on her own to keep the children fed and clothed. As for his siblings it appears that Percy enjoyed the company of his sister Lilian and Margaret, but found the morose Richard difficult.

Percy Thompson pursued his courtship of Edith Graydon by visiting No. 231 every evening. The New Year for the young couple held only promise. 1910 was the year King Edward – the ‘peacemaker’ – died, and almost simultaneously Edith’s grandfather passed away in Speen, where the grandparents had at last retired. It was the one blot on the calendar.

With her new boyfriend and his sister Lily as escort, Edith Graydon now discovered the amateur theatricals of the Stepney New Meeting House, a Congregationalist institution in Garden Street, Stepney Green. One can assume that it was Thompson and his sister’s admirer, young Kenneth Chambers, who introduced her to the Elocution class. In 1896 Chambers’s father, the Reverend Charles Chambers, had taken on the ministry of Stepney Meeting House. He accomplished his arduous task as a minister with gargantuan energy and was soon embarked on the constituting of a troupe of amateur theatricals, the self-styled ‘Stepney Elocution Class’. Recitals and performances got under way in about 1904. Then, as later, the repertoire consisted of adaptations of English classics. When Edith, Percy and his sister Lily joined late in 1909 two works were scheduled for rehearsal: The Merchant of Venice and Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Edith must have warmed to the task of an adult recital performance of The Merchant of Venice and particularly to the prospect of herself in the role of Portia again. The big night, Saturday 9 April 1910, failed however to deliver stardom to its sanguine cast; the characters lacked life and were not imaginatively credible. Empathy and dramatic intelligence were conspicuously absent from the ‘impersonations’. It was a chastened cast that took to the board fourteen days later in The School for Scandal, this time to the accompaniment of vocal and instrumental music. This inventive move by the Reverend Chambers – who also directed and had himself adapted the play for recital – added further spark to the already finely honed performance of Percy’s sister Lilly as ‘Lady Teazle;’ and Chambers’s son Kenneth as ‘Sir Peter Teazle’. They made a ‘capital pair’ and the recital was a great success, not least for its supporting cast.

Ten months later, on Saturday evening 4 February 1911, in front of ‘a large and appreciative audience’, the Stepney Elocution Class gave a costume rendition of A Christmas Carol in accordance ‘with an original rendering’ once again by the director of the class. The piano on this occasion was manned by a Mr Lewis Haskins and the cast of twenty-one included one Charles W. Stormont, Edith and Percy, Lily Thompson and Kenneth and Victor Chambers. 1911 may have been a particularly hectic year for, in the summer probably, the Elocutionists put on a dramatic recital of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edith played her old part of Hippolyta, Percy was Starveling, and C. W. Stormont was Snout. One surmises that the talented Lily Thompson would have played Titania to Chambers’s Oberon and that the director himself would have cherished the role of Theseus. Charles Stormont remembered the productions with great fondness, and sixty years later took a dubious pride in the fame subsequently won by some members of the cast.

On occasions this jolly and carefree crowd of Thespians would adjourn to the Graydons’ home for a little whist drive, singing at the piano, and supper. Mrs Graydon and Avis, with some help from Edith, would prepare mashed potatoes and a vegetable to accompany tinned pink salmon, costing all of sixpence, and a sweet. For the fifteen-year-old Avis these occasions were particularly memorable. She relished attending the performances at the Stepney Meeting House and thought her sister and her friends were awfully clever and brave. She was so shy that it would have been inconceivable for her to act on any stage. Meeting part of the cast at home therefore was a treat and a privilege. It also appealed to her romantic temper and she would look her best when her big sister’s friends visited.

The following year, on Wednesday 31 January 1912, the Elocution Class gave what an enthusiastic reviewer described as ‘a highly creditable costume recital of “The Mysteries of Silas Marner”’, which ‘held the audience in rapt attention throughout’. The by now familiar figures, including among others Lewis Haskins, Victor Chambers, Edith Graydon, Percy Thompson, Charles Stormont, and Lily Thompson were all in attendance. The star parts in the adaption of George Eliot masterpiece were probably taken by Lily Thompson and the flamboyant Chambers, while Edith and Percy would be in relatively minor roles.

Edith may have faintly resented Lily’s undeniably superior theatrical talents; and she may have turned up her nose at the budding romance between Kenneth and Lily. In her nineteenth year now, she held a secure position at Carlton & Prior in the Barbican, with exciting prospects, including the tantalising thought of a trip to Paris. Her life was developing, and it was time to withdraw from this once heady, but now increasingly burdensome part of her experience with Percy in tow.

1913 brought Edith Graydon the incomparable reward of a trip to Paris in full recognition by Carlton & Prior of her exceptional taste in clothes and hat fashions. As Percy saw off his increasingly blossoming sweetheart at Victoria Station he may have wondered whether she would ever accept his pleas to become his wife. She was now earning more than her father and had overtaken her lover. She had furthermore attracted her employer’s favour. Mr Herbert Carlton of Thorpe Bay, Westcliff, had always been a ladies’ man. With a shop full of girls, mostly in temporary apprentice work, and with his wife resigned to the spinsterish existence of minding the ‘other’ place in Hamlet Court Road in Westcliff, the Barbican establishment was a bachelor boys’ paradise. The elegant Miss Graydon floated in like a gift: witty, astute, handsome, well spoken, and never averse to a little flirtation. Her adeptness at accountancy quickly reconciled her to the ‘dragon’, the stern Miss Prior. As Carlton’s junior partner with a large share in the business, Miss Prior could be depended on to police the morals of the firm. Though her left hand was missing and she wore a wooden one which was permanently gloved, Miss Prior would tie a parcel as neatly and as expeditiously as the next person. The girls dreaded her. They found a precarious revenge in the sure knowledge that although Miss Prior carefully chose her expensive underwear at Debenham & Freebody, no man was ever likely to see it. If Miss Prior harboured suspicions about Edith and Mr Carlton, she kept them to herself, of necessity indulgent of middle-aged male folly.

In preparation for her trip to Paris, Edith crammed her way through French primers and novels. Always an avid reader, she now positively sated herself as far as her acquaintance with the language would allow. She did not fail to notice the degree of ‘licence’ in such works as she read. Far from objecting to it, she relished their bolder portrayal of passion. Certainly her command of French grew to be quite competent. Her leaving and her homecoming filled 231 Shakespeare Crescent with justified pride. The girl from Manor Park was returned from the magical pleasure haunt of the Edwardian era, Paris. Almost overnight the young Miss Graydon found herself famous in her neighbourhood.

Late in 1913 or early in 1914 Edith was back in Paris to inspect the spring fashions and to buy for Carlton & Prior. As she strolled through the boulevards redolent still of the Belle Époque, the young ‘Anglaise’ with the lilting East London pronunciation of French would be no more than an object of passing curiosity. What in the end she made of Paris is not recorded. What is known is that her selection of French patterns and models aroused huge enthusiasm and warm congratulations again from Carlton & Prior. Percy and she now decided to go on holiday. Together with Lily Goodwin from work and, probably, Edith’s sister Avis, they picked Ilfracombe. This was to be for June.

Even as they were planning their holiday the clouds of an all-out European war were gathering. The spark that ignited the conflagration was struck on 28 June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Habsburg heir to the throne. The four-year carnage would leave behind a radically redesigned European map and signal the terminal struggle of the imperial power balance on the Continent and overseas. The four weeks of June 1914 therefore emphatically belong to a world of the past. In this ‘past’ world Edith and Percy, with Avis and Lily Goodwin, set off for Devon.

The lovers were hardly ever separated, whether in Ilfracombe, or on day trips to Cardiff and Westward Ho. It was in llfracombe that Edith Graydon and Percy Thompson became lovers. It would now be that much harder for her to hold out against marriage to a man to whom she had given her virginity.

When the four of them returned home at the end of June, Freddy Bywaters was a few days short of his twelfth birthday. He had entered Kensington Avenue Infants school at the age of five. Another little boy who had just been enrolled at Kensington Avenue School was Bill West, friendly affectionate, and shy. The two boys quickly became fast friends. Unity conferred strength, particularly against the boys of the rival Essex Road school in Sheridan Avenue. They were notoriously vicious and often tried to waylay the smarter Kensington Avenue scholars on the Browning bridge. Bill West was not a fighter, but nothing deterred Bywaters, slight though he was as a child.

An eye-witness account of one such encounter in 1915 survives through Pat Dixon, formerly a pupil at the rougher Essex Road school whose charges, unlike their rivals, had no caps and no badges. At the time of the incident Pat Dixon was about nine years old, while Bywaters and Bill West were aged thirteen. The champion of the Essex Road boys was one Lawt, a bit slow, but a big ‘fella’. Whether they waited for Freddy because of a chance remark during the weekend’s football fixture out on Wanstead Flats, or whether Bywaters had unguardedly challenged the others to obstruct his way, the fact is that they blocked his passage at the corner of Browning Rad, just off the bridge. He would have to fight Lawt or be licked by the whole gang. Freddy agreed to fight. A human circle was formed and the two boys braced themselves for the encounter. Within seconds, Freddy fast, tough, and wiry had ‘chopped poor old Lawt to pieces’, to the horror of the Essex Road scholars and the delight of the Kensington Avenuers who were beginning to catch up with the crowd at this point. In good, if grudging sportsmanship, the circle yielded a wholly untouched Freddy. Holding his head high, the hero of the day, he crossed over the bridge. A mortified Lawt, with his nose bleeding and ‘bunged up’, was in tears and vowed revenge as his mates supported him on the way to the school’s washrooms. Recalling the incident seventy-two years later, Pat Dixon chuckled and commented about Bywaters ‘I am certain his father must have shown him how to use his mitts!’ He remembered the smart-looking boy and his ‘fair wavy hair’ with affection and sorrow.

Freddy Bywaters’s favourite novel was Tom Brown’s Schooldays. A Tom Brownish mixture of childish mischief, high spirits and adult responses early on made up Freddy’s characteristic identity. Notwithstanding an originally delicate constitution, he quickly built up strength and made friends easily, both at school and in the streets of Manor Park. He teamed up with Bill West, Bill and Harold Graydon and others. While in the Infants division Freddy was frequently visited between lessons by his mother who took him milk and cake and ensured that he wore his boots when it rained, though the family home at Rectory Road was not always idyllic. The father would rant and rage against the world in the children’s presence. On one occasion he fired a gun through the ceiling.

As he progressed from Infants to Elementary and was approaching his tenth birthday, Freddy was picking up well at school. It is wholly in character that his best essay should have been on the subject of ‘Kindness to Dumb Animals’. His writing was now greatly improved. It is with the utmost pride that he wore the school colours, the Kensington Avenue tie and the fashionable Eton collar. Above all he was faithful to the school’s motto of ‘What I do, I do well’. If to his friends his increasingly daring exploits and athletic prowess made him into a ‘born leader’, the trust of his teachers in him is reflected not least in the caretaker delegating to him the prompt ringing of the school bell which marked the rounding up for the start of classes and also functioned indirectly as the area’s alarm clock. If it were late dozens if not hundreds of commuters would miss their train from East Ham Station into the City.

Outside school Freddy Bywaters, Bill West and Bill Graydon gathered to cycle, swim and play football. By the time they were ten the boys all owned bikes and could cycle out to East Ham Central Park or to Valentine’s Park in Ilford. Unlike young West and Bywaters, Bill Graydon was held rather more tightly in check. If the boys called at No. 231 at an awkward time for school – too early perhaps with a view to a few pre-class pranks – Mrs Graydon would sternly put her foot down: ‘I send my son to school when I see fit. Now run along boys.’ On these rare occasions, which never deterred the callers, Bill Graydon would later explain apologetically that it was ‘one of those days, you know.’ In general the parents were indulgent, and life in the Crescent under the circumstances shaped up ideally for the children, whether they were chestnut-hunting or cycling, swimming or playing Can-Copper. Open spaces were ever close by. Swimming in the East Ham baths was partly a curricular activity under the auspices of the school. On such occasions young Bywaters was dazzling. He would as easily plunge down from the highest diving board as others would from the side of the pool. The excitement of Valentine’s Park was of a different order. The boys would assemble near the Browning bridge in the crisp hours of the early morning before 7 a.m., and then cycle across to the park, where gossamer racks of mfacedist were floating in still silence on the lake and even the summer water was chilly. They stripped to their trunks under the clock tower and went in.

Bill West’s protestations about swimming in water that cold were never of much avail against his friend’s willpower. During these blessed hours of solitary and unadulterated fun, ‘Taffy’ West, as Bido had nicknamed him, grew to admire the much more dynamic boy. More than seventy years on, he recalled those far-off days and noted sadly about Freddy Bywaters:

He was a hero to me. I asked him about my homework and he’d treat me with scorn: ‘You don’t know that!’ … I looked up to him, but he was so kind … what I thought of Freddy – it doesn’t mean that he thought anything of me. My appreciation is the greater because I didn’t have the qualities which he possessed … He was such a force to me which I would say exists to this day.

As much as swimming, football was one of Freddy Bywaters’s master passions. The boys, it appears, played for the school’s honour as much as for their own eleven on Wanstead Flats. Every participant during these encounters dreamed of playing for West Ham one day. Freddy played a reputedly tough game, and a contemporary photo taken of the team in 1914-15 shows him proudly in the midst of his peers.

The boys did not always play on the Flats. Sometimes they would cross over Landser Road to the nearby Little Ilford Park or the Sports Grounds north of Church Road. The insalubrious River Roding flowed very close to the east of the houses here. Parents were not happy to let their children loose in this area, partly because of the river and partly through the proximity of Walton and Parkhurst Roads, infamous as the roughest and poorest of Manor Park. To the outside observer the children romping about in Little Ilford Park or the adjacent sportsground would have seemed indistinguishable. The children themselves were already uncannily attuned to fine social and geographical shadings. The Graydon boys never ventured here without parental consent. Freddy did so, and so did others who spent their childhood on the east side on the Browning bridge. One very particular little boy played here all his life. He had grown up in Walton Road. He was daring to a degree, like young Bywaters with whom he may well have exchanged courtesies, insults, marbles or footballs. Like Bywaters’s, his name would soon hit the headlines. It would be in his death, for exceptional bravery, on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, that John T. Cornwell – known to this day throughout East London by the name of ‘Jacky Cornwell the boy VC’ – at the age of sixteen became the country’s youngest carrier of the Victoria Cross. His memory is today honoured in Manor Par by Jack Cornwell Street, which lies adjacent to his childhood home.

When young Bywaters left school at the early age of thirteen, after completing the curriculum, his father had already enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery and had been shipped to France. The year was 1916. Released from school in the spring, Freddy at once became employed as an office boy with the shipping form of Charles Howard in Leadenhall Street. Within a few months, now aged fourteen, he transferred to a more challenging post with Van Hopplers, still in shipping and still in the City. During this period he kept in touch, though only erratically, with his old schoolfriends. He knew of Bill Graydon’s elder sister’s marriage and very occasionally ran into her in Shakespeare Crescent. She didn’t take any notice of the flashy young boy who three years before had bravely sought her attention by offering her a sprig of flowers. She had then thought him very ‘sweet’ and had kindly foreborne to tease him about it in the company of adults. The incident had long since been forgotten, and it is to be doubted that she as much as recognized him on the crowded East Ham platform when travelling to work either in her father’s company, her sister’s, or her husband’s.

On 13 June 1917 Freddy was standing outside Baltic House in Leadenhall Street. He had just parted from an acquaintance and was heading for Mark Lane, unaware of the huge fleet of Gothas which had been steering its course inland and was about to disgorge its deadly load on the capital. Leadenhall Street took a direct hit. The blast instantly killed the friend whom Bywaters had left and floored the boy himself. Momentarily shell-shocked, he came round quickly. Wholly oblivious of his own safety, he started to run across Mansion Square and up to Aldersgate and Bartholomew Close. His sister ‘Nellie’ worked here. He found her safe and, after the raid was over, took her home to an anxious parent. Although Manor Park and Ilford were taking their share of Gotha and Zeppelin raids, they were never exposed to the fierce aerial punishment visited upon the City that afternoon. Even so the rumbling from the Northern European front was sometimes audible in London and rationing had come in early in 1917. By proxy the war was everywhere.

Freddy thought he ought to be in the thick of it. Jack Cornwell was his hero and the sea was beckoning. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1917 he tried hard to join the merchant navy convoys. His first successful attempt at securing a position was thwarted by his mother, who blocked it by officially notifying the ship’s purser of her intention to withhold parental consent, on the grounds that since 1 February 1917 Germany had been committed to ‘unrestricted submarine warfare’ against Britain. Stubborn as ever, Bywaters persisted. On 11 February 1918 he was taken on by the P & O, who for four days employed him in desk work at the Royal Albert Docks. On 15 February 1918, aged fifteen years and seven months, after signing a statement that he took up his duties as a writer in the full knowledge of the dangers to shipping at sea for a country at war, Freddy set sail. The ship was the P & O carrier Nellore bound for India. His mother was completely ignorant of his whereabouts.

The return journey took three months during which Freddy, for the first time in his life, encountered the wonders and dangers of the sea. Repeatedly the Nellore had to outmanoeuvre enemy craft and submarines. Unperturbed the boy writer and laundry steward carried out his duties and easily made friends with the troops. He told them about his father who landed in Salonika in 1915, survived the Somme in 1916 and, with the Royal Field Artillery, had moved through Egypt into Palestine. Freddy’s assured gregariousness and his boyish delight at everything new, from cards to uninhibited men’s talk and the sheer magic of exotic tales and places, easily recruited friends. These friends were real men! For the precocious writer of the P & O, the world would never be the same again.

One day in mid-May 1918 Freddy knocked on his mother’s door in Rectory Road. The prodigal, tanned and fairer and fitter than ever, was home at last. For his prolonged absence parental forgiveness was promptly forthcoming, but if his mother hoped that he would now stick the rest of the war out at home, she was deluded: ‘Surely you have had enough of it by this time’ – ‘Not a bit, Mum. I am going away again.’ And so he did.

His father likewise could not be made to stay at home. He was gassed in France in 1918 and was sent to England to convalesce in a hospital. Restless, and against doctor’s advice, he returned to France to witness the end. He developed a haemorrhage of the lungs and was forced back to England and again hospitalised. Freddy saw his father before leaving for China early in 1919. On 1 March Frederick Sam Bywaters died from a severe haemorrhage at the Red Cross Auxiliary Hospital Eggington Hall, Derby. His mother cabled the news to China to await Fred’s arrival there. In his reply he comforted her and promised to the best of his ability to make up for the dead father. His own sorrow he nursed in private.

Home in the spring of 1919 he and his mother considered their next move, now that there was no resident breadwinner and Freddy’s salary was not nearly adequate to feed and clothe the family. It was decided that the girls could do knitting and cleaning tasks up in the West End, while the mother was to set up shop as a ‘costumier’ in Upper Norwood, at 11 Westow Street where there were modest shop premises. Property was considerably cheaper in Norwood than in Manor Park, as Mrs Bywaters knew from visiting relatives ‘down south’. They would sell the house in Rectory Road. The profits accruing from that ought to defray the cost of buying the cottage in Westow Street as well as a minimum stock of materials. The arrangement was to work remarkably well. In September 1919 the Bywaters family moved to Upper Norwood. For Freddy this seemed to signal the break with his boyhood past. All his friends were now working; Billie and Harold Graydon, like himself, had entered the merchant navy. So had Taffy West. The boys’ leaves rarely coincided. Now that his family had moved south Freddy no longer had a base in East Ham. That he might miss the streets of his childhood and their inhabitants never struck him in the heady days of 1917 and 1918, the years of his first major voyages. In the end it was to be both sentiment and convenience that would bring him back here.

When Edith Graydon lost her virginity in Ilfracombe she did so in the knowledge that she was probably giving herself to her future husband. The abandon of the Ilfracombe days was rudely checked by the events of the summer. Already for Edith other considerations were troubling her. She was earning very well now at Carlton & Prior, and met increasingly sophisticated people, whom she charmed with her personality as much as her ready knowledge of the latest French fashions. Partly as a consequence of this, she was getting profoundly restless. The inevitable confinement to the single partner in love was proving unusually difficult and she was beginning to wonder about Percy’s and her temperamental compatibility: he so stolid, broody, morose at times and unadventurous; she the exact opposite. Her love of dancing, her need for male and female company, her smartness and shrewdness, these could not be forever repressed or adjusted for Percy’s sake. Furthermore, once her initial curiosity about sex had been gratified, she was disappointed that it should have developed so quickly into a routine. Percy was not very imaginative, if at times ardent. He seemed not to tire of finding her body intriguing and exciting, which puzzled her. She, on the other hand, found male sexuality totally lacking in mystery. Her girlhood dreams, pure and impure, had been of a great love. This she had failed to discover. Though Percy was fascinated by Edith’s physical appearance and grateful for her forbearance, he could not bring her out. This was no fault of his, and she did not resent him for it.

At 231 Shakespeare Crescent Edith and Percy would take over the front parlour for their courting, while the parents used the back room and the kitchen. Her mother would instruct Avis to ‘go into the front room and say good evening to Mr Thompson. Don’t stay. Come out here.’ By 1915 this ritual may have been abandoned, but it is indicative of the decorum which then applied to respectable unmarried couples. Whenever it became quiet in the front room, Mrs Graydon would take it upon herself to ‘pop in to see if everything was all right’, just in case. If the mother guessed that Edith was sexually active she kept it to herself. She preferred not to know since, like her husband and her other daughter, she felt a slight disquiet about the prolonged courtship. Four years was usual in those days for young couples to prepare for the lifelong commitment of marriage. This was Edith’s and Percy’s sixth year. The mother sensed her eldest daughter’s reticence. Was Percy really the right man for her? Of course there was the war to consider and the sheer scale of the numbers of young men swallowed up in the mud massacres of France and Belgium. If this did not clinch the case for Percy’s eligibility, it was a contributory factor.

On 25 December 1915 Edith was twenty-two years old and became engaged to Percy Thompson. Notwithstanding the shadows cast by the war and Edith’s unease about the whole business, the engagement created its own special aura. The big event was planned for 15 January 1916; in three weeks’ time Edith Graydon would become Edith Thompson. Right now she slipped on the splendid five-stone diamond ring presented to his fiancée by Percy, while he admired the silver cigarette case and gold ring that she had given him. The young couple spent a happy as well as anxious Christmas together. Anxious they were, because it was almost certain that conscription would be introduced early in the New Year. The press had been agitating about the 650,000 ‘slackers’ – of whom Percy was one – and claimed that they shamed their country and the brave men overseas. On Wednesday 5 January 1916 Asquith introduce the Government’s Compulsory Service Bill in the Commons, which passed its first stage on the following day.

Saturday 15 January 1916: Throughout most of Friday night Mrs Graydon, her sisters, friends and relatives have been baking, cooking, and cleaning. Upstairs the bride for the last time prepares to share a bedroom with her sister. Tomorrow she will become Mrs Edith Thompson. Before the two young women settle into bed, they hug each other tightly. For nineteen years they have shared every secret. The inevitable morning dawns shortly after 8 a.m. Edith never liked chill January morning, when the wan light of day seemed reluctant and joyless. There is just enough time for a quick dress rehearsal before the wedding guests arrive to express their good wishes. In small groups they proceed to St Barnabas on foot. Edith is to be driven there, led by her father, and accompanied by her mother and sister. The boys and, if he is home, the soldier brother, are waiting in St Barnabas, where the choir goes through an improvised review of their programme for the ceremony. The service is scheduled for noon.

Edith and Avis, her only bridesmaid, are sitting on the bed in their room. The house is nearly empty. Edith is still pinning a huge bunch of artificial Parma violets on her sister when Mr Graydon comes up from the staircase and says to her: ‘Come along, they are waiting for you.’ The ‘they’ means the hired car. Edith panics and says: ‘I, I can’t go through with it, I don’t want to go …’ Her father stares at her aghast for a second. Then, soothing her, he gently but firmly replies: ‘Oh, you must … everybody is at the church waiting for you.’ Avis is concerned and impressed by her sister’s manifest discomfort. She reaches out to press her hand and proceeds downstairs. Edith follows almost immediately. The moment she steps out of their little cottage, in full view of the neighbourhood, Edith unprompted straightens up. From the gathered crowd there are murmurs of approval of the sheer elegance of the bride. Dressed in some of the most stylish fabrics available in the West End in a war-time city, Edith looks truly a daughter of the house of Liles. All of her five foot seven and a quarter proudly erect, taller than her father on whose arm she is leaning, she smiles as she eases herself into the open car. As it slowly proceeds up through Rosebery Avenue Edith is transformed.

She is suddenly excited about getting married. In the packed church, she is led to the altar by her father, who gives here away to Percy Thompson.

Shortly after noon Edith had vowed to be Percy Thompson’s wife for better or for worse and to obey him in everything. Then the couple and their witnesses adjourn to the sacristy to sign the parish register. The clerk is jittery and careless and mistakenly gives her address as 221 Shakespeare Crescent. For the last time in her life Edith signs herself officially with her maiden name ‘Graydon’.

There had not been a bride quite as elegant as the Graydons’ daughter in Manor Park in living memory. In her tiered, boat-necked dress with its fine embossed design, Edith Thompson cuts a splendid figure. From her hands a riot of roses tumbles down the front of her dress when she poses for a group photo next to her sister. As the crowd begins to thin and some repair to the local pubs, Edith and Percy, and Avis with Richard Thompson head the procession which winds its way back to No. 231, where some twenty invited guests crowd into the front parlour and the staircase. Champagne starts to flow, some of it provided by Mr Carlton who is at the breakfast, which consists of ample portions of beef, ham, vegetables and cake. After dinner drinks are served. Edith by now is much brighter, the soul of the party.

The atmosphere of this late January afternoon is caught perfectly in a vignette of Percy Thompson by an invited guest. Bessie is chatting with two friends in the party when up comes one of the Graydon boys and comments on Percy’s teetotalism, at his wedding day no less. This produces a highly amused response from another friend among their little clique who was serving drinks earlier on. She tells them that as she passed Percy by, he stopped her and said laughing mischievously: ‘Don’t give it all away.’ Then, leaning forward conspiratorially, he whispered: ‘I’ll have some whisky if you have hot a coloured glass to put it in.’ Hardly a duplicitous move – merely that Percy had promised Edith never to get drunk in her presence. At about 5 p.m. Edith disappears upstairs and changes into a cream blouse and navy blue costume. A taxi comes and collects the newly wed couple and takes them to East Ham Station. From here they are to catch a through train to Westcliff and Southend-on-Sea. The honeymoon has started. While No. 231 continues to celebrate, Edith and Percy as man and wife are heading for the coast.

On Monday 17 January, in the company of Herbert Carlton, husband and wife commuted into Fenchurch Street from Westcliff. The only cloud on the horizon was Percy’s imminent enlistment in the London Scottish.

Even as Edith – who was to remain Miss Graydon at Carlton & Prior – resumed her duties in the Barbican, Percy was processing his papers for the regiment. Within ten days Thompson was ‘voluntarily’ enlisted, in the nick of time: conscription came in on 10 February 1916. He as twenty-six years old. A snapshot taken at the time shows an overweight and sheepish-looking Percy in the kilted uniform of his regiment.

Thompson passed his medical at A1, and by the end of January 1916 was quartered in camp in Richmond Park. For some time he had been a steady smoker, and for the past four weeks he had been smoking up to fifty cigarettes a day. His professed intention ‘never to go abroad’ and to get his discharge seemed to be realised at the end of the month when he was hospitalised for suspected heart trouble. His wife, in the company occasionally of Avis, visited him three times a week and on Sundays. Every Tuesday she drew the ‘wife’s separation allowance’ and took all of it to her mother-in-law. In late February Percy’s regiment was shipped across to France, without him. As winter turned to spring and summer, Percy shuttled between hospital and camp. In July, at the time when the country adjusted to the stunning news of the carnage on the Somme, and while endless convoys of wounded jammed London’s hospitals, Percy Thompson was honourably discharged as physically unfit for active military service. No heart condition as such was diagnosed.

[Percy Thompson’s discharge paper: 3 July 1916]

No. 6730.   Army rank: Private.
Name: THOMPSON, Percy
Corps. 14^th London Regt.
Battalion: Reserve Battalion.
Attested at Recruiting Office, East Ham.

Date of Discharge: 3.7.16.
Place of Discharge: London.

Cause of objection from Army Form B. 204. Application for Discharge of a Recruit as not likely to become an efficient soldier.

He was subject to fainting fits up to age of 15. Has always has palpitation and dyspnaea [shortness of breath] after slight exertion, also frequent attacks of giddiness. Has never been able to go through physical drill – cannot march, has to fall out after 1 to 3 miles. His heart is dilated, apex beat in 6^th intercost space – sounds audible to right as far as nipple line – aortic systolic murmur. Has aortic obstruction. Complaint not due to military service. Is unfit for military service.

Herbert F. Chapman.

Visiting Physician.

Recommended for discharge under para. 392 (iii) (cc) Kings Regs, as he is unlikely to become an efficient soldier.

Percy Thompson attested on the 10^th December, 1915, and was then 25 years and 9 months old and his occupation that of a Shipping clerk.

The young wife who collected a husband invalided out of the army in July 1916 was the happiest girl. She clung to him and leaned on his arm as once more they entered her parents’ home to enjoy the ‘interrupted honeymoon’. Edith Thompson would not be a war widow.

For nine more months, from the end of July 1916 to Easter 1917, Edith and Percy lived in at 231 Shakespeare Crescent. Conditions in the house were cramped and hardly private. The parents and the Thompsons needed a bedroom each. Avis probably settled for a put-you-up in the parental bedroom, while the boys crowded together in the third. The newly weds’ attractive bedroom suite was purchased entirely out of the wife’s money. She was the higher earner in the marriage. In their joint bank account at Barclays, 202 High Street North, they were saving hard towards the acquisition of their own home, a dream not to be realised for another four years. In the meantime they contributed to the running costs of No. 231 of course, and Edith helped with cooking and cleaning while Percy assisted with gardening. During this period Edith regularly wrote to her brother at the front and bravely coped with her panic-stricken husband during the Zeppelin raids. Whereas Edith and the Graydons stoically played whist at night while waiting for the raiders, Percy shook uncontrollably. On one occasion Edith was badly affected by ‘flu and confined to bed when the Germans struck. She reputedly dragged herself out just to be with Thompson, knowing his fearful heart.

For Percy therefore a few months later to boast about his discharge in front of H. McCollin Warren – whose two sons had fought at Gallipoli – and relate how he had fooled the army’s medical officers, was inconsiderate and offensive. Warren promptly called him a cad and a coward and pointed out that his wife’s home had provided a gallant soldier: he was a disgrace! In his in-laws’ dining room Thompson felt sure of his ground and taunted Warren who immediately grappled with him. Mr Graydon indignantly stepped between them and demanded that they make their peace. They settled for a truce and Warren left.

The war dragged on into the new year 1917. Percy’s health was causing concern, largely to himself. His addictive hypochondria prompted Dr Wallis to recommend a change of air. In April 1917 the Thompsons moved into furnished apartments at 25 Retreat Road near the station in Westcliff.

The landlords were Reg and Rose Mirabel Lockwood with whom the Thompsons would live from Easter 1917 to September 1919. Edith was now no longer a suburban commuter. She might have been expected to be reluctant to move so far out from the metropolis. But the presence in Westcliff of Mr Carlton, and his company on the daily one-hour journey to and from London, smoothed the transition. Whereas previously Edith journeyed into work from No. 231 with her father and sister, followed half an hour later by her husband, she now travelled with Carlton and Percy. Once this novelty had worn off, she used the time and the comfort of a seating space to read.

Edith’s and Percy’s times in Westcliff were reasonably content by most accounts. As the train journey took her through East Ham it was easy for Edith to comply with her father’s request to visit home at least one evening a week. It would be Fridays. This routine was never to be broken. Occasionally Edith would stay overnight with her parents, joined later in the evening by Percy. More frequently Edith would meet her parents for Friday dinner, and then on a late train they would all, including Avis, ride out to Westcliff to spend Saturday and Sunday at the sea or on Canvey Island in the nearby Thames estuary.

As yet there was no work at Carlton & Prior on Saturday mornings. It is in this fashion that the people from Manor Park endured the tribulations of 1917 and 1918. In the summer of 1918 Newenham was miraculously still alive, as were his brothers Billie and Harold serving in the merchant navy. Then, on the eve of victory, Newenham came home. The parents and their daughters feverishly prepared for the occasion, which Edith was to remember as the happiest day of her life.

Newenham had toiled through the hell of the European front. It is from there that the previous autumn he had written to Avis to break the sad news of her lover’s death. There was a party at No. 231 to celebrate his return. ‘Newnie’ and the brave regiments of the Fifth Army were toasted and the piano accompanied popular classics like ‘Tipperary’ and the army’s marching version of ‘Auld Lang Syne’: ‘We’re here because we’re here because …’ Edith, who had a poor singing voice, chimed in. What she lacked in tone she made up for by a spirited performance, and while Mr Graydon said grace, Edith may have wished that God had provided her with such a man as her brother: quiet in his fortitude, solicitous for the ‘widowed’ sister, conscious of dreadful knowledge, gallant in accommodating himself to the innocence of Manor Park.

11 a.m., Monday 11 November 1918: Edith Thompson was six weeks short of her twenty-fifth birthday and up in London at Carlton & Prior. The booming sound of the maroons from Westminster ripped through the air, followed by the sonorous rolling of thousands of church bells all over the metropolis. The war was over. Like hundreds of thousands of Londoners, Edith and her workmates spontaneously burst into fits of happy laughter followed by frantic dancing in the streets. They joined the surge of the crowd thronging towards St Paul’s, Westminster and Buckingham Palace. Now that Germany had surrendered, it appeared that the world could reassemble the pieces. In spite of her terrible losses, Britain would try to retain control over a loyal Empire and guarantee a prosperous mother country for her heroes. But the problems facing the country at home and abroad were immense and the official end of the war for Great Britain was fixed for 10 January 1920. The imminent prospect of universal male suffrage, the continuing stirrings of the suffragettes, the huge logistical problems posed by the demobilisation of four million men who needed to be reintegrated into jobs taken over by stay-at-homes and by women, these social and economic issues needed to be tackled urgently. Furthermore, the country was visited twice in 1918 and in 1919 by an influenza epidemic, which left hundreds of thousands dead and which severely knocked morale. Under these testing circumstances Lloyd George’s coalition, which swept to power in the ‘Coupon Election’, did remarkably well at least in generating enough wealth to spare the country the fate of violent revolution.

As the nation reverted to a superficially peaceful rhythm, Percy Thompson rediscovered a taste for living in London. There would be no more air raids, and the young couple, whose savings during the war had become considerable, expressed a desire to purchase a house. What better area than Ilford, the smartest of all the north-eastern suburbs, and very familiar to all parties concerned from their childhood? Furthermore Kenneth Chambers and his wife Lilian, Percy’s sister, had moved there as a couple in 1915, and were resident at 65 Mansfield Road. Situated within five minutes’ walking distance from Ilford station, with convenient connections every half hour into Liverpool Street, the Chamberses’ home was spacious, and an invitation was issued to Edith and Percy to become paying guests there.

In September 1919, at about the same time as the Bywaters family moved from Manor Park to Upper Norwood, the Thompsons arrived at 65 Mansfield Road. Notwithstanding the superior mobility afforded them by living in suburbia, they were sad to leave Westcliff. There were other unforeseen disadvantages to the move. Neither Edith nor Percy was fully aware of the strains in the relationship between Lily and Kenneth. Furthermore the Chamberses’ four-year-old son Graham was very demanding. He took a liking to Percy, but above all cherished the rare and less spontaneous attentions of his beautiful aunt Edith.

The Chamberses’ living-in-maid was a 28-year-old Cornish woman by the name of Ethel Vernon White. She and Edith quickly discovered a bond in their shared dislike of Lily. It would not take very long for this initially muted antagonism to erupt into overt anxiety and downright hostility. To overcome her boredom at No. 65 as much as to get away in the evenings and on Saturdays, Edith took up tennis at the nearby Valentine’s Park. She never learned to play properly, but warmed to the idea of engaging in such middle-class pursuits. The theatre more than ever fed her starved imagination. Now that the pressures of rationing were easing off rapidly, and as Edith’s considerable wages were paid out weekly, the Thompsons became regular patrons of the West End theatres. Avis often accompanied them on these visits, after which they would carefully split the expenses equitably.

It was in the winter of 1919 that the Thompsons met Sidney J. Birnage and his wife. The Birnages lived at 74 Argyle Road, Ilford. Their garden backed on to that of the Chamberses. They were friendly neighbours and would converse over the fence which partitioned their two properties. Birnage worked for the Sun Life Insurance Company in Treadneedle Street. He and his wife met Edith and Percy over dinner at 65 Mansfield Road and took a liking to the smart couple who hoped to become adopted Ilfordians. Shortly after their first meeting, Percy Thompson called on the Birnages and asked Sidney to effect an insurance on his life. This was duly transacted. The amount grossed by the policy would be £250 payable on Percy’s death or on the day of the policy’s maturation and his retirement.

The Birnages and the Thompsons remained on friendly terms after the latters’ move to 41 Kensington Gardens. They exchanged regular visits and Mrs Birnage enlisted the Thompsons’ and the Graydons’ co-operation in staging and attending charitable events such as the garden fêtes at the Seamen’s Orphanage in Wanstead. Not the least of her husband’s achievements was to enrol Percy Thompson on the books of Sun Life, to work part-time on commission for the company.

Another acquaintance was renewed in this period to Edith’s dismay. Seven roads up from the Chamberses, in the area where Edith and Percy were prospecting for their dream home, Richard Halliday Thompson, now married to Ethel Hull, had set up house at 49 Seymour Gardens. He had promised to keep an eye out for anything that might be going locally. It is quite possibly on a tip-off from him that the sale of 41 Kensington Gardens came to Edith’s and Percy’s notice, as he passed the road every morning on the way to work. Neither Percy nor Edith felt warmly towards Richard. She particularly disliked the idea of being swamped by her husband’s family in Ilford. More than ever she therefore valued her parents’ home at No. 231 and her beloved sister’s company. From September 1919 to June 1920 Edith, and often her husband, would dine with the Graydons. Foremost among their topics of conversation were the excitements of the house hunting. But everything seemed to be going smoothly. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, Edith and Percy had no money worries, as Edith had again been promoted at Carlton & Prior.

The firm had recently moved from Barbican to much more spacious premises at 168 Aldersgate Street, on the same side as Aldersgate tube station, the Manchester Hotel and Postman’s Park. To celebrate their move and merger, Carlton & Prior hosted a party at a London Hotel, probably the Manchester. Their staff and, it seems, friends and spouses, were invited. A woman called Florrie Green worked at Carlton & Prior at the time. In the 1921 Eastcote group photo she is second from the left in row 3, standing next to Lily Vellender. On 30 October 1988 her widower, Frederick Charles White, wrote to the author:

Dear Sir,

Having read the review of your book in the Daily Telegraph 13/8/88, it prompted me to purchase a copy from the library, which I read with interest and great sadness. I have a large photograph of the outing at Eastcote 1921 & my late wife is second from the left of Mrs Thompson, my wife at the time was an employee at Carlton & Prior, & was then known as Miss Florrie Green. When Carlton & Prior merged, they gave a reception at a London Hotel. The staff and friends were invited. After a few songs, there was a round of whist & cemented in my mind today is a remark that I made after a round where Mrs Thompson & Partner, were opponents, they took all thirteen tricks, & my remark was ‘That’s a bad omen’ little knowing that such a tragedy was to happen.

I lived in Milton Court Road Deptford S.E. at that time, now in the above address with my widowed daughter. I am in my 93 year, & it would be interesting to know if there are other acquaintances who remember.

Pardon me for the encroachment.

Yours faithfully,

F G White (Mr)

The building in Aldersgate faced east and was located on the southern corner of Manchester Avenue, directly opposite Fuller’s teashop in Edmund Place. Immediately to the west of Carlton & Prior stretched Bartholomew Close which once provided shelter to the fugitive Milton. To the north and north-west lay Smithfield and Charterhouse, while to the east it faced the Barbican. The Cripplegate Institute, where Edith assisted her father in giving his weekly dance lessons, was situated nearby.

At the time of Edith’s working in Aldersgate, Carlton & Prior was an undistinguished building, consisting of four operational levels. The nerve centre of the shop was the ground floor which consisted of the showroom and of administrative offices at the back. It was entered from the street through a glass door which opened onto a rising staircase. On its left, steps descended into the basement while on the right-hand side were the hat racks and drawers of the showroom. Under the staircase and at the bottom end of the room Miss ‘Tartar’ Prior, Carlton, and Edith as book-keeper had their offices. A contemporary cartoon and a print of G. F. Watts’s pre-Raphaelite ‘Hope’ adorned the east wall. The selection of hats did not run in the top five West End millinery shops, but Carlton & Prior prided themselves on their initiative and self-sufficiency. Not only did they boast buyers like Miss Graydon who could confidently be dispatched into the world of French fashion, but they employed remarkable contingents of well-paid work girls on two upstairs floors. The girls did all the cutting of material, knitting and fitting, under the expert supervision of senior staff like Edith Graydon and Lily Vellender, a horsy, generous and amiable girl.

Often Edith would excitedly chat with Lily in full view of the girls and, for their benefit, she would present herself in profile while touching her auburn hair, just to ensure that her bun was tied firmly. Really though she was showing off, as Myrtle Aldridge, who worked at Carlton & Prior with her sister at the time, well remembers. ‘A woman’s hair then was her glory’, another contemporary of Edith’s remarked with reference to this exhibitionist streak of hers. Few were taken in by her vanity, and several girls resented her for being the boss’s favourite. Working conditions at Carlton and Prior were cost-effective without overly exploiting the staff. Edith loved it. For her it meant independence and attention – everything that her marriage was turning out not to be. But if she was brooding on the way events were shaping up, she managed to hide it well enough.

Then a house came up: 41 Kensington Gardens. It belonged to a Mr Hobday of 8 The Drive, Ilford. Hobday was keen to sell, because of protected tenants, the Lesters, who were becoming increasingly troublesome and proved impossible to evict. The house was double-fronted, with a horseshoe lawn at the front and an attractive garden at the back. Pears and apple trees proliferated here, where once the entire stretch, from Cranbrook Road down to Wanstead Park, had constituted a huge orchard. No. 41 contained eight rooms. For this large Edwardian property Edith and Percy paid £250, the equivalent of ten times Edith’s monthly salary, and thereby became outright owners of a substantial home; no one in their immediate family had ever lived in a comparable house. It needed some work done to it, but both Percy and Edith were very capable in this respect; and Mr Graydon would help.

It was in June 1920 that Percy signed the deeds which made 41 Kensington Garden his. Edith contributed over half of the expense, but in keeping with contemporary custom, the house was legally entered in the husband’s name. The time had come to leave 65 Mansfield Road. Things there had deteriorated steadily over the past few months. When Mr and Mrs Graydon went on holiday in May, Edith and Percy eagerly jumped at the opportunity of leaving the Chamberses and moving into No. 231 for a fortnight. The ‘rift with Lily’, as Edith called it, had become unbridgeable.

In July 1920 the Thompsons moved into their Ilford home. In the autumn of 1922 Lily Vellender recalled visiting Edith and Percy in their new home: ‘About two years ago Mrs Thompson invited my husband and I to 41 Kensington Gardens, Ilford, to see their house, which they told me they were going into. My husband and I went.’ The photo taken on that occasion shows a happy gathering, which included Avis and, probably, Edith’s godmother Edith Walkinshaw. Looking at the photo 60 years later, Myrtle Aldridge (Ellwood) at once identified her former Carlton & Prior work supervisor Lily Goodwin, noting wryly that it did not show Lily looking her best.

In the meantime, an event had taken place which, when viewed retrospectively, would prove momentous.

It was no more than a knock on a door one evening in January 1920. Freddy Bywaters was asking for his schoolfriend Billie Graydon.

Whether he knew of Bill’s leave from duty with the White Star Line, or whether he called out of nostalgia for the old times and haunts, or to procure lodgings at No. 231 near the docks is not materially relevant. Bywaters spent only an hour on his first visit. The conversation with Bill and his parents revolved around travels in the Far East and their former exploits at football and swimming. Freddy’s ship, the P & O’s Plassy, was getting ready at Tilbury. He was doing day duty on board during these January weeks of shore leave, hence his appearance in the Crescent which was only a twopenny fare away from the East India Docks.

Young Bywaters had kept in touch with the Graydons as a family photograph from the summer of 1919 demonstrates. It shows quite how friendly and close the Graydon boys, Freddy, and even Mrs Graydon were. Now Freddy was a young man of seventeen and a half, with masculine good looks and assured manner. He proved entertaining and was mature in outlook beyond his years. He was his own man entirely. During these three weeks of January 1920 Freddy Bywaters paid the Graydons some four visits in all. They welcomed him and he enjoyed their company. It was the sea that bound all of them together. Before leaving he had become re-acquainted with the family: Bill and Harold, Newenham, the parents and the twenty-four-year-old Avis. Bywaters was conscious of his attractiveness to women and instinctively picked up the signals emanating from the lively Miss Graydon. He knew how saddened she had been by the loss of her lover at Passchendaele. She was nicely turned out, he noted approvingly, and thought that he might pay her rather more attention in the future. Right now he was due out for a long voyage. From the end of January and for three and half months the Plassy with Bywaters on board would sail to China and Japan and back.

It was mid-May therefore when Freddy once again appeared at 231 Shakespeare Crescent. This time he asked to be accommodated at the Graydons’ as a paying lodger. The reason was that the Plassy had been moved to the East India docks in Tilbury for an eight-week reconditioning spell in which Bywaters was participating. No. 231 provided him with a convenient haven and freed him from the tedium of commuting to and from Upper Norwood. It also emancipated him from the overly solicitous attentions of his mother. If Freddy spent his first weekend home with his family in Westow Street and then moved with most of his effects to Manor Park, the date of his first meeting with Edith, as Mrs Thompson, would be Friday 24 May 1920.

As on every other Friday, on her way home to Westcliff or Mansfield Road, Edith stopped over at her parents’. On this day she arrived between 7.30pm and 8pm, ‘her arms full of flowers, a book, a newspaper, and the sides of her attaché case almost bursting with the purchases she had crammed into it.’ As she entered and went through to the kitchen with her mother, Freddy Bywaters rose to be introduced to her. Edith, he realised, was handsomer than even her parents’ wedding photographs suggested. For her part she was struck by the former adolescent’s confident appearance: of medium height – five foot six and a half to her five foot seven and a quarter – muscular, broad-shouldered, tanned, with thick light brown wavy hair brushed back, and with dark eyes and eyebrows set in a square-jawed face.

After a few pleasantries had been exchanged, the women left the men to their devices and prepared supper. Percy would arrive at 8 p.m., after his customary late drink in Bishopsgate. He in turn was introduced to Bywaters. The two men, so different in temperament, at once hit it off. Percy was attracted to the youngster’s blunt, bluff manner. As for Freddy’s reaction to Percy, it appears to have matched Thompson’s in warmth. He liked the older man’s direct touch, his firm handshake, his connection, albeit at a desk, with matters seafaring. Before the Thompsons departed that night, Percy told Mr Graydon how much he had enjoyed Bywaters’s company: ‘I like him very much. He is a smart, interesting boy. A clean-looking fellow.’

Every Friday evening for the next seven weeks Freddy Bywaters would dine with the Graydons and the Thompsons. He occasionally lunched with Avis when he was up in the centre of town. No. 231 had virtually become his home during this transition period, although he regularly visited at 11 Westow Street. But Freddy was anxious to be off at sea, and early in July he secured a transfer to P & O’s Cap Polonia at Southampton and promptly sailed for Bombay. After the Cap Polonia’s return to Southampton, Freddy was back for an hour at No. 231 in mid-October. A fortnight later he again dropped in briefly on the Graydons to tell them his latest news, learn of Edith’s and Percy’s house-buying progress, and promise a card from Bombay.

In the meantime the Thompsons had reluctantly agreed to their protected tenants’ terms for the occupancy of the house: Edith and Percy would have the large front bedroom on the right of the house and the front drawing room under it, both with elegant bay windows. At the back they were to occupy the morning room on the left of the house with its access into the garden, along with the use of the scullery, kitchen and bathroom. Cellar and loft were also shared, and before long the Thompsons had secured the exclusive use of the small back bedroom over their morning-room. This small bedroom at the end of the landing faced south-east and had a door which closed off the bottom end of the floor. As one left it the bathroom was immediately on the left and the Lesters’ bedroom opposite it on the right. Next along was the Thompsons’ bedroom, also on the right. It opened directly on to the staircase and was adjacent to the third bedroom, facing back and occupied by the Lesters’ twenty-eight-year-old daughter Norah. It was largely on these ultra-respectable suburban premises that the future drama of human love and deceit was to be initiated.

As a protected tenant Mrs Fanny Lester and her ailing elderly husband paid a rent of merely 30 shillings (£1.50p) each month and half the rates and taxes. Even in 1920 that amount was wholly uncommercial and not realistic. The Thompsons almost at once gave the Lesters six months’ notice to leave. In the end the tenants successfully deferred moving till the late summer of 1922, when Percy consulted his solicitors about forceful eviction. Till that time Mrs Lester ingratiated herself with Mrs Thompson, in particular by offering her services as a quasi-maid: on the gas stove in the scullery she would cook the porridge for everyone in the mornings, do the shopping, take the laundry down to Belgrave Road, and assist with the cleaning.

The ‘people from Manor Park’, as Mrs Lester repeatedly referred to them, went with gusto at the task of giving No. 41 a face-lift. They christened it ‘The Retreat’, after the road where they had lived in Westcliff. The fence and the hedge which enclosed the front needed tending. The wooden cross-barred gate was oiled, the path was retiled and the rest of the semicircular drive was weeded. In the horseshoe, which they made into a lawn, daffodils and red and yellow tulips as well as rose bushes were planted; and geraniums, Edith’s favourite flowers, were everywhere. The same care went into tending the fruit trees and bushes in the back garden. At this Percy was accomplished. With his father-in-law in tandem, he could grow and mend anything.

The inside of the house gradually filled with the Thompsons’ possessions. Their furniture and clothes were chosen with taste. Furthermore Edith owned a remarkable collection of Japanese and Chinese porcelain and exotic cushions, which her brothers Bill and Harold would bring her as presents from their trips in the Far East. She accorded a place of particular privilege to her array of trophies, accumulated from years of dancing competitions. As she looked at them with a tinge of regret, she had the consolation at least that here she was in her own home; and her parents and sister, and occasionally the boys visited on Saturday evenings. On such occasions the family would sing Irish ballads round the piano, or the most recent music-hall hit. Edith usually prepared a small cold supper of salads and fruit jellies for these visits.

To the external world the Thompsons were a reasonably happy and contented couple. They had every reason to be so: both were healthy and in full-time, well-paid employment. They owned their home, could still afford frequent visits to the theatre, the music halls and the cinema; and they had even started to spend money on patronising the odd Masonic banquet, at Percy’s request, to please his freemason friends. If Ladies’ night at the Masons bored Edith, we may be sure that she endured them with a measure of good humour.

All seemed well – except for two details which do not fit into this picture of London suburban happiness.