Preface

Mrs Russell had interviewed Edith Thompson’s sister Avis Graydon in the 1970s, and Avis had given her a necklace and an Edwardian tray-cloth which had once belonged to Edith.

I remember hearing Avis Graydon’s voice on tape for the first time. Avis Graydon Interview It was an unforgettable moment. Her quiet dignity constituted a moving tribute to her strength of character in adversity. It had done so on that day in December 1922 when she had impressed the court at the Old Bailey with the delivery of her evidence. Listening to Avis talk about her sister marked a personal turning point in my researches. If I had harboured the slightest doubt about the propriety of carrying on with this project, Avis Graydon’s passionate belief in her sister’s innocence, half a century later, confirmed me in my conviction that Edith’s name must be cleared.

Avis Graydon was one of the main victims of the tragedy of ‘Thompson and Bywaters’. She lost her boyfriend, her sister, and her future. In the long years which followed she shared her parents’ grief, and the word ‘spinster’ after her name on her death certificate starkly sums up her tragic story. Avis could never, she later claimed, have told a man whom she loved what had happened to her family, because it would have been too dreadful a thing to own up to. What she must have experienced during the final hours leading up inexorably to the violent and wilful extinction of her sister one can barely imagine.

Avis outlived the removal of her sister’s remains to Brookwood by six years. The Home Office failed to notify her, as Edith Thompson’s closest surviving kin, of the transfer and thus robbed Avis, a devout Roman Catholic, of the chance to visit her sister’s place of burial. Even at that late stage it might have afforded Avis some comfort to mourn at Edith’s grave in the leafy parklands of Brookwood, to stand there for herself and for her parents, and to know that at last her beloved sister no longer lay immured at Holloway. The verdant groves of the Surrey cemetery echo with the same sounds as Wanstead Park where she and ‘Edie’ spent untroubled summer afternoons on their school’s plant-learning trips. In those mellow, far-off days two bright little English girls playing with their peers in an ancient woodland could never have imagined what the wickedness of the world had set in store for them.

Avis’s mother had yearned to have Edith’s body returned to her. In a letter of March 1924 a prison visitor from Holloway had written to a Labour Party grandee, the Right Honourable Arthur Henderson, to say that she had ‘been approached by the mother of poor Edith Thompson (whom I met under very sad circumstances) to find out whether anything could be done to get back the body of her child, or if at least she might be informed where she is buried’. What Henderson replied is not recorded, but the Home Office predictably wrote back to say that, in accordance with the law, Edith Thompson ‘was buried and must remain buried within the precincts of the Prison’.

Throughout the proceedings of the winter months of 1922-23 the Home Office, the Prison Commission, and the judiciary had taken the view that Edith Thompson’s life rated as little more than disposable waste. As Avis noted bitterly fifty years later,

to think that these people, Christmas time, they hadn’t, they hadn’t got time to bother with her, with the, over the, the appeal. They just hadn’t time to bother with her. It was Christmas time, let’s get away and get away with it all.

The country’s governing class and its intelligentsia cruelly failed this hard-working, high-achieving cockney family. T. S. Eliot’s and Thomas Hardy’s heartless responses to Edith Thompson’s predicament are well documented (CJ 291-2). Similarly Rebecca West wrote that Edith Thompson ‘was, poor child, a shocking little piece of rubbish, and her mental furniture was meagre. … I am not asking for sympathy for Edith Thompson. She is a poor, flimsy, silly, mischievous little thing.’ (Reynolds 17.XII.22,p.2). So much for the sisterly compassion of this proto-feminist intellectual whom the same newspaper introduced as ‘perhaps the most brilliant woman journalist of the day’. Had not Henry James, the great novelist whom West admired, memorably written ‘Never say you know the last word about any human heart’?

In a little over a year after her sister’s death Avis read an article in Thomson’s Weekly News by John Ellis, the man who had hanged Edith Thompson. It was called ‘Secrets of my Life Revealed’, and the sub-heading was ‘How Edith Thompson Met Her Death on the Scaffold’. It was to this piece that Avis referred when she told Audrey Russell in 1973 that she had read that

they said the morning of the execution there was a great struggle. She was kicking, and frantic, and fighting them all.

For Ellis the execution of Edith Thompson was a landmark event primarily because it afforded him his first opportunity to travel by air. His flight on 8 January 1923 from Manchester to Croydon rated, he tells us, as a ‘great experience’. The bonus was that ‘some time later I was thrilled at learning that this same machine as I had flown in was smashed while on the journey back from London to Manchester.’ Ellis was rather less coarse-grained when writing about Edith Thompson, and his detailed account of Edith’s last 24 hours seems to be largely accurate, since it generally (but not in every detail) tallies with the Governor’s official report which is preserved in the Public Record Office in Kew. Here are Ellis’s words from the moment he stepped inside the condemned cell at 9am on 9 January 1923:

Mrs Thompson was in a state of complete emotional collapse, and had absolutely lost all control of herself … Understanding my beckoning nod, the chaplain left Mrs Thompson’s side, and the wardresses practically lifted the sobbing woman to her feet, for she was totally unable to stand unaided.
My own feelings defy description. The woman’s cries and semi-demented body movements almost unnerved me, but I told myself that my only humane course was to work swiftly and cut Mrs Thompson’s agony as short as possible. So pulling myself together I quickly pinioned her hands behind her back. By this time the poor woman’s cries were being blotted out by the unconsciousness which now mercifully descended upon her and from which she never again emerged. She had sunk back into her chair … I called forward my two assistants and also the Pentonville warders. I instructed Phillips and Baxter to strap her skirts round her ankles and that they must carry Mrs Thompson to the scaffold with the help of the two warders. I then left the agonising scene and hurried through to the scaffold.
In a few moments I saw them coming bearing Mrs Thompson. She looked as if she were already dead. … as soon as they reached the trap-doors I put the white cap on her head and face, and slipped the noose over all. It was a pitiable thing to see the woman being held up on her feet by four men. Her head had fallen forward on her breast, and she was utterly oblivious of all that was going on. … I sprang to the lever. One flick of the wrist, and Mrs Thompson disappeared from view.

In the same piece Ellis also commented on Edith’s striking weight-increase (CJ 304).

Twenty-five years later, during a long intervention on the death penalty in the House of Commons, Sir Beverley Baxter, formerly an editor of The Daily Express, stated that the faces of the two men who came to see him after hanging Edith Thompson were ‘not human. I can assure you, Sir, they were like people out of another world. Edith Thompson had disintegrated as a human creature on her way to the gallows, and yet somehow they had to get her there.’ (Hansard 14 April 1948).

Much has been written over the years regarding the allegation that Edith Thompson disintegrated ‘as a human creature’ and the further rumour that ‘her insides fell out’. As I argued in 1988, I believe that she may have been pregnant when she died, and her constipation and headaches, to which the Governor of Holloway referred in his report, may have been attributable to that. If so, she probably suffered a haemorrhage on the scaffold.

There is, however, another explanation, and one which is not exclusive of pregnancy. It is possible that Edith lost control of all bodily functions in those final moments of utter terror as the men grabbed her to carry her to her death. This may be hinted at by Ellis’s claim that she ‘lost all control of herself’. If so then her alleged ‘disintegrating as a human creature’ and her ‘insides falling out’ would be a prudish euphemism. The spectacle of Edith Thompson’s last moments inspires outrage even now, not least because it was grotesquely gendered: five men physically manhandling a young woman to kill her by law, with four other men and two women looking on. The alleged immorality of Edith’s correspondence pales into insignificance when contrasted with such a scene.

Members of the Graydon family other than Avis could find no respite from their memories either. Thus a framed picture of Edith Thompson hung on the bedroom wall of one of her brothers for the rest of that family’s life. The picture in question featured on the dust jacket of the first two issues of Criminal Justice (1988, 1990). It was one of two that Edith had given to Freddy Bywaters, and the one that carried her qualified stamp of approval (CJ 66,104). This tragedy continued to affect the families of all those concerned down through the years. Every new generation needed to be told at some point what the past had held, who the unknown young woman in the photograph on the wall was, what the smart boy with the keen profile had done, why Percy Thompson could never grow old.

Whereas the upper executive and the establishment treated Edith Thompson as a mere cypher, many of those who came into close contact with her liked, and often loved, her. This was true particularly of the women staff at Holloway, who by all accounts did their utmost to make Edith Thompson’s stay there more bearable; and prison regulations, regarding access to the condemned woman, notably the visitors’ physical proximity to her, seem to have been repeatedly relaxed. The Governor of Holloway, Dr John Morton, was a decent man and, where Edith Thompson was concerned, he acted in the spirit rather than the letter of the law whenever he could; as, for example, when he tried to ignore the fact that Canon Palmer of Ilford was a R.C. father rather than an Anglican priest (CJ 288-89). During the family’s last visit to Holloway for the post-mortem on 9 January 1923 several staff at the prison were in tears, a fact that moved and comforted the stricken family.

I had long known that Mrs Lester, the Thompsons’ sitting tenant, had taken Edith’s side after the murder. But I had been unaware of an extended article and interview that she had contributed (probably assisted by a ghost writer) to a newspaper, and which throws new light on both the night of 3-4 October 1922 and the relationship of the doomed couple. It also touches on Edith’s attachment to her material possessions, and in this regard it connects interestingly with the most striking new piece of information that has come my way since 1990.

In her piece Mrs Lester offers a passionate defence of the young woman at Holloway, whom she praises for her generosity, intelligence, hard work, and elegance. Percy, on the other hand, she portrays as petty, morose, and mean. She alleges moreover that Edith and Percy Thompson were asked to leave the Chamberses’ home in Ilford because he was violent towards Edith:

They came to [41] Kensington Gardens in a hurry, owing to a quarrel they had one night in the bedroom, when Thompson was knocking his wife about and his brother-in-law told them to go.

This was not the whole story, since the burgeoning dislike between Edith and Lily Chambers, Percy’s sister, must have been a contributory factor (CJ 30). But the reference to bedroom rows at the Chamberses has the distinct ring of authenticity, because the bedroom was the Thompsons’ usual battleground. I had originally assumed, from the interview with Avis Graydon, that it was Kenneth Chambers’s querulous temper that had caused the estrangement, although just before the reference to temper Avis described Chambers as ‘a most charming man, most charming’. Here is what Avis said:

Edie and Percy lived with Kenneth for some time, but he was so bad tempered and he got on so badly with his family that they came and got this house in Kensington Gardens, and then the maid [Ethel Vernon White] went to live with them; and then that maid came to our place to stay.

The placing of the first ‘he’ and Ethel Vernon’s going to live with the Thompsons suggested to me, mistakenly it turns out, that the bad-tempered ‘he’ referred to Kenneth Chambers when in fact it denoted Percy.

Mrs Lester asserts categorically that no one who knew Edith Thompson could imagine that she would attempt to murder her husband. The idea of Edith’s ‘powdering electric light globes to put into her husband’s food is too stupid for words’, she averred. Mrs Lester’s implacable hostility towards Percy must have partly stemmed from his repeated attempts to evict her and her daughter, and shortly before his death he had intensified the pressure when the Lesters failed to move out by August 1922 as originally (it seems) agreed (CJ 151).

On the night of the murder Mrs Lester was woken up by her daughter Norah, with whom she shared a bed:

‘Do you hear them, mother?’ We thought it was the Thompsons coming in, and did not take a great deal of notice, because we were used to them arguing with each other at all hours of the night. But when my daughter drew my attention to the noise at the front door, I sat up in bed with a feeling of alarm. A moment later I nearly shrieked with fright when I heard heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, and someone came into my room with a lantern. It was a policeman, and his helmet could be seen in the comparative dark. ‘What’s the matter?’, I said, ‘Has somebody come in and left the front door open?’ … ‘No, it’s all right, Ma’am’, he said. ‘Will you come downstairs for a time? There is a young lady down there, and her husband has dropped dead in the street.

Mrs Lester’s account of that grim night at 41 Kensington Gardens makes for harrowing copy: the hysterical widow covered in her husband’s blood, the police trying to help, the arrival on the scene of Percy’s brother, then Edith’s parents, more police (now wiser and suspicious after visiting the mortuary), and finally Edith Thompson’s departure from her home, never to return there. It is Mrs Lester who advanced a mundane, but all too credible, reason for why Edith stayed with Percy:

She told me, and I believed her, that she would not entertain any proposition which meant her leaving ‘The Retreat’ and all it contained. It was her money with which the house had been bought, and most of the furniture had been bought by her from time to time. She prized it as all women will prize the home which has been laboriously got together, beyond everything on earth. She told me from time to time that she would willingly have parted from her husband, but that nothing would induce her to leave the home which had taken so much trouble to get together.

The force of this was brought home to me only when I came across the inventory of Edith Thompson’s house, and then I realised the full extent to which 41 Kensington Gardens had been Edith’s rather than Percy’s in almost every respect except the garden. It made me wonder yet again whether or not Edith would really have left Percy for Freddy if it meant surrendering her home.

There is a revealing moment during the interview with Avis Graydon when Mrs Russell puts it to Avis that Edith intended to elope with Freddy, and that they were planning to buy a flat together:

Avis No, no – what was, what was going to happen to Percy?
Mrs Russell Well, they were just going to run away and live together and leave Percy on his own.
Avis No [laughing sadly] Not my sister!
Mrs Russell That’s what she is talking about anyway in her letters.
Avis Not my sister!

A very different interpretation was put on Edith’s motives for not separating from Thompson by Percy’s brother Richard. I alluded to his articles in the press in the original edition of this book, but they deserve to be set alongside Mrs Lester’s declarations; and they engendered a vehement public response from one of Edith’s friends.

According to Richard Thompson the black widow from Manor Park was hoping to lay her hands on her husband’s estate so that she and Bywaters could enjoy the proceeds of murder without facing up to any of its consequences. The general tone of his pieces in Lloyds Sunday News can be understood, perhaps, as the outpourings of a grief-stricken relative, but there is a measure of calculated malevolence about them as well, a desperate desire to ensure that the woman at Holloway should not escape the noose.

He paints a lurid picture of Edith Thompson as a Jezebel who drenched herself in perfume and bathed in water that was scented to the tune of one-guinea’s worth a throw. It was in the same luxuriant baths and bathroom that she composed her degenerate letters, he noted, and she dressed and undressed in the window, notwithstanding several complaints by neighbours.

As regards this alleged streak of exhibitionism, it is untrue that there were any recorded (that is, official) complaints about this. But it does seem to have been the case that Edith changed occasionally in the window, although how much of her could be glimpsed through the narrow slats of the Venetian blinds in the upstairs bedroom at 41 Kensington Gardens is debatable. Two independent sources from the Thompsons’ neighbourhood in Ilford also alleged that their menfolk had enthusiastically tried to catch furtive glimpses of Edith Thompson disrobing in her bedroom, and that her changing habits were known in the street. Perhaps; but these allegations were made after the notoriety of the murder, by which time everybody seemed eager to be thought to have known the protagonists. It is also just possible that Edith sometimes simply forgot to draw the curtains.

In his first piece, on 7 January 1923, Richard Thompson insinuated that Edith’s income was not nearly large enough to allow her the kind of life-style that she led, particularly with regard to her gambling (as he called her occasional small flutter on the horses) and her finery. She must have, he intimated, supplemented her earnings from other sources, something to do with the men with whom she loved to surround herself. Although he later denied that he intended to imply this, he clearly meant that she was living off immoral earnings or prostitution: ‘her trips to the West End – those escapades of which we know but a little’, he hinted darkly.

To most fair-minded readers his articles on his sister-in-law constitute venomous diatribes. Thus, for example, he alleged that Edith took over the cooking at 41 Kensington Gardens systematically to poison her husband. He withheld the fact, of which he was well aware, that it was the rift between Percy and the Lesters which had caused Mrs Lester to stop cooking for the Thompsons.

What must have caused particular hurt to Edith’s family was when he called the young woman sitting condemned to death a pervert: ‘That Edith had a mind very far from pure I well knew. The extent of its vileness I only learnt when I saw letters addressed to her lover and never published; letters of an obscene kind that could have been written only by a moral pervert’.

This is doubly dishonest. Firstly, because he never saw any unpublished letters other than, perhaps, the ones that were not put in evidence in court; and, secondly, because like the Crown at the trial he intended to convey the impression that if only all the facts were known then no-one could have any doubt about the guilt of this vampish moral pariah. If Curtis-Bennett made one mistake in leading for the defence, it was his agreeing to the Crown’s seemingly harmless wishes not to submit all the letters. The jury never knew why they were being withheld, or whether or not crucial and incriminating evidence might not be hidden in them. At the trial the Solicitor-General unscrupulously exploited this chink in the defence’s armour.

To Richard Thompson Edith’s alleged moral perversions chimed perfectly with her preference for ‘a certain type of French novel, whose equivalent we do not allow to be published in this country; the type of novel which is concerned solely and nastily with sex’.

Finally, with bogus magnanimity, and in a malicious echo of one of Edith Thompson’s letters from Holloway, he suggested that to let this extravagant sybarite live would be a worse punishment than hanging her.

Shocked by Richard Thompson’s mendacity, a ‘near-relative’ of Edith Thompson’s, her aunt Edith Walkinshaw, noted caustically towards the end of a newspaper article on her by then dead niece:

In closing I would just like to thank Richard Halliday Thompson for his articles on Edith Thompson. I have seen several letters asking if his brother was anything like him.
If only he can realise one iota of the sympathy extended to her from those who can read deeper than the surface, then, indeed, I am satisfied.

I had originally assumed that the ‘near-relative’ who wrote so movingly in Edith’s defence in Lloyd’s Sunday News was her aunt Lillie Laxton (née Liles), who had accompanied the two Thompsons to the theatre on that fateful night of 3 October 1922. But although Lillie and her husband undoubtedly visited Edith at Holloway, I now lean towards thinking that the author of the newspaper articles may have been Edith Walkwinshaw, who was Edith’s other aunt as well as her godmother; and she lived close enough to Holloway to visit her niece frequently.² Edith Walkinshaw was born Edith Florence Liles in 1871. She is the addressee of the newly discovered letter reproduced below. She was a year older than Edith’s mother, while Edith’s aunt Lillie was only forty-two when her niece was on trial at the Old Bailey. Mrs Walkinshaw died on 27 August 1934, by which time she had moved from Lucerne Road (where Edith had known her) to 49 Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square St Pancras, her last place of residence. When the writer of the articles refers to remembering little Edith playing with her dolls in an imperious manner, she is perhaps referring to dolls that she as her godmother had given to the little girl as presents.

Richard Thompson’s articles, and particularly their innuendoes about Edith Thompson as the natural creature of a demi-monde of vice, reduced a woman friend of Edith’s to tears and caused her to launch into a detailed rebuttal of his charges in Lloyd’s Sunday News. The newspaper described this young woman as Edith Thompson’s ‘lifelong friend’. One by one she exposed Richard Thompson’s charges as sham. The friend concluded her defence of Edith’s reputation by sadly looking ahead into the future:

It will be written of her that she was a woman without a heart; a murderess of vile and inconceivably wicked instincts. A creature whose passions were without bounds; whose duplicity was only matched by her lust.
All that will be said of Edith Thompson, the bright-eyed, laughing child who romped through youth with me, the woman whom, in later years, I looked up to and admired as a natural leader, a true friend, with generous heart and tender impulses.

But Edith’s friend would be proven wrong on her fear of how Edith Thompson would be reported by posterity. The vast literature on ‘Bywaters and Thompson’, from the 1920s to the present day, would be virtually unanimous in proclaiming her innocence.

In the first edition of Criminal Justice I had taken it for granted that the ‘lifelong friend’ was Bessie of Reg and Bessie. But this is almost certainly wrong, because Bessie was Edith’s senior by six years. It was only when I realised that Bessie’s married name, given by Avis on tape, was Akam (and not Aitken, as I had originally written in CJ) that I could trace her. Bessie was born Maud Elizabeth Harriet Moore in Islington on 28 September 1887, and she was Jewish or half-Jewish. Even so she married Reginald Edward Akam in the Anglican faith in the parish church of Stoke Newington on 26 June 1913, when Edith Graydon was 19 years old.

In Criminal Justice I wondered whether the friends whom Edith and Percy visited on Sunday 30 September 1922, the week-end before the murder, had been Reg and Bessie. Since we now know that Bessie had turned 35 two days earlier, the Thompsons may have gone there to celebrate her birthday. Did Edith issue a theatre invitation for Tuesday to the wealthy Akams? It is not impossible that the Akams joined them, but I believe that they would have been summoned if they had indeed been of that party hours before Percy Thompson’s death.

It is almost inconceivable that the mysterious ‘lifelong friend’ should not have been mentioned at some point in Edith’s detailed, moment-by-moment correspondence between November 1921 and October 1922. There had all along been another candidate for the identity of the friend. I had originally considered her, and then had, for various reasons, decided that it could not be her after all. She was Edith’s friend Lilian Vellender-Goodwin from Carlton & Prior.

Since the ‘lifelong friend’ had been at school with Edith, I searched for Lilian (and for Bessie) in the Kensington Avenue Schools records, but I drew a blank. That may have been due to the fact that Jewish children such as Bessie and also Lily (see below) missed classes through Jewish holidays and therefore did not qualify for the ‘perfect attendance’ medals. The lists of medalists are the only major source of children’s names in the schools’ logbook.

It seemed too much of a coincidence that Edith should end up working in the same place as an old schoolmate, and the Vellenders were after all living in Islington by 1920. I had assumed that Lily’s family came from either Islington or Stoke Newington, although I had noticed the name Goodwin in the 1922 Electoral Roll of Edith’s home street, Shakespeare Crescent, and of Byron Avenue, Manor Park. But by then I had already concluded that Lily could not have been the ‘friend’ because, firstly, she was never mentioned in connection to the party that went to the Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly on 3 October 1922 and, secondly, and above all, because she did not refer to the theatre visit in court. For unlike Reg and Bessie Akam, Lily Vellender did testify at the Old Bailey, but she was not asked about the theatre. This may have been because she was examined by the Prosecution who were only interested in Freddy’s assignations with Edith in the days before the murder. Lily gave little away in her terse statement.

In the mid 1980s the Vellenders had eluded me because of a small, single-letter error. I had searched for Vallender instead of Vellender. By so doing I perpetuated a mistake made by Filson Young in Notable British Trials (1923), the police and court records, and almost all other sources, and it was this misreading that prevented me from finding the Vellenders’ marriage certificate. Even the clerk who drafted the said certificate wrote ‘Vallender’ at first and subsequently corrected it to Vellender.

In the end though I could not quite believe that the Vellenders, who seemed such solid London professionals, should have married somewhere abroad. In the summer of 2000 I therefore returned to the Family Records Centre which had by then relocated from the Aldwych to spacious new premises in Islington. I now did what I should have done years ago, and checked through all the Goodwins. Whereas Vallender was a rare name, the Goodwins were many in number. Even so, it did not take long to discover that I had been coursing the wrong hare by a vowel.

Lilian Amy Florence Vellender was born Lilian Goodwin in Camberwell, south London. She was Jewish (the family had originally been called Goldswain), and she was Edith Thompson’s junior by two years. Like Edith, Lily continued to be known at work by her maiden name. Lily converted to Catholicism when she married Norman Vellender, and after their marriage she and Norman settled in her mother’s home at 66 Albion Grove (now Ripplevale Grove) beyond the Almeida theatre in Islington. The Vellenders’ marriage was celebrated at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament in Islington on 7 August 1920; Lily was 24 and Norman 27. Edith and Percy Thompson would undoubtedly have attended their friends’ wedding, and one John Dunford acted as a witness.³ John Dunford died in Crawley in West Sussex in 1983 at the age of 86, close to Horley. He is not to be confused with Reginald Arthur Dunsford, who is mentioned by Edith in her letters and who worked with her at Carlton & Prior where he was a traveller.  The Vellenders’ Catholicism may have been a contributory reason to Edith’s eagerness to receive the ministrations of Canon Palmer during her last hours (CJ 289).

The ‘lifelong friend’ met Edith Graydon at school for the first time when Edith was nine years old, and the friend later refers to having known Edith (who turned 29 on Christmas Day 1922) for twenty years. She attended the Thompsons’ wedding in Manor Park in 1916, and she knew Percy as well as his mother and family. She claims to have been present with Percy at the Thompsons’ one day (presumably Richard Thompson’s home in Ilford) when Edith was spotted with Bywaters in Wanstead Park, while Percy thought that she was at the theatre. She moreover knew about Bywaters, and she tells us how she once tried to warn Edith against carrying on with Freddy. She recalls a visit in September 1922 to Edith’s and Percy’s home, and she remarks on how Edith seemed to be quite indulgent of Percy’s grumpiness. She is also familiar with the appearance of the porch of Carlton & Prior’s. But the most important clue of all perhaps is her casual defence of Edith’s passion for hats (against Richard Thompson’s charge of immoral extravagance) by noting that Edith sometimes changed her hats twice in one afternoon. It is probable that only someone who worked with Edith at Carlton & Prior and knew of her double duties as manageress and buyer, which required her to be smart at all times, could have known this.

Most of these details fit Lily Vellender, even though I could not find her father John Goodwin on the Electoral Roll of the official catchment area of the Kensington Avenue Schools for the period when Edith Graydon attended there. But then Lily’s father abandoned his family when she was young, and Lily, her younger brother, and her mother may have lived with her mother’s family after the separation.

Lily and Norman visited Edith and Percy on Sunday 17 September 1922, and Edith was congratulated that day by Norman Vellender on her home-made chutney. Was it Lily who took the photographs of Edith and Percy which I originally dated at 3 September and attributed to Bessie? On at least one other occasion when Edith and Percy visited the Vellenders in their garden in Islington, a number of photographs were taken, and one of those shows Edith standing between Percy and Norman.

Lily certainly knew about Edith’s affair with Bywaters, and on Monday 25 September 1922 and again on the Friday before the murder she joined Freddy in Fuller’s tea-room to keep him company until Edith was free.⁴Bessie also knew about the affair, and she may have lied for Edith about a visit to the theatre with her on 30 March 1922, when in reality Edith was out on the town with Bywaters (CJ 94-102). She also asked after Freddy on Sunday 21 May 1922 when she and Reg picked up Edith, Percy, and Avis for a long spin in the car (CJ 120). Lily moreover dreamt one night in April 1922 that Percy was going to murder Edith because he had discovered that she had been out with ‘a fair man’ (CJ 102-3). Lily related her nightmare to Edith, and it may well be to this incident that the ‘lifelong friend’ alluded in Loyd’s Sunday News of 7 January 1923, when she claimed to have tried to reason with Edith over Bywaters months earlier. Edith saw Lily every day except Sundays, and the Vellenders had been on holiday with the Thompsons on at least two recorded occasions, and probably more often. Lily is an intrinsically more likely candidate for a confidant than Bessie Akam.

Would Lily have fabricated her role in the outing to the theatre? I do not think so now any more than I did in 1988, when I assumed that the ‘friend’ was Bessie. But it is puzzling that she was not cross-examined about these crucial hours by Curtis-Bennett, and that neither Edith nor her aunt and uncle, the Laxtons, refer to Lily’s presence then. The ‘lifelong friend’s’ recollection of that evening is very precise (CJ 177), and she relates it twice in two separate articles (LSN 17 & 24 xii. 1922). The fact that she remembers a remark in the foyer of the Criterion Theatre about the chill that night and Percy’s not wearing a coat authenticates her account further, since it was indeed cold on 3 October 1922.⁵See Criminal Justice 173 and Notable British Trials (1923), page 21 (evidence of police sergeant Walter Mew).

There is an additional piece of information extant about that same evening, and I may originally have underestimated its importance. In her plea for clemency to the Prime Minister, Avis Graydon insisted that a fortnight before 3 October she had been invited along to the theatre, and that she had planned to spend that night at her sister’s in Ilford. She would therefore have accompanied the Thompsons on their way home from the station, which proved, according to Avis, that her sister could not possibly have set up an encounter with Bywaters in the Belgrave Road (CJ 271).

The outing of that night had indeed been initiated by the women’s aunt Lillie Laxton, and it is quite natural that the aunt should have invited Avis along, since the younger Graydon daughter, who was still without a male companion, frequently joined the others as a member of the party. I had originally set little store by Avis’s cancelling at short notice, although the reason that she gave had always struck me as odd. She withdrew, she told Percy on the telephone, because she ‘had already made arrangements to go out for mother’. If her mother had been sick this would have been perfectly intelligible, since Avis would have been needed to do her mother’s shopping. But Mrs Graydon was fine. There was, I suspect, a reason much closer to Avis’s heart for being at ‘mother’s’, and that is because the night of the theatre coincided with Freddy Bywaters’s last night of shore-leave. Avis probably stayed at home to spend the evening with Freddy. I argued in 1988 that Edith’s insistent invitation to Bywaters to ‘do something tomorrow night’, something that would make him forget even though it might hurt her, referred to his taking her sister out.

What happened was probably that Bywaters called Avis on Tuesday 3 October after lunching with Edith and arranged to go and see her in Manor Park; and that she then pulled out of the theatre. One of the terrible ironies of this story is that Freddy was gravitating back towards Avis, and both Avis and Edith knew this. If Freddy had not killed Percy Thompson that night, it is very likely from the way things were shaping up that he might have found his way back to Avis altogether during the course of his next visit. Instead, by the time his ship returned, he was close to death at Pentonville.

It may be the case that Percy rang Edith after hearing from Avis that she was unable to join them, and that Edith then invited Lily to replace Avis; but it is more probable that she had already done so, since Bywaters must have told her over lunch at the latest about going out to East Ham that evening to see the Graydons. The fact that it was during the ‘late afternoon’ of 3 October that Avis dropped out only really leaves someone with whom Edith worked as a possible replacement. Lily Vellender fits this scenario better than anybody else from Edith’s circle of friends and acquaintances.

We may never know the answer to these questions for certain. Lily, whom everybody had adored, the girl with the quick smile and the big heart, died almost destitute in a first floor flat in Hove in December 1974. A removal firm cleared out all her belongings, including her correspondence. Among it there would almost certainly have been letters by Edith Thompson, whether or not Lily was the ‘lifelong friend’ from Lloyd’s Sunday News. Everything was destroyed, with the exception of a few snapshots, two of which are reproduced here.

In order to understand what truly happened in this 1920s tragedy the full facts needed to be put before the reader, to allow Edith Thompson’s innocence to speak for itself. A knowledge of the most intimate details of Edith’s life was required to refute the allegations about her. The prosecution had turned her life before the murder into a simplistic, linear and purposeful narrative whose sole goal was murder. But human reality is so much more varied and complex, and I tried to convey some of that inconsequential chaos in my diaristic account of her life. By doing so I also hoped to be able to commemorate Edith Thompson more effectively, because I believed that my readers would empathise with the inner recesses of her life.

Such exposure may sometimes demean the subject under the spotlight, but no holds can be barred where a distortion of the truth cost a young woman her life. To establish the true facts it was necessary to talk about Edith Thompson’s sexuality, her periods, her pregnancies and her weight. The hollow pudeur that precluded discussing these matters at the trial connived with dragging a healthy, innocent young woman to the gallows. This was forcefully recognized by James Douglas, a leading journalist of the day. He claimed, as a scoop, to have discovered that Edith Thompson’s correspondence was in reality concerned with female sexuality and not murder; that many of the more sinister passages read out in Court made sense only if they were interpreted as treating of terminations and abortifacients (or ‘abortives’ in the phrase of the time), and not of poisoning (Sunday Express 21 January 1923). Most people following the trial had suspected this all along, and by the time Douglas rode to Edith’s rescue she was dead; instead of being her champion, he had cravenly betrayed her by not revealing a truth that might her saved her life.

In the course of writing this book in the 1980s I immersed myself more deeply in Edith Thompson’s tragic and short existence than seemed at times bearable. She had been a living, breathing, human being with every right to her secrets. She gave much and was loved back by many. Like thousands of her contemporaries she was unhappily married, but her options for resolving this were fewer than they would be now. A passing glance at her immediate circle of acquaintances underlines the extent to which she was no different from others. Thus Dr Wallis, the GP who treated her as a little girl in Manor Park, become embroiled in a tragic love triangle (CJ 83-4); her employer Herbert Carlton was a cheerful womaniser who in the end ran off with a girl from the shop-floor; and the Thompsons’ friend, the wealthy Sidney Birnage, kept a mistress in a flat in London and tried to sell his married home behind his wife’s back (Avis Graydon interview, 1973). He may well have wanted to step into Bywaters’s shoes with the mistress of 41 Kensington Gardens (CJ 114-15), and plenty of other men (‘Mel’ and ‘Derry’ among them) were only too eager to be seen with Edith.

Although these events happened nearly eighty years ago, Edith was not very different from the urban professionals of my generation. She had absorbed the same Shakespeare plays as my contemporaries and me, and at Holloway she was reading Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend which I had been urged to study in my first year at university. Her father’s cry of incredulity, that something so outlandish as a trial for murder should happen to ‘people like us’, has echoed down the twentieth century. Writing about Edith Thompson, Professor Jane Miller of the University of London Institute of Education noted:

If Edith and Freddy had been born fifty years later they would probably have stayed on at school until the age of sixteen, and, given their intelligence and their interests, the chances are good that they would have taken some A levels and proceeded to university, perhaps to read English. Yet their reading and their writing were disparaged as ‘uneducated’, undiscriminating, even though their brief schooling clearly ‘took’ in ways which must have had something to do with their confidence that they would get jobs after school and that the education they were getting would be useful in such jobs. (School for Women: Virago 1996,187)

Edith Thompson tried to bend reality to make her dreams come true. Like the rest of us she occasionally behaved foolishly and often selfishly, but she never acted in the spirit of wickedness that was imputed to her in court. She has sometimes been compared to Emma Bovary, the protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s famous novel Madame Bovary (1857). Emma had married in the hope of romantic love, but marriage failed to deliver happiness to her, and she therefore thought that she must have made a mistake. According to Flaubert, ‘Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres. [And Emma endeavoured to find out what exactly was meant in real life by the words happiness, passion and total abandon which had struck her as so beautiful in her books.]’ (Madame Bovary, chapter V)

Edith Thompson dared to do just that with the consequences that we know.

The fact that people who had known Edith were still alive in the 1980s rendered a sense of her immediacy particularly acute then. Even at the time that I am writing this Preface, Edith Thompson’s most famous surviving contemporary is thriving. It was a few days after Edith Thompson’s death that the future King and Elizabeth of Glamis became officially engaged to be married.

At some point in the mid-1980s I visited Edith’s and Percy’s home in Ilford in the company of Mrs Audrey Russell. The Thompsons’ garden was virtually identical to what it had been on 1 August 1921 when Percy struck Edith and Freddy Bywaters intervened (CJ 54-55). It felt to us as if somehow the conversation of that day still hung heavily in the air. As we ascended the stairs towards the bedrooms, we both felt uneasy. When finally we stood in the ill-starred couple’s room and looked up at the same ceiling and bow-window that Edith had gazed at in the early hours of the morning when she could not sleep, it seemed like a journey too far. All I could think of was of how desperately she had wanted to come home to these very rooms from the nightmare of Holloway.

At 41 Kensington Gardens I thought that I had come as close as it was possible to be to this tragic tale. I was mistaken, because the most revealing window on this story of 80 years ago was yet to open, and it was precisely to do with the house. It was in the early 1990s when a chance enquiry produced the auction catalogue for 41 Kensington Gardens which, I now learnt, was first sold with a 99-year lease on 25 March 1901 so that Edith’s and Percy’s lease ran to just over 80 years.

The catalogue preserves the Thompsons’ rooms the way they were when Edith walked out of the house for the last time at noon on 4 October 1922. All that is missing are her and Percy’s clothes, although a few of his personal belongings such as his silver match box, silk handkerchiefs, and gent’s leather suitcase were still in the house. What happened was that shortly after charging Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters with murder, the police sealed all the Thompsons’ rooms in the house. At some point thereafter the Lesters were evicted, and on Thursday 27 September 1923 the house in Kensington Gardens was auctioned off.

In the catalogue’s pages Edith’s most precious possessions were itemised, those very things that Mrs Lester and others recalled her cherishing so much. Of all the intimate details of her most private life and thoughts that were exposed to the public gaze in and out of court, this inventory of her house and furnishings was the most poignant. I wrote ‘her’ rather than ‘their’ because almost everything in the house seems to have been chosen by her, and most of it she had paid for.

At the auction everything went, and people apparently were so desperate for mementoes from the property that they ripped the leaves off the privet hedge at the front of the house and tore twigs from the trees in the gardens.⁶It has been reported that Edith’s parents were present and bidding for some of their child’s belongings, but that they could not afford them, because the prices were too high. It may be more likely that her brother Newenham attended: the family’s copy of the 1923 Auction Catalogue, with all the fetched prices pencilled in the margin (see Images and Media), was in his possession and is now owned by the author.

Some details about the furniture of Edith’s home have long been known, of course, including the wicker couch and deck chair in the garden. In the two most famous photographs of the doomed threesome, one with Edith pointing up, the other showing her sandwiched between the two men, the wicker settee is clearly visible; and Percy’s right hand rests on the deck chair in the last photograph of him and his wife.

Percy was a keen gardener and subscribed to gardening magazines, but that he boasted a blow lamp in his glass house in addition to a ‘Green’s mower’ and an 18 in. twin cylinder roller was an unexpected revelation in the catalogue; as was the fact that the Thompsons kept a dozen novels in the glass house. It turns out that hoards of novels were to be found in the bedrooms, as well as in the drawing-room, in its china cabinet, and in the hall where there were some 60 novels as well as a multi-volume History of the Great War.

At the time of the tragedy the couple occupied the drawing-room at the front of the house, the breakfast room (or morning-room) at the back, the garden, the scullery with the outside lavatory, and the glass house (see the diagram, CJ 36). The hall, scullery, and perhaps the kitchen too were covered by what the catalogue describes as ‘black and white lino’, that is, probably, a diamond-check pattern of black and white.

Upstairs they owned the large bow-window bedroom, which ran over the hall and drawing-room, and the small bedroom. This bedroom was briefly occupied by Freddy in 1921. It gave over the garden at the back, and it was adjacent to the bathroom, which must have been shared with the tenants. It was fitted with a bath, a W.C., and a washhand basin. Its taps ran hot and cold water, probably from the boiler in the breakfast room. Edith occasionally used the bathroom for writing to Freddy or for escaping from Percy.

Two pieces of furniture from the master bedroom at 41 Kensington Gardens are prominently mentioned in Edith’s letters. They were the ottoman at the foot of the Thompsons’ bed and the broken mirror of Edith’s dressing table.

One night when Edith returned from an assignation with Freddy Bywaters, she found Percy reclining on the ottoman in one of his more melodramatic poses (CJ 124). At the auction someone paid £1.3s. for it. But an impressive £29, the equivalent of an above-average monthly middle class salary, was fetched by the Thompsons’ ‘Inlaid Mahogany Bedroom Suite’. According to her father, the suite had originally been purchased by Edith from her own money. It comprised

[a] 4ft. dressing table with long oval-shaped bevelled swing mirror in centre, two trinket drawers over and one long and four small drawers under, and drop centre, [b] washstand with Sicilian marble top and back and chamber cupboard under, [c] 5ft. wardrobe with pair doors, each with long oval-shaped bevelled mirror, enclosing hanging presses and with two small drawers under, and [d] 2 cane-seat chairs

Is was the cheval glass mirror of the dressing table that Edith had inadvertently shattered in May 1922 while hanging new curtains with her mother (CJ 115). These were probably not the lace curtains that ran along the lower sash windows, but either the ‘six pairs curtains’ or the ‘five pairs curtains’ which were now selling at £1.6s. and £1.5s. respectively.

Edith may have liked mahogany, because her 4ft. 6in. bedstead consisted of inlaid mahogany as indeed did the chest of drawers and the mahogany furnishings of the drawing-room.⁷The chest of drawers contained the Thompsons’ stationery, photographs, and gloves: see Filson Young (ed.), Notable British Trials, page 35. The bedroom also contained, among others, a cane easy chair, a white enamelled wicker chair with cushion, and at least two electric lights. The ‘pink electric shade’ had bead trimmings.

The master bedroom contained in addition a number of vases and china ornaments, at least five cushions, sheets, bolster, pillows, pillow cases, white quilt and a coloured eiderdown. Among the most affecting items in the catalogue was Edith’s ten-piece, black and white ‘service de toilette’, which was ‘decorated with flowers and birds’.

There were no fire-places in the upstairs bedrooms. Instead, both the front bedrooms were fitted with ‘Register Stoves’ and had Sicilian marble mantelpieces. One of the two large bedrooms had a built-in wardrobe cupboard. This would have been the Thompsons’ room, and it probably ran past the outside wall towards the mantel-piece. That is certainly where the fitted wardrobe (of a different vintage, of course) was in the 1980s.

In the small bedroom, which lay on the left of the landing from the master bedroom, was Percy’s medicine chest, which is listed as a ‘white enamelled medicine cupboard’. Avis had once retrieved tincture of opium from it (CJ 107). The furniture here was oak, and so was the 2ft. 6in. bedstead of the single bed ‘with wire spring, wool mattress, feather pillow and bolster’. It was on this bed and in this room that Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters consummated their relationship for the first time on his nineteenth birthday on 27 June 1921.

The drawing-room floor downstairs was covered with linoleum on top of which sat a sheepskin rug and a ‘bordered thick pile carpet’ complete with ‘circle designed centre’. Like the master bedroom above it, it was fitted with a ‘Register Stove’, and it had a tiled hearth and a marble mantelpiece. Percy Thompson had installed a gas fire in this room, and this is duly listed under Lot 87.⁸See Notable British Trials, page 30. It also contained a mahogany drawing-room suite with silk upholstery, a mahogany side-board, and a china cabinet which was 4ft. wide and stood 6ft. high, with a bow-front centre and a glass door.

Inside the cabinet Edith kept her finest china, consisting of a Limoges dessert service in dark blue and gold (perhaps a wedding present?), and a number of other pieces, including a whole set of Goss china, which were little white and coloured china ornaments. It also contained, among others, three collections of novels, a number of Japanese prints (probably gifts from her sailor brothers), two small ebony elephants, cut tumblers and glasses, and ‘a Moore & Moore pianoforte in black case’, which may have been an elaborate porcelain ornament. As it happens, Edith had acquired a proper piano on hire-purchase, and this also stood in her drawing-room for a short time. It was repossessed soon after her arrest.

Here she also kept a black velvet cushion and three black satin ones. Two of these are clearly visible in the pictures of 10 July, and pictures 2 and 3 show Catalogue item 133, which was a ‘black velvet cushion decorated one side with roses and bunch of grapes’.

One of the more remarkable items in the drawing-room was a 16in. bronzed figure on a black base of the poet John Milton. The blind author of Paradise Lost may have composed parts of his masterpiece while he was hiding in Bartholomew Close within a few yards of Edith’s place of work in Aldersgate.

The Thompsons dined in the breakfast room. It was here that Edith entertained her family and friends for Sunday lunches and the occasional dinner party. The room, which had cork lino on the floor, opened into the garden through French windows with sun blinds, and it connected across the hall with the kitchen and scullery. It boasted a fire place with tiled cheeks and tiled hearth, and above this ran an enamelled slate mantelpiece. There was an ‘inter-oven stove with boiler back’, which would have provided the hot water for the bathroom above it, china cupboards, and a tall oak dresser. Above all, here stood the deal top table against which Edith fell when Percy struck her on 1 August 1921. It had stained legs and one drawer, and it measured 4ft. 6in. x 2ft. 9in. The six chairs with imitation leather seats which are also listed would have comfortably fitted around it. But the saddest item in the room was a ‘lady’s folding work basket’. It had rested in Edith’s lap on the same 1 August as she sat sewing in her garden and was unable to find a pin she needed.

The Thompsons’ house was well appointed and full of beautiful things. By the time Edith and Percy were 28 and 32 respectively they were well off. Indeed they were almost prosperous, because the many acquisitions for the house did not come about at the cost of major material sacrifices. Edith regularly went out for City and West End lunches, thés dansants in the Waldorf, and theatres and concerts all over London. By the time of her arrest she had enjoyed a successful business career for at least twelve years. After reading Criminal Justice one of her contemporaries remarked to me ‘She didn’t half have a good life, all those rich lunches and visits to the theatre’. The speaker was Mrs Myrtle Ellwood. She was the owner of the photograph from which the print at the graveside had been taken, and I traced her not long after my first visit to Brookwood.

By the time I met her, Myrtle Ellwood was an octogenarian widow who lived alone in a small cottage at 86, Islingword Road in Brighton. She had earlier given a copy of one of her snapshots to the indefatigable Trevor Mallett, who at the time carried a lonely torch for Edith Thompson. It was Trevor who had placed it where I eventually found it. Few people know as much about this case as he does, and in his quiet way Trevor Mallett has been a source of inspiration.

Myrtle Ellwood and I became fast friends. When Criminal Justice first appeared, she rang round the public libraries in Sussex to make sure that they all stocked it. She wanted to boost my sales, she told me. Myrtle and her sister had worked alongside Edith Thompson at Carlton & Prior’s, first in the Barbican and later in Aldersgate. After one of the firm’s outings Edith had even suggested that Myrtle and the other girls from the shop floor must come and see her in Ilford.

Myrtle had carefully kept her photographs from the firm’s day-trips to Horley and to Eastcote in 1921 and 1922. A number of them are reproduced here. She never thought that they might be of interest to anyone other than herself.

But then, in 1973, the BBC screened a lavish costume drama with Francesca Annis in the lead. It was called A Pin to See the Peepshow, after the famous novel by Tennyson Jesse which was based closely on the story of Edith Thompson and Freddy Bywaters. The BBC’s production generated renewed interest in the case, and it prompted Myrtle Ellwood to write to the Radio Times. In her letter she expressed her sadness at the memory of those long-gone days echoed in her snapshots:

You see, I worked at Carlton and Prior’s and remember well the terrible shock it was at the time to us all. My snaps of Miss Graydon and Percy Thompson are happy ones, and my memories are, too.
Looking at them, I wonder how many of the group are alive today…Many I know have followed poor Edith Thompson to Eternity.

Myrtle could not know that Edith Thompson’s best friends from Carlton & Prior, Norman and Lily Vellender, had also retired to Brighton, where Norman died in 1969 at the age of 76, predeceasing Lily by five years.

Lily Vellender died a year after the broadcasting of A Pin to See the Peepshow. Did she, like Avis, watch it? Such was the publicity for the BBC’s production at the time that she could hardly avoid being aware of it, and she was lucid almost to the end. But a direct participant from this 1920s tragedy was not only alive then, but lasted well beyond the original publication of this book in 1988. She was one of Freddy Bywaters’s sisters, and she lived not far from Myrtle Aldridge. It seems that she enjoyed a prosperous life after the terrible tragedy of 1922-3, although, as with Avis Graydon, it is hard to imagine that a single day passed in those long subsequent years when she did not remember the fair-haired boy from her days in Westow Street.

One of Freddy’s best childhood friends had been Bill West from Beechwood Gardens in Ilford, and Bill proved to be the most inspired source of information on his friend Freddy Bywaters. In the mid-1980s when we met he was in excellent health and regularly travelled from Gants Hill to the theatre in the Barbican. He was unaware of the fact that Avis Graydon, whom he had known in the 1910s, had for many years lived only four streets away from him.

Bill was blessed with an acute memory, and not only interpreted his wonderful photographs to me, but joined me in a visit to his old school. He was astonished by how little it had all changed, and he showed me where he and young Bywaters used to hang their coats on (probably) the same coat-hooks. In front of the classrooms he pointed out the exact position of the table with the handbell. Bill remained proud of the fact that his friend Freddy had enjoyed the trust of the school to the point of becoming its bellman.

He then asked me whether we could drive past his own childhood home just across the Browning bridge. This we did. We sat in the car and looked up at the modest terraced villa in Chesterford Road before proceeding from there to Freddy Bywaters’s house. As we turned the corner to head down towards 72 Rectory Road, Bill reminded me that it was at the intersection of the two roads before the bridge that he used to meet Freddy on the way to school. Bill West’s composure and courtesy were those of a perfect Edwardian gentleman, but he was nearly overcome as we sat in silence outside Freddy’s home. He had recognized it at once. ‘It makes me very sad’, he remarked, and as we drove back towards his immaculate home he was subdued.

I last saw Bill West in the King George Hospital in Ilford. He had suffered a brain haemorrhage when he fell from a ladder while decorating his house. His daughter told me that at his bedside sat a library copy of A Pin to See the Peepshow. There seemed to be so much more for him and me to discuss, but I took comfort from the fact that I had enjoyed the privilege of his friendship at all, even if it was far too briefly. At Bill’s funeral in the City of London cemetery I was mindful of the fact that Avis Graydon had come to this same place to mourn for her parents, and that both Percy and Richard Thompson rested not far from the chapel where we stood.

Since the first publication of this book in 1988 I have received a substantial correspondence from members of the public. They desired to know whether an approach was being made to the Home Secretary, and they almost invariably expressed their indignation at the unjust treatment of Edith Thompson at the hands of a system that was pledged to protect the innocent.

Two people in particular made contact, and they profoundly influenced the direction this story was to take. They were Professor William Twining of the Faculty of Laws at UCL, my own university, and John Clarke of the Brookwood Cemetery Society, who has since also become a colleague at UCL by joining its Institute of Child Health.

William Twining is a distinguished professor of jurisprudence and a world authority on Wigmorean analysis, a rigorous system of analysing forensic evidence named after its chief practitioner, the famous American jurist John Henry Wigmore. Unbeknown to me William Twining had for years worked on the case of Thompson and Bywaters, and his extensive teaching notes on it were the foundation of a high-powered course at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the University of London. Like me he was adamant that Edith Thompson was innocent, and that she had never been proven guilty by any acceptable legal standard of proof. His published analyses of some of the most incriminating material, such as the lines ‘Darlint – do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget’ and ‘I’ll risk and try if you will – we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest’, afford a classic deconstruction of the interpretation put on the sentences by the Crown in 1922. We decided to make common cause, and since the late 1980s William Twining and I have collaborated on the case of Edith Thompson.

John Clarke contacted me in the early 1990s. He was then a librarian in Sheffield but a native of Surrey. He and the Brookwood Cemetery Society, which he chairs, became the driving force behind the move to erect a proper memorial to Edith Thompson. In the end a number of us shared the cost of the handsome granite slab which now covers Edith Thompson’s final resting place.

Some seven or eight years earlier I had made the acquaintance of the Reverend Barry Arscott of St Barnabas in Manor Park, Edith Thompson’s local church. Barry had taken me into the church where Edith Thompson was married in 1916, and he had allowed me to inspect the register in the vestry, which she had signed in that same place on 15 January 1916.

In 1993 Barry once more made himself available, this time as master of the proceedings. His sermon struck a chord in all our hearts. As we were gathered under a canopy of umbrellas, he spoke with solemn dignity about the young woman who had formerly been of his parish. Here are his words.

‘Sermon at the Service for the Dedication of a Memorial Stone in memory of Edith Jessie Thompson, Saturday, November 13th 1993 11am at Brookwood Cemetery’.

Later on, we shall dedicate this stone in memory of Edith Jessie Thompson, seventy years after her death. Those who have worked hard to see that Edith’s resting place does not go unmarked are to be congratulated.

Edith’s tragic death and the circumstances are well known to us all and she will not be forgotten, but we place and dedicate this stone here today, first because it would have been what her family would have wanted and because we want to acknowledge and recognise Edith alongside all the departed; no one should be treated as though they never were; but secondly, we have this ceremony, I believe, because of the way in which she died, and the injustice of that should never be forgotten.

John Donne, the poet, said ‘Everyman’s death diminishes me’, and it is true that when someone we love dies, part of us dies too. But in the case of this particular death, we may well say Edith’s death diminished humanity, and there are a number of lessons we need to learn and take heart from it.

First though I want to reinforce the Christian view about death; that it is not an end, that we go through death to eternal life, that all the departed remain in the loving hands of God. If that is your own particular belief, thank God for it and ask him to strengthen your faith and hope in eternal life. The God I believe in is a God who is present with us at all times, here and for ever. He is a God of love and forgiveness who holds us all in his heart. As our reading (Romans 8. vv.18.28,35,37-39) suggested, nothing can separate us from Him and His love, whoever we are, whatever we may have done.

We do not try to paint Edith as a saint; we know that, like all of us, she wasn’t blameless. But it is not our place to judge. We leave whatever judging there may be to God who I have to say is much more loving and accepting and forgiving than we could ever be. It is reassuring to know that God knows us and understands our failings; He knows the truth about Edith. She is not beyond his love.

There are other lessons that need reinforcing. We believe that Edith was put to death unjustly. Her execution was just one of a number that have been proved to be unjust. It’s a salutary reminder that it is not man’s place to play God, and it’s incumbent on all of us who believe capital punishment to be wrong, to make sure that those who may seek to re-introduce it fail to do so. In a sense, this ceremony today prevents the whole sordid issue from being swept under the carpet.

As we remember Edith today, we cannot forget all those other people who were caught up in this tragedy; Edith’s parents and the rest of her family, especially Avis Graydon who kept faith with Edith right up to the end of her life; Percy Thompson and his family; Freddy Bywaters and his mother and family. They too all remain in God’s loving embrace. We pray that they, along with Edith, know God’s eternal peace and joy and mercy in the belief that nothing can separate them or us from Him and His love.

There then followed a prayer of dedication:

Eternal God and Father, from whose love neither death or life can separate us; we dedicate this stone in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, to the memory of Edith Jessie Thompson; in Your mercy we ask You to bless her with Your love and pray that she, with all the departed, may know the peace and joy of eternal life in fellowship with You. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord.

[Film of 1993 Brookwood Service of Dedication]

During the ceremony words spoken by William Twining came into my mind. We were driving to Ilford one day when, with reference to asking the Home Office to reopen the case of Edith Thompson, William told me quietly, but firmly, ‘We know that Edith was innocent, and so does everybody who has ever looked at this case. That in the end matters more than symbolic acts of restitution by the Home Office.’

But if Edith’s innocence is so self-evident to anyone who has read and studied the evidence, then we need to go the extra distance and secure a full pardon, particularly now that the Criminal Cases Review Commission has been set up, with the aim precisely to investigate miscarriages of justice such as this one.

The last words in this new Preface should properly belong to Edith Thompson and her mother. I found two more letters after the paperback publication of Criminal Justice in 1990. The letter by Edith dates from Saturday 23 December 1922, two days before her twenty-ninth birthday at Christmas, and is addressed to her aunt Edith Walkinshaw, the mother of the Leonard Walkinshaw who is referred to in the letter and on page 267. The letter by Edith’s mother needs no gloss.

Holloway Prison
December 23, 1922

Dear Auntie – It was good of you to send me in the book; it will help to pass a good many weary hours away, when my mind is more settled.
At present I can’t think – I can’t even feel. When I was told the result of the appeal yesterday [CJ 265], it seemed the end of everything.
In Life, Death seems too awful to contemplate, especially when Death is the punishment for something I have not done, did not know of, either at the time or previously.
I have been looking back over my life, & wondering what it has brought me [sic] – I once said “Only ashes and dust and bitterness”, and today it seems even less than this. – if there can be less.
This last ordeal seems to be the ultimate end of that gradual drifting through Life, passing each event, each disappointment, so many of which I have encountered and met with a smiling face and an aching heart. [for these two paragraphs, see inset]
Auntie dear, I have learnt the lesson that it is not wise to meet and try to overcome all your trials alone – when the end comes, as it has to me, nobody understands.
If only I had been able to forfeit my pride, that pride that resents pity, and talk to someone, I can see now how different things might have been, but it’s too late now to rake over ashes in the hope of finding some live coal.
When I first came into this world, and you stood to me as godmother, I am sure you never anticipated such an end as this for me. Do you know, people have told me from time to time that to be born on Christmas Day was unlucky, and my answer has always been, ‘Superstition is only good for ignorant people’, but now I am beginning to believe that they are right; it is unlucky.
However, what is to be will be. Somewhere I read ‘The fate of every man hath he bound about his neck’, and this, I suppose, I must accept as mine.
I’m glad I’ve talked to you for a little while. I feel better – it seems to lift me out of this abyss of depression into which I have fallen, and I know you will understand, not only what I have said, but all my thoughts that are not collected enough to put on paper.
Thank Leonard for me for his letter. It made me laugh, and it’s good to laugh just for five minutes. I’ll write to him another day. I can’t now – but I know he will understand.

EDITH

Eighteen days later, after seeing her child’s body at Holloway that morning, Edith’s mother wrote a letter to the press

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

René Weis
University College London, 2001