This is the last letter written by Edith Thompson before the killing of her husband, Percy, by her lover Freddy Bywaters. I am reproducing it (slightly cut) because it was written, in fits and starts during Edith’s working day, on the 2nd October, ie today, in 1922. A Monday. The fatal stabbing took place tomorrow, sometime around midnight, as the Thompsons were walking from Ilford station back to their marital home after an evening at the Criterion theatre. Both Freddy and Edith were hanged for the crime.
I remain obsessed with the case (longstanding subscribers, to whom fond thanks, will know this). I have been writing a TV script about it, which obviously keeps these things in one’s head. But that is not the only reason. The best expression of why the story stays fixed in my mind is in an unrelated quotation from Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (whose instinctual ability to say what she means is, I sometimes think, unparalleled).
Poirot asked:
“What do you see so plainly? The witnesses? The counsel? The judge? The accused standing in the dock?”
Fogg said quietly:
“That’s the reason, of course! You’ve put your finger on it. I shall always see her…”
It is her. It is Edith. The highly singular Everywoman, the ambitious alluring girl from the East London lower-middle-classes who sought that nameless more from life, the natural-born writer whose words were an expression of her urge for freedom and would wrap her in chains.
This last letter was handed to Freddy Bywaters - the handsome merchant seaman eight years her junior - later that day, probably over tea on 2nd October. Freddy had returned to England on 23rd September, after a four-month voyage during which he had tried to break things off with Edith. He succumbed on the 25th and since then the couple had met regularly at Fullers tea-room, across the road from her place of work in the City. They had also - the previous Saturday - had an afternoon meeting at some nameless site near her Ilford home, possibly Wanstead Park, whose pagan pleasures seem to have been new to Edith, and to have lit a dangerous flame in the twenty-year-old Freddy.
After that Edith went out with her husband, four nights running.
The following letter became Exhibit 60 at the couple’s Old Bailey trial in December. My commentary (edited here) is from Au Revoir Now Darlint: The Collected Letters of Edith Thompson, published by Unbound.
Darlingest lover of mine, thank you, thank you, oh thank you a thousand times for Friday – it was lovely – its always lovely to go out with you
And then Saturday – yes I did feel happy – I didn’t think a teeny bit about anything in this world, except being with you – and all Saturday evening I was thinking about you – I was just with you in a big arm chair in front of a great big fire feeling all the time how much I had won – cos I have darlint, won such a lot – it feels such a great big thing to me sometimes – that I can’t breathe
When you are away and I see girls with men walking along together – perhaps they are acknowledged sweethearts – they look so ordinary then I feel proud – so proud to think and feel that you are my lover and even tho’ not acknowledged I can still hold you – just with a tiny ‘hope.’
Darlint, we’ve said we’ll always be Pals haven’t we, shall we say we’ll always be lovers – even tho’ secret ones, or is it (this great big love) a thing we can’t control – dare we say that – I think I will dare Yes I will I’ll always love you – if you are dead – if you have left me even if you don’t still love me, I always shall you
Your love to me is now, it is something different, it is my life and if things should go badly with us, I shall always have this past year to look back upon and feel that ‘Then I lived’ I never did before and I never shall again
…
It seems like a great welling up of love – of feeling – of inertia, just as if I am wax in your hands – to do with as you will and I feel that if you do as you wish I shall be happy, its physical purely and I can’t really describe it – but you will understand darlint wont you? You said you knew it would be like this one day – if it hadn’t would you have been disappointed. Darlingest when you are rough, I go dead – try not to be please.
…
I tried so hard to find a way out of tonight darlingest but he was suspicious and still is – I suppose we must make a study of this deceit for some time longer. I hate it I hate every lie I have to tell to see you – because lies seem such small mean things to attain such an object as ours. We ought to be able to use great big things for great big love like ours. I’d love to be able to say ‘I’m going to see my lover tonight.’ If I did he would prevent me – there would be scenes and he would come to 168 [Aldersgate Street, her place of work] and interfere and I couldn’t bear that – I could be beaten all over at home and still be defiant – but at 168 it’s different It’s my living – you wouldn’t let me live on him would you and I shouldn’t want to – darlint its funds that are our stumbling block – until we have those we can do nothing. Darlingest find me a job abroad I’ll go tomorrow and not say I was going to a soul and not have one little regret I said I wouldn’t think – that I’d try to forget circumstances Pal, help me to forget again – I have succeeded up to now – but its thinking of tonight and tomorrow when I can’t see you and feel you holding me
Darlint – do something tomorrow night will you? something to make you forget I’ll be hurt I know, but I want you to hurt me – I do really – the bargain now, seems so one sided – so unfair – but how can I alter it?
About the watch [a gift to him, which she was having mended] – I didn’t think you thought more of that – how can I explain what I did feel? I felt that we had parted – you weren’t going to see me – I had given you something to remind you of me and I had purposely retained it If I said “come for it” you would – but only the once and it would be as a pal
…
How I thought you would feel about the watch, I would feel about something I have
It isn’t mine, but it belongs to us and unless we were differently situated than we are now, I would follow you everywhere – until you gave it to me back
…
Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest.
Try & help PEIDI.
‘Do something tomorrow night’; ‘Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room’. The sentences leap out, even now.
Written in between the demands of work, the letter is undated. The couple met twice on Monday 2 October, for lunch and tea at Fullers, so logic suggests that she wrote it between those meetings and handed it to Freddy when they parted. Such was her desire to write - she wrote thousands of words to Freddy when he was overseas - that she did so even when her lover was at hand.
‘I tried so hard to find a way out of tonight darlingest boy but he was suspicious and still is’ – she had to spend the evening of 2 October with, of all people, her loathed brother-in-law Richard Thompson [who would later inform the police of her ‘friendship’ with Freddy].
And this paragraph might be said to hold Edith’s defence, against those who contended that she was plotting murder in this letter. For what she describes here is a continuation of the situation as it has always been: waiting, lying, planning to go abroad, not daring to provoke matters for fear of losing her job.
The line ‘I could be beaten all over’ is of grave interest, given the ongoing, unanswered questions about Percy’s own capacity for violence – the casual way in which it is mentioned compels belief, although with Edith one simply never knows. For she is also, of course, defending herself to Freddy. Everything that she writes in this paragraph has been written before, over and over, although here the pressure of events – the long separation, the tremulous bliss of reunion – give her words an unprecedented poetic force.
They had, in fact, reached the endgame. She was married and apparently always would be. If he too wanted to marry, then it would not be to her. She had reclaimed him at an immense cost to her pride, and with a remarkable expense of effort, but all she had really done was prove that she could do it. He had trailed back to her, her tame wolf, and her response was to go out with her husband: on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
What did he think, therefore? That she had pulled every trick in the book to get him back in order to say: life won’t always be like this, darlint, while at the same time making it perfectly clear that it would? It is possible to interpret her words – her very defeatism – as a challenge, which her prosecutors would call deliberate. Nothing will ever change, unless you change it. It is possible, indeed, that this is how Freddy read what she wrote.
The end of the paragraph deals with Edith’s attempts to ‘forget’ her circumstances. ‘Pal, help me to forget again’. Given this, the infamous phrase – ‘do something tomorrow night… something to make you forget’ – takes on a far less sinister aspect. It links, in fact, to what she had just written about herself. And it makes sense of the following exchange at the Old Bailey (where Edith’s words would have been greeted with palpable waves of scepticism):
‘What’, asked the solicitor general, ‘had Bywaters to forget?’
‘That I was going somewhere with my husband.’
‘What was he to do to make him forget that?’
‘I wanted him to take my sister Avis out.’
‘You say “I will be hurt, I know.” What did that mean?’
‘I should have been hurt by Bywaters being with a lady other than myself.’
This also explains the line: ‘the bargain now, seems so one-sided’ – it would be less so, went Edith’s reasoning, if Freddy went out with another girl. Indeed Avis, three years Edith’s junior, had been the original object of Freddy’s attentions (whereby hangs another tale).
And the remarkable fact is that Freddy did ask Avis out on the night of 3 October, when he visited the Graydon house before walking to Ilford. She told the Old Bailey:
‘As I was letting him out of the door he said to me, “I will be down to take you to the pictures tomorrow evening.” That arrangement was made by him just as I was letting him out the front door.’
Then: ‘Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest.
Try & help’
To her accusers, this seemed to offer up Edith’s guilt on a plate. It conjured – in truth it still does – a final breathless meeting at Fullers, in which the couple plotted the following night’s murder over the tea-cups.
‘Look at the end of that letter,’ the solicitor general said to her.
‘What had you discussed in the tearoom?’
To which she replied: ‘My freedom.’
The oddest thing about it is that this ‘Tea Room’ talk almost certainly does not refer to the meeting in Fullers on 2 October. The entirety of Edith’s letter relates to Monday – she describes, for instance, ‘thinking of tonight and tomorrow when I can’t see you’. Therefore if she handed it to Freddy when they met at tea, she cannot have been writing about what they discussed that day. The only other possibility is that she wrote this final sentence after they met. She might have left the letter at the office and added a coda the following morning, before giving it to Freddy on Tuesday 3rd. Which sounds unlikely.
So if her reference was to a conversation of the previous week, in which they met at the tea-room three times, it does rather take the heat out of it. There is no knowing what they talked about on, say, Friday 29 September. Obviously they dreamed about their future – the usual talk of ‘risk’, which may well have meant separation from Percy, moving abroad; ‘we only have 3 ¾ years left darlingest’, which alluded to a long-held suicide pact - a romantic nonsense of Edith’s, which in an unspeakable way did come true, wherein they would kill themselves after a period of time if they were not together. So she was writing, in her usual idiom, about the desire for things to change. There was no evidence whatsoever to say that she meant change brought about by murder.
Yet this is how the passage was analysed in the closing speech for the prosecution:
‘I ask – what did they talk about in the tea room? I put it that there was a long course of suggestion resulting in a desire to escape from the position, and a fresh suggestion was made in the tea room…’ With regard to the murder, and Freddy’s waylaying of Percy on his way home from the theatre: ‘There is the undoubted evidence in the letters upon which you can find that there was a preconcerted meeting between Mrs Thompson and Bywaters at the place’. This quite extraordinary statement, which defines the word ‘evidence’ in the most dystopian possible way – as meaning whatever the forces of law choose it to mean – can only have referred to the ‘tea room’ conversation.
How was it that Edith’s expensive defence did not emphasize that a) nobody knows what was talked about on that occasion; and b) there was no proof of when it took place? But the defence seemed in a dream, as if dazed by the impossibility of arguing against a case of shreds and patches.
In an ineffable Home Office memorandum of 28 December, written to bolster the case for the executions proceeding as planned, Sir Ernley Blackwell [a senior civil servant] stated smoothly: ‘Undoubtedly Bywaters knew their plans [where the Thompsons would be on the night of 3 October] and the Jury were certainly entitled to infer that at tea time, when they were together in the teashop, they arranged for the attack.’
It will be noted that ‘tea-rooms’ had now, mysteriously, acquired a proven connection to crime-plotting (even though on the 3rd, the day of the murder, the couple spent no time at all in Fullers – as Sir Ernley must have known), and that the correlation with Edith’s letter of the 2nd was now so loose as to be almost irrelevant. Effectively, Sir Ernley’s statement meant this: that it was legitimate to hang a person on what the jury inferred from a conversation of which nobody really knew anything, including when it happened.
There remains, however, the truly unanswerable question, the one that was no business of the law: what did Freddy understand by Edith’s words?
You offer a gripping and nuanced exploration of Edith Thompson’s final letter. How you weave historical detail with legal analysis provides a strong sense of the story's depth. This article evokes sympathy while questioning the broader narrative, making the piece poignant and thought-provoking.
Reading this twice Laura, really got me thinking..you know how much I can immerse myself in true crime, but particularly, the emotional psychology that is the catalyst... Edith's writing fascinates me here , much jumps out doesn't it..then I lived, beaten all over, she says (or alludes to) so much. I can absolutely understand why this case lives on in your mind, it's surrounded by sadness and what ifs, what if Freddy had managed to break free? What if Edith had been younger (would she have received such a harsh outcome,) what really went on behind those closed doors. Thank you so much for such a thought provoking read.