Thompson-Bywaters

In memoriam

I was going to post something else, then I saw the date and decided that I must instead release this, somewhat expanded, from behind the paywall…

Today, 102 years ago at 9am, Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were hanged simultaneously for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy. Edith, who had turned twenty-nine on Christmas Day, died at the now-demolished Holloway gaol; her lover Freddy, who was twenty, a couple of miles away at Pentonville.

He had fatally stabbed Percy at around midnight on 3-4 October 1922. That is beyond doubt, although murderous intent is to my mind far from certain. The extent of Edith’s involvement is still disputed (a request for a posthumous pardon was recently denied). The case against her was contained within love letters that she wrote to Freddy, which were read out to an Old Bailey where seats in the public gallery had sold for a fiver or more. The letters were construed, by an all-too-willing legal system - riding a wave of public prejudice against an adulterous, sexy, lower-middle-class, ‘uppish’ woman, with a career and no children - as evidence of conspiracy, incitement, and murder.

Quite coincidentally I have been thinking about these three people - Edith, Percy, Freddy - because I was looking something up in the 1921 England census and decided, as one does, to find them. There is something intoxicating about those lists of officialdom: the names, so harmless on the page, and the stories that they shield.

But none of the three were listed… which I could not understand, until I saw that the census recorded the whereabouts of people, quite specifically, on 19th June. And that was the day that the Thompsons, plus Freddy, were returning from a holiday on the Isle of Wight. How real that absence from the census made the event! They had gone there on the 11th, along with Edith’s younger sister Avis, who was in love with Freddy and in the vaguest possible way ‘going out’ with him. During the holiday, however, on the evening of the 17th, Freddy had declared his love for Edith. She described this in a letter written one year on:

It’s Friday now, darlint. I am wondering if you remember what your answer was to me in reply to my “What’s the matter” tonight of last year.

I remember quite well – “You know what’s the matter, I love you”.

Freddy left the holiday one week early, at the same time as the Thompsons; Percy, poor Percy, had invited him to lodge at their jointly-owned house, 41 Kensington Gardens, in the then aspirational suburb of Ilford. The image shows them together in the garden, Freddy to the left, Percy to the right, Edith between them. Freddy was a merchant seaman on leave, Edith had a further week off from her managerial job in the City, Percy was required back in his clerical office. Thus it was that at the end of June, in Freddy’s little lodger’s bedroom, that the love affair began.

Meanwhile the census impassively records the fact that on the 19th Avis was a ‘boarder’ at Esher House, The Esplanade, Shanklin, Isle of Wight. She had stayed on alone for a further week: the week that she had hoped to spend with Freddy.

And what a very grave pity it was that he did not remain there with her. I still feel the terrible power of these ‘what ifs’; still, ridiculously, hope that this story will end differently.

I have written two books about the Thompson-Bywaters case: Rex V Edith Thompson and, most recently, Au Revoir Now Darlint, an edited collection of Edith’s letters to Freddy (she had wisely destroyed most of his; the fact that a last passionate outpouring remained, not yet consigned to the fire in her office, is what convinces me that she had no foreknowledge of the attack on her husband).

This is from the introduction to Au Revoir Now Darlint.

What condemned her, essentially, were her own words: the letters that she had written to her lover, which were used by the legal system to ‘prove’ that she had conspired with Freddy and incited the crime.

A century ago, the content of the letters was what signified, although a handful of people saw them as remarkable in themselves. Now it is possible to see them as a record, perhaps unparalleled, of a woman seeking to vault the walls around her life and scale the twin towers of class and gender: an Everywoman who was also a supreme individualist, and who suffered an outlandish fate that might – in mitigated form – befall anybody who takes the wrong risks.

The letters were her great autonomous act, an attempt to release the self that had no other means of expression. But it is the way in which she does it, clear and direct and almost appallingly alive, that speaks across the years… Hers is a modernist voice, boneless and fluid, disdaining the formalities of grammar and snapping the shackles of morality.

Edith, who wrote to Freddy, was really writing for herself. Part of the appeal of this young man – her only extra-marital lover; she took love intensely seriously – was that he was hardly ever there. Fifteen months spanned the start of the affair in late June 1921 and its ending in early October 1922, and of that time the couple spent more than three-quarters apart. So the affair was epistolary, perforce; but the letters acquired their own importance, over and above her feelings for their recipient. And she believed, of course, that he was the only reader that she would ever have. She had no thought of being judged on what she wrote – not in a literary sense, and certainly not the literal sense applied by the No 1 court of the Old Bailey, where her letters were read to suit a particular end, the one that would kill her.

A century before the advent of cancel culture, this woman was cancelled – obliterated – for word crimes, thought crimes, the crime of being herself.

The last letter that Edith is known to have written, dated 4th January 1923, was to her father William Graydon, and part-censored by the prison authorities.

Dearest Dad

Somehow today I feel I’d like to write to you. It seems such a long time since I saw you – and yet it isn’t. It’s only the same distance from Saturday as it was last week. I wonder why some days seem so long ago and others quite near?

Of course nothing different happens here, every day is the same. The best part of each day (and of course the quickest) is the half an hour’s visit I have. It never seems to be longer than ten minutes.

Do you remember the book I told you I wanted? They tell me it is out of print, and I couldn’t help thinking that even in little things my luck is entirely absent.

… I’ve been reading Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’, but the print is so frightfully small and indistinct that I can’t see anything if the light has to be on, and it is after dark always that I feel I would like to read the most.

Yesterday mother showed me the sketch of the Morea [Freddy’s ship]. It looks nice in its frame, don’t you think? I was quite pleased about it.

I’m getting quite used to things here now. It’s really astonishing what you can do without when it’s ‘Hobson’s choice’.

You’ll be coming to see me on Saturday, won’t you? On that Saturday of last year, I wonder if you remember what we did?

I do, quite well. We were all at Highbury, and the huge dinner Harold [her youngest brother] ate I can see now if I close my eyes. And then there were the rattles and trumpets and whistles in the Tube and Avis getting out without her ticket and we throwing it out of the carriage on to the platform when it was too late. Oh, dear! What a lot can happen in a year!

I hope Saturday comes quickly, it’s been such a terrible long week. Au revoir until then.

EDITH.