CRIMINAL JUSTICE

5

The Trial

© René Weis

Wednesday 6 December 1922, 10.30 a.m.

A whispered hush is settling on Court I at the Old Bailey. The press are present in force. From the tiny Magistrates Court in Stratford the letters of Edith Thompson have reached out to an audience of millions. Even The Times will be giving the case prominent coverage, reproducing the trial verbatim, day by day. The public gallery is packed with well-dressed men and women. They have some of them purchased seats for more than a pound from unemployed labourers and others who queued since 4 a.m. By Monday 11 December, the last day of the trial, seats will be changing hands for over £5, more than an average weekly income. The court is hot, and in the glaring light of the chandeliers it looks like an oak-panelled Oxford or Cambridge lecture hall. Its formidable reputation is almost belied by its unsettling intimacy. That this civilised-looking room should become as much of a life and death arena as a Roman circus is initially hard to credit, were it not for the suspended sword under the lion and unicorn. The distances between judge and accused, dock and jury hardly measure more than thirty feet. Under the court are the cells, and barely visible to the spectator is the tiled staircase leading down out of the dock into the bowels of the building which squats on top of what was once Newgate prison, the scene of judgment and of innumerable executions.

Slowly stepping into the dock today is Edith Thompson. She is wearing her heavy musquash coat and, in the words of James Douglas’s eye-witness account, ‘a black velvety hat with black quills curving forward from the left side in a scythe-like sweeping drop’.

She moves across into the far corner. Bywaters follows her, perfectly groomed. Both have been carefully briefed by their respective counsel for the occasion. Even so the courtroom may appear more frightening to Edith than she imagined. Now all of England will scrutinise her great love affair in the world’s most famous court.

The unreality of the place is underlined by the alien look of the bewigged judiciary and the sphinx-like figure of the trial judge, sitting across the well of the court and facing the dock. Mr Justice Shearman, High Church man and stern moralist, presides. A former athlete and the author of a book on football, he is a man of little intellectual distinction. He dislikes courtroom antics and disapproves of female jurors, whom he insists on addressing as ‘gentlemen’. The most notable saying of this pillar of the community is that ‘The Court is not a theatre.’ He is a family man of the old school. To him the ardent and intensely masculine-looking young man opposite will only ever be an ‘adulterer’, the phrase he is to use again and again about Bywaters, particularly in his summing up. The other members of the judiciary present are men of the world: the recently knighted bon viveur and successful barrister Henry Curtis-Bennett, and the urbane Cecil Whiteley, appearing for Mrs Thompson and Bywaters respectively. Also representing Edith Thompson, at the instruction of Stern, are Messrs Walter Frampton and Ivor Snell, and for Bywaters, instructed by Barrington Matthews, Messrs Huntly Jenkins and Myles Elliott. For the Crown, the Director of Public Prosecutions has instructed the newly appointed Solicitor General, Thomas Inskip (a Baldwin protégé) to lead, assisted by the redoubtable Travers Humphreys, reputedly the sharpest legal mind in the country, and Roland Oliver. There are two indictments against the prisoners: the first one is murder and is the one to be tried; the second consists of five counts variously relating to conspiracy to murder, misdemeanour, poison, glass and soliciting murder. The jury consists of eleven men and one woman.

Within the first five minutes of the trial Thompson and Bywaters lose a crucial round, as Shearman refuses the defence application for the two accused to be tried separately. After the prisoners’ pleading ‘Not Guilty’ the jury is empanelled. Even at this late hour Curtis-Bennett still hopes to prevent the letters from being used in evidence. As his client insists on going into the witness-box, he knows that they will be crucial to the Crown’s clinching its case, particularly if Inskip can lead Mrs Thompson into contradicting the forensic evidence. Sir Henry therefore formally raises his objection and the jury is asked to retire. Curtis-Bennett points out that in view of the fact that only the first indictment is being tried, Mrs Thompson’s letters can only become admissible evidence if the prosecution establish that she ‘took some active part in the murder’. Some of the letters, counsel argues, date from a long way back and cannot conceivably bear on the manner of Percy Thompson’s death on 4 October. Aware of the Crown’s likely cast against his client, that she will be accused of being a principal in the second degree, Curtis-Bennett writhes skilfully around forensic niceties, aware of the judge’s limited intellect. The point is that she may have desired the murder but had no part in it and was as surprised as any innocent person would have been when it happened. Both judge and Crown demur, and then the judge rules for the Solicitor General on the basis that the letters reveal ‘evidence of intention and evidence of motive’. Motive for what? The legal brains in the court must have wondered, since as yet the case against Bywaters had not even started, let alone been proven.

It is gone 11 a.m. when the jurors file back into the court. Inskip opens his address haltingly and sounds subdued. The eyes of the entire court are fixed not on him, but on the accused, and the woman in particular. During the opening words of the Crown the two prisoners, who so far have avoided looking at each other, instinctively examine the jury. Then they relapse into a self-possessed and impassive motionlessness. The Solicitor General’s address proceeds hesitantly, with ‘apparently’ and ‘perhaps’ and innuendos, as for example when he attempts to impugn Mrs Thompson’s integrity because she remained in work as a married woman: ‘and, perhaps because there were no children, or for other reasons, she was carrying on her employment’. He notes that she is considerably older than Bywaters and then, a mere ten minutes into his oration, he turns to the letters. He invites the jury to take note of Edith’s sending newspaper cuttings referring to ‘ground glass’, though while winding up concedes magnanimously that ‘a post mortem examination showed that there were practically no traces of any poison’. The strategically placed ‘practically’ is as dishonest and disingenuous as his preliminary conclusion that ‘there is the undoubted evidence in the letters upon which you can find that there was a preconcerted meeting between Mrs Thompson and Bywaters at the place. ‘In fact there is not the slightest evidence of this in the letters, but because the jury knows that not all the defendants’ correspondence has been submitted as evidence they are led into believing that the place of Percy’s death might be mentioned in one of the letters not submitted. (The reason for withholding several of the letters was that they were deemed overly explicit about abortion and sex.)

It is gone noon when the Crown has finished its opening. During the speech Edith has slipped out of her musquash coat and is now sitting in a mourning frock. Her uncle steps into the witness-stand and gives evidence, followed by the Ilford constable who drafted the plan of the area where the crime happened. Miss Pittard is next. When hearing herself quoted on that terrible night and listening to the witnesses describe her agitation and hysteria, Edith bursts into tears.

For the luncheon adjournment shortly after John Webber’s evidence, which complements Percy Cleveley’s and Dora Pittard’s, Edith has to be helped downstairs. In the afternoon witnesses for the Crown include Dr Maudsley and Percy J. Drought, as well as some of those dearest to her, like her father, Mr Carlton, and Lily Vellender. Also giving evidence are Richard Thompson, Mrs Lilian Bywaters and Mrs Lester, the Thompsons’ tenant. This time Edith is more composed during her father’s evidence but Mrs Bywaters and the Ilford divisional surgeon’s description of Percy’s injuries crack her precarious reserve. Here is how James Douglas saw it:

There are two terrible moments in her suffering. She looks at that sorrowful mother in the witness-box while she gives evidence about her son. Mrs Bywaters and Mrs Thompson – two tragic women – both linked to the boy sitting there between the warders, both suffering as only women can suffer in such a plight. ‘One of the best sons a mother ever had’, cries the tragic mother, with a pang of motherly love in her trembling voice. And Mrs Thompson buries her face in her hands while we all shrink from the triangle of misery revealed in the three.
The other dreadful moment is during the evidence of the police surgeon, as the glittering knife is passed to him across the court, and as the blood-stained trousers are taken out of a bag and held up before our eyes. The pale face grows paler, the nostrils quiver, the eyes fill with tears, and her face goes down sobbing into her handkerchief, her slim shoulders quivering.
And this it is that fixes every eye on the pale woman in black who sits all day long in a dreadful solitude. She is so young, so delicately made, so pitifully pale, and yet so tragically wrought that her thoughts are visible as they flit across her face, like a flower fading on its stem, while she listens to her own letters read in dry, colourless legal tones that veil and muffle their passionate import.
And what of the boy? Frederick Bywaters is a handsome youth, with a clear skin, finely carved profile, a trenchant, high forehead, brilliant eyes, and a great wave of thick brown hair brushed back high from his white brow. He is virile and vigorous in his gait, walking with a firm step and swinging arms.
This it is that throbs all day in court – youth in the toils of destiny, youth caught in the net of circumstance.¹‘The Ilford Murder: The Case for and against a Reprieve’, by James Douglas (Daily Express pamphlet, No. 1, 1922)

Thursday 7 December: It is bitterly cold when, not long after midnight outside the Central Criminal Court in Newgate Street, the queue for the day’s trial on Court I begins to form. A ‘coloured man’ is among those heading it, and there are soon six times as many men as women. Most of them are young and will attempt to tout their seats. A wily street-trader avails himself of the opportunity of making a killing by hiring out campstools. At about 10.30 a.m. Bywaters enters the dock and takes up his seat on the right-hand side, followed shortly after by a weary-looking Mrs Thompson.

The first witness to be called is Edith A. Brown, the manageress of Fuller’s at 42 Aldersgate Street. She is succeeded by Amelia A. Lee (one of the waitresses), Rose Jacobs, Charles Higgins, and Mrs Bywaters who has been recalled by Bywaters’s counsel to testify to a conversation she had with her wayward son on Mrs Thompson’s prospects of a divorce back in August 1921. To Mrs Bywaters’s reported parental guidance, that ‘there was no law to compel her to live with a man if she was unhappy with him’, the judge pompously interjects: ‘She has obviously not read the House of Lords decision.’ Next to take the stand in the witness-box are Frank Page, Alfred Scholes, Percy James, John Hancock and Francis Hall, all of them police officers. Hancock is pummelled by Curtis-Bennett about the precise number of letters found on Bywaters altogether and admits that a mere half are put in evidence. He is also made to agree that of the fifty-odd newspaper cuttings which Edith sent to Bywaters, only a few refer to poisoning. He dutifully reports on finding a bottle of aromatic tincture of opium in the Thompsons’ bedroom at 41 Kensington Gardens, and suspects that, as the drawer from which he retrieved it contained none of Thompson’s ‘collars and ties’, but ‘only envelopes, note papers, photographs, and gloves’, it is probably hers. Perhaps it is at this point that Edith leans forward over the dock to protest to Stern the identity of the drawer. An observer notices her wedding-ring on her left hand as she grips the rim of the wooden enclosure.

Next into the witness-box is Francis Hall. He has been warned against Curtis-Bennett’s no nonsense approach and is therefore rather more nervous than previously at Stratford. He knows that his interrogation of the two prisoners at Ilford might be shown up for the fraudulent bullying act it was. He immediately stumbles over the time when he took the woman to the Ilford police station and then reads out the statements made by the two accused, with their corrections. Inskip has already read these the previous day, and although their resurfacing here is legitimate, it clearly is also strategically placed by the Crown to consume time and thereby curtail the scope of the defence’s cross-examination of this potentially embarrassing but crucial witness. Of the fact that the Solicitor General is required for other duties of state on Monday, the judge and the defence are fully apprised. Hall’s evidence is therefore doubly objectionable, for its calculated evasion of cross-examination and for its deliberate dragging out of the proceedings.

Over half an hour has elapsed when Hall is finally examined by Whiteley who pinpoints the inspector’s jealousy of the Scotland Yard Superintendent. He elicits the concession from Hall that he repeatedly interviewed Bywaters on his own and that the statement which has just been read was produced by their questioning him and ‘incorporating’ his answers into their draft statement, which he signed as if it had been dictated entirely by him. The next admission by Hall is that Wensley was not present when Edith Thompson exclaimed ‘why did he do it …’ on seeing Bywaters, and that ‘no steps were taken by the police to prevent Mrs Thompson and Bywaters seeing each other’. Even the judge takes this up and tries to clarify the incident, but without success. Curtis-Bennett invites Hall to correct his error about the time of Mrs Thompson’s arrival in the police station and to admit that she at once ‘confessed’ on seeing Bywaters – which would show a total lack of premeditation on her part and would to some extent redeem her earlier lying. In both instances Hall concurs with the defence’s statements. As the inspector leaves the witness box, both the accused feel outraged that, in this of all courts of law, a police officer should have got away with lying under oath.

Finally, for this morning, John Webster and Sir Bernard Spilsbury give evidence. Both men are scientists of integrity and widely respected outside the courts and the Home Office. Their findings offer cold comfort for the Crown. Webster stresses that ‘aromatic tincture of opium is quite an ordinary thing and that until recently it could be ‘purchased at any chemist’s’ without a prescription. Spilsbury categorically remarks: ‘I did not find any signs of poisoning, nor did I find any scars in the intestines [and] I found no indication of the presence of glass either in large pieces or in powdered particles.’ Since both these statements occur in answer to Inskip’s questions, the defence’s task seems easy enough. In normal circumstances, one feels, these two admissions alone should have saved Mrs Thompson, notwithstanding the fact that she was being tried as an accessory to Bywaters’s killing, as opposed to the five counts of the second indictment. If she took heart from the conclusive scientific evidence regarding her own position, her reprieve was only momentary.

For now, after stating ‘That will be the case for the Crown’, Inskip has four typed sets of Edith’s letters passed to the jury, one lot for each group of three. Then Travers Humphreys begins the reading of them. The time is approximately 12.15 p.m. No sooner have Humphreys’s precisely articulated sentences begun to cut through the silence of the courtroom than Edith Thompson slumps forward and, covering her face with both hands, begins to weep, silently but without a break. All eyes in the court bore and burn themselves into her slight, black figure, as passage after passage of her ardent language of love is enunciated by the remorseless voice of the prosecution. She dares not raise her head for fear of seeing her mother and father who share their child’s agony and some of her shame. As she is sitting there, and perhaps imagines the endless distance between her feelings when writing these words and Humphreys’s dispassionate voice during the readings, she feels utterly destroyed. At 1 p.m. the judge rises and the court officials prepare to adjourn for lunch. Bywaters immediately starts to confer with his solicitor and is seemingly heedless of the woman. The two wardresses, sitting one behind Edith and the other one by her side, try to rouse her. She does not respond. Finally they grasp her firmly by the waist, steady her by the arm and then move her ponderously to the dock steps.

The proceedings resume at 2 p.m. For another forty-five minutes Humphreys reads the letters, intermittently relieved by a junior counsel. Up in the public gallery some of the young men in the audience fail to control their delight at the woman’s hyperbolical rhetoric. Repeatedly a ripple of giggles and gleeful laughter emanates from there and subsides only under the stern gaze of the judge. It is out of embarrassment and to save time that the judge, in concert with counsel, decides to cut short the readings and leave what remains to the jury to peruse. After all, he remarks, it is mostly ‘gush’. Curtis-Bennett, keen to save his client further hurt and to invalidate the importance of the letters concurs. It is 3.30 p.m. Edith only barely flinches when Cecil Whiteley announces firmly: ‘I will call Bywaters.’

The defence’s case has got under way at last. Freddy rises. He is wearing his black jacket, grey trousers and spats. He slowly crosses the dock behind Edith, who is sitting nearest the glass door leading into the court. Preceded by the usher he walks across the well, passes in front of the jury and, brushing against someone, audibly apologises. He then takes his stand in the witness-box. He appears calm and observers notice his striking profile and the way his thick hair brushed back gives him additional height. He clenches his hands and will be tapping the ledge of the witness-box continuously with his right fist during his evidence. His assumed confidence is further belied by his answering in a very low voice – he will be asked repeatedly to speak up. He is sworn in and is handed a thick portfolio of typed and numbered copies of the letters sent him by the woman sitting across the well of the court. He kept them for love and out of pride, and now they will be public property and permanently degraded.

For the next hour and a half Bywaters explains his early acquaintance with the Graydons, his remove to Norwood, his voyages, and finally his shared holiday with the Thompsons, the Vellenders and Avis. A mere five minutes into his account the judge interrupts and heavily hints that Bywaters is distorting the evidence. Quick on the uptake, Whiteley invites Bywaters to explain himself further. It is important to dispel from the minds of the jury at once the idea that the boy is a congenital liar. But within minutes Freddy indeed lies, when he denies that he and the woman opposite were lovers in the late summer of 1921. The prosecution will catch him out on this with the letters in question and will suggest that it proves collusion with intent to murder over an extended period. He probably told this lie to exonerate himself and her from the charge of premeditation and of abusing Thompson’s hospitality. Even the most sympathetic of jurors would be wary of a situation in which the wife’s secret lover takes up residence at the married home.

Listening to Bywaters’s edited account of the past year, Edith Thompson must realise that the prosecution will easily puncture it. Only she and Freddy understand that romantic make-believe played a vital role in their relationship. Suicide was a part of the charade. Although Edith toyed with the notion of self-destruction, as her marriage bed was becoming unbearable and the sight of her husband increasingly loathsome to her, she didn’t seriously contemplate killing herself. Only once did she really appear to have pondered its implications, when she wrote in November 1921:

Death seemed horrible last night – when you think about it darlint, it does seem a horrible thing to die, when you have never been happy, really happy, for one little minute.

It is with this passage that Whiteley chooses to open his readings of the letters. By stressing the importance of suicide, real and imaginary, in the relationship, he hopes to divert attention away from poisoning plots and, if he fails to clear Bywaters from the suspicion of murder, he will at least have reduced the element of conspiracy and contributed towards rendering the final act a gesture of despair rather than of premeditated killing. The extracts quoted are in rough chronological order, from November 1921 to September 1922. While he is invited to comment on them by his counsel, Freddy coolly asks for page references and then runs his finger lightly down the page to the passage in question. When he comes to Edith’s letter of 1 May referring to ‘You said it was enough for an elephant’, a wan smile of recognition flickers over his face. A quarter of an hour later, he is invited by Shearman to explain the reference in her letter of 27 August, ‘I said I would wait five years.’ Bywaters explains that what it specifies is for a certain period of time to elapse before she would commit suicide. Shearman leans forward and, half smiling, questions Bywaters incredulously: ‘She suggested suicide, and you said “Let’s put it off for five years”?’ Freddy agrees, while Edith sits in the dock opposite, humiliated and bewildered by the judge’s scepticism. But the lovers’ ordeal for the day is nearly over. When the court adjourns at 5 p.m. Freddy’s examination by his counsel is not complete. Tomorrow will be the big day, when he will be cross-examined and followed into the witness-box by Edith Thompson.

Friday 8 December 1922: Long before dawn on Friday, the queue to the public gallery for Court I has grown to look like an ugly oversized snake winding its unwieldy body round the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey. The Evening News has sent out its reporter for a minor scoop. The first two arrivals, he notes, are two sailors who claim a ‘professional interest in the case’, as young Bywaters is a seafaring man. They are quickly succeeded by others, some of them unemployed men who will presently be selling their places. This promises to be the trial’s most rewarding day, as the woman is forecast to be in the box for at least half the entire session. The first female spectator to arrive reaches the Central Criminal Court at 2 a.m. The sound of her high heels on the night-time pavement carries down Newgate Street. She is young and embarrassed to be the only woman so far, but quickly makes friends, and the two sailors offer her the place at the front. Perhaps it is she who is noticed by the Daily Sketch’s man in court in the first row of the gallery, hatless and having removed her cloak and gloves to be comfortable and enjoy the occasion to the full. As more and more onlookers crowd the Newgate Street entrance to the gallery, the campstools appear and the conversation gets increasingly animated. Speculations about the case and verdict abound, coffee and tea are served, messenger boys keep places for patrons, and the spectacle assumes all the atmosphere of a wintry scene outside one of London’s innumerable theatres.

10.35 a.m.: Freddy Bywaters takes up his position in the witness-box. During the night he must have rehearsed everything that was said on the preceding day. His counsel will have briefed him on how he performed and also on the strategies the prosecution are likely to employ in today’s hearing. Similarly Edith Thompson is briefed by Curtis-Bennett who has made one more effort to dissuade her from giving evidence.

Cecil Whiteley now invites Bywaters to relate the events from his return to London on 23 September to the night of the killing. He still hopes that by telling the truth – and about this bit of the story there is little dispute even in Whiteley’s mind – the youth might be able to sway the jury in his favour. The line of defence that Bywaters’s counsel would have much preferred, but the one specifically forbidden him by his client, would have been to portray him as the youthful and ultimately gallant victim of a sophisticated older seductress. As it is, he depends on the boy’s romantic appeal to rescue him, if anything can. He therefore pointedly asks Bywaters to ‘tell us in your own way what your feelings were towards Mrs Thompson.’ Freddy replies seemingly unsentimentally, but not without a tremor in his voice, how sorry he felt for her on his way to East Ham station after leaving the Graydons. At the station, he claims, he could not take it any longer and decided to walk across to Ilford. He now maintains that he eventually saw the two Thompsons ahead of him. His narrative of the assault on Percy is itself accompanied by vivid and, to one observer, ‘appallingly realistic’ movements. He tries to impress on the court that he acted in self-defence by showing how Thompson reached for a hip-pocket gun – the most recent line of the Bywaters defence – and inadvertently damages his case further. The jury has already been shocked by the sight of the knife and by Percy’s bloodstained clothes. To see the assassin himself re-enacting the crime does little to predispose them in his favour. Whiteley makes Bywaters stress the fact that Percy was leaning against the wall when he ran away, and that he first learned of Thompson’s death from the Evening News, and had it confirmed by Mr Graydon. Whiteley’s final point is to get Bywaters to protest at the way his statements at Ilford were extracted as well as signalling to the court that the police’s version of the ‘accidental encounter’ of the two suspects was a fabrication.

It is nearly 11.30 a.m. when the defence yields its witness to the Crown for cross-examination. So far the youngster has left a mixed impression on the court. Few believe his version of the night, particularly the references to Thompson’s gun. It is as a shameless liar that Inskip will portray Bywaters to the jury. He immediately declares his intent by precisely locating the date in June 1921 when the boy first confessed his love to Mrs Thompson. Confronted with the evidence of the letter, Bywaters nevertheless decides to brazen it out, which incenses the judge. Freddy remains cool. Edith now hangs on every word he says, observers note. Her eyes never leave his face. She seems weary to the point of exhaustion, but does not for a second let go, as though by sympathetic magic she might help him in his ordeal. If her love for him has ever flagged, she now recognises the full extent of his courage, as again and again he struggles to keep her free from the charge against her: ‘Never a denial but it was for two, a different reading of a sentence in a letter and it was an explanation for two’, wrote one woman spectator, moved by Bywaters’s chivalry and stamina.

After establishing the defendant’s manifest untrustworthiness, Inskip proceeds to the suggestions of suicide and separation in the letters. He reminds Bywaters of the fact that the easiest way to obtain a separation would have been through confronting Percy with the adultery. As far as suicide goes, when was the idea of it mooted and when was it dropped? Freddy has to explain that he did not always take Edith’s threats in her letters seriously. Earlier, to Whiteley, he had used the word ‘melodrama’ and, convinced that the uneducated boy is ignorant of its meaning, the Solicitor General invites him to define the word. He does so competently and claims that her many references to poison, broken glass and quinine fell into the same category. Furthermore, as Freddy explains, he was fond of chemistry at school, and Edith and her brother knew this. He is then confronted by the ‘bitter tea’ incident, recorded mischievously by Edith: ‘He puts great stress on the fact of the tea tasting bitter.’ Bywaters emphatically abides by his reading of the letter in terms of this being Mrs Thompson talking about her own tasting rather than the husband. An incredulous Inskip sneers at this. However, Freddy’s seemingly implausible suggestion could well be the truth, as has already been argued. When he is finally pushed up against the wall on the issue of quinine and the dose being ‘enough for an elephant’, Bywaters becomes agitated and passionately asserts that he knew that ‘she could not hurt herself with quinine’:

Inskip: You were playing with her ideas?
Bywaters: I was pulling her leg.

The sound of this, and particularly its exposing of the young man as a reckless prankster, further detracts from his credibility and hurts, as he knows, the woman opposite whose eyes he senses resting on him. He is asked about the glass particles and replies that he understood that to be ‘a lie from her to me’. How can he possibly explain that the ‘lie’ refers to attempted murder? Of course they ‘discussed’ an imaginary romantic murder, but to admit that and then to expect the jury to believe that they never meant it, after it actually happened, would be an almost impossible task. Pressed further on Edith’s query about his study of ‘bichloride of mercury’ – which Freddy professes to have read as a query about gardening – and the ‘light bulb’ incident, he bluntly states that she had been ‘lying’ to him again. He might have preferred, as he will do shortly, to have used the word ‘melodrama’, but Inskip has already ridiculed it. He now pretends not to have understood Bywaters: ‘She had been what?’ – ‘Lying to me, lying’. Inskip is a barrister of distinctly limited gifts, but he puts Bywaters shrewdly on the spot here. If however he hoped to trap the youngster into disowning the woman in extremis, he had miscalculated. The two of them will keep faith with each other throughout. Nevertheless it is hard to imagine that Edith did not wince at his blunt admission that he knew that she was lying. Presently he is forced to confess that her plea of ‘yes darlint be jealous, so much that you will do something desperate’ was ineffective because he was not jealous, whatever he might have written to the contrary. The Crown asks whether he ‘ever thought of marrying her’, and Bywaters replies with a single ‘No’. She knows he is speaking a truth now that neither of them dared articulate. It hurts even in these awful circumstances.

Gazing at the face of her young lover across the well of the court, Edith notices how the strain is beginning to show in his pallor. His voice remains firm, but he sounds subdued. Inskip now changes tactic and reverts to the afternoon of 3 October, particularly the meeting at Fuller’s. Bywaters denied that they plotted murder, but unwittingly concedes that she mentioned that Percy and she were going to the theatre that night. In his first statement he particularly denied any knowledge of the Thompsons’ visit to the theatre prior to his evening stay at the Graydons. He is picked up on this inconsistency at once. It was a white lie, as he will explain later to the defence; he did not wish to involve Mrs Thompson while making his first statement, hence the suggestion that it was only by chance that he learned of the theatre party. But his excuse sounds implausible, as does his sworn evidence in court about acting in self-defence. Ergo his police statement is untrustworthy and his evidence in court is equally dishonest. Bywaters bravely maintains that his police statement is misleading, because he was prepared to confess to anything as long as it let her go free from the police station. Again he claims that things were put to him by his interrogators. The Crown rounds off the questioning of Bywaters with a graphic rendering of Thompson’s fatal struggle with his assailant. Whiteley briefly attempts to clarify the issue of statement and sworn evidence, before resting his case and allowing his client to step down.

The morning session is not over yet. It is just gone noon. Bywaters has taken up his seat in the dock again. Edith Thompson is now called. She pats her hair, adjusts her hat, and quickly wipes her face with a handkerchief. Then, slowly and with deliberation, she crosses the floor of the court, takes the oath and sinks into the chair offered her in the witness-box. Some members of the court scramble to their feet, as she begins her loneliest journey through the glass door and heads for the box. A policeman in the court asks the public gallery to ‘Sit down, please … Will you please sit down’, as the spectators strain forwards to catch a better glimpse of the woman. All eyes in the court are bent on her, and she shudders at their gaze. Then she revives, removes her black gloves, and receives from Walter Frampton, her junior counsel, the five-inch-thick pad of her letters. Frampton immediately invites her to the relate to the court the course of her life with Thompson and her first encounter with Bywaters. Her voice is low to the point of becoming inaudible, and Shearman several times calls on her to repeat words which he has failed to catch. Irritated, the judge finally asks her to pull her chair forward as far as it goes into the box. Her counsel’s procedure will parallel Bywaters’s by concentrating on a pre-emptive strategy and confronting the difficult letters head-on. For the letters are the sole evidence against her, a point which cannot be overstressed.

Embarrassed though she is, Mrs Thompson bravely bears up. Her voice may falter and occasionally sound choked, and her right hand repeatedly travels up to her throat and strokes her neck. The famous reference to the ‘wrong Porridge’ occurs early on, and she replies: ‘I really cannot explain.’ How can she, a respectable woman, tell this open court full of men that she tried to abort? It would make her look degenerate when, as yet, she naively believes that she has nothing to fear, since she is innocent as charged. Her refusal to answer the question does not impress the jury, and the judge at once construes it as a sign of collusion. She concedes that they planned to make Percy ‘ill’, but without really either of them meaning to carry it into effect. The most salient points of her evidence as elicited by counsel concern the tea tasting bitter, the light bulbs allegedly fed to Thompson, the bottle of aromatic tincture disposed of by Avis Graydon and the relevance to the case of the novel Bella Donna. The night of 3 to 4 October Curtis-Bennett reserves to the end, hoping to capitalise on the widow’s manifest inability to control her emotions while relating her husband’s death. Thanks to the sympathetic prompting of her counsel and the intervening lunch-hour, Mrs Thompson revives and her answers become more confident again. The bitter tea incident is competently re-addressed and gets short shrift – she even manages to indicate that Thompson’s mother could undoubtedly bear her out on this, as she is alive still to testify.

When the bottle of aromatic tincture of opium is produced, she coolly refuses to identify it positively as the one that she removed from her husband’s medicine cabinet back in April. Her sister Avis will support her on Saturday on this. Repeatedly the evidence reverts to ‘divorce’ and ‘suicide’ and Hichens’s novel Bella Donna. The treatment in court of Bella Donna during the trials underlines the extent to which the case against Edith Thompson rested on involuntary as well as deliberate misrepresentations of the available evidence. To indicate the nature of these distortions, it has been necessary to collate the material relating to Bella Donna from the remaining three days of the trial.

As soon as her counsel had got Edith Thompson to state that the novel was about Egypt, the trial judge chipped in with:

I should like to clear this up. Is not the main point of it that the lady killed her husband with slow poisoning?

The Solicitor General immediately rose with ‘I was going to deal with it in cross-examination’. The judge had not read the novel, nor did he invite the jury to read it. They must have assumed, as clearly he did at first, that Bella Donna actually succeeded in killing her husband. His comment during the defence’s summing up of the novel was ‘Are you going to put in the book? If you do, the jury will have to read the whole of it’:

Curtis-Bennett: I do not wish to do that. I think your lordship has given a description of the book. I will if necessary put in the book.

Judge: Surely not. I don’t think that is necessary. I hope not. I hope you will not put it in. You can deal with anything that has been given in evidence about it.

A human life was at stake, but the judge preferred for the jury not to be overburdened with the additional task of reading an entire novel; and the parliamentary schedule of the Solicitor General further required an unseemly, expeditious haste. But Curtis-Bennett ought to have insisted, in view of the judge’s earlier intervention and the prosecution’s tendentious emphasis on the poison plot in the novel:

Solicitor General: Did she [Bella Donna] arrange a plot to poison her husband by slow doses in order that she might get away to Baroudi?

Edith Thompson: I cannot say if she arranged it. There was a plot right at the end of the book.

Solicitor General: There was a plot, which is really the plot of the story, to poison her husband, without anybody finding out what she was doing?

Edith Thompson: It is a matter of opinion whether that is absolutely the plot, is it not?

Mrs Thompson was struggling desperately here to disentangle herself from a web of distortion spun from a throwaway remark in one of her letters. How could she explain in court the complex human interactions that made her pretend to be a would-be assassin? Could she simply step out of herself, with her lover facing her a few yards across the well of the court, and admit that she was playing a part to keep him?

In his cogent address to the jury, Curtis-Bennett advised them to remember Edith’s private view of Bella Donna (cited below) as expressed in the letter of 13 July: ‘Fortunately we have Mrs Thompson’s view of Bella Donna.’ Because he sensed that the trial judge was against them, Curtis-Bennet did not wish to antagonise him further by demanding that the novel be submitted to the jury. Since in this case the Crown was allowed the last word, and again pointed the jury to the digitalin passage, the judge might have been expected to set the record straight. He had virtually undertaken to do so by suggesting that evidence about the novel used in court would be enough. But he did not know the novel. When he summarised its relevance in his charge to the jury – and it needs to be quoted in its entirety for its disturbing inadequacy – he noted:

‘It must be remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and that the same dose, harmless if taken once, yet frequently repeated, becomes deadly.’ I should not think you should bother much about what is in the book called ‘Bella Donna’. The only point about it is, it is the case of a woman – nobody suggested that she was like this woman, or the man was like this man. It is the case, admitted on oath by herself, that there is at the end of the book somebody poisoning her husband, or trying to poison her husband. ‘It must be remembered that digitalin is a cumulative poison, and that the same dose, harmless if taken once, yet frequently repeated, becomes deadly.’ And there is this remarkable statement – ‘The above passage I have just come across in a book I am reading, ‘Bella Donna,’ by Robert Hichens. Is it any use? … I’d like you to read ‘Bella Donna’ first, you will learn something from it to help us; then you can read “The Fruitful Vine.”’ No doubt the letter about the ‘Fruitful Vine’ was something similar; they write chiefly about so-called heroes and heroines, probably wicked people, which no doubt accounts for a great many of these tragedies.

This gross misrepresentation, quite apart from its erroneous assumptions, not the least of which concerns Edith’s letter on The Fruitful Vine, wholly ignored the defence’s case for a fair hearing on the crucial point of the novel’s legitimacy as evidence. For this is what Edith Thompson wrote about Bella Donna, in a letter (13 July 1922) only ever intended for her lover’s eyes and therefore speaking from the heart:

About Bella Donna – no, I dont agree with you about her darlint – I hate her – hate to think of her – I dont think other people made her what she was – that sensual pleasure loving greedy Bella Donna was always there. If she had originally been different – a good man like Nigel would have altered her darlint – she never knew what it was to be denied anything – she never knew ‘goodness’ as you and I know it – she was never interested in a good man – or any man unless he could appease her sensual nature. I don’t think she could have been happy with nothing – except Baroudi on a desert island she liked – no loved and lived for his money or what it could give her – the luxury of his yacht, the secrecy with which he acted, all bought with his money – that’s what she liked.
Yes she was clever – admire the cleverness – but she was cunning there is a difference darlint, I dont admire that – I certainly dont think she would ever have killed Nigel with her hands – she would have been found out – she didn’t like that did she? being found out – it was that secret cunning in Baroudi that she admired so much – the cunning that matched her own.
If she had loved Baroudi enough she could have gone to him – but she liked the security of being Nigel’s wife – for the monetary assets it held.
She doesn’t seem a woman to me – she seems abnormal – a monster utterly selfish and self-living.
Darlint this is where we differ about women.
I usually stand up for them against you and in this case its the reverse but honestly darlint I dont call her a woman – she is absolutely unnatural in every sense.

Bella Donna is here called ‘a monster utterly selfish and self-living … she is absolutely unnatural in every sense’. Edith professed to hate Ruby Chepstow for her indecent sensuality and her cunning, which allowed her coolly to contemplate her husband’s demise. Freddy, it appears, had expressed cautious regard for Bella Donna’s cleverness and had ventured to suggest that she might even have dared to kill Armine with her hands. He was pandering to his lover’s presumed automatic allegiance to the older woman and her predicament in relation to a young husband and lover. Here he miscalculated. If anything Edith Thompson felt annoyed by the simple-minded assumption that her moral sympathy would automatically lie with the temptress. If the judge had even acknowledged the sentiments on Bella Donna quoted above, which had been submitted by the defence and were read out by Curtis-Bennett in Court, it is at least possible that the jury would have deemed there to be a genuine case of doubt with regard to the correspondence. Here at last, in this story of life and fiction, were two irrefutable pieces of mutually illuminating evidence: the novel and the commentary on its moral bearings, both on the page for the world to judge. Instead a grossly excerpted and prejudicial version of part of the commentary was substituted for the whole.

After her first quizzing on Bella Donna on Friday 8 December, Edith Thompson is challenged to explain the five-year period which recurs as a stipulation through the letters like a sinister refrain. Shearman intervenes and she defines it as the time agreed to wait for her to secure a position. He observes: ‘The other witness’s story was that they wanted to commit suicide, and he said ‘Put it off five years’, which seems to be the only sensible thing I have heard.’ After this damaging and partisan statement which leaves the young widow confounded, the defence redirects her to her last evening out with her husband. Once again she is made to relive the agonising night of 3 October.

She breaks down sobbing, falling forward on her hands when she repeats the doctor’s telling her that Percy was ‘dead’, that she could not therefore take him home. For a long time the court is silent save for the woman weeping in the witness-box. When she recovers she raises a tear-stained face and explains that she could not believe it. She also calls into further doubt the police’s version of the confrontation in Ilford of Bywaters and herself, and maintains that she made her second and true statement after Wensley (it was in fact Hall) had informed her of Bywaters’s alleged full confession. This takes even the editor of the Notable British Trials series by surprise, and he acknowledges that the whole thing seemed odd.

It is about 3 p.m. when the Crown starts its questioning of the witness. Their opening gambit is to invalidate the sympathy that the widow has temporarily elicited from the jury in her bereaved collapse. Surely she is a liar, the Crown implies; did she not do her utmost to mislead the police by a controlled charade? Had she not lied even in her alleged moments of hysteria, as she plunged through the night towards Miss Pittard and Mr Cleveley and told them that ‘someone flew past’? For over half an hour Inskip bullies her on her lie to the police. He wins this first round by sheer persistence and equivocation. By pretending to be utterly incredulous at some of her replies, he makes the complex seem obvious and the truth so many lies. His task is greatly assisted by the fact that the lovers had lied themselves into several corners unnecessarily. The date of their first kissing is unambiguously established in Edith’s letters. But since Bywaters has denied its applicability, she has no choice now but to follow suit. Phrasing his question with judge and jury in mind, Inskip asks:

When did you first begin to address him as your lover?

Edith Thompson: It is just what you mean by ‘your lover’.

Inskip: The terms in which a woman does not write to any man except her husband?

Edith Thompson: I cannot remember.

The linchpin of the Crown’s strategy for the next two hours is to expose the adulterous couple’s deceit over the issue of divorce and suicide, before proving them guilty of a conspiracy to murder and of the killing itself. Why, Inskip asks, did she resort to such secrecy if what she claimed to have wanted to do was to convince Thompson of the need to let her go? Evidence of the clandestine relationship with her lover would surely have produced the ardently desired separation? Edith fights back valiantly and points out that if her husband was convinced that she and Freddy would get together after a divorce, he would have been that much less likely to let her go.

It is in this context that Edith becomes befuddled by a series of non sequiturs from Inskip. She finds it impossible to disentangle herself from the net woven around one of her statements inviting Bywaters to bring the poison which she would administer to her husband. She explains that she wished to retain the boy’s love at any cost, hence this missive. But Shearman intervenes and presses her to explain further how she intended to assist Bywaters in the murder. She refuses to comply with his request, and he warns her about her lack of cooperation. It is immediately after the judge’s interruption and under pressure that she implies that Bywaters suggested that she should poison her husband. Her letter of 11 April 1922 headed ‘Don’t keep this piece’ is now cited as further evidence of a conspiracy. Then Inskip points at Bywaters in the dock and says:

You are representing that this young man was seriously suggesting that you should poison and kill your husband?

Edith Thompson: I did not suggest it.

Judge: Give him something in his food; you answered my question a little while ago that it was to give him something to make him ill?

Edith Thompson: That is what I surmised, that I should give him something so that when he had a heart attack he would not be able to resist it.

As one contemporary sitting behind the dock with the press noted, ‘a sound like a rustle of wind shuddered through the Old Bailey Court’ at this astonishing admission. It had been prefaced by ‘I surmised’ and even if the two accused had ever seriously considered the proposition in question, she knew well that Percy was a shameless hypochondriac, and that he hardly suffered from a dangerous heart condition. In the immediate aftermath of this costly lapse of concentration, Edith is left in even greater distress and recoils when the judge leans her way and, in a manner which illustrates his bias, asks:

One moment, I do not want to be mistaken. Did I take you down rightly as saying, ‘I wanted him to think I was willing to take my husband’s life?’

Edith Thompson: I wanted him to think I was willing to do what he suggested.

Judge: That is to take your husband’s life?

Edith Thompson: Not necessarily.

Edith’s final statement of the day, shortly after this, is to concede that she and Bywaters gave each other the impression that what they hoped for was that Thompson should not be able to recover from one of his ‘heart attacks’ through his having taken something that would make him ill.

During her evidence Freddy Bywaters, who earlier kept his cool with impressive self-control, has appeared agitated and strained by listening hard. His forehead puckers as he concentrates, and he nervously passes his hand through his hair as he witnesses her agony and her blunders. He probably tries to catch her eye as she returns crying and exhausted to the dock. It is to be doubted that she sees anything very much. She has spent four hours in the witness-box.

Saturday 9 December: A very pale Edith Thompson is assisted by a wardress into the witness-box. Her widow’s clothes and black hat with its sweeping plumes set off the vulnerability of her face as she moves through this blind white place. She steals a furtive glance at Bywaters, who misses it and is examining his hands. She is again handed the typed pad of her letters and immediately finds herself pressed on further suspicions of poison. Her answers today are even more indistinct than yesterday. The Crown, however, fails to maintain its momentum and therefore turns to Hichens’s novel Bella Donna. Had Edith been more knowledgeable in the ways of the law and of the witness-box in particular, she might even now have exposed the weaknesses of the Crown’s case. Instead she wearily confines herself to repudiating Inskip’s preposterous misreadings.

The measure of the Solicitor General’s moral limitations is gleaned from his premeditated misreading of the sentence ‘He’s still well’ in Edith’s last letter to Freddy. ‘Is “he” your husband?’ Inskip asks. Edith replies, ‘No. That refers to a bronze monkey I have.’ The implication by Inskip that ‘he’ refers to a ‘still well’ Percy Thompson who is failing to submit to any of the poisonous treatments administered by Edith is implausible and downright dishonest.

It takes Inskip less than an hour to complete the cross-examination. Curtis-Bennett rises. He puts the court right on the monkey and other points in the same letter, and finally asks why, over the last summer, she wrote the way she did:

Edith Thompson: I thought he was gradually drifting away from me.

Curtis-Bennett: Did you still love him very much?

The court is hushed by the intimacy of the question, and all eyes bend on her and on him. She sits totally still, closes her eyes, finally nods, and is barely heard to breathe, ‘I did’. She looks stunned; her face is shivering; she is biting her lips. A few minute later she blindly gropes her way back towards the dock. Tears are streaming down her face, and she leans heavily on the nurse in attendance. As soon as she has sunk back into her chair, she buries her head in her hands and, without restraint, sobs loudly.

Through this spasm of unleashed emotion penetrates the name of her sister, and shortly afterwards Avis Graydon’s clear voice carries through the impressed silence of the court. Avis stands up firm and exudes elegance and courage. Edith’s eyes have come to rest fixedly on the sister who tries to exonerate her to the best of her ability, by refusing to identify the opium tincture bottle and by vigorously denying that Thompson ever complained of Bywaters in the presence of the Graydons. Avis says that this ‘is pure imagination on my sister’s part’. When she assures Curtis-Bennett that there is no truth in that story at all, she thumps the witness-box for emphasis. She also confirms her father’s account of their last evening with Bywaters whom she calls ‘Freddy’. Avis’s remarkable performance is followed by poor Mrs Graydon entering the witness-box. As a mother watching the ordeal of her favourite child, she is on the verge of a nervous collapse. Now, looking across at Edith from the box, she mutely pleads, one imagines, with the powers that be to save her child. She is dressed completely in black, and her hands are clasped in front of her. She tries to remove her gloves, but in vain. Her fingers are too weak to pull them off her clammy palms. In the end she leaves them on. Her evidence lasts a few minutes only, time enough for her to bear out the claim that Edith indeed had a bump on her head when she fell on 3 October.

The witnesses have been called. Cecil Whiteley rises shortly after Mrs Graydon has relinquished the witness-box. He is not the most gifted member of the Bar. At times he appears thin-lipped and dispassionate. But on this occasion he will give his utmost in what will be remembered as a short but punchy address to the jury, which with considerable mastery will foreground all the salient points in his client’s defence. Facts, he realises, will weigh heavily in favour of the Crown. He therefore will tap the case’s fantasy elements and plead Bywaters’s love for Mrs Thompson and his youth:

Judge this young man as you yourselves would be judged. One life has already been sacrificed in this sordid and horrible drama. Is there to be yet another?

He points out that the tragedy of Bywaters’s predicament is compounded by the fact that ‘there is sitting next to him in that box one who is charged jointly with him, one who is dearer to him than his own life’. Hence his counsel is not allowed to state anything in his client’s defence that could damage the chances of acquittal of the woman. Already Mrs Bywaters and Mrs Graydon are in tears. The thrust of Whiteley’s argument is to reduce the charge to one of either justifiable homicide or manslaughter. After all, he notes, Bywaters persuasively maintained that he was not fooled by Mrs Thompson’s letters which in any case date back to over four months before the killing. After receiving the last of the letters used by the Crown to prove a homicidal collusion, Bywaters in fact prepared to break off the relationship. His solitary walk to Ilford that night from the Graydons’ home was intended to settle the issue of separation and ended in a killing almost by default. He aptly deals with the knife, so competently in fact that the judge and the Crown decide that they will have to address it with special emphasis in their speeches.

Quite properly Whiteley notes with concern that the Crown in this case enjoys the unusual privilege of addressing the jury last. He expresses a fervent desire that this anomalous practice may be changed soon and that the questioning of prisoners in police stations should also be subject to a more satisfactory code of conduct. It is while Whiteley is drawing to his conclusion, and raising the emotional temperature in the court by pleading the boy’s youth and foolishness, that for the first time Bywaters’s composure cracks. His eyes glisten with tears as he hears his counsel’s final words asking the court in his name to believe, and

by your verdict to proclaim to the whole world that in all this history I am not an assassin I am no murderer.

It is 2.45 p.m. Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett rises to attempt the Herculean task of rescuing the woman from the clutches of the law. He is hugely talented and very theatrical. Shearman loathes his dramatic antics. From the outset it is clear that the judge will try to hamper the defence case at every juncture. A gamble on a point of law by Curtis-Bennett early on immediately gives the judge an opening to put the defence counsel on the spot. He tries to suggest that, on the evidence available, Edith Thompson cannot in law be charged as ‘principal in the second degree’. There is no precedent for it. The judge dissents vehemently, and Curtis-Bennett is mildly discomfited. He proceeds however with verve and points out that there is no evidence to indicate that his client knew anything at all about what was going to happen exactly on that night of 3 October. If only the Crown were honest about their case and its direction, they could not possibly mislead jury and court the way they are doing. He remarks that his client inhabits a world of fantasy to such an extent that it renders her an extraordinary person. He compares the case itself to a play or opera, and pleads for the same kind of suspension of disbelief in the jury that would be extended to fiction. Counsel then refers to the various time-spans mentioned in the letters and adduces them as irrefutably supporting evidence for the lovers’ suicide pact. One of his trump cards and one which he repeatedly produces is the prosecution’s evidence elicited from its own witness, Spilsbury. The absence of any trace of poison and glass should conclusively point to the woman’s innocence, he notes.

How all too easy it is to work a guilty retrospective pattern into events of the past Curtis-Bennett suggests, or to draw rash conclusions from the mere impressions gained from listening to the putative contents of novels such as Bella Donna! Does not the accused describe the woman in it as a monster? Curtis-Bennett is in full swing when Shearman indicates that the time has arrived for the court to adjourn. His parting shot to the jury sends a chill down the spines of defence counsel and of the accused. The judge sternly warns the jury that they are ‘trying a vulgar and common crime’; they are not, he stresses, ‘listening to a play from the stalls of a theatre’. With this – improper – direction still ringing in his ears, Curtis-Bennett spends a few more minutes conferring with his client. Whether he manages to soothe her fears is not known, but he still has at least one and a half hours to go and will put them to good use.

While the lovers spend a very anxious and exhausted Sunday, the members of the jury which is trying them are seeking spiritual guidance at St Paul’s. In a secluded part of the cathedral, temporarily out of sight from a posse of journalists who stalk them at the court and at the Manchester in Aldersgate, a mere few yards from where the accused woman used to work, the jury is attending the morning service. After an early lunch nine of them, excluding the woman and two of the men, go for a three-hour ride on a motor coach journey which takes them through Epsom and Richmond.

In the meantime the queue is already forming outside the Central Criminal Court for Monday’s session when a verdict is confidently expected.

Monday 11 December 1922: Curtis-Bennett briefly recapitulates, thus recovering some of the ground lost by the adjournment on Saturday. He again reminds the jury of the ease with which confusion arises: the monkey, for example, assumed a positively sinister meaning when the Crown pretended to mistake it for Thompson: ‘Does that not show the danger of guesswork when people’s letters are being looked at?’ he asks of the jury. And yet ‘letters’ provide the sole evidence against Mrs Thompson, and events do not remotely tie her in with the killing which happened that night in Ilford. The Thompsons took the standard route from the station to their house. This was not a seedy back alley killing, in which the wife lured the unsuspecting husband to his death. He also protests against the sham of the ‘meeting’ of the accused in the police station and urges the jurors not to let themselves be swayed into finding the accused woman guilty on the basis of the suspected conversations that may or may not have happened in the tea lounge at Fuller’s. It is ultimately on a shrewd combination of reason and sentiment that Curtis-Bennett rests his case at 1.30 p.m., after nearly three hours. Intellectually his rhetoric and lucidity have proved formidable. Edith Thompson could hardly have found a stronger champion in court.

The Crown’s performance is by contrast lacklustre and only half the length of Sir Henry’s Ciceronian oration. Furthermore it so shamelessly distorts the evidence on two points in particular that one must wonder why the judge let it pass. Inskip draws attention again to the fact that there are discrepancies between the lovers’ first and second statements to the police and that by implication they are both untrustworthy liars. He pretends not to be concerned over the absence of concrete evidence connecting the accused woman with Thompson’s death and prefers instead to reiterate over and over again the obviousness of his case. It is then that, incredibly, he argues that Spilsbury’s forensic evidence bears out the prosecution’s case: ‘it would have been wrong to have left you [the jury] with the impression that an injury must necessarily have been found if glass was used.’ What’s more, he maintains now that ‘I called him as much to assist the defence as the Crown’. Such disingenuousness and particularly the statement that ‘the administration of glass, even in large pieces, would not necessarily cause lesions in the intestines’ should at once have been exposed. The court’s failure to do so severely weighs the odds against the accused. A mere ten minutes later Inskip once again alleges a grossly misleading fact, that the woman in the witness-box admitted that ‘Don’t forget what we talked about in the tea room’ meant murder. In fact she specifically repudiated the imputation by the Solicitor General and replied to his question, ‘Was that in connection with the same matter, the idea of poisoning your husband?’ – ‘No, that was not. What we talked of in the tea room was getting me a post abroad.’

In the end it seems the Crown’s case appeared so weak to the judge that he felt it needed a helping hand. Even as Inskip is summing up, Shearman is jotting down notes for his forthcoming address to the jury, including the tell-tale remark: ‘great love … nonsense: Great and wholesome disgust. You will bear in mind that illicit love may lead to crime, but you must not of course let your disgust carry you too far’. He adds more of the same observations. As Shearman’s advice was sought by the Home Secretary before he finally decided against a reprieve, such vengefulness by the trial judge appears doubly immoral and reckless in view of its consequences. It is nearly noon. Shortly after his opening remarks Shearman invites the jury to disregard two specific points from Sir Henry’s address: firstly, the allegation about the lack of precedent for Mrs Thompson being charged without being accused of sharing in the actual act of killing; and secondly, his alleged reference to the Deity.²Curtis-Bennett never referred to the Deity in the manner attributed to him by Shearman, but had merely noted that ‘Thank God, this is not a Court of morals’. His remark was certainly not intended to frighten the jury, as the judge alleged. The judge reminds the jurors of their duty and of the fact that the supreme penalty is none of their concern. They will decide only a matter of guilt and innocence. His charge to the jury concerns itself with Bywaters first and is ruthlessly edited to the disadvantage of the accused. He draws the attention of the jurors once again to the knife and highlights the discrepancies between the boy’s first and second statements in his sworn evidence. How can any testimony of his be believed? Look at the knife and remember that there were no real signs of a struggle taking place! Even before he reaches the stage of dealing with Mrs Thompson, Shearman intimates that her cry of fear, despair and shock, ‘Oh don’t, oh don’t’ was heard by Webber when the salesman finally arrived outside his house from the upstairs bedroom some five minutes after the assault. The truth of course is that the screams were so loud that inside his curtained bedroom Webber heard them and consequently rushed down.

The court adjourns for lunch. Then it is the woman’s turn. The judge has already loaded the dice against her by discrediting Webber’s evidence as proof of the woman’s good faith. He will revert to the midnight hour of 3 October. Before doing so he needs to comb through and annotate the letters which perpetrated ‘this insensate silly affection’. Commenting on the letter concerning The Fruitful Vine which was not put in evidence and which he has not read, the judge nevertheless speculates confidently that it is ‘something similar’ to Bella Donna: ‘they [these authors] write chiefly about so-called heroes and their heroines, probably wicked people, which no doubt accounts for a great many of these tragedies’. After warming up, Shearman prepares for the kill. Webber’s evidence about hearing the woman scream is now conflated with his arrival on the scene of the crime and overhearing the doctor ask the woman whether her husband was taken ill. For the second time round, Shearman makes sure that he calls in doubt altogether Mrs Thompson’s screaming. Her hysteria, he hints, is itself open to question. After all, this highly strung woman at this crucial point of crisis proved quite capable of lying to Miss Pittard, the doctor and the police. Is it not possible that her terror was partly put on? Thus the judge is sowing the seeds of suspicion even more in the minds of the jury. The jury, possessed of Bywaters’s knife and his overcoat, retires. The time is 3.32 p.m. Outside it is getting dark.

The jury has been out for two hours when a commotion in court signals its return and indicates that it has reached a verdict. The time, shown by the hands of the clock under the public gallery, is 5.43 p.m. The jury files back into court through the narrow doorway. The woman among them enters last. She is very pale. The actual debate has been short. The reading of the letters has taken up most of the time, and it was the alleged moral degeneracy of the correspondence that made the jury find Edith Thompson guilty. In the words of one juror thirty years later: ‘it was my duty to read them to members of the jury … “Nauseous” is hardly strong enough to describe their contents … The jury performed a painful duty, but Mrs Thompson’s letters were her own condemnation.’

The judge enters and focuses his eyes on the dock. The prisoners are still in the cells. The court is thick and heavy with silence. Then at last a blanched Bywaters appears. He moves towards the front of the dock and looks up at the judge unflinchingly. A few moments later Edith Thompson arrives, like Bywaters stumbling to the front of the dock. On each side of her she is supported by a wardress, as she is barely able to stand. Her face is pale and her eyes are glassy. She is clutching the edge of the dock. Her hands are trembling and her wedding ring on her left hand glitters in the soft electric light of the court. The small finger on her right hand is pressed painfully far back. She doesn’t seem to notice. Her mother and father, brother and sister, aunt and uncle as well as Carlton, the Thompsons and others are present in the well of the court. The Graydons’ eyes are anxiously fixed on their daughter. In their hearts they are convinced that later she will be walking home with them and the dreadful nightmare of the last three months will be swallowed up by the march of time.

Within seconds the foreman of the jury has shattered their illusions by announcing that both prisoners are guilty. He also fails to add any recommendation to mercy. The Clerk of Arraigns asks Bywaters whether there is anything he wishes to say. He flings back his head and slowly, clearly, speaks into the awesome silence:

I say the verdict of the jury is wrong. Edith Thompson is not guilty. I am no murderer. I am not an assassin.

A slight tremor shakes his voice when, for the last time in his life, he speaks her name in her presence. Asked the same question in turn she replies in a thin and faltering voice: ‘I am not guilty.’ The chaplain now places a little square and black cap on the judge’s head. Turning to Bywaters, Shearman peers at the youth over his glasses. Then, staring down at the piece of paper, he mechanically reads out the words of the death sentence. The chaplain breathes a barely audible ‘Amen’, before the judge bends his eye towards the woman.

Every eye in court is on her and already dozens of female voices are heard crying for pity of the lost boy. The judge sentences Edith Thompson to death. The Clerk of the Court asks whether she has anything ‘to say in stay of execution?’ A whisper ripples through the gallery: if the woman is by any chance with child, seemingly a possibility after the courtroom innuendos about the nature of her affair with the young sailor, then she cannot be made to suffer death – the sentence will automatically be commuted to penal servitude for life.

Already the warders are pulling Bywaters by the sleeves to force him out of the dock. But he resists, his eyes rest dazedly on her, and it is at the precise moment that he agrees to be led downstairs that an agonised scream tears through the air of the courtroom: ‘I am not guilty; oh God, I am not guilty’. The woman slumps. Bywaters is taken downstairs. Avis Graydon’s eyes fasten on her sister’s figure, so close and yet so far. She notices how the wardresses try to wrench free Edith’s fingers from the rail of the dock. She is now sobbing hysterically, and they lift her out of the chair and virtually carry her ‘weeping and wailing’ down the staircase into the cells. Eventually the pitiful sounds fade away.

A stunned court barely takes in the judge’s thanking the jury for doing their duty. Another piercing cry was heard as the judge passed sentence. From the middle of the court Edith’s mother groaned: ‘She is my child – my child. They dare not harm her.’ The other mother has spent part of her day in a comatose state, drifting between the inside of Court I and the outer hall. She breaks down sobbing when the verdict is delivered. Relatives are seen to crowd around her now and give her what comfort they can. Judge and jury prepare to leave. Bywaters’s counsel are still sitting at their tables in disbelief. They must have suspected the likely outcome of the trial, but they still find it hard to accept. One of them is blindly gazing at his propelling pencil.

Outside in Old Bailey the crowds are gathering to see the prisoners emerge. They throng the street in droves, and mounted police push them back to clear the road traffic. The cars which for the next half hour circulate in Old Bailey are the police vehicles which temporarily keep the curious at bay.

Inside the building the ever-faithful Bessie is comforted by one of the many barristers who have been swarming in and out of Court I over the past few days to catch a glimpse of the case already famous as ‘Thompson & Bywaters’. Bessie vehemently protests her friend’s innocence, and he, smiling sadly, says, ‘the devil himself knoweth not the heart of man’. Bessie remains unconvinced. The devil might not know the heart of Edith Thompson, but she does. Earlier in the day, fate had seemed to her to step into Newgate Street when, in the courtroom queue, she met a former acquaintance who was barely recognizable because he had become a derelict. He had attended Kensington Avenue School, and he had been in love with Edith Graydon; she had consented to keep a place for him in her heart. He returned from the sea in the winter of 1916 to find that she had gone to Southend on her honeymoon. Now he was witnessing her suffering and hoping to sell his seat for sustenance.

A few minutes only have elapsed since the prisoners, now under sentence of death, left the court. Whiteley is summoned downstairs. A downcast but resolute Bywaters warmly thanks him for his valiant defence and advice throughout. His mother has joined him for a brief farewell. The Graydons have meanwhile been allowed downstairs to see Edith. They are devastated, but bravely pretend otherwise, as she will need every ounce of strength they can give her. She is weeping hysterically when they see her. Two policemen as well as Curtis-Bennett are with her in the tiny cell. Suddenly she looks up into those familiar faces and rushes towards them, nearly blinded by tears. She catches hold of her father’s coat and hangs on to him. The police immediately disengage them. Pushed back and firmly kept away from either parent, Edith is reaching out her arms to her father and crying ‘Take me home, Dad!’ Overwhelmed by grief the Graydons remain speechless. While their daughter’s cry still rings in their ears, they are bundled out of the building. Their last impression of Edith is of her arms stretched out. The precise moment would sear itself forever into the memory of her sister. Fifty years later Avis Graydon could not recall this scene without crying.

Her father is so badly shaken that his brother takes him across to the Magpie and Stump for a whisky. The mother, once the dominant figure in the family, clings to her husband like a child. Journalists and photographers still pack the street and, one imagines, the little pub. One of the photographers tries to catch a snap of Avis, but she covers her face with a fur hat which Edith bought her as a present. Unabashed the photographer kneels down to get a shot from underneath and is nearly stampeded by the terrified young woman. It is 7p.m. when the Graydons travel home to Shakespeare Crescent. By the time they reach No. 231 their prisoner-daughter has already arrived at Holloway in a taxi. When she gets there at a quarter past six, the governor has left instructions for her to be made comfortable and, if necessary, to spend the night in the prison hospital.

Bywaters is now transferred to Pentonville where he will occupy the same cell as Crippen and Seddon. The governor of Brixton was in court all day, as he would be surrendering his remand prisoner to the authorities at Pentonville in the case of a guilty verdict. He anxiously hoped that the jury would recommend the boy to mercy. He knew that the youth trusted him. Immediately after reaching the cells when they were shaking hands and the governor wished him luck, Bywaters urgently whispered a request to him to relay a last message to Edith Thompson: ‘BB’ and ‘PG’, meaning ‘be brave’ and ‘pray God’. The governor assured him that he would do his best. In fact he would write at once to the Prison Commissioners requesting permission to do so on the grounds that ‘It was a last request & to him may be of deep sentiment’. The reply reads: ‘This cannot be permitted. It is hoped that you did not lead him to think that it could be’. She will not get this message, but there will be others and many will in the end percolate through in spite of the hawks in the Prison Commission.

Tuesday 12 December 1922 Pentonville – 2.30 p.m.: Mrs Lilian Bywaters and her daughter Florrie visit Freddy in prison. He smiles wanly at them, as he takes his seat between the two warders at the end of a long table, some ten feet away from them. He has not shaved and is wearing mandatory prison uniform. His is now number 4153. He is very sad. The stoicism which allowed him to bear up throughout his ordeal at the Old Bailey has deserted him. He still manages to hold back his tears, even though his voice repeatedly chokes as he goes through the evidence again with his mother. To her at the moment he looks ‘just like a great big boy’. He praises Whiteley and at first refrains from saying anything against Mrs Thompson. Then, suddenly, he remarks: ‘I never imagined she would have turned against me as she did in the witness-box’, and his voice falters. Even this momentary reaction to her evidence under cross-examination – where she appeared to intimate that his suggestion of poisoning her husband initially shocked her – is quickly dispelled. By tomorrow night he will again have briefed his counsel specifically to safeguard Edith Thompson’s interests in the Appeals Court, at whatever cost to himself. This first of twenty-eight remaining daily visits passes, and the tearful family prepare to part. Before she leaves Pentonville Mrs Bywaters reassures her son that she will do everything in her power to get him off. Eight hundred policemen have already declared a willingness to sign the petition for a reprieve, she tells him, and his solicitor is hoping to draft the text of a petition with her help. When Mrs Bywaters asks to kiss Freddy goodbye, permission is refused. It will be granted during the next visit though, and from then on.

As his parents and siblings stumble back into the Caledonian Road, over at Holloway, less than a mile away, Mrs Graydon and Avis visit Edith. She is in the prison hospital and under sedation. The guards accompany the women through the dark corridors of the building. They dimly realise that Edith now lies in a different part of the prison. Then they reach the narrow hospital cell. Edith is lying propped up in bed trying to read a book from the prison library. At 10 a.m. this morning she was visited by the governor. She had slept well and told him this: ‘I have had the best night I have had for a month, in fact I slept almost all night.’ The governor has informed her of the special dietary privileges accorded condemned prisoners. She is keenly interested and has expressed a desire to be allowed to smoke. This is readily granted. After the visit, she settles down for the next few hours waiting for Avis and her mother to come.

She rises to meet them, but is cautioned by the wardress to stay put. They are allowed to sit at the cell door, no closer. The family and the prisoner try hard to keep off the case, and at no point is Bywaters mentioned. The only reference to the trial occurs when a pained and ill-looking Edith remarks:

It is terrible, mother, to be in here for something I never did and knew nothing about. I cannot believe I have been found guilty.

To this the mother replies that her father will do everything to secure her release. All three of them stake their hopes on the appeal next week. Does she need anything? ‘No, there is nothing. I have everything I need.’ The moment of parting is imminent. The mother and her two daughters break down completely when it comes.

While the two Graydon women make their solitary way to East Ham, Edith receives a message from the governor: would she be wanting to see a Miss Ida Burton from 778 Barking Road, Plaistow? She may vaguely remember who Ida Burton is, but declines. Miss Burton is informed of this by the governor in his office. She is disappointed, and he explains to her the procedures for seeing condemned prisoners. If he is sympathetic and even solicitous, it is because he is impressed by her urgency and her written references from a certain Canon Palmer of Ilford. How important Canon Palmer will become in the final stages of this story no-one can have anticipated, least of all the governor. In the meantime he patiently attends to Burton’s explanation that she and Mrs Thompson were schoolfriends together before the war in Manor Park. Why doesn’t she write in then, he suggests, telling Mrs Thompson of this? Perhaps she will then relent. Miss Burton eagerly accepts the invitation. Later this week she will be writing to Mrs Thompson alluding to their schooldays. Edith will agree to see her, and Miss Ida Burton, in the company of Mrs Graydon and Avis, will visit at Holloway on 1 January 1923.

It is dark when mother and daughter enter Shakespeare Crescent arm-in-arm and walk its weary length. The house is almost under siege from reporters eager for a shot of the family. The two women bravely ignore them and enters its dark premises. The mother puts on the kettle for a cup of tea, and then they sit waiting for the father and brother to return from work. The little home which once held such happiness enhances their sense of enclosed loneliness. Every corner is redolent with memories of the luckless child now lying in a London gaol. On the hall table telegrams are piling up already. They have been flooding in since early in the morning. All of them express their deepest sympathy for the suffering family. There is among the Graydons’ mail a letter from the editor of the Daily Sketch: ‘could they let their photographer into the house to take pictures of the parents’ reading the telegrams? The paper is preparing to launch a massive campaign and petition to rescue the two lovers from the scaffold. The Graydons’ limited cooperation would be appreciated’. Reluctantly the family allow the Daily Sketch inside. The two photos which feature on the front page of the paper’s first edition of the morning of Wednesday 13 December 1922 show the entire family except Bill and Harold in a frozen pose, looking not unlike a late nuclear Victorian clan. The second one portrays the two parents scanning the telegrams of sympathy and condolence. Inset in the picture is the smiling face of young Edith Graydon on holiday in Ilfracombe, contrasting starkly with her mother’s anguished and drawn looks, as she pretends to read the pieces of paper in front of her. On the same page adjacent to it the paper shows Mrs Bywaters writing her appeal for Freddy.

The Graydons have not even taken their dinner when the bell rings again and a well-spoken young man gently requests permission to enter. He had earlier left them his card and explained briefly why he wanted to see them. He was a journalist, but one very different from the others. Their first encounter with him would confirm this. His name was Beverley Nichols. For this talented dandy whose natural 1920s haunts coincided with those of the Bright Young People, and who was more at ease with Nellie Melba and the genteel decadence of the Bankheads, Beatons and Cunards, the story of ‘Thompson & Bywaters’ would form an unsettling landmark. It was his first assignment on the Weekly Dispatch. He was fresh down from Oxford and found himself plunged into Court I at the Old Bailey. His horror at the proceedings in court was compounded by his irresistible attraction to the young woman in the dock. She unfailingly reminded him of Diana Cooper. The timbre of her voice and its barely perceptible cockney vowels struck a sympathetic chord in his heart. He witnessed her collapse on Monday and he remembered how years earlier he had burst into uncontrollable tears in a cinema, when it was announced to a jubilant house that Crippen had been sentenced to death. Now here he was about to visit the parents of the tragic woman whose suffering he had witnessed from the press benches at the Central Criminal Court. After leaving his note for them, he strolled through the wet and wintry streets of Manor Park. Perhaps he recalled that these were her streets, where she had played and in which she grew up.

When her father lets him in Nichols seems to be almost as upset as the older man, who is crying and shaking his head, as if continuously in despair. Then he says: ‘To think that this should happen to people like us …!’ He leads Nichols into the sitting room. Newenham and the two women greet him quietly. The brother was in tears earlier, and can barely talk. Only Avis retains her calm, as Nichols silently notes with respectful approval. He has come to propose that for a substantial remuneration, the Graydons contribute to his paper the life story of their daughter. He realises that they need the money badly to campaign for Edith’s life. He knows how upright they are, and that they would never stoop to ‘selling’ their daughter’s story for money. In the end they are swayed by Nichols’s ingenuousness and their desperate need for finance. There will be five instalments by W. E. Graydon, and his writing will be assisted by a ghost writer, probably Nichols himself. In the end only three will materialise, because the father will be unable to carry on, as his daughter’s death approaches. But the paper, as part of its tribute to the family, will treat Edith Thompson with sympathy and protest her innocence to the end.

In the meantime and over in Upper Norwood, Lilian Bywaters has completed her first letter of appeal. It is headed ‘A Mother’s Appeal to the Mothers of the Nation’:

I am appealing to the hearts of all of the mothers of the nation to give me their help in getting a reprieve for my boy. You who have dear boys of your own will I am sure understand the terrible agony I am now suffering, and my great anxiety for his life to be spared. His father gave his life for you & yours, don’t let them take my boy from me. From a brokenhearted mother.

LILIAN BYWATERS

On Wednesday 13 December Bywaters is visited by his solicitor to lodge the appeal and, later, by his mother. He reissues specific instruction to his counsel to the effect that nothing must be said in his defence that could possibly harm Edith Thompson. During the mother’s visit he compliments her on how improved her looks are since yesterday. He does not mention Edith, but is excited to learn of the Daily Sketch petition. Earlier in the morning Mrs Bywaters has read in the paper under the headline ‘Save Young Bywaters’ that the offices and switchboards of the Daily Sketch have been inundated with anxious pleas for Bywaters’s life. The paper has printed a remarkable letter by ‘One Who Understands’, appealing for it to lead the way in a reprieve petition. The Daily Sketch has promised that in view of such high and generous feeling it will proceed at once with the printing of petition forms. They will be available in London, Manchester, Liverpool and other big cities, at the office of the Daily Sketch and in cinemas, kiosk, theatres and at Tube stations. The petition will be advertised by large bills with the words ‘Bywaters’ reprieve, sign here.’ Hearing of this nationwide groundswell in his favour, Freddy colours with delight: ‘That’s splendid, mum! That is going to make all the difference in the world.’

Also on this day the Daily Express, which is well disposed towards the lovers not least because of its editor Beverley Baxter’s passionate belief in the abolition of the death penalty, publishes details of Mrs Thompson’s estimated worth: 41 Kensington Gardens is valued at £800, half of which is hers as well as half the furniture. Their joint bank account shows a balance of approximately £100, and Thompson’s life is insured for £400. The parents in the end would be left with almost nothing from Edith’s home and possessions apart from a few personal belongings of their daughter’s and some precious photographs and letters.

On Thursday 14 December the Daily Sketch launches the petition for the reprieve of Bywaters. It is addressed to the Home Secretary. The text reads:

We, the undersigned, humbly petition for the commutation of the sentence of death passed on Frederick Edward Francis Bywaters at the Central Criminal Court by the Right Hon. Sir Montague Shearman on December 11, 1922.

By 7 a.m. the first Londoner has signed the form in the newspaper’s Shoe Lane office, and the trickle a few minutes later has already become a stream. It will be a torrent by night and in the course of the week will assume the proportions of a majestic river. The largest petition ever to be signed in Britain for a convicted prisoner has got under way. In a quick random survey of ordinary Londoners, all of them – chefs, bus drivers, sailors, mannequins, barmaids, soldiers, actresses – quoted verbatim, the paper has failed to elicit a single hostile comment on its mounting the petition. One man reading the paper today and deciding to appeal for the boy’s life direct to the Home Office is Eliot Howard, the committing magistrate. Ever since Thursday 24 November he has brooded over the evidence presented in his court. Increasingly he has become convinced that the boy is innocent. His extraordinary resilience at the Old Bailey and his refusal to get off through incriminating the temptress have vindicated the magistrate’s sense of Bywaters as a foolish young hothead, unable to resist the blandishments of Mrs Thompson. He points this out in his letter and reminds the Home Office of the boy’s previous good character, both at work and at home. His letter is promptly filed.

The massive early response to the petition allows Mrs Bywaters to break good news to Freddy, when she visits him in the company of her daughter Lilian and her sister-in-law Mrs Simmons. She tells him of how she herself has signed the petition at the offices of the Daily Sketch, and how people have recognised her and expressed their regard for her and wished her and her boy good luck. He is almost his old self when he tells Mrs Simmons to ‘take good care of Mum; don’t let her worry’ as they are leaving. He especially wants his family to thank all those who are signing their names for his life. Among the first to sign are the Graydons. Neatly and on a single petition form, they sign their names, the two parents first, followed by their son and daughter. They desperately want the brave boy to live and know that if his sentence is commuted hers will automatically be also.

Even as the family are signing the petition, the governor of Holloway visits the woman in his charge. He tells her that the date of her execution is fixed for Wednesday 3 January. She takes it calmly and remains collected after he is gone. Her mother will soon be coming, and she will be able to share the news with her. That will make it better.

On Friday 15 December the Daily Sketch increases the momentum of its campaign to translate the sentiment which has ‘echoed throughout the British Isles’ into fact: ‘Bywaters must not be hanged’, announces its bold headline, and it is followed proudly by a statement that 10,000 letters have arrived in the first post alone and that a double queue has formed at the Daily Sketch to sign. At the same time the paper prominently carries a dissenting letter from an outraged Ilfordian, Mr Charles R. Walters of 11 Mortlake Road, Ilford, who is nauseated by all this ‘sentimental bosh’ and wants to see the lovers hang. The paper’s centre piece, though, is a shrewdly edited biography of Bywaters by his mother, followed by a criminological analysis of the entire case. The mother’s article highlights the absence in the family of a father, who gave his life for his country, the importance Freddy attaches to the ‘bronze monkey’, and his chivalric behaviour to his sisters. By the time Mrs Bywaters visits Freddy again on Friday and Saturday, he has settled more into the prison routine. He now plays draughts and dominoes with the warders, as well as cards and tells them of his voyages. He is allowed to smoke and is given the football results, which interest him. But he remains almost obsessively preoccupied with the bronze monkey. He gave the ‘hear-no-evil’ monkey to Edith Thompson as a keepsake during his absence at sea. He had been warned that the creature would keep him in luck as long as he hung on to it. He now wants it back, convinced that his fate is indissolubly bound up with it. Meeting his mother in the afternoon Freddy sends his gratitude through her to ‘the Daily Sketch for giving its readers the opportunity to put forth their marvellous efforts to save my life’. On the same page the paper records the Home Secretary’s reply in the Commons to a question regarding the position of advice sought in capital decisions. It indirectly confirms that the judge’s opinion will be taken into account, and notes contiguously that Percy’s mother, aged over seventy, ‘has lain at death’s door’ since learning of her son’s violent death.

Every day since Tuesday Edith has seen her mother and sister. Now, on Saturday 16 December, her father is at last free to visit, accompanied by Newenham. The cell door is open, and she is up. The two men are requested not to enter, as a heavy deal table is pushed across the doorway and chairs are arranged on either side. Mr Graydon, with a note of enforced jolliness, greets his daughter who slowly walks towards him and her brother with a cheerful ‘Hullo, father. How good it is to see you.’ Sitting just out of touching range of each other, father and daughter exchange news about mostly ordinary things. He comments on the fact that she is wearing a new dress of grey serge and a small apron of white and blue check. She explains that this uniform is specifically designed for appeal prisoners. Her father remarks on the airy lightness of the room, and she concurs, wondering whether that is why she feels much better and sleeps more soundly now. ‘Tell me about mother’, she asks, and Mr Graydon dutifully relates his impression of the mother and how she is bearing up. It will be her birthday tomorrow and Edith has written her a loving letter to make her feel better. From her father she learns that her mother is coping bravely, but she guesses the truth as Newenham’s eyes fill with tears. Astutely she brings the conversation round to her diet and routine. She is allowed to do some crochet-work, she tells them, and she reads a lot. She is wholly unconstrained as regards the number of letters allowed her, but so far she has felt little need to communicate in writing, apart from the letter to her mother. The prison diet is dreary enough. It consists largely of milk, fish, and eggs. The tea is poor, so she drinks milk instead. Her father notices that Bywaters’s name has not so far passed her lips, even though she must be thinking of him all the time. Again and again during their conversation her eyes furtively glance up at the barred window. Outside it is a fine wintry day and there was even some sunshine earlier on. Her manifest longing hurts her father who can do so little to help her. Their parting is an emotional occasion, the more so since tomorrow is a Sunday, when no visitors are allowed and Mrs Graydon will celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Is is the harshest anniversary of her life. Like her daughter at Holloway and every other member in her family, she recalls the sheer insouciant happiness of last year’s 17 December.

While Edith breathes a silent prayer and greetings to her mother, Mrs Graydon lies prostrate in her home. She has read and re-read Edith’s letter to her: if only the people who decided and will still decide her fate could see writing like this rather than her daughter’s unseemly passion in the famous letters! This brave and caring child could never harm a fly, let alone be a killer, the mother reasons. Bessie is visiting No. 231 this Sunday. She has always been part of the family. They took her in during the war when Reg was on active service. Now she will do her utmost to assist Edith and all the Graydons in their ordeal. She writes to Edith in prison and commiserates with her friend about the awfulness of the Monday of the sentencing. How, she enquires, is Edith bearing up and what is the routine at Holloway like? She tells her that on Friday 22 December she and Reg will be off on holiday, but that she will try and see her before going. Has she remembered her mother’s birthday? She must be reassured about them; the family are coping, and friends and relatives are constantly at hand to help them.

Edith receives Bessie’s warm and affectionate letter on Monday 18 December. She replies immediately:

Dear –
I have just received your letter and I hasten to answer it.
Yes, it was awful last Monday. I can’t explain what it felt like. I suppose no one knows unless their position is the same. It would be so much easier to bear even if I knew or even felt that I deserved that verdict, but I’m hoping for such a lot on Thursday. Everyone seems so hopeful for me. I suppose it is catching.

Edith’s handwriting A © René Weis

The time here, on the whole, seems not as long as on remand – so many things are different. I can’t tell you because it is against the rules, but it is a fact, and I sleep better here than I did there; really I have very good nights’ rest.
There is plenty of time and opportunity to think all day long, so that by the time the night comes my brain is quite worn out and rests quite naturally.
This is something I am really pleased about, because I never – no, I think, not once – had a really good night’s sleep. I have asked and obtained permission for you to visit me. Now, as you are going away on Friday, I wonder if you will have time, but if you don’t come I shall quite understand, and hope that you will be having a real good rest over the holidays.
I remembered it was mother’s birthday yesterday [17 December], and wrote to her. I’m glad you went down to see them. I expect they want cheering a little.
You know, dear, it’s really about them I worry far more than about myself. It must be painful for them – the publicity alone must be more than they can cope with. You see I am shut away here and know nothing of all that. However, perhaps things will come right even yet.
Ask – to write; only tell him to mind his p’s and q’s. Now there is nothing else I want to say except to thank you – I can’t tell you how much – for all you have done for me and for mother during this time.
It has helped tremendously to know that everybody, friends and relatives, have all stood by me during this time and have believed in me and still do.
I can’t say anymore, but I’m sure you will understand how I feel, and remember that all I want you to do now is to wish me luck for Thursday.
EDITH

The ‘–‘ whom she here invites to write could be anyone in her circle of men friends except Harry Renton, who has already written to her and who will repeatedly visit her in prison.

On this rainy Monday morning Bywaters signs his petition and Edith probably does likewise. Meanwhile the Daily Sketch has attracted the prominent support for its petition of an otherwise unrepentant hanger, Edward E. Wallace. Wallace’s shrewd letter is one of thousands. The most striking letter to be published in the paper, advocating clemency for the boy, deserves quoting for its indignant humanity:

It is sad to think that so many of our writers and letter-writers cannot originate an argument against Bywaters, but must depend even for their words upon a remark of the judge. He said ‘gush’. Those who think it must be fashionable or a sign of super intelligence to copy the judge say ‘gush’. It is sad, too, to think that there are even a few of these left in England. They are the gloomy-minded, the narrow-souled hermits that decry the sun because it sheds light on dark places; poor, disappointed, cynical derelicts in a world that holds no gladness for such as them. They are the kind who never said ‘I love you’ to a woman or had that sort of ‘gush’ said to them by a man. Let the rest of England, bright, happy, clean-thinking England, pray for the gloomy minds that are so valiant in their tirades against the gush that spends itself in an effort to save that which may be taken away but never returned – a human life!

Throughout this week the weather in London has been bad. Icy showers and gusty winds make Londoners’ lives as miserable as only the British climate can. The day of the appeal approaches.

Thursday 21 December is a bleak day. The august Appeal Courts in the Strand seem to stand up defiantly to the elemental onslaught of gales and hail-showers. Inside three old men are settling down in the court of the Lord Chief Justice to rule on the lives of two very young people. Their only concern should be with points of law, but their comments will betray a gross moral bias.

Bywaters arrives early for the hearings in a taxi-cab, accompanied by three warders. He is dressed in the same blue lounge suit and spotless white shirt and tie that he was wearing at the Old Bailey. For a few minutes he is kept in the cells before the court is ready. Then he enters through the curtained doorway. His mother and Mrs Simmons are sitting on either side of Inspector Hall, by coincidence. Freddy and she exchange a quick smile before he takes up his place in the dock. Inskip is seen sitting behind a pile of law books and a transcript of the trial. Whiteley takes an hour and a half over his appeal before the three judges, Mr Justice Salter, Lord Hewart as Lord Chief Justice, and Mr Justice Darling.

His attack is two-pronged: firstly to protest against the refusal to allow separate trials and hence the inadmissibility of the letters which in any case failed as evidence on the indictment for which they were submitted; secondly, Whiteley notes bitterly, Bywaters’s defence was severely prejudiced by the fact that the Crown was granted the last address before the summing-up.

It takes the judges a mere five minutes to agree a verdict, which is to dismiss the appeal on every ground. In the process of so doing, Hewart endorses as ‘a true and appropriate description’ Shearman’s characterising the case as that of a ‘common and ordinary charge of a wife and another murdering her husband’. His conclusion is, remarkably, that the case was

a squalid and rather indecent one of lust and adultery, in which the husband was murdered in a cowardly fashion, partly because he was in the way, and partly because such money as he possessed was desired by them.

Freddy listens to this tirade impassively. He darts a quick glance towards his mother on hearing the verdict, and then responds to the gentle touch on his arm by one of the warders. He has vanished through the curtain door before his mother has fully grasped the implications of the ruling. Inskip has not even been challenged to state or restate the Crown’s case.

It is gone noon when Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett rises. He knows that the odds are overwhelmingly stacked against him. For a full three hours he pleads his client’s case again. He reminds the court of the inadmissibility of the letters on the first indictment, that they blur fact and fiction, that Spilsbury and Webster conclusively disproved that Thompson had been the victim of a plot to poison him and that furthermore there was not a shred of evidence in the correspondence to point towards a conspiracy to murder Thompson on the night of 3 October. Hewart interrupts and reminds counsel that the woman tried to shield the killer. Curtis-Bennett accepts this, but rightly denies that it in any way proves her connivance before the murder. Repeatedly the three judges chip in, Hewart with bullish seriousness, or, more memorably, Darling with distasteful flippancy. The latter’s jokes about the lovers in this matter of life and death and in the presence of Mrs Bywaters and of Mr Graydon attracts some vulgar applause in court, but muted opprobrium in the press at large the following day. Eight minutes is all the judges require. Late in the afternoon Edith Thompson’s appeal is dismissed on every ground. This is ‘a commonplace and unedifying case’, Hewart remarks, mindful of Curtis-Bennett’s attempt at blowing it up into a great and tragic romance. Mrs Thompson’s ‘letters are a deplorable correspondence of the most mischievous and venomous kind’, and were certainly properly submitted. The guilty affection between the lovers was ‘passionate’ and ‘wicked’. In conclusion, this sordid affair ‘exhibits from beginning to end no redeeming feature’. Inskip has still not spoken.

Edith has elected to forfeit her right to be exhibited to the public gaze once more, but all day at Holloway she is hoping, hoping. The news of the progress of the petition has fired her spirit. Already well over half a million people have signed and hundreds of thousands are still putting their names to it up and down the country. Noon comes and goes, and as yet she has no news of what is happening in the Strand.

But a young woman who is shortly afterwards travelling up to Holloway from Edith’s familiar haunts over in East Ham catches a glimpse on a billboard: Bywaters’s appeal is dismissed, it announces. With a heavy heart Bessie enters the gloomy prison. In the reception hall and in front of a blazing fire her name and address are entered into a ponderous ledger. Then she is escorted across a courtyard, with flagged paths ‘bordered with small patches of soot-covered London grass, wherein are set rose bushes. It is the most tragic garden in London’. A short wait in a little vestibule is succeeded by another walk along a narrow, linoleum-covered passage, followed by a staircase and a landing. Eventually she arrives at the hospital.

Bessie is face to face with Edith. She has gathered from Avis and the other Graydons that the family have been allowed to go up and kiss her, in spite of the official instructions to the contrary. ‘You are allowed half an hour’, the wardress pronounces. Bessie is almost overcome at the sight of the other woman. For so long they have been such close and intimate friends. She is shocked by the unreality of Edith’s appearance, in grey, aproned and wearing a white cap. Her mouth droops listlessly and her hands move tremulously in her lap. She looks pale, her eyes appear dark and shadowed from her vigils. Bessie cannot help remembering that this is the same girl with whom she shared everything, all her romantic dreams and their concerns about ‘women’s things’. Edith was, like herself, such a truly ordinary girl. Why then is her friend sitting there and she over here, divided by a heavy table which demarcates the line between life and death? ‘How is mother?’ Edith asks. ‘Have you seen her and is she coping all right?’ Bessie nods, and Edith tells her how she at once assumed that her visitor was her mother when she was informed of a caller. Bessie understands that Edith needs her mother now more than ever. The visitor is also momentarily tongue-tied, because of the hovering presence of the three wardresses. Edith is used to them. They are present even when she uses the lavatory, a ritual whose unsettling intimacy has curiously bonded the women more closely together, like mother and child.

Well [Edith says] I suppose you want to know how I am getting on in here? I will tell you. Strange as it may seem, I am infinitely more comfortable here than I was when on remand. That was simply horrible. Here, all things considered, I have comfort. Of course, I loathe these clothes.

The last words are accompanied ‘with a little dainty gesture of contempt’. The most Bessie can say is ‘How do you pass the time here?’ to which Edith replies brightly:

Well, you know, ever since I was sentenced I have been waiting for the appeal which is being heard today. I feel so convinced that it must succeed, that I shall wake from this as from some awful dream, that all will come right yet, as I said in my letter.

Suddenly she asks whether Bessie knows the result of either appeal. Before the wardress can intervene, Bessie has denied any knowledge of the appeals’ outcome. She cannot break it to her there and then that her lover has stepped that much closer to the gallows. The wardresses remind the two prisoners that outside news is not allowed to be communicated. To explain further how she passes her day, Edith puts her hand to her throat, which Bessie knows to be an old gesture of hers and one which she repeatedly used during cross-examination at the Old Bailey. It serves to remind her where once she wore an amber bead necklace, she now has a simple white string. ‘This is the routine’, she explains, turning to the wardress: ‘I suppose I may tell that?’ She nods, and Edith proceeds:

They are kind to me here in the prison hospital, and I am given breakfast in bed at half-past seven. Then I dress in these and from then on the morning is my own to do what I like in. Sometimes I write, sometimes I read, sometimes I knit mufflers which, I am told, go to the boys of the Borstal Institute.
Then at midday I have dinner. I am not allowed to have a knife or fork, and it is rather difficult to eat with the wooden spoon they provide; but I suppose that must be put up with!
After dinner I walk in a yard alone for an hour – that is to say, I see no other prisoners. I do not enjoy that.
At four I have tea, and at half-past eight I have to go to bed.

Her reading of books sent in by friends and relatives and volumes borrowed from the prison library consists of her favourite authors:

You know, I have always loved W. J. Locke’s romances. Well, I have been reading ‘The House of Baltazar’. It is wonderful. But sometimes I feel I cannot read, for my mind goes back again and again to what is going on outside – I mean the appeal. I can never get away from that for long. But there is one blessing. While I was on remand, and during the trial, I simply couldn’t sleep. I think that was why I so nearly collapsed during the trial. But now I sleep every night, soundly.

How, Bessie wonders, can her friends simply keep the horrors of the gallows so wholly at bay? Her courage fires Bessie in turn bravely to ignore and overcome her fears. She decides to spend her remaining moments with Edith Thompson talking of happier childhood memories. They speak of early school adventures and when Bessie reminds Edith of the squashed frog incident on a Sunday long ago she even laughs and remarks: ‘Fancy you remembering that’. Together in the death cell at Holloway the two women become two young girls revisiting their childhood in Edwardian England and their adolescence during the Great War.

At 3 p.m. a wardress indicates that time is up. Edith and Bessie rise and bravely smile goodbye to each other. While the one disappears into the bowels of the grimy gaol, the other us escorted out into the wintry London dusk. Even as she is walking in the grim shadow of Holloway Prison to reach the Underground, Bessie is passed by a screaming newspaper boy flashing the latest bill saying that Thompson’s appeal has been dismissed. It hits Bessie that at this precise moment her friend Edith Thompson is immured still in hope behind these dreaded walls, when already the law has declared her dead. Now Bessie may never see her again. But she will try and freeze these last moments with Edith Thompson in her own and the country’s memory, by putting them down on paper in precise detail. Not for money, but to clear this generous woman, as she knows her, from the shame and horror of the fate destined her if no miracle intervenes. Lloyd’s Sunday News has approached her and she has informed the Graydons of this and consulted them about her course of action. In the end it has been agreed that however repellent they find the newspapers, the money can be pooled to assist with Edith’s case, and the columns of the paper can be used to state its urgency to the nation, her sole hope if the appeal fails. The paper has also offered to pay handsomely for any new and therefore ‘exclusive’ photographs of Edith Thompson and her family. Bessie has provided several of hers, just as Mr Graydon has done for the Weekly Dispatch. Edith herself has been briefed on the family’s and relatives’ use of the press to secure a commutation. She has not objected. She in any case will not see anything of it.

A couple of hours after Bessie’s departure, the governor arrives at Edith’s cell door and informs her regretfully that the appeal has failed. She looks stunned but remains calm. He tells her that the date of the execution is now fixed for Tuesday 9 January at 9 a.m. ‘I understood you to say the date was Jan 3rd ’, she remarks quietly. He explains that it has been changed because of the appeal. She thanks him. As Dr Morton walks back to his office, not forgetting the sheer monstrosity of what is happening – he himself cannot quite imagine what hanging a woman would mean – the widow is numbly crying in her cell. The women about her do their utmost to comfort her. They are almost as dumbfounded as she is. Eventually Mrs Thompson comes round and asks for pen and paper. She simply must talk to her parents:

Dearest Mother and Dad –
Today seems the end of everything. I can’t think – I just seem up against a blank, thick wall, through which neither my eyes nor my thoughts can penetrate.
It’s not within my powers of realisation that this sentence must stand for something which I have not done, something I did not know of, either previously or at the time. I know you both know this. I know you both have known and believed it all along.
However, I suppose it is only another landmark in my life – there have been so many when I look back, but somehow they are not landmarks until I look back upon the journey, and then I know that certain events were landmarks.
I’ve tried to unravel this tangle of my existence, this existence that we all call life. It is only at these times that we do think about it.
It has been an existence, that’s all, just a ‘passing through’, meeting trials, and shocks and surprises with a smiling face and an aching heart, and eventually being submerged and facing Death, that thing that there is no escaping – no hope of defeating.
You both must be feeling as bad and perhaps worse than I do today, and I do so hope that this will not make things harder to bear. But I really felt that I should like to talk to you both for just a little while, after I was told the result.
Even now I cannot realise all it means: but, dearest mother and dad, you must both bear up – just think that I am trying to do the same, and I am sure that thought will help.

If the governor is not eager to fight her corner, he nevertheless does his best by her. He has to censor her mail and sends this one up to the Prison Commissioners for scrutiny. In his covering note he points out that she has written ‘a number of letters since she was condemned to death’ and that they have all been ‘couched in a more or less frivolous [sic] style’. This one at last, he notes, and for the first time, shows that she has begun to realise the meaning of her sentence. Could the Commissioners please consider the paragraph commencing, ‘However I suppose’ and ending, ‘I know that certain events were landmarks?’ The letter is harmless enough and could not possibly be objected to. Its submission – unlike the more ‘frivolous’ ones – suggests that the governor is playing safe by being seen to do his duty by the Prison Commissioners, while simultaneously allowing a fair part of Edith’s correspondence to pass without opposition.

There are three more days to go till Christmas. The Graydons have been invited to Highbury by the Walkinshaws to spend the day with them. They have accepted. On Friday 832,104 signatures are delivered by van to the Home Office. Thousands more are pouring in every hour, but the Daily Sketch wishes to pre-empt a zealous negative decision by the Home Secretary in the immediate aftermath of the appeals’ dismissal. It is probably also banking on the spirit of Christmas coming to the condemned couple’s rescue. Hence it seems worth trading the advantage of the magical million figure against a possible and irrevocable decision not to reprieve.

Saturday 23 December 1922: This morning Edith receives a letter from Bessie to share her sense of shock over the appeal. In it she voices her fervent hope and conviction that humanity will prevail and that she, Edith, will not have to suffer the extreme penalty. Wearily the prisoner puts it aside. She will reply later. She has not been out of bed since Thursday night. At 2.30 p.m. her father, mother and sister visit her. She is sitting already in an armchair at the table, and is now wearing a blue-grey dressing-gown. It is her first time up in two days and she tries hard to appear cheerful. She enquires after all her friends except Bywaters, and then asks: ‘Do you remember last Christmas, Dad?’, without sounding wistful or self-pitying. She recalls the 22lb turkey she was given, Percy’s good cheer, the chocolates and how the whole family enjoyed themselves. Moreover she expresses a keen appreciation of the lady doctor, Dora Walker, the Assistant Medical Officer at Holloway who is now looking after her. Her parents expect her to be deeply depressed about spending both Christmas and Boxing Day alone, and of course about the outcome of the appeal. The thought of a lonely and cheerless Christmas however hardly seems to impinge on her mind; and she is not bothered by the prospects of a spartan diet throughout these festive days. About the appeal Edith wanly smiles and remarks: ‘Wasn’t it bad luck?’ She nearly chokes on the phrase though and betrays the depth of her emotional upheaval by beginning to weep. Then, turning to Avis, she tells her sister that she has been reading If Winter Comes and ‘I am very disappointed with it. I have only read a few chapters, but up to the present none of the characters strike me as live men and women.’ On this she will change her mind during the next few weeks, after at last finishing Hutchinson’s novel; and she will convey her revised sense of it to Bessie in a letter of 3 January, the day she was originally to die.

While talking to her family Edith is seen to be toying nervously with her wedding-ring, and sometimes she leans forward so much that her arms almost touch her father’s. She enquires after her house in Kensington Gardens and seems reassured to hear that it is in the hands of the receiver. She is distraught when the time of the visit is up. Not to see them for three days seems an unbearable prospect. In nearby Pentonville young Bywaters also prepares for three days’ isolation. Over the summer and after the reconciliation with his mother, Freddy had written to her to tell her that at last they would spend a Christmas together, their first one since he was fifteen years old. Now his mother has written to the Queen and to the Home Secretary separately to appeal for her son’s life. In the meantime the petition is still rolling and rumour has it that it will pass the million mark any moment now.

Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day are bleak and wet as heavy gales sweep in from the sea and unleash rain, hail and a chill on the metropolis. 25 December 1922 marks Edith Thompson’s twenty-ninth birthday. Her parents well remember that day in Dalston nearly thirty years ago when she was born. For the millionth time they wonder whether this nightmare will suddenly dissipate itself and produce a new awakening; how can the pretty baby who seemed to fulfil all their dreams now be the much-slandered woman lying in Holloway close to death? Mrs Graydon feels the hurt of her daughter’s predicament more intimately than anyone else. She gave her life in the first place.

Somebody who assisted at Edith’s birth was her aunt Edith Walkinshaw who is entertaining the Graydons today, along with the Laxtons and other relatives, like the Graydon children’s cousin Leonard, on leave from school.

Before lunch Leonard suggests that they all go for a drink. Avis and Newenham trudge along with him to the Barn in Highbury. The others stay behind at 32 Lucerne Road, from where not a sound of Christmas emerges. The grief-stricken families are waiting, thinking, praying, hoping.

For the two condemned prisoners, the day serves as a reminder of their total physical apartness both from each other and from the world. Bywaters is fretful and takes an anguished walk round the prison yard in the company of two warders. He spends a little time in the chapel, but remains unmoved by the carol-singing. He prefers to play draughts or sit in his cell chatting to the warders, telling them of his little brother, his sister and his life at sea. He enjoys his Christmas dinner, which consists of roast beef and plum pudding. He can still joke about only being allowed the use of a fork and spoon, opining that he is not after all likely to take his own life now. Just before Christmas he told his mother:

I think they will let me live, though they will not let me out of prison till I am almost an old man. But that will be a great concession.

In Holloway Edith Thompson has declined the invitation to exercise. Since her parents’ and sister’s visit she has remained in bed. She is calm now on Christmas morning and graciously accepts the muted ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy Birthday’ greetings tendered her by the embarrassed invigilatory staff. She merely nibbles at her Christmas dinner of broth, chicken and fruit. It is shortly thereafter that she flies into a fit of hysteria.

The doctor examines her while she is held down by the wardresses. Again and again she exclaims: ‘What a Christmas!’ and bursts uncontrollably into tears when she hears the ‘neighbouring bells [of Tufnell Park] crash out their merry peal.’ Dr Walker injects her with a heavy sedative, and she subsides into sleep. She moans and tosses in her slumber and continues in this manner until evening falls. They wake her from this restless rest to offer her tea. She speaks intermittently to the wardresses, and then only to utter over and over the same cry of ‘Why – oh why, am I here?’, as though they could possibly give her an explanation. Again they fail to calm her down, and she is drugged afresh. In this state of near-delirium she continues groaning and repeating with monotonous regularity: ‘Why did he do it, why?’

On Boxing Day she is calmer. She knows that if the Home Secretary should not reprieve her it will be this morning in a fortnight’s time that she and Freddy will die. But that awareness she as yet manages to control. Finally she collects herself enough to write a remarkable letter to Bessie:

Dear Bessie,
I wanted to write to you yesterday and yet I couldn’t. I could do nothing but sit and think. Who was it said, ‘Some days we sits and thinks, and some we simply sit’? Well, yesterday was a ‘sitting and thinking day’.
I got your letter on Saturday. Yes, the result of the appeal was a great shock – I had such hopes of it – not only hopes for mercy, but hopes for justice; but I realise how very difficult it is to fight prejudice.
If you have facts to fight, and you fail, you seem more reconciled, but when it’s only prejudice – oh, it’s awful.
You talk about not having to pay the extreme penalty. Do you know that I don’t dread that at all. I feel that would be easier than banishment – wrongful banishment for life. I feel no apprehension of what might lie ahead after this life.
Yesterday I was twenty-nine; it’s not really very old, I suppose, and yet it seems so to me.
Yesterday I was thinking about everything that has ever happened, it seems to help in all sorts of way when I do this. I realise what a mysterious thing life is. We all imagine we can mould our own lives – we seldom can, they are moulded for us – just by the laws and rules and conventions of this world, and if we break any of these, we only have to look forward to a formidable and unattractive wilderness.
I’ve often thought how good it would be to talk, to pour out everything, it might have pained as well, but it would be pain that comes with sudden relief of intolerable hurt.
However, I’m going to forget all that now. I’m going to hope– because everybody tells me so. I’m going to live in those enormous moments when the whole of life seems bound up in the absolute necessity to win.
Thank you so much for writing to me, and helping to keep me cheerful.
EDITH

Wednesday 27 December brings with it more visits from parents, siblings and other friends and relatives. Everyone pretends to be buoyed up by the progress of the petition and the ‘leaked’ information in the Daily Sketch that the Home Secretary has raised the matter with Cabinet colleagues and the Prime Minister, Bonar Law. The most generous interpretation of this move – authenticated by reports to the same effect elsewhere – is that Bridgeman has experienced genuine moral doubts as to whether to reprieve or to let the law take its course. The cynical view is that Cabinet and Prime Minister were consulted for reasons of political expediency; the momentum of the petition was such that no politician could simply ignore it.

On Saturday 30 December Edith is visited by her father, her uncle Jack and Avis. To their surprise she advances towards them smiling and humming a tune. She greets them with a warm ‘Hullo’ and with smiles for everyone. She is now wearing a grey dress and her father notices that her cheeks are flushed from exercise in the yard. It is almost as if she is momentarily rejuvenated. She does not mention the trial at all, nor Bywaters, and merely breathes a single word about the appeal. What she most desires to talk about is ‘mater’ and how she is bearing up in spite of all the publicity which the case has attracted and is still generating. Reassured on that point, she tells them of the piles of letters that are pouring in from all over England and from abroad. This same morning she received more than thirty of them. This, in conjunction with the prospect of a Cabinet decision on the reprieve, motivates the family anew. Back at home it is decided that a direct approach to the Prime Minister and the Queen must be tried, as well as a separate one to the Cabinet. Avis Graydon and Mrs Graydon who, unlike Edith, are not versed in the epistolary arts, nevertheless write the following two impressive letters:

231 Shakespeare Crescent
Manor Park
London E. 12
30-12-22

To the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty

Most Gracious Sovereign,

May it please your Majesty to grant the favour of your Royal influence towards obtaining a reprieve for my unfortunate daughter Mrs Edith Thompson.
As a Mother, you well realise the torment through which I am passing knowing that my daughter is the victim of the most compromising circumstances but yet being absolutely innocent of the awful charge upon which she has been convicted, and I now appeal to you as Mother of the Nation to be pleased to show your gracious mercy towards one who, up to the time of this terrible catastrophe has always been a most dutiful and loving daughter and who has always been the first to help others in the hour of their distress. I hope in your Royal mercy and graciousness you will not fail to hear this cry from the heart of a grief stricken Mother in her hour of need, all of whose three sons served their country in its hour of need.
I have the honour to remain your Majesty’s most faithful subject and dutiful servant.

ETHEL J. GRAYDON

Surely her sons’ service in their country’s uniform ought to appeal to the Queen’s maternal and patriotic instincts, Mrs Graydon reasons. Not only is Edith innocent and a mother’s daughter, but she is the sister of loyal English soldiers and sailors.

Avis’s letter to the Prime Minister is punchier, more spontaneous, visceral and desperate. It remains, like her mother’s, a deeply stirring document:

231 Shakespeare Crescent
Manor Park
E12
30/12/22
Sir,

Re my sister Mrs Thompson

I beg you kindly to read this letter in the hope that some of the points will enable you to see my sister’s character other than presented to the public, by the prosecution.
I can assure you Sir that my sister had no idea that her husband was going to be murdered, as it had been arranged a fortnight before that I should accompany them to the Theatre, & spend the night with her in Kensington Gdns, & she had no idea until she met her husband in the evening that I was not going to be of the party.³In court, on 8 December 1922, Bywaters stated that at Fuller’s tea shop, on 3rd October, Edith ‘said she was going to the theatre and added “I wish I was going with you”’. In response to his counsel’s question ‘Did she say with whom she was going?’, Freddy replied ‘Yes, she told me she was going with Percy, her uncle and aunt from Stamford Hill, and her sister Miss Avis Graydon’. Her husband telephoned me late in the afternoon & I told him that I had already made arrangements to go out for mother. How can they pass sentence of Death on her?
Dr Spilsbury gave evidence that there was no trace of poison in the deceased’s body, how then can it be said, she poisoned him. Why was all the evidence of defence put on one side, & only the black side – the foolish letters of an over wrought, unhappy woman – placed before the Jury.
It is untrue that my sister was happy before Bywaters came into her life.
Mrs Lester can prove, & also others with whom she lived before, that she was unhappy; only her great respect & love for her parents prevented her bringing her troubles home. If she had done anything wrong at any time, she would have told mother at any cost, also my brother in law would have spoken to my dad.
I should like to say, that Percy Thompson being of a peculiar character had no friends of his own, & naturally very soon disagreed with my sister’s friends.
The man is dead, but why should he die blameless. His case was just the same as my sister’s which you can see by the letters not produced.
Mrs Thompson was a hard working woman, of a generous, loving nature & no doubt after Bywaters seeing her unhappiness, she turned to him for sympathy. Her greatest mistake being – afraid to confide in her family who loved her above everything. Why was it so emphatically said ‘She incited Bywaters?’ It is obvious her letters are answers to questions, where are Bywaters letters to prove his statement that Mrs Thompson is innocent? Why has no benefit of the doubt been given in this case to the accused?
Can it be my sister is insane! Is this question having the prison doctors attention?
If you had seen my sister at any time, there could no be any doubt in your mind that the verdict is wrong.
I beg you to show mercy on her, for her parents sake, you are a father therefore understand their feelings.
We are helpless & know that she is Not Guilty.
May the Great Judge of all guide you in coming to your final decision, to which the family are just clinging, as the last hope.
Committing the above to your kind attention.
I remain in anticipation

AVIS E. GRAYDON (Miss)

To
The Rt. Hon. Bonar Law Esq. M.P.

The following day, Sunday 31 December, Lillie Laxton, who has all along supported Ethel, writes to ‘The Gentlemen of the Cabinet’:

Jack and Lillie Laxton in c. 1929 © Daryll Baynard

5 Rostrevor Avenue
Stamford Hill
N.15

31/12/22
To
The Gentlemen of the Cabinet

Dear Sirs,
As the Home Secretary has left the decision of the case of Frederick Bywaters & Mrs Thompson to you, I feel I must make a final appeal on their behalf.
My husband & I were the aunt and uncle with whom Mr & Mrs Thompson spent the evening at the theatre, & I assure you Gentlemen, that from Mrs Thompson’s manner, conversations, & also arrangements we all made to go to dances, dinners & other theatres, during the season, it was absolutely impossible for Mrs Thompson to have entered into any arrangement with Bywaters to commit the crime. Moreover, knowing the late Mr Thompson very well. I say the lad’s story is true & undoubtedly he acted as he thought in self-defence, Mr Thompson being just the kind of man who would bluff having a weapon.
But Gentlemen, my real plea is on behalf of the parents. By hanging the unhappy couple it is not them who suffer, but the family left behind. I know it is a difficult decision for you to arrive at, & possibly it will make a precedent for the abolition of ‘Capital Punishment’, but Gentlemen, being a new Government it is possible for you to do this. If burning at the stake was not a deterrent to crime, I am sure the more merciful way of hanging is not. These things or crimes are only committed in a moment of passion & not premeditated. The punishment of years of confinement is borne by the offenders, but the punishment of hanging is borne by the parents and relations. May I therefore ask once again for ‘Mercy’.
Yours sincerely
L. LAXTON
(sister to Mrs Thompson’s mother)

The last night of the last day of 1922 has arrived. The two lovers in their death cells are pondering their situation. This was to have been the year when everything ought to have worked itself out! They might have eloped, or just gone on holiday together. As Edith reviews ‘her’ year in numbness and pain, Bywaters keeps up the brave façade of nonchalant stoicism. This morning the warders have communicated to him the results of Saturday’s football matches which he has eagerly scrutinised. The final minutes of the old year glide away and bells all over the metropolis start ringing in the New Year of 1923. While crowds are jamming the main thoroughfares of London and Trafalgar Square, Edith Thompson lies wide awake, listening intently to the noises of the outside world. Is she really meant to die in this year 1923? Later, when her mother asks her whether she wished herself ‘Good luck’, she replies: ‘Yes, I did; but it doesn’t seem to matter now, does it?’