THE ‘LIFELONG FRIEND’
IDA LOUISE BURTON (1893-1965)
The three most intimate pieces about Edith Thompson in the newspapers of the time were signed ‘By a lifelong friend of Mrs Thompson’. They appeared in Lloyds Sunday News (LSN) on 17 and 24 December 1922, and on 7 January 1923. They are reproduced in their entirety and in chronological sequence at the end of this page. They can also be read in context at ‘Edith Thompson in the press’ at (https://edithjessiethompson.co.uk/primary-source-texts/newspaper-article-1).
But who was she? In the 1988 (Hamish Hamilton) & 1990 (Penguin) versions of Criminal Justice I thought she must have been Bessie Akam, because Bessie visited Edith at Holloway (the chit recording her visit is extant), and the Akams were family friends. But, for reasons set out in the ‘Preface’ to the 2001 revised version of Criminal Justice, the ‘lifelong friend’ could not be Bessie; nor, it is clear now, was she Lily Vellender, who worked with Edith at Carlton & Prior where, we now know, the two young women first met ten years before the tragedy (https://edithjessiethompson.co.uk/criminal-justice/preface/.
After Bessie, Lily had seemed a strong candidate. She and Norman visited Edith and Percy one Sunday in September 1922 (the occasion is referred to by the lifelong friend) and Edith was congratulated that day (it seems) by Norman Vellender on her home-made chutney. Was it Norman who took the two September 1922 photographs of Edith and of Edith and Percy? He was a keen photographer, it seems, from a photo of the 2 June 1922 Horley outing in which he is clutching his camera as Edith is about to start racing.
Lily certainly knew about Edith’s affair with Bywaters. On Monday 25 September 1922 and again on the Friday before the murder, she joined Freddy in Fuller’s tea-room to keep him company until Edith was free. Lily moreover dreamt one night in April 1922 that Percy was going to murder Edith because he had discovered that she had been out with ‘a fair man’ (CJ 102-3). Lily related her nightmare to Edith. Was it this incident that the ‘lifelong friend’ alluded in LSN of 7 January 1923, when she claimed to have warned Edith off Bywaters months earlier? Edith saw Lily most days except Sundays, and the Vellenders had shared at least one holiday with the Thompsons, and probably more than one. Lily seemed an intrinsically more likely candidate for the ‘lifelong friend’ than Bessie Akam.
In the end though the key factor regarding the author of the LSN pieces was that she and Edith attended the same primary school in Manor Park. Neither Bessie nor Lily attended Kensington Avenue Schools with Edith Graydon nor did either of them grow up in East Ham.
The ‘lifelong friend’ of the LSN pieces met Edith Graydon at school for the first time when Edith was nine years old, that is in about 1902. The friend later refers to having known Edith, who turned 29 on Christmas Day 1922, for twenty years. She attended the Thompsons’ wedding in Manor Park in 1916, and she knew Percy as well as, it seems, his mother and family. She reports an incident which occurred in Richard Thompson’s home in Seymour Gardens, Ilford, one day in 1922 when Edith was spotted with Bywaters in Wanstead Park, while Percy thought that she was at the theatre. She recalls a visit in September 1922 to Edith’s and Percy’s home in Ilford, and she remarks on how Edith seemed to be indulgent of Percy’s grumpiness. She mounts a spirited female defence of Edith’s passion for hats against Richard Thompson’s charge of immoral extravagance and she is familiar too with Edith’s love of scented baths. As a child, the ‘lifelong friend’ lived in Manor Park. She undoubtedly knew Freddy Bywaters and his family who lived in the same neighbourhood. Freddy attended the same school as Edith, her brothers, and the lifelong friend.
The most controversial aspect of the ‘lifelong friend’s’ pieces is her claim that she was a member of the theatre party at the Criterion Theatre the night of the murder.
The key chronological points of the ‘lifelong friend’s’ friendship with Edith Thompson are:
SCHOOL DAYS TOGETHER: 1902-1909
Before going up to Kensington Avenue Schools together, Edith and the ‘lifelong friend’ were children together in Manor Park, attending Sunday school at St Barnabas:
Let me tell a little story which well illustrates this trait in her complex character.
We were both quite small children at the time. The incident occurred one Sunday when we were coming out of the schoolroom of St Barnabas Church, Manor Park, after Sunday school.
A frog had got trampled on by some heedless little foot. It lay panting in the path before us, its glassy eye blinking horribly in pain. Edith saw it and recoiled in horror, for all creepy things repelled her, as did, indeed, all animals at near quarters. ‘How disgusting!’ was her first comment; then: ‘Poor thing, what can we do?’ Then, as the idea came into her head, and she turned to carry out her project: ‘I know, we will get teacher to come and do something for it.’
I reminded her of this trivial incident, as she sat there in her prison clothes.
She laughed, and the sound of her laughter was like an echo from the past.
‘Fancy you remembering that’, she said.
As small children little Edith Graydon and the ‘lifelong friend’ went to visit Edith’s grandmother in Stoke Newington:
So I took her back to her childhood.
‘Do you remember that thrilling journey we made all the way to Stoke Newington to see your grandmother?
Her face lit up.
‘Of course I do. And remember how we climbed up on the old lady’s knee and demanded fairy tales.’
‘Yes, and do you remember, Edith, how at the end of each old favourite you would exclaim ‘But I know a better one than that?’
I was searching desperately in my memory for other episodes from the past which would take her mind off her condition.
PRE-1916: EDITH AND PERCY COURTSHIP
Before Thompson was invalided out of the Army on account of his heart months later, there had been a series of incidents which boded ill for their future happiness.
One day there was a party in the tiny living-room of Shakespeare-crescent. Friends of the family were there and, sitting in the corner, Percy Thompson. Always at those little affairs the centre of attraction was the eldest daughter of the house, fascinating Edith Graydon.
There can be no doubt that Edith’s popularity with the men was a sore point with her lover. For on that occasion, just because the high-spirited girl was romping with a young fellow, Percy Thompson got up and walked out.
It was but the first of many such scenes. That courtship was far from being a happy one. We used to wonder how long it could last, for it was apparent that no two people could be more ill-assorted.
15 JANUARY 1916: EDITH’S AND PERCY’S WEDDING
I was one of the very merry party at the Graydons’ on the occasion of Edith’s ill-starred marriage. It was noticeable that the bridegroom avoided all intoxicating drink, and a member of the family who happened to join two other friends and myself during the evening remarked on this fact. A third member of the party seemed highly amused, and explained her mirth by relating a request made to her by Percy Thompson while she was dispensing liquid refreshments to the guests.
‘Don’t give it all away,’ Thompson had said, laughingly; and then, in an aside, ‘I’ll have some whisky if you have got a coloured glass to put it in.’
SUMMER OF 1918: CANVEY ISLAND OFF WESTCLIFF-ON-SEA
I remember an occasion in 1918 when a party of us went to Canvey Island, that quaint little place in the mouth of the Thames, for a holiday. [Edith and Percy lived in Westcliff-on-Sea at the time; they left in 1919]
Edith was in the highest of spirits for her brother had been demobilised just a few days previously, and there had been a festival at home in honour of his return.
EDITH THOMPSON’S MODESTY
Someone suggested a bathe. There were many people bathing, girls and men running down to the water’s edge, splashing in amidst loud laughter and shouted jokes.
‘I’m going in’, I said to Edith. ‘You’ll come too, won’t you?’ [
‘No. I don’t think I should like to,’ she answered.
‘But why not?’ I persisted.
‘Well, if you want to know, I think for girls to run down to the water in such flimsy costumes is utterly shameful.’
That was a characteristic view. For Edith Thompson was essentially feminine and modest. She had a slight, pliant figure – the sort of figure that can afford to go to the water’s edge clad in tightly-fitting bathing costume; but she considered it immodest.
When she did, at last, give in she walked to the water wrapped in a loose bath robe.
LATE SUMMER / AUTUMN 1921 – SUMMER 1922
‘The lifelong friend’ may be present in Seymour-Gardens, Ilford, when Percy learns from one of his sisters – almost certainly Lily Chambers (Edith and Percy had been her lodgers in Ilford in 1991-20) – that she had just then spotted Edith with Freddy in Wanstead Park. By 19 June 1921 Richard Thompson and his wife Ethel had not yet moved into 49 Seymour Gardens (the census lists them still at 87 Clements Road, East Ham). So this incident occurred either in the autumn of 1921 or else, more likely, in the course of 1922, perhaps during Bywaters’s shore leave in England 26 May to 9 June 1922 (Edith’s letter of 12 June 1922 may refer to this same incident). Rather than actually witnessing the incident (why would the ‘lifelong friend’ be in Seymour Gardens?) the ‘lifelong friend’ may here be reporting something that Edith told her.
I remember one occasion when he came to visit his invalid mother. It had been his habit always to bring his wife. This time he came without her.
‘Where is Edith’, asked Mrs Thompson who is a chronic invalid.
‘She has gone to the theatre’, her son answered.
At that moment another relative came into the room. ‘To the theatre’, she exclaimed. ‘Why, I have just met Edith with Bywaters in Wanstead Park!’
Thompson rose when he heard this and a deep flush spread over his face. It was a case of a thoughtless blunder. It resulted in a terrible scene, in which many blows were struck. The tragedy had marched forward yet another stride!
[24?] SEPTEMBER 1922: 41 KENSINGTON GARDENS:
The ‘lifelong friend’ refers to visiting the Thompsons in their garden in September 1922:
Then I think of her as I saw her with her husband so short a time before the murder. They seemed normal, happy even. I can remember an occasion in September when we were all in their little garden. There was no apparent shadow then, no hint of the imminent crime. She laughed, she jollied with her guests; she even put in a word for her husband when he was taking in a poor spirit some joke against himself. ‘Oh don’t mind him’, she said. And with the words there was a suggestion of protective affection.
The two 41 KG September 1922 photos of Edith with her bobbed haircut were probably taken at this party in the Thompsons’ garden: in one of them Edith, standing, is photographed on her own; the other is a close-up of her sitting in the garden with Percy standing behind her. These two photographs accompany the LSN pieces by the ‘lifelong friend’, and in all likelihood therefore date from the September garden party to which she refers. The garden party is probably the occasion described by the ‘lifelong friend’ as ‘so short a time before the murder’. This cannot refer to the weekend of Saturday 30 September 1922, because we know Edith’s movements on that day in considerable detail. The weekend before is more plausible, the more so as Sunday 24 September 1922 was Avis Graydon’s 26th birthday. What better reason for a party could there be, with family and friends invited for lunch or tea on that day?
3 OCTOBER 1922: THE VISIT TO THE THEATRE
The ‘lifelong friend’s’ recollection of that evening is related twice, in two separate articles in LSN, on 17 December & on 24 December 1922. The fact that she remembers a remark in the foyer of the theatre about the chill that night and Percy’s not wearing a coat would seem to authenticate her account, since it was indeed cold on 3 October 1922:
LSN 17 December 1922: the Criterion Theatre
I go back again and again to the circumstances of that tragic night. And always I find myself still in darkness, still in doubt.
That Edith was in the highest of spirits that night at the theatre I know; no one better. She was the life and soul of the party. Must I believe that as she sat there beside her husband she was cognisant of his imminent tragic fate?
For me at least that thought is impossible. How could it have been? What woman, humanly constituted, could have sat there, have dined and then have returned to the suburban quietude with that knowledge hidden in her heart?
Would not, I ask myself, some sign, some betraying gesture, have revealed the tumult in her breast? Would not some thought of what such a thing have meant have left her petrified, frozen with horror?
LSN 24 December 1922: the Criterion Theatre
Incidents of that last West End party come back. I see Edith Thompson as she sat in that restaurant the centre of the party, its wit and its mainspring. Her eyes sparkle as she breathes in the atmosphere of pleasure and gaiety.
I see her again as she stood outside the foyer of the theatre. I recall an episode that makes incomprehensible to me the murder which was to take place a few hours later.
Another friend who was of our party said to Percy Thompson: ‘Why haven’t you a coat? You will catch your death of cold.’ I forget what Thompson answered, but I remember well the laughing remark of his wife: ‘Oh, he’s too mean to buy himself an overcoat! I have promised to buy him a dress overcoat; but I won’t until he gets a grey one I have asked him to buy.’
A strange jest from a woman with murder in her heart!
The ‘lifelong friend’ would seem to be specific: the evening she allegedly spent with Edith, Percy, and others ‘of our party’ at the restaurant and theatre was the night of 3 October 1922. But this is impossible according to the records.
Take, for example, Edith’s ‘jest’ about the coat. The ‘lifelong friend’ refers to Percy Thompson’s not wearing a coat that night at the theatre but P.C. Cyril Geal, who examined the day after the murder (MEPO 3/1582), notes that at the Ilford mortuary he ‘assisted to unclothe it [Percy’s body] …. The sleeve of the coat was cut … The man’s linen collar was also cut, and the jacket was torn in several places’. There can be no mistake: Geal clearly differentiates between coat and jacket, so the ‘lifelong friend’ s assertion that Percy was teased about not wearing a coat must refer to another visit to the theatre?
The ‘lifelong friend’s’ account of the restaurant that same night of 3 October 1922 poses similar problems: ‘I see Edith Thompson as she sat in that restaurant, the centre of the party, its wit and its mainspring’. But the theatre party of 3 October did not meet up in a restaurant before Dippers. On this the eyewitness accounts by all parties concerned are clear. On 4 October 1922 Edith’s uncle and aunt accounted to the police for their movements of the night before. A shorter version of Jack Laxton’s account survives in the court records while Lillie did not testify at the trial. Both the Laxtons are categoric about their West End outing with Edith and Percy. Neither statement is available outside the National Archives, but they are hugely important. Here they are. According to Jack Laxton:
About a week ago my wife made an appointment by letter to meet Percy Thompson and his wife at the Pit Entrance to the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly, at 6.45 pm 3 October 1922. I left business on the 3 October at 6 pm and met my wife at the Piccadilly Circus exit at about 6.45 pm. We both proceeded to the Criterion Theatre, and there met Mr and Mrs Thompson. We all remained in the queue till about 7.45 pm when we entered the theatre … After leaving the theatre we all walked to Piccadilly Circus tube where I purchased four tickets, two to Liverpool Street for them, and two to Finsbury Park for wife and myself. We all said goodnight and I left them in the lift.
Lillie Laxton is equally clear about who was at the theatre in her statement to the police:
About two weeks ago I wrote to Mrs Thompson … in which I suggested paying a visit together to the Criterion Theatre … stipulating a Tuesday. Subsequently, by telephoning to her business address, we all arranged to meet at 6.45 pm Tuesday the 3 October 1922 outside the Criterion Theatre Pit Entrance. I first met my husband outside Piccadilly Circus Tube and walked to the Pit Entrance of the Criterion Theatre where we met Mr and Mrs Thompson. They both appeared happy and in their usual spirit. We saw the play ‘The Dippers’ through. During the interval my husband and Mr Thompson left us for a few minutes to go and get a drink. Mrs Thompson and I remained in the theatre. Se appeared very happy. We left the theatre about 10.45 pm and all four walked to the Piccadilly Circus tube station. The men went to the ticket office, Mrs Thompson and I remaining in the centre of the booking office. When they came up with the tickets Mrs Thompson said ‘You go that way’, meaning towards [the] Finsbury Park lift, we go this way, pointing towards the lift down to the trains for Liverpool Street. I kissed her goodbye and shook hands with Mr Thompson and we parted.
In view of these two witness statements from the day after the murder, it is evident that the ‘lifelong friend’ was not present at the theatre on 3 October. There were only four people and there was no dinner in a restaurant beforehand. And Percy Thompson almost certainly wore a coat, if O C Geal is to be believed.
It is hard to see how the ‘lifelong friend’ could be quite so mistaken here, even allowing for the stress she was under and perhaps some narrative prompting from the journalist who ghosted her pieces. Edith’s joshing with her husband about the coat would only be of interest if it happened close in time to the murder; less so if a few weeks earlier. What is even odder is that the ‘lifelong friend’s’ two accounts occur shortly after the trial. Everyone who had followed the trial, which concluded six days before the ‘lifelong friend’s’ first piece of 17 December 1922, would have known that there had only been four people at the theatre the night of 3 October, not five. Which is not to suggest that some of what the ‘lifelong friend’ reports about the visit to the theatre on that fateful night may not be true: she may well be reporting impressions from that night conveyed to her by Lillie Laxton. It is also possible that her LSN ghost prompted her to turn what reported information into directly experienced one, on the basis that it came to the same?
Conversely, the ‘lifelong friend’ may be merging an earlier West End 1922 autumn night at the theatre with the night of the murder. But it would need to be close to 3 October to be relevant.
Could she be referring instead to the night of Sunday 1 October when, according to Mrs Lester on 15 October, Edith and Percy ‘both left home together about 7 pm returning home together about 10.30 pm and went straight to bed’?
Whom did they see that night? On Friday 29 September they had, as always, visited Edith’s parents in Manor Park, and on Saturday 30 September they had met up with Edith’s family for a dinner party at the Birnages. On Monday 2 October Edith returned home from work at 7 pm, Percy at 8.30 pm. Which only leaves the hours of 7 pm – 10.30 pm of Sunday 1 October. Did Edith and Percy meet up with friends for dinner in the West End that night? Perhaps at Pinoli’s, a restaurant in Wardour Street Soho that, according to Avis, they liked? If so, that would be the dinner party cited in her LSN piece of 24 December 1922.
On Sunday 17 December 1922 the ‘lifelong friend’ goes to see the Graydon family at 231: it is Mrs Graydon’s birthday (see Edith’s letter of 18 December 1922, below). This is also the day when the first of the ‘lifelong friend’s’ three LSN pieces appeared.
At some point I had assumed that the ‘lifelong friend’ had been given Avis’s ticket and that that accounted for her presence at the theatre. In her plea for clemency to the Prime Minister, Avis insisted that a fortnight before 3 October she had been invited along to the theatre along with Edith and Percy, and that she had planned to spend that night at her sister’s in Ilford. Because of the lateness of the hour she could not expected to travel home on her own to East Ham and then double back alone from the station all the way to 231 Shakespeare Crescent. In short, Avis was intended to accompany the Thompsons on their way to 41 Kensington Gardens from Ilford station. According to Avis, this proved that her sister could not possibly have set up an encounter with Bywaters in the Belgrave Road (CJ 271).
The visit to the Criterion on 3 October 1922 had been initiated by the women’s aunt Lillie Laxton, and the women’s aunt naturally invited Avis along. The younger Graydon daughter was still without a male companion and frequently joined the others as a member of the party.
I had originally set little store by Avis’s cancelling at short notice, although the reason that she gave had always struck me as odd. She withdrew, she told Percy on the telephone, because she ‘had already made arrangements to go out for mother’. If her mother had been sick, this would have been perfectly intelligible, since Avis would have been needed to do her mother’s shopping. But Mrs Graydon was fine. There was a reason much closer to Avis’s heart for being at ‘mother’s’, and that is because the Thompsons’ night of the theatre coincided with Freddy Bywaters’s last night of shore-leave. Avis stayed at home to spend the evening with Freddy.
What happened regarding Avis’s ticket for The Dippers was, probably, that Freddy Bywaters called Avis on Tuesday 3 October after lunching with Edith and arranged to go and see her in Manor Park; and that she pulled out of the theatre at that point. It would have been too late to pass on the ticket to anyone else. One of the painful ironies of this story is that Freddy was gravitating back towards Avis, and both Avis and Edith had sensed this. If Freddy had not killed Percy Thompson that night, it is very likely, from the way things were shaping up, that he might have found his way back to Avis altogether during the course of his next visit.
It is pretty clear that the ‘lifelong friend’ was never given Avis’s ticket. The reason why she was not called upon as a witness at the trial was because she was not there that night, contrary to what she claims in her two articles in the LSN. The trial record speaks for itself:
JOHN AMBROSE HENRY LAXTON, examined by Mr TRAVERS HUMPHREYS —
I live at South Tottenham. The deceased Percy Thompson was my nephew by marriage. From time to time I met him and his wife, the prisoner Thompson. On Tuesday, 3rd October, I met them both by arrangement at the Criterion Theatre; I think the arrangement was made by my wife about a week or a fortnight beforehand. After the performance was over we left Mr and Mrs Thompson at the Piccadilly Tube station, about quarter to eleven or eleven o’clock. They were going to Liverpool Street, and went down a different lift from what we did.
Cross-examined by Sir H. CURTIS BENNETT —
I had gone on several occasions before to the theatre with Mr and Mrs Thompson. So far as I could see, they appeared to be on good terms. The party upon the particular evening to which I have spoken was an ordinary happy theatre party, and when Mr and Mrs Thompson left us at the tube station they appeared to be upon their usual terms. (Notable British Trials)
In his closing speech for Edith Thompson, and following on from this, her counsel Curtis-Bennett stresses that Edith and Percy seemed happy hours before the murder:
On 3rd October there was a family theatre party. The evidence is that Mr and Mrs Thompson were at the Criterion Theatre with Mr and Mrs Laxton, and, according to Mr Laxton, were happy and normal. Do you believe that that woman could have sat with her husband and the Laxtons the whole evening, happy and in normal condition, if there was to her knowledge going to happen the tragedy which did happen to her husband? (Notable British Trials)
If the ‘lifelong friend’ had been of the party, Curtis-Bennett would have called her. His words to describe Edith at the theatre express sentiments that are virtually identical to the ‘lifelong friend’s’ in her two LSN pieces:
Do you believe that that woman could have sat with her husband and the Laxtons the whole evening, happy and in normal condition, if there was to her knowledge going to happen the tragedy which did happen to her husband?
In LSN, the lifelong friend writes
I see Edith Thompson as she sat in that restaurant, the centre of the party, its wit and its mainspring. That Edith was in the highest of spirits that night at the theatre I know; no one better. She was the life and soul of the party. Must I believe that as she sat there beside her husband she was cognisant of his imminent tragic fate? … I see her again as she stood outside the foyer of the theatre. I recall an episode that makes incomprehensible to me the murder which was to take place a few hours later.
The ‘lifelong friend’ was not interviewed by the police, unlike almost everybody else who could conceivably throw light on the tragedy. This includes several witnesses who were not called at the trial.
The only unaccounted time for Edith’ and Percy’s movements close to the murder is the evening of Sunday 1 October. Were they meeting friends in the West End that night, after two consecutive nights out already?
In spite of the ‘lifelong friend’s’ misrepresenting her role on 3 October 1922, the ‘lifelong friend’s’ LSN pieces may still be accurate in most other respects. A reason for thinking this may be because in one of them, LSN 7 January 1923, she is sparring openly with Richard Thompson. He would be bound to have protested that the ‘lifelong friend’ was blatantly inventing things, if she had she been doing so. Moreover the ‘lifelong friend’s’ LSN pieces were almost certainly ghosted. That is, a journalist actually met the ‘lifelong friend’, interviewed her, and wrote up the interview. This further suggests that she is generally bona fide. Richard Thompson’s LSN pieces in turn are ghosted, probably by the same journalist, so this further vouches for the integrity of the lifelong friend’s identity as the journalist would have spoken to both of them.
Was the lifelong friend a married woman?
This matters because the one person who most obviously fits the bill for the ‘lifelong friend’ among Edith’s circle of friends and acquaintances, someone who was demonstrably at school with her, was single in December 1922. And would be single for the rest of her life. The ‘lifelong friend’s’ identity may ultimately ride on how one interprets three words in a sentence in her 17 December 1922 piece. Writing about Edith’s early married years, the ‘lifelong friend’ remarks that
That early period of their marriage I have some reason to know something of. Edith Thompson had never had much time for learning the art of housekeeping; but she was in no wise self-sufficient. In this, as in other matters, she was keen to learn, and was always grateful for any assistance I or other married girl friends were able to give her.
At first sight this would seem to imply that the ‘lifelong friend’ was a married woman; moreover, a woman married before Edith, who was married in January 1916. In other words, the ‘lifelong friend’ may mean ‘I or other friends who, like me, were married’. But it is also possible that she means ‘I or other girl friends who, unlike me, were married’. That is, not ‘I or other married girl friends’ but ‘I or other married girl friends’.
Because the ‘lifelong friend’ was a classmate of Edith’s at both St Barnabas kindergarten and at Kensington Avenue schools, she could not be Bessie Akam or Lily Vellender. Lily moreover testified at the trial: had she been at the theatre with the Thompsons and Laxtons on 3 October 1922, she would undoubtedly have been asked about it or have herself referred to it.
All along there had been another possible candidate for the ‘lifelong friend’. I had overlooked her because she is not mentioned by Edith in her letters. Such was the ‘lifelong friend’s’ intimacy with Edith, her earnings, her bets, her clothing, her hats, her scented baths, her husband’s family, parties in her home and garden, that it seemed inconceivable that she should not feature in Edith’s extant letters to Freddy Bywaters.
This other woman did share Edith’s childhood and went to school with her. She was born some six months before Edith, grew up a few doors away from her in Manor Park, and would later be formally identified as a fellow scholar at Kensington Avenue. She was, or became at the time of the tragedy, a close friend of Avis Graydon and would sponsor Avis’s being received into the Catholic church in 1924. Like the lifelong friend and like Bessie, she too visited Edith at Holloway; an extant chit from the prison and the governor’s report attest to this. She visited Edith at Holloway with Avis and Mrs Graydon and she introduced Edith to Canon Patrick Palmer. She wrote repeatedly to Edith in prison. She knew Freddy Bywaters and may have conveyed coded messages between the two prisoners.
The name of this woman, Edith’s immediate contemporary from Manor Park, was Ida Louise Burton. The first time we hear about Ida is in an official note by the governor of Holloway Prison: according to the governor, on Tuesday 12 December 1922, the day after the guilty verdict at the Old Bailey, a woman called Ida Burton visited Holloway Prison, asking to see her old school friend Edith Thompson. In a letter written to his superiors at the Prison Commission on 6 [he means Sunday 7] January 1923, Dr John Hall Morton, the governor of Holloway, writes
I beg to state that the day after the above named [Edith Thompson] was sentenced to death a Miss Ida Burton of 778 Barking Rd Plaistow called at the prison and expressed a wish to see Thompson. Miss Burton sent up a letter of introduction from Canon Palmer with his visiting card. I saw Miss Burton having previously ascertained that Thompson did not wish to be visited by her. I explained to Miss Burton that I could not allow her to visit and that were it the prisoner did desire it I would have to obtain an order from a member of the Visitors Committee.
A few days after this a letter was received for Thompson from Miss Burton explaining how anxious she was to see her & reminding the prisoner that she (Miss Burton) had been to the same school. Thompson replied to this letter that under the circumstances she would like to see her.[see the letter of 18 December 1922 quoted below but that is not, I don’t think, the opening letter between them, because the 18 December letter implies that Edith & the ‘lifelong friend’ have already been corresponding]
The prisoner also asked me to make arrangements for Miss Burton to visit, which I did, Miss Burton visited on Jan. 1st. accompanied by the convict’s Mother and sister. During the visit Miss Burton said I wish you would let Canon Palmer visit you ‘just as a friend, he won’t talk religion’ ‘he is very sweet I am sure you would like him’. On Jan. 2nd Thompson applied to me for permission to be visited by Canon Palmer. I was given to understand she would be visited only as a friend. I therefore gave the necessary instructions & complied with Rule G3. …
I regret having omitted to state what took place during the visit of Canon Palmer. I am informed that the great part of the conversation was in a frivolous vein but that Canon Palmer said words to this effect. Miss Burton had something very particular to say but that she could not say it with all these people present. He then went on to say would you like me to see you alone to which the prisoner replied, she would. No mention was made of religion or any suggestion as to what religion he belonged to. I beg to state that in one of Miss Burton’s letters she used the same words viz I have something very particular to say. As a result of this statement I gave special instructions to the Officer to note carefully anything Miss Burton said but nothing of any importance was reported.
The governor’s claim that Ida Burton visited Edith at Holloway on 1 January 1923 in the company of Edith’s mother and her sister Avis need not be doubted, but the 1 January 1923 visit may not be the one referenced in the extant Ida Burton visitor’s chit reproduced here, which seeks permission for Ida Burton to visit with Edith’s solicitor F A S Stern:
26 December 1922 chit for F A S Stern and Ida Burton
The governor’s letter to his superiors is Janus-faced. His referring to Edith Thompson consistently as ‘Thompson’, ‘the prisoner’, or ‘the convict’, renders her gender-neutral; or rather an honorary male prisoner for the purpose of her scheduled killing. This contrasts starkly with his identifying Ida Burton throughout as ‘Miss Ida Burton’ or ‘Miss Burton’. Perhaps the governor was trying to impress the hawks in the Prison Commission with his tough-looking posture. He sounds an altogether different note in his report on Edith Thompson of 9 January, after they had killed ‘Thompson’. Throughout that document he refers to her at first as ‘the above named’ (‘Edith Jessie Thompson’), and then always and almost respectfully as ‘she’ and ‘her’. Not a single mention of ‘Thompson’. As Margery Fry records, when she visited Holloway towards the end of the week of Edith’s death, ‘I think I have never seen a person look so changed in appearance by mental suffering as the Governor appeared to me to be.’ Tennyson Jesse would later remark ‘I received every possible help [for her 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow] from the Governor of Holloway and the Deputy Governor, both most merciful people who were convinced that she was innocent and should never have been hanged.’
Everything we know about Dr Morton, including from a letter by the Graydon family, suggests that the governor of Holloway went out of his way to be kind and compassionate to his prisoner. He clearly bent the rules on a number of occasions and issues, and he may have done so too with regard to Ida Burton and to his further pretence of not spotting that Canon Palmer was RC rather than CoE.
When Dr Morton writes ‘The prisoner also asked me to make arrangements for Miss Burton to visit, which I did, Miss Burton visited on Jan. 1st. accompanied by the convict’s Mother and sister’, he is not stating categorically that this was her first or only visit. There appear to be at least two separate Ida Burton visits for which records survive: one with Edith’s solicitor Stern (as per the 26 December 1922 chit), the other on 1 January 1923 with Avis and her mother.
Is it possible that, when the governor wrote his 7 January 1923 memo for Whitehall, he had forgotten an earlier visit by Ida Burton? By then an account of the ‘lifelong friend’s’ visit to Edith at Holloway on 21 December 1922 had been published in LSN of 24 December 1922. If the ‘lifelong friend’, the author of the 24 December piece, was someone other than Ida Burton, it would follow that Edith was visited in prison by two of her former schoolfriends from Manor Park: by the ‘lifelong friend’ on Thursday 21 December 1922, the day of the appeal, and separately by Ida Burton with Stern first and then with Avis and her mother on 1 January. This is inherently unlikely. Whatever doubts there may be about specific aspects of the pieces by the ‘lifelong friend’, she could not have invented her visit to Edith in prison. Not least because of the governor’s partial corroboration of her presence at Holloway Prison. On balance then there may be sound reasons for believing that the ‘lifelong friend’ was Ida Louise Burton.
IDA LOUISE BURTON
28 June 1893 – 7 August 1965
Ida Louise Burton was born in Southwark on 28 June 1893 and baptised at Newington All Souls, Southwark, on 17 September 1893. Her father’s occupation is given as ‘law clerk’. She was almost six months older than Edith.
By 31 March 1901 the eight-year-old Ida Burton was living at 134 Browning Road, Manor Park, not far from St Barnabas and a stone’s throw from Edith Graydon at 231 Shakespeare Crescent. Ida and Edith both attended Sunday school at St Barnabas, Browning Road, before starting at Kensington Avenue School. The 1901 census gives her parents as Walter William Burton (40) and Alice Madeline Burton (46). Her six siblings are another Alice Madeline Burton (16), Ethel Grace Burton (15), Percy W. Burton (13), William S. Burton (12), Ernest Arthur Burton (5), and Walter Augustus Burton (2). Ida Louise was the fifth of seven children.
In June 1902, some 150 yards east of Ida Burton and her family, Freddy Bywaters was born at 72 Rectory Road. Two years later the Bywaters family had moved round the corner to nearby 49 Chesterford Road, not far from Freddy’s close childhood friend Bill West who lived at number 70. By 1911 the then nine-year-old Freddy was living at 108 Browning Road (the Burton family had left Manor Park by then), the corner house at the intersection of Browning Road and Goldsmith Avenue, within a few yards of St Barnabas. Freddy lived in Browning Road with his mother and two sisters; his father is not mentioned.
Ida Burton undoubtedly knew Freddy Bywaters for most, if not all, his life as he would have been at Kensington Avenue Schools with at least one of her four brothers, Walter Burton, who was 2 in 1901 and therefore two to three years older than Freddy. In her 7 January 1923 LSN piece, the ‘lifelong friend’ reveals that she tried to warn Edith off her clandestine relationship, but that Edith told her that she was perfectly able to handle things herself:
At least one of Edith’s friends became apprehensive on the one point many months ago and urged her not to seek Bywaters’s company. Her reply didn’t leave room for further argument. Very quietly she said ‘I do not seek his company. And I am quite able to take care of myself.’ There the matter had to rest. I was that apprehensive friend. The suspicion had come quickly. I had known Edith since schoolgirl days. It wasn’t difficult to notice when things were worrying her, and my greatest mistake was to attribute her strained mental condition during the past few months to remorse at her conduct with the man who ultimately stood beside her in the dock.
Kensington Avenue Schools was attended by Edith and Avis Graydon, Ida Burton, Edith’s and Ida’s brothers, and by Freddy Bywaters and Bill West. The school’s catchment area when these Manor Park children were present included all of Shakespeare Crescent and Browning Road Nos 59-249 & 130-250, with Ida living at 134 Browning Road in 1901 and probably too when these boundaries were reaffirmed by the council in October 1905 (KA Logbook, 84-86). The Graydons, Bywaterses, and Burtons were all safely inside the catchment area.
Edith (at least twice) and Avis Graydon (also twice) are listed as prizewinning scholars in the KA Schools (Girls) Logbook, alongside a number of other girls. https://edithjessiethompson.co.uk/primary-source-texts/edith-thompsons-school When Edith Graydon and Ida Burton were at the school, April 1905 – April 1909, it numbered some 490 pupils on average, so the number of awards was modest proportionate to enrolment. Unlike the two Graydon girls, Ida Burton is not recorded as a medals laureate.
Ida finished KA schools at the same time as Edith Graydon, who left on 20 April 1909. In 1909 Ida is listed as a ‘learner’ at the London Central Telegraph Office, at the G. P. O. By the time of the 1911 census, the Burtons had moved to 16 Lancaster Road, East Ham, Forest Gate. The seventeen-year-old Ida Burton’s occupation is given as ‘Telegraphist in G.P O.’, so her 1909 apprenticeship at the G.P.O. had been served successfully. The General Post Office was located at the bottom of Aldersgate Street, to the north of St Paul’s, not far from Carlton & Prior in the Barbican, where Edith Thompson started work at about the same time as Ida did in the G.P.O.
In 1911 Ida’s family home at 16 Lancaster Road sat right across the street from the Roman Catholic church of St Anthony of Padua. Every time the Burton family opened their curtains in the morning they looked at the church. That prospect may have been their reason for buying the house in the first place. Such was Ida’s faith that on 12 March 1920, at the age of 26, she made a kind of will, a ‘Deed of Declaration of Charitable Trusts, for the maintenance and education of students for the Roman Catholic priesthood for the diocese of Southwark’ with the Most Reverend Peter Emmanuel Amigo of Southwark. Forty-three years later she refers to this in her last will and testament. Ida was received into the Catholic church on 1 April 1922 by Canon Patrick Palmer, who would briefly minister to Edith Thompson at Holloway in 1923. Ida Burton lived in Crowborough Hill, Crowborough until 1963. Her elder widowed sister Ethel Grace Worssam (widowed in 1953) lived with her and died there in 1965 at the age of 79; five months before Ida herself died aged 72. The Electoral Register for Eastbourne Spring 1963-4 still lists Ida as living at Rosemary Cottage Crowborough Hill, Crowborough in East Sussex. At the time of her death Ida had recently moved to 8 Upper Chyngton Gardens in Seaford in Sussex. Ida’s main heir was her nephew John Burton Worssam (born 1923), a chartered surveyor and the son of Ethel Grace. He died in 2008. In his will, drafted in 1971, he mentions his two sisters, who at the time of his will were nuns of the religious order of The Daughters of the Cross.
It was Ida who introduced Edith to Canon Palmer, and it was Ida who mentored Avis Graydon when Avis in turn was received into the Catholic church by Canon Palmer on 3 October 1924. Avis had chosen her date purposefully. Years later her last will and testament starts with 9 January, that day whose closure would come when she would at last rejoin her sister.
As a family friend of the Graydons, Ida was probably close to Avis as well as Edith. In June 1921 Avis worked at James Pollock, Sons and Co, of 3, Lloyd’s Avenue, London E. C. 3, just off Fenchurch Street and a hop from Fenchurch Street station from which Edith and Percy were commuting at some point. Ida was then employed by HM Commissioner of Customs, with her occupation listed as ‘Customs and Excise Old Age Pensioner’. She would have worked at their headquarters building in Lower Thames Street, not far from Tower Hill Tube station and Fenchurch Railway Station used at some time or other by most of the people in this story. Ida may have held that job all her life, as in 1939 she is listed as working for the ‘Civil Servant Pension Office, Customs’.
Ida never married. She knows Edith’s parents, which chimes with Edith’s letter of 18 December 1922, addressed to the ‘lifelong friend’ and referring to the ‘lifelong friend’ seeing Edith’s mother on her birthday on 17 December. In the same letter Edith refers to the ‘lifelong friend’ ‘going away on Friday [22 December 1922]’ and wishes her ‘a real good rest over the holidays’, meaning the Christmas break. It is tempting to read this as a retreat, if the ‘lifelong friend’ is indeed Ida. The more so as Ida’s holiday in June 1921 appears to have been to a Marian place of pilgrimage in Devon together with her mother. On the day of the census Ida and her mother were staying in a boarding house at 253 Babbacombe Road in St Marychurch, Torquay.
That even at this late stage she was Edith’s confidant is clear from the following note by the governor:
[GOVERNOR’s LETTER: 6 January 1923]
I regret having omitted to state what took place during the visit of Canon Palmer. I am informed that the great part of the conversation was in a frivolous vein but that Canon Palmer said words to this effect: Miss Burton had something very particular to say but she could not say it with all these people present. He then went on to say would you like me to see you alone to which the prisoner replied, she would. No mention was made of religion or any suggestion as to what religion he belonged to. I beg to state that in one of Miss Burton’s letters she used the same words viz I have something very particular to say. As a result of this remark I gave special instructions to the Officers to note carefully anything Miss Burton said but nothing of any importance was reported.
Perhaps the oddest thing after all concerning Edith’s schoolfriend Ida = the ‘lifelong friend’ author of the three LSN articles is the already noted fact that Ida is not mentioned by Edith, unlike other women friends. Also, the friend may at times turn second-hand information into events witnessed by her. The night of 3 October 1922 is clearly an instance of this and so may be the row about Bywaters in Seymour Gardens. Again, while the friend seems well informed about Edith’s habits and sense of fashion, and knows the glass door of her place of work from visiting her there, she is far off the mark about the courtship of Edith and Percy. It may well be that Edith was wowed by khaki, as the friend claims, but by the time Percy was enlisted he and she had been a courting couple for several years. Far from a war-time whirlwind romance, the ill-matched pair had known each other for years, as Edith’s father reported accurately in the Weekly Dispatch. The records of the amateur theatricals at the Stepney Meeting House 1910-1912 bear this out. It is certainly curious that her old schoolfriend should labour under such misapprehension regarding timing while claiming to have been present at Edith’s wedding; unless her account is repeatedly reshaped by the paper’s (and her ghost’s) need for a more formulaic narrative with greater momentum. Did Ida’s father’s profession as a law clerk embolden her to ride to Edith’s defence? Was it her passionate religious conviction that rendered her fearless, undaunted by the male line-up facing her and her beloved friend Edith Thompson?
Unless we assume that Edith was visited at Holloway by two rather than just one schoolfriend from KA Manor Park, we may be reasonably confident that the ‘lifelong friend’ was indeed Ida Louise Burton. Were it not for the Holloway governor’s reports and letters and one particular visitor’s chit, all we would know about Ida would be that she mentored Avis’s reception into the Catholic church.
Here are the three LSN pieces by, probably, Ida Louise Burton.
LSN: 17 DECEMBER 1922
If anyone had told me six months ago that the time was near when my friend, Edith Thompson, would be notorious throughout the world as a heartless murderess, I should have thought the speaker was quite mad.
The idea would have seemed grotesque, ridiculous. Yet only six days ago I, her old schoolfellow, saw her sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, saw her carried a bundle of human wreckage to the prison which may be but a stepping-stone to the ignominy of the gallows.
Beside me in the crowded court was one of the many barristers who had listened throughout the hearing. We had got into conversation. I had told him the woman in the dock was once dear to me.
I had protested vehemently to that sympathetic stranger that the Edith Thompson I knew could not have been capable of the awful crime for which this woman in the docks was standing trial for her life.
And he had turned to me with a wistful smile, and said these words, which, I think, are branded on my mind forever: ‘The devil himself knoweth not the heart of man.’ And he had told me they were uttered by a famous judge when a prisoner stood in that very place charged with the crime of murder, ‘The devil himself knoweth not the heart of man’!
Can it be that I have never seen the heart of my woman friend? Can it be that there were secret places in the heart of Edith Thompson that we, who admired and loved her, never guessed at.
QUICKWITTED CHILD: NINE-YEAR-OLD EDITH GRAYDON AT TOP OF THE CLASS
Hard indeed it is to reconcile my many memories of her with the image of her as she is seen by the world today.
Those memories go back near twenty years. Twenty Years! Yet it seems as though it were but yesterday that she came as a new girl to the Kensington Avenue Council School Manor Park.
Hers was then, and even more noticeably so in later life, one of those vivid personalities which immediately impress themselves upon those about them. She was a mere slip of nine years. Slight and reedy of figure, with supple body and pale, dark-eyed face, and dark hair. And above all she was vivacious, quick-witted, and insinuating in manner.
It was not long before she was the recognized leader in our class; not long before she moved rapidly into top place; not long before we saw in the flower-like child our superior, mentally and physically.
I cannot attempt any explanation of those hidden sources of magnetism which we call personality; I can only record that in my childish way I loved her. For she drew love as a cloud draws water – and the truth of that statement was never so marvellously illustrated as it was at the trial at the old Bailey, where the amazing spectacle of Bywaters’ truly heroic stand for the woman he loves will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it.
To have the power to draw love implies a like capacity for giving love. Edith Thompson was volatile, as I have said, and she was capable of warm and lasting affections, as my own relations with her go to prove.
THE GRAYDON HOUSEHOLD
The Graydon family lived then where they live to-day. But twenty years ago Mr Graydon was a struggling clerk with a young family to keep. There was little spare money for pleasure.
How the Graydon parents contrived to set aside monthly the payment for the building society through which they purchased that little red-brick villa, they alone know. It must have meant countless little sacrifices, numberless economies. But they succeeded. Six months ago they were able to take life a little easier: the long lane had had its turning. But now, by one fell stroke of a merciless Fate, all those sacrifices, all that labour of a lifetime, has been swept away.
The Graydons have given their all that their daughter might have every chance in her fight for her life. It has left them where they were when they started life as a young couple thirty-five years ago.
Growing up in this tiny home, where every penny counted, Edith early made up her mind to turn to for herself. Among her many accomplishments was a facility with the needle. At fifteen she went out to earn her own living. At twenty she was earning more than her father. It was always a peculiar thing about Edith Graydon that she combined with a bookish romantic nature an astuteness for business which was to stand her in good stead when she married Percy Thompson.
In the wholesale millinery business of Carlton & Prior, in Aldersgate-street, she soon made herself felt. She was recognised as an exceptional girl – ‘a girl in a thousand’, her employer has said of her.
A keen bookkeeper, she also had a flair for buying. She was soon earning five pounds a week. She was trusted and proved herself trustworthy. One thing led to another. She was sent over to Paris on the business of her firm, and her keen buying and astuteness led to a repetition of the new activity. She was overjoyed when she told me before the event that she had been chosen to make the journey. She was doubly happy when she came back and received the congratulations of her employer for having succeeded brilliantly. All this time she was living at home, bringing into the little villa in Shakespeare-terrace more money than her father: bringing, too, the light of a fascinating personality which radiated throughout the home.
Edith Thompson was one of those women who seek instinctively to improve themselves. She led a busy life; she liked gaiety and amusement, but she also found time for books. Day by day, sitting in the crowded third-class carriage that took her to her work, she read omnivorously. During the luncheon hour, when she came out of that glass door of her employers’ premises into the hubub of Aldersgates-street, she carried a book under her arm.
On the one side there was the strenuous life of a clever young business woman; on the other, that of the secret dreamer of romance, and of love.
Love came to her first in 1915 – that is to say, the first real love affair of her life.
Oh, yes, there had been little affairs with other boys and young men. It was inevitable that it should be so with a girl of Edith’s temperament. For romance, even more than we who were near her suspected, played a great part in her life. Beneath that sleek head of black hair there was a vivid mind and fiery imagination. Who can doubt that she dreamed her dream of the ideal lover?
And when Percy Thompson came into her life it seemed, for a time, as though that dream were to come true.
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT: PRIVATE PERCY THOMPSON, OF THE LONDON SCOTTISH
That was in 1915. The war was in its second year. The man who fired this romantic girl’s heart was in khaki. Must one class this marriage as the most tragic of all those hasty war marriages? I think so.
In 1915 khaki had an irresistible glamour. Men in khaki were heroes. And this thick-set young man, with the brooding manner and deep eyes, seemed to Edith Graydon, I have no doubt, the most heroic of them all.
The scene of the first meeting was a party in the house of a mutual friend in Manor Park. There was Percy Thompson resplendent in his uniform as a private in the London Scottish.
They were introduced. The flame leapt high: it burnt with sudden and intense heat.
It was, perhaps, love at first sight.
So, too, it may have been love at first sight which gripped the heart of a certain fresh-complexioned boy who, diffident and shy, worshipped this fascinating girl, eight years his superior, from a distance and in silence.
BYWATERS STILL AT SCHOOL
However that may be the predestined forces of the lives of these three unhappy mortals were moving towards the last act of the terrible drama.
When Percy Thompson, a man grown, was courting Edith Graydon, Freddie Bywaters was attending school, and dreaming who knows what dreams of boyish love.
Edith Graydon took the man of her choice along to her parents’ home. He was introduced to her parents as their prospective son-in-law. But they did not like him. Love makes some men tender, some it makes morose, savage. Percy Thompson was of the type of brooding lover
Without social graces, just an intense young man, with the prospect of active service before him, and a limited time to spend with his sweetheart.
Had Edith been of a less dominating character it is possible that parental counsels would have prevailed against a match, which to all onlookers was so obviously ill-sorted. But they did not. Edith Graydon had always had her own way. For years she had been dominating that little home with her vivid and intense personality. She had her man, she went her own way.
There is one anomaly in the lives of these two people. I have emphasised the fact that Edith Thompson was a forceful personality; and so she was.
In a sense it might be said that she dominated her fiancé, and, later, her husband. But it would not be altogether true. There are facts which make a qualification of this estimate necessary.
First, then, the matter of their property. The money that went to buy their first home was the wife’s money; the title deeds are in the name of the husband. The major part of the income was derived from the activities of the wife; the banking account was a joint one.
These may be small matters, but they have their significance; they reveal Thompson as a masterful man. Yes, in many ways he was that; and it may be that that very masterfulness made its appeal to the nature of Edith Thompson in the early stages of that courtship.
Before Thompson was invalided out of the Army on account of his heart months later, there had been a series of incidents which boded ill for their future happiness.
One day there was a party in the tiny living-room of Shakespeare-crescent. Friends of the family were there and, sitting in the corner, Percy Thompson. Always at those little affairs the centre of attraction was the eldest daughter of the house, fascinating Edith Graydon.
There can be no doubt that Edith’s popularity with the men was a sore point with her lover. For on that occasion, just because the high-spirited girl was romping with a young fellow, Percy Thompson got up and walked out.
It was but the first of many such scenes. That courtship was far from being a happy one. We used to wonder how long it could last, for it was apparent that no two people could be more ill-assorted.
AFTER THE WEDDING: ‘NEITHER HAPPY: QUARRELS FREQUENT AND VIOLENT’
Yet, so often one sees happy marriages result from the union of entirely different temperaments, there was in the case of these two the hope that after marriage things would go more smoothly.
In January 1916, Edith Graydon became Edith Thompson. Thompson had returned to his civilian employment as a shipping clerk. The marriage was precipitate for Thompson had nothing saved and no money with which to provide a home for his beautiful bride.
It was characteristic of Edith that she overcame all difficulties where her will was concerned. She determined to continue her work in the City; she announced herself content to put up with lodgings.
The young couple moved into lodgings near the Graydons’ house. Trouble started from the first. And always the bone of contention was the attitude of Percy Thompson to his wife’s men friends. It seems as though he resented her even talking to any other man.
After their return from Southend, where the brief honeymoon was spent, the two had probably realised the ghastly mistake they had made. Neither was happy, quarrels were frequent and violent. And always after these quarrels there would be a return to a short-lived intimacy; only to relapse again into an acrimonious dispute about some third party.
Percy Thompson was a man who wanted humouring; his temperament – certainly not devoid of sterling qualities – was not one which blended with the high-spirited nature of his intensely vital wife. It was merely the old story of a somewhat hasty marriage and subsequent misery.
During this time, and for the next few years, Edith Thompson’s life was one of hard and incessant work. They had no maid so that it fell to her lot, not only to do a long day’s work in Aldersgate-street, but also to attend to the duties of her little home.
As I know during this time Edith would be up every morning at six cramming into the early hours of the day the normal day’s work of a married woman. I have known her often and often do the washing before sitting down to breakfast she had herself prepared and put upon the table. Then, the breakfast things washed up, she would go off to the City and be at her place of business at nine o’clock.
Her husband worked different hours. He left always a little later than his wife. He arrived back later in the evening. At half-past five Edith Thompson would leave Aldersgate-street and return home. When her husband arrived there would be a cosy supper set out for him.
That early period of their marriage I have some reason to know something of. Edith Thompson had never had much time for learning the art of housekeeping; but she was in no wise self-sufficient.
In this, as in other matters, she was keen to learn, and was always grateful for any assistance I or other married girl friends were able to give her.
With £10 a week coming into the little home, with no more money worries, and with much outside amusement, one would have supposed these two young people would have been able with time to adjust their differences and settle down to a life of tolerable happiness.
For my part I waited for one great event to cement their relationship – an event which might have saved the woman’s soul and found the latent tenderness in the man’s heart.
But that event never happened. No baby came to Edith Thompson and her jealous husband.
And instead of a gradual readjustment to meet the requirements of each other’s temperaments, the rift widened.
Love had died, slowly, perhaps, and by imperceptible phases: hate took its place.
Meanwhile the boy who had been the silent and distant adorer from afar made his appearance on the scene. Freddie Bywaters had tried to show his feelings in a boyish way on many occasions. He had come with little gifts of flowers: gifts which were received without a thought by the recipient.
He returned a grown man – tall, good-looking, passionate. After many migrations from lodging to lodging – they were several times requested to move because of the scenes which were continually disturbing other occupants of the house. … joint savings – The Retreat, 41 Kensington Gardens, Ilford.
To this new home Freddie Bywaters, home from sea, came as a paying guest. Very soon the old, old story of the eternal triangle was played yet once more. The quarrels continued. Bywaters, now thoroughly the slave of his passions, was the unwilling spectator of many ignoble scenes.
It were useless to try to probe the brain and … of this amazing woman. Like everyone else who has known her, I can have known but the mask she showed to the world. Certain it is that she returned the love of Bywaters, and turned to him when the domestic atmosphere was marred by the wrangles which were becoming more and more frequent.
First sympathetic interloper, Bywaters became fellow conspirator. Consider the respective ages of these two people, take into account the character of the woman, as I have tried to draw it, and it will not be hard to decide who was here the dominant partner.
Bywaters’s moral code collapsed.
A TERRIBLE QUARREL
And from that time forward the tragedy marched towards its ghastly climax
That Percy Thompson suspected the illicit relation cannot be doubted. I remember one occasion when he came to visit his invalid mother. It had been his habit always to bring his wife. This time he came without her.
‘Where is Edith’, asked Mrs Thompson who is a chronic invalid.
‘She has gone to the theatre’, her son answered.
At that moment another relative came into the room. ‘To the theatre’, she exclaimed. ‘Why, I have just met Edith with Bywaters in Wanstead Park!’
Thompson rose when he heard this and a deep flush spread over his face. It was a case of a thoughtless blunder. It resulted in a terrible scene, in which many blows were struck. The tragedy had marched forward yet another stride!
I think nothing made for disharmony between the Thompsons more than one characteristic of the husband. Edith Thompson was a pleasure-loving girl. As I have said, dancing, parties, and the theatre were her chief sources of amusement. But she was also very keenly interested in books, a great reader. Her husband never opened a book; he therefore was debarred from sharing her intellectual life.
Once a friend warned Thompson that he was foolish to tolerate in his house a man who was obviously in love with his wife.[Richard Thompson claimed in his Lloyds Sunday News piece that he spoke to his brother about Bywaters and was told to mind his own business] He was advised to separate since their life together was becoming a scandal, in their respective families and among their friends.
To all these counsels Thompson had but one dogged reply: ‘I married her for better or for worse. I shall stick to her whatever happens.’
And from that attitude his obstinate and downright nature never swerved.
Meanwhile, Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters took the wide and easy path to destruction. They had many things in common; and not the least of these was their mutual love of reading.
A NOVEL A DAY: FANCIED HERSELF IN ROLE OF LOVE-SICK HEROINE
Edith, as her father has often told me, found time to read a novel a day. Her taste was formed, and she preferred novels dealing with love; such novels as that so often referred to in her letters reads at the trial, Robert Hichens’ ‘Bella Donna’.
Together the clandestine lovers discussed the plots of the books as they read them. Edith Thompson, passionate and hungry for passionate love, by a twist of the imagination, saw herself in the roles of every unfortunate and love-sick heroine of which she read.
The process of her mind’s disease – for who can doubt that hers was a morbid mentality – is not a subject I can write of. Its influence on her conduct is not, however, difficult to trace.
Unknown to those about her, there must have been a secret mental process divorced from all human feeling; with but one overwhelming objective – the gratification of her illicit love.
Until, at the last, the old Edith that we know and loved, was dead.
Yet, even as I write of this unhappy woman, I recall a characteristic of hers that endeared her to those about her.
Edith Thompson was an open-handed, generous soul. She once told me that in a single year she had spent no less than £100 on presents for her friends – a very large sum for a woman in her financial position.
At Christmas she would sally forth on shopping expeditions, and no one was forgotten. That is a tragic thing to recall at this time, and under these circumstances. For Christmas day is Edith Thompson’s birthday! This year there will be no Christmas shopping, no ‘glad anticipations’, no happy returns.
I go back again and again to the circumstances of that tragic night. And always I find myself still in darkness, still in doubt.
That Edith was in the highest of spirits that night at the theatre I know; no one better. She was the life and soul of the party. Must I believe that as she sat there beside her husband she was cognisant of his imminent tragic fate?
For me at least that thought is impossible. How could it have been? What woman, humanly constituted, could have sat there, have dined and then have returned to the suburban quietude with that knowledge hidden in her heart?
Would not, I ask myself, some sign, some betraying gesture, have revealed the tumult in her breast? Would not some thought of what such a thing have meant have left her petrified, frozen with horror?
All these things I ask myself again and again. And I have no answer. I must remember that those hellish letters were written by a woman – who knew that this man whose life she plotted against was the son of a widowed mother, of a chronic invalid. Had pity no place in her heart?
Then I think of her as I saw her with her husband so short a time before the murder. They seemed normal, happy even. I can remember an occasion in September when we were all in their little garden. There was no apparent shadow then, no hint of the imminent crime.
She laughed, she jollied with her guests; she even put in a word for her husband when he was taking in a poor spirit some joke against himself. ‘Oh don’t mind him’, she said. And with the words there was a suggestion of protective affection.
Surely this amazing woman must pass down in the history of crime as an inscrutable enigma.
OLD BAILEY QUEUE: THE DERELICT WHO HAD LOVED EDITH GRAYDON
During the trial at the Old Bailey I passed a night among the queue waiting on the Newgate-street side for the next day’s hearing.
It was an extraordinary experience. There, huddled together, were men and women of all descriptions; well clad and those in rags, old and young – an extraordinary assortment.
And among that crowd I noticed the face of a man, gaunt and haggard, and with the growth of a week on his clay-like face. Something moved me to speak with him. I wanted to know what could be his reason for waiting there through the cold night to watch that woman’s suffering. He told me his story, quite simply and without embellishment. I am convinced that it was true, for it had the hall mark which truth alone bears.
This derelict was once a pupil at the Kensington-terrace School, Manor Park, the school attended by Edith Thompson and myself. He had loved Edith passionately. And, having passed from school to become a seafaring man, he had kept in touch with her. His affection, so he said, was returned, and he had made up his mind to marry her.
He returned from a long voyage in 1916. He went immediately to seek her out. He was a fortnight too late. Edith Graydon had become Edith Thompson: she was at Southend on her honeymoon!
His history from then one was one of a slow descent into the under-world. It was the usual story – drink, and its last chapter where the wastrel comes to the doss-house.
‘And so I have come down to this’, he said shivering in the cold. ‘I stand here in the queue outside the Old Bailey in the hope that I may be able to sell my place this morning – sell my place for some stranger to go in to gloat over the agony of the woman I once loved’.
Yet, who shall judge this poor fellow?
And who shall presume to sit in judgement upon Edith Thompson, convicted murderess?
Those were the tasks of judge and jury.
As for those who knew the central figures of this squalid tragedy of love, of hate, of crime, should we not find it possible even now to withhold utter condemnation, leaving just a small place in our hearts for pity?
‘Be pitiful, for all of us have to fight a hard battle’.
You, reader, and I know but a little of that lost battle that was fought by Edith Thompson and her lover.
And since the devil himself knoweth not the heart of man, let us pass on to the sweet sanity of normal life, and happiness and love – but not as the Pharisee, thanking God we are not as these, but rather pitying them.
LSN: 24 DECEMBER 1922
I have seen Edith Thompson in prison.
I have looked upon her as she sat guarded by the ever-vigilant wardresses, who are her companions by day and by night.
I have seen the woman I knew as a butterfly that went out to meet life joyously, a thing of the sunshine, sitting in the half light of a bare prison room, garbed in the uniform of shame.
And I have done more than that: for I have glimpsed something of that fear against which she is battling: buoyed up by the hope that the end is not yet.
Edith Thompson has not yet pictured to herself the reality of the gallows. She stands with her back to that fear fighting it off with the weapon of hope – Hope that dies only when the breath has left the body.
When I saw her carried, an inert and crumpled mass of womanhood, from the dock at the Old Bailey, I turned away so as not to witness that last agony. I said to myself as I was carried on the tide of humanity towards those jambed doors: You will never see Edith Thompson again. That is the end.
‘IT WAS AWFUL’: MRS THOMPSON’S COMMENT ON END OF THE TRIAL
Imagine, then, my surprise and my joy, when I read this letter from the condemned woman, written on the official prison notepaper.
[18 December 1922]
Dear [Ida?]
I have just received your letter and I hasten to answer it.
Yes, it was awful last Monday [Monday 11 December 1922], the day she was sentenced to death]. 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 [the day of the appeal]. Everyone seems so hopeful for me. I suppose it is catching.
The time here, on the whole, seems not as long as in 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 [22 December 1922], 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. [the ‘lifelong friend’ will visit on 21 December 1922: see below her reference to ‘murky afternoon]
I remembered it was mother’s birthday yesterday [17 December 1922], 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
When I turned my steps towards the gaol on a murky afternoon last week [Thursday 21 December 1922] I already knew that the appeal for Frederick Bywaters was dismissed. It was with a heart of lead that I knocked upon the small doorway of the prison which is set in its main, iron-studded gateway.
The door of the prison swung open; I stepped across the narrow threshold. It closed. The sounds of the busy world outside become suddenly muffled. A blue-uniformed official was standing beside me scrutinising my credentials.
My name and address is entered into a ponderous ledger. I am asked into a room where there is little save bare necessities as a great, brightly burning fire.
Presently a neatly uniformed woman comes. She beckons me to follow her.
She is taking me to a quarter of the gaol where those condemned to death pass the little balance of their lives. Across a courtyard we go, our footfalls sounding strangely loud; along flagged paths bordered with small patches of soot-covered London grass, wherein are set some rosebushes.
It is the most tragic garden in London. We pause before a door, the wardress producing a key. We pass in and pause. The key turns again. We are locked in.
THE DEAL TABLE BARRIER
It is a little vestibule. I am told to wait. The wardress disappears, her footsteps echoing down unseen corridors. Presently another woman appears. We pass together along a narrow passage furnished with linoleum. Everything is scrupulously neat. Upstairs, then along a landing.
It seems an endless journey to my painfully pounding heart. Yet each step takes me nearer to that woman who was once my friend and is now the lone occupant of the condemned cell.
How swift is thought!
During that progress towards that place of sorrow my mind flashed over the past we had shared so often together. It seems like a horrible dream, like some ghastly hallucination from which I should awake to hear the clear laughter of Edith Thompson – Edith Thompson in the glittering gaiety of a West End restaurant, Edith Thompson in her Ilford garden, laughing, joking, playing.
THE PRISON DRESS: DAINTY GESTURE OF CONTEMPT FOR HER CLOTHES
‘You are allowed half an hour’ the voice of the wardress informed me.
We are before a door. It was open and before it stood a deal table, beyond, the bareness of a room in the murky half-light of the December afternoon.
Sitting some yards from me, with two wardresses on either side of her, was Edith Thompson.
She was dressed in a grey plain dress. A checkered apron covered her skirt, upon her head was a white cap with strings, which tied under her chin.
These things I only noticed later.
As I saw her at first it was only the face I was conscious of. Edith Thompson! Blanched face, and dark eyes; a mouth of tragic droop and hands that moved in her lap tremulously. Whatever may be said of this woman – and much nonsense has been written about her by people who cannot possibly have any real knowledge of her – there can be no doubt about her courage.
It was she who helped bridge over the gulf that was between us – the physical gulf that prevented me going to her; and the gulf that lies between a free person and a condemned fellow creature.
Her first question was of her mother: Had I seen her mother? How was she bearing up? When she was informed there was a visitor she had thought immediately of her mother: to see me had been a disappointment, for friends are but friends, and under what circumstances could a woman want her mother more vehemently than under such as I was seeing my old friend?
Have you ever tried to carry on a conversation in the presence of three perfectly impassive spectators?
It is something of an ordeal even to talk intimately in a railway carriage when strangers occupy adjacent seats. Imagine, then, what strain is involved in trying to put a brave front on such a meeting as that which I had with Edith Thompson last week.
And yet, as I have said, it was she – it was the condemned woman who put me at my ease, who removed with the magic of her personality and her assurance that intolerable atmosphere of the prison.
How did she do that? I will tell you. You know, in those much-debated letters, there are, by common consent, touches of genius. Well, that same flash saved our prison meeting from the threatened fiasco.
‘Well’, she said, ‘I suppose you want to know how I’m getting on 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.’
These last words were accompanied with a little dainty gesture of contempt, and as she made it I saw a slight movement on the part of one of the vigilant watchers.
But Edith Thompson had set me at my ease by the only possible tactics under the circumstances: she had not tried to pretend she was not there; she had not adopted any artificial manner as though she would contrive that both of us could pretend we were not where we were, and under the conditions we were.
She referred to the incidents of her prison life in a perfectly natural manner. It was a supremely artistic gesture; and it was also a thing for which I want so much that she should have credit.
FAITH IN APPEAL: ‘I SHALL WAKE FROM THIS AS FROM SOME AWFUL DREAM’
You see, don’t you, how difficult it must have been for her, with that ghastly horror at the back of her mind, to try to ask ordinary questions in a natural manner? What a supreme effort of will and heart was required to save me from the spectacle of the real and terrible suffering.
So we talked as the afternoon drew on towards evening.
‘How do you pass the time here?’ I asked her, and I think there must have been a catch in my voice, for she answered so spontaneously, so 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.’
She asked me whether I knew the result of either appeal, and before the wardress could intervene to forbid my answer I had told her I knew nothing.
‘How do you pass your days?’ I asked.
She put up her hand to her throat – an old gesture of hers, and one which served to remind her of the beautiful amber necklace she once wore in place of that white and simple string.
THE WOODEN SPOON
‘This is the routine’, she said, turning to the wardress’, I suppose I may tell that?’
‘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’ – another little gesture of disdain – ‘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 in 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.’
I realised what a boon it must be for Edith Thompson, the bookworm, to have access to the books of the prison library. I asked her what she had been reading in prison.
‘You know, I have always loved W. J. Locke’s romances. Well, I have been reading ‘The House of Balthazar’. 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, and soundly.’
How I managed to do it I hardly know. But as I conjured up in my mind the mental anguish that such suspense must inflict upon this wretched woman, I made up my mind to talk of cheerful little things. It seemed to me that if she could live in memory some of the happy times of the past, when there was no shadow across her life, then, at least, something would have been gained.
FAIRY TALES OF LONG AGO
So I took her back to her childhood.
‘Do you remember that thrilling journey we made all the way to Stoke Newington to see your grandmother?
Her face lit up.
‘Of course I do. And remember how we climbed up on the old lady’s knee and demanded fairy tales.’
‘Yes, and do you remember, Edith, how at the end of each old favourite you would exclaim ‘But I know a better one than that?’
I was searching desperately in my memory for other episodes from the past which would take her mind off her condition.
You who have never undergone such an ordeal can have but little conception of the painfulness of it all. There was I for a little half-hour, free at the end of that time to go out again into the sweet air of freedom. But with the knowledge that I was leaving behind me a woman who in all probability will never again move among her fellow-beings as a free woman.
I remember an occasion in 1918 when a party of us went to Canvey Island, that quaint little place in the mouth of the Thames, for a holiday. [Edith and Percy lived in Westcliff-on-Sea at the time; they left in 1919]
Edith was in the highest of spirits for her brother had been demobilised just a few days previously, and there had been a festival at home in honour of his return.
EDITH THOMPSON’S MODESTY
Someone suggested a bathe. There were many people bathing, girls and men running down to the water’s edge, splashing in amidst loud laughter and shouted jokes.
‘I’m going in’, I said to Edith. ‘You’ll come too, won’t you?’
‘No. I don’t think I should like to,’ she answered.
‘But why not?’ I persisted.
‘Well, if you want to know, I think for girls to run down to the water in such flimsy costumes is utterly shameful.’
That was a characteristic view. For Edith Thompson was essentially feminine and modest. She had a slight, pliant figure – the sort of figure that can afford to go to the water’s edge clad in tightly-fitting bathing costume; but she considered it immodest.
When she did, at last, give in she walked to the water wrapped in a loose bath robe.
THE LAST SMILE: HOW ORDEAL OF THE 30 MINUTES’ INTERVIEW ENDED
And, just as she was modest to a somewhat Victorian degree, so was she luxury-loving. She dearly loved beautiful fabrics, and, I think, it must have been her love of beautiful things that influenced her choice of a career.
As a buyer for a wholesale firm of milliners she was always in contact with the beautiful things all women crave. In her home, too, she imported something of her exotic love of luxury and voluptuous comfort.
Cushions she had in abundance, and all those touches she added to her living rooms which make a place a real home.
For example, she had a really quite wonderful collection of Japanese china. It must have been worth a considerable sum of money, for I have been told the pieces are all good, and all well chosen.
And with this innate modesty she had a dread of violence and of the sight of suffering. Let me tell a little story which well illustrates this trait in her complex character.
We were both quite small children at the time. The incident occurred one Sunday when we were coming out of the schoolroom of St Barnabas Church, Manor Park, after Sunday school.
A frog had got trampled on by some heedless little foot. It lay panting in the path before us, its glassy eye blinking horribly in pain.
Edith saw it and recoiled in horror, for all creepy things repelled her, as did, indeed, all animals at near quarters.
‘How disgusting!’ was her first comment; then: ‘Poor thing, what can we do?’ Then, as the idea came into her head, and she turned to carry out her project: ‘I know, we will get teacher to come and do something for it.’
I reminded her of this trivial incident, as she sat there in her prison clothes. She laughed, and the sound of her laughter was like an echo from the past. ‘Fancy you remembering that’, she said.
So through that brief half-hour we spoke of such things. Does it seem unlikely? Does it seem absurd? Well, I am not concerned with whether it does or does not. I am just putting down so much of that last conversation I shall ever have with my erstwhile schoolfellow as I remember it. You know one rarely behaves under any circumstances as one expects one will.
I had imagined I should be saying things of a heroic kind; that I should be telling her to be brave; that I still believed that her fate would be averted. And then when the time actually came there we were talking about fairy tales, frogs, and bathing parties!
It seemed but five minutes that I had been sitting on that hard chair talking to this condemned prisoner, when the wardress intimated that the half-hour was up, and that I must go.
OUTSIDE THE PRISON GATES
We were not allowed to approach one another. So we smiled – bravely, I hope, but perhaps with a twist of the lips. Then we turned, and that pale face, that slight prison begarbed figure, disappeared.
It was almost dark when I made my way out of the prison. The door closed with a metallic clang. I was once more in the street. People hurried by me with shining faces; the spirit of Christmas seemed everywhere; that prison and its inmate faded as unrealities from my mind. But as I passed along within the shadow of its walls, a shrill-voiced paper-boy, carrying a fluttering bill, was shouting the result of the appeal.
A moment later I knew the fate of my friend was sealed. Even while she sat immured, buoyed up with hope invincible, Fate had cast the die against her.
I can never hope to see Edith Thompson again. But my mind goes back incessantly to the past. I strive to solve this insoluble mystery of human personality. And I find no solution – only contradictions against which my mind butts as a moth onto a lighted window.
NIGHT OF MURDER: EDITH THOMPSON’S JEST AT THE THEATRE
Incidents of that last West End party come back. I see Edith Thompson as she sat in that restaurant the centre of the party, its wit and its mainspring. Her eyes sparkle as she breathes in the atmosphere of pleasure and gaiety.
I see her again as she stood outside the foyer of the theatre. I recall an episode that makes incomprehensible to me the murder which was to take place a few hours later.
Another friend who was of our party said to Percy Thompson: ‘Why haven’t you a coat? You will catch your death of cold.’ I forget what Thompson answered; but I remember well the laughing remark of his wife: ‘Oh, he’s too mean to buy himself an overcoat! I have promised to buy him a dress overcoat; but I won’t until he gets a grey one I have asked him to buy.’
LOVE OF MUSIC AND DANCING
A strange jest from a woman with murder in her heart!
I think of Edith Thompson in every phase of her life, but I remain completely baffled. I cannot square with my knowledge of her the awful facts which have come to light in the course of the trial.
Here was a woman who was so essentially attractive and wholesome that children went to her instinctively for sympathy. Is that not usually looked upon as a sure sign of a woman innate womanliness? Yet so it was: She had no child – as I think, unhappily; yet she loved children, and none more than the child of her brother-in-law.
If I had been asked to sum up Edith Thompson in a word at any time prior to this murder I should have said without hesitation Edith the Joyous.
How she loved all that makes life bright and happy. I remember her as a quite little thing, dancing with a grace and finish that would have made possible for her a career on the stage. In her now deserted home are many trophies of her clever dancing, prizes won at open competitions. And above all, she was a superb waltzer. I think the waltz was her favourite dance.
Then there was her love of the theatre and her love of music.
PLAYS SHE LIKED BEST
She once told me her favourite song was ‘One Little Hour’, a setting to the words of Evelyn Sharpe … One little hour! The phrase that occurs in that tragic letter which was read at the Old Bailey. One little hour!
Yet Edith Thompson had no gifts in this direction. She loved music and especially music of the sentimental kind, but she had no voice, nor could she play the beautiful piano she bought to grace her drawing-room.
And on such occasions as that red-letter day when the little family circle gathered round the returned soldier-brother in the tiny room in Shakespeare-crescent – the happiest day of her life, she said of it – she could not sing, or play, or take active part in the musical proceedings that passed the happy evening away.
It was the theatre which gave her emotional outlet; and to it she turned for the emotional stimulus she loved – perhaps to her undoing.
It was only a short time ago that she saw Maurice Moscovotich in The Great Lover, a play which moved her profoundly. The Wandering Jew, with Matheson Lang in the principal role she went to see many times. But no play made so deep an impression on her impressionable mind as The Bird of Paradise.
In that play of unhappy love Edith Thompson found something which made its direct appeal to her. It is not difficult to understand the nature of the thoughts which passed through her brain as she sat through that play. The coloured wife of the white man, and the tragedy of the utter hopelessness of the unnatural marriage. And its end – the suicide of the woman.
Plays, books, admiration, and an insane search for ideal love; who can doubt but that each worked upon a mind neurotic, and unbalanced, fomenting the surging desires that were her daily and nightly lash.
THE ENIGMA: HOW THE SOUL FELL AND THE BODY TRIUMPHED
Yet whatever the depth of her secret depravity, and however secret her sin, I can think of her only as I visualise her now.
All memories of the happy and carefree past fade; I see her, and I shall always see her, a slender woman with a face of perfect whiteness, dark-eyed and tragic, arrayed in the disfiguring garments of a condemned convict, of a murderess.
And as I conjure up this picture of her I remember, too, the great hope which was her support when she sat facing me between those two blue uniformed wardresses in the hospital of Holloway Gaol. That hope is now gone. And I ask myself how will she support the hours when hope is dead and nothing stands between her and the gallows?
Nobody can comfort her now. She has played desperately with life, with fate, and now the grim accounting is at hand. If she goes out into the great darkness, if no reprieve comes to save her at the eleventh hour, then with her to her grave goes the secret of her personality.
What that secret is no one will ever know. It will die with her.
HER FRIEND’S ANALYSIS
It will be written of her that she was a woman without a heart; a murderess of vile and inconceivably wicked instincts. A creature whose passions were without bonds; whose duplicity was only matched by her lust.
All that will be said of Edith Thompson, the bright-eyed, laughing child who romped through youth with me, the woman whom, in later years, I looked up to and admired as a natural leader, a true friend, with generous heart and tender impulses.
What is the solution?
Surely it is to be found in the riddle that each of us it to his or herself.
There were two Edith Thompsons. There was the Edith Thompson of the Body; there was the Edith Thompson of the Soul.
And so, between these two the battle was waged. The Soul fell and was trampled; the Body triumphed.
It is a battle that each of us must fight. For those who lose, even where Justice demands life, it is not forbidden for us to be pitiful.
LSN: 7 JANUARY 1923
Just two weeks ago I laid aside my pen at the end of a task I had felt bound to undertake out of loyalty to an old friend in great distress. I had then finished describing Edith Thompson as she had slowly revealed herself to me in the course of a long and intimate companionship, but now I must write again. Time after time during the past week I have reread the article contributed to the last issue of Lloyds Sunday News by Mr R. H. Thompson, Edith’s brother-in-law.
That article showed the woman who is at this moment standing on the threshhold of death as a voluptuary, a decadent creature of loathsome habits, with never a good point in the whole of her amazing nature. Tearfully I have discussed these terrible charges with those of my friends who shared, to some extent, my intimacy with the condemned woman.
Almost without exception they have advised me to remain silent – to leave the verdict to the readers of my own writings and those of Mr R. H. Thompson.
That I cannot do.
Yet what is the alternative?
Certainly I cannot take Mr Thompson’s story as a whole and characterise it as a string of untruths. But this I can and do urge with all my soul – Mr Thompson has misunderstood; in his grief he has put a terrible construction on innocent little incidents.
Some of his suggestions I cannot pretend to dispute. Of some of them I know absolutely nothing. But others there are which bear a perfectly simple explanation, and before I deal with some of the things which Mr Thompson said let me draw attention for the moment to what was perhaps the most terrible accusation of all – the one which was left unsaid.
We have read of Edith’s extravagant habits, of her passion for expensive clothes, and of other things which would swallow up the whole of her week’s salary of six pounds in a few hours. Then we are left to ask ourselves ‘Where did the rest of the money come from?’
Nothing more is said, no charge is formulated, but it is enough. The awful doubt arises. The inference to be drawn is unmistakable.
Edith Thompson cannot answer for herself; but even if she were free she could not assert with more emphasis than I do now that that inferred charge, at least, is untrue. I know the court has condemned Edith Thompson as a murderess; I know, too, that that same court drew very definite conclusions as to the nature of her relations with Freddie Bywaters. In the light of what has been revealed those decisions cannot be questioned.
At least one of Edith’s friends became apprehensive on the one point many months ago, and urged her not to seek Bywaters’s company. Her reply didn’t leave room for further argument. Very quietly she said ‘I do not seek his company. And I am quite able to take care of myself.’
There the matter had to rest.
I was that apprehensive friend. The suspicion had come quickly. I had known Edith since schoolgirl days. It wasn’t difficult to notice when things were worrying her, and my greatest mistake was to attribute her strained mental condition during the past few months to remorse at her conduct with the man who ultimately stood beside her in the dock.
If she had been grossly immoral, if she had been carrying on intrigues with a number of men, is it possible that she could have hidden her secret completely from all who knew her intimately? Wouldn’t some of us have seen her with different companions? Most assuredly the tongues of the gossips would have wagged. But they didn’t.
No! Edith Thompson has been found guilty of much that is terrible to contemplate, and I do not pretend to defend her moral character so far as Bywaters is concerned, but that apart I cannot, and will not, allow to go unchallenged any suggestion that she was a woman of loose morals.
And here in the midst of all this awful tragedy I find one thing for which I can be thankful. There in her condemned cell, each day carrying her nearer to the dawn of that day which may be her last on earth, one mercy at least is shown to Edith Thompson.
FAMILY SUFFERINGS
She is almost entirely cut off from the world in which she failed so ignominiously. She is not allowed to see the newspapers; even her visitors may not talk to her of the articles which have been published since that dreadful evening at the Old Bailey, nearly a month ago.
Some pain at least has been spared her.
But what of her family?
For a respected and honoured family to have a daughter condemned as a murderess is surely a calamity which calls for some measure of sympathy! So too with that brave and solitary figure Mrs Bywaters. I agree with Mr Thompson that his family too is suffering innocently and is deserving of pity, but I would add this: One member, and one member only, of each family was involved in this terrible crime. The two criminals did not act as representatives of their families; neither did they kill Percy Thompson because he was a Thompson. Sympathy softens suffering, and all these blameless victims of circumstance have an equal right to our condolences.
I speak, of course, only of the families. Of the condemned couple each of us has the right to think as he or she will.
Now let me turn to some of the more startling assertions in Mr Thompson’s article. First of all there is the episode of the scented baths.
If, in all that has been written about the awful crime and its sequel there is one germ of laughter I should say it was contained in those references to the scented baths. It is all so perfectly simple.
Edith did indulge in scented baths. But is that in itself a criminal act? If so I am afraid there are many criminals still at large.
But Edith Thompson did not scent her bath with guinea bottles of perfume. The real fact are much more prosaic, and rob the incident of all its sensationalism.
What happened was that a friend solved the problem of what to give Edith for a birthday present by buying her a large bottle of eau de Cologne.
Mr Richard Thompson may never have heard of the horrible practice of pouring eau de Cologne into a bath. Anyway, let me assure him that is one of the secret vices of we women – when the eau de Cologne is available in sufficient quantities. Edith Thompson had heard of it. And she tried it. But she made one awful mistake. She used a very strong extract rather too freely!
A SIMPLE GARDEN MISHAP
She told the story to me as a joke against herself, but she was visibly annoyed when she referred to the fact that a relative [probably Richard Thompson], without knowing anything of the present or of the mistake which led to the too powerfully perfumed atmosphere, had accused her of reckless extravagance.
So much for those reprehensible scented baths!
Now let me deal with a much more significant happening – the mysterious slither of glass in Percy Thompson’s finger. My memory on this point is not the least bit doubtful, for the incident occurred less than three weeks before the tragedy.
Percy Thompson, whose love of home life has already been described, was pottering around in his garden one day busily working on the glasshouse. His father-in-law, Mr Graydon, had come over from Manor Park to help him, and while the two men were cutting glass for the frames Percy ran a splinter of glass into his finger.
Mr Graydon drew it out and the incident was forgotten until a few days later when the tiny wound began to look ‘angry’. Mrs Graydon was having tea with her son-in-law when the latter complained that his finger was becoming uncomfortably sore, and in an endeavour to give him some ease Mrs Graydon prepared a bowl of hot boracic water in which the troublesome finger was steeped.
A little while later a tiny particle of glass appeared!
Could that trivial incident have hidden a malignant secret? Could Edith Thompson who was miles away at the time that slight accident befell her husband, have willed the splinter of glass into his finger, however much she had desired his end?
There is another point I should like to contest most strongly, but I must admit at once that I do not feel on such firm ground as I did in offering an explanation of the scented baths and the splinter of glass.
Mr Richard Thompson has toyed with the suggestion that his unfortunate brother was driven to drink by an intemperate wife of vulgar and disgusting habits. We may not wish to believe this charge; we may refuse to believe it; but who can disprove it?
Was that quite a fair charge to make when the only material witness is dead? I have very few observations bearing on this charge, but one memory is of such special significance that I give it despite my anxiety to avoid saying anything hurtful against those who are no longer in a position to defend themselves.
I was one of the very merry party at the Graydons’ on the occasion of Edith’s ill-starred marriage. It was noticeable that the bridegroom avoided all intoxicating drink, and a member of the family who happened to join two other friends and myself during the evening remarked on this fact. A third member of the party seemed highly amused, and explained her mirth by relating a request made to her by Percy Thompson while she was dispensing liquid refreshments to the guests.
‘Don’t give it all away,’ Thompson had said, laughingly; and then, in an aside, ‘I’ll have some whisky if you have got a coloured glass to put it in.’
Do not think from this that my case is that a man who drinks at all is of necessity a drunkard, or that there is anything especially evil in a man practising sufficient deception to allow his friends and relatives to consider him a teetotaller when, in fact, he is not.
HAPPY GARDEN SNAPSHOTS
But I do claim the incident as proof that the unhappy Edith did not so torment a husband who had never looked at strong drink, until, in despair, he deliberately sought forgetfulness in intemperance.
All this of course is only relevant if we accept without qualification the allegation of excessive drinking on the part of these two people. But look at all the happy snapshots which have been published in Lloyd’s Sunday News from time to time.
Do these pictures of happiness which makes the horrors of the present seem so unreal, suggest drinking bouts and orgies of dissipation?
In all my experience of Edith Thompson and her ways I have never once seen her show even a suggestion that she had taken too much strong drink. And of this I am quite certain – she never, never drank stout. All I have ever known her to have was an occasional glass of port wine or a little sherry or champagne. Even then she would only drink a small quantity, because she knew that a very little wine would make her excited.
HER HIGHEST BET £1
Next I read that Edith ‘gambled heavily for a woman in her position,’
Edith never made a bet bigger than £1, and it was only on one occasion that she risked so much money over one horse, for she lost and, womanlike, decided that anything more than ‘bobs’ on big races, just for luck, was a silly game.
Perhaps half a dozen times during the year would she display any interest in horse-racing, and she had her little flutter merely to be ‘in the swim’.
Now I turn to the charge of extravagance in the matter of dress, and the question has a particular interest for me since Edith used to give me the benefit of her professional experience in buying my own clothes. Our tastes in dress were very similar, and I know pretty well to a shilling how much of her money used to go on her back. It was surprisingly modest.
So far as hats are concerned Mr Thompson is perfectly right. I don’t think Edith ever went a week without a new hat. But listen to the explanation.
In the course of her business she frequently had to go to the big West End stores in search of order for her firm’s millinery business. Now would any milliner send his representative in a dowdy hat to call on a prospective customer?
Those frequent new hats were referred to many times before Mr Richard Thompson ever thought of them, and I have heard people chaff Edith in front of her employer on being a walking advertisement.
And that view was never disputed.
I will go so far as to say that the one-hat-a-week charge is a distinct understatement of the real facts. I have known Edith wear two new hats in one afternoon, but never without a definite object, for few women could display smart millinery to such an advantage as Edith Thompson.
Of the ill-fated man’s home life I can say little for he never gave even the most frequent of his wife’s visitors any opportunity to study him. Just an expressionless ‘Good morning’ or ‘Good afternoon’, and he would relapse into silence or go out into the garden.
HELPED HIM AT THE OFFICE
Of this surliness Edith never complained, but she has often told me of the bitter disappointment she felt at the suspicion that her husband did not appreciate the help she often gave him. Quite apart from her own tasks, Edith worked very hard to make things run as smoothly as possible for her husband in his employment, and time after time I have seen a table in the house at Kensington Gardens strewn with the books which Percy Thompson had brought home for his wife to straighten out.
Back they would go to the City next day, and for a little while Thompson’s work would be all plain sailing.
Then the figures would gradually become involved once more, and again Mrs Thompson had to put matters right. She has even spent her Saturday afternoons in her husband’s office helping him with his bookkeeping. [see letter of 6 March 1922: ‘…Last Saturday we went over to Tulse Hill – to Mr Manning’s – I went to his office and helped him with his books until 5 p.m. & then met Mater & Dad. …]
AN APPEAL FOR JUSTICE
Won’t all these additional points help Mr Richard Thompson to a better understanding of the facts he gave us in his article last week? In the light of the horrible events of the last three months I know how easy it is to attach undue significance to trivial incidents; I think too I can feel some of the grief which fills the soul of the man who wrote those words.
I ask you then – you who have read both our stories – to pause a moment and turn your thoughts to those two wretched creatures who in a few short hours will be launched into the Great Beyond.
It is only left for them now to repent of their terrible deed and seek the forgiveness of their Maker. An inflexible justice has placed them where the world can injure them no more to await the last dread moments in which their own lives shall be claimed as forfeit for the destruction of the life which was so callously thrust from the path of their evil design.
[Date: Wednesday 3 January 1923]
Dear [Ida?] – ,
I know I ought to have written to you yesterday – but I didn’t feel I wanted to – that’s my only excuse.
Thank you sending along the book. I haven’t [received] it yet, but I soon shall have. When I think I have been longing to get it for three months now and you have had it all the time. I feel so cross that I didn’t mention it before. However, I am going to prepare myself to enjoy it to the full, after waiting so long.
Does it seem three whole months since I first came here to you? Some days it seems like three weeks and others like three days. Time is always our enemy, don’t you think? It either goes too fast or too slowly always.
I’ve read lots of books since I’ve been here; usually I get through one every day – but they, none of them, have been very striking, nothing in them to impress one, or to make you remember them. Of course, I read ‘If Winter Comes’. Auntie – sent it in to me. That I enjoyed; it is quite differently written from the usual type of novel, and that fact alone made it interesting, but the plot (which doesn’t really appear until quite the end of the book) was even more interesting to me under these circumstances.
Have you read it? You should. Then I read ‘A Witness for the Defence’ by A. E. W. Mason. I wonder if you have ‘The Four Feathers’ by him? I should like to have that. Oh! And I read ‘His Daughter’, a Yankee book by Governor Morris, but there was nothing much in that; at least, nothing much I can discuss in writing.
I could talk to you about it, but I couldn’t write. Now I am starting Dickens again. I think I have read all his at least three or four times, but you can always pick up one and feel interested in it at any time.
I remember at school we used to have what was called a ‘Reading Circle’. A Dickens book was chosen by our teacher, we read it at home, not at school, and then we each chose a character from the book and wrote a little essay on him or her, as the case might be. These essays we would all take to Wanstead Park on a Saturday afternoon: we would each read our own out loud, and then it was discussed in general.
We usually took our tea to the park and made a little picnic party of it. I remember an essay I was highly commended on by the teacher. It was on ‘Quilp’.
Today it is lovely; the sun is shining and everywhere looks bright and cheerful. I begin to feel quite cheerful myself – isn’t the sun wonderful, it always raises your spirits. But I don’t like it as cold as this. I’ll be ever so glad when the summer comes: the heat I love, but I never did like the cold – not out of doors, at any rate. I don’t think I should mind inches of snow outside if I was inside in a huge armchair before a great, big fire, with a nice book – yes, and some nuts, I think.
I’ve still got faith – I’m still hoping. They say ‘you can always get what you want if you want it enough, but you can’t control the price you have to pay’, and I think that’s so every time.
I got – letter. Thank him for me; it was very sedate and proper, tell him. I really didn’t think he could be like that – I think that is part of him I don’t know yet.
Shall I see you again soon – Edith.