Three Days in November

Edith Thompson – Exhumation and Funeral

Tuesday 20 Nov 2018 – Thursday 22 Nov 2018

© René Weis

PRELUDE

On Monday 15 January 2018 I met with our family solicitor, Nicholas Brown of Bircham Dyson Bell (BDB) Pitmans, in his offices in St James’s, Westminster. It was around 2 pm. It had snowed earlier. The pavements were slippery and congested with humps of thawing slush. The wintry feel chimed with my apprehensive mood. I had come to see Nick Brown about petitioning the Ministry of Justice to move Edith Thompson from her current resting place in Brookwood Cemetery, in Surrey, into her parents’ grave in the City of London Cemetery. As her executor and heir I was in loco familiae, and so enjoyed legal standing with regard to her estate and remains. I was the owner of the grave in Brookwood and of her parents’ grave in the City of London Cemetery, a grave that Edith had purchased in October 1922 to bury her murdered husband Percy, and from which his family subsequently removed him.

Nick Brown had long been interested in the case of Edith Thompson. As ever he was incisive, measured, efficient, and kind. By coincidence the Ministry of Justice sits right across the street from the offices of BDB Pitmans. Nick Brown took me through the various steps involved in the application. One of the key issues would be consent. When the Home Office moved Edith Thompson out of Holloway to Brookwood, they put her in a common grave alongside three other executed women: the two baby farmers Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, hanged together at the prison in 1903, and Mrs Styllou Christofi, who had died at Holloway in 1954.

At the time of the rebuilding of Holloway in 1971 the Home Office had approached the families of Ruth Ellis (d. 1955) and Mrs Christofi about returning the bodies to them. The 1965 ‘Abolition of Death Penalty’ Act (also known as ‘The Murder Act’) made provision for the return to relatives of the bodies of executed men and women. While Ruth Ellis’s family desired to have her remains back, Mrs Christofi’s chose not to. But regarding Edith Thompson, Amelia Sach, and Annie Walters, no attempt was made by the Home Office to seek out and contact the families. In the National Archives a somewhat desultory exchange of letters between the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police briefly speculated whether the three women had surviving relatives, before concluding – on the advice of the police – that this was unlikely.

This was an unconscionable oversight. Avis Graydon, Edith Thompson’s sister, and her youngest brother Harold, were both alive at the time, one of them in London, the other in Shrewsbury. It would have taken the authorities a couple of hours of research at best to establish this fact.

In 1973 Avis Graydon repeatedly met up with Mrs Audrey Russell, who became her friend and confidant. Avis had no idea that her sister Edith was no longer at Holloway. Had she known about it, the grave in Brookwood would indubitably have become a place of pilgrimage for her. As late as the 1980s Edith’s niece told me that she was unaware of the fact that ‘my aunt Edith’ now rested at Brookwood.

The Home Office briefly considered cremating the women’s remains but decided against it; probably because of the multiple controversies surrounding Ruth Ellis, from her conviction to her death and disputes in the family about who had the superior claim to her remains. So the bodies of the four women would be interred together in Brookwood Cemetery.

Although reasonably detailed records were kept of the 1971 exhumations of the women at Holloway, no substantive record is extant from the reburial in Surrey. Ahead of the 2018 exhumation of Edith Thompson it was thus not possible to determine in which order the four women had been buried in their ‘mass’ grave; whether the bodies were stacked on top of one another or whether they rested side-by-side, two-by-two. Also, the word ‘casket’, as used in the records of the exhumation at Holloway, was not helpful: did it mean coffins? or zinc or lead containers? If so, would all of them have name plates attached to them so that they could easily be identified? When several years earlier I first spoke to a local undertaker in Woking about the possibility of an exhumation, he was adamant that at most there might be a few bones left; that zinc or lead caskets were unlikely to have been used so that whatever remains there were would probably all have merged together. He did not hold out much hope of finding any remains that could be identified separately and matched to names. Particularly because the soil at Brookwood is acid woodland soil which explains the thriving thickets of ancient rhododendrons in that part of the cemetery.

Our solicitor explained to me the law on mass graves and the need to get the consent of surviving relatives of all the women in the grave, if they could be traced. At least we would need to prove that all reasonable efforts had been undertaken to secure consent. Only then could the form be sent to Brookwood Cemetery. Once the cemetery had signed off on it, it would be forwarded to the Ministry of Justice, along with certified copies of documents relating to my own standing, my relationship with Edith’s family, my ownership of the two graves, a testimonial from Mrs Audrey Russell, and so on. If our application failed, our only option would then, as a last resort, be to appeal the minister’s decision in court, to argue that the Ministry of Justice had acted ‘irrationally’. Letter to Richard Finlay at MoJ dated 6 February 2018 (with enclosures)

Shortly after seeing Nick Brown I placed an advert in Parikiaki, the newspaper of the Greek Cypriot community in Britain. It was essential to make contact with the family of Mrs Christofi: unlike Amelia Sach and Annie Walters, her remains were not covered by the 100-year rule; her family’s consent for the proposed exhumation would be required. Parikiaki was the suggestion of my former UCL student and fellow Shakespeare scholar, Chris Laoutaris, author of the best-selling Shakespeare and the Countess. Like Mrs Christofi, Chris Laoutaris is of Greek Cypriot extraction. He informed me that the paper is widely read in the Cypriot community in Britain. If it did not yield a result he would try to go through his local Greek church for me. As always he was most generous with his time and wisdom.

My solicitors and I were prepared for the Christofi family to prefer not to know or be traced, given the circumstances. The Ministry of Justice too seemed ready to accept that we might be able to proceed if the family chose to remain anonymous. But within 24 hours of my placing the advert in the paper, Toby Christofi, Mrs Christofi’s grandson, had made contact. His call to me was followed shortly afterwards by an email from his half-sister Stephanie, Mrs Christofi’s granddaughter. In the end Toby’s and Stephanie’s understanding and unqualified support made all the difference. The apparently most difficult hurdle had proved to be nothing of the kind.

After the signed forms were returned to me, my solicitors forwarded them to Brookwood Cemetery. By the time of my application the cemetery had been acquired by Woking Borough Council and was under the management of Avril Kirby, who duly signed off on the papers. The documents, now ready to go, were submitted to the Ministry, while a notice was placed on the grave in Brookwood, to alert visitors to the proposed exhumation, and to elicit any objections. During all this time my solicitors were in touch with colleagues in the Ministry.

On Tuesday 18 September 2018 Nicholas Brown notified me by email that my application had been approved and that the exhumation licences would be issued the following day. They were four separate licences, one for each of the women, in case it should be necessary to disturb any other remains in order to move Edith Thompson. The licences would be valid for a year from the date of issue.

Two days later the licence to reunite Edith Thompson with her parents, her mother’s lasting wish since 9 January 1923, sat on my desk.

The two cemeteries, Brookwood and City of London, were alerted at once. Eventually we settled on Tuesday 20 November 2018 for the exhumation and 22 November for the funeral. Our Funeral Directors, Frederick W. Paine’s of London Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, suggested the November dates, as it would be important to get the exhumation done ahead of winter frosts. On Wednesday 21 November Edith Thompson would lie in the chapel of rest in the funeral parlour of Paine’s, after her mortal remains had been properly prepared for burial.

As it happens, I had contacted Paine’s three years earlier as it was they who had moved the women’s remains in 1971 on behalf of the Home Office. Paine’s ranks among the most reputable, respected, and historic undertakers in the country. Not long after my visit Paine’s were joined by the historian Dr Brian Parson, who was about to curate their archive. At my request Brian conducted a thorough search in the Paine archive but he too drew a blank.

However, from enquiries by Dawn Trigg, the Business Manager of Paine’s, it emerged that someone who had worked for the company in 1971 was not only alive but lived locally and had been present at the 1971 funeral in Brookwood. While he could no longer recall much about the ‘caskets’ that were used, he was adamant that name plates had been attached to them. So once the remains were found there could be no confusion about their identities, assuming that the plates were not made of wood.

I had been alerted to Brian Parsons’s joining Paine’s by a mutual friend, John Clarke, the official published historian of Brookwood Cemetery, a world authority on all matters relating to cemeteries, exhumations, and much else. (https://www.john-clarke.co.uk)

John Clarke had been at my side for many years and had played a shaping role in the dedication of the women’s grave in Brookwood in 1993, when we placed the current granite stone with the women’s names on it.

From my first tentative contacts with Brookwood under its previous management several years earlier to the exhumation and funeral in 2018 John had been advising and guiding, replying with the patience of Job to countless email messages from me. Without his unstinting help over the years I might have lost heart long ago regarding any chance of moving Edith Thompson’s remains.

It was again John Clarke who pointed me in the direction of Paine’s for the exhumation while the application to the Ministry of Justice was working its way through the system. He knew them well and vouched for them. Indeed, John, who never praises lightly, emphatically recommended Paine’s, and Dawn Trigg in particular for their professionalism.

My wife Jean and I duly followed up and visited Paine’s on Tuesday 2 October 2018. We were met by Dawn, who would eventually oversee everything regarding the exhumation and funeral with extraordinary thoroughness and attention to detail. John Clarke in person and I separately by email had already briefed Dawn about Edith Thompson, the broad outlines of the case, and the reason for the reburial.

During our initial visit we went through the logistics of the exhumation, of the funeral, of the choice of coffin, flowers, hearse, and much else. Dawn now suggested a specialist company for overseeing the exhumation: they would be expensive but in her view they were the best. She knew them because years ago their CEO had occupied offices in Paine’s. They were Peter Mitchell Associates. The moment she mentioned him I realised that this was the same company whom my solicitor had recommended. BDB Pitmans had worked with Peter Mitchell while overseeing major exhumations for Crossrail. Peter had moreover been involved in important archaeological exhumations.

There was no doubt in my mind that Peter Mitchell Associates would be right for us. The exhumation of Edith Thompson required sensitive handling and it was imperative that everything be done by the book. As it turned out we could not have been in safer hands, with Dawn and her colleagues at Paine’s, Peter Mitchell Associates, Avril Kirby at Brookwood, and Janine Knighton, the Environmental Health officer from Woking Borough Council. Ms Knighton, we were informed, had a reputation for thoroughness: she would not let anything pass that did not conform to regulations. The more the reason to have Peter Mitchell. At least for her final journey home Edith Thompson would have the best.

Jean and I chose the coffin and the flowers that would adorn it. It would be a ‘Pure and Simple Single-Ended Spray’ of white lilies, white roses, and mixed white flowers, to mark Edith’s innocence.

By a happy coincidence the case for Edith Thompson’s innocence had recently been argued on BBC 2 by two distinguished barristers, Sasha Wass QC and Jeremy Dein QC, who were appearing in the channel’s series Murder, Mystery, and My Family. The programmes investigate famous criminal cases from the past in the context of living members of the families of convicted men and women. In the case of Edith Thompson Sasha Wass was instructed to argue the case for the prosecution while Jeremy Dein defended. In the end Ms Wass, on behalf of the Crown, submitted that, in her view, there was no case to answer. She pointed to the prejudicial, gendered nature of the case against Edith Thompson, particularly evident in the judge’s heavily biased summing up. Mr Dein concurred. After studying the two barristers’ documentation, His Honour Judge David Radford, a recently retired Senior Circuit judge, concluded that the conviction of Edith Thompson for murder was unsafe.

There are clear limits to trial by television. I had for that reason declined to participate in the 2018 film, while allowing Chalkboard, the company making the film and its 2018-19 successor, to use my materials gratis. Other friends, notably the reverend James Ramsay, who had for years presided over the annual 9 January memorial service for Edith Thompson in St Barnabas, Manor Park, had similarly decided not to appear in it. But in the end the finished product, first broadcast in 2018, was a serious take on the case, with the two barristers wholly professional, analytical, and at no time playing to the gallery.

The programme was built around Nicki Toay, the granddaughter of Edith Thompson’s cousin Leonard Walkinshaw, and therefore the great-granddaughter of Edith’s aunt and godmother, Edith Walkinshaw, the elder sister of Edith Thompson’s mother.

Leonard Walkinshaw – he was born in 1906 and was therefore 16 at the time of the tragedy – was educated at the famous public school Christ’s Hospital in Sussex, whose old boys include Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edith and her family were proud of Leonard, as is clear from the Avis Graydon interview, as she remembered that on that terrible Christmas Day 1922, with Edith immured at Holloway, Leonard Walkinshaw was home in Highbury from Christ’s Hospital.

The Graydon family spent that day with his parents at 32 Lucerne Road. Avis and probably her brothers were also there. Leonard suggested that they all go for a Christmas drink at the Barn in Highbury. What else could they do? The older generation, Edith’s parents and her aunts and uncles, had Christmas of 1922 in the family home closest to where Edith now was: less than a mile down the road at Holloway. It is probable that Edith’s parents and the Walkinshaws made their way at some point that day to a spot outside the walls of the castellated prison, to be as close to her physically and mentally as they possibly could.

When Nicki Toay was contacted by the BBC in 2017 about their planned programme on Edith Thompson she knew nothing about the case. She had never heard about her grandfather’s cousin Edith. For Nicki the tragic scale of her family history was a great deal to take in. She and her sister felt deeply for the family and of course for their grandfather above all. With Nicki the TV company struck gold. She was a television star to the manner born: superbly articulate, intelligent, and profoundly sympathetic to her relative Edith Thompson. Nicki instantly grasped the enormity of her great-aunt’s predicament. Rather than running from her family’s painful heritage, Nicki embraced it. She was determined to do Edith Thompson proud and went on to do so with considerable panache. In addition to talking to the lawyers, which included a warning that they might find against Edith, she visited the grave in Brookwood and started immersing herself in the case.

Unbeknown to her I had encountered another member of her extended family through a link on ancestry.co.uk. This member, with whom I met up when she was over in Britain, in turn discovered through our links that she was a cousin of John Walkinshaw’s, and that she and the Walkinshaw family lived not far from each other in the same state of the United States. It was this cousin, a micro-biologist from California, who wrote to me at some point in the course of 2017-18 and suggested that I contact Nicki and meet her.

Nicki and I first met on 9 January 2018, at the annual memorial service for Edith Thompson, some months after the screening of the first instalment of Murder, Mystery, and My Family. Afterwards we walked back together to the station at East Ham, past the Graydon family home at 231 Shakespeare Crescent. Nicki, her friend Helen, and my wife and I lunched in our home that day. I showed Nicki as much of my materials about Edith Thompson as time allowed. This included Edith’s necklace and a delicate, Art-Deco patterned, Edwardian traycloth that ‘Edie’, as Avis called her, had worked on as a child. We agreed there and then that Nicki would be included in my application to the Ministry of Justice.

MONDAY 19 NOVEMBER 2018

Monday 19 November 2018: in the morning I visited the City of London Cemetery to check that everything was set for the funeral. My appointment in the church was at 11 am. I was early and so walked over to see Edith Thompson’s parents’ grave, where she would shortly be joining them. To my surprise another grave was being dug next to it. It was covered with planks: could there be another funeral in the grave next to theirs? Surely an impossible coincidence. I decided that I needed to return to the grave after inspecting the facilities at the Anglican Church in Aldersbrook Road, Manor Park. Everything was fine at the church, with the microphone fully integrated into the lectern. There would be no awkward need to adjust it during the service for readings. I could not test the music system as it was not accessible but I had listened to it online so that was fine.

I then returned to Square 197 (the grave number is 92743) to check on the grave and on the one that had earlier looked freshly dug next to it. Fortunately this time the grave digger, ‘Mike’, happened to be there. He was digging low-down in the new grave. It was impossible not to think of the grave-digger scene in Hamlet. Like Ophelia’s, Edith Thompson’s death had been ‘doubtful’, to use Shakespeare’s word; as with the suicide Ophelia, the powers that be had determined that Edith Thompson ‘should in ground unsanctified have lodged / Till the last trumpet’.

I asked Mike to confirm that he was digging up the correct grave: was not the Graydon grave next to it?  Patiently Mike explained that the Graydon gravestone – a single integrated piece – had been moved to the side temporarily where there happened to be a free plot of grass: after the interment of Edith Thompson it would be placed back on the grave. He stood inside the real grave, getting it ready to receive Edith’s coffin. When I asked where her parents were, he pointed down to his feet and remarked ‘right underneath here’.

In accordance with common practice regarding exhumations, the preliminary dig at Brookwood had started on Monday 19 November. When John Clarke visited the grave on Saturday 17 November, the granite slab had already been moved in readiness for the exhumation. By Monday night the digger had dug down to a specified depth around the grave in Brookwood, so that early the following morning the remains in this common grave could be reached by manual digging. The area was then sealed and secured for the morning’s exhumation.

TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2018:

‘SHE IS WITH US NOW ’

On Tuesday morning Jean and I rose at 4.30 am and were on the road from Chiswick to Brookwood shortly after 5 am, understandably anxious about what lay ahead. It had rained heavily overnight and it was very cold. Meanwhile Nicki Toay in turn was making her way to Brookwood from her home. She was parked just inside the perimeter when we pulled into the necropolis. She noted that a number of cars had gone past already, with one of them, Peter Mitchell’s, stopping to ask her to identify herself. The cars were those of the Funeral Directors, Dawn Trigg and Sue Harvey from Paine’s, two ambulances from Paine’s, Peter Mitchell, who with his staff would carry out the exhumation. Also present were the Woking Borough Council Environmental Health Officer, Janine Knighton, the manager of Brookwood Avril Kirby, and the cemetery foreman.

We drove in convoy up Chapel Avenue in the direction of the railway embankment, before entering the northern loop of Eastern avenue to head east. Just beyond the eastern end of the ellipse formed by Eastern Avenue, in an area designated as ‘unconsecrated’, lies the grave of the four hanged women. We advanced slowly towards it. Three quarters up the avenue a track cuts across the ellipse. Backing down towards this track, away from an eerily strobe-lit area ahead, were a number of parked cars. As I edged forwards a woman, dressed smartly in black, stepped into my headlights and motioned me to stop. It was Dawn Trigg from Paine’s. She explained that this was a far as Jean, Nicki, and I were allowed to go but she would keep us posted as the exhumation proceeded. So we stood in the pre-dawn night, lit up spasmodically by commuter trains thundering past on the embankment above us, barely speaking as we waited.

The twin-tented scene over the grave cast a green-white sheen over the surrounding woodland. I could just make out masked figures in white Tyvek coveralls moving in and out of the lights. In due course Dawn came towards us: they had found Amelia Sach at the top of the grave, identified by her name plate.

My heart sank: the fact that Amelia Sach was found first suggested that they had buried the women’s remains in the reverse order in which they had been put in the ambulance that brought them from Holloway. The 1 April 1971 report of the exhumations at Holloway records that the women were exhumed, and their remains prepared for reburial, in the order of Ruth Ellis, Styllou Christofi, Edith Thompson, Annie Walters, and Amelia Sach.

With the exception of Ruth Ellis, who was not interred at Brookwood but would be returned to her family for reburial in Amersham, the ‘caskets’ (they turned out to be coffins) were stacked, I now realised, in the order in which they were exhumed: Styllou Christofi and Edith Thompson were first up after Ruth Ellis, and they were therefore at the bottom of the transport. Annie Walters and Amelia Sach, who were brought up next, would be on top. The grave dug at Brookwood was wide enough to have two coffins side-by-side. Accordingly the women were lowered into it in the order in which they came off the transport. Edith Thompson and Styllou Christofi were put in first at the bottom, their respective coffins side-by-side and head-to-foot, while Amelia Sach and Annie Walters were put directly above them.

We returned to the car, tense and anxious. A friend had told me months earlier that the grave in Brookwood had been waterlogged when he last visited it a year before I sought to exhume Edith Thompson. The deeper inside the grave her remains were the more likely it was that they might not be identifiable.

It was still dark when Dawn once more came towards us from the grave area. All three of us stepped out of the car.

Dawn was holding something: ‘We have found Edith’, she said. My wife asked ‘All of her?’ – ‘Yes’, Dawn replied, ‘all of her’.

What she was carrying in her hand was a brass name plate.

She held it up for us to see. It was covered in mud but the name, in italics, was easy to make out: Edith Jessie Thompson. ‘We are bringing her up now, there is a lot of lime’, Dawn said before returning to the grave.

The three of us hugged. It would be okay. Edith Thompson would be home with her parents shortly as her mother had hoped all those years ago.

There was now a grey glimmer of light on this dank late November morning.

Shortly after 7 am Dawn returned to us once more.

‘She is with us now’, she said.

More than any others those words would define these three days for me. They struck a chord like nothing else. No-one could restore her stolen life to Edith Thompson but at least she was forever free now from anything to do with the justice system, prisons or Home Office.

Dawn explained that there was such a mass of lime around Edith’s remains that they would not all fit into one coffin: they needed two temporary coffins for the ten heavy polythene bags that contained her remains. They would take them to Kingston-upon-Thames and clean the lime off her remains there. At the graveside there had been some discussion, it transpired later, about where Edith’s remains could be most suitably prepared for reburial. It was agreed in the end that this would be at Paine’s, who have a specially equipped mortuary facility for just this kind of delicate work. Once Edith’s skeleton was free from the lime and cleaned, the remaining lime and the earth would be returned later that afternoon to Brookwood.

In the half-dark we saw the two temporary coffins being moved from the grave to the ambulances. Dawn returned to us for a last time that morning. She explained that Edith Thompson’s remains were now ready to leave the cemetery.

We shook hands with her and then watched as the two ambulances carrying Edith gently moved down the southern track of Eastern Avenue on their way to the cemetery entrance on Cemetery Pales. It was 7.26 am on Tuesday 20 November 2018.

It was a mesmerising moment to watch her leave her ignominious resting place to the dignified safety of Paine’s in Kingston-upon-Thames. Of the many turbulent moments that morning in Brookwood cemetery, this was perhaps the most poignant. Edith Thompson’s remains and those of the other women, all heavily coated in lime, were found in polythene sacks (ten in her case) which had been stored in cheap, chipwood coffins. Over time the coffins had disintegrated completely, but forty-seven years after it was first put there the outline of Edith’s was still visibly imprinted in the earth. Her name plate sat on top of the polythene bags. In the end it was the polythene bags that preserved Edith’s remains and those of the other women.

A detailed account of the exhumation was written up by Peter Mitchell and separately by Dawn Trigg. Shortly after the ambulances had left the cemetery, Peter came up to me as I was standing near his four-by-four. We shook hands. Before I could thank him he told me what a privilege it had been to oversee this particular exhumation. Peter looked, and is, the ultimate professional. The boot of his car was packed with sophisticated equipment. I assumed it included Ground Penetrating Radar. He remarked on the inhumanity of a past system that did not return the bodies of the dead to their families and how this punished the families as well. I mentioned to him that I had thought about an autopsy, to see whether there was even at this late stage a possibility to establish whether or not Edith Thompson was pregnant when she died. He was sceptical in view of the likely state of her remains.

Peter and his staff packed up quickly and soon it was just the two of us and Nicki left. We chatted a bit, to give the rush hour a chance to thin out before doubling back to London on the M25. We walked over to the grave where the digger was parked and where the man operating it sat studying his mobile phone. Already the grave was temporarily filled in, waiting for the earth and lime around Edith Thompson’s remains to be returned. Only then would it be fully and finally resealed.

We stood there talking and we took photographs. It all felt so different from November 1983 when I first visited here, and from so many other visits there since.

Shortly afterwards Jean and I decided that we should take off for home. Nicki pushed on ahead. While still in the cemetery I texted my friend John Clarke to say that all was well. We then spent the next two hours on the road back to London and arrived home shortly after 10am. I spent the rest of the morning emailing friends about the exhumation and then took off to UCL to give a King Lear class and two tutorials.

I arrived home again at around 6.30 pm. I had been asked to call the BBC regarding an already scheduled interview on the Today programme the following day, Wednesday 21 November: at 8.45 am at first; then at 7.20 am, then at 7 am, with the car picking me up at 6 am. I was already in bed at 11.30 pm when they pinged me to say that I was being put back to 8.45 am. This would clash with an interview with Vanessa Feltz scheduled for 8.35 am on BBC Radio London.

In the meantime, at 10 am that same morning, the mortuary of Paine’s in Horace Road, Kingston-upon-Thames, was cleared of all staff except for the business manager Dawn Trigg and her colleagues, the area manager, the funeral manager, the funeral service arranger, and the team leader. Over three hours these five members of staff worked to extricate Edith Thompson’s skeletal remains from the lime-laden polythene sacks, which weighed some 250 pounds. Edith, it turned out, had long legs, something which is evident from several of her extant photos. This would have been an asset for her dancing. It was an odd detail under the circumstances, but it linked her remains literally, tangibly, to extant photos of the young woman from Manor Park. Dawn did not know Edith Thompson’s height but guessed from her skeleton that she would have been around five foot eight. In fact we know she was five foot seven and a quarter when she died.

Her remains were laid out as a skeleton on a heavy-duty body bag on the central mortuary table and then transferred into the coffin that Jean and I had chosen. In this she was taken to the chapel of rest at Paine’s in London Road. The small chapel was arranged beautifully and adorned with flowers. A framed photograph of Edith with her arm around her sister Avis stood guard over it. The remaining earth and lime had by then already been packed into two more body bags and taken back to Brookwood, in accordance with the law.

WEDNESDAY 21 NOVEMBER 2018

I was up at 6 am the following morning, Wednesday 21 November, and rang Today to explain that I had to cancel the 8.45 am interview because I needed to be present when Edith’s coffin was sealed in Kingston. After 5 minutes they rang me back to say that they could pre-record my interview with John Humphrys. I emailed BBC Radio London and told them in turn that we needed to do their interview by phone. They agreed. I was taken by taxi to the BBC and interviewed by John Humphrys. He was sympathetic and told me that he had known nothing about Edith Thompson until that moment. As I left we shook hands and John Humphrys remarked ‘They keep on saying that it’s getting worse all the time. But it’s not, is it, when you think of something like this.’ Or words to that effect. Afterwards I wrote ‘Sam’ (my contact on the Today programme) a note to ask her to pass on my thanks to John Humphrys for that parting shot. The interview made ‘Best of Today’ and triggered a number of emails to my UCL email address from friends and former students.

The Radio London telephone interview was done by Vanessa Feltz. She had certainly done her homework. She rather glamorised Edith to set up a polarity between a beautiful young woman, successful in business, fabulous dancer, romantic to the core, and a dullard husband who could not dance but excelled at gardening: how could Percy possibly hang on to this flashy exciting creature? This was clearly not the whole story but Feltz understood at once that it was Edith’s decision to give evidence in court that caused her perdition. Why would she not give evidence? She knew herself to be innocent, after all, and was desperate to save her twenty-year-old lover. As her barrister Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett remarked shortly after her death, she never realised the mortal danger she herself stood in. He had done his best to persuade her not go into the witness-box, but to no avail.

The Radio London interview lasted 7-8 minutes.

Shortly afterwards my wife Jean and I set off for Kingston-upon-Thames to see Edith Thompson before the coffin was sealed. Dawn explained that Edith’s remains were now clear of lime in her coffin and could be visited. We were taken inside the little chapel where she rested one last time.

We had carefully considered whether seeing her would be right: it would be upsetting and might even feel like an act of trespass. In the end though I decided that we needed to see her. The last people ever to look at her should be people who cared about her. Her sister and her parents had kissed her at the inquest as she lay dead at Holloway the morning of 9 January 1923. What would they have wanted? I would like to think that they might have approved of us looking at her this final time and part from her as if we were her family. Dawn had told us that some of Edith’s hair could be seen. In fact her fringe, as seen in the September 1922 pictures, was discernible, matted against her forehead and whispy strands of her hair were visible, still growing on her head. My wife and I stood in solemn silence, and then I sat alone with Edith Thompson’s remains for a short while.

Edith Thompson had been in my life ever since I first read about her during the Thatcher-era debates on the death penalty in the 1980s. In the literature on this highly charged and emotive issue her name had come up time and again, just like Timothy Evans’s. Indeed, Edith’s fate had haunted the earlier Commons debates on judicial killings in 1948 and again in 1956, when evoking her death played a significant role in the initial Commons votes for abolition. Arguably more than any other capital case from the past, Edith Thompson stood as a searing indictment of the inevitable (because human) fallibility of the justice system, and more widely of the moral bankruptcy of the death penalty. She never stood a chance, with the odds so heavily stacked against her in court by a barely disguised hostility to her as a working woman who had chosen to remain childless.

My wife and I had felt nothing but tenderness for the remains of the young woman whose life had been taken in such a terrible way. To know that on the morrow she would finally rejoin her parents was a comfort.

Edith’s great-niece Nicki had expressed a wish to see her before the sealing of the coffin. I had discussed it with Dawn. In the end it seemed right that Nicki, who had done so well for Edith, should have her wish. We waited for her to arrive. She did in the company of a friend from Kingston with whom she was planning to stay that night. She entered the chapel with Dawn who left her there for a short time with her grandfather’s beloved cousin.

The heightened emotion in the funeral parlour was palpable when we were all gathered together. Dawn suggested that we might want to put something into the coffin with Edith. We paused and thought about it. Nicki said that she would only do so if I was happy for that to happen. I said I would consider it and promised to get back to her in the evening. It seemed a big thing to do.

As we left Paine’s my wife advised that I might want to write a note to Edith and also put in a copy of my 1988 book, Criminal Justice: The true story of Edith Thompson. Thirty years earlier I had sent a copy to Edith Thompson’s family. Her niece, the daughter of Edith’s brother Newenham, had written to me to thank me for what she thought was a discreet and honourable book about her aunt Edith. If only, she wrote, her mother, Edith’s sister-in-law, could read it: she was sure that it would comfort her. Her mother Elsie, who had known Edith well – she grew up a few doors away from her in Shakespeare Crescent, Manor Park – was still alive and living with her. But her daughter thought she would be too frail to cope with the book. Also, it would be bound to upset her even while giving some solace.

Elsie Graydon had been badly bruised, when fifteen years earlier she and her relatives were approached by a journalist during the 1973 making of the BBC’s A Pin to See the Peepshow. That subsequently the family were prepared to be in touch with me is a measure of their generosity. Indeed, my greatest debt of all regarding moving Edith Thompson is to John Painter, Newenham Graydon’s son-in-law. John was exceptionally kind to me. We stayed in touch through the years. It is my deep regret that he died the year before Edith was moved. It was he who made it all possible in the first place.

Edith’s niece had been touched by the dedication of the first edition of my book to her other aunt, Edith’s sister Avis. She noted how thrilled Avis would have been by that. Above all, she was struck by the picture of Edith on the cover of my book. It is the one Edith had given to Freddy Bywaters in November 1921. According to Edith’s niece, that picture hung in her parents’ bedroom all her life.

My wife and I agreed that my first ever copy of Criminal Justice should be buried with Edith. It was my favourite and was dated 23 July 1988. I inscribed it to her that evening and inserted a card addressing her. The card was Le Visage du Christ from the Cocteau chapel in Villefranche-sur-Mer. Writing the card and dedicating the copy of the book to her were perhaps the hardest things to do that night. At some point, with the card and book in front of me, I emailed my friend Audrey Russell in Cape Town. I confided in her that I dreaded not getting through my eulogy at the funeral and wondered too whether or not I ought to put in with Edith the traycloth and necklace that Avis had given to Audrey in 1973. Both had after all belonged to Edith Thompson. Audrey replied at once, to say ‘Keep her necklace with you thereby you have something of her but she has something of you in your book …  My thoughts will be with you all day’. 

THURSDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2018

We left home at 8.15 am for Kingston. The cab drove through Richmond Park. It was minus one outside and frost sat on the grass and in the trees. It all looked incongruously lovely. We entered Paine’s at 9.30 and met the others who would be travelling with us in the limousine: Nicki Toay, her daughter Georgia, John Clarke, his friend Daphne Mather from Sheffield, and Dawn Trigg had already gathered. We entered the chapel. Edith’s face was now covered. She rested in an all-white array of silk, linen and lace. Dawn took my book and note and Nicki’s note and gently folded them into the sheets close to Edith’s heart. I remained with her alone one last time. Then I joined the others and her coffin was permanently sealed. We stood aside in silence while she was moved out of the chapel, through the parlour, and into the hearse. Then we set off, with Jean, John Clarke and me in the front, and Nicki, her daughter Georgia, and Daphne in the back.

We stayed south of the river well beyond Wandsworth. The drive seemed interminable and was slowed downed further by a demonstration on one of the Thames bridges. We crossed the river near Tower Bridge. Finally, after a long ride east, we spotted a sign for Manor Park.

Shortly afterwards the hearse and limousine edged their way past East Ham Station. Immediately beyond it we turned right into Sibley Grove on our way into Shakespeare Crescent. We passed Edith’s bank (she banked with Barclays) on the corner of East Ham’s High Street and Sibley Grove. I thought of how on Friday nights she would come out of East Ham Station (‘E.H.S.’, as she briskly put it) and tear down towards her parents’ home, invariably with a bunch of flowers for her mother.

We followed the hearse down the Crescent. Before reaching her home we veered up left past her old school in Kensington Avenue, before turning right into Browning Road and past St Barnabas Church where she was married. Then we drove into Shakespeare Crescent from the Browning Road. Edith Thompson’s childhood home was on the left just a few houses down from the Browning bridge.

No-one in the limousine spoke during this leg of the journey. It seemed important to take it all in but none of us were quite prepared for what happened next.

The hearse started to slow down and then stopped directly outside 231 Shakespeare Crescent. It was shortly after 12 noon on Thursday 22 November 2018.  Edith Thompson was back in front of her mother’s home: ‘You will be home with us tomorrow night’, her father had promised her the day before she died, and now she was.

And she would be honoured the way we honour our loved ones in the very place where she had last been happy 96 years earlier. Dawn Trigg stepped out of the hearse. She solemnly bowed to Edith’s coffin first, then to her parents’ home. Then she proceeded, gently and for some 20 yards, to walk the hearse away from 231 Shakespeare Crescent. It was a most poignant moment. The day before I had suggested to the Funeral Directors that Edith’s last journey should take her past her childhood home. I never imagined that Dawn would do quite what she did, to walk Edith Thompson away from her home in just the way funerals used to be done in her time. And with such dignified gravity.

Dawn rejoined the hearse. It drove up Rosebery Avenue, and once more past St Barnabas. Here the hearse stopped again. Dawn stepped out of the hearse, bowed to the coffin and the church where, for over 25 years now, we have met every year at 8am on 9 January to remember Edith Thompson. Again Dawn walked the hearse away. It was this very place that, on a wintry morning in January 1916, the twenty-two-year-old Edith Graydon had entered as a bride and from where she had emerged an hour later as Mrs Edith Thompson.

From St Barnabas the hearse drove up to the City of London Cemetery. It took all of ten minutes. Beyond the cemetery gates and with 50 yards to go, the hearse stopped. Dawn and two of her fellow undertakers stepped out. Slowly she led the procession. The hearse followed, flanked on either side by one of her male colleagues, with the limousine behind.

Edith Thompson’s coffin was received by Father Brian Creak, who had kindly accepted to officiate at Edith’s funeral. Brian is the Roman Catholic chaplain of Goodenough College in Bloomsbury where at the time I was the president. I had broached Edith’s funeral to Brian one cold night on the river when we were both on a Goodenough College themed ‘pirates’ cruise sailing down towards Greenwich. I was hoping that he might be free to act.

Brian immediately agreed. Father Creak is a French scholar with a Christian calling to serve, doing so with humility and inspirational inner fortitude. Exactly like Canon Patrick Palmer, the RC priest who gave Edith Thompson a few moments of love and comfort during the last few days of her life. She trusted Canon Palmer just as she would have done Brian Creak. I am not a believer but to know, as Brian assured me, that she would be in his prayers, was comforting.

We had printed 75 orders of service. They were placed on the seats before we entered the church. Dawn Trigg came out of the church to organise the formal moving of the coffin, before inviting the congregation to form a cortege. Jean and I went first, then Nicki and her daughter, then John Clarke, then Daphne, and then the rest of the congregation. Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major was playing as we filed in. Brian Creak was waiting for us and Nicki’s husband Rob was discreetly filming the occasion from a recessed place out of sight.

I delivered the eulogy:

We are gathered here to honour the memory of Edith Jessie Thompson. We are here because her mother wanted Edith to join her one day. We are here because we believe that Edith was innocent and that her case remains a tragic blot on this country’s tradition of equitable and effective justice.

As her parents parted from Edith at Holloway for the last time, on 8 January 1923, her father said to her ‘Well now don’t worry about it: you will be home with us tomorrow night’. The hearse this morning took her past her childhood home, through the very street in which she played as a little girl, and past the church in which she was married. 

Immediately after her daughter’s death Edith’s mother tried to have her daughter’s skirt and blouse returned to her, because Edith had worn them when she died. To her mother they would have been an infinitely precious connection to her daughter’s last moments, but instead they were burnt. A year later, with the first ever Labour government in power, a distinguished Holloway prison visitor petitioned the new Home Secretary: ‘I have been approached by the mother of poor Edith Thompson, whom I met under very sad circumstances, to find out whether anything could be done to get back the body of her child, or if at least she might be informed where she is buried’. The Home Office replied that, in accordance with the law, Edith Thompson ‘was buried and must remain buried within the precincts of the Prison’. 

Edith’s mother died on 7 January 1938, two days before the 15^th anniversary of Edith’s death.

Edith was not a saint, but she was a talented, intelligent, kind, and generous woman, who loved her beautiful home. In due course she might well have settled into her marriage with her husband Percy. There is a telling moment when, in 1973, her sister Avis is asked about Edith eloping with Freddy Bywaters: 

AVIS  No, no – what was going to happen to Percy?!

[AR  Well they were just going to run away and live together and leave Percy on his own.]

AVIS  No, not my sister!

[AR  That’s what she is talking about anyway in her letters.]

AVIS  Not my sister! 

Edith had a superb head for figures, dressed elegantly, earned well, travelled to Paris for her firm, and was an avid reader. Writing about her in School for Women (1996), Professor Jane Miller of the University of London Institute of Education observed: 

‘If Edith and Freddy had been born fifty years later they would probably have stayed on at school until the age of sixteen, and, given their intelligence and their interests, the chances are good that they would have taken some A levels and proceeded to university, perhaps to read English.’

At the trial the judge, who had not read Edith’s favourite novelist Robert Hichens, thought that his novels must be mischievous rubbish, that this kind of fiction was surely among the root causes of adulterous crimes. But Henry James, the greatest novelist of the age, then as now, admired Hichens just as Edith did. 

She had a wonderful ear for English and wrote with quite remarkable facility. Her surviving letters to Freddy Bywaters run to over 51,000 words. 

At school she had been a prize-winning girl. Writing from Holloway she recalled 

‘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’ [the grotesque villain of The Old Curiosity Shop].’ 

Edith was also a modern young woman with strong opinions including an openness towards other cultures and a modest measure of feminism. For instance, when Freddy wrote to her about an altercation with an African woman during one of his voyages, Edith remonstrated with him, saying that she objected to his derogatory phrases about the woman’s colour:  

‘And after all, is she any worse for being a native? Anyway, I don’t know and I don’t think you do; and then you say ‘If it had been one of the male sex’. Why ‘it’, darlint? I thought you were beginning to think just a little more of us women than you used to.’ 

On this commemorative occasion today we also remember

Percy Thompson and his family.

Freddy Bywaters and his family.

Avis Graydon whose entire life after 1923 became a mournful footnote. When 50 years after the tragedy she was asked why she never married she replied ‘How could I? how could I tell a man, especially a man I loved, what had happened to my sister?’

I then read the first letter in the Order of Service, the one written by her mother on 9 January 1923:

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

The other readers were Jean Sykes, Sean O’Connor, Nicki Toay, and John Clarke.

Sean O’Connor had been my tutorial student at UCL many years earlier, at just the time when my book on Edith Thompson first appeared. Since leaving UCL he has enjoyed a brilliant career in film and television as writer, producer (among others of Footballers’ Wives), editor of BBC Radio 4’s The Archers, and author of books, on Terence Rattigan and modern drama, and on crime. His book Handsome Brute, on Neville Heath, won impressive plaudits and at the time of Edith Thompson’s funeral he was doing final revisions of his forthcoming book, The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury (2019). Although the trial of Alma Rattenbury happened over twelve years after Edith Thompson, the two cases are intimately linked: not just because it was another crime triggered by an affair between an older woman and a much younger man, but because Alma Rattenbury was almost certainly acquitted because of the profound unease in the same court room about the sentence passed on Edith Thompson. In Sean O’Connor’s riveting book an entire chapter is given over to Edith Thompson. It was Sean who alerted the media to her upcoming funeral. He too is passionate about the innocence of the young woman from Ilford.

Avis Graydon, Edith’s sister, also spoke at the funeral. The extracts of the rather crackly recording that were played came from the 1973 interview with Audrey Russell, with the text printed on the order of service. We had had some doubts about playing it but in the end thought it was right that her voice should be heard at her beloved sister’s funeral.

The funeral service passed off with solemn dignity. The hymn ‘Jerusalem’ rang out when the Funeral Directors collected the coffin and ceremoniously returned it to the hearse. We were again lined up behind it and then followed it on its final journey to the graveside.

We reached there in ten minutes and rallied round the open grave.

Brian Creak spoke two prayers of committal and finished with the Lord’s Prayer before the coffin was lowered into the earth.

Dawn had picked up a bowl with earth from the grave. We all threw small handfuls of it on Edith Thompson’s coffin.

I then talked to various people including my friend Vesna Andonovic, who had travelled all the way from Luxembourg to be with us. She is a leader writer and editor of the main newspaper in Luxembourg and had written a brilliant piece about Edith Thompson and the wider implications of the case for the history of women. Vesna’s coverage was incisive, succinct, and contextualised. I was touched by the fact that she had gone to so much trouble out of compassion for a young English woman who died in 1923.(https://www.wort.lu/de/kultur/der-fall-edith-thompson-schuldig-weil-sie-eine-frau-war-5bf41a6c182b657ad3b9a003)

Others who had come to pay their last respects to Edith Thompson included Professor Sir Stanley Wells, the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholar. He had travelled from Stratford-upon-Avon that morning with another distinguished Shakespeare scholar and colleague, my good friend the Reverend Dr Paul Edmondson. Paul had kindly offered to take Edith’s funeral service if Father Creak could not serve; this in spite of the fact that he was already heavily committed that day. Chris Forse had grown up in Shakespeare Crescent and enjoyed a successful career in the Far East. Some years earlier he and I had corresponded about Edith Thompson and Manor Park. He too had travelled from his home in the Midlands to be present. Also present was a former local journalist whose parents had been neighbours and friends of Avis Graydon’s in later life, after she had moved from Manor Park to Gants Hill in llford. Professor Jane Miller had long been interested in the case of Edith Thompson, drawn to the young woman’s natural and vivacious intelligence. She too had come to pay her last respects to the girl from Manor Park.

Somebody else who joined us was Peter Bywaters, the son of Freddy Bywaters’s cousin. I had first met Peter, a British Telecom engineer, and his daughter Fiona at a lecture I had given in Brookwood, at the invitation of John Clarke. At the time Fiona was a child. I remember the occasion well. Halfway through my talk I looked up and spotted her. My immediate thought was that she should not be in the audience of such an adult topic as a lecture on Edith Thompson and capital punishment. Then I saw her father and knew at once that they were Freddy Bywaters’s family. Her father Peter bore a striking resemblance to Freddy, with Fiona too sharing the handsome looks of the family. At the end of my talk Fiona and her father came up to me. She had been drawing a family tree as a school project and thus discovered her kinship with Freddy Bywaters. Fiona was wholly unfazed by this. To her it was history as indeed it was.

Some twenty years earlier I had interviewed Fiona’s grandfather, Peter Bywaters senior, in his home in Wimbledon. He and his wife had been charming and welcoming. Peter was Freddy’s first cousin. He had been a professional soldier and knew nothing about his cousin’s fate as he grew up. Then one day, in a camp in the Far East after the fall of Singapore, he was asked by a fellow prisoner whether he was Bywaters as in ‘Thompson and Bywaters’. On returning home after victory he enquired of his family about it. The response was swift and clear: ‘Now shut up about it, we don’t talk about that.’

Peter, like his son and granddaughter, was genial and kind to me, the stranger trespassing on his painful family history. To see the younger Peter and his daughter Fiona, so relaxed, so at peace with a tragic history, with Fiona clearly a star in the making, gave solace on that rainy night in Brookwood. Fiona went on to become a human rights lawyer, passing through Strasbourg and the European Community, before returning home to join local government. She read a poem at the 90^th anniversary commemoration of Edith Thompson’s death at UCL on 9 January 2013. We are friends and her father attended Edith’s funeral on the family’s behalf. As I write these words Fiona and her family are thriving.

I waited at the graveside until almost everyone had left for tea. I then asked Mike and the other gravedigger to start covering the coffin. It sat at a depth of 6 feet, above her parents, who had died in 1938 (her mother Ethel) and in 1941 (her father William). As the first clods of earth hit Edith’s coffin, I thought of Avis Graydon who had come here to bury her mother first and then, three years later, her father. Her mother died on 7 January 1938. At least she was spared another 9 January wake. Ever since that terrible day in 1923 she had found some comfort from what the family had learnt about Edith’s last moments. In Avis’s own words,

My parents were told by a clergyman she was dead before reaching her final place. This of course can only be substantiated by the powers that be, and they would be afraid to speak the truth even if they are alive. Anyway I have always, and shall continue to, think this is the truth.

As Mrs Graydon was fading that Christmas of 1937 her comfort will have been that she would shortly be reunited with ‘Edie’. Her devout daughter Avis will have harboured the same hopes. Asked in 1973 whether seeing her sister in her coffin at Holloway was the first time that she ‘could actually believe that Edith was dead’, she replied: 

Yes, and sometimes I can’t believe it now. Do you know, sometimes I think I’ll go to that door, and she’ll be coming in. I do! I know it’s fantasy, but I do sometimes think that … I often think to myself one of these Sundays she’ll be at the door.

If only Avis Graydon had been informed by the Home Office in 1971, that she could have brought her sister here then. To the end Avis believed that she would walk once more with her tragic sister. Words written by Ludovic Kennedy about another judicial killing came to mind: ‘Then he pulled the lever, and Timothy John Evans, twenty-five years old and innocent of any crime save that of having a ten-and-a-half-year-old brain, went to join his wife and child in Paradise’. So too perhaps the sisters from Manor Park, Avis Graydon and Edith Thompson.

Avis Graydon was received into the Catholic church by Canon Palmer at SS Peter & Paul RC Church, Ilford, on 3 October 1924. Two years earlier to the day, Avis’s life, her beloved sister’s, Percy’s, Freddy’s, and all their families’ had forever unravelled in Belgrave Road in Ilford. Avis’s choosing 3 October for joining the Catholic Church suggests that she was hoping that in her end too there might be a new beginning. The fact that it was Patrick Palmer who received her connected her intimately to Edith: her sister would walk in Avis’s heart every waking hour into the future for 52 years, the time that stretched ahead of her from October 1924 until her own passing in August 1977.

She chose to be buried in Saint Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery, Leytonstone. Canon Palmer rests here too. So does Timothy Evans, who was moved here from Pentonville in 1965 and granted a royal pardon in 1966. The parents and grandparents of the film director Alfred Hitchcock – he and Avis Graydon knew each other  – are interred here also.

A journalist from the Independent had attended the funeral service and now came up to me. He was Adam Lusher. He had asked earlier whether we could talk and we agreed that we would do so after the coffin was covered.

The tea room at the City of London Cemetery was packed. Somehow we found a table and talked for about 30 minutes. He took notes. He struck me as a tough-minded professional and I appreciated his willingness to listen. He was bemused by the 1922 trial judge’s inflated language of moral opprobrium, and particularly Mr Justice Shearman’s use of phrases like ‘wholesome disgust’, to describe passages in Edith Thompson’s letters: ‘great love … nonsense: Great and wholesome disgust. You will bear in mind that illicit love may lead to crime, but you must not of course let your disgust carry you too far’. Adam Lusher’s piece is excellent and represented my quotes accurately.¹Laid to rest at last: Edith Thompson, victim of a ‘barbarous, misogynistic’ death penalty As she is finally reburied in the same grave as her parents, those attending the reinterment ceremony say the 29-year-old was guilty of nothing more than a scandalous love affair and being a woman with ‘ideas above her station’ History will almost certainly record that when they sent Edith Thompson to the gallows, the case against her was wretchedly weak. So weak that it could be said her only ‘crimes’ were to fall in love with a man who wasn’t her husband, to express that love in literary flights of fantasy, and, perhaps, to be a woman with ‘ideas above her station’. It is also possible she was pregnant, which would have made her execution, on 9 January 1923, illegal. They hanged her anyway. In the eyes of the law, and contemporary popular opinion, Edith Thompson was a murderer, a woman who had incited her much younger lover, Freddy Bywaters, to plunge a knife into her cuckolded husband Percy as he walked home from an evening at the theatre on 3 October 1922. Her mother Ethel Graydon wrote directly to King George V begging for mercy but Edith, 29, was hanged in Holloway Prison less than a month after a jury found her guilty. Then Mrs Graydon begged to be allowed to visit her daughter’s grave, or at the very least to be told where in the grounds of Holloway Prison it was – to similarly little avail. It is said that when Ethel passed away in January 1938, her dying wish was for Edith to be reburied with her in the family grave. On Thursday that mother’s last wish was granted as the government gave the executed Edith Thompson perhaps the only scrap of justice left available to her. After the Ministry of Justice allowed an exhumation, Edith’s mortal remains were laid to rest in the grave of her mother and father in the City of London Cemetery– 95 years after William Graydon kissed his daughter on the eve of her execution and promised: “You will be home at last tomorrow night”. Outside the cemetery church, on a cold, grey afternoon, one of a handful of bouquets came with a handwritten card: “In loving memory, home at last with mum and dad”. Among the 50 or so arriving to pay their last respects, there was unanimity about the injustice. “She was innocent,” said Sue Syms, whose husband Graham is a great- nephew of Edith’s brother. “It was a trial of women’s morality. “She was executed for having a relationship outside marriage, for letters to her lover that were seen as highly immoral and disgracefully against everything people believed in at the time.” And yet, they tell you, even in the 1950s, three decades after the execution, there was a lingering sense of awkwardness, perhaps even shame, that ensured children were ushered out of the living room before the grown-ups of the family dared discuss the fate of Edith. She had, it seemed been reluctant to marry shipping clerk Percy Thompson in 1916, after a seven-year courtship that had begun when she was 15. When she told her sister Avis “I can’t go through with it,” her father had insisted: “You must go; everybody is at the church waiting for you.” She was 27 when she began a relationship with 18-year-old Freddy Bywaters. To compound what would later be seen as the scandal of the nine-year age gap, Edith wrote Freddy page after page of love letters. Written in a style inspired by her love of literature and literary romance, they went way beyond what was considered “proper” for a suburban wife of the 1920s. She claimed to Bywaters that she had carried out her own abortion after becoming pregnant by him. She told him of her lack of periods, and of the orgasm she had experienced when they had open-air sex in Wanstead Park. And, concealed within at least 51,000 words of other outpourings, were what the prosecution portrayed as coded requests for Bywaters to kill her 32-year- old husband. In one letter she mentioned meeting a woman who had lost three husbands. “I can’t even lose one,” she told her young lover. She also claimed to Bywaters that she had tried “poisoning” her husband and putting the glass from a smashed light bulb into his mashed potato. On 3 October 1922, as Mr and Mrs Thompson walked home from Ilford station in east London, Bywaters jumped out from behind some bushes and stabbed Percy to death, as Edith screamed, seemingly hysterically, “no, don’t!” The public lapped up the reports of the subsequent Old Bailey trial. Freddy Bywaters at Ilford police station after his arrest (Getty) After the guilty verdict was delivered on December 11, a petition calling for mercy attracted nearly one million signatures. But they weren’t seeking a reprieve for her. They were after mercy for him – Bywaters, the man who never denied killing Mr Thompson. Throughout, Bywaters maintained that he had acted entirely alone. Graham and Sue Syms and their side of the family are convinced this made the public warm to the killer as a gentleman who was “chivalrously protecting his lover”. The man who delivered the eulogy at Thursday’s service, Professor René Weis, author of Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, wholeheartedly agrees. “It goes without saying,” he tells you, “That what happened was misogynistic.” Despite having left school at 16, Edith had a natural flair for literature, and the kind of ability that allowed her to shoulder the responsibility that came with her job as a buyer for a fashionable hat maker. At the time of the murder, by contrast, Bywaters was a 20-year-old steward on a P&O liner. “She was self-evidently more intelligent than him,” says Prof Weis, “Self- evidently more successful, so they thought, wrongly: this woman must be the driving force in the murder. “Here was this lower middle class girl from east London,” the professor adds. “Extremely talented, earning a great deal of money – she was smart, she was elegant, a fantastic dancer. “For her to behave in ways that would have been fine with the ruling classes, to have everything … in the view of the court and in the view of other people, she got ‘above her station’. “The mood was very hostile to her in a lot of places.” One such place, according to Prof Weis, was in the Old Bailey courtroom, in the form of 65-year-old trial judge Sir Montague Shearman. “They called him ‘old school’ in the 1920s,” says Prof Weis. “Essentially, he was a Victorian. One of his favourite phrases was ‘wholesome disgust’. “The notes he made at the trial have survived. He was against her. When the court heard how Edith had written about ‘great love’, he scribbled ‘Great love? No, unwholesome nonsense.’ “Edith wrote to Freddie Bywaters about her husband, saying ‘He has the right by law to everything you have the right to by nature’ – meaning her – and the judge wrote: ‘Nature … Law … Wholesome disgust.’” In addition, says Weis, “the judge didn’t know the topography of Ilford. He was convinced Edith had lured her husband down some dark alley, which was absurd. They walked down Belgrave Road, which was the widest road in the entire area, and the only way they could have got home from the station.” And, says Prof Weis, when two eminent doctors conducted an autopsy on the murdered husband, to see whether Edith really had attempted to poison him or put ground-up light bulb glass in his mashed potato, “The findings were categorical: no poison, no light bulb. “What the Crown thought to be their trump card turned out to be nothing. Edith’s writings about what she had tried to do to her husband were exposed as the florid fantasies they were.” And yet she was still convicted and sentenced to death. Unlike most of the congregation on Thursday, Prof Weis is not even a distant relative of Edith Thompson. He first became interested in her case in the early 1980s when, to his great surprise, members of the Thatcher government made it known they were seriously considering restoring the death penalty. He began reading up about Timothy Evans, wrongly hanged in 1950 for murders committed by Rillington Place serial killer John Christie, and about Edith Thompson, the other person who kept on being mentioned in the debates about the death penalty. Prof Weis, whose day job involved researching the works of Shakespeare atUniversity College London, began reading Edith’s surviving letters. He realised she was “a wonderful writer”. As he said in his eulogy, he believes that had Edith been born 50 years later, she would have gone to university. Instead, she went to the gallows. Only after she was dead, did public opinion turn in her favour, and only because of the gruesome details of her execution. January 9 1923: Crowds gather outside Holloway Prison ahead of Edith’s execution (Getty) “The day she was executed,” explains Prof Weis, “Two men who had been present went to the Daily Express and described ‘scenes of horror that beggared belief’. They said her insides fell out, she haemorrhaged on the scaffold. “Beverley Baxter of the Express took this story to the Home Secretary and said ‘Never again must a woman be hanged in Britain’.” Some have taken this, plus the fact that Edith gained a stone in weight despite eating hardly anything while awaiting execution between 11 December and 9 January, as evidence she was killed while pregnant with Bywaters’ child. Having sought medical opinion, Prof Weis remains uncertain about where the truth lies on this. But he is certain that the indignities inflicted on Edith did not end with her grisly execution. In 1971, at the start of the rebuild of Holloway, it became necessary to move the bodies in the condemned prisoners’ graveyard. The body of Edith and four other executed prisoners were removed and taken to what Prof Weis calls “a mass grave” in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey. Edith Thompson with her husband Percy (Getty) Advised that it was unlikely any immediate family members were still alive, the prison authorities did not seek to notify Edith’s relatives. “Morally, albeit not legally, they should have done,” says Prof Weis. “But they didn’t bother, and Edith’s younger sister Avis Graydon spent the last seven years of her life not knowing she could have visited the grave in Brookwood Cemetery. “She would have given her eye teeth to have known. She adored her sister.” Edith’s death did prompt the first moves to set up what became the National Council for the Abolition of the Death Penalty. The group eventually achieved its aim in the 1960s – after more than four decades, and the deaths of Timothy Evans, Derek Bentley and Ruth Ellis, to mention the more high profile cases. Prof Weis’ campaign has also taken decades. He published his book about Edith in 1988. On Tuesday morning, shortly before dawn, he watched as her mortal remains were finally lifted out of the mass grave in Brookwood Cemetery. “When they brought up the body,” he says, “We thought …” The professor’s eyes seem to water and his voice trails off. He resumes, after a long pause: “When the ambulance carrying her body moved off, it was almost too much to bear. “She was no longer in the place where the Home Office wanted her to be. She was on the way to where she and her family wanted her to be.” For him, and for the others who saw Edith Thompson finally laid to rest, there can be no doubt about the moral of her story. “Edith Thompson,” says Prof Weis, “Is one of a number of people whose stories prove that to return the death penalty to this country would be an act of barbarism.” It can be found at

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/edith-thompson-death-penalty-capital-punishment-hanging-miscarriage-justice-buried-mother-murder-a8647636.html

News of Edith Thompson’s funeral was featured in, among others, The Mail Online, The Sun, and the Sunday Times, at

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6357679/Remains-Edith-Thompson-buried-family-plot-mother.html

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7666774/should-edith-thompson-have-hanged/

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tragic-affair-of-the-milliner-and-the-murderer-tgrw93ffc

POSTSCRIPT

Since 22 November 2018 Edith Thompson has been back in Manor Park where, forever now, she will rest alongside her mother and father. At the suggestion, again, of John Clarke I chose as our stonemasons Haven Memorials from Fleet in Hampshire. Their proposed design for the grave was attractive and their paperwork was detailed and impeccable. They would also affix a plaque to the granite stone in Brookwood with the text ‘Edith rested here from 1971 to 2018’.

On Christmas Day 2018 I thought of Edith Thompson in the City of London Cemetery. It was her birthday and she was with her parents. On 9 January 2019, after the annual service at St Barnabas at 8.30 am, a few of us, including Nicki Toay and my friend Ken Green, a stalwart over many years of the annual act of commemoration, made our way to her new grave. It was sad, of course, but it also felt more peaceful than at any previous time.

It took several months for the grave in the City of London to settle. Then, on Wednesday  26 June 2019, it was ready. When my wife and I arrived in the cemetery at the appointed time of 12 noon, the Haven Memorials lorry was parked up from Square 197. Two of their men were at that moment getting the integrated Graydon gravestone ready to receive the new marble. We met up with them at the graveside. The monument was unrecognizable. Previously it had been grimy from pollution, coated in a sooty crust. Now it was as white as the Elgin Marbles. For the first time we realised that the Graydon grave was in fact marble and that it would provide an exquisite frame for the marble we had ordered. We returned to the truck with the men. They unveiled the stone for us. We instantly loved it, for the beauty of the marble and the exquisite way in which the stonemasons had carved into it in 23.4 karat gold