Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters

Edith Jessie Thompson (25 December 1893 – 9 January 1923) and Frederick Edward Francis Bywaters (27 June 1902 – 9 January 1923) were a British couple executed for the murder of Thompson's husband Percy. Their case became a cause célèbre.

Early life

Edith Thompson was born Edith Jessie Graydon on 25 December 1893, at 97 Norfolk Road (now Cecilia Road) in Dalston, London, the first of the five children of William Eustace Graydon (1867–1941), a clerk with the Imperial Tobacco Company, and his wife Ethel Jessie Graydon (née Liles) (1872–1938), the daughter of a police constable. During her childhood, Edith was a happy, talented girl who excelled at dancing and acting, and was academically bright, with a natural ability in arithmetic. After leaving school in 1909 she joined a firm of clothing manufacturers, Louis London, near Aldgate station in London. Then, in 1911, she was employed at Carlton & Prior, wholesale milliners, in the Barbican and later in Aldersgate. Edith quickly established a reputation as a stylish and intelligent woman and was promoted by the company several times, until she became their chief buyer and made regular trips to Paris on behalf of the company.

In 1909, at the age of 15, Edith met Percy Thompson who was three years her senior. After a six-year engagement, they were married at St Barnabas, Manor Park on 15 January 1916. At first, the couple lived in Retreat Road in Westcliff-on-Sea, before buying a house at 41 Kensington Gardens in the then-fashionable London suburb of Ilford in July 1920. With both their careers flourishing, they lived a comfortable life.

Acquaintance with Bywaters

140px|thumb|left|Edith Thompson,

In 1920, the couple became acquainted with 18-year-old Frederick Bywaters, although Bywaters and Edith Thompson had met nine years earlier when Bywaters, then aged nine, had been a schoolfriend of Edith's younger brothers. a man jumped out from behind some bushes near their home and attacked Percy. After a violent struggle, during which Edith Thompson was knocked to the ground, Percy was stabbed. Mortally wounded, he died before Edith could summon help. The attacker fled. Neighbours later reported hearing a woman (here assumed to have been Edith) screaming hysterically and shouting "Oh don’t, oh don’t" several times. By the time police arrived Edith had not composed herself. At the police station the following day she was distressed. She was unaware that Bywaters was already a suspect: he was arrested that evening and taken to Ilford Police Station. The police confronted her with Bywaters. One of the inspectors, Frank Hall, untruthfully told her that Bywaters had already confessed. She then admitted to the police that she knew who the assailant was and provided the police with details of her association with Bywaters. The prosecution for the Crown was led by the Solicitor-General Sir Thomas Inskip, assisted by Travers Humphreys. Bywaters had cooperated completely. He had led police to the murder weapon he concealed after the murder, and consistently maintained that he had acted without Edith's knowledge.

Edith Thompson's love letters were produced as evidence of incitement to murder. The extant letters date from November 1921 to the end of September 1922. They run to over 55,000 words and afford a day-to-day account of her life in London when her lover Bywaters was at sea. In a few passages of these letters, she writes about her longing to be free of her husband, Percy. She refers to grinding glass light bulbs to shards and feeding them to Percy mixed into mashed potato, and on another occasion feeding him poison. She wrote of a woman who had lost three husbands and remarked, “I can’t even lose one.” Thompson described how she had carried out her own abortion after becoming pregnant by Bywaters.

Edith Thompson's counsel urged her not to testify, stressing that the burden of proof lay with the prosecution and that there was nothing they could prove other than that she had been present at the murder, but she rejected his advice. She was determined to give evidence, imagining that she could save Bywaters. As Curtis-Bennett later observed, she had no conception of the danger she was in. She made a poor impression on the judge and the jury, particularly when she repeatedly contradicted herself. She had claimed that she had never attempted to poison her husband and references in her letters to attempting to kill him were merely attempts to impress her paramour. In answer to several questions relating to the meaning of some of the passages in her letters, she simply said "I have no idea."

right|130px|thumb|(Left to right) Frederick Bywaters, Percy Thompson, and Edith Thompson in July 1921

Bywaters stated that Edith Thompson had known nothing of his plans, nor could she have, as he had not intended to murder her husband. His aim had been to confront Percy, he claimed, and to force him to deal with the situation. When Percy threatened to shoot him and reacted in a superior manner, Bywaters lost his temper. Edith Thompson, he repeatedly claimed, had made no suggestion to him to kill Percy, nor did she know that Bywaters intended to confront him. In discussing the letters, Bywaters stated that he had never believed Edith had attempted to harm her husband, but that he did believe she had a vivid imagination, which was fuelled by the novels she enjoyed reading. He felt that in her letters she viewed herself in some way as one of the fictional characters she had read about.

With the exception of Ruth Ellis, the remains of the women executed at Holloway (Edith Thompson, Styllou Christofi, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters) were reburied in a single grave at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

The new grave (in plot 117) remained unmarked for over 20 years. It was acquired in the 1980s by René Weis and Audrey Russell, who had interviewed Avis Graydon (Edith Thompson's surviving sister) at length in the 1970s. On 13 November 1993, a grey granite memorial was placed on plot 117, and dedicated to the memory of the four women buried there. The grave and plot were formally consecrated by the Reverend Barry Arscott of St. Barnabas, Manor Park, the church in which Edith Thompson was married in January 1916. The names of the other three women are inscribed around the edges of the tombstone. The precise location of Thompson's former grave within Brookwood Cemetery is .

The remains of Frederick Bywaters still lie in an unmarked grave within the walls of HMP Pentonville, where they were buried shortly after his execution in January 1923.

The remains of Percy Thompson are buried at the City of London Cemetery.

On 22 November 2018, Edith Thompson's remains were exhumed from Brookwood Cemetery, and two days later formally buried alongside her parents, in accordance with her mother's wishes, in the City of London Cemetery.

Critiques of the case and the trial

René Weis echoes a trend of recent and older suggestions that Edith Thompson was innocent of murder. In his letter to the Home Secretary in 1988, he notes that the Crown used a selection of her letters in Court to generate a climate of prejudice against her as an immoral adulteress who seduced a young man eight years her junior. One mistake that Edith appeared to make was in testifying that Bywaters had led her into the poison plots. Delusion was no defence to murder and this could not save her. Curtis-Bennett argued a more legally secure but evidentially weak defence based on Edith acting the part of poisoner, or engaging in a fantasy. The fact that the two Home Office pathologists, Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Dr John Webster, both concluded categorically in their independent post mortem reports that there were no traces of poison or glass in Percy Thompson's body should have been proof of the fantasy defence.

The defence did succeed in some points, showing that guesswork by the prosecution over ambiguous content of some of the letters was fanciful and wrong. An autopsy on Percy Thompson had failed to reveal any evidence that he had been fed ground glass or any type of detectable poison. That her letters did not necessarily reflect her deeds in respect of the so-termed poison plots was fairly clear. Even though perceived in her favour by Lewis Broad, Filson Young, Edgar Lustgarten, René Weis, Laura Thompson and other students of the case, the Court of Appeal held the poison-plots against her and against him: "If the question is, as I think it was, whether these letters were evidence of a protracted, continuous incitement to Bywaters to commit the crime which he did in the end commit, it really is of comparatively little importance whether the appellant was truly reporting something which she had done, or falsely reporting something which she merely pretended to do." said the Court of Appeal to Bywaters.

James Douglas, the chief reporter for the Express papers covering the trial in 1922/23, also took issue with the verdict, writing "I think the hanging of Mrs Thompson is a miscarriage of mercy and justice ... I believe she was an adulteress. But we do not hang a woman for adultery. The Mosaic Law stoned the adulteress to death. Our law punishes adultery by divorce, not by death. Therefore, in judging Mrs Thompson we must not mix up the crime of murder with the sin of adultery ... Let us condemn her as being guilty of all she charges herself with in her letters. Having done so, let us see what she is not guilty of.

1. It was not her hand that struck down her husband.

2. Her husband did not die by poison or powdered glass administered by her hand.

3. There is no evidence that she put poison or glass in his food.

4. There is no evidence that at any time in any way she ever made any attempt on the life of her husband.

5. There is no evidence that she was guilty or premeditated connivance, collusion, or complicity in the actual crime.

6. There is no evidence that she was an accessory before the fact, apart from the incitements in her own letters.

7. There is no evidence that she actually aided and abetted the striking of the fatal blows.

8. There is no evidence of wilful murder against her. Therefore, in her case murder is not murder, but merely a legal extension of the legal definition of murder. It is a moral, not a physical, crime. It is a sin of the soul, and not a consummation of sin in the act of slaying.

I might amplify this catalogue of the innocence or non-guiltiness of Mrs Thompson, but my eight points suffice to drive home my argument that her guilt stopped short of wilful murder if only by a hair's breadth was a broad abyss separating the will from the deed.

One last word. If Mrs Thompson had not been walking with her husband when he was murdered, would the jury have found her guilty of wilful murder? Why should she be hanged by reason of what may have been the unforeseen accident of her presence?"

In Verdict in Dispute (1949), Edgar Lustgarten states that "The Thompson verdict is now recognized as bad, and the trial from which it sprang stands out as an example of the evils that may flow from an attitude of mind." He continues with "There was no failure of law; there was no failure of procedure; there was no failure to observe and abide by all the rules. It was from first to last a failure in human understanding; a failure to grasp and comprehend a personality not envisaged in the standard legal textbooks and driven by forces far more powerful and eternal than those that are studied in the Inns of Court." From this it may be reasonably surmised that his essay is something of an apology for Edith, whose culpability he diminishes on the basis that "she was a woman of quality whose talents were frustrated". He adds: "She was a remarkable and complex personality, endowed with signal attributes of body and of mind. She had intelligence, vitality, a natural grace and poise, sensitiveness, humour and illumining all these that quintessential femininity that fascinates the male." He writes: "[In the absence of her letters] all that could be said against her was that she had lied in a futile attempt to protect and cover Bywaters. That might make her an accessory after the fact. It could not bring her into danger of the rope." Although Lustgarten does not allege any defect in legal procedure, he says that the Court was unable to understand questions of "sex and psychology" and the consequent possibility of fantasy.

A critique of the conduct of her trial and the state of the law was made by Lewis Broad. He argued that it was the misfortune of Edith Thompson that she was unable to separate herself from the prejudice due to her immorality whereas, if it had been a former crime, she was entitled not to have it mentioned. He also attacked the judge for using morally prejudiced language to incite the prejudice of the jury. He concedes that it was within the rules for the jury to decide what the words in Edith's letters meant and what was intended by them. Broad went on to attack the general conduct of the trial:

1. She should have been granted a separate trial in that she was handicapped by having to appear alongside Bywaters.

2. The judge allowed the jury to be inflamed by prejudice on account of her immorality.

3. Suspicion based on prejudice was allowed to take the place of proof of meaning, motive and intention in respect of her letters.

Broad also levels criticism against the prosecution for the unfair use of her letters at trial, covering such matters as:

a) 1,500 word extract used at trial from 25,000 words in total, which in turn were less than half of her total of 51,000 or so words. Many of the letters were censored by the court during the trial, because they dealt with subjects such as menstruation and orgasm, subjects that were not then considered fit for public discussion.

b) There was only one unambiguous reference to poison in the five months preceding the murder.

c) The meaning of uncertain phrases were allowed to be suggested by the Crown and were determined to prejudice the jury.

d) The context of the murder suggested no element of planning.

e) Despite their meandering and casual discussion of the subject matter, Percy's murder, there is nothing in the letters that amounted to agreement or one.

f) There was a break in the chain of causation after Bywaters had indicated he did not want to continue to see Edith, evidenced from her letters from 20 June to 12 September 1922.

g) That the letters were part of a fantasy between the parties was not put forth to the jury.

The "broken chain" theory of the case, favoured by Broad, arguing that there is no causal link between Edith's letters and the actual murder, because of the length of time separating them and the manner of the murder, is developed by the UCL professor of jurisprudence William Twining. In Rethinking Evidence: Exploratory Essays (2006), pp. 344–396, Twining argues that a Wigmorean, "decompositional" analysis of the charges brought against Edith Thompson demonstrates how unsatisfactory the verdict against her was in law. Twining writes that "For the prosecution to convict Edith, they had to prove that the attack was premeditated. Even if one totally discounts Freddy's evidence about the events of the evening (and his story of the period up to 11 p.m. was generally consistent and was largely corroborated by the Graydons), there is almost nothing to support the proposition that the attack was premeditated. There was no evidence to support the proposition that the knife was purchased recently in order to attack Percy; there was no evidence in support of the proposition that Bywaters put the knife in his pocket that morning because he planned to attack Percy – the best that the prosecution could do was point out that there was no corroboration for his claim that he was in the habit of carrying it." The "tea-room" passage (exhibit 60) – "Don’t forget what we talked in the Tea Room, I’ll still risk and try if you will – we only have 3½ years left darlingest. Try and help.” – was interpreted by the judge as referring to either poisoning Percy Thompson or to using a dagger.

Twining continues with "Even if we totally discount testimony of both accused that it referred to eloping (the ‘risks’ being financial and/or of social stigma), the context of the letter as a whole and the words ‘3½ years left’ both tend to support the judgement that an innocent explanation is a good deal more likely than the prosecution's interpretation. At the, very least, such factors seem to me to cast a reasonable doubt on that interpretation, yet this passage was the main item of evidence in support of the conspiracy theory."

A feminist review of the case occurs in Laura Thompson's 2018 book, Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders. Thompson (not a relative) claims that Edith Thompson was the victim of a highly prejudicial "gendered" trial, with the trial judge's and the Appeal Court judges' bias against the accused woman playing a key part in her conviction.

In March 2018 the BBC presented a thoughtful evaluation in an episode of the series Murder, Mystery and My Family in which barristers Sasha Wass and Jeremy Dein reviewed the case. Although they were unable to determine any new evidence, they agreed that there were serious issues to be addressed regarding the final summing up by the trial judge, Mr Justice Shearman. Despite acting as prosecution and defence, Wass and Dein presented a joint submission to Senior Crown Court Judge David Radford for consideration, arguing that there was no case to answer by Edith Thompson with regard to the charge that was brought against her. Judge Radford gave his opinion that the summing up in the case was deficient and had failed to offer correct direction to the jury. He considered that it had been unfair and unbalanced and that there were grounds for coming to a decision that the conviction of Edith Thompson was both unsafe and unsatisfactory. This was followed by a second BBC Two programme in 2019, with the same participants, to take account of the reburial of Edith Thompson in November 2018.

Application for a posthumous pardon for Edith Thompson

In January 2023 it was reported that an application for a posthumous pardon for Edith Thompson, using the royal prerogative of mercy, would be reconsidered by the Ministry of Justice; the application, made on behalf of Thompson's heir and executor, René Weis, had initially been rejected in 2022 by the then Justice Secretary Dominic Raab.

On 6 March 2023 BBC News reported that the Secretary of State for Justice, Dominic Raab, had referred René Weis’s application on behalf of Edith Thompson to the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), "as a potential miscarriage of justice". The BBC quotes Mr Raab’s letter to Prof Weis stating that this will

"allow a full investigation of your application to take place". The Times of 7 March 2023 heads its piece on the CCRC referral with "Pardon for hanged woman is step nearer after 100 years".

In popular culture

Fiction

1924 novel - Messalina of the Suburbs by E. M. Delafield
1934 novel - A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
2014 novel - The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. Partly inspired by the case.

Non-fiction

1952 – The Innocence of Edith Thompson: A Study in Old Bailey Justice, by Lewis Broad.
1988 – Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, by René Weis

Radio

1953 - The Black Museum: "The Sheath Knife". Dramatization of murder case, with names changed.

Theatre

1948 − London premiere of the 1930s play People Like Us by Frank Vosper.

Film

2001 - Another Life.

Television

1973 - Televised adaptation of A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
2019 – Murder, Mystery, and My Family

Video

2023 – Hanged for Adultery, the Tragic Fate of Edith Thompson by Chris Forse
2025 - Tales from the Hangman's Record: Hanged at Pentonville - Part Five 1920-1923 by Steve Fielding

References

Cited works and further reading

External links

The Case of Edith Jessie Thompson: A Miscarriage of Justice (edithjessiethompson.com)
The Trial of Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson by Filson Young, 1923 – an account of the trial alluded to more than 45 times in Finnegans Wake
Verdict in Dispute by Edgar Lustgarten, online copy at The Internet Archive