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Date of Birth |
Thompson: 26th December
1893
Bywaters: UNKNOWN |
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Date of Death |
Thompson: 9th January
1923
Bywaters: 9th January 1923 |
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Known Also As |
UNKNOWN |
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Hit Count |
1 |
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Information & Pictures |
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It was after midnight on
4th October 1922. Along the Belgrave Road, which links Ilford Station
with the neat suburban houses of Ilford proper, two sets of footsteps
echoed in the icy night. A couple were walking quickly towards their
home in Kensington Gardens. They had just got off the 11.30pm train
from Liverpool Street station, having spent an enjoyable evening at
the Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly, in the heart of the West End.
As they approached Endsleigh Gardens, a figure loomed out from the
shadows, and fell upon the couple. He pushed the woman out of the way
so hard that she fell and banged her head hard enough to daze her for
a crucial minute or so. As she sat muzzily on the ground, her
assailant attacked her husband, shouting, 'Why don't you get a divorce
from your wife, you cad?'
The husband replied, 'I've got her, I'll keep her, and I'll shoot
you.'
It was hardly a fair fight. The attacker was young and muscular, his
victim more than ten years older. The attacker also had a 15 cm (six
inch) long, double edged sheath knife. He used it to slash his victim
round the face and neck, finally sinking it into his throat.
At last, the woman recovered herself, and ran to help her husband. Her
scream of 'Oh, don't! Oh don't!' was loud enough to wake John Webber
two streets away.
As the woman crouched over her husband, attempting to comfort him,
blood welled up and poured over her hands. She heard the sound of
pounding feet, and looked up to see the attacker running away up
Belgrave Road. |
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[
Percy Thompson ]
Aged thirty at the time of his murder in 1922, Percy Thompson was a
shipping clerk employed by OK Parker and Co in Eastcheap, in the City
of London. In the First World War, he joined the London Scottish
Regiment, and was invalided out because of a week heart. He married
twenty two year old Edith Graydon in 1915. Why the vibrant,
imaginative Edith married the moody, and occasionally violent, Percy
Thompson is a mystery. Perhaps Percy benefited from the fact that so
many of his contemporaries had been killed. Certainly he was reliable
and genuinely loved Edith. |
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She became hysterical.
Startled passers by called the police and roused a local doctor. By
then, it was too late. The man, Percy Thompson, lay dead on the
pavement. Astoundingly, when the doctor examined the victim, he missed
the knife wounds and diagnosed haemorrhage. The woman seized on this.
When the police came she told them that her husband had just been
walking beside her then fell, bleeding from the mouth.
She seemed quite distraught. Across her brain ran the image of the man
she had seen running away. She had recognized his trilby hat and
overcoat. Edith had just seen her lover, Freddy Bywaters, murder her
husband. |
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[
Edith, Percy & Freddy ]
Edith and Percy sit in the garden at their Ilford home with
nineteen year old Freddy Bywaters (left). This photo was taken in
1921, at the start of the love affair between Thompson and Bywaters. |
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After the police took
Percy's body away, a sergeant escorted Edith home. It was about 1am.
Her brother in law Richard Thompson then arrived, having heard about
his brother's death. She repeated her account of the event, but her
story that her husband had been taken ill in the street - suffering
one of his heart attacks - did not hold up for long. The post mortem
revealed that Thompson had died from stab wounds.
At 11am, Edith was taken to Ilford police station for further
questioning. By now, the investigation was being handled by Frederick
Porter Wensley of the CID who learnt from Richard Thompson the
existence of Freddy Bywaters.
The police soon found and arrested Freddy. A ship's steward on shore
leave, he had not tried to run away, hoping that he would be off on
his shop, the SS Morea, before being located. He was taken to Ilford
police station. When Edith caught sight of her lover at the station
the following day, she almost fainted, and was heard to say, 'Oh God,
oh God, what can I do? Why did he do it? I did not want him to do it.
I must tell the truth.' |
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[ The Knife ]
As Bywaters ran away down Belgrave Road after the attack, he thrust
the murder weapon down a grating in the gutter. Bywaters later told
the police where to find it and it was shown in court. |
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Edith confessed to the police that it
was Bywaters who had attacked her husband. She believed herself to be
merely a witness and was unaware that she would be charged with
conspiracy to murder.
The damning evidence came with the discovery of the letters she had
sent to Bywaters over the period of their affair. They had been found
in Freddy's mother's house in Upper Norwood, south London.
All the letters were addressed to 'darlint', an abbreviation for 'darlingest',
and were a mish-mash of cheap novelettish fantasy. More damning still,
the letters were accompanied by various newspaper clippings referring
to domestic murders. In the letters, Edith Thompson, calling herself 'Peidi'
(probably an endearment like 'Edie'), raised the idea of killing her
husband by the administration of poison (hyoscine, cyanide, gas) or
powered glass. |
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[ Edith Thompson ]
Edith Thompson was twenty nine when her husband was murdered by her
side. She had been married for some six years, and was employed as a
manageress and bookkeeper by a millinery firm in the City. |
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When the police told Freddy he and Edith
were to be charged with Thompson's murder, Bywaters admitted that he
alone was responsible.
The trial of Frederick (Freddy) Bywaters and Edith Thompson began on
6th December 1922, in Court No. 1 at the Old Bailey. It was popular
with the press and public alike, with seats being touted for £5 a
time. Mr Justice Shearman, a hostile judge with inflexible moral
principals, presided. There were eleven men and one woman on the jury.
The charges were murder and conspiracy to murder.
From the start, it was hopeless. The judge would not allow separate
trials. This meant that evidence given against one defendant could
also be used to prejudice the case of the other. More damning, he
ruled admissible evidence the piles of letters from Edith to Freddy.
These were read out again and again, with quotations taken out of
context and given the most sinister interpretation. Intended as love
letters - and brimming with fantasy - they were her downfall.
By the end of the five day trial, there was enormous prejudice against
Edith for her adulterous relationship with a younger man - a prejudice
inflamed by the moral rectitude of Mr Justice Shearman.
After the opening speech, there was a string of witnesses, none of
whom could connect Edith to the crime. |
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[ Freddy Bywaters ]
Freddy Bywaters is escorted by a police officer from Ilford train
station. He had been picked up the day after the murder; at first he
denied any involvement, but then admitted guilt when Edith was
indicted. |
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On the afternoon of the second day of
the trial, it was the turn of Freddy Bywaters to give evidence in the
witness box. Although he made a good first impression, being young and
handsome, with fair, wavy hair and a striking profile, his manner was
abrupt and unsympathetic. He claimed the murder occurred in self-defence,
contrary to all the evidence. In an effort to protect Edith, he became
trapped in a mire of lies, evasions and absurd contradictions.
Edith insisted on testifying, even though it opened her up to
dangerous cross questioning. She had to explain that the incriminating
passages were pure make-believe, written in order to retain her
lover's affections. But her strategy failed to make an impression.
In his summing up, the judge told the jury that 'these two by
arrangement between each other agreed to murder this man, Thompson,
and the murder was effected by the man Bywaters.'
When the jury went out on 11th December, they took only two hours to
come to their decision. The verdict returned was 'Guilty'. The jury
decreed that Edith Thompson should hang, as well as her lover. When
she heard the verdict she screamed, 'I am not guilty. Oh God, I am not
guilty!'
On 9th January 1923, the two were hanged at the same time, 9am, but at
different places in north London. At Pentonville, Freddy Bywaters went
to his death 'like a gentleman', as he said he would. Nearby, at
Holloway prison, Edith Thompson - her hair turned grey - had to be
carried to the scaffold in a state of near collapse. |
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[
Edith Thompson ]
Following her trial from the dock, Edith Thompson's face mirrors
her extreme anxiety. Though Bywaters sat two seats away from her, she
hardly ever looked at him - her concern was now to save herself.
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Police files on the Thompson and
Bywaters case were not opened to the public until January 1986. They
revealed both pitiful and shameful evidence. There were all the
pleading letters written by the Graydon family to the Home Secretary,
and Freddy Bywaters' letters of comfort to Edith in Holloway, which
she never received as they were intercepted.
The files also revealed just how many drugs Edith Thompson needed to
sedate her (morphia, strychnine, scopolamine), and the appalling fact
that she may well have been pregnant when she was hanged. She had put
on over a stone in weight during her time in prison, when she was
hardly eating anything, and suffered a massive haemorrhage when she
was hanged. The grisly rumour on the street that 'her insides fell
out' seems to have been founded by truth. Significantly, the biggest
section on the post mortem form, reserved for the internal examination
was left blank. |
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[ Edith Thompson - Why
did she hang? ]
Edith Thompson was found guilty of murder, conspiracy to murder,
soliciting to murder, inciting murder, attempted poisoning and
attempted administration of broken glass. There was little proven
foundation for these charges. Vanity, respectability and hypocrisy
killed Edith Thompson. All she had to do was deny everything apart
from her presence at the scene of the murder. It was and is up to the
prosecution to prove guilt. Vanity drove Edith to insist on
testifying, against her counsel's advice. Casting herself as heroine
in her own tragedy, she tried to explain the emotional truth of her
letters to a hostile courtroom. Respectability prevented her from
making clear that many of the herbs and 'poisons' mentioned were to
procure her two abortions. Hypocrisy was the final strand in the rope:
Edith Thompson stood in the courtroom as a self-confessed adulteress.
The prosecution successfully contended that id she could break one
commandment, she was automatically guilty of breaking another. The day
of her hanging in 1923, drew huge crowds outside Holloway Prison
(above). |
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Edith Thompson's hanging haunted the
people who carried it out. John Ellis, her hangman, did not like
hanging a woman and said so. The prison chaplain, Glanvill Murray, had
to fight back the urge to bodily rescue her, and spent in his
retirement campaigning for abolition. The governor of Holloway, Dr J H
Morton, is alleged to have paid a secret visit to the Daily Mail,
urging them to start an anti-hanging campaign. |
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[ Edith and Percy
Thompson ]
Edith and Percy Thompson photographed during their fateful holiday
on the Isle of Wight in mid 1921, when Edith and Bywaters recognised
their attraction for each other. |
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Edith Thompson's body was buried in
Holloway Prison cemetery where it remained until 31st March 1971, when
it was transferred to un-consecrated ground near Woking in Surrey; no
one bothered to notify her sister, Miss Avis Graydon, when the body
was moved after the abolition of the death sentence. Freddy Bywaters'
body remains buried at Pentonville. |
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