The Bywaters case

EDMUND PEARSON

• To the Judge, it was "a vulgar and common crime." and the charge against the prisoners the ordinary one of "a wife and an adulterer, murdering the husband.

No one in Court rose up to say: "My Lord, that is the theme of the 'Agamemnon of Æsehylus, and, in part, of the tragedy of'Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. "

It was well that no one did do that. Mr. Justice Shearman was annoyed by too many literary allusions. He warned the jury that they were not "listening to a play from the stalls of a theatre." And he heard so much talk about novels, especially Robert Hichens's "Bella Donna" and Robert W. Chambers's "The Common Law, that he was ready to pluck the hairs out of his own wig.

To the literary people, however, the trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters for the murder of Percy Thompson was neither vulgar nor common. Their interest in it was intense, and with one novelist it survived to inspire, only last year, one of the few adequate treatments, in fiction, of a notorious murder.

During the Great War, a London clerk named Percy Thompson married Miss Edith Graydon. Seven years later, in 1922, although nearly estranged, they were living in their house at Ilford. Thompson was now thirty-two, and his wife, twenty-eight. Every day they left their home in care of a housekeeper, and went to their long hours of work in London. The husband was in a shipping office, while Mrs. Thompson had risen from bookkeeper and saleswoman to be office-manager with some wholesale milliners. She had become her employers' foremost assistant, and earned more money than her husband.

Not a beautiful woman, not always even pretty, she is described by one who saw her, for days, as possessed of unusual attraction, character and grace, and "the secret of looking like a hundred different women," according to her surroundings. No two pictures of her look alike. Men found her charming, and her old friends, together with strangers whom she met in the course of business, gave her many invitations to luncheon and tea. far from being promiscuous in love affairs, however, she does not seem to have been even flirtatious.

Her husband, like thousands of other men, rather vain and rather stupid, was much less imaginative than his wife. His interests seem to have been fewer. And. for one reason or another, he is said to have "beaten her up" a little—especially when he became aware that he had a dangerous rival.

Frederick Bywaters was about nineteen, eight years younger than Edith Thompson, when he became her lover, lb* had been a friend of her family, but the intimacy with her began when he accompanied the Thompsons during summer holidays in the Isle of Wight. Following this, he lived in their Ilford house, for a few weeks, as a lodger. This was terminated when a quarrel between the husband and wife was followed by another quarrel between the two men.

Bywaters was a clerk, later the laundry steward, on the P. and 0. ship Morea. His duties took him to Eastern ports on cruises of a month or two at a time. He was a self possessed youth of good reputation, but he was not an unsophisticated boy, led astray by an artful woman, as the British public imagined him. Bywaters had "been about a bit."

Except for furtive meetings in tea-shops and restaurants, Bywaters and Mrs. Thompson had few opportunities to see each other. With By waters away so much they had to expend their passion upon paper, and innumerable letters were dispatched from London to Marseilles, Port Said, Aden, Bombay and Colombo, where the Morea called.

As with Madeleine Smith and her lover in Scotland, and with Grace Brown and Chester Gillette in America, it was the woman who wrote long, passionate, pleading letters—all to come into publicity horrible enough both to writer and recipient.

Bywaters also wrote to Edith Thompson, but while he kept her letters, she destroyed practically all of his. She was often in despair:

"I'll be feeling awfully miserable tonight; I know you will be, too, because you've only been gone one week out of 8, and even after seven more have gone—I can't look forward, can you? Will you ever be able to teach me to swim and play tennis and everything else we thought of, on the sands of Cornwall? . . . When I lay awake at night and think, the small ray of hope seems so frail, so futile, that I can hardly make myself keep it alive."

Thompson refused to give his wife a divorce; neither she nor Bywaters could afford the expense of a suit for divorce. The other way out, to elope and live openly together, was forbidden to them, not only because it would have pained her mother and sisters, but because it meant the instant loss of her position, and the salary which was so essential. Bywaters, like Thompson, earned less than Mrs. Thompson did. the question of meagre sums of money, as in so many great crimes, hampered and determined their lives. They chose to abide in seeming respectability; to keep clear of the appearance of sin; and they found themselves deep in crime.

Mrs. Thompson was troubled by dreams —prophetic dreams:

"One night I dreamed that you had married Avis | her sister] because she found out how much there was between us & threatened to tell everybody unless you married her. Another night I dreamed I had been to a theatre with a man I knew I had told you about him & you came home from sea unexpectedly & when you found me you threw me over a very deep precipice & I was killed. . .

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The amazing feature of Mrs. Thompson's letters lay in her many references to death. As with Dr. Isaac Watts, her thoughts on "awful subjects rolled; damnation and the dead."

Her correspondence with Bywaters had begun with their intrigue, in the summer of 1921. and lasted until the tragedy, a little more than a year later. Early in the course of this letter-writing she is referring to the luck some people have: she had just met a woman who had lost three husbands in eleven years. And yet, she added, "some people I know can't lose one! '

Then she began to make mysterious remarks about her husband's food: "I had the wrong Porridge today, but don't suppose it will matter." She tells By waters: "You must do something this time . . . opportunities come and go." And later, it seemed that Mr. i Thompson was complaining that his tea tasted bitter. Then the lady wrote: "I'm going to try the glass again occasionally—when it is safe. I've got an electric light globe this time." However, she reported disappointment: "I used the light bulb three times, but lie found a piece, so I have given it up —until you can come home."

Either in newspaper clippings which she sent him, or in her letters, there followed references to opium; to some "stuff" which was to he rolled in pills "like Beecham's"; to digitalin (a hint from Mr. Hichens's Bella Donna) ; to cocaine and morphia; to bichloride of mercury; to ptomaine poisoning from tinned salmon.

The correspondence went on, voluminous, chatty, sometimes pleasant and humourous, sometimes pitiful, but full of allusions to her attempts to avoid her husband's attentions, and, indeed, to escape from his society as much as possible. She spoke of risks she and By waters were running for each other, and of some compact they had. They were to wait five years— for something never defined. And many readers of the letters think they found in them efforts to persuade the young man to a desperate act for her sake.

In the autumn of 1922, Bywaters' ship had been in port a day or two, and he had met Mrs. Thompson for tea at a restaurant. They parted, and she joined her husband for dinner and the cinema. At midnight they were slowly pacing the dim and deserted street which led from the Ilford station to their house. Mr. Filson Young, in his dramatic account, writes:

"Other footsteps were hurrying after theirs; footsteps of fate indeed; whose overtaking meant the death of the three persons who met in that place."

Bywaters came swiftly out of the darkness; attacked Thompson, at first merely with words, and then with a knife. He stabbed the unarmed man two or three times, and ran away. A neighbor heard Mrs. Thompson crying: "Oh, don't! Oh, don't!" She ran up and down the street, apparently distracted, and calling for people to come to her husband. Before a doctor could arrive, Thompson was dead.

Both Mrs. Thompson and Bywaters gave accounts of the event which were totally false. She said, first, that she did not know what had caused her husband's death; next, that he had been struck by an unknown man; finally she admitted that she recognized Bywaters as lie fled. She insisted, however, that the attack was, to her, a surprise and a horror. Bywaters denied that he was even present, hut when he found that Mrs. Thompson was under arrest, acknowledged his part in the killing, and fell hack on a plea of self-defence. He came there, he said, to beg Thompson to divorce his wife, and only struck when he thought Thompson was about to attack him.

The police found Mrs. Thompson's letters in Bywaters' possession, and the tangled story told therein-—-never wholly explained—brought both the lovers to trial for murder. Bywaters had preserved these perilous documents, it has been suggested, with an eye to future blackmail. Hardly anyone believed his story of self-defence, and the best that could he done for him was a petition to save him from the extreme penalty. He behaved well throughout the trial; tried to exonerate Mrs. Thompson; and imperilled his own safety by forbidding his lawyers to attack or impede her defence.

It would have been astonishing if the jury—which included a woman— had come to any other conclusion than to find both prisoners guilty. The only doubt could have been as to Mrs. Thompson, and, in the jury's eyes, she had incriminated herself of attempting murder and inciting the actual crime.

Her lover, when he gave testimony, and her counsel, the famous Sir Henry Curtis Bennett, developed an astonishing theory as to her guilt. It was scoffed at by the Judge, and probably accepted by few in Court, save for some of the literary folk—like Miss Rebecca West —who were present. It was that Edith Thompson's murders were—like Macbeth's, before his crimes—"fantastical'"; that she was a novel-reader, who lived in a world of dreams, fancied herself the heroine of all the hooks she read (like Bella Donna) and dallied with the notion of poisonings, to make herself strange and exciting to her lover, whose passion was cooling.

The autopsy on her husband gave negative support to this: no traces of poison, no wounds from broken glass, could he detected. She lived in fear of losing Bywaters, who had begun to suggest that they should "just he pals". On the witness-stand, she swore that she never tried to poison her husband. hut sent descriptions of her essays in murder to her lover because, as she put it, "I wanted him to think 1 would do anything to keep him to me."

Many cryptic passages in her letters were more or less plausibly explained by the two as referring to acts of desperation other than murder; a "suicide pact", or an elopement in open adultery. Sir Curtis Bennett, in his defence, was handicapped by the fact that he did not dare offer the reasonable explanation of some of the "risks" which the letters constantly mentioned. The wretched woman, seeking to avoid the results of her relation with her husband and her lover, had had recourse to an abortionist, and her lawyer feared still further to prejudice the jury against her by disclosing this. As in every scandalous case, current gossip was full of unauthenticated rumours about parts of Mrs. Thompson's letters which could not he published, and as to her strange gifts to Bywaters.

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Her fate moved Thomas Hardy to write a sonnet, and it has lately resulted in a novel of surpassing interest: A Pin to See the Peepshow, by F. Tennyson Jesse. In this hook Mrs. Thompson's pitiful story is sympathetically told in a narrative which combines pages of the frankest realism with passages of haunting beauty.

Mrs. Thompson and Bywaters never saw each other, and had no communication of any kind, after they heard their sentences of death. Almost the last voice in the Court room was that of Edith Thompson: "I am not guilty —oh, God! I am not guilty."

She perished, at the hands of the hangman, one dismal winter's morning at Holloway Prison. At the same hour, the sentence was executed on Bywaters at Pentonville. It is one of the legends of the case that the subsequent suicide of John Ellis, the hangman, was caused by remorse, because of his share in the death of Edith Thompson.