My review of Rex v. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, by Laura Thompson

Rex v. Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders

by Laura Thompson

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

It was known in its day as 'the Ilford murder'. 

Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were British lovers hanged for the murder of Edith's husband Percy. 

Their 1922 Old Bailey trial became one of the biggest scandals of the still stuffy, Edwardian-minded era.

Edith's love letters used as prosecution material in court … and published in the national press for all to sniff at and tut over (journalist Rebecca West publicly tagged Edith 'a shocking piece of rubbish').

As the older married woman (a mere twenty-nine) to her twenty-year-old lover, Edith was smeared ('cancelled' in todays' patois) and demonised as an adulteress. A jezebel, a temptress. More or less a sorceress, who had bewitched naïve young Freddy and seduced him into killing her dull, disinterested yet violently jealous husband.

It happened thus:

On 3 October 1922, in the East London suburb of Ilford, Edith and husband Percy were walking home after a night at a London theatre, when an assailant leapt from the darkness and fatally stabbed Percy. 

When police tracked the murderer, merchant seaman Freddy Bywaters, and discovered his romantic link to the abruptly widowed Edith, she too was arrested as Freddy's accomplice. 

Both were found guilty and hanged in January 1923, he at HMP Pentonville, she at HMP Holloway. Edith's executioner, John Ellis, was reportedly traumatised by this finality, after she spent her concluding hours of life hysterically crying and screaming.

Each were buried in unmarked graves in their respective prison grounds, as was customary. Edith would later be exhumed with other executed women, under a prison rebuilding program, and reinterred at Brookwood. Freddy was not.

Edith was framed throughout the trial as a foolish, impetuous woman from humble beginnings, who had married more for convention than love. Only at the final hour did her plight draw brief public sympathy, with the hanging of women considered abhorrent (none had occurred in Britain since 1907). 

The case fleetingly became a cause célèbre.

Yet there was nary a skerrick of evidence to convict her, just the straitlaced prejudice (and perhaps veiled jealousy) of 'respectable' married ladies, institutional misogyny of a patriarchal judicial system, and prudish demurral to recognise a complex, intelligent woman aeons ahead of her time in a society still metaphorically trussed-up in stays and starched collars.

The lovers had a platonic history predating their romance. Freddy was a friend of Edith's younger brothers and had once lived with her family before moving out into the world. Returning in his late teens, he met her again through her family. Now married to Percy, the bright, career hopeful Edith introduced the two men who hit it off. 

She gradually saw the handsome, homecoming Freddy in a new light, potentially pairing him off with her sister Avis when the quartet holidayed on the Isle of Wight. 

But nothing eventuated with Avis and Freddy, and as a newfound friend of Percy, Freddy was invited to lodge with the married couple, the trio at first happy. 

Soon, however, Edith and Freddy's affair unfolded, at first secretly. As Percy grew suspicious, fireworks were sparked. Edith was flung across a room hitting a chair, her arm bruised black from shoulder to elbow. Husband and lover locked horns, with the latter sent packing.

She was by no means alone. The married upper classes and bohemian elite brazenly slept with who they liked, though it wasn't much talked about in polite society. But Edith's aspirant, lower middle-class breed had stiffer rules of morality to adhere to. The hypocrisy stank.

If this had happened a century later, post #MeToo, Edith's conviction would be laughed out of court, with global sisterhood protests erupting via social media teamwork.

Published in 2018, this astonishing dissection of a fatal extramarital tangle by Laura Thompson (no relation to Edith or Percy) delivers a 444-page forensic juggernaut, arguably unparalleled in scale or scope in its genre.

Admittedly, such fleshed out intensity may not be for everyone, especially those rushing to grab a lunchtime pulp read from a railway platform kiosk. It took patience at the outset, but once into the pace I was hooked.

This is surely among Laura Thompson's greatest works (I had already read and loved her earlier biographies Life in a Cold Climate: Nancy Mitford and Take Six Girls: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters).

On narrative power alone, she could write about Thomas the Tank Engine and captivate no less. Her incisive study of the human psyche is razor sharp, her absurdist tongue-in-cheek wit and droll asides hilarious.

Fellow author and biographer Kate Colquhoun describes this infamous case, on the book's back cover blurb, as 'another dark parable of society's vilification of women. Intelligent... A tantalizing investigation'.

I agree wholeheartedly. Highly recommended reading.