The Girl on the Gallows

by Q. Patrick

Q. She had been what?

  A. Lying to me, lying.

  Q. What did you understand the lie was?

  A. It was melodrama on her part, trying to persuade me that she had taken broken glass.

  Q. “I used the ‘light bulb’ three times but the third time he found a piece.” You understood she meant her husband had detected her in an attempt to commit suicide?

  A. Yes.

  Q. “So I have given it up until you come home.” Do you suggest that she was going to wait for your arrival home in order that you might co-operate with her in committing suicide?

  A. I might give her something more, some quinine.

  Q. That would be a strange idea to you, Bywaters, if that is right?

  A. Yes; I do not know her idea.

  At this juncture Mr. Inskip must have felt that the dead knight had been sufficiently flogged. His cross-examination, which had in any case been effective more by the luck of Freddie’s pigheadedness than by any particular astuteness on his own part, then petered out into a succession of points halfheartedly brought up and then dropped.

  After a floundering attempt to discredit Freddie’s already discredited version of the murder itself, he suddenly gave up.

  Mr. Whiteley rose to his feet and asked his client a few minor questions. Then he said:

  “That is our case.”

  It was a case, of course, that Freddie had hopelessly lost for himself, and one that he had gone a long way toward losing for Edith. The prosecution had been unable to force any admission that was legally destructive to Mrs. Thompson’s cause. But legality and logic were taking second place to emotion, and from the emotional point of view it had looked time and time again as if Freddie’s blatant lies could only have been motivated by Mrs. Thompson’s total guilt.

  Now that the hour of her greatest ordeal was upon her, Mrs. Thompson had Freddie no longer as a champion, but as another millstone around her neck.

  Chapter Twelve

  The newspapers, of course, had followed noisily, day by day, the progress of the trial. Freddie’s moral collapse in the witness box was common knowledge in the remotest shires, and there was hardly a person in England who was not acutely aware that the time had come for That Woman to take the stand. The British Isles, after months of journalistic pressure, were in a lynching mood, and inside the stately shabbiness of Court Number One at the Old Bailey the galleryites awaited the great moment with sadistic excitement.

  It is hard to comprehend the enormous need in the Great Britain of that time to destroy Edith Thompson. We can understand that, as an adulteress who had been found out, she infuriated both the chaste and the unchaste. We can understand that, as a woman of twenty-eight who had managed to find an attractive twenty-year-old lover, she had incurred the righteous jealousy of less fortunate females. We can understand too that the scent of sex and murder, floating as it were in the air, can disturb and infect the human climate.

  But, even so, it is difficult to grasp the fact that when Edith Thompson, broken, sick, bewildered, and exhausted, tottered into the witness box, there was scarcely a single pair of eyes that watched her with pity.

  However, we must not forget that this final ordeal was one of her own choosing. It is certain that, after Freddie’s disaster, Sir Henry repeated his urgent entreaties for her to keep silent. But, even so, Edith Thompson took the stand.

  We will never know why, for, almost from the first moment of her examination, it was obvious that she was as incapable of explaining herself as a corpse. She could listen to questions and answer them and even, on occasion, show a little synthetic spirit. But the thread had already been lost. She didn’t really know what she was trying to prove or even what they were trying to prove against her. We can only assume that she went into the witness box because that was the decision she had made earlier and now she lacked the will to change anything.

  There were no climaxes in her testimony, no thrilling moments when the spectators could ask themselves: Will she save herself? Will she break down? She answered in a dream that made her seem more exasperatingly stupid even than Freddie. Oddly enough, the trait that took the longest to die in her was her gentility. Sometimes, as she sat there answering questions, her phrases and her choice of words became affected, almost mincing, as if she felt she were at a tea party with people above her walk of life, who had to be convinced that she was not a common person, but a lady of station.

  It was not Sir Henry that conducted her examination. He was saving his energies for his final address to the jury. The task was taken on by his aide, Mr. Walter Frampton, who treated the broken woman on the stand with consistent kindness and gentleness.

  Under Mr. Frampton’s guidance, Edith Thompson, in a small but audible voice, spoke of her employment at Carlton and Prior and of her marriage, stating that it had not been a happy one even before the advent of Freddie. She covered the familiar ground of the Isle of Wight holiday, Freddie’s period as a lodger, the quarrel about the pin, and the futile divorce attempt. She made a flat denial that she had ever attempted to poison Percy or feed him ground glass. She referred to Freddie’s various departures on the S.S. Morea. Then, while the spectators in the gallery seethed, stared, and craned their necks, she came to the crucial point of the letters themselves.

  Mr. Frampton quoted the now familiar passage from Exhibit 62 about the “compact” the two lovers had made.

  Q. What compact were you referring to in that letter to Bywaters?

  A. The compact of suicide. We had discussed the question of suicide some time previous to the writing of this letter. I cannot state when.

  Q. What was said about it?

  A. That nothing was worth living for, and that it would be far easier to be dead.

  Q. Had you discussed any particular means of committing suicide?

  A. I believe we had.

  Mr. Frampton referred briefly to the newspaper clippings and then asked:

  Q. Look at the letter [Exhibit Twenty-seven] where you say: “I had the wrong porridge to-day, but I don’t suppose it will matter. I don’t seem to care much either way. You will probably say I’m careless and I admit I am, but I don’t care—do you?”

  Several commentators on the trial have pointed out that the phrase “the wrong porridge” was used in vulgar parlance at that time to mean intercourse with the wrong man. It is conceivable that this interpretation throws light on an otherwise confusing passage, and, if this were so, Edith’s apparent inability to explain it could have been caused by a reluctance to appear coarse. But there is no way of proving this.

  Q. What were you referring to?

  A. I really cannot explain.

  Q. The suggestion here is that you had from time to time put things in your husband’s porridge—glass, for instance?

  A. I had not done so.

  Q. Can you give us any explanation of what you had in your mind when you suggested the wrong porridge?

  A. Except we had suggested or talked about that sort of thing and I had previously said, “Oh, yes, I will give him something one of these days.”

  Mr. Justice Shearman broke in here, obviously angered by what seemed to him an evasion.

  He asked: “Do you mean that you had talked about poison?”

  Mrs. Thompson replied: “I did not mean anything in particular.”

  But, as with Freddie Bywaters, Mr. Justice Shearman seemed to have a sinister effect upon Edith Thompson. Suddenly, and quite unprompted, as if the Judge had thrown her off balance, she made the unnecessary and damaging remark:

  “We had talked about making my husband ill.”

  As in the case of the “wrong porridge,” certain commentators on the trial have produced a theoretical explanation for this admitted desire to make Percy ill that would exonerate it from serious criminal taint. These commentators suggest that Edith, finding her necessary sexual relations with her husband extremely distasteful, had discussed with Freddie Bywaters, in a stumbling, amateurish way, the possibility of administering somet
hing to Percy that would cut down his libido. It was, for example, an established belief among the British soldiers of the First World War that quinine had an anaphrodisiac effect. If this was the real meaning of many of the vaguely ominous, hints in the letters, it was never mentioned in court. Perhaps Sir Henry, conscious of the damage already done his client by her reputation for immorality, felt that a revelation of this sort would do her more harm than good. But for some reason, Edith Thompson did admit that the lovers had discussed making Percy ill, and Mr. Frampton had no course but to follow up this statement once it had been made.

  Q. How had you come to talk about making your husband ill?

  A. We were discussing my unhappiness.

  Q. Did that include your husband’s treatment of you?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Now you say you probably said that you would give him something?

  A. I did.

  Q. Did you ever give him anything?

  A. Nothing whatever. My husband took porridge in the mornings. It was always prepared by Mrs. Lester and never by me.

  Mr. Frampton then quoted from a letter that mentioned the need for taking “drastic measures.” Edith Thompson explained that the drastic measures referred to her leaving England with Freddie. Mr. Frampton then brought up Freddie’s formal Christmas note and Edith explained it had been written so that she could show it to her family without arousing their suspicions of an affair. After this, Mr. Frampton returned to the letters.

  Q. You go on to say: “Darlint, I’ve surrendered to him unconditionally now—do you understand me? I think it the best way to disarm any suspicion, in fact he has several times asked me if I am happy now and I’ve said ‘Yes quite,’ but you know that’s not the truth, don’t you?” What is the meaning of that paragraph?

  A. When I wrote that letter I was expecting Mr. Bywaters home in a few days, and I knew if my husband had any suspicions he was coming home he would try to prevent me from seeing him.

  Q. Further on you say: “Thanking you for those greetings darlint, but you won’t always be ‘the man with no right’ will you?” What does that refer to?

  A. I had hopes of obtaining a divorce from my husband and that Bywaters would marry me.

  Mr. Frampton quoted yet another passage, which included the sentence “You must do something this time.” Edith Thompson explained that the thing she had wanted Freddie to do was to try to get her a job abroad. Mr. Frampton then moved back to the subject of her relations with her husband, quoting:

  “I want to tell you about this. On Wednesday we had words—in bed—Oh you know darlint—over that same old subject and he said—it was all through you I’d altered. I told him if he ever again blamed you to me for any difference there might be in me, I’d leave the house that minute and this is not an idle threat. He said lots of other things and I bit my lip—so that I shouldn’t answer—eventually went to sleep. About 2 A.M. he woke me up and asked for water as he felt ill. I got it for him and asked him what the matter was and this is what he told me—whether it is the truth I don’t know or whether he did it to frighten me, anyway it didn’t. He said—someone he knows in town (not the man I previously told you about) had given him a prescription for a draught for insomnia and he’d had it made up and taken it and it made him ill. He certainly looked ill and his eyes were glassy. I’ve hunted for the said prescription everywhere and can’t find it and asked him what he had done with it and he said the chemist kept it.”

  Q. Is that a true account of something that happened to your husband?

  A. Absolutely true. He suffered from insomnia and from his heart, and he took medicines for both.

  Q. Were you in any way responsible for that condition that you describe in this letter?

  A. None whatever.

  Q. You go on: “I told Avis about the incident only I told her as if it frightened and worried me as I thought perhaps it might be useful at some future time that I had told somebody. What do you think, darlint. His sister Maggie came in last night and he told her, so now there are two witnesses, altho’ I wish he hadn’t told her—but left me to do it. It would be so easy darlint—if I had things—I do hope I shall.”

  Here was the first quotation that was really damaging. It was damaging because it was a mixture of truth and falsehood. Percy had, indeed, had his unfortunate brush with the insomnia remedy, but Edith had embroidered the episode with her melodramatic needle. She had claimed to have told Avis “as if she were frightened” so that it could be “useful” at some future time.

  This was the point at which Edith Thompson should have made the admission that Freddie had baulked at making. This is when she should have explained that she had fancifully, almost frivolously played the murderess in her thoughts and in her letters. But Edith, although she had made a half admission to the Judge, could not, any more than Freddie, go the whole way. She was a little franker than Freddie had been, but only a little. When Mr. Frampton asked her the meaning of those passages, she said:

  “I wrote that to let Bywaters think I was willing to do anything to help him, to retain his affections.”

  Here, almost at the beginning of the examination by her own counsel, she seemed to be doing the one thing she had vowed never to do; she seemed virtually to be shifting the blame onto her darlingest pal. “Willing to do anything to help him” implied that Freddie had urged her to poison Percy and she had passively complied “to retain his affections.”

  Mrs. Thompson returned fitfully to this attitude through her examination and cross-examination, and it is easy to lose sympathy for her. We have reluctantly to face the fact that Edith, at this point and later, did go back on her lover and try to shift the blame onto him. But there are, too, many occasions when she wriggled just as futilely as Freddie had done to shield her lover.

  From this point on, we see her balanced between feeble efforts to blame Freddie and just as feeble efforts to defend him.

  Q. Look at your letter of twenty-second February, Exhibit Sixteen, where you write: “I suppose it isn’t possible for you to send it to me—not at all possible. I do so chafe at wasting time darlint.” What were you referring to when you wrote that?

  A. Mr. Bywaters had told me he was bringing me something and I had suggested to send it to me, to allow him to think I was eager for him to send me something to do what was suggested. I wanted him to think I was eager to help him, to bind him closer to me, to retain his affections. I had no idea what “it” was.

  There was double talk as extreme as Freddie’s and still with a heavy overlay of gentility. “Mr. Bywaters.” “Eager to help him.” “To bind him closer to me.”

  Mr. Frampton then quoted a longish passage from a letter in which Edith referred to the “thing I am going to do” and showed anxiety that “you will think the less of me because of this thing that I shall do.” Edith managed quite successfully to point out that “the thing she was going to do” had been an elopement with Freddie, which would have permanently damaged her respectability and might, in later years, have caused Freddie to think less of her. She also, with equal success, interpreted a second passage along these lines.

  Once again Mr. Frampton led her toward more dangerous ground.

  Q. The next letter I have to trouble you with is the one dated first April, Exhibit Seventeen: “He was telling his Mother et cetera the circumstances of my ‘Sunday morning escapade’ and he puts great stress on the fact of the tea tasting bitter.” Was there ever any time when your husband complained to his mother about the tea tasting bitter?

  A. Not to my knowledge.

  Q. Was this an imaginary incident then that you were recording?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Listen to this: “Now I think whatever else I try it in again will still taste bitter—he will recognise it and be more suspicious still and if the quantity is still not successful—it will injure any chance I may have of trying when you come home. Do you understand?”

  This was the quotation whose interpretation Freddie Bywaters had so h
opelessly botched. Mr. Frampton was not going to run the risk of a similar debacle with Edith. He phrased her answer for her.

  Q. Had you at that time or any time put anything into your husband’s tea?

  A. No.

  Q. Had he ever at any time made complaint that his tea tasted bitter?

  A. No.

  Q. “I’m going to try the glass again occasionally—when it is safe. I’ve got an electric light globe this time.” What did you mean Bywaters to understand by that?

  A. That I was willing to help him in whatever he wanted me to do or suggested I should do or we should do.

  There was the leitmotiv again.

  Q. Had you got an electric light bulb for any purpose of this description?

  A. I had not.

  Q. Did you ever intend to use one?

  A. I did not.

  Q. Did you ever at any time use one?

  A. Never.

  Mr. Frampton then read another quotation, and for the first time in the defense’s case he read a couple of introductory sentences to indicate the context. It is surprising that this obvious and effective method was not used more frequently.

  Q. “Mother and Dad came over to me to dinner—I had plenty to do. Monday Mr. and Mrs. Birnage came to tea and we all went to the Hippodrome in the evening. By the way—what is ‘Aromatic tincture of opium’—Avis drew my attention to a bottle of this sealed in the medicine chest in your room. I took possession of it and when he missed it and asked me for it—I refused to give it him —he refuses to tell me where he got it and for what reason he wants it—so I shall keep it till I hear from you.” Had your sister Avis found the bottle of aromatic tincture of opium?

  A. Yes. I had no idea it was in the house before she found it. I did not know whether my husband was using it or not. I had no idea what it was, beyond the name, and in my letter I am asking Bywaters what it is. My husband missed it and asked me about it. I believe my sister Avis took possession of the bottle and threw its contents down the sink and then threw the bottle away. The bottle which is now shown to me [Exhibit 51] is similar, but I cannot say whether it is the same.