Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters: The Love Letters That Led to the Gallows

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Just after midnight on 4 October 1922, a shipping clerk called Percy Thompson was walking home through Ilford with his wife Edith when a young man came out of the dark and stabbed him. Three months later, the man with the knife and the woman who'd been on Percy's arm were hanged at exactly the same moment, in two different London prisons.

One of them had definitely killed Percy Thompson. The other, plenty of historians now argue, went to the gallows for writing overheated love letters and having an affair the public couldn't forgive. A century on, the case of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters still hasn't been put to bed.

Quick Answers

Who were Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters? Edith was a 28-year-old buyer for a London milliner. Freddy Bywaters was her 20-year-old lover, a ship's steward with P&O.
What happened? Bywaters stabbed Edith's husband Percy to death in Belgrave Road, Ilford, in the early hours of 4 October 1922. Edith was charged with murder too, largely because of her letters.
When were they executed? At 9am on 9 January 1923, Edith at Holloway and Bywaters at Pentonville.
Has Edith been pardoned? No. A long campaign for a royal pardon was knocked back in February 2024.

Edith Graydon, the Girl From Manor Park

Edith Jessie Graydon was born on Christmas Day 1893 in Manor Park, east London, the eldest of five children. She was bright, stylish and mad about the theatre and dancing, and she did very well for herself at work. She joined Carlton & Prior, a firm of wholesale milliners in the City of London, and worked her way up to chief buyer. By the early 1920s she was earning more than both her husband and her father, which was a rare thing for a woman back then.

Edith (right) and her younger sister Avis

In January 1916 she married Percy Thompson, a shipping clerk. The couple bought 41 Kensington Gardens in Ilford for £250. Edith put up more than half the money, but the deeds went in Percy's name, which tells you a fair bit about how things worked in 1916.

The marriage wasn't a happy one. Edith was restless and romantic, a big reader who lived half her life in novels. Percy was steadier and far more conventional, and the gap between what Edith wanted and what she'd got grew wider every year.

Enter Freddy Bywaters

Frederick Bywaters wasn't a stranger who wandered into Edith's life. He'd been at school with her younger brothers and knew the whole Graydon family from Manor Park. He went to sea as a steward with P&O, and whenever his ship docked at Tilbury he'd stay with the Graydons. That's how he got to know Edith properly.

Freddy lived for a time with Percy and Edith at the couple's home, 41 Kensington Gardens

In June 1921 Freddy joined the Thompsons on a holiday to Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. He was still a teenager, eight years younger than Edith, handsome and full of swagger. By the time they got home the pair were falling for each other, and Freddy moved into Kensington Gardens as a lodger while he waited for his next ship.

It didn't last. In August 1921 a row broke out in the house during which Percy hit Edith, and Freddy was told to leave. Whether Percy had worked out what was going on or just didn't like the lad hanging around his wife, Bywaters was out. He sailed in early September and the affair carried on the only way it could, through the post.

The Letters

Over the next year Edith wrote to Freddy constantly. He was at sea for months at a time, and when he was home they'd snatch meetings in tea shops and parks, and on one occasion booked into a hotel under false names. Freddy kept her letters. That one decision would end up killing her.

There were 62 of them, long, rambling and passionate, full of gossip about work, reviews of novels she'd read and her pet word for him, "darlint". Mixed in with all that were passages that sounded far darker. Edith described trying to poison Percy, claimed she'd put powdered glass from a light bulb in his food on three separate occasions and moaned that his tea had tasted too bitter for him to drink. She told Freddy that Percy had complained a dose would have been enough to fell an elephant. She sent him newspaper cuttings about poisoning cases too.

She also told him she'd been pregnant by him and had brought on a miscarriage herself. Freddy, for his part, brought her back quinine from his travels. Some writers now think the bitter tea and the quinine had far more to do with Edith trying to end pregnancies than with Percy.

Edith's explanation, when it came, was simple. She'd made it all up. She was terrified that a young, good-looking sailor would lose interest in a married woman eight years his senior, so she played the part of a woman ready to do anything to be with him. Freddy later said much the same thing: he'd never believed she was really trying to poison anybody and put it down to her vivid imagination.

Freddy Bywaters (left) pictured with Edith and Percy Thompson in the married couple's garden

The Night of 3 October 1922

On the evening of Tuesday 3 October, Edith and Percy went up to the West End to see a comedy called The Dippers at the Criterion Theatre, along with Edith's uncle and aunt and her sister Avis. It was an ordinary night out, and by most accounts a pleasant one.

Freddy was back in England on leave. He'd returned in September and the pair had been seeing each other again whenever Edith could get away from work. That evening he called at the Graydons' house in Manor Park, where Edith's parents still lived, and left late. In his pocket was a sheath knife he'd bought the previous November. Instead of going home, he took the train from East Ham towards Ilford and walked the rest of the way.

The Thompsons caught a late train back, got off at Ilford station and set off on foot towards Kensington Gardens. It was dark and drizzly, and the streets were close to empty. At around 12.30am they were in Belgrave Road, about 100 yards from home, when Bywaters stepped out from the shadows by the road.

The attack

What happened next took less than a minute. Bywaters pushed Edith aside so hard she fell, grabbed Percy and started stabbing. The blows landed in Percy's neck and chest. Percy didn't have a weapon and didn't stand a chance. Within moments the knife had done its work and Bywaters was running off down the road.

Neighbours who heard the commotion later said a woman had been screaming over and over at somebody to stop. Edith picked herself up to find her husband staggering, then slumping against a wall. She ran for help. A local woman, Dora Pittard, said Edith came to her begging for a doctor, and another neighbour, John Webber, heard a woman crying out not to do it.

Dr Noel Maudsley arrived to find Percy dead, propped against a wall with Edith kneeling beside him in a state of hysterics. She told the first officers on the scene that she hadn't seen who'd done it, and later that a strange man had attacked them.

Arrest and the Letters Come to Light

Edith's story didn't survive long. Fanny Lester, a lodger at Kensington Gardens, told police all about the handsome young sailor who'd once lived in the house and the rows he'd caused, and detectives picked Bywaters up at the Graydons' home within hours.

Both of them were taken to Ilford police station. The story goes that Edith was walked past a room where she could see Freddy being held. Whether or not it was staged, it broke her. She cried out, "Why did he do it? I didn't want him to do it", and then gave a fresh statement naming him as the attacker.

Freddy, seen at Ilford police station, was arrested while visiting Edith's parents

That one sentence did her enormous damage. To the police it sounded like a woman who'd known something was coming. To her defenders, then and now, it sounds like a woman who'd been begging Freddy to leave things alone.

Bywaters confessed once he was told Edith had been charged too. He said he'd gone to Ilford to have it out with Percy and get him to let Edith go, but that Percy seemed to find the idea funny and he lost his temper. He claimed the two had struggled and that he'd drawn the knife because he thought Percy was going to kill him. He showed police where he'd dumped the knife, down a drain about 250 yards from Kensington Gardens. From the moment he was arrested until the moment he died, he insisted Edith had no idea what he was going to do.

When detectives searched his cabin on the SS Morea at Tilbury, they found dozens of Edith's letters. Once the poison passages were read, the police and the Crown saw a very different case: a wicked wife who'd spent a year trying to murder her husband and finally talked her young lover into finishing the job. Both were charged with murder.

There was one big problem with that theory. Percy's body was dug up on 3 November 1922 and the Home Office pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury went over it for any sign of poison or ground glass. He found nothing. Not a trace of either. Percy hadn't been noticeably ill in the months before he died either. The prosecution carried on regardless.

Trial at the Old Bailey

The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 6 December 1922 in front of Mr Justice Shearman. It was the hottest ticket in London. People queued from 4am to get into the public gallery, and some of them sold their places for £5, a serious sum at the time.

The Solicitor-General, Sir Thomas Inskip, led for the Crown. Edith was defended by Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, one of the best barristers in the country, and Bywaters by Cecil Whiteley. The big fight was over the letters. The judge allowed them in as evidence of Edith's intentions and motive, and huge chunks were read aloud to a packed court, "darlint" and all.

Queues to get into the Old Bailey would build up from the early hours

Curtis-Bennett begged Edith not to give evidence. She insisted, convinced she could make the jury understand, and it went badly. Asked what she'd meant by passages about giving her husband something, she claimed not to know. She came across as evasive and theatrical, and the jury clearly didn't warm to her. Curtis-Bennett later said he could have saved her if she'd only kept out of the witness box.

The judge's summing up didn't help. He described Edith's letters as "the outpourings of a silly but at the same time, a wicked affection". The jury was out for a little over two hours. On 11 December both were found guilty.

Bywaters shouted from the dock that the jury was wrong and that Edith wasn't guilty. Edith cried out that she wasn't guilty either and had to be helped down to the cells. Shearman put on the black cap and sentenced them both to death.

Appeals, Petitions and a Country Divided

Edith went to Holloway and Freddy to Pentonville. Their appeals were heard on 21 December by the Lord Chief Justice and Justices Darling and Salter, and both were thrown out.

Outside, the public mood was swinging, but mostly towards Freddy. A petition to save him gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, with some estimates putting it close to a million. Plenty of people saw him as a lovesick boy led astray by an older woman. Edith got far less sympathy. The newspapers tore her apart, and the writer Rebecca West famously called her a "shocking little piece of rubbish".

There was a strong expectation that Edith would be reprieved anyway. Every woman sentenced to death in Britain over the previous decade had had her sentence commuted, and no woman had hanged since 1907. The Home Secretary, William Bridgeman, refused to step in for either of them. After the executions, women wrote to him to thank him for not letting Edith off. The contrast with another Old Bailey case later that same year is hard to miss: Marguerite Fahmy shot her husband dead at the Savoy in July 1923 and walked free.

The Last Night

Right up to the end, people were trying to stop the hangings. A group called the League of Christian Intercession sent a last-minute petition to the King. Bywaters made one final attempt to save Edith with a new statement taking all the blame on himself. None of it worked.

On Monday 8 January, the families came to say goodbye. Freddy spent an hour and a half with his mother at Pentonville and told anyone who'd listen that Edith had played no part in the killing and that he'd acted in self defence.

At Holloway, Edith saw her parents, her sister Avis and one of her brothers for the last time. She'd been in a terrible state for weeks, and by then she could barely stand. She told her family she was ready and had nothing on her conscience, and when the Bishop of Stepney visited her later that night she told him there was nothing for her to confess because she was innocent.

She collapsed that evening and doctors sat with her through the night. Crowds were already gathering outside both prisons in the early hours, despite the cold and the drizzle.

9 January 1923: Two Hangings at 9am

The two executions were set for exactly the same time, 9am on Tuesday 9 January 1923, a mile or so apart in north London.

Frederick Bywaters at Pentonville

Freddy's last morning was about as calm as these things get. He slept reasonably well, smoked a cigarette and sent a message thanking the Pentonville staff for treating him decently. When the hangman William Willis came for him he walked firmly to the scaffold without needing to be held. Willis gave him a drop of 7 feet 4 inches, and he was dead within 30 seconds of leaving the condemned cell, still protesting that Edith was innocent.

Edith Thompson at Holloway

Edith's was a very different story, and it's the part of this case that's haunted people ever since.

She'd been sedated for days. That morning the prison doctors gave her more: an injection at around 8.15am, then a cocktail of morphine and hyoscine at about 8.40am, and some accounts say a glass of brandy on top. By the time the executioner John Ellis and his assistants arrived at her cell just before 9am, she was barely conscious.

Ellis was the most experienced hangman in Britain. He'd hanged Dr Crippen in 1910 and Roger Casement in 1916, and he'd seen plenty of prisoners lose their nerve. Edith was something else. As he went to pinion her wrists she collapsed completely, screaming, sobbing and then passing out.

There was no way she could walk. Two warders and Ellis's assistants, Robert Baxter and Thomas Phillips, carried her the short distance to the execution room, and some accounts say she was strapped into a chair to get her there. On the trapdoor she needed holding upright while Ellis pulled the white hood over her head and put the noose round her neck. She weighed just over 130lb, and Ellis gave her a drop of 6 feet 10 inches. Then he pulled the lever.

What happened on the scaffold

The official record lists the cause of death as fracture and dislocation of the neck. But witnesses described something far worse. There was heavy bleeding from Edith's lower body after the drop, so much that one account said it looked as though her "insides fell out".

Explanations have varied ever since. Some put it down to a miscarriage, others to a uterine inversion caused by the force of the drop. Holloway's deputy governor, Elizabeth Cronin, later disputed the more lurid versions, but in 1956 the Home Secretary Gwilym Lloyd George confirmed in the Commons that Edith had been heavily sedated and had to be carried and supported on the gallows.

Outside the prison gates

Outside Holloway, a crowd had been building since 7.30am, and by 9am several hundred people were standing in the rain. Women marched with placards. One read "Murder can't be abolished by murder", while another said that if the pair were hanged, the judge and jury were murderers too. Despite the strength of feeling, both executions passed off without any trouble at the gates.

A huge crowd gathered outside Holloway Prison on the morning Edith was executed

The cost to those who carried it out

The hanging left deep marks on the people involved. Several Holloway officers took early retirement afterwards, and stories circulated for years about how badly it had shaken them.

Ellis named Edith as one of the two executions that troubled him most. He resigned in 1924, got no pension from the Home Office and started drinking heavily. Later that year he shot himself in the jaw and survived, and was charged with attempted suicide. In 1932 he died by suicide at his home in Rochdale. No one from the Home Office or the Prison Commission turned up to his funeral.

Was Edith Pregnant When She Was Hanged?

This question has never gone away, and it matters. Executing a pregnant woman was illegal in Britain. If Edith was carrying a child on 9 January 1923, then she was hanged unlawfully, whatever anyone thinks about her guilt.

René Weis, an English professor at University College London who has spent decades on the case, made exactly that argument when new evidence surfaced in 2018. The official paperwork gives the cause of death as a fracture and dislocation of the neck and mentions bruising from the rope, but it doesn't settle what caused the bleeding. With no proper post-mortem record of a pregnancy, it's likely to stay an open question.

From a Prison Grave to Her Parents' Plot

As her sentence required, Edith was buried inside the walls of Holloway. Freddy was buried at Pentonville. For nearly 50 years that's where she stayed.

When Holloway was rebuilt, the remains of the five women executed there were dug up on 1 April 1971. Edith's family weren't told. Her coffin was taken to Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey and buried in an unmarked grave alongside three other hanged women: Styllou Christofi, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters. The fifth, Ruth Ellis, went to a churchyard in Amersham. Ruth had been hanged in 1955 by Albert Pierrepoint, and her case and Edith's are often mentioned together in the story of how Britain turned against the death penalty.

Edith's mother had always wanted her daughter brought home. Her wish was finally met on 22 November 2018, when Edith was reburied in the family plot at the City of London Cemetery in Manor Park, next to her parents and just a short walk from where she'd grown up. René Weis, by then her executor, had worked with the family for years to make it happen.

There are some grim little footnotes along the way. When the household goods at Kensington Gardens were auctioned in September 1923, souvenir hunters stripped the privet hedge. Madame Tussaud's put waxworks of the pair in the Chamber of Horrors, where they stood until the 1980s. They're now in storage and slowly falling apart.

The Fight for a Pardon

For years Weis has pushed for Edith to receive a posthumous royal pardon. His central argument is that the trial was unfair: Shearman shouldn't have encouraged the jury to lean so heavily on the letters, which were fantasy rather than fact. There was no poison in Percy's body, no glass, no evidence that Edith bought the knife and nothing to show she knew Freddy would be in Belgrave Road that night.

In January 2023, a hundred years after the hanging, it looked as though the campaign might finally get somewhere. It didn't. In February 2024 the case was ruled not to meet the requirements for a royal pardon, and Edith remains, officially, a murderer. That stings all the more now. In July 2026 Ruth Ellis, hanged at the same prison in 1955, was granted a posthumous conditional pardon by the King. Edith is still waiting.

The case has also lived on in fiction. F. Tennyson Jesse based her 1934 novel A Pin to See the Peepshow on it, and Jill Dawson retold it from Edith's side in Fred & Edie. The writer Laura Thompson, no relation, has written two books on the case, and they make a strong argument that Edith was hanged less for anything she did than for the kind of woman she was: independent, well paid, sexually active and married to someone else.

That's why the case still bites. Bywaters killed Percy Thompson and said so. Edith Thompson wrote some foolish and frankly disturbing letters, but nobody ever proved she harmed anyone. Of the two, she was the one who had to be carried to the noose.