Tempus fugit; Sally Mann 'What Remains' (Bulfinch Press, 2003, out of print) & 'Hold Still; A Memoir with Photographs' (Penguin Modern Classics, 2024 £14.99)

As for me, I see both the beauty and the dark side of the things; the loveliness of cornfields and full sails, but the ruin as well. And I see them at the same time, at once ecstatic at the beauty of things, and chary of that ecstasy. The Japanese have a phrase for this dual perception: mono no aware. It means "beauty tinged with sadness," for there cannot be any real beauty without the indolic whiff of decay. For me, living is the same thing as dying, and loving is the same thing as losing, and this does not make me a madwoman; I believe it can make me better at living, and better at loving, and, just possibly, better at seeing.

Sally Mann, ‘Hold Still; A Memoir with Photographs.' 

For a visual artist straddling the 20^th and 21^st centuries, photographer Sally Mann is remarkably rooted in her native soil. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, she has lived in Rockridge County for all her life apart from a spell at school in Vermont when she was a teenager. She married Larry Mann in 1970 and the couple raised their three children in the house they built on a farm bought on impulse by Sally’s medical practitioner father in the late 1950’s. Her work is rooted in history, in place, in family, in community but is not constrained in any way by the idyllic surroundings of the Shenandoah valley because her themes are the eternal verities, life and death, light and darkness, love, loss, memory and the unremitting flight of time.  She acquired public notoriety in 1992 with her exhibition and third monograph ‘Immediate Family’. A cover article for the New York Times Magazine focussed on photographs Mann had taken of her children naked in the arcadian surroundings of the family farm. The author, Robert Woodward, claimed Mann had been told that “no fewer than eight pictures she had chosen for the traveling exhibition could subject her to arrest” for displaying indecent images. Her work was denounced as child pornography, often by people who had never seen it, and whilst the controversy made ‘Immediate Family’ a publishing sensation and Mann a celebrity, it was damaging to her reputation and brought with it much unwanted attention. 

Surprisingly perhaps further controversy did not ensue when Mann published ‘What Remains’ in 2003, a book which features photographs of decomposing corpses taken at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility, more generally known as the Body Farm. Regarding ‘What Remains’, Blake Morrison noted in the Gurdian “her point being that death is not an end, that nature goes on doing its work long after the body has become a carapace. When her exhibition of that title opened in Washington in 2004, most reviewers got the point: "But not the woman in the New York Times, who freaked out and called the photos gross." Mann was surprised to see an art critic using the vocabulary of a 10-year-old, but not by the underlying prejudice: "There's a new prudery around death. We've moved it into hospital, behind screens, and no longer wear black markers to acknowledge its presence. It's become unmentionable."

In the introduction to her book Mann says that her ‘kids chalk up my “death thing” to genetics, blaming it, along with other things I do, on my father.” Robert S. Munger, her father, was a GP, who for four decades ‘labored over his great masterwork…exploring the iconography of death in art.’ He was, she says, ‘even for the time,..an uncommonly direct man. Not for him the euphemisms of death – it was a dead body, not “remains,” nobody “passed,” there was no “eternal rest.” People died and that was it.’ He died himself in 1988, suffering from cancer he committed suicide with an overdose of Seconal. His death ‘laid me flat for almost a year. Now, many deaths later, I am as perplexed by the experience as ever. Where did all of that him-ness go? All that knowledge, the accretion of experience from a remarkable life, the suffering – his and others’ – he had borne, the beauty, life’s own rapturous visions?” He died on the couch in the family living room and Mann took a famous picture of him post mortem, lying in his red robe, wild flowers laid on his chest and circling his wrists.    

‘What Remains’ is split into four sections; the first ‘Matter Lent’ begins with a quote from the 17th century French bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet

All things summon us to death: nature, almost envious of the good she has given us, tells us often and gives us notice that she cannot for long allow us that scrap of matter she has lent…she has need of it for other forms, she claims it back for other works.

In the pages that follow, Mann explores the physical processes by which the matter lent to us during our lives is returned to the natural world after our deaths. She draws us gently into the theme beginning with the decayed remains of her pet greyhound Eva, who died one Valentines Day and for whom Mann ‘wept noisily’. “And yet,” she says “I was still curious about what would finally become of that head I had stroked, oh, ten thousand times, those paws she so delicately crossed as she lay by my desk, rock hard nails emerging from the finest white hair.” So with the help of a friend, Mann buries her much loved Eva in a metal cage on the farm and a few weeks later disinters her to find “what looked like a stick drawing of a sleeping dog; her bones, punctuated by tufts of indigestible hair and small cubes of adipocere, appeared like a constellation in a rich black sky.” The first photos of Eva show her hide; presumably Mann’s friend, who ‘didn’t bat an eye’ at what she asked him to do, had skinned Eva for her, before helping to bury the greyhound. A series of Mann’s darkly sensuous images then show us the teeth, claws and bones of the dead dog. Then a quote from the poet Galway Kinnell (lamenting the barrenness of embalming and its prevention of decomposition) stands opposite a tenebrous landscape of leaves and grass in which a tiny sluglike old-fashioned shroud, tied neatly at both ends, shines luminously white. We are on the body farm. These are not documentary photographs but beautiful as they are, there is no attempt to disguise the subject matter. Bodies bloated with the post mortem gases produced by the corpses intestinal flora, skin split as it swells, skin being sloughed off, faces reduced to eyeless sockets and bared teeth. One photo shows a face apparently enveloped in mist; I thought it must be a spider’s web. In ‘Hold Still’ Mann reveals that the face was in fact a mass of writhing blow fly maggots (she provides a graphic colour image to confirm it), the gauzy film that veils it in the final black and white photograph was produced by a long exposure which reduced the motion of the insects to a fine blur.     

The section ‘December 8, 2000’ records the day a 19-year-old police fugitive broke onto the Mann family property. When cornered by the police he hid himself behind a tree within sight of the Mann’s house, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Later Mann photographs the landscape where the suicide took place, the tracks left by the police cars in the meadow grass, the space around the tree where the body lay. “Death has left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in the front yard,” Mann says, “But would a stranger, coming upon it a century hence, sense the sanctity of the death-inflected soil?” The next section, ‘Antietam’, answers that question. It is a series of landscape photos taken on the site of the Battle of Antietam, in Sharpsburg, Maryland where in 1862 the armies of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General George B. McClellan, fought on the bloodiest day in American history, with 22,727 men dead, wounded or missing.  Mann’s photos, all apparently taken at night, may be darkly foreboding and dramatic but we know that this has everything to do with her artistic vision and little to do with the actual landscape. The final section ‘What Remains’ begins with a quote from Mann’s beloved Ezra Pound;

What thou lovest well remains
the rest is dross
What thou lov’t well shall not be
reft from thee 

It continues with 20 portraits of her children, cropped images of their faces. What remains is the love? It sounds trite but it isn’t, the series portraits grows more distorted with each shot, one is faded out except for a pair of lips, in others there are scratches and marks in the negatives, or the print is so dark the face resembles a skull with huge black sockets and the blanched skin looking like bone. What remains? Nothing. Love. Memory, The body. It all goes, it all ceases to exist.   

In 2015 Mann published a 570 page memoir called ‘Hold Still’ and last year reissued it in paperback as one of their Modern Classics series. There is plenty of stiff competition out there but this book is one of the best autobiographies I have ever read. Mann is as talented a writer as she is a photographer. She may not have moved very far from Lexington and even now spends most of her time at home but her life is fascinating from her feral childhood (her description) to her stately old age (she is now 74, though you wouldn’t guess it to see her). The book seems blisteringly honest; she does not shy away from or make excuses for her relatively privileged upbringing. There is a fascinating account of Gee-Gee, Virgina Carter, the black nanny who brought up Mann and her siblings and to whom she felt closer than to her own mother. Her portrait of Carter and the belated realisation of the difficulties a black woman living in Virginia would have faced are compulsive reading. As is her own and her husband’s family history (her mother-in-law murdered her husband and then committed suicide). This isn’t a straight forward memoir; some readers have felt short changed because they felt Mann doesn’t reveal enough of her personal life, others feel that she doesn’t focus enough on her work and others feel that the non-linear narrative is distracting. Despite all this it was a best seller in the US. I think it is a wonderful book, I love the meandering form, I love its willingness to grasp thorny issues, quite frankly I love everything about it. The woman is a genius and don’t let anyone tell you any different.  

The Tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) Riverside Drive, New York

It was a freezing February visit to NYC; nighttime temperatures down to -8C and daytime only up to -1C in the sun, -10 with windchill taken into account. I wanted to visit Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn and I would happily have braved the subarctic weather conditions. But I could hardly expect the mother of my children to risk frostbite trailing around after me. We compromised and went to visit the tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant, 18th President of the United States, which was a short ride on the IRT up to 125th Street Station in Harlem (‘Up to Lexington, one-two-five’, the Velvet Underground playing in my head the whole way) and a 15-minute walk to Riverside Drive and Grant’s Mausoleum. To get inside you have to go to the General Grant National Memorial Visitor Centre across the road and ask one of the Park Rangers if they will let you in. There were only three us wanting to see the mausoleum on a bitterly cold midweek morning; the Ranger told us that we could only stay in there for 10 minutes for health and safety reasons, the temperature being so low. To be honest, out of the freezing wind the chilly mausoleum felt almost balmy.

The National Park Service leaflet about the mausoleum says that Grant was “a plain-spoken unassuming man who studiously avoided pomp and ceremony.” It is ironic then that the nation decided to honour him by entombing him in a mausoleum of a grandeur usually considered more appropriate for the last resting places of Emperors, Kings and Pharaohs. General Grant, who was born in Ohio, is credited with winning the Civil War for the Union after struggling to get himself recruited at a suitable rank in the early stages of the conflict. Lincoln eventually promoted him to Lieutenant General after his victory at Chatanooga and he defeated the confederate General Robert E. Lee after a 13-month campaign at the battle of Appomattox. He fell out with Lincoln’s unpopular successor, Andrew Johnson, and became the Republican candidate for the Presidency in 1868. Reconstructing and reuniting the war-ravaged US was an even bigger job than winning the war and Grant struggled with what was an almost impossible task but is now generally considered to have done a creditable job under difficult circumstances. He won re-election to the Presidency in 1872 in a landslide victory but his second term was a struggle and he stood aside for the 1876 election. In 1877 he commenced a two-year world tour, starting in England before moving onto Europe, then India and the rest of Asia, before travelling back to the US via Hawaii. In England he was the guest of the Prince of Wales at Epsom races (where he also met the Duke of Wellington) and he had breakfast with Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope and Robert Browning. He was received by Queen Victoria at Windsor, though there were issues about protocol as no one knew how to treat an Ex-president (the then prime minister Benjamin Disraeli thought that he was just a ‘commoner’) and his son Jesse, much to his disgust, was seated at the official banquet with the Royal servants.    

His later years were overshadowed by financial worries. With an income of only $6000 dollars a year and no presidential pension, Grant felt obliged to involve himself in business speculations starting with the ill fated Mexican Southern railroad which went bankrupt in 1884. He then invested $100,000 dollars in his son’s Wall Street brokerage firm, not realising that his son’s partner, a man called Ferdinand Ward, was essentially running a Ponzi scheme. When the scheme eventually crashed Grant not only lost all his money, he found himself in personal debt of $150,000 to William Henry Vanderbilt from whom he had borrowed the money, at Ward’s insistence, to try and save the floundering firm. Vanderbilt offered to forget the debt but Grant refused and repaid all the money by signing over his house to the multi-millionaire and selling off most of his personal possessions. His integrity was heroic; he already knew that he was suffering from the throat cancer that would kill him the following year. Desperate for cash to try and secure the finances of his soon to be widow Julia, Grant began writing articles on his civil war campaigns for The Century Magazine at $500 a time.  These were so well received that he accepted an offer for a book from the magazine to write his memoirs with a 10% royalty. At this point his friend Mark Twain stepped in and made him an alternative offer for the memoir, with a royalty of 70%.  Grant spent his last months writing his memoirs, completing them on 18 July 1885, just five days before he died on July 23rd. 

News of General Grant’s death was widely reported in the British and Colonial press. One of the first full reports came in the Colonial Standard and Jamaica Despatch published in Kingston on the first of August and drawing heavily on a report in the New York Herald which gave extensive details of the General’s dying moments;       

Death of General Ulysses Grant.

THE TWICE ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.

The "New York Herald," of the 24th July announces the death of General Grant; which took place after nine months of suffering, from cancer on the tongue, at Mount McGregor shortly after eight o'clock on the morning of the preceding day. From scenes at his death bed published in the "Herald," we take the following pathetic example;

The wife almost constantly stroked the forehead and hands of the dying General, and at times, as the passionate longing to prevent the event so near would rise within her, Mrs. Grant pressed both his hands, and, leaning forward, tenderly kissed the face of the sinking man, colonel Fred Grant sat silently, but with evident feeling, though his bearing was that of a soldier at the death-bed of a hero father. U. S. Grant, Jr., was deeply moved, but Jessie bore the scene steadily, and the ladies, while watching with wet cheeks. were silent as befitted the dignity of a life such as was closing before them. The morning had passed five minutes beyond 8 o'clock and there was not one of the strained and waiting watchers but who could mark the nearness of the life tide to its final ebbing. Dr. Douglas noted the nearness of the supreme moment and quietly approached the bedside and bent above it, and while he did so the sorrow of the grey haired physician seemed closely allied with that of the family. Dr Shrady also drew near. It was seven minutes after eight o'clock and the eyes of the General were closing.

His breathing grew more hushed as the last functions of the heart and lungs were hastened to the closing of the Ex-President's life. A peaceful expression seemed to be deepening in the firm and strong lined face, and it was reflected as a closing comfort in the sad hearts that beat quickly under the stress of loving suspense. A minute more passed as the General drew a deeper breath. There was an exhalation like that of one relieved of long and anxious tension. The members of the group were impelled each a step nearer the bed, and each awaited another respiration, but it never came. There was absolute stillness in the room, and a hush of expectant suspense, and no sound broke the silence save the singing of the birds in the pines outside the cottage and the measured throbbing of the engine that all night had waited by the little mountain depot down the slope. “It is all over," quietly spoke Dr. Douglas and there came then heavily to each witness the realization that General Grant was dead.

Then the doctors withdrew, the nurse closed down the eyelids and composed the dead General's head, after which each of the family group pressed to the bedside, one after the other, and touched their lips upon the quiet face so lately stilled.

From the Aberdeen Press and Journal - Tuesday 01 June 1897

Over a decade later the British press followed with interest the building of the General’s mausoleum. This is from the Saffron Walden Weekly News of Friday 09 April 1897;

GENERAL GRANT'S TOMB. The inauguration of the Grant Mausoleum in New York on April 27th promises be one of the most impressive ceremonies ever witnessed in the United States. When General Grant died there was universal desire among his countrymen that his services should be marked in some striking manner, and so long ago 1885 a, committee began to collect funds and inspect designs. The site selected is at Riverside Park, on the banks of the river Hudson, near New York city. For some years the project met with only moderate financial success, but in 1892 there was a great revival of popular feeling in New York city, and in single month £40.000 was subscribed.

Altogether the monument will cost £120,000. It consists of a granite structure 90 feet square. This runs to height of 70ft. and then is surmounted circular cupola 70ft. in diameter which has a pyramidical top. The summit is 150ft. from the base, and as the site selected is 130ft. above the waters of the Hudson, it will form a conspicuous landmark for many miles.

The interior is cruciform, ornamented with sculptures illustrating the life and death of General Grant. These are the work of an American sculptor, Mr J. Massey Rhind. The sarcophagus is porphyry, and the pedestal of dark bluish grey granite. All the exposed faces of the sarcophagus are highly polished, the finish being so smooth that the surfaces are like mirror, reflecting whatever objects are close at hand. The pedestal is square in plan, measuring ten feet ten inches each way. The lower course is made in pieces, with a simple moulding, and is one foot eight inches thick. Above this is a five inch course, also made in pieces. Under this rest two large blocks, ten feet long and five feet wide, and on these rest the pillow blocks, which support the sarcophagus proper and its cover. The total height above the floor the crypt will be seven and half feet. The space inside is large enough to contain the metallic casket of highly-polished copper inside the cedar coffin. The casket of Bessemer steel which now encloses the coffin will be dispensed with, as it is no longer needed, its place being taken by the stone sarcophagus, with I its heavy cover. The only inscription the sarcophagus is: “Ulysses S. Grant.”

The Exeter & Plymouth Gazette of 22 April 1897 focussed on the details of the General’s sarcophagus;

The sarcophagus, in which the remains of Ulysses S. Grant will be placed on the 27th inst. on the Riverside Drive, New York City, is a huge block of granite quarried at Montello, Wisconsin. When uncut, this stone is as being of “a pinkish chocolate colour dashed with specks of black and white,” and when polished, “it becomes indescribably beautiful, the pale pink taking a rich red lustre, and the fine hard grain reflects like a mirror.” The sarcophagus weighs 10 tons. Its dimensions are 10 feet 4 inches long, 5 feet 6 inches wide, and 4 feet 8 inches long. The lid is of marble.  The sarcophagus is supported by two pillar blocks of granite resting on a slab of granite from Massachusetts, the grey of which contrasts admirably with the rich red tone of the sarcophagus. The inscription, with eloquent simplicity, consists only of the name, arranged in three lines, “Ulysses S. Grant.”

And finally, from the Evening News of Wednesday 28 April 1897 details, supplied almost instantly by Reuters via the latest technology of telegraphy, of the inauguration ceremony held the previous day in New York;  

(Reuter’s Cablegram) New York, April 27.—The monument to General Grant which has been erected by private subscription on the Riverside Drive, overlooking the Hudson, was dedicated to-day, in presence of President M‘Kinley,  ex-President Cleveland, the high officers of the nation and of the various States, the members of the Diplomatic Corps, the survivors of General Grant’s family, including Mrs Sertous and children, and a vast concourse of spectators.

The dedication was marked by splendid pageant on land and water. The weather was favourable on the whole. Lying off the promontory were the American and foreign warships participating in the ceremonies, All were decked with flags and fired salutes in the morning. In the course of the forenoon the sons of Confederate veterans laid a wreath (with crossed swords) on the tomb.

Shortly after nine o'clock President M’Kinley and Mr Hobart, Mrs. Grant, and family, and the official guests, accompanied by an escort, preceded to the monument.   The members of the diplomatic corps, headed by Sir Juliam Pauncefote were also warmly greeted as they passed along. The ceremonies began at half-pest eleven with a brief religious service.

President M‘Kinley then delivered a short address. General Grant, he said, loved peace and told the world that honourable arbitration was the best hope of civilisation. Mr. Horace Porter transferred the monument to the sale-keeping of the city. The march past of troops followed. In this there participated nearly 6000 regular troops, seamen, and marines. The troops were everywhere received with ringing cheers.  They were subsequently received by Mr M’Kinley.

The President afterwards went on board the Dolphin and reviewed the fleet. The city was gaily beflagged and decorated, a feature in the decorative scheme being portraits of General Grant, on which were inscribed his words, ‘Let’s have peace.’

In the evening there was a largely attended reception of foreign and naval officers at Waldorf House. Her majesty’s ship Talbot had a leading place in the foreign line of the international fleet.

General Grant accepts the surrender of General Robert E. Lee

Scenes of Clerical Life; the remarkable story of the Rev. Basil Claude Hudson Andrews (1867-1963? final resting place unknown)

 

This kindly looking old cove is the Reverend Basil Andrews, for forty years the chaplain at Kensal Green Cemetery. The most famous funeral service he conducted, certainly the one he remembered in later life, was for Winston Churchill’s two-year-old daughter Marigold in August 1921. A grief-stricken Churchill asked the assembled press photographers not to take pictures and it is always said that they quietly left without taking any shots of the private funeral. But researching the life of Reverend Andrews I came across a grainy photo on the front page of the Daily Mirror for Saturday 27 August 1921 which shows a clergyman, it must be him, conducting the final part of the service in front of an open grave. Churchill stands with stooped shoulders, supporting himself with a walking stick, by Andrews’ side.  A large crowd of mourners is gathered on the far side of the grave; it seems to have been a very public ‘private’ funeral for the two-year-old. Thirty years later a disgraced Andrews was recalling the funeral for the benefit of a journalist, from the Sunday Dispatch, whose distrust of the cleric’s uncorroborated word was so great that he felt obliged to go and check the story in newspaper files. The Reverend Basil Andrews was, it has to be said, not a man to be trusted.

Basil Claude Hudson Andrews was born at the vicarage of St Luke's, Kentish Town in 1867. His father Charles was the vicar of St Luke's and Basil was the youngest of seven children. He was educated privately at St Edward’s School Oxford and, for reasons which were almost certainly nothing to do with religious conviction, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and become ordained as a clergyman in the Church of England.  At the age of 24 he became a missionary in South Africa, where he spent four years before moving on to take up a clerical position in Toronto. In Canada he made his first marriage, to Annie Maud Rackham in December 1895. The couple had two children, a son Arthur who was born in 1897 and a daughter Naomi who was born in January 1901 but died just a month later (Arthur was also to die young, in 1922 at the age of 25). The marriage evidently did not go well because a couple of years later Basil returned to England apparently abandoning his wife and young son in Canada. He then spent three years as a curate at the parish of St Leonards, in Watlington, Oxfordshire before his tenure ended in mysterious circumstances. In 1907 he became the chaplain at Kensal Green cemetery, a job he remained in for the next forty years. 

The 1911 census shows the 43-year-old Basil living at Flat 5, 89 Elgin Crescent with his 27-year-old ‘wife’, Emma Louise Andrews. In truth Basil and Emma were, ironically, living together without benefit of clergy. Basil was, after all, still married to Annie in Canada. At the same time he also seems to have been carrying on a relationship with a woman called Alice Clark as she gave birth to a son in Hackney in 1913 and Basil is the registered father. Despite this his relationship with Emma seems to have been a serious one; they were certainly still masquerading as man and wife on the 1921 census, though she may not have known about his amorous adventures in Hackney. Basil could have made an honest woman of Emma as his first wife died in March 1921. He may have been able to marry her even earlier; Annie remarried in 1915, either because she and Basil had divorced or because she thought she could get away with bigamy. In any case Basil was free to remarry by 1921 at the latest but there is no record of a marriage ever taking place.  Electoral records show Emma as living at Elgin Avenue with Basil until 1931; she then disappears from the record, untraceable now because Andrews was never her real name.

Financial difficulties as well as Basil’s reluctance to pop the question were probably the cause of the breakdown of his relationship with Emma. By 1925 Basil was bankrupt, owing £6500 to his creditors and having only £300 in assets. Although he wasn’t admitting it to anyone, Basil was a gambler and a spendthrift. To the court he claimed that he had only got into financial difficulties trying to help out an unnamed friend. This is from the Kensington Post of 09 January 1925;

A CHAPLAIN’S GUARANTEE, At Bankruptcy Buildings, Carey Street, the first meeting was held of the creditors under a receiving order made against Basil Claude Hudson Andrews, clerk in Holy Orders, whose address was given as Elgin Avenue. The receiving order was made on the debtor’s own petition. From the statement made by Mr. Walter Boyle, Senior Official Receiver, it appeared that the debtor estimated his liabilities at £6,500, and his assets at £300, apart from a claim of against a friend, who was an undischarged bankrupt. The debtor was ordained in 1890. He had taken duty in South Africa and in Canada, and from 1906 until 1908, when he was appointed chaplain at Kensal Green, he acted as organising secretary for the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society for the dioceses of Oxford and Peterborough. He became guarantor for his friend, who had borrowed £500 from a moneylender, and to meet his guarantee he had himself been forced to obtain loans. In the hope that his friend might repay him, he had borrowed from moneylenders. He attributed his insolvency to the high interest he had to pay. It was decided that the estate should remain in the hands of the Official Receiver.

In 1932 Basil married again, this time a wealthy widow, Edith Isabella Henderson.  Edith, and her money, seem to have kept Basil out of trouble for the next 20 years. He retired from Kensal Green in 1947 and the couple carried on living quietly in the Elgin Crescent flat until Edith died in 1952. Following her death the 85-year-old Basil found himself gradually slipping into a way of life that would eventually make him, temporarily at least, the most famous, and notorious, clergyman in England. Quite what happened we do not know but by 1955 Basil was apparently almost destitute, no longer living at Elgin Crescent, hanging around the Cumberland Hotel in Bayswater, helping himself to continental breakfasts and whatever else he could cadge from the staff or guests, betting heavily on the horses and asking for favours from the other shady characters who used the hotel as a base for their shady activities. 

Jack 'Spot' Comer and his wife Margaret (Rita Molloy) after his acquittal on stabbing charges  

In the hot afternoon of Thursday 11 August 1955 an argument between two middle-aged men broke out outside the Bar Italia on Frith Street in Soho. The argument quickly turned violent and both men pulled out blades. The two combatants were 43-year-old Jacob Colmore aka Jack Comer or Jack Spot and the slightly younger and taller George Arthur Albert Dimeo aka Albert Dimes or Italian Al. The fight, in which both men were seriously injured, was the climax of a long running power struggle between Jewish gangland boss Jack Spot and his one-time protegee Billy Hill. Hill encouraged Dimes to refuse to pay protection money to Spot and the result was the fracas outside the Bar Italia. That no one was killed in the fight is generally credited to Mrs Stone Hyams. the 13 stone wife of a Frith Street greengrocer, who laid about both men with a cast iron frying pan. When Spot found himself in court charged with stabbing Dimes a key witness was the Reverend Basil Andrews who had apparently witnessed the fight from the other side of Frith Street and quite clearly seen Dimes pull his weapon first and inflict the first wound. The jury drew the conclusion that Spot had acted in self defence and he was acquitted.  The Reverends performance in the witness box may have convinced the jury but the police and perhaps more crucially, the press, were not fooled. The police were chary of questioning 88-year-old clergymen on whether he had perjured himself in the witness box but the press had no compunctions. Basil found himself besieged in his rented room by Fleet Street’s finest.

“When I was living in Inverness-terrace,” he later recalled, “I was bombarded by these beastly reporters who have no decency in them and who do nothing but bully and nag and treat you abominably. They came upstairs while I was in bed and when I opened the door, they put their foot in the door and treated me disgracefully. It is a disgrace for the Press to treat a man like at. I believe a reporter of the Daily Telegraph came to my room and he happened to be an extremely nice man. I do not know his name. He asked me lots of questions about my life. He said: ‘Of course, in the future, at some time or other, if you tell us a story it might be worth your while,’ something to that effect.” Garrulous Basil ended up confiding in the nice man from the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper published, the police questioned Basil and by December Spot’s 27-year-old Mrs. Margaret Comer, of Hyde Park Mansions, Marylebone; Peter MacDonough, 45, of Upper Berkeley-street, Mayfair; Morris Goldstein, 43, of Gore - road, Hackney, and Bernard Schack, 53, of Maple-place, Stepney found themselves behind the dock accused of conspiracy to pervert the course of Justice. Basil was the main prosecution witness. According to the daily Express he “said in a pulpit-loud voice at Bow-street court yesterday: “The evidence I gave at the Old Bailey trial of Jack Comer was all lies. I never saw the fight I described; I was not even there. I got £64 for the lies I told.” Under questioning from the prosecution barrister and the 3 counsels for defence he told the court that he had been first approached by McDonough in the Cumberland Hotel, then met Goldstein and Schack before been driven by car next day “to a flat in Hyde Park Mansions from Inverness-terrace, Bayswater, where I was living. At Hyde Park Mansions we went to a flat on the fifth floor. I was shown into a very nicely furnished sitting-room with large armchairs and was introduced to Mrs. Comer. She was extremely nice and offered me a cup of tea. She was very friendly and pleased to see me. I think she expressed herself as being so thankful that I was going to help them. She was in a terrible state of anxiety about her husband. I felt extremely sorry for her. At the end of my first visit to the flat Mrs. Comer gave me a £1 note. . .  I am not positive whether it was £1 or 10s. to pay for a taxi.” Basil was taken to Frith Street to fix the topography of the knife fight in his head, and comprehensively rehearsed in his story before been taken to see Spot’s solicitor to make a statement. The jury found all four defendants guilty. Margaret Comer was fined £50 but the three men were all given jail sentences, McDonough and Schack 12 months and Goldstein two years.

A few months after his wife's conviction for conspiracy, Jack and Rita were attacked by a gang of Billy Hill's enforcers, including Mad Frankie Fraser. In this famous photo Jack shows off his injuries from the attack

The perjuring parson had found himself an unexpected celebrity following the initial trial. The newspapers were keen to find out more about him and contrary to what he told the court in the conspiracy case, it wasn’t just the Daily Telegraph he had spoken to.  Even when he did refuse to speak to journalists some old acquaintances were not so reluctant, turning out to be blabbermouths who could just not stop themselves talking once a reporter flipped open his notebook and asked them a question or two.  This is from the Daily Herald of 26 September 1955;

In the past two years Mr. Andrews appears to have abandoned the settled life which he had hitherto led. For about 40 years he lived at a flat in Elgin-avenue, Maida Vale—first with his wife and later, after she died, alone. Since leaving there two years ago he has had a number of addresses. Mrs. Gertrude Vizard, caretaker of the Elgin-avenue flats, remembers him. "He had many friends at Oxford," she said last night, "and was often visited by a woman from Oxford who had a young daughter. He was a kind and quiet gentleman, but never had much money. I once lent him £8 to settle an income tax demand but he paid me back." The Rev. Basil Andrews had appointments in Canada until came this country in 1901 and became curate at St. Peter's, Eaton-square, S.W. Then for 40 years he was chaplain at Kensal Green Cemetery until he retired in 1947. In the last few years has worked the tough streets of Soho among criminals and girls who have "gone astray."

Even more damaging was the story in the Sunday Dispatch on the 2nd of October 1955 which appeared under the headlines ‘From diamond fields to the West End stage, the strange life of the ‘Jack Spot’ parson, Women travelled miles to hear him preach’;

"The parson with the silver voice." That is how the people of Watlington, Oxfordshire, remember the Rev. Basil Andrews, key witness in the sensational Jack ("Spot") Comer case. Older parishioners recall the tall, dark, wavy-haired curate whose brilliant preaching filled the church 45 years ago. They remember that many women came from miles around to hear him. For three years they thronged to listen to the "dapper" curate. Then Mr. Andrews went as suddenly as he came. "He disappeared from the White House at Church Close with his smartly dressed wife and son one week-end," Mr. Harold Searly, 70-year-old clothier, told me, "In a way we were sorry to him go. We will never forget his three years at St. Luke's Parish Church." Mr. Surly said It was understood that Mr. Andrews left because women parishioners were paying him too much attention. "I was always in the congregation," Mr. Searly added. "So were my sisters. He was so interesting. He helped the church no end. He was a vigorous worker and looked after the choir. Two years ago he came back to our village. I hardly recognised him. He told me he was retired and wanted to meet old friends."

Mr. F. Storer, of the Mill House. Cooksham-road, Watlington, told me: "He stayed here sometimes with my mother and father. He was a great friend of the family. I know of no relationship between us, though my sister, Mrs. Sybil Owen. of Eastleigh, Southend, Garsington, Oxford, has been described as his niece. I saw him about four years ago. He came here with Sybil and I drove him around. My mother knew him before she married my father, who was organist at St. Luke's Church.” Friends of Mr. Arthur Owen, Sybil's husband, told me: "Mrs. Owen has been away for three years. She returned Just over a week ago. I was surprised to see that she has become a blonde after three years away."

Later. Mr. Andrews became minister at All Souls Church of England Chapel in Kensal Green Cemetery. He had a flat in Elgin Avenue, W. In the past ten years he was a fairly frequent visitor to a public house at Kensal Green. He would go in, drink five pints of beer and have a set lunch. It was not unusual for him to leave a half a crown tip. In the neighbourhood people told me: " He used to buy a midday racing paper. He telephoned his bets. Sometimes his language was unclerical."

In Soho Mr. Andrews was also well known. "In the years I've known him he always liked a gamble," a friend said. The silver tongue of the whitehaired. bent-shouldered Rev. Basil Claude Andrews has not deserted him in his 89th year. He tells how, at the age of 23, he went to South Africa as a missionary. He shook hands with Cecil Rhodes within 60 minutes of disembarking at Cape Town. But for his wanderlust, he says, he could have been a bishop in Toronto, Canada. After three years In South Africa. and wandering round the diamond fields of Kimberley, meeting and drinking with "some of the worst scoundrels in the world," Andrews sailed for Canada. There. in Toronto he became secretary to the bishop and priest-vicar at the cathedral. Mr. Andrews's next recollection takes him to London's West End and he believes the Lyric Theatre. There he had tea on the stage with actress Marie Löhr while the curtain was down between acts. Another experience he tells about was reading the burial service at Kensal Green Cemetery over the child of Winston Churchill. who was then Colonial Secretary. (This service—on two-year-old Marigold Frances Churchill — has been verified in newspaper files). Not long ago. Mr. Andrews says. he went for help--because he was hard up—to the Rt. Rev. Cyril Eastaugh, Bishop of Kensington. "But." says Mr. Andrews. his thin lips tightening, "the bishop was most unsympathetic. He despises me because I have borrowed money and not pad it back, and in particular, borrowed it from members of the Church."

After the trial, and rather unusually or an 88-year-old man, the Reverend Basil disappears from the official record. Given that he was 88 he can’t have lived for very much longer but there is no trace of a death record for Basil Andrews in the UK, in Ireland or abroad. Did embarrassed relatives spirit him away? Quite possibly; there are rumours that he died in 1963, though no records are available to back this up. The rumours originate from Australia; his son with Annie Clark moved to New Zealand in the 1920’s. Perhaps Basil spent his final years living down under, living under an assumed name.

His death isn’t the only mystery still unsolved from Basil’s colourful life. James Morton in an article for the Law Society mentions in passing that Basil lived for 20 years with a woman called Ruby Young. Coincidentally Ruby was also someone who achieved national notoriety as a result of appearing as a witness in a court case. Her 15 minutes of fame had come in 1907 when she gave evidence in the trial of Robert Wood who was accused of murdering Phylis Dimmock, a prostitute, in Camden Town. Phylis had been found at her lodgings with her throat cut clutching a postcard of a rising sun. A photograph of a postcard was printed in the papers and Wood, an artist, came forward to admit not only that the drawing was his but that he had known Phylis. Wood also persuaded Ruby Young, an old girlfriend of his, to give him an alibi for the night of the murder, but she later changed her mind and went to a journalist and the police with the story. Ruby was called as a prosecution witness and she suddenly found herself famous. It had become clear in the course of her evidence that she had had an intimate relationship with Wood, and she was attractive and not averse to posing for newspaper photographers. This did not go down well with the jury who seemed to believe the defence’s suggestion that Ruby had made the whole thing up to get the £100 reward offered by The News of the World for anyone able to identify the handwriting on the rising sun postcard. Wood was found not guilty. If Morton is correct when would Ruby Young have lived with Basil? We know that Basil did live with a woman for more than 20 years; the woman who on the 1911 and 1921 census and the electoral roll is named as Emma Louisa Andrew. Are Ruby and Emma the same person living under different names? 

Is this Emma Louisa Young? 

Glasgow Necropolis

Seated under the massive proportions of a handsome mausoleum erected to the memory of a distinguished citizen of Glasgow, we write the notes for this article on the Necropolis, a burying-place beautified by nature and art. It is a bright morning in January, and the bracing frosty air has quite a pleasant and exhilarating effect. From far down in the valley beneath comes the hum of busy city life, making the solemn stillness here quite a contrast to the active existence below. The view from this elevated situation is picturesque and interesting in the highest degree. Quite a forest of elegant spires, tall chimneys, and handsome erections form prominent objects in the scene. Sweetly sounding above the noise of vehicular traffic, is heard the pleasing chimes of the bells at the Cross, in happy harmony with the feelings of meditation and contemplation that occupy our musing thoughts at this moment.  Although the general aspect of this great city of the dead is pleasing visitors are forcibly reminded of the mutability of all mundane affairs by the various objects of interest around. The multitude of miscellaneous gravestones preach a silent sermon against feelings of pride and vanity, or inordinate ambitious projects. Under the numerous erections, ‘neath the weeping willow or splendid mausoleums lies the remains of departed genius and heroism. Every walk teems with items of weird interest, the memorials on vault and speaking of human greatness in all departments of the world’s business, levelled down here in the romance of death into the comparative obscurity of one common fate and resting place.

‘Dick Swiveller’ Glasgow Necropolis, Glasgow Evening Post, 7 January 1887

 

I only spent a couple of hours at the Glasgow Necropolis, which is nowhere near enough time to fully explore its 37 acres. Glasgow’s premier cemetery is found on the city’s second highest hill at the rear of St Mungo’s cathedral, and has good views of the south of the city. The hilltop is almost treeless the turf studded with large monuments. The biggest of these, a statue of John Knox which stands on top of a 58-foot Doric column, predates the cemetery and was erected by public subscription in 1825 when the site was still Fir Park and the city’s dead were still buried in churchyards and small burial grounds. 

In 1831 John Strang published ‘Necropolis Glasguensis’, advocating the creation of a garden cemetery in Glasgow, to be modelled on Pere Lachaise and built on the site of Fir Park.

It is a melancholy truth, that while the cemeteries of ancient and modern nation have boasted something that has wooed, and still occasionally woos, thither the most cynical of our race. the cineral depots of Scotland and particularly those of Glasgow, have, from their neglected state, fairly banished from their bounds even those in whose bosoms the tender feelings of affection and sympathy hold a paramount sway. Here the chief characteristics of the churchyard are, the noxious weed, the broken tombstone, and the defaced inscription; and hence the sepulchre, instead of proving, as it does elsewhere, either the solemn and affecting shrine of devotion, or the resort and consolation to weeping individuals, is little better than a disgusting charnel-house avoided by general consent, as if infected with a pestilence, and calculated even when entered to call forth rather the feelings of aversion and disgust, than of sympathy and sorrow.

John Strang ‘Necropolis Glasguensis’ 1831

Strang had been born in Glasgow in 1795. The son of a successful wine merchant, the death of his father when he was 14 left him with independent means and the financial means to indulge his love of foreign travel and his literary ambitions. Fluent in French and German his earliest published works were translations of Hoffman and other romantic writers with a bent for fantasy and horror. He also involved himself in the civic life of his home town, eventually becoming City Chamberlain in 1834, a position he held for 30 years. Necropolis Glasguensis is a short work, typical of the garden cemetery movement, which surveys the worldwide history of burial practices, deplores the state into which current funeral practices have sunk and the unhealthy and dialpitated state of churchyards, eulogises Pere Lachaise and argues for a local version of the Parisian cemetery to be built. The Merchants House of Glasgow were already considered opening a cemetery and had even identified Fir Park as a potential site; Strang was already knocking at an open door. The cemetery was opened in 1833, the same year as the Cemetery of All Souls in Kensal Green. Strang is buried in the Necropolis.   

The best entrance to the cemetery is behind St Mungo’s Cathedral where after passing an impressive pair of gates you see three modern memorials, one to still-born children, the second to the Korean War and the third to Glaswegian recipients of the Victoria Cross. To get into the cemetery proper you cross the Bridge of Sighs, which spans the Molendinar Burn, admire the ornate abandoned entrance to what was to have a tunnel through the cemetery (it proved impractical to build it alas) and then you start the stiff climb to the top of the hill. On the way you will pass the grave of William Miller (1810-1872) ‘the laureate of the nursey’ according to his headstone and the author of ‘Wee Willie Winkie’, a nursery rhyme was has steeply declined in popularity since I was a child.

The top of the hill is covered with impressive memorials. Charles Tennant, who died in 1838, is shown, twice lifesize, seated casually in a chair, legs akimbo, arms dangling at his sides in an open necked shirt and a muffler around his neck. Tennant was a chemist who started off his career in weaving, made his fortune coming up with an improved bleaching process for cloth and opened the St Rollox Chemical Works. His great discovery was bleaching powder, Calcium Hypochlorite, the smell of which we are all intensely familiar with, as one of its uses is to treat water in swimming pools, a process which releases chlorine. Next time you are in a swimming pool and you take a lungful of chlorine, remember Charles Tennant.   

Other noteworthy memorials include the marvellous, neo-Norman 1842 Monteath mausoleum, now fenced off with a warning sign announcing 'Danger Keep Out'. Archibald Douglas Monteath (1773-1842) served in the East India Company and is alleged to have ““made his fortune when an elephant carrying precious gems belonging to a Maharajah was captured and ‘relieved’ of its load by him.” (The quote is lifted from the Friends of Glasgow Necropolis website, they don’t give a source for it but do say that it is probably not true. It may have some basis in truth; officials of the East India Company were not averse to robbing the natives…) Then there is the Mughal style Wilson Mausoleum which houses the mortal remains of William Rae Wilson (1772–1849) lawyer, landowner and travel writer, who wrote books on Italy, France, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Russia, Spain, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine. In this particular case, travel did not broaden the mind, according to the 1900 DNB he was “an upright man, a writer and a distributor of tracts, he was not of a specially tolerant spirit.”

 

The Messalina of the Suburbs; Edith Jessie Thompson (1893-1923) City of London Cemetery

 

“Three soldiers of the Coldstream Guards were walking in Montgomery street. Onegavean opinion in which all concurred. It was the woman, they said; he showed himself a man afterwards.”                                                                       James Joyce ‘Finnegans Wake’ 

 

At around midnight on Tuesday the 3rd October 1922, a married couple Percy and Edith Thompson were walking back to their house on Kensington Gardens from Ilford train station. They had spent the evening in London at the Criterion theatre watching a Ben Travers farce The Dippers. As the couple strolled home arm in arm they were followed by twenty-one-year merchant seaman Frederick Bywaters. In Belgrave Road, less than 200 hundred yards from their house, Bywaters pulled a twelve-inch knife from his coat, broke into a run and, catching up with the Thompsons, stabbed Percy twelve times in a short, frantic and fatal attack.  Most of Percy Thompson’s wounds were superficial but there were three severe neck wounds, one of which severed the carotid artery, sliced open the oesophagus and flooded his stomach with blood.  The scuffle was over in less than a minute. Frederick Bywaters immediately fled the scene leaving Percy Thompson to bleed to death in the arms of his hysterical wife.

Edith Thompson & Frederick Bywaters

Edith Graydon was born on the 25th December 1893, the eldest of 5 children, in Stamford Hill in North London. When she was 6 the family moved out their cramped accommodation to a house in Shakespeare Crescent in the new suburb of Manor Park in East London.  When Edith was eight, Frederick Bywaters was born round the corner in Rectory Road, E12.  The two families grew up together and Frederick became a great friend of one of Edith’s younger brothers. Of course, she would have paid no attention to a small boy 8 years her junior.  Edith left school at 15 and held a variety of jobs in shops and offices until, in 1911, she found work at the fashionable wholesale milliners Carlton & Prior in the Barbican, where she was to remain, a valued and trusted employee, until her death. She met the 19-year-old Percy Thompson a few months after leaving school, shortly before her sixteenth birthday.

Edith’s relationship with the stolid Percy was ambivalent almost from the start. They shared many mutual interests, in music and the theatre and in amateur dramatics but Edith was far livelier and more adventurous. Whilst Percy was a plodder at work and never received promotion, Edith quickly rose from a relatively menial sales job to assistant buyer, acquired passable French and went on sales trips to Paris. But she stuck with Percy, eventually losing her virginity to him on a holiday in Ilfracombe and thereby making it almost a certainty that she would have to marry him.  After a six-year long courtship (incredibly long for the time and quite probably a reflection of her uncertainty about a lifelong commitment to him) the couple finally married in 1916.  Shortly afterwards, with the ignominious threat of conscription hanging over him, Percy enlisted in the army. Within 4 months he had wrangled himself an honourable discharge with ‘suspected’ heart trouble (rumour had it that he had taken to smoking 50 cigarettes a day to induce cardiac palpitations).

Percy’s cowardice contrasted poorly with the much younger Frederick Bywaters eagerness to involve himself in the fight for King and country. By 1917, and still only fifteen he was still too young to enlist in the armed forces. Instead, he spent the spring and summer trying to volunteer for the merchant navy convoys that were being regularly torpedoed by German U boats. His mother blocked his first successful attempt to sign on by withholding parental permission.  Frederick simply lied about his age on his next attempt and in February 1918, after signing a disclaimer that he was accepting a position in the full knowledge of the dangers faced by shipping in war time, he set sail for India in the P & O troop carrier Nellore. For the next three months his mother had no idea where he was. His next voyage was to China. When the war ended Frederick decided to stick with the merchant navy. Following the death of his father from injuries sustained in a gas attack on the Somme, his mother had been forced to sell the house in Rectory Road and buy somewhere cheaper in South London. When Fredrick returned from a trip to China and Japan in early 1920 his family were settled in Upper Norwood. His ship was berthed in East Tilbury, and knowing that he was looking for temporary lodgings somewhere closer to Tilbury than Norwood the Graydon’s suggested he take a spare room at Shakespeare Crescent. It was here that he and Edith met again for the first time since Frederick had been a small boy. For the next seven weeks Frederick met regularly with the Thompson’s at Percy’s in-laws. The two men struck up friendship and Frederick began to take an interest in Edith’s younger sister Avis. After seven weeks he rejoined his ship on a voyage to Bombay and was away from the country for several months.

Frederick, Edith and Percy in the back garden in Ilford

In the summer of 1921 Frederick was back in the country and staying once again with the Graydon’s in Manor Park. The Thompson’s were planning a holiday on the isle of Wight and Edith had insisted on inviting her younger sister Avis. When Frederick showed up Percy fatefully suggested that he join them on the holiday as a foursome would be much more fun than Avis tagging along on her own. Percy was very aware that Avis was infatuated with the handsome young sailor and he seemed determined to play the matchmaker.  In fact, it was during this week on the Isle of Wight that Frederick and Edith first made their mutual interest in each other clear, at least to each other if not to Percy and Avis. The holiday was such a success that Percy invited Frederick to come and lodge with him and Edith at their new house in Kensington Gardens in Ilford.

Within a few days of moving into the Thompson’s home Frederick and Edith became lovers. On the 27th June, Frederick’s 19th birthday, they had the house to themselves as Edith had a day’s leave from her job. As soon as Percy left for work Edith made breakfast for the birthday boy and took it up to his bedroom where she inevitably ended up joining him in bed. Opportunities for sexual encounters would have been limited but the lovers took them whenever they could. Over the following weeks Percy became increasingly suspicious about the relationship between his wife and their young lodger. Freddy showed no desire to find himself a new berth on a ship and lost his former interest in passing boozy nights in local pubs with his host. Instead, he hung aimlessly around the house waiting to dance attendance on Edith when she returned home from work, helping her to set the table for meals, drying the dishes she had washed, and generally fetching and carrying for her. Edith was bright and cheerful with Freddy but irritable and impatient in her husband’s company. Most ominously she shunned his physical attentions. Percy began to grow sullen and resentful. Things came to a head on the August bank holiday. The three were sitting in the back garden, Edith sewing, Freddy reading a book, Percy the newspaper when Edith asks her husband to go into the house and get a pin for her. When he doesn’t jump up, Freddy does and disappears into the house. A furious argument breaks out between husband a wife. It lapses when Freddy reappears but starts again later inside the house. Freddy discretely steps outside to avoid being drawn into the squabble but as soon as he is gone Percy breaks into a tirade about Edith, her sister and her family in general. Goaded Edith screams back and Percy slaps her several times and pushes her backwards into a table. Hearing the fracas Freddy comes racing in back inside and steps between the Thompsons. Edith rushes upstairs but when Percy tries to follow Freddy stop-s him. There is no physical fight, Percy is a coward. He orders Freddy out of the house but Freddy refuses to go and tells Percy that if he ever touches his wife again, he will have him to deal with.  

The relationship between Edith and Freddy is now more or less out in the open as far as Percy is concerned. When Percy continues to insist Freddy moves out, in the end he has to comply. With no income he is also forced to go back to sea. While Freddy is away Edith begins the correspondence with him that would eventually get her hanged. The couple’s clandestine relationship continues whenever Freddy is in the country but when he is away Edith writes to him in candid detail of her daily life. She writes of her visits to the theatre, her flutter on the Derby, and a dinner with a mysterious man from Ilford called Mel, who has realised that Edith is having a sexual relationship with Freddy and therefore thinks it is worthwhile chancing his arm while the sailor is away. She writes of Percy’s sexual advances, her refusal to succumb to them and her husbands plaintive whine “Why aren’t you happy with me? We used to be happy.” She holds Percy’s advances off until 5th December; two days later Edith is putting an abortifacient into her porridge in case the encounter leads to a pregnancy. Percy picks up the wrong bowl and eats the drugged porridge himself. This semi farcical episode provides the germ for a series of recurrent fantasies in which Edith imagines drugging Percy’s tea or mixing ground glass into his porridge. She shares the details of her periods with Freddy, and tells him about is either a miscarriage or a self-administered abortion. The letters have the virtue of honesty, it was this quality of course which so shocked the judge and jury at her trial. What sort of woman would openly discuss her sexual feelings and her periods with a man? It was this unseemly candour which led to Edith, the Ilford milliner, being compared to Messalina, the whorish wife of the emperor Claudius who famously challenged Scylla, Rome’s premier prostitute, to a contest to see who could satisfy most men in a single night.

During the following year Freddy tries to get Edith away from Percy, even going to see him after the husband spots his wife and her ‘sailor boy’ at Ilford Station together. In the row that follows Percy tells Edith that if Bywaters were a man he would his permission to take out his wife. Edith relays this to Freddy who calls at Kensington Gardens to have things out man to man with Percy. He tells Percy that he doesn’t need anyone’s permission to take Edith and suggests that the couple come to an amicable agreement, a separation or a divorce. The humiliated Percy salvages what little dignity he can by digging in his heels and telling Freddy “Well I have got her and will keep her.” The argument between the two men does on for the best part of two hours but Percy refuses to budge although he finally agrees not to hit his wife anymore. All three parties no doubt grew increasingly frustrated until a desperate Freddy decides that there is only one way to resolve the situation; Percy must die. At the couple’s trial Freddy insisted that he had acted alone and that Edith had nothing to do with the murder of her husband. But from those letters the prosecution built a case that Edith, who was 29 and 7 years older than the 21-year-old Freddy, had manipulated, sexually and emotionally, the infatuated younger man. Her letters proved how shameless she was, they proved how she plotted to poison her husband or to kill him with ground glass and when that failed, how she insinuated to the hapless Freddy that he should kill Percy for her, so that they could finally be together. The evidence against Edith was scanty to say the least and one would hope that no modern jury would convict her on the basis of it.    

Justice was much swifter in the 1920’s than it is today. By the 6th December 1922 Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson were both on trial for murder at the Old Bailey.  On the 9th January 1923, little more than 3 months after the murder Bywaters was executed at Pentonville Prison and Thompson at Holloway.  The trial and execution generated a remarkable amount of public interest. People queued from midnight in an unusually cold winter to ensure a place in the public gallery at the court and the newspapers devoted dozens of pages of close print to the affair. The leader writer of The Times was at a loss to understand the attention given to a ‘simple and sordid case’ by the British public in ‘a trial which presented really no features of romance and which provided none of the horrors that appeal to a morbid mind.’ He went on to concede that there were elements of the crime passionnel, ‘but that extenuating term has never received a welcome in this country.’   No welcome from the legal establishment perhaps but from the British public it was another matter. Within a matter of days of the verdict prurience had turned to pity and public opinion swung firmly behind the condemned couple (though it was Bywaters that initially attracted the lion’s share of sympathy).  The Daily Sketch ran a campaign to save the pair from the hangman. On the day following the launch of the campaign the newspaper received 10,000 letters of support in the first post and a long queue to sign a petition had formed by midmorning from the lobby of its offices, out into the street and then 500 yards along the pavements. The magistrate who had committed Bywaters to trial wrote to the Home Office pleading for the boy’s life. He was followed by dozens of other worthies as the campaign gathered pace. Eventually the Daily Sketch collected over a million signatures in support of a reprieve, the largest ever petition in support of a condemned prisoner. 

The 82-year-old Thomas Hardy, who had read Edith Thompson’s correspondence and was struck by her looks, produced the distinctly unsympathetic poem ‘On the Portrait of a Woman about to be Hanged’ when he learned that she was to be executed.   In Paris James Joyce followed the case closely in the British newspapers and interpolated several passages from them into his notes for Finnegans Wake.  In the years that followed the case continued to exert a fascination that has never gone away. A score of novels, influenced to some degree by the case, appeared over the next 20 years including Dorothy L. Sayers ‘The Documents In The Case,’ E.M. Delafield’s ‘The Messalina Of The Suburbs’ and F. Tennyson Jesse’s ‘A Pin To See The Peepshow.’  The case was covered in the Notable British Trials series, Alfred Hitchcock later toyed with the idea of basing a film on it and by the time George Orwell came to write ‘The Decline of the English Murder’ for the Tribune in 1946 he could cite it as a classic example of the great British murder perpetrated, it seemed, purely for the delectation of the readers of the News of the World.  Following the Second World War, Orwell notwithstanding, Thompson and Bywaters seem to largely disappear from public consciousness (though the poet Kathleen Raine who was 13 at the time of the trial and living in Ilford, could declare in her 1974 autobiography that ‘Edith Thompson c’est moi’). Curiosity about domestic murders was gradually being replaced by an obsession with the phenomenon of serial killers. In the last thirty years however there has been a revival of interest beginning with the publication of Rene Weis’s account of the affair, ‘Criminal Justice’ in 1988. PD James’ discussed the case at length in 1994’s ‘The Murder Room’, the same year that Shelagh Stephenson’s radio play ‘Darling Peidi’ was broadcast. Since then Jill Dawson published the well-received novel ‘fred & edie’, and a feature film ‘Another Life’ dramatising the events that led up to the murder was released in 2001. There have been further books, notably by Laura Thompson and Edith’s letters have also been published in full. 

Following her execution Edith was buried in an unmarked grave within the grounds of Holloway Prison. Her parents expressed a wish for her to be buried with them but this was not possible for an executed prisoner. In 1971 the prison was redeveloped and the 5 bodies of executed women (including Rith Ellis) were exhumed. Ruth Ellis was buried elsewhere but the families of the other four executed women were not informed. Edith and the three other women were moved in secret and reinterred at Brookwood Cemetery.  Since 2000 Edith’s family and the author Rene Weiss campaigned to have her body moved from Brookwood to her parent’s grave in the City of London cemetery. On Tuesday 20th November 2018 Edith was exhumed from Brookwood and taken by private ambulance to an undertakers in Kingston. On the 22nd her body was brought to the City of London cemetery where a memorial service was held in the Anglican Chapel before Edith was reburied in her parent’s grave.