Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters - Early Life and Events Leading To The Murder

Early Life and Events Leading To The Murder

Edith Thompson was born Edith Jessie Graydon on Christmas Day 1893, at 97 Norfolk Road in Dalston, London, the first of the five children of William Eustace Graydon (1867–1941), a clerk with the Imperial Tobacco Company, and his wife, Ethel Jessie Liles (1872–1938), the daughter of a police constable. During her childhood, she was a happy, talented girl who excelled at dancing and acting, and was academically bright, with a natural ability in arithmetic. Upon leaving school in 1909, she joined a firm of clothing manufacturers near Aldgate Station in London. Then, in 1911, she was employed at Carlton & Prior, wholesale milliners, in the Barbican and, later, in Aldersgate. Edith quickly established a reputation as a stylish and intelligent woman and was promoted by the company several times, until she became their chief buyer and made regular trips to Paris on behalf of the company.

In 1909, at the age of fifteen, she met Percy Thompson, three years her elder. After a six-year engagement they were married at St Barnabas, Manor Park, in January 1916. At first they lived in Westcliff (Southend-on-Sea) before buying a house at 41 Kensington Gardens in the fashionable suburb of Ilford in Essex. With both their careers flourishing they lived a comfortable life.

In 1920, the couple became acquainted with 18-year-old Freddy Bywaters, although Bywaters and Edith Thompson had met nine years earlier when Bywaters, then aged nine, had been a school friend of Edith’s younger brother. By 1920, Bywaters had joined the merchant navy. The 26-year-old Edith was immediately attracted to the 18-year-old Bywaters, who was handsome and impulsive and whose stories of his travels around the world excited Edith's love of romantic adventure. To Edith, the youthful Bywaters represented her romantic ideal; by comparison, 29-year-old Percy seemed staid and conventional. Percy welcomed the youth into their company, and the trio, joined by Edith’s sister Avis, holidayed on the Isle of Wight. Upon their return, Percy invited Bywaters to lodge with them.

Soon afterwards, Edith and Bywaters began an affair, which Percy discovered. He confronted the pair. A quarrel broke out and, when Bywaters demanded that Percy divorce Edith, Percy ordered him from the house. Edith later described a violent confrontation with her husband after Bywaters left, and said that her husband struck her several times and threw her across the room. From September 1921 until September 1922, Bywaters was at sea, and during this time Edith Thompson wrote to him frequently. Upon his return, they met again.

Read more about this topic:  Edith Thompson And Frederick Bywaters

Famous quotes containing the words early, life, events, leading and/or murder:

    The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
    George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)

    The work of adult life is not easy. As in childhood, each step presents not only new tasks of development but requires a letting go of the techniques that worked before. With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.
    Gail Sheehy (20th century)

    Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone, which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past.
    David Hume (1711–1776)

    We have got to stop the nervous Nellies and the Toms from going to the Man’s place. I don’t believe in killing, but a good whipping behind the bushes wouldn’t hurt them.... These bourgeoisie Negroes aren’t helping. It’s the ghetto Negroes who are leading the way.
    Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)

    One can endure everything except hunger. If I were a man, maybe I would have committed murder to fill my stomach. But as a woman, I became a prostitute.
    “Manju” (b. c. 1973)