'Be a man, and don't hang a woman': The Interwoven Fates of Mr John Ellis and Mrs Edith Thompson

John Ellis

Born in Rochdale 1874, John Ellis would try his hand at a variety of occupations, including newsagent and hairdresser, before becoming an assistant executioner in 1901 and eventually Chief Executioner in 1907. Hanging a total of 203 people, Ellis' career spanned twenty-three years and only ended with his resignation in  early 1924. That summer, he was himself in the dock on a charge of attempted suicide, after shooting himself in the jaw. Appearing in court that August, he apparently 'looked very ill, and had two or three days' growth of beard on his face [...] During the proceedings he leaned wearily on the edge of the dock'. Mr Ellis was bound over for twelve months, meaning that he agreed not to repeat the attempt and that if he did, he would be brought back before the court on the original charge. Promising to give up the drinking habit that he claimed had precipitated the suicide attempt, Ellis left court and walked into obscurity. 

The Scotsman, 27th August 1924

Three years later, however, a play opened in Gravesend entitled The Life and Adventures of Charles Peace and Ellis was hired to play the part of William Marwood, public executioner in the latter part of the 19th century.  The last public execution in Great Britain had been carried out in 1868; since then, hangings had moved behind closed doors, and had somehow seemed more shady and secretive, almost less honest. There was something altogether very real about a public execution, witnessed by the populace. Now, as executions became almost sanitised in the public mind, some found the reminder of the reality of hanging to be a bit uncomfortable. 

The Leeds Mercury, 16th December 1927

The Leeds Mercury, 22nd December 1927

Despite being apparently well-received by audiences,  some found the notion of a real-life executioner playing one on the stage thoroughly distasteful. Questions were raised in the House of Commons. The MP for Hammersmith North, James Patrick Gardner, asked if perhaps in future some measures could be taken to prevent executioners from participating in such a spectacle, but the Home Secretary pointed out that this was really a matter for the Sheriffs and was not something in which he ought to get involved. Nonetheless, it appears that there was some public outcry, albeit rather muted. The Daily Herald reported on a 'rising tide of public indignation', though it has proven difficult to find any actual tide marks left behind, suggesting that this may be overstated. Nevertheless, it was a difficult episode in the retirement of John Ellis.

In September 1932, almost a decade after he resigned his post, Ellis made a second attempt on his life and this time he was successful. One afternoon, having returned home from his work as a hairdresser, Ellis' wife had the impression that he might have been drinking. Ellis ate his tea and went into another room to have a smoke. A short while later he returned, picked up his razor from a shelf, rushed over to his wife and declared his intention to cut off her head. Mrs Ellis fled and her husband turned to the couple's daughter, Constance, and said, "I cannot cut your mother's head off. I will cut yours off". Constance escaped and John disappeared into another room where he promptly sliced into his own neck with the razor, so deeply that he reportedly came close to decapitating himself. 

The Illustrated Police News, 29th September 1932

The Deputy Coroner unsurprisingly returned a verdict of 'Suicide while of unsound mind', explaining that he was 'of the opinion he [Ellis] did this rash act in a sudden frenzy of madness'. Many people, including some of Ellis' own friends and acquaintances, were of the opinion that it was his previous profession that had precipitated his madness, with one commenting that 'his trouble was his interest in crimes'. The friend continued, 'he read everything he could find in the newspapers about murders [...] and he always made up his mind beforehand about the verdict. That is why he worried so much about hanging Mrs Thompson for the murder of her husband. He felt she should have been given a life sentence'. 

Mrs Thompson. There is arguably nowhere else in British criminal history where the tragedies of both the executioner and the executed are felt to be so closely intertwined. Their deaths occurred more than ten years apart, but many were nonetheless quick to make the connection. The Illustrated Police News literally placed the two events side by side in their creative reimagining.

The Illustrated Police News, 29th September 1932

For his own part, Mr Ellis had always denied the connection between his role in the execution of Mrs Thompson and the later fragmentation of his mind. In an article in The Framlingham Times from around the time of the unfortunate Gravesend performance, Ellis is quoted as saying, 'In 1924 I retired [...] It is often rumoured that I did so through the Mrs Thompson case. But really that had nothing whatever to do with it, although it was a terrible task. Practically all the executions of Sinn Feiners in Ireland were done by me, and one morning I hanged six people before breakfast - two as six o'clock, two at seven o'clock, and two at eight o'clock. That was a dreadful day, and the strain was terrible'. It is hardly surprising that the job of Chief Executioner would take its toll on the psychological wellbeing of an individual, particularly if they operated as such for more than two decades. Despite his own denial that executing Mrs Thompson had been the cause of his decision to retire, if not also his suicidal ideation, newspapers continued to report the connection as fact, right up until Ellis' death in the 1930s.

The Illustrated Police News, 29th September 1932

I have recently been reading Laura Thompson's Rex v Edith Thompson: A Tale of Two Murders, which explores the character of Mrs Thompson extensively, laying out not simply the events as they unfolded, but the societal attitudes and prejudices that ultimately condemned her to hang. It is a curious book, not least due to the author's clear affection for her subject, but it has an excellent structure and was shortlisted for the Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger (Non-Fiction) Award a couple of years ago. The depth of Laura Thompson's analysis is obviously far beyond the scope of this blog, so I will look to another source to provide an overview of what became known as the Ilford Murder - the autobiography of Edith Thompson's executioner. As doing this has the joint benefit of explaining the murder and giving you a sense of Ellis as a man, I shall quote at length.

Entitled Diary of a Hangman, which is reassuringly to-the-point, Ellis' book is fairly short, and covers a small selection of cases he was involved with, chosen by himself. The book's opening chapter, 'How I Hanged a Woman', concerns Edith Thompson. Ellis writes

'Edith Jessie Thompson had been married about seven years when the tragedy came that was to end in the death of herself, her lover and her husband. For almost the whole of those seven years she and Percy Thompson had lived the ordinary uneventful lives of a normal husband and wife, in a suburban semi-detached house in Ilford. They had no children, leaving Edith free to continue her career as a bookkeeper and manageress of a central London millinery business, where she earned the then very considerable sum of £6 a week, plus bonuses. 

Although her husband didn't earn as much as she did, his salary as a shipping clerk meant that they could live comfortably, commuting to London every day, going to restaurants and the theatre and so on. It was a good life - but it wasn't quite good enough for Edith Thompson. She seemed to see herself as a woman with a capacity for deep passion, which she was forced to bury beneath the mask of a humdrum life with a rather unimaginative husband. [...]

Then one day, in the spring of 1921 came a fateful visit to her mother's home, where she was introduced to Freddie Bywaters, the handsome young man who was there paying court to Edith's younger sister.'

Edith Thompson

An affair began between twenty-eight-year-old Edith and the nineteen-year-old Freddie Bywaters, an affair which continued by letter when Freddie's job took him away on voyages. The letters are available to read here as part of an extraordinarily detailed website dedicated to the case. Ellis picks up the story once more:

'One evening in October, 1922, Mr and Mrs Thompson, who were outwardly on the happiest terms with each other, went to a show in the West End. On their way home they were walking from the station the last few hundred yards to their house when a figure emerged silently from the shadows and stabbed Percy Thompson'.

That figure was Freddie Bywaters, who left his knife, now covered in blood, near to the scene and was quickly arrested. When Edith's letters were found in his possession, she was also arrested. The letters were pawed over in the ensuing trial and ultimately condemned Edith Thompson more strenuously than anything else - it was, more than anything, a trial about adultery, a word Ellis describes as having 'a stinging Edwardian ring to it'.

Both Edith and Freddie were found guilty of murder. John Ellis, after agonising over the decision, decided to agree to carrying out the execution of Edith Thompson, as he knew he had 'the capacity to carry it out with the minimum amount of risk or anything going wrong, and I felt it was my duty to the poor doomed wretch to help her through her ordeal with all the swift humanity that my twenty years' experience as a public hangman had taught me how to bestow'.

Ellis would later write that 'like most of the rest of Britain, including Edith Thompson herself, I believed almost to the last that she would be reprieved. I genuinely hoped she would be saved from my rope'. No woman had been hanged in Britain in more than fifteen years, since the baby farmer Rhoda Willis was hanged on her 40th birthday in 1907, incidentally the only woman to be executed in Wales during the 20th century. Edith's execution in early 1923 would be followed at the end of that year by that of Susan Newell, who was convicted of the murder of a thirteen-year-old newspaper boy and hanged at Duke Street Prison in Glasgow. Newell would become the last woman hanged in Scotland. Times were changing.

Many members of the public were horrified at the prospect that Thompson would hang, and some of them wrote to Ellis to inform him. One such letter adopted a rather sinister tone, informing Ellis that 'if you go and pull that lever and take a woman's life, Government ain't going to answer for it, God'll send the bill to you'. Another wrote 'Be a man and don't hang a woman. You know you have to die yourself in a few years. Just think.' Yet another, written in capital letters, read 'BE A MAN AND NOT A MACHINE'. On the reverse, the author added 'as she did not actually do the crime, and being a woman, she should be reprieved'. 

The above titled article was published in The Guardian in October 1923, months after the execution of Edith Thompson and a mere ten days after the execution of Susan Newell. It explores the relationship between gender and reprieves. 

'Every now and then an event occurs that brings some special inhumanity of our present system of society into sharp contrast with the general tendency of that society to become more humane in its outlook. The application of the extreme penalty of the law to a woman causes this kind of moral shock, and its first effect is, therefore, to make many human people revolt against this horror, not on the general ground that capital punishment itself is horrible, but on the particular ground that it is too horrible to be inflicted on a woman though she has committed the very crime for which a man may be hanged. Is this ins instinctive revulsion of feeling against the hanging of women a sign of progress or reaction?'

'As in all other matters where important issues are evaded through our inability to judge man and woman equally as "homo," the article continues, "the tendency to confuse sex differentiation and penal reform is a reactionary one and subversive of real progress'. The piece is the work of a trailblazing journalist named Evelyn Sharp and you can read a little more about her here if, like me, you enjoy falling down historical rabbit holes.

Evelyn Sharp

Throughout the decade, the movement against capital punishment had been simmering, driven in no small part by fears around miscarriages of justice. Two days before Thompson's execution, the journalist James Douglas wrote in The Sunday Times that 'law, like morality, is never free from the law of change. We used to hang a man for stealing a sheep. The process of humanising the law continues. The hanging of Mrs Thompson will accelerate it. Mrs Thompson is an accessory before the fact. The law as it stands deems her to be guilty of murder in the same degree as the murderer who struck the blow. It is a cruel law, and sooner or later it will be swept away by public opinion'. 

Douglas, like many others, accepted the prosecution's argument that Thompson knew precisely what her lover intended to do and gave her blessing. I am not so sure. I believe that had I been on the jury bench in 1922 I would not have been able to convict Edith Thompson on the basis of her letters alone, many of which contains all manner of fantasies and fabrications and any combination of the two. Did Edith Thompson want to be free of a loveless marriage? Almost certainly. Would she have gone as far as murder to aid in her escape? We can't know that. What I do believe is that Edith was hanged more for her adultery than for her role in the crime. In the eyes of many, she had made Percy Thompson a cuckold and that in itself was unforgivable, never mind his murder. As James Douglas wrote, 'Mrs. Thompson’s infidelity ought not to be used to eke out the evidence against her. She ought not to be hanged because she was immoral'. And yet he believed that this was precisely what was happening. Interestingly, for all his defence of Mrs Thompson, Douglas was a staunch believer in censorship and so will come to our attention again in a few weeks, in the possibly unlikely company of Mary Whitehouse.

James Douglas

But so it was that the Home Secretary did not intervene. Edith was to hang. 

The Sunday Illustrated reported that 'when Mrs Thompson heard of the Home Secretary's decision from the lips of the Governor of Holloway Prison, she collapsed. She was seriously ill when her parents, brother and sister visited her' Her brother described in an interview how Edith staggered into the room and cried out, "Mother! Mother! They are going to hang me!" Still, she remained desperately hopeful to the last, ending this visit from her family with the words, "Ta-ta, daddy dear. I will see you again on Monday, and many times after that, I am certain. Never fear". 

There was nothing left to be done by anybody except Mr John Ellis. In the early morning of 9th January 1923, he began to prepare the execution shed. He described the events that followed in his memoirs:

'At one minute to nine we walked to the condemned cell. Waiting for no other signal, I stepped inside. Mrs Thompson was in a state of complete collapse, and had lost all control of herself. As I entered, the chaplain was striving to help her with consoling words, and the two wardresses were bravely seconding his effort. I've often wondered since then how those two wardresses stood the terrific ordeal, for there were strong men peering in from the corridor who afterwards confessed how close they were to breaking down themselves. Understanding my beckoning nod, the chaplain let Mrs Thompson's side, and the wardresses practically lifted the sobbing woman to her feet, for she was now totally unable to stand up by herself. My own feelings defy description. The woman's cries and semi-demented body movements all but unnerved me, but I kept telling myself that my only humane course was to work swiftly and cut her agony as short as possible. Pulling myself together, I quickly pinioned her hands behind her back. By now her cries were being blotted out by the unconsciousness which was mercifully covering her, and from which she was never to emerge. She had sunk back into her chair, and realising that there was nothing for it but to put into operation the emergency measures which I had hoped wouldn't be needed, I called for my two assistants and the two Pentonville warders. "Strap her skirt around her ankles," I rapped softly to Baxter and Phillips. Then, with a quick glance at the other two warders: "When that's done, all of you carry her to the scaffold." I left them to it, and hurried to the scaffold myself. In a few moments all four of them arrived carrying Mrs Thompson. She looked as if she were already dead. The door through which they had to carry her inert body was extremely narrow - how they got through it with their burden I can't begin to understand. I turned my back briefly to them briefly, but when they reached the trap-doors I put the white cap on her head and face and slipped the noose over all. It was agonising just to see her being held up by the four men, her bound feet on the trap-doors. Her head had fallen forward on her chest, and she was completely oblivious to what was going on. Without giving a moment for anything further to happen I sprang the lever. One flick of my wrist and Mrs Thompson disappeared from view. She died instantaneously and painlessly. I saw her afterwards, when I helped the matron in her unpleasant task of putting her in her coffin, and her face was calm and composed, just as if she were peacefully sleeping.'

Just over two years later, Mr Ellis resigned from his post. His first suicide attempt came only months later and he would be dead within a decade

In his 1988 biography of Edith Thompson, Rene Weis noted that she remained buried in unconsecrated ground and 'so far her body has not joined her parents, as her mother hoped when she lay dying in the upstairs bedroom at 231 Shakespeare Crescent on the eve of World War II'. In 2018, Edith Thompson's body was exhumed and reburied in the City of London Cemetery, alongside her parents, William and Ethel. Ninety-five years after her death, Edith had finally come home.