A fatal imagination
Peter Cotes
A Pin to See the Peepshow F. Tennyson Jesse (Heinemann £2.75).
Desmond MacCarthy once pronounced F. Tennyson Jesse to be the most notable of all those writers who wrote about notable British trials. Her most celebrated study in crime and punishment was inspired by the ThompsonBywaters case and trial in 1922. The verdict of many thousands of people since that double execution day in January 1923 is that Edith Thompson should not have been hanged. The Bywaters and Thompson case was always a talking point in favour of ending capital punishment — especially for women. It has been featured in numerous books, from formal accounts of the trial to fictional re-creations, the most famous perhaps being F. Tennyson Jesse's own 1934 bestseller, A Pin to See the Peepshow. Even before that date the late playwright, Frank Vosper, was so moved by the case that at the age of 25 he wrote a psychological study based on it called PeoPle Like Us (1929). In 1948 Beverley Baxter, MP, in a House of Commrins debate on capital punishment, quoted the case in an emotional plea against lighging: "Edith Thompson 'had disintegrated as a human being on her way to the gallows, and yet somehow they had to get her there." Apparently two warders frorn Holloway contacted him to say he must use his influence to see that "never again must a woman be hanged."
By the early 'fifties Miss Tennyson Jesse's husband, the playwright H. M. Harwood, had adapted her book into a play, but like the earlier Vosper one it was banned by the then Lord Chamberlain and only performed privately in a club theatre; it was subsequentlY performed publicly in the less censorious capital of New York, on Broadway in 1953. Exactly a score of years later a four-episode serial, based upon the novel again, was screened for television, and there has now been a reissue of the original that has gained in fame down the years. Forty years later, how does it stand up to the test of time? How does the well-known plot in this much-told story now unfold, with so many details concerning Mrs Thompson and Frederick Bywaters (known as Julia and Leo in the novel) being common knowledge? Charged with killing the woman's husband, Bywaters insisted throughout the trial that he alone was guilty,,i and Mrs Thompson unaware of his dark design. Just as vehemently she protested her innocence, but despite this both were convicted and executed. The catchy title referred to Leo and Julia recollecting their schooldays when he charged her a pin to see his peepshow, a shoebox affair full of little toys and things which Julia loved staring into:
This little rose-tinted snow scene was at once amazingly real and utterly unearthly. Everything was just the wrong size —a child was larger than a grown man, a duck was larger than a horse; a bird hanging from the sky on a thread, loomed like a cloud. It was a mad world, compact, of insane proportions, but lit by a strange glamour .
It was a glamour of an even 'headier' kind that dogged poor Julia during all those first world war years that were to follow this peep into little Leo's show. Her escape from the semi-detached villa in a quiet London backwater off the Goldhawk Road, where she had been brought up; her tuition at the Polytechnic upon reaching school-leaving age, enabling her to work in a smart dress shop in the West End; her acceptance of a proposal of marriage from an older man because she hoped in this way to escape from the stifling suburban atmosphere of her home. But the 'world' of Herbert Starling (alias Percy Thompson), in the early post-war period that followed, demanded that Julia lead an even more. restricted life as a wife than a schoolgirl. So she retreated into a fantasy world of her own; the smart Mayfair clientele of her dress shop where she still worked were her 'guiding lights'; Robert Hichens her 'literary' mentor; Leo Carr who, eight years her junior, was now a merchant seaman in his late teens, became her lover. This was the peepshow existence, a hangover from her schoolgirl's vivid imagination, that went day-dreaming ceaselessly on in Julia's mind. A headstrong search for happiness which was only to bring her terrified to tragedy.
Now, it has been held that Mrs Thompson was an unremarkable woman, caught up like Thomas Hardy's Imaginative Woman in events more unusual than those experienced by every average man and woman. "A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling — the uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters ...' However, the son of the KC who defended Mrs Thompson,
himself a counsel of note, told me that of all the hundreds of clients his father had been ;ailed upon to represent in a lifetime at the ar, not one of them had ever made the indelible impression upon him that the uncommon Edith had made. Moreover, the letters themselves which hanged her were, in the Pinion of her advocate, touching and most beautifully written. Tennyson Jesse's Julia, although neither abnormal nor incredible, is no ordinary woman, as the writer observed about her fictionalised Edith: When I wrote the book, to save everyone's feelings as Munn as possible, I altered the relationships and the !!)cus. The tragedy itself is a 'free-for-all' as long as 'the' is avoided ... She lived in a dream world of her own And Julia is impressionable, sentimental, romantic, sometimes giddy, and of course ibmaginative. She had to be all these things to e transported into that mad world of the Peepshow when still a schoolgirl. This initial act starts the tale and sets in motion those !lents which, like Edith Thompson's first ance meeting with Bywaters, led to catas‘roPhe. But if character is fate, so must Julia, as a woman with individual traits, respond characteristically to the existing forces of that adolescent peep at life, as did Edith to those of chance meeting. Frequently writing in language recalling her talents as a poet, Miss Jesse composed a narrative in which there are no loose ends. A series of actions all consequent upon the initial act and all growing c'e out of the other, bringing conflict, susPense, coincidence and irony in their wake, carries this suburban Greek tragedy to its final conclusion. Julia and Leo, because of the writing's calculated interplay of character superimposed upon a notorious Old Bailey Plot, are driven to what would seem their irrevocable doom. It was Tennyson Jesse's deePIY-felt belief in the innocence of Julia's real-life counterpart that inspired a novel about a dream world a world in which the old silent films vied with the reading of Bella Donna, the tango-tea and a compulsive desire to write love letters; one which became, when seen through the eyes of a humane observer and outstanding writer, a re-enactment of st„range happenings in Ilford and elsewhere in '42, leading to one of the most sensational cases of the century. A Pin to See the Peepshow remains today an Unforgettable and disturbing masterpiece Which took root from its author's own dreams (or nightmares) about Mrs Thompson's in,110eence, the vulgar-minded judge who tried 'ler: a jury made up largely of husbands, and a_birth certificate that hanged her. Peter Cotes, the stage and film director, Presented and directed the first stage perfor?zances of A Pin to See the Peepshow in L°Odon and New York.
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