The year 1922 was not a good one for Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett, or more particularly for his clients. He lost Major Armstrong, ‘The Poisonous Solicitor’, to the gallows; and later he defended Edith Thompson in the celebrated Bywaters-Thompson case. 

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James Morton

Just as when Florence Maybrick had been convicted of murder in 1889 following adultery, Edith was unfortunate to be caught up in a bout of newspaper-driven British moral censure. She was convicted because of letters she wrote to her lover Frederick Bywaters.

On 3 October she and her husband Percy were returning home after an evening at the theatre when a man attacked Percy, stabbing him in the neck and chest. Edith was heard to call out, ‘Oh don’t!’ The man was her lover Bywaters. Later she said, ‘Why did he do it? I didn’t want him to do it’. But once her letters were discovered the prosecution wanted her on trial with Bywaters. In those letters she had recounted or fantasised how she had tried to poison Percy or to feed him broken glass.

However, pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury said there was no trace of poison or glass in Percy’s body. Many think Curtis-Bennett could have pressed him by asking, if Edith had indeed fed her husband glass or poison, surely he would have been seriously unwell. There were no suggestions he had been.

The high water mark of the defence is usually when the prosecution closes its case. From then on the question is whether the defendant should give evidence, and especially so when capital punishment was a possible outcome. Pretty, vain and wilful, Edith could be said to have hanged herself. She thought she could charm the jury, refusing to listen to the entreaties of Curtis-Bennett. ‘I could have saved her,’ he said later. She was cut to ribbons as her letters to Bywaters were read out to her.

Edith was hanged on 7 January 1923, carried semi-conscious to the scaffold. The hangman resigned the next year. By then, far too late, public opinion had swung back in her favour.

 

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor

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