All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Hung for Adultery? The Condemnation of Edith Thompson in the Aftermath of the Great War
| In January 1923 Edith Thompson and her lover Frederick Bywaters were hung for the murder of Thompson’s husband Percy. Bywaters, who claimed sole responsibility, had stabbed her husband dead. Edith had had poisoning fantasies, as revealed in her letters to Bywaters produced at the trial, but an autopsy established that these were never acted upon. Further, there was no concrete evidence of incitement. Subsequent to her death, Edith’s execution has been increasingly proclaimed a miscarriage of justice. At the time however, the jury, judge, Appeal Court, many of the national newspapers as well as surveys of popular opinion indicated widespread belief in her culpability. But if the evidence as to her guilt as to murder is now viewed as non-existent, why was she deemed a murderess at the time?
According to her defence barrister, Sir Henry Curtis Bennett: ‘Mrs Thompson was hanged for immorality’. In other words, her ‘guilt’ lay in her adulterous relationship with her young lover (8 years her junior, of which much was made). Her guilt also lay in her passionate sexuality, as revealed in her letters read out in court, and arguably in her ‘flapper’ lifestyle of fashionable clothes, bobbed hair, an income inappropriate to her origins, her frequenting of clubs and West End shows, her reading of romantic literature, and the fact of her being a working wife who had seemingly chosen to remain childless. If Edith was indeed hung for immorality, how are we to understand this occurrence?
Women in the 1920s had won certain freedoms, and writings on sex and marriage now presented married women as legitimate sexual beings, but there was still significant hostility towards the expression of explicit female sexuality, let alone a woman’s adultery, especially with a younger man. In the years immediately after the First World War there was particular concern to differentiate normal from deviant sexual behaviour, acceptable from unacceptable, and the War’s aftermath saw deep concern as to the disruptions of gender boundaries. The desire for restitution of the sexual division of labour, domestic harmony and clear class divisions (Edith Thompson’s location in the suburbs informed much press commentary, in terms of deep ambivalence towards the lower middle classes) all need consideration in the analysis of this extraordinary and perplexing trial.
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