The trial involving neighbours – one a mother of an illegitimate child, the other genteel – transfixed Britain. So which wrote the obscene letters that scandalised a seaside town? A new book reveals a tantalising tale of class prejudice
As she arrived at the magistrates’ court in Littlehampton, a quiet seaside town in West sussex, edith swan appeared the model of prim respectability.
On that October day in 1921 she wore a black hat, modest blue dress and grey cloak. A white chrysanthemum was pinned to her breast.
With her wire-rimmed glasses and stern expression, she seemed the embodiment of spinsterhood, someone whose place in court was surely in the public gallery, or perhaps as a witness.
Instead, edith was escorted to the dock to answer the most surprising of charges.
According to police, she was the author of numerous poison-pen letters sent in the town over the preceding year — letters littered with obscenities unprintable in a family newspaper even today.
The evidence seemed incontrovertible. But as an absorbing book by historian Christopher hilliard revealed last year, the problem lay in persuading a jury, or indeed a judge, that the seemingly upright citizen before them was capable of such vulgarity.
Appearances in those days were indeed everything. edith had pinned the blame on her foulmouthed neighbour Rose Gooding, and it was much easier to believe in the guilt of this fiery young woman, mother of an illegitimate child, who thought nothing of walking down the high street with her hair down and bare-legged, disregarding such niceties as stockings.
On two occasions Rose would be sent to prison for crimes of which she was totally innocent, and the case would involve four trials in all — each reported unsparingly by the national press and enthralling the nation.
As a tale of morality, class and sexism in Britain between the wars, it is fascinating in its detail, with evidence sought in such minutiae of domestic life as knitting patterns, a marrow chutney recipe and how workingclass women did their laundry.
had the two women been born 50 years earlier, the letters might never have been sent at all, for edith and Rose belonged to only the second generation to pass through compulsory elementary education. But in those increasingly literate times, postcards, letters and writing pads were fast becoming newly familiar features of everyday life.
Newcomers to the town Rose and Bill Gooding moved into 45 Western Road, Littlehampton, shortly before Christmas 1918. he was a 39-year- old from Kent who had served aboard military supply ships during World War I, then found a job in a local shipyard.
he had married Rose, 12 years his junior and from east sussex, in 1913 even though she had an illegitimate daughter, Dorothy, born three years previously.
having children out of wedlock was something of a family tradition. Bill and Rose shared the small two-bedroomed cottage in Western Road with Rose’s younger sister Ruth, herself a single mother with two illegitimate children.
At first it seemed they had found the perfect neighbour in 30-yearold edith swan. she was three years older than Rose and lived at No 47 with her father edward, a retired decorator, and mother Mary Ann, a laundress.
Although edith was engaged, her fiancé Bert was serving with the British occupying forces in Iraq, so she saw little of him.
When not helping her mother with the washing they took in, she was a leading light in the Tontine Club, a local organisation that encouraged people to put aside money for a rainy day in a mutual savings fund.
With her encouragement, Rose also became a member and edith helped the Goodings in other ways, too. After her father gave them a large marrow she wrote out a recipe for chutney, and she lent Rose knitting patterns for socks.
In return, Rose loaned edith a tin bath. But this initial harmony slowly disintegrated in disputes over their shared back yard, with the swans complaining about the Goodings’ overflowing dustbin and the Goodings moaning about the smell from rabbits that the swans kept for meat.
The turning point was easter sunday 1920, when edith was one of several neighbours who overheard a violent row between the Goodings. By then Ruth had given birth to another baby and, according to edith, Rose suspected her husband Bill of being the father.
The resulting argument involved what William Birkin, a bathingmachine proprietor whose house backed on to the communal yard, described as ‘the filthiest language I had ever heard’. Many felt this told them all they needed to know about Rose.
As soldiers returned home from the trenches, where bad language was routinely used to alleviate despair or relieve pain, swearing had become increasingly routine in everyday British life — but only among men. Polite society still clung to the belief that a ‘respectable woman’ was incapable of using foul language and, conversely, that women who did swear were beyond the pale.
This made it all the more plausible when, on the day of the argument, edith claimed to have heard Rose beating her sister’s newborn child and reported her to the NsPCC. Their inspector found the Goodings’ cottage neat and tidy and the baby well cared for, but the visit was nonetheless useful to edith.
shortly afterwards a ‘flood of filthy postcards’ began to arrive at the swans’ house — and edith let it be known that Rose was seeking revenge.
‘You bloody old cow, mind your own business and there would be no rows,’ the first one started. soon there were letters too, all signed either ‘R’ or ‘R.G’ and one even ending ‘ with Mrs Gooding’s compliments’.
edith was the originator of the letters and she addressed missives not just to herself but to people she knew. some were even sent to her mother’s laundry customers with warnings that if they ‘ knew what [edith] was, they would not let her have their washing’.
Another reached Iraq, where her fiancé Bert was informed that she had fallen pregnant by a local policeman. Their engagement was broken off until Bert learnt of the ‘campaign’ being waged against his betrothed.
This all showed considerable cunning on edith’s part. No one would suspect her of sabotaging her own interests in this way, and especially not of using words that became increasingly disgusting as time went on.
Not least was one addressed to edith and Rose’s neighbour Violet May and placed in her peg-basket when she left it on the communal drying-ground where they hung out their sheets. ‘You bloody f****** whore,’ it began.
edith’s plan was that the police would arrest Rose — and when they refused to do so, presumably because of lack of evidence, she launched a private prosecution.
This was an extraordinary step for a working- class woman. The legal bills could easily run to £30 — the equivalent of two years’ rent for edith — but she was prepared to risk her Tontine Club savings in her spiteful pursuit of ‘justice’.
That september, Rose appeared before Littlehampton magistrates charged with criminal libel. In the absence of any hard evidence, it was a case of edith’s word against her own but the former carried considerable weight.
The local police superintendent described Miss swan as ‘ a hardworking woman who bears a very good character’. As for Rose, he merely observed that she had an illegitimate child. ‘ enough said,’ was the implication.
As no one could afford to stand bail, Rose was remanded in custody and when her case finally came up at Lewes Assizes, she was sentenced to a further 14 days in prison.
By the time she was released she had been away from her husband and children for three whole months — but edith hadn’t finished with her yet.
During Rose’s absence from Littlehampton, there had been no libellous letters. They resumed almost as soon as she was back home, and edith used these to bring a second private prosecution. Rose was tried again.
In vain, Rose’s barrister produced the handwritten knitting instructions and chutney recipe given to her by edith, pointing out that the handwriting strongly resembled that on the incriminating correspondence. edith simply denied she had written either, and such was the presumption of Rose’s guilt that the judge refused the jury’s request to see a sample of either woman’s handwriting.
Rose was found guilty and this time jailed for 12 months with hard labour. But then edith made an uncharacteristic error and acted overconfidently, filling a notebook with more obscene scribblings in the same hand as that used for the libellous letters and posting it to the police with a covering note claiming it had been found near Western Road.
her reason for doing so is unclear but perhaps she was trying to stoke evidence against Rose for a future prosecution.
Unfortunately for her, similarities in the handwriting suggested to the police that whoever had penned the accompanying note had also written the obscenities in the notebook — and therefore the libels. And, since Rose was in prison at the time, it could not have been her.
Rose was released that July, having served three months of her sentence, by which time Inspector George Nicholls of scotland Yard had already arrived in Littlehampton to re- open the investigation into the libels.
he noted that in her letters to Bill from Portsmouth prison, she always misspelt it ‘ prision’, a mistake never made when the word ‘prison’ occasionally cropped up in the poison-pen letters.
Might those letters instead be the work of edith swan, whose teachers remembered her as being ‘very clever at essay writing and a good penman’?
Nicholls’s suspicions grew after he had searched both the Goodings’ and the swans’ cottages. In the latter he found several pieces of blotting paper imprinted with the same handwriting as on those vile letters and postcards.
edith had a ready explanation. she claimed Rose Gooding had borrowed the blotting paper when they were still friendly and that the
A flood of filthy postcards arrived at the house The police spied on her from a potting shed
writing was clearly hers. Nicholls did not believe her and a policewoman named Gladys Moss was ordered to mount surveillance on the Swans’ house from a neighbouring potting shed.
That September she witnessed Edith throw a piece of paper on the ground near Violet May’s back door. Upon retrieval it proved to be another venomous dispatch, addressed to ‘f****** old whore May, 49 Western Road’.
It seemed the Littlehampton Libeller had finally been nailed. The local magistrates certainly seemed to think so, failing to be swayed by Edith’s white chrysanthemum when she appeared before them in October 1921.
That December, Edith was sent for trial at Lewes, like Rose before her. The difference was that the judge who presided over her case simply refused to accept the evidence, convinced that Edith Swan was the kind of Englishwoman incapable of swearing.
‘I would not convict,’ Sir Clement Bailhache told the jury — and they followed his guidance, declaring her innocent. But extraordinarily, this narrow escape did not stop Edith sending yet more toxic communications. In the years since there has been speculation that she was suffering from some kind of mental illness.
Perhaps the most perceptive comment about her motivation came from Sir Archibald Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions, who criticised the local constabulary for initially refusing to consider that Ethel could have sent the letters to herself.
‘The country police are perhaps not so alive to the mysterious occurrences which may be met with if a woman becomes malicious towards another woman,’ he noted sagely. Sir Archibald and the Home Secretary had a vested interest in clearing up a case to which the Press continued to devote an embarrassing amount of coverage as one of the great unsolved mysteries of the day.
For these senior figures, there was no mystery to be solved. Edith Swan wrote the libels. The challenge was proving it in a way that could not be thwarted by judges’ and jurors’ prejudices.
Their opportunity came in the summer of 1923, when detectives daubed a set of postage stamps with invisible ink and instructed counter staff at the local post office that they were to be sold only to Edith Swan.
One June evening she posted a highly offensive letter to a local sanitary inspector, which they removed from the pillar box immediately after observing her posting it. Applying chemicals to the stamp to render the invisible ink visible, so proving that it had been sold to her, they finally had the evidence they needed to arrest her once again.
The following month, a jury at Lewes Assizes found Edith Swan guilty as charged, much to the consternation of the trial judge, Mr Justice Avory.
Like Mr Justice Bailhache before him, he was incredulous that such a ‘ respectable, clean- mouthed woman’ was capable of writing such ‘filth’ but he had little leeway in the matter.
Emphasising that it was not his verdict but that of the jury, he pronounced a sentence of 12 months’ imprisonment — an early example of justice being served by science and modern detective work in a society obsessed with character and reputation.
A respectable woman swear? Not possible!