The
pleasures of Wicked Little Letters, which just premiered at the Toronto International
Film Festival, are simple. Would you like to see two of our finest actresses
clad in period garb, screaming hilarious (and ridiculous) profanities at one
another? You would? Good.
The film
from director Thea Sharrock reunites The Lost Daughter stars Olivia Colman and
Jessie Buckley for a far goofier tale. The Oscar winner and Oscar nominee,
respectively, play warring neighbors in a tiny English village in the 1920s,
and there is a glorious gusto to their very funny performances.
Colman is
Edith Swan, an uptight and ostensibly pious woman who lives with her demanding
father (Timothy Spall in full grumbly mode) and her timid mother (Gemma Jones).
The action kicks off with the arrival of the 19th “poison pen” letter that
Edith has received, a vindictive missive that targets the lonely woman with
scandalous name-calling. The immediate suspect: Buckley's Rose Gooding, a
boisterous Irish immigrant and widowed single mother, who drinks, curses, and
has sex with her boyfriend (Malachi Kirby)—sex that Edith can hear through
their thin walls.
Rose is
quickly arrested by the bumbling local authorities thanks to Edith's holier
than thou account. In Edith's telling, the two were friendly when Rose moved to
town, with Edith attempting to show her the ways of a respectable woman, but
Rose rebuked her help (and accidentally hit her in the face with a toilet brush
in the process).
But there's
something amiss, which police officer Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan of We Are Lady
Parts) sniffs out. Why would Rose, who never minces her words, hide behind
anonymity? The mystery deepens where more residents of Littlehampton start
being targeted. Who is calling people "piss country whores" and
"foxy asses"? And why? And what's a "foxy ass"?
Ultimately,
Wicked Little Letters turns out to be not much of a whodunnit—frankly, you can
probably guess now and get it right. But the lack of a real mystery doesn't
really matter when Buckley and Colman are as delightful to watch as they are in
this film. Colman understands Edith is a sad character deep down, but she also
relishes in making the character subtly hateable. With a flick of her eyes or a
purse of her lips, her Edith just can't hide her superiority complex, or the
pride she takes in the attention she is getting as a quasi-martyr. Meanwhile,
Buckley is having a raucous good time as Rose, who cares little what others
think. It's a performance that recalls her breakout work in Wild Rose. Rose
Gooding may be something of a mess, yet you want to spend time in her company.
The rest of
the cast is filled out with equally amusing work from the likes of Vasan, whose
big, searching eyes are excellent vehicles for exasperation, as well as Hugh
Skinner as her doltish colleague and Joanna Scanlan as an unhygienic local
woman who helps Gladys unearth the real letter writers and loves eating boiled
eggs.
Remarkably,
Wicked Little Letters is based on a true story. There’s a lot of meat in the
narrative—about class prejudice and expectations placed on women in post-WWI
society—that mostly goes unexplored in Jonny Sweet's script. In fact, the film
falters the most when it tries to swerve into the serious; though Buckley can
handle the tonal shift as it relates to her character, the rest of the
production cannot.
Olivia
Colman and Jessie Buckley Are Having a F---ing Blast in Wicked Little Letters.
By Esther Zuckerman. Vanity Fair, September 11, 2023.
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The trial was begun at Lewes Assizes yesterday of Edith Emily Swann, 32, of Littlehampton, on the charge of maliciously publishing a defamatory libel concerning Charles Thomas Gardner, sanitary inspector of Littlehampton, and also with sending a postal packet containing an indecent article at Littlehampton on June 24.
Mr Travers
Humphreys appeared for the prosecution, and Mr Collingwood for the defence. Mr
Travers Humphreys said that during the last year or two there had been sent to
different persons at Littlehampton a number of documents of an obscene and
libellous character.
Watch had
been kept for some time at the Beach post office. When Mr Baker, the
sub-postmaster, saw the defendant post two letters he put his hand into the
tray of the box and caught them. One of the letters was addressed to Miss
Swann, sister of the defendant, at an address near Woking, and the other, in
pencil, was addressed to the sanitary inspector of Littlehampton. Mr Bowler, an
official from the General Post Office, opened the latter envelope, and found
the document which was the subject of these proceedings.
On June 23
the defendant had purchased two stamps at the post office from a special stock
which had been marked in invisible ink by Mr Bowler. The stamps on the letters
were developed, and certain initials were found on them.
The
defendant said she was not guilty of sending the letter to the sanitary
inspector. She was told about the purchase of the two stamps, and said she put
one on a letter to her sister, Miss Swann, and the other on a letter to another
sister, Mrs Thompsett, of Cranleigh.
Evidence
would be given that no such letter was either posted at Littlehampton or
received at Guildford. Mr Walter Edward Bowler said that on June 24 the Beach
post office was under observation from early morning until 5.29pm. Every letter
which dropped into the box was caught and examined.
Mr Baker,
the sub-postmaster, in cross-examination, said he saw the defendant post the
letters by means of a special mirror. The letter to the sanitary inspector was
folded. If it had been posted by someone else and caught up he would have found
it.
The case
for the prosecution was concluded, and the hearing adjourned until today.
A
poison-pen libel trial unfolds at Lewes.
On this day 100 years ago. From The Times, July 19, 1923.
The Times,
July 19, 2023.
Littlehampton,
with its sandy beach on the Sussex coast, was the perfect spot for
holidaymakers after World War I: a peaceful, old-fashioned town where the
biggest excitement was a walk to the end of the pier.
But in 1920, a scandal erupted that put the sleepy settlement in the spotlight. The Seaside Mystery — as the Daily Mail called it — caused a sensation. It involved a series of poison-pen letters, filled with obscene language and outrageous accusations — and it had the entire country riveted.
The Seaside
Mystery was solved only after the intervention of a detective from the London
murder squad, a secret sting operation and no fewer than four trials, attended
by reporters from all the newspapers and omnibus-loads of spectators.
The
intriguing story is now being brought to life in a forthcoming movie, Wicked
Little Letters, starring Oscar-winner Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley as
friends-turned-enemies Edith Swan and Rose Gooding.
The letters
at the heart of the Seaside Mystery were sent to Swan (and, later, to others)
just after Easter 1920, with 'cow' and 'bloody' initially being the worst
insults.
They became
progressively more vile, accusing their recipients of being 'whores', 'f***ing
whores,' 'foxy a** whores' or even 'bloody f***ing p*** country whores'. It was
colourful language for any era, but truly shocking in the 1920s when
respectable people, particularly women, did not swear.
Yet the
letters were written by a woman, one whose identity was at the heart of the
mystery that arose after a friendship turned toxic. Historian Christopher
Hilliard tells the fascinating tale in The Littlehampton Libels, which
chronicles how a woman's reputation counted for more than the truth.
Swan, 30, a
spinster played by Colman in the movie (currently being filmed in Sussex),
seemed a model of working-class respectability. She lived with her parents and
two brothers in their terraced house in Western Road, just two streets back
from the seafront.
The Swans'
neighbours, the Goodings, were very different: theirs was a far rowdier
household. Rose, 28, was 12 years younger than her shipbuilder husband, Bill,
and had an illegitimate daughter from a previous relationship.
The couple
were often heard rowing. Bill sometimes hit his wife, accusing her of
infidelity. With them lived Rose's sister Ruth who had three illegitimate
children. The sisters' relationship was strained, as Rose suspected Bill and
Ruth were having an affair.
Rose was
known for her quick temper, foul language and unconventional behaviour.
According to her neighbour, a policeman, she once went 'into the street with
her hair down her back and wearing a thin frock, no stockings and white shoes'
— tantamount to being half naked in those days.
Despite
their differences, when the Goodings arrived in Littlehampton in 1916, Edith
and Rose got on well.
Things
turned sour when a dispute arose over their shared back garden. Edith
complained about the Goodings' overflowing dustbins. The Goodings protested
about the smell of rabbits the Swan family bred for food.
The Swans began to view the Goodings as nightmare neighbours after a row on Easter Sunday, 1920, between a drunken Bill and his wife.
Some days
later, an inspector from the NSPCC turned up. Edith had accused Rose of beating
Ruth's toddler, Albert, with a cane. The inspector found no evidence — all the
children appeared healthy and the cottage spotless.
Shortly
afterwards, Edith received a postcard: 'You bloody old cow, mind your own
business and there would be no rows.'
More
postcards followed, calling Edith a 'bloody whore,' and insulting her family,
signed variously 'R' or 'RG', Rose Gooding's initials.
The Swans'
laundry customers also began receiving malevolent missives, warning that if
they knew how dirty the Swans were, they wouldn't give Edith their washing.
Edith's fiancé Bert, a soldier in Iraq, got a letter accusing her of becoming
pregnant by the neighbouring policeman.
Distraught,
he broke off the engagement, although they were later reconciled.
The manager
of the hotel where Edith's brother Ernest worked received three postcards,
accusing Ernest of stealing.
In fact,
anyone who encountered the Swans on a regular basis began receiving offensive
letters.
The Swans
told everyone that Rose was the letters' author and Edith repeated her
accusations to the police. The police had a word with the Goodings, who denied
having written any of them.
Then,
remarkably, Edith brought a private prosecution for libel against her former
friend — at the cost of £30, or two years' rent.
Rose was
remanded in custody for two and a half months before the trial. Incredibly, no
handwriting expert was called to examine the letters.
Instead,
the judge instructed the jury that if Rose Gooding had not written the letters,
then Edith Swan must have written them herself. They must decide which woman
they believed.
The jury
believed prim and proper Edith Swan. Rose, with her lack of stockings and
morals, was found guilty and sentenced to a further two weeks in prison.
Released on
December 23, still protesting her innocence, her relief was brief. On New
Year's Day, the filthy letters started again.
Edith
launched another prosecution. Yet another jury was convinced of Rose's guilt.
This time, the judge sentenced her to 12 months' hard labour at Portsmouth
prison. Rose appealed but it was rejected.
Then the
Seaside Mystery took a new turn. A notebook, filled with libellous obscenities
in the same handwriting as the letters, was allegedly found near
Littlehampton's Western Road and posted to the police. As Rose was in prison,
she could not have sent it.
So, who had? With the story hitting the national papers, Scotland Yard sent Inspector George Nicholls, fresh from a murder case, to investigate. He saw similarities between the handwriting in the notebook and the letters.
He searched
the Swans' house and found blotting paper with indentations that, when
examined, matched the handwriting on the indecent letters and notebook.
Edith had
an explanation: the Goodings had borrowed the blotter. But Nicholls began to
suspect Edith was a liar. The Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Archibald
Bodkin, read Nicholls's report and examined samples of both women's
handwriting, comparing them with the notebook and letters.
He believed
Edith might have written the letters to frame Rose. The Appeal Court eventually
overturned Rose's conviction. She was freed and awarded compensation of £250.
The
Goodings and the Swans stayed apart, avoiding one another.
But then
another neighbour who shared the yard, Violet May, began receiving notes even
more obscene than the previous letters.
However,
unbeknown to Edith, a policewoman had been watching the yard from a hiding
place in a shed and witnessed Edith dropping the notes.
Edith was
arrested for criminal libel. Incredibly, the judge still refused to believe
that this respectable-looking woman could possibly have written such appalling
letters. 'If I were on the jury, I would not convict,' he pronounced. Edith was
duly acquitted.
Yet the
letters started again. The Daily Mail's correspondent reported that they were
'more indecently and subtly worded and spread over wider area than before'.
The
Goodings, desperate to clear their name, begged Scotland Yard to help. So the
Yard authorised a sting operation.
Two Post
Office Special Investigation Branch clerks were sent to Littlehampton. They
arranged for Edith's local Post Office to be put under surveillance and to sell
stamps, marked 'S' with invisible ink, only to Edith Swan. She was witnessed
buying the stamps and using one to post an offensive letter.
It was
enough. At the next trial, attended by a large crowd, Edith was finally found
guilty of libel and of sending indecent, obscene and grossly offensive letters.
The trial
judge, Mr Justice Avory, who found it 'difficult to believe that you could be
in your right mind in writing filth of this description,' sentenced her to 12
months hard labour.
'End of
Seaside Mystery' announced the Daily Mail.
Was Edith
insane, as Justice Avory implied? A doctor told one newspaper he believed Edith
was suffering from 'a criminal impulse arising out of a sexual disease'. The
News of the World agreed that the letters were a symptom of an 'obscure but
well recognised sex mania'.
With Edith
in prison, the libellous letters stopped. In Littlehampton, peace was restored.
But Edith never explained her actions. Therefore, to this day, the most intriguing part of this seaside mystery — why she did it — remains unsolved.
Who sent
the obscene letters that scandalised a seaside town... the snobbish spinster or
the working-class mum next door? As Olivia Colman stars in film about infamous
1920s trial, why part of the mystery remains unsolved. By Annabel Venning. The Daily Mail, November 3, 2022.
Filming
crews have flocked to Sussex over recent weeks for the filming of a new comedy
Wicked Little Letters, set to be released next year. With famous faces such as
Olivia Colman, who featured in The Crown, being spotted in Arundel and
Worthing, film crews have taken to the same spots where the true story behind
Wicked Little Letters played out.
Although
most people in Sussex are simply excited for the film to be released next year,
especially as so much of it is being produced and filmed locally, not everyone
knows how this comedy is actually capturing a true story from the Sussex county
itself. With various parts of Sussex, including Arundel and Worthing seafront,
being converted to look like 1920s Britain, the true story the film is based on
is expected to really come to life on TV screens next year.
The story
behind Wicked Little Letters originated from Littlehampton, when some ladies in
the coastal town began to receive "scandalous letters written with foul
language" from an unknown source. One of the ladies to receive the letters
was Edith Swan, who immediately assumed the foul-mouthed notes were from her
neighbour Rose Gooding, who she didn't get on with.
The story
behind Wicked Little Letters originated from Littlehampton, when some ladies in
the coastal town began to receive "scandalous letters written with foul
language" from an unknown source. One of the ladies to receive the letters
was Edith Swan, who immediately assumed the foul-mouthed notes were from her
neighbour Rose Gooding, who she didn't get on with.
With
suspicion pointing at Rose, who was of a lower class than Edith, Rose lost her
freedom and the custody of her daughter, who she had out of wedlock. With these
"outrageous letters" spreading around the town, an inspector called
George Nicholls suspected something was wrong.
George,
with the help of other women, then solved the mystery and liberated Rose, who
was innocent all along. The eventual finding was that it was in fact Edith who
wrote the letters in an attempt to frame Rose, which he discovered through
looking at handwriting, which was the same as the letters.
When the
inspectors suspicions of Edith grew, he sent policewoman Gladys Moss to watch
Edith, which is when Edith was caught dropping one of the notes on someone's
doorstep. After being trialled a few times, with her class allowing her to
appear innocence, it was a few months before Edith was finally sentenced for
the letters, which were proven to be hers through various detective work.
It is
thought that Edith went to such lengths to frame Rose after some petty rows and
class differences. Suggestions also arose that Edith may have been struggling
with her mental health.
With both
Rose and Edith living on Western Road in Littlehampton at the time, it is not
known whether the filming of Wicked Little Letters will actually feature on the
exact same road. So far, film crews have been spotted in Arundel and Worthing
mainly, with the seafront being converted to look exactly like 1920s Britain.
It is
thought that Olivia Colman will be playing Edith Swan, with all the main
characters of the true tale featuring in the comedy film. Scenes so far have
been filmed at The Lido in Worthing, in Arundel town centre and along the
seafront, with mass security operations to keep the cast and crew safe during
filming.
The exact
release date is not yet known, but Sussex residents can eagerly anticipate to
watch some Sussex history being played out by some fantastic actors. With the
time period of the movie being the 1920s, we can also expect to see interesting
outfits, vehicles and certain attitudes in the upcoming movie.
The true
Littlehampton story behind Wicked Little Letters as filming continues across
Sussex. By Jasmine Carey. Sussex.Live,
October 10, 2022.
As an exciting experiment in merging the genre of the mystery novel with a work of historiography, Hilliard’s The Littlehampton Libels succeeds in crafting an engaging, pacey, and intellectually stimulating account of an unusual criminal case in 1920s England. Oriented around a series of libels sent to the close-knit inhabitants of the seaside town of Littlehampton, ranging from imputations about prostitution, extramarital affairs, thefts, and other neighborly grievances, the monograph keeps its readers guessing about the culprit until the final chapters. Part of Hilliard’s brilliance lies in demonstrating how these libels signified more than “petty” grievances to their recipients, for whom issues of reputation still had economic consequences. Among those whose employment was often precarious, and who depended on credit and neighborly assistance for survival during periods of hardship, the libels imperiled crucial relationships that were already fraught due to the proximity of their living arrangements.
Hilliard’s
painstaking examinations of “the textures of writing and speech” (177), as
recorded in police interviews with suspects and witnesses, courtroom testimony,
contemporary letters, and the libels themselves, flesh out how increasing
levels of literacy in this era profoundly impacted the ability of the poor to
express their individuality. Indeed, the writing style—both penmanship and
literary coherence—of one suspect, who displayed the ability to modify her
letters to become “proficient in the language of official correspondence”
(139), serves as a fascinating example of the kinds of agency that literacy
afforded, creating a means to interact across social classes and institutions.
Herein lies the significance of sometimes derided “micro-histories” and the
case-study approach. As Hilliard writes, The Littlehampton Libels offers “an
attempt to push my earlier exercises in intellectual or literary history ‘from
below’ further, and treat vocabularies and handwriting styles as sites of
individuality and ambition” (177).
This work
is interdisciplinary in format rather than methodology. It inhabits the style
of a novel successfully, but is unmistakeably an academic text, informed by
exhaustive research into the lives of its protagonists as well as the local and
institutional structures that they encountered. Hilliard also explores broader
themes of poverty, gender, class, and notions of respectability at intervals
that enhance the development of the main “story” without jarring shifts in
tone. As such, The Littlehampton Libels is an outstanding work of social
history, but it also deploys cultural history’s emphasis on conflicting
narratives of the past in a manner doubly effective because the case actually
hinged on these concerns. Playing with historians’ abilities to act as
“detectives” when confronted by testimonies that deliberately sought to obscure
the truth, Hilliard’s book creates a new template for exposing the
methodological and intellectual challenges of claiming to “know” the past in a
way both elegant and engaging.
Chapter 9 (133–144), following the revelation of the culprit’s identity, marks a change to a more conventional style of academic writing. Hilliard discusses the etymology of the “bad language” used in the libels and its resonance in the period and place under study. This change in tone would be problematical in a history that sought exclusively to appeal to a “popular” audience, but this chapter and its successor bridges the gap between academic and popular histories by summarizing the key arguments succinctly. It recalls Summerscale’s excellent The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, albeit with a more explicit social-historical emphasis.
The
Littlehampton Libels is an engaging and ambitious work that scholars in the
fields and sub-disciplines of history and English will mutually enjoy,
particularly for its suggestive insights into working-class agency through
literacy.
The
Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice & a Mystery about Words in
1920s England by Christopher Hilliard (review). By Elisabeth Moss. Journal of Interdisciplinary History. The MIT
Press.Volume 49, Number 1, Summer 2018
A series of
poison pen letters being circulated in a small English village is the subject
of Agatha Christie's 1942 novel The Moving Finger, yet there are a number of
other books in which they appear as well.
Dorothy Sayers, Edmund Crispin, and John Dickson Carr spring to mind
immediately as just a few examples; in the hands of these authors murder
generally followed as a result. In The
Littlehampton Libels there are no killings, but the poison pen letters
circulating in the 1920s within Littlehampton, a "middling town"
along the Sussex coast (and beyond), eventually merited police investigations,
resulted in four different trials, widespread news coverage, imprisonment, and, as the title reveals,
"a miscarriage of justice."
The stories of the two women involved, according to the author, is a
"kind
of English story told over and over in fiction and film but rarely in works of
history..."
And it all began with "a quarrel between
neighbors."
In 1918,
Bill and Rose Gooding moved into the town of Littlehampton, at No. 45 Western
Road. Rose's sister Ruth Russell shared
the house with them and their daughter Dorothy; Ruth had two children of her
own. No. 45 shared garden space with
two other houses: No. 47, the home of
the Swan family, as well as No. 49, the "police cottage," where
police officers and their families could sublet the house which was rented by
the West Sussex Constabulary. At the
time "the libels started flying," the police cottage housed Constable
Alfred Russell and his family. At first,
Rose Gooding and Edith Swan (age 30 and living with her parents), seemed to get
along well, but an incident in May of 1920 led Edith to call in the National
Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children against Rose, in a complaint of
"illtreating a child." The
inspector who came out in response to Edith's complaint found nothing amiss,
but it was just after his visit that "a flood of filthy postcards"
began, with the bad language escalating each time; since they were signed
"R--", "R.G.," or "with Mrs. Gooding's compliments,"
the assumption was that the letters had come from Rose Gooding in retaliation
for Edith's complaints. Rose
consistently denied that the letters had been her doing, and the police were
satisfied, but that wasn't enough for Edith -- eventually she consulted a
solicitor and instituted a prosecution against Rose for "criminal
libel," which ultimately resulted in a two-week imprisonment for Rose, as well as her being responsible for
keeping the peace for two years after her release. While I won't go into details here, mainly
because this bizarre story really has to be experienced on one's own, Rose
found herself back into prison, appealed, and her case was reopened, along with
a major investigation to find the true culprit which reads at times like something
you'd find in a work of crime fiction.
In this
truly splendid work of microhistory, written in a way I personally believe the
best histories should be written, the
author traces not only the events in this case, but uses his investigation to
also examine how, as he says, these
"outlandish insults form part of a larger
story of individuality and originality in unexpected places."
As Bee Wilson says in her review in the London
Review of Books, (which you should absolutely refrain from reading until you've
finished the book), The Littlehampton
Libels reveals "the uses and abuses
of literacy. " It also gives a concise history of the legal use of libel
up to this point in time as well as an insight into how the legal system was
used by members of the working class.
It's important to note here that one's respectability as a member of
this class was based on several factors and there were gradations in the class
structure. In this particular case, as
Mr. Hilliard notes, it wasn't "just circumstances that counted against
Rose Gooding," but more to the point, it was the fact that she and her
family were viewed as belonging to "a slightly rougher class" than
her accuser, a woman seen to be of
"very good character" and one who would never use the sort of
language found in the poison pen letters.
As the trial testimony was given, and that particular point was made,
something popped into my head right out of Christie's The Moving Finger and I had to go look it up. There's a scene in which Jerry Burton tells
us that
"In novels, I have noticed,
anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if
possible, to women. It is implied that
women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate
nervous systems."
Given the
"foul and disgusting character" of the Littlehampton poison pen
letters and the truth behind who actually wrote them, well, I couldn't help but
inwardly giggle thinking about that particular passage.
Obviously
my short post here just scratches the surface of this book, but The
Littlehampton Libels is a phenomenal work of history, giving credence to the idea that quite often
truth is stranger than fiction. I knew it was going to be something right up my
alley when I first read about it, and I don't regret forking over more than I
generally pay for a book to read it. I
can't speak highly enough about it.
The
Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice & a Mystery about Words in
1920s England, by Christopher Hilliard. By NancyO. The Real Stuff, April 16, 2018.
In July
1923 at the Lewes assizes, Mr Justice Avory handed an anonymous letter
containing some ‘improper words’ to a respectable-looking woman. He asked her
if she had ever used such foul language. ‘Never during the whole of my life,
either in writing or talking, never,’ she replied. The woman’s father, a
retired house painter with a grey beard, was asked whether he had ever heard
his daughter use indecent language. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘She was brought up quite
differently. I have never heard such language from her or any others of my
family of nine children.’
Edith Swan,
a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was
accused of sending a letter to a sanitary inspector called Charles Gardner that
contained words of ‘an indecent, obscene and grossly offensive character’. The
full letter has not survived, but the gist of it was that Mr Gardner would be
very sorry that he had ever called Swan’s ‘dust boxes’ a nuisance. Three
witnesses had seen Swan post this letter. Offensive letters had been
circulating in Littlehampton for several years, and the police had taken the
unusual step of installing a periscopic mirror in the post office’s mail drop.
Whenever anyone posted anything, it was retrieved by post office staff and examined
by two clerks from the Special Investigation Branch. Looking through the
periscope, Edwin Baker, one of the clerks, saw Miss Swan’s hand posting the
letter to the sanitary inspector along with a letter addressed to her sister in
Woking. The stamps on both letters had been marked with invisible ink, and had
been sold to Swan at the request of the police, who had long suspected her of
being behind the rash of anonymous letters.
Despite all
of this, Mr Justice Avory was not convinced that the slender, self-possessed
woman in front of him was capable of writing such a letter. The Brighton Argus
reported that he directed the jury to ‘consider whether it was conceivable that
she could have written this document’ given that her ‘demeanour in the witness
box was that of a respectable, clean-mouthed woman’. The judge said that the
jury must ask themselves ‘whether there might possibly be some mistake’.
The
Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of
microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to
illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from
ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their
sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather
dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters
became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as
Hilliard writes, ‘demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most
murders’.
Hilliard
asks what it was like to live in a society where ‘nice’ women had to pretend
that they were ignorant of all profanity. Melissa Mohr claims in her excellent
book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) that the British started to
swear more during and after the First World War, because strong language – like
strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric
Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They
claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a
warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used
for emphasis, but Brophy and Partridge found that obscenity was so over-used
among the military in the Great War that if a soldier wanted to express emotion
he wouldn’t swear. ‘Thus if a sergeant said, “Get your —ing rifles!” it was
understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, “Get your rifles!” there was
an immediate implication of urgency and danger.’
As former
soldiers re-established themselves as civilians, swearing became normalised,
but it was only acceptable when used by men and addressed to men. The story of
the Littlehampton libels reveals the extent to which British society at this
time clung to certain beliefs about women and language. One of these
prejudices, fiercely held, was that a ‘respectable’ woman was incapable of
allowing a dirty word to sully her mouth. Another was that women who did swear
were beyond the pale, and therefore capable of anything. The tenacity of these
prejudices within the legal system would allow Edith Swan to send multiple
poison pen letters to her neighbours over a period of three years and contrive
to have a less ‘respectable’ woman – Rose Gooding – twice sent to jail for
crimes of which she was entirely innocent.
Swan was
accused of libel for the first time in 1921, charged with sending a series of
obscene letters, mostly addressed to her neighbours Violet and George May. Here
is an extract from a letter dated 14 September 1921: ‘You bloody fucking
flaming piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. Its your drain that stinks
not our fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor.’
The Mays were sent many such letters in the course of 1921. Swan claimed that
she had received similar letters herself, such as this one from 23 September:
‘To the foxy ass whore 47, Western Rd Local. You foxy ass piss country whore
you are a character.’
There was
compelling proof that Edith Swan was the author of these letters, even the ones
she received. The police searched the house where she lived with her parents
and two of her brothers and found a piece of blotting paper which contained
clear traces of some of the letters. Swan protested that the blotting paper had
been found by her father in the washing house. A still more devastating piece
of evidence was that Swan had been seen by a policewoman throwing one of the
letters into the garden her family shared with their neighbours. Gladys Moss,
the policewoman, was keeping watch on Swan through a slit in a garden shed when
she saw her throw a folded piece of buff-coloured paper in the direction of the
Mays’ house. The paper was addressed to ‘fucking old whore May, 49, Western Rd,
Local’.
For Travers
Humphreys, the barrister who acted for the prosecution in the 1921 trial,
Swan’s case exposed a flaw in the English justice system, as he explained in
his memoir 25 years later. Humphreys thought that juries were very rarely
wrong, but that a miscarriage of justice was possible if a woman of respectable
appearance was prepared to lie in court. Swan was that woman. She dressed for
court in a blue serge dress with a long grey cloak over it and a white
chrysanthemum pinned to her breast. ‘She was the perfect witness,’ Humphreys
wrote. ‘Neat and tidy in her appearance, polite and respectful in her answers,
with just that twinge of feeling to be expected in a person who knows herself
to be the victim of circumstances, she would have deceived, nay she did
deceive, the very elect.’ What Humphreys did not say was just how willing ‘the
elect’ were to be deceived, eager as they were to refute the notion that a
woman like her could conceivably use such language.
The
immediate cause of the letters was a dispute between Swan and her neighbour
Rose Gooding that began in 1920. Swan lived with her parents at 47 Western Road
and Rose Gooding lived at 45 Western Road with her husband, Bill, a seaman who
worked as a ship’s cook, and her younger sister Ruth Russell, who was
unmarried. Between them, Rose and Ruth had four illegitimate children. Rose and
Bill also had a son, Willie. Both families were working class, but the presence
of illegitimate children in the Gooding home made them less respectable than
the Swans. Another thing that set the families apart was that the Goodings were
known for having loud rows and swearing at each other. In 1919, Rose Gooding
was fired from her job as a servant in the house of a local publisher. He
complained about her ‘habit of making horrible accusations particularly about
her husband and sister ... that her husband was sleeping with her sister, he
treated her as his wife, that he took no notice of her [Mrs Gooding] when she
was in the room and if she made a remark she was told to shut up.’
The fiery
Rose Gooding had little in common with Edith Swan, who was described by
Inspector Nicholls, a detective, as having a ‘stony expression’ that made her
seem ‘possibly wrong in the head’. Edith had a fiancé, Bert Boxall, a soldier
who had served in India and then in Afghanistan, but at the age of thirty she
was still sharing a bedroom with her parents, both in their seventies. The
Swans had always lived in Littlehampton, a middling-sized Sussex town with a
sandy beach and a pier whose architecture was described by Pevsner as ‘a rather
bewildering mixture of Old Hastings and Bournemouth’. By the time of the
libels, most of her older siblings had left home. Only two brothers, Stephen
and Ernest, both of them labourers but often unemployed, remained. Edith’s
mother is described by Hilliard as ‘quiet and unobtrusive’ whereas her father
was irritable and quick to meddle in the affairs of others. At the time of the
libels, Edith was earning money by taking in laundry. The whole family was
thrifty and Edith was a keen member of the Tontine Club, a group that met at a
local pub and put their savings in a mutual fund.
The houses
in Western Road were ‘jammed in against each other’, as Hilliard puts it. The
communal garden was also ‘the site of a motley collection of sheds and home to
the residents’ rabbits and chickens’ as well as the location of the ‘drying
ground’, where the women hung out laundry. The front door of No. 45 and the
scullery of No. 47 were practically adjacent, so that it was possible to
eavesdrop on conversations in the other house. As Inspector Nicholls observed,
‘everything that went on in the Goodings must have been known in the Swans and
vice versa.’ There were spats over the smell from the Goodings’ dustbin or the
nuisance caused by the chickens owned by Alfred Russell, a policeman who lived
with his wife, Edith, at No. 49.
The
relationship between Edith Swan and Rose Gooding got off to a fairly good
start. When the Goodings moved in late in 1918 Edith Swan made an effort to be
friendly. Questioned by Inspector Nicholls, Edith recalled that she ‘went in
and out’ of the Goodings’ house and sometimes took the children out. Her father
gave Rose Gooding a large marrow he had grown and Edith gave her a recipe for
marrow chutney. She also gave Rose a knitting pattern for socks and encouraged
her to join the Tontine Club to help her build up some savings. Rose lent the
Swans patty pans, clothes pegs and a suet scraper – a cutter for shredding beef
suet into tiny pieces. These details would resurface as points of controversy
in Rose Gooding’s trial.
Edith and
Rose disagreed about the reasons for their falling out. Rose said in court that
the whole Swan family ‘seemed to turn against her ever since one Saturday
afternoon, when she was unable to lend Mrs Swan her flat irons’. The court
exploded with laughter at such a trivial casus belli. Edith Swan’s version of
events was different. She maintained that Bill and Rose Gooding had had a
vicious row, as a result of which she wrote a letter to the NSPCC accusing Rose
of ‘ill-treating a child who was living with her’.
The row
happened over the Easter weekend of 1920. On Easter Sunday, Edith claimed to
have overheard a row in which Rose accused Bill of being the father of her
sister Ruth’s last baby. She said she heard Bill reply that Rose’s guts were
‘bloody rotten through going with other men while I was risking my life at
sea’. Some of her story was corroborated by other neighbours. Edith Russell
confirmed that Rose Gooding was a woman of ‘a very bad temper’ who frequently
shouted at her children and quarrelled with her sister. Russell said that Rose
Gooding had told her that her husband would call her ‘a rotten cow, and a
bloody sod’. Bill Gooding was not usually a drinker, but several neighbours
said that he had been drinking heavily that weekend. At 51 Western Road, a
bathing machine proprietor called William Birkin overheard some of the row on
Easter Sunday. He heard Bill shout: ‘You bloody rotten cow – You rotten
bugger.’ The couple were using ‘the filthiest language I had ever heard’,
Birkin said. The next day he saw Rose Gooding with her eye bandaged and
‘surmised that Mr Gooding had struck her’. The one part of Swan’s story that no
one else could corroborate was her insistence that Rose Gooding had beaten her
sister’s baby.
When the
NSPCC inspector arrived – a man from Chichester called A.C. Bailey – he found
the Gooding home to be ‘spotlessly clean and the children in a perfect state in
every way’. Bailey met with Edith Swan and Rose and Bill Gooding and, in Rose’s
confusing translation, he gave her ‘a good name and credit for how all the fine
little children looked after for a poor person he told me not to brood over it
as the person who wrote him had no cause whatever’. He saw the baby who was
supposed to have been beaten and found him healthy.
It was
after the inspector’s visit that the first scurrilous postcards started to
arrive. The first libel, Edith Swan would later testify, was an unstamped
letter which said: ‘You bloody old cow, mind your own business and there would
be no rows.’ Most of the letters targeted Edith Swan or those close to her. In
a single week, three letters were sent to the Beach Hotel where Edith’s brother
Ernest worked accusing him of stealing things. Various letters were sent to
local people for whom Edith did laundry telling them not to send their washing
to her. Shopkeepers were sent letters saying that Edith was a whore and her
family was ‘a dirty drunken lot’.
Most of
these early letters were signed ‘R – –’ or ‘R.G.’ or on one occasion ‘with Mrs
Gooding’s compliments’. The letters also included words and phrases that people
had overheard the Goodings using in conversation, such as ‘bloody old cow’.
Edward Swan told the police that he had ‘heard them use the language that was
on the postcard’. Often they were sent to people with whom Rose had recently
had contact. Several times, as a kindness, she had sent some cakes or a bit of
fish to the young son of Constable Russell. Whenever Rose sent one of these
gifts, it would be swiftly followed by an offensive letter or card to Constable
Russell.
As the
mother of an illegitimate child, and someone who was known to swear, Rose
Gooding was already guilty in the eyes of many. As Mohr notes, in this period,
swearing was deemed ‘morally wrong’ partly because it was seen as
characteristic of the lower classes: ‘people who would violate linguistic
decency, it was thought, would not hesitate to commit any sort of outrage
against moral decency.’ It was this kind of reasoning that enabled Edith to
frame Rose. As Hilliard writes, ‘Rose Gooding was serving her second prison
sentence before anyone thoroughly examined the evidence against her.’
In July
1920, Swan consulted a solicitor who began to build a libel case against
Gooding. In order for something to count as ‘criminal libel’ in the eyes of the
law, there had to be a public interest at stake. In September, the Director of
Public Prosecutions ruled that these were private libels and not of ‘general or
public importance’. Undeterred, Swan took what Hilliard calls the
‘extraordinary step’ of launching a private prosecution. Gooding was detained
in prison for two and a half months awaiting trial and then prosecuted at the
assizes in December 1920 in the case of Rex v. Gooding. There was no expert
testimony on the handwriting of the libellous letters. Essentially, the jury
had to decide whether they believed Gooding had written the letters in question
or whether they were the work of Swan. Gooding was found guilty and sentenced
to 14 days at Portsmouth prison, in addition to the two and a half months she
had already spent locked up awaiting trial.
During this
three-month period not a single libellous letter was sent in Littlehampton. But
within two weeks of her release, they started up again and the Goodings became
frightened that Rose would be framed again. This time, a solicitor for the
Goodings, William Smith, tried to outwit Swan. Smith told Gooding to leave
Littlehampton in secret and go to stay with her mother in Lewes. All the time
that she was gone, the rest of her family made a show of shouting out loudly to
Rose, to make the Swans believe she was still at home. Rose sent regular
letters with Lewes postmarks to prove that she was not in Littlehampton. One of
them has survived in the police files. In its diction, its spelling and its
softness of tone it is quite unlike the poison pen letters: ‘Dear ruth i have
got a suit fore your Billie and one fore Little Willie and a Dress fore your
Gertie and one fore Dorie and some stockings for them and a Black skirt ...
Dear ruth I am coming nix wensday in the afternoon same time ... xxxxxxxxx’
While
Gooding was in Lewes, Swan was seen posting a letter at the Littlehampton post
office and the mailbag was found to contain an abusive letter addressed to
Alfred Russell’s wife, who was in hospital. This should have been enough to
show that Gooding couldn’t be the culprit, but Alfred Russell said he didn’t believe
that she had really gone away. He did not believe it because Edith Swan and her
mother insisted that they had seen her crossing the yard.
Gooding was
only saved at last by the Court of Criminal Appeals, because some new evidence
had showed up in Littlehampton while she was locked up in Portsmouth. The week
before her appeal hearing, two notebooks were discovered on Selbourne Road, not
far from Western Road, containing a series of expletive-ridden rants in the
same handwriting as the libels. The notebooks were splattered with the name
Dorothy Gooding – Dorothy was Rose’s 11-year-old daughter. Both books contained
the sentence ‘Inspector Thomas wants pole-axing for taking my angel mother to
prison.’
In June
1921 Inspector George Nicholls spent a week in Littlehampton investigating the
libels and taking detailed statements from 29 people. To start with, he was
suspicious of Ruth Russell, Rose’s sister. ‘That Miss Russell is immoral goes
without saying,’ he wrote. But then he found several clues that settled the
matter. On searching the Swans’ house, he found some pieces of blotting paper
with clear signs of the same big handwriting that the libels had been written
in. The blotting paper also contained fragments of names and addresses that
exactly corresponded to some of the libels. When he asked the Swans to explain
the presence of this blotting paper in their house, they insisted that the
Goodings often borrowed blotting paper, pens, ink and pencils and, moreover,
that Rose Gooding had tossed some blotting paper into their house. Nicholls did
not ‘give much weight’ to this statement, instead concluding that he could not
trust anything Edith Swan said.
In the
end, Rose Gooding’s faulty spelling helped to save her. Inspector Nicholls
painstakingly went through 27 letters that Rose sent to Bill from Portsmouth
jail and found that she always misspelled the word ‘prison’ as ‘prision’. This
was a mistake that the author of the libels never made (one of Edith Swan’s
school teachers said she was ‘very clever at Essay writing, and a good
penman’). Unlike Rose Gooding’s public exclamations of ‘bloody old cow’ and so
on, which were easily copied by Edith Swan in the letters, ‘prision’ was a
little quirk of Rose’s language that no one knew about except for Bill. On 25
July 1921, the Court of Criminal Appeals heard Rose’s case and overturned both
of her convictions. Sir Ernley Blackwell, the top lawyer at the Home Office,
concluded that Rose Gooding had twice been wrongly imprisoned and had in ‘no
way’ contributed to her own misfortune:
"Mrs Gooding
is a woman of good character and for a long time she has borne the stigma of
having committed offences of a particularly disgraceful kind, many of the
letters she was supposed to have sent being of a filthy and abominable nature."
The British
government paid Rose Gooding £250 as an ‘act of grace’ but without any
admission of liability.
"To the old
bastards May. You can talk about us as much as you like you dirty cows. You
bloody fucking sods, you think you are big but we are as good as you. You are
bloody dirty or you would clean the yard sometimes you bloody rotten buggers."
And
another, from 7 October:
"We are not
going because you want us to you poxy ass piss country whores. We shall stay
all the longer now."
As well as
being obscene, the libels were also ‘decidedly strange’, as Hilliard remarks.
This was swearing as a foreign language by someone who had the vocab but was
not sure of how to fit the words together. The phrases ‘poxy ass’ and ‘foxy
ass’ often pop up in the libels. The ‘foxy’ in question did not mean ‘sassy’,
Hilliard points out, but decaying like a foxed book. The phrase ‘piss country
whore’, a favourite in Edith’s letters, is not one that Hilliard can trace to
any known usage. He wonders whether she perhaps misheard the phrase
‘piss-factory’, meaning a pub. Often, she piles up an excess of adjectives for
effect: ‘bloody flaming fucking piss country’, where ‘bloody country’ on its
own would do.
The great
mystery of the Littlehampton libels is what motivated Edith Swan to produce and
send this curious array of obscenity, other than hatred of the Goodings. If the
libels hurt the reputation of Rose Gooding, they were also a form of
self-sabotage against Swan herself. One of the letters from 1920 had been
written to Swan’s fiancé Bert Boxall telling him that Edith had an affair with
the policeman Alfred Russell and was carrying his child. Boxall broke off the
engagement. Many of the letters insulting Edith Swan were sent to people who
were of economic value to her family. Among the people who received letters
saying that Edith Swan was a dirty drunken whore were Caffyns the butchers, Mr
Boniface the fishmonger and several of Edith’s laundry clients. As Hilliard
writes, Edith Swan was ‘tearing at the fabric of her own daily life’.
Perhaps
this kind of self-harming behaviour ran in the Swan family. In 1921, when he
was desperately trying to get his wife freed from prison, Bill Gooding wrote to
the home secretary to say he had heard that ‘the youngest Swan boy used to
write letters to himself and tear his clothes up and knock his self about and
say other people was doing it’.
After Edith
Swan was finally sent down for her libels in 1923 – despite Justice Avory
directing them to see her as the victim of a ‘mistake’, the jury took just ten
minutes to find her guilty – some of the national press speculated on the state
of her mental health. The Daily Express saw her as a ‘wretched being’ whose
crimes were ‘the product of a mental aberration’ and who should be in an
‘asylum, not a prison’. The Manchester Guardian, likewise, saw her as ‘a
subject for a mental rather than a legal specialist’. The News of the World,
more bluntly, argued that this ‘unattractive’ woman with ‘weak, peering eyes’
and ‘no semblance of a figure’ must be suffering from ‘sex mania’. Hilliard
himself wonders whether Edith Swan was suffering from borderline personality
disorder, a form of identity disturbance in which individuals lack a stable
sense of self. A typical case of a ‘discouraged’ borderline would be someone
who overcomplies with the rules of society, only to feel periodic fury and
resentment at this constricted way of living, and acts out some kind of
rebellion.
The madness
of Edith Swan was an extreme and personal reaction to the linguistic
constraints under which most women in Britain lived in 1920. The person who
wrote these weird, malicious libels seems to have had two equally strong urges.
One was to maintain the moral high ground and prove to the world that she was
the ‘clean-mouthed’ feminine creature that Mr Justice Avory and others took her
to be: a neighbourly lender of clothes-lines and blotting paper, a wearer of
blue serge dresses, a dutiful daughter, a protector of innocent babies, a
target of someone else’s unmannerly aggression. Yet Edith Swan’s letters show
that she had an equally strong impulse to utter the foul words that someone
like her was not allowed to use. The Great War forced many women out of their
traditional roles as they took on the jobs of men who were away fighting and
gave them a glimpse of other, freer lives. Edith Swan spent most of the war
working in conventional female jobs as a domestic servant but for six months in
1915 she worked for a local construction firm doing distempering and
whitewashing on houses. Was it on the construction site that she learned about
‘piss’ and ‘foxy ass’ and ‘whore’ and all those other words that she could not
say at home in front of her parents and her eight siblings? When Rose Gooding
moved in next door and started swearing without inhibition, did Edith feel a
twinge of jealousy? Ruth Russell said that she sometimes overheard Stephen and
Ernest Swan ‘make use of the words “fucking and bugger”’ but she never once heard
Edith or her parents swear.
When Edith
was finally found guilty of the libels in 1923, Justice Avory sentenced her to
12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour, yet even then, he clung to a sense of
incredulity that such a woman could have written such ‘filth’. ‘I can only act
upon the verdict of the jury. It is not my verdict’ were his final words to
her.
