A week or so ago I posted about the case of Abdul Ezedi – the corrosive liquid attacker – and compared it with a similar case from a hundred years ago. Ezedi would appear to have been found in Mayor Khan’s makeshift morgue otherwise known as the River Thames. Meanwhile, a hundred years ago Ezedi’s counterpart’s case has reached a conclusion. This is from The Times of 29 February 1924:
At the Central Criminal court yesterday, EDITH LOUISA BASSETT, 30, was found Guilty of throwing corrosive fluid upon Arthur William Thompson, and upon three other persons, with intent to do grievous bodily harm to Thompson. MR. JUSTICE SHEARMAN sentenced her to three years’ penal servitude.
Only three years? But there’s a bit more to this woman:
After the jury had found the prisoner Guilty, Inspector Aldridge said she had a remarkable history. Throughout her life she had been of a violent disposition. In 1905 she was sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour for wounding with intent to murder. She had made the acquaintance of an omnibus driver and one night after he had stated that he wished to have nothing more to do with her she went on the top of his omnibus and cut his throat with a razor. In 1910 she married a man named Bassett. The marriage proved a unhappy one and the husband joined the Navy. She next met a wealthy young man, and saying that she was the daughter of a retired doctor, persuaded him to go through the ceremony of marriage with her. She was charged with bigamy and bound over. Later she went to Scotland and assaulted a gentleman whose son, she said, had failed to carry out his promise to marry her. The prisoner in 1914 was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment with hard labour at the Central Criminal Court for perjury in the name of Melville. In that case she had borrowed a person’s baby to obtain an affiliation order against a man. In 1915 she made the acquaintance of an Army officer, and told him that her father was a ranch-owner in Mexico, and induced him to marry her. She also married another officer, and in that case borrowed a baby to work on the generosity of the officer’s parents. For that bigamy she was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment.
I make that 4 weddings, 4 assaults and 3 jail sentences. The women of today yesterday…
There has been a great increase in such attacks – and that increase is due to mass immigration.
Pretending that Britain has always been like this is false.
It reminds me of the Russian proverb – “First they smash your face in, then they say you were always ugly”.
The British people have voted, repeatedly, to end mass immigration – yet it is higher than ever. Is the United Kingdom a democracy at all?
“Cut his throat with a razor” and got 12 months.
Sounds like she was sentenced by an ancestor of Judge Tanweer Ikram CBE.
I’ve often wondered how criminals might choose. One year’s Very Hard Labour or three years Ordinary Labour? The ‘choice’ to be the start of taking control over their own lives.
Do I have the lovely ladies’ timeline right: she was tried at age 30 in 1924 but had tried to cut a guy’s throat in 1905…at age 11! Psychopathy starts early I guess!
Makes you wonder what crimes she was up to as a toddler that were not discovered!
What are you blathering about? Did I miss the bit where that was contended?
Having had reason to study criminal trends in Edwardian England to some degree, I came to the conclusion that, while the overall or average level of crime was much lower than it is today, those times tended to produce criminals just as vicious and depraved as the worst of what we see today – in other words, while there may have been less of them, there were monsters then just as there are today.
By contrast, a lot more crime these days, and especially the floridly-violent and depraved crimes, seem to have all sorts of other motives than the merely economic. Religion, sexual jealousy, drink, drugs and a sort of ill-defined underclass ethos of general antisocial misanthropy seems to be more and more prevalent in many of these crimes.
My other observation is that back then, much-more of the crime, even the floridly-violent and depraved crime, was much-more-often and -directly economic – as in the instant case, where the young lady’s repeated crimes were mostly in attempts to marry men, presumably for their money. Crippen, Seddon, Smith, Manning, Haigh – they were all depraved monsters, but they all killed for money, nothing more.
On the matter of whether Britain has ‘always been like this’, I have to observe that, in the specific area of acid attacks, yes, Britain has a long history of this particular form of attack which is, I think, perhaps unique in the Western nations. In Georgian and Victorian times, vitriol-throwing was a commonplace, often mentioned in newspaper editorials, in fiction (“The Adventure of the Illustrious Client”) and in the popular experience. It seems to be more-directly associated with the ready availability of concentrated sulphuric acid, a common part of heavy industry, than with any particular cultural or racial grouping.
llater,
llamas
Thanks for that Llamas. It seems to me too that crime was a lot lower in those days. One of the ways I can tell is that The Times has space to report on burglaries. You wouldn’t get that today – too many murders. By the way, I thought Crippen did it for love?
@ Patrick Crozier – of course, you are correct, and Crippen killed for reasons other than money. I opened the drawer in my memory marked ‘horrible Victorian and Edwardian killers’ and he marched out with all the others. My oversight. For ‘Crippen’, read ‘Cotton’.
llater,
llamas
Bulldog Drummond.
Yet again you are rude and pretend to not understand what you, in fact, understand very well (this is not the first post on this matter – and the agenda is obvious).
You are a dishonest man Sir.
In the preface to the remarkable book about the Bulger murder (‘The Sleep Of Reason’), the author’s research into child murderers reveals they have not been as rare a crime as was commonly believed
Llamas
The generally excellent Granada TV adaptation starring Jeremy Brett (my slightly contentious choice for the best ever TV or film Holmes, closest to the book version anyway) makes one notable departure from canon by portraying Kitty Winter as having previously been facially acid-scarred by the Baron before exacting her revenge in similar fashion. In the original story while a thoroughly despicable character he does not use acid against women.
I suspect there is a case for saying that such vile acts by men against women, or at least the increased incidence of them, are a recent phenomenon connected to demographic and cultural change.
The visceral horror of facial scarring and permanent disfigurement is particularly pertinent to women (albeit not to be taken lightly in men either) representing the “if I can’t have you then no-one will” creed which I believe to be a comparative rarity in our less honour-fixated western culture.
GregWA said:
You’d probably be horrified to learn just how early some of these sorts get started… And, with how little environmental input.
There was a kid, local to us here in Washington State, who everyone who knew him and his family were fairly certain was responsible for killing his father and stepfather, both before the age of twelve. The two deaths were never properly investigated, but the facts of the cases were such that people who knew the details were certain the kid was responsible. They also knew he had a proclivity for killing the family pets and neighborhood cats and dogs with an alacrity that was very Dahmeresque. All of this was known to the neighborhood and community, the teachers at school all being aware of it. Nothing was ever really thoroughly investigated, the deaths being written off to misadventure and “farming accident”.
Nothing good was ever expected of this kid; he gave off massive “Damien” vibes. Mom was his constant defender and enabler, preventing anyone from ever holding him to account over his slaughter of the animals in the neighborhood. After the death of her second husband, she moved the family well away from the area, and the local concerned parties all heaved sighs of relief. That kid’s fate is at this time unknown, but if I ever hear his name in conjunction with a serial murderer case, I’m not going to be surprised. It’s been over twenty years, and people are still talking about the oddities involved with those two deaths…
@John – while I share your admiration for the Jeremy Brett interpretation of Holmes (we’ve reviewed it here in the past) it’s a fact that the Granada series took not-a-few liberties with the original stories. I had forgotten this particular one. While I can understand that dramatizing for TV may mean some changes, I don’t understand this one at all – the dramatic reason for adding a second vitriol attack is lost on me. But then, I’m not John Hawkesworth.
Thanks also to another correspondent – she is an actual historian, not like me 🙂 – who reminded me with some vigour of another major difference in the motives for murder between Victorian/Edwardian times and today, viz, the use of murder because divorce was generally unavailable. She also described how much-more common (relatively-speaking) this type of murder was in those days among the middle- and upper-classes than it is today. With the ready availability of deadly poisons, much-shorter life expectancy, and the high rates of death from all kinds of causes now virtually-unknown, she suggests that a lot of unsatisfactory marriages ended in this way with noone the wiser. I think there’s a dissertation in there somewhere, or perhaps it’s already been done, I will ask.
llater,
llamas
@Kirk – regarding your description of the ‘bad seed’ in your neighborhood, the ex-copper in me thinks it far-more-likely that if you ever hear a name connected with a serial-murder case, it will not be the boy, but rather, his mother. Father, then step-father? Yeah, no common thread there :-).
llater,
llamas
@llamas… Trust me on this: The mother was looked at, but there was no way she could have done it without using the kid as her agent/proxy. One of the deaths the kid freely admitted he’d been out in the shop “playing” with things, before the “accidental” welding tank explosion that killed his stepfather. The mother was entirely out of town and hospitalized when this went down, and the way the “accident” happened convinced the state fire investigator (a very experienced one, BTW…) that there had been deliberate sabotage of the tank setup, but there was no way anyone but the kid in question or the stepfather could have done it. And, there wasn’t anyone willing to entertain the idea that said kid was the one, so they called it an elaborate suicide.
Whole thing was hearsay, but… Yeah. Something was straight-up wrong with that kid. Everyone was terrified of him, to include adults. The school administration refused to discipline him because they were afraid he’d be going after them, next. This kid was another Ken Rex McElroy in larval form, in that there wasn’t anyone willing to stop him. You talk to one of the investigating cops, to this day, and he’ll tell you that he was dead-nuts certain that the kid killed those two men, he was unable to prove it, and that that kid scared him worse than anyone else he had ever encountered in his law enforcement career. This is a cop who did undercover work with biker gangs, sooo… Yeah.
I think the entire premise of “juvenile justice” is insane, on the face of things. You do the crime, you get the punishment, and I don’t give a damn whether you’re age seven or ninety-seven; “diminished capacity” is meaningless to your victims. You still harmed them; you should still pay the price, and if that means you spend your life incarcerated from adolescence forward? Too bad; so sad.
Can’t source where I heard this, but I believe corrosives/ acid served yet another purpose in the Victorian era: suicide. Specifically, gory ‘self-murder’ by drinking lye. It was said that choosing this agonizing method was common among Victorian suicides for the simple reason that if you killed yourself, you *expected* to suffer. Hadn’t ocurred to me til just now, but yeah – industrialization would have made all kinds of nasty material newly available to the common man.
You never can tell about those rotten kids. At our fiftieth HS class reunion, one of them turned up as the city’s Mayor, and I turned up as a woman. We agreed that in school, nobody had expected us to end up this way. Still – he was a politician, and I had a doctorate in nuclear physics. So we did fulfill some of the expectations.