Jamaican ship's cook: her poison mystery 1764

 Maybe the mysterious cook previously worked in the Jamaican
canefields, like these women?

It's Black History Month. And here's a newly-found story about a rare BAME woman seafarer. 

So this is about race, gender, ships. It's part of the history of maritime diversity, labour and seafarers' forgotten lives. A fluke and your occupation could affect whether you ever arrived home from the sea. 

Only a fragment about this mysterious West Indian woman can be found. And the same words about her are repeated word for word in seven British newspapers. No more information than that is available. 

The story's a gift for a dramatist with a Sherlock Holmes touch. So I hope someone creative will make fiction from this small seed in the Derby Mercury, 10 Feb 1764. 

'We hear that a whole Ship's Crew, lately arrived from Jamaica, have been poisoned by a Black Woman-Cook they had on board, who after she had committed it, threw herself into the Sea and was drown'd. They are all dead except the Captain and two Men, who are very bad.'

Seven good questions to ask

Q. 1. Why does her story matter?

 A. Because women crew were very unusual.Black women  crew were even more unusual. This is the frst black woman ship's cook I've heard about in 40 years of researching maritime women.

Picture from 'Seamen “Love Their Bellies”: How Blacks Became Ship Cooks'  

Q. 2. How did the ship come to have a woman cook, unusually? 

A. Because a cook was needed. This person was available and affordable. It was was common for cooks to be black or disabled.

(See Guadeloupean William Buckland's story Buckland seacook BAME Maybe another black cook recommended  her. Indeed she may have been the widow of a black cook on board who'd died.  

Want to know more about the brief and late history of women cooks (usually white)? See my book From Cabin 'Boys' to Captains: 250 Years of Women at Sea,pp 214-219. 

This picture from it shows (left) Chief Cook Betty Fitch and Freda Price (right) Second Cook, in the tinned food storeroom on the Langleeclyde c1950. (Courtesy Maud McKibbin). Freda and Betty were highly appreciated for their good cooking.

Q. 3. Why did she poison these men? 

A. If it was deliberate, because she was angry and wanted redress. Revenge? Perhaps the ship was a slaver and she was one of the enslaved people who'd endured a bad voyage and seen her shipmates die. Perhaps someone on board had offended her. by assuming she was sexually available,  or had expressed dislike of food she had cooked?

A. If it was accidental, she might have had been supplied with bad ingredients.

Q.4. Why did she throw herself overboard? 

A. Surely because she knew she would be punished on landing. It was better to end the misery now, and by her own hand.

A. If it was accidental, she might have felt ashamed, and/or feared summary justice. Seafarers could hate bad cooks, because seafaring was hard enough without dismal food.

Q.5. What poison would she have used, if it was deliberate?

A. Women such as her were sometimes doctresses with a knowledge of herbs. Possibly she had a selection of herbs with her. 

A. If the poisoning was accidental, it could have been because the food she was expected to cook had gone off, There were plenty of opportunities were victuals to deteriorate as the 4,000-miles,oyage from Jamaica took between between three  weeks and four months depending on winds etc. 

Q.6. Why didn't everyone die?

A.  Possibly because the cook was given two lots of ingredients to cook, and those for the crew were inferior to the officers' rations. This status difference would not be unusual.

A.  Perhaps, if the poisoning was deliberate, she was targetting lower-decks crew, not officers.

Q. 7. So what else should we be asking about her?

A. All we can!

Pic shows sentimentalised version of a black male cook, with ayah and white girl on Victorian ship.

This story was drawn to my attention to John D Ellis. I thank him very much for his generosity in sharing it, and many other stories too. John is working on the history of black people in the armed services. Some of his work can be seen at https://www.historycalroots.com

To Marseille and beyond: avec amour and murder plans

 

L to R: The steward, the adulterous wife, and her husband, the
mariner's orphan whom they murdered

Sex, sea, stabbing, scented baths and ruthless day dreams. The 1922 Thompson-Bywaters murder trial at London's Old Bailey offers a new angle on the sea life, involving a ship’s steward and the daughter-in-law of a maritime family. 

The case also reveals the most scandalous exchange of letters in the gendered history of relationships between people far away at sea and those ashore who’ve barely travelled. 

In this blog I: 

• bring out the maritime aspects of the participants' lives, which has never been done before
• show that knowledge of a ship's timetable was nearly as central as knowledge of a railway timetables in an Agatha Christie whodunnit. 

COMMUNICATIONS MATTER

Letters were crucial when emails and social media didn’t exist. And they’re a historian’s delight. Modern landlubbers can learn about past life on the seas partly through wives’ letters to officers, such as Fanny’s to her husband Edward, Admiral Boscawen. Migrant voyagers’ epistles to families  tell gendered tales too.

But the famously infamous correspondence - between glamourous vamp Edith Thompson and stylish Frederick Bywaters, a P&O steward, a hundred years ago this year - make very different reading. 

The couple were hanged for the murder of Edith’s husband, Percy Thompson, in 1923. Freddy premeditatedly leapt from bushes and stabbed Percy on the way home from the Criterion. 

Why? To enable the adulterous affair to bloom, as Edith wanted. Or did she really?  

Edith, fifth from left, at the wholesale milliners where 
she worked, Carlton &Weiss

DARLING OR DREADFUL?

Four portfolios of Edith’s hyperbolic letters – now typed up and five inches thick - were used in court. They were perused as evidence of ‘one of the most extraordinary personalities’ that courts had encountered in the history of female accomplices.  

Well, what can you expect of an adultress so shockingly unconventional that she continues to work after her marriage; of an almost-vamp who later stars under the chandelier in the ‘worlds’ most famous courtroom’ sporting ‘a black velvety hat with black quills curving forward from the left side in a scythe-like sweeping drop’. 

A vulgar older woman ensnaring an innocent mariner? An intelligent arty day-dreamer whose young lover gallantly helps her divest herself of a mismatched husband: a Presbyterian non-dancer who, ergo, had it coming to him?   

1922. Helpful sailor delivers teas to long queues
waiting outside the Old Bailey for the verdict  

No wonder that seafarers were part of the Old Bailey queues in the exciting ‘show’. 

Those heading for the public gallery members queued long before dawn in Newgate Street include two seamen.

 They told the Evening News that they had a ‘professional interest in the case’. Presumably they were P&O shipmates who’d take the gossip back on board.

BONUS

Delightful melodramatic spectacle aside, there’s a bonus. People interested in the sea’s history can also use the letters to gain insight into the subjective history of seafaring labour and the emotions in relationships shaped by geographical distance. 

The milliner's letters were written alone in her rented downstairs flat at The Retreat, 41 Kensington Gardens, Ilford. They went to all points on P&O’s trek between the British Empire and the Antipodes. 

Her recipient was a lowly but cocky rating in a floating 24-7 community of thousands. He was on prestigious, not emigrant-laden, liners at a time when travel was seen as making voyagers prestigious.

It’s not just that, counter-intuitively,  these effusive, uneven torrents were so interlarded with discussions of doing away with a human hindrance: the limited Mr Thompson. (Tina Turner’s words, ‘What’s love got to with it’, could be the soundtrack for this melodrama.) 

But also it’s very interesting to see the side-story: how this woman on land knew precisely where her lover’s floating workplace would be, because accurate timetables were available, just like Bradshaw’s Railway Handbooks. 

Arrivals and departures on sea route had become a precise matter. You could set your wristwatch by them.

Courtesy of P&O Heritage.

Arithmetically adept, Edith understood exactly when his ships were due into Marseille and Gibraltar, Port Said and Plymouth, Colombo and Aden, Bombay and Melbourne, Sydney and Fremantle. 

Although she'd never sailed, this landlubber knew the very hour that faraway Freddy could be expected to dash off replies to catch a homeward-bound mail ship.

Also, here in the UK, to avoid her husband knowing about her adultery with their young ex-lodger, Edith physically collected the ship’s mail from the London sorting office.  

Freddy’s ship, RMS Morea, Leaving Royal Docks,London, 1911. (Courtesy P&O Heritage)

In this way we also learn about how a seafarer’s partner gains unusual knowledge of maritime mail handling. Edith explained how the system works in this letter to Freddy in Fremantle in July 1922: 

‘Darlingest Boy ... I went to the G.P.O for the Port Said Mail and encountered the first man that I saw before – he handed me a registered envelope from you 

'... and told me if I had an address in London I couldn’t have letters addressed to the G.P.O. – I told him I hadn’t – but I don’t think he believed me anyway he didn’t give me your Port Said letter and I hadn’t the patience to overcome (or try to) his bad temper.’

REVEALING LETTERS

Professor René Weis, the author of Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, (Penguin, 2001) has made all the information, including transcribed letters, freely available on line. https://tinyurl.com/Letters-Edith. (I am very grateful to him for all his kind support).

The correspondence begins just short of a hundred years ago, on 11 August 1921. It continues while the two were in Holloway and Pentonville. Only the noose ends it.

Unfortunately, what remains is mainly one-sided. Most of Edith’s letters are available because Freddy kept them safe in his ditty box, the locked wooden box in which each seafarer placed their most precious objects, and which no honourable shipmate would broach. 

Replica ditty box. http://maritime-universal.org/ship
-store/sailors-ditty-box

When her mother later ask Edith why she has written ‘such letters’ she replied ‘No one knows what kind of letters he was writing to me.’

 Few letters by Freddy exist because Edith had to destroy them to keep her affair secret.  

I’m familiar with the idea that early 20C ship’s stewards could be rather flashy ne’er-do-wells. 

Freddy’s beautiful handwriting, impeccable phrasing, and use of Italian and French phrases in the several extant letters reveal that this purser’s writer (a kind of ship’s secretary) and later laundry steward, was strikingly adept at giving a stylish impression. 

After all, this handsome man of ‘smouldering masculinity’ and ‘studied arrogance’ had been picking up lessons from other Merchant Navy seafarers since he was 15. 

He’d been on the Nellore during WW1, when it was under torpedo and gunfire attack.‘Seasoned’ and ‘heroic’ might be words he’d use to describe himself. 

Plus he’d taken dancing lessons. This was a man who calculates how to perform, as some stewards did.  

(Courtesy P&O Heritage)

For six years Freddy had been working for one of the most prestigious companies in the world: on the Malwa in 1920, the Orvieto to Brisbane from Feb to June 1921, then the Morea.  And white ships’ servants often adopted the swagger of elite passengers, as well as regarding themselves as immensely superior to the ‘Lascars’. 

Although his record of service was stamped VG (Very Good) Freddy had, in fact, blotted his copy book by precipitately leaving the Malwa’s tender, off Tilbury in January 1921. 

Percy Thompson’s intervention (he was friends with the Orvieto’s purser) had led to the company taking Freddy back. But the faux pas may explain Freddy’s demotion from writer: he couldn’t quite be trusted.

In Freddy's letters he is nothing like as passionate, nor as grammatically challenged, as his 28-year old lover. 

The much-questioned tale of their shared role in killing Percy is well-known, not least because of all Edith ‘over-wrought’ letters. These were read out at the Old Bailey trial, to her family’s shame.  Several were censored because they mention such scandalous subjects as orgasm and her abortion, though very obliquely.

Mainly her letters are like those of any lover made anxious by the long separations and uneven silences.  ‘Why are you so late this time – oh I hate this journey, I hate Australia and everything connected with it – it will be 109 days since I’ve seen you – and you didn’t answer my question about China and Japan next time.’ 

She mithers about whether he still loves her, and how she’s performing: ‘Darlingest boy, when you get my letters and have read them are you satisfied? Do you feel that I come up to all your expectations? Do I write enough? Just don’t forget to answer this.’

Edith also passes on the East Ham gossip, including describing her day out at the local Seamen’s Orphanage Fete. 

The Merchant Seamen’s Orphanage. Courtesy of
childrenshomes.org.uk and Peter Higginbotham

She was probably attending because the Thompsons knew maritime life and may have been helped by charities since 1901 when Percy’s mariner father, Robert Conen Thompson, died leaving three orphans.  

Percy himself worked as a clerk for Commercial Road timber shipping agents Messrs Parker & Co. His sister Eliza worked for tea merchants. Brother Richard did accounts at a City paper merchants. 

(The under-funded Snaresbrook-based institution housed many child victims of P&O and British India Line shipping disasters, just as the Liverpool and Southampton seafarers’ orphanages were evidence of the shipping lines based there, such as Cunard and White Star respectively.  

Most of all Edith discusses novels with Freddy including Bella Donna, about a woman who slow-poisons her husband. (Edith had tried smashed lightbulb glass in Percy’s mashed potato – or was that just her fantasy?).

The 1911 film Bella Donna, based on the book that Edith 
discussed, as a model murder method, with Freddy far
away across the seas

Like so many millions of relatives of seafarers thinking ‘There but for the grace of God goes my man’ Edith feels alarm at the maritime fatalities that might befall him:‘Darlint I had a terrible shock when the Egypt went down Imagine what I felt can you?’

 (The Egypt was another P&O liner, but on the Tilbury-India route. It had sunk in just 20 minutes after fog caused a collision, causing some Asian and European crew to be lost).

TRACK N’TRACE

The extracts that follow show that the structure of Edith and Freddy’s lives was created by the ship’s predictable schedule in 1922. By then steam ship voyages were so reliable that you could set your clock by them. 

Hopeful emigrants went out. Refrigerated cargoes, such as meat, came back, along with emigrants who'd made good. 

On 28 January Edith writes ‘Darlingest boy, its Wednesday now, the last for posting to Marseilles.I’ll be thinking & thinking, wishing such a lot of things tomorrow – late – when I shall know you have arrived.

‘Darlint is my letter to Bombay awaiting you on arrival, or do you have to wait a week for it, I believe you do,’ she enquired on 15 February. 

Marseille docks, P&O vessel and mail sacks.
Courtesy of P&O Heritage

To Freddy in Marseilles on 6  March she rejoices : ‘I was pleased to get letters from you last Monday I hadn’t expected any – as I got that note – after the Port Said letter & thought it must have been posted at Aden. Darlint if you were 1 ½ hour out from Port Said how did you post it?’

 ‘Will you tell me how many letters you have got at Marseilles. Wed. the last day for posting was fearful here – gales and now storms, and I believe the next day no Channel boats ran at all. I hope nothing went astray. I wrote three letters and one greeting, posted separately ... Altho’ it’s Monday darlint, the mail from Marseilles is not yet in, I’m expecting it every moment, I wish it would hurry up and come.’ 

NEITHER FAST NOR FREE COMMUNICATIONS

Today’s e-correspondence is so virtually cost-free and instant that people contacting seafarers don’t usually have to think about communication methods in the way Edith did. 

For example, usually she put on five penny-worth of stamps.  But in Exhibit 17 she’s concerned: ‘I believe I insufficiently stamped the first Marseilles letter I sent. If I did darlint I [am] ever so sorry, I hate doing anything like that. You know don’t you.’

Long delivery delays brought worrying gaps, but also accumulations (which could impose oppressive duties on recipients).  You can see this in Edith’s letter to the Morea in Marseille in May:

‘By now darlint you will have heard from me several times. Yesterday [Sunday 14 May] you passed Suez and got my Port Said letters. I’m so sorry it’s a long time from Marseilles to Bombay, when you hear from me, but I can’t do anything to help it can I darlint? 

'You’ll be able to talk to me a long time this week to post at Marseilles because you’ll have all my letters to answer.’ 

(Courtesy P&O Heritage)

Infrequently cables are used instead of letters. She writes: About the Marconigram – do you mean one saying Yes or No, [that I have killed him?] because I shan’t send it darlint. I’m not going to try any more until you come back.’ 

Edith’s letter of 20 June reveals the classic obstacle to communication in the period: money. 

‘I have been looking at the mailcard and see you do not arrive in Australia until July 22nd – I’m so sorry – I wish I could afford to cable you a long long letter to somewhere before Sydney, or better still, to be able to phone to you and hear you say “Is that Peidi?”'

And the problem that besets seafarers’ digital communications today – signal range – beset Edith too. 

On Freddy’s 20th birthday she sends birthday greetings to Melbourne via Marconigram: ‘I sent you greetings by cable this time it was the only way I could celebrate darlint I wanted you to receive it on the exact day but I’m afraid you won’t it’s not my fault darlint its the fault of that ship of yours not being within radio range of either Aden or Bombay on the 27th [June].’

When autumn begins and Captain Garwood’s team is homeward bound again, on 21 September, Edith writes yet another date-aware letter:

 ‘I’ve not sent a wire to Plymouth to you ... I see you left Gibraltar on the 19th and perhaps you will get in Saturday morning – then I shall send you a wire to Tilbury to meet me in the afternoon – if it’s at all possible for you.’

DREAM ACHIEVED BUT...

Within ten days of landing back in England, on 3 October Freddy commits the murder of Percy Thompson that Edith had – sort of – longed for.  (People still argue that she had only been fantasising.) 

 The couple would exchange no more letters across the seas.  On 9 January 1923 Edith and Freddy were hanged, and then placed in separate graves. 

The cause celebre is the focus of books and films, including Another Life (2001) with Natasha Little playing an un-sultry Edith. Should the lovers have been hanged? Was justice miscarried?

Pola Negri, marketed as Hollywood’s most smouldering and exotic vamp, starred in Bella Donna three months later. Lookalike Edith would have been writing Freddy rapturous letters about it.

Until scrapped in 1930 the Morea kept ploughing from Tilbury to Australia, regular as clockwork.

 Outbound, Freddy’s former colleagues were busy with holidaying passengers using the summer season to explore beyond P&O’s mail routes. Increasingly P&O was marketing tours or broken journeys to passengers, while still sticking to the Mail schedules.

Stewards must have found passengers’ curiosity wearing: ‘Bywaters, your shipmate. What was he like, eh?’ 

But surely the jute sacks full of love letters to and from P&O crew were never again laden with murder plans. 

Trafficked women die at sea: females over 5 times more at risk than males

(The corpse of a migrating person is retrieved from rescue ship Cantabria, Salerno, on Sunday. Getty image)

Reports are just coming in that 26 corpses of Nigerian and sub-Saharan women were retrieved from the Mediterranean at the weekend.
Presumably economic migrants seeking entry to Europe, the dead were aged only 14 to 18. Mass murder is suspected.
A “seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags” , said Agence France-Presse, was landed by the Spanish ship Cantabria when it arrived in Salerno, southern Italy, after a rescue operation that brought in 400 people.
The deceased young women had been among the 64 people on the boat travelling to southern Italy from Warshefana, near Tripoli, when rough weather caused the boat to capsize.
Some of those still living were found in the sea, clinging to the sides of a partly-sunk rubber dinghy.

Picture: Survivors land in Salerno.(Antonio Masiello/Getty Images)

Yesterday, Tuesday, the autopsies were due to begin. The young women were going to be examined to see if they were poisoned and/or raped before they died.




FEMALE ESCAPEES’ DEATH RATE USUALLY 6 TIMES THAT OF MEN

When women are trafficked – not for sex, but just because they want to escape their country – they are five or six times more at risk of dying on their escape boats than are men.
In this case, the dead young women were 40 per cent of those aboard (the total female to male ratio is not yet revealed).

The Guardian reports that Marco Rotunno, spokesperson for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said 90% of migrant women arrive with bruises and other signs of violence.
“It’s very rare to find a woman who hasn’t been abused, only in exceptional cases, maybe when they are travelling with their husband. But also women travelling alone with their children have been abused.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/07/italy-investigating-deaths-of-nigerian-women-thought-to-have-been-murdered

The reasons why women are so additionally mistreated vary a little according to culture and situations. But from my studies of secondary sources explanations would appear to include:
1. women are regarded as lesser and therefore more disposable
2. women usually have less economic power to bribe their way out of trouble
3. women tend to have been socialised to be less assertive about their rights
4. women may also be less physically strong and have had less experience in fighting off male assailants. (Childhood play fights are useful training but are usually only sanctioned between boys, not girls versus boys).
5. mothers are hampered by being with children they are protecting
6. advanced pregnancy – and miscarrying en route – makes women less physically able to withstand attack or hardship, or simple y to fight for a fair share of scarce food and water
7. murder sometimes follows rape, or even after sex as a bribe. It’s a way to ensure silence. Because those with power in the escape progress (such as boat captains) are invariably male, so the rape victims are usually females.

How can this danger at sea, this horrifically gendered aggression, still be allowed to happen?

NIGERIAN REPORT

A report in Monday's Vanguard, the Nigerian newspaper with the motto ‘Towards a better life for the People’, gave the details:
“The bodies of 26 women were unloaded in a procession of black bags on to the dock of Salerno. The deceased women, believed to be Nigerian in origin, were recovered by the Spanish ship Cantabria as part of operation Sophia, an EU anti-trafficking force. Most of the women, aged in large part between 14 and 18, were drowned when the rubber boat carrying 64 sank on Friday while crossing the Mediterranean.
“The other three victims were collected as part of other operations and transferred the Cantabria as it headed to Salerno to turn over the bodies to the Italian authorities. 375 rescued migrants were also brought to Salerno, originating from sub-Saharan Africa, Gambia, Ghana, Libya, Nigeria, Sudan, and Senegal: 90 of them women, eight of them pregnant; and 54, children.

SEXUAL VIOLENCE ON BOARD?

“An investigation into the deaths of the women has been launched by Salerno prosecutors who believe there is a possibility that sexual violence played a role in the death of these women. Public prosecutor Luca Masini has arranged the external examination of the bodies with emphasises on toxicology and evidence of rape.
“The bodies were frozen onboard the Cantabria in order to preserve evidence that may have been lost during the journey to the coast. Full autopsies are expected to be completed at the Salerno morgue within the week.
“Police have detained 7 people for questioning including two men of Libyan and Egyptian origin who are believed to be the captains of the vessel.

SEX SLAVES WOULD BE BETTER PROTECTED

“Salerno’s prefect Salvatore Malfi has expressed doubts that the women were being trafficked into sex slavery, as he said “the sex trafficking routes are different. Loading women onto a boat is too risky. The traffickers would not do it as they could lose all their ‘goods, ‘as they describe them, in one fell swoop.”
“While women are statistically at more risk during this kind of migration, it is far beyond the 5 to 6 death rate of men to women crossing the Mediterranean. Read more at: https://www.vanguardngr.com/2017/11/26-nigerian-women-die-mediterranean-sea/”

TINY DISTANCE – HUGE PROBLEM

People wanting to cross that telling bridge from Africa to Europe know the shortest distance by sea is across the Straits of Gibraltar from Point Oliveros to Point Cirse: 8.6 miles(14 km). (A road bridge is being planned.)
‘Illegal’ migrants from southern Africa usually travel via Libya, much further east. Italy has 4,000 mile of coastline and the north-east tip of Tunisia to the west of Sicily, Marsala, near Trapani, is only 325 miles ( 284 km) as the crow flies.
But it’s never that simple, because of sea conditions, and lack of easy places for covert embarkation and disembarkation.
‘Bonafide’ people travelling that route may take ferries from Tunis to Palermo, in north west Sicily. The ten-twelve hour voyage on these large and powerful vessels costs 110 euros in the cheapest period (February).
By contrast, travelling illegally in a rubber dinghy with an inboard motor costs whatever the traffickers can get.
Speeds on a dinghy with a 15 horsepower engine vary between 15-20 miles per hour, but being heavily-laden slows them down. With just two or three people aboard such a boat voyage would take at least 16 hours. These people could have been at sea for several days.
Survivors are just starting to give evidence.

WW2 Wrens shooting spotlighted,

WW2 image of servicewomen are usually positive. They're 'our girls', working for 'our victory'. But now a story emerges of a Wren in uniform whom a mystery assailant shot four times as she was returning from an errand. She died.

The question is, was this a crime motivated by hostility to Wrens, to women, this particular woman, or was it just random? A crime of passion? Or politics? Or just a fluke? But let's bear in mind that more men murder and assault women than women murder men. So the bigger question is: does the murder expose a gendered hostility to servicewomen that has silenced?

Twenty-year-old Gertrude Canning, of Donegal, was a serving Wren (Woman’s Royal Naval Service) at Camp Quebec at No. 1 Combined Training Centre in Inveraray, Argyll, when she was murdered by four shots in 1942.

It's reported that 'Scotland's newly-formed Cold Case Unit could reopen an investigation into the murder...The Crown Office has listed the death... as part of the Unsolved Homicide Database, the result of which may see her case re-examined. A total of around 93 serious crimes are subject to a re-investigation due to advances in forensic technology.'

'Family’s fresh hopes for clues to mystery of Gertrude’s murder', 22.12.2011,
http://www.milngavieherald.co.uk/news/local-headlines/family_s_fresh_hopes_for_clues_to_mystery_of_gertrude_s_murder_1_2017325