In 1921, Edith Swan — a 30-year-old laundress in the UK — began sending abusive, curse-studded letters to several of her neighbors. She got away with it for a while by framing another of her neighbors, Rose Gooding.
Swan, you see, was a respectable, middle-class woman, while Gooding was a working-class woman with an "illegitimate child". So the police and judge simply couldn't believe the respectable Swan could possibly use such gutter language! It was thus quite easy for Swan to frame her working-class neighbor, who spent a few months in prison before Swan was eventually caught.
This is a completely demented story of social class, crime, and some filthy, filthy language. It's told in a new book The Littlehampton Libels, which I am ordering right now, and which is discussed in this essay in The London Review of Books:
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'.
As in the 1923 trial, the judge simply refused to accept the evidence of Swan's guilt. Sir Clement Bailhache was not convinced by Moss's testimony because it conflicted with what his eyes told him: that Edith Swan was the kind of Englishwoman who was incapable of swearing. 'If I were on the jury, I would not convict,' Bailhache announced. The jury followed his guidance.
