How poison-pen letters spread across Britain – and ruined lives
“Perhaps in a trance or coma, don’t bury yet – the other Curate was reported dead – some time since.” This strange, unsigned note was received in 1894 by someone about to bury her son. Morton Willoughby, an assistant curate at All Saints Church in Carshalton, Surrey, had just died, aged 28. “Perhaps in a trance or coma”: the letter alleged (falsely) that his mother, Mary Dorothea Cokayne, was about to bury him alive. The sender was not identified.
Why would someone send a note like this to a grieving mother? Mary’s husband George kept a diary, which is how we know about it today, but he left no clues as to his wife’s reaction. And who was the “other Curate”? It’s possible that the note was written by someone with a long memory; George’s nephew, the Rev George Hill Adams, had absconded in 1877 while on bail for a serious sexual assault involving three young girls. Rumours circulated about him: was he in Spain? In France? In a foreign mental asylum? Or dead? And finally: why did Mary keep this note? It must have brought her sadness, so was it kept as evidence in case future letters arrived?
The term “poison pen letter” refers to any message sent anonymously – either unsigned, or signed only with initials, symbols or a pseudonym – with the apparent aim of unsettling the person to whom they’re sent. This includes obscene or threatening letters; letters accusing someone of doing something, sent to someone else who might make life hard for the person(s) mentioned; and even decoy letters, written by someone who sent one to themselves and publicised it.
In Britain, these letters are probably as old as letter-writing itself. One way to categorise them is as forms of impolite behaviour, allying them with assault, spoken intimidation, stalking and verbal haranguing. Such campaigns may appear, to us, to prefigure the most concerning tendencies of the internet age. Yet they were, and still are, most effective on the smallest scale. Cruel letters circulating locally can create paranoia and suspicion, damaging the social fabric. In 1962, the rector of a village in Essex took to his pulpit in an attempt to ferret out the person who had sent letters to several members of the community over the prior two years. He told The Guardian that nerves were fraying, that “minds [were] broken, one [victim] actually having to go into a mental hospital”. After the rector spoke in church about the matter, two more villagers came forward as victims.
While researching this topic for my forthcoming book, Penning Poison, I mentioned this project to several acquaintances, and four of them told me they had received anonymous mail through the post. One letter was sent by a disgruntled former student to their old university lecturer; another was sent by someone in a small Yorkshire village to newcomers; one – a postcard – was sent following a house sale, making comments about the “FILTHY” state of the property. The last was received by the owners of a cat:
Regardless of whether or not we had cat allergies, we should be able to leave a window open without then having to scrub and repaint walls, or change all the bedlinen, and vacuum/mop the house. We do not have time or money to take on this extra work which has come with your cat entering our house.
In each case, the person who received a letter was upset, shaken and confused.
Letters that allude correctly to private matters have always had the potential to terrorise their recipients. In 1938, a woman in Streatham miscarried shortly after receiving one that included this passage:
You are lowering the value of our property by hanging out washing on the Sabbath. Unless you cease we, the neighbours, will inform the borough council or your landlord, and you would not like him to know.
In close-knit communities, such messages had colossal power.
One might imagine that hate mail came, historically, to be treated in terms of harm, but until the 20th century, this was rarely the case. It was highly unusual for the matter to be considered under tort law; it wasn’t (and isn’t) an offence per se to send an anonymous letter. The law instead judged other aspects of such communications: whether it was “indecent”, “obscene”, “extorting”, “threatening”, or “libellous”.
The laws also varied according to how the letters were delivered. They might be left on street furniture, slid under milk bottles, or put straight through a letter-box – but only if they were sent through the Royal Mail could their exposed sender be tried under legislation that empowered the Post Office to interdict harmful mail. The Communications Act 1988 provided more generally for “the punishment of persons who send or deliver letters or other articles for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety”, and the sending of a threat, grossly offensive message, false information or “indecent or grossly offensive” article became easier to prosecute.
Over the centuries, Britain’s police forces found it hard to get a handle on anonymous writing, as they received more anonymous “tip-offs”. This is hardly a modern phenomenon: Lord Monteagle received an unsigned letter sent on October 26 1605, warning him to avoid being in attendance in Parliament, which was set to “receive a terrible blow”. He immediately took it to Robert Cecil, James I’s spymaster, who ordered a search of the Palace of Westminster that uncovered Guy Fawkes. But it was in 1888 that, in the best-known case, the Metropolitan Police became engulfed by Jack the Ripper missives. After anonymous tip-offs and accusations were widely publicised, hundreds of hoax letters were written, and they continued until 1896.
The problem persisted. In the early 20th century, there were several infamous false accusations and miscarriages of justice, especially in cases involving women. In 1944, Birmingham City Police received this note, postmarked with the time and date of 1.15pm, April 11 1944:
Hagley Murder
what woman was
signalman Edginton
with up the Hagley
road one Sunday night
near mid night.
came through
Blakedown. 5 oclock
next morning. going
up the Birmingham
road Kidderminster.
where he then lived
very fishy
The “Hagley Murder” was, at that time, a national sensation: the previous year, the skeletal remains of a woman had been found in a wych elm in Hagley Wood in Worcestershire. The body was thought to have been placed there around 1941. In 1944, graffiti started to appear locally, asking “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?” The “signalman Edginton” of the note was Arthur W Edgington, employed by the Great Western Railway and resident only a few miles from Hagley Wood. The case remains unsolved to this day, but despite what the letter insinuated, Edgington was never considered a credible suspect.
In the early to mid-20th century, there seemed to be a “plague” or “epidemic” of poison-pen letters. During the peak, in 1946, the vicar of Holy Trinity, Malvern, in Worcestershire, remarked glibly that “almost everyone receives an anonymous letter from time to time”; he himself had received “a fairly large number”. The uptick may have been triggered, as with the Ripper wave, by a copycat impulse, as there was plenty of popular fiction in which they were appearing, such as Agatha Christie’s The Moving Finger, published in 1943.
A parliamentary report in 1985 noted a lack of statistical evidence as to their ongoing incidence, but it suggested that the receipt of poison-pen letters was still “by no means a rare event”. As my own acquaintances will testify, they certainly still exist today. Perhaps you have had that prickly feeling of being at the receiving end of unwanted anonymous attention?
Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters by Emily Cockayne will be published by Oxford University Press on Sept 14