Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Hate Mail: A Scandalous History

Episode Date: September 15, 2023

From tip-off letters about the gun powder plot to village quarrels that lead to jail time - today we’re going Betwixt the Sheets to find out about the history of hate mail. Joining Kate is Dr. Emily Cockayne, author of Penning Poison and consultant on the forthcoming film Wicked Little Letters, starring Olivia Coleman, based on a famous case of anonymous letters from the early 20th century. This episode was edited by Stuart Beckwith and produced by Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Lovely bit twixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here to make sure that we are all on the same page and we all know what we're getting into and we all know. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults in an adulty way about a range of adult stuff and you should be an adult too. Now, if you continue listening and you get upset,

well, you really have nobody to blame but yourself because fair do's, you were warned. It's 1919 and we are in the kitchen of 30-year-old housewife Rose Gooding in a modest home in Little Hampton West Sussex. She's at the stove watching over what will be marrow chutney. A recipe that her neighbour Edith Swan, aka Edie, gave her. Unbeknownst to Rose, Edie, a slightly odd-looking woman with an intense expression in her eye, is currently at the police station. Huh.

She's received a string of anonymous abusive letters. One has gone as far as to call her a foxy asshoar. Shocking stuff. And Edie suspects one person. That's right. Her neighbour rose. And this is just the beginning of a case which will shock the local community

and see two women ending up behind bars. Today we are going Bertwix the Sheets to look at the history of poisoned pen letters. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry.

Welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of second. scandal in society with me Kate Lister. Today I am joined by Emily Cockane to talk about the history of anonymous letters, some accusatory, some libelists and some just plain bonkers, some leaving people wrongfully imprisoned, others trying to blackmail the recipient into paying them large chunks of cash. From the 1800s onwards, Emily has been researching these letters and sifting through the archives for more than a decade and she has unearthed some truly wild stories. All right, let's open the seal. We are going in. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Emily Cockane. How are you doing?

I'm fine, thanks, Kate. I am here to talk to you about such a fascinating subject and something that you have been researching for a number of years. The history of, what would we call it, poison pen letters? Yes, some of them are poison pen letters. sort of the history of anonymous letters. Anonymous letters. What was it that made you, even know that this was a history

and that it was something you wanted to research? A few things. So about a dozen years ago, I was writing my second book, which was about neighbours. And I came across the Little Hampton case I can talk about later. It's a case from the 1920s

that involved a couple of neighbours. And I think it probably came about through the stress caused by living in proximity. So if you think about now, neighbours, they kind of know all your backstage lives. They know how much gin you're put in the recycling, you know, the state of your underwear and that sort of thing on the line. So the people who live in each other's pockets, who sort of criss-cross each other's personal spaces, I saw how this triggered this lettercase that I put into Cheap by Jail, but I couldn't stop there. It's like, are there others? what is this all about? So I started emailing some archives and looking through archives.

I found that most local archives have like one or two anonymous letter cases. Some of them are really boring. And so it took me ages to work my way through a lot of the archive material. And so I'd even, I wrote my last book in the meanwhile, which was a history of recycling. And every time I was in the archive, it's like, can I just have a look? some of your anonymous letters as well. So eventually, they had this sort of cache of letters that I wanted to know more about.

What constitutes a boring anonymous letter in your books? What's like an anonymous letter that you're like, oh, that's a really rubbish one? There are loads in the 18th century that are all about, they're all to do with blackmail, basically.

So they're blackmailing rich men and you read about them. So E. P. Thompson worked on these. So he wrote about the 18th century letters, that go through the London Gazette. So people in the London Gazette say somebody's writing me anonymous letters because they're trying to threaten me. Oh, these are so tedious.

They're just quite formulaic and the same sort of thing. And E.P. Thompson worked on a lot of those letters. And I kind of have a bit of a go at him for his methodology because it's a bit rubbish, which felt terrible because E.P. Thompson's like one of my heroes. It's like, I'm finding letters he didn't find. So I think he selected his source to fit his argument. so bad methodology. And yeah, then I had this sort of cash a letters.

And what I liked was the sort of interpersonal snarkiness. I didn't really want it to be about money. Yeah. I wasn't all that interested in somebody writing something because they just wanted to blackmail someone. I was interested in the sort of gossip and the tip-offs and the sort of intrigue. So unless it had a bit of a story going on that I could sort of dig into, I wasn't interested.

So these are letters. that are blackmailing people? Are they doing anything else, these anonymous letters? Because I'm going to assume that the only reason you would write an anonymous letter is because you've got something bad to say. So it's blackmailing letters? What other kind of stuff is this? So there's libel, malicious libel.

So the complication with the letters is often they say something that's true. And it's like there's all sorts of ethical dilemmas because they're writing, oh, this happened. and you look into it, you think, yeah, it did. Wow. And then you sort of think, well, am I re-victimising the person who received the letter if I dig into this little grubby secret of theirs? So a lot of the letters are look at a decoy letters.

And those are letters written by somebody as though they were written by somebody else, but sent to themselves. And then they complain about them. So they say they're libeling me. And it's not, if you write a letter, if you post a letter, if it's like broadcast the letter. And then a lot of the letters are also obscene. So there's also obscenity.

So there are various reasons. But I think on the whole, people write anonymous letters to unsettle somebody. Yeah. Because it's very different to correspondence, isn't it? You don't know who it's written by. Yeah, they're complicated little fellas, really. They're not the same as... Ah, aren't they?

Yeah. So this would be like a letter turning up at your house that might be something like, I know the dirty secret, give me loads of money, but it might also be like, I saw, you the other night doing something that you shouldn't have been doing, you horrible person, or it might just be like, you horrible cow, blah, blah, blah, blah, and just like full of insults. It could be any of these things. Or it could be. I read in the paper about you doing this and that's really horrible. You know, loads of them in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s are, I know you

dye your hair. And it's like, I was like, what? It's like, blindy. It became a bit of a theme. in like the court cases as well. Do you dye your hair? Do you not die your hair? It's like, what? If that's the worst someone's got on you, that doesn't seem that bad to me. What would unsettle me about that is even getting it is if you just got a letter that said, I know you die your hair, that's weird. It would be the weirdness of it that would get me. Yeah, and a lot of these are really just completely weird. You sort of get them and you think, not only what's this about, but how did the person who receive it? How did they relate to it? What was their emotional response. And most of the letters that survive, it's a tiny percentage of the letters that were

ever written, because most people just get rid of them. They just burn them. God, that's such a weird culture that was going on. What are the earliest ones that you found on this? I mean, do we have, like, Pyrius Anonymous things being written? There's quite a lot of tip-off letters. Like, there's tip-off letters to do with the gunpowder plot in 1685. I think, I think, yeah, I think letter writing is, anonymous letter writing as old as letter writing because it sort of creates another form of power. One thing I found doing the research is that there's often an assumption that it's poor people with no power writing these letters, but I actually found it was often people with a lot of cultural capital pretending to have bad literacy or bad spelling to get away with a bit more

power. So there's lots of power dynamics going on as well. That is fascinating, isn't it? God, no wonder you've spelled it. so long research in this. This is just like just little snippets into stuff that people have been up to. All right. So tell me about the Little Hampton libel case because this, I hadn't heard about this until I got your book, but this is fascinating. How did you discover it and just tell us what happened? Okay, so I discovered it when I was researching Cheapy Jan. There's a little bit of it in Cheap by Jail, but I just thought that wasn't enough because it's about neighbouring and neighbours. So it's Little Hampton in the West Sussex Coast, a sleepy seaside village.

And I read about it in newspapers at the time. So when I was researching the neighbours book. And it involves two women, mostly. So Rose Gooding and Edith and Mali Swan. So their neighbours. So I went to Little Hampton to see where they lived. And they're down this little alley. Basically the Goodinghouse is in the garden.

of the set of terraced houses that the swans live in. This really is cheek by gel. It's a very close proximity. Both houses really crowded. They're tiny. So the Gooding House has quite a lot of people knocking around. Her sister lives there with her children. Rose has children there.

Her husband's there as well. It's sort of like, it's quite a laid-back, quite jolly, quite loud house. I get the impression. Then on the other side is the Swan House. and in this one house at that time is Edith, who's sort of late 20s, I think, at the time, and her two brothers who are a bit older and seem a bit weird. Right.

And Edith's got loads of sisters, but she's the youngest, so she's having to look after her fairly elderly parents. And I think she sleeps in their bedroom. So really crowded, two brothers, one of them is a bit weird, and Edith's living there. And she's working in sort of odd jobs here and there. And so in May 1920, it all kicks off because Edith accuses Rose or somebody does. We assume it's Edith accuses Rose of cruelty to children to the NSPC.

And they check it out and they say, there's nothing going on. It's all fine. Right. And then at the same time, she accuses Rose of writing obscene letters, some to herself and there's other circulating as well. Then eventually Rose Gooding, who is like, she's a bit of a good time girl. I really like her. She's like, you know, quite laid back. She's, you read her letters, like the non-anonymous letters that the police collect.

They don't collect them to look at handwriting. They just collect them to see what sort of a person she is. And, you know, she's got this lovely, chaotic, scatty writing. And the letters, they're written in this beautiful script. And it's like, there's no way that Rose could have written these. That's not the same hand. But the police don't think that. It's so weird, isn't it?

CSI Little Hampton. Rubbish. Oh, yeah. Oh, blind me. They're so bad. They go, well, Rose, she's like, she's from this slightly dodgy family. We don't really know what's going on

with the husband and the sister. And she's quite rough. So we think she probably wrote the letters. That's all the privilege. Exactly. It's exactly that. Wow. So she's found guilty of criminal libel in 1920,

and she's imprisoned. in Portsmouth Prism. Oh, gross. There's more, though. So she's out by Christmas, Christmas 1920, and then she must have felt really bad. She must have felt really scared because letters continue to circulate.

And we know now she didn't write them, but she'd already... She didn't write any of them. So letters are continuing to circulate. One of them calls Edith Swan a whore, and one of them calls the Swan family a dirty drunken lot. Now, we know they're really,

written by Edith's one. So she's writing those to herself. She's writing them to herself. Yeah. So the police, the sleepy local police, yet again, go, well, it's probably Rose, isn't it? So Rose is up in court again. Again, handwriting not looked at. And she gets 12 months hard labour. Again, in prison, yeah. And then they put in an appeal and the appeal fails, but it does attract the attention of a Met police officer, an inspector, Inspector George Nichols. And he he sort of says, oh, there's something fishy going on here. And he sort of calls the local police. They're a bit sleepy.

And he says, I think Rose is innocent. And therefore he sort of deduces. Therefore, the only credible suspect has to be Edith's one. So he met with her talk to her. He said she was quite peculiar in appearance and behaviour. Did he say why? What was she doing that was peculiar? Does he expand upon that?

Yeah, yeah. He said she's got this really good memory for remember these mucky phrases. in all the letters. Like she can reel it all off. The rookie era. Yeah. Okay. And he says she thinks she's a bit wrong in the head.

So at this point, therefore, Rose has got someone on her side, but it's taken quite a long time. She's been in jail, hard labour for a year. Yeah, so she's halfway through that. Yeah. Like hard labour at the time, it's like really ill-fitting uniforms,

bad visiting. You've got to visit in a cage. It's, you know, she's probably doing hard labour. I think she might even be sewing like mail bags, which is a horrible irony given this is about letters going through the post. Oh, God, yeah. So anyway, the inspector's doubts mean that it triggers sort of various things.

It triggers marked stamps and it triggers this amazing policewoman called Gladys Moss. What's a marked stamp? What's that? Oh, a marked stamp is where you mark a stamp with Invisible Ink and then sell it to people and you mark them this one household or the other household. So you can work out. Oh, right. This is like a police sting operation using. stamps. Yeah, it's an investigative bureau through the general post office. So it's a sort of post office, royal mail sting. Cunning. Like done in conjunction with the police. So they've got a little bit there. And then they've got this policewoman Gladys Moss hiding in the shed in the garden,

like watching the comings and goings. And that's enough to trigger a search at the Swan House. And that uncovers incriminating blotting paper. And then eventually there's enough material. to charge Edith's one and take her to court. Still, like, the judge doesn't think, she thinks she's so respectable that, you know, how could she have done it? My God. So it's sort of still, it's about roughness and respectability.

So in the end, they did find her guilty, and she got, again, one year in prison, the same as Rose. Like, she's perjured herself, but she doesn't get anything extra for that. And Rose has a really rubbish time because people still think she wrote the letter. still think that she wrote them. Do we know what kind of things were in these letters?

So you said that she's calling herself a whore, calling her own family a drunken lot, but what else was being written in? All sorts of things. So one letter written about herself was sent to her fiancé, who was away because he was part of the military, and said that Edith's one's expecting the baby

of the next door neighbor and therefore your relation. And like, why would you write, you know, what are weird? It's not just letters, about herself then. It's like just random weird stuff. Yeah, all sorts of random weird stuff.

Oh, God, it's so strange. Someone that studied cases like this, what is your take on why someone would do this? Why would Edith and other people write letters attacking themselves? Like, why would, is it to frame themselves as a victim? Is there some payoff for that? I think so. I mean, it's complicated, isn't it?

It's 100 years ago. So it's, and she, was never asked, you know, she never had psychological help. There was never any explanation. Did she ever admit it that she did? Not really, no. In prison, she wrote a letter saying she wanted a handwriting analysed and she wasn't guilty. I'll be back with Emily after this short break. People do con people still today. I mean, they're not like writing letters, but I've just finished a brilliant podcast series, not as good as this one, but still quite good, called Scamanda about a woman in America who

pretended that she had cancer for years, years and years and years and got like loads of money from her friends. I don't think she was writing letters, but it's that same like weird holding yourself up as a victim that people need to pity you. There's a really interesting case. I think it's from 1923 that this daughter of a clergyman or something she gets letters. And then she

sort of, they stop coming. So she writes them herself because she's suddenly got a little bit of limelight and interest and then she's the one that ends up getting accused of writing all the letters. So I think it gives people some attention. tension in a way that they may be craving. Yeah. Especially if you're a woman in these kind of quite poor areas, there isn't a lot.

Yeah, and it gives you a bit of power for a while maybe. So what happened to Rose? And what happened to Edith? Neither of them entered up happily, really. Did they have to keep living next door, aren't we? No, no. Rose is sort of hounded out a bit. She has a terrible relationship with her husband and terrible relationship with her son. It's all gets a bit nasty for Rose, really, and she has quite a miserable life. And Edith, likewise, she ends up being capacitated in the workhouse, essentially. And she was busted by the post office, was she? That was what bought

Adan, this stamp sting operation. The men of secrets, they're called. Wow. They're allowed to open people's post and work out what's going on. It's like, it sounds like this dark organisation, the men of secrets, yeah. Wow. Okay, tell me about Annie Tugwell from 1910, the case of Annie Tugwell. Annie's my favourite. I can't let go of. Annie. I can't let go of Annie. I'm carrying on research in her because her case is quite weird. I love weird. What was Annie up to? Okay. So I can say what we think Annie was up to, but also I think that Annie wasn't up to all of it. So I think Annie was also framed. Right. It starts, or at least the sort of legal case starts in 1909, but the letters probably go back much further. So in 1909, another Annie, Annie,

Annie Dewey, who's the housekeeper for a local Catholic priest called Cannon Cafferata. So Annie Dewe gets accused of writing these mucky letters all about prostitution. Shall I read one of them? They're quite dirty. Please do. One of them is, the dear canon is having you watched by Detective Entercap, you dirty prostitutes. You and Mrs. Wesley will let any man fuck you and feel your worn-out cunts. and that's apparently written to Annie Tugwell in Annie Jew's handwriting.

So Annie Tugwell and her husband take this to court and accuse Annie Dewey, who's writing it's in, because it's been copied, of writing these. Various other things as well. The canon is apparently putting in like big orders for beer and there's implications that you might have illegitimate children, that sort of thing. So these are these letters circulating at the time. 1909 Annie Dewey goes to court for libel, for defamation and malicious libel. But that case kind of, it rumbles on, but it kind of fails. And they eventually realize it's not any Jewie doing it. So it must be someone else doing it. Why did they realize that? What was the smoking gun there?

It's complicated. It's to do with reasonable doubts and things like that. Why would you do it? This sort of thing. Also, so there's another family. The bottings come forward and say, this is really weird. weird because we know Annie Tugwell and she wrote letters to us like in 1904 or thereabouts. So the police start thinking, okay, there's something else going on. And there's lots of Annie's in this, but we'll go back to Annie. So Annie Jew is out the picture now. She's innocent, right? She's gone. So Annie Tugwell then is the main focus of attention. And there is handwriting expertise in this case because these are richer people. So Annie Tugwell, she's married to the registrar of Sutton, a pretty odd character called Harry Warren Tugwell.

And eventually, in the summer of 1910, Annie Tugwell is now in court answering to writing these mucky letters that have been in Annie Dew as handwriting. Does that make sense? Addressed to the priest, also addressed to herself as well. Addressed to various people in the area. So the area is Sutton and Carlshulton and Wallington, so a little area. And they're mostly focused on Catholics, Catholics in the congregation. The sleepy local police say, oh, it's just women, congregations falling out with each other.

It's nothing interesting, nothing important. Then also some of these letters are sort of combined with, or also there are a parcel sent with a female pestery, dog poo, things like that. So it's parcels of filth and filthy letters. Oh, that feels like it's been stepped up and much. Anyway, so Annie's failed guilty for posting the letters, not for writing them. And if you look through the letters that the Met have, they're quite different. And then clearly not in one person's handwriting. Wow. Okay. So then she's out. She gets out of prison. But then other things happen in 1912. Two people who were involved in the case from 1910 get sent dirty corsets,

this sort of thing. So there are things rumbling on. Right. And in 1910, Annie's sister-in-law, Emily Jones, came forward and said, it can't be Annie. She's just like this amazing woman. She keeps her house really tidy. She's great. She's like, her sister-in-law is her biggest supporter. Then in 1913, this sister-in-law, Emily Jones, gets letters herself. So she takes those to the police. And also a solicitor gets letters. And so then Annie is, watched right when there's other stuff going on. The Met Police decide that Annie is so important that they have to find her guilty, not of writing the letters, but I've posting them, that three policemen watch her for three whole weeks from separate vantage points, follow her round, eventually

find her posting letters. So it's like, yeah, we've got you busted. And she gets put in Holloway again, hard labour for another year. Can't hack it there. So she ends up being certified insane. taken to Colney Hatch Asylum, and then from there goes to Nathurn Asylum. And then she's like busted from there by Emily Jones, her sister-in-law, who got the letters in 2013, who's still saying it's not Annie, it's someone else writing the letters. This is why I can't let go at this case. It's like, I think Annie was a bit framed. Why was she so sure that Annie couldn't have written these letters?

I don't know. Emily Jones herself is a weird woman too, because I've looked into her as well. Maybe she wrote. Someone in the family, someone in the wider Tugwell family is involved in all of this. And that's what the police suspect as well. But Annie is the one that gets all the focus because the police want it all tidied up and sorted out and one person to be accused. And other people who might be suspects are sort of members of local government, are sort of officials. So they don't really want those to be accused.

And were they all these super mucky letters? Because wasn't it true that they were so rude that they couldn't. actually be read out in court? Yeah, what the jurors say. Can we just look at the envelopes? So, I mean, some of the letters are totally weird. And they do not look to me like they're written by women at all. Okay. Give us an example of it a totally weird one. Have you ever flowed semen or spunk? Don't wank yourself off. Ever seen Mrs. D's cunt? Have you ever rubbed your cunt? It comes with these like really gross pictures. Right. Okay. They're graphic in a way that they don't look written by females at all to me.

Do you have anybody that you think it might be, anybody that, you know, that you've got your eye on? I've got a couple, but I'm not going to name them because that could. No, don't. Spoilers, because this is the next book and we don't want to be giving it away. But, like, you've got somebody that you're like, I think it was you, your mucky poke. Yeah, there's two definite suspects. I've heard some rather exciting news about you. I have heard that Olivia Coleman is going to star in a film about the Little Warrer

or in libel case. The Little Hampton libels, yeah. Yeah, the Little Hampton libels. I'm getting all my Hampton mixed up now. It's like 100 years ago now. And Jesse Buckley as well and Timothy Spall. It's got an amazing, amazing cast. And you've been the consultant for that.

Yeah, yeah. It's a comedy. So it has to be taken with a pinch of salt. But actually what they do with the film is fantastic. I can't wait to see that. So as somebody that studied the history of anonymous letters and poison pen letters and all of those things, What do you think the future of it is? Do we still live in a culture of this today? Because it's really easy to look at this sort of past and go, oh, it's just something that they did back in the olden days. But has it morphed into something else?

Well, I mean, it's like online stuff, isn't it? You know, trolling and things like that. Trolling, this is trolling before trolling was trolling, isn't it? So it's complicated because online trolling, everyone sees it. So it's a little bit. more public. It's different, isn't it? Yeah, but then it's a little bit like some of those letters that, so some letters were written. There's a really good case in 1895 written by George Munslow. It was written as though it was from other people in the village. So he wrote loads of letters, all from different people in the village, all saying all sorts

of bits of gossip. So he's like throwing the cat amongst the pigeons. And therefore, I think cases like that are quite similar to online exposés of people. I think therefore you can learn quite a lot looking at anonymous letters. Like don't make assumptions about who might be the author, who might have written it. I write in the book about a reporter for the Birmingham Post in 2009. She invited like the nastiest of the below the line commentators to contributors to come and meet up with her because she thought this would be really good. And so she's like really scared, like who's it going to be?

What's it going to be like? And this bloat that turns up, she described him as, polite, erudite, passionate and engaged in the local news. And he was totally oblivious about the sort of image had been portraying in his below-the-line keyboard warrior things. And that to me was quite interesting, you know, to people really know what motivates them, we don't really know. But anonymity, it sort of creates a disinhibition. It means that people act in ways that they wouldn't ordinarily. Also, one thing that's quite useful to think about is that lots of people in the legal system and the police in the early 20th century to the mid-20th century assumed that these letters were all written by women. And they also assumed they were to do with like mental distress, often around the menopause.

So there are things like... Yeah. And so assumptions like that are things we have to guard against as well. Emily, you have been amazing to talk to today. This has been absolutely fascinating. If people want to know more about you and your research, where can they find you? Not anonymously. Where could they find your work and find you? I've got a website which is www.rumage.work. I'm also on threads and Instagram and clinging on to the formerly known site that was Twitter and is now X, but for how long I don't know because that's a site for nasty anonymity and things, isn't it? Very true. Oh, you have been so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Kate. Thank you so much to Emily for coming on the podcast and sharing all of your research. I had so much fun. This podcast was produced by Charlotte Long and mixed by Stuart Beckwith. And if you like what you heard, please follow wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review because we really do read them all. And if you want to get in touch, you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. This podcast contains music from EpidemicS. sounds.