These are notes of a couple of coincidences I experienced in 2020 which have been sitting in my file ever since. I offer them diffidently, on the assumption that some people will find them about as interesting as hearing someone else’s dream. On the other hand, while they probably have no significance, they still leave me with a feeling they might point to something deeper I cannot quite put my finger on (the reason I noted them).
1 Cause Célèbre
On the evening of Friday 24 April
2020, I sat down with my wife to watch the 1987 Anglia Television adaptation of
Terence Rattigan’s final play Cause
Célèbre, starring Helen Mirren, Harry Andrews and David Morrissey as Alma
Rattenbury, her husband Francis, and her young lover George Bowman
respectively. The play is based on the
real-life murder at Bournemouth in 1935 of Alma’s elderly husband and the
subsequent trial of Alma Rattenbury and George Stoner (presumably the name
change to Bowman was because Stoner was still alive in 1987) at the Old Bailey.
While I was putting the DVD into
the player I mentioned I was familiar with the case from a true crime volume,
and said, disregarding spoilers, that the husband was attacked by the lover
when Alma and her husband were walking along a suburban road and the young man
jumped out from behind a hedge, bludgeoning him. As we watched the programme it was clear this
was not how the murder happened: George creeps into the downstairs bedroom of
‘Rats’, as Alma calls her husband, and whacks him several times with a mallet,
cracking his skull. Clearly, I had been
confusing it with another case, but a search the following morning did not
throw up what it was.
A few hours later I was reading the
Daily Telegraph’s Saturday review
section and turned to Simon Heffer’s ‘Hinterland’ column. He writes about aspects of British culture
and generally has something interesting to say.
To my surprise his subject was a 1934 novel by F Tennyson Jesse, A Pin to See the Peepshow, a
fictionalised retelling of the Thompson/Bywaters murder case at Ilford in
1922. Although Heffer does not refer to
the manner of the murder, the mention of Thompson was enough to remind me this
was the case I had had in mind the previous evening. Edith Thompson had an affair with the lodger,
Frederick Bywaters. One night, while
Edith and her husband Percy were walking home, Frederick jumped out from some
bushes and stabbed Percy several times, fatally injuring him.
There were similarities in the
Thompson and Rattenbury cases: an affair between a married woman and a younger
man leading to violence against the husband, though whereas in the latter Alma
was acquitted (shortly afterwards committing suicide) and George’s capital
sentence was commuted to a prison term, both Edith and Frederick were
hanged. This was clearly a miscarriage
of justice as there was no evidence Edith was complicit in the death of her
husband. Perhaps the more lenient
judicial outcome for Alma and George 13 years later – the court of public
opinion was another matter – was influenced by the earlier verdict. I had wrongly recalled that Percy Thompson
was bludgeoned, as Francis Rattenbury was, because he was stabbed; I had clearly
conflated the two murders.
This was a minor coincidence to be
sure, but it seemed odd to have the reference I had been seeking fall into my
lap with no effort after having failed to track it down a mere couple of hours
before. They are both fairly well-known
true-crime cases of course, but Heffer ranges widely over British culture, and
there were many topics he could have addressed other than A Pin to See the Peepshow.
However, another echo on Sunday 26 April, when I heard about a multiple
stabbing in Ilford, indicated the need for caution when assessing events with
so many potential associations.
Then to my surprise the following
month the Rattenbury murder popped up again, with no effort on my part to seek
it out. The excellent Strange Histories blog (subtitled ‘A
walk on the weird side of history’), which I follow, published a lengthy post
on 25 May 2020 titled ‘A Moment of Madness: Murder at the Villa Madeira’. This recounted the background, murder and
aftermath in some detail, highlighting the complexities of the confessions
which raise doubts over who actually killed Francis Rattenbury. A comment remarking it would make a good film
elicited the reply that Cause Célèbre
was based on the case. This is the sort
of story Strange Histories would
cover so its inclusion was not surprising, but it felt noteworthy coming so
shortly after what was already a coincidence relating to the Rattenbury case.
But it was not the last time it
crossed my horizon during those weeks.
On 1 July I received an email from a Sean O’Connor about a particular
topic he was working on with which he thought I could assist (it became the
2022 book The Haunting of Borley Rectory). Not knowing the name, I looked him up and
discovered he was the author of the 2019 non-fiction book The Fatal Passion of Alma Rattenbury, and in the foreword he refers to the Edith Thompson
trial. By now of course I was picking up
on any mention of these cases, whereas at one time they would perhaps have
passed by little noticed (leaving aside my general interest in true crime), but
it still seems strange to come across so many references over so short a
period.
2 ESP in Life and Lab
If anything, this was odder. I was reading Louisa E Rhine’s 1967 ESP in Life and Lab:Tracing Hidden Channels, a book mixing anecdotal evidence sent by
members of the public and the results of laboratory research into psi
processes. One of the anecdotes (pp.
192-4) was about a dream a woman had had.
In it she came upon a house, inside which she could see a room set up
for what looked like a wedding breakfast, although there were no people
around. A few weeks later she and her
husband were invited to a meal to celebrate his having achieved 25 years with
his company (something neither had realised was imminent until he was told).
The meal took place at a new inn
they had never been to before. Although
reluctant to go, it proved to be a very enjoyable lunch. The writer said they married during the
Depression and did not have much of a celebration, so this felt more like her
wedding than the real one had. When they
entered the dining room, she had a feeling she had been in it before, and after
she returned home she realised the room was the one in her dream though
reversed, as in the dream she was looking in from the outside, hence she had
not immediately recognised it.
Now, quite often dates are not
given in these accounts; the year is mentioned, sometimes the month, but precise
dates are infrequent, probably a function of the delay between having the
experience and writing the report. In
this case, however, the precise date is supplied. The date of the dream, which the dreamer took
to represent a room where a wedding was to take place, was 7 March 1953. That was the very day my parents married in
south London. There is no doubt about
the date of the dream because the dreamer wrote her account straight away.
This was one of many reports in the
extensive Rhine collection that could have been used to illustrate the point
being made, and one of the few in the book with a precise date. To then find the reference to a wedding has a
date which tallies with an event of personal significance (albeit occurring
before my time!) seems remarkable. There
would have been few things linking a middle-class couple in Virginia and a
working-class couple in Camberwell, but here a dream provided a connection only
appreciated 67 years later. I should add
the reason I am sure of the date of my parents’ wedding is because I was born
on their wedding anniversary.
I have had a couple of other
experiences, as recounted in the Autumn/Winter 1996
issue of However Improbable,
the magazine of the long-gone Anglia Paranormal Research Group. In the first of these, when I was a student,
I was hitchhiking with a girlfriend to Greece and we met some college
acquaintances, also hitch-hiking, on a minor road somewhere in Yugoslavia (also
long gone). In the second, while on a
family holiday from Norfolk, we bumped into my young daughter’s best friend
from home in Carlisle railway station.
These are incidents in life that seem to have no great meaning (though I was happy to have my idle curiosity about English domestic murder satisfied in such an easy fashion by Mr Heffer) but they catch our attention. Similar anecdotes can be told by many people, the sort of thing that makes one wonder about the interconnectedness of life no explanations couched in terms of the law of large numbers can quite satisfy.
