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An extraordinary legal case which has been underway at the High Court in London concerns the alleged sending of poison pen letters, and seems to hark back to an earlier age.
The best-selling author Richard Parsons, has waged an unbelievable libel battle against neighbours, and in the trial he has accused one of them of reading aloud one of the letters which included the untrue claim that he had destroyed the community with “his greed and selfishness”.
This incredible case has served to underline an allegedly similar incident of poison pen letters from 1921, which our Editor Welshman Phil Parry has written about in his book “A GOOD STORY”, and has now been turned into the hit film “Wicked Little Letters”.
So here he re-publishes a piece about the event from earlier in the year.
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Phil, who has spent 40 years in journalism, celebrates how an astounding legal case from the 1920s of poison pen letters has now been turned into a hit film, five years after he wrote about it in his book.
It is always pleasing when it becomes obvious that others share your opinion.
I immediately latched onto an astonishing legal case involving foul-mouthed poison pen letters from the 1920s because it showed how the law can sometimes be an ass – so I included it in my book five years ago.
This is what I wrote in 2019: “In 1921 an interesting court case took place after a strange incident in Littlehampton.
“A woman called Edith Swan had been sending poison pen letters…
“Here is an extract of one of them: ‘You bloody fucking piss country whores go and fuck your cunt. It’s your drain that stinks not your fish box. Yo fucking dirty sods. You are as bad as your whore neybor’.
“But the jury in the libel trial of Swan refused to convict because she had an education (unbelievably) after a judge’s direction, and another jury later wrongly convicted an ill-educated woman called Rose Gooding, who was sentenced to 12 months in prison with hard labour.
“She was fully exonerated afterwards.”
This unbelievable incident has now become a hit film called Wicked Little Letters starring Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley.
One reviewer said of it: “…the increasingly raunchy letters will have you howling with laughter”.
Another that it was: “…an absolute blast”.
I cannot claim I was responsible because many others knew of these events.
For example a 2018 article in the London Review of Books (LRB) concerned history professor Christopher Hilliard’s book The Littlehampton Libels.
Nevertheless the timing is propitious…
The memories of Phil’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (including details of this case which inspired the film) as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Regrettably publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – we look as only we know how at today’s local elections.
