Peter's images are inspired by the kind of  profoundly emotional events which still have the power to touch us decades later.

In 1923 Edith Thompson's affair with Fredrick Bywaters led both of them to the gallows when her younger lover murdered her husband Percy and she was implicated in the crime. She'd written a series of rambling letters to Bywaters - letters in which she wove bizarre and unfeasible fantasies about attempting to poison Percy...in one note she claimed to have placed large pieces of broken glass from a light globe in his food without either attracting his attention or doing him any harm. Edith was a keen reader of romantic fiction and her narratives were clearly inspired by the lurid novels which fanned her fantasies. She wanted to be mysterious and alluring, but her otherwise unconvincing pose as a femme fatale helped to place a rope around her neck. In the most damaging letter Edith, plainly afraid that her lover was losing interest in her, wrote "do something desperate darling" - she'd wanted him to behave like the dashing hero of a novel...but the legal authorities chose to treat it and her other silly words as part of a conspiracy to kill. In fact, Edith Thompson was convicted and hanged mainly because she had sought happiness with a man who was not her husband and an outraged nation decided that she had to swing. A supposedly even-handed Judge actually referred to her as an 'adulteress' when vindictively summing up the case to a jury bristling with moral indignation. Her fate was sealed.

This painting depicts a stolen moment of happiness during Thompson & Bywaters' doomed relationship.

Fredrick Bywaters worked as a steward on a passenger ship; he was at sea for long stretches. At such times Edith had only his infrequent letters for solace and she feared that he would find another lover in one of the faraway ports where his ship docked. Thus she wrote those fatal letters; doing her level best to transform her dull and ordinary life into the stuff of high drama. She wanted him to see her as a passionate person who was totally consumed with love for him; so in the dragging lonely hours she scribbled tales that she hoped would hold him.