On Thursday, April 16th. a woman, Nurse Waddingham, was hanged for murder. She had been found guilty of poisoning a patient in her nursing home, with the object of getting the patient's money. A special correspondent of the Evening News, on the day of the execution, wrote at some length on the life of Nurse Waddingham and on the motive for the murder: "Passion played no part in prompting her crime The motive was one more often associated with men murderers — avarice". Avarice, the dictionary tells us, is "greed of gain". So 34-year-old Nurse Waddingham, widow of "a respectable Nottingham yeoman ", mother of five children, was greedy. What made her greedy? A few years ago. during a court case, her household was described: "There seemed never any money in the house, and scarcely any food. No rent had been paid for nearly two years". The Evening News mentions this, but makes no comment. Poverty is so common that it is not news unless a murder is committed. Then the very natural desire to have food, clothing and shelter in a world where these exist in abundance — for the privileged minority of the population — is "avaricious"’ if the person concerned is not a member of the propertied class.
The murder was a callous one. but so are the journalists' capitalist employers callous. They accept the facts of working-class poverty, undernourishment and insecurity as necessary evils, just as they do all the premeditated atrocities of their war makers. Then, when some individual takes to private murder as a means of getting out of destitution, they sit back and sermonise about avarice.
[From the Socialist Standard, May 1936]
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