by Erik Larson
Ethel said no.
Mrs. Jackson persisted: “I told her she must have something on her mind, and that it must be something awful or she would not be in that state.” She told Ethel, “You must relieve your mind or you will go absolutely mad.”
Ethel said she would tell her the story later in the day, after dinner, but within two hours she came to Mrs. Jackson and said, “Would you be surprised if I told you it was doctor?”
Mrs. Jackson assumed that Ethel was now revealing for the first time that Crippen had been the father of her lost baby, and that for some reason the whole incident had come back to cause her renewed grief.
Mrs. Jackson said, “Why worry about that now its all past and gone?”
Ethel burst into tears. “Its Miss Elmore.”
This perplexed Mrs. Jackson. The name was new to her. Ethel had never mentioned anyone named Elmore—she was sure of it. “Who’s that?” she asked.
“She is his wife you know, and I feel it very much, when I see the Doctor go off with her after the other affair.” Ethel added, “it makes me realize my position, what she is and what I am.”
On this score Jackson had little sympathy. “What’s the use worrying about another woman’s husband?”
Ethel told her that Crippen’s wife had threatened to leave with another man and that he hoped to divorce her.
“Don’t you think he is asking rather a lot of you?” Mrs. Jackson asked. “At your age it seems to me to be most unfair. Tell him what you have told me, as regards feeling your position. Tell him that you have told me.”
Ethel remained in her room the rest of the day. The next day, however, she returned to work and spoke to Crippen just as Mrs. Jackson had advised. Crippen assured her that he had every intention of marrying her someday.
That night Ethel told Mrs. Jackson how thankful she was that she had confessed her troubles. From then on her mood improved. Said Mrs. Jackson, “she seemed very much more cheerful.” Their evening conversations resumed, though now a new and compelling topic had been added to the palette already available for discussion.
DESPITE THEIR ADDRESS in the northern reaches of London, the Crippens took full advantage of the city’s gleaming nightlife. Electric trams, motorized buses, and a rapid shift from steam to electric locomotives in the subterranean railways had made travel within the city a fluid, easy thing. Starting in about 1907 a new term had entered the language, taximeter, for a device invented in Germany that allowed cab drivers to know at a glance how much to charge their customers. In short order the term was reduced to taxi and applied to any kind of cab, be it growler, a hansom, or one of the new motorized variety.
The Crippens also often invited friends to their home, typically for casual dinners followed by whist, though occasionally Belle threw parties of a more boisterous nature to which she invited some of London’s most prominent variety performers. For Crippen, these occasions became ordeals of labor and hectoring, for the house invariably was a shambles and had to be cleaned and neatened while Belle prepared the food.
Two friends were regular visitors to the house, Paul and Clara Martinetti, who lived in a flat on Shaftesbury Avenue, an easy walk from Crippen’s office. Paul had once been a prominent variety performer, a pantomime sketch artist, but he had retired from the stage and lately had been in poor health from a chronic illness that required weekly visits to a physician. The Martinettis first encountered the Crippens at a party at the home of Pony Moore, the minstrel director. At Belle’s suggestion, Clara joined the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild and became a member of its executive committee. They saw each other every Wednesday at guild meetings and became friends. Soon the couples began visiting each other’s homes and, as a foursome, going to the theater and then out to dinner in Piccadilly and Bloomsbury. The Martinettis were unaware of the tensions that suffused their friends’ marriage. “I would describe Dr. Crippen as an amiable kind-hearted man,” Clara said, “and it always looked to me as if he and his wife were on the best of terms.” Belle, she said, “always appeared to be very happy and jolly and to get on very well with Dr. Crippen.”
Late in the afternoon of January 31, 1910, a Monday, Crippen left his office at Yale Tooth and walked to the Martinettis’ flat to invite them to Hilldrop Crescent that evening for supper and cards. Clara at first demurred. Paul was at his doctor’s office, and she knew from past experience that when he returned, he would be tired and feeling poorly.
“Oh make him,” Crippen said, “we’ll cheer him up, and after dinner we’ll have a game of whist.”
Crippen left.
Paul returned from his appointment at about six o’clock. Soon afterward Crippen also returned and, exhibiting an unusual degree of insistence, repeated his invitation directly to Paul. His friend looked tired and pale and told Crippen, “I feel rather queer.” Nonetheless Paul agreed to come. He and his wife said they could be at the Crippens’ house by seven o’clock.
Despite the ease of transportation, the journey proved something of an ordeal. The Martinettis encountered an age-old problem—they could not find a taxi. They walked instead to Tottenham Court Road, where they caught one of the new motorized buses, then rode it north through congested streets to Hampstead Road, where they got off and caught an electric tram that took them to Hilldrop Crescent. It was now about eight o’clock, one hour later than they had intended. As they walked to No. 39, they saw Crippen at the door, watching for them. Now Belle too came barreling out, jerking her head backward as was her custom, smiling, and calling out, “You call that seven o’clock?”
For Paul, the trip had been exhausting. He did not look well. As always, there were no servants, so Clara took off her own coat and hat and took them to a spare bedroom. Belle went down to the kitchen on the basement level and continued preparing dinner. She called up to Crippen to take care of the Martinettis. Paul had two whiskeys.
At length, dinner was ready, and Crippen and the Martinettis descended to the breakfast room, where for these casual suppers the couples always converged. Belle greeted them by first showing off a new addition to the family, “a funny little bull terrier,” Clara recalled, “and she tried to show us how funny he was.” Belle clearly was delighted with the dog but complained about his lack of cleanliness, though she just as quickly excused his condition on grounds he was after all only a puppy.
Dinner consisted of several salads and “a joint” of roast beef. Crippen carved.
It was about eleven o’clock when Belle brought out dessert—two or three sweets, what E. M. Forster called “the little deadlies”—and served them with liqueurs and coffee. Real coffee, at eleven at night. Belle offered cigarettes, but only Paul accepted, then began to smoke. He and Crippen went upstairs to the first-floor parlor, while Belle and Clara stayed behind to clean up. Belle told Clara to remove only the “necessary” things from the table; she and Crippen would finish in the morning.
They chose partners for whist, Belle with Paul, Crippen with Clara. As the game progressed, the room grew warm and soon was stifling. Crippen left the table and turned down the gas. Paul became quiet. “I had got a chill while playing cards and was not feeling well,” he said.
One day soon, great importance would be assigned to every detail of what happened next. At the time, however, it all seemed utterly without significance.
PAUL EXCUSED HIMSELF and left the room, heading for the bathroom. “Mr. Martinetti wanted to go upstairs,” Crippen said later, “and, as I thought he knew the house perfectly well, having been there many times during eighteen months, I thought it was quite all right that he should go up himself.”
When Paul came back, he looked worse than ever. “He returned looking white,” his wife said. He took his place at the card table, but his hands were cold and he began to tremble.
Belle poured him a brandy, but Clara protested. “Oh no, Belle, that is too much,” she said. “I don’t think he ought to have brandy after the whiskey he had.”
Belle insisted. “Let him have it.”<
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Clara: “No, Belle, I rather not, you know I have to take Paul home.”
“You let him drink it, I take the responsibility.”
They struck a compromise. “Give him some pure whiskey,” Clara said. “I really don’t care for him to mix his drinks.”
Belle poured him a whiskey, straight, then commanded Crippen to find a taxi. He put on his coat and left. He found nothing, no two-wheeled hansom, no four-wheeled growler, none of the new motorized taximeter cabs. Repeatedly Belle glanced out the front window to look for Crippen. “It seemed to us,” said Clara, “that he would never return.”
At last he did come back, but without a cab. Belle sent him out again. This time he returned within a few moments with a growler.
Crippen helped Paul down the front steps and into the cab. Belle and Clara kissed, and Belle too started down the steps, but without a coat. Clara stopped her. “Don’t come down, Belle, you’ll catch a cold.”
The cab rumbled off into the night. Later Clara would recall that Crippen and Belle “were certainly on affectionate terms” and that apart from Paul’s discomfort the evening had been a pleasure. Belle as always had been warm and jolly, Crippen self-effacing and solicitous of her needs. “On the night of the party,” Clara said, “we were the happiest party imaginable.”
But when Crippen walked back up the stairs to the house after saying a last good-bye to the Martinettis, he found that Belle had undergone a transformation.
“Immediately after they had left my wife got into a very great rage with me, and blamed me for not having gone upstairs with Mr. Martinetti,” Crippen said, referring to Paul’s exit to use the bathroom. “She said a great many things—I do not recollect them all—she abused me, and said some pretty strong words to me; she said she had had about enough of this—that if I could not be a gentleman she would not stand it any longer, and she was going to leave me.” He quoted her as shouting, “This is the finish of it I won’t stand it any longer. I shall leave you tomorrow, and you will never hear of me again.”
So far none of this was novel. “She had said this so often that I did not take much notice of it,” Crippen said.
But now she went one step further and said something she had never said before—“that I was to arrange to cover up any scandal with our mutual friends and the Guild the best way I could.”
Belle retired to her bedroom, while Crippen retreated to his. “I did not even see her the next morning,” he said. “We retired very late, and it was the usual thing that I was the first one up and out of the house before she was ever up at all.”
THAT MORNING, TUESDAY, February 1, Crippen went to his office at Yale Tooth as usual and was, according to Ethel Le Neve, “his own calm self.” She wrote, “Surely we, who knew him so well and every expression of his face, would have noticed at once if he had shown the slightest agitation.”
At midday Crippen left Albion House and walked to the Martinettis’ flat on Shaftesbury to check on Paul. Clara greeted him at the door and told him Paul was sleeping. Crippen was pleased to learn that Paul had gotten no worse during the night. They chatted a few moments longer, then Crippen turned to leave.
Clara asked, “How’s Belle?”
“Oh, she is all right.”
“Give her my love.”
“Yes,” Crippen said, “I will.”
When he returned to Hilldrop Crescent at seven-thirty that evening, he found the house empty, save for the cats, the canaries, and the bull terrier.
Belle had gone.
The main question that now occupied him, he said, was how to avoid the scandal that would arise if the true reason for Belle’s departure ever got out.
THE FATAL OBSTACLE
ON SIGNAL HILL THE WEATHER WORSENED. Marconi listened hard for the sound of three snaps in the static mist that filled his telephone receiver, but he detected nothing. Outside, his men struggled to keep the kite aloft and stable. Each time it bobbed and dipped, its two trailing wires grew longer or shorter. Marconi still had only a vague understanding of how electromagnetic waves traveled and how the length of his antennas affected transmission and reception, but he did recognize that this constant rising and falling could not be helpful.
Trying to send signals to a wildly shifting kite was a bit like trying to catch a fish in a whirlpool.
IN POLDHU MARCONI’S OPERATORS fired chains of S’s into the sky over Cornwall. Thousands of watts of power pulsed through the spark gap. Lightning cracked, and pipes tingled. Electromagnetic waves coursed in all directions at the speed of light. Receivers at the Lizard, at Niton, and at Crookhaven instantly detected their presence. The signals were likely received aboard at least one of the increasing number of ocean liners equipped with wireless, perhaps the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse or the Lake Champlain or one of Cunard’s grand ships, depending on their locations. But the receiver on Signal Hill remained inert.
At about twelve-thirty the receiver issued a sharp click, the sound of the tapper striking the coherer. It meant the receiver had detected waves.
The tension in the room increased. Marconi’s face bore its usual sober expression. As was so often the case, his lips conveyed distaste, as if he had scented an unpleasant odor.
“Unmistakably,” he wrote, “the three sharp little clicks corresponding to three dots, sounded several times in my ear.”
He was excited but skeptical. He wanted to hear the clicks so badly that he felt he could not trust his own judgment. He passed the telephone receiver to Kemp.
“Can you hear anything Mr. Kemp?” he asked.
Kemp listened, and he too heard, or claimed to hear, sequences of three dots. They passed the telephone receiver to Paget as well, who listened but heard nothing. He, however, had grown increasingly hard of hearing.
“Kemp heard the same thing as I,” Marconi wrote, “and I knew then that I had been absolutely right in my calculation. The electric waves which were being sent out from Poldhu had traversed the Atlantic, serenely ignoring the curvature of the earth which so many doubters considered would be a fatal obstacle, and they were now affecting my receiver in Newfoundland.”
There was no serenity on Signal Hill. A burst of wind tore the kite free. The men lofted a second one, now with a single wire of five hundred feet. This configuration, Kemp wrote in his diary, “appeared more in harmony with the earth’s electric medium and the signals from Poldhu station. We were able to keep this kite up for three hours and it appeared to give good signals.” In all, they picked up twenty-five of the three-dot sequences.
Marconi wrote a draft of a telegram to Managing-Director Flood Page in London to announce his success but held it back. He wanted to hear more signals before notifying his board and especially before the news became public.
He tried again the next day, Friday, December 13, 1901. The weather grew more ferocious. There was snow, rain, hail, and wind—great gasps of it. Three times they launched kites, and three times the weather drove the kites to ground. During the brief periods the kites were in the air, however, Marconi claimed that he again heard three-dot sequences from Poldhu, though these signals were even less distinct than what he had heard the day before.
Frustrated by the lack of clarity, Marconi still did not send his cable to headquarters. He resolved to wait one more day, until Saturday, to allow time for more trials.
The wind accelerated. On Saturday it reached a point where an attempt to fly anything, balloon or kite, was out of the question. In desperation, Kemp and his helpers began constructing a very different kind of antenna. They began stringing a wire from the top of Signal Hill to an iceberg marooned in St. John’s harbor.
To Kemp’s regret, he never got the chance to test it.
MARCONI DEBATED WHAT to do next. He could wait and hope that the weather would improve or that Kemp’s iceberg antenna would work, or he could simply trust that he had indeed heard signals from Poldhu and go ahead and notify Flood Page in London.
He sent the cable. “SIGNALS ARE BEING REC
EIVED,” it read. “WEATHER MAKES CONTINUOUS TESTS VERY DIFFICULT.” That night, he released a statement to The Times of London.
For one so aware of the “doubters” arrayed against him and of the hostility in particular of Lodge, Preece, and the electrical press, Marconi in orchestrating this transatlantic experiment and in now revealing it to the world had made errors of fundamental importance.
Once again he had failed to provide an independent witness to observe and confirm his tests. Moreover, in choosing to listen for the signals with a telephone receiver instead of recording their receipt automatically with his usual Morse inker, he had eliminated the one bit of physical evidence—the tapes from the inker—that could have corroborated his account. He had to have recognized that his claims of so wondrous an accomplishment, deemed impossible by the world’s greatest scientists, would pique skepticism and draw scrutiny, but apparently he believed that his own credibility would be sufficient to put all doubts to rest. This belief was a miscalculation that would prove costly.
THAT SUNDAY, DECEMBER 15, the governor of Newfoundland, Sir Cavendish Boyle, held a celebratory lunch for Marconi at which, as Kemp recalled, the governor served champagne that had been retrieved from a shipwreck after years underwater. The New York Times called Marconi’s feat “the most wonderful scientific development in modern times.”
Over the next few days the stock prices of the transatlantic cable companies began to fall. Within a week the Anglo-American Telegraph Co. saw its preferred stock drop seven points and its common stock four. Shares of Eastern Telegraph Co. lost five and a half.
AMBROSE FLEMING LEARNED of Marconi’s feat only by reading a newspaper. He wrote later that he had been “left in ignorance of this success” until he opened the December 16 edition of the Daily Mail, where he saw the headline, “MR. MARCONI’S TRIUMPH.”
