by Erik Larson
The engagement moved forward. Beatrice and Marconi scheduled their wedding for the following March.
From the first there were warning signs. “She was a born flirt,” Degna wrote, and was “incapable of suppressing her adorable, flashing smile at every male who came near her.”
At such times Marconi flared with jealous rage.
IN HIS LABORATORY at University College, London, Fleming directed the hurt of his rejection into work aimed at winning his way back into Marconi’s favor. He invented a device that in time would revolutionize wireless, the thermionic valve. He wrote to Marconi, “I have not mentioned this to anyone yet as it may become very useful.” Soon afterward he invented another device, the cymometer, that at last provided a means for the accurate measurement of wavelength. He told Marconi about this as well.
Oliver Lodge, meanwhile, became a bona-fide competitor to Marconi. In Birmingham, in moments when he wasn’t busy managing his university or teaching or conducting research or investigating strange occurrences, Lodge helped his friend Alexander Muirhead attempt to find buyers for their wireless system. In 1904, while seeking a contract from the Indian government to provide a wireless link to the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, they wound up in direct competition with Marconi.
And won.
HOOK
THE NEW CENTURY RACED FORWARD. Motorized taxis and buses clogged Piccadilly. The fastest ocean liners cut the time for an Atlantic crossing down to five and a half days. In Germany the imperial war fleet rapidly expanded, and British anxiety rose in step. The government began talks with the French, and in 1903 Erskine Childers published his one and only novel, The Riddle of the Sands, in which two young Britons stumble across preparations for a German invasion of England. Prophetically, the German villain captains a ship named Blitz. In Germany the authorities ordered the book confiscated. In Britain it became an immediate best-seller and served as a rallying cry. The last sentence in the book asked, “Is it not becoming patent that the time has come for training all Englishmen systematically either for the sea or for the rifle?”
But this question raised a corollary: Were the men of England up to the challenge? Ever since the turn of the century, concern had risen that forces at work in England had caused a decline in masculinity and the fitness of men for war. This fear intensified when a general revealed the shocking fact that 60 percent of England’s men could not meet the physical requirements of military service. As it happened, the general was wrong, but the figure 60 percent became branded onto the British psyche.
Blame fell upon the usual suspects. A royal commission found that from 1881 to 1901 the number of foreigners in Britain had risen from 135,000 to 286,000. The influx had not merely diminished the population; it had caused, according to Scotland Yard, an upsurge in crime. Most blame was attributed to the fact that Britain’s population had increasingly forsaken the countryside for the city. The government investigated the crisis and found that the percentage of people living in cities had indeed risen markedly from the mid-nineteenth century but had not caused the decay of British manhood, though this happy conclusion tended to be overlooked, for many people never got past the chilling name of the investigative body that produced it, the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. A month later the government launched another investigation with an equally disheartening name, the Royal Commission on Care and Control of the Feeble-Minded, and discovered that between 1891 and 1901 the number of mentally defective Britons had increased by 21.44 percent, compared to the previous decade’s increase of just over 3 percent. There was no escaping it: Insane, weak and impoverished, the British Empire was in decline, and the Germans knew it, and any day now they would attempt to seize England for their own.
In London on the night of December 27, 1904, at the Duke of York’s Theater, a new play opened and immediately found resonance with that part of the British soul that ached for a past that seemed warmer and more secure. The action opened in the nursery of a house in what the playwright, James M. Barrie, described as a “rather depressed street in Bloomsbury,” and it involved children led off to adventure by a mysterious flying boy named Peter. The Daily Telegraph would call the play “so true, so natural, so touching that it brought the audience to the writer’s feet and held them captive there.”
There were pirates and Indians, and danger. At the end of Act IV the audience gasped as Peter’s fairy companion, Tinker Bell, drank poisoned medicine meant for him.
Peter turned to the audience. “Her light is growing faint, and if it goes out, that means she is dead! Her voice is so low I can scarcely tell what she is saying. She says—she says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies!”
He turned and spread his arms. “Do you believe in fairies? Say quick that you believe! If you believe, clap your hands!”
And oh yes, on this cold night in London in December 1904, they did believe.
THEN CAME HOOK, the pirate captain, and the audience chilled at the intimation of coming evil.
“How still the night is,” said Hook. “Nothing sounds alive.”
THE TRUTH ABOUT BELLE
CRIPPEN LED THE DETECTIVES INTO his office—“quite a pleasant little office,” Dew said. It was now about noon. A clamor of hooves and engines rose from the street outside, and the increasingly prevalent scent of gasoline tinged the air. Sergeant Mitchell sat at a small table, pencil and paper at hand. Dew began asking questions, and Crippen answered each without hesitation. “From his manner,” Dew wrote, “one could only have assumed that he was a much maligned man eager only to clear the matter up by telling the whole truth.”
The interview had barely begun when all realized it was time for lunch. Dew and Mitchell invited Crippen to join them, and the three left Albion House for a nearby Italian restaurant. Le Neve watched them go, chafing at Dew’s order to remain in the office and at his lack of courtesy in failing to notice that she might wish to have lunch as well. “Meanwhile,” she wrote, “I was absolutely fainting with hunger.”
Over lunch the men talked. Crippen ordered a steak “and ate it with the relish of a man who hadn’t a care in the world,” Dew wrote. He found himself liking Crippen. The doctor was gentle and courteous and spoke with what appeared to be candor. Nothing in his manner suggested deception or anxiety.
Once back in Crippen’s office, Dew continued his interview. He asked a question one way, then later asked it again in a different form to test the consistency of Crippen’s story.
“I realized that she had gone,” Crippen said, “and I sat down to think it over as to how to cover up her absence without any scandal.” He wrote to the guild that she had gone away. “I afterwards realized that this would not be a sufficient explanation for her not coming back, and later on I told people that she was ill with bronchitis and pneumonia, and afterwards I told them she was dead from this ailment.”
To “prevent people asking me a lot of questions,” he said, he placed a death notice in the show-business journal The Era.
He said, “So far as I know she did not die, but is still alive.”
Dew watched Crippen closely. “I was impressed by the man’s demeanor,” he wrote. “It was impossible to be otherwise. Much can sometimes be learned by an experienced police officer during the making of a statement. From Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen’s manner on this our first meeting, I learned nothing at all.”
The detectives then reduced Crippen’s story to a written statement. Crippen initialed each page and signed the last.
IT WAS ABOUT FIVE o’clock. Six hours had passed since the detectives had first come to Hilldrop Crescent. Ethel was hungry and annoyed but also fearful. With each hour the detectives had spent closeted with Crippen, her concern had deepened.
Now it was her turn, as Dew put it.
Ethel told the detectives about Belle’s sudden departure, her illness, and her death. Mitchell took careful notes. “The girl showed some signs of embarrassment when she came to the admissions
about her relations with Crippen,” Dew wrote later. “But making due allowance for this, there was nothing in Miss Le Neve’s manner which gave rise to anything in the nature of suspicions.”
As had been the case with Crippen, nothing about the way she spoke suggested an attempt at deception. She seemed to be telling the truth, or at least the truth as she knew it, but Dew wanted to make sure.
He turned to her abruptly. “He told you a lie,” he said. “He has just admitted to us that, as far as he knows, his wife [is] still alive, and that the story of her death in America was all an invention.”
Any last doubt about her candor now disappeared.
“I WAS STUNNED,” Ethel wrote. “I could not believe it. It seemed impossible to me that Belle Elmore might still be alive.” Crippen would never have lied, she believed, and yet here was Dew confirming that he had done so. “Stricken with grief, with anger, with bewilderment, I answered all the questions put to me about my relations with the doctor, my love for him, and my life. But all the time I was thinking of the way I had been deceived if this story about Mrs. Crippen were true.”
She signed her statement, but the ordeal, she now learned, was not yet concluded.
TO BE THOROUGH, DEW wanted to search Crippen’s house. He knew, however, that no judge would give him the legal authority to do so. “There was not enough evidence against the man—indeed any evidence at all—on which I could have asked a magistrate for a search warrant.” He asked Crippen’s permission, and Crippen readily assented. Shortly after six that evening all four climbed into a growler and rode to Hilldrop Crescent, Le Neve and Crippen at one end of the cab, the detectives at the other. It was a long, silent ride. “I seemed to be living in a nightmare,” Ethel wrote. “I felt rather faint and sick.”
The detectives began their search, but there was nothing in particular that Dew hoped to find. “I certainly had no suspicion of murder,” he wrote.
First the detectives walked around the garden, then entered the house and went through each room, searching wardrobes, cupboards, dressing tables. They found signs that Crippen and Le Neve had been packing for a move, including filled boxes and rolled carpets. They found nothing that shed light on Belle’s current whereabouts, but they did find “plenty of evidence that Belle Elmore had a passion for clothes,” as Dew put it. “In the bedroom I found the most extraordinary assortment of women’s clothing, and enough ostrich feathers to stock a milliner’s shop. The whole would have filled a large van.”
No search, of course, would have been complete without a visit to the coal cellar. “I had no special motive in looking there on this occasion,” Dew wrote. “It was just that I wanted to make certain that I had covered the whole of the house.”
Crippen led the detectives down a short passage that ran from the kitchen to the cellar door.
ETHEL WAITED UPSTAIRS, struggling to absorb the news of Crippen’s deception. She sat in the sitting room, “quite stupefied and dazed,” she recalled. “What were these men doing? Would they never go? It grew dark, and I sat there in the gloom. My head was aching furiously.”
CRIPPEN WATCHED from the cellar doorway.
The cellar was cramped—nine feet long and six feet, three inches wide. “The place was completely dark,” Dew wrote, “I had to strike matches to see what it contained and what sort of a place it was. I discovered nothing unusual. There was a small quantity of coal and some wood which looked as though it had been cut from the garden trees.” The floor was brick, coated with a fine layer of dust.
The detectives and Crippen next went to the breakfast room off the kitchen and took seats at the table. There Dew asked his last questions and examined the jewelry Belle had left behind, including the rising sun brooch. He told Crippen, “Of course I shall have to find Mrs. Crippen to clear this matter up.”
Crippen, helpful as always, agreed and promised to do everything he could to assist. “Can you suggest anything?” Crippen asked. “Would an advertisement be any good?”
Dew liked that idea, and together he and Crippen composed a brief advertisement for placement in newspapers in America. Dew left that task to Crippen.
It was after eight when the detectives said good night and exited the house. They had found Crippen’s story, especially his fear of scandal, entirely plausible, though the fact that Crippen clearly had lied was troubling. In a deposition Dew said, “I did not absolutely think that any crime had been committed.”
He told at least one observer that for all intents and purposes the case was closed.
ETHEL FELT GREAT RELIEF that she and Crippen at last were alone, “but I am bound to say,” she wrote, “that I was angry and hurt, and that I felt in no mood for conversation. One thought only was in my head. It was, that the doctor had told me a lie. He had been untruthful to me for the first time in ten years—to me, of all people in the world, who was certainly the one to know the truth and all the truth. I had been faithful to him. I loved him. I had given up all things for him, and it hurt me frightfully that he should have deceived me.”
Crippen attempted to cheer her up. He made supper and coaxed her down to the breakfast room. She could not eat and said nothing. At ten she went up to the bedroom and sat in a chair fully dressed, too tired to get ready for bed. Soon Crippen came up.
“For mercy’s sake,” she said, “tell me whether you know where Belle Elmore is. I have a right to know.”
“I tell you truthfully that I don’t know where she is.”
Crippen told her that he had concocted the story of Belle’s disappearance and death to avoid scandal, but now in the wake of the detectives’ visit, everyone would know the truth and his and Ethel’s reputations would be destroyed. It would be impossible to face the ladies of the guild. The scandal, Crippen feared, would be far more damaging to Ethel. He would do anything, he said, to spare her the inevitable humiliation.
It seemed to Ethel that Crippen had a plan in mind. She asked him what he intended.
“My dear,” he said, “there seems to me only one thing possible to do.”
THE PRISONER OF GLACE BAY
BEATRICE AND MARCONI MARRIED ON MARCH 16, 1905. They expected a relatively private ceremony but arrived at St. George’s Church to find Hanover Square filled with what one newspaper called “a vast crowd of onlookers.” That morning Alfred Harmsworth’s latest creation, the Daily Mirror, the first British newspaper to make regular and lavish use of photographs, had filled its front page with half-tone images of Marconi and Beatrice, a display technique the newspaper had pioneered a year earlier when it published a full page of photographs of the king and his children. The police stood guard, not as protection from the crowd but because two days earlier the O’Briens had received a letter that warned that Marconi would be killed as he approached the church. The ceremony came off peacefully. Marconi gave Beatrice a diamond coronet, which she suspected had been her mother’s idea. He also gave her a bicycle. “That,” she said, “was really his own idea.”
They retired for their honeymoon to Beatrice’s ancestral home, Dromoland, in Ireland. When she was growing up, the castle had been full of clamor, generated by her thirteen siblings and their friends, but now it struck her as gloomy and lonely. They were assigned rooms in the “visitors” part of the castle, apparently for privacy, but this only amplified the alien feel of the place.
Alone now with her husband (apart, that is, from a small battalion of servants), Beatrice quickly discovered that Marconi was not always the gentleman of charm and good cheer she had come to know on Brownsea Island. He revealed himself to be moody and volatile. They fought, and afterward he would storm from the castle and walk off his rage in the woods, alone. They ended their honeymoon early, after only a week, ostensibly because Marconi had to get back to London on business.
In London they first checked into a small hotel near Marconi’s office, but Marconi realized it was hardly the place for his new bride. They moved to something far grander, the Carlton Hotel at Haymarket and Pall Mall, wh
ich the Baedeker’s Guide called “huge and handsome.” For Beatrice, despite her wealthy upbringing, the experience of the Carlton was novel and wonderful.
She found the hotel’s location irresistible and one day decided to take a walk, alone, to explore the surrounding streets. The National Gallery and Trafalgar Square, with Nelson’s column, were two blocks east, St. James’s Park just south. Piccadilly was an easy walk northwest, but as a destination was not, for the time being, a terribly appealing one. The city had resolved that because of increased traffic the street had to be made far wider. Demolition was under way and soon would bring the destruction of many treasured places, among them Nevil Maskelyne’s Egyptian Hall.
“When she got back,” Degna wrote, “her husband met her at the door of their room, storming that she was henceforth to tell him before she left exactly how long she would be gone, and street by street where she planned to be.”
ONCE AGAIN HE PLUNGED into work. He was compelled to acknowledge that his company now confronted a difficult choice. His ship-to-shore business had grown slowly, but it had indeed grown, until by the end of 1904 his company had equipped 124 ships and 69 land stations in Britain, America, Canada, and elsewhere. The Italian Navy had selected his equipment for its warships, and the Italian government had contracted for a giant station in Coltano, now under construction. Moreover, Parliament at last had enacted a law that eased the strictures of the British Post Office monopoly over telegraphy by allowing customers for the first time to turn in messages at their local telegraph offices for delivery to ships at sea. Marconi had also agreed to take Ambrose Fleming back into the company, not because of some newfound adoration for the man but because he recognized that Fleming’s two new inventions, his cymometer and his thermionic valve, had the potential to greatly improve wireless transmission. One clause of the agreement—and no doubt the most important—gave Marconi the rights to use the inventions while allowing Fleming to retain ownership of the underlying patents.
