Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  Her son Edward, the Prince of Wales, would be king. James called him “Edward the Caresser” and feared his impending accession was “the worst omen for the dignity of things.” In marked contrast to the old queen, the king-to-be was affable, indulgent, even funny. As Victoria lay dying, someone asked, not intending an answer, “I wonder if she will be happy in heaven?”

  To which Edward replied, “I don’t know. She will have to walk behind the angels—and she won’t like that.”

  MARCONI AND HIS MEN mourned the queen but did not let her death interrupt their work. Kemp’s diary makes no reference to her passing. On January 23, 1901, the day after her death, Marconi achieved his greatest distance yet, registered when the new test station at the Lizard on its first day of operation received messages sent from the Isle of Wight, 186 miles away.

  The transatlantic station at Poldhu was well into the first phase of construction, and now Marconi turned to the matter of where to build its twin. He examined a map of the United States and began planning his second voyage to America.

  MISS LE NEVE

  IN 1901, AT THE AGE OF SEVENTEEN, Ethel Clara Le Neve became an employee of the Drouet Institute for the Deaf, in Regent’s Park, London, and soon afterward began working for another newcomer to the firm, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.

  Though its lofty name suggested otherwise, in fact the Drouet Institute was a seller of patent medicines, one of the wealthiest and most famous of the species. In time Britain’s House of Commons Select Committee on Patent Medicines would expose the fraudulent and harmful practices of the industry and of Drouet in particular, but for now the company operated without scrutiny, its lavish offices reflecting the wealth accumulated in each day’s harvest of mail. Drouet produced what it claimed was a cure for deafness, and its pitch was sufficiently compelling that an estimated one out of ten of Britain’s deaf population bought one of its products.

  Le Neve’s true family name was Neave, but she had taken the name her father, once a singer, had used as a stage name. She was slender, about five feet five inches tall, and had full lips and large gray eyes. Her face formed a soft, pale V in which her cheekbones were clearly delineated, without appearing spare or gaunt. For the time, which tended to favor rounder faces and lush corseted bodies, her look was unusual but undeniably alluring. Her childhood peers would have been surprised at how she turned out. As a young girl she had prided herself on being a tomboy. “For dolls or other girlish toys I had no longing,” she wrote. She loved climbing trees, playing marbles, and shooting her slingshot. “At that time my chief companion was my uncle, who was on the railway,” she recalled. “Nothing delighted him more than to take me to see the trains, and even to this day.” Even as an adult, she said, “there are few things which interest me more than an engine.”

  When she was seven years old, her family moved to London. She completed her schooling and resolved to make her own living. A family friend taught her and her older sister, Adine or more commonly Nina, how to type and take stenographic notes. Her sister achieved proficiency first and set out to find a job. The Drouet Institute hired her, and soon afterward Ethel joined the company, also as a stenographer and typist. “Very soon afterwards came Dr. Crippen, who was fated to influence my life so strangely.”

  CRIPPEN CAME TO THE DROUET Institute when his previous employer, the Sovereign Remedy Co., went out of business. Drouet hired him to be a consulting physician, and in that capacity he soon encountered Ethel and her sister. “For some reason the doctor took kindly to us,” Ethel wrote, “and almost from the first we were good friends. But really he was very considerate to everybody.”

  Nina became Crippen’s private secretary, but Ethel too got to know the doctor. “I quickly discovered that Dr. Crippen was leading a somewhat isolated life. I did not know whether he was married or not. Certainly he never spoke about his wife.”

  Crippen and the sisters often took afternoon tea together. On one occasion, as Ethel and Nina prepared the tea and laid the service, a friend of Crippen’s happened to come by the office. Seeing the preparations under way, the man sighed, “I wish I had someone to make tea for me.”

  With what Ethel termed his “customary geniality,” Crippen urged the visitor to stay and join them. He did so, and during the conversation that followed, Ethel recalled, “mention was made of the doctor’s wife.” The sisters received the news in silence, though they found it both startling and intriguing. They said nothing to elicit further details.

  At length the visitor left. After Ethel and Nina cleaned up the remains of the tea, Nina went to Crippen and asked if what the guest had said was true—that he really was married.

  Crippen said only, “It would take the lawyers all their time to find out.”

  NINA BECAME ENGAGED, and as her wedding neared, she left her job at Drouet. Now Ethel became Crippen’s private secretary. She missed her sister. “With her departure I felt very lonely,” she recalled. “Dr. Crippen, too, was very lonely, and our friendship deepened almost inevitably. He used to come to see me at home. All this time his wife was shrouded in mystery.”

  One day a woman came to the office. She was large and energetic and had hair that clearly was dyed an amber blond. She wore a lot of jewelry and a dress that must have been expensive but was more flamboyant and gaudy than anything Ethel herself would have considered tasteful.

  “Her coming was of a somewhat stormy character. I was leaving the office for lunch when I saw a woman come out of the doctor’s room and bang the door behind her. She was obviously very angry about something.”

  Ethel turned to another employee, William Long, and whispered, “Who is that?”

  “Don’t you know?” he asked. “That’s Mrs. Crippen.”

  “Oh,” she said, startled. “Is it?”

  Ethel needed a moment or two to absorb this revelation. Here was Crippen, so kind and soft-spoken, small in every way—one inch shorter, in fact, than she herself—married to this thunderhead of silk and diamond.

  “After that,” Ethel wrote, “I quickly realized Dr. Crippen’s reluctance to speak about his wife.”

  AN EVEN STORMIER VISIT followed—a visit, Ethel wrote, “which might have ended tragically.”

  Belle was again in a fury and burst into the office in a cyclone of cloth and abraded corset. “There were more angry words, and just before she left I saw the doctor suddenly fall off his chair.”

  Belle roared out, slamming doors. Ethel ran to Crippen. “He was very ill, and I believed that he had taken poison. He told me that he could bear the ill-treatment of his wife no longer.”

  She found brandy and deployed it to revive him. Afterward, she wrote, “we did our best to forget the painful incident.” But the violence of the encounter and Crippen’s expression of such deep unhappiness caused a fundamental change in their relationship. Ethel wrote, “I think it was this, more than anything else, which served to draw us closer together.”

  SOON THE DROUET Institute also failed, helped along by a coroner’s inquest that identified one of Drouet’s cures—ear plasters—as a possible exacerbating factor in the death of a man whose ear infection spread to his brain with devastating consequences. Suddenly Drouet’s advertising disappeared from the city’s horse-drawn omnibuses. Though tolerance of patent medicine companies was beginning to wane, many companies continued to operate, and Crippen quickly found a new job as “Consulting Specialist” for the Aural Remedies Co., another firm that specialized in cures for deafness, though on his letterhead the only credential Crippen listed was, paradoxically, his degree in ophthalmology from New York.

  The offices of Aural Remedies were in New Oxford Street, completed in 1847. It was a fitting location because the street had been built with the intent of eliminating one of the most crime-ridden parts of London, the Rookery, home previously to confidence men, pickpockets, and thieves. The construction cleared the neighborhood’s worst precincts and triggered a lasting reformation, so that now only high-priced frauds such as Aural Reme
dies could afford the rents. Crippen brought with him the expertise he had gained at Drouet. He also brought Ethel, as his secretary.

  In one letter, probably typed by Ethel, Crippen wrote to a reluctant customer about a special offer. “This places within your reach the possibility of being speedily…cured, and I hardly need point out that I could scarcely make such an offer, were I not convinced of the efficacy of my Treatment.”

  He proposed that the customer send him half the price quoted in an earlier letter, at which point Crippen would send him the treatment—“the complete Outfit”—on a trial basis. If after three weeks or so the treatment didn’t accomplish anything, he wrote, the man would not have to pay another penny. “On the other hand, if you feel you have been benefited by the treatment, you can then remit the balance of the purchase price, namely 10s 6d.” (Until 1971 British currency was configured in pounds, shillings, and pence. One pound equaled twenty shillings, written as 20 s., which in turn equaled 240 pence, or 240 d. A new pound is equal to 100 pennies, with one penny equal to 2.4 of the obsolete pence.)

  Though the letter might seem to indicate otherwise, Aural Remedies was not going to take a loss if the customer never made the second payment. Patent medicines cost almost nothing to produce. Even the reduced price Crippen now offered would have yielded a substantial profit regardless of whether the customer paid another pence. The key point is that Crippen was not offering to return the initial payment.

  In time Aural Remedies and Crippen would be identified by the muckraking magazine Truth in its “Cautionary List” of companies to avoid.

  WITHIN THE CRIPPEN HOUSEHOLD the weather did not improve. They moved to another address on Store Street, No. 37, but this new apartment did not offer enough additional space to allow them to stay out of each other’s way. They still had to sleep in the same bedroom. They could not afford anything larger, at least not in Bloomsbury. Crippen was only earning a fraction of the salary Munyon’s had paid. Nonetheless he continued to allow Belle to spend heavily on clothing and jewelry. Crippen said, “although we apparently lived very happily together, as a matter of fact there were very frequent occasions when she got into most violent tempers, and often threatened she would leave me, saying she had a man she could go to, and she would end it all.”

  It was clear to Crippen that the man in question was Bruce Miller. In early April Miller came by the apartment for what would prove to be the last time. He wanted to say good-bye to Belle. He told her he was taking her advice and returning to Chicago to reunite with his wife. He sailed from England on April 21, 1904.

  If Miller’s departure reignited in Crippen any hope that his own marriage could now be restored, he immediately found those hopes dashed. Belle’s temper worsened, and so too did the couple’s financial situation, though he still made no effort to curb her expenditures. He began looking for another home that would be much larger but also cheaper, which meant necessarily that he would have to look outside the core of the city, at grave risk of annoying Belle even further.

  THE EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPE negotiated each day by the Crippens grew still more contorted. On her brief visits to Crippen’s office, Belle had taken note of his typist, Ethel Le Neve. She was young and striking and slender. Her looks alone may have made Belle uneasy, or Belle may have sensed an unusual degree of warmth in the way Crippen and the young woman behaved toward each other, but there was indeed something about the typist that made Belle uneasy.

  One morning a friend of Belle’s named Maud Burroughs, who lived in the same building on Store Street, stopped by as Belle was getting dressed. In the course of their conversation, Belle mentioned her past surgery and asked Burroughs if she would like to see the scar.

  Burroughs said no.

  “Give me your hand,” Belle said, “and you can feel where it was.”

  Belle took Burroughs’s hand and, as Burroughs recalled, “placed it underneath her clothing upon her stomach. I felt what seemed to me to be a hole, so far as I remember, a little on one side of the lower part of her stomach.”

  The conversation shifted to Crippen, who by now, for reasons unclear, had taken to calling himself Peter. It was by this name that Belle and her friends addressed him.

  Belle said, “I don’t like the girl typist Peter has in his office.”

  “Why don’t you ask Peter to get rid of her then?” Burroughs asked.

  Belle replied that she already had asked him, but Crippen had told her the typist was “indispensable” to the company.

  CRIPPEN’S RELATIONSHIP WITH ETHEL deepened. Later he would recall a particular Sunday in the summer of 1904 when “we had a whole day together, which meant so much to us then. A rainy day indeed, but how happy we were together, with all sunshine in our hearts.” He recalled it as a time when he and she were in “perfect harmony with each other. Even without being wedded.”

  For her part Ethel came to view Crippen as “the only person in the world to whom I could go for help or comfort. There was a real love between us.”

  It was at about this point that Ethel, “by sheer accident,” came across the letters Bruce Miller had sent to Belle. “This, I need hardly say, relieved me somewhat of any misgivings I had with regard to my relations with her husband.”

  WITHIN SIX MONTHS Aural Remedies also failed, and Crippen went back to work for Munyon’s, this time out of a new location in a building called Albion House, also on New Oxford Street. Again he brought Ethel but also another past employee, William Long. Crippen returned not as a full-time employee but rather as an agent paid by commission. He made less than he had hoped. Finding a cheaper place to live became imperative, but here a challenge had no easy resolution: to find lodging that was not only less expensive but also much bigger and nice enough to keep Belle happy, or if not happy—which at this point must have seemed an impossible goal—at least to stop her behavior from degrading further. These clashing imperatives drove his search farther and farther from Bloomsbury.

  “THE THUNDER FACTORY”

  THE HUNT FOR LAND ON WHICH to build his first American station lasted far longer than Marconi had planned. Accompanied by Richard Vyvyan and an employee named John Bottomley, a nephew of Lord Kelvin, Marconi toured the coasts of New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, taking trains as far as possible, then proceeding in wagons or on foot. Marconi before leaving Britain had appointed Vyvyan to build and run the new station.

  Every piece of land seemed to harbor a critical flaw. No drinking water, no nearby town to supply labor and supplies, no rail line, and—a flaw that particularly rankled Marconi—no fine hotels of the kind that were common on the windswept coasts of Britain.

  In February 1901 the group made its way to Cape Cod, landing at Provincetown. On a map the cape looked appealing, especially its midpoint where it hooked northward and the land rose to form oceanside cliffs over one hundred feet high.

  In Provincetown Marconi hired a guide named Ed Cook, who was said to have a thorough knowledge of the cape’s coastal lands. Cook did indeed know the beaches well. He was a “wrecker” who salvaged ships and boats wrecked off the cape on their way to Boston. In the previous century Henry David Thoreau had toured the cape and in his book Cape Cod described how wreckers descended on the remains of one ship, the St. John, even as grieving relatives came to the beach in search of lost loved ones. Cook used the profits of his salvage work to buy land.

  Cook led Marconi the full length of the cape, traveling in Cook’s wagon exposed to the frigid winds of February. When Cook led Marconi to the Highland Light, near the north end of the cape, opposite North Truro, Marconi believed he had found exactly the location he needed. The lighthouse stood atop a 125-foot cliff overlooking the shipping lanes that led to Boston harbor, which lay about fifty miles to the northwest. Here the keepers watched for inbound ships and consulted guidebooks to identify them, then telegraphed the news to the ships’ owners in America and abroad, the latter messages traveling first by land line, then by cables laid under the Atlant
ic.

  But the operators of the Highland Light did not trust Marconi. “They thought he was probably a charlatan,” his daughter Degna wrote, “and they knew he was a foreigner. Not even Ed Cook was able to override their thorny New England resistance to strangers and new-fangled contraptions.” They refused access.

  Next Cook led him a few miles south to a parcel of land just outside South Wellfleet, consisting of eight acres atop a 130-foot cliff that overlooked the same beach along which Thoreau had walked half a century earlier. Buffeted by wind, now Marconi walked the ground. The land in all directions had been shaved to a stubble by gales and by loggers who over the previous century had stripped it to provide lumber for shipbuilders. Marconi knew he would have to import the tall masts necessary to hold his aerial aloft.

  He liked this clifftop parcel. If he stood facing east, all he saw was the great spread of the Atlantic. As Thoreau observed, “There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe.”

  When he faced the opposite direction, he saw the harbor at Wellfleet in clear view and very near. A railroad passed less than a mile away, and the nearest telegraph office, at Wellfleet Depot, was only four miles off. This meant lumber and machinery could be delivered to Wellfleet by ship or rail and hauled with relative ease overland to the cliff. A company report on Marconi’s search states, “Plenty of water is available on the site and a very bad inn is situated about 3 miles away; there is, however, a residential house which we can rent on very moderate terms within 200 yards of the site.” One bit of historical resonance was lost on Marconi. During the eighteenth century Wellfleet had been named Poole, after a village in England—the same Poole whose Haven Hotel now served as Marconi’s field headquarters.