Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  What Belle’s friends and neighbors did not seem to grasp was that Belle was lonely. She stayed at the house most of the time, though she often left for lunch, typically departing at about one o’clock and returning about three. She found comfort in pets, and soon the house was full of mewing and chirping and, eventually, barking. She acquired two cats, one an elegant white Persian; she bought seven canaries and installed them in a large gilt cage, another common feature of homes in the neighborhood. Later she and Crippen acquired a bull terrier.

  At one point soon after moving into the house, she decided to take in boarders and placed an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph. Soon three young German men took up residence in the top-floor bedrooms. One of them, Karl Reinisch, later recalled that Belle had wanted more than just income.

  He told his story in a letter that is now in the possession of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, accessible only to police officers and invited guests:

  The house had a “beautiful garden,” Reinisch wrote, and was situated on “a quiet, better street.” He considered himself lucky to have been accepted as a tenant. “It counted at that time as a certain distinction to obtain board and lodging in the house of Dr. Crippen,” he wrote. Crippen was “extremely quiet, gentlemanly, not only in thought but also in behaviour, not only towards his wife but also to me and everyone else. He idolized his wife, and sensed her every wish which he hastened to fulfill.” That first Christmas, 1905, offered an example. “Dr. Crippen wished to give his wife a big surprise, one that would make her very happy, namely a gramophone. These were then very costly. Mrs. Crippen, a good piano player, was as pleased as a child at this attentiveness, and Dr. Crippen was even happier at the joy of his wife. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to procure the gramophone.”

  Crippen and Belle had opposite natures, Reinisch wrote. He found Crippen to be “extremely placid” and Belle “very high-spirited. Blonde, with a pretty face, of large, full, may I say of opulent figure.” She was, he wrote, “a good housewife, unlike many other English women. She cooked herself, quite excellently.” He noticed that despite the couple’s “good financial circumstances,” they had no servants.

  Often Crippen and Belle recruited Reinisch and one of the other tenants for whist. “Mrs. Crippen could be extremely angry if she lost a halfpenny or a penny, and on the other hand extremely happy if she won a similar sum. The penny was not the most important thing here, but ambition. Merely so that his wife should not be angry, Dr. Crippen asked me…to play often intentionally badly, as he also often did, just to allow the mistress of the house to win and thus to make her happy.”

  Overall, however, the couple struck Reinisch as being reasonably content. “The marriage, at least during my time there, was very harmonious,” he wrote. “I never once perceived any misunderstanding or bad feeling between the couple. I must mention that they lived a comparatively retiring life. It was only for this reason, so as not to be always alone together, that they took me into their household. I felt myself very much at home with this family, and never had the feeling that I was just an object to be made money out of, as was often the case elsewhere.”

  It was the absence of children, Reinisch believed, that had compelled Mrs. Crippen to seek lodgers.

  “As a ‘substitution’ for offspring someone was to be in the house who was trustworthy and sociable,” he wrote. “Thus the condition was made, on my being taken into the house, that I was not to go out every evening, but should rather stay in the house for the sake of the company…. It was not easy for me, as a young man who wished to enjoy himself in the big city, to agree to this. I had no need, however, to regret it, as the society of the two cultured people had only a good influence on me, and the frequent conversations beside the fire were very varied, stimulating and interesting.”

  Another tenant, however, had a different perception of the Crippens and told Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison about a number of quarrels that always seemed one-sided, “Mrs. Crippen, excitable and irritable, chiding her husband; Crippen, pale, quiet, imperturbable.”

  THOUGH THE PRESENCE of Reinisch and the other tenants might have eased Belle’s loneliness, it inserted extra tension into her relationship with Crippen. She made Crippen tend to their needs every day, and even on Sunday, which was Crippen’s one full day off from work. “He had to rise at six o’clock in the morning to clean the boarders’ boots, shovel up the coal, lay the breakfast, and help generally,” Adeline Harrison wrote. He had to make beds, wash dishes, and on Sundays help prepare the tenants’ midday dinner, all this without servants. “It was a trying time,” Harrison wrote, “and quite unnecessary exertion for both, as Crippen was earning well, and gave his wife an ample supply of money.” Belle used the income from the tenants to buy more clothing and jewelry.

  In June 1906, after less than a year, Belle evicted the Germans. The work had become too much, a friend said, though it is possible too that the mounting fear of German spies influenced her decision. At nine-thirty on Saturday morning, June 23, Belle wrote, “As my sister is about to visit me, I regret exceedingly I shall want the house to ourselves, as I wish to do a great deal of entertaining and having Paying Guests in the house would interfere with my plans. I therefore hope you will find comfortable quarters elsewhere. Kindly do so at your own convenience as I do not want to rush you off and want you to feel thoroughly at home while you remain with us. I hope you will honor me with your presence at my weekly Receptions while my sister visits me.”

  THE ASPECT OF BELLE’S nature that most colored life at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was her need for dominion over Crippen. Placid and malleable, he was almost on a par with the household’s other pets. He awaited definition. “He was a man with no apparent surface vices, or even the usual weaknesses or foibles of the ordinary man,” Adeline Harrison wrote. “Restraint was the one and only evidence of firmness in his character. He was unable to smoke; it made him ill. He refrained from the consumption of alcoholic liquor in the form of wines and spirits, as it affected his heart and digestion. He drank light ale and stout, and that only sparingly. He was not a man’s man. No man had ever known him to join in a convivial bout; he was always back to time, and never came home with a meaningless grin on his face at two o’clock in the morning attended by pals from a neighbouring club.”

  Soon after the move to Hilldrop, Belle insisted that Crippen convert to Roman Catholicism. She determined how he dressed. On January 5, 1909, she bought him three pairs of pajamas at the annual winter sale at Jones Brothers, a clothier, soon to prove among the most significant purchases of her life. She specified the color and cut of his suits. “His eccentric taste in the matter of neckties and dress generally may be attributed to the fact that it represented feminine taste,” Harrison wrote. “His wife purchased his ties, and decided on the pattern of his clothing. She would discuss the colour of his trousers with the tailor, while he stood aside looking on, without venturing to give an opinion.”

  Her need for control extended as well to her cats. She never let them outside “for fear they should fall victims to the shafts of illicit love,” Harrison wrote. Instead, she had Crippen build a cage for them in the garden.

  Lest Crippen step out of line, there was always the threat that she would leave. She kept at least one photograph of Bruce Miller on display at all times. A reminder.

  Later Crippen would tell a friend, “I have always hated that house.”

  IN 1907 A MAN calling himself Mr. Frankel rented a bedroom in a building on Wells Street a short walk west of Tottenham Court Road. He identified himself to his new landlord as an ear specialist. He was a small man with a large mustache and warm, if slightly protruding eyes, and when he walked, he tended to throw his feet out to the side. His manner was gentle. “The rooms which Frankel occupied were seldom used at night,” his landlord said later, “but occasionally during the day I saw a girl coming down the stairs from the direction of Frankel’s bedroom. I could not identify her.”

  DISASTER


  AT POLDHU THE WEATHER CONTINUED rough. Kemp noted in his diary that on the morning of September 17 a gale from the southwest raked the station. Marconi was there. He, Kemp, and Fleming conducted experiments involving the generation of sparks. The wind intensified. “At 1 p.m.,” Kemp wrote, “the wind suddenly changed to N.W. with a heavy squall which struck the circle [of masts] with increasing violence.”

  The masts rocked. The triatic stays that linked each mast to its neighbor caused them all to dance at once. Wind moaned through the wires.

  One mast broke, but the triatics held—and transmitted the jolt of the collapse to the rest of the circle. All the masts failed. Half collapsed entirely, slamming onto the rain-soaked ground like great trees. The rest jutted from the ruin at haphazard angles.

  No one was hurt, and somehow even the condensers, transformers, and generators in the buildings below escaped damage.

  Marconi showed little emotion. Inside, however, he was impatient, nearly desperate. The disaster posed a wrenching challenge to his dream of transmitting across the Atlantic. He refused to postpone the attempt.

  At his direction, the men at Poldhu erected two new masts, each 160 feet tall, and strung a thick cable across the top. From it they hung fifty-four bare copper wires, each 150 feet long, that converged over the condenser house and formed a giant fanshell in the sky. No particular law of physics dictated the design. It just struck Marconi as right.

  Seven days after the disaster the new antenna was finished, and soon afterward, Marconi used it to make his first test transmissions to his station at the Lizard.

  With this temporary antenna in place, he gave orders to build a new permanent station to consist of four towers each two hundred feet tall, constructed of cross-braced struts of pine. The four towers would anchor the corners of a piece of ground two hundred feet square. A thick cable of twisted wire would link the tops, and from it Marconi planned to string at least two hundred more wires to form a gigantic inverted pyramid reaching down to the roof of the condenser house. This time Marconi made sure the towers were designed to withstand the worst weather Cornwall was likely to deliver.

  But construction of such an immense station would take months. He could not bear so long a delay in his transatlantic experiment. Partly his impatience was fueled by practical considerations. He worried that his board of directors would lose faith. So far the board, with reluctance, had allowed him to spend £50,000 on the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet—$5.4 million today. He needed to prove it was money well spent, though now with one station in ruins that proof would be harder to generate. He worried as always about the growing competition, especially from companies in America, and he still smarted from his failure at the last America’s Cup. He knew also that the secrecy of his transatlantic plan could not be maintained much longer.

  But the overriding motivation came from within. On an instinctive level he knew that his signals could cross the Atlantic, even though nothing in the laws of physics as then understood even hinted that such a feat might be possible.

  The fact that his temporary antenna at Poldhu still allowed communication with a station he had built at Crookhaven, Ireland, 225 miles away bolstered his confidence. So too did a bit of new technology that had fallen into his hands. In August a friend and fellow countryman, Luigi Solari, an officer in the Italian Navy, had paid a visit to Poldhu and brought with him a new coherer developed by a navy signalman. Marconi tested it and found it to be far more sensitive to transmissions than even his own best receivers.

  He devised a new plan. On November 4, 1901, he sent Kemp a conventional telegram: “PLEASE HOLD YOURSELF IN READINESS TO ACCOMPANY ME TO NEWFOUNDLAND ON THE 16TH INST. IF YOU DESIRE HOLIDAYS YOU CAN HAVE THEM NOW. MARCONI.”

  He said nothing of the new plan to Fleming.

  MARCONI WAS ENOUGH of a realist to recognize that his temporary station was unlikely to be able to generate the power and the wavelengths that he believed would be necessary to produce waves capable of traveling all the way to Cape Cod. But Newfoundland was a different matter. It was far closer to Britain, yet still at the opposite side of the Atlantic. It was also well served by undersea cable, through the Anglo-American Telegraph Co., which held a monopoly on telegraphy between Britain and Newfoundland. This fact was vital to Marconi. He needed to be able to send and receive conventional telegrams in order to direct his operators in Poldhu and to gauge the progress of his experiments.

  But now he faced the most important hurdle. Somehow, quickly, he had to erect a receiving station in Newfoundland with an antenna tall enough to receive signals from the temporary station at Poldhu. The antenna would have to be hundreds of feet high.

  He came up with a novel solution. It was a good thing that he kept the whole effort secret, because if the shareholders had known of his plan, their confidence in him and his company likely would have plummeted.

  KEMP PACKED HIS BAGS, as did another engineer, Percy Paget, and on Tuesday, November 26, 1901, at the wharves in Liverpool, they and Marconi boarded the Allan Line’s Sardinian, bound for Newfoundland. Marconi carried his own coherers and versions of the Italian signalman’s device given him by Solari. Tucked in the ship’s baggage hold were two large balloons made of cotton and silk that, once inflated, would each have a diameter of fourteen feet. Here also the crew stowed a number of large canisters containing hydrogen to fill the balloons, and spools containing thousands of feet of copper wire, along with materials to assemble six kites measuring seven by nine feet, each capable of lifting a man.

  The balloons and kites, Marconi wrote later, were a necessary concession to time and the elements, “as it was clearly impossible at that time of the year, owing to the inclement weather and especially in view of the shortness of the time at our disposal to erect high poles to support the aerial.” Marconi envisioned using kites and balloons to loft a wire four hundred feet into the sky—twice the height of the masts at Cape Cod. At his instruction, the operators at Poldhu would send signals over and over at designated times until detected. Once he received a message, he planned then to go to his station at South Wellfleet to send a reply, thereby achieving at least a semblance of two-way communication across the Atlantic.

  That evening, before the Sardinian sailed, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sat down to dinner, their first meal onboard. It was a sumptuous affair, with excellent food and wine. The ship was warm and comfortable, the service attentive—not surprising, given that the three men comprised about half the ship’s roster of passengers. Paget and Kemp shared a cabin; Marconi had his own.

  In the middle of the meal a telegram arrived, addressed to Marconi.

  AT SOUTH WELLFLEET, November was proving ferocious. The Weather Bureau called it the coldest November “for many years,” with a mean temperature that was “phenomenally low.” All month there was wind, rain, sleet, and snow, but the last week proved especially violent. On Saturday night, November 23, a nor’easter blew in and continued raging all the next day. Over the following two days the wind on Block Island reached eighty miles an hour, hurricane force. Storm flags went up and stayed up.

  On Tuesday, November 26, the storm reached its peak. Powerful gusts of wind tore across the clifftop and caused the masts to undulate and twist. The triatic stays linking the tops of the masts caused them to move in unison, like dancers in some primitive ceremony.

  The dance turned jagged. Eerily, the South Wellfleet station now experienced the same disaster that had destroyed its sister station in Poldhu. One mast failed; then all failed. A segment of mast the size of a tree trunk pierced the roof of the transmitting room. Another nearly struck Richard Vyvyan. It fell, he wrote, “within three feet of where I was standing at the time.”

  Now this station too lay shattered. Marconi’s lavish investment had yielded only a dozen shipwrecks’ worth of damaged spars, royals, and topgallants.

  VYVYAN SENT WORD of the disaster via undersea cable to the company’s headquarters in London, which relayed the news to Marconi, now dining ab
oard the Sardinian. The telegram was concise: “MASTS DOWN CAPE COD.”

  THE POISONS BOOK

  IN SEPTEMBER 1908 ETHEL LE NEVE became a lodger in a house a few blocks south of Hampstead Heath and a mile or so west of Hilldrop Crescent. The house was occupied by Emily and Robert Jackson. Robert was a “traveler,” or salesman, for a company that sold mineral water; his wife managed the letting of bedrooms in the house and provided the tenants with meals. Mrs. Jackson and Ethel took to each other immediately. Each evening when Ethel returned from work, Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room, where the two would spend a few moments catching up on the day’s events. Soon Ethel was calling Mrs. Jackson “Mum” and “Ma.”

  What Mrs. Jackson did not know was that Ethel was four months pregnant, but this became apparent two weeks later, when Ethel had what Mrs. Jackson called a “miscarriage,” though that could have been a euphemism. Female doctors were rare, but one such physician, Ethel Vernon, came to the house to care for Le Neve. “I never saw the baby,” Mrs. Jackson said, later, “and I was present in the room when Miss Vernon asked her where it was.” Le Neve said she did not know, “but eventually said she had been to the lavatory and whilst there felt something come from her.”

  The doctor and Mrs. Jackson questioned Ethel “closely” for the name of the father, but she would not reveal his name.

  Ethel became ill and Mrs. Jackson tended to her as if she were her daughter. Two or three days later Crippen came to the house and asked to see Ethel, giving Mrs. Jackson his card. He stayed only a few minutes. A week later he returned, but this visit was just as brief as the last. Mrs. Jackson said of him later, “I thought him quite the nicest man I had ever met.”