Thunderstruck Page 18

  Ethel remained in bed about two weeks, then returned to work.

  CRIPPEN RETAINED A VAGUE connection to Munyon but threw most of his energy into founding a new business, a dental practice, with a New Zealand dentist named Gilbert Mervin Rylance. They called their new venture the Yale Tooth Specialists. “He was the financier,” Rylance said, “and I was the dental partner.” Crippen managed the company and produced the necessary anesthetics. They agreed to split all profits evenly. The practice occupied an office in the building where Crippen already had been working, Albion House on New Oxford Street, and where the Ladies’ Guild maintained its headquarters. Crippen continued to concoct and sell medicines of his own design, including a treatment for deafness called Horsorl.

  The miscarriage changed the tenor of Ethel’s relationship with Crippen. Where once the affair had been carefree and daring, especially given the proximity of the Ladies’ Guild, now there was loss and along with it a realization on Ethel’s part that her love for Crippen had grown deeper. She found it increasingly difficult to endure the fact that each night he returned to his home and to his wife, she to a single room in Hampstead, alone.

  THE MUSIC HALL LADIES’ GADIES’ continued its good works. Its members grew fond of Belle Elmore and her energy, and Belle returned their affection. Though she herself was not performing, she daily encountered those who were, and at least for the time being this seemed to be enough. The one stubbornly dreary part of her life was her husband. She assured him time and again that there were many men who would have her in a heartbeat. With increasing frequency she reiterated her threat to leave.

  She appeared not to realize, however, that her threat had lost a good deal of its power. Crippen was in love with Ethel Le Neve and promised her that one day he would make her his legal wife. She was, he believed, the woman who should have shared his bed all along. Belle’s departure would be a blessing, for desertion was one of the very few grounds that British law accepted as cause for divorce.

  In turn, Crippen did not realize that Belle had become increasingly serious about her threat and had begun planning ahead. Their savings account at Charing Cross Bank in the Strand now contained £600 (more than $60,000 today). Under bank rules, Belle and Crippen each had the right to withdraw money, without need of the other’s signature. There was a catch, however. Only the interest could be withdrawn on demand. Closing the account or withdrawing any of the principal required advance notice of one full year.

  On December 15, 1909, the bank received a notice of intent to withdraw the entire amount. It was signed by Belle alone.

  BELLE WAS GENEROUS with her new friends at the guild. On Friday, January 7, she and Crippen went together to the guild offices, and there Belle gave a birthday gift, a coral necklace, to her friend and fellow member Louie Davis. Belle was troubled by something that had happened the night before, and now, as she handed the present to Davis, she said, “I didn’t think I should be able to come to give it to you as I woke up in the night stifling and I wanted to send Peter for the priest. I was stifling and it was so dark.”

  Belle turned to Crippen. “Didn’t I dear?”

  “Yes,” Crippen agreed, “but you are alright now.”

  The three then left and walked together to a nearby Lyons & Co. teahouse, crowded as always, and there Belle repeated her story, with still more drama.

  “I shall never forget it,” she said. “It was terrible.”

  She put her hand to her throat.

  Davis found it odd to hear Belle recount such a story, for one of Belle’s most salient characteristics was her robust good health. As one friend said, Belle “did not seem to know what an ache or pain was.”

  Over tea Crippen blamed the incident on anxiety generated by Belle’s work for the guild. He urged her to resign, advice that he had given before and that she had ignored, just as she ignored it now. One reason he wanted her to quit was to remove her from Albion House, where she had become a near-constant presence, forcing Crippen and Ethel to maintain a level of circumspection that both found cumbersome and inhibiting.

  At Lyons the conversation moved on.

  ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 15, 1910, Crippen left his office and walked along New Oxford Street to the nearby shop of Mssrs. Lewis & Burrows, Chemists, where he always bought the compounds he used in his medicines and anesthetics. Over the previous year he had acquired hydrochloric acid, hydrogen peroxide, morphine salts, and—his highest-volume purchase—cocaine, which he bought on nine occasions throughout the preceding year, for a total of 170 grains. Today, however, he wanted something different. He asked the clerk, Charles Hetherington, for five grains of hyoscine hydrobromide.

  The order did not surprise Hetherington. He knew Crippen and liked him. Crippen always smiled and exuded an aura of kindness. Part of it was the way he looked—the now-graying mustache and beard made him seem approachable, and his eyes, magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, made him seem somehow vulnerable. Hetherington knew also that Crippen made homeopathic medicines and dental anesthetics, and that hyoscine was sometimes used in drugs meant to have a tranquilizing effect on patients.

  But Hetherington could not fill the order. Hyoscine was an exceedingly dangerous poison and was rarely used, and as a consequence he did not have it in stock. Indeed, in his three years working for Lewis & Burrows, he had never known the shop to have that large a quantity on hand at any one time. He told Crippen he would have to order it and that it ought to arrive within a few days.

  HETHERINGTON RELAYED THE ORDER by telephone to a drug wholesaler, British Drug Houses Ltd., “the largest firm of Druggists in London, and probably in England,” according to its managing director, Charles Alexander Hill.

  His company had no problem filling the order, as it typically had about two hundred grains on hand, supplied by Merck & Co. of Darmstadt, Germany. Hyoscine had “very limited demand,” he said. Ordinarily his company supplied chemists with a maximum of one grain at a time, though a wholesale drug firm once ordered three grains and a hospital fifteen, the largest single order he could recall.

  The company shipped the five grains of hyoscine to Lewis & Burrows on January 18, along with other compounds the shop had ordered.

  THE NEXT DAY, Wednesday, January 19, Crippen again walked to Lewis & Burrows’s shop and asked for his order.

  In the past whenever Crippen picked up his poisons—his morphine and cocaine—the clerks on duty did not make him sign the poisons book, in which they recorded purchases of “scheduled” poisons. “We did not require him to do so,” said Harold Kirby, an assistant at the shop, “because we knew him, and knew him to be a medical man.”

  On this occasion, however, the shop did ask him to fill out an entry in the book and sign it, because of the unusual nature of the order and the potency of the drug. Crippen “did not raise the slightest objection,” Kirby said.

  First the form asked for the “Name of Purchaser,” and here Crippen wrote, “Munyons per H. H. Crippen,” though by now he had only a slight connection to Munyon. Where the form asked, “Purpose for which it is required,” he filled in, “homœopathic preparations.” He signed his name.

  Kirby handed him a small container that enclosed tiny crystals that weighed only one-hundredth of an ounce yet were capable of killing twenty men. He put the container in his pocket and returned to Albion House.

  THE SECRET OF THE KITES

  DESPITE THE NEWS ABOUT SOUTH WELLFLEET, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget sailed for Newfoundland. The crossing took ten days and was marred by what Kemp called a “terrific gale” and a blizzard at sea. On Friday, December 6, 1901, they entered the harbor at St. John’s and docked at Shea’s Wharf. Snow bearded the Sardinian’s hull and lay in drifts on deck.

  A throng of reporters and dignitaries met Marconi as he disembarked. To mask the true purpose of his mission, he hinted that he had come to Newfoundland to explore aspects of ship-to-shore communication. He reinforced the ruse by cabling the Cunard Line in Liverpool to inquire about the location
s of the wireless-equipped Lucania and the more recently outfitted Campania. “He reasoned,” Vyvyan wrote, “that if he stated his purpose beforehand and failed, it would throw some discredit on his system…whereas if he succeeded the success would be all the greater by reason of its total unexpectedness.”

  Soon after landing, Marconi began scouting for a site to launch his kites and balloons and settled on a “lofty eminence” that he had spotted from the ship, which bore the apt name Signal Hill, for the fact that it previously had been used for visual communication. It rose three hundred feet over the harbor and had a two-acre plateau at its top. Marconi and Kemp decided to set up their receiver and other equipment in a building on the plateau that previously had been a fever hospital.

  On Monday, December 9, three days after their arrival, they began their work in earnest. They buried twenty sheets of zinc to provide a ground, assembled two kites, and oiled the skin of one balloon so that it would retain hydrogen.

  Before leaving England, Marconi had given his operators at Poldhu instructions to wait for a cable from him specifying a day to begin signaling. Here too he was concerned about secrecy, for he knew that information leaked from telegraph offices as readily as water from a colander. By establishing the protocol in advance, all he now had to do was send a cable stating a date, with no further instructions. On that date, at three o’clock Greenwich Mean Time, his Poldhu station was to begin sending the letter S, three dots, over and over. Marconi had chosen S not out of nostalgia for his first great success on the lawn at Villa Griffone, but because the transmitter at Poldhu channeled so much power, he feared that repeatedly holding down the key for a dash might cause an electric arc to span the spark gap and damage his equipment. His operators were to send ten-minute volleys of 250 S’s spaced by five-minute intervals of rest. The pauses were important, for the key required to manage so much power had more in common with the lever on a water pump than the key typically found in conventional telegraph bureaus—it required strength and stamina to operate.

  That Monday Marconi sent Poldhu his cable. The message read, simply, “BEGIN WEDNESDAY 11TH.”

  So far, he had succeeded in keeping his real goal a secret. Only the New York Herald had bothered to send a correspondent to Signal Hill, and now the newspaper reported that Marconi “hopes to have everything completed by Thursday or Friday, when he will try and communicate with the Cunard steamer Lucania, which left Liverpool on Saturday.”

  On Tuesday Kemp and Paget conducted a test flight of one kite, which rose into the sky trailing an antenna of five hundred feet of wire. The weather was fair, and the kite flew nicely. The next day, Wednesday, when the signaling was to begin, the weather changed.

  Of course.

  A strong wind huffed across the clifftop and raised the hems of the men’s coats. They decided to try a balloon first, thinking it would have more stability in the rough air. They filled a balloon with a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen and, with Kemp holding tight to a mooring line, sent it aloft. This time the wire was six hundred feet long. The balloon’s silk and cotton sleeve, expanded by gas to fourteen feet in diameter, acted now as a giant sail far overhead. In his diary Kemp wrote that he “had great trouble with it.”

  Abruptly, the wind intensified. The balloon rose to about one hundred feet when Marconi decided the weather was too turbulent. The men began hauling it back down.

  The balloon tore free. Had the balloon moved in a different direction, Kemp noted, “I should have gone with it as its speed was like a shot out of a gun.”

  With six hundred feet of wire following in a graceful arc, the balloon, Marconi wrote, “disappeared to parts unknown.”

  MARCONI TOLD THE Herald’s man, “Today’s accident will delay us for a few days and it will not be possible to communicate with a Cunarder this week. I hope, however, to do so next week, possibly with the steamer leaving New York on Saturday.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Thursday, December 12, the plateau atop Signal Hill was engulfed in what Marconi called a “furious gale.”

  “I came to the conclusion that perhaps the kites would answer better,” he wrote, and so despite the storm Kemp and Paget readied one for launch. This time they attached two wires, each 510 feet long. Coats flapping, they launched the kite into the gale. It dipped and heaved but rose quickly to about four hundred feet.

  “It was a bluff, raw day,” Marconi wrote: “at the base of the cliff, three hundred feet below us, thundered a cold sea. Oceanward, through the mist I could discern dimly the outlines of Cape Spear, the easternmost reach of the North American continent, while beyond that rolled the unbroken ocean, nearly two thousand miles of which stretched between me and the British coast. Across the harbor the city of St. John’s lay on its hillside, wrapped in fog.”

  Once the kite was airborne, Marconi, Kemp, and Paget retreated from the weather into the transmitter room. “In view of the importance of all that was at stake,” Marconi wrote, “I had decided not to trust to the usual arrangement of having the coherer signals recorded automatically through a relay and a Morse instrument on a paper tape.” Instead, he connected his receiver to the handset of a telephone, “the human ear being far more sensitive than the recorder.”

  It seemed at the time a prudent decision.

  NOT ONLY THE PRESS was kept in the dark. Ambrose Fleming had left Poldhu on September 2 and soon afterward departed for his first vacation in years. Despite his crucial role in designing and adjusting Poldhu’s transmitter and power supply, he knew nothing about the attempt then under way in Newfoundland. On returning from his holiday, he occupied himself with his teaching duties at University College in Bloomsbury and worked on an important upcoming talk, a Christmas lecture at the Royal Institution.

  For reasons that remain unclear, Marconi had excluded Fleming from the very thing that he had hired him to achieve. It may simply have been an oversight, owing to the turmoil raised by the destruction of the stations at Poldhu and South Wellfleet. It may, however, have been another example of Marconi’s periodic lapse into social blindness with its attendant disregard for the needs of others.

  THE KITE SHUDDERED through the sky and strained at the line that tethered it to the plateau. At the appointed time Marconi held the telephone receiver to his ear. He heard nothing but static and the noise of wind. Each new gust stabbed the room with the scent of winter.

  In Poldhu the operator began slamming down the key to make each dot.

  To anyone watching, the whole quest would have seemed utterly hopeless, deserving of ridicule—three men huddled around a crude electrical device as a gigantic kite stumbled through the sky four hundred feet overhead. If not for the atmosphere of sober concentration that suffused the room, the scene would have served well as a Punch parody of Marconi’s quest.

  WRETCHED LOVE

  TOWARD THE END OF JANUARY 1910 Ethel’s friend and landlady, Mrs. Jackson, began to notice a change in her behavior. Ordinarily Ethel left the house at ten o’clock in the morning for work, then returned around six or seven in the evening, when she would greet Mrs. Jackson warmly. In practice if not blood they were mother and daughter. But now Ethel’s demeanor changed. She was, Jackson said, “rather strange in manner, sometimes she would speak to me, sometimes not and was depressed. People noticed it.”

  After several nights of this Mrs. Jackson resolved to ask Ethel why she seemed so depressed, though indeed London in deep winter—so dark, cold, and wet, the streets conduits of black water and manure—was enough to depress anyone.

  As was her habit, Mrs. Jackson followed Ethel into her bedroom, where in more pleasant times they would spend the evening talking about work or the day’s news. The thing most on people’s minds was the rising power of Germany and the near-certainty of invasion, raised anew by a terrifying but popular play, An Englishman’s Home, by Guy du Maurier.

  At first Ethel said nothing. She undressed and changed into bedclothes, then undid her hair and let it fall to her shoulders. Her cheeks still red from the col
d, her hair dark and loose, she really was lovely, though sad. She put curlers in her hair, Jackson recalled—and probably these were examples of the latest in grooming technology, the Hinde’s Patent Brevetee, about three inches long, with a Vulcanite central core and two parallel metal bands.

  She had difficulty. Her hands moved in clumsy jolts. Her fingers twitched. She did her hair, then undid it, “pulled and clawed it, looked straight into a recess in the corner of the room and shuddered violently,” Jackson said. Ethel had a “horrible staring look in her eyes.”

  Jackson was too worried to leave and stayed with Ethel until nearly two o’clock in the morning. She begged Ethel to tell her what was wrong, but Ethel would only say that the cause had nothing to do with Mrs. Jackson. “Go to bed,” Ethel said, “I shall be alright in the morning.”

  Ethel lay back in bed and turned her face to the wall. Mrs. Jackson sat beside her awhile longer, then left.

  IN THE MORNING ETHEL was no better. Mrs. Jackson brought her a cup of tea in her room. Later, after Mrs. Jackson’s husband had left—his liking for Ethel had waned after her miscarriage—Ethel came into the kitchen for breakfast. She ate nothing. She rose and put on her coat, preparing to leave for work. Mrs. Jackson stopped her. “I can’t let you go out of the house like this,” she said.

  It was clear to Mrs. Jackson that Ethel was too ill to leave. She telephoned Crippen at Albion House, then returned to Ethel. “For the love of God,” she now said, “tell me what is the matter, are you in the family way again?”