Doctor Crippen: The Infamous London Cellar Murder of 1910 (25 page)

The publication of the first edition of the NBT of Crippen had provoked a response from one of Cora’s friends. Lottie Albert had known the Crippens for twelve years and succeeded Cora as honorary treasurer of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild. After reading the NBT she wrote to the
Weekly Dispatch
, who had run a story about Crippen the previous week in their regular ‘Real Crime and Mystery Stories’ feature. ‘Little do they who hurled these accusations at Belle Elmore know of the innermost character of that straight and true little woman. Hers was a temperament truly enigmatical. She was a creature of moods, passionately fond of children, possessing a heart of gold.’ Lottie never suspected that Dr Crippen would ‘turn out to be a fiend in human clothing, and that his pretty, vivacious, and lovable little wife would be done to death by those long, tapering, feminine-looking hands which were always their owner’s pride’. Crippen had ‘cold and calculating’ eyes and at gatherings was an interesting conversationalist, speaking in a voice that never raised ‘above the monotone which was habitually his style’. Lottie admitted that Cora had ‘her little eccentricities. Who hasn’t? But to accuse her of being extravagant and to state that she accepted presents from admirers is to blacken a character that was strictly honourable and upright.’
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When Philip Curtin told the story of Crippen in the
Weekly Dispatch
in February 1920, he was also critical of Young’s recently published depiction of Cora Crippen:

Mr Filson Young has evidently taken great pains over his striking pen portrait of poor ‘Belle Elmore.’ But the present writer, who has in the past gone to some pains to find out what this woman was really like, ventures to think that his delineation errs on the hard side.
    If Cora Crippen was as selfish, vain, frivolous, and, in little things, meanly natured as Mr Filson Young seems to believe she was, and has described her as being, then it is strange indeed that she made such warm, faithful friends.
    The writer has met yet another friend of ‘Belle Elmore,’ the lady in question being a well-known clergyman’s wife, and she, though apparently under no illusion as to certain incidents in her unfortunate friend’s career, yet speaks with real affection and real admiration of the woman who met with so awful a fate on the night of January 31, 1910.
    According to her account, ‘Belle Elmore’ was an eager, high-spirited, extraordinarily kind-hearted woman, always ready to do anyone a good turn; devoted to her friends, keenly interested in their affairs, and never speaking in any sense unkindly or even censoriously of the husband with whom she was undoubtedly not on good terms towards the end of their joint life.
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But the Notable British Trials study is normally the first volume an author will consult when writing about a famous crime, not a long-forgotten pair of articles in a long-defunct tabloid newspaper. Later authors may have been influenced by Young and their descriptions of Cora became increasingly vicious.

In the same year as the publication of the NBT, Ethel Le Neve had her memoirs serialised in
Thomson’s Weekly News
. She repeated Crippen’s claims of domestic misery, for which she only had his word:

‘But after the company has gone she is quite a different person. Any excuse is good enough to pick a quarrel with me. There is not a night that she does not go to her room in a temper at me.’ Everybody in the office was painfully aware that the Doctor was having a bad time, and Belle Elmore did not care a brass farthing how much she showed him up in his own office.
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In a later instalment Le Neve wrote that Cora ‘at times was a very violent woman. When anything went wrong with her terrible scenes used to take place in the house at Hilldrop Crescent. She would abuse the doctor until the wonder was that he did not take the poison himself.’
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Yet despite his trials and tribulations Crippen’s chivalrous reputation was enhanced by his concubine for ‘at no time did he ever use a phrase or a word that would bring a blush to the cheek of a woman, and he never lost his respect for the sex’.
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The celebrated playwright and journalist George R. Sims wrote in 1922 that ‘Belle Elmore, disappointed at her own personal failure, had taken to nagging the little doctor, frequently before company’.
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For Edward Marshall Hall’s biographer, Edward Marjoribanks, Cora Crippen ‘was at once a peacock and a slut. To the outside world she appeared in all her finery; at home she kept no servant, and her husband seems to have performed what little housework was done.’
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There are a couple of sources, written by contemporaries who knew the Crippens, but not published until years later, that demonise Cora. One was by journalist W. Buchanan-Taylor, who wrote a gossipy, name-dropping memoir. He recorded that in 1910 he was asked by his editor to investigate Cora’s disappearance as he was acquainted with many of the music hall personalities of the day. Buchanan-Taylor wrote that he met actress Marie Lloyd and her husband Alec Hurley:

Marie made it quite plain that she didn’t like either of the Crippens, and Belle Elmore was particularly in her disfavour. I asked Marie what she thought of ‘Dr’ Crippen.
    ‘Blimey, I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him with my little finger. When he looks at you through them glaa-ses it makes you think you’re going to have an operation,’ declared Marie, as she fanned herself characteristically with a little lace-edged handkerchief.
    ‘Cut that out, Marie,’ said Alec, ‘you know she’s a bitch and you never know what’s behind it. She’d make a man do anything.’
    ‘There you are,’ Marie interposed, ‘when it’s a man that’s in trouble you men all stick up for him. All the same, if it came to choosing between ‘em I’m not sure I’d pick her. What a cow!’
    Marie made many mistakes about men, but she was seldom wrong about women.
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Lloyd further confided that ‘there was always suspicion among the women who knew them that Crippen, with his supposed knowledge of poisons, was liable to have “done her in”’.
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As for Crippen, Buchanan-Taylor thought he was ‘one of the quietest, most unassuming chaps I ever knew intimately’. Crippen allegedly enjoyed his tenuous theatrical connections and became a member of the Vaudeville Club, where he played cards in the afternoon. The journalist probed the club’s members for ‘all the intimate details of Crippen’s family life; the stories of Belle Elmore’s misdeeds, her confirmed drinking habits, and her continuous abuse, verbal and physical, of Crippen. She was everything but a wife to him. Elmore was such a harlot that even her closest friends would not have regretted her disappearance or missed her companionship.’
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This last assertion is blatantly untrue and it must cast doubt on Buchanan-Taylor’s other comments. He also claimed that it was ‘well known among their most intimate friends that Crippen had on numerous occasions “quietened” Belle Elmore with the aid of sedative drugs. Her outbreaks were violent in the extreme and some of her friends have stated that it was a miracle that she had not killed him in one of her outrageous, drunken tantrums.’
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Another description of Cora was published in 1933 by one of Arthur Newton’s clerks in a Sunday tabloid. He claimed to have met a theatrical client in a West End pub when his attention was drawn to

a big, blousy woman, hotly flushed and obviously a shade the worse for her glasses of port. There were two or three men at her table and, I should judge, she was paying for the drinks.
    ‘Calls herself Belle Elmore,’ said our client, noting my curious gaze in the woman’s direction. ‘Thinks she can dance too. Holy Pete! We’ve got a lot of outside competition on the halls, but we haven’t sunk to that.’
    She led Crippen the devil of a life. They were always quarrelling. She was a loud, vulgar woman of slovenly habits, very vain and extravagant, and she not only had no regard for his money or their home, she began also to treat him with a more and more open contempt.
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Despite both of these accounts being written by people who claimed to have known Cora in 1910, they more closely reflect post-1910 views and are in stark contrast to what her friends said about her. As the years passed the descriptions of Cora became evermore fearsome and no evidence was given to support them.

In 1934, writer Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed a novel based on the Crippen case called
Henbane
by Catherine Meadows. Sayers thought Crippen had been a nice man who had ‘murdered only under overwhelming stress of circumstances’ and thought it ironic that his name now had sinister connotations which was purely due to his method of disposing of Cora’s body. The Cora character in the novel was ‘noisy, over-vitalised, animal, seductive, and intolerable’.
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Cora still had loyal friends. Edith Field was one of them and she responded to Sayers’ review by describing Cora as ‘a delightful woman … She was a sweet-natured woman, loved by all who came into contact with her. “Belle Elmore,” Mrs Hawley Harvey Crippen, leaves behind her a fragrant memory.’
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Sayers replied, not unreasonably, that ‘Miss Meadows’ interpretation of the personalities concerned agrees substantially with that offered in the majority of text-books dealing with the Crippen case’.
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A reviewer in the same newspaper held a similar view to Sayers when writing about Max Constantine-Quinn’s 1935 case study of Dr Crippen, ‘whom most intelligent people now believe to have been more sinned against than sinning (there are worse crimes than the murder of the body, and one of them is murder of the soul)’.
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By now the damage done to Cora’s reputation was almost irreparable and descriptions of her were only too predictable. Horace Thorogood, who claimed to have attended every stage of Crippen’s trial, seems to have forgotten everything that was said in the courts by the time he came to write about the case in 1935:

The home life of this quiet, likeable little man was made wretched by an uncongenial wife who treated him with contempt. She was a worthless creature. She filled his house with people whom he despised and who despised him. Here, if ever, was an excusable crime. The woman had no known relatives and no children. There was no one to mourn her loss. She was out of the way, and not only was no one the worse for it but it made at last possible the happiness of the lovers.
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Harold Dearden wrote in 1948 of Cora that ‘she had no room in her tawdry little mind for generosity to the man who had raised her from the gutter. She grew steadily lazier and more masterful and pleasure-loving, and their home life in consequence became a martyrdom for the Doctor.’
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Captain Kendall, who had never met Cora, wrote in his memoirs that she was ‘a flashy, faithless shrew, loud-voiced, vulgar, and florid’.
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It seemed that authors were trying to outdo each other when it came to writing nasty things about Cora. In 1954, Leonard Gribble added to the anti-Cora literature:

This over-weight and overbearing female allowed her intimates to call her Belle, and never for a moment suspected the name could be comic in the circumstances. But then she had no sense of humour.
    His loud-mouthed wife, who openly sneered at his lack of the more obvious masculine attributes, was extravagant and utterly without taste. She cultivated friends who pandered to her conceit. She spent money recklessly on entertaining those friends, and on clothes and jewellery to deck her gross body.
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Ursula Bloom had a very unfavourable view of Cora Crippen, whom she described as ‘a music hall lady with large bust and bottom … she was hysterical and blowsy; she had affairs with other men; Crippen had rescued her from the streets of New York, where she worked as a prostitute, and she was for ever “kicking up a dust”’.
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The 1962 film
Dr Crippen
, starring Donald Pleasence and Coral Browne as Dr Crippen and Cora, perpetuated the myth of henpecked Hawley and unfaithful Cora, as did Tom Cullen’s 1977 book
Crippen: The Mild Murderer
, which was for years the standard text on the case along with the NBT volume.

In recent years opinions seem to favour Cora more and it has been realised that her outrageously tarnished image was far from the truth. Joan Lock jumped to Cora’s defence in 1991. ‘Reading about the Crippen case sometimes makes one feel like setting up a Cora Crippen Defence Society. For some strange reason, much of the sympathy in this case has gone to the murderer. Some writers appear to believe everything he said about Cora despite the fact that he was shown to have lied so effortlessly about everything else.’
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However, Dr Crippen’s recent entry in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
seems heavily influenced by the NBT and revives the archaic caricature: ‘In reality Belle Elmore was a tipsy, plump and unfaithful shrew with inordinate vanity and a miserly streak.’ It added for good measure, and with no supporting evidence, that in December 1906 Crippen found Cora in bed with a lodger.
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Just as the characters of the Crippens have provoked different reactions from people who knew them and later authors, their relationship is also open to interpretation. For every person who commented on their arguments there were more who would remark on how devoted the couple were. Lottie Albert said that during the twelve years she had known them, ‘I never witnessed any signs of discord’. Something wasn’t quite right though and there was ‘an air of mystery about both of them. When it came to probing into their pasts one realised that it was forbidden ground.’ Albert suspected that Cora was a wronged woman. About a month before Cora’s death the pair were discussing men. Albert casually remarked that all the men she knew could be trusted. Cora gave her a look ‘half sorrowful, half dubious and said, “Not all of them, Lottie, not all”’, which made her friend wonder if she knew about Crippen and Le Neve.
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