Thunderstruck (21 page)

Hozier negotiated on behalf of Lloyd’s but also on his own behalf, as a private individual, and on September 26, 1901, he struck a deal with Marconi. Hozier got his seat on the board and personally received £4,500 in cash and stock, half a million dollars today. Marconi got the right to build ten stations for Lloyd’s, and Lloyd’s agreed to use no other brand of wireless equipment for fourteen years.

The most important clause stipulated that the ten stations would be allowed to communicate only with ships carrying Marconi equipment, virtually ensuring that as shipping lines adopted wireless, they would choose Marconi’s service. Shippers understood that wireless would make the process of reporting the arrivals and departures of ships to Lloyd’s much safer and more efficient by eliminating the danger incurred when ships left course to venture close to shore for visual identification by Lloyd’s agents. The agreement moved Marconi closer to achieving a monopoly over ship-to-shore communication, but it also fed resentment among governments, shipowners, and emerging competitors already unhappy with Marconi’s policy barring his customers from communicating with any other wireless system.

Germany in particular took offense; and at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, Nevil Maskelyne seethed.

C
LAUSTROPHOBIA

C
RIPPEN’S SEARCH FOR A NEW HOME
took him into a leafy neighborhood in Kentish Town, north of London proper, on the upper edge of the Borough of Islington, where rents were lower than in Bloomsbury. Here he came across a house on a pleasant street called Hilldrop Crescent. The house seemed a solution to the challenge before him. On September 21, 1905, he signed a contract with the owner, Frederick Lown, under which he agreed to lease the place for three years for 52 pounds 10 shillings a year, about $5,500 today.

The details of the house would, in time, be of avid interest to countless millions around the world.

W
HAT THE NEIGHBORHOOD
lacked in glamour, it made up for by the fact that other people associated with the theater likewise had been drawn to it by its affordability, among them singers, acrobats, mimes, and magicians, some at the beginning of their careers, others at the end. It helped too that the house Crippen selected lay on a crescent, for the shape evoked some of London’s nicest blocks and was reminiscent of the Crippens’ past address in Bloomsbury. The new street, Hilldrop Crescent, formed a nearly perfect semicircle off the north side of Camden Road, the main thoroughfare in the district. The house Crippen chose was No. 39.

Trees lined the crescent and in summer presented an inviting arch of green to those passing in the trams, omnibuses, and hansoms that moved along Camden Road. The houses in Hilldrop Crescent all had the same design and were arrayed in connected pairs, every home sharing an interior wall with one neighbor but separated from the next by a narrow greensward. Residents did what they could to distinguish their homes from their attached twins, typically through gardening and the use of planters in shapes and colors that evoked Italy, Egypt, and India. Nonetheless, despite front stairwells that flared with cobalt and Tuscan rose, the neighborhood exuded an aura of failed ambition.

Like all the others on the crescent, the Crippens’ house had four stories, including a basement level that, per custom, was used both for living space and for storage, with a coal cellar under the front steps and a kitchen and breakfast room toward the rear. The breakfast room was sunny and opened onto a long back garden surrounded by a brick wall.

At the front of the house a flight of steps led to a large door fitted with a knocker of substantial heft and a knob mounted at the door’s center, behind which lay sitting rooms and a dining room. This was the formal entrance, reserved for princes and prime ministers, though guests of such stature never appeared on Hilldrop. When friends came for supper or cards, they typically entered through a door on the side. The next floor up had another sitting room and two bedrooms; the fourth and final level had a bathroom and three more bedrooms, one at the front, two at the back.

The walled garden behind the house was a long rectangle, in the midst of which lay two small glazed greenhouses overgrown with ivy. Behind one of the greenhouses and blocked from the view of anyone in the house stood a point where two walls intersected to form a secluded corner. Here lay a hundred crockery flower pots, empty and stacked neatly out of sight, as if someone once had planned a great garden but now had laid that dream aside.

Two decades earlier the crescent had been considered a good address, though with nothing like the prestige of a Mayfair or Belgravia. Since then it had begun a decline, which happened to be captured in one of the great works of nineteenth-century social reform.

In the 1880s a businessman named Charles Booth set out to conduct a block-by-block survey of London to determine the economic and social well-being of its residents as a means of contesting the outrageous claims of socialists that poverty in England was vast and deep. To conduct his survey, he employed a legion of investigators who gathered information by accompanying London School Board “visitors” on their rounds and Scotland Yard officers on their beats. For a time one of his investigators was Beatrice Potter (later Webb), soon to become a prominent social activist, not to be confused with Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit, though both women led nearly contemporaneous lives and would die in the same year, 1943, Beatrice at eighty-five, and Beatrix at seventy-seven. Booth was stunned to find that the incidence of poverty actually was greater than even the socialists had proclaimed. He found that just over 30 percent of the city’s population lived below the “poverty line,” a term he invented. He distilled his findings into seven groups from poor to rich and assigned a color to each, then applied these colors block by block to a map of 1889 London, thereby making the disparities in wealth vividly apparent. Hilldrop Crescent was colored red, for “Well-to-do. Middle class,” Booth’s second-wealthiest category.

A decade later Booth saw a need to revise his findings and again set out to tour the streets of London. At least three of Booth’s walks with police officers took him into Hilldrop Crescent itself or adjacent streets. In his summary remarks for one walk, Booth wrote, “The best people are leaving.” On another walk Booth followed Camden Road where it crossed the entrance to Hilldrop Crescent. Here he found “substantial houses” but “not such a good class of inhabitants as formerly.” The decline continued a trend already well under way in neighborhoods just to the north. Booth wrote, “District is rapidly going down.”

Various forces drove the trend, among them the increasing ease of transportation. A spreading network of suburban and subterranean railways enabled families of modest means to escape “darkest London” for distant suburbs. But the area around Hilldrop also happened to be blessed, or cursed, with the presence of three institutions unlikely to encourage housing values to soar. It is possible that Crippen persuaded himself that none of the three would have any direct effect on his life, but it is equally likely that he simply failed to notice their presence when making his choice. This state of ignorance could not have endured for long.

One of these institutions began its vast and fragrant sprawl about a minute’s walk to the southeast of Crippen’s house. Here lay the Metropolitan Cattle Market on Copenhagen Fields, opened in 1855 to replace the Smithfield Market where, as Charles Dickens observed in
Oliver Twist,
“the ground was covered nearly ankle deep with filth and mire” and the air was filled with a “hideous and discordant din.” The new market covered thirty acres. Each year four million cattle, sheep, and pigs passed through its gates either for evisceration and dismemberment or to be sold on market days from its enclosed market stalls and “bullock lairs.” There was less filth than at Smithfield, but the din was no less hideous, and when the weather was right and the market at its peak, typically Mondays—especially the Monday before Christmas, always the single busiest day—the chorus of lowing and bleating could be heard many blocks away, audible even to the residents of Hilldrop Crescent. Charles Booth found that animals were driven to the market through neighborhood streets, occasionally with comic effect. “Some go astray,” he wrote. One bull remained loose for thirty-six hours. Another time a flock of sheep invaded a dress shop. “Loose pigs are about the worst to tackle,” Booth noted: “they will spread so: attract a crowd in no time: make the police look ridiculous.”

The market environs tended to draw a class of residents less savory than what the Crippens had encountered in Bloomsbury. “Very rough district,” Booth observed, “many of the men working at the cattle market as drovers, slaughter-men, porters, &c; great deal of casual work. Some old cottage property partly in bad repair.”

The two other institutions that tended to suppress the allure of Hilldrop Crescent were prisons. One was Holloway Gaol, also called City Prison, opened in 1852 to serve as the main prison for criminals accused or convicted of crimes within the City, London’s financial district. Until 1902 Holloway had housed both men and women, including, briefly, Oscar Wilde, but by the time the Crippens moved to Hilldrop, it incarcerated only women—and soon would receive its first police van full of suffragettes arrested for seeking the right to vote.
Baedeker’s Guide to London and its Environs
for 1900 describes the building as “rather handsome,” an appraisal that could spring only from a predilection for gloom, for Holloway Gaol with its turrets, battlements, and jutting chimneys was the kind of place that stole the warmth from a sunny day.

But even Holloway’s presence was benign compared to another prison, Pentonville, that fronted Caledonian Road, a short walk southeast of the Crippens’ house. Its facade was no more or less dreary, but the frequency of executions conducted within imparted a black solemnity to its high, blank walls. Upon its opening in 1842, reformers called Pentonville a “model prison” in recognition of both its innovative design—four clean and bright cellblocks jutting from a central hub where guards had a ready view of every level—and its regimen, “the separate system,” under which all of its initial 520 prisoners were kept in what later generations would call solitary confinement, each man alone in a cell and barred from ever speaking to his fellow inmates. The point was to compel prisoners to contemplate their behavior and—through solitary work, daily religious services, and the reading of soul-improving literature—to encourage them to shed their unhealthy behavior. In practice the separate system drove many insane and prompted a succession of suicides.

In 1902 the prison became a center for execution. This did not please the neighbors, although anyone with an appreciation of history would have seen this new role as a fitting return to the district’s roots. In the 1700s an inn stood in Camden Town by the name of Mother Red Cap, a common stop for omnibuses but also the end of the line for many condemned prisoners, who were hung at a public gallows across the street. Public executions became great picnics of malice and drew increasing criticism until Parliament required that they be conducted within prison walls. By the time the Crippens arrived in Hilldrop Crescent, one remnant of prior practice remained enshrined in law and served as a persistent and depressing reminder for families living near Pentonville that they had a prison in their midst and that there were men within its walls who knew precisely the moment at which they would die. The law required that prison authorities ring the bell in the prison chapel fifteen times upon the completion of each hanging. This became wearing for neighbors and certainly for prisoners next in line for the gallows; for Belle it became another marker of her own social decline.

One immediate neighbor of the prison, Thomas Cole, grew sufficiently concerned about how the executions were affecting adjacent streets that he complained to the home secretary, a youngish man named Winston Churchill. “The Building,” he wrote, “is surrounded by Houses occupied by respectable working people who find much difficulty in letting the apartments. It is also causing the Houses to remain empty and of course much loss to all concerned.” He closed by asking, nicely, whether these executions couldn’t take place elsewhere—in particular at a prison called Wormwood Scrubs, “which is, I believe in an isolated position?”

Cole’s complaint made its way through the Home Office to the governor of Pentonville Prison, who responded promptly, in equally civil language and with empathy. After noting that indeed one of the major streets bordering the prison, Market Street, now contained several empty houses, he stated, “I do not think that the carrying out of executions here causes the difficulty in letting apartments, at least to any appreciable extent. The fact of a prison in itself being in a particular spot is bound to cause the neighborhood to be looked on as undesirable—However this agitation has been going on ever since executions were commenced in 1902.”

But he argued that the prison was not the sole cause of neighborhood decay. Landlords were charging excessive rents, and “trams and tubes also tend to make the better class working people move farther away.” Another problem was “the numbers of rats which I am informed infest the houses there.” Decline clearly had occurred, he wrote. “I have observed that the people who reside in Market Street are not of as good a class as they were a few years ago. In fact every time places are to let they appear to be taken by people not so well off as those who lived there before them and so moves are more frequent.”