Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [134]
The hunt for Crippen and Le Neve began in earnest, and suddenly Dew found himself at the center of a storm of effort and press scrutiny surpassed in his recollection only by the days of the Ripper.
THAT AFTERNOON IN LONDON two detectives from Scotland Yard’s Thames Division, Francis Barclay and Thomas Arle, began visiting ships moored at Millwall Docks to alert crews to the manhunt underway. Among the vessels they boarded was a single-screw steamship, the SS Montrose, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway’s shipping division. After a ship’s officer informed them that the Montrose was not going to pick up any passengers in London, the detectives disembarked and continued on their way, but soon afterward they learned from another source along the wharf that while the Montrose would not accept passengers in London, it would do so in Antwerp, its next destination. The detectives returned to the ship and there met one of its junior officers.
The detectives told him about the recent discovery at Hilldrop Crescent and suggested that he might want “to take a few particulars.” The officer had a taste for mystery and invited Barclay and Arle into his cabin, where they conversed for about an hour. The detectives suggested that the fugitives might attempt to join the ship in Antwerp and described several likely ruses that Crippen and Le Neve might deploy. Crippen, they said, might be masquerading as a clergyman, and Miss Le Neve might try “to disguise herself in youth’s clothing.”
The ship’s officer said he would keep an alert watch and would pass the information to his captain, Henry George Kendall. The detectives departed and continued their canvass of the wharves.
IN BRUSSELS ETHEL began to feel that she was falling out of touch with the outside world. She could not read French, though Crippen could and bought copies of L’Etoile Belge. He spoke little about what he found in its pages.
“I asked him several times to try and get an English paper,” Ethel wrote, “but he never did.”
THE DYNAMITE PRIZE
SLOWLY, THROUGH GREAT EFFORT and endless experimentation, Marconi forced his transatlantic service into operation, despite foul weather and frequent malfunctions and in the face of competition that seemed to grow more effective and aggressive by the day. Germany’s Telefunken, marketing the Slaby-Arco-Braun equipment, was particularly energetic. It seemed that every time Marconi’s men approached a new customer abroad, they discovered that Telefunken’s salesmen already had been there. They described the German company’s omnipresence as “The Telefunken Wall.” To make matters worse, in 1908 the provisions of Kaiser Wilhelm’s international wireless conference at last took effect. Marconi ordered his men to continue shunning other systems, especially Telefunken, except in case of emergency; Telefunken engineers likewise refused to accept communication from Marconi-equipped ships. Later, Germany banished all foreign wireless systems from its vessels.
Marconi’s new transatlantic service was slow and fraught with problems. A company memorandum dated August 4, 1908, showed that from October 20, 1907, through June 27, 1908, the total traffic between Clifden and Glace Bay was 225,010 words—an average of only 896 words a day. Another company report revealed that in March, the best month, the average time needed to complete transmission of a message was 44 minutes; the maximum was 2 hours and 4 minutes. The next month, however, the average climbed to more than 4 hours; the maximum was 24 hours and 5 minutes, an entire day to send one message.
But the system worked. Marconi had achieved the impossible. These were not merely three-dot messages but full-length dispatches, many of which were sent by correspondents based in America for publication in The Times of London, and Marconi knew, with his usual certainty, that improvements in speed and reliability would come.
In 1909 he received