Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [60]
The transatlantic station at Poldhu was well into the first phase of construction, and now Marconi turned to the matter of where to build its twin. He examined a map of the United States and began planning his second voyage to America.
MISS LE NEVE
IN 1901, AT THE AGE OF SEVENTEEN, Ethel Clara Le Neve became an employee of the Drouet Institute for the Deaf, in Regent’s Park, London, and soon afterward began working for another newcomer to the firm, Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen.
Though its lofty name suggested otherwise, in fact the Drouet Institute was a seller of patent medicines, one of the wealthiest and most famous of the species. In time Britain’s House of Commons Select Committee on Patent Medicines would expose the fraudulent and harmful practices of the industry and of Drouet in particular, but for now the company operated without scrutiny, its lavish offices reflecting the wealth accumulated in each day’s harvest of mail. Drouet produced what it claimed was a cure for deafness, and its pitch was sufficiently compelling that an estimated one out of ten of Britain’s deaf population bought one of its products.
Le Neve’s true family name was Neave, but she had taken the name her father, once a singer, had used as a stage name. She was slender, about five feet five inches tall, and had full lips and large gray eyes. Her face formed a soft, pale V in which her cheekbones were clearly delineated, without appearing spare or gaunt. For the time, which tended to favor rounder faces and lush corseted bodies, her look was unusual but undeniably alluring. Her childhood peers would have been surprised at how she turned out. As a young girl she had prided herself on being a tomboy. “For dolls or other girlish toys I had no longing,” she wrote. She loved climbing trees, playing marbles, and shooting her slingshot. “At that time my chief companion was my uncle, who was on the railway,” she recalled. “Nothing delighted him more than to take me to see the trains, and even to this day.” Even as an adult, she said, “there are few things which interest me more than an engine.”
When she was seven years old, her family moved to London. She completed her schooling and resolved to make her own living. A family friend taught her and her older sister, Adine or more commonly Nina, how to type and take stenographic notes. Her sister achieved proficiency first and set out to find a job. The Drouet Institute hired her, and soon afterward Ethel joined the company, also as a stenographer and typist. “Very soon afterwards came Dr. Crippen, who was fated to influence my life so strangely.”
CRIPPEN CAME TO THE DROUET Institute when his previous employer, the Sovereign Remedy Co., went out of business. Drouet hired him to be a consulting physician, and in that capacity he soon encountered Ethel and her sister. “For some reason the doctor took kindly to us,” Ethel wrote, “and almost from the first we were good friends. But really he was very considerate to everybody.”
Nina became Crippen’s private secretary, but Ethel too got to know the doctor. “I quickly discovered that Dr. Crippen was leading a somewhat isolated life. I did not know whether he was married or not. Certainly he never spoke about his wife.”
Crippen and the sisters often took afternoon tea together. On one occasion, as Ethel and Nina prepared the tea and laid the service, a friend of Crippen’s happened to come by the office. Seeing the preparations under way, the man sighed, “I wish I had someone to make tea for me.”
With what Ethel termed his “customary geniality,” Crippen urged the visitor to stay and join them. He did so, and during the conversation that followed, Ethel recalled, “mention was made of the doctor’s wife.” The sisters received the news in silence, though they found it both startling and intriguing. They said nothing to elicit further