Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [69]
Germany in particular took offense; and at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, Nevil Maskelyne seethed.
CLAUSTROPHOBIA
CRIPPEN’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.
WHAT 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