Thunderstruck - Erik Larson [75]
THE ASPECT OF BELLE’S nature that most colored life at No. 39 Hilldrop Crescent was her need for dominion over Crippen. Placid and malleable, he was almost on a par with the household’s other pets. He awaited definition. “He was a man with no apparent surface vices, or even the usual weaknesses or foibles of the ordinary man,” Adeline Harrison wrote. “Restraint was the one and only evidence of firmness in his character. He was unable to smoke; it made him ill. He refrained from the consumption of alcoholic liquor in the form of wines and spirits, as it affected his heart and digestion. He drank light ale and stout, and that only sparingly. He was not a man’s man. No man had ever known him to join in a convivial bout; he was always back to time, and never came home with a meaningless grin on his face at two o’clock in the morning attended by pals from a neighbouring club.”
Soon after the move to Hilldrop, Belle insisted that Crippen convert to Roman Catholicism. She determined how he dressed. On January 5, 1909, she bought him three pairs of pajamas at the annual winter sale at Jones Brothers, a clothier, soon to prove among the most significant purchases of her life. She specified the color and cut of his suits. “His eccentric taste in the matter of neckties and dress generally may be attributed to the fact that it represented feminine taste,” Harrison wrote. “His wife purchased his ties, and decided on the pattern of his clothing. She would discuss the colour of his trousers with the tailor, while he stood aside looking on, without venturing to give an opinion.”
Her need for control extended as well to her cats. She never let them outside “for fear they should fall victims to the shafts of illicit love,” Harrison wrote. Instead, she had Crippen build a cage for them in the garden.
Lest Crippen step out of line, there was always the threat that she would leave. She kept at least one photograph of Bruce Miller on display at all times. A reminder.
Later Crippen would tell a friend, “I have always hated that house.”
IN 1907 A MAN calling himself Mr. Frankel rented a bedroom in a building on Wells Street a short walk west of Tottenham Court Road. He identified himself to his new landlord as an ear specialist. He was a small man with a large mustache and warm, if slightly protruding eyes, and when he walked, he tended to throw his feet out to the side. His manner was gentle. “The rooms which Frankel occupied were seldom used at night,” his landlord said later, “but occasionally during the day I saw a girl coming down the stairs from the direction of Frankel’s bedroom. I could not identify her.”
DISASTER
AT POLDHU THE WEATHER CONTINUED rough. Kemp noted in his diary that on the morning of September 17 a gale from the southwest raked the station. Marconi was there. He, Kemp, and Fleming conducted experiments involving the generation of sparks. The wind intensified. “At 1 p.m.,” Kemp wrote, “the wind suddenly changed to N.W. with a heavy squall which struck the circle [of masts] with increasing violence.”
The masts rocked. The triatic stays that linked each mast to its neighbor caused them all to dance at once. Wind moaned through the wires.
One mast broke, but the triatics held—and transmitted the jolt of the collapse to the rest of the circle. All the masts failed. Half collapsed entirely, slamming onto the rain-soaked ground like great trees. The rest jutted from the ruin at haphazard angles.
No one was hurt, and somehow even the condensers, transformers, and generators in the buildings below escaped damage.
Marconi showed little emotion. Inside, however, he was impatient, nearly desperate. The disaster posed a wrenching challenge to his dream of transmitting across the Atlantic. He refused to postpone the attempt.
At his direction, the men at Poldhu erected two new masts, each 160