Thunderstruck

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 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.”

In closing, he offered a suggestion: “that the tolling of the bell after an execution should be stopped—there appears to be no reason for it and if it were stopped I think very few people in the neighborhood would be aware of anything unusual taking place.”

He was overruled. The bells had always rung. They would continue to ring. It was, after all, the law, and this was, after all, England.

BELLE DECORATED IN PINK. She wore pink dresses. She wore pink underclothes, including a pink silk ribbed undervest. She bought pink pillows with pink tassels, walled rooms with pink fabric, and hung pink velvet bows off the frames of paintings. She loathed green. It was unlucky, she believed. On seeing green wallpaper in the drawing room of a friend’s home, she exclaimed, “Gee. You have got a hoo-doo here. Green paper! You’ll have bad luck as sure as fate. When I have a house I won’t have green in the house. It shall be pink right away through for luck.” By that standard, she would now be very lucky indeed.

She exhibited an odd mix of frugality and extravagance, according to her friend Adeline Harrison. “Mrs. Crippen was strictly economical in small matters in connection with their private home living,” Harrison wrote. “In fact, to such an extent did she carry it that it suggested parsimony. She would search out the cheapest shops for meat, and go to the Caledonian Market and buy cheap fowls. She was always trying to save the pence, but scattering the pounds.”

She spent most heavily on clothing and jewelry for herself. For the house, she bought knickknacks and gewgaws and odd pieces of furniture. Given her passion for bargains, she no doubt frequented the famous Friday market of “miscellanies” at the Metropolitan Cattle Market. At first “miscellanies” was meant to describe livestock other than cattle, hogs, and sheep, such as donkeys and goats, but over the years the term had come to include anything that could be sold, whether animate or inanimate. On Fridays, as Charles Booth discovered when his survey of London took him to the cattle market, “nearly everything is sold & nearly everything finds a purchaser.” Anyone browsing the stalls could find books, clothes, toys, locks, chains, rusty nails, and an array of worn and beaten wares that Booth described as “rubbish that one wd. think wd. not pay to move a yard.” Another writer observed in 1891 that the “buyers and sellers are as miscellaneous, ragged and rusty as the articles in which they deal.”

Belle adorned the house with ostrich feathers and in one room installed a pair of elephants’ feet, a not uncommon decoration in middle-class homes. Her friends noted with cheery malignance that while Belle paid a lot of attention to how she looked and dressed, her housekeeping was haphazard, with the result that the atmosphere within the house was close and musty. “Mrs. Crippen disliked fresh air and open windows,” Harrison wrote. “There was no regular house cleaning. It was done in spasms. The windows in all the rooms, including the basement, were rarely opened.” Despite the size of the house—its three floors plus basement—Belle refused to spend money on a maid, even though servants could be hired for wages that later generations would consider laughably low. To reduce the amount of housework, she simply closed the top-floor bedrooms and regulated access to the rest of the house. “They lived practically in the kitchen, which was generally in a state of dirt and disorder,” Harrison wrote. “The basement, owing to want of ventilation, smelt earthy and unpleasant. A strange ‘creepy’ feeling always came over me when I descended—it was so dark and dreary, although it was on a level with the back garden.”

Harrison recalled visiting the house on a day when the contradictions of Belle’s nature became strikingly evident. “I followed her into the kitchen one morning when she was busy. It was a warm, humid day, and the grimy windows were all tightly closed. On the dresser was a heterogeneous mass, consisting of dirty crockery, edibles, collars of the doctor’s, false curls of her own, hairpins, brushes, letters, a gold jeweled purse, and other articles.” In the kitchen the gas stove was brown with rust and stained from cooking. “The table was littered with packages, saucepans, dirty knives, plates, flat-irons, a washing basin, and a coffee pot.” And yet in the midst of this clutter, a white chiffon gown with silk flowers lay draped “carelessly” across a chair.

At the window, which was closed, stood one of Belle’s cats. “The little lady cat, who was a prisoner, was scratching wildly at a window in a vain attempt to attract the attention of a passing Don Juan.”

OUTWARDLY, THE CRIPPENS seemed to have an idyllic marriage. Neighbors in the houses on either side and in back reported often seeing the couple at work together in the garden, and that Belle often sang. One neighbor, Jane Harrison, who lived next door at No. 38, reported, “They always appeared on very affectionate terms and I never heard them quarrel or have a cross word.” On four occasions Harrison came over to help Belle prepare for parties, including one large affair that Belle hosted for the birthday of George Washington “Pony” Moore, manager of the blackface Moore and Burgess Christy Minstrels.

But those with a closer view saw a relationship that was not quite so idyllic. For one brief period Belle did try having a servant, a woman named Rhoda Ray. “Mr. and Mrs. Crippen were not altogether friendly to each other,” Ray said, “and they spoke very little together.” And a friend, John Burroughs, noticed that Belle could be “somewhat hasty” in her treatment of her husband. One change in how they configured their home appeared to cause no great concern among their friends, though within a few years it would take on great significance. For the first time in their marriage the Crippens occupied separate bedrooms.

What Belle’s friends and neighbors did not seem to grasp was that Belle was lonely. She stayed at the house most of the time, though she often left for lunch, typically departing at about one o’clock and returning about three. She found comfort in pets, and soon the house was full of mewing and chirping and, eventually, barking. She acquired two cats, one an elegant white Persian; she bought seven canaries and installed them in a large gilt cage, another common feature of homes in the neighborhood. Later she and Crippen acquired a bull terrier.

At one point soon after moving into the house, she decided to take in boarders and placed an advertisement in the Daily Telegraph. Soon three young German men took up residence in the top-floor bedrooms. One of them, Karl Reinisch, later recalled that Belle had wanted more than just income.

He told his story in a letter that is now in the possession of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, accessible only to police officers and invited guests:

The house had a “beautiful garden,” Reinisch wrote, and was situated on “a quiet, better street.” He considered himself lucky to have been accepted as a tenant. “It counted at that time as a certain distinction to obtain board and lodging in the house of Dr. Crippen,” he wrote. Crippen was “extremely quiet, gentlemanly, not only in thought but also in behaviour, not only towards his wife but also to me and everyone else. He idolized his wife, and sensed her every wish which he hastened to fulfill.” That first Christmas, 1905, offered an example. “Dr. Crippen wished to give his wife a big surprise, one that would make her very happy, namely a gramophone. These were then very costly. Mrs. Crippen, a good piano player, was as pleased as a child at this attentiveness, and Dr. Crippen was even happier at the joy of his wife. He had gone to a great deal of trouble to procure the gramophone.”

Crippen and Belle had opposite natures, Reinisch wrote. He found Crippen to be “extremely placid” and Belle “very high-spirited. Blonde, with a pretty face, of large, full, may I say of opulent figure.” She was, he wrote, “a good housewife, unlike many other English women. She cooked herself, quite excellently.” He noticed that despite the couple’s “good financial circumstances,” they had no servants.

Often Crippen and Belle recruited Reinisch and one of the other tenants for whist. “Mrs. Crippen could be extremely angry if she lost a halfpenny or a penny, and on the other hand extremely happy if she won a similar sum. The penny was not the most important thing here, but ambition. Merely so that his wife should not be angry, Dr. Crippen asked me…to play often intentionally badly, as he also often did, just to allow the mistress of the house to win and thus to make her happy.”

Overall, however, the couple struck Reinisch as being reasonably content. “The marriage, at least during my time there, was very harmonious,” he wrote. “I never once perceived any misunderstanding or bad feeling between the couple. I must mention that they lived a comparatively retiring life. It was only for this reason, so as not to be always alone together, that they took me into their household. I felt myself very much at home with this family, and never had the feeling that I was just an object to be made money out of, as was often the case elsewhere.”

It was the absence of children, Reinisch believed, that had compelled Mrs. Crippen to seek lodgers.

“As a ‘substitution’ for offspring someone was to be in the house who was trustworthy and sociable,” he wrote. “Thus the condition was made, on my being taken into the house, that I was not to go out every evening, but should rather stay in the house for the sake of the company…. It was not easy for me, as a young man who wished to enjoy himself in the big city, to agree to this. I had no need, however, to regret it, as the society of the two cultured people had only a good influence on me, and the frequent conversations beside the fire were very varied, stimulating and interesting.”

Another tenant, however, had a different perception of the Crippens and told Belle’s friend Adeline Harrison about a number of quarrels that always seemed one-sided, “Mrs. Crippen, excitable and irritable, chiding her husband; Crippen, pale, quiet, imperturbable.”

THOUGH THE PRESENCE of Reinisch and the other tenants might have eased Belle’s loneliness, it inserted extra tension into her relationship with Crippen. She made Crippen tend to their needs every day, and even on Sunday, which was Crippen’s one full day off from work. “He had to rise at six o’clock in the morning to clean the boarders’ boots, shovel up the coal, lay the breakfast, and help generally,” Adeline Harrison wrote. He had to make beds, wash dishes, and on Sundays help prepare the tenants’ midday dinner, all this without servants. “It was a trying time,” Harrison wrote, “and quite unnecessary exertion for both, as Crippen was earning well, and gave his wife an ample supply of money.” Belle used the income from the tenants to buy more clothing and jewelry.

In June 1906, after less than a year, Belle evicted the Germans. The work had become too much, a friend said, though it is possible too that the mounting fear of German spies influenced her decision. At nine-thirty on Saturday morning, June 23, Belle wrote, “As my sister is about to visit me, I regret exceedingly I shall want the house to ourselves, as I wish to do a great deal of entertaining and having Paying Guests in the house would interfere with my plans. I therefore hope you will find comfortable quarters elsewhere. Kindly do so at your own convenience as I do not want to rush you off and want you to feel thoroughly at home while you remain with us. I hope you will honor me with your presence at my weekly Receptions while my sister visits me.”

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.”