Thunderstruck

ONE OF THE GREAT PRIVILEGES of hunting detail is the opportunity for travel to far-flung places that do not typically appear on the itineraries of tour companies. In Oxford, for example, I had the happy experience of being allowed to use the New Bodleian Library, which is only a billion years old and is not to be confused with the Old Bodleian Library. Gaining access required a bit of perseverance. Well in advance I had to fill out an application and find a “Recommender” to vouch for me. On arrival, I had to read aloud a declaration in which I swore “not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame.” Grudgingly, I left my blowtorch at the desk. Michael Hughes, charged with curating the library’s recently acquired archive of Marconi papers, was kind enough to give me full access to the vast diary of George Kemp, even though technically the archive was closed pending completion of Hughes’s work.

At the National Archives in Kew, just outside London, I entered writers’ heaven. After an hour or so of acquainting myself with the archives’ search and retrieval protocols and getting my “Reader’s Ticket”—actually a plastic card with a bar code—I received a trove of documents accumulated by detectives of the Metropolitan Police during their hunt for Crippen and Miss Le Neve, as well as stacks of depositions from the Department of Publication Prosecutions and a small but chilling collection of records from the Prison Commission, including the “Table of Drops,” which allowed me to calculate the precise distance that an Edwardian executioner would have insisted I fall in order to break my neck—four feet, eight inches. In all I collected over a thousand pages of statements, telegrams, memoranda, and reports that helped me reconstruct the hunt for Crippen and the chase that followed.

One of my greatest pleasures was simply walking London streets where the characters who appear in this book also once walked, past squares, parks, and buildings that existed in their time. There is no place quite like Hyde Park on a warm spring evening as the gold light begins to fade, no view quite so compelling as the Victoria Embankment under a bruised autumn sky. As so often occurs, I experienced strange moments of resonance where the past seemed to reach out to me as if to offer reassurance that I was on the right path. On my first research trip to London, I arrived during a week of unexpectedly hot weather. My hotel had no air conditioning. After a couple of too-still nights, I moved to a different hotel a few blocks away, the very charming and blissfully cool Academy House. I discovered the next day that the window of my room afforded me a view of Store Street, one block long, the very street where Crippen and Belle had lived after Belle’s arrival in London and where for a time Ethel Le Neve kept a room.

It was easy to imagine moments when Crippen must have walked past Ambrose Fleming, whose office and laboratory at University College, London, were just a few blocks north. On some evenings, Crippen and Belle and, later, Le Neve surely must have crossed paths with Marconi himself, perhaps on the Strand or in a theater on Shaftesbury Avenue, maybe at the Cri, the Troc, “Jimmy’s,” or the Café Royal. One thing is certain: On an almost daily basis the waves Marconi transmitted from his early apparatus struck Crippen and Belle and the ladies of the Guild, and Chief Inspector Dew and Sir Melville, Fleming and Maskelyne, and just about everyone else who makes an appearance in this book.

I visited a number of London’s many museums, and found two particularly useful in helping to conjure a vision of the past. At the Museum of London I saw one of Charles Booth’s actual color-coded maps and was able to run my hand along the gleaming enameled body of a hansom cab. There I also saw Maskelyne and Cooke’s most famous automaton, the whist-playing “Psycho,” as well as Crippen’s hearing aid and the heavy manacles that once bound his wrists. At London’s Transport Museum, the little boy in me burst forth the moment I walked through the door. The place is full of vintage taximeter cabs and double-decker buses and subterranean railcars from the days when smoke and cinder filled the Tube. I had an opportunity to meet Crippen face to face, at Madame Tussaud’s, in the Chamber of Horrors. He was shorter than I expected.

In the course of my research, I began studying Italian, expecting that I would need to do a lot of research in Italian archives and texts. I quickly found I was mistaken, for Marconi, “The Little Englishman,” conducted his affairs, business and romantic alike, largely in England and in English. My study of Italian did give me a sense of the broader forces of heritage at work within Marconi, and quickly resolved a puzzle that confronts any monolingual American who tries to pronounce Marconi’s first name. Phonetically, it’s Goo-yee-ail-mo.

Certain published sources proved especially useful to me. On the Marconi side of the story, the most valuable was Degna Marconi’s memoir, My Father, Marconi, one of the few works that provides a glimpse of Marconi’s emotional life. Other works also proved useful, among them Richard Vyvyan’s memoir, Marconi and Wireless, and three secondary works, Hugh Aitken’s Syntony and Spark, Sungook Hong’s Wireless: From Marconi’s Black-Box to the Audion, and, most recent of the three, Gavin Weightman’s Signor Marconi’s Magic Box. In the special collections reading room of University College, London, I spent very pleasant days reading vitriolic back-chatter about Marconi and his claims, in letters that revealed that even the greatest intellects of the age were not above mean-spirited sniping. They just happened to be more articulate about it. Also valuable were the letters, reports, and so forth held in the archives of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, London; the Beaton Institute, Breton University, Nova Scotia; the Cape Cod National Seashore; and Archives Canada, in Ottawa.

I am grateful to Princess Elettra Marconi, Marconi’s daughter from his second marriage, for allowing me to interview her at her home on the Via Condotti in Rome, and to Marconi’s grandson—Degna Marconi’s son—Franceso Paresce, who spoke with me at his apartment in lovely and peaceful Munich, where he is a physicist with the European Southern Observatory. I owe thanks as well to Gabriele Falciasecca and Barbara Valotti at the Fondazione Guglielmo Marconi at Villa Griffone, where they showed me the foundation’s museum and the attic in which Marconi performed his earliest experiments.

For my retelling of the Crippen story, I found three memoirs particularly useful: Chief Inspector Dew’s I Caught Crippen; Ethel Le Neve’s Ethel Le Neve, published as Crippen awaited execution; and Sir Melville Macnaghten’s Days of My Years. A necessary work for anyone interested in Dr. Crippen is The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen, a more or less complete transcript of the trial published in book form as part of the Notable Trials Library. The files of the Branch County Library in Coldwater, Michigan, helped me piece together details of Crippen’s childhood and family. The best popular account of the Crippen story is Tom Cullen’s Crippen: The Mild Murderer.

Certain books gave me a good grounding in what life was like during the Edwardian era, a period typically defined as lasting from 1900 until the start of World War I, even though Edward VII died in 1910. Among the most useful: The Edwardian Turn of Mind, by Samuel Hynes; The Other World, by Janet Oppenheim, which explores Britain’s early obsession with the occult; The Edwardians, by J. B. Priestley; and The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919, by Jonathan Rose. In the bookstore of the Museum of London I acquired a reproduction of Baedeker’s London and Its Environs 1900, published by Old House Books, which in its more than four hundred pages provides a rich sense of London and its restaurants, hotels, subway lines, and institutions as perceived at the time. I also acquired Old House’s reproduction of Bacon’s Up to Date Map of London 1902, which gave me a good visual grasp of Edwardian London’s tangle of streets and crescents. A more recent collection of maps, London A–Z, proved indispensable in helping me locate various obscure locales.

Though I tend to be leery of information conveyed via the Internet, I did find several websites that were credible and useful. MarconiCalling provides an easy-to-use online archive with photographs, audio recordings, early film clips, and reproductions of letters and telegrams now held by Oxford University. The website of the Edwin C. Bolles Collection on the History of London, created by Tufts University, allows visitors to search an array of books from the late Victorian era to find descriptions of particular streets and buildings, a process that otherwise would take days if not weeks. For example, one can type New Oxford Street into the site’s search engine and learn all about the sordid roots of the neighborhood. The Charles Booth Online Archive of the London School of Economics presents images of the actual notebooks kept by Booth and some of his investigators, including pages that describe his walks through Hilldrop Crescent.

Regrettably, when the time came to write the final drafts of this book, I found myself forced by the demands of narrative coherence and pace to eliminate a number of compelling but useless pieces of information. Anyone obsessive enough to read the following footnotes will encounter some of these orphans, lodged here for no better reason than that I could not bear to expel them.

I do not cite a source for every fact in the book, only material that for one reason or another begs attribution, typically direct quotations and items that other authors unearthed first. And I must again remind readers: Anything between quotation marks is from a written document. All dialogue that appears in this book is taken verbatim from the sources in which it initially appeared.