further. The masts were up, but high winds made it impossible for riggers to reach the mastheads. Squalls raked the cliff. On August 14, 1901, Kemp wrote, “The weather is still boisterous. The men could not work outside today.”
The squalls and winds continued without ease for a full month, forcing Kemp to send workers home.
Signs went up beside the condensers that boosted the station’s electrical power: “Caution. Very Dangerous. Stand Clear.” At night the eruption of sparks could be seen for miles along the coast, followed by the crack of artificial thunder. One witness would call the Poldhu station “the thunder factory.”
IN LONDON THERE WAS good news: Marconi’s negotiations with Colonel Hozier of Lloyd’s now yielded fruit. Hozier had given up trying to sell patents and technology to Marconi after realizing that the only aspect of the talks that interested him was the possibility of a contract with Lloyd’s itself.
Hozier negotiated on behalf of Lloyd’s but also on his own behalf, as a private individual, and on September 26, 1901, he struck a deal with Marconi. Hozier got his seat on the board and personally received ?4,500 in cash and stock, half a million dollars today. Marconi got the right to build ten stations for Lloyd’s, and Lloyd’s agreed to use no other brand of wireless equipment for fourteen years.
The most important clause stipulated that the ten stations would be allowed to communicate only with ships carrying Marconi equipment, virtually ensuring that as shipping lines adopted wireless, they would choose Marconi’s service. Shippers understood that wireless would make the process of reporting the arrivals and departures of ships to Lloyd’s much safer and more efficient by eliminating the danger incurred when ships left course to venture close to shore for visual identification by Lloyd’s agents. The agreement moved Marconi closer to achieving a monopoly over ship-to-shore communication, but it also fed resentment among governments, shipowners, and emerging competitors already unhappy with Marconi’s policy barring his customers from communicating with any other wireless system.
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 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
