Murder, he telegraphed

July 31st 1910: one hundred years ago today, a small, balding, bespectacled man stands in handcuffs on a docked ocean liner, arrested on his arrival in Canada. The man is Hawley Harvey Crippen, and he is under arrest for the murder of his wife. His arrest is a landmark in that defining story of the twentieth century, the abolition of distance: during these years it became possible for news routinely to travel between continents faster than a person could carry it, and Crippen is one of the first people to be caught by the law as a result of this.

Crippen is notorious even now, a member of the same Rogues’ Gallery of public opinion as Jack the Ripper or Denis Nielsen. It can often come as a shock to people when they learn that, while he was undoubtedly convicted as a murderer, he had only one victim: he was no serial killer but someone whose crime was, if anything, a banal one. Tolstoy tells us, at the opening of Anna Karenina, that all happy families are alike but that unhappy ones are all unhappy in their own way. With all due respect to the Russian master, Crippen’s marriage was unhappy in all-too-hackneyed ways.

A native of Michigan born in 1862, Crippen had qualified as a homoeopathic doctor in 1884. After his wife’s death ended a short first marriage, he moved to New York to set up as a general practitioner, and it was here that he met Kunigunde Mackamotzki, the daughter of a Polish fruit stall owner, who had aspirations as a music hall singer and used the name Cora Turner. Crippen married her in 1892 and the couple lived initially in New York; however, when his practice failed in 1894 he took a job with Munyon’s Homoeopathic Remedies and three years later was sent by the firm to set up a London branch. Crippen remained in this rôle for only two years before Munyon’s fired him for spending his time managing his wife’s music hall career; however, he remained in London, moving from one shadowy quack establishment to another for the next ten years.

Behind closed doors, the Crippens’ marriage was coming off the rails. Mrs Crippen, now using the stage name Belle Elmore (in so far as her faltering stage career made it necessary at all), drank and was routinely unfaithful; in 1906 Crippen discovered her in bed with one of their lodgers. Their day-to-day existence followed a drearily familiar pattern: Belle vain, drunk and verbally abusive; Crippen, outwardly submissive, seething with resentment. Into this toxic situation had come a young typist called Ethel Le Neve, employed by Crippen when working at Drouet’s Institute for the Deaf. Crippen and Le Neve fell in love around 1903 but it was not until the lodger-in-the-bed incident three years later that Crippen crossed a barrier and consummated the relationship. Tensions must have risen inexorably during the following years: in 1908 Crippen moved to the Yale Tooth Specialists in Albion House, New Oxford Street, taking Ethel with him as a typist, whilst in the same building were the offices of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild, a charity for which Belle did work as a way of maintaining her connections with the stage (a stage on which very few people would pay her to perform). Farcical encounters on the stairs must have ensued.

Matters came to a head in January 1910. On January 31st two friends of Belle’s dined with the Crippens. After this, no-one saw her again. Crippen gave out that she had gone to America for a few months and then, in March, that she had died there. Ethel moved into the Crippens’ house at Hilldrop Crescent, Islington. Outwardly, normality was resumed and Crippen continued to work as though nothing was amiss: the letter by him held in the Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection as MS.8332 dates from early April, in the middle of this calm before the storm. However, Belle’s music hall friends were unconvinced by Crippen’s account of her convenient death; their investigations revealed no trace of a Belle Elmore or Cora Crippen either crossing the Atlantic or dying in California as her husband had claimed. Scotland Yard were alerted and Detective-Inspector Walter Dew interviewed Crippen on 8th July. Crippen cracked: although he had told an outwardly plausible tale in the interview, of being deserted and lying to cover the humiliation this brought him, he was unable to keep up the pretence and bolted the next day. Alerted by his flight, the police searched the house and on July 13th, under the floor of the kitchen coal cellar, found a dismembered female body. The corpse contained a poison Crippen had bought shortly before Belle’s disappearance.

Crippen and Ethel had fled together to Belgium and on 20th July sailed on the Montrose from Antwerp, bound for Montreal. Crippen used the name John Philo Robinson and Le Neve, in boy’s clothes, was posing as his sixteen-year-old son. Captain Kendall of the Montrose, however, was suspicious that Robinson and his son were a little too lovey-dovey in their behaviour for father and son. Crippen’s disappearance, and the murder, had been widely reported: readers with a Wellcome Library card will be able to see how the Times reported the flight and the body’s discovery on Friday July 15th here. The captain made the correct guess as to the couple’s identity and, in a first for crime prevention, sent a message back to the ship’s owners, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, by telegraph. The owners informed Scotland Yard, which dispatched Detective-Inspector Dew in pursuit on the faster liner Laurentic; they also informed the press, which from July 25th onwards was able to report on the slow-motion chase as the two ships ploughed across the Atlantic. On the 30th the vessel arrived off Quebec and police disguised as river pilots rowed out to her; Dew looked at the couple, confirmed the identification, made the signal and the arrest was made. The Times correspondent reports that “Crippen turned the colour of death, and his voice gurgled some unintelligible sound as he was hurried below. Miss Le Neve became hysterical and fainted.” The escape had failed.

Crippen was returned to London and tried for murder; his defence was unconvincing (the human remains must already have been under the floor when he bought the house). The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, in one of his first notable cases, demonstrated that a scar on the corpse matched one on Cora Crippen. (Nonetheless, in fairness one should note that there have been attempts to prove that the conviction was unsafe: see here.) Crippen was hanged on November 23rd, but succeeded in minimising damage to Ethel Le Neve; she was acquitted at her trial of acting as an accessory to murder after the fact, and lived until 1967.

Why do we remember Crippen to this day, when the facts of this crime are so banal, and other widely reported crimes of the time are forgotten? The “Battersea Flat Murder”, the shooting of the actor Thomas Weldon Anderson (stage name, Atherstone) which was reported in the same issues of the Times as the chase for Crippen, has sunk into oblivion. Bernard Spilsbury did not think the Crippen case sufficiently interesting for him to keep any note of it in his set of index cards documenting noteworthy cases (held in the Wellcome Library archives collection as PP/SPI), yet Crippen has a notoriety out of all proportion to the dingy facts of the case. In part, perhaps, it is the fascination with doctors that kill, the transgression involved when those whose vocation is health turn to murder. (The calculating use of medical skill to dismember a body, the element of cold self-control in the killing rather than a simple upwelling of violent passion, often especially outrages us.) Crippen, of course, was essentially a quack – it is notable that the Times often uses inverted commas, the typographical equivalent of tweezers, around his title “Dr.” – so there is also something a little sleazy about him, the disreputable truth behind the respectable façade. That meeting of the respectable and the furtive is, of course, true of Crippen’s appearance as well: contemporaries exclaimed at the idea that this unassuming polite little man could have been capable of killing. But in the end, Crippen was just in the wrong place at the wrong time: unlucky enough first of all to have the press, for the reasons set out above, pick up the story and run with it (Wellcome Library card holders can follow the whole story in the Times Digital Archive), but most of all to be on the receiving end of a technological breakthrough, and to be the first person arrested as a result of a telegraph message from a ship summoning a faster liner. Technology caught Crippen; had he been accused of the crime ten years earlier and fled in the same way, he might have got away scot-free. Today, of course, technology in the shape of this blog perpetuates his notoriety. Would he have preferred Anderson’s oblivion to his own posthumous fame? We can ask, but the grave within the walls of Pentonville Prison will never answer.

Images, from top:
1/ Crippen and Le Neve in the dock at the Old Bailey, from Wellcome Images
2/ Belle Elmore, an image originally from the Library of Congress, from Wikimedia Commons
3/ Police excavating the garden of Crippen's house (Detective-Inspector Dew on the extreme right), from Wikimedia Commons
4/ Letter from Crippen to a client, dating from the period between Belle Elmore's death and Crippen's flight, held in the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection as MS.8332.

The crust of it!

This week is National Pie Week in Great Britain, celebrating the long history of pies and pasties in British cookery. Although the haggis and the Roast Beef of Old England occur more in song and story, food wrapped in pastry is a running motif in the story of British cookery, eaten by kings and labourers alike. The Wellcome Library’s holdings relating to food are extensive – we have already mentioned, for instance, our large number of manuscript recipe books, of which the seventeenth-century items are now online. Browsing through these, the reader comes across all manner of pies: penny-plain or decorative and fancy, basic and nutritious or figurative and metaphorical, palatable or disgusting. Here we highlight some pastry-wrapped delicacies from our collections.

All manner of recipes for savoury pies occur in the manuscript collection. For the modern reader, used to the dominance of a few types of meat as pie fillings, their variety comes as a surprise: in particular, seafoods are a common filling, with oysters, lobster and shrimps (the last-named being measured in quarts rather than by weight: a heroic quantity) all being used. We, however, will highlight another recipe, one that sheds incidental light on a common turn of phrase. We speak still of someone “eating humble pie” when we mean that they have been humiliated: the expression comes ultimately from a French word for the entrails of a deer, Humble Pie (or Umble Pie, as it was originally) being made from these less choice cuts after the more sought-after parts of the animal had been taken. In our MS.3769, compiled by a Mrs Jane Parker around 1651, we find a pie slightly further down the social scale than this, even: an ersatz Humble Pie to be made from lamb’s meat.

To bake a lams head and portinance [viscera] in a pie to eat like the Umbles of a dear

Take a lambs head and portenance and parboyle it a litell and then Chop it small as you doe for minst [mince] pies with a po[u]nd of beefe suet, a pou[n]d corrance [currants] [and] a few sweet herbs[;] season it with peper and salt and so bake it[.] When it comes out of the oven you may put a litell sack [sherry] with a litell sugar and a litell boter [butter] and warme it and put it into the pie.

How to make the pastry case, in this recipe, is seen as too obvious to bother mentioning. Noticeable also in seventeenth century recipes is the absence of timings or oven temperatures – these are refinements that only come in when items are cooked in predictable gas or electric ovens. Working on an old-fashioned kitchen range, whose temperature would differ from house to house and from day to day, the cook would simply put the item in and let it bake until it was done, testing frequently and adjusting in the way we still do now with items cooked on the top of the stove.

The British pudding, in which beef suet can be used in a sweet dish, often startles people from other countries. It is interesting to see the same combination of suet and fruit in this savoury dish, suggesting that we are misguided in drawing a sharp line between sweet and savoury dishes when looking at these traditional recipes. The recipe book of Hannah Bisaker (née Buchanan), dating from 1692, endorses this view, with the many pies listed in its opening pages including, next to each other, “Veale Pye Savery” and “Veale Pye Sweete”. As we noted in an earlier blog posting, however, Bisaker’s recipe book is of particular interest for the attention it pays to the outside of pies as well as their content. For Jane Parker, the pastry case was something not even worth mentioning in the recipe. Hannah Bisaker, in contrast, gives up several whole pages to templates for elaborate pastry shapes. Whatever the content of her pies – and as well as the two veal recipes mentioned above, she cites hare, venison, mincemeat (using real meat) steak and “stump pie”, a sweet recipe combining meat, sugar and dried fruit, just in the first few pages – they would be housed with appropriate care and ceremony.

From pies literal to pies figurative, and a much less palatable recipe. On the shelves of the Library's Reading Room, Howard W. Haggard's 1929 history of medicine Devils, Drugs and Doctors reproduces a caricature by Robert Cruickshank (brother of the more famous George) in which a corpulent doctor tucks into "Cholera Pie". The image reflects the belief that an epidemic that was disastrous for the public was good financial news for the doctor: his pie here rests on a table labelled "Board of Wealth", a pun on "Board of Health". For the ultimate in unsavoury pies, however, we must go to Fleet Street and the story of Sweeney Todd, the famous barber whose customers reputedly ended up in the products of his neighbour's pie shop. Sweeney Todd: the real story of the demon barber of Fleet Street sits on the Library's shelves at shelfmark KM.43 (and in passing, how many of our readers know that this shelfmark takes them to a long rank of works on famous British murderers?). Mercifully, it contains no recipes.

The image at the head of this posting is an engraving after Hogarth, whose details can be seen here.

All recipes cited here are tried strictly at the cook's own risk; and pies containing human flesh, of course, should not be made at all.