The Great Cat Massacre (4 page)

His decision might even have prevented Britain becoming a republic – Dilke was the last MP to suggest such a thing in the House of Commons, earning the eternal hatred of Queen Victoria – and had he gone on to become party leader and Prime Minister who knows what might have happened?

Years later, an inquiry was held. It decided that Virginia had been lying about the affair. Although nothing had happened after she had married, it is possible that she and Dilke had had an affair beforehand and he had reneged on his promise of matrimony. Virginia had therefore wanted revenge. So, when she needed a divorce from her husband because she had contracted syphilis from another lover, she decided to kill two birds with one stone.

Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American homeopathic ‘doctor’ who practised in London with his wife, a
music-hall
singer named Cora, who apparently ‘had gentlemen friends’.

After a party on 31 January 1910, Cora disappeared. Her husband said she had returned home to the US, but later amended his story to say that she had died and been cremated. There was, of course, nothing in the least bit suspicious about his initially forgetting that his wife had died and been cremated but Cora’s music-hall chum Kate Williams, a strongwoman better known as ‘Vulcana’, informed the police that Cora was missing. Suspicions were further raised when Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Neave, moved into the family home and began wearing Cora’s clothes and jewellery. The Peelers thought it was a right rum ’un and no mistake so they searched the Crippens’ home and interviewed Crippen on 8 July.

They found nothing untoward but Dr C panicked. When he and Ethel fled, the police searched the house again. Again they found nothing. They searched it once more but still found nothing. Finally, on the fourth search of the property, they found some loose bricks in the basement. Examining further, they discovered the abdomen of an adult buried under the floor, with the head and limbs missing. Suspecting foul play, the police started about the search for Crippen. As they did so, chemical tests also showed traces of the surgical drug scopolamine in the cellar.

By this time, Crippen had run away to Brussels, and had then boarded a steamship bound for Canada, with Ethel dressed as a boy and pretending to be his son.

It was bad luck for the doctor that the boat on which he was fleeing was captained by a man who was (a) struck by the fact that Crippen kept groping his son, who had large breasts and (b) a pioneer of ship-to-shore telegraphy who happened to be aboard a vessel that was one of only 60 in the world able to send a message back to Britain saying Crippen was aboard. Captain Henry George Kendall wired the authorities the message: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers. Moustache taken off growing beard. Accomplice dressed as boy. Manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’

Chief Inspector Dew of Scotland Yard jumped aboard a faster boat to beat Crippen to Canada, and arrested him as he docked. His first words were: ‘Good morning, Dr Crippen. Do you know me? I’m Chief Inspector Dew from Scotland Yard.’ Crippen’s reply surprised him: ‘Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great – I couldn’t stand it any longer.’

If Crippen had travelled in third class, the captain would probably never have seen him. Had Ethel dressed as a woman instead of a transvestite, the captain would probably not have been curious. If Crippen had sailed for his native land of America, Britain might never have been able to extradite him, but from the British dominion of Canada he was taken back to London, tried, convicted and hanged.

But hang on, there’s a twist. In 2007 a team at Michigan
State University DNA tested the abdomen from the cellar and decided that it wasn’t Cora. It was, possibly, the body of a woman on whom Crippen had carried out an illegal abortion, which had gone wrong. Or, possibly, it had been buried there before the Crippens moved in. But all along, it had been the wrong body that had set the police on Crippen’s trail and started the saga of the most celebrated murder case of the early twentieth century.

In 2007, a key was put up for auction. Unexceptional in most regards, it was an ordinary locker key but it fetched £90,000. It was, after all, the key that sank the
Titanic.

The key was sold by the descendants of David Blair, the liner’s second officer, who was supposed to be on the ship but was removed from the roster at the last minute. When that happened, it slipped his mind to give the key to his locker to his replacement. Understandable – it wouldn’t have seemed that important at the time. But the locker contained the binoculars for the look-out in the crow’s nest – had Blair handed over the key, the look-out might well have spotted something a bit iceberg-like on the horizon. In fact, during the American inquiry into the disaster that was responsible for the loss of 1,522 lives, the look-out, Fred Fleet, said if the crew had had binoculars they would have been able to warn the captain of the impending icy fate much earlier.

‘How much earlier?’ he was asked.

‘Well, enough to get out of the way,’ he replied.

Of course, there were a host of other blunders that sank the unsinkable ship. Perhaps the first was publicly describing it as unsinkable, because that sounded almost like a challenge to its crew.

Added to that, the boat was the largest in the world – more than twice the size of the largest battleships of the time, it was able to carry 3,000 passengers and almost as many crew. It also had seven miles of deck and the luxury of its state rooms rivalled the palaces of Europe. And because it was ‘unsinkable’, there was really no need for lifeboats – just the 16 necessary to comply with the law. These 16 could carry 1,178 people. Of course, that would mean, of the 2,207 people on the maiden voyage, more than 1,000 would drown even if every lifeboat was launched full, but of course the ship could not sink, so everything was fine. And the company didn’t like having lifeboats around – casually reminding the passengers that they could be drowned at any moment tended to make them nervous.

So off sailed the
Titanic
on her maiden voyage, leaving Southampton on 14 April 1912 loaded with nobs – including Charles Ismay, chairman of the White Star line and owner of the ship. Soon it got a bit icy out there on the Atlantic. So icy, in fact, that the nearest ship to the
Titanic,
the
Californian,
actually shut down her engines and drifted through the pack ice in order to prevent major damage. But the
Titanic
needn’t do that: it was unsinkable.

Knowing it was unsinkable, Captain Edward Smith, who had been brought out of retirement for this special journey, ordered the ship to continue at 22 knots. He didn’t want to
be late docking in New York on her maiden voyage – that would be embarrassing.

At 11pm on 14 April, the captain of the
Californian
saw the lights of the
Titanic
speeding through the darkness. He was concerned – he knew that the pack ice was dangerous and told his radio operator to send a signal to the other ship warning of the ice. But the wireless operator on the
Titanic
was too busy sending holiday telegrams on behalf of the passengers and sent a reply that read: ‘Keep out. You are jamming me.’

So on sped the
Titanic
through the dark waters. Visibility was good that night (it would have been better with binoculars, of course) and the
Titanic
received another warning, this time from the
Mesaba
. ‘We have seen much heavy pack ice and a great number of bergs also field ice,’ it stated. Once again, the
Titanic
’s operator ignored it and went back to the telegrams, failing to pass the message on to the captain.

The next person to see an iceberg was the
Titanic’
s first officer. By then, of course, it was too late. The liner hit the berg, tearing a hole 100m in length. In fact, the passengers were entranced – how exciting! – because the ship was ‘unsinkable’ so there was no reason for concern. One of those passengers, however, was Thomas Andrews, managing director of the firm that had built the ship. So, when the captain told him that the gushing water had filled three of the watertight compartments, he knew the
Titanic
could be best described as ‘sinking’.

The wireless operator decided that it was now time to set aside the telegrams about tennis games on Saturday and send
out a distress signal, which brought all the ships in the area rushing to help. All except for the
Californian
– after the
Titanic
had been so rude to him, its wireless operator had turned off his set and he therefore had no idea what was going on. A junior member of its crew had spotted distress flares, but was told it must be a fireworks show for the passengers. This was unfortunate – the
Californian
was the only ship close enough to help. Back on the
Titanic
, as the women and children were selfishly pushing themselves to the front of the queue for the lifeboats, it became apparent that 16 were not enough after all.

Only 711 people survived the disaster. A later count noted that 63 per cent of first-class passengers had survived, 42 per cent of second class and 25 per cent of third class. It led to questions being asked about how the life of a first-class passenger was given priority over that of someone travelling in third class.

Such considerations probably passed over the heads of the gentlemen left on deck as they waved goodbye, though. The band did play on, as it happens, but they were actually playing ragtime, not ‘Abide With Me’ as legend states. Drinks were still being served – you would presume it was a free bar.

As a result of this incident, the law was quickly changed to ensure that ships carry adequate numbers of lifeboats to provide places for everyone on board and lifeboat drills be carried out so that passengers know what to do in the event of an emergency. Ocean-going vessels had to carry a wireless set for emergency communication, which had to be manned around the clock.

One of the lesser-known facts about the
Titanic
is that it
was actually on fire when it hit the iceberg. Coal in one of the bunkers had caught light some time beforehand and for hours the crew had been attempting to put it out.

So the iceberg might just have been the icing on the cake.

William Joyce, the most famous British collaborator with the Nazis, was not British. He was born in New York to Irish parents and the family moved back to Ireland when he was young. Although his father was a Catholic, they were staunch unionists and the young Joyce joined the Unionist special constables, the Black and Tans. After moving to mainland Britain in 1921, he became involved with Oswald Mosley’s Fascists and Mosley took a liking to Joyce, inviting him to join a group travelling to Nazi Germany in 1933 to see what Britain would be like if they were to come to power. Joyce jumped at the chance but, since he didn’t have a passport, he fraudulently applied for a British one, claiming to be a United Kingdom citizen. This petty crime would cost him his life.

Six years later, while still in Britain, Joyce was tipped off by a Fascist sympathiser in British military intelligence that he was about to be arrested as a Nazi and he fled to Germany, where he was recruited to a German propaganda radio station, Rundfunkhaus (the same one that P.G. Wodehouse worked for), to broadcast to Britain. He soon became known to British listeners as Lord Haw-Haw.

On 30 April 1945 Joyce fled the advancing Allied forces but was arrested near the Danish border and returned to Britain to be tried. As an American citizen, legally, he should
have been tried in America but his trivial act of fraud a decade earlier meant he had a British passport and that meant Britain had the right to try him – and hang him.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor points out that the normal penalty for a fraudulent passport application was £2 – Joyce’s sentence was somewhat harsher, making him the last man in Britain to hang for treason. His colleagues at Rundfunkhaus received short prison sentences – except for Wodehouse, who got a slap on the wrist and was eventually awarded a knighthood.

Richard Bingham, the ironically nicknamed Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, wanted to kill his estranged wife, Veronica. He planned to do so on a Thursday – 7 November 1974, to be precise – when his children’s nanny had the night off and always went out with her boyfriend, leaving his wife alone in the house.

So that night he hid in the kitchen of his wife’s home in Belgravia, west London, took the bulb out of the light and waited until nine o’clock when his wife always came down to make herself a cup of tea. When she did so, he sprang out and beat her to death in the dark with a length of lead piping, as in the popular board game Cluedo. He was therefore a little surprised to then hear her voice from upstairs calling for Sandra Rivett, the nanny. With understanding dawning like an unwelcome guest at Christmas, he realised that he had killed the wrong woman. Not one to be put off a task, however, when his wife really did come down this time, he attempted to kill her too, but bizarrely relented halfway through and went
upstairs with her to watch television. Lucan, it seemed, couldn’t bring himself to kill his hated wife, but he was perfectly capable of beating an innocent third party to death. This unusual decision allowed Veronica to escape and raise the alarm by running to a nearby pub.

After Lady Lucan burst into the Plumbers Arms, screaming that her husband was trying to kill her, the police rushed to the house and forced open the door to find a bloodstained towel in one bedroom and a large pool of blood with a man’s footprints on the floor of the basement. In the basement they found the body of the nanny stuffed in a canvas mailbag, as in a cheap detective novel.

The perpetrator of this grisly act, however, had disappeared and soon became Britain’s most famous fugitive, passing into near-mythical status. Since then, he has been spotted everywhere and was even inadvertently responsible for one of Britain’s oddest political scandals, the Stonehouse affair…