My bathroom book for the past few weeks has been Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson. It is a mashup between the invention of wireless telegraphy by Guglielmo (Guleyelmo) Marconi and the murder of Belle Elmore by her husband, Dr. Harvey Hawley Crippen. Marconi’s invention had just recently proved itself capable of transmitting messages not only between ships but also across the Atlantic. Crippen, meanwhile, was attempting to evade arrest with his lover, Ethel LeNeve, by taking ship from Brussels to Quebec.
Meanwhile, wanted posters and newspaper articles had been published all over Great Britain and some had made their way into the Marconi rooms of ships at sea. On one of those ships, the captain thought he recognized Crippen and Ethel, with her disguised as a boy, and radioed Scotland Yard where a detective decided to give chase across the Atlantic. There ensued a race, with messages flying all around the fugitive couple from ship to ship, while they sailed on with no inkling that refuge did not await them.
But I am calling this review, of sorts, Ethel. Because not only was she proven innocent of any knowledge of wrongdoing on the part of Dr. Crippen, she was also just an ordinary English woman of the working class (Crippen’s secretary) and would have had no idea that more than a century on readers would finish the tale of both wireless and murder asking, “But what about Ethel?”
Larson saves the tale of her life after Crippen for last, so we do learn a little something more about Ethel. I remain fascinated by her.
Ethel Clara Neave, known as Ethel Le Neve, was born in Diss, Norfolk, the eldest child of Walter William Neave, a railway clerk, and Charlotte Anne Neave (née Jones).[4] Ethel was hired as a typist by Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, a homeopath, in 1900,[5] and was his mistress by 1905.(link). Thus Wikipedia.
Larson describes her childhood so: She loved climbing trees, playing marbles, and shooting her slingshot...'For dolls and other girlish toys I had no longing', she wrote.
No wonder I identify with her.
Women had begun taking their places behind typewriters as early as the 1880’s. By 1900, it was an acceptable occupation for young working class women. For someone like Ethel, it may have been an escape, at 17, from the probability of marriage and continued village life. London would be for her an adventure.
One could make a case for the typewriter as an escape valve for women all through the 20th century. I had no intention of becoming a stenographer – Ethel had also learned stenography, I didn’t – but I did take a typing class the summer after I graduated high school, thinking it would come in handy in college. And it did. But when I found myself in Chicago after just two years in college (mistakes were made), I also found that typing was my only skill. Luckily for me, shortly after I began that career, dictaphones entered the picture and I could type nearly as fast as my boss could dictate. I, like Ethel, became the picture of the office standby. The secretary who would and could do almost anything required of her. I also had a boss, at one time, who became somewhat enamored of me and who asked if I would consider a liaison. I turned him down. So many others didn’t. Ethel didn’t, and I don’t blame her. Dr. Crippen, especially after the loss of his wife, was a gem. He was also her greatest adventure.
All of Larson’s sources seem to bear out the fact that Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was unfailingly kind to Ethel, that he protected her the best he could, and that he never incriminated her in any way in the killing of his wife, Belle. He seemed to have truly loved her. Which fact puts Ethel Le Neve head and shoulders above too many of her sisters of the typewriter in the years to come who were used and abused by married, lecherous men who promised what they never intended to give. At least, one could say, Dr. Crippen did leave his wife – in pieces and buried in the cellar, true - and he never forsook Ethel. And she, if all the testimony given in court can be trusted, knew nothing of it.
Ethel went on after the verdicts – guilty and hanging for him, innocent for her – to live under an assumed name, marry a guy named Smith, have a couple of kids and live a life close to the one she had escaped when she was 17. She died in 1967 at the age of 84.
In 1967, I was living in Chicago with a husband, a two-year-old son, and fully entered on a career as a secretary at around $400/mo. Ethel had begun her career at something like 15-20 shillings a week - $3-5. Both of us on the bottom rung.
I am currently 82 and have had many adventures of different kinds over my lifetime. Ethel was two years older than I am when she died, having had one great adventure to call her own. She never knew until their arrest, just steps from freedom, that her lover was said to have murdered and dissected his wife, Belle. But I believe that she loved and believed him innocent until her dying day. I would have.
And how many girls of 17 from a village called Diss, getting their first job in London at the turn of the century, could know that a fellow secretary, in the first quarter of the next century, would be reading of her and finding in her a fellow adventurer.
Guglielmo Marconi and Hawley Harvey Crippen may be the subjects and heroes of Larson’s book, but Ethel LeNeve is who I related to from the moment I saw her sit down at a typewriter. Feeling free and on her own, for the first time.