One of them, for instance, was a list of eighty convicts, or so, condemned to penal servitude and transportation to Botany Bay. Many of them—boys and girls—had been sentenced to death for the crime of stealing a few potatoes, a pinafore, some yards of cotton, or, in one case, for breaking a threshing machine, and had been “graciously reprieved by His Majesty King William IV” and condemned to that ferocious punishment of penal servitude in the convict settlements of Australia, which to many of them was a living death, until by flogging, and insanitary conditions, and disease, death itself released them. That was but a few years before the reign of Queen Victoria!
It was in the new Old Bailey, very handsomely paneled, nicely warmed, lighted with delicate effects of color through high windows—doubtless the clerks of the court thought it quite a privilege for the criminals to be judged in such a place—that I saw the trial of that famous and astonishing little murderer, Doctor Crippen.
It will be remembered that he was captured on a ship bound for Halifax, with a girl named Ethel le Neve, dressed up in boy’s clothes, with whom he had eloped after killing his wife and dissecting her body for burial in his cellar.
Crippen looked a respectable little man, with weak, watery eyes and a drooping moustache, so ordinary a type of middle-class business man in London that quite a number of people, including one of my own friends, were arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went forth.
I was at Bournemouth at that time, in one of the aviation meetings which were held in the early days of flying. It was celebrated by fancy fêtes, open-air carnivals, fancy-dress balls, and all kinds of diversions. The most respectable town in England, inhabited mostly by retired colonels, well-to-do spinsters, and invalids, seemed to take leave of its senses in a wild outburst of frivolity. Even the Mayor was to be seen in the broad glare of sunshine, wearing a false nose. Into that atmosphere of false noses and fancy frocks came telegrams to several newspaper correspondents from their editors.
“Scotland Yard believes Crippen at Bournemouth. Please get busy.”
That was the tenor of the telegram sent to me, and I saw by the pink envelopes received by friends at table in the Grand Hotel one night that they had received similar messages. One by one they stole out, looking mightily secretive—in search of Crippen, who, by that time was nearing Halifax.
With a friend named Harold Ashton, a well-known “crime sleuth,” I went into the hall, and after a slight discussion decided that if Crippen was in Bournemouth it was not our job to find him. We were, for the time, experts in aviation, and couldn’t be put off by foolish murders.
As we went upstairs, Ashton put his head over the banisters, and then uttered an exclamation.
“Scotland Yard!”