10:34am Saturday 5th December 2009
TOMORROW, Bishop Auckland Hippodrome celebrates its 100th birthday.
Now a bingo hall, it was opened by Lil Hawthorne, “the well-known and popular comedienne”, who wowed the 1,800 audience with her sketches and songs.
American Lil was a big gig in Bishop in 1909.
The high point of her act was when she handed dolls to the audience from a tray suspended around her neck while singing her hit: “Take it home and give it to the baby.”
Just two months later, Lil was starring in an even bigger drama: one of the most notorious murder mysteries of the 20th Century.
Belle Elmore was another American music hall artiste, an exotic creature with many male partners. Her real name was Kunigunde Mackamotzki, but off-stage she was known as “Cora Crippen” because her husband was an American homeopath, Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen.
In January 1910, Crippen explained that Belle had been suddenly summoned to the US.
Concerned, Lil called at her friend’s house – 39 Hilldrop Crescent, Holloway – but there was no answer. The house was in darkness.
Lil’s worries grew as Crippen then claimed Belle had died in the US, and when Lil attended a dinner at the Criterion Hotel, Crippen was present with his secretary, Ethel Le Neve, on his arm wearing Belle’s jewellery.
In March, Lil had bookings in the US. She tried to trace her friend, but there was no sign, living nor dead. On her return, she went to Scotland Yard, and Hilldrop Crescent was searched unsuccessfully. In fact, Inspector Walter Dew believed Crippen’s story that he’d been so deeply embarrassed when Belle left him for a prize fighter that he’d invented the story about her dying.
Still, Crippen feared police were on to him, and so fled to Brussels with his lover.
This sudden flight reignited Insp Dew’s interest.
He resumed his search. This time, beneath the cellar floor, he found human remains.
Not many remains, admittedly. No head, no limbs and no organs.
But enough, including a scrap of stomach skin on which there was a distinctive scar – just as Belle had.
The sensation stole the headlines. In panic, Crippen threw away his spectacles and shaved off his moustache, and Ethel cut her hair and dressed in boy’s clothes. In disguise, they sailed for Quebec on the SS Montrose.
But Captain Henry Kendall became suspicious of his first-class passengers listed as “Mr John and Master Robinson” when he saw them squeezing hands behind a lifeboat.
Using one of the first Marconi wireless transmitters installed on a liner, the captain telegraphed Scotland Yard: “Have strong suspicions that Crippen, London cellar murderer and accomplice, are among saloon passengers.”
SS Montrose was three days out – but still had 11 to sail. Insp Dew leapt aboard the faster Laurentic and overtook the Montrose. In the St Lawrence River, Insp Dew, disguised as a tug pilot, came aboard the Montrose and arrested Crippen, who said: “Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer.”
In court, the jury heard that Crippen had poisoned Belle with hyoscine hydrobromide and then burned her bones in the back garden, dissolved her organs in acid in the bath and thrown her head overboard in a handbag from a ferry.
It took them just 27 minutes to find him guilty, and Lil was awarded £100 compensation for missing her bookings – including a week in Stockton – while attending court.
Crippen, the first murderer to be convicted by radio communication, was hanged in Pentonville Prison on November 23, when Bishop Auckland Hippodrome had not even made it to its first birthday.
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/trade_directory/