Dr Crippen, the murderer with an eye for a bargain advert in the Express
Handcuffed Crippen is led from the Montrose
THE customer queuing at the Daily Express ‘last-minute’ advertising desk in Tudor Street in 1908, was always polite and courteous. He was a small man, 5ft 3 tall, bespectacled and with a walrus moustache any Sgt Major in the Royal Hussars would be proud of. The homeopathic doctor spoke with an American accent and the staff knew him well. They were even on first name terms as he paid for display advertising at cheap rates.
They were to get to know him even better however when he came to trial at the Old Bailey. For that man was the notorious Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who poisoned his wife, Cora, and buried her under a cement floor in the cellar of his home in Hilldrop Crescent, Camden Road, Holloway. When her body was found, she had no head, no bones and no sex organs. All that was left of her was her husband’s pyjama jacket she was wearing. But was it Cora? Some journalists believed not.
When Express advertising director George Wetton did not sell his quota of advertising space as the clock ticked up to deadline at 6pm every day, he would offer half a column, bargain boxes to medical advertising agents who were patient enough to queue in reception for up to an hour or more.
Crippen went in regularly and took the cheap space for his medicinal distribution business. Wetton got to know Crippen so well that he introduced editor Ralph Blumenfeld to him, especially as both men were American.
Blumenfeld said in his diary: “Dr Crippen was a mild-mannered, unpretentious person, and we got on well, especially when I discovered that he was from Michigan. He told me he was an occultist and ear specialist of sorts and had qualified back home. He was a charming, mild man.”
But Blumenfeld and Wetton didn’t know that Crippen’s qualifications were not recognised in England, and he was practising illegally.
His wife Cora, from New York, was a blowsy, heavy-drinking and promiscuous music hall singer, who called herself Belle Elmore, and claimed she had relatives who were journalists and owned a weekly newspaper back home.

Crippen: Had an idea for the editor
Blumenfeld wrote: “Crippen planned to bring her along one evening to meet me perhaps for supper as he had ideas for an educational competition, and we could swap tales of America.”
Not long after that day Crippen was arrested for poisoning Cora and stripping the bones and sex organs from her body. Express news editor Holt White, a burly six-footer with a fist and forearm ‘as thick as a York Ham joint’, covered the Old Bailey trial which Arthur Conan Doyle attended taking notes throughout its four days.
White said later that he was told by prosecution lawyers that the doctor could have been saved from the gallows, if one theory was true … that he had bought a potion to curb his wife’s sexual appetite after she had many affairs and got syphilis, but he mistakenly gave her an overdose and covered it up to avoid the shame of it all.
Crippen was arrested on the liner Montrose with his lover, typist Ethel Le Neve, who was dressed as a boy, on their way to Canada. He had shaved off his moustache. Every newspaper in Fleet Street carried the pictures of him in handcuffs on deck.
As he waited for the gallows, White reported that Crippen tried to cut his wrists with broken glass from his spectacles but was stopped by jail warders. He finally went to the hangman happy that the authorities let him be buried in his Pentonville grave with a picture of his lover Ethel, who had started to wear Cora’s clothes and jewellery.
For years after, the Express ran stories that the body might not have been Cora but was an illegal abortion gone wrong. Perhaps it was really a man. She could only be identified by a piece of skin and flesh that allegedly bore the marks of an operation she once had.
Crippen denied killing her until his last breath.
*****
COME INTO THE GARDEN … OH GAWD!
Beaverbrook had a habit of embarrassing his editors as Bob Edwards, who had the distinction of being appointed to The Chair, not once, but twice, found out the first time they met.
Bob sat nervously waiting to see the Beaver on a vast sofa in the drawing room at Cherkley, opposite a large painting of a horse by Stubbs. He was, he says, wrestling with his conscience as a socialist, offering himself to a Tory Press baron whose newspaper had printed the infamous headline: ‘Socialist Gestapo!’ at the 1945 election.
The drawing room door opened, and Beaverbrook stood eyeing him for a few moments.
“His right fist was clenched in a curious fashion,” says Bob in his memoirs. “You must be Mr Edwards!” Beaverbrook announced. “I would like to shake your hand, but mine is full of worms.”
He opened his fist to reveal a pile of muddy brown worms wriggling around. “These are for Mr Churchill’s fish he gave me.” He took Bob’s arm with his free hand and led him to an ornamental pond outside the library where he threw the worms to their fate. Then they strolled to the lawn outside a window, where he undid his trouser zip.
“Excuse me, I am an old man, I must make water,” he said. And he did, urinating all over the grass in front of his new editor and in full view of the window.
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THE HONOURABLE GENTLEMAN OF THE KIRK

Marcia with Wilson: He denied affair to wife
The 1970s saw the arrival of a new generation of Express news subs and reporters, including people like myself; Drone editor Alastair McIntyre; Chris Williams, Alan Frame, and many more. Some came down from the Manchester office like Roger Watkins and Dick Dismore. Over the years we were all to become good friends, and still are today 50 years later.
The editor at that time was churchman Ian McColl, a Kirk Elder and friend of Beaverbrook, whose own father was a Presbyterian minister. They had that common bond … although the two men were poles apart in lifestyles. God always walked with Ian, but Beaverbrook only searched for him in his last days.
McColl had been brought down from Glasgow after Beaverbrook’s death to stop the circulation rot that was settling into the London edition. The first of a long line of appointments to the Chair who ultimately failed. Some editors had been appointed just because their company was liked at dinner parties or at the whim of a chairman’s wife. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail, with its trusted, well-paid and long-serving staff, who valued and promoted its own home-grown journalists, marched on.

Ian McColl: Kept a secret for years
McColl was a grey-haired, trustworthy and serious looking man, with gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his pointed nose. He would often sit in his grey cardigan next to Les Diver on the Backbench. In fact, he had the same passion for chips that Diver did … and often pinched one from his plate. I was told that in his Glasgow days, he would order a large plate of them with six forks, for the Backbench to dig in at 10pm after a heavy night.
I had arrived from the Guardian where Alastair Hetherington, who also wore gold-rimmed glasses, was editor and the two men had similar looks and dress sense, I thought. Hetherington always put the fear of God in me, as a young sub, after he once gave me a bollocking for changing the tone of a story.
But little did we know in those days on the Express that McColl kept a big secret out of the headlines … his political editor Walter Terry was having an affair with the woman nicknamed the dragon of Downing St, Marcia Williams, Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s private secretary. They would go on to have two children.
But even McColl didn’t know the whole truth of it … that Marcia was lucky not to be murdered in an alleged plot suggested by the PM’s personal doctor. For Williams sowed discord wherever she could at No.10, through her brittle personality and her fixation with control.
“She survived on a day-to-day basis on her Purple Hearts, a combination of amphetamine and barbiturate that kept her going,” Downing Street Press Secretary Joe Haines revealed later. “Her outbursts at people, including Wilson himself, showed that she had a status that others should not threaten.”
She once told Wilson’s loyal wife Mary: “I have only one thing to say to you. I went to bed with your husband six times in 1956, and it wasn’t satisfactory.”
Wilson strongly denied the allegation and appeared to convince Mary, but Haines could see that she was a menace. She was always upstaging the PM. At one dinner for the prime minister of Fiji in 1975, she deliberately arrived 20 minutes late, then walked out as the guest of honour began to speak, only to return to the reception afterwards ... with Frank Sinatra in tow.
The storms that Williams generated became so fierce and frequent during Wilson’s second premiership that there was a discussion in Downing Street about having her murdered, Haines revealed in his book: “Wilson’s personal doctor Joe Stone said that he could dispose of her in such a way that it would seem to be from natural causes”.
Haines made it clear that there was no way he would go down that road. It does make you wonder though, what went on in the shady rooms of Downing Street in those days.
Years later McColl wrote that he killed the story about Walter Terry’s affair and children not because of pressure, but because it would have ruined Terry’s career. “I was not prepared to let this happen to a colleague, and friend,” he said.
Still more years later, when I was editor in Scotland, McColl rang and invited me to lunch at his favourite Italian restaurant in Glasgow. He was charming of course, but I felt out of place tucking into my whacking great plate of spaghetti bolognaise, washed down by a generous glass of chardonnay, with my napkin draped from my shirt collar to pick up the sauce, while he picked gently away at a slice of fresh smoked salmon from Loch Duart, and sipped Highland Spring water. London oaf meets refined Scottish gentleman.
I wanted to ask him so much about Walter Terry; the Martin Bormann story; train robber Biggs and other stuff, but instead he just wanted me to know about Scottish religion … particularly the Wee Frees, so-called after the two Scottish Presbyterian Churches united in 1900.
Ian, who married his secretary Brenda in 1968, when his mother died, passed on to higher plains on June 21, 2005, aged 90.
*****
SECRET SIDE OF THE BEAVER
Beaverbrook’s favourite song was apparently Some Enchanted Evening according to his staff and his favourite film was Destry Rides Again. He made his editors sit through Destry in his cinema time and again, but he would often fall asleep until the end.
The 1939 Western comedy film stars Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart and features a power-hungry cattle boss who controls the small town of Bottleneck. Townsfolk are frightened of him, until Destry turns up played by James Stewart.
'Beaverbrook’s eyes would water whenever he played the song Some Enchanted Evening sung by Mario Lanza. Italian star Rossano Brazzi sang it in the film, but it was dubbed by Giorgio Tozzi.'
There was always speculation about who Beaverbrook was thinking about when the song was played. There were so many candidates, so many crowded rooms.
TERRY MANNERS
2 September 2024