10 Jan 2015
Henry George Kendall is not a household name today, but there was a time when, as Master of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company's SS Montrose, he played a central role in a major news story. It was Kendall who proved instrumental in capturing a wanted man and his mistress, making criminological history in the process. The tale is one of murder, romance, an international manhunt and a ship equipped with the latest 'wireless' technology.
It was shortly after the Montrose left the Belgian port of Antwerp that Henry Kendall noticed that two of his passengers, a father and son, were behaving oddly. The pair walked the deck affectionately hand in hand, and as Kendall observed them further, he became convinced that the boy was in fact a woman and that the father was a wanted man whose photograph he had seen in the newspaper: an American homeopathic doctor called Hawley Harvey Crippen.
Dr Crippen was wanted for the murder and mutilation of his wife Cora, a.k.a. Belle Elmore, a former music-hall artiste. What were believed to be Cora's partial remains had been unearthed in the cellar of the Crippens' north London home, 39 Hilldrop Crescent.
The SS Montrose is noted in Lloyd's register as being equipped with wireless, and this proved crucial. Kendall instructed the ship's Marconi telegraph operator to send the following message to Mr Piers, the Canadian Pacific's Managing Director at Liverpool:
3 PM GMT Friday 130 miles West Lizard
have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are amongst saloon passengers moustache taken off growing beard accomplice dressed as boy voice manner and build undoubtedly a girl both travelling as Mr and master Robinson.................Kendall
The Canadian Pacific passed this information on to the police.
A faster ship, the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company’s Laurentic, was soon due to leave from Liverpool and was scheduled to overtake the Montrose and reach Canada first. Chief Inspector Walter Dew of Scotland Yard boarded the Laurenticand began the chase across the Atlantic. Near Father Point, Quebec on 31 July, disguised as a pilot, Dew boarded the Montrose with Canadian police. Crippen and his mistress Ethel Le Neve were arrested and brought back to Britain.
The rest of the story is better known. Crippen stood trial at the Old Bailey, was convicted of Cora Crippen’s murder, and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 23 November 1910. He consistently sought to protect Le Neve, insisting she knew nothing about the human remains at Hilldrop Crescent. After Crippen’s trial, Le Neve was tried as an accessory, but acquitted.
Dr Crippen’s is one of those enduring murder cases we still remember long after it happened. Its interest lies not only in the act of murder but in the theatrical element of Le Neve dressing as a boy, in the transatlantic chase which saw Crippen and Le Neve coming close to escape, and in romance on the high seas.
Kendall received a £250 reward for supplying the information which led to Crippen's arrest, but he never cashed the cheque, choosing instead to frame it. His telegraph message from on board the Montrose reputedly makes this the first crime solved using wireless telegraph.
Henry Kendall enjoyed an adventurous and distinguished career. His master's certificate (number 029896) is in the collection of the Caird Library and Archive. It shows he qualified as a master of a foreign-going ship on 4 February 1901 and as an extra master in 1902. His height is given as five feet eight-and-a-half inches, his hair as brown and his eyes as grey. During World War One he served on HMS Calgarian doing convoy work and was torpedoed, his master's certificate being destroyed in the process. A letter from February 1919 in his certificate file requests that a copy certificate be handed to the man bearing the letter, 'Mr. James Smellie […] my reason for asking this is I am so busy down here with Government work'.
This was not the first time Kendall had survived a disaster at sea. He lived through several; for example, he was serving as a Second Mate on the SS Lusitania (not the more famous RMS Lusitania) when it went off course and was wrecked at Newfoundland in 1901.
Kendall ended his career as a Marine Superintendent for the ships of the Canadian Pacific in London. He died in 1965, aged ninety-one.
In 1939, he had published his memoirs, Adventures on the high seas. Like Walter Dew, who entitled his memoirs I caught Crippen, Kendall has a claim to being the man who caught one of the 20 century’s most notorious murderers.
If you would like to learn more about Henry Kendall’s career and the vessels he served on, the following items are amongst those you can search for on the Caird Library catalogue:
- Canadian Pacific by Duncan Haws, Hereford: TCL, 1992 [Library ID: PBP1687]
- Lloyd’s list
- Lloyd’s register
Stawell, Librarian, Acquisitions and Cataloguing