Free Thunderstruck by Erik Larson Page A

avoid the police, including a brief dictionary of useful phrases, among them
“Je vous tirerai le nez,”
meaning “I will pull your nose.”
    But these fears and pressures existed as a background tremolo, audible mainly to the writers, journalists, and reformers who made it their business to listen. Otherwise Britons had much to be pleased with. Though the murder rate was up, overall crime was on the wane. The Metropolitan Police, known more commonly as Scotland Yard, had grown larger and moved to new headquarters at Whitehall on the Victoria Embankment, on the north bank of the Thames. The building and the department became known as
New
Scotland Yard. The new location at first proved a bit problematic, albeit appropriately so. While excavating its foundation, in the midst of the terror raised by Jack the Ripper, workers had found the torso of a woman, without head, arms, or legs, triggering fears that this too had been Jack’s work. The story got grislier still. A police surgeon tried fitting the torso to a severed arm, with armpit, that had been retrieved from the Thames several weeks earlier. It fit. Next, a reporter used a dog to search the excavation and turned up a left leg. This too fit. Soon afterward a second leg was fished from the Thames.
    It did not fit.
    Upon examination it proved to be another left leg, causing speculation that a medical student had tossed it into the river as a prank. The case became known as the Whitehall Mystery and was never solved. When the police moved into their new headquarters, one of the departments they left behind at their previous address in Great Scotland Yard was their lost and found division, with 14,212 orphaned umbrellas.
    Overall there was a lightening of the British spirit. If any one individual symbolized this change, it was the Prince of Wales, Albert Edward, heir to the throne. In the spring of 1897 he was fifty-six years old and notorious for having an empire-sized appetite for fun, food, and women, the latter despite his thirty-four-year marriage to his wife, Alexandra. That the prince had had sexual dalliances with other women was considered a fact but not a topic for public conversation. Nor was his weight. He drank modestly but adored food. He loved pigeon pie and turtle soup and deer pudding and grouse, partridge, woodcock, and quail, and when the season allowed he consumed mounds of grilled oysters. No one called him fat to his face, for it hurt his feelings, but in private his friends referred to him with affection as “Tum Tum.” When not eating, he was smoking. Before breakfast the prince allowed himself a single small cigar and two cigarettes. Through the remainder of a typical day he smoked twenty cigarettes and a dozen more cigars the diameter of gun barrels.
    The prince hated being alone and loved parties and clubs and, especially, going out with friends to the music halls of London. Here he had much company. By the late 1890s music halls with their variety acts had become the most popular form of entertainment in Britain and were fast shedding the seedy image they had acquired earlier in the Victorian era. The number of variety theaters within London multiplied rapidly until the city had five hundred, including such familiar names as Tivoli, Empire, Pavilion, Alhambra, and Gaiety. On any given night a typical variety bill would feature dozens of short acts, called “turns,” including comedy, acrobatics, ventriloquism, mind reading, and acts in which men pretended to be women, and women to be men.
    Overseeing this changing empire was Queen Victoria. In 1896 she celebrated her seventy-seventh birthday. She had reigned for nearly sixty years, during which the empire had grown to be the biggest and most powerful ever known. Meanwhile she herself had grown frail. For over three decades she had lived in a state of perpetual mourning over the death in 1861 of her husband. Ever since then, the Widow of Windsor had worn only black satin. She kept a cast of