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Ursula Bloom
Ursula Bloom (1892-1984) was a British writer who had become very friendly with Ethel Le Neve as a consequence of her novel The Girl Who Loved Crippen (1955) that had been serialised in the Sunday Dispatch the previous year.
According to Tom Cullen, Ethel's younger brother, Sidney, had contacted Ursula and he had complained about the way his sister had been portrayed. The outcome was that Sidney offered to put Ursula in touch with his sister provided it was made worth his while, which would cost £30.
At first, the two women corresponded before eventually meeting when their friendship blossomed.
Cullen acknowledged that Ursula had been helpful to him when he was researching his book Crippen: The Mild Murderer (1977) and she passed on what little Ethel had told her over the years, some of it demonstrably wrong.
Apparently, after arriving in New York on 1st December 1910, Ethel had gone on to Toronto where she had worked as a typist before returning to England in 1916 'to nurse her beloved younger sister, Nina, who was dying'.
However, Ethel was certainly back in England on the 2nd January 1915 when she married Stanley Walter Smith at the Wandsworth Register Office. She was then 31 and her husband, described as a Household Furnisher's Clerk, was 26. Her sister Nina - otherwise Adine Brock - was a witness.
In the event, Nina died on 1st December 1919 from Pulmonary Tuberculosis. She was 34.