The press, what they knew and how they knew it.

[The Good Michael]

Hi,
This is just like a court of law..prosecuting v defence.
None of us can know for sure, the truth behind Toppings tale.
As I said.. it is known[ from private source] that Reg knew nothing about the Ripper crimes, and even had to borrow a book from a younger member of the family to educate himself.
In 1974[ Radio show approx] he would have been completely clueless about the statement made by George Hutchinson in 1888[ as he only borrowed a book around the time of Fairclough's offer], yet some 18 years prior to that he was able to give a audio interview, this would suggest that he heard the tale from who he claimed..his father.
I should remind that J D Hutchinson made a brief visit to Casebook a few years ago, [Topping's brothers..daughter in law] and she confirmed that the family had heard about the tale, her father-in-law was aware of it.
Unfortunately she was reluctant to continue on Casebook , because of the ''put up, or shut up brigade amongst us''.
Because of all of the evidence I personally am aware of , I will continue to accept Hutchinson's statement as the truth, but I reserve the right to have some doubt to query exactly what his motives were...
Regards Richard.

Richard, I did read about that radio show somewhere I believe. It was the 2nd part of a broadcast, with the first guest being...a famous British writer...maybe Waite or White? He wrote about demonology and such things.

Mike

[richardnunweek]

Hi Mike,
As far as I can remember the programme was called ''The man that saw Jack'', it ran for approx 40 minutes , on a weekday at 8pm.
I can only pinpoint the year as being 1973-4, it was [ hazard a guess] on the same station as ''The great Victorian series'' which was running at the time.
It was advertised in the Radio times, otherwise I would not have known some days in advance of its broadcast.
I strived along with my wife , and eldest daughter, a few years ago to search for the said copy, we booked a slot at Brighton University, on a very hot summers day, and combined we searched through the years 1971-1975.
We had only a 90 minute slot, and we failed to find it.[frustrating for all]
It was only when I searched my memory [ at a later date[ that I realized that the section was in the rear pages of the magazine, not the front as we searched.
Regards Richard.

[The Good Michael]

Richard,

Could this be it?

http://www.radiotimesbacknumbers.com/Category/Radio+Times--3aRT+1970-79--3aRT+1973/31569/Review.aspx

Mike

[Ben]

Hi Dave,

You've done a truly splendid job of attending to some of the nonsense that has been posted on this thread of late, and it's the worst kind of nonsense too - off-topic, done-to-death, and a complete derailment to the thread. Fortunately, it is easily dispensed with. Given the sheer number of posts in the Hutchinson forums, I need only conduct a keyword search, pinpoint where the original "debate" took place and reproduce my original response. Sinch!

Also, how tiresome to see the same thoroughly rejected claims being trotted out again and again as though they had never been countered. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen the completely false claim that not a single paper impugned Hutchinson's honesty. This is 100% not the case.

Besides the Echo's report on the authorities discounting Hutchinson for precisely that reason, we have the Star reporting that his statement was "discredited" as a "worthless story" that had led the police on a "false scent". Then there's the Graphic, who reported that the level of detail in Hutchinson's description of the Astrakhan man "engenders a feeling of scepticism", and perhaps most damningly of all, we have Washington's Evening Star whose comments made clear that they regarded Hutchinson as a potential suspect.

I'll reproduce this every time I read the completely false claim that "all" papers regarded Hutchinson as a "stand-up citizen". Where does that even come from anyway? No one so much as hinted at Hutchinson's status as a "citizen". It is perfectly clear that neither the newspapers nor Dew knew anything about Hutchinson away from his statement. It has also been claimed, again quite falsely, that lots of newspapers commented positively on Hutchinson's credibility. These newspapers were merely publishing one report of an interview, conducted and circulated by the Central News Agency who, having "got the scoop" in tracking Hutchinson down and interviewing him, were bound to paint him in a favourable light. They were milking the story, and since it contained a villainous looking Jewish suspect carrying a black bag, it was eminently milkable. Central News were hardly likely introduce a witness they've tracked down with "Get a load of what this lying bell-end just told us!". Significantly, the newspapers who offered their own commentary on the subject did question his late appearance, overly detailed description etc.

Hence, we may dispense with the idea that lots of individual newspapers expressed their own enthusiasm for Hutchinson.

It is a simple unarguable reality that "the authorities" came to discredit Hutchinson, in part, because of his failure to come forward for three days after the murder, and failure to present his evidence on oath at the inquest, i.e. reasons that were inextricably linked to the question of honesty. It is nonsense to assert that he was treated any differently to the likes of Packer and Violena. Hutchinson and Packer referred to together in the aforementioned Star article where it was stated that both were discredited for reasons pertaining to their credibility and honesty. There is, as I said, no mystery behind his fall from grace, and certainly no reason to revive the erroneous speculations of Walter Dew (whose 1938 ripper memoirs, Fisherman tells me, are "riddled with mistakes)". To be fair, nobody apart from Fisherman really has. Most of us have been aware of Dew's Hutchinson theory - it's been readily accessible for yonks - but nobody gives it any credence because of how obviously wrong it is. Hardly surprising, then, that Fisherman's own questionable interpretation of Dew's comments garnered just as few adherents.

It's an obvious non-starter. Hutchinson did not have dementia (as far as we know) and he wasn't commenting on an event that had occurred 40 years previously (as per the bad, inapplicable comparisons). He was recalling the events of three days previously, where three highly memorable and date-crystallizing events occurred - the murder of Mary Kelly, the Lord Mayor's Show and a mammoth 13 mile hoof back from Romford in the small hours. Additionally, we have the evidence of Sarah Lewis, which tallies with Hutchinson's with regard to the location and behaviour of the wideawake man to such an extent as to establish, more or less for certain, that Hutchinson was the man she saw. Copy and pastes at the ready if anyone has the time to waste repeating that silly argument over where precisely Hutchinson stood. The idea of Hutchinson being a day-out (which is a strictly modern idea) is borderline impossible for these reasons, not that Dew was suggesting any such thing.

I don't know of any general consensus, incidentally, that Dew was the "greatest detective in British history", so it's probably best to chill out a bit on the exaggeration and hyperbole. To be fair to him, he made it abundantly clear that he was only offering personal speculations with regard to Hutchinson, and certainly wasn't writing on the basis of information supplied to him by his superiors, or else he'd have said so. That's just obvious.

All of the above reflects mainstream, majority-endorsed thinking on the subject of Hutchinson, and it is a fascinating insight into the thought processes of those who consider Hutchinson both innocent and truthful that they need to resort to fringe theories, remote outside chances, and the acceptance of bizarre "coincidence" in order to depict him as such.

Finally, it is extremely annoying that my very simple point regarding the Manchester Guardian continues to be missed. No, I'm not saying that Hutchinson must have heard the news if this particular paper did. I'm saying that an alleged disappearing act from London would not have rendered him oblivious to news of the Kelly murder. If he couldn't be arsed to read the paper himself, you can practically guarantee that other people did, and they'd have mentioned it. But the whole idea of Hutchinson even leaving the East End without hearing of the murder is unstomochably ludicrous anyway, for reasons already provided.

[The Good Michael]

I said : if they were friends for years, why did she call him "Mr Hutchinson" in November 1888 ?

David,

Hutchinson said that she called him 'Hutchinson'. She said, "Hutchinson can you lend me x shillings'...something like that. I think that very point of calling him by his last name seems to put them together as almost comrades. On sports teams and in the military, people call each other by the last name frequently...it's seems normal here and at least this part of his testimony doesn't sound like a lie. It's possible she called him Mister H., but the newspapers don't say that, though they may have received bad information...(on topic, yes!)


Mike


Mike

[Ben]

It's Toppy time!

Yay!

..On a thread that's supposed to be about what the press new, but what the hell, let's flog this dead horse just a little bit more and see who wants to play.

Just so you know, Toppy was introduced to us by Melvyn Fairclough in the discredited Royal Conspiracy book, "The Ripper and the Royals", published in 1992 and later discarded by its own author. His correspondent was Reg Hutchinson who claimed to have been the son of the witness and was accepted as such by Fairclough despite the total lack of evidence to establish the truth or otherwise or this claim. I know that at least four well-respected ripper authors were aware of Reg Hutchinson at the same time, but none of them chose to incorporate Reg's claims into their own publications for fear of injuring their credibility. Quite simply, they didn't believe him, and the only author who was prepared to use his material was - surprise, surprise - a royal conspiracy theorist.

Reg told Fairclough and his then co-author Joseph Gorman "Sickert" (yep, that one!) that his father, George William Topping Hutchinson, had "mentioned several times that he knew one of the women and was interviewed by the police", that the ripper's crimes were "more to do with the royal family than ordinary people", and that the man he saw "looked like Lord Randolph Churchill". Alarm bells ought to be ringing already. The real Hutchinson, on the other hand, observed that the man he saw was Jewish-looking and probably lived in the neighbourhood - a million miles away from Churchill and the royals. Isn't it slightly suspicious that Reg's father's alleged observations just happened to tie in with the precise individuals that Fairclough's book was seeking to implicate?

Reg mentioned a sum on air, and then some eighteen years later the exact figure, a figure which matches the ''five times salary'' which the Wheeling referred to in 1888...this broadsheet was not commonly read by the population of the east end

I think I've explained to you before why this is disastrously in error, Richard. The police were under the impression that Hutchinson was not in regular employment, and that he would not therefore have been taking home a "usual salary". The police would not, therefore, have paid Hutchinson to the tune of five times a non-existent usual salary. So there is no "interesting coincidence" between the figures provided by the two dubious sources, Ripper and the Royals and The Wheeling Register’s gossip column. That’s even disregarding the outlandish nature of the claim. One can accept that the police might have provided Hutchinson with basic expenses for his efforts, but a huge pay-off such as the one hinted at here? It would have opened the floodgates to any number of bogus witnesses coming forward and expecting to be paid off in a similar fashion.

Are we suggesting that he took over the witness Hutchinson's identity, became familiar with the statement

But he didn't.

Reg demonstrated absolutely no familiarity with Hutchinson's statement. He simply agreed with what Fairclough and Sickert told him. "Royals you say? Churchill you say? That's funny, my daddy mentioned both, honest he did!"

Meanwhile, Reg's father almost certainly had nothing to do with the events of 1888. There is no evidence of any connection to the East End until he met his wife in 1895, who happened to hail from Bethnal Green, and he was described as a plumber who followed his father into the trade who was rarely, if ever, out of work. Indeed, he is listed as a plumber with a residence in the West End in 1891. A far cry from the real i.e "witness" Hutchinson who was described as a groom by trade, now working on and off as a labourer who had known Kelly for three years. Quite simply, their biographies are incompatible with one another, and you can forget the idea of a labouring former-groom upgrading to a plumber just three years later. In the normal course of events, a plumber whose father is a member of the same trade would have served a prolonged apprenticeship with that father which started at the age of about 14. This, we can assume with reasonable certainty, is what happened in Toppy's case, as opposed to him eschewing this opportunity in favour of bumming around the worst part of the East End for three years, consorting with prostitutes and miraculously becoming a plumber anyway by his early twenties.

Incidentally, Mike, Toppy was recorded as living in Eltham in 1881, which certainly wasn't in the East End. And no, he wasn't born in the East End either, and nor was he christened there.

Again, the idea of Toppy being Hutchinson the witness is an extreme minority endorsed idea. For most people, Toppy is just another bogus relic from the Royal Conspiracy era of "ripperology". It is noteworthy, one again, that the argument for the "defense" rests to a large extent on fringe hypotheses.

(I triple-dare someone to start a fight over signatures)

[Cogidubnus]

Oh god you go away for a couple of hours and there's a sudden outbreak of Toppy Wars...

All the best

Dave

[lynn cates]

for sale

Hello Richard. Perhaps the programme will be for sale?

Cheers.
LC

http://www.cmo.com/content/cmo-com/home/articles/2012/12/7/bbc-radio-times-archive-digitised.frame.html

[Garry Wroe]

I triple-dare someone to start a fight over signatures

Would that be the miscellaneous Toppy signatures, Ben, or the only one of the three Hutchinson statement specimens seen by Frank Leander?

[DVV]

George "Dopey" Hutchinson

Hi Ben,

thanks for your posts.

You know, if Fish is true, it would mean that Toppy mistook the day... and never realized it.

...!!!

Poor Toppy must have spent the rest of his life wondering : "Aaarff... Why did the police let me down so quickly...? Why have I been discredited in some papers...? I had seen the man and given so precious détails, right...?"

Curiously, we hear nothing of those bitter feelings in Reg's story.

As a rule, down-to-earth fellows give birth to demure sons.

Cheers

[DVV]

David,
Hutchinson said that she called him 'Hutchinson'.
Mike

Point taken, Mike.
I heard "Mr Hutchinson" in some radio broadcast years ago, while taking a nap after a dozen of gin-tonic.
My mistake.

Cheers

[Cogidubnus]

Another little gem, David...you're not good for my dodgy heart...and my family think I'm totally cracked peeing myself laughing at the computer!

All the best

Dave

[DVV]

Dave, you're my most precious fan on boards after Fisherman.

God bless both of you.

[richardnunweek]

Hi,
People can believe what they want about my sanity, in recalling an event that happened some 40 years ago, and even remark about possible alcohol consumption which may have clouded my judgement.
The truth of the matter is I [ rather like Hutchinson] can only recall what is positively known to me, and forward that onto Casebook, and the stubborn resistance shown by me over the years is because unlike.. anyone else ''I heard it''.
Ben,
We have had the discussion about the payment figure many times before, and your argument that five times a unknown salary =0, does not wash with me.
An average weekly labourers wage was approx one guinea per week , therefore five times that would obviously calculate to a rounded figure of five pounds /one hundred shillings.[ well as good as ]
One has the impression that like most men of that period, one got, what one could in forms of work mostly casual, and although listed as a groom , does not mean that he was presently in that occupation.
Actually Gin and tonics were a tipple of mine at that period, so at least that was right.
Regards Richard.

[DVV]

Richard, you are reading too much into a joke.
Since you're able to recall something heard 40 years ago, you certainly can remember that I've ALWAYS trusted you regarding the broadcast.

Now you can have one more.