A question of time.

[rjpalmer]

Deposition of PC Joseph Allen, witness in the Alice McKenzie murder. My emphasis in bold.


Police-constable Joseph Allen, 423 H, deposed, - Last night I was in Castle-alley. It was then 20 minutes past 12 when I passed through. I was through the alley several times. I remained there for five minutes. I entered the alley through the archway in Whitechapel-road. I had something to eat under the lamp where the deceased was found. Having remained in the alley for five minutes, I went into Wentworth-street. There was neither man nor woman there. There were wagons in the alley - two right underneath the lamp.

[Coroner] Would you swear there was no one in the wagons? - I would not swear to that, as I did not look into them; one of the wagons was an open one. Everything was very quiet at the time. The backs of some of the houses in Newcastle-street faced the alley, and in some of the upper windows were lights. That was not an unusual thing at that time. I cannot say if any of the windows were open. No sounds came from those houses. On leaving the alley I met Constable Walter Andrews, 272 H, in Wentworth-street. It was about 100 yards from the alley where I met Andrews. I spoke to Andrews, who then went towards Goldston-street. [Goulston Street]

[Coroner] How did you fix the time? - I looked at my watch. It was 12:30 when I left the alley. At the end is a public house - the Three Crowns - and as I passed the landlord was shutting up the house. After leaving Andrews I went towards Commercial-street and met Sergeant Badlam, [Badham] 31 H, who told me a woman had been found murdered in Castle-alley, and he directed me to go to the station. When the sergeant spoke to me it was five minutes to 1, and 1 o'clock when I got to the station.

"I looked at my watch." It was that simple.

That beat constables, including those associated with the Buck's Row murder, didn't carry watches is an assumption rather than an ascertained fact. If their beat ended in the early morning hours, when they were expected to 'knock up' residents, I suspect carrying a watch would have been quite common.

I've even seen accounts of beat constables who were robbed of their watch while on patrol.

Unfortunately, it appears to have been rare for a Coroner to directly ask a constable (as Allen was asked) how he fixed the time, so speculation will continue.

[Wickerman]

To illustrate my point, take George Hutchinson. He says he saw Mary and Astrakan Man enter the courtyard sometime after 2am. He stayed and watched the courtyard for about 3/4 of and hour and then left, as per his statement to Abberline.

Now, is George trying to provide valued assistance to the police with this statement, in which case the obvious issue of waiting 4 days to come forward would counter that idea,...

Hi Michael.
The 'waiting 4 days' issue can easily be countered if theorists would only look at the press articles for Friday to Sunday (9th-11th). The police had no idea what hour Mary had been murdered, the press were all publishing a variety of theories but, the most popular was that of Maxwell & Lewis, that Kelly was likely murdered after 9:00am Friday morning.
This is what the public thought, there was no other official opinion, so naturally this would be what Hutchinson thought also.
The solution why Hutchinson didn't bother coming forward is obviously that he didn't think seeing Kelly with a man between 2-3:00am was of any use when her murder took place after 9:00am., that is only reasonable, so there's no mystery, he wasn't holding back, he wasn't trying to think up excuses.

What did happen on Sunday was the press reported the first official opinion concerning Kelly's time of death, that it was nearer 3:00am, Hutch did say he approached a policeman on Sunday to tell him what he knew. However, following the inquest on Monday one of the early newspapers who went to press in the afternoon reported that a Mrs Cox must have seen the murderer at midnight. This, Hutch would have known was a mistake because he saw Kelly at 2:00am, so after discussing this with a friend at the lodging house Hutch went to the police station.

[Michael W Richards]

To illustrate my point, take George Hutchinson. He says he saw Mary and Astrakan Man enter the courtyard sometime after 2am. He stayed and watched the courtyard for about 3/4 of and hour and then left, as per his statement to Abberline.

Now, is George trying to provide valued assistance to the police with this statement, in which case the obvious issue of waiting 4 days to come forward would counter that idea, or is he trying to establish that he saw a Mary Kelly quite alive at 2-3am with someone heading into her room, with the benefit of having Sarah Lewis's sighting to validate his claim he was there and of the time? Was he establishing his innocence, since he claimed he knew Mary? Might he be suspected since he knew where she lived? Was he insinuating another suspect into the investigation by virtue of the story? Was he creating a narrative that suggests Mary brought her killer into the square herself, rather than someone went in to her room while she had passed out from drinking and singing?

The times given by witnesses cannot be validated by any single timepiece in the city, but the rationale for those particular times may be far more relevant. I cite Louis Diemshitz's assertion he arrived "precisely" at 1 as another case worth looking closer at. Particularly when there are several witnesses who stated they saw him in the passage as much as 15 minutes earlier than that. What was the reason for his absolute time of 1am? Was that for the benefit of the investigation, or to give himself an alibi?

[Michael W Richards]

I think some valuable reminders have been addressed in this thread. Some witnesses, (not the Police ..people actually charged with keeping their beat times recorded based on station house timepieces), made some very specific timing claims about when they saw what they claimed to have seen, or how long it took them to get from A to B. Any witness who insists that he was correct in his timing, with the obvious unknown variations in virtually every timepiece in London at the time, would seem to me to be attempting to establish their value in the investigation, or their innocence with respect to the crime. For the victims who were "witnessed" within 5-10 minutes of their murder, this becomes a case of sorting out why the witnesses give the time they gave, perhaps more relevant than the actual time itself in some cases.

[Doctored Whatsit]

Hi Dr. Whatsit,

Just replying to bump this thread back up as it relates to the time aspects discussed in the Long vs Cadosch thread starting around here.

Anyway, your suggestion that the police would be aware of such things is, I think, demonstrated by Baxter's summing up as well (ok, he's the coroner, but part of the legal process etc) where he says "...There is some conflict in the evidence about the time at which the deceased was despatched. It is not unusual to find inaccuracy in such details, but this variation is not very great or very important. ..."



- Jeff

I agree. Coroners must have come across time discrepancies regularly, and seem to have accepted them as inevitable. We should do so too, I think!

[JeffHamm]

Thanks George and Jeff, you have more than confirmed my recollections! The police at the time clearly understood these variations in time readings, which is why they accepted minor differences in witness evidence. Some of us refuse to recognise this, unfortunately.

Hi Dr. Whatsit,

Just replying to bump this thread back up as it relates to the time aspects discussed in the Long vs Cadosch thread starting around here.

Anyway, your suggestion that the police would be aware of such things is, I think, demonstrated by Baxter's summing up as well (ok, he's the coroner, but part of the legal process etc) where he says "...There is some conflict in the evidence about the time at which the deceased was despatched. It is not unusual to find inaccuracy in such details, but this variation is not very great or very important. ..."



- Jeff

[Doctored Whatsit]

Thanks again Jeff. I believe I read once that some people thought that the stations with the correct time, were the ones causing the problems! People missed a train, and blamed the railway clock and not the local clocks.

[Doctored Whatsit]

Thanks dusty. I believe that I read somewhere that the railways used GMT, and so did police stations, I think. Elsewhere it was "pot-luck".

[JeffHamm]

Railways started introducing synchronised in the 1840's for trains and stations. Railway workers were required to own an approved pocket watch with a prerequisite number of jewels in it to ensure accuracy. Outside the railways for the general public it was pretty much a free for all until the 1900's. I have some good articles on Victorian time keeping, but I can't find them at the moment.

Yes, the railways started synchronising times, but there was a period where the town in which the railway was would still keep "local time", so the train station and the town would be out of sync, causing all sorts of confusion for a rather long time. This lasted for years in some places, and there was a lot of resistance to setting a standard time setting across the UK. This was one of the interesting areas covered in the article I read a while back. It's a rather interesting, if eclectic, area of history.

- Jeff

[drstrange169]

Railways started introducing synchronised in the 1840's for trains and stations. Railway workers were required to own an approved pocket watch with a prerequisite number of jewels in it to ensure accuracy. Outside the railways for the general public it was pretty much a free for all until the 1900's. I have some good articles on Victorian time keeping, but I can't find them at the moment.

[Doctored Whatsit]

Thanks George and Jeff, you have more than confirmed my recollections! The police at the time clearly understood these variations in time readings, which is why they accepted minor differences in witness evidence. Some of us refuse to recognise this, unfortunately.

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

A few months ago I found an article on clocks and times during the Victorian era. At the time I was hoping to find some information about how far out two different clocks generally were (ideally, of course, would be detailed information about how probable a clock would be out by 5 minutes, 10, 15, etc, but even an average would have been great). Sadly, they didn't have what I was looking for, but it was informative all the same.

Apparently, in the early 1900s, I forget the exact year, but there was a flurry of letters to the papers by people insisting something be done to deal with just how unreliable the clocks were and that the city really had to do something to standardize their settings. The closest I came to what I was looking for implied that basically the range appeared to span about 15 minutes, meaning, once the noon chimes started, you would expect to hear them for the next 15 minutes! That seems a bit unlikely given it would mean that at the end of the noon chimes, a series of quarter past would then start, and chimes would therefor be constantly going off all the time somewhere! Perhaps the majority of clocks just struck the hour, and only a few would sound the others.

Regardless of just how accurate that 15 minute span claim was/is, it still remains that even in the 1900's (pre-WWI), the variation between clocks was large enough that people noticed, and by this time, wanted it dealt to. It would hardly have been any better in 1888.

So, as a rule of thumb, I tend to figure if we're dealing with two stated times, both of which we know were read from a clock, if they fall within 10 minutes of each other (so a "true time +- 5 minutes"), then we shouldn't claim that is evidence there's something "wrong, and clearly one is a lie", rather, that's the sort of differences we should expect to find even if both people are being truthful - they read their clocks and stated the time their clock said, the problem is, the two clocks being referred to are not reading the same script.

- Jeff

[GBinOz]

Hi Whatsit,

I found this article by Chris McKay to be informative.

'The issue is I believe of how accurate was time measured in London in the 1880s.
I think it depends who you were.
If you were well off you had a good pocket watch, the clocks in your house were wound weekly by a local clockmaker, who one would hope had a reasonable standard of time. Any decent clockmaker would have a shop regulator, a clock that told time accurately; let us say it might vary by 10 seconds a
week at the most.
Then there is the problem of how the regulator was set. A sundial was one possibility, a good large sundial could tell the time to a minute, but the user needs to be aware of the equation of time; that difference between solar time and mean time. The striking of Big Ben is accurate to a
second... you have to allow for the speed of sound so a map was published for London showing the delay. Even so, you are talking about 10 seconds at the most, and if you know where you are, then you can compensate. London then
was not so built up, so I think the clock could be heard over a larger range
A new St Paul's Cathedral clock was installed in 1892, the previous clock was by Bradley and was set by a sundial, it could be probably read to within 20 seconds.
Several balls were erected in London from 1852 onwards, these were released by telegraphed time.
Time signals could be telegraphed to those who paid for them. The British Horological Institute (BHI) installed a telegraph instrument in 1862, and this was used to correct a regulator. Members could then come with an accurate watch to 'get the time'.
Ruth Belville took a pocket chronometer round Clerkenwell, I think here customers were mainly chronometer makers. Pretty crazy since they could get the time by telegraph if they paid, or from the BHI in Northampton Square.
So perhaps the 'Gentleman' in the street in London would know the time by his watch to within half a minute. This being derived from a clock at home and that being set by his clockwinder.
Taking the traders, they would have watches, but probably no clockwinder to regulate their house clocks. So they are down to using Big Ben, St Paul's, the time ball for accurate time and the local church clock otherwise.
The working class generally did not have watches, though they possibly had cheap clocks that were being imported from America. Watches could be had from America and Switzerland for a tenth of the price of an English watch.
You will have heard probably of the dollar watch. Their watches and clocks would have been set by the nearest public clock. I remember an old man telling me that during WW1 when he was a lad, his mother asked him to run down to the church and get the time. So we have an accuracy of several
minutes.
This is somewhat confused by the local church clock. Certainly in village we know that early in the 19th century variations from village to village were of the order of plus and minus 20 minutes or even more.
I am not familiar with church clocks in Whitechapel, but their clock setting was often at the whim of the clock winder. Perhaps plus or minus 10 minutes could be expected, or even more.
So, if the working man's watch or clock was within 10 minutes of true time, I would think that good for the 1880s.

You need to understand why time was needed. First to regulate a local community. The absolute standard did not really matter, that all met together at the appointed time was sufficient. In larger communities the railway was the one that called the shots, the train left at Railway (Greenwich) time and it was tough if you missed it due to your poor clock or
watch. Factories were another corporate gathering place. Again, their standard was absolute to them, so provided all were through the gate by the set time on their clock, then all was OK. The fact that it was fast or slow of GMT was irrelevant. Churches publicised their services by bells, so
the exact time of starting was not too important.

Overall I think that if you found a clock in the East End that was telling time to within 10 mins of GMT you were doing well.

Regards, Chris McKay

The last sentence is interesting for times in 1888. If one witness clock source was ten minutes fast and another's ten minutes slow, you can still be "doing well" with a discrepancy of twenty minutes. Throw in estimating after the actual clock sighting and that we have only contradictory press reports, even from inquests, for the time statements and.....well, you know the rest.

Cheers, George

[Doctored Whatsit]

I don’t think that there’s any evidence that Lechmere or Paul had a clock at home my dear Whatsit. I’m not saying that they couldn’t have had them but I don’t think that we can assume it.

Agreed, it is only probable, but I think, my dear Sholmes, that we may accept that they provided their times, or estimates of the time, by the nearest street clock to their homes if we so wish. It doesn't really matter, because the point was that everyone was using a different time source, and they were never going to all be synchronized.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don’t think that there’s any evidence that Lechmere or Paul had a clock at home my dear Whatsit. I’m not saying that they couldn’t have had them but I don’t think that we can assume it.