Pc Long and the piece of rag.

[Fisherman]

Long was confronted by a black rectangle?

You canīt prove it didnīt happen, can you?

[Abby Normal]

Interesting....do you know whether his demotion occurred before or after his being drafted into Whitechapel?

he wasn't demoted-monty just said he was retarded and probably not drunk all the time.

poor Long just cant win can he? LOL!

But I guess that's what you get for finding the only clue and real evidence in the whole dam case

[PaulB]

Long was confronted by a black rectangle?

It was enough to drive anyone to drink.

[Abby Normal]

It was enough to drive anyone to drink.

LOL. now that's funny

[Fisherman]

LOL. now that's funny

Couldīve been Johnny Walkerīs Black Label, that rectangle...

[Monty]

Apologies.

Long was suspended, not retarded. He was reinstated on 14th December 1888. As a rule, suspensions last a month, so going in that, he would have been suspended from 14th November 1888.

Monty
🙂

[David Orsam]

Am I aware of the reflective properties of light? Sure I am.
Do I know How a lamp enables people to see objects in the dark? Sure I do.

Right, good, so if that's the case, bearing in mind that PC Long used his lamp to see the piece of white apron, why have you presented us with a black rectangle, with the comment "Heres what Long would have been confronted with"?

[David Orsam]

Apologies.

Long was suspended, not retarded. He was reinstated on 14th December 1888. As a rule, suspensions last a month, so going in that, he would have been suspended from 14th November 1888.

According to Police Orders of 14th December 1888, PC 254A Long was suspended from 13th December 1888 and reinstated on the following day, "with loss of pay during suspension".

[Wickerman]

Long was confronted by a black rectangle?

It's true, it's been around a long time...


2001 A Space Odyssey.

[Abby Normal]

It's true, it's been around a long time...


2001 A Space Odyssey.

Hahahahahaha!!! Nice one wick.

And noticing the crouching apeman, now I know why his name is Harry.

[harry]

It isn''t a black rectangle that I posted.It is a photo of the Wentworth Dwelling'.That can be seen if you follow what I wrote.The illustration was to show how the eyes can be deceived.Some posters were deceived it appears.
Those w ho only saw a black rectangle.But then,are they telling the truth?
The conditons of darkness is well recorded in the evidence of witnesses of the Stride killing.Diemschutz,Morris Eagle,and a doctor who attended in Mitre Square.

Morris Eagle states,'Going through the passage at the gateway from Berner street into Dutfields Yard he saw nothing unusual,but given the total darkness,could not swear the body was not there'.But then again,I suppose Goulston street w as in another land,and an apron piece more easily seen than a body.A whole body,in a yard open to the sky,and total darkness.

We know from hundreds of books and reports of that era,how,despite the gas lighting,the streets were devoid of good lighting.So apparently,no moonlight,no starlight,bad lighting,yet Long would have seen a dark cloth,on a dark floor,in a dark passage,in about the couple of seconds it took to pass a doorway..
Had it been there.And before anyone says he w ould have seen with his lantern,they have to show the lantern was on.Tell it to the marines.

Yes Long might have been stood on the other side of the street,eating w hatever.No one today knows where he was or what he was doing,except the pc he signalled,and he could only attest to something that happened outside the dwelling.
The inquest report I cite can be found on this site.Go to victims,Eddowes,inq uest,for Long's testimony,The A to z for Eagles description.Photoshop for colour theory.The library for Victorian lighting.If that's not enough,I suggest the problems with you.

Keep up the ridicule.It's all youu have.That and a bolt hole in never never land.

[Fisherman]

Keep up the ridicule.It's all you have. That and a bolt hole in never never land.

You are far too generous, Harry; we donīt have a bolthole. That is nothing but a suggestion that may - or may not - explain why the rag was not in Goulston Street at 2.20.

Nobody is saying that the bolthole is in any way an established fact, so we cannot possibly "have it" as such.

What we DO have, however - and you missed that - is evidence that the rag was absent from Goulston Street at 2.20.

You see, that is how this kind of work is done. If there is evidence, then we must weigh that in. Any suggestions that are in conflict with the evidence must be substantiated by OTHER evidence, before it can be given equal weight. If no such evidence is at hand, then such suggestions can never reach beyond mere guesswork, and are worthless as such from a factual point of view. They may form ground for a discussion and are not necessarily uninteresting per se, but that is all there is to it.

You have made numerous such suggestions by now: Maybe it was pitch dark, maybe Long never lit his lamp, maybe he was sitting on the stairs, maybe he was so affected by his desire for alcohol that he did a less than good job, maybe he lied about having surveyed the area where the rag was found at 2.55, maybe this and maybe that.

If you use the suggestions to instigate a discussion, then that is fine. If you try to use them as a counterweight to the evidence Long offered, it will never work in a million years. To that end, such suggestions are useless, and it is an exercise in futility to try and nullify the evidence using them.

Take the dreaded black rectangle as an example. The way most of us out here would regard the suggestion (and I know that it is not your suggestion, but one made in jest by some posters here, me included) that a black rectangle confronted Alfred Long in Goulston Street, would call upon us to look at the factual world, where being confronted with such a black rectangle is more or less an impossibility.
But if we were to look at it the way you look on such matters, we would reason "the rectangle was either there or it was not, so itīs fifty/fifty chance, and therefore both suggestions are equally likely to be true".

You are doing the exact same: You are reasoning that the rag was either there or it was not, and therefore both suggestions carry equal amounts of weight.
But this is not so. That would only apply if there was no evidence in either direction, or if there were equal amounts of evidence in both directions. As it stands, the evidence there is points in one direction only, and therefore that direction takes precedence.
As has been stated a billion times, it does not mean that the evidence must be correct on this point, but until evidence to the contrary surfaces, it is the best bet we have.

Now we can go back to your quoted sentences from above: "Keep up the ridicule. Itīs all you have. That and a bolt hole in never never land".

At the end of the day, all we actually DO have is Longs evidence, stating that the rag was not in place at 2.20.
It is not conclusive. It would be nice to have more, but with cops patrolling empty streets in the middle of the night, that is not going to happen. What they state is what we get.

On the other hand, Harry, you have absolutely nothing.

And that is what this discussion and this thread has been about from the outset. Maybe the time has come to understand that now? We have evidence, and you have nothing.

[Monty]

According to Police Orders of 14th December 1888, PC 254A Long was suspended from 13th December 1888 and reinstated on the following day, "with loss of pay during suspension".

Thanks for that David, you are quite correct.

He was also retarded for six months from March, when he was due a move up the scale.

Monty

[PaulB]

You are far too generous, Harry; we donīt have a bolthole. That is nothing but a suggestion that may - or may not - explain why the rag was not in Goulston Street at 2.20.

Nobody is saying that the bolthole is in any way an established fact, so we cannot possibly "have it" as such.

What we DO have, however - and you missed that - is evidence that the rag was absent from Goulston Street at 2.20.

You see, that is how this kind of work is done. If there is evidence, then we must weigh that in. Any suggestions that are in conflict with the evidence must be substantiated by OTHER evidence, before it can be given equal weight. If no such evidence is at hand, then such suggestions can never reach beyond mere guesswork, and are worthless as such from a factual point of view. They may form ground for a discussion and are not necessarily uninteresting per se, but that is all there is to it.

You have made numerous such suggestions by now: Maybe it was pitch dark, maybe Long never lit his lamp, maybe he was sitting on the stairs, maybe he was so affected by his desire for alcohol that he did a less than good job, maybe he lied about having surveyed the area where the rag was found at 2.55, maybe this and maybe that.

If you use the suggestions to instigate a discussion, then that is fine. If you try to use them as a counterweight to the evidence Long offered, it will never work in a million years. To that end, such suggestions are useless, and it is an exercise in futility to try and nullify the evidence using them.

Take the dreaded black rectangle as an example. The way most of us out here would regard the suggestion (and I know that it is not your suggestion, but one made in jest by some posters here, me included) that a black rectangle confronted Alfred Long in Goulston Street, would call upon us to look at the factual world, where being confronted with such a black rectangle is more or less an impossibility.
But if we were to look at it the way you look on such matters, we would reason "the rectangle was either there or it was not, so itīs fifty/fifty chance, and therefore both suggestions are equally likely to be true".

You are doing the exact same: You are reasoning that the rag was either there or it was not, and therefore both suggestions carry equal amounts of weight.
But this is not so. That would only apply if there was no evidence in either direction, or if there were equal amounts of evidence in both directions. As it stands, the evidence there is points in one direction only, and therefore that direction takes precedence.
As has been stated a billion times, it does not mean that the evidence must be correct on this point, but until evidence to the contrary surfaces, it is the best bet we have.

Now we can go back to your quoted sentences from above: "Keep up the ridicule. Itīs all you have. That and a bolt hole in never never land".

At the end of the day, all we actually DO have is Longs evidence, stating that the rag was not in place at 2.20.
It is not conclusive. It would be nice to have more, but with cops patrolling empty streets in the middle of the night, that is not going to happen. What they state is what we get.

On the other hand, Harry, you have absolutely nothing.

And that is what this discussion and this thread has been about from the outset. Maybe the time has come to understand that now? We have evidence, and you have nothing.

Harry
It is right and proper, ideed it is essential, for an investigating policeman to pinpoint the parts of a witness's statement that lacks corroboration and, where necessary, re-interview the witness. Unfortunately, P.C. Long has been dead for eighty-three years and we can't interview him. We therefore use other, well-established techniques to assess the sources as best we can by doing things such as looking at P.C. Long's overall reliability, reasons (if any) that he might have lied in this instance, and so on. That's why it is important to find out as much about P.C. Long (or whoever the source might be) as possible. But it isn't just the source we can assess, but in this case his superiors. As far as we can tell from the material available to us, everybody accepted P.C. Long's story. Nobody seems to have doubted that P.C. Long could see the apron, nobody so much as questioned it. And the police back then weren't idiots. Many of the same questions and doubts that occur to us could and almost certainly would have occurred to them, and we may safely assume that P.C. Long was closely questioned, and he seems to have satisfied his superiors.

We can also look to see if the actions of other people corroborate what P.C. Long said. In this case the only uncorroborated part of his story about finding the apron is that it was situated underneath the writing on the wall. What evidence do you have to suggest that P.C. Long lied about the location of the apron? What vested interest in the location of the apron to the writing did P.C. Long have? Is there any reason to suppose that P.C. Long did lie about the location of the apron viz a viz the writing? I can't think of anything in particular, so speculating that the apron was elsewhere seems to be going nowhere. Just a waste of time. And if the apron was located just below the writing, it was likely to have been in the entrance to the passage. Plenty of people viewed the writing and could have testified to its precise location, and not one voice suggested that it could not have been seen from the street. Nobody questioned Warren's statement that any covering could have been torn down by anybody passing by. So you have Warren's story to some extent corroborates P.C. Long's.

So, insofar as we can tell from careful reasoning, P.C. Long's story can be tested - the apron appears to have been located in the entrance to the dwellings, almost on the pavement, clearly visible to P.C. Long. If you think otherwise, it is up to you to provide the evidence. Not the sort of 'P.C. Long could have been down the road having a cup of tea' speculation, but good, solid, actual evidence.

And to very quickly remark on your comparison of the visibility between Berner Street and Goulston Street, it isn't a fair one. Elizabeth Stride's body lay in a narrow passage running between two tall buildings, it was close to a wall, and it was partially hidden by and in the shadow of a large gate. Berner Street itself a comparatively narrow. It was also largely residential. Light from the houses, including the Club itself, spilled into the street, not into the passage where the body was found. The only light spilling into the passage came from inside the kitchen and from the Arbeter Fraint printing office. what natural light from the moon spilled into the passage isn't known, but probably not much. In comparison, Goulston Street was a fairly wide thoroughfare, and Middlesex Street was even wider, and the lighting and natural light would have given sufficient illumination for P.C. Long to see where he was going and to have probably penetrated a little way into the passageway. But the apron was probably almost on the pavement, so not enveloped in total gloom as was Stride's body.

What (most of the) people here are trying to do is to establish and clarify the facts. This isn't about developing 'what if' scenarios, which is what you are doing when you ask questions like 'what if P.C. Long was sitting inside the passage on the steps?' He could have been. He could have been doing lots of things. But there's no point in seculating unless you have evidence to suggest that that's what he was doing.

Nobody is ridiculing you Harry. Not that I can see. But they do have is a lot more than ridicule on their side.

[Trevor Marriott]

Harry
It is right and proper, ideed it is essential, for an investigating policeman to pinpoint the parts of a witness's statement that lacks corroboration and, where necessary, re-interview the witness. Unfortunately, P.C. Long has been dead for eighty-three years and we can't interview him. We therefore use other, well-established techniques to assess the sources as best we can by doing things such as looking at P.C. Long's overall reliability, reasons (if any) that he might have lied in this instance, and so on. That's why it is important to find out as much about P.C. Long (or whoever the source might be) as possible. But it isn't just the source we can assess, but in this case his superiors. As far as we can tell from the material available to us, everybody accepted P.C. Long's story. Nobody seems to have doubted that P.C. Long could see the apron, nobody so much as questioned it. And the police back then weren't idiots. Many of the same questions and doubts that occur to us could and almost certainly would have occurred to them, and we may safely assume that P.C. Long was closely questioned, and he seems to have satisfied his superiors.

We can also look to see if the actions of other people corroborate what P.C. Long said. In this case the only uncorroborated part of his story about finding the apron is that it was situated underneath the writing on the wall. What evidence do you have to suggest that P.C. Long lied about the location of the apron? What vested interest in the location of the apron to the writing did P.C. Long have? Is there any reason to suppose that P.C. Long did lie about the location of the apron viz a viz the writing? I can't think of anything in particular, so speculating that the apron was elsewhere seems to be going nowhere. Just a waste of time. And if the apron was located just below the writing, it was likely to have been in the entrance to the passage. Plenty of people viewed the writing and could have testified to its precise location, and not one voice suggested that it could not have been seen from the street. Nobody questioned Warren's statement that any covering could have been torn down by anybody passing by. So you have Warren's story to some extent corroborates P.C. Long's.

So, insofar as we can tell from careful reasoning, P.C. Long's story can be tested - the apron appears to have been located in the entrance to the dwellings, almost on the pavement, clearly visible to P.C. Long. If you think otherwise, it is up to you to provide the evidence. Not the sort of 'P.C. Long could have been down the road having a cup of tea' speculation, but good, solid, actual evidence.

And to very quickly remark on your comparison of the visibility between Berner Street and Goulston Street, it isn't a fair one. Elizabeth Stride's body lay in a narrow passage running between two tall buildings, it was close to a wall, and it was partially hidden by and in the shadow of a large gate. Berner Street itself a comparatively narrow. It was also largely residential. Light from the houses, including the Club itself, spilled into the street, not into the passage where the body was found. The only light spilling into the passage came from inside the kitchen and from the Arbeter Fraint printing office. what natural light from the moon spilled into the passage isn't known, but probably not much. In comparison, Goulston Street was a fairly wide thoroughfare, and Middlesex Street was even wider, and the lighting and natural light would have given sufficient illumination for P.C. Long to see where he was going and to have probably penetrated a little way into the passageway. But the apron was probably almost on the pavement, so not enveloped in total gloom as was Stride's body.

What (most of the) people here are trying to do is to establish and clarify the facts. This isn't about developing 'what if' scenarios, which is what you are doing when you ask questions like 'what if P.C. Long was sitting inside the passage on the steps?' He could have been. He could have been doing lots of things. But there's no point in seculating unless you have evidence to suggest that that's what he was doing.

Nobody is ridiculing you Harry. Not that I can see. But they do have is a lot more than ridicule on their side.

But different people describe different locations as to where it was found, based on where the writing was. It is therefore unsafe to readily accept it was almost on the pavement and could not have been there at 2.20am otherwise he would have seen it. Other locations suggest that he could have missed it at 2.20am.

The evidential value of both the apron piece and the graffiti are negligible. The apron piece does no more than link Eddowes in some way to Goulston Street and bearing in mind she lived a stones throw away, could give rise to other plausible explanations.

The graffiti has never been linked to the murder of Eddowes or any other murder, and there is no evidence that it was ever written by the killer.

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