Suspect Witnesses?

[NotBlamedForNothing]

Well, that is at least how I read it and the "This is what I now believe... The young woman who spoke to Fanny was Spooner's lady friend" played an important part in it.

Now reading the link in your link, I understand that you think the couple seen by Mortimer/the couple that stood in a bisecting thoroughfare for about 20 minutes before the alarm was given, was actually standing on the corner of the Nelson Pub and not on the corner of the board school. While that could explain why Brown wouldn't have noticed them, it still doesn't explain why Spooner explicitly stated they had been standing by the Beehive in Christian Street.

If I still haven't read it the way you meant it, then just say how you did mean it, instead of - rather arrogantly - asking "Is that what 164 says?" There really is no need for that, plus it would be much more helpful & efficient.

In regard to the identity couple on the corner, #164 says:

The couple seen by Brown was Stride and Overcoat Man.

In regard to who Fanny spoke to, the same post says:

The young woman who spoke to Fanny was Spooner's lady friend.

Regarding Fanny's understanding of the young couple's (i.e. Spooner and lady friend's) location, the linked post says:

The 20 yards is Fanny's mistake - the pub around the corner the young woman referred to, was the Beehive, not the Nelson. The about 20 minutes is Spooner's about 25. The woman is the subject of the report because she spoke to Mortimer while Edward was attending to matters in the yard. The woman is neither named nor quoted because she did not speak to the press - only to Fanny, who gave her story to the press, second-hand. Mortimer's couple was Spooner and his girlfriend. The board school couple was Stride and Overcoat Man - as Brown supposed. There was no other couple, other than the couple who said their goodnights at 12:30, at the top of Berner St. Had the board school couple been yet another pair, they would have become crucial to the police investigation, but the police make no reference to them as separate identities, nor were they called to the inquest. They didn't exist.

I don't assume anything other than that it seems the police didn't speak to the couple. And it doesn't seem particularly improbable to me for any couple to have made a stroll further away from where they lived. Isn't that what Stride did on the night of her murder?

We know there was a door-to-door search, so, by supposing the police did not speak to the couple, not assuming anything is not an option. Either one or both were inside the search zone, in which case there is a near 100% chance that the police would have discovered there whereabouts on the night, or both lived outside the zone, in which case the police would only have identified them if one or both had gone to the police voluntarily.

Stride didn't stroll to from Flower and Dean St to Berner St, on a whim - she was there for a reason, albeit an unknow one.

The bottom line is that supposing the couple at the board school corner was not who Brown thought they were, involves a double risk. One, that Brown was wrong even though he was almost sure he was right, and two, that the young couple substituted for Stride and Overcoat Man were never identified by the police, owing to both living outside the search zone and neither bothering to volunteer information to the police.

[NotBlamedForNothing]

The reason I proposed was he objected to what he assumed was a woman soliciting, maybe he heard a partial exchange between her the the man in the shadows - which caused him to react.

Why couldn't she and man in shadows avoid the man's wrath by showing him the bag of grapes they were eating from?

Not in this case, she was talking to someone else.

I read the police report as indicating that the man stopped and talked to the woman at the gates, then started ill-using her. Are you saying that my interpretation is wrong, or that the error lies in the report?

You're assuming BS-man was not a club member?
We don't know that.

To be fair, I assume we only have one side of the story, and that reality was quite different.

We are looking for a reason for this man assaulting Stride that night - perhaps that was the reason, he thought she was a prostitute soliciting in the yard of his club.
He doesn't have to be entering or leaving the club to be a club member.
There may have been scores of men living in the area who were club members that were not in the club that night.

BS-man may have been a club member, but had other commitments that night, he walked home passed his club, it was closed except for a few hanger's-on singing upstairs, he had no intention of entering his club, besides he was pretty well intoxicated, but he saw what he thought was a prostitute engaged with a client on club property, he became irate at the thought . . .
We tend to treat BS-man as a stranger, perhaps that is our mistake, maybe he wasn't.

I agree we should look for a reason for this occurring. Had the man been a club member who was not Eagle and did not attend the meeting, I cannot see him getting so irate that Stride ends up on the ground, but then he just leaves her there and walks off. Why is he not persistent? If she stubbornly refuses to go, why does he not raise his voice to a point loud enough to alert others? Why not knock on the front door and alert others himself, if he is so bothered by her presence?