Where does Joseph Fleming fit into the equation?

[Wickerman]

Im not sure if your taking my suggestion seriously or not Jon,....

Funny you should say that Michael, I wasn't sure if you were serious when you suggested it - Isaacs, Kelly's Sugar-daddy?

He was also a cigar maker....curiously, just like some of the folks in the cottages at 40 Berner.

Ahh, ok.

It would seem that at least on the surface, he ticks some qualifier boxes.

I have a quote for you which expands upon his character, he was arrested at Dover for impersonating a Detective - Gold watch chain to boot!

An amusing case was heard at the Dover police-court on Tuesday, a man named Joseph Isaacs, who gave false addresses, being charged with attempting to obtain admission to the Admiralty Pier by falsely representing himself to be a detective from Scotland Yard.
The Prisoner presented himself at the entrance to the Pier, and said he was going by the boat. He was refused admission, and he then stated that he was a detective from Scotland Yard, and was sent down to follow a young man who was wanted in connection with the Meux jewel robbery case.
Curiously enough, while the Prisoner was telling his story, a Scotland Yard detective, named Foy, who is one of the detectives engaged in watching the Continental boats, walked up, and, having heard the man's story, made himself known to him, and demanded his warrant card. This he was unable to produce, and he was then taken into custody.
When searched, the Prisoner was found to be wearing a sham medal on his breast and an imitation gold chain, but no watch.
It is supposed that he belongs to the light-fingered fraternity, a number of whom have been infesting the Continental traffic from Dover and Folkstone for some time past, and have given the officials a great deal of trouble.
Whitstable Times and Herne Bay Herald, 30 July, 1887.

[Note: those "false addresses" he gave were in Spitalfields and Commercial Rd]

I guess he never did manage to steal a watch for that gold watch chain seen by Hutchinson, - a poser, through and through.

[Ben]

Hi Lynn,

Thanks for your post, with which I agree entirely.

A storm in a teacup indeed.

Fisherman,

Will you please show some consideration towards other posters and stop using that bold type-face all the time.

No, I really donīt think so.

So you don't want to show any consideration at all towards other posters, and are determined to persist in writing your posts in bold? Okay, if you want your posts to be ignored or skimmed through or generally considered gauche and impolite...

(Sigh)...you try to help a bloke...

No - that is untrue -not to call it something else.

Time for you to conduct a little more research then, for enlightenment and all that. The BBC health website cautions, at the very least:

If your BMI is under 18.5 you should discuss it with your doctor.

I was observing simply that such a low weight would invite the possibility that s/he has become underweight as a result of malnutrition. There are obvious health concerns associated with being underweight, and it naturally follows than anything appreciably below a BMI of 18.5 is a more significant concern, especially if they have other lifestyle issues which would inevitably affect their health, such as not being a footballer or Hollywood film star, but instead being a wandering lunatic pauper in the slums of the East End. I'm not suggesting that all people with an extremely low BMI must all be anorexics, but a great deal of them are, and it is still an extremely unhealthy weight commonly associated with sufferers of anorexia. You are not in "good" bodily health if you have a BMI of 17.3, and have no positive redeeming aspects of your lifestyle to counter that, as Fleming didn't.

Once again, your celebrity comparisons are utterly worthless because a) they don't represent people with lifestyles remotely comparable to that of Fleming (which, as any competent doctor will tell you, is an extremely important consideration), and b) they have considerably higher BMI's than that proposed of Fleming.

The terms mildly thin and moderately thin are not my inventions. Nor is the term severely thin. They are the instruments the WHO use.

I realise that, and I don't quibble with them. What I quibble with is your woeful, woeful misinterpretation of them. Just because words like "mild" and "moderate" might sound a bit warm and fuzzy to you, you've made the easily avoidably mistake of concluding that such extremely low BMIs as 17 and 16 are being depicted by the "WHO" as perfectly normal and barely noteworthy. But this is irriterande nonsens. Motbjudande nonsens, actually.

They use simple, convenient adjectives to convey the various extents of thinness, but that doesn't mean they truly believe there is anything remotely "moderate" in the thinness of a person with a shockingly low BMI such as 16.

You somehow seem to think they should be "incredibly dangerously thin", "excruciatingly, incredibly thin" and "lethally thin". What utter, utter rubbish. Tosh!

Read my posts more carefully or don't bother responding in future. I made it quite clear that it was precisely because they couldn't resort to hyperbole in describing the more extreme levels of thinness - at least not without appearing unprofessional - that they chose the adjectives they did.

Why would there not be a category between the dangerously thin and the normal people? Hmmm?

Don't you "Hmmm?" me.

There IS a category between "normal" and dangerously thin. It is called underweight, and is still a potential health concern. A BMI of 16 IS dangerously thin, which is why dismissing it as moderate - in the sense that people would normally use the word - is such a fatal mistake.

James Stewart was exactly a "shocking" 17.3.

I call your bluff.

Where's the evidence that James Stewart had a 17.3 BMI and was considered healthy at the time?

You quote someone from the internet as follows:

"i am recovering from anorexia. my bmi was 18.5 at its lowest"

I see. Interesting. So when this anorexia sufferer was at their lowest recorded BMI at 18.5, it was still considerably higher than the 17.3 recorded of Joseph Fleming. I think the point may be sinking in, gradually. We can but hope.

Incidentally, have you guys heard who was voted the most beautiful woman in the world by Peopleīs magazine recently? Yep - Gwyneth Paltrow! Gorgeous looking woman!!

... and with a 17.3 BMI, apparently

Errmm...

Apparently not.

http://healthyceleb.com/gwyneth-paltrow-height-weight-body-statistics/7556/

Height 5'9"

Weight 60 Kg

Giving her a BMI of 19.5

Which is perfectly healthy, perfectly normal, and certainly not 17.3.

Unlucky.

But keep dancing with me on this subject. It's great fun. And I'm up for a real entrenched marathon posting session for the next few months or so.

[Wickerman]

... and he played for Tottenham Hotspur, so heīs a great guy in more than one sense.

The best,
Fisherman

Ah,...my wife's team!
I'm ashamed to say, the only thing I remember about Spurs is, Jimmy Greaves.

[Wickerman]

Indeed fisherman - a salient fact - in suspect based "ripperology' I like to deal in facts and avoid at all costs rubbing out inconvenient bits and pieces. I would deal ashamed to do so.

Alas, some have no shame.

[lynn cates]

tea time

Hello Christer. Thanks.

"THAT is how to put things, Lynn - you donīt posit that it is more probable that he was 5 ft 7, you simply say that YOU think it more likely, you stay away from the "infinitely more likely's" and all the Bagdad Bob vocabulary and you acknowledge that he may well have been 6 ft 7. Totally neat."

Ah! A compliment. OK, I'll take it.

"Now, you are a teacher, right ...?"

Mmm, more of a glorified baby-sitter. (heh-heh)

"Much as you think it a tempest in a teapot, I'm kind of particular with my tea, see ..."

Same here. I'll take a pure Darjeeling and steeped until it draws properly upon the tongue--as my mum would say.

Cheers.
LC

[lynn cates]

two in a row

Hello Ben. Thanks.

"Thanks for your post, with which I agree entirely."

Wow, two in a row?

Cheers.
LC

[DVV]

Indeed fisherman - a salient fact - in suspect based "ripperology' I like to deal in facts and avoid at all costs rubbing out inconvenient bits and pieces. I would deal ashamed to do so.

Funny.
From somebody who denies Fleming was MJK ex-boyfriend against all evidence, and without any better cadidate to introduce.

[richardnunweek]

Hi,
Although I am reluctant to dismiss the height as 6'7'', it appears only plausible if the correct height was 67''.
Plausible in the sense of the inmate Evans being the ex of MJK, and plausible that his stature would enhance him being the murderer known as Jack the Ripper, or a copycat.
It is entirely possible that Fleming killed Kelly, and because he considered he may have been traced hid his tracks by a JTR blitz , I do not endorse that scenario , but its possible, especially as he might have imagined, that after abusing Kelly, she may have informed a associate,and that might have been relayed to the police.
I have to say that any known person that was involved intimately with a victim, that is known to have been detained under the mental health act, has to be a suspect, and a good one to boot.
I have never believed that Mary Kelly was so irresponsible for her safety, that she would venture out in that area alone, in the small hours of the morning, and allow herself to be accosted by a man straight out of the ''Penny dreadful'', and within seconds allow him to accompany her back to her room, without knowing who he was....
That is unrealistic, especially as only the previous day had informed Mrs McCarthy''He is a concern , and I hear he is ripe in the this area''
Regards Richard.

[Fisherman]

Ben!

This may come as a total surprise to you, but people weigh one thing one day and another thing the next. So hereīs the source I was using:

Miley Cyrus: 1m65, 50kg | Gwyneth Paltrow: 1m75, 53.2kg | Kim Kardashian: 1m57, 53.2 kg | Jennifer Lopez: 1m67, 60kg

(http://www.fitnesstreats.com/2013/01...es-weight-bmi/)

Iīm sure other sources will have other measures, taken on other days. The thing is, Paltrow IS a woman that corresponds with the 17.3 BMI. She IS a mildly thin woman.

The BBC health website cautions, at the very least:

If your BMI is under 18.5 you should discuss it with your doctor.

... who may tell you that your just fine or that you need to put on a bit more, depending on what type of person you are. And remember that the BBC are not exactly superior to the WHO in errands like these. Nobody is, in fact. And the WHO says that it is not until you get near the 15.0 mark that you must see a doctor. If - that is - you have been feeling fine up til then. If you have a metabolism and body that will not allow you to sink below 18.5 before feeling sick, then THAT is when you should consult the doctor. It is all individual, see. If you feel fine, eat regularly and take your exercise at 17.3, you may be the healthiest person on Moder Earth.

I was observing simply that such a low weight would invite the possibility that s/he has become underweight as a result of malnutrition.

No. You were not "simply" doing that. You were raving on about how he cannot possibly have been healthy and making comparisons with Belsen victims.

If you HAD simply been saying that he could have been malnutritioned, I would have said yes, thatīs quite possible. And then I would have added that we cannot possibly KNOW that this was so, since many people ARE slim by way of nature. And I would have finished off by adding that the asylum remarks about good bodily health would not be another way of writing that he looked like Primo Carnera, but instead that the man was not sick, quite simply. Nothing else than that.

"Just because words like "mild" and "moderate" might sound a bit warm and fuzzy to you, you've made the easily avoidably mistake of concluding that such extremely low BMIs as 17 and 16 are being depicted by the "WHO" as perfectly normal and barely noteworthy."

The WHO actually tells us what IS perfectly normal. Normal ranges from 18.5 to 25. So 17.3 does not belong to the normal area. It belongs to the mildly thin area, closing in on the moderately thin area. And as I have told you a thousand times by now, some people really should not be at 17.3 in BMI, because it is not healthy for them. I posted a snippet from an anorectic that never went below 18.5, and that should tell us something.
However, other people are at home weightwise at 17.3 - like James Stewart, for example, who was perfectly healthy, who lived to be 89 and who died of lung disease. He was decorated many times in the war and he was a movie action hero. And he was thin. He could probably have dropped way below 17.3 without falling down dead, even.

You seem to believe that the 18.5 borderline is some sort of general line below which nobody can drop without subjecting themselves to serious danger. But this is not so. James Stewart would never have gotten OVER that border, and he lived a perfectly healthy life.
How is that even possible? Iīll tell you why - because that was how he was shaped; he was predestined to be a thin man. His metabolism was such as to shape him into a thin man. Thatīs how it was possible for James Stewart to be 17.3 and perfectly healthy, just as it is possible for millions of people on this planet to answer to the same description.
Now, before you fly into a rage about that, I may just as well tell you that this to some extent owes to other people, like asians, having lower general BMI values than we have. They are genetically predisposed to be thinner than we are. You see, thatīs the whole snag here - some people are genetically fit to have a lower than normal BMI. For some reason (guess which ...!), it is of vital importance to you that Fleming/Evans did not belong to this huge group of people, but in spite of this it applies that he may well have.

At the end of the day, my own best guess is that the Stone asylum man was a man with a genetic predisposition to be thin. Maybe he would ideally have weighed 73, 74 kilograms if he had been fed well, representing a BMI of 18.1-18.3, which is quite close to the "normal" range. Instead, he was living in a meagre society that produced meagre people, and so he ended up at 70 kilograms flat, representing a BMI of - thatīs it, Ben - 17.3.
This is the whole story. It is no more dramatic than that. Sparse feeding on an asylum diet could have detracted three or four kilograms from his weight. And that could have led, perhaps, to him having less energy resources when doing hard labour, I donīt know - but it most certainly would not be the equivalent of being on the treshold of death, generally speaking.

Read my posts more carefully or don't bother responding in future. I made it quite clear that it was precisely because they couldn't resort to hyperbole in describing the more extreme levels of thinness - at least not without appearing unprofessional - that they chose the adjectives they did.

So you mean that if had not been for ethical considerations, the WHO would prefer these phrases? They would be better suited than mildly thin, moderately thin and severly thin? Huh?
Tell me, why would the WHO, dealing with disastrous epidemics, death, malnutrition, plague and famin on a daily basis refrain from telling the truth? Sheer nonsense, Ben! You need to accept that what follows on normal weight cannot be anything but mild thinness. You drop weight enough to be excluded from the normal range, but only just - what do we get? A skeleton? Or a mildly thin person?
And you say that I misrepresent what the WHO says? You even place quotation marks around "WHO"! Why? Do you want to call them into question? Is that it? Do they need a good spanking for speaking about mildly thin people as mildly thin people?

"Where's the evidence that James Stewart had a 17.3 BMI and was considered healthy at the time?"

It was the BMI he had when he was accepted as a pilot for the US Airforces in World War II. He was considered thin, but was accepted anyway.
Presumably, the US Airforce were looking for sickly, unhealthy anorectics to fly their planes.
Anyway, thatīs where the information comes from, Ben.

Now that youīve "called my bluff", how do you feel about the outcome? If it was me, I would feel kind of asinine, but you may of course see things differently. You normally do.

I see. Interesting. So when this anorexia sufferer was at their lowest recorded BMI at 18.5, it was still considerably higher than the 17.3 recorded of Joseph Fleming. I think the point may be sinking in, gradually.

I rather think it went over your head totally. But each to his own.

All the best,
Fisherman

[DVV]

There is one point on which Ed Lechmere is a bit more clever than his accomplices : undoubtedly, if Fleming looked like Peter Crouch, it would have leaked out.

Unfortunately, he doesn't realise (or doesn't want to) that such an uncommon height and thinness would have also prompted some comments on behalf of the medical staff - especially since Fleming was said to be "very abusive on little provocation", and since such a freakish appearance would certainly have affected, one way or another, his mental health.

[Lechmere]

DVV
I don't have to produce better candidate for Kelly's ex.
You are basing your entire theory on what Barnett says Kelly told him.
(Actually you are also basing your entire theory on the height being wrong - but let's leave that to one side for a moment).
The details of what Barnett recounted regarding what Kelly told him about herself nebulous to say the least. It would be exceptional if the Fleming story was the only verifiable one. She could easily have made the name up. She could have told the name of someone else she vaguely knew. There are endless possibilities.
it is not a 'fact' that the asylum Fleming was Kelly's ex. It is a theory that has certain things against it - that I have detailed in this thread.

As I pointed out somewhere above, there is no reason for Fleming's height to be commented upon later in his records. But there would have been every reason for the error - if it was an error - to have been spotted and corrected later.

[DVV]

I don't have to produce better candidate for Kelly's ex.

Icing on the cake.
Let me rephrase this for you :
"I can't produce better candidate for Kelly's ex, because there is none, and JF son of Richard and Henrietta was indeed Kelly's ex."

You are basing your entire theory on what Barnett says Kelly told him.

Not at all. We have Barnett, Venturney and Mrs Carthy.
I interpret evidence as everybody should.
As did Chris Scott.
And Fisherman.
And Debs.
And Corey.
And anybody else except you, at last.

As I pointed out somewhere above, there is no reason for Fleming's height to be commented upon later in his records.

That's wrong, false, unthinkable.
A freakish appearance IS important when somebody is mentally ill.
If he had been a dwarf, do you seriously think it wouldn't have been alluded to in the records ?
They would have written "4ft2" on his admission and never made any further comments ?

[The Good Michael]

I hope this is my last post on the topic of height for a while. Many moons ago, Debs posited the idea that the 6' 7" was a clerical error. She never said she thought that was the case. She only gave it as a possibility. (please correct me Debs if I'm paraphrasing incorrectly) When I look at the record, it is clearly NOT 67 inches, so that would make it an error of not a simple pen stroke, but of gross negligence. That of course is possible, but less likely than a pen stroke error. What I would like to see is a list of other such size errors where feet and inches are recorded, but only inches were meant. I would like to see these instances from any British hospital in the period of say 1888 - 1896. If anyone can produce a list from this time period, it would shore up the "error" idea a bit and I'd be inclined to waffle on the issue. This being said, I absolutely see no reason to assume a tall man's height would be mentioned in the records surrounding Kelly as no one but Kelly knew the man. He could have been tall or short and as no one but Kelly saw him from the people we know involved in the case, we can't know that.

Mike

[DVV]

As everybody knows, girls never talk of the physical appearance of their boyfriends.

[Fisherman]

There is one point on which Ed Lechmere is a bit more clever than his accomplices : undoubtedly, if Fleming looked like Peter Crouch, it would have leaked out.

Unfortunately, he doesn't realise (or doesn't want to) that such an uncommon height and thinness would have also prompted some comments on behalf of the medical staff - especially since Fleming was said to be "very abusive on little provocation", and since such a freakish appearance would certainly have affected, one way or another, his mental health.

Accomplice? Would that be me? If so, you may observe that I said in an earlier post that a 6 ft 7 man would be noticed everywhere back then. That stands to reason - he deviated much, and people who deviate much are people you notice.
It is however rather obvious that neither Barnett nor Venturney ever SAW the man in question. And if you donīt see somebody, itīs hard to guess their height.

Well, some of us find it hard, at least. Others can decide both weight and height without any evidence at all. Remarkable feat, that!

The best,
Fisherman