Joran Van der Hutchinson?

[Fisherman]

Have some faith, Mike ...! I am the pacifist around here, remember?

The best,
Fisherman

[Monty]

Fish,

Will you kindly show me where, on these boards, it was established Billycocks and Wideawakes were referred to as the same?

Many thanks

Monty

[Fisherman]

Hi Monty!

Scroll up a little bit, and you will find the post (38), written by Ben, that I refer to.

The best,
Fisherman

[Monty]

Cheers Fish,

Monty

[Fisherman]

You´re welcome, Monty!

The best,
Fisherman

[Monty]

Webster's dictionary from 1913 defines a "billycock" thusly:

A round, low-crowned felt hat; a wideawake.

Interesting albeit misleading.

A Billycock was not a soft felted hat, it was a hard felted hat. Nor did it have a wide brim, as a Wideawake. The clue is in the name.

People of the period would have known the difference. A Billycock is not a wideawake.

http://www.hatshapers.com/Hat%20Dictionary.htm

Monty

[Fleetwood Mac]

Why do you think that Hutch is surely the 'favourite suspect' of modern times concerning JtR -and the one about whom the most suspect based books have been written ?

If there was "nothing" to connect him to the murders, it makes you wonder why intelligent people would waste time on him..

Assuming this board is a representative sample of suspects and their proponents.....then I'd say Hutchinson is not 'the favourite suspect'.

You have misrepresented my post Ruby.

I said: "beyond claiming to be loitering outside of the court there is nothing to connect him to the murders". And there isn't.....you could speculate about all sorts such as anti-seminism and red neckerchiefs....but it doesn't change the fact that Hutchinson merely claimed to be loitering outside of the court.

No one ID'd him there......no one else saw the man supposedly with Mary.

I've noticed you have a habit of a stretching the evidence in an attempt to lend weight to Hutchinson......such as your comment about watching the room...when in fact he was looking up the court.....and I suppose that in of itself tells a story about just how credible Hutchinson is.

Garry listed all the points adding to a 'profile' of the killer, and demonstrated ably that Hutch matched all the points.

Which are?

[Fleetwood Mac]

'Stout' we can deduce -also with certainty- is 'muscle bound ' rather than 'fat' or even 'flabby'. You would not describe someone as being 'of military appearance' if they were fat or flabby, just for starters.

Incorrect.

Military appearance could quite easily apply to someone's demeanour.

Next he was working as a labourer, and had apparently humped barrels, and his story about walking back from Romford was accepted -so he must have looked fit and strong.

Again....this is unconvincing.

My Grandma used to walk 8 miles a day to get to school......she was a young lass.....hardly "strong".....if you watch documentaries etc you'll see tribes of Africans and Arabs wandering the plains for days on end.....but they ain't "strong" in the sense that you mean it.

So now we have a short muscular chunky young man of approx 28 or 29 (Hutch's given age somewhere).

No we don't Ruby. We have you putting a few ingredients in the pot and coming up with a recipe of sorts.

[Fisherman]

Monty writes:

"Interesting albeit misleading.
A Billycock was not a soft felted hat, it was a hard felted hat. Nor did it have a wide brim, as a Wideawake. The clue is in the name.
People of the period would have known the difference. A Billycock is not a wideawake."

I think the safer bet is that people of our time would know the difference, Monty. The dictionary together with the article Ben referred to made it clear that there was an obvious interchangeability inbetween the two types of hats around the time we are dealing with. And if both the editor of the Webster´s dictionary and the ditto of the Te Aroha got it wrong, I fail to see why this could not have been the case with Lewis too.
At any rate, since Lewis set out by not remembering anything when asked by the police, and since she seemingly did not get much of a look at the loiterer, I think it would be a very hasty conclusion to make that he could not have worn a billycock OR a wideawake - or some other type of headgear altogether ...

The best,
Fisherman

[Rubyretro]

Wanted to rephrase that: Once you choose a suspect, it becomes easy to refute anything because your mind is set. It isn't just a Hutchinson thing.
I'm talking about having a solid belief that someone is the killer.

Mike...I just one thing clear here : I am somebody who is very willing to admit
that I'm wrong,when I accept that I'm wrong, and change my mind. If you need proof of this, I was once a Toppy-ite but changed my mind when considering all the evidence that shows, on balance, that Hutch and Toppy could not be the same person. I have changed my mind on lots of other detail too, and have always said so straight up, when that is the case.

I almost only reply at length to Hutch Posts, but I read with interest all the 'New Posts' everyday, as well as lots of older Posts (as you will know if you ever click on 'Quick Links') but I have yet to read a Post on another
Suspect that has ever convinced me -but my mind is open.

If I was forced to give a second favourite Suspect, then it would be 'unknown'...yet, for me, the buck stops at the Kelly killing as it is the Crescendo -then 'nothing'. Hutchinson appears to me to be the man in the guilty spot, at the guilty time, who fits the profile for the killer...'unknown'
finally forced from the shadows..

[Monty]

Fisherman,

Im merely pointing out that the two hats are indeed different, both in construction and style.

Are you saying that people today would know the difference between a Wideawake and Billycock? I have to disagree. These hats are most certainly not prevalent in this age, whereas back in 1888 they were fairly common and recognisable.

Monty

[Fisherman]

Monty:

"Im merely pointing out that the two hats are indeed different, both in construction and style."

Indeed they are, Monty! You know that and I know that. But this knowledge of ours is dated September 10, 2010, a date where no confusion is about any longer in this issue. A century ago, however, we know that dictionaries and papers wrote about "the billycock or the wideawake" as one and the same headgear, quite obviously believing they were interchangeable.

There could be three explanations to this:

1. Our editors could have held a billyckock in one hand and a wideawake in the other, and accepted that both types of hat belonged to the same family of headgear, or ...

2. They could have held ONE of these hats in just the one hand, exclaiming that "This is a billycock, or, as it is also known, a wideawake", or ...

3. They could have foreseen that two Ripperologists would wrestle over it if given the chance, and so they provided that chance, just for jolly.

...and I´ll be damned if I can tell just how it went down. But one thing I DO know, is that one of these alternatives applied, both in the case of Webster´s and the Te Aroha. The interchangeability - that is not around today - was there!

"Are you saying that people today would know the difference between a Wideawake and Billycock? I have to disagree. These hats are most certainly not prevalent in this age, whereas back in 1888 they were fairly common and recognisable."

"People today", Monty, include both the lad skating past your bedroom window in the morning, and the elderly man who used to play piano in a jazz quartet in the 1940:s, sporting a billycock hat on his head. It´s a wide spectre. In the broad sense you would be correct - these hats are not in style today. But what I chiefly meant, was that as they went out of style, they did so as two types of hats that were told apart. Apparently that did not apply in the same degree - if in any degree at all - back in 1888.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Monty!

This is from "History of Felt hats & Straw hats - Felt dress hats", found on the web. In it, in a chapter concerning itself with American fashion, http://www.hathistory.org/dress/felt.html, it says:

"In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, top hats were required in cities and were sometimes worn by workers with their work clothes. During this period, the "wide-awake", a black felt hat with a broad stiff brim, was very popular in the western states."

Maybe this has some sort of bearing on the issue we are dealing with - here it seems that brim was made of stiff felt, and not soft ditto, they way we today perceive a wideawake. In that case, we would have a hat that would fit in between the billycock and the wideawake as we know them today.

Fashion is a strange thing.

The best,
Fisherman

[Ben]

“The F-word, Ben, applies in many a respect in this discussion, and as I said before, that owes to the fact (!) that we are dealing with a completely static phenomenon.”

That really doesn’t make any difference, Fish.

Buildings are also a “completely static phenomenon”, but if I were to state as fact that a particular building was ugly when you considered it a thing of architectural beauty, you would surely question my right to mutate what is so obviously an opinion into a fact? From my inexpert analysis of the handwriting samples, I’m of the opinion that the differences are either more plentiful or more significant than the similarities, and an expert in the field of document examination – who also examined the Maybrick diary, and whose views on that subject are accepted and endorsed by the majority – is also of that persuasion. I appreciate that you made contact with another source, but would reiterate that the nature of the material supplied to him was not acceptable for the purposes of an expert analysis – something he keen to point out, much to his credit. I say all this not to ignite another exchange of opinion, but merely to explain how I arrived at a conclusion on this issue, as opposed to recognition of an ironclad fact.

I didn’t make any “statement about Victorians writing in a very similar fashion”. I spoke of “Victorians whose penmanship was influenced by the era in which they both lived” which I thought was a reasonable observation, borne out by evidence of certain habits – the flourished capital letter of a first name or surname being an obvious example. For a quick example of how even static phenomena such as handwriting samples lend themselves to opinions rather than fact, I would dispute the suggestion that the capital H’s resemble each other very strongly since they connect to the adjoining letter u very differently, besides which the first page signature H looks bears no resemblance at all to any of Toppy’s. But that’s strictly by way of illustration, and not an invitation to embark on more repetitive scrutiny of the material!

All the best,
Ben

[Monty]

Fisherman !!

"In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, top hats were required in cities and were sometimes worn by workers with their work clothes. During this period, the "wide-awake", a black felt hat with a broad stiff brim, was very popular in the western states."

And the width of the brim??

Seems to me it was broad.

The bottom line is that the Billycock was referred to as the Billycock and the Wideawake as the Wideawake.

The two were not questioned, which is an indication the witness and statement taker knew exactly which hat was being referred to.

Monty