Did Hutchinson get the night wrong?

[Fisherman]

Monty!

Thanks a lot for that link! So we could well have a PC Morton on our hands that perhaps did cover Dorset Street, but who had nothing to report about anything conspicious. Interesting.

If I may, could you post the full picture? There are some bits and pieces on the sides that I would like to see.

Once again thanks,

Fisherman

[Monty]

Ive not the full image to hand Im afraid Fish, may do later.

And the PC isnt Morton. He would have retired by 78 I think.

Monty

[Ben]

I agree entirely with Garry’s opinion that the sketch gives us far better clues as to Hutchinson’s likely appearance than the later one, and it rather obviously depicts a somewhat fleshier than average man who was equally obviously older than 22 years old. Interestingly, other sketches of other witnesses appeared to depict the correct ages. The eyes are not “shadowed” in the original sketch, incidentally, which reveals a light moustache.

As for the nature of the Victoria Home, I would consider a contemporary detective to be the most reliable guide for the simple reason that he was not attempted to advertise it in any way. That isn’t to say that the other sources contain falsehoods in any respect, but even accepting that it was a cut above the average grotty doss house, there may have been a temptation to put rose-tinted slant on matters. Jack London’s views are valuable for the same reason. As for the type of people who frequented the home, the inspector’s references are in accordance with other sources. As we learn from the indefatigable effort of Chris Scott who transcribed the Whitechapel Infirmary records, labourers and grooms were also documented as having lived there at the time.

Most crucially, it tells us that a contemporary detective – most probably Edmund Reid – considered the Victoria Home to have been a viable lair for the ripper.

[Fisherman]

Ruby:

"I think that Hutch WAS waiting about near the area of the court at about that time -because I think that it was corroborated by Mrs Lewis."

"I think" and "I think" being the operative words here.

Sarah Lewis "corroborates" nothing at all, Ruby. I have said it a thousand times. It is the other way around: Hutchinson SEEMINGLY corroborates Lewisīstory. But that is only seemingly. For anybody who recognizes the fact that there was more than one male person in London in the autumn of 1888 must immediately realize that what Sarah Lewis says she has seen is A man. Not THE man. Once we start to look at her story as a corroboration of Hutch, we are in very, very deep water. I realize that the effort to look at things from 1 to 2 instead of from 2 to 1 is a strain to many a poster, but if we want to look at this in an unbiased manner, there is nothing else we can do.
We must ask ourselves a couple of questions:
1. Could there on any given night have been a man standing outside Crossinghams?
2. Would such a man normally stand with his back or his face to the door?
3. Would a man standing with his back to the door at Crossinghams be able to convey the impression that he was looking across the street?

It is anything but rocket science once we throw any bias overboard.

"Have you read about all the circumstances regarding the attack on Thomas Sadler (Fances Cole murder) ?"

No. You must tell me all about it sometime!

Okay, that was irony. And I have, occasionally, read a line or two about Saddler and Coles. And it was not just the one attack, by the way.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Ben:

"it rather obviously depicts a somewhat fleshier than average man who was equally obviously older than 22 years old."

Being such an "obvious" thing, it is strange that I cannot see it...? How old would he have been? 43 and a half? Plus, once again, where id the certificate telling us that this WAS a true depiction of Hutchinson? How do we know that the artist did not draw a phantasy figure or that he had been told by somebody roughly what Hutch looked like? How?

Answer: We donīt.

The best,
Fisherman

[Ben]

Thanks, Monty, for that interesting reference.

Fisherman,

Please don’t go on about my “erroneously” calling a sketch a photograph, as this will irritate. The post was quickly edited and now reads “sketch”. If people weren’t in quite such tremendous haste to reply, these problems wouldn’t arise.

“We know that dorset Street had a vicious rumour, and it was said that no lone PC entered it. So maybe there is reason to believe that the police simply avoided the street”

Patrolling it in pairs would have been more likely than total avoidance, I would suspect. As for Hutchinson’s failure to avoid mentioning a PC passing through Dorset Street, it wouldn’t have made any sense for such a detail to be mentioned by Hutchinson. If there was a PC, and Hutchinson did have something to conceal about his reasons for monitoring the court entrance on the night of a murder, he would obviously have sought to keep well out of sight, and this would have been relatively easy to achieve in Dorset Street, which had various courts and passageways leading off from it. Had Hutchinson mentioned a PC, only to be “contradicted” by the man in question - who would have observed that he saw nobody loitering on his beat - it would have rung alarm bells and awoken the senior detectives to the possibility that Hutchinson deliberately concealed himself from the PC as he did his rounds.

“Therefore, if Hutch HAD nefarious reasons for being in the street, the reasnable place tp post himself would have been right at the archway leading up to the court”

Well yes, in which case in would have been a case of temporarily aborting his post outside Crossingham’s (where Lewis saw a man who was almost certainly Hutchinson, short of unacceptably outlandish coincidence) and relocating to somewhere more concealed, such as the Miller’s Court archway.

Best regards,
Ben

[The Good Michael]

Ben:

"it rather obviously depicts a somewhat fleshier than average man who was equally obviously older than 22 years old."

Being such an "obvious" thing, it is strange that I cannot see it...? How old would he have been? 43 and a half? Plus, once again, where id the certificate telling us that this WAS a true depiction of Hutchinson? How do we know that the artist did not draw a phantasy figure or that he had been told by somebody roughly what Hutch looked like? How?

Answer: We donīt.

The best,
Fisherman

Fish,

He does look strikingly like Toppy's photo.


Mike

[Fisherman]

Mike:

"He does look strikingly like Toppy's photo."

It could well be him, yes. But that does not change the fact that the sketch is very crude and may well have been drawn with no model at hand.

The best,
Fisherman

[Fisherman]

Ben:

"Please don’t go on about my “erroneously” calling a sketch a photograph, as this will irritate."

Could we swop that for your not pitying my family any further?

"As for Hutchinson’s failure to avoid mentioning a PC passing through Dorset Street, it wouldn’t have made any sense for such a detail to be mentioned by Hutchinson. If there was a PC, and Hutchinson did have something to conceal about his reasons for monitoring the court entrance on the night of a murder, he would obviously have sought to keep well out of sight, and this would have been relatively easy to achieve in Dorset Street, which had various courts and passageways leading off from it. Had Hutchinson mentioned a PC, only to be “contradicted” by the man in question - who would have observed that he saw nobody loitering on his beat - it would have rung alarm bells and awoken the senior detectives to the possibility that Hutchinson deliberately concealed himself from the PC as he did his rounds."

Well, rather than believing in a killer running in and out of the various doorways and archways of Dorset Street, I keep to Hutchinsons own assertion that he went to the court and stood there for 45 minutes. Not absolutely still, mind you.

"Well yes, in which case in would have been a case of temporarily aborting his post outside Crossingham’s"

HIS post? That was the loiterers post, Ben. Hutch would have been at the court. He said so.

The best,
Fisherman

[Ben]

“If a discredited witness lived there it would imply to me that they would endeavour to check him out (e.g. what are the names of your relatives in Romford, which firms did you apply for a job with etc or whatever excuse he came out with).”

No, Lechmere.

Probably not.

There’s no evidence of this sort of post-discrediting procedure occurring in the cases of other discredited witnesses, so there’s no reason to conclude that any special treatment happened in Hutchinson’s case. Even if they did, and discovered him to have been lying about his Romford travels, it would simply have been more fuel for the time-waster or publicity/money-seeker assumption, to which several other false witnesses had already been consigned, including Packer and Violenia.

“The hat doesn’t look like a wide-awake to me either – more of a bowler.”

No, it was what was understood in those days as a “wideawake”, which was interchangeable with a “billycock”, but it wasn’t far off a bowler at all.

I’m afraid you still assume far too much when you imagine that the contemporary police had all these “checking” powers you seem to be envisaging. The sort of things you’re asserting that the police would have checked are just the sort of things that Hutchinson could easily have “blagged”, utterly secure in the knowledge that his claims were incapable of being verified or contradicted. You seem to have fallen into the trap that has claimed others in assuming that a discredited witness instantly becomes a prime suspect. Emanuel Violenia claimed to have been at a crime scene, but he was dismissed as a false witness, and assumed to have been lying even about being there. There is no indication that he was ever suspected of murdering anyone. The likelihood is that similar treatment was meted out to Hutchinson. Quite simply, a precedent had been set, and the idea that Hutchinson was simply a publicity seeker had safety in numbers.

“I if am able to avoid straying over the border into the tipping a pint of Guinness over someone’s head type of aggression”

Good luck with that little mission, Lech, and we’ll see if you’re still standing afterwards.

Again, your ideas about the way the Victoria Home operated are frankly very strange indeed. You’ve recited some invented dialogue in an effort to make out that something similar must have happened with Hutchinson, but I’m afraid the dialogue in question seems far more compatible with a Bed and Breakfast in the Cotswolds than it does an East End lodging house in a very bad and very crowded district that catered for 450 men coming and going at all hours if the night. There was simply no time for some kindly doorman to engage in friendly conversation with one particular lodger out of hundreds, discussing his activities for the day and making meticulous notes accordingly. Not realistic.

It would have been a case of:

“Weekly pass, please.”

“Sold, here’s a lump of metal to prove it. Show it to the doorman on entry.”

“It’s probably similar to when boys at school are given permission to leave the grounds on some supposed errand”

No. It’s probably nothing like that at all.

Best regards,
Ben

(I too am just kidding about the Guiness)

[Lechmere]

The sketch could look like almost anyone - I would say it deliberately vague.
Does anyone know where it appeared?

Beat policemen tended to check the side courts. Imagine if a beat copper (or two for Dorset Street) had gone down a side alley and found Hutchinson or anyone else hiding behind a packing case. Oh dear.
Didn't Hutchinson mention he saw a policeman in Commercial Street? Does that not imply he would have mentioned seeing one on Dorset Street?

I have read reports where it was commented on that a witness would have seen a policeman on his beat and so forth. It was a matter that occured to people at the time as well.

[Ben]

Hi Fish,

HIS post? That was the loiterers post, Ben. Hutch would have been at the court.

The loiterer and Hutchinson were almost certainly one and the same, in my opinion, short of implausible "coincidence", and "to the court" refers to anywhere in Dorset Street in front of the entrance. This encompassed the area in front of Crossingham's where Lewis spotted the wideawake man. Gosh, it's almost as though we're repeating ourselves now, isn't it?

I intended no malice with my earlier comments. I've almost come to enjoy the fact that whenever our mammoth Hutchinson posting sessions crop up on the message board, there'll be one of Fisherman's "reconstructions" tucked in there somewhere. I can almost envisage your son's reaction:

"Okay Dad, now who am I pretending to be, and where do you want me to stand, sit or recline this time?"



On a less frivolous note, I do rather agree with Sally's thoughts about the nature of this particular "experiment".

"How do we know that the artist did not draw a phantasy figure or that he had been told by somebody roughly what Hutch looked like? How?"

Don't echo! We don't for certain, but we can chose once again to avoid the "coincidence" interpretation. This impression of what Hutchinson roughly looked like just happened to coincide with Sarah Lewis' description of a man she saw on the night of the murder who was watching or waiting for soneone to come out of Miller's Court, just as Hutchinson would later claim he did.

Didn't Hutchinson mention he saw a policeman in Commercial Street? Does that not imply he would have mentioned seeing one on Dorset Street?

It really depends, Lechmere. If he was a squeaky clean witness who really did see a scary Jewish-looking opulently dressed man, then yes, he probably would have done. If, on the other hand, he was a discredited witness who might have had reasons for concealing his true reasons for loitering outside a crime scene an hour or so before the murder, he may well have withheld it.

Best regards,
Ben

[Rubyretro]

Incidentally, Hutch DID say that he saw the Policeman on his beat (Fish mentions it himself on his post of 20th January).
I think that Hutch said that he saw a policeman look into the street -but he didn't walk down it.

[Sally]

The worst street in London and the Victoria Home

A couple of points regarding Dorset Street, and that Working Men's Savoy, The Victoria Home: from Charles Booth's notebooks made on police walks in 1898:

Dorset Street -

The worst street I have seen so far, thieves, prostitutes, bullies, all common lodging houses...women, draggled, torn skirts, dirty, unkempt, square jaws, standing about in street or on doorsteps. The majority of the houses are owned by Jack McCarthy, keeper of a general shop on the North side of the street

Victoria Home -

South down Commercial Street and west into Wentworth Street ; at the SE end a Victoria Home , lodging house, rough characters, dark blue

The reference to 'a Victoria Home' is due to there being two Victoria Homes by this date - the other on Whitechapel Road.

'Dark Blue' is not the worst of Booth's colour codes for poverty - it is the next one up. What he refers to as the 'Dorset Street Area' is all black - the worst possible classification.

Black is described as: Lowest Class. Vicious, semi-criminal

Dark Blue is described as: Very poor. Casual (work). Chronic Want.

For comparison, Booth classified some of the buildings on neighbouring Flower & Dean Stree, and on Wentworth Street as Pink: Fairly comfortable, good average earnings. Flower & Dean Street had recently seen some renovation.

The above should serve to demonstrate the true social picture in the area; which Booth considered had changed very little (barring isolated patches of regeneration) in the previous decade.

[Fisherman]

Ben:

"The loiterer and Hutchinson were almost certainly one and the same, in my opinion"

And if it had not been for the fact that the missing day premise covers it all neatly, I would have agreed that Hutch was EITHER the loiterer or making his story up. But looking on things the way I do - no, they were not one and the same. And it is no coincidence that Hutch does not mention Crossinghams, or Lewis.
But yes, we are moving in circles.

"I intended no malice with my earlier comments."

If that is true it is welcome. I would still prefer if you refrained from commenting on my family on the whole, though. It has no bearing on the case as such what persons I used in my test. Stick with the subject instead.

"I do rather agree with Sally's thoughts about the nature of this particular "experiment"."

I agree totally with some of them too. That would be her statement that we cannot reproduce either the street or Hutchinsons hearing capability.
As for my statement that conversation can be heard in an open street from thirty meters away, it is a fact, proven empirically. That is how these things work. Of course, Ben, you were not there, so you have not seen (heard) the proof, and if you wish, you may question that I did a correct test. If you have any complaits or objections to how the test was carried out, please say so. Otherwise, letīs just drop the thought that conversation can not be heard from these distances.
I could of course confirm what I already know by contacting an expert in the area, but donīt you think it would be rather superfluous? It will only tell us that I am right anyway, and that the setting I used was probably much worse than the one in Dorset Street.
But before I look for an expert, I would like to know in what manner you would fault my own test. Is there something in it that you think was wrong technically, or do you mistrust my information? A test cannot be much simpler than this: measure 30 and 50 meters, respectively. Stand at each end. Speak a sentence in a normal conversation voice and see if the other party can make it out.

"Don't echo!"

Donīt even go there, Ben, unless youīve grown tired of posting. Do not hope for a sense of humour on my behalf when it comes to remarking on how I post. Do simply not comment on how I post in any way. Look at the arguments only and comment on them only. No family hints, no telling me how to word myself, no nothing of this kind. The subject. Nothing else.

"We don't for certain, but we can chose once again to avoid the "coincidence" interpretation. This impression of what Hutchinson roughly looked like just happened to coincide with Sarah Lewis' description of a man she saw on the night of the murder "

Yes, it IS perhaps the same type of hat. But only perhaps. Otherwise, there is nothing to conclude from at all. Unless we "chose" to see it, as you put it. And just as I donīt chose to see a man much older than 22 in that crude sketch, I do not chose to see a not tall but stout man in it. Nor do I chose to see a thin, tall man in it. It could have been both, and in such cases, chosing on my behalf would be moot.

The best,
Fisherman