Originally posted by JeffHamm
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My impression is that Smith was stating how long it usually took him to complete his round, which would vary according to any disturbances he may have had to address, or anything unusual that he may have had to investigate. When Frank and I, and I seem to remember you were involved, were trying to work out how Smith patrolled the internal streets of his beat, the conclusion was that he walked down Berner St, turned around at Fairclough, and return back up Berner St, so to complete this he probably was in Berner St for about five minutes. When he said 12:30-12:35, he wasn't talking about a point time but a total time in the street.
I am in no doubt that when he spotted all the commotion, Smith didn't check the Harris clock as it was on the opposite side of Berner St, and I'm sure he would have run straight to the yard. But it makes sense to me that Lamb and Smith would have been using the same clock as their time benchmark. So I believe Lamb would have checked the clock at least on his way east towards the fixed point if not on the way back as well after the alarm was raised.
Frank's timeline is in an almost permanent tab on my computer. His point "19, P.C. Lamb arrives, followed by PC 426 H", indicates to me that Lamb had told PC 426 H (Ayliffe) that he had a minute or two before his release time of one o'clock. Herlock disagrees with me here insisting that the fixed point PC had to be released by the supervising Sergeant, but I would think that if that Sergeant were there to release him the Sergeant would have come to the yard as well when th alarm was raised. The fact that the fixed point PC was following Lamb indicates to me that he was called by Eagle and Koze before or at one o'clock. This would support Johnson's testimony that Ayliffe arrived a few minutes after one o'clock. Smith testified: When I came to the spot two constables had already arrived. The gates at the side of the club were not then closed. I do not remember that I passed any person on my way down. I saw that the woman was dead, and I went to the police-station for the ambulance, leaving the other constables in charge of the body. Dr. Blackwell's assistant arrived just as I was going away. This seems to confirm that there was a disparity between police time and Blackwell's pocket watch time, IMO about 7 minutes.
If we allow two minutes from pony shy to search parties departure, and four minutes for a sequential search and apply that to a Lamb call time of 12:59, we have Diemshitz turning into Berner at about 12:53. That would, I should think, qualify as about one o'clock as he originally said. It also would not unduly disturb times by Mortimer (adjusted), Letchford and Schwartz. I used Google maps to determine that when Diemshitz said he saw the clock he would have been in the middle of Commercial Road nearly 15 metres from the clock. Apart from my doubt that he could have seen the clock from there past the palister facade, I also wonder why he would have, while trying to cross a major thoroughfare in the dark, felt the need to know the time when he was less than a minute from home. Your speculation on his mental processing seems more likely.
I still believe that all the time differences, including those of Koze and Hosch, can be resolved with clock sync adjustments. With so many witnesses sourcing their estimates from so many different clocks, there would be many sync corrections to make.
Cheers, George
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