Witnesses of the lower class

[spyglass]

Hi all,
when witness statements from those regarded as lower class were taken by the police and also the recording of statements in court, can we trust they were put on recorrd word for word and accurately .
I came across an old documentary on the Titanic recently, and it seems all statements made by the lower class passengers who survived, if their statements contradict those of the higher class passengers or officers, they were deemed to be wrong and not recorded in some case , just because of who they were..

Regards

[JeffHamm]

Hi all,
when witness statements from those regarded as lower class were taken by the police and also the recording of statements in court, can we trust they were put on recorrd word for word and accurately .
I came across an old documentary on the Titanic recently, and it seems all statements made by the lower class passengers who survived, if their statements contradict those of the higher class passengers or officers, they were deemed to be wrong and not recorded in some case , just because of who they were..

Regards

Hi spyglass,

Given statements were recorded by hand, it is in all probability that transcription errors will have occurred. Also, given the different idioms and turns of phrases that would be used by different classes, it would not surprise me if the police also had to do some "translations" at times, creating another potential source of error.

Regardless of those possibilities (obviously, we can't know for sure if any of those actually occurred, but we must not presume they never did), the biases of the time are very important for us to keep in mind. Statements from Police and medical personnel will have been given greater preference over working class men, who in turn will be given preference over working class woman, who in turn will be given preference over the testimony of destitute woman (unfortunates). The influence of such biases is likely one of the stumbling blocks the police had, but failed to realize, at the time. When we review the statements and evidence, it is important we try to set those biases aside. Just as important, of course, is that we must at the same time try not to introduce our own modern biases, otherwise it's just the same underlying problem.

- Jeff

[Damaso Marte]

This seems especially likely given how many of the witnesses would have had a foreign accent.

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Hi Spyglass,

From what remains to us, it doesn't appear to be the case. The inquests were well on board with hearing the testimony of all and sundry, and we know the police took Schwartz and Lawende seriously. Add in the large scale house to house enquiries and it appears that the lower classes were being actively sought out.
Victorian prejudices could have played a part though, the 'no gentile could have done it' attitude, and any better class suspects might not have been investigated too thoroughly if they had the right background possibly. But no, I don't think witnesses of the lower orders were dismissed on that basis.

(The Titanic inquest was a different proposition altogether though. The sinking was indisputable and the White Star line had to control the damage on a large scale, so tales of poor seamanship, inaction and lifeboats half filled with toffs only had to be played down. Lightoller redeemed himself at Dunkirk though.)

[spyglass]

Hi Spyglass,

From what remains to us, it doesn't appear to be the case. The inquests were well on board with hearing the testimony of all and sundry, and we know the police took Schwartz and Lawende seriously. Add in the large scale house to house enquiries and it appears that the lower classes were being actively sought out.
Victorian prejudices could have played a part though, the 'no gentile could have done it' attitude, and any better class suspects might not have been investigated too thoroughly if they had the right background possibly. But no, I don't think witnesses of the lower orders were dismissed on that basis.

(The Titanic inquest was a different proposition altogether though. The sinking was indisputable and the White Star line had to control the damage on a large scale, so tales of poor seamanship, inaction and lifeboats half filled with toffs only had to be played down. Lightoller redeemed himself at Dunkirk though.)

Hi,
But say just for arguments sake a hypothetical lower class witness swore blind that they saw Prince Eddie hanging around Millers Court, would a ranking Police Officer even entertain taking a statement, or even if he did would it go straight in the bin on the biased believe that they couldn't have possibly seen him?
where as if a respectable Doctor of high standing had made that claim, although staying under wraps, I feel pretty certain that it would be taken more seriously.

As for the Titanic, it was only due to the lower class survivors testament that we know for example the ship split in two just before sinking, where as the crew members said it didn't and so that myth continued as truth in films and books only until James Cameron rectified the wrongs with his film.

I just like to add that I dont feel comfortable using the terth"lower class " but cant think of an alternative.

Regards

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Hi,
But say just for arguments sake a hypothetical lower class witness swore blind that they saw Prince Eddie hanging around Millers Court, would a ranking Police Officer even entertain taking a statement, or even if he did would it go straight in the bin on the biased believe that they couldn't have possibly seen him?
where as if a respectable Doctor of high standing had made that claim, although staying under wraps, I feel pretty certain that it would be taken more seriously.


I just like to add that I dont feel comfortable using the terth"lower class " but cant think of an alternative.

Regards

I think Eddie's not a great example, his sighting by anyone in Miller's Court would raise an eyebrow, but I see your point, if an eminent member of society claimed a counter point given by a commoner, would the preference be the upstanding good doctor/ barrister etc. It's not unfeasible. Look at the scandals in the church. There's not really anything to show that the police would listen to a 'respectable' witness any more than a poor one. It's certainly not what's left in the files. Can't really expand on this one any further. It's a fair question though.

[JeffHamm]

Where I could see such biases having a noticeable impact would be when men were questioned and released after "giving an adequate explanation" type thing. The more respectable the individual, the lower the bar becomes to reach a satisfactory account.

Also, in the case of Chapman, the 3 witnesses who place the time of death around 5:25 are still considered with suspicion given the weight of favour applied to the more respectable doctor's estimate of around 4:30, despite his qualification of that estimate indicating that he isn't disputing the witnesses. In that case, we can see indications of some confusion (which continues today) as to how to reconcile the difference. My own view, having looked at the accuracy and error ranges of even modern day estimates of the ToD based on temperature and rigor is that there isn't really a conflict. The error of the medical estimate creates a range if times that includes the witnesses' time, and therefore there is no problem to solve. I know that view is debates (but I don't want to divert this thread to that issue, we have others for that specific discussion), other than with respect to how the difference in class may have influenced the weight given to the witnesses vs the doctor.

-Jeff

[spyglass]

Where I could see such biases having a noticeable impact would be when men were questioned and released after "giving an adequate explanation" type thing. The more respectable the individual, the lower the bar becomes to reach a satisfactory account.

Also, in the case of Chapman, the 3 witnesses who place the time of death around 5:25 are still considered with suspicion given the weight of favour applied to the more respectable doctor's estimate of around 4:30, despite his qualification of that estimate indicating that he isn't disputing the witnesses. In that case, we can see indications of some confusion (which continues today) as to how to reconcile the difference. My own view, having looked at the accuracy and error ranges of even modern day estimates of the ToD based on temperature and rigor is that there isn't really a conflict. The error of the medical estimate creates a range if times that includes the witnesses' time, and therefore there is no problem to solve. I know that view is debates (but I don't want to divert this thread to that issue, we have others for that specific discussion), other than with respect to how the difference in class may have influenced the weight given to the witnesses vs the doctor.

-Jeff

Hi,

But we do have those witnesses reports because clearly they were important at the time to the police who didnt have much else.
I was wondering if some witnesses accounts and possible information never even saw the light of day and was just disregarded that today could be invaluable.
Cold case investigations today often get reopened by such evidence, but sadly as the years role on, that would be virtually impossible regarding JTR

Regards

[JeffHamm]

Hi,

But we do have those witnesses reports because clearly they were important at the time to the police who didnt have much else.
I was wondering if some witnesses accounts and possible information never even saw the light of day and was just disregarded that today could be invaluable.
Cold case investigations today often get reopened by such evidence, but sadly as the years role on, that would be virtually impossible regarding JTR

Regards

Ah, got you.

Of course, that's an unanswerable question. We have what we have, and we know a lot of what the police had at the time is lost to us. So, do we not have something because A) because the police at the time had it but discarded/ignored some of it, B) the police at the time had recorded it and it has now been lost, oor C) because the police at the time never had it?

Your question, if I understand it properly (and please, if I've got it wrong please correct me), is whether or not in the collection of information that we do not have access to today there tended to be more of "option A" from lower class people ; that the police would be more prone to simply "discard/ignore" information along class divides skewing the information they kept on file away from lower class witnesses. Moreover, with the information we have, it is possible that the police would also be more prone to ensure the safety of information from higher class individuals, skewing the remaining information even more in that direction. The fact that the bulk of the information we have still tends to come from working and lower class individuals simply reflects the overwhelming number of individuals in the area who come from those classes to begin with. (i.e. if 120 of the people interviewed were of lower class, and 10 we higher up, the police might have not bothered to record say 20 of the lower class individuals' statements, but would record all 10 of those from "higher up"; moreover, of the 100 they did record at the time we might today end up with 70 of the documents from the lower class witnesses but still have all 10 from those higher up, changing the ratios from 12:1 to 10:1 then to 7:1 now.

Given we're talking about information we cannot actually observe (information not available to us), there is no way for us to answer that. I suppose we could look at police behaviours, and try and decide how prone they might have been to dismiss a witness at all, etc, but again, we can only do that if they wrote it down and filed it. We're considering all the information that may have been given to some officer that, for whatever reason, they didn't record - but of course we don't actually know if that ever happened.

It's an interesting idea, but one that I'm not sure we can ever answer as it is a theoretical idea about the non-observable. If we found a new collection of records, containing new witnesses and new statements, and found they were weighted towards lower classes similar to what we already have; well, that doesn't change anything because now that information is "recorded", and we're wondering about information not recorded; and since the information has been found, it means the police didn't lose it, so it doesn't even address the idea of them being more prone to preserve one set of data over the other.

Anyway, the only way we could address that issue would be to look for obvious signs of class bias in other aspects of police behaviour and use that as the basis for the suggestion that there may have been important information presented to the police that has not been preserved due to bias. And while one could argue that idea requires consideration, there would be no way to prove that bias actually influenced what information the police recorded (though it may influence how much weight they gave to it).

- Jeff

[jerryd]

Along those lines Spyglass and Jeff, I often wonder why a witness makes a statement to the press early on in the investigation, which gets printed, and then by the time they get to the inquest the story didn't make it as was expressed earlier. I would think that there must be some truth to the original statement in at least SOME of those cases. Isaac Lewis Jacobs comes to mind. If his original statements to the press are to be taken as he said, it changes the story of Alice McKenzie completely.

[JeffHamm]

Along those lines Spyglass and Jeff, I often wonder why a witness makes a statement to the press early on in the investigation, which gets printed, and then by the time they get to the inquest the story didn't make it as was expressed earlier. I would think that there must be some truth to the original statement in at least SOME of those cases. Isaac Lewis Jacobs comes to mind. If his original statements to the press are to be taken as he said, it changes the story of Alice McKenzie completely.

Hi jerryd,

I think there are a number of different factors to consider as possible reasons for this sort of thing, and as they're not mutually exclusive, it's possible some of the cases of "changed stories" could reflect a few of these all working at the same time.

Off the top of my head, and in no particular order, the following possibilities come to mind.
1) "Inaccurate reporting". This might be things like leading questions by the reporter as they dig for a big story (i.e., pipeman becomes "knifeman" in the Star possibly through a question like "could he have been holding a knife"? and if the reply was "possibly", then it gets written up along that line as it is a better story and the person didn't deny it. I'll include complete fabrication by the press in here as an extreme version of this sort of thing.

2) "Witness over confidence in an informal setting". Basically, the idea here is that the witness, because they are just telling their story and are not under oath (which tends to make people more cautious in their statements), are just telling their story and not really evaluating how sure they are of the fine details. There will be a tendency to embellish, or fill in the gaps, to make the story coherent and interesting. When under the more formal setting of the inquest, however, the witness will probably engage in more introspection, and be more conservative as to what they are willing to say as they have to be more confident in their beliefs and also they know that embellishment will be frowned upon. The basic idea here is that when speaking to the press, details and events about which they are less confident will still be stated with confidence (they have a lower setting by which they decide "I'm confident enough about it to tell it to the press"), but when placed in a formal inquest, having sworn in, that necessary level of confidence goes up, and so some things that were "above the confidence bar" before are now "below the necessary level". As an extreme example, let's say some witnesses are willing to say things they know are "not true" to the press, because it serves some other purpose (makes the story better, they have a grudge against the police, etc), in that case their actual confidence in the statements' truth is low (they know they are over stating things) but their criterion is so low that's ok - but once under oath, those things are now well below their criterion and so dn't get repeated. I hope that makes sense?

3) "Witness realises they may have got things wrong after talking with the police"; this is sort of related to #2, but different enough I think it deserves its own bullet point. What I'm thinking here is that the witness may have been very sure of things, but when probed for details by the police, and having to answer a number of questions, they realise they may have gotten some things wrong and so by the time of the inquest, they are truly less sure than they were when interviewed. The difference with #2 is that here their actual confidence in the statements has changed through the process of being formally interviewed, while in #2 their actual confidence isn't what has changed, only their criterion as to how confident they have to be. One example of this I can think of. Schwartz apparently was initially confident that Broad Shoulders shouted "Lipski" as a warning to Pipeman, who then chased Schwartz. However, after questioning, it is recorded that he came to realise that it was possible that "Lipski" was shouted at himself, and that Pipeman was not associated with Broad Shoulders at all! His belief changed due to being questioned about it. Another example, that goes the other way, might be Richardson and his visit to Hanbury Street. The first time he mentions being there he just says he was there to check the steps, then eventually (I think it's in the press too), due to retelling and being questioned, more details are recalled and told (i.e. sitting on the steps, fixing his boot, ect). Repeated questioning is done to do just that, draw out more details. As he does this, his confidence in his claim that Annie was not there grows, rather than how Schwartz's confidence lowers. It can work both ways, depending upon the situation and perhaps the personalities of the people involved.

4) "Memory". This is just the basic fact that our memory for events is not perfect. As more time goes by, and as we're exposed to more information about something, our memory of our own experiences will change. By the time witnesses are giving their statement at the inquest, they've no doubt had many conversation, with many other people, and heard things in the papers, etc. These experiences will have an impact upon their memory of what they experienced at the time. Interviews with the press, that occur at a different time relative to the inquest, will therefore be a recording of different memory versions of an event.

5) "Language use": It also could be there is no real change in what they think, however, the words they choose to describe those beliefs may take on a different character depending upon the setting (describing to a reporter vs answering formal questions under oath). As a result, the information sounds very different even though the witness themselves is trying to describe the same event and memory. Similarly, if someone tells the same story twice, it will simply be different in some ways between tellings for no other reason than the words they choose to use "this time" compared to "that time" - we don't memorize scripts to retell, we just package up the "concepts" and turn them into words. Those words may come out different on two separate occasions even if the underlying concepts the person has in their head are the same. In fact, if someone tells the same story in almost exactly the same way every time, it starts to become suspicious - it's like they've memorized a story, memorized a set of words, rather than have had an experience which they then are translating into English, which can take on many different specific words and sentence structures, we just choose one particular combination of the many options we have to use at the time so we could make a different choice the next.

I'm sure there could be others as well. Also, not all of these will apply each and every time, and some may be more common than others. If there are major differences in "facts" (i.e. Pipeman vs Knifeman, for example) that can hardly be attributed to simple language use (a more formal word choice isn't going to change a pipe to a knife). I don't like to play the "press fabrication" card too often, but there are examples of completely made up stories being printed at the time. I believe there's one that involves describing an attack on a woman over near Buck's Row after Nichols' murder, but it never actually happened - it was a completely made up story by the reporter. And of course, if the Dear Boss letter was a reporter's hoax, that would be another. The difference in aspects of Paul's statement (to Lloyds) and his formal inquest statement is probably, in part, a combination of press leading questions and his willingness to dramatize things. In Paul's case he's prossibly influenced by his emotions after realising she was indeed actually dead, and nearly decapitated - that would no doubt have been unnerving for him, so his presentation will be over the top as his "criterion" for factuality would suffer as a result. By the time he's in the more subdued setting of the inquest, his presentation levels out.

Those are the sorts of things I often think are behind those sorts of differences. Which, if any, apply to any specific example, I can't say although I do have some ideas about some examples (as I've indicated above). And of course, I can't be sure if my opinions about those examples are correct, but I think they may be at least partly responsible for the differences in those cases. I'm also sure I've overlooked a number of other possible explanations as well.

Anyway, not sure if that's of interest, but thought I would share my own views. Yours may differ of course.

- Jeff

[Abby Normal]

Along those lines Spyglass and Jeff, I often wonder why a witness makes a statement to the press early on in the investigation, which gets printed, and then by the time they get to the inquest the story didn't make it as was expressed earlier. I would think that there must be some truth to the original statement in at least SOME of those cases. Isaac Lewis Jacobs comes to mind. If his original statements to the press are to be taken as he said, it changes the story of Alice McKenzie completely.

hey Jerry
happy new year! what was jacobs original statements to the press?

[jerryd]

hey Jerry
happy new year! what was jacobs original statements to the press?

Thanks Abby and the same to you! I'll keep this short so this thread can stay on topic.

Depending on the press report you look at, Isaac Jacobs described the blood from the neck wound as "running very fast", "spurting" or "gushing" when he was left alone with the body while the police officials were securing the scene. "Spurting" for example, may indicate a heart that is still beating.

[Abby Normal]

Thanks Abby and the same to you! I'll keep this short so this thread can stay on topic.

Depending on the press report you look at, Isaac Jacobs described the blood from the neck wound as "running very fast", "spurting" or "gushing" when he was left alone with the body while the police officials were securing the scene. "Spurting" for example, may indicate a heart that is still beating.

Thanks Jerry! That is intriguing.

[spyglass]

Ah, got you.

Of course, that's an unanswerable question. We have what we have, and we know a lot of what the police had at the time is lost to us. So, do we not have something because A) because the police at the time had it but discarded/ignored some of it, B) the police at the time had recorded it and it has now been lost, oor C) because the police at the time never had it?

Your question, if I understand it properly (and please, if I've got it wrong please correct me), is whether or not in the collection of information that we do not have access to today there tended to be more of "option A" from lower class people ; that the police would be more prone to simply "discard/ignore" information along class divides skewing the information they kept on file away from lower class witnesses. Moreover, with the information we have, it is possible that the police would also be more prone to ensure the safety of information from higher class individuals, skewing the remaining information even more in that direction. The fact that the bulk of the information we have still tends to come from working and lower class individuals simply reflects the overwhelming number of individuals in the area who come from those classes to begin with. (i.e. if 120 of the people interviewed were of lower class, and 10 we higher up, the police might have not bothered to record say 20 of the lower class individuals' statements, but would record all 10 of those from "higher up"; moreover, of the 100 they did record at the time we might today end up with 70 of the documents from the lower class witnesses but still have all 10 from those higher up, changing the ratios from 12:1 to 10:1 then to 7:1 now.

Given we're talking about information we cannot actually observe (information not available to us), there is no way for us to answer that. I suppose we could look at police behaviours, and try and decide how prone they might have been to dismiss a witness at all, etc, but again, we can only do that if they wrote it down and filed it. We're considering all the information that may have been given to some officer that, for whatever reason, they didn't record - but of course we don't actually know if that ever happened.

It's an interesting idea, but one that I'm not sure we can ever answer as it is a theoretical idea about the non-observable. If we found a new collection of records, containing new witnesses and new statements, and found they were weighted towards lower classes similar to what we already have; well, that doesn't change anything because now that information is "recorded", and we're wondering about information not recorded; and since the information has been found, it means the police didn't lose it, so it doesn't even address the idea of them being more prone to preserve one set of data over the other.

Anyway, the only way we could address that issue would be to look for obvious signs of class bias in other aspects of police behaviour and use that as the basis for the suggestion that there may have been important information presented to the police that has not been preserved due to bias. And while one could argue that idea requires consideration, there would be no way to prove that bias actually influenced what information the police recorded (though it may influence how much weight they gave to it).

- Jeff

Yep, all good points, and I was thinking more along the lines of A.
but I have since reminded myself that almost most of the post cards/ Letters that the Police received supposedly from JTR and clearly hoaxes were kept and held on to.

Regards