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Diana
Chief Inspector
Username: Diana
Post Number: 567
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 11:04 am: | 
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This started on the Blotchy Face Thread, but I thought it worthy of its own thread. Following is a list from the witness descriptions. In almost every case the individual was wearing a hat. I'm sure that not all of them were really JTR, but one wonders why he found it necessary to always keep his head covered. If he were a flaming redhead and had any intelligence at all he would realize that this would be a dead giveaway. Copied from the Witness section of the Casebook ; appearance column.
Patrick Mulshaw – suspicious
Emily Walter -- black scarf and black felt hat
Elizabeth Long -- brown deerstalker hat
J. Best and John Gardner -- billycock hat
William Marshall -- round cap with a small sailor-like peak
Matthew Packer -- soft felt hawker hat
P.C. William Smith -- hard dark felt deerstalker hat
James Brown – no mention of hat
Israel Schwartz -- black cap with peak for first man; old black hard felt hat with a wide brim for second man
Joseph Lawende -- grey peaked cloth cap
James Blenkinsop -- Well-dressed
Mary Ann Cox -- Billycock hat
George Hutchinson – dark hat
Of course hats may have been de rigeur in the Whitechapel of 1888. I don't know. I know I have seen old pics somewhere on the site with street scenes of crowds. It would be helpful to find out what percentage of the men wore hats. Of course weather enters in too. When Nichols and Chapman were killed it probably was fairly warm. It would be cooler by the night of the double event and it was raining. The temperature was down near freezing the night MJK was killed.
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Christopher T George
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Chrisg
Post Number: 1400
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 12:40 pm: |
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Hi Diana
I am not sure the number of men wearing hats is terrifically significant, if at all. We tend to forget that the wearing of hats in public was the custom almost right through the 1950's though it is less so now.
Put it this way, men or women in those previous times probably would not have been caught dead without a hat. So the sight of a suspicious person with a hat does not mean they were hiding something.
On the other hand, the wearing by criminals of disguises, hats, false beards, mustaches, etc., might have been more common back then. Or at least purple fiction and Sherlock Holmes (!) might so have us believe.
All my best
Chris
Christopher T. George
North American Editor
Ripperologist
http://www.ripperologist.info
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Glenn G. Lauritz Andersson
Assistant Commissioner
Username: Glenna
Post Number: 3333
Registered: 8-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 1:54 pm: |
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Hi Diana,
It was customary for both men and women to wear some sort of hat, more or less regardless of weather or social class, probably all the way into the 1950s. You very seldom showed yourself outside without a hat.
That is one of the reasons for why some witness descriptions, referring to different sorts of hats, are of very little use to us.
All the best
G. Andersson, author/crime historian
Sweden
The Swedes are the men That Will not be Blamed for Nothing
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Diana
Chief Inspector
Username: Diana
Post Number: 568
Registered: 2-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 2:27 pm: |
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I remember it too. I was born right after WW2 and remember the 50s well. But with the poverty in Whitechapel I thought maybe it might not have been so common. Does anybody remember where those pictures are? I think some of them were from postcards. Just to make absolutely sure. After all it was 60+ years before the 50s. |
Phil Hill
Inspector
Username: Phil
Post Number: 255
Registered: 1-2005
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 4:05 pm: |
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I agree with others, no body in 1888, of any social class, would have been seen in public without a hat. It was both customary, and in the days before central heating and air-conditioning, when people walked rather than drove in a heated car, hats were practical in that most body heat escapes through the head.
There were some recent TV documentaries about some film-makers in the north of England c 1900, who made films of daily life. Costume had changed little in 12 years, and almost all men wore hats.
Hats were also associated with certain trades or types of people - brimless or knitted -sailors; straw boaters - butchers and green-grocers; the special "hard-hats" of Billingsgate fish market porters (to help them carry the baskets of fish on their heads); bowlers for office workers; broad-brimmed hats - certain Jewish sects.
Flat (cloth caps) trilbys (fedoras in the US I think); top hats (at certain times of day for the better off); homburgs (made fashionable by the Prince of Wales; "deerstalkers" etc were all worn.
Hope this helps,
Phil |
Frank van Oploo
Chief Inspector
Username: Franko
Post Number: 558
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Sunday, March 27, 2005 - 4:57 pm: |
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Hi Diana,
I think you can find at least some of those pictures you here:
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