Handwriting

[Howard Brown]

In case anyone questioned whether handwriting was analyzed in the LVP...

IPN
June 29,1889
***********
http://i908.photobucket.com/albums/ac287/HowieNina/2011%20Forums/Summer%202011%20Forums/ha.jpg

[Chris G.]

In case anyone questioned whether handwriting was analyzed in the LVP...


What makes you think that anyone questions whether handwriting was analyzed during the period? If they counted bumps on a person's skull, which they did (phrenology) or the fairies at the bottom of one's garden (Cottingley), certainly they were going to analyze handwriting. Duh.

[Jon Simons]

Hi How

The address given for The Family Doctor, 286 Strand, as printed in the IPN, was only a couple of doors away from Le Grand and Batchelor at 283, Strand.

[Howard Brown]

Thanks for that J.G...that's a coincidence,eh ?

[Debra Arif]

And just to link the two; At Le Grand's 1891 blackmail trial a renowned handwriting expert and analyst, Mr. Nethercliffe, was brought in for the prosecution to determine if he had written the blackmail letters received by Baroness Bolsover, Lady Jessel and Lady Baldock, and also Sir Edward Bradford.
It must have been difficult for Nethercliffe to prove though, because out of these four charges Le Grand was only convicted of one. That was the one where a copycat letter, with the exact words and phrases used in a letter to one of these people was found in his lodgings.

..I would have got the Cottingley fairies in here too, but I've just this minute changed my avatar.

[m_w_r]

Hi chaps,

One of the most famous handwriting experts of the period was Thomas Henry Gurrin of Holborn Viaduct, who was involved in notable cases such as the Adolph Beck controversy and the Moat Farm Mystery. He was chiefly looking for signs of forgery and imitation, though - the interpretation of character as it's revealed in handwriting is quite a different pseudoscience. He was involved in dozens of cases at the Central Criminal Court for at least twenty-five years after 1888, and, I'd have thought, at least a few other cases tried at other venues.

Regards,

Mark

[Maria Birbili]

He {Thomas Henry Gurrin of Holborn Viaduct} was chiefly looking for signs of forgery and imitation, though - the interpretation of character as it's revealed in handwriting is quite a different pseudoscience.
Absolutely. I think people frequently mix up handwriting analysis done as research vs. “graphology“, which is a pseudoscience.
In my own field of musicology, we are still identifying autograph scores (by Beethoven, Mozart, Rossini, Verdi) simply by structure analysis and by identifying the handwriting. Of course we look at the water marks, but many people, esp. in the mid 19th century, were using the same kind of paper. Thus the identifying factor for a source (be it music or text) in most cases is the handwriting.
I'm also under the impression that handwriting experts are still allowed in court today. They were documentedly involved in the trial in the Ramsey case (while the proceedings of that trial in Boulder, Co. are not open for the public), while lying detector tests are NOT allowed in court in the US.

PS.: Wow! Debra Arif has turned into a man! Can it be that this is Le Grand's portrait drawn last spring by the Debsarifator herself, or am I hallucinating?

[Howard Brown]

Mark:

Thank you for that post....because it leads me to this question:

As someone ( that being you ) who has studied cases extensively from the period, do you recall whether Gurrin was involved in analyzing any of the "Ripper missives"....either by invitation of the Met or by his own design ?

Thank you.

[Adam Went]

This thread is much like a bit of a debate that's going on over at Casebook at the moment. Basically my point there was that handwriting analysis did indeed exist in the time of the Ripper, BUT, like fingerprinting and crime scene photography and all the rest, it was still early days, it wasn't really understood properly and certainly it couldn't/wouldn't be used to try and nail a suspect in a criminal investigation.

All of this stemmed from the argument from Mike Hawley that whoever had written the "From Hell" letter seemed to be making an attempt to disguise their true handwriting style early on in the letter before slowly lapsing into their more normal style later in the letter. I argued that he had no real need to be trying to disguise his handwriting, except for if it was in an attempt to make it more legible to the reader.

In any case, as How's article illustrates, a LOT of things existed in 1888 - whether or not they were effective is another matter!

Cheers,
Adam.

[m_w_r]

... do you recall whether Gurrin was involved in analyzing any of the "Ripper missives"....either by invitation of the Met or by his own design?

Hi How,

I've no information to that effect. I suppose, without wanting to raise the ghost of Maybrick here, that Gurrin was closer to what one would now call a document examiner than what Maria has quite correctly referred to as a graphologist. All the police could have asked someone like him to do is compare the handwriting on separate letters - or, I suppose, other documents - to determine whether there was a match, and a handwriting expert's opinion was ultimately subject to the same legal tests as any other expert's evidence.

Conversely, the pre-Freudian science of the personality was a nebulous matter, and the police had no end of "assistance" from those who were attacking the problem of "knowing" the Ripper from many different perspectives - the clairvoyants are one obvious group, and the alienists are another. I can't say for sure that the police would have considered graphology to be another dead end, but some of its assumptions - broadly, that unconscious desires, motivations and values can be displaced physically in the act of writing, and interpreted later - clearly have a lot more definition after Freud than before him, and would have been unavailable at the time.

Perhaps this is another way in which the police of 1888 stood on the cusp of another, more modern way of going about their duties, which was, by a matter of only a few years, unavailable to them, although I suppose to be fair, Dr Bond had a go at seeing the psychological future in his report to the Home Office. The use of bloodhounds might be another example - nobody seemed certain that they'd do any good, and they played no real part in the chase for the Ripper. And it wouldn't be so very long before fingerprints would be accepted as reliable scientific evidence in a court of law, or before animal-mammalian blood could be distinguised from human-mammalian blood. If he'd tarried for a few years, the Ripper could have found himself in a forensic trap, perhaps in more than one area of his work, as it were.

Regards,

Mark

[Maria Birbili]

Basically my point there was that handwriting analysis did indeed exist in the time of the Ripper, BUT, like fingerprinting and crime scene photography and all the rest, it was still early days, it wasn't really understood properly and certainly it couldn't/wouldn't be used to try and nail a suspect in a criminal investigation.

Handwriting analysis existed officially and in full blown capacity already in the ancient and the medieval era, Adam, (with scholars very capably analyzing and identifying various written sources), and I personally have worked/have colleagues who have worked with cases where handwriting analysis led to the identification of manuscripts in 17th century France.

As of handwriting analysis in criminal investigations in the Victorian era, it definitely nailed Le Grand in 1891. Plus look at Debs', Mark Ripper's, and How Brown's posts below, with a reference to several other cases in Victorian England.

Fingerprinting is a whole another matter. There was a letter printed in the press in the fall of 1888 suggesting the use of fingerprinting in the Ripper investigation (if I'm not mistaken, pertaining to the letters, not the murder sites).

[Maria Birbili]

Conversely, the pre-Freudian science of the personality was a nebulous matter, and the police had no end of "assistance" from those who were attacking the problem of "knowing" the Ripper from many different perspectives - the clairvoyants are one obvious group, and the alienists are another. I can't say for sure that the police would have considered graphology to be another dead end, but some of its assumptions - broadly, that unconscious desires, motivations and values can be displaced physically in the act of writing, and interpreted later - clearly have a lot more definition after Freud than before him, and would have been unavailable at the time.
Absolutely, there was no interest in criminal “graphology“ pre-Freud, but there were several neurologists trying to establish a connection between facial traits/facial dysplastia and criminal tendencies. Even Balzac believed in that. I'm not just referring to French neurologist Octave Crouzon (1874-1938), who was quite scientific, but to someone else, whom unfortunately I don't recall by name presently. Roy Corduroy would know, as he once mentioned him on casebook, posting sketches by him.

A very sick thing about "graphology" is that it was frequently used in France in the 1980s by recruiting services for hiring people for jobs, and the same with astrology sometimes!!! Or so I've heard from teachers and friends' parents. It was a real weird era in France, when president Mitterand entertained his own astrologist and it all looked a bit like the Russian Court pre-revolution! (One of the reasons why I would never consider applying for a permanent job in France, even if this practice is dead by now...)

[Howard Brown]

Thanks very much, Mark and Maria, for the replies.

[Maria Birbili]

I went through casebook trying to find that 19th century neurologist's sketches about facial traits and criminality, but haven't found it yet. It was in a thread about Natalie Holloway, possibly posted by Roy Corduroy. Was unable to locate it in Other Mysteries or in Pub Talk. Sorry...

PS.: Got it! Roy Corduroy's post #24 in this thread: http://forum.casebook.org/showthread.php?t=4292&page=2&highlight=Joran+van+der+Sloot
It looks like a pamphlet from the 18th/17th century or even earlier, written in Latin. No decipherable title or author's name.

[Debra Arif]

This thread is much like a bit of a debate that's going on over at Casebook at the moment. Basically my point there was that handwriting analysis did indeed exist in the time of the Ripper, BUT, like fingerprinting and crime scene photography and all the rest, it was still early days, it wasn't really understood properly and certainly it couldn't/wouldn't be used to try and nail a suspect in a criminal investigation.



From the Old Bailey trial of Charles Le Grand 1891, a handwriting expert brought in to try and determine if Le Grand had written a series of threatening blackmail letters to different people:

witness- FREDERICK GEORGE NETHERCLIFT . I have made handwriting a study for forty-eight years; during the adjournment of the Court I have looked at the letter just produced, marked E. T., also the letter H. W., addressed to the Commissioner of Police—I have compared them with letters A and B addressed to Mrs. Baldock, and I say in my judgment the four letters are written by the same hand.
Cross-examined. I have made a very hurried examination of them, but quite sufficient for my purpose—I have been through pretty well all the documents, not to remark all the peculiarities in each, but I am quite positive they are written by the same hand—I do not often find a peculiarity in one person's writing that I find in another, I do sometimes, but very seldom—I am not in any other business—I was a lithographer and fac-similist, and published a work upon the subject, which I dedicated to Royalty—there are other experts in handwriting, not many, there is Mr. Inglis; there are two or three who style themselves exports, brought forward in opposition to me—it may be that I am sometimes wrong, I do not remember it, sometimes persons have taken an opposite view—Mr. Inglis is not an expert, he is a lithographer, as well as myself—he has been on one side and I on the other, in difficult cases—I am now speaking from a general glance of these documents; I have seen this handwriting before—I think I have seen all these, A, B, C, and D—I think I can pledge my oath that these are all in the same handwriting.
By the COURT. There are some peculiarities in the writing to which I could call attention, in the word "two," for instance, which occurs all through the documents in letter A; the beginning of the word "Madam," that word is formed in rather a peculiar way, and it is the same in the letter produced by the last witness; and the k's are alike all through.


I meant to add, I believe that Nethercliffe was maybe not able to persuade the jury that Le Grand wrote all the menacing letters. Le Grand was only convicted on one charge out of four concerning writing menacing letters. The one blackmail case that Le Grand was convicted for was proven by the fact that a copy letter containing the exact same words and phrases as one of the blackmail letters, was found in Le Grand's lodgings.

[Adam Went]

Maria & Debs:

Yes I already know about Le Grand and his handwriting but that is obviously an entirely different kettle of fish, as I said on Casebook, because it's easy enough to compare handwriting to one suspect - that's criminal investigation 101. It's an entirely different scenario when you've got hundreds upon hundreds of potential suspects and leads at any one time, they can't all be tested and some of them wouldn't have even been able to write anyway.

Handwriting analysis existed officially and in full blown capacity already in the ancient and the medieval era, Adam, (with scholars very capably analyzing and identifying various written sources), and I personally have worked/have colleagues who have worked with cases where handwriting analysis led to the identification of manuscripts in 17th century France.

Blood letting to release evil spirits, burning witches and drinking all sorts of potions to ward off the plague also existed in the medieval era, Maria.

As for the last part of that quote, I'll confess that i'm thoroughly baffled by it - the point is what technology was used in 1888 to identify handwriting, not what technology was used in the 2000's to identify old manuscripts!!??!! If we could not have a repeat of the efforts on the Berner Street threads, that'd be just dandy, Maria. :)

Cheers,
Adam.

[Maria Birbili]

Blood letting to release evil spirits, burning witches and drinking all sorts of potions to ward off the plague also existed in the medieval era, Maria.
Blood letting as a medicinal process was used as late as in the 17th century, Adam!:yuck: Just read Molière.
My point was that even in the dark medieval ages there were scholars acquainted with successfully identifying older Latin manuscripts through capable handwriting analysis.
the point is what technology was used in 1888 to identify handwriting, not what technology was used in the 2000's to identify old manuscripts!!??!!
Incidentally, handwriting analysis hasn't changed significantly since those dark ages or since the 17th century. And it ain't even necessary that it does, as it still works fine for identifying manuscripts. There are some oldies that are still goodies.

[Adam Went]

Maria:

Indeed. In fact, if memory serves, many of the bubos of the plague victims were pierced in order to let the "poisoned blood" out in those cases as well.

But we're off topic. You obviously misunderstood my point about handwriting analysis - again, of course handwriting analysis of sorts has existed throughout the ages, but it has a much more broad scientific range in the 21st century, as do most things - the issue here, and the only issue, is the use of handwriting analysis by the police investigating the Whitechapel murders in 1888 to identify potential suspects - or lack thereof. That in itself is an interesting discussion point because it brings us back to the old chestnut of the investigative methods of the police of the day and the what if's of what could/should have been done.

Cheers,
Adam.