A letter in Windsor Castle attesting that Edwar I’s grandson (Edward III) was really William Wallace’s son with Isabella.
I’ve always loved the story of how the existence of the GPO tower in London was covered under the Official Secrets Act and therefore not on Ordnance Survey maps, despite the fact it’s a enormous freaking communications tower (and one of the tallest buildings in London), until an MP exercised her right to parliamentary privilige in 1993 to state the blatantly obvious; ie the building did exist and it was at a specific address.
William Wallace died in 1305. Edward III was born in 1312. Get your information from something other than a film.
The journal of one of Catherine the Great’s ladies-in-waiting was suppressed until the late 1970s; that’s gotta be a contender.
For British dopers: are the cargo manifest of the liner “Lusitania” still secret? I recall that the British government never explained just what the ship was carrying (there was a large shipment of unknown contents to a arsenal in the UK).
I also read somewhere that all classified documents on Jack the Ripper will be de-classed after 1996 (or thereabout.) Didn’t hear of any.
Do you have a citation for those Jack the Ripper classified documents? I tried searching for such a thing, and the only mentions of the possibility of them was on distinctly oddball websites. Do you know of any mention of such things on reliable websites?
My so-called letter also came from somewhere. :rolleyes:
That’s why I’m still searching. Read it long before the earnet. Come to think of it, does Scotland Yard or the Home Office even hold classified material on things like prostitute murders?
Krokodil writes:
> The journal of one of Catherine the Great’s ladies-in-waiting was suppressed
> until the late 1970s; that’s gotta be a contender.
Suppressed in what sense? If it was simply hidden by someone and only found much later by someone else, it doesn’t count as being classified.
Before I check the link, are you referring to using semen as invisible ink?
In another thread we noted that the Brit intelligence service had had a hand in it.
And it’s written in French! What sort of conspiracy is this? 
I love the “Received:” date stamp on the bottom that looks identical to something you’d see today. And the handwritten accent marks over the typewritten letters; I suddenly had a flashback to high school French when I remembered having to do that.
Well, yes and no. Historically (prior to various Freedom of Information acts in recent decades), the UK government’s approach to official secrets has been that everything is classified unless explicitly released. So any government documents relating to the Whitechapel murders might well have remained classified for almost a hundred years – but then again, so would the Home Office bill for toilet paper.
China.
It’s got to be in China.
Lots of bureaucracy got carried over, from one regime to the next.
Far from being an example of an unusually long closure period, the files on Jack the Ripper are an example of documents being released unusually early.
The files were originally closed for 100 years. But that was just standard practice, as official files in the UK containing personal information about private individuals are usually closed for that long. They were due to be released in the mid-1990s because the release date was calculated not from the date of the murders but from that of the latest document in the files.
However, in the early 1970s the journalist, Stephen Knight, was granted access to them and, in the wake of the huge publicity that his book on the subject then generated, the files were released several years later in the late 1970s. That proved to be Knight’s only positive contribution towards Ripperology.
Conspiracy theorists have a tendency to repeat uncritically claims about long closure periods from older publications without realising that the documents in question have since been released. It’s a mistake also often made about some of the JFK files.
Sadly, it’s hard to check the specifics of something I read in The Washington Post’s Style section 35 years ago, especially from a foreign country. I may be a borderline hoarder, but I’m not that far gone. The article–which I haven’t thought about in decades–gave the impression that some kind of government seal had been in place, though why the then-Communist government would honor an imperial decree is a mystery to me. (Maybe it was kept under seal by the LIW’s family?) The journal didn’t reveal anything groundbreaking, as I recall.
I don’t think you could say that anything in the years 1729 to 1796 (the years that Catherine the Great was alive) could be called classified. I don’t think classification in the modern sense existed until the twentieth century. Threatening an individual person if they talk about something and taking away their writings may have the same effect, but it’s not classification.
Well, they sure sat on the Seventh Seal for a while.
What are you talking about? I’ve looked at all the usual definitions of the Seventh Seal. None fit into what we’re talking about in this thread.