One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Sam Flynn]

For some reason I always got the impression that Diamine was a large concern, but it's a rather small company. More power to their elbow and all that, but they currently occupy a single unit on an industrial estate in Bootle and appear to employ fewer than 10 people.

Assuming the company wasn't exactly huge in the 1990s either, would they have needed a chief chemist with a PhD? Come to think of it, would they have needed a "chief" chemist at all? What would s/he have done all day?

Genuine questions. I'm not casting nasturtiums.

[rjpalmer]

Mind you, why Voller was told that Barrett was stupid, and who told him, is quite another question. If it was someone involved with researching the diary this should never have happened because it clearly could, and this case did, lead Voller to give an incomplete answer in the first instance.

Great point. And rather troubling.

Meanwhile, I came across the following.

"Ink chemists determine the age of ink by the rate of extraction from the paper and the percentage of extraction. They measure how fast the ink can be chemically removed from the paper and how easily it is remove. Ink dries chemically in approximately three and one-half years according to Erich Speckin. By using the rate of extraction, ink chemists can determine the age of the application of the ink within six months. After the ink has completely dried, the chemist can only state that the ink is over three and one-half years old."--Attorney's Guide to Document Examination by Katerine Koppenhaver (2002)


This is our old friend, the 'solubility' test that was conducted by Dr. Baxendale in 1992. The ink 'extracted' from the paper very quickly, leading to the conclusion that it had been very recently applied.

25 years on, why doesn't Robert Smith have the solubility test repeated? The test would take no more than a few hours, and if the "extraction" rate is markedly different from what Baxendale observed in 1992, it should tell him very quickly whether or not he is the proud owner of an aproximately 26 year old hoax.

[David Orsam]

Great point. And rather troubling.

Yes, I think so too.

Voller does say that he "assumed" Mike Barrett to be a "complete idiot" but this must be based on something, unless he has a habit of assuming everyone else in the world who he hasn't met is a complete idiot, and it can surely only be something he was told by someone. It will be unfortunate if the experts were being fed stories that Mike was stupid because it might have made them think from the start that the Diary couldn't have been forged.

[David Orsam]

Here is an extract from [the start of] a letter written by Melvin Harris to Mr Voller dated 29 June 2001. I do hope Mr, *coughs*, sorry, Dr Voller wasn't offended by the omission of his imaginary title in this letter:

[David Orsam]

RJ, you might be interested in the following which was written by the Diary Defender Hero, Nicholas Eastaugh Ph.D,; Dip. Cons,; BSc, to Paul Feldman on 22 August 1994 (i.e. before the AFI and Leeds University tests):

"Dear Paul,

Following our recent conversations about the scientific study of the ink putatively identified by Michael Barrett and the comparison of it to that used for the diary, I am now writing with my detailed proposal of how I believe the analytical work should proceed....While the basic aim is to identify whether there are compounds like chloroacetamide in the ink of the diary, to achieve this there are consequently some very scientific and practical safeguards which make the process more complex than one might immediately suppose. Firstly, we need to know that whatever analytical technique we use is appropriate to the materials we are looking at, is sensitive to detect whatever is left in the ink and is widely accepted as a method. For this reason we must use established instrumental methods, probably in this case a technique called pyrolysis mass spectrometry (PY-MS), though I have been looking into a couple of alternative techniques as well in case they offer any significant advantage for us."

The highlighting in bold is mine. Eastaugh goes on for another paragraph which need not detain us for I think the interesting point here is that Eastaugh was anticipating that there might not be very much chloroacetamide left in the ink, to the extent that he wanted to ensure that the analytical technique used was sensitive enough to detect any remaining amount.

[rjpalmer]

(Quoting Dr. Eastaugh) "While the basic aim is to identify whether there are compounds like chloroacetamide in the ink of the diary, to achieve this there are consequently some very scientific and practical safeguards which make the process more complex than one might immediately suppose. Firstly, we need to know that whatever analytical technique we use is appropriate to the materials we are looking at, is sensitive to detect whatever is left in the ink and is widely accepted as a method."

Thanks, David. In fact, I will thank you twice--once on behalf of 'Caz,' who now has something else to ponder.

By his use of the phrase "what is left," Dr. Eastaugh certainly seems to be implying that he wouldn't expect to find chloroacetamide during a Gas-Liquid Chromatography analysis to be in the same ratio or percentage that one finds it in fresh 'liquid' Diamine ink. I've been trying to raise this point with Caz for well over a decade; perhaps she will listen more intently now that it is coming from Dr. E.

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, Jennifer Pegg makes an identical claim in her dissertation on the Maybrick Diary's ink (still on this site):

"The concentration of Chloracetamide found in the AFI tests falls far below the level which would be expected of that in Diamine Ink (in fact, it is less than 10 percent of what would be expected)."

Hmmm. But what would one 'expect' to find? The same ratio? Is chemistry really that simple? Dr. Eastaugh only seems to expect to find 'what is left.'

A footnote tells us that Jennifer Pegg's statement is based on something that Alec Voller had written (to Shirley Harrison?) in January 2007, a full decade after the AFI/Leeds tests.

Very odd. I wish I had noticed this earlier and had asked Mr. Voller for clarification. On what is he basing this assumption? At the very least he is suggesting something entirely at odds with Dr. Eastaugh's earlier concerns...

[caz]

I'm happy to rephrase my statement from #4443 as follows:

The arguments about the diary being a forgery do not depend in any way on Mike being an honest person, at any time, and nothing Mike says is taken at face value without corroboration.

On the other hand, every single diary defender claims that Mike was being honest when saying that he received the diary from a friend with whom he drank in the Saddle pub, even though there is absolutely no supporting evidence of any such transfer occurring.

Not true, if David considers me to be a 'diary defender'. I don't claim Mike was being honest when he claimed he got the diary from a pal who used to drink in the Saddle. I have no doubt he was lying through his teeth when he first made that claim, and again when he claimed he got it from an auction and used it to forge the diary, and then again when he reverted for the rest of his sad life to his original claim.

Mike cannot be relied upon for anything he ever claimed about the diary - and that includes the purpose he claimed for obtaining the red diary, which he tried to imply was all Anne's doing, because she ended up paying for it.

I think David may be losing the plot - if he ever had it.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Thanks, David. In fact, I will thank you twice--once on behalf of 'Caz,' who now has something else to ponder.

By his use of the phrase "what is left," Dr. Eastaugh certainly seems to be implying that he wouldn't expect to find chloroacetamide during a Gas-Liquid Chromatography analysis to be in the same ratio or percentage that one finds it in fresh 'liquid' Diamine ink. I've been trying to raise this point with Caz for well over a decade; perhaps she will listen more intently now that it is coming from Dr. E.

Did you not read my post, in which I took account of the fact that the proportion in fresh 'liquid' Diamine would be greater than the proportion in the equivalent dried ink, that is, when all the water had evaporated?

Even so, when I took the water out of the calculation, then compared the resulting percentage of the other ingredients with AFI's findings and gave both figures as parts per million, I still had a whacking 200 parts per million in Diamine minus the water and only 6.5 parts per million found by AFI.

Considering Dr. Eastaugh could find nothing inconsistent with ink meeting paper many decades previously, I don't find it particularly telling that he was thinking in terms of needing to know that the technique used would be sensitive to 'detect whatever is left in the ink' at the time of writing, of 'any compounds like choloroacetamide'.

Could either rj or David clarify exactly what they think they have stumbled on here, because to me there is no more evidence today that Mike bought and used Diamine ink for the diary than there was when he first picked up and ran with the suggestion given by the art shop owner.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Surely the reason why the presence or otherwise of chloroacetamide in the ink was such a hotly contested issue in August 1994 was because it was believed that chloroacetamide was "a modern preservative agent" (as reported in the Evening Standard of 13 Dec 1994) so, if Eastaugh was concerned that the chosen equipment might not be sensitive enough to detect it, he was surely contemplating the possibility that it might be difficult to detect if the Diary was a modern forgery. Or am I being too sensible?

[David Orsam]

Curiously, or perhaps not so curiously, Jennifer Pegg makes an identical claim in her dissertation on the Maybrick Diary's ink (still on this site):

"The concentration of Chloracetamide found in the AFI tests falls far below the level which would be expected of that in Diamine Ink (in fact, it is less than 10 percent of what would be expected)."

Hmmm. But what would one 'expect' to find? The same ratio? Is chemistry really that simple? Dr. Eastaugh only seems to expect to find 'what is left.'

A footnote tells us that Jennifer Pegg's statement is based on something that Alec Voller had written (to Shirley Harrison?) in January 2007, a full decade after the AFI/Leeds tests.

I don’t know if this was available to Jennifer Pegg, RJ:

Letter from Alec Voller to Shirley Harrison (and Nick Warren) dated 27 December 1994 (with my highlighting).

"The Leeds report is profoundly disturbing. That any possibility of cross contamination should have been allowed to arise in Gas Chromatography is unforgiveable but even worse, calibration of the instrument appears to have been very cursory and its ability to detect tiny traces of chloracetamide assumed rather than properly established. For reasons that I will expand upon later, it is questionable whether the SEM/DEX examination which forms the central core of this report, should have been performed at all. This is not necessarily to say that the results obtained at Leeds are wrong but I feel that a distinct question mark hangs over them."

THEN

"By contrast with the above, the report for Analysis for Industry presents us with almost a model picture of how an analysis should be conducted and reported."

AND

"You will have gathered by now that I regard the authenticity of the diary as unresolved."

AND

"It now seems established beyond reasonable doubt that the diary ink is of the iron-gall type, but what of the temporary dyestuff, the ‘sighting colour’ which must be present. It seems to have been generally accepted that this must be Nigrosine…but I regard this as unproven and quite possibly wrong because there are two other dyestuffs which have been very commonly used in inks of this type. These are Ink Blue…and Napthol Blue Black…It is virtually certain that the diary ink will contain one of these three, but which one? All three are made up of precisely the same chemical elements i.e. Hydrogen, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Sulphur and Sodium (although of course in differing proportions and molecular arrangements) so how can a technique which only tells us which elements are present distinguish between them. Moreover, if Dr. Eastaugh’s comment about the limit of detectability for this technique (‘about half a percent’) is correct, then it is questionable whether it could firmly establish the presence of a dyestuff at all, let alone tell us which one."

He goes on to say: "….another simple mathematical exercise gives us 0.26% and 0.29% as the Nitrogen and Sodium contents of the dried ink residue (assuming no other Nitrogen and Sodium compounds are present). You will note that both figures are well below the 0.5% limit mentioned by Dr Eastaugh and thus SEM/EDX becomes doubly inappropriate. It is perhaps not without significance that Leeds did not find Nitrogen or Sodium. It is in areas such as this, i.e. which chemical compounds might be present and to what extent, that the advice of an ink specialist should have been sought from the very beginning."

And there was me thinking that the failure of the Leeds test to find Nitrogen meant that we could rule out the presence of Nigrosine. That’s not what Voller seems to be saying! In fact he seems to be saying that Nitrogen MUST have been present in the ink because it would have been present in any dyestuff used in inks of the type which he believed had been used to write the Diary.

I wonder if Voller will soon lose his imaginary doctorate!

Incidentally, the source of the Eastaugh "half a percent" reference, mentioned by Voller, appears to be from the preface to Eastaugh's report of October 1992 cited by Harrison (2003): "the SEM/EDS system measures down to about half a percent and the proton microprobe down to just a few parts per mission of the composition."

[caz]

Dr. Baxendale did. He looked at every single line of the Diary and saw no sign of bronzing. And Casey Owens, Rendell, etc. also found no sign of bronzing in 1993, even when specifically looking for it.

Obviously this could be very significant if true, rj.

Do you also happen to know anything about bronzing of ink in handwritten books that are known to have been kept shut and in a confined space away from any light sources for a number of years? Would the ink still begin to show signs of bronzing after, say, 2 or 3 three years of being confined in those conditions? Or might there be no bronzing to observe until the pages have finally been exposed to normal levels of oxygen and daylight for those 2 or 3 years?

You can see where I'm going with this, even if you don't personally give any credence to the possibility of the diary having been written and immediately sent to bed in a small dark space, eventually to emerge, blinking and yawning, into a chilly Aigburth morning, having been disturbed from its slumber by a light-fingered floorboard lifter.

"In July 1992, Dr. David Baxendale examined the Diary handwriting line-by-line using a Zeiss binocular-microscope. At that time not the slightest trace of age-bronzing was found. Yet this phenomenon should have been present in an iron-based ink that was years old, certainly in one said to have been applied in 1888-9. Following that, in October 1992 Dr. Nicholas Eastaugh also saw no signs of age-bronzing.

The next examination of the Diary pages took place in August 1993, and was conducted by Warner Books' commissioned examiners. The members of this team were free to express their independent views. Neither Kenneth Rendell, Dr. Joe Nickell, Maureen Casey Owens, or Robert Kuranz saw any signs of age-bronzing. And my own limited examination of the Diary pages, in October 1993, led to the same conclusion." ---Melvin Harris.

It certainly sounds like the ink bronzed sometime between 1992 and 1995, which would match the observations made by Nick Warren using the ink that Voller had sent him to "play around with."

Voller's suggestion that the ink was old was evidently based on its washed-out and unevenly faded appearance. An amateur forger like Barrett might have simply added water to the ink in order to give it a faded look.

I'm specifically looking for a quote confirming your claim that any of the above-mentioned sources were 'specifically looking' for signs of bronzing when examining the diary pages in the years before Voller managed to find slight, barely visible bronzing in one or two places when he held the book up to the light from the window.

And I'm coming up empty.

Melvin was always very good at spin, and making people see things that may never have been there - or in this case making people not see things they may or may not have been looking for at the time.

Where is it stated by any of the people named that they specifically looked at every page for the slightest trace of bronzing and reported at the time that there wasn't any? If Melvin didn't use any direct quotes - a transparent tactic allowing the truth to be bent to the will of the writer - I'm far more inclined to think he was working on the basis that the bronzing Voller observed in 1995 could not have been missed by anyone previously, and therefore it could be inferred that the absence of any mention of bronzing meant that it was looked for but 'not the slightest trace' found. Typical Melvin in other words. We know that not the slightest trace was observed before Voller, but only because it would presumably have been recorded. What is not clear is whether anyone had looked for it, or how closely, or where Melvin got Dr. Baxendale's 'line-by-line' from and whether that meant every line of every page. Expensive, since he agreed to waive his fee in return for Robert Smith agreeing to keep his reports out of the papers.

Melvin's examination in October 1993 was indeed 'limited', if the diary was opened at just one page for attendees of the book launch to see. Even more limited if it was displayed for people to look but not touch, as is my understanding. And where is the evidence that Melvin thought back then to look for signs of bronzing, which he was very unlikely to have spotted in any case under those conditions, if the signs Voller only just managed to observe 2 years later were already there?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

If we translate the post in response to mine about Voller into English from the current Evasivespeak in which it is written I think what we are being told is that the authors of Inside Story made a mistake and that the rebuttal by Voller was on 30 October 1995, not 20 October.

The 'rebuttal' in question, in case readers are confused, was of Mike's claim to have written the diary in Diamine ink. Voller examined the diary on 30th October 1995 and gave his opinions while examining it. If David really expected me to grovel and explain how a figure 3 could have been typed as a figure 2 by mistake, at a later stage of our book, and not picked up at the final proofreading stage, maybe he could explain how he totally ballsed up the relevant page number, while supposedly staring at our own grievous error. Good grief.

Love,

Dr. Caz [if it was good enough for Dr. Feelgood]
X

[David Orsam]

I wasn't aware that publishing a book involved the same standards as typing a quick post on an internet forum but at least we have admission of sorts at the second attempt.

Now, as for the bronzing that's an interesting issue. Here is what Voller said at the meeting on the 20th, no make that the 30th October 1995:

"This bronzing effect is a chemical process which is not understood...you only get pronounced bronzing where the ink is a blue-black that is to say when the ink is not nigrosine. With a nigrosine base the bronzing is usually less obvious. The dyestuff here is clearly nigrosine..."

So he is saying here, is he not, that if this Diary were genuinely old and written with a non-nigrosine based ink, the bronzing should be very pronounced. And he is saying that it is BECAUSE the ink contains nigrosine that there is so little bronzing. Isn't that right?

But I thought the Diary defenders tell us that there was no nigrosine in the ink because Leeds found no nitrogen in 1994.

So what is it? Is it a nigrosine based ink or not?

[rjpalmer]

Caz. I am no chemist, nor do I pretend to be, but there are a surprising number of abstracts on the internet about measuring chloroacetamides using gas chromatography, because these nasty chemicals are used in pesticides and have been linked to cancer, so scientists want to be able to accurately detect them in soil and water. These abstracts contain a noticeable amount of "hand-wringing" about the difficultly of accurately detecting certain types of chloroacetamide. For intance:

"There is no established method to measure 2-chloroacetamide and very little information on its analysis. An attempt to measure 2-chloroacetamide in solution and in soil extract by gas chromatography with electron-capture detector (GC-ECD) gave an inconsistent multipeak pattern that was not useful for even semiquantitative measurements."

--"Gas Chromatographic Determination of Chloroacetamide Herbicides in Plants and Soil." Article in Journal of Chromatography A 455:391-395

Let's repeat that together: "not useful in semi-quantitative measurements."

Chloroacetamide is volatile and it degrades in light. I am not referring to the amount of water in Diamine ink. I am suggesting once the water evaporates and the ink is dry, the chloroacetamide will slowly leach out. I think this is what Eastaugh meant when he was pondering what would be 'left' of this volatile substance and the difficulties in accurately detecting it.


As for the Leeds report, my understanding is that the atomic number for nitrogen is so low that it may be difficult to detect in an SEM/EDX analysis. So that result is to be expected. But Leeds should have found sodium and they didn't. (Eastaugh readily found it and listed it as a 'minor constituent' of the ink). This alone puts the Leeds report in grave doubt. If they couldn't find sodium, why should any reasonable observer be impressed by their failure to find chloroacetamide...on the second run, that is? Yet it is held up as some sort of antidote to Dr. Simpson's findings. Further, it appears that Voller had the same misgivings about the type of tests that Leeds conducted as Melvin Harris did when he contacted Smith about replicating the AFI tests with an independent lab. So, as fond as the Diary camp is at stating that the ink is definitely not Diamine, I believe this is far from certain.

[David Orsam]

"I don't claim Mike was being honest when he claimed he got the diary from a pal who used to drink in the Saddle."

So there we have it from the horse's mouth. Mike did NOT receive the diary from a drinking friend from the Saddle called Eddie Lyons. At least we've finally got that one sorted.