Did Anderson Know

[caz]

Caroline Morris

I'm sorry, but I really don't have the time to waste in responding to such nonsense.

Can't you go and make trouble somewhere else?

I could, Chris. But you don't get off that easily.

I just checked back over your little discussion with Martin and confirmed my first impressions of it.

What you did (and I’m not suggesting you did it consciously - I don’t believe it occurred to you) was to lift Martin’s ‘Nobody with any scholarly training’ remarks out of their context - which was always the suggestion of forging, tampering or doctoring, pretty obviously by someone from a later era than Swanson himself - and you then sought to compare his remarks with the caveat from Davies about the possibility of different authors.

Your purpose, as you had to clarify for Martin at one point, because he was understandably confused, was to express your dislike of:

…attempts to belittle those who do think there is room for doubt - who evidently include Dr Davies - on the basis of Martin Fido's supposedly superior "scholarly training"

You also took exception to what you saw to be:

…personal attacks on those who honestly consider that there is room for doubt about the matter. I don't think it's appropriate to describe that view as "unbelievable poppycock" - or to say that it could not be held by anyone with "scholarly training" - particularly as that is the view held by the only document examiner who has looked at the marginalia and whose conclusions have been made public.

Immediately before and after you posted these words, Martin emphasised that his ‘poppycock’ comments were directed solely at anyone trying to suggest there was evidence of forgery, tampering or doctoring:

...Of course the work can be repeated if any doubt is felt, but nobody has turned up a smidgeon of evidence to suggest that tampering or forgery has anything to do with the problems of the marginalia, and it is a foolish waste of time to embark on any thinking that hopes to lead off from such an idea...

You also managed to strip the ‘different authors’ caveat of its strictly Victorian context (again, I’m not suggesting you did it consciously, or to mislead) while discussing it with Jeff and Martin:

…an expert opinion that the author is "most likely to be Swanson", but that the differences between the different sections "may just have been the small differences between different authors…

The evaluation by Christopher Davies, which I quoted earlier, states that the differences between the different sections "may just have been the small differences between different authors". He does not say that he considers this likely, but evidently he considers that it may be the explanation for the observed differences.

This caveat, that different authors ‘may just’ be indicated, is the only alternative we have from Davies to ‘Swanson only’. It also relates, quite specifically, to authors producing very similar handwriting on account of being schooled in the same era. His words could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a nod in the direction of the more recent ‘tampering’, which Martin was referring to all along as ‘poppycock’.

If Davies left room for doubt about that matter, the only thing that Martin can fairly be accused of is failing to pick up on it. He certainly wasn’t belittling the man or launching a personal attack on him for a view he didn’t even appear to be hinting at. I would hope that Martin is also well aware that a forensic document examiner's first priority is to assess the document itself and not let even the most scholarly assurances of an impeccable provenance influence that assessment. If that's the case, Martin would not suggest that a specialist like Davies was a fool for saying he could not be completely certain about his 'most likely Swanson' conclusion, based on the handwriting alone. The best scientists will never claim complete certainty about anything, even if every non-scientific factor supports them.

Instead of realising your mistake, you went on to accuse Martin of missing your point, and repeated the complaint about him discounting opinions that differed from his own on the basis of being a superior scholar. I’d still like to see where Davies is meant to have differed fundamentally from Fido, either regarding the quality of their individual 'training' or their views on the whole ‘tampering’ issue.

Love,

Caz
X

[Chris]

Caroline Morris

Frankly, I have no idea what your problem is. But I think you should seriously consider getting some professional advice about it.

[Natalie Severn]

While not wanting to join in the Davies/Fido trajectory, I am very surprised at the lack of response by Mr Fido to some earlier postings from Stewart Evans which contained a revelation about Robert Anderson ,in particular his habit of pilfering from official documents, including private correspondence that belonged to Scotland Yard.
My own response to this eye-opener regarding Anderson"s "extra mural activities" is that Anderson could not therefore, have had quite the scrupulous regard for truth ,honesty and uprightness that Mr Fido and Mr Begg would have us believe.I am ofcourse aware that both authors allow for a degree of "professional" estrangement from the truth,regarding Robert Anderson, it being par for the course in his role as a spymaster and master of "disinformation",but this new "evidence"from Stewart, points to a man who was apparently in the habit of "blurring the edges of propriety" in this particular compartment of "personal behaviour " in his extra curricular life.
Norma

[Chris]

I will just point out that Caroline Morris seems to have forgotten (despite the fact that I have only just pointed it out to her) that both sets of annotations in question are initialled "D.S.S.".

The suggestion that they could have been written by someone other than Donald Sutherland Swanson, and yet not have been the result of "forgery, tampering or doctoring" at least has the merit of novelty. Perhaps Caroline Morris believes that another police officer with the initials "D.S.S." wrote them in Swanson's copy of Anderson's autobiography and initialled them, with entirely innocent motives!

But perhaps I am just inviting a twenty-page essay on the technical difference between forgery and fakery.

[Jeff Leahy]

While not wanting to join in the Davies/Fido trajectory, I am very surprised at the lack of response by Mr Fido to some earlier postings from Stewart Evans which contained a revelation about Robert Anderson ,in particular his habit of pilfering from official documents, including private correspondence that belonged to Scotland Yard.
My own response to this eye-opener regarding Anderson"s "extra mural activities" is that Anderson could not therefore, have had quite the scrupulous regard for truth ,honesty and uprightness that Mr Fido and Mr Begg would have us believe.I am ofcourse aware that both authors allow for a degree of "professional" estrangement from the truth,regarding Robert Anderson, it being par for the course in his role as a spymaster and master of "disinformation",but this new "evidence"from Stewart, points to a man who was apparently in the habit of "blurring the edges of propriety" in this particular compartment of "personal behaviour " in his extra curricular life.
Norma

As stewart has pionted out Martin comes and qoes..i'm sure he will be back..patience..

With reguards to correspondance..it has been poonted out to everyone that this was common practice at the time...trying to judge people of 1888..by the standards of 1968, 1978, 1988, 1998, or 2008 is piontless..

We are dealing with history..something Martin Fido clearly understands..

Not, a modern day witch hunt..

Hand writing analysis is not Science it is an art form..practiced by experienced professionals..much like Peter Bowers paper analysis..

Its not scientific evidence...it's profession opinion....

There are still letters conected to the Mormon church that no one knows if original or not because Hoffman was such a good forger...

No one can tell...

So hand writing analysis is Just Alcheme, not sceince..

So Fido's comments about provenance remain, the key, and basically true.

I still wouldnt bet me daughters life..however given her last shopping expedition i might now consider it..

Pirate

[Glenn Lauritz Andersson]

Can we please leave the tiresome issue of the provenance of the Swanson marginalia and get back to Anderson. I believe Stewart was trying to get the thread back on track but obviously to no avail.
Although the Swanson marginalia is one of the key factors that 'supports' Anderson's claims it still leaves us with the problematic fact that several other police officials didn't agree with Anderson.
And once again - while it has been assumed by the Kosminski supporters that Swanson in his marginalia confirms Anderson's facts about the Ripper's identity, this really shouldn't be taken for granted. All Swanson seems to be doing is correcting or elaborating on Anderson's information about the suspect that was taken in for identification - he never actually confirms that he as Jack the Ripper!

So surely what this thread is all about is Anderson's credibility and character.

All the best

[caz]

Hi Glenn,

And there was me thinking it was all about the credibility and character of someone in Swanson's family.

I will just point out that Caroline Morris seems to have forgotten (despite the fact that I have only just pointed it out to her) that both sets of annotations in question are initialled "D.S.S.".

The suggestion that they could have been written by someone other than Donald Sutherland Swanson, and yet not have been the result of "forgery, tampering or doctoring" at least has the merit of novelty. Perhaps Caroline Morris believes that another police officer with the initials "D.S.S." wrote them in Swanson's copy of Anderson's autobiography and initialled them, with entirely innocent motives!

But perhaps I am just inviting a twenty-page essay on the technical difference between forgery and fakery.

Hi Chris,

I have only just now seen this response of yours as I believed you when you said you didn’t have time for one and I have only just returned to ‘Police Officials’.

Not sure what this is all about. Where did I suggest that someone other than Swanson could have used his initials with entirely innocent motives?

Did Martin Fido have anything other than modern forging, tampering or doctoring in mind when making his comments about scholarly training and not a shred of evidence being turned up? I didn’t think so from the context.

Did Dr Davies supply any evidence, or even so much as suggest that anyone other than Swanson or, just possibly, someone schooled in the same era as Swanson, could have been responsible? Again, I didn’t think so.

You suggested that Martin must have Dr Davies down as an unscholarly buffoon. But where was your evidence that Martin had contemporary tampering in mind, or that Dr Davies considered modern tampering was any more likely than Martin does?

You are more than welcome to have another bash at producing the evidence, but if you can’t it’s hardly my problem.

Love,

Caz
X

[Chris]

Caroline Morris

Look. This is really simple.

As I have said several times, what I took exception to was Martin Fido's statement:
"As for the suggestion that the Swanson marginalia might have been forged or doctored, it is unbelievable poppycock."

Whereas quite clearly Davies thought the marginalia might have been written by someone other than Swanson.

Your response was to try to draw a distinction between being "forged or doctored" on one hand and being written by someone other than Swanson on another.

As you surely understood, the point of my message of 12 August, which you have just responded to, was that this is a nonsensical distinction. The marginalia are initialled "D.S.S." and from internal evidence they purport to have been written by a senior police officer involved in the Ripper investigation. If they were written by someone other than Swanson, then necessarily they were "forged or doctored".

I hope that's clear now.

[caz]

Your response was to try to draw a distinction between being "forged or doctored" on one hand and being written by someone other than Swanson on another.

No Chris. My intention was never to try and draw any such distinction.

Your intention was very clearly - and is still - to apply Martin's comments directly to Davies, so that the former appeared to be accusing the latter of 'unbelievable poppycock', by removing the context in which they were both writing and reducing everything right down to the two bald 'might have been' sentences you use here.

I will apologise unreservedly if I have misread the situation, but unfortunately, from what I gathered from one of Martin's posts on the 'More Questions Than Answers' thread, he lost a lengthy response he had prepared for this one and didn't have time to write it again. I don't know if he planned to comment directly on our discussion, but it's a pity he could not have made just a brief statement to clarify whether or not he was happy to rope Davies in with anyone who has voiced concerns about the annotations not being all Swanson's own work.

What Martin did post, on the other thread, was this:

Chris - you're sitting on an unnecessary fence. Nobody who has met the Swansons has ever imagined that they could or would have forged the entries. Only Stewart, of all those who have looked at the original volume and other examples of Swanson's memos, notebooks and marginalia, has ever thought that there was anything to suggest that the authorship needed checking. And as the end result of his suspicions and checking, he too concludes that Swanson wrote them. So where is the space for this "possibility" you want to allow for?

Nothing there to indicate that Martin thinks any of the observations made by Davies amounted to a serious suggestion of forgery by anyone down the line of ownership from Swanson.

The theoretical possibility Davies alluded to was that because any two Victorians' normal handwriting may just pass for one another's, by virtue of their education, such a scenario in this case could not be completely ruled out.

However, Davies makes no suggestion that if anyone other than Swanson wrote the later annotations and added Swanson's initials (a no-brainer that this would have been forgery, doctoring, tampering, fakery - whichever term you fancy) it would have necessitated the deliberate disguising of their own hand and the wilful copying of Swanson's. In short, only Victorian forgers whose normal handwriting, coincidentally, could pass for the victim's need apply for the post. Davies leaves it to others to assess the chances that someone other than Swanson 'might have been' responsible on that basis, and that basis alone.

Davies naturally also leaves the question of provenance to others, since he cannot be expected to know anything about the book's chain of ownership, or who had access to it apart from Swanson himself. I seriously doubt that Martin would expect Davies to have taken provenance into account, or would think he was even hinting at the possibility that someone down the line of ownership from Swanson 'might have been' responsible. And that appears to be the only context in which Martin has made his remarks and in which others, like you and Stewart, have responded to him:

I made no libellous comment about anyone, and the only person my remarks could have been construed as referring to was Jim Swanson, and he by then had passed away and could not be subject of any libel action.

I'm sorry, but all this boils down to is that you, personally, don't believe that the people concerned would have faked the marginalia.

This is patently not what Davies was suggesting when he allowed for the outside chance of a Victorian forger whose handwriting could pass for Swanson's. And you are patently not including any unknown Victorian forgers in 'the people concerned' here.

That is the only disagreement I have had with you on this subject, and you will not be surprised to learn that I wholeheartedly agree with almost all of your comments on the other thread relating to provenance or the lack of it.

As you say, a great provenance and good character references are no guarantees, without additional evidence, that nobody could have set up the perfect sting and introduced a fake at some point in the recorded chain of ownership.

Likewise, no provenance in sight and bad characters everywhere you look do not by themselves make something a fake, otherwise nothing of any value would get nicked, because without a record of its previous ownership it would be considered a worthless fake, and armed with such a record the thief would quickly be arrested if he tried to get a decent price for it.

By Martin's reasoning, a work of art can be dismissed as an obvious fake if found by someone of bad character in the attic of an old lady whose house is being cleared after her death, and who had no record of it and didn't realise its value. The thief obviously couldn't say how he really came by it, but it wouldn't make it any less likely to be genuine, if he stupidly claimed it had fallen off the back of a lorry, or came out with some old guff about his great auntie being given it by a very generous and grateful employer.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I meant to add this, Chris, but my editing time is up:

If we apply Martin's reasoning to the Swanson annotations, and the old boy had left the book in his attic, and had no family to pass it on to, and a thief had pinched it when clearing out the house and offered it to a newspaper, claiming he had got it from a dead friend, I suppose that would have made the same annotations virtually certain to have been faked.

Love,

Caz
X

[Chris]

Caroline Morris

Well, this is where I came in.

Davies mentions the possibility that the marginalia might have been written by a contemporary of Swanson, but he doesn't - in the very brief extracts from his comments that we have - say that they couldn't have been written by a modern faker. And naturally what he does say doesn't imply that - that's a matter of simple logic.

As I said above, however much you try to twist the facts and rewrite history, this is actually very simple.

[Chris]

Your response was to try to draw a distinction between being "forged or doctored" on one hand and being written by someone other than Swanson on another.

No Chris. My intention was never to try and draw any such distinction.

Oh, and just in case you had really forgotten having done this (and to be fair I suppose it was nearly two months ago), take another look at your post of 12 August, where this is precisely what you try to do:
This caveat, that different authors ‘may just’ be indicated, is the only alternative we have from Davies to ‘Swanson only’. It also relates, quite specifically, to authors producing very similar handwriting on account of being schooled in the same era. His words could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be seen as a nod in the direction of the more recent ‘tampering’, which Martin was referring to all along as ‘poppycock’.

Of course, the phrase "more recent" here is your own invention. Martin Fido obviously didn't limit his "poppycock" remarks to the suggestion of "recent" tampering. And if you were in any doubt about this before, you can't be after reading his contributions of the last few days!

[Voyeur]

I've gotta ask you this: Anderson declares in Blackwood's Magazine (1910) that they did, indeed, solve the Ripper case. They didn't publicize it because, "no public benefit would result in such a course, and the old traditions of my department would suffer."

What the heck did he mean? How could knowing the case was solved NOT benefit a public that might still be in fear of the Ripper?

[Jeff Leahy]

I think you have two possible alternatives: Either Anderson knew something and hinted at the truth. Or Anderson made it up because he was embarrassed by not having caught Jack the Ripper.

So your views on sir Robert Anderson are fairly critical to your perspective on the case. Clearly the only expert on Victorian Literature and on Sir Robert Anderson, Martin Fido, doesn’t believe he would have lied or mislead people on such a matter.

Clearly a number of well-known posters and authorities on the case disagree with Martins position. Which is why this is such a hotly debated area of Ripperology.

My opinion for what its worth is that the Marginalia is almost certainly genuine and appears to confirm that Anderson told the truth.

Of course whether or not that ID was of the real Jack the Ripper is another question all together.

All the Best

Pirate Jack

[Voyeur]

I think you have two possible alternatives: Either Anderson knew something and hinted at the truth. Or Anderson made it up because he was embarrassed by not having caught Jack the Ripper.

So your views on sir Robert Anderson are fairly critical to your perspective on the case. Clearly the only expert on Victorian Literature and on Sir Robert Anderson, Martin Fido, doesn’t believe he would have lied or mislead people on such a matter.

Clearly a number of well-known posters and authorities on the case disagree with Martins position. Which is why this is such a hotly debated area of Ripperology.

My opinion for what its worth is that the Marginalia is almost certainly genuine and appears to confirm that Anderson told the truth.

Of course whether or not that ID was of the real Jack the Ripper is another question all together.

All the Best

Pirate Jack

Thanks for the response. I myself am actually quite intrigued by the Kosminski angle. The Cohen thing is interesting too but I just don't know.