Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[caz]

Hi Caz,

That's certainly something I wasn't aware of...that it had been determined that the 'diary' was not in Anne's handwriting, or apparently any of the others mentioned. Do you remember who did the test and made that determination?

Hi Cris,

Nobody who has examined the diary and seen examples of handwriting from any of these individuals [apart from my cat, who has been very reluctant to produce any of his own work] has ever, to my knowledge, been able and willing to stick their neck out and say yes, they can detect signs that Anne, or Mike, or Tony, or Billy, or Gerard penned the diary. Nobody.

Examples from all the above, with the exception of Mike and Monty, can be seen in Ripper Diary, for any amateurs like me who fancy giving this another go. I have seen more of Mike's work than I really wanted or needed to. The poor chap was simply incapable of distinguishing between uPPEr AnD lowEr cAsE letters, and the less said about his spelling, grammar and punctuation skills the better.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

That would be interesting to know, however I don't think that the diary is written in someone's natural hand in any case.

Hi Gareth,

Haven't you also said it would take some considerable effort and skill to write consistently in a disguised hand over 63 pages?

Has any professional examiner observed signs of either deliberate disguise or even a suspicious inconsistency in the handwriting?

And would any of the usual suspects have been able to disguise their own handwriting so thoroughly over those 63 pages that nobody has yet detected a single underlying similarity or characteristic of the available examples? Or is it possible that one or more of the examples themselves are in a second successfully disguised hand?

You'd know something about this, wouldn't you, from your work with the George Hutchinson and 'Toppy' signatures? And not everyone agreed with your conclusions, did they?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I have no idea what the significance of the observation that Caroline went down to London in June 1992 is supposed to be. Nor what response to that is awaited. Caroline going to London in 1992 seems to me in no more need of explanation than her parents allowing her to speak to researchers.

Well if you think Caroline must have remembered in the March that Tony had died the previous summer, and you also think the guardbook only arrived in Goldie Street at the very end of March, you must also believe her parents got her word perfect on the physically impossible 'Dad pestering Tony' story pretty damned quickly, since they let her loose in London just a couple of months later, where she might have been asked to remember all sorts. Or were they not worried about her getting their 'story' arse backwards from their point of view, but in the right order chronologically, by putting Tony's death months before the diary said its first hello?

You might be better off letting go of your argument that Caroline would have known when Tony died, in relation to when she first saw her Dad with the guardbook [because you daren't admit the slightest possibility of her simply confusing the names of two of her Dad's drinking buddies]. It's not working for you.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The latest post on the Antiques Roadshow strikes me as garbled and incoherent. As far as I can make out there seems to be some suggestion that I have changed my position or something, which is not the case.

Here's what I said about the Antiques Roadshow in my first post on the subject (#1418):

"If, therefore, someone did actually claim to have seen a feature on gold watches on the Antiques Roadshow at some point in the weeks prior to 3 June 1993, or indeed any episode of Antiques Roadshow in that period, they cannot possibly have been telling the truth."

Then to RJ Palmer shortly afterwards I said (#1421):

"So it was absolutely impossible for them to have been chatting about a recently seen television programme which led Albert to bring the watch in."

Those points are as true today as when I first made them. To repeat: The discussion about the watch could not have been "triggered" by a recent episode of Antiques Roadshow.

That strikes me as a very important point. It's natural for work colleagues to discuss a programme they saw on television the previous evening, or perhaps even a few days earlier, especially over the weekend, but odd and unnatural for them to be discussing a programme that must have been broadcast at least six weeks earlier (and possibly much, much, earlier than that, who knows?)

But it's a chicken and egg question, if you have no idea which might have come up first: a particular episode of the Antiques Roadshow, which Albert and his workmates had seen and were discussing; or the subject of gold, or gold watches, which then reminded someone of a particular episode he had seen, which had no doubt featured an expert's opinion. You have plumped quite indiscriminately - and predictably - for the former option, so you can argue that any such episode must have been shown at least six weeks earlier, and couldn't therefore have prompted Albert to take his own example into work. You might be right, but equally you could be wrong.

The point is that this long gap is entirely consistent with my theory that the discussion in the college about 18 carat gold watches was a blatant pretext to induce Albert to bring his watch into work. It will be recalled that the initial response to this was that the BBC people must have somehow been involved! But they could only have been involved if there had been a recent broadcast of Antiques Roadshow involving a gold watch. That was what we were being told although now, having learnt that there was no such programme, that line of attempted mockery is abandoned.

The 'long gap' [six weeks or longer] would be equally consistent with the account given by John White, who had worked with Albert for 12 years. He recalled the first time the watch was mentioned: 'It all stemmed from the Antiques Roadshow... we were talking about gold and Albert said he had this watch; he said it was 18 carat gold and one of our group said they didn't have 18 carat gold in Victorian times. So Albert brought the watch in to show us... We could see the scratches but we couldn't make them out. The light was bad so we said we'd take it over to the Science and Technology block...' [page 241 of Shirley's 1998 paperback]

Assuming 'one of our group' got his wires crossed about 18 carat gold from something he had heard quite a while ago on the tv programme, everything is consistent with Albert telling his colleagues about his watch and not being 'induced' to bring it in on anyone's 'blatant pretext'. He brought it in to prove they did have 18 carat gold in Victorian times and that his colleague was mistaken.

But if not a recent programme when was it broadcast? And why were the security guards discussing it on that day?

See above. There needn't have been a 'discussion' of the programme, if it was only brought up by one of the group because he didn't believe Albert could have a Victorian watch in 18 carat gold.

It surely goes without saying that one of the reasons I am suggesting Albert was induced to bring the watch into work was because it was known by the scamster that there was a microscope available. It was part of the plan!

And of course, one of the employees, where microscopes were available, was bound to be the proud owner of a Victorian gold pocket watch, which could not have proved more perfect 'for forgery purposes' if your hoaxer had been granted three wishes to make it so. It was bought just a year earlier, from a jeweller who was bound to know nothing about its previous owners, whereabouts or history, as it was bound to have been bought from a complete stranger calling into the shop.

Come on David. Think.

Think.

Love,

Caz
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[Sam Flynn]

Haven't you also said it would take some considerable effort and skill to write consistently in a disguised hand over 63 pages?

Someone evidently did, Caz. Much of the lettering is evidently contrived, and I'm not sure the writing is fully consistent throughout.

[David Orsam]

and I'm not sure the writing is fully consistent throughout.

This was a point made by Dr Baxendale, according to Inside Story (p.13). Dr Baxendale, a forensic document examiner, stated that most of the diary was written in a looped cursive style but he isolated a number of instances of script style writing where plain letters were written separately.

[David Orsam]

Once again in this thread we go round in circles.

I have already said on this forum loud and clear (and it has been responded to) that any forger of any diary is unlikely to have written the diary in their own handwriting. They would surely have disguised their handwriting when doing so, especially to try and make it look as Victorian as possible.

So the fact that the handwriting of the diary is or may not be identifiable to any particular individual cannot possibly rule that person out as being the author of the diary.

It really is that simple. So why I am being told that the diary is not in Anne's handwriting without any account being taken of what I have said on this matter in the past is unfathomable.

[David Orsam]

To say that I have been happily ignoring the evidence that the diary is not in the handwriting of any named suspects, including Maybrick, is untrue. Moreover, it is knowingly untrue and, therefore, not to put a fine point on it, a complete lie.

Not only have I posted on more than one occasion that the forger of the diary is likely to have disguised his or her handwriting (a very simple point that for some reason is not absorbed) but, in respect of the possibility that the diary was written by Maybrick, I have referred to the claim by those who are supposed to understand handwriting that psychopaths can have multiple styles of handwriting and that I am in no position to contradict such a claim; so that if Maybrick was Jack the Ripper he could have different handwriting for different occasions.

Far from ignoring the point, therefore, I have addressed it more than once.

To try, in obviously desperate fashion, to link the way Simon Wood blithely ignored the evidence about Maybrick not being in his sick bed on 3rd May 1889 with anything I have said on this forum is really quite pathetic and means that someone is now just reduced to lying about me in miserably abject fashion.

[David Orsam]

To put some meat on the bones of my previous post. Here is what I first said on the subject of the handwriting back in November 2016:

"I would have assumed that whoever forged the diary would have had least made some attempt not to do so in their own handwriting and to have made an attempt at disguise. Am I wrong in so assuming?" (Incontrovertible thread, #2049)

At this point I was in dialogue with the very person who now laughably claims I am happy to ignore the handwriting evidence and, a few days later, I posted:

"Mike says in his affidavit that his wife actually wrote the words in the diary so his own handwriting skills are not that important. I have no idea whether Ann Graham could have disguised her handwriting or not. But if she could then it is perhaps not significant that her handwriting might be different to that in the diary." (Incontrovertible thread, #2056)

In this thread I have repeatedly returned to the subject, saying (#206):

"any forger who managed to produce the Diary of the Jack the Ripper is not very likely to have written it in his or her own undisguised handwriting (durr!)"

In the same post, responding to the point that the Diary is not in Maybrick's handwriting I said:

"As for the point that the diary is not in Maybrick's handwriting, I don't recall ever doing any research into this issue or telling anyone anything about it. But, yes, of course the fact that the handwriting is not Maybrick's is important but we have been told that psychopaths or sociopaths or whatever can have multiple styles of handwriting. I don’t have sufficient knowledge of graphology to contradict such a statement and feel I have to accept it as true. That being so, the handwriting can hardly be the clincher that the Diary was not written by Maybrick."

In #322 I posted:

"It is said that the handwriting in the diary does not match the handwriting of Mike and Anne but that supposes that the author of the diary would have written it out in his or her own handwriting which seems to me like a daft thought."

Then this in #333:

"A forensic document examiner might be able to analyse handwritten text or signatures to see if someone has been attempting to mimic someone else's handwriting (due to hesitancy in pen strokes), although the fact of the matter is that this is very difficult to do and forgeries of signatures cannot always be detected by any means, but to assume that such an examiner is able to tell whether handwriting on a document has been disguised is almost certainly a false assumption."

And again in #904 (in a post to John G):

"the author of the diary is hardly likely to have written it in their own normal handwriting anyway."

That's not all because in the Incontrovertible thread it was said by the world's leading expert on handwriting matters that:

"Because it's not in Anne's handwriting and there is no evidence that she'd have been able to disguise it well enough and thoroughly enough to fool experts like Sue Iremonger?" (#2664)

The reliance here on a claim of "no evidence" will be noted. It's a favourite tactic where evidence for anything is absent.

So I replied to the above post by saying (#2673):

"Equally, there is no evidence that Anne could not have disguised her handwriting is there?"

The response (#2782) was

"If you can keep wheeling Baxendale out because he considered it 'likely' that the diary was not penned before 1945, I can repeat that Sue Iremonger did not see Anne's disguised hand in the diary any more than she saw Maybrick's disguised hand there."

I will discuss in a separate post what Sue Ironmonger saw or did not see but for now it should be noted that the above post was addressed to me by someone who claims I have been happy to ignore the evidence that the diary was not written in Anne's handwriting even though it has been the subject of much discussion involving me. This is why I say the claim is a lie and known to be a lie.

[David Orsam]

As we have seen, the world's leading expert has told us that there is "no evidence" that Anne would have been able to disguise her handwriting well enough "to fool experts like Sue Ironmonger". (We haven't been told, incidentally, which other experts, if any, were ever provided with samples of Anne's handwriting so perhaps that should have read "to fool an expert like Sue Ironmonger").

We have also been told that, "Sue Iremonger did not see Anne's disguised hand in the diary any more than she saw Maybrick's disguised hand there."

So where do we find Sue Iremonger's report on the subject? Err, well I have no idea.

If we want to know what Sue Iremonger actually said about the handwriting it seems we have to make various assumptions and presumptions. For the world's leading expert on the subject told us this on 30 June 2008:

"According to Keith (for what that’s now worth here in Daft Land) Sue Iremonger was provided quite early on with various handwriting samples that included Anne’s. If she noticed any resemblance at the time she evidently didn’t think it was significant enough to mention or to request further samples."

So far from it being the case that Sue Iremonger is known to have said that she was able to rule out the Diary having been written by Anne Barrett, all we are told is that if she did notice any resemblance she "evidently" did not think it was significant enough to mention it or request further samples. Sounds to me like someone who doesn't really know what Sue Iremonger concluded.

And here we have pretty much the same thing said six years later (on 28 March 2014):

"I understood from my co-author Keith Skinner many years ago that the reputable document examiner Sue Iremonger had been provided with various handwriting samples (including Maybrick's, Mike's and Anne's) very early on, and she determined that the writing in the diary did not match the Maybrick samples. I presume she found no more of a resemblance with the Barrett samples because she did not say otherwise, and nobody has ever suggested the remotest likeness there."

It is presumed that there was no resemblance with Anne's handwriting by someone who doesn't even appear to have seen Sue Iremonger's actual conclusions!

All it seems can be stated as a fact is that Anne Barrett's handwriting does not match the handwriting in the Diary. But if the author of the Diary successfully disguised their handwriting then that tells us nothing.

Where is the conclusion from a single expert who has examined the Diary that it could not have been written in a disguised hand? Where, indeed, is the conclusion from a single expert that it could not have been written in a disguised hand by Anne Barrett?

Given that Mike claimed in his 1995 affidavit that his wife transcribed the Diary I am going to make an assumption of my own which is that if a single expert had concluded that Anne couldn't have written the Diary in a disguised hand we would certainly have been told about it by now.

[David Orsam]

We keep being told that Mike claimed to be a member of MI5 and to have foiled an IRA attack etc. but no actual details of these claims have ever been provided or the context in which they were made. I really have no idea if he was joking, or speaking tongue in cheek, when and if he said these things.

Anyway, being a liar with an active imagination does not make someone mentally incompetent so that really is the end of that.

[David Orsam]

We are told that Mike's known behaviour was not "particularly rational" (whatever that means) yet at other times we are told that he does behave rationally.

Here is what we were told was Mike's thought process when he suppposedly received the Diary from Eddie on 9 March 1992 (#49)

"For Mike to do anything with it, he has to come up with some other story. He thinks – and hits on the idea quite quickly, remembering another pal, who used to drink in The Saddle and even lived on the same road as the electrician, who has been dead for around six months. Perfect. He simply backdates his acquisition of the diary to before August 1991, so he can have a housebound Tony thrust it upon him in gratitude - a funny little reward - for the errands he could feasibly have been running for him. "Do something with it, Bongo, but I'll say no more so it's no use asking." Death comes not long afterwards, relieving Tony from Mike's persistent questions, which naturally he refused to answer to the end. If Tony's daughters are highly sceptical [and they were], at least they can't prove it didn't happen."

All very rational it seems to me.

Earlier (in #24) we were told that Mike sold the Diary to Robert Smith "to protect his very substantial future royalties, which would have been in peril had Feldman bought the diary from Mike for a helluva lot more than £1, but for considerably less than he could expect from the royalties if he stayed with Robert and Shirley.. That sounds like a remarkably rational decision from someone who has never been known to behave particularly rationally.

When it comes to Mike's thought process as to whether to accept Feldman's offer and agree to give Dodd 5% in return for Eddie admitting he found the Diary in Battlecrease, we are told (#446):

"Mike was in a precarious situation, whether the diary was a recent fake, which could be exposed at any moment, causing the book to be pulled and possible arrests made, or whether Eddie had stolen it from the house and Mike now risked being exposed, not as the wonderful chap who solved the ripper murders, but as a shabby little receiver of stolen property after the big time. In the former situation a false Battlecrease provenance which couldn't be disproved might have been worth grasping with both hands. "Tony must have got it from somewhere. Why not the house? Even Dodd is open to the possibility." But the price of a real, supportable Battlecrease provenance would arguably have been too high to pay."

The entire argument is made on the basis that Mike was totally rational.

Yet Mike is always irrational in his behaviour when doing things that the Diary Defenders find hard if not impossible to explain but which are, by pure chance, consistent with the Diary being a modern fake.

[David Orsam]

I don't think I need add much about Caroline. Given that she said nothing to anyone in June 1992 there is nothing to explain. For all I know, had she been asked, she would have said nothing whatsoever. So no, I don’t need to believe that her parents got her "word perfect". As I have said before, the idea that Caroline confused Fat Eddie with the deceased Tony Devereux is nonsense of the highest order. It is a classic example of an argument that does not work.

[David Orsam]

All I think I need to do is repeat what Melvin Harris said about Caroline:

"Feldman (p128) tells us that in February 1993 he met Anne together with Mike and their daughter Caroline. At one point Caroline was cross-examined by Paul Begg and Martin Howells. They "were relentless" admits Feldman, and they forced out of her statements that seemed to confirm Mike's story. But did they? Or was the girl going along with a pre-rehearsed family tale? Feldman thinks not: "Caroline told the truth; that is all a kid of eleven can do.” Really? Try telling that yarn to any experienced schoolteacher!"

[David Orsam]

'It all stemmed from the Antiques Roadshow... we were talking about gold and Albert said he had this watch; he said it was 18 carat gold and one of our group said they didn't have 18 carat gold in Victorian times. So Albert brought the watch in to show us... We could see the scratches but we couldn't make them out. The light was bad so we said we'd take it over to the Science and Technology block..."

You know what, highlighting a part of a quote doesn't change the meaning of that quote.

What John White was saying was very clear:

'It all stemmed from the Antiques Roadshow...'

Does it help if I put it into bold?

'It all stemmed from the Antiques Roadshow...'

So him subsequently saying "we were talking about gold" means that the topic of gold obviously arose out of a mention of the Antiques Roadshow. So the mention of the Antiques Roadshow came first. Which raises the question of why someone had mentioned an episode of the Antiques Roadshow which had not recently been shown on television.

I'm not going to repeat everything I've said about this. The point I have making has simply been missed or deliberately misunderstood. I wasn't arguing anything was impossible. The key thing I said was this:

"It's natural for work colleagues to discuss a programme they saw on television the previous evening, or perhaps even a few days earlier, especially over the weekend, but odd and unnatural for them to be discussing a programme that must have been broadcast at least six weeks earlier (and possibly much, much, earlier than that, who knows?)"

As that has not been answered my point must remain as originally written and regarded as unchallenged.