Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[Kaz]

Caz appears to have hit a nerve.

+1


Poor David, digging himself into a deeper and deeper pit with all of his hypothesising

[Henry Flower]

+1


Poor David, digging himself into a deeper and deeper pit with all of his hypothesising

Kaz, do you have any research to contribute? or reasoning? or anything at all, other than throwing what you imagine are cutting little asides at people who do contribute research and reasoning?

No?

[Henry Flower]

Caz appears to have hit a nerve.

Either that, or else David raised many points that Caz attempted to rebut, and David is now taking issue with some of those rebuttals and restating questions that he feels should've been addressed but which have not been.

There's no really no need for any of the amateur psychological umpiring as far as I can see. It's called debate.

[Kaz]

Kaz, do you have any research to contribute? or reasoning? or anything at all, other than throwing what you imagine are cutting little asides at people who do contribute research and reasoning?

No?

I've done PLENTY of research, real detective work, not done from the comfort of my sofa like so many naysayers on here...

But reading the way Caz and James are treated giving up their hard work, knowledge and reasoning...

I'll keep it close to my chest...for now



ps, keep naysaying!

[caz]

Thank you, David. Extremely well written and -argued.

Your tenacity and persistence in the face of misguided and even illmannered opposition are admirable.

Hi Kattrup,

I hope you don't include me, but I'd understand if you did. My manners are usually pretty good, often in extremely trying circumstances, but everyone has a breaking point and if someone starts being extremely ill-mannered without provocation, I will reserve the right to respond in kind. If they don't like it they know what they can do.

I do, however, disagree when you claim several times that James Johnston "ran away" from this thread.

People participate on these boards for various reasons. Family, job, health etc. can easily become more important than answering insistent questions from a curious internet stranger - and rightly so. The fact that James Johnston was polite enough to answer several of your posts does not mean that he afterwards "ran away", merely that he left and chose not to or was unable to reply for some reason.

That is my personal interpretation, anyway. As you use the term, it implies cowardice and inability to answer you, thus further implying that you, in fact, right, and also IMHO serves to alienate James Johnston, who might feel offended and not return. Such would be a shame, since his posts, as you mention, were those of a reasonable and interested person, who might well have more insights to offer.

Very well said. James was perfectly polite to David, and even if he really had "run away", in floods of tears and his tail between his legs, that should not have provoked David's ill-mannered comments, which James and others could be forgiven for thinking were designed to alienate and offend him so he wouldn't want to come back and challenge David's personal take on the diary's likely origins.

In actual fact, James is a very busy and resourceful young man, and I know he has been gathering a whole lot more intelligence away from the boards than he was ever likely to get from staying here like a good boy, to add to David's.

Love,

Caz
X

[curious]

Hi Kattrup,

I hope you don't include me, but I'd understand if you did. My manners are usually pretty good, often in extremely trying circumstances, but everyone has a breaking point and if someone starts being extremely ill-mannered without provocation, I will reserve the right to respond in kind. If they don't like it they know what they can do.



Very well said. James was perfectly polite to David, and even if he really had "run away", in floods of tears and his tail between his legs, that should not have provoked David's ill-mannered comments, which James and others could be forgiven for thinking were designed to alienate and offend him so he wouldn't want to come back and challenge David's personal take on the diary's likely origins.

In actual fact, James is a very busy and resourceful young man, and I know he has been gathering a whole lot more intelligence away from the boards than he was ever likely to get from staying here like a good boy, to add to David's.

Love,

Caz
X

And, sometimes, when you've said your piece, you've said your piece. You put a thought out there for people to ignore, learn from, think about and perhaps build on, agree with or disagree with . Some of us see absolutely no need for the incessant carrying on others appear to require. Sometimes it descends into pure bullying.

There are probably as many different personalities on this board as there are individual people. I suggest we allow others the freedom to be themselves.

curious

[Henry Flower]

Caz, this question isn't meant in a snide or insidious way, I admire your style and I'm sure we'd make each other laugh in real life, so please don't take this badly:

Do you concede the possibility that sometimes the deeper into a thing you dig, the less clearly you see? I've known people who delve so deeply into topics that they fill their heads with minutiae and can no longer see the wood for the trees. Your knowledge of Diary lore is obviously deep indeed.

I'm no expert, but I think from this distance I can see what looks like a wood, and from my own perspective, unless or until someone can take me beyond the following with something concrete, I know what the likeliest explanation is:

The Diary has no provenance. The only provenance it has is Mike Barrett.

Everything else - Tony Dev, Ann and her daft story, the various contradictory and hypothetical scenarios that see it pulled from under the floorboards at Battlecrease - none of that has any solid evidence supporting it. And it can't all be true. At least half the people involved who have given an account of its provenance must actually be mistaken or lying, because the stories contradict one another.

Mike Barrett.

A man who dabbled at writing.

A liar - one way or another.

The procurer of a Victorian diary with a minimum number of blank pages.

A confessed forger, retractor of said confession, repudiator of said retraction.

Husband of Ann, whose own account of the provenance must have been an outright lie if the new floorboards angle is to be believed.

And yet, what we constantly hear is that those who met Mike Barrett, who looked him in the eye, know that he could never have pulled off such a complicated forgery!

We know from other obvious forgeries that this just isn't the case. Notably, as has been mentioned earlier, the Patterson-Gimlin 'bigfoot' movie, filmed at Bluff Creek; Patterson was a conman who did a very good impersonation of a simple cowboy who could never produce such a complicated forgery. Also noteworthy is the entire internet subculture which insists that the film is genuine, and that Hollywood's finest couldn't make a bigfoot suit that convincing and complicated at the time. Well, yes they could, and if you look at it without the eyes of a believer, it's clearly a man, walking slightly funny, in a big monkey suit with tits. It's not in the interest of any conman to have people noticing what cunning native intelligence he possesses. People who are afraid of facing legal repercussions for their actions also habitually feign a higher level of simplicity and confusion than they actually possess.

But in any case it's not a sophisticated job. It's a mostly silly unconvincing forgery:

The handwriting is not like Maybrick's, and is clearly not Victorian. It's written in what Rendell found to be fairly obviously twentieth century handwriting, occasionally remembering to badly mimic a Victorian hand. Not sophisticated.

It's not especially long but it still couldn't avoid using at least one exclusively twentieth century phrase. It gives absurd prominence to Michael Caine - er, sorry - Johnny Depp - eeerrrr, no, sorry - Fred Abberline, the Ripper's nemesis in later twentieth century popular Ripper lore. Not sophisticated.

Most shoddily, it was written in a scrapbook with twenty pages ripped from the front. Imagine if those twenty pages were intact and contained material connected in some way to the Maybricks or Battlecrease?! That would be massive. The fact that they had to be ripped out by the forger is also massive, and a massive give-away. Not sophisticated.

It contains such self-evident drivel as "her nose annoyed me so I cut it off". The diary forger evidently thinking that even in the midst of a disemboweling and mutilating frenzy, the killer would need to be specifically 'annoyed' by her nose to cut it off. One can only imagine that poor Mary Kelly must have been 'annoying' over the entire surface of her body, as well as most of its interior. Did Catherine's intestines 'annoy' him too?

It's not a sophisticated forgery. It's been lucky - but the Poste House, the one-off instance, and most especially the physical stuff of the diary, the type of physical document and the handwriting - speak to me of something rather shoddy that has so far led a charmed life and persuaded those who want to be persuaded, and more importantly, spawned a species of expert who, though not willing to be completely taken-in by it, go in so deep that when they surface they insist that it's impossible that the amateur writer who had tried to procure a blank Victorian diary, and who is the Diary's only provenance, likely played a key role in its creation.

[Abby Normal]

what id like to know is that why are the diary defenders who think it was found under the floor boards of battlecrease and or is a Victorian hoax also adamant that it wasn't written by Maybrick. I mean if its Victorian and found stashed in his house?

[caz]

Continuing on from yesterday [before I catch up with all subsequent posts]...

It was known to everyone in 1993 that the floorboards in Battlecrease had, at some point prior to the discovery of the Diary, been lifted by the electricians and it was equally obvious to everyone that if the Diary had been found in Battlecrease the most likely place for its discovery was under the floorboards.

Could you define 'everyone'? Okay, so Paul Dodd would have known, along with Colin Rhodes, Arthur Rigby and James Coufopoulos. They were directly involved with the job in Battlecrease which necessitated the lifting of the floorboards on the first floor. We know this was on March 9th 1992, but would they all have recalled the month, let alone the day, without checking the timesheets? If Eddie Lyons wasn't at the house on that occasion, someone else must have told him what the job was, or there'd be no reason for him to know anything about it, or to tell James he had been on a job to do with heaters, which involved the floorboards coming up.

Feldman, who believed that the floorboards had been lifted in 1989, summarised his thinking thus in 1997:

"Three years before [April 1992], in 1989 – for the first time since Maybrick’s death on 11 May 1889 – the floorboards in what was his bedroom had been removed. I was finding it difficult to accept that there was not a connection between the two events."

So here, on both occasions, we have a clear connection made between the lifting of the floorboards and the discovery of the Diary. That connection has absolutely nothing to do with the floorboards being lifted on 9 March 1992. On the contrary, Feldman was happy to make a link on the basis that the Diary had been discovered THREE YEARS before Mike Barrett first mentioned the Diary.

Quite so, David. At the time, Feldman was looking at the big picture and not the finer details. Keith has confirmed to me that Feldman would not have known, nor concerned himself with the date of Mike's first call to Doreen, which he would only have read in 2003, in Ripper Diary. He was working on vague dates from 1989 for the diary coming from the house and only knew it finally arrived in London in April 1992. It was the time lapse that bothered him. Had he not given up on the electricians because the dates given for the electrical work seemed to be all over the place, he might have looked more closely into events and found the right floorboards had only come up the once, as late as 1992, and then turned his attention to when exactly in 1992 the diary was first known to exist. But he never did.

So the fact of the matter is that if the floorboards had been lifted on ANY DAY between 1 January 1989 and 9 March 1992 the exact same point about how amazing it is that the electricians had claimed in 1993 to have found the Diary under the floorboards could have been made as is being made now.

I strongly disagree. This has all been well known since the first press reports in April 1993 and the earliest rumours among the electricians. It wasn't seen as 'amazing' by anyone, least of all Feldman when the dates didn't seem to work, although no one doubted electrical work had been done at some point, during which the diary could have been found and taken.

That the floorboards were supposedly lifted on 9 March 1992 is neither here nor there in respect of this point. We all understand the coincidence of 9 March 1992 being the day that Mike telephoned London but that coincidence is totally unchanged with respect to the 1993 claims of the electricians.

If you say so, David. It just seems odd, to say the least, that the March 9th 1992 connection could have been sitting there all that time, with nobody knowing about it in 1993, or indeed for another decade, so they could not take advantage of it when putting the rumours out there if completely false. Conversely, if just one electrician knew all about it, because he took the diary and got Mike to "do something with it", that would explain both the early rumours and the continuing secrecy surrounding the actual date of its discovery.

And is there a single electrician who recalls seeing something being discovered under the floorboards in March or otherwise? No, actually there isn’t. Rawes claims he was told by Eddie (in July) that he had discovered something under the floorboards but he didn’t witness this himself. I have already dealt above with the problems with Rawes’ story. That only leaves Davies and his APS shop yarn but this has not been properly dated. Both stories could easily have been influenced by Feldman’s belief that the diary had been discovered under the floorboards.

No. Feldman didn't know Brian Rawes existed so one could have had no direct influence on the other. There were very limited dates when work was being done in Battlecrease and no reason why Rawes should have made up, or been mistaken about what Lyons told him on the one occasion we know they were both there, doing what they were meant to be doing. In conversation, "I found a diary" [a few months back] would sound exactly the same as "I've found a diary" [today or the other day], which could explain why Rawes assumed Lyons meant very recently.

The 'shop yarn' has been told independently by all three men involved: Alan Davies, Alan Dodgson and Tim Martin-Wright. Had they got together to get their stories straight first, I would imagine they'd have sorted out what dates would work and what wouldn't, with an invented conversation about the diary before the public knew it existed. Memories do play tricks, as we know, but Martin-Wright believes he can date it to December 1992 by reference to a hall stand he bought around the same time from an antique shop nearby, and a diary entry to that effect, which he gave to Keith. This of course would have been before Feldman first went to Battlecrease and learned of any electrical work being done there.

We don’t hear much about Vinny Dring and his alleged discovery these days do we?

We should also not forget that, according to Harrison (1998, p.307): “One version claimed that it [the Diary] had been removed from behind window panelling” but we don’t hear much about that possibility.

Possibly because there is no evidence to link Dring's alleged discovery with the diary, or to connect Dring with Devereux or Mike. If there were two books behind the window panelling that vaguely resembled the physical scrapbook, that might have been interesting, but if they were thrown in a skip at some point in the 1980s and never seen or heard of since, there's not a lot even James Johnston can do to find them now.

The truth is that the electricians appear to have said a number of contradictory things and their various stories do not confirm the discovery of the JTR diary in Battlecrease.

That's fine. Rest assured that others, more enthusiastic and able to continue investigating, are not sitting back congratulating themselves on resolving anything to their satisfaction or yours, but are ploughing on with the job of trying to disprove such a discovery.

If I found a document today that I wrote in ink in 1992 I wouldn’t expect it to be visibly different today so why is it any different for the diary?

It's not. The diary ink is no different visibly today than it was in 1992. Not the case with Diamine though. Didn't Melvin say his written examples bronzed after two years? In any case, you'd presumably have used a modern ink in 1992. Do modern inks age like older ones, or like inks bought specifically to mimic a Victorian one? I don't know. I'm not an ink chemist, and I had no idea you were. Voller certainly talked about the way inks age on the page, and how you can tell old inks from modern ones from visible effects such as irregular fading. Perhaps he needs lessons from you on the subject if you think he was talking out of his bottom.

As I have now said many times, a forger can produce a forgery on Monday and present it as old on a Tuesday. There does not need to be a period of time when the forgery matures. A diary written on a Monday in 1992 could have been presented as Victorian on a Tuesday and there would have been no reliable scientific way of proving that it wasn’t written on the Monday. The only test which could do it would be a solubility test. One which the diary failed.

Right, so now you know more about ink chemistry than pretty much everyone else who has ever analysed or examined the diary. Terrific. Why else would anyone have got involved and tried all sorts of different testing methods? If they'd all been qualified to your level, and as satisfied as you are with Baxendale and his solubility test result, they could have taken the fee and done sod all except confirm his findings, nailing it as a very recent fake.

So don't be shy, David. Tell us all about your ink chemistry qualifications, which allowed you to write with such authority on the dating of disputed documents. It beats me why you have been hiding your light under a bushel all this time, and bothered so much with Mike and the electricians and your one-off instance, if you really believe that the solubility revealed all, back in the summer of '92.

Before the Maybrick Diary story, I had never heard of Diamine ink and it seems reasonable to assume that Mike Barrett had not either. If he went into the ink shop and asked for a type of ink consistent with the Victorian period it strikes me as perfectly possible that he either never took note of the name of that ink or forgot the name later. Why should he remember it? When he saw it stated in the newspaper that the ink was probably Diamine he might have incorporated this in his affidavit. Obviously if that is the case then the thousands and thousands of words devoted to the issue of whether or not the diary was or was not written with Diamine ink are a waste of time.

I agree about that particular waste of time, David. But what are you actually saying here? That someone else composed the text; someone else wrote it into the scrapbook; and someone else allowed Mike off the leash to go and source a suitable ink for them to use, trusting that it wouldn't turn out to contain a shitload of modern ingredients? Do you honestly believe that's remotely likely?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

what id like to know is that why are the diary defenders who think it was found under the floor boards of battlecrease and or is a Victorian hoax also adamant that it wasn't written by Maybrick. I mean if its Victorian and found stashed in his house?

I can't speak for others, Abby, but for me it's the handwriting and the content. It reads like a deliberate piss-take.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz, this question isn't meant in a snide or insidious way, I admire your style and I'm sure we'd make each other laugh in real life, so please don't take this badly:

Do you concede the possibility that sometimes the deeper into a thing you dig, the less clearly you see? I've known people who delve so deeply into topics that they fill their heads with minutiae and can no longer see the wood for the trees. Your knowledge of Diary lore is obviously deep indeed.

I'm no expert, but I think from this distance I can see what looks like a wood, and from my own perspective, unless or until someone can take me beyond the following with something concrete, I know what the likeliest explanation is:

The Diary has no provenance. The only provenance it has is Mike Barrett.

Everything else - Tony Dev, Ann and her daft story, the various contradictory and hypothetical scenarios that see it pulled from under the floorboards at Battlecrease - none of that has any solid evidence supporting it. And it can't all be true. At least half the people involved who have given an account of its provenance must actually be mistaken or lying, because the stories contradict one another.

Mike Barrett.

A man who dabbled at writing.

A liar - one way or another.

The procurer of a Victorian diary with a minimum number of blank pages.

A confessed forger, retractor of said confession, repudiator of said retraction.

Husband of Ann, whose own account of the provenance must have been an outright lie if the new floorboards angle is to be believed.

And yet, what we constantly hear is that those who met Mike Barrett, who looked him in the eye, know that he could never have pulled off such a complicated forgery!

We know from other obvious forgeries that this just isn't the case. Notably, as has been mentioned earlier, the Patterson-Gimlin 'bigfoot' movie, filmed at Bluff Creek; Patterson was a conman who did a very good impersonation of a simple cowboy who could never produce such a complicated forgery. Also noteworthy is the entire internet subculture which insists that the film is genuine, and that Hollywood's finest couldn't make a bigfoot suit that convincing and complicated at the time. Well, yes they could, and if you look at it without the eyes of a believer, it's clearly a man, walking slightly funny, in a big monkey suit with tits. It's not in the interest of any conman to have people noticing what cunning native intelligence he possesses. People who are afraid of facing legal repercussions for their actions also habitually feign a higher level of simplicity and confusion than they actually possess.

But in any case it's not a sophisticated job. It's a mostly silly unconvincing forgery:

The handwriting is not like Maybrick's, and is clearly not Victorian. It's written in what Rendell found to be fairly obviously twentieth century handwriting, occasionally remembering to badly mimic a Victorian hand. Not sophisticated.

It's not especially long but it still couldn't avoid using at least one exclusively twentieth century phrase. It gives absurd prominence to Michael Caine - er, sorry - Johnny Depp - eeerrrr, no, sorry - Fred Abberline, the Ripper's nemesis in later twentieth century popular Ripper lore. Not sophisticated.

Most shoddily, it was written in a scrapbook with twenty pages ripped from the front. Imagine if those twenty pages were intact and contained material connected in some way to the Maybricks or Battlecrease?! That would be massive. The fact that they had to be ripped out by the forger is also massive, and a massive give-away. Not sophisticated.

It contains such self-evident drivel as "her nose annoyed me so I cut it off". The diary forger evidently thinking that even in the midst of a disemboweling and mutilating frenzy, the killer would need to be specifically 'annoyed' by her nose to cut it off. One can only imagine that poor Mary Kelly must have been 'annoying' over the entire surface of her body, as well as most of its interior. Did Catherine's intestines 'annoy' him too?

It's not a sophisticated forgery. It's been lucky - but the Poste House, the one-off instance, and most especially the physical stuff of the diary, the type of physical document and the handwriting - speak to me of something rather shoddy that has so far led a charmed life and persuaded those who want to be persuaded, and more importantly, spawned a species of expert who, though not willing to be completely taken-in by it, go in so deep that when they surface they insist that it's impossible that the amateur writer who had tried to procure a blank Victorian diary, and who is the Diary's only provenance, likely played a key role in its creation.

I see what you are saying, Henry. And I would accept it more if there was just one of us - me - this deeply into the diary and its possible origins. You get that with the whackier ripper theories, where just one or two people get so stuck in their own groove of confirmation bias that it would take a hundred boy scouts to prise them out and a hundred more scout masters with big sticks to show them the error of their ways.

But there are many of us working on the finer details, checking each other's thinking against the available evidence, checking and rechecking what we actually know and what we still need to know and making sure we stay grounded.

It's not just about the diary text, and whether or not we think Mike was capable of writing it or even handling such a project. In fact it's hardly about that at all. It's almost all about examining the various things people have said and done and building up a picture of what was going on in the early 1990s: what is and what isn't relevant to the diary; what's possible within the known facts and, more importantly, trying to eliminate the impossible, again using the known facts, without resorting to guesswork.

Love,

Caz
X

[Hunter]

And, sometimes, when you've said your piece, you've said your piece. You put a thought out there for people to ignore, learn from, think about and perhaps build on, agree with or disagree with . Some of us see absolutely no need for the incessant carrying on others appear to require. Sometimes it descends into pure bullying.

Indeed, and a good lesson to live by, if one considers their views valuable enough for others to consider also.

[Hunter]

. . Also noteworthy is the entire internet subculture which insists that the film is genuine, and that Hollywood's finest couldn't make a bigfoot suit that convincing and complicated at the time. Well, yes they could, and if you look at it without the eyes of a believer, it's clearly a man, walking slightly funny, in a big monkey suit with tits.

I must be getting old and less observant, 'cause I missed the part about the tits.

[David Orsam]

Poor David, digging himself into a deeper and deeper pit with all of his hypothesising

Says the person who thinks that the Battlecrease provenance story has "too many holes" (#275) and thus actually agrees with me!

[David Orsam]

It goes without saying that there were no "ill mannered" comments by me towards James. I was perfectly polite to him throughout his brief time posting in this thread and said more than once how refreshing it was to be discussing this subject with a rational person. But the fact of the matter is that he did run away from the discussion and he falsely stated that he had "honestly" shared everything he could on the subject. That clearly wasn't the case. There was much more he could have shared. He gave a very poor reason for not posting the full transcripts of his interviews.

And did James have an agenda? He certainly did.

I don't believe I am being paranoid in saying that his first post in this thread contained at least two digs against me. Thus, he said, "The reality is, that the truth of the Diary's provenance is not to be found on Casebook", adding, "It is easy (and perhaps more comfortable) to pontificate as to the conclusions of others, but unless one is willing to go out and establish some discourse with those actually involved, then whatever conclusions that might be reached, are rather ineffectual..imho".

Those comments were undoubtedly aimed at me so he was, quite gratuitously, accusing me of pontificating about the conclusions of others while also claiming that my own conclusions were "ineffectual".

His big point of course was that researchers need to "go out" and speak to people. Thus he quoted Keith Skinner as saying that it would be "irresponsible" for any purported historian or researcher not to bust a gut to speak to the "modern people who are alive".

This was all done on the false basis that I am in some way a historian or researcher in respect of the Maybrick diary, which is not the case, but when I said that I did not regard myself as such he came back with a narky and silly little point when he said:

"I think that with a total of 6,973 posts (averaging 6.32 posts per day) you certainly can count yourself a researcher/historian." To which he added, "Unfortunately for you, that does of course mean that K.S's appraisal still applies!"

Now I pretty much overlooked these provocations, and the underlying arrogance of his agenda, because I actually wanted to discuss the issue of the Maybrick diary with James and I commented throughout that it made a change to do so with someone who was generally polite and reasonable, something which I maintain was the case. He also did provide some new information albeit that I had to tease it out of him.

At the same time, James did make a number of important mistakes in his essay and his posts on this forum and these were pointed out to him by me. Before our discussion properly concluded he ran away. If he wants to explain why he ran away he is free to do so but the explanation he has given is wholly unsatisfactory and inadequate and it sadly prevented a proper discussion of this subject from developing and concluding.

In the end, James has become one more of these Diary Defenders who has information but is deciding to withhold it for reasons best known to themselves.