Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[caz]

Thanks, Caz. It sounds like a good description of someone who might perpetrate a hoax.

How did I guess this response was coming?

Confirmation bias, anyone?

Mike's more outrageous, obviously false claims were made, according to Shirley, since his January 1995 affidavit. Not back in 1992 when David fondly imagines he was the model of sobriety and fully in control of all his forging faculties.

So it's equally valid to infer it's a good description of a shambolic drunkard making desperate stuff up in the wake of his world falling apart and not really expecting anyone to fall for it hook line and sinker.

And yes, that's also confirmation bias.

But whose is nearer to the truth?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Did I really just read someone asking what motive a woman could have for collaborating in a financial venture with her husband? Seriously?????!!!!

I mean, does this need any response? I don't think so.

I think rj's argument was that Anne felt she had no choice and didn't collaborate happily or willingly in this financial venture of her husband's to flog her 'novella', as rj calls it, as a genuine Victorian diary. But you might want to check with the man himself.

We know that this woman refused any share of the monies until Doreen persuaded her, two years later when she had left her husband, for Caroline's sake. We don't know what motive she had for collaboration without remuneration.

So frankly, I'm not sure what all those punctuation marks are for. Have you lost the plot???????????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

What motive she had for collaboration without remuneration??????!!!!!!!

She was his wife for gawdsake!!!!!!

[David Orsam]

The Great Misunderstander strikes again.

I didn't, of course, say that every piece of information needs to be included in essays, dissertations, books or documentaries, only that if you quote from one part of a document the rest of it needs to be made available.

Most books, documentaries etc. are based on information publicly available in archives or libraries. So anyone with an interest in the subject can check the way that information has been used. What I'm saying is that you can't selectively quote from a privately held document (or transcript) while withholding the rest of it. Especially when, as in this case, parts of the transcript contradict the case being made.

I thought that was perfectly clear when I said "If you refer to one part of a document or a transcript the rest of the document or transcript needs to be made available" AND "I'm not saying you need to publish all your research before you are ready but it's just not right to selectively quote from documents or transcripts to which others don't have access."

Surely that was written in the clearest possible English and not capable of being misunderstood.

[David Orsam]

I'm not sure there's much more to say on this subject. While a team of frustrated researchers apparently scurry around the country trying to find the one missing piece of evidence to prove the Battlecrease provenance that was supposed to have been proved by the last missing piece of evidence, the situation, as it seems to me, is that, until any new evidence is produced (and we may have to wait a long time for that), the possibility that Mike and/or Anne were involved in forging the diary must remain a serious one.

It's simply amazing that the point is made that Mike wasn't a professional freelance journalist simply because his wife might have helped him with his articles. As I've previously said, all this means is that Mike and Anne jointly were a team of professional freelance journalists so that they could have forged the diary together. It's utterly hilarious that we are told that Mike's articles were "presumably" edited by the magazine before publication. So just like every article written by all journalists in the world then???! It just shows how any notion that Mike could have been a journalist sticks in the throat of some people who have spent years saying he was too stupid to string a sentence together.

Furthermore, whenever I refer to something that Mike Barrett said had happened I am virtually laughed out of the forum by one person with the repeated chant "Mike was a liar, Mike was a liar" yet, when it suits, that same person is perfectly prepared to support an argument by saying Mike "admitted he couldn't write up those interviews in a coherent fashion and needed Anne to do it for him". So suddenly something Mike has said is taken to be 100% true!!!

That's if he even said it because I've never seen a direct quote from him actually saying exactly this. All I've ever seen is Harrison (2003, p. 7) quoting Anne as saying about Mike's articles that she "usually" (note that word, which does not mean "always") "tided them up for him". And in Inside Story (2003, p.172) Mike is said to confirm Anne's account that she had to "tidy up" the celebrity interviews (although in the quote provided he just says "all the interviews, great, but could I get the articles out properly?....so Anne stepped in and I felt she was taking something away from me."). So in "tidying up" his articles, for all we know Anne was simply correcting his spelling or punctuation or making some minor adjustments. It doesn't strike me as an admission that he couldn't write up his interviews "in a coherent fashion".

I only ever mentioned the ink in this thread in response to a direct question from James about Robert Anderson's essay. I make no positive points about it. I simply commented that if the ink in the diary is not Diamine it doesn't get us very far if a forger used another type of ink. That's it. Unlike some people, I don't wish to engage in endless unsupported speculation about what might have happened or how the forgery might have been executed. It won't help anyone.

I point to one simple hard and undisputed fact about the attempt by the person who produced the Diary to obtain a genuine Victorian diary with blank pages shortly before he produced it. It doesn't really get much more suspicious than that. And I point to the appearance of the phrase "one off" in the diary to mean a unique happening which was not in use in the nineteenth century. That's really all I need to say. I can only repeat that if there is another suspected solution then there needs to be solid evidence to support it.

[rjpalmer]

Regarding the ink changing color. An interesting (and infuriating) article by Adrian Morris.

http://www.jamesmaybrick.org/pdf%20files/Diary%20-%20Ink%20debate%20(A.%20Morris%20article).pdf

[ChrisGeorge]

Regarding the ink changing color. An interesting (and infuriating) article by Adrian Morris.

http://www.jamesmaybrick.org/pdf%20f...20article).pdf

Thanks, Roger. This is indeed an interesting article by Mr. Morris even if as you I have indicated, it will illuminate and frustrate the reader in equal measure.

I have to take exception with the first sentence of the last paragraph in Adrian's article, in which he states --

"The tragedy of the Maybrick 'diary' was that its central aim was to solve an old Victorian series of murders."

Really????

Given that no one knows who created the Diary how can we be certain what the intention was?

[caz]

When I said that the idea of Mike being involved in an attempt to forge the diary has been criticized "on the basis that no-one in their right mind would have handed total control of the Diary over to Mike yet those same people say that Mike was given total control of the Diary by the person or persons who found and stole it from Battlecrease!!!!" the point is all about why someone would have chosen Mike Barrett to give control of the diary to.

A child could understand this.

So why am I reading a response which tells me that an electrician finding the diary had to hand over control to someone? That's not the issue. The issue is why Mike Barrett.

A child could understand that a forgery which had taken its creator(s) considerable time, effort and research to plan, put together, compose and perfect might require a somewhat different kind of person to "do something with it" than some old book pinched from an old house and quickly offloaded.

In the second scenario, it was arguably more a case of "get rid and forget where you got it from", at least until it was realised that Mike was not going to "get rid", but make a killing by staying with it and publishing the thing. But in the first, it would have been a case of "do your best to pass this off as genuine and don't screw up along the way". Mike had to be trusted to be the front man for the long haul.

In the first place I would have expected someone finding the diary to want to sell it as quickly as possible on the black (criminal) market using the fact that it had been found in Battlecrease as a major selling point. They would want hard cash not some form of licensing agreement.

You might have expected this, but put yourself in the shoes of the finder, having just stolen this old book. Unless you are a career criminal, how do you go about finding your black market buyer, so that you can tempt them with the provenance? First you need to have read through the old book and connected it to the house via the name Battlecrease, to appreciate its potential significance and value. If Eddie Lyons, for instance, finds this old book and liberates it from the house before he has the chance to study its contents, and without knowing who is meant to be its author, or even the history of the house, might he not just be looking to get shot of it, for a modest amount of 'hard cash', to some wide boy who does claim to know all the right contacts? Enter Mike, eager and willing to do the business. The tea leaf may not know or perhaps care what will become of it as long as his own name is kept out of it - honour among thieves and what have you. Why would 'some form of licensing agreement' enter Eddie's head if Mike doesn't yet know what lies ahead?

I mean, if Eddie agrees with Mike that they split the proceeds, how does Eddie go about enforcing this if Mike never gives him any money? What leverage does he have? Clearly there can be no legal recourse. But it's not just about getting money, how does Eddie know he is getting his fair share? Who is going to audit Mike's income on behalf of Eddie? I'm not saying anything is impossible, only that such an arrangement in respect of stolen goods would be very unusual.

But this stolen property would be very unusual to begin with - if not unique. In a scenario whereby Eddie assumes Mike is just going to find a buyer for the physical diary and leave it at that, then later learns he is going to co-author a bloody book about it and make a potential fortune, I could see him putting the squeeze on Mike for a share of the royalties by, say, threatening to sell his confession. Isn't that precisely what he tries to do in 1993? If he is chasing the money then, why stop when Mike's royalties start rolling in? Of course, if Mike knows the diary hasn't been stolen, and Eddie has nothing on him but an empty threat, there is nothing for Mike to fear. No need to confront him on his doorstep and tell him to back off. He's the one in total control, remember. And no need to pay anyone off a year later in large sums of hard cash either. I'd still like to know what those cash withdrawals in May 1994 were really all in aid of.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Here's some great logic:

"What I find puzzling is why, if Mike really was part of this nest of forgers, he didn't seize the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon that was Feldy and the Electricians circa April 1993, by saying: "So that's what Tony was keeping from me. It must have come from the house back in 1989 or whenever, and Tony must have got hold of it and worried about what to do with it".

Do you see the problem with that sentence?

The premise is that Mike is part of a "nest of forgers" yet he is supposed to now believe his own fabricated story about getting the diary from Tony Devereux!!!!!!

Oh David, David, David. You see but you do not observe.

Why the hell would Mike have had to 'believe' a false story in order to add another????????????

If Mike had been part of this nest of forgers, he'd have been lying about getting the diary in good faith from Tony Devereux in 1991, wouldn't he? Ditto if he really got the diary from Battlecrease via an electrician in 1992. If Anne was canny enough to invent a backstory in 1994, which retained the flimsy "dead pal" story, all I was saying is that Mike could have done the same in 1993, using someone else's convenient and infinitely better, but totally false claim that it had been in Battlecrease until circa 1989. Who could have proved it hadn't? He only had to pretend to put two and two together to come up with the perfect solution: "Tony must have been the middle man between the theft from the house and leaving it to me in 1991". Simple. A neat enough explanation for how Tony had come by the diary. Yet Mike preferred his own theory that it had been in Maybrick's office before eventually getting to Tony.

Six exclamation marks there for anyone counting.

Really a small child would not make this type of mistake.

You don't seriously think that whenever Mike said anything he must have actually believed it. Or do you?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

But what it would be very useful to know is what James Coufopoulos had to say about the lifting of the floorboards? Did he remember doing it himself? Was he assisted by anyone? In particular, did he recall the presence of Eddie Lyons?

I'm hoping James [Johnston] will return to the boards at some point with the information you seek.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

But the date of 17th July 1992 doesn't make any sense does it? Why would Eddie, on 17th July 1992 (having long since passed the Diary on to Mike Barrett), have blurted out to Rawes, completely out of the blue, that he had found something important in Battlecrease over four months earlier? Do you have any thoughts about that?

I can't speak for JJ, but I have. If Rawes was misremembering some other conversation from some other occasion, the date of 17th July 1992 nevertheless fits perfectly with Eddie and Graham Rhodes being in the house working that day, while Rigby was assigned to the job at Halewood police station, to be joined by Rawes when he'd picked up the van from Battlecrease. If nothing else, he gives great context.

The timing would also fit very neatly with Eddie hearing [from Mike?] that the diary he had found under the floorboards back in March was considered so important by the people in London that authors, publishers and scientists were all getting involved. Rawes wouldn't have known about any of this in July 1992, and I'm not sure Feldman would have known, or cared much, about such details in Spring/Summer 1993. If Rawes got the information from Shirley's book after it came out on October 4th, 1993, giving rise to a false memory, which he believed was significant enough to tell the police later that same month, he was not only very quick off the mark, but he presumably missed the detail on page 7 that Shirley first saw 'the' diary in London in the Spring of 1992, and it was therefore not something Eddie could only just have found in Liverpool in the July.

Why couldn't Rawes have been telling it just as it happened, hearing it as "I've found a diary", not "I found a diary", because he didn't have the faintest idea in 1992, or when talking to the police in 1993, when Eddie might have found this diary; when 'the' diary was first known to exist; or whether they could have been one and the same?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Let's recap on the Paul Dodd point.

It was stated (#234): "We know Rigby later went to see Paul Dodd, worried he might be implicated in theft, and volunteered the information that it was Bowling and Lyons who knew something about it."

My comment (#322) was: "I don't know anything of the sort".

The response to this (#327) was: "No, but Paul Dodd does - unless he was just making it up."

So I ask for the source of all this and it turns out to be from Robert Smith, page 19, as follows:

"I had also heard from another source that a very worried Rigby came to Paul Dodd's flat to deny any involvement in the removal of the diary, again trotting out exactly the same story that he had told Feldman, and implicating Bowling and Lyons as being culprits."

So the comment "No, but Paul Dodd does - unless he was just making it up" is the usual nonsense because Smith does not say in his book that his source was Paul Dodd.

No, but you are assuming, for some unknown reason, that I wouldn't have access to any of the same source materials as Robert. I don't just make stuff up, David. Paul Dodd did relate the details of this visit from Rigby. Believe it or not. I don't much care. Dismiss it as irrelevant anyway. I don't much care. I think I might just die of shock if I got any other reaction from you.

If Rigby was genuinely so worried about being accused of theft, that he was prepared to grass up two of his workmates to the owner of the house, for something he didn't actually witness them doing - finding and taking a diary which Feldman believed to be very valuable, doesn't that suggest he hadn't knowingly been involved in a scam to con Feldman? Where would that leave his involvement, if he believed Lyons and Bowling might have taken something while he was working there, and that it could have been the diary?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

It's utterly irrelevant whether the electricians had the faintest idea who Mike was or when he first told anyone about his diary or knew anything about his telephone call or precisely when the diary was thought to have been found. All they needed to know what that it was suspected that the Diary had been found (under the floorboards) at Battlecrease. Once they had this information in their heads then when they searched their memories in 1993 (or later) about the work they carried out at Battlecrease during 1992 (or earlier) they might have interpreted innocent remarks or actions by others as being connected with this supposed discovery.

It's no doubt why Vinny Dring, who appears to have found some irrelevant books in Battlecrease in 1982, thought that HE might have found the Diary.

I don't think it's a difficult point to understand. And I wasn't making a positive point. I made the point in response to claims that the stories of the electricians somehow validated the timesheet evidence. I'm saying that the coincidence revealed by the timesheet evidence is not enhanced by the pre-existing stories of the electricians.

I do understand all this, David. I was just observing that the fact remains that all the evidence so far gathered allows for the scrapbook to have come out of Battlecrease on the morning of the day the diary is first mentioned, by Mike, to the Rupert Crew literary agency, when there would have been no such guarantee if the electricians just made it all up on the strength of some floorboards being lifted at some point prior to 1993.

Rest assured that efforts will continue to be made to find just the one little scrap of information that closes down that possibility and demonstrates that it could only have been a strange coincidence.

This is the way to go, David. Try your best to disprove your own instincts about how the diary, which Mike took to London in April 1992, came into his possession.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

So I say that the line of enquiry into the APS shop conversation will be a waste of time unless it can be positively ruled out that the conversation occurred in 1993 and I am then told that it won't be a waste of time if it can be positively ruled out that the conversation occurred in 1993!!!!!!!!!! (Ten exclamation marks.)

I mean, honestly. This is why my conversation with James was such a contrast. He seems to be able to read and understand English.

But you were clearly assuming that 1993 couldn't be ruled out, and therefore implying this line of enquiry was already a waste of time.

I dispute what can or can't be ruled out, so we won't know if this line of enquiry will prove to be a waste of time until we follow it as far as we can!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Another 24 hours in the life of the Maybrick diary and we have advanced not one jot in our knowledge. Just another batch of complete nonsense has been posted. As I said in my post on Friday, there isn't much more to say on the subject. The fact of Mike's attempted acquisition of a Victorian Diary with a minimum of 20 blank pages remains unchanged. "One off instance" still didn't exist in the nineteenth century. So I was minded not to post any further today but some things just can't go unchallenged.

A statement was made that "We know Rigby later went see Paul Dodd" . But did we know this? The source (apparently) turns out to be some private unpublished information from Paul Dodd. So "we" didn't know anything of the sort. And when I asked for the source I was directed to Robert Smith's book at page 19. This just referred to an anonymous source who was not said to be Paul Dodd himself. If Robert Smith had the information direct from Paul Dodd then this is not what he said in his book. So when I said "I know nothing of the sort" it was a perfectly correct response because the supposed information from Paul Dodd himself had never been published.

Then I'm told that in saying that, "the line of enquiry into the APS shop conversation will be a waste of time unless it can be positively ruled out that the conversation occurred in 1993", I was "clearly assuming" that it "couldn't be ruled out" (shouldn't that be "could"?) when I was doing no such thing. I was speaking English. Unless it can be ruled out that the APS shop conversation occurred in 1993 any investigation into the conversation will obviously be a waste of time.

In the meantime, were we told how it made any sense for Lyons to blurt out to Rawes in July that he had discovered (and stolen) a Diary in March? No, we certainly were not.

I'm not saying that Rawes was deliberately putting forward a false story. Only that he might well have become aware in 1993 that the Diary was supposed to have been found under the floorboards and then connected that with a vague memory of a conversation he had with Eddie in July 1992; a conversation that had nothing to do with a discovery of the diary. If he remembered a conversation with Eddie about "a diary", why did he tell James Johnston that he recalled being told by Eddie of "this book"? If Eddie told him he found a diary it's odd that he would ever refer to it as a book. If, on the other hand, Eddie told him he found a book, then his mention of it being a diary can only have been influenced by his knowledge of the Maybrick Diary. But then Robert Smith tells us that what Rawes recalls being told by Eddie was: "I found something under the floorboards...". Not a diary, not a book. Just something. It could have been anything.

Similarly I've never said that Rigby was involved in a scam. I've said that he was trying to help Feldman and was reconstructing many months later, turning a memory of something being thrown into a skip and a visit to Liverpool University into something being connected with a diary, even though no-one ever appears to have mentioned the discovery of a diary to him in 1992.

It was Paul Dodd, not me, who claimed that Feldman was the victim of a scam - and this comes from Inside Story. Dodd is also quoted as saying that there was "no substance at all to the claims made of finding the Diary at Battlecrease." So whatever conversation he had with Rigby made no impression on him whatsoever it seems.

I've already said more than once that Mike might (perfectly reasonably) have not wanted to give up 5% of his income on the basis of a false provenance so why is it continually asked why he did not agree to accept that false provenance?

Why did Eddie take out sums of money in cash from his bank? Who knows? Was it to pay off someone? Not necessarily. That's as far as we can take it.

Did Eddie try to put "the squeeze" on Mike in 1993? Not to my knowledge he didn't. And how could he do it anyway? Any claim by him to have found the diary could have been dismissed as false, just as Mike did. If he has a "royalty share" deal with Mike, how does he know how much he is due to receive? And isn't Eddie supposed to be scared of anyone knowing that he stole the diary? So doesn't Mike have as much reason to blackmail Eddie? But who knows? The story changes from day to day and motives are shifted back and forwards. James Johnston tells me that Eddie was so keen to know what he (JJ) knew about the discovery of the diary that he agreed to meet him three times. But why does Eddie care unless he is scared of exposure as being the thief? And if he's scared of exposure how did he have any real leverage over Mike?

But all these questions are pointless because we can speculate for ever. They will never get us anywhere. For every unsupported speculation I read on this forum I could easily come up with an equal and opposite unsupported speculation of my own. The facts remain what they are. Mike trying to acquire a Victorian diary with blank pages. An unhistorical phrase used in the diary. A coincidence of dates.

Surely there is no more to say on this subject at the moment.