Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[Sam Flynn]

Hello Abby

are there any blank pages after the end or does the writing go to the last one?

There are 17 blank pages at the end.

[Sam Flynn]

Hello Abby
There are 17 blank pages at the end.

... like Caz said


(Our posts crossed.)

[David Orsam]

I think we must be up to about the tenth different explanation for Mike's acquisition of a Victorian diary, each one worse than the last!

So now (as far as I can understand it) the latest hare-brained theory is that Mike was trying to establish the going rate for a Victorian diary with 20 blank pages, just like the Jack the Ripper Diary he had been shown by his mate Eddie.

Let's ignore the fact that the Jack the Ripper diary has 17 blank pages so that even the price of a diary with 20 blank pages wouldn't do the job and, okay, we'll assume that dopey Mike miscounted and thought there were 20 blank pages at the end of the Jack the Ripper diary.

Well then the advert was utterly useless for Mike's purposes. Because, as I have had to repeatedly point out (but it doesn't seem to sink in), when asking for a Diary with "at least" 20 blank pages that is a minimum requirement, so it would obviously have suited Mike's purposes to receive a diary with 50 blank pages or 100 blank pages or even an entirely blank diary! Hence "unused or partly used".

Now, let's say Mike receives a diary with 100 blank pages and he believes that the way to establish the price of a diary is from the number of blank pages (another barmy suggestion) then how does it help him to establish the price of the Jack the Ripper diary by telling Eddie Lyons (someone who, incidentally, couldn't have discovered the diary on 9 March 1992, because he wasn't at Battlecrease, so why is he selling it?) that a diary with 100 blank pages is worth £25 or £30 or whatever. The answer can only be that it doesn't help him at all.

Even worse is that the only way to prove to Eddie that the Diary is worth £25 is to show him that he, Mike, has just purchased an equivalent Victorian diary. Now perhaps Eddie was an idiot but surely even he would have wondered why Mike would have wiped out any profit he could possibly make on selling the Jack the Ripper diary by purchasing another diary at retail price just for the sole purpose of showing Eddie what the retail price was of a Victorian diary!!

But crazy and nonsensical as all the above is, it's not even the worst flaw in the theory. For it's perfectly obvious that any conversation with Eddie (assuming Mike actually managed to get a diary with his minimum of 20 pages) would have gone like this:

Mike: Look I've just bought this Victorian diary for £25 and it's only got 20 blank pages so let me give you the same for your diary.
Eddie: Was your diary written by Jack the Ripper?
Mike: Er…

And surely that disposes of that barmy and laughable suggestion. I mean, perhaps people are in denial but the clear and obvious reason for Mike Barrett to have gone on the hunt for a Victorian diary with a MINIMUM of 20 blank pages – I repeat a MINIMUM of 20 blank pages - was to obtain a volume in which the text of a "Victorian" diary could be written. (And we may note in passing that the transcript of the JTR Diary in Shirley Harrison's 2003 book is exactly 20 pages.) This notion perfectly fits in with Mike making the telephone call to Doreen on 9 March 1992, having in his possession an already written or typed up draft of the text of the diary, establishing from Doreen that such a diary would be valuable and realising that he now needed to obtain a bound volume containing paper from the period which, by random coincidence, is exactly what he said he was doing in his January 1995 affidavit. It certainly explains why he didn't rush down to London with the diary but waited over a month to meet Doreen. Realising the Victorian diary was too small he then managed to obtain the scrapbook (quite possibly at an O&L auction held on 31 March) and this would literally have given him just sufficient time, as stated in his affidavit, for the text of the diary to be written by hand into the scrapbook (i.e. 11 days) before being presented to Doreen in London on 13 April 1992.

The notion of a modern forgery (in 1992) is the only one that sensibly fits the fact of the purchase of the Victorian diary - indeed it fits all the facts - and, even after all this time, I really have no idea why there is such fanatical resistance to this simple and obvious explanation.

[David Orsam]

The barmy ideas keep on rolling in and I had to rub my eyes on seeing that it is stated as a fact that Mike enquired about purchasing Jack the Ripper books at the same time as he enquired about purchasing a Victorian diary!!!

This can only emerge from the mind of someone who cannot distinguish fact from wild speculation.

In the first place, we are told in Inside Story (p.237) that Keith Skinner investigated the purchase of the Victorian diary and discovered that HP Bookfinders "had received a telephone enquiry from a Mr Barrett asking them to locate a Victorian diary, which struck them as an unusual request". Nothing said there about any further enquiries for Jack the Ripper books. So unless it is being said that Keith Skinner's investigation was faulty that's a dead end right there.

Furthermore, Martin E. Earl's advertisement contains requests for over 80 books on all sorts of subjects. Is it being said that Mike Barrett was the person who wanted all these books????? It's absurd.

Following on from the advert for the Victorian diary is a request for ITV yearbooks for the period 1955 to 1979, a request for BBC yearbooks for 1950-1979 and a request for a book by P. Cummings called "Silver Eagle carries on". Unless Mike also wanted these books too there is no connection whatsoever been the Ripper books in Earl's list and the Victorian diary.

It was perfectly common in 1992 in these book collecting magazines for people to be requesting hard to find Jack the Ripper books and what we have here is a great example of someone trying to see patterns and connections in separate events which almost certainly don't exist.

[David Orsam]

I see that some people are now reduced to reproducing unsubstantiated rumours in support of the Battlecrease provenance. This must surely show how desperate these Diary believers are. The timesheets were supposed to prove the provenance but that turned out to be damp squib. So now we are told that the diary was sold in an Anfield pub for £20. Forgive me, but where is the evidence for this assertion? What is the source of it?

All I keep reading in this thread are unsubstantiated and unsupported statements. Like: the 9 electricians were never in Battlecrease before 1992, the floorboards in Maybrick's room had never been dug up before, Arthur Rigby and Coufopolous were working in the morning in Battlecrease on 9 March 1992, they definitely lifted the floorboards on 9 March, the Portus & Rhodes working day was between x and y etc. etc. Is it not possible to stick with the actual evidence in this case? And if there is evidence in support of any such statements it should be provided so that we can see it.

Certainly the claim that the floorboards were lifted remains an assumption and all the argument in the world won't change that. Maybe they were lifted but how do we know for sure? Are we simply supposed to assume they were?

[David Orsam]

Excellent, we can now ignore the timesheets because they are rubbish. They don't actually show us who was working in Battlecrease at any time, apparently. And Eddie had no interest in being paid for any work he did on 9 March. Wonderful. So let's ditch the timesheets. Instead, we need to rely on bits of unsubstantiated gossip and rumour that are suddenly being posted from out of absolutely nowhere on this forum. Bits of gossip and rumour which one doesn't even find mentioned in Robert Smith's book which was supposed to be "The True Facts"!!! This story really does just get better and better.

[rjpalmer]

Concerning the other requests:

Jones/Lloyd - The Ripper File
Farson-Jack the Ripper
Spencer Shew-Hand[s] of the Ripper

Published 1971, 1972, 1975.

Not new titles in May, 1992. Nor titles that would normally spring to the mind of a neophyte out to study Jack the Ripper for the first time. Nor titles a librarian would normally recommend to a neophyte. Well, maybe Farson would be.

The two books Barrett actually mentions in his supposed "research notes" are Wilson/Odell JtR: Summing up and Verdict (1987) and Paul Harrison JtR: the Mystery Solved (1991). Both much more recent titles.

No, to me this smells more like the request of someone who knows what they are doing, or is out to add to their already substantial collection. What is common known as a "Ripperologist."

Barrett allegedly had little knowledge of the Whitechapel Murder case (at least according to the opinions of Keith Skinner, etc) and yet, in that 36 hour whirlwind of activity, May 9-10th 1992, Barrett somehow comes up with these 3 curious titles and somehow concludes they are worth spending what little money he doesn't have in order to obtain them in order to...do what exactly?

[David Orsam]

So now we are being drip fed information – or rather, drip fed statements without any evidential support – not mentioned in Robert Smith's book or any other publication or website of which I am aware, one statement being that the Portus and Rhodes electricians were working in Battlecrease in 1989.

One has to love the logic of the argument here. On 9th March there is a timesheet which does not show Eddie Lyons working in Battlecrease. In 1989 there is a timesheet which does not show Eddie Lyons working in Battlecrease. Of course this obviously means that Eddie Lyons was working in Battlecrease on 9th March 1992 but not in 1989! It's Diary logic at its finest.

It's such a great point I must repeat it. When I ask: Where is the evidence that Eddie Lyons didn't work in Battlecrease in 1989? The answer comes back: The timesheets prove it. But when the timesheets don't show Eddie working in Battlecrease on 9th March 1992, then the timesheets are wrong!!!

You've gotta love the flexibility of that timesheet evidence. It can say whatever you want it to say.

But it seems to me that if we can't rely on the timesheets to tell us who was working in a property on any particular day then perhaps Eddie Lyons was working in Battlecrease on 1989. According to Feldman, Eddie claimed to have found the diary in Battlecrease in 1989 and on this basis Mike Barrett was seriously asked to give up 5 percent of his proceeds from the diary. So perhaps Eddie did find something in there in 1989. Not the diary of course but something else. And the story has now been built up into the massive fog of rumour and gossip that is unfortunately being repeated in this thread.

[David Orsam]

No, to me this smells more like the request of someone who knows what they are doing, or is out to add to their already substantial collection. What is common known as a "Ripperologist."

I have no doubt that this smell is the right one. I recall seeing other adverts for JTR books in similar book collecting publications in 1992. There's nothing unusual about it at all.

[Scott Nelson]

Could the Diary have been tossed into the skip and been retrieved by "Eddie", who rummaged through it later to see if there was scrap metal he could sell to Mike (knowing he would see him later in the pub)? Eddie may not have been doing actual work in the house but just scavenging for metal. And where was the site of the skip?

[David Orsam]

When I think of the importance of Robert Smith's first hand experience of watching the body language of Mike and Eddie during their June 1993 meeting, their eye contact and reactions, well, you know, it makes me wonder why he said not a word about any of it in his book "The True Facts"! And my conclusion from him saying nothing is that it can't have been very important after all.

But more than this, I think that it has absolutely nothing to do with the point I was making which is that Robert Smith set up the meeting in June 1993 specifically and expressly to meet Eddie Lyons, something which he asked Mike to arrange on his behalf.

So I have to repeat: what purpose did any mention of this meeting serve?

The latest mystery that we are supposed to be impressed about is that Robert Smith can't work out how Mike managed to convey to Eddie that the meeting was to be in the Saddle at 10pm. But does it matter? Are we supposed to think that Mike and Eddie were in psychic communication? It was Robert Smith who asked for the meeting and Robert Smith who says he "suggested meeting Lyons that evening in the Saddle". So when he later met Eddie Lyons in the Saddle, having suggested such a meeting to Mike earlier in the evening, it's really futile to try and wonder how Lyons knew about it because it means nothing at all.

I say again:

If anyone understands the significance of the fact that Eddie Lyons "actually came into the Saddle one night [in June 1993] when Robert Smith was there with Mike and sat down" perhaps they can explain it to me. Why was it ever mentioned in this thread? To simply give some information to RJ that he apparently didn’t know before? Do me a favour!

[Sam Flynn]

Not new titles in May, 1992. Nor titles that would normally spring to the mind of a neophyte out to study Jack the Ripper for the first time. Nor titles a librarian would normally recommend to a neophyte.

Quite so. They're pretty much "special interest" books, I'd say, apart - arguably - from Farson. Even the latter wouldn't have been a natural choice for a newbie in the early 1990s, given the popularity and publicity surrounding the books of (e.g.) Rumbelow, Knight and Fido in the post-Farson years.

[Sam Flynn]

Following on from the advert for the Victorian diary is a request for ITV yearbooks for the period 1955 to 1979, a request for BBC yearbooks for 1950-1979 and a request for a book by P. Cummings called "Silver Eagle carries on". Unless Mike also wanted these books too there is no connection whatsoever been the Ripper books in Earl's list and the Victorian diary.

It was perfectly common in 1992 in these book collecting magazines for people to be requesting hard to find Jack the Ripper books and what we have here is a great example of someone trying to see patterns and connections in separate events which almost certainly don't exist.

To be fair, David, there are Far More egregious examples of seeing imaginary patterns in ripperology, and it's not as if the "pattern" here is purely fanciful in any case. Instead we have, within a couple of lines of one another in the same advertisement, a request for three specialist Ripper books and the notorious blank Victorian diary. This may be entirely coincidental, of course, but it's an interesting coincidence nonetheless.

[David Orsam]

Instead we have, within a couple of lines of one another in the same advertisement, a request for three specialist Ripper books and the notorious blank Victorian diary. This may be entirely coincidental, of course, but it's an interesting coincidence nonetheless.

Well I saw those books immediately when I first saw that advert and I have to say that I didn't think it was particularly interesting. By that time, mind you, I had already looked through a number of other book collecting mags from 1992 and seen other requests/adverts for JTR books.

[David Orsam]

Just by way of example, here is an extract from Book and Magazine Collector of May 1992. Three adverts below the Martin E. Earl advert is a collector asking for Jack the Ripper books. Nothing unusual or remarkable about it at all.