Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[Spider]

Hi DD,

I really do wonder sometimes why others waste a second of their time on this subject here if they are 100% satisfied in their own mind that Mike did know the answer to one or more of those questions. They are not going to convince Ike, who seems to be the only one posting who thinks the diary was written by Maybrick.


Rant over.

Love,

Caz
X

I find it hard to believe that that some people think the ‘Diary’ is a late hoax. I find it quite frightening that some believe it could have been written by a twelve year old. That some believe Mike Barrett to have been involved in any way whatsoever with it, other than being the most unfortunate cog in its appearance, is the peak of hilarity.
It is apparent that the majority of posters on this subject on these boards have not even seriously read the ‘Diary’ in any detail.
All the discussion around Mike B and electricians is pointless, does no-one realise this?
Having only become aware of the ‘Diary’ in 2002 and being initially suspicious of it, I now count myself amongst the ‘apparent’ few in believing that it is the genuine article from 1888/89 and also that it was written by James Maybrick. It isn’t going to go away.

[caz]

I think I'm finally getting the hang of this.

Mike was too stupid to write the diary while Anne was too clever.

She would never have written "Frequented my club" with a straight face because she was too sensible and competent! Mind you, what does being sensible and competent have to do with it?

In her voicemail message of 31 July 1994, we find that Anne said this:

"I think it was in 1968/69 I seen the Diary for the first time."

AND

"I never seen Tony again."

AND

"I seen Paul the other day..."

Not so sensible and competent as to be able to speak English properly, it seems. But perhaps she did not say those words with "a straight face".

It's the vernacular, David. "I seen..." is very common in conversation and informal writing in Liverpool.

It has no significance whatsoever and is no indication of a person's education. In fact, I hope Chris Jones would forgive me for observing that he has said "I seen..." in my presence.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Does not "I seen" crop up in the diary itself?

I wouldn't be at all surprised, Gareth. But then, why wouldn't it?

Even if David needed educating on the point, surely you are not saying you didn't know this was/is all too common among Liverpudlians, and the subject of the diary is meant to have been one, born and bred.

Tut tut, the education standards of the modern age. Didn't they teach you anything?

I would be surprised if Paul Dodd and Professor Canter had never uttered "I seen..." on occasion, when not speaking or writing formally. And if I had written the diary I'd have put more than one "I seen..." in it.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

That’s a good question sam.

If it does, that should really put the final nail in the cofffin that this thing was written by MB and his wife.

Oh for crying out loud, Abby.

It would have been perfectly normal for any Liverpudlian to write "I seen..." in his private journal. It means nothing.

Has it really come to this? A common as muck Liverpudlian turn of phrase is now claimed to be 'the final nail in the coffin'? What happened to David's 'one off' argument? To his little red diary argument? To his 11 day creation argument? None of them good enough to be final nails now? What fun!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just to repeat for those who are slow on the uptake. I have never claimed that Mike did research in any library so I don't have to use any speculation to put him there. I'm not trying to put him there.

Good. That's settled then, David. So you are not going to suggest that Mike researched anything to do with JtR or the Maybricks prior to March 1992, on the sole basis of those typed up research notes finally handed over in the summer of 1992, claiming to represent research done by Mike going back to August 1991. Clearly, whether he and Anne knew the diary was forged, or they first saw it in March 1992, courtesy of Eddie Lyons, those typed up notes are not evidence of either, otherwise he and Anne would hardly have handed them over at a critical time for the publishing deal.

So we come back to the central point that the absence of evidence in this situation is meaningless and should never have been put forward as a reason against Mike being involved in the forgery of the diary.

Agreed, if this was put forward as a reason against Mike's involvement, but it is a reason against relying on Mike or Anne to have known, prior to March 1992, anything about the physical diary's existence, or anything about a forgery in the making.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

Oh for crying out loud, Abby.

It would have been perfectly normal for any Liverpudlian to write "I seen..." in his private journal. It means nothing.

Has it really come to this? A common as muck Liverpudlian turn of phrase is now claimed to be 'the final nail in the coffin'? What happened to David's 'one off' argument? To his little red diary argument? To his 11 day creation argument? None of them good enough to be final nails now? What fun!

Love,

Caz
X

Well. I would find it extremely odd that a Victorian writer and certainly not one of may Rick’s status say that and also that it’s quite a coincidence that at least one of the people who have been accused of forging it was apparently common for them to talk like that.

What’s your thoughts about my post 1299?

[caz]

My goodness, how much misunderstanding can one person achieve in one day?

When I said "It's almost certain that Anne had no idea that Martin Earl placed an advertisement in Bookdealer and a good chance that she didn't even know what instructions her husband had given to Earl" , I meant exactly what that sentence said.

I didn't mean that Anne didn't know that Mike instructed Martin Earl to obtain a diary nor that she didn't know that he obtained one nor that she didn't know why he obtained it.

What I was saying was written in plain English. She did not know about the advertisement.

Is it easier to understand in underlining? For why would Mike or Anne have had the first clue how Martin Earl obtained his second hand books? How would they have known he put adverts into specialist magazines? As I discovered, the advertisement was so cheap there would have been no need for Earl to charge his clients for it.

Equally, Anne would not necessarily have known what instructions Mike gave to Martin Earl. All she would have needed to know when she paid for it is that Mike had attempted to obtain a Victorian diary into which the JTR diary was intended to be written but the one he received from Martin Earl was not suitable.

So what was your point, David? I thought you were arguing that if Anne didn't know about the advertisement, she would have seen no danger in giving Keith the red diary and the means of tracing her purchase of it.

If you are now agreeing with me that she'd have known damned well, in May 1992, 'that Mike had attempted [and failed] to obtain a Victorian diary into which the JTR diary was intended to be written', if she was in on the plan to do just that, are we not back to my own argument that she'd have seen the danger of providing the evidential support for Mike's January 1995 claim that they were in it together, and that she had even paid for that diary, which proved 'useless for forgery purposes'?

And what about the far greater danger for her, back in July 1994, of claiming the diary had been in her family all along, if she knew Mike had the means, not only of proving his own involvement in its creation, but of proving hers too? It's no use anyone arguing that there was no danger for her at that stage because Mike wasn't accusing her, but claiming to have done it all by himself [presumably in secret?]. That would only apply if she really did have nothing to do with its creation. If the truth had been that she wrote out the diary herself, she'd have known there was every danger of Mike being forced into admitting this because it was so obviously not in his handwriting.

I may have missed the obvious explanation for Anne's behaviour, in July 1994 and again in 1995, when she helped Keith with the red diary, if she had been in the thick of it when Mike first tried to obtain it, waiting for something suitable in which to write out the diary.

But surely it's something that demands a credible explanation, every bit as much as Mike's strangely worded, ill-fated enquiry for a 'diary' does.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Well. I would find it extremely odd that a Victorian writer and certainly not one of may Rick’s status say that and also that it’s quite a coincidence that at least one of the people who have been accused of forging it was apparently common for them to talk like that.

And what do you know about 'may Rick's status', Abby? You seem to know very little, certainly about Liverpudlians using "I seen..." so commonly as to make it impossible to identify the diary author on that basis. My old mate Tony, who told me where Liverpool's posthouse was, also wrote "I seen..." in cards he used to send me, with local newspaper cuttings and so on. Perhaps he forged the diary.

It's not 'quite a coincidence' if "I seen..." is in the diary. Any forger might have put one or two in, just to make it sound more typically Liverpudlian.

Love,

Caz
X

[Abby Normal]

And what do you know about 'may Rick's status', Abby? You seem to know very little, certainly about Liverpudlians using "I seen..." so commonly as to make it impossible to identify the diary author on that basis. My old mate Tony, who told me where Liverpool's posthouse was, also wrote "I seen..." in cards he used to send me, with local newspaper cuttings and so on. Perhaps he forged the diary.

It's not 'quite a coincidence' if "I seen..." is in the diary. Any forger might have put one or two in, just to make it sound more typically Liverpudlian.

Love,

Caz
X

caz-my post 1299? have you ever considered that possibility?

[caz]

admittedly this is probably a stupid question and its probably been brought up a million times before but...but-

if (big if of course) it did come out of battlecrease and MB got his hands on it, could MB, his wife etc., come up with the lie that they got it through her family because they were afraid if they admitted where they got it they could be accused of theft(or receiving stolen property) and not only lose out on any profit but possibly face legal trouble?

could explain a lot.

Well that's what Anne eventually did claim, wasn't it? That the diary had been in her family and she gave it to Tony Devereux to give to Mike, with instructions not to let on, because it would help Mike's self esteem to do something for himself, that hadn't had her input.

If the diary was taken from the house on the morning of March 9th 1992 and shown to Mike, and he then impetuously phoned Doreen's office that afternoon, before Anne knew a thing about it, there may have been very little time or opportunity for them to discuss as a couple where they could say it came from, when the inevitable question was asked. If Mike took it upon himself to come up with his 'dead pal' story, because Tony had conveniently lived on the same road as Eddie Lyons, and all three had supped their pints in the nearby Saddle, it could have been too late for Anne to suggest something more credible.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

By the time Anne was being asked about Mike's purchase of the Victorian diary, Mike's affidavit was already in the public domain. If there had been any danger to her about people seriously believing Mike's affidavit it had passed.

Really? I mean - really?? That danger had passed, back in 1995??? And we are now well into 2018 and people are still seriously believing that part of Mike's affidavit which had Anne beavering away, writing out the diary into the guardbook acquired at the last minute, because his previous enquiry had produced something that was 'useless for forgery purposes'.

David, you slay me. Tell me you were not being serious when you wrote the above.

As for the position in July 1994 when Anne came up with her own provenance story (shortly after Mike had publicly claimed to have forged it by himself) one has to ask ourselves what is all this evidence which Mike was supposed to have been able to produce at the time to prove his involvement in writing the diary?

Exactly. I don't believe there was any. And you don't seem able to imagine any either. Isn't that even slightly problematic for the Barrett hoax theory?

Let's say that Anne knew the receipt for the scrapbook (which, incidentally, would probably not have been a receipt for a scrapbook but for "miscellaneous" auction items) had been destroyed - perhaps she had thrown it away herself - and the ink and any pens had been thrown away. What other physical evidence was there of her or Mike's involvement in forging the diary?

Well David, the argument for ages has surely been that the red diary, for starters, was 'crucial' evidence of this, and then there's the Sphere book, which Mike claimed was in their home from 1989. Anne didn't think to get rid of either, did she? She got the red diary from Mike and handed it over to Keith! As for the Sphere book, either she was careless or forgot all about the one quotation included in their forgery, or that book was never in their home when they lived under the same roof and Mike has been conning people about it since late 1994, when he bought it in a secondhand book shop. Aside from this, if Mike knew which ripper and Maybrick sources had been used for which sections of the diary, he should have been able to do a much better job of listing them and describing the forgery process, without needing the physical books to help him.

Indeed, on the basis that she did not want to get caught by the police it would only have been sensible to have destroyed everything connected with the making of the diary in April 1992. So what could Mike have possibly produced in July 1994 to prove her story was false (and prove that he and Anne had forged the diary?)

As I say, the red diary plus a Sphere book [in the right condition for his later claims about it] would very likely have been considered game over in the June, when he first 'confessed', and would certainly have gone a looong way in the August to unpick Anne's story in the July.

We are told that she was a sensible and competent woman so she would have figured that she had nothing to fear from Mike whatsoever.

And yet she has so many people to fear, here and now, who prefer to stick with Mike's forgery claims and believe she held the pen.

He was a drunk, a fantasist and couldn't prove his story.

Indeed he was. And still people believe.

The physical evidence was gone.

Not if you consider the red diary and/or Sphere book as physical evidence. I don't, but then it's not my argument. It's yours.

Any attempt to by Mike to reconstruct the writing of the diary, however convincing, could be dismissed as fiction. His finds such as the Crashaw quote put down to good luck.

How was he ever likely to produce anything 'convincing' while attempting to 'reconstruct' the writing of the diary? If he could have done that, why would a sensible and competent woman like Anne have taken on the task herself?

Once again, Anne either knew Mike could still have had the book they used for the Crashaw quote, or she knew nothing of the sort, and was as surprised as anyone else when he first sourced it to a library book and later produced a copy of his own.

Rather than someone constantly pointing out that Mike never produced evidence we need to be told what that evidence actually was that they expected to see.

Hope the above helps, although I did think, for what it's worth, that you of all people could have figured it out for yourself. Maybe you need to take a break and recharge your batteries.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The argument that I find most amusing is that Mike deliberately didn't say when he purchased the red diary (March 1992) because he knew it would have messed up his chronology in his affidavit.

Did I use the word 'deliberately', David? I don't think so. I merely observed that he couldn't very well have dated this to March 1992, while claiming Tony D was severely ill at the time of 'the' diary's completion, using the guardbook acquired after the red diary. It's a mess, isn't it? Tony was long dead by the time these other events would need to have happened if he was telling the truth about what the red diary represented.

Let's just think about this for a moment.

Let's not.

But we are told that Mike was a compulsive liar. So why not just say that Anne bought him a (fictional) blue Victorian diary in 1990 but then he threw that diary away? Why did he need to mention the real red diary which he didn't even have in his possession at the time?

Because liars will latch on to anything that will make their lies sound more credible. If Mike knew he had been sent that red diary around the same time he was planning to take JtR's diary to London, his story at that time had been that Tony Devereux had given it to him, and he hardly ever deviated from including Tony in the affair. In his mind, by 1995, he was evidently mixing up his stories and trying to make everything fit his latest narrative, that Tony was involved in the forgery itself and the red diary was also part of this. But the chronology he suggested could never have worked, although he seems to have been blissfully unaware of it, or maybe he was, but assumed nobody would examine it that closely.

Well the answer to that, of course, is that it existed. More than that, he knew that Anne had paid for it by cheque and this could be corroborated, thus implicating her. Hence he gives quite a lot of detail about the diary in his affidavit. More than for just about anything else he talks about.

And with good reason if he had bugger all else to use in support of his claims, as you yourself have argued! In fact, I wouldn't mind betting it was his awareness that Anne had paid for the red diary by cheque which gave him the idea to claim she had helped him forge the diary. He may not have bargained for it coming out that she had nothing to do with the initial enquiry or what it produced, and only had to pay for Mike's stupidity when he went down as a 'late payer'.

But therein lies the problem. If he expected his story to be checked out AND he knew he was lying about the date of the purchase then he would have known that his story would not be corroborated by the red diary, but, on the contrary, it would immediately be falsified by it.

See above. I reckon he knew the red diary had arrived shortly before he took 'the' diary to London. He just got himself into a mucking fuddle over the chronology he was inventing on the back of it - that it proved 'useless for forgery purposes' [well duh], so the guardbook was then obtained and used instead, but the completed diary had to be left for a while [how long could that have been?] because Tony Devereux was severely ill at the time.

In other words, if he consciously knew that he was inventing a story about writing the JTR diary in 1990 while also consciously knowing that he bought the red diary in 1992 he simply must have known that his story was going to be shown to be a lie once someone asked Anne about it.

Oh I'm sure he was beyond any rational thought by then, David. He just thought he could get away with his usual trick: 'You have to tell the tale right, it's just like fishing, you play the line then just pull them in'. He said just what people wanted to know. He knew what they wanted to hear and then he had them believing - and he was right, wasn't he? Even though he didn't tell the tale right in January 1995, but got it totally arse about face.

So I don't think it's as simple as someone might like to portray it. My own feeling is that if you assume that when Mike was speaking about writing the diary in 1990 with Tony Devereux he was talking about drafting it then the story can be made to make sense. I appreciate it does not read that way but poor drafting of statements is not confined to drunks and, I can assure you, can be made by sensible people, even lawyers.

Okay, but if the story 'can be made to make sense' only by redrafting it in a way that would help confirm your own suspicions, does that not give you any qualms that Mike was right about one thing - his ability to play the line then just pull 'em in, knowing they would believe what they wanted to hear, even if it meant some considerable redrafting to hear it?

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

It's not 'quite a coincidence' if "I seen..." is in the diary. Any forger might have put one or two in, just to make it sound more typically Liverpudlian.

However, "I seen" isn't typically Liverpudlian; it's very much a lower class thing, if you'll forgive me for putting it that way. What competent forger would want to paint Maybrick as lower class on the one hand, whilst attempting high-falutin' language (and Crashaw quotes!) on the other? It doesn't add up.

[Phil Carter]

However, "I seen" isn't typically Liverpudlian; it's very much a lower class thing, if you'll forgive me for putting it that way. What competent forger would want to paint Maybrick as lower class on the one hand, whilst attempting high-falutin' language (and Crashaw quotes!) on the other? It doesn't add up.

Hello Gareth

You've saved me the trouble of expressing exactly the same thing. It is not 'Liverpudlian' at all. I believe it is common (as in the old class system) slang.


Phil

[caz]

So the diarist writes on page 43: "I am cold curse the bastard Lowry for making me rip I keep seeing blood pouring from the bitches".

We are seriously supposed to think that this means that something Lowry did or said made him tear some early pages from the diary while retaining 43 pages which contain the confessions of five murders of prostitutes in London and, apparently, one in Manchester?!!! That makes sense. Not! What could have been in the pages that Lowry caused him to rip out? Something worse than murder and mutilation? I don't think so. It's a ridiculous idea. Even Smith doesn't sink so low, interpreting it as Maybrick blaming Lowry "for making him kill women" (Smith, 2017, fn97).

Well, David, I was thinking that if "Sir Jim" was going to have to rip anything out of his precious guardbook, because Lowry was perhaps still asking about the 'missing items', which JM had earlier wondered angrily if he should 'replace', it would hardly be the pages confessing to the murders, but more likely the early pages, which had presumably housed whatever Lowry had been banging on about. So, finally losing his temper, he rips them all out and throws them at 'the bastard' to keep him quiet.

There must have been a reason for every line in that diary, unless you think Mike was drunk when he helped compose it and put down the first thing that came into his head.

Love,

Caz
X