Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[rjpalmer]

Hi rj, Do you know if anyone, at any time, has suggested that the above two books would have given Mike some, if not all, the ripper information he'd have needed to create the diary text?

Good afternoon Caz. Just dropping by, and funny you should ask, because I've recently read, or partially read, the two books Mike mentions. Let me warn you in advance: this WON'T convince you that "Mike dunnit." But I found it slightly interesting.

The Wilson/Odell book mentioned in Mike's 'research notes' actually has a paragraph that mentions the Maybrick case in passing. It concerns Dr. Forbes Winslow, his father's asylum, and the sad case of Florie M. The 1988 edition of Wilson/Odell is a paperback, gum binding. If Barrett gazed on that passage once too often it would have made a crease in the gum.

The same paragraph has the word "Hammersmith" rather prominently placed at the beginning of a sentence (1988 edition). In the 1987 edition, the word is also prominent, being at the end of a line and hyphenated: Hammer-smith. I don't know which edition Mike owned, but it doesn't matter much.

Mike supposedly had a habit of flipping open books. For instance, he is said to have come up with the obscure "O[h] Costly intercourse of Death" quotation by casually flipping through the Sphere Guide to English Literature. The alleged binding defect made it more likely that the book would open at that page. Mike saw the quote, and decided to incorporate it in the Diary's text.

Now, if Mike also wanted to come up with an interesting name for an imaginary neighbor, what could be more natural than flipping open his trusty Wilson/Odell and grabbing a name at random? Thanks to the crease, the book flips open to page 79-80--right to that oft gazed upon paragraph---and the word "Hammersmith" is staring Mike in the face.

Thus, Mrs. Hammersmith 'the bitch' is born.

I can't imagine this 'works' for you, but it does show that coincidences can be so... coincidental.

But I am reminded by your above link that those of us who still suspect Mike's involvement are suffering from 'mental health issues,' so I will leave it at that and go seek medication. Have a good evening.

[David Orsam]

But I am reminded by your above link that those of us who still suspect Mike's involvement are suffering from 'mental health issues,' so I will leave it at that and go seek medication.

Yes, indeed.

I try hard not to respond to comments made in another place but, as the link to the thread has been posted here, it is worth amusing ourselves with the claim that anyone who still believes that Barrett himself created the diary has "mental issues". I'm not sure if the poster who said this allows for the possibility that Barrett might have been assisted by others in the creation of the text and writing of the diary but what's so amusing is that in support of this extraordinary claim the poster makes at least one serious factual error.

Thus he says he that, if he had forged the diary, it doesn't make sense (and he can't believe) that "Barrett ADVERTISES for a diary". Well if he had consulted the OP of this thread, he would know that Mike Barrett never once advertised for a diary. It was Martin Earl who placed the advertisement and the likelihood is that Barrett had absolutely no idea how Martin Earl acquired his rare books and thus had no idea that he ever placed an advert in Bookdealer to obtain the diary. In any event, if Barrett had not himself stated in his 1995 affidavit that he had acquired a Victorian diary no-one would ever possibly have discovered the advertisement and linked it to the JTR diary.

The other point he makes in support of his argument is that Barrett showed no familiarity with the Maybrick and JTR cases when speaking to Keith Skinner and it was only when he got up to speed by creating his backdated "Research Notes" that he knew anything about those subjects. Well I mean, if Barrett created the Diary it means he was reasonably clever and he's hardly going to show off his detailed knowledge of Maybrick and JTR to the researcher who is investigating whether the Diary is a fake!

That's assuming that the conversation with Keith Skinner was before he created his Research Notes. Those notes were handed to Shirley Harrison in July or August 1992 so Keith Skinner's conversation with Barrett must have been prior to this and I'm not aware that such an early conversation has ever been documented. Our friendly poster doesn't tell us what date this conversation took place.

Yet it is on the basis of this flawed and dodgy thinking that this poster is able to say that anyone who disagrees with him has "mental issues". And that's just about the standard of debate that we have come to expect from the Diary faithful.

[David Orsam]

Reading through today's barrage of unduly aggressive and poorly argued posts I am struck by the fact that the one topic not addressed is my point (which relates to the actual subject of this thread) that Mike Barrett in March 1992 was obviously NOT trying to obtain a diary with 20 blank pages but, instead, an entirely blank unused diary and only in the alternative a partly used diary which could have had 50 or 100 pages.

[David Orsam]

The levels of (mis)comprehension being demonstrated in this thread are incredible. Far from criticising anyone from using the word "probably", my criticisms are for that word not being used! I am criticising the use of unqualified statements of people stating things as facts which are not facts. And I am criticising the overblown claims being made for the timesheet evidence as if we now know that the Diary came from Battlecrease. We know no such thing!

But let me be clear. I do not criticise anyone for setting out a notional scenario in which, for the sake of explaining that scenario, elements of it are expressed as facts. For that reason, I make no criticism of the way the scenarios are set out in, for example, #49 in this thread, even though, taken out of context, it might appear to contain speculation stated as fact.

What I have been criticising are statements of fact that are not expressed in any way as speculation or assumptions, such as: "There is no denying that the floorboards in Maybrick's old bedroom were lifted on just the one day"(#54). If the claim in #68 that the JTR books were enquired about by Mike at the same time as he enquired about a Victorian diary was only supposed to be a possible scenario it was very poorly expressed.

But let's look at that statement about the floorboards being lifted "on just the one day" and compare it to what is said in Shirley Harrison's 2003 book:

"Paul [Dodd] was adamant. The house was originally gaslit and converted to electricity in the 1920s. It was re-wired when his father bought it in 1946 and again in 1977 when Paul himself had gutted the place and lifted the floor boards. Had anything been hidden, he was sure that would have found it then."

So the floorboards were lifted in 1977.

And in Inside Story (p.251) we find this:

"Dodd says the floorboards have been lifted a number of times since 1946 and nothing found..."

The authors of Inside Story go on to note that, from some sort of private information, Dodd believed that Feldman was the victim of a scam (presumably involving the Portus & Rhodes electricians) and that there was "no substance at all to the claims made of finding the Diary at Battlecrease."

[David Orsam]

Here's an interesting quote from Feldman's book (1997 edition, p. 133):

"Mike Barrett had taken the diary to the literary agent Doreen Montgomery in April 1992. Three years before, 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".

Replace "Three years before, in 1989" with "One month before, on 9 March 1992" and it seems that the exact same argument is being made today as was being made 20 years ago, which shows how far the timesheet evidence has got us!

We might note that the authors of Inside Story point out that Paul Dodd claims that Feldman was wrong to say that the floorboards were lifted for the first time in 1989, not because he should have said 1992 but because they were lifted prior to this, as I have quoted in my previous post.

[David Orsam]

As people seem to have difficulty in understanding what I am saying let me rephrase:

The point is that Eddie Lyons was NOT a random coincidence. He probably only exists in the story because he happened to be one of nine Liverpool electricians who drank in the Saddle. It’s not a random coincidence, in other words, it’s a manufactured story – manufactured by Rigby - created to please the big film producer, Paul Feldman, and give him exactly what he wanted. In response, Eddie initially seems to have been non-committal and then, according to Feldman, appears to have agreed that he did find the diary (in 1989) once he realised that there might be something in it for him. Then, when it became clear that there was nothing in it for him after all (and after having been confronted with an angry Mike Barrett asking him why he was lying) it looks like he reverted to the truth in June 1993 and said he never found it. As far as I know, that remains his position to this day.

All very simple.

[GUT]

Bet poor old Tony Devereaux is feeling left out.

[David Orsam]

If anyone is wondering why I am still here posting in this thread, my thread – the thread that I created to discuss Mike's acquisition of a Victorian diary – it is because I am responding to new (timesheet) evidence which is being used to suggest that Mike did not attempt to locate a Victorian diary with blank pages in order to write something onto those blank pages.

But, as I have said, if the diary did come from under the floorboards in Battlecrease in 1992 then the only sensible conclusion is that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper which, forgive me, seems to be a pretty important conclusion because it solves the entire JTR mystery and here I agree entirely with Robert Smith in this regard: it's either a genuine diary or a modern forgery.

The notion that a forged diary of this nature could have ended up under the floorboards of Battlecrease is so ridiculous – and I have yet to read a single coherent argument as to how or why such a thing could have happened - that it is beyond contemplation.

[David Orsam]

I am quite certain that Keith Skinner and others have not been investigating to prove me wrong about anything and I have never said they were. I said that I thought the new evidence was supposed to prove me wrong about things I have posted on this forum. I didn't say that this was the reason anyone has done anything. My goodness, some people really have problems with basic comprehension.

[David Orsam]

I have been told directly on this forum that the new timesheet evidence was going to make any notion that the diary could have been forged in March/April 1992 redundant. Well it certainly has not done that. All it has done is create a new argument about when the diary was created and it is no more than this. If anyone thinks that we now know for certain on the basis of a single coincidence that the diary was not forged in 1992 they might as well think the moon is made of cream cheese.

[David Orsam]

I love the fact that I am told that the floorboards could have been lifted on any number of days between May 1889 and today and then, in the very next breath, that the floorboards being lifted on 9 March 1992 (if they were so lifted) was a "one off instance". Well if they were lifted prior to 9 March 1992 - as Harrison and Dodd suggest was the case - then it wasn't a one off instance was it?

[David Orsam]

I suppose it's just as well that I am not addressing my comments in this thread to anyone in particular bearing in mind that there is always a chance that some people might not care what I think about any particular issue. But I must say that for someone who claims not to care about what I think, one person seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time responding to all my posts on this forum. One might even detect that someone has an obsession about what I think given the attempts made to counter my views. I even wonder why that person is posting in this thread - my thread - if they don't care what I think. Perhaps someone is getting upset and frustrated that the much vaunted timesheet evidence has turned out to be a damp squib.

[David Orsam]

Here's a funny thing though. The person who said she doesn't care what I think, and who wonders why I keep posting in this thread, posted a link to this thread (my thread) in another forum on 10 November with the following comment:

"I put up a long post over at casebook at the end of last month, exploring some alternatives if Mike used Devereux to conceal or disguise the diary's true origins. I'm quite surprised it hasn't been pounced on yet and trashed by any of the regulars - not a single response."

She was talking here about a post she made in this thread very dated 30 October which was addressed specifically to RJ Palmer and began "Hi RJ". It was, needless to say, a long rambling post full of nonsense, not worth commenting on, and so I, like most sensible people, ignored it. Yet that ignoring seems to have been the source of such surprise to the extent that the absence of responses by "the regulars" (which undoubtedly included me) was publicly commented on in another forum!

And let's face it, what she was saying there was that her post was so good it was unanswerable! Not, of course, the case but some people seem happy to delude themselves.

But that's not all because the same person initially set out her theory that Mike was testing the price of a Victorian diary in the other forum on 17 November with the comment: "Any thoughts, before I wave this under the noses of the terminally sceptical?" Perhaps she was referring to those who are terminally sceptical that the diary was written by James Maybrick (i.e. herself!) but then in a subsequent post she said "I don't doubt someone will come up with a million and one objections to this all too straightforward and mundane explanation, so they can keep the theory afloat that Mike was still busy at the end of March 1992 trying to find an old book in which his diary could be penned in time for his appointment in London on April 13th". Would it be fair for me to conclude she was talking about me? I think so. And so, far from not caring about what I think, she is talking about me on other forums. Obsessive or what?

One thing worth mentioning is that amongst all the intellectually lazy backslapping over in that forum, one of the posters did, to his credit, step forward and, in a brave case of the Emperor's New Clothes, pointed out that the latest so-called "straightforward and mundane" theory to explain Mike's acquisition of a Victorian diary doesn't make any sense.

[David Orsam]

The whole notion of Mike trying to get hold of those three rare JTR books is so ludicrous that it's barely worth discussing. Clearly we are now being told that Keith Skinner's investigation WAS faulty. He could see those JTR books on the advert as well as any of us. And it must be perfectly obvious that if Mike had also requested JTR books as well as the Victorian diary, Keith would have been told this by Martin Earl during his investigation.

As I've mentioned in #10, to get the advert into the issue of Bookdealer of 19 March 1992, Mike had to have contacted Martin Earl by 10th March at the latest so it wasn't a case of him requesting the diary, then a few days later, at another point in time, asking for some Ripper books too.

But I'd like to know this. Was Mike responsible for the request for the ITN and BBC yearbooks? If not, why not? Why is he not believed to be responsible for this bit of the advert which appears directly beneath the request for the diary?

What we have here is someone who can't seem to comprehend that Martin Earl had lots of clients and it was obviously another client who asked for those Jack the Ripper books which were collected or sought after by many people just like it was another client who asked for the ITN and BBC yearbooks. It's a case of someone drawing false conclusions from minimal information. And it's part of a pattern of doing so, looking for connections which don't really exist.

[David Orsam]

Ah, the rumours going round the electricians in 1992. Yes indeed. Now where is the actual evidence of these rumours going round the electricians in 1992? Where is the evidence that there were any rumours in 1992 of a diary having been found? That's what I've been asking. How do we know this is not all ex post facto, with hindsight, after Feldman started sniffing around and possibly creating false memories?

One thing that seems to be a fact is that an old newspaper was found in Battlecrease and the electricians asked permission to keep it. How do we know that the stories told to Feldman in 1993 were not confusing the discovery of this newspaper with an imagined finding of a diary?

How do we even know that the stories were not part of "a scam", as claimed by Paul Dodd and reported in Inside Story?

In the absence of any evidence of such rumours actually existing in 1992 are we entitled to conclude that, in fact, there were none and those supposed rumours only came into existence in 1993 during Paul Feldman's "investigation"?