Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[rjpalmer]

Drilling holes in the joists is exactly what would happen when electrical groundwork was being conducted so such a memory is trivial in the extreme (for an electrician). The issue is not that aspect of his memory - the issue is was he there or not?

This issue is when someone's memory starts out vague & uncertain and then grows more detailed and specific with the passing of time; this is what might suggest the 'lost in the mall' syndrome.

This is why Mr. Powell's account, quite interesting in its original form, of having met a nurse in Australia in the 1970s who claimed she had Jack the Ripper's Diary began to lose all adherents as his tale grew more and more detailed.

I think you'll need to work out the obvious contradictions in the accounts given by James J vs by Dolgin & Jones.

The latter claim that the work in July (I suspect they mean June) was on the ground floor, whereas James claims it was finishing the installments on the first floor.

I wasn't there, but I imagine late March and April in Liverpool can be as bloody cold as the diarist described it, so why the electricians would simply do the wiring in March but not install the heaters and leave Mr. Dodd to freeze his tail off is something of a mystery to me. And then install the heaters at the beginning of summer?

Make it make sense.

[Iconoclast]

This issue is when someone's memory starts out vague & uncertain and then grows more detailed and specific with the passing of time; this is what might suggest the 'lost in the mall' syndrome.
This is why Mr. Powell's account, quite interesting in its original form, of having met a nurse in Australia in the 1970s who claimed she had Jack the Ripper's Diary began to lose all adherents as his tale grew more and more detailed.
I think you'll need to work out the obvious contradictions in the accounts given by James J vs by Dolgin & Jones.
The latter claim that the work in July (I suspect they mean June) was on the ground floor, whereas James claims it was finishing the installments on the first floor.
I wasn't there, but I imagine late March and April in Liverpool can be as bloody cold as the diarist described it, so why the electricians would simply do the wiring in March but not install the heaters and leave Mr. Dodd to freeze his tail off is something of a mystery to me. And then install the heaters at the beginning of summer?
Make it make sense.

Well, the electrical work was definitely done in March 1992 and the heaters were installed in July 1992 so I don't know what more sense I can make of it than that. Are you suggesting that these (or similar, then, if necessary) events did not happen and Colin Rhodes simply bunged some random invoices out to pay the wages???

The only issue we need answers to is whether or not Eddie Lyons and/or Jim Bowling were down at Battlecrease House on the morning of March 9, 1992. The finer details growing over time may very well speak of false memory syndrome, but are we saying that false memory syndrome cannot furnish details which were not true whilst the event itself was true? "I threw up at my brother's wedding!". "No you didn't, you only had a few pints". "Oh, maybe I wasn't my brother's wedding at all, then?".

Make it make sense, RJ.

Please.

[rjpalmer]

Well, the electrical work was definitely done in March 1992 and the heaters were installed in July 1992 so I don't know what more sense I can make of it than that. Are you suggesting that these (or similar, then, if necessary) events did not happen and Colin Rhodes simply bunged some random invoices out to pay the wages???

Ike, Old Man, I'm attempting to get at the truth. Bear with me.

As far as I know, there are only three relevant timesheets. One in March, one in June, and one in July 1992.

The first (9 March) was reproduced in Robert Smith's book.

The third (21 July) was given on this forum by James J:

"The only other timesheet where Eddie's name appears is dated the week ending 21.7.92. Arthur Rigby's name is nowhere to be seen, and the description of work conducted reads; 'Alternator LT Wiring + DB. Check Low Tests - Ground Floor'. This cannot be the work Eddie described during our interview."

Note: ground floor, not first floor, so your current claim that "the heater were installed in July" seems to contradict the July timesheet.

You must mean June.

However, the timesheet for June I cannot find (I've seen but do not currently own Robert Smith's book) and it is only stated as matter of faith on this forum that the heaters were installed in June. I'm not insisting that is correct or incorrect. But since the accounts given by Jones & Johnston contradict each other, how is the reading public supposed to know which is accurate?

That's what I'm asking/attempting to determine.

I guess I'll wait for the documentary; by no means arse yourself.

RP

[rjpalmer]

Hi Ike,

I'm getting somewhere.

A correspondent, Smith's book in hand, has informed me that a night heater (singular) went in on the first floor on Tuesday, 9 June. (Jones & Dolgin mentioned multiple heaters being moved around, but perhaps this means the new one?) That floor is now done.

July was as previously reported.

Several other days were worked in June, but it was all on the ground floor for lighting. The cellar was used for the wiring, so this would seem to be what Eddie was remembering.

Eddie Lyons only appears on the sheets for the week of 15 Jun - 19th.

Ciao.

[caz]

It's high time for some housekeeping...

Mr. Jones does exactly what you & Caroline Brown do; he paraphrases Lyons 'admission' of having allegedly been at the house on 9 March but does not give enough of the context of the conversation to resolve my concern--the very real possibility that after the passing of many years, Lyons is confused about the chronology and is admitting to being there on 9 March when he is actually remembering having been there in July. It is obviously a FACT that when quizzed by Feldman all those years earlier, the electricians were referring to events that happened in the summer of 1992 and not in March 1992. The driveway incident, etc. with Lyons on the scene. It would be easy enough to inadvertently repeat this mistake when quizzing Lyons years later.

Nowhere in any account does Lyons admit to being at the house TWICE. Surely you can appreciate the importance of this?

The concern is that once the great coincidence of 9 March 1992 was noticed by Mr. Skinner, it was deemed desirable in some quarters to shoehorn Lyons onto the job site in March when he was actually there in July. I don't mean that in an accusatory way, but it's the best way to describe it.

Now, Palmer is not entirely to blame for getting so much of the above wrong, so in the spirit of enlightening everyone, may I first say that having revisited Eddie's fascinating account from 2018, I can confirm that no actual dates were mentioned by him - how could they be? It was more than a quarter of a century since he had worked in the house - and no dates were supplied to him, to help jog his memory or to 'shoehorn' him onto the site in March 1992 [we are talking about Keith Skinner, James Johnston and Chris Jones here, not Paul Feldman] and plant false memories. Eddie could not have been remembering the July job, where his name does appear on the relevant timesheet, and he wasn't suffering from false memory syndrome. His memories were of a real event, and it was clearly the March job he was describing, because he said he was sent to the house with his mate Jim Bowling, but that it wasn't his job. They were just "filling in" when the Skelmersdale contract had to be put on hold - which dates it conclusively to the week beginning Monday 9th March without any prompting from anyone.

Eddie and Jim had been taken on together by Colin Rhodes on 26th November 1991, specifically for the "Skem" job, and they had both worked solidly on it, full days every week from Monday to Saturday, without a break except for a few days over Christmas, right up to and including Saturday 7th March. Eddie remembered it was Arthur Rigby's job they were sent to help out with at Battlecrease, and thought there were four of them in the house on that occasion, which corresponds with the young Jimmy C being there with Arthur. [According to the timesheet Jimmy C only worked for two hours while Arthur was there for eight, so it's not clear if the youngster had to catch a bus or was able to cadge a lift at the end of his two hour shift. Only Arthur appears on the timesheet for Tuesday 10th, working four hours.] Eddie thought he recalled only going to the house on one day that week, but said it might have been two.

We know Eddie returned to the house in the July because he is down on the relevant timesheet for seven hours on Thursday 16th; six hours on Friday 17th; six hours again on Monday 20th; and two hours on Tuesday 21st. Colin Rhodes's son Graham was working with him all that time, on a wiring job on the ground floor, and yet Eddie didn't mention this four-day job, or offer any personal memories of it, and he didn't appear to remember Graham Rhodes at all, despite also having worked with him and Jim Bowling on the Skem job. For whatever reason, it was the brief March job that Eddie was recalling, so the question is: what made that earlier occasion memorable, so long after the event, while the longer job in the July with the boss's son didn't even merit a mention? Eddie was made redundant from Portus & Rhodes on Thursday 23rd July, just two days after his second visit to Battlecrease. Maybe this affected his memory of how he spent the final days of that particular employment.

Jones and Dolgin write:

"The Portus and Rhodes show that on this day [9 March] Eddie Lyons and Jim Bowling were working on a sewage farm in Skelmersdale in Lancaster. However, the work on the site was held up as they were waiting for materials to arrive. As was the practice at Portus and Rhodes, the two electricians were redeployed to help with existing jobs."

Hold the phone.

This does NOT truly agree with what is now being claimed by Caroline Brown. There is no timesheet for Lyons for Monday and we are told that the job at Skelmersdale was suspended on the previous Friday, not on Monday the 9th, so claiming Lyons was 'redeployed' on Monday comes across as inadvertently misleading--the result of a muddle of speculation and assumption.

As I have posted many times previously, the timesheets show that the work at Skem carried on until the end of play on Saturday 7th March 1992, and didn't resume until Friday 13th, but for once without Eddie, so I don't know where Chris got the idea that anyone was working at Skem 'on this day [9 March]'. To my knowledge Chris has not seen the unpublished P&R timesheets and if he had, he'd have seen that the only work done on 9th was the job for Paul Dodd.

The fact is no one really has any idea where Lyons was for the entire week of March 9-13th, his name not appearing on any other work order, and the most logical conclusion is that he had been laid off the previous Friday when the job was suspended and what we have is a muddle of bad memories after the period of many years. According to C.A.B., Rhodes admitted that Lyons' whereabouts that week was a mystery. He's AWOL.

The 'mystery' wasn't that Eddie was missing from the Battlecrease timesheets that week. Colin Rhodes himself told Keith it was plausible that he had sent him to help out on that job. The suggestion didn't even come from Keith, who was prepared to accept that if Eddie wasn't on the timesheet, he wasn't there. The mystery was why Eddie's name was absent from the Skem timesheets from 13th March when that job resumed and was still absent when it was completed. His name appears with Jim Bowling's on every previous Skem timesheet, back from 7th March 1992 to December 1991. Colin could think of no plausible explanation for this.

More corrections to come regarding the heater installation in June 1992....

[caz]

Hi Ike,

I'm getting somewhere.

A correspondent, Smith's book in hand, has informed me that a night heater (singular) went in on the first floor on Tuesday, 9 June. (Jones & Dolgin mentioned multiple heaters being moved around, but perhaps this means the new one?) That floor is now done.

July was as previously reported.

Several other days were worked in June, but it was all on the ground floor for lighting. The cellar was used for the wiring, so this would seem to be what Eddie was remembering.

Eddie Lyons only appears on the sheets for the week of 15 Jun - 19th.

Ciao.

I'm afraid Eddie doesn't appear on any of the P&R timesheets for June 1992, so I don't know where Palmer got this information from.

The timesheets are all based on the week ending on a Tuesday, and the Battlecrease timesheet for the week ending on Tuesday 9th June has Graham Rhodes working there for eight hours on 9th and Jim Bowling for two hours, to install storage heaters on the first floor, following the wiring job in the March, exactly three months previously. Eddie's name does not appear, and I don't think anyone recalled him helping out on that occasion. The job title is not written very clearly, so it could be read as: INSTALL STORAGE HEATER [singular] 1st FLOOR, but the list of materials on the same sheet includes 1 3kw HEATER, 1 2.44kw HEATER and 1 1.7 kw HEATER, along with their respective prices, so that would appear to explain the slight confusion there.

The only other timesheet for June 1992 is for the week ending Tuesday 16th June, for a rewire in the ground floor flat, and only the names of Graham Rhodes, Jim Bowling and Arthur Rigby appear on that sheet.

That's it for now, folks.

[rjpalmer]

I'm afraid Eddie doesn't appear on any of the P&R timesheets for June 1992, so I don't know where Palmer got this information from.

I had it from Tom Mitchell that Eddie's name was on the timecards that summer---at least for July 1992:

That is not in debate. It was July 17, 1992. We know this because this time he [Eddy] is on the timesheet written up by Colin Rhodes (and Jim Bowling reported a conversation with Lyons around that time - I think he got it out by about a month).

Whether it was June or July doesn't concern me. We keep hearing about work done in June/July 1992. What concerns me is that the public is never given access to Eddie's "admission" that he was also at Dodd's house in March----we only hear speculation that he was---often from the same people who assured us that Anne Graham's account of seeing the diary in the 1960s was credible and consistent. Later, it turned out that she was anything but consistent and her various statements were riddled with contradiction and implausibility.

The 'mystery' wasn't that Eddie was missing from the Battlecrease timesheets that week. Colin Rhodes himself told Keith it was plausible that he had sent him to help out on that job. The suggestion didn't even come from Keith, who was prepared to accept that if Eddie wasn't on the timesheet, he wasn't there. The mystery was why Eddie's name was absent from the Skem timesheets from 13th March when that job resumed and was still absent when it was completed.

Smoke and mirrors, I'm afraid.

Eddie's whereabouts that week might be no mystery to you, since you have convinced yourself otherwise, but I assure you they remain a mystery to anyone who has been paying attention. Talking in circles won't change that.

Eddie's last known whereabouts date to 7 March 1992. He is then off the 'radar' for at least two weeks---he isn't on the job on March 13th or even afterwards. I'm getting all of this from you.

So how in the heck do you know he even worked the week of March 9-14? We are told it is 'plausible' that he worked for a couple of hours at Dodd's house, but not only can't you produce any documentation to show it, you can't even show he was at any other job site that week or the next.

If he worked that week---not just Dodd's house but anywhere--shouldn't there be a record of it?

How is that not a mystery?

As far as the public knows, Eddie was in bed sick with the flu for three weeks or cruising the Mediterranean. Or laid-off.

You might not like hearing it, but when I learn of a person whose job was suspended on March 7th--and his whereabouts aren't known for the next two weeks or more, I'm going to assume he either got laid off or took the opportunity to go on holiday.

When I've asked about this in the past, someone like Jay Hartley usually rushes in to inform us that Eddie admitted to being there on 9 March.

But this only brings me back the original question: what was the context of this admission, and why can't we hear it? If, as Tom Mitchell tells us, Eddie was there on 17 July 1992, couldn't this be what he was remembering and 'admitting' to?

These are not unreasonable questions and that you respond by pretending they are confused and foolish doesn't do you any favors.

You've convinced yourself that the diary came out from under Dodd's floorboards. Which is fine, but if you're going to convince anyone else, you'll need to do better.

[Lombro2]

You’ve convinced yourself the Diary wasn’t in a cubby hole for 103 years. It should be easy to prove it and convince other people.

You even have another fairly valuable artifact in its own right you can use.

It’s been over 30 years now. What exactly are you waiting for?

[rjpalmer]

You’ve convinced yourself the Diary wasn’t in a cubby hole for 103 years. It should be easy to prove it and convince other people.

No one needs to disprove Caroline Brown's theory.

"What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence." --Hitchens' Razor.

[Lombro2]

That’s convenient since you can’t prove it’s not true when it should be easy.