Acquiring A Victorian Diary

[caz]

Eddie goes AWOL for two weeks--no record of where he was--but magically we know with certainty that he was at Dodd's house at the necessary time for the provenance to work. It sounds rather convenient.

I'd hardly call it 'convenient' for Eddie, considering that he freely gave enough detail to put himself 'with certainty' at Dodd's house on the one and only occasion that allows for the Battlecrease provenance to remain unshaken by all Barrett hoax theories.

I appreciate that Chris Jones has stated that Eddie Lyons admitted to being there, but why wouldn't he.... WAS there...later that summer.

How many more ways can I put this? Eddie was describing what we know happened on 9th March, but he didn't describe what we know happened later that summer, when his name was actually attached to a specific job. For all Eddie knew, when speaking in 2018, Colin Rhodes could have kept a dated record of each time he sent an employee out on a job, with no exceptions.

The desire not to ask leading questions is a legitimate one, but the flip side is that, after so many intervening years, it would be entirely plausible for Eddie not to have a clear memory of the dates (nor even seasons) nor to understand the full context and thus admit to having been there in March when he was really there in July. Floorboards or no floorboards. Skips or no skips.

But no dates were even suggested to Eddie in 2018. He'd only have been able to narrow it down to between the end of 1991 and late July 1992, while employed by Portus & Rhodes. What was the 'full context' that Eddie needed to understand, when asked in the drive of Dodd's house what he could remember about having worked there more than a quarter of a century before? He admitted to being at the house to help out on a job that dates itself to March 1992. The details he gave correspond to that job and no other. He hardly recalled the job that dates itself to July 1992, when we already knew he was there. Floorboards and skips are not required to confuse the issue in this context.

It's not like we don't see similar confusion in the statements by Tim M-W, Dodgson, etc., nor a tendency for those promoting the theory to exaggerate or misinterpret what was actually said.

Similar confusion? What 'confusion' do we see with Eddie recalling details that can only be applied to March 1992?

I'll wait for James J's documentary. I really don't expect to be eating my words, but I'll keep a bottle of ketchup on hand.

Ciao.

Probably wise.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Don't get coy with me. You know what I'm asking. Anyone in general, not just you, what is the definition of a diary defender?

It's not an expression I've ever used myself in that form, Scott, but do you think it might refer to those who regularly, routinely and consistently defend the diary from attacks on its authenticity; who challenge every single anachronistic expression in the diary (claiming that someone in the 19th century could easily have written "one off instance", "bumbling buffoon", "top myself" and "spreads mayhem"), every single factual mistake (the diarist mistaking Florence's godmother for her aunt, the breasts in the wrong place, the non-existent key and the poste house) and who challenge the conclusions of experienced document examiners (Baxendale and the Rendell team) that the diary is a modern fake? Might that be it? All seems pretty self-explanatory to me considering that the words "diary" and "defender" are easy to look up in a dictionary. But do you really think it's a good idea to personalize this debate with labels? Wouldn't it be best, considering Admin's recent warning, to stick with discussing issues relating to the diary rather than the people who post about it?

[Scott Nelson]

Don't get coy with me. You know what I'm asking. Anyone in general, not just you, what is the definition of a diary defender?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I’m genuinely baffled Scott, as I suspect are others who might be reading this. Which of the words in "the diary gets defended by a minority" don't you understand and need me to explain to you? What point are you trying to make?

[Scott Nelson]

Because you said in #2082 that the diary gets defended by a minority.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Why are you asking me?

[Scott Nelson]

No argument with any of that, except what's a diary defender again?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes. I stick to the evidence at hand despite being regularly confronted with weird comments, insinuations, sulks and strops. The evidence tells us that the diary is a forgery and yet it still gets defended by a minority. The earth isn’t flat, men did land on the moon, the earth isn’t 6000 years old, the King isn’t an alien, OJ was guilty and the diary is a forgery.

[Scott Nelson]

Yes, but of course you're immune to all of that.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

A very useful summary of the many oddities, inconsistencies, and unanswered questions about the proposed provenance. Ultimately, it will be up to those promoting the theory to address these concerns, but I am hesitant to involve myself further because when I ask questions, I'm either fobbed off or treated like a conspiracy theorist who is too dim to see how this 'evidence' dovetails together seamlessly.

The above in bold, though, appears to be a typo. According to the original post on JTR Forums, the phone interview took place on 6th July 2004---fully twelve years after the summer job at Dodd's, and the 'informant' Margaret Davies is, at best, passing along third-hand information. This is a theme that runs throughout. Old garbled memories of people who have no first-hand information.

It's not unlike a ghost story where one can find people who heard about the ghost or knew someone who knew someone who supposedly knew something about the ghost, but no one can ever find anyone who had actually seen the ghost, and one is left wondering if there was any ghost to begin with, though there is certainly a lot of 'lore' about the ghost.

Hi Roger,

It often feels like i’ve wandered into some kind of twilight zone with this subject. We have a provably anachronistic phrase for which people have spent 10 years or so coming up with increasingly desperate and bizarre ‘explanations,’ every one of which is palpable nonsense. Following on from that, on here we’ve had ‘examples’ posted which have clearly been shown to have been mixed up gobbledegook and do we get acknowledgment of this ‘error’? No, we get more of the same. We get endless examples of people bending over backwards to make increasingly weird excuses for things. And then we get responded to in a tone that implies that it’s us that’s posting the nonsense. Then there’s the secrecy. The ‘things that shall not be told’ element. We know it’s a forgery…that’s proven. Who forged it? I can think of a couple of people who stand out head and shoulders from the rest…and it’s not Ant and Dec.

[rjpalmer]

We also know from a JTR forums post of 13th September 2023 by Caz who seems, on this one occasion, to have been given special permission to post a note taken by Keith Skinner of an interview with Margaret Davies, that Keith phoned Alan Davies on 6th July 1994but he wasn't in and Keith spoke to his wife. She seemed to know all about the diary and called it an "old book" with "old handwriting" which she had wanted to buy herself .

Hi Herlock,

A very useful summary of the many oddities, inconsistencies, and unanswered questions about the proposed provenance. Ultimately, it will be up to those promoting the theory to address these concerns, but I am hesitant to involve myself further because when I ask questions, I'm either fobbed off or treated like a conspiracy theorist who is too dim to see how this 'evidence' dovetails together seamlessly.

The above in bold, though, appears to be a typo. According to the original post on JTR Forums, the phone interview took place on 6th July 2004---fully twelve years after the summer job at Dodd's, and the 'informant' Margaret Davies is, at best, passing along third-hand information. This is a theme that runs throughout. Old garbled memories of people who have no first-hand information.

It's not unlike a ghost story where one can find people who heard about the ghost or knew someone who knew someone who supposedly knew something about the ghost, but no one can ever find anyone who had actually seen the ghost, and one is left wondering if there was any ghost to begin with, though there is certainly a lot of 'lore' about the ghost.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Setting aside the tedium of these inquiries, a companion question would be when did TMW "recover" this memory of having left a hall stand or a hat stand at APS?

Initially, he couldn't pinpoint when the conversation occurred. He gave a vague, six-month window.

But as I understand it, Keith Skinner didn't reopen the investigation into the Curious Case of Paul Feldman and the Electricians until sometime in the 2000s, ie., post-Anne Graham, and it appears that some of these blokes weren't reinterviewed until 2014 or later. So they are being asked to recover memories from years--or decades--earlier.

So I don't think we've ever been given enough information to determine when TMW's memory began to shift to where he now began to associate the conversation with a specific episode involving a hall stand. But it appears as if it must have been years later.

Maybe you'll see it differently, but it seems to me that the standards of what constitutes reliable "witness" testimony¹ is shifting radically depending on what the theorist wants to believe. Rawes' account of Eddie being at Battlecrease in June is dismissed as unreliable even though Rawes specifically referred to a memo book about the job itself, and even though Shirley Harrison must have interviewed him back in the mid-to-late 1990s.

But TMW, who is not truly a witness to anything, and was never at Dodd's house and didn't know Eddie, etc., is deemed reliable even though--unless I understand it improperly--he wasn't interviewed about the hall stand until many years after the fact, and (unlike Rawes) his memo book was not even related to anything to do with the work at Dodd's house nor (specifically) to any conversation.

Can you appreciate my concerns?

¹I use the term "witness" loosely, because I don't see how TMW is a witness to anything. His only usefulness to the theory is that he supposedly heard a rumor about the diary before Feldman entered the equation and had a chance to muddy the waters or to allegedly offer filthy lucre for information. I couldn't say, but I'm assuming someone later noticed that this minor "witness," TMW, was placing this conversation to pre-Feldman so it was only at that point that it was thought necessary to recontact TMW and ask him if he could pinpoint the date of the conversation more specifically, and it was then that the hall rack connection was discussed.

Hi Roger,

We can add a few things to the timeline of events.

We already know that Tim told his story to Feldman in June 1994 but that Feldman wasn't interested. Whether Tim mentioned the involvement of an electrician at this time is unclear. There's no such mention in the snippet we've been provided.

What happened next, according to Shirley Harrison in The American Connection, is that a solicitor friend of Tim's mentioned his story to someone (we're not told who), in what must have been about May 1997, and Tim, together with Dodgson, spoke to Robert Smith. The story at this time was that the electrician Alan Davies had told Dodgson "a few months" after the opening of the APS shop in Bootle that a colleague of his had found "a leather bound diary and a gold ring" in a biscuit tin while doing some re-wiring work at Battlecrease. Davies had supposedly offered to sell the diary to Tim for £25 even though he didn't own it. Nothing came of it but Dodgson is supposed to have later discovered that the diary had been sold in an Anfield pub, although who told him this is not stated. On 30th May 1997 (per James Johnston), it would appear that Shirley, Smith and Sally Evemy then went to speak to Alan Davies but oddly, in her 2003 book, Shirley doesn't relay a single thing that Davies told them about his encounter with Dodgson (nor does Robert Smith in his 2017 book). All she says Davies told them was that they should speak to Brian Rawes about his encounter with Eddie Lyons when Eddie is supposed to have told Brian about finding something important under the floorboards.

As we know, Brian had already informed Scotland Yard about this encounter when interviewed on 21st October 1993. But it's very curious that Davies knew about it because it's supposed to have occurred on 17th July 1992. Yet, according to Caz, Davies was involved in a very serious car crash in June 1992 and "spent the next few month on sick leave". He was, thus, in her words, "out of the loop". How did he know in 1997 what Eddie was supposed to have said to Rawes who was made redundant from Portus & Rhodes on 21st July 1992? It strongly suggests that Davies had been speaking to other electricians about the diary before he was interviewed for the very first time in connection with it in May 1997. Who knows how his mind had been polluted by then?

Shirley appears to have been misled as to the date of the encounter between Davies and Dodgson because she said it occurred in 1991. But it is likely to have been the supposed involvement of an electrician which sparked Keith Skinner's interest in June 2004 when, we are told, he spoke to Tim for the first time. There is no published record of which I'm aware of what Feldman said on this occasion, and in particular whether he repeated his story about Dodgson having been shown a copy of Jack the Ripper's diary in a pub (this is all top secret apparently) but James Johnston told David Orsam in 2018 that Feldman did tell Keith at this time that the document being offered to him was "Jack the Ripper's diary". Unfortunately, we now know that Johnston does not necessarily reveal the full story about these interviews.

We also know from a JTR forums post of 13th September 2023 by Caz who seems, on this one occasion, to have been given special permission to post a note taken by Keith Skinner of an interview with Margaret Davies, that Keith phoned Alan Davies on 6th July 1994 but he wasn't in and Keith spoke to his wife. She seemed to know all about the diary and called it an "old book" with "old handwriting" which she had wanted to buy herself but the one thing she didn't seem to know about it was that it was supposed to be Jack the Ripper's diary which is astonishing if that's what her husband had been telling Dodgson it was. Unfortunately, she doesn't seem to have been asked by Keith Skinner precisely when she acquired her knowledge of the mysterious old book with old handwriting but we're not necessarily given all the information. Could she have estimated it as having been in 1993? Would we be told if she had done?

One of the oddities about this whole saga is that we've not been told what explanation Alan Davies gave for his knowledge about the diary or what he remembers saying to Dodgson. In contradiction of Shirley's 2003 account, Smith says that it was Davies, not Dodgson, who discovered that the diary had been sold in an Anfield pub. Once again, though, no interest seems to have been shown in finding out where Davies obtained this information even though one would think it is absolutely critical. James Johnston says he interviewed Davies on 15th February 2016 but has revealed nothing about what Davies said to him regarding his encounter with Dodgson or his knowledge of the diary other than that someone had told him that it had been found under the floor in a biscuit tin with a gold ring and (he now claimed) a watch.

Another extraordinary aspect to this story is that the only person who appears to have believed the diary was Jack the Ripper's diary was Tim (although, strangely, he doesn't seem to have informed Robert Smith of this in 1997). Neither Alan Davies, Margaret Davies or Alan Dodgson are known to have said anything about the item supposedly found in Battlecrease as having any connection with Jack the Ripper yet only Dodgson could have described the diary to Tim, while Dodgson's only source of information was Davies. It's a puzzler.

So that's where we are. A story full of contradictions and unexplained oddities which has never been properly dated.

[rjpalmer]

Are you able to explain to me the significance of the purchase of the hat stand in dating the conversation between Davies and Dodgson? I'm afraid I've no idea how that could have helped Tim.

Setting aside the tedium of these inquiries, a companion question would be when did TMW "recover" this memory of having left a hall stand or a hat stand at APS?

Initially, he couldn't pinpoint when the conversation occurred. He gave a vague, six-month window.

But as I understand it, Keith Skinner didn't reopen the investigation into the Curious Case of Paul Feldman and the Electricians until sometime in the 2000s, ie., post-Anne Graham, and it appears that some of these blokes weren't reinterviewed until 2014 or later. So they are being asked to recover memories from years--or decades--earlier.

So I don't think we've ever been given enough information to determine when TMW's memory began to shift to where he now began to associate the conversation with a specific episode involving a hall stand. But it appears as if it must have been years later.

Maybe you'll see it differently, but it seems to me that the standards of what constitutes reliable "witness" testimony¹ is shifting radically depending on what the theorist wants to believe. Rawes' account of Eddie being at Battlecrease in June is dismissed as unreliable even though Rawes specifically referred to a memo book about the job itself, and even though Shirley Harrison must have interviewed him back in the mid-to-late 1990s.

But TMW, who is not truly a witness to anything, and was never at Dodd's house and didn't know Eddie, etc., is deemed reliable even though--unless I understand it improperly--he wasn't interviewed about the hall stand until many years after the fact, and (unlike Rawes) his memo book was not even related to anything to do with the work at Dodd's house nor (specifically) to any conversation.

Can you appreciate my concerns?

¹I use the term "witness" loosely, because I don't see how TMW is a witness to anything. His only usefulness to the theory is that he supposedly heard a rumor about the diary before Feldman entered the equation and had a chance to muddy the waters or to allegedly offer filthy lucre for information. I couldn't say, but I'm assuming someone later noticed that this minor "witness," TMW, was placing this conversation to pre-Feldman so it was only at that point that it was thought necessary to recontact TMW and ask him if he could pinpoint the date of the conversation more specifically, and it was then that the hall rack connection was discussed.

[caz]

No, Caz, I didn't say that I assumed Eddie was shown the the timesheets "because of a question asked in advance by David Barrat". I said I assumed Eddie was shown the timesheets because of what James Johnson said when answering that question. You don't appear to be denying that Eddie was shown the timesheets. It seems to be obvious that he must have been shown those timesheets. James Johnston made clear he was going to show them to Eddie only a few weeks before seeing him, and he surely couldn't have forgotten. So I repeat what I said, namely that you've confirmed that Eddie couldn't say what he was doing on 9th March 1992, even with the benefit of the timesheets.

As for Brian Rawes, you say that he only went there once "on Friday 17th July 1992" but that's precisely what we're trying to establish. How do we know he went there on Friday 17th July 1992 as opposed to some other day? There doesn't seem to be any documentary record of his being at Battlecrease that day. At one time he thought he was there in June by reference to an old daily memo book but you don't explain what it was in that old book which suggested to him that he had been there in June. You now tell me his suggestion of the 17th July date in October 1993 might have been based on "Colin Rhodes's records" but if that means the timesheets, which only showed Eddie as having been present at Battlecrease on one Friday in July (i.e. the 17th), the whole thing becomes purely circular and we could be relying on the timesheets to corroborate what is in the timesheets.

On the present evidence, I just can't see how it can be stated as a fact that Rawes was at Battlecrease on Friday 17th July. I appreciate that one timesheet shows that Eddie was at Battlecrease between 15th and 21st July but, on your own account, the timesheets are not always accurate as to who is present. So how do we know Eddie wasn't also working at Battlecrease on Friday 12th June 1992? In fact, what was he doing on that day? If he wasn't at Battlecrease, where was he?

Just a quick one before I go off in a cloud of evil smelling smoke.

As far as I know, Eddie has never been shown a Battlecrease timesheet. He was completely unaware, back in June 2018, while giving his account in the drive of Dodd's house, of what work records James may or may not have possessed, and I didn't see him being shown any documentation afterwards.

I can't give you the detailed information you want, Herlock, and there's nothing either of us can do about it. We will have to wait until it's all in the public domain.

I'm so sorry to leave you in a state of limbo, but there we are.

[caz]

Morning Campers,

I've got good news and bad news for you.

I'm off to the Land of Love Me Do tomorrow for a long Cavern weekend - positively no diary research! - and then our kids will be coming to stay for a while, and after that we're on a countdown to our September fortnight somewhere even hotter than it has been here in the UK of late.

I'm sure everyone will enjoy the peace and quiet and the tumbleweed which will now descend on this troubled place, with all its nagging questions left hanging in the air, and nothing for anyone to do but guess if they are getting vaguely warm or stone cold.

The bad news is that five balls on the lotto last night means we didn't win the jackpot, or I'd have been putting my trotters up for good.

Carry on speculating, chaps!

Love,

The Old Sow-and-Sow
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