25 YEARS OF THE DIARY OF JACK THE RIPPER: THE TRUE FACTS by Robert Smith

[Darryl Kenyon]

[QUOTE=David Orsam;426027]I don't know why you think I need to prove anything.
As David says.

There are enough problems with the diary to set enough bells ringing to keep Big Ben quite for fifty years. Surely the onus is on those who have faith in the diary to stop those bells from ringing to people like me who have an interest in the case. So far they sound as loud as ever.

[Kaz]

As David says.

There are enough problems with the diary to set enough bells ringing to keep Big Ben quite for fifty years. Surely the onus is on those who have faith in the diary to stop those bells from ringing to people like me who have an interest in the case. So far they sound as loud as ever.

Indeed, but its not us 'pro' diarists saying this is to be believed...its laughable. this was put to bed back in the day...its now being dredged up again as the naysayers can't come up with anything better...

http://www.casebook.org/suspects/james_maybrick/mb-con.bjan5.html

[David Orsam]

It seems that the same people who rake you over the coals if you say that the Diary has been proven a forgery are happy to sail along simply repeating that MB's confession has been proven to be wholly false.

Yet none of these people have been able to point to a single example of the use of "one off" in the 19th century, let alone in the sense of "one off instance", nor have they been able to come up with a credible explanation as to why, almost immediately after telephoning an agent in London that he had Jack the Ripper's diary on 9 March 1992, Mike instructed a specialist bookfinder to locate for him a nineteenth century diary with a specified minimum number of blank pages.

[caz]

That's a bit strange because Shirley Harrison provides some evidence that Mike had gained quite an impressive knowledge of the Ripper case. She tells us that, in 1992, Mike gave her "all his notes" from when he researched the Diary which, curiously enough, had been re-typed and, in Harrison's words, "tidied up" by Anne. No idea why his original notes were not produced but anyway....

Could it be that the original notes had been handwritten on scraps of paper, and not wonderfully legible or coherent, and that "tidied up" just meant that Anne wanted to spare Shirley the effort of trying to decipher them and put them into some sort of order?

Harrison only gives one example of what appear to have been extensive research notes and these say:

"Check for copy of Punch around Sept. 1888...nothing to date...Where was Knowsley Buildings? To date cannot find...Question. Who else other than the Ripper would have known that he was almost caught? Answer: Not sure but if the Diary is genuine and written at that time these facts could only have been known by the Ripper".

It is very frustrating that this is the only snippet of his notes produced but they give a glimpse of someone who is methodically checking and researching the facts of the Ripper case and doing so, incidentally, before he brought the Diary to London on 13 April 1992.

Given that we are now being told that he was only handed the Diary on 9 March 1992 he must have done a lot of work in a short space of time - and the expression "nothing to date" in his notes can't refer to more than a few weeks at most.

Well the typed up notes were not actually handed over to Shirley by Mike until sometime in the July or August of that year, but sadly we don't appear to have an actual date for this, and some of the information and input came from Shirley in any case, which Mike had added to his own notes. It means we can't be sure when Mike started making them, from 9 March, or when Anne finished typing them, anything up to 4 or 5 months later.

Those notes don't seem to me to be the work of a mentally incompetent and incapable person...

Well they wouldn't, with Shirley contributing to them and Anne tidying them up, although I can't recall anyone suggesting that Mike couldn't read or write, or was too mentally feeble to undertake some basic research.

...but if it is said that they were significantly improved by Anne then that is the same person Mike said he wrote the text of the Diary with.

Well that was predictable, wasn't it? I suppose it depends on whether Anne's "tidied up" can be read as "significantly improved" or merely "collated and typed up to form a single A4 document.

Either way the Battlecrease evidence suggests that Anne was not sitting there with Mike between the end of March and 13 April getting the text penned into a scrap book he had spotted in an auction house some three weeks after the one which emerged from the Maybrick house.

Love,

Caz
X

[Kaz]

Yet none of these people have been able to point to a single example of the use of "one off" in the 19th century, let alone in the sense of "one off instance", nor have they been able to come up with a credible explanation as to why, almost immediately after telephoning an agent in London that he had Jack the Ripper's diary on 9 March 1992, Mike instructed a specialist bookfinder to locate for him a nineteenth century diary with a specified minimum number of blank pages.

And yet you're prepared to take mikes word over the scientists who claim the inks been dry since 1970...

Are they all incompetent aswell? Or are they lying to you like the rest behind the diary... apart from mike...obviously..

[caz]

Originally Posted by David Orsam View Post
As I posted on another thread, one of the false facts that has been mentioned in connection with the diary is that a forger could not have known that Maybrick wrote lyrics. But this information was contained in Nigel Moreland's 1957 book (i.e. page 7 refers to "the strong religious and moral nature of his lyrics").

Yeah, I remember it well, David.

Which is precisely why I asked if your idol Melvin Harris ever gave this as the source for the hoaxer's knowledge that MM wrote lyrics.

I presumed he couldn't have given a source at all, unless the mindless masses who used to bleat up until quite recently about this being a modern forger's fatal error had not bothered to check with Mel the oracle first.

Seems Mighty Mel was more orifice than oracle, if he thought MM only wrote music and claimed his nest of forgers only needed about 3 books for everything else.

If Moreland's book was one of the 3, how did MH miss the nugget on page 7 about MM?

My own argument, before I knew either way, was always that a chap of MM's education would almost certainly have tried his hand at poetry while at school, if not song lyrics, and his brother JM would be expected to have known this, as any hoaxer with a modicum of sense could have worked out for themselves. The hoaxer knew perfectly well that MM wrote 'a merry tune' too, which was something that tended to get overlooked by those who claimed he was ignorant about this fact too.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz, love you as I do, it strikes me this is a rather Manichean way of looking at things. So either Mel must be able to name a source for every single detail in the Diary or else we must say his expertise is in doubt?

I have no idea what Manichean means, dear Henry, and I don't have time right now to look it up. Waitrose beckons.

But yes, his expertise has to be in some doubt if he asserted stuff years ago as if it were certain fact [the forger used this book, or that book, or only needed x number of books/the forger got MM's profession wrong etc etc] and it now turns out he was talking out of his arse. Sorry, but that's how it works when someone wheels out a deceased self-professed expert to support some argument or other with claims long past their sell-by date.

I learned a lot about the Diary from reading Melvin Harris. No doubt there were parts of it that were either erroneous or downright false. But it was written with such venom, and it confirmed my own bitter prejudices to such a pleasing extent that I refuse to hold any of that against him.

You make my point for me then.

But for me, anyone who dishes out so-called facts so liberally coated with venom should not be surprised when not everyone falls over themselves to swallow them.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Grand National info could be found in just about any book published in the 20th century about the Grand National - they almost all contained a list of historical times of past races. With Mike Barrett being in Liverpool I doubt books on the Grand National were hard to find.

Missing the point again by about a mile I see. It's as much about the number of sources a modern hoaxer needed as the actual books used. And Mel always conceded one thing - Mike Barrett did not have the 'capacity' to forge the diary.

We know he didn't have the time either now.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

The first person to reveal a source for the Crawshaw quote was Mike Barrett himself. Quite an achievement for an incompetent and incapable person.

Crashaw actually. Even Mike Barrett knew that.

But did he know the source before searching for it in the small but very clearly marked section on English Literature at Liverpool's Central Library in the second half of 1994, when desperately seeking something - anything - to support his master forger claim?

I suspect you don't know and neither did Melvin.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I don't know why you think I need to prove anything.

And I'm not aware that Mike's confession that he made in a sworn affidavit has been disproved.

Well to be fair, those who say they believe Maybrick could have written it are always expected to prove it and quite rightly so.

Yet you have made it abundantly clear that you still believe Mike could have done it and that his confessions have not been disproved. And you don't think you have to prove a thing?

Not disproving Mike's confession is not the same as proving it. Nobody needs to disprove it. It's up to those who keep trotting it out as evidence of anything to prove it reflected the truth.

Love,

Caz
X

[David Orsam]

Here's the thing. My only knowledge of Mike's purported research notes is what Shirley Harrison said about them in her 2003 book. And this is what she said (bold and underlining added):

"In 1992 Michael had given me all his notes, re-typed and 'tidied up' by Anne from his researches. They are a record of his forays to Liverpool Library before he brought the Diary to London when he was desperately trying to make sense of it all."

If anyone now says they include a record of his forays to Liverpool Library after he brought the Diary to London it makes me wonder why the story is changing.

I can't see anywhere in the book where Shirley says that she provided some information and input into Mike's research notes but perhaps she wasn't telling the full story, I have no idea.

If the notes needed to be 'tidied up' by Anne, does this show that the Barretts prepared other written work in this way, with Mike having a first crack and Anne tidying it up?

More than ever I question why the original notes were not produced. If they were hard to read then a transcript should have been prepared. If they were destroyed then that is destruction of original evidence pure and simple.

[David Orsam]

And yet you're prepared to take mikes word over the scientists who claim the inks been dry since 1970...

Are they all incompetent aswell? Or are they lying to you like the rest behind the diary... apart from mike...obviously..

The first document examiner to examine the Diary was the experienced Dr David Baxendale:

From the Sunday Times of 19 September 1993:

"One test used commonly to date documents such as this is, the solubility test... For a document purportedly more than 100 years old, Baxendale would have expected the ink to take several minutes to begin to dissolve. In this case, says Baxendale, "it began to dissolve in just a few seconds." Baxendale concluded it had probably been written recently, in the past two or three years."

[David Orsam]

Let's remind ourselves about what Feldman said of his miraculous Grand National discovery:

"But what of the race, 'the fastest....?' The newspapers had certainly described the race as exciting and even surprising, but we could not find detail to confirm the diarist's use of those words. My Liverpool researcher, Carol Emmas, visited Aintree. They were not able to help. Carol, like all my team, was resolute. She scoured magazines and newspapers for days on end. Her efforts were not unrewarded.

In an obscure magazine entitled the Liverpolitan, in an issue dated March 1939, page 27 carried the headline A STATISTICAL GUIDE TO THE WORLD'S GREATEST STEEPLECHASE. Every result since 1837 was listed. So were details of the owner, age and weight of the horse, number of horses in the race, jockey and time. The Grand National of 1889 was won by a horse called Frigate. It was the fastest Grand National run for eighteen years!"

Here is the page of that very same Liverpolitan that Feldman's researcher had miraculously found. It's just a list of owners, winners, weights, riders and times etc.

[David Orsam]

And what's this from a 1972 book entitled "The Grand National: An Illustrated History of the Greatest Steeplechase in the World" by Clive Graham and Bill Curling?

Oh the very same thing:

[Iconoclast]

Erm, David, you have a warped view of what I said...

I SAID "dear life". it was you who said "real life".

Somewhat disappointed to find that the great man failed to acknowledge his mistake or offer a simple apology. You might read into this a difficulty admitting to any possibility of error.

Come on David, man up and apologise.

Honest Ike