Too Sensible & Competent

[David Orsam]

Oh, ha ha, so now we are being told that there IS a note of Keith Skinner's 2004 meeting with Colin Rhodes are we? Yesterday, it was "Note? What note?" Today, it's: Yes there is a note but there's also a recording!!!! Unbelievable. How disingenuous can one get?

Clearly, knowing how meticulous Keith Skinner is, I figured there must be a note. So where is it? Why has it not been produced?

I just don't understand.

And the idea that someone is "repeating herself" when that person is actually giving different answers to the same question - one day attempting to deny the existence of a note, the next day admitting it exists - is extraordinary.

[David Orsam]

I need to wrap my head around Diary Defender logic. Asking for a note to be produced means that I don't want it to be produced. And doing so in some way is supposed to be "pissing people" off (according to the person who is, apparently, the official spokesperson of those who don’t post or produce information). So in order to get a note produced I am not supposed to ask for it to be produced, is that right? Is that how it works?

So how does one ensure a note is produced? Psychically? Through the power of the mind?

It gets even harder to ask for a note to be produced when the response is "Note? What note?" because that would be the response when such a note doesn't exist. Now that this feeble attempt at evasion has been exposed the usual nastiness emerges.

[David Orsam]

There appears to be some sort of misapprehension that I actually care, for myself, whether documents are produced or not. Like I'm sitting here eagerly waiting for them like an excited schoolboy. But if we are genuinely trying to get to the truth of this matter then it's perfectly obvious that documents should be produced when available. Or how else are we going to make progress, as opposed to going round and round in circles with endless speculation (which some people obviously enjoy)?

If someone of Keith Skinner's stature says that a document is going to be produced in "a few weeks" then that is what I would expect to happen and it's perfectly reasonable for me to ask why this promise hasn't been kept. How long am I supposed to wait before asking? A year? Ten years? Twenty?

No answer has been provided as to why the Diary transcript prepared by the Barretts hasn't been produced, as it was promised it would be, just speculation that Keith or James might be "busy". Well if that's the case why is it not possible for Keith or someone else (if Keith is too busy) to say that he's too busy now but will do it at the first opportunity? I had thought that Keith Skinner joined this forum specifically for the purpose of answering questions and providing information. He's yet to make a single post on his own account!

And if Keith Skinner has a problem with any of my posts (which would greatly surprise me) he can presumably say so himself rather than have dark hints dropped via his official or unofficial spokesperson, the same person who tries to turn everything I say into an attack on him and has, for reasons best known to herself, been doing this at every possible opportunity for the past two years.

[David Orsam]

Just to make a post that's actually on the topic of this thread, here is the image of Anne's famous "bloody gaul" slip in a typed letter to Mike dated 1 February 1995:

[David Orsam]

And no apostrophe in "fathers", a little quirk of not using them shared by the Diary's author.

[David Orsam]

So I post a snippet of factual information from Devereux's will and am asked how "low" I can go? It's bizarre. I have seen a theory (not mine) that Devereux was the driving force behind the Diary and was transferring his own feelings about his wife onto the Diary's author. That's a theory and, given what Mike says in his affidavit, it has to be worth considering. I appreciate that some people don't like it when facts are posted and would prefer to engage in full rampant speculation (something I deliberately avoided in my post about Devereux's will) but I prefer to post the facts, not hide them, thank you very much.

I've found the reference I was thinking of to the theory that Devereux's relationship with his wife was a driving force behind the way the Diary was written. It is one of Melvin Harris's private letters in which he wrote:

"Incidentally, if I have not told you before, Devereux used to call his ex-wife an whoring bitch or the whore, because she betrayed him."

If that is true I would think it is extremely important information given the way the author of the Diary refers to his wife.

[Iconoclast]

Posted May 4, 2018 before his sensational and controversial resignation from the Casebook:

I'll quote the full paragraph from Voller's letter relating to the sunlamp in a moment but a reminder of what I said about this originally so the purpose for which I was originally quoting from his correspondence, and the full context in which I was doing so, can be seen:

START ############
Originally posted by David Orsam View Post
It's a little known fact that Voller qualified his opinion on this subject in a letter to Dr Nick Warren dated 8th February 1996, as follows:

"It was an honest opinion, taking into account all the known facts and making due allowance for the various unknowns and purely on the basis of appearances, I can see no reason to change that opinion. What you may not be aware of however, is that having expressed this opinion, I was asked whether I could think of any way in which such an appearance could be simulated by a forger and the gist of my reply was that I could not think of any method which would not be unmasked by chemical analysis. In the light of your comments about Mike Barrett [that he had once been a freelance writer], I rather regret making that statement because even at the time, I knew it not to be entirely true. There is in fact such a method but I did not think it even worth mentioning because it seemed to me that a complete idiot such as I assumed Mike Barrett to be, could not possibly comprehend the details."

He then sets out a possible method of forgery which might have fooled him, involving the use of a modern ink chemically identical or near chemically identical to a genuine Victorian ink, an accelerated fading apparatus (which could either be a big carbon arc lamp within a metal drum, a xenon arc lamp or a mercury-tungsten fluorescent lamp) and an exposure of the text to the radiation from one of these lamps a few weeks after it was written. He says he does not know how long it would take to produce an 80-90 year old fading effect because no experiment had ever been conducted.

He goes on:

"I also have to say (ruefully) that as a method of forgery, the above technique would probably produce more convincing results in amateurish rather than professional hands because a person unused to the finer points of the operation of the equipment would probably obtain willy-nilly, exactly the sort of uneven fading that is characteristic of old documents."

Voller was sufficiently uncertain about the age of the Diary to say to Dr Warren in a subsequent letter dated 13 February 1996 that, "your remarks about the text actually having been written by some nameless confederate (I have always thought that Anne Barrett was the favourite suspect) have given me food for thought."

Perhaps most importantly he concedes in this letter that, "at least some of the effects of an accelerated fading apparatus could be duplicated" by the use of "no more than an ordinary sunlamp".
END ############

Now here is the full unexpurgated paragraph from Voller's letter of 13 Feb 1996 subject to one line at the bottom of the first page of the letter which is virtually cut off in the photocopy I have seen:

"I suppose that it is going too far to speculate that Barrett [here is cut off but he probably says something like: had access to an] accelerated fading apparatus (which is designed to produce an emission spectrum similar to that of the sun), but your remarks about the text having been actually written by some nameless confederate (I always thought that Anne Barrett was the favourite suspect) have given me food for thought. I wonder if he might have done more than just set pen to paper? I wonder if someone knew enough to realise that at least some of the effects of an accelerated fading apparatus could be duplicated by using no more than an ordinary sunlamp? There would presumably be no problem of access there."

There is nothing else in the letter relevant to this issue. There are three paragraphs in the letter. The previous paragraph discusses the possibility of fading being caused by the Diary having been photographed and/or photocopied. The subsequent, and final, paragraph discusses a point of naval history with Warren.

I submit that Voller is CLEARLY saying in the above-quoted paragraph that the effects of an ordinary sunlamp could have been similar to the effects of an accelerated fading apparatus, otherwise the entire paragraph is both pointless and meaningless. What would even be the point of him referring to "no problem of access"? If the effects of a UV sunlamp were not sufficiently similar to create the fading, which he expressly admitted in a previous letter would have fooled him, what would have been the point of the entire paragraph? Because surely he would just said, "yes, Barrett's confederate might have had access to a sunlamp but that wouldn't have helped him because the effects of a sunlamp wouldn't have been similar to those of an accelerated fading apparatus and thus wouldn't have been able to fool me."

Unless that point is specifically addressed and answered we can certainly take it that Voller was saying that the effects of a sunlamp were similar to those of an accelerated fading apparatus, which he has already admitted to Warren in express terms could have simulated the appearance of the Diary. My interpretation and summary of Voller was therefore entirely reasonable, proper and appropriate while the use of the word "Naughty" to describe it was wholly illegitimate.

I assume it is okay to quote Lord Orsam from his extant posts here on Casebook?

Assuming that to be the case, my dear readers should note that - in the interest of balance - Orsam did counter here (back in the day) in quoting Alex Voller's February 13, 1996, letter to Warren in which he implies that some of the aging effects could have been produced by use of an ordinary sunlamp. The individual reader needs to decide for themselves what those aging effects would have looked like and to what extent they would be sufficient to fool Voller and quite how long Barrett would have had to place each individual page underneath said sunlamp; but I would certainly draw my dear readers attention to the bit where Orsam claims "and an exposure of the text to the radiation from one of these lamps a few weeks after it was written". Now, quoting Orsam in the Casebook may very well survive any censorship, but this blatant cake-and-eat-it moment should not survive my dear readers' personal censorship: you cannot buy a scrapbook on March 31 of any given year, write up a faked text in ink you have somehow managed to ensure mirrored Victorian ink, and then have taken that scrapbook to Landarn by April 13 and still have exposed the 63 pages of text to 'a few weeks' of radiation from one of those lamps'. Surely? Surely no-one is going to grant Orsam and RJ and all of their ilk the special pleading to end all special pleading in which Mike Barrett betters God and re-writes the first few verses of Genesis?

Come on, people - use your freaking brains here!

[rjpalmer]

Now, quoting Orsam in the Casebook may very well survive any censorship, but this blatant cake-and-eat-it moment should not survive my dear readers' personal censorship: you cannot buy a scrapbook on March 31 of any given year, write up a faked text in ink you have somehow managed to ensure mirrored Victorian ink, and then have taken that scrapbook to Landarn by April 13 and still have exposed the 63 pages of text to 'a few weeks' of radiation from one of those lamps'. Surely? Surely no-one is going to grant Orsam and RJ and all of their ilk the special pleading to end all special pleading in which Mike Barrett betters God and re-writes the first few verses of Genesis?

Thomas - For several weeks now, I've been noticing with growing alarm that the reading comprehension skills of those defending the diary are not what they should be and have led to much mud, misinformation, and malarky.

You appear to have complete misread the passage. Where does Orsam state that the hoax would have to be exposed 'to a few weeks of radiation'?

He states, quite clearly:

"an accelerated fading apparatus (which could either be a big carbon arc lamp within a metal drum, a xenon arc lamp or a mercury-tungsten fluorescent lamp) and an exposure of the text to the radiation from one of these lamps a few weeks AFTER it was written."

A few weeks AFTER it was written, not for a FEW WEEKS.

He the states, in the very next sentence that:

"[Voller] says he does not know how long it would take to produce an 80-90 year old fading effect because no experiment had ever been conducted."

"He does not know how long."

Good Gawd Man. Drink more coffee or tea and get to bed before 3 a.m.


Perhaps have your vision checked. I admit my eyesight is not so great. I first thought Hartley's article read the The Knotty Yam of Woolton and figured he was writing about some remarkable and strange vegetable. Do they grow yams in Woolton? What is a knotty yam?

And I'm not sure why you bring me into it. The fading doesn't interest me that much and I don't recall ever discussing it. I've often thought that it could be down to something as simple as Anne or Mike randomly dipping the nib in water from time-to-time or watering down the Diamine, coupled with super absorbent unsized paper.

What should scare the living bejesus out of you is that Kuranz, Baxendale, and Eastaugh saw no signs of bronzing in 1992-1993 even though they looked for it, but Voller noticed it in late 1995.

Subsequent tests proved that Diamine could bronze in as little as two years, so Voller, rather than showing the ink was old, proved that it wasn't. The bronzing had developed between 1992 and 1995. To Melvin Harris, and I agree with this reasoning, this is extremely strong evidence--iron clad, I would suggest--of a modern fake. Sunlight is not needed for bronzing, because bronzing is merely the rusting of the iron, so the sudden emergence of the diary into sunlight is not an intelligent hypothesis. Oxygen and water vapor exist even under floorboards. The goose is truly cooked.

[Iconoclast]

Thomas - For several weeks now, I've been noticing with growing alarm that the reading comprehension skills of those defending the diary are not what they should be and have led to much mud, misinformation, and malarky.
You appear to have complete misread the passage. Where does Orsam state that the hoax would have to be exposed 'to a few weeks of radiation'?
He states, quite clearly:
"an accelerated fading apparatus (which could either be a big carbon arc lamp within a metal drum, a xenon arc lamp or a mercury-tungsten fluorescent lamp) and an exposure of the text to the radiation from one of these lamps a few weeks AFTER it was written."
A few weeks AFTER it was written, not for a FEW WEEKS.

I acknowledge my error of attention, of course.

I wonder though why you did not have anything to say about how radiation was to be applied to the Maybrick scrapbook "a FEW WEEKS AFTER IT WAS WRITTEN". Did Barrett take the scrapbook to Rupert Crew on April 13 pretty much wet to the page and then a week or so later start radiating it in order to artificially age the appearance of the ink?

He must have had some nerve that boy, eh?

[rjpalmer]

Hello Thom.

Personally, I don't believe Mike or Anne used radiation to artificially age the diary (I am skeptical that the hoaxer did anything that sophisticated) so I'm the wrong person to engage in this conversation; I was only pointing out that you seem to have (sigh) misread Orsam once again.

That said, I recall reading that Shirley Harrison had to travel to Liverpool to view the diary after the initial meeting with Barrett in London, so there seems to have been a short window when Barrett retained possession of the relic before Smith took complete control of it, so theoretically he could have tinkered with it after the initial meeting.

Not that I am suggesting that he did.

I think there must be another explanation, but Orsam was quite right to note that Voller admitted that the fading could have been artificially induced. Who knows? Maybe there was an even simpler technique to achieve this effect. An unsophisticated hoaxer like Barrett might have simply watered down the ink in some misguided effort to make it look old, did so haphazardly, and thus accidentally achieved a more sophisticated effect. But would this have fooled Voller? I have no idea.

It is worth bearing in mind that scientists are seldom trained in the fine art of "how to fake sh*t," so my own instinct is that scientists like Turgoose and Voller, etc., as honest and intelligent as they were, might have not been the first choice to study these relics for signs of fakery.

[caz]

Was it not Voller who also wrote the following, concerning what he thought Mike Barrett would have needed to do to try and age his hoax artificially?

'A) Prepare the text, using paper of the right sort of vintage and an ink of the appropriate type i.e. an ink which though of recent manufacture is chemically identical or near-identical to a genuine Victorian ink. B) Wait for a few weeks, then expose the text to the radiation of an accelerated fading apparatus for as long as may be necessary...'

Firstly, RJ has been claiming recently that the diary paper is the wrong 'sort of vintage' - 20th century - and that Mike knew this when he saw it in an auction sale on 31st March 1992.

Secondly, in Voller's professional opinion, it would require Mike to have waited 'for a few weeks' after the handwriting was done before exposing the 63 pages to the radiation of an accelerated fading apparatus 'for as long as may be necessary...'.

I can see why RJ plays his lack of sophistication card at this point, preferring this to the image of Mike taking the diary out of the bank in Liverpool, a few weeks after returning with it from London on 13th April 1992, and training Anne's sun lamp on each page for as long as it proved necessary to achieve the effects of age which Voller observed in October 1995. Any such 'tinkering' would have had to be completed before Mike personally handed over the diary to Baxendale for the first round of forensic testing, in company with Shirley Harrison. The diary was also due to be transferred from the Liverpool branch of Lloyds Bank to Shirley's London branch, which suggests a very short window for any sun lamp action on his return from London. There is also the small matter of the linseed oil, which Mike claimed he had used on the cover, before drying out the book with the heat from the gas oven, and this was supposedly during the initial 11-day creation process. Nobody to my knowledge, who examined the diary at any time, ever detected a hint of this having been done. But then, Mike claimed this was back in January 1990, which would have solved the problem of the distinctive odour of linseed oil, if not its flammability.

If Mike had gone on to do as Voller described, to simulate age, he'd presumably have needed to pick up some pretty specialised knowledge and expertise, including how to recognise when the sun lamp had done its job and produced an effect that might simulate the right number of years of natural ageing. So did Mike know better than Voller, that he could safely bypass this potentially lengthy process altogether? Or did he just wing it, managing to fool Voller without actually making any discernible attempt to age the pages artificially?

Finally for now, the modern hoax argument has always been that there was no bronzing in 1992 and this only happened naturally and gradually over the next three years. Voller initially presumed that the slight bronzing he observed in October 1995 was not only natural, but would have been present when Mike first showed the diary to anyone. So when he later conceded that the ageing process could have been artificially accelerated, was he including the bronzing in his thinking? If Mike had tinkered around with a sun lamp in 1992, to produce the effects Voller would observe three years later, would that not have included the bronzing? Would it not have been there when the diary went to Baxendale?

Yes, I can see why RJ might find this sun lamp business as implausible as I do.

Brian Rawes.

Tim Martin-Wright.

The brown paper.

The auction ticket which Mike said he had in 1999, but didn't consult back in 1995, when he needed a date.

These are the hurdles RJ really needs to clear, because if the science had proved anything about the age of the writing, Chris Jones would not have needed his diary demolition book.

[caz]

The fading doesn't interest me that much and I don't recall ever discussing it. I've often thought that it could be down to something as simple as Anne or Mike randomly dipping the nib in water from time-to-time or watering down the Diamine, coupled with super absorbent unsized paper.

I think there must be another explanation, but Orsam was quite right to note that Voller admitted that the fading could have been artificially induced. Who knows? Maybe there was an even simpler technique to achieve this effect. An unsophisticated hoaxer like Barrett might have simply watered down the ink in some misguided effort to make it look old, did so haphazardly, and thus accidentally achieved a more sophisticated effect. But would this have fooled Voller? I have no idea.

When Voller examined the diary, he said that diluting Diamine "would simply not produce this sort of effect". One might have expected the chemist who formulated Diamine to know a little bit about the behaviour of his own ink, but I can see why his opinion on the uneven fading of the diary ink must be undermined at all costs, if the sun lamp business is not a feasible option.

But why on earth would Anne [or Mike, for anyone who actually entertains the eccentric idea that he could have held the pen] have thought of 'randomly dipping the nib in water from time-to-time'? What would she think that would achieve? Did she have some specialist knowledge of how ink fades in and out on handwritten documents that have been knocking about for many a long year? Or was this random guesswork on her part, which for all she knew could have had the opposite of the desired effect?

And why would she have bothered anyway, if she thought she was only creating an innocent 'marketing gimmick' for a work of fiction? Honestly, I sometimes wonder how RJ sells some of his theories to himself, let alone to his readers.

Perhaps he should steer himself back to some of the things that will not fade away [thank you, Buddy]:

Brian Rawes.

Tim Martin-Wright.

The brown paper.

The auction ticket, which Mike said he had with him in 1999, but didn't consult back in 1995, when he needed a date.

[Scott Nelson]

The old newspaper that one of the electricians found and asked Dodd if he could keep it -- was that before March 9, 1992?

[caz]

Morning Scotty,

I think the Victorian newspaper could only have been found on 9th or 10th March 1992, or between 9th and 16th June 1992, or between 16th and 23rd July 1992, or between 7th and 13th August 1992. Prior to 9th March 1992, the only work done in Dodd's house by any of the Portus & Rhodes crew was back on 19th September 1989, when Bennett and Reilly spent three hours repairing a faulty immersion heater on the ground floor. I can't see how a Victorian newspaper could have been hiding there without Dodd's knowledge.

Incidentally, Brian Rawes, who never actually worked in the house, was made redundant by Colin Rhodes on 21st July 1992, followed by Eddie Lyons two days later on 23rd. Eddie's mate Jim Bowling was kept on, but left of his own accord on 7th January 1993. The following month Feldman arrived in Liverpool and went to Battlecrease with Barrett, Begg and Howells, where they learned from Dodd about the electrical work done by Portus & Rhodes [and Barrett famously 'recoiled' - or accidentally lost his footing but saved the contents of his hip flask, depending on who you choose to believe] but were given inaccurate information about the dates involved.

Love,

Caz
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