Diary Handwriting

[Herlock Sholmes]

Experts like Cantor and Rubinstein and Koren?

David Canter (professor of psychology) - "The Diary of Jack the Ripper clearly has to be approached with extreme caution...The diary may be a fake..." Mapping Murder (2005)

William Rubinstein (professor of history, not an expert on anything relating to the diary) - "The facts of its provenance are as follows: it was allegedly seen by Anne Graham's father, William Graham, in 1943 while he was on leave from the army, in a black tin box in his mother's house in Liverpool. It was allegedly seen by Anne Graham herself, in a trunk in a cupboard in her house in Liverpool in the late 1960s. Anne Graham took possession of it in the mid-1980s when her father moved house. In marital difficulties, she gave the diary to a friend of her husband Michael Barrett (who was unemployed) to give to her husband to keep him intellectually occupied. For reasons related to her marital breakdown, she did not admit its actual provenance, leading to the spread of (untrue) stories that it was dug up from the floor-boards of Battlecrease House." The Hunt For Jack the Ripper (2000) - so if Anne's story is false, Rubenstein's entire outdated argument from 25 years ago (before the discovery of Martin Earl's advertisement) that the diary may be genuine collapses.

Anna Koren is a graphologist - From Wiki: "Graphology is the analysis of handwriting in an attempt to determine the writer's personality traits. Its methods and conclusions are not supported by scientific evidence, and as such it is considered to be a pseudoscience."

[Lombro2]

Experts like Cantor and Rubinstein and Koren?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Doh!

"one off instance" - the experts say it's 20th century.

diary handwriting - the expert said it's not naturally written.

diary age - the expert said it's 20th century.

I follow the experts on the diary, Ike, you ignore them and invent your own reality

[Iconoclast]

He is his own expert on all matters.

Doh!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes, I think Ike was a good sport to admit this, and I respect him for it.

However, I do find the following statement from Post #13 dubious (and it also contradicts Baxendale's expert opinion):

"which are, in truth, quite alarmingly different in structure, and in ways which you would just not predict from a hoaxer attempting to hide their own hand or at least not reveal that there is fair reason to question the hand which wrote the text; or indeed from someone actually writing it 'for real'. It really doesn't make any sense."


The second clause in bold doesn't make sense to me; these 'alarmingly different structures' is precisely what caused Baxendale to 'question the hand that wrote the text,' so I'm not sure what Ike was getting at. Baxendale found this amount of variation to be unnatural and suspicious.

The first clause I find highly debatable. Why would we not 'predict' that a hoaxer, hiding his or her own hand, wouldn't inadvertently introduced a suspicious amount of variation? Baxendale seems to be saying there would be variations.

The way I see it, if a hoaxer was attempting to imitate the hand of Maybrick one wouldn't expect to see these 'alarming' variations unless the hoaxer was inept. They would replicate Maybrick's handwriting uniformly the best they could. They would be consciously trying NOT to add variations but simply stick to the exemplars they had.

However, it their only motive was to disguise their own handwriting, would we really expect them to keep up the same disguised lettering uniformly over a 63-page transcript?

All the hoaxer would be doing was to change his or her normal hand movements, ingrained in their brain from years of replication, but it's not like he or she would necessarily 'learn' those new hand movements in the same way we all learned to write over a period of months and years.

I'm not even confident that if I was hoaxing it, I'd remember the changes I made from one line to the next, and certainly not from one day to the next, if it took several days to create the transcript.

I suspect a lot of variation would sneak in, and I also think examples of my own style would sneak in, too.

Watch this space.

Hi Roger, yes, Ike clearly has no interest in what a handwriting expert has to say about the handwriting in the diary. He is his own expert on all matters.

[Lombro2]

How does this help you again when the diary is alleged to have been written by an old serial killer with mood swings from day to day and with Jekyll/Hyde personalities who took drugs that caused impaired nerve function?

But thanks for pointing this out.

[rjpalmer]

Even Ike seemed to agree when he wrote in #13: " yet there are these rather bizarre distortions of style which even the most erratic of writers would surely find surprising in their own hand." In #15, he called it: "a particularly unexpected phenomenon" and suggested he was alarmed "for the implications for the human brain - how it can write such inconsistencies (in consecutive words, for goodness sake!) in the first place, and evade detection for so long in the second place."

Yes, I think Ike was a good sport to admit this, and I respect him for it.

However, I do find the following statement from Post #13 dubious (and it also contradicts Baxendale's expert opinion):

"which are, in truth, quite alarmingly different in structure, and in ways which you would just not predict from a hoaxer attempting to hide their own hand or at least not reveal that there is fair reason to question the hand which wrote the text; or indeed from someone actually writing it 'for real'. It really doesn't make any sense."


The second clause in bold doesn't make sense to me; these 'alarmingly different structures' is precisely what caused Baxendale to 'question the hand that wrote the text,' so I'm not sure what Ike was getting at. Baxendale found this amount of variation to be unnatural and suspicious.

The first clause I find highly debatable. Why would we not 'predict' that a hoaxer, hiding his or her own hand, wouldn't inadvertently introduced a suspicious amount of variation? Baxendale seems to be saying there would be variations.

The way I see it, if a hoaxer was attempting to imitate the hand of Maybrick one wouldn't expect to see these 'alarming' variations unless the hoaxer was inept. They would replicate Maybrick's handwriting uniformly the best they could. They would be consciously trying NOT to add variations but simply stick to the exemplars they had.

However, it their only motive was to disguise their own handwriting, would we really expect them to keep up the same disguised lettering uniformly over a 63-page transcript?

All the hoaxer would be doing was to change his or her normal hand movements, ingrained in their brain from years of replication, but it's not like he or she would necessarily 'learn' those new hand movements in the same way we all learned to write over a period of months and years.

I'm not even confident that if I was hoaxing it, I'd remember the changes I made from one line to the next, and certainly not from one day to the next, if it took several days to create the transcript.

I suspect a lot of variation would sneak in, and I also think examples of my own style would sneak in, too.

Watch this space.

[rjpalmer]

Duplicate post. Deleted.

[Lombro2]

Wow! That one-off coffin lid must still be coming off!

Are you looking for old, and used, bent nails you can straighten out and try using again?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm transferring an interesting comment made by "Herlock Sholmes" on another thread:

"I also note that, according to a 2005 post by John Omlor, Dr David Baxendale wrote this in his report of July 1, 1992 about the diary handwriting:

"The handwriting shows considerable variation in fluency and letter design, and I have noted that some of the letter designs have been altered. This shows that the writing has not all been naturally written.

"For the most part, the handwriting is in a looped cursive style, in other words the letters are connected to each other and have prominent loops. There are however many instances where individual letters have been written in a script style, i.e. plain letters written separately. For example, there are instances of script styles for the letters A, h, k, L, N, t, T and x.""

My thoughts are those of an interested amateur, but I agree with Dr. Baxendale.

There does seem to be an unusual amount of variation in letter formation or what Dr. B calls "letter design."

One would expect a small amount of variation in anyone's handwriting, but when the writer has three or four different ways of creating the same letter or pairing of letters, commonsense suggests the writer is consciously altering his or her accustomed style, though not consistently. There is too much variation for it to be natural. This is what Dr. Baxendale is saying.

As I see it, the handwriting is disguised but the forger hasn't taught herself or himself the difficult task of creating a whole new way of writing, which I imagine would be extremely difficult.

Instead, they are altering their slant and changing the way they form individual letters as they go along--but often in a haphazard and inconsistent manner. It isn't convincing, and they have raised the suspicion of not only Dr. Baxendale, but also Dr. Giles and Maureen Casey Owens.

More another time, with an example.

Hi Roger,

I remember this thread very well. Looking back, I'm fascinated to see that I made the exact same point as Baxendale in post #9 on May 16th, 2018, but at that time I wasn't aware of what he'd said in his report. My comment at the time was: "Curiouser and curiouser".

Even Ike seemed to agree when he wrote in #13: " yet there are these rather bizarre distortions of style which even the most erratic of writers would surely find surprising in their own hand." In #15, he called it: "a particularly unexpected phenomenon" and suggested he was alarmed "for the implications for the human brain - how it can write such inconsistencies (in consecutive words, for goodness sake!) in the first place, and evade detection for so long in the second place."

I don't think he was correct, though, about it having evaded detection because Baxendale had, of course, spotted it in 1992. But he had access to the original. It wasn't until September 2017 that the rest of us could see a high quality reproduction in Robert Smith's book.

Caz could also see the inconsistencies of the handwriting but, naturally, posted (in #18) to say that she'd have thought that Anne would have "taken care over such details", although on what basis she felt able to say this about Anne, or why Anne, of all people, would not have been inconsistent in disguised handwriting when forging a diary, was not stated. Interestingly, after David Orsam subsequently posted examples of Anne's genuine handwriting, and pointed out the similarities with the diarist's handwriting, Caz had nothing to say about it, even though she posted a couple of times to discuss irrelevant matters in #72 and #73.,

[rjpalmer]

I'm transferring an interesting comment made by "Herlock Sholmes" on another thread:

"I also note that, according to a 2005 post by John Omlor, Dr David Baxendale wrote this in his report of July 1, 1992 about the diary handwriting:

"The handwriting shows considerable variation in fluency and letter design, and I have noted that some of the letter designs have been altered. This shows that the writing has not all been naturally written.

"For the most part, the handwriting is in a looped cursive style, in other words the letters are connected to each other and have prominent loops. There are however many instances where individual letters have been written in a script style, i.e. plain letters written separately. For example, there are instances of script styles for the letters A, h, k, L, N, t, T and x.""

My thoughts are those of an interested amateur, but I agree with Dr. Baxendale.

There does seem to be an unusual amount of variation in letter formation or what Dr. B calls "letter design."

One would expect a small amount of variation in anyone's handwriting, but when the writer has three or four different ways of creating the same letter or pairing of letters, commonsense suggests the writer is consciously altering his or her accustomed style, though not consistently. There is too much variation for it to be natural. This is what Dr. Baxendale is saying.

As I see it, the handwriting is disguised but the forger hasn't taught herself or himself the difficult task of creating a whole new way of writing, which I imagine would be extremely difficult.

Instead, they are altering their slant and changing the way they form individual letters as they go along--but often in a haphazard and inconsistent manner. It isn't convincing, and they have raised the suspicion of not only Dr. Baxendale, but also Dr. Giles and Maureen Casey Owens.

More another time, with an example.

[David Orsam]

So we are told that when Mike spoke to the Daily Post in June 1994, "Anne was furious at this intrusion into her privacy and wrote to Feldy in July 1995, claiming to have told Mike within weeks of leaving him in the January of 1994 that she had every intention of divorcing him."

Well, of course, if Anne said this to Feldman in July 1995 it must be true because everything she told Feldman was true, such as that she first saw the Diary in the 1960s and later kept in her bedroom despite it supposedly being under the floorboards in Battlecrease House during all this time.

The difficulty I have is in seeing how Mike confessing that he forged the Diary to a Daily Post reporter is in any way an invasion of Anne's privacy. It's not clear that even Anne could answer that because, when trying to justify her comments about the Daily Post story, she remarked:

“I said the first thing that came into my head which was something like “I will fight like a tiger to protect my family” I can remember walking up the stairs thinking “What the hell did I say that for?”

What the hell did she say that for, indeed. Shirley Harrison was equally baffled. As she says in her 2003 book (p.266), when quoting Anne as saying in June 1994, "He is trying to get back at me because I have left him":

"I did not understand why forging the Diary would get back at Anne - unless of course Michael was implying that she was involved."

Let's just think about this for a moment. Anne at this time, we are told by Diary Defenders, actually believed that Mike had stolen the Diary. Scotland Yard had already been round asking questions, which must have been unnerving, and there must always have been a worry that Mike would be arrested for "fencing" this stolen item. So his story of having forged it, something which he could obviously never prove in a million years, nor could anyone else, and Anne would have known this more than anyone, was surely an ideal cover story to deflect attention away from the theft (thus protecting himself in an understandable way). Certainly, Anne wasn't mentioned in Mike's story in June 1994. He said he did everything himself and was the world's greatest forger.

Well perhaps Anne thought Mike was getting back at her by destroying the provenance of the Diary so that she wouldn't make any money out of it. But, hold on, Anne wasn't interested in the money, was she?

It's possible that I haven't been speaking English for long enough but I would have thought that when someone says: "I am afraid you left me with no choice after speaking to the newspapers" this means that if the newspapers hadn't been spoken to, there would have been a choice. And does this not in turn mean that if Mike had not spoken to the newspapers, Anne would not have filed for divorce on the day the story was published?

Which, I think, means that the filing for Divorce in June 1994 was, in her own words, a direct result of Mike saying he had forged the Diary. I can't see any other way around it, at least not if English means what I understand it to mean.

Oddly, though, she does not seem to explain to Mike in her letter just what the problem was with him speaking to the Daily Post and saying that he forged the Diary. She seems to assume he will know.

Not that any of this is of any real importance in this thread about the Diary handwriting.

[David Orsam]

I'm trying to count the ironies in the statement: "Didn't Melvin at one time state that the diary was written by someone who had been schooled in the 1930s?"

Irony number one is that Melvin Harris is not normally relied upon by this person as an authority for anything. Does she think that the rest of us worship Melvin and regard him, like the Pope, as incapable of error?

Irony number two is that this same person once told me how important it was to use the exact words of someone and not summarize. Perhaps this only applies to me when I am (correctly) summarizing Voller's words but when I consult Feldman, I find (as Director Dave has noted) that Melvin's actual words were supposed to be that the Diary was written by “by someone most likely to have been schooled in the 1930s”. The words "most likely" seem to indicate that there may be some doubt in the matter so that Harris was not, in fact, stating that the Diary was written by someone schooled in the 1930s. And it's not even clear that Feldman has quoted him accurately because later in his book he claims the words used were "schooled in the 1920s or 30s" so who knows what Harris actually said?

Irony number three is that Harris seems to have changed his mind anyway (according to Feldman, again as noted by Director Dave) and died believing that the Diary was (most likely?) written by a man or woman born in the 1950s. Harris is not the only member of this forum to have changed his (or her) mind about the Diary - and, if one looks hard enough in the archives, one will even find evidence of the world's greatest expert changing her mind a number of times, and fiercely defending her right to do so - and it must surely be important to cite someone's most recent opinion, not one that has been superseded.

Irony number five is that there is no irony number four.

Irony number six is that Harris' views on the origins of the Diary are surely irrelevant because, having died in 2004, he was never aware of the key fact of Mike Barrett's search in March 1992 for a Victorian Diary with a minimum of 20 blank pages and, having been told that O&L did not sell a scrapbook of the type identified by Mike during 1990 or 1991, might have been led to draw wrong conclusions about who was involved in the forgery and when that forgery took place.

[David Orsam]

And please note that I added an unnecessary and utterly wrong apostrophe to my last post, like a small kiss blown in the direction of lowercase caz as she's off to another wonderful weekend.

Sorry RJ but, despite your confession, I'm still reporting you to the Typo Police.

You're going down my son.

[rjpalmer]

And please note that I added an unnecessary and utterly wrong apostrophe to my last post, like a small kiss blown in the direction of lowercase caz as she's off to another wonderful weekend.