Diary Handwriting

[Lombro2]

I believed Anne’s story in 2000. It was a lie and I was wrong. It doesn’t demolish anything else.

At least, I dropped my false provenance after I checked it out thoroughly and found no evidence in 25 years. I dropped it and denounce Anne as a liar.

Maybe you should try that with Mike and your non-existent provenance for the journal and the watch. Not doing so demolishes what was already in ruins.

[Lombro2]

Name-dropping is for cherry pickers anyway.

When you got nothing, drop names and fall back on their “expertise”.

[Iconoclast]

My 'quote' button appears to have gone to pot so I'm having to do this one manually ...
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One of the favourite tricks played by the Dark Lord was to find quotations in books and newspapers and posts from long long ago and use them as if they had been scribed forever in granite - let's call them Aberdeen Graffito: then the trick was to imply that there was no context behind the quotation and to use it as proof that the author was either unreliable or even little short of mendacious.

RJ picked up the baton when the Evil One was sensationally 'resigned' from the Casebook. And now Herlock Sholmes is playing that game too.

I don't know, it's like He has just never gone away!

Anyway ...

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)

This is sound advice, and one which I myself sort of repeated just the other day when I stated that the Maybrick scrapbook may well prove to be a hoax, but it's hardly worthy of quoting. It's a platitude and an obvious one. It doesn't tell us anything about what Professor Canter actually believes is ultimately true.

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.

So the bit above was just padding - he was just relating what was claimed to be true by Anne Graham. We all know what Anne Graham claimed so this quotation was irrelevant.

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."

So Professor Rubinstein noted that the claims for a Battlecrease House provenance were 'untrue'. This makes sense: he believed Anne's story and he noted that any suggestions that the scrapbook came out of Maybrick's old house were therefore untrue. He did not know at the time of writing about the thing that would undoubtedly have given him reason to withdraw his inclusion of the word 'untrue' in parentheses. Doesn't mean he would have changed his mind about Anne's story.

... - 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.

This is classic Dark Lord of Total Darkness: if Anne's story is false (which almost no-one alive today knows to be the case or not), then the Battlecrease provenance may be true or may not be true. They are not inextricably linked so only proving one to be true can alter our understanding of the possibility that the other is not. Using words like 'collapses' is a technique designed to imply that someone's beliefs are no more than a house of cards - it is inflammatory in the cheapest possible way.

Ultimately, though, the entire quotation is irrelevant. A man who knew less than we know now believed Anne's story and therefore discarded a different theory. Had he lived to know about the 'double event' of March 9, 1992, I have no doubt that he might very well have changed his mind. In my world, that's allowed. In the Orsamesque nightmare of trial by Aberdeen Graffito, it's not.

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."

As I noted in my brilliant SocPill1, graphology has very little real science to support it so - until it does - it must remain a pseudo-science. It just means the evidence is lacking for its accuracy. Nevertheless, Koren had been at this game for a couple of decades and - for me - the most intriguing aspect of her commentary was when she was asked if the scrapbook's tone could have been faked to which she replied, "Impossible".

So L2 mentioned three names and you tried scurrilously to denigrate the value of those names with pathetically ineffective quotations. What does that tell us about your mindset, I wonder?

[Iconoclast]

Name-dropping is for cherry pickers anyway.

When you got nothing, drop names and fall back on their “expertise”.

Yep, "when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose" [thank you, Bob Dylan].

[rjpalmer]

This sub-forum concerns the diary's handwriting. I revived it to address the proposition that the diary is written in disguised, or semi-disguised, handwriting.

If this does not interest you, or you have nothing intelligent to say about it, that's entirely fine.

Now, if you gentleman can assure me that you're done with the usual bickering and off-topic posts (about Professor Rubinstein, Lord Orsam, the 'appeal to authority' fallacy, etc. etc. ad infinitum) I will proceed.

Thank you.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I believed Anne’s story in 2000. It was a lie and I was wrong. It doesn’t demolish anything else.

At least, I dropped my false provenance after I checked it out thoroughly and found no evidence in 25 years. I dropped it and denounce Anne as a liar.

Maybe you should try that with Mike and your non-existent provenance for the journal and the watch. Not doing so demolishes what was already in ruins.

Just focus for a moment if you can, Lombro.

The point about Anne's story being wrong only went to the fact that Rubinstein appears to have based his theory that Maybrick was 90% likely to be Jack the Ripper on Anne's story being true. He called the Battlecrease provenance "untrue". Why is this relevant? Because you suggested that Rubinstein was an expert whose opinion I was ignoring. Well he's not an expert - just a historian giving his opinion on who Jack the Ripper was - and what he said was based on something you now don't think is true, and which you're ignoring. So why for the love of all that is pure and holy did you mention his name?

As for the "non existent provenance for the journal and the watch", well yes, indeed, you've identified a massive problem for anyone who thinks those items are genuine.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Name-dropping is for cherry pickers anyway.

When you got nothing, drop names and fall back on their “expertise”.

So were you drunk when you name dropped the names of Canter, Rubenstein and Koren in your #89 or had someone hacked your account?

[Herlock Sholmes]

This sub-forum concerns the diary's handwriting. I revived it to address the proposition that the diary is written in disguised, or semi-disguised, handwriting.

If this does not interest you, or you have nothing intelligent to say about it, that's entirely fine.

Now, if you gentleman can assure me that you're done with the usual bickering and off-topic posts (about Professor Rubinstein, Lord Orsam, the 'appeal to authority' fallacy, etc. etc. ad infinitum) I will proceed.

Thank you.

Sorry Roger.

[rjpalmer]

If you can ignore the presenter's somewhat thick Indian accent and the rather dated and cheesy graphics, the following is an intelligent general overview of disguised handwriting and the issues involved in detecting it.

If you're interested, please set aside 29 minutes of your busy day. Thank you.

Questioned Document - Disguised Writing

[rjpalmer]

One initial point.

In Posts #52, #59, and #60 and elsewhere, Scott Nelson and I observe that the 'slant' in Anne Graham's handwriting looks different than the slant in the diary. Shirley Harrison also used Anne's 'backslope' to raise doubts about her authorship.

However, these observations are worthless if the handwriting is disguised.

According to the above video lecture, as well as in other articles on disguised handwriting one can find on the internet, 'slant' is the first thing a person thinks of when disguising their handwriting.

Similar to when disguising's one appearance, the first thing they think of is changing their hair colour.

[Iconoclast]

This sub-forum concerns the diary's handwriting. I revived it to address the proposition that the diary is written in disguised, or semi-disguised, handwriting. If this does not interest you, or you have nothing intelligent to say about it, that's entirely fine. Now, if you gentleman can assure me that you're done with the usual bickering and off-topic posts (about Professor Rubinstein, Lord Orsam, the 'appeal to authority' fallacy, etc. etc. ad infinitum) I will proceed. Thank you.

Sir, sir! It was a big boy, sir, and he ran away.

In shame!

[rjpalmer]

I'd like to explain why I think Dr. Baxendale was concerned and suspicious about the diary having so much variation in the formation of individual letters.

Handwriting is 'neuromuscular.' (This term used in the video linked above)

The brain sends signals to our hand, wrist, and arm muscles and this allows us to execute the movements needed to write.

After years of repetition, these signals and the resulting movements become automatic and subconscious---which is what allows us to concentrate on the content of what we are writing rather than the act of writing itself.

When we are scribbling away in our private diaries, we never agonize over the formation of each individual letter or group of letters like a school child learning to write for the first time.

The diarist instead concentrates on his thoughts and memories--'The thoughts! The very best' or 'She opened like a ripe peach!'

What he is NOT doing--if the diary is genuine and undisguised--is thinking about how he is going to form the 'ght' in thoughts, or the 'r' in ripe or the 'p' in peach.

He's leaving that to his subconscious mind and the 'neuromuscular' patterns that he has formed over many years. He should be giving no more thought to individual letters than a doctor jotting down a prescription.

This is why, I think, Dr. Baxendale was alarmed by all the variation in writing.

The diarist is thinking about the act of writing and because of this is altering the formations in an unnatural, inconsistent way.

Dr. Giles also wrote that certain strokes, etc. were added as an afterthought and were not a natural and automatic element of the writing.

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An interesting observation in the video, though, is that while a forger can effectively disguise handwriting in a short document---the signature on a check, for instance--it becomes increasingly difficult to effectively keep up the act in longer documents.

Fatigue, old habits, inattention, etc. will creep in.

And the diary is 60+ pages in length.

[rjpalmer]

I'm interested in how the diarist forms the uppercase 'D.' Here are some examples taken throughout the text.



There is a lot of variation.

The first 'D' is clumsy and has a lot of tremor to it, as if the writer is not accustomed to making this shape. It is formed in a very different way to the second 'D.' It is quite unique in the diary---it's difficult to find another quite like it.

The second and third 'Ds' look superficially different, but at least they are formed using the same muscular movements.

The same cannot be said of the fourth 'D' which again shows a new way of forming the letter.

It's a bit like a halfmoon with a curly tail, or the figure 2, and strange to say, the left-hand bar of the 'D' is little more than a short stroke. I find this rather unusual and will return to it again.

[rjpalmer]

More Ds. More variations. The first is another "one-off" and looks quite unnatural. I'm not sure I'd even know it was a 'D' if it stood alone.

[rjpalmer]

Finally, in the middle of the diary, we see four uppercase Ds that introduce a new style, though it appears to be a variation of the fourth D in the first set of examples.

We again see a halfmoon shape, bold and fluid, with nothing but a small line for the downstroke. I think it's quite stylish and unusual.

These four Ds, all nearly identical, follow each other in short order, and it makes me wonder if this isn't the writer's more natural way of forming the D. It's subjective, but there seems to be a confidence to them.

It's also important to note the ratio. The D is big--it is 3 or 4 times larger than the accompanying letters.



That's all for now.