A Very Inky Question

[caz]

In case you can't read the above, the article about the boy from Sierra Leon was written by none other than Michael Barrett.

What is your explanation, Ike? And is it fair to represent this as nothing more than 'preset questions' concocted by an illiterate and aimed at a local celebrity?

How did you manage to confirm this was 'none other' than our Michael Barrett? I'm not questioning that you did so, and correct me if I am wrong, but were there not two contributors of that name who were active during the same period?

And why could Anne Barrett not have done the lion's share of the work needed to make this particular example acceptable to the publisher?

It's all very well, trying to argue that Mike may have been a decent and reasonably literate writer in the late 1980s, only to lose all his literacy skills in January 1994, as if his departing wife and daughter had packed them in their suitcases while he wasn't looking. But it's not very likely, is it?

[caz]

All of this is off-topic, Ike, but I do appreciate how you can't help bringing your discussion of the Maybrick Hoax back to ground zero: Mike Barrett.

With all due respect, RJ, I always saw Mike as your ground zero. What else do you have in your tool box, apart from the biggest tool - sorry, liar - in Liverpool?

Being a child of the Great Plains, I had to look up the details of Maggie Thatcher's Enterprise Allowance.

It was apparently suspended in 1987, while Barrett's 'brief' career as a freelance writer (as you inaccurately portrayed it) extended into 1988 and apparently even to 1989, so your theory here, while irrelevant in any case, may be on just as weak footing as your theoretical briefcase full of sandwiches.

Source please, for the Enterprise Allowance scheme being suspended in 1987, because I can't find one, and you seem to be relying on this for your own understanding of Mike's writing 'career' and duration.

I did find in HANSARD Dec 1986 that Maggie's scheme 'continues to flourish'.

I also found that the policy transmuted into the similarly successful Business Start Up Scheme in 1991, which survived for four years.

And Keith Skinner is not sure how he was able to launch his second career as an historical researcher on the back of it in 1989, if it was suspended in 1987.

Mr. Hartley has just reintroduced the allegation of Barrett's near illiteracy, but as you can readily imagine, I have no problem whatsoever with Anne Graham having helped Mike along with his projects, whatever they may have entailed, but what about this:

Isn't it entirely possible that the drunken, erratic Barrett of 1994-1999 that we so often hear about from you and Keith and Caroline is a far-cry from the Mike Barrett of 1990-1992?

After all, Feldman quotes Paul Begg early on as saying that "those of us who have been a little less critical of Mike Barrett are those of us who have met him." (page 19)

This isn't in reference to Barrett's writing abilities, of course, but at the same time Paul doesn't sound like he's describing a drunken, erratic, ignorant lout, but a rather pleasant, plausible man who carried himself respectably enough.

And we hear Anne Graham describing how when she first met Mike she had been impressed by his 'intelligence.' Shirley Harrison similarly described Barrett as 'far from stupid.'

I am of the opinion that Barrett's kidney problems, his generally bad health, his heavy drinking, his stroke or alleged stroke, and his divorce turned him into a very different man than what he once was.

Do you not think there is a difference between someone becoming more drunk and erratic as their personal circumstances and physical or mental health deteriorate, and losing whatever literacy skills they might once have possessed from childhood? Did Peter Cook or Ollie Reed lose the ability to construct a written sentence, using correct spelling, grammar and punctuation? I'm genuinely interested in your take on this, preferably with examples of real celebrities who suffered this descent into infantile literacy levels due to their addictions to booze, sex, drugs or rock n' roll. You surely wouldn't suggest the same fate for James Maybrick, during the period of his own deterioration?

[Iconoclast]

Cheers! I had a super smashing DAiRy free long weekend, with sunshine, showers and a sudden storm, and several sessions of Scrabble, trying to outdo Mister Brown's success on the scoring front.
Love,
Switchypoo
X

One of your best ever, Switchy!

It did make me chuckle.

Ikeypoos

[Iconoclast]

How did you manage to confirm this was 'none other' than our Michael Barrett? I'm not questioning that you did so, and correct me if I am wrong, but were there not two contributors of that name who were active during the same period?

I think our dear readers will find that this unfortunate young lad was living with his adoptive parents in Cheshire at the time of the interview which was attributed to Michael Barrett in 1987. For the record, Cheshire, being right next to Merseyside, was well within my personal definition of 'local interview'.

Cheers,

Ike

[rjpalmer]

How did you manage to confirm this was 'none other' than our Michael Barrett? I'm not questioning that you did so, and correct me if I am wrong, but were there not two contributors of that name who were active during the same period?

So, if I understand you correctly, are you suggesting that Mike Barrett of Liverpool, who bought a word processor in 1985 to launch a writing career (as eventually conceded by his ex-wife, Anne Graham and confirmed by the receipt posted by David Barrat) learned that there was another Mike Barrett working as a freelance writer for Celebrity magazine in the 1980s, and, having tucked away this knowledge in his memory bank, tried to pawn-off the work of this other Michael Barrett during his interview with Keith Skinner at the Cloak and Dagger in 1999?

A rather remarkable theory, and entirely Feldmanesque: two Mike Barretts.

Perhaps we should investigate this and eliminate the possibility from our inquiries.

The story of Dr. Tate and the boy from Sierre Leon was reported in Tony Devereux's old paper, The Liverpool Echo, in November 1985--not long after Barrett had acquired his word processor. The boy was operated on at the Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, which was about 5 miles from Barrett's family home in Garston.

Where did this other Michael Barrett live? Was it also in Liverpool?

And why could Anne Barrett not have done the lion's share of the work needed to make this particular example acceptable to the publisher?

Indeed, why not?

We have little evidence of it, of course, other than Barrett's inept post-alcoholic scribblings from 1995, and Anne's claims that she often did his work for him, but considering that I am the one who suspects that Anne did the lion's share of many of Mike's little projects, it is unlikely that you are going to get an argument from me.

I am merely questioning whether the Mike Barrett of 1985-1991 was as illiterate and incompetent as is being portrayed by Tom Mitchell and others, considering that somehow--by hook or by crook or by sheer will power and determination--he seems to have got his work into print.

[rjpalmer]

Source please, for the Enterprise Allowance scheme being suspended in 1987, because I can't find one, and you seem to be relying on this for your own understanding of Mike's writing 'career' and duration.

Oh, I read it in the blog of some British financial historian; I didn't put much effort into the details, I admit. The Loan Guarantee Scheme ended in 1987, and the Enterprise Allowance seems to have gone under around the same time, but I couldn't swear to the exact month. I will withdraw the statement if you like, until further confirmation.

But my 'understanding' of Mike's writing career hardly relies on Ike's suggestion of a schemer taking advantage of the Enterprise Allowance.

Why would it?

Are we to judge the cooking abilities of those who started restaurants in the 1980s if they quite understandably took advantage of a government program? Or the skills of anyone else who took advantage of the program?

What I find amusing is that for some reason Ike thinks portraying Barrett as a schemer who rips off the government or who allegedly tried to rip off the National Health Service by faking kidney disease is supposed to somehow alleviate our suspicions against him.

I suspect that for most rational people, it would only increase their belief that Barrett was exactly the sort of person who would pull off a stunt like this.

[rjpalmer]

Barrett's inept post-alcoholic scribblings from 1995.

This was poorly phrased. What I meant was that Barrett's abilities have been largely judged by the scribblings the diary supports obtained during his bout with alcoholic psychosis in 1994-1995. He certainly wasn't in 'post alcoholism' at the time. It was after his descent into the abyss.

I'm trying to understand why Caz and Ike are suddenly concerned with Maggie's "Enterprise Allowance." Is there any evidence that Barrett received money from the scheme, and if so, what is the supposed relevance?

Maurice Chittenden reported early on that Barrett was on some sort of forty pound-a-week disability allowance, due to Barrett's confirmed health problems and bad back.

Is the suggestion being made that this was a lie, and that Barrett was actually receiving money from the Enterprise Allowance scheme?

If so, and there is evidence for this, wouldn't this be further indication that Barrett was hiding his writing career in the 1980s from his collaborator (Shirley Harrison) and his agent (Doreen Montgomery) as well from the early diary researchers? Why was Barrett hiding and downplaying this career?

Anyway, I'll return to the theme of this thread--the ink--in a day or two. I'm in the middle or a painting project and have merely stopped by during a coffee break. Cheers.

[rjpalmer]

P.S. I have been informed that the other writer for Celebrity Magazine was Tom Barrett.

There were not two Michael Barretts.

[Iconoclast]

Articles were posted in Celebrity magazine under Michael Barrett (8) then Mike Barrett (5) followed by Michael Barrett (3) - sixteen in total. I'm guessing that these were the two Michael Barretts Caz was referring to. I'm sure she probably agrees with me that they were almost certainly the same person but - as there were also articles under the name of Tom Barrett (81), I suppose it is possible that there were three Barrett contributors. I don't imagine we'll ever know.

[rjpalmer]

Articles were posted in Celebrity magazine under Michael Barrett (8) then Mike Barrett (5) followed by Michael Barrett (3) - sixteen in total. I'm guessing that these were the two Michael Barretts Caz was referring to. I'm sure she probably agrees with me that they were almost certainly the same person but - as there were also articles under the name of Tom Barrett (81), I suppose it is possible that there were three Barrett contributors. I don't imagine we'll ever know.

Ike - Isn't it pointless to muddy the waters? At one point, Anne Graham was questioned about it and admitted that this was her Michael Barrett (though she seems to have been somewhat deceptive).

The relevant statement is alluded to on page 172 of Ripper Diary: The Inside Story.

Anne states that she "had to tidy up the celebrity interviews he wrote for the children's magazine (for which the interviewees included Bonnie Langford, Kenneth Williams, Stan Boardman and Jimmy Cricket)".

Unfortunately, this is just a paraphrase, and the question I would pose to Keith and/or Caz is whether this was Anne's own wording.

Referring to these interviews as having appeared in "The children's magazine" sure sounds deceptive--an attempt at damage control--by implying that Mike was just ineptly submitting stuff to a magazine for little kids--word puzzles, etc. and now the occasional interview---when the interviews with Stan Boardman and Kenneth Williams and Bonnie Langford had actually appeared in Celebrity, which was for adult readers. Mike had also written for Chat, which was also for adult readers. Why the misrepresentation?

Even Look-in was more for teens than little kids. It sounds like a deliberate attempt (by Anne) to downgrade Barrett's writing career and to mischaracterize it.

Why would she have been doing that?

[caz]

So, if I understand you correctly, are you suggesting that Mike Barrett of Liverpool, who bought a word processor in 1985 to launch a writing career (as eventually conceded by his ex-wife, Anne Graham and confirmed by the receipt posted by David Barrat) learned that there was another Mike Barrett working as a freelance writer for Celebrity magazine in the 1980s, and, having tucked away this knowledge in his memory bank, tried to pawn-off the work of this other Michael Barrett during his interview with Keith Skinner at the Cloak and Dagger in 1999?

A rather remarkable theory, and entirely Feldmanesque: two Mike Barretts.

No, I'm not suggesting that. This remarkable, Feldmanesque interpretation of what I wrote is entirely your own.

I invited you to correct me, but I merely asked how you knew the article you posted was by 'our' Mike Barrett, because I had it in the back of my mind that there may have been two article contributors of that name active during the same period.

It wasn't the Spanish Inquisition, old chap.

I can't actually see - or read - the date on that first article you posted, so do you happen to have one? I only ask because, according to Melvin Harris, the date on the Dixons receipt for the famous word 'prosser' is 3rd April 1986, five months after the story had been reported on in The Liverpool Echo. A small point, but when you are pushing a theory, it always helps to give accurate dates wherever possible. I have no reason to dispute Harris's date, but the copy of the actual receipt, faxed by Shirley to Keith in February 1995, is unfortunately incomplete, missing off the date at the top right corner after the figure 3.

I'm not sure why you invoked the spirit of Tony Devereux at this point, some years before the Barretts had even moved to Anfield, where Mike would go on to meet Tony for the first time in his local - apparently becoming such firm friends over a short space of time that the three of them would soon be discussing top secret plans to make Jack the Ripper a fellow Scouser, and choosing poor maligned James Maybrick to be their victim.

We have little evidence of it, of course, other than Barrett's inept post-alcoholic scribblings from 1995, and Anne's claims that she often did his work for him, but considering that I am the one who suspects that Anne did the lion's share of many of Mike's little projects, it is unlikely that you are going to get an argument from me.

I see that, but then why bother doing this rather lame levelling up job on Mike, to make him literate enough in the 1980s to get 'his work into print' under his own steam, when you believe Anne probably had to compose up to 95% of the diary text for him, apart from [and I apologise for giggling at this point] possibly some of the weakest bits of doggerel.

You can't surely believe that the illiterate Mike Barrett of the mid 1990s would have been a literate 'Bongo' Barrett in the mid 1980s? The most significant change between those two periods of his life was arguably the fact that at the start of 1994 his previously loyal 'personal assistant' resigned in despair, and was no longer around to correct his awful English. Perhaps it's easier for you to sell the image of Anne helping him with a literary hoax if she didn't already know by the late 1980s that it would inevitably be totally beyond him, and down to her to try and make it work, as she had with all his innocent little articles.

[rjpalmer]

I can't actually see - or read - the date on that first article you posted, so do you happen to have one? I only ask because, according to Melvin Harris, the date on the Dixons receipt for the famous word 'prosser' is 3rd April 1986, five months after the story had been reported on in The Liverpool Echo. A small point, but when you are pushing a theory, it always helps to give accurate dates wherever possible.

The article about Gbassy from Sierra Leone appeared in Celebrity on 13 August 1987. Which is the year after the Amstrad purchase. My date '1985' for the word processor was just a rather insignificant typo and I'm not 'pushing' a theory. I'm just convinced Anne and Mike were up to their elbows in the hoax and if you believe otherwise, that's entirely your prerogative. Clearly, Ike's claim that Barrett only wrote 'briefly' for 'one' magazine, supposedly as part of a writer's course, is a mischaracterization.

Why did Anne Graham leave the impression with Keith that these interviews had appeared in "the children's magazine" when they most obviously didn't?

If, as you believe, Anne was writing the "lion's share" of these articles, why was she unaware of the publisher? Or is there another explanation for Anne leaving this wrong impression?

And I don't see why it matters one iota if Mike wrote 90% of these articles or only 10%. The couple were living together in the 1980s and they were still living together in March/April 1992.

I'll try to upload a more legible copy later today, so we can judge whether Ike's characterization of these articles being nothing more than "preset" questions is accurate.

[caz]

I suspect that for most rational people, it would only increase their belief that Barrett was exactly the sort of person who would pull off a stunt like this.

I'd word it slightly differently.

Mike may have appeared to most rational people [those who didn't know the man personally before 1992, and what he was or wasn't capable of], as exactly the sort of person who might have fancied his hand at trying to pull off a successful alternative to the quickly rubbished Hitler Diaries.

But that is a world apart from getting his far more grounded wife to try it for him, without either of them knowing the first thing about hoaxes and how not to fall at the first hurdle, and then ending up with a best seller instead of a sore bottom from Doreen at best, and a prison sentence at worst. And here you are still, 30 years on, trying to do Mike's special pleading for him and getting precisely nowhere.

He really was a special little pleader, wasn't he?

[rjpalmer]

And here you are still, 30 years on, trying to do Mike's special pleading for him and getting precisely nowhere.

Do you mean with you and Hartley and Skinner and Mitchell? You're right. I'm getting nowhere, but that has an entirely different explanation.

People still discuss and write about the Piltdown Hoax and it has been around a lot longer than 30 years. That certainly doesn't mean people should be stupid enough to believe that a Roman scull with the molars of an orangutan could be the real deal, nor that it wasn't debunked years ago.

And the Maybrick Hoax DID fall at the first hurdle. The first three hurdles in fact. 1. Baxendale. 2. The Sunday Times team. 3. The Kenneth Rendell group.

That Smith went on to publish it anyway is not evidence of its sophistication.

[rjpalmer]

Hi Caz, while I brace myself for your mockery of my spelling of the word 'skull' in the previous post, let's return to the subject of the ink.

You write:

2) If Baxendale's 'freely soluble' result was as good as it gets, and ought to have ruled out any possibility of an older document, why did all those other professionals, commissioned by both 'sides', see any merit in conducting their own tests or visual examinations, knowing that the ink would have had sufficient time to bond with the paper by then?

This is oddly formulated, and you should know the answer.

Melvin Harris explained many years ago that he commissioned AFI to test for the presence of chloroacetamide, for the sole reason of testing whether Barrett had demonstrated any inside knowledge when he pointed out the ink shop. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the ink being bonded to the paper or a visual examination, nor due to any nagging doubts about Baxendale's earlier examination.

Similarly, the Leeds test, and the visual examination by Voller, where set-up by Harrison in response to the AFI test and Harris's assertions. So you seem to be misstating the purpose of these tests.

Shouldn't you be asking whether Smith alerted everyone to Baxendale's results? Was the Kenneth Rendell team even initially aware of his ink solubility test? According to Shirley Harrison, Baxendale's report (or reports) was set aside by mutual agreement, and according to Maurice Chittenden, Robert Smith had told him that he had shoved the report in a desk drawer and had 'forgotten about it.'

Times-Warner had grown suspicious of the diary in 1993, and according to Feldman, it was they who insisted that Smith seek more expert opinions, so Smith flew the diary to Kenneth Rendell in the US in August 1993. As you note, by now the diary had been around for at least 16 months, and Rendell opted to bring Rod McNeil to conduct a relatively new and certainly controversial "ion migration" test rather than the customary ink solubility test.

Chittenden wouldn't publicly reveal the existence of Baxendale's results until a month later, September 1993. Whether Rendell and his team knew of them before that date is unclear.

Be that as it may, the members of Rendell's team did learn about Baxendale's test at some point, because a member of the team, Dr. Joe Nickell would later write in his 1997 book Detecting Forgery (page 194):

"...current evidence shows he [McNeil] also obtained an erroneous date.. .for the forged Jack the Ripper diary, one potential problem having been the diary's unsized (and thus extra absorbent) paper. In contrast, a British examiner used the relatively simple ink-solubility test to determine that the ink was barely dry on the pages."

Rendell seems to have come to the same conclusion. The "British examiner" is obviously Dr. David Baxendale.

So, whatever the exact timing, the Rendell team (whose tests were at the insistence of Time-Warner) did, indeed, accept Baxendale's results, and found the implication of the ink solubility test more credible than that of their own team member, Rod McNeil.

Leeds didn't conduct an ink solubility test per se, but they had to try to separate the ink from the paper and they found it almost impossible to do so--in stark contrast to what Baxendale observed in 1992.

To me, this is conclusive, and no one has given a rational explanation for why these results were observed. It seems obvious to me that the ink continued to 'set' between 1992 and 1994, which is seeming confirmation of Barrett's claim that the diary was created in March-April 1992.