A Very Inky Question

[caz]

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.

Not so, RJ. Mike's 'scribblings' continued in the same illiterate vein long after 1994-1995 - right up to his newly sober period in the 21st century, when he tried to interest Robert Smith in another literary venture - several pages of utter mince, posing as the start of a novel - which once again demonstrated the futility of clinging to the idea that he wrote any part of the diary, with or without Anne's input. Mike only needed the ability to spot an opportunity when he saw one, and he was exactly the kind of person to have conned someone out of the diary, with some old chat about having the right contacts to look it over and offer a fair price with no questions asked. I suspect that would have been the last Eddie Lyons saw of the "old book" until he read about it in Mike and Shirley's shiny new best seller, and saw it again in facsimile form. At least Mike had kept Eddie's name out of it and used the late Tony Devereux's instead, but Eddie had been robbed of his share in Mike's good fortune.

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?

No particular relevance as far as I'm concerned, but you went hunting for details about the scheme when it was mentioned very briefly by Ike, so I assumed - wrongly it seems - that you were using the information you found to make some kind of point or argument. I have no idea if Mike made a formal application, or was ever accepted onto the scheme, but you needed a thousand pounds up front to join, and I'm not sure how easily Mike could have raised such a sum in 1986, on top of the cost of the word processor, which was presumably paid for by Anne or her father, possibly more in the hope of keeping him out of the pub than in any real expectation that he could ever earn his own living that way.

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?

You come out with these sort of madcap suggestions like pulling rabbits out of a hat - a quite extraordinary talent if only you were right occasionally.

I don't know the ins and outs of what Mike was claiming in the 1980s, and whether he was entitled to it, and I don't know how far he got if he did apply to join 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?

Mike tended to speak before engaging his brain, as we all know, so my guess is that he lied to Doreen and Shirley very early on about buying the word processor to transcribe the diary, to show his commitment to it, and to the writing project being proposed. At this point the diary was fully occupying his mind 24/7. He did later talk about his previous writing 'career', so he wasn't doing his best to hide it or play it down. How else would Shirley have found out about it and been able to make enquiries?

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.

I once fancied trying my hand at a painting project, but I was rubbish at it. It looked nothing like a real Monet by the time I had finished.

Unfortunately, my partner at the time was not the kind of sad sap who would have paid for an old canvas, and agreed to paint 95% of my second attempt for me, so I gave up and taught myself to knit instead. Moral of the story: know your limitations.

[Iconoclast]

I don't believe we ever fully understood the chemical make up of the ink did we?

Hi ero b,

I think it is fair to say that - with the benefit of retrospect - Baxendale's 'freely-soluble' claims needed to be tested as a matter of urgency to check that:

1) On this second occasion that he had reported to Robert Smith on the scrapbook (as opposed to the 'first' such analysis which was laughable) that he had actually tested the scrapbook and not some rogue fragment of another document in error (I'm struggling to believe that Michael Barrett had left it with him to do with as he pleased and for as long as he pleased - did Baxendale even have the right to test for solubility given that it would damage the scrapbook?) - this would have provided immediate verification or contradiction of his 'freely-soluble' claims.

2) At that point, if further tests also showed free-solubility, then experts should have been engaged to comment on what that would mean for a document which may have been hidden from light and oxygen for over a hundred years.

Based upon those two processes and conclusions, we would be in a far stronger position to argue that the scrapbook ink - and therefore the entire tale - was just months old when Baxendale did his tests. Instead, we are left with far more questions than answers, sadly.

It is interesting that almost no-one pursued the Baxendale free-solubility issue until fairly recently. I'd have to check, but I wonder what Melvin Harris made of this ticking time bomb (if anything)?

The reason why Robert Smith shoved Baxendale's second report in a drawer is presumably because the first 'report' was patently superficial and based solely on prima facie 'evidence', and that the second - suddenly more in-depth - contained such inexpert inaccuracies that Baxendale requested that his report be excluded from Harrison's book. With a background like that, it is significantly more difficult than it ought to have been to invest much faith in Baxendale's one-off instance of free-solubility so we ought to discard it in much the same careless way that Rod McNeil's ever-so-inconvenient ion migration dating of 1921 (plus or minus 12 years) never reached the ears of the Time Warner executives whose deeply-flawed Rendall report cost their company a payday like no other in the long history of Jack-related media.

Finally:

3) In an ideal world, ink experts would have been engaged to comment on the likelihood of freely-soluble ink in mid-1992 becoming entirely non-soluble in late 1994 (Leeds Report). Was this likely? How fast should ink bond firmly to its paper?

I don't think we can blame the protagonists of the investigation back in the early 1990s - they had far too much to research into and not enough resources to pay for it all. Looking back, we can see questions we dearly wish were asked. But - projecting forward - we will look back one day and wonder why we didn't ask certain other questions today than the ones we are asking. It's not a perfect world, but - equally - science proceeds by replicating results in order to confirm them and the absence of replication in an appropriate timeframe and with a specific agenda to do so leaves us - as ever, it seems - with those pesky questions and without those elusive answers.

Ike

[erobitha]

** bump **

For the benefit of Jay Hartley: "no ink is going to fade in the pages of a closed book" -- Alec Voller, ink chemist.

So how did this fading occur in the Mudbrick Diary if it was under Dodd's floorboards for 103 years?

Wasn't this your explanation for the diary's ink miraculously remaining soluble for all those years?

Something to think about. Have a nice day.

"Unfortunately, ink, like most things in life, is not permanent. The inks used in print production will all fade over time. The main cause is exposure to light (especially UV), which causes the ink/paper system to oxidize. When ink is oxidized it fades. Fading is much more complicated than is usually realized as it depends on environmental factors (light, heat, humidity,), the particular pigments being used, and the substrate the ink was applied to.

Ink manufacturers use fadeometers, along with known ink pigment characteristics, to test fade resistance by exposing the print to light radiation produced from a carbon arc or xenon tube. The arc emits an intense actinic light which in a matter of hours approximates the destructive effect of a much longer period of ordinary daylight. Although it does not exactly duplicate the effect of prolonged exposure to natural light, it is still an effective indicator of the degree of light stability and of the comparative resistance to fading. The results are interpreted with the aid of a chart that correlates the number of hours a printed sample lasts in the fadeometer to the equivalent exposure to direct sunlight taking into account the amount of UV light that different regions receive based on their latitude.

If resistance to fading is an important criteria for a print project, the best source of information is the vendor supplying the inks. They will know the characteristics of the pigments in their ink formulations and can suggest alternatives that may provide better fade resistance - though often at the expense of some other attribute like rub resistance, color vibrancy, or cost."

I don't believe we ever fully understood the chemical make up of the ink did we? Best start there old chap.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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]

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]

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?

[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]

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

There were not two Michael Barretts.

[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]

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]

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.

[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