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Originally posted by caz View PostYou don't seriously still think Mike could have had a hand in the diary's creation do you, Gareth?
1 Down: Famous book by Ann Frank (5)
8 Across: Italian city, or the girl from the Magic Roundabout (8)
12 Across: French word for fish (6)
etcKind regards, Sam Flynn
"Suche Nullen" (Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, 1888)
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Allo, folks. I've been away for a month or two, and was notified by a friend down the ale-house (not the Poste House, mind) about a brand new book out concerning Maybrick and the diary, so I thought I'd pop on and see what the fuss was about, as he seemed rather excited.
From what I can gather, not much is about the extent of what is found within its pages. Still, I bet Bruce has made a few quid out of it, eh?
The convention at the Marriott hotel is at the end of this month, and I can't say I'm too excited for the Maybrick section, as I'm expecting it to be about these new "reveals" from the book in question, about the electricians who supposedly found the diary, etc, and not much else.
So, has the book actually been released yet, and if so, has anyone read it?
I'm currently just getting through the massive thread on the book, so if I've missed anything, please let me know.
Cheers, la.
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Originally posted by Tom Mitchell View PostThe 13 year old who wrote this diary one wet weekend probably had no idea that he or she would probably never again in their lifetime write such a spectacularly complex work, and one so complex and so brilliant that it would be called both infantile and genius in equal measure.
It is time for the old timers to move on. Nine years after gifting the world of Ripperology its Greatest Thread of All, it has finally lost its flavour and its favour in the light of Robert Smith’s recent book which has provided concrete and final proof that the Liverpool journal is the inadvertent confession of Jack the Ripper, written in his own hand – the hand of James Maybrick.
It just comes down to statistics now. When Anne Graham’s providence for the journal was all we had, we were presented with a profoundly-unlikely coincidence of circumstances were it to prove the case that her story was untrue. In this event, two things would then have had to be true by sheer chance alone:
• Florence Maybrick left gaol in 1904 and immediately took the surname Graham; and
• Anne's father Billy’s step-grandmother was an intimate of Alice Yapp – she the sharp-fanged viper of the nest which was Battlecrease House in 1889.
I have always believed that these two facts were sufficiently-unlikely and that the likelihood of their occurring independently – never mind in tandem – were so remote that the most cautious p value possible would still profoundly exceed it. So implausible a coincidence of events simply should not happen, and it is not unreasonable to then infer that no such coincidence had occurred – that, therefore, the two events listed above were part and parcel of the journal’s route into Anne Graham’s hands, and thence (tragically) into the hands of her utterly compromised husband, Mike.
And yet Robert Smith’s book presents us with a second providence and one with a probability of occurring by sheer chance alone as equally remote as that of the coincidence described above. If the journal of Jack the Ripper did not come out of Battlecrease House and reasonably quickly into Mike Barrett’s sweaty palms, then we are left with a coincidence so implausible that it boggles the mind to reflect that it could have happened:
• On the very day that Portus & Rhodes Ltd. work records show workmen installing underfloor wiring for a night storage heater in James Maybrick’s bedroom (March 9, 1992), Mike Barrett rings Doreen Montgomery at Rupert Crew Ltd. with the immortal words that he had the diary of Jack the Ripper.
On the very day, no less! You simply cannot shake the utter other-worldliness of two such sets of coincidences – and you cannot ignore the fact that they are entirely mutually-exclusive. Either one is actually a coincidence and the other the truth, or both are coincidences, but they cannot both be true. Evidently, the man upstairs was humouring himself no end when He contrived to create these two parallel stories, leaving us in awe that either both are actually coincidences (the chances of both being coincidences are infinitesimally small!) or that one provides us with the providence we require for the emergence in March 1992 of this most controversial tome.
As a statistician, I have to tally in my mind the implausible truth that one of these sets of events is actually a coincidence. But as a statistician, I could never accept that both sets of circumstances occurred by sheer chance alone. That is one stretch of the imagination too many. So the Maybrick journal has its providence – either via Anne Graham or via Portus & Rhodes Ltd., or else the greatest coincidence of them all occurred when both of these sets of events occurred entirely by chance alone.
And yet you will argue for the latter - incontrovertibly, unequivocally, undeniably. I do not need to be the brilliant Foreteller of Things to Come that you know me to be to predict that within minutes all manner of ill-conceived alternatives and contradictions will be offered – almost entirely by a cohort of Casebook contributors who simply do not have the pedigree to offer insight and balance, not because they have not been around the case or because they lack years behind them, but simply because they proselytise on our doorstep without having even cast an eye on their bible. Many of the arguments made now on the Maybrick site are made through a lack of knowledge and a stab-in-the-dark, I-think-it’s-true-but-I-don’t-really-know mentality. This amazing thread started with the illustration of how ignorance quickly multiplies itself. I fear that not a lot has changed when posters come on cementing their trenchant views but revealing that they haven’t actually read anything on the subject of their opinions (this has been a long-standing frustration for me in my long battle for the journal to have a fair voice – a frustration arguably tipped over the cliff edge by the recent post from an-too regular dismisser of all things pro-journal asking what date and time the journal was concluded, when anyone who has read the journal knows that that is revealed in the journal’s final line).
I genuinely believe that there is nothing left to add to this debate. The journal is the confession of Jack the Ripper, and its author was James Maybrick. The providence is now in place (it remains one or other of the two versions, but the laws of statistics do not comfortably allow it to be neither). The case against Maybrick is essentially complete.
And so I reflect in the gathering light of my time on this site and on how much I brought you all down the long years. I gave you ‘Imagine’ by Ann Truth in order to initiate a debate around whether a confession was actually sustainable. It didn’t take off, much to my disappointment, despite my sock puppet Porky Man doing all he could to draw everyone’s attention to the wonderful line ‘Damn Michael Barrett’.
Later, I gave you ‘Fake!’ to entertain you, just for jolly, wouldn’t you? At Robert Anderson’s invitation I transferred briefly to JTR Forums where I gifted them the transcendent ‘The Diary's Fingerprints’ and ‘Reading 5, Arsenal 7 (Genuine) DIEGO LAURENZ’. Unfortunately, no-one seems to read the JTR Forums (it’s Sunday Times vs The Sun, I fear) so they didn’t have anything like the impact they should have done.
A few indiscretions later and regeneration came in the form of Gladiator and then the last-hurrah of Iconoclast stormed down the walls with my true pièce de résistance in ‘The Curious Case of History vs. James Maybrick’ – a barn-storming, page-turning trip down Memory Lane for Jack the Spratt McVitie fans, especially those who wished to see James Maybrick’s murderous actions chronologized in an entertaining, insightful quarter century of pages.
After a quarter century since the journal first surfaced, it is probably true to say that my greatest contribution to the weird and anything-but-wonderful world of Ripperology was to finally explain the Goulston Street Graffito (in ‘History vs. Maybrick’). The Cleverness Engine was truly running at full throttle as the GSG was gently deciphered by my large detective’s magnifying glass. No, please, there’s no need to thank me.
And yet – despite all the genius that has flowed from so many different routes – my greatest Hour was also my longest in this, The Greatest Thread of All. At 666,000 views, I guess it would be safe to say that it truly is a beast.
I joined the Jack the Ripper Casebook full of optimism that we could have meaningful debate, and The Grave Maurice’s response to my maiden speech was encouraging (“That's an impressive and thought-provoking piece of work”). Sadly, the exchanges which followed quickly diverted me from my original lofty ideals and I descended into pantomime farce just to rationalise it all in my deeply disappointed head. And also because it frankly quickly became just good fun.
Like all lemmings, eventually we all reach the cliff edge, and I think that it is safe to say that I have reached mine. I am probably all maudlin because yesterday we took young Susie to university and have barely heard from her since. The Casebook belongs to a new generation, as does the future of the world. The issue of the identity of a man who caused terror throughout the Autumn of 1888 is not in the same league as that of a man who attempted to bring terror to the same capital as we drove south, windows coated with lampshades, duvets, and bags full of Pot Noodles and beer. Everything has its day, and James Maybrick has had his in court and been found well and truly guilty. It’s honestly time to move on, everyone.
To you all, friend, foe, or uncommitted, it is no crime to be passionately committed to a cause and defend it with an argument (and no more) unweakened by criticism, however at times quite overwhelming. You left me breathless on many many occasions which seems wonderfully and ironically appropriate given the subject of our study. To you all, my fondest regards.
I give my name that all know of me, so History vs. Maybrick do tell, what life can do to a Geordie boy born.
Yours truly
Soothmundus ‘Soothy’ Soothsayer
Dated this sixteenth day of September 2017.
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Originally posted by Iconoclast View Post
End of an Era
It is time for the old timers to move on. Nine years after gifting the world of Ripperology its Greatest Thread of All, it has finally lost its flavour and its favour in the light of Robert Smith’s recent book which has provided concrete and final proof that the Liverpool journal is the inadvertent confession of Jack the Ripper, written in his own hand – the hand of James Maybrick.
It just comes down to statistics now. When Anne Graham’s providence for the journal was all we had, we were presented with a profoundly-unlikely coincidence of circumstances were it to prove the case that her story was untrue. In this event, two things would then have had to be true by sheer chance alone:
• Florence Maybrick left gaol in 1904 and immediately took the surname Graham; and
• Anne's father Billy’s step-grandmother was an intimate of Alice Yapp – she the sharp-fanged viper of the nest which was Battlecrease House in 1889.
I have always believed that these two facts were sufficiently-unlikely and that the likelihood of their occurring independently – never mind in tandem – were so remote that the most cautious p value possible would still profoundly exceed it. So implausible a coincidence of events simply should not happen, and it is not unreasonable to then infer that no such coincidence had occurred – that, therefore, the two events listed above were part and parcel of the journal’s route into Anne Graham’s hands, and thence (tragically) into the hands of her utterly compromised husband, Mike.
And yet Robert Smith’s book presents us with a second providence and one with a probability of occurring by sheer chance alone as equally remote as that of the coincidence described above. If the journal of Jack the Ripper did not come out of Battlecrease House and reasonably quickly into Mike Barrett’s sweaty palms, then we are left with a coincidence so implausible that it boggles the mind to reflect that it could have happened:
• On the very day that Portus & Rhodes Ltd. work records show workmen installing underfloor wiring for a night storage heater in James Maybrick’s bedroom (March 9, 1992), Mike Barrett rings Doreen Montgomery at Rupert Crew Ltd. with the immortal words that he had the diary of Jack the Ripper.
On the very day, no less! You simply cannot shake the utter other-worldliness of two such sets of coincidences – and you cannot ignore the fact that they are entirely mutually-exclusive. Either one is actually a coincidence and the other the truth, or both are coincidences, but they cannot both be true. Evidently, the man upstairs was humouring himself no end when He contrived to create these two parallel stories, leaving us in awe that either both are actually coincidences (the chances of both being coincidences are infinitesimally small!) or that one provides us with the providence we require for the emergence in March 1992 of this most controversial tome.
As a statistician, I have to tally in my mind the implausible truth that one of these sets of events is actually a coincidence. But as a statistician, I could never accept that both sets of circumstances occurred by sheer chance alone. That is one stretch of the imagination too many. So the Maybrick journal has its providence – either via Anne Graham or via Portus & Rhodes Ltd., or else the greatest coincidence of them all occurred when both of these sets of events occurred entirely by chance alone.
And yet you will argue for the latter - incontrovertibly, unequivocally, undeniably. I do not need to be the brilliant Foreteller of Things to Come that you know me to be to predict that within minutes all manner of ill-conceived alternatives and contradictions will be offered – almost entirely by a cohort of Casebook contributors who simply do not have the pedigree to offer insight and balance, not because they have not been around the case or because they lack years behind them, but simply because they proselytise on our doorstep without having even cast an eye on their bible. Many of the arguments made now on the Maybrick site are made through a lack of knowledge and a stab-in-the-dark, I-think-it’s-true-but-I-don’t-really-know mentality. This amazing thread started with the illustration of how ignorance quickly multiplies itself. I fear that not a lot has changed when posters come on cementing their trenchant views but revealing that they haven’t actually read anything on the subject of their opinions (this has been a long-standing frustration for me in my long battle for the journal to have a fair voice – a frustration arguably tipped over the cliff edge by the recent post from an-too regular dismisser of all things pro-journal asking what date and time the journal was concluded, when anyone who has read the journal knows that that is revealed in the journal’s final line).
I genuinely believe that there is nothing left to add to this debate. The journal is the confession of Jack the Ripper, and its author was James Maybrick. The providence is now in place (it remains one or other of the two versions, but the laws of statistics do not comfortably allow it to be neither). The case against Maybrick is essentially complete.
And so I reflect in the gathering light of my time on this site and on how much I brought you all down the long years. I gave you ‘Imagine’ by Ann Truth in order to initiate a debate around whether a confession was actually sustainable. It didn’t take off, much to my disappointment, despite my sock puppet Porky Man doing all he could to draw everyone’s attention to the wonderful line ‘Damn Michael Barrett’.
Later, I gave you ‘Fake!’ to entertain you, just for jolly, wouldn’t you? At Robert Anderson’s invitation I transferred briefly to JTR Forums where I gifted them the transcendent ‘The Diary's Fingerprints’ and ‘Reading 5, Arsenal 7 (Genuine) DIEGO LAURENZ’. Unfortunately, no-one seems to read the JTR Forums (it’s Sunday Times vs The Sun, I fear) so they didn’t have anything like the impact they should have done.
A few indiscretions later and regeneration came in the form of Gladiator and then the last-hurrah of Iconoclast stormed down the walls with my true pièce de résistance in ‘The Curious Case of History vs. James Maybrick’ – a barn-storming, page-turning trip down Memory Lane for Jack the Spratt McVitie fans, especially those who wished to see James Maybrick’s murderous actions chronologized in an entertaining, insightful quarter century of pages.
After a quarter century since the journal first surfaced, it is probably true to say that my greatest contribution to the weird and anything-but-wonderful world of Ripperology was to finally explain the Goulston Street Graffito (in ‘History vs. Maybrick’). The Cleverness Engine was truly running at full throttle as the GSG was gently deciphered by my large detective’s magnifying glass. No, please, there’s no need to thank me.
And yet – despite all the genius that has flowed from so many different routes – my greatest Hour was also my longest in this, The Greatest Thread of All. At 666,000 views, I guess it would be safe to say that it truly is a beast.
I joined the Jack the Ripper Casebook full of optimism that we could have meaningful debate, and The Grave Maurice’s response to my maiden speech was encouraging (“That's an impressive and thought-provoking piece of work”). Sadly, the exchanges which followed quickly diverted me from my original lofty ideals and I descended into pantomime farce just to rationalise it all in my deeply disappointed head. And also because it frankly quickly became just good fun.
Like all lemmings, eventually we all reach the cliff edge, and I think that it is safe to say that I have reached mine. I am probably all maudlin because yesterday we took young Susie to university and have barely heard from her since. The Casebook belongs to a new generation, as does the future of the world. The issue of the identity of a man who caused terror throughout the Autumn of 1888 is not in the same league as that of a man who attempted to bring terror to the same capital as we drove south, windows coated with lampshades, duvets, and bags full of Pot Noodles and beer. Everything has its day, and James Maybrick has had his in court and been found well and truly guilty. It’s honestly time to move on, everyone.
To you all, friend, foe, or uncommitted, it is no crime to be passionately committed to a cause and defend it with an argument (and no more) unweakened by criticism, however at times quite overwhelming. You left me breathless on many many occasions which seems wonderfully and ironically appropriate given the subject of our study. To you all, my fondest regards.
I give my name that all know of me, so History vs. Maybrick do tell, what life can do to a Geordie boy born.
Yours truly
Soothmundus ‘Soothy’ Soothsayer
Dated this sixteenth day of September 2017.
Sorry to say that nothing has changed.
Steve
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Is Ike's last post meant to be a wind up? For the reasons given on the other thread the recent revelations only serve to demonstrate how completely ludicrous the argument in favour of the diary has become.
I mean, not only did one of the electricians tell Paul Feldman that the diary was discovered in 1989, not 1992, something he had no reason to lie about if the story about the discovery was true, the idea that one of the electricians then mysteriously presented Barrett with the aforementioned document the same dayof discovey-a man whom he had no proven connection to- who then quickly decided that it was the diary of Jack the Ripper, his next thought being, "wow, I'd better phone a literary agent about this", is completely hilarious!
Quite apart from anything else, where did he get the agent's name and number from at such short notice? And assuming the electrician didn't bunk off work during the daytime, before, completely by chance, meeting Barrett in his local pub-miles away from where he was working-the meeting must have taken place during the evening. Presumably Barrett then, possibly in a somewhat inebriated state, phoned directory enquiries, telling the telephonist, "You're never going to believe this, I've just bought Jack the Ripper's diary from a man in a pub. please connect me to a random literary agent." And, of course, the random literary agent was still working, despite it probably being well outside normal business hours. Unbelievable!Last edited by John G; 09-16-2017, 12:15 PM.
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You know i have a feeling that even if Maybrick was ever found to have attended, say a gala evening in Liverpool on the night of one of the murders. It would prove to the pro diarists what a clever man he was and obviously the murderer by planting a body double at the event so as to murder fallen women in London without suspicion against him ever being raised.
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Originally posted by John G View PostI mean, not only did one of the electricians tell Paul Feldman that the diary was discovered in 1989, not 1992, something he had no reason to lie about if the story about the discovery was true, the idea that one of the electricians then mysteriously presented Barrett with the aforementioned document the same dayof discovey-a man whom he had no proven connection to- who then quickly decided that it was the diary of Jack the Ripper, his next thought being, "wow, I'd better phone a literary agent about this", is completely hilarious!
Quite apart from anything else, where did he get the agent's name and number from at such short notice? And assuming the electrician didn't bunk off work during the daytime, before, completely by chance, meeting Barrett in his local pub-miles away from where he was working-the meeting must have taken place during the evening. Presumably Barrett then, possibly in a somewhat inebriated state, phoned directory enquiries, telling the telephonist, "You're never going to believe this, I've just bought Jack the Ripper's diary from a man in a pub. please connect me to a random literary agent." And, of course, the random literary agent was still working, despite it probably being well outside normal business hours. Unbelievable!Kind regards, Sam Flynn
"Suche Nullen" (Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung, 1888)
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Originally posted by Iconoclast View Post...then we are left with a coincidence so implausible that it boggles the mind to reflect that it could have happened..
The diary is riddled with coincidences, all of which you find no issue in shunning, lol.
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Originally posted by John G View PostIs Ike's last post meant to be a wind up? For the reasons given on the other thread the recent revelations only serve to demonstrate how completely ludicrous the argument in favour of the diary has become.
I mean, not only did one of the electricians tell Paul Feldman that the diary was discovered in 1989, not 1992, something he had no reason to lie about if the story about the discovery was true, the idea that one of the electricians then mysteriously presented Barrett with the aforementioned document the same dayof discovey-a man whom he had no proven connection to- who then quickly decided that it was the diary of Jack the Ripper, his next thought being, "wow, I'd better phone a literary agent about this", is completely hilarious!
Quite apart from anything else, where did he get the agent's name and number from at such short notice? And assuming the electrician didn't bunk off work during the daytime, before, completely by chance, meeting Barrett in his local pub-miles away from where he was working-the meeting must have taken place during the evening. Presumably Barrett then, possibly in a somewhat inebriated state, phoned directory enquiries, telling the telephonist, "You're never going to believe this, I've just bought Jack the Ripper's diary from a man in a pub. please connect me to a random literary agent." And, of course, the random literary agent was still working, despite it probably being well outside normal business hours. Unbelievable!
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Originally posted by Mike J. G. View PostYou know what they say, John, never let logic get in the way of lunacy! lol
It is so wearisome, this being so utterly clever and you lot being so slow on the uptake. Even in the depths of my self-imposed retirement, I find myself having to illustrate again how James Maybrick seems to be doggedly determined to remain in the frame for the Whitechapel slaughtering of 1888. By the way, if you can’t be a****d to read through the following and just want to get straight to the core of my brilliant insight, feel free to leap lazily to the end of this, my latest illuminating post as there lies my genius in its ever most freshest moment.
Okay, we’re on the theme of coincidence again, fellow sleuths. And the fact that there need to have been an awful lot for the Maybrick journal to be a hoax. The number keeps growing, and yet still the Naysayers ignore its volume. Nay, even attempt to out shout it!
So – for the sake of some fun - we enter a bizarre world where the Maybrick journal is finally proven to be a hoax. We are then left to tally up the serial coincidences – I’ve collated 21 chronologically but the 22nd at the end of this post deserves a much higher placing if it were on merit - which worked so cunningly in the hoaxer’s favour. From the top of my head (and other faithful sources):
1) The spelling of Jack from Maybrick’s name
2) Maybrick – despite being a hypochondriac whose second home was the doctor’s surgery – never being placed somewhere else at the time of any of the murders
3) Maybrick’s now well-established addiction to arsenic
4) Maybrick’s now well-established link with the east end of London (via his girlfriend/wife/lover Sarah Robertson, and possibly Mr. Witt and his ‘London business’)
5) A Whitechapel in both Liverpool and London
6) The ‘Who is Jim?’ newspaper article after the first canonical murder
7) The piece of muslin left with Annie Chapman’s corpse
8) The ‘M’ on the envelope also found with Chapman’s body
9) V marks on Catharine Eddowes (‘left my mark’)
10) The convenience of Juwes in the GSG appearing much like ‘James’, and – oh – as you know, ‘Thomas’, and ‘William’, and ‘Ed’ [I’ll excuse you the ‘win’ here], Michael and Florence Maybrick’s initials, and even the word ‘nothing’ written in the hand that wrote the journal [remember, the GSG we have on the record is a ‘duplicate’ of that which was washed so carelessly off the wall]
11) The discovery of the little-known September 17 ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter in whose hand the journal was written
12) The remarkable ‘photofit’ of Oct 6 which looked so much like Maybrick
13) The FM on the wall of MK’s room [unclear in many versions of the infamous photograph, but very clear indeed in the works of those two arch-journal detractors Sugden and Marriott]
14) Florence’s comment in a letter to Brierley (‘The tale he told me …’) [not so much a coincidence, I grant you, but we’ll leave it in nevertheless]
15) The Diego Laurenz letter [arguably the biggest clue that Maybrick was indeed Jack]
16) The extravagant swirl at the end of a sentence (see Feldman, ‘The Final Chapter’)
17) The Maybrick watch and the incredibly-unlikely coincidence that Maybrick’s best pal George Davidson would die penniless and yet leave a gold watch under his pillow on the day he died – a fact which either inspired the watch’s hoax or else which supports the theory that the hoaxers put in a truly remarkable shift in the Liverpool libraries in creating their masterpieces (the journal and the watch)
18) The provenance given by Anne Barrett which revealed that Elizabeth Formby (pal of the viper Alice Yapp) had a daughter Edith who was married to Anne’s grandfather (second marriage) thereby providing ‘apparent’ support for the hoaxer’s work
19) The implausibly-convenient fact that on her release from gaol in 1904, Florrie Maybrick took the surname ‘Graham’ (Anne Barrett’s maiden name, of course)
20) Latterly, the stunningly-implausible coincidence that work had been done on the floorboards in Maybrick’s old room on the very day (March 9, 1992) that Michael ‘Master Forger’ Barrett first attempted to gain interest in his Ripper journal
21) The geoprofiling data which placed Middlesex Street at the very heart of where the Ripper should have been found [the GSG was ignored so Flower and Dean Street was focused on as his most likely lair, but the case for Middlesex Street was just as strong and if Rossmo had added in the GSG, Middlesex Street it undoubtedly would have been]
All of this is discussed in my seminal work of stunning insight and genius – History vs. Maybrick (email historyvsmaybrick@gmail.com if you would like a full expose with pretty pictures) – but it is worth iterating these points for the uninitiated. Oh, and for the initiated.
And so to the point of all this reprising malarkey. The rhymes. Those wonderful little snippets of verse which the Maybrick journal makes occasional reference to and which conveniently turn up in the record in all the right places. You know the ones:
I’m not an alien maniac
Nor yet a foreign tripper
I’m just your jolly, lively friend,
Yours truly – Jack the Ripper
And
I'm not a butcher
I'm not a Yid
Nor yet a foreign skipper
But I'm your own light-hearted friend
Yours truly, Jack the Ripper
Recently, I came across a longer version of the ‘I’m not a butcher’ verse, and it continued thus:
Up and down the goddam town
Policemen try to find me.
But I ain't a chap yet to drown
In drink, or Thames or sea
I’ve no time now to tell you how
I came to be a killer
But you should know, as time will show,
That I'm society's pillar
A quick Google search brought me to an old, disused corner of the Casebook, which seems to point towards an origin of sorts and from which I paraphrase below:
Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Message Boards » Letters and Communications » General Discussion » "Up and down the goddam town ..."
Posted on Thursday, April 03, 2003 - 5:43 pm:
Chris Phillips
Does anyone know anything further about the following example [the verses I quote immediately above] of the Ripper's "sallies in verse", quoted by Donald McCormick, The Identity of Jack the Ripper (1959 edn, p. 83).
In contrast, no source is given for the poem above (it immediately follows the poem "I'm not a butcher...", extracted from Macnaghten's memoirs), and it seems to play no part in McCormick's scheme.
Chris Phillips
But you should know, as time will show,
That I'm society's pillar
Maybrick first gives us his family motto – tempus omnia revelat (time reveals all) – when he writes ‘as time will show’.
And not content with that teasing little clue, he secondly goes one step further and gives us a clue to his name – he is ‘society’s pillar’. Google ‘pillar’. You’ll get, an upright shaft or structure, of stone, brick, or other material, relatively slender in proportion to its height, and of any shape in section, used as a building support, or standing alone, as for a monument. In shorter, simpler terms, a brick.
Truly, no hoaxer could ever have hoped for such luck, but our hoaxers received it in bucket loads. Maybrick just keeps creeping out of the brickwork of the Jack the Ripper story at every turn, and yet still we will hear the bleating of the hoaxers’ defenders, at least we do in here, this occasional sacred cowpat of debate. They will say that it was old mad McCormick making it up again (with no evidence to prove it, of course), but they will miss the point - whether McCormick made it up, someone else made it up, or it was a genuine Ripper rhyme of 1888, its last two lines conveniently speak of James Maybrick yet again! The unluckiest man ever in the legal system (if he'd ever been arrested)?
Of course, I can hear the Naysayers sharpening their pencils even as I post this. I already sense Orsam looming out of the darkness in the cramped, foggy alleyways yielding his cutting opinions. “Does it actually say – word for word – ‘Tempus Omnia Revelat’? Does it say – word for word – ‘Time reveals all’? Does it say ‘My surname contains the word ‘brick’’? Does it say ‘By ‘pillar’ I do of course mean ‘brick’? Does it say ‘I am a ‘brick’’? Et cetera. Yawn yawn! We’ll have to face it, so I suggest you all prepare yourselves for the onslaughter. See, I even give you a new word for it. Personally, I am back off into the world of retirement and a different type of toothless companion in the nursing home. They all love me there, you know!
PS For those of you who feared that Orsam the Ripper had mutilated and destroyed The Greatest Thread of All, you will all be relieved to hear that I have also resolved his confusion over the mooted ‘one-off instance’ which he claims was never a term which in 1888 could have been used or – if it was – it was not then used again anywhere in the world until about 1982 in an early episode of ‘Only Fools and Horses’ in which Rodney Trotter downs a sex worker and then writes in his diary that he’ll not do it again. The inspiration for my solving this conundrum came from my dear old mother, God rest her soul (though He’ll have to wait a bit to do so as she’s not actually dead yet) – who always says ‘a one’ when she means ‘one’. So, for example, she’ll say “Could you get me a one?” when “Could you get me one?” would suffice. It may be a Geordie thing. It may be a northern thing, I don’t know. But I do know that James Maybrick may very well have written it thus in his musings of 1888 and 1889. So ‘a one-off instance’ (which really should be hyphenated but in the Maybrick journal was not) becomes ‘a one off-instance’ (which definitely wasn’t hyphenated in the Maybrick journal but is here for clarity). Maybrick has hit poor old Florrie, and it’s okay your honour because it was a bit of an ‘off’ instance. Indeed, it was a one ‘off' instance. I’m sure I won’t find the lightbulbs going on around the detractors too soon with this notion, but it should serve to provide a little caution. The Greatest Thread of All lives and breathes and ‘one off instance’ may or may not be one incontrovertible, unequivocal, undeniable fact which refutes the diary, but sadly for all Mr Orsam’s efforts, it is not just yet the final nail in its coffin. Indeed, it’s not even a one.
Iconoclast (inter alia)
Detective with Merit and a Right Old Orchestrator of Cleverness
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