One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[David Orsam]

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!

I don't why you pretend to anticipate something that I might say on a subject that I've never discussed before, or even said anything remotely similar to what you purport to anticipate me saying. Then, having had this imaginary conversation with me, you conclude with "Yawn yawn!"

It's very poor, pathetic even, and I'm disappointed in you because I thought you were better than this.

[David Orsam]

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.

Frankly, this is just meaningless gobbledigook. The expression "one off", whether hyphenated or not, was not used in the 1880s to mean something unique (such as hitting a person) and that's the end of it. There's nothing more to say. This fact alone nullifies all the little "coincidences" that you seem to find so fascinating but which are remarkably unconvincing.

[Iconoclast]

I don't why you pretend to anticipate something that I might say on a subject that I've never discussed before, or even said anything remotely similar to what you purport to anticipate me saying. Then, having had this imaginary conversation with me, you conclude with "Yawn yawn!"

It's very poor, pathetic even, and I'm disappointed in you because I thought you were better than this.

I'm not.

[Iconoclast]

Frankly, this is just meaningless gobbledigook. The expression "one off", whether hyphenated or not, was not used in the 1880s to mean something unique (such as hitting a person) and that's the end of it. There's nothing more to say. This fact alone nullifies all the little "coincidences" that you seem to find so fascinating but which are remarkably unconvincing.

I think you may have misunderstood my argument.

[David Orsam]

I think you may have misunderstood my argument.

Yes, of course I have. It was meaningless and nonsensical and not capable of being understood.

[Iconoclast]

Yes, of course I have. It was meaningless and nonsensical and not capable of being understood.

I think we should let my legion of fans decide that.

Bob? Harry?

[John G]

Well here's a thing. They actually don't say that at all!

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:



This is truly a coincidence too far for me. The Diego Laurenz letter is astonishingly-convenient for our erstwhile hoaxers, but this latter verse simply compounds the evidence or unreasonably racks up the coincidences. Why? Because Maybrick reveals himself not once but twice in this rhyme:

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

Just a few points. Maybrick had no known connection to Middlesex Street, not that geographical profiling is an exact science anyway. I would also point out that any attempts at geo profiling is dependant in who is classified as a JtR victim, and tgat is something that ultimately requires a degree of guess work.

JtR didn't right the GSG because it would have been too dark, not that I really understand your convoluted argument about this issue amyway.

I have no idea what point your trying to make about "one off" or "one off instance", except to say your thinking, once again, seems to be highly convoluted.

[Iconoclast]

Just a few points. Maybrick had no known connection to Middlesex Street, not that geographical profiling is an exact science anyway. I would also point out that any attempts at geo profiling is dependant in who is classified as a JtR victim, and tgat is something that ultimately requires a degree of guess work.

JtR didn't right the GSG because it would have been too dark, not that I really understand your convoluted argument about this issue amyway.

I have no idea what point your trying to make about "one off" or "one off instance", except to say your thinking, once again, seems to be highly convoluted.

That'll make me wrong them, I'm guessing?

[rjpalmer]

Hi Icon - I normally wouldn't challenge such indisputable scholarship, but isn't your amazing coincidence #18 in direct conflict with your amazing coincidence #20? Or are you suggesting that Eddy Lyons discovered the diary on March 9, 1992 and inexplicably returned it to the husband of Edith Formby's grand-daughter?

[Spider]

Hi Iconoclast, interesting 'coincidences', many of which I agree with and have personally thought of as pointers in Maybrick's direction.
I have quite a few more 'coincidences' as I will call them for now, totalling over one hundred and not including those listed, all of which implicate James Maybrick and some of which I believe are irrefutable. The dreaded 'diary' isn't going to go away.

“…… what they have in store for them they would stop this instant. But do I desire that?....

[Iconoclast]

Hi Icon - I normally wouldn't challenge such indisputable scholarship, but isn't your amazing coincidence #18 in direct conflict with your amazing coincidence #20? Or are you suggesting that Eddy Lyons discovered the diary on March 9, 1992 and inexplicably returned it to the husband of Edith Formby's grand-daughter?

Hi RJP,

You are absolutely correct - the two provenences are entirley and utterly mutually exclusive so perhaps they should be one double-barralled one in the list. As I have argued elsewhere, this doesn't make them any less stunning for their mutually exclusive implausibility. In reality, only one at the most should be true and the other a coincidence, or else both should be astonishing coincidences. There is a possibility that both could be true but that simply generates another hard-to-believe coincidence: So if the journal emerged on March 9, 1992, from Battlecrease House (or 'Battlecreak' as I saw recently on the internet), then the astonishing coincidence lies in the fact that it ended up in the hands of a man who just happened to be married to Anne Graham, whose family ties have those other two links to the Maybricks (Edith Formby, and Florence 'Graham').

The point of listing 22 (or 21, or even 20) coincidences is that this guy Maybrick just keeps fitting the bill and no right-minded hoaxer could ever have dreamed of such retrospective post-publication good fortune. At most, you might have 2 or 3 coincidences work in your favour with your chosen suspect, but whoever wrote this journal - if they were not James Maybrick - had the serendipity of the gods.

PS Sorry RJP, just read your post again and realised that you'd actually articulated the both provenences are true scenario - and better than I!

Ico

[Observer]

[QUOaboutSpider;439444]Hi Iconoclast, interesting 'coincidences', many of which I agree with and have personally thought of as pointers in Maybrick's direction.
I have quite a few more 'coincidences' as I will call them for now, totalling over one hundred and not including those listed, all of which implicate James Maybrick and some of which I believe are irrefutable. The dreaded 'diary' isn't going to go away.

“…… what they have in store for them they would stop this instant. But do I desire that?....[/QUOTE]

How about number 10 on the list. Do you agree with that?

[Iconoclast]

Hi Iconoclast, interesting 'coincidences', many of which I agree with and have personally thought of as pointers in Maybrick's direction.
I have quite a few more 'coincidences' as I will call them for now, totalling over one hundred and not including those listed, all of which implicate James Maybrick and some of which I believe are irrefutable. The dreaded 'diary' isn't going to go away.

“…… what they have in store for them they would stop this instant. But do I desire that?....

Spider,

List 'em, my son. Get them down here so we can all marvel at them!

Cheers,

Ike

[Kaz]

Hi Iconoclast, interesting 'coincidences', many of which I agree with and have personally thought of as pointers in Maybrick's direction.
I have quite a few more 'coincidences' as I will call them for now, totalling over one hundred and not including those listed, all of which implicate James Maybrick and some of which I believe are irrefutable. The dreaded 'diary' isn't going to go away.

“…… what they have in store for them they would stop this instant. But do I desire that?....

Should keep the naysayers busy for another 25+ years

[Observer]

Three at once! That's impressive