One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[caz]

Someone without the concept of "spreading mayhem" at their disposal would scarcely have dreamt up such a thing in the first place, Caz, anymore than someone before the 1940s would have thought to write about "digging a beat".

But was the expression "digging a beat" in the diary, Gareth? No it wasn't, so it's a poor argument. My only argument here is that none of your suspected anachronisms is a problem for a spoof diary concocted some considerable time before the Barretts ever set eyes on the guardbook containing it.

I suspect you would like to pin it on one or both Barretts, because you imagine the quality of the writing perfectly lends itself to such a conclusion, but you have no evidence that either of them had the means, motive or opportunity to write that diary.

Do you seriously entertain David Orsam's tighter than tight time scale for the actual creation, based on nothing much more than Mike's January 1995 affidavit and the little red diary herring? It seems to be the only scenario left on the table these days for a Barrett forgery, but had this been proposed by Melvin Harris or John Omlor, back in the good old bad old days, I strongly suspect it would have been rejected as risible, far-fetched nonsense.

Literary agency contacted on March 9th 1992. Would they like to see the diary Mike has found? [Doreen referred to it as a 'find'.]

Guardbook finally found on March 31st.

Diary text written into it in Anne's perfectly disguised hand over the next 11 days.

Writing artificially aged as needed.

Finished diary taken to London on April 13th and shown off to the curator of 19th century manuscripts at the British Museum, who sees nothing iffy about it, despite the ink barely having time to dry on the page by then.

And no hard evidence from that day to this that either Barrett had any involvement in the inspiration, preparation, purchase of materials, drafting or handwriting - nor indeed any knowledge of who did, when or why.

For a couple of fvckwits, whose literacy and literary skills you see in the diary as barely existent, they didn't do too badly, did they?

Am I really the only one here to think this whole scenario is beyond insane?

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

I really don't mind if the Barretts were the hoaxers or not, Caz, but I am certain that the collective anachronisms point to a 20th century origin for the text of the diary. "One off instance" is enough on its own, with the other anachronisms (or near-anachronisms, if you like) only adding weight to the idea that, whoever wrote those phrases, they were very familiar with them. To explain them away as the work of an early neologist is, to my mind, untenable.

[caz]

I just want to discuss the possibility of ink changing colour due to oxidisation.

According to Robert Anderson in his 2017 essay: "When laid down on paper, nigrosine ink offers a nearly black colour (actually a very dark lilac that does not change or oxidize over time, although it may dim through exposure to light)".

So that should deal with that.

However, he also quotes David Carvalho as saying in Forty Centuries of Ink, "Nigrosine...is much used as a cheap "black" ink, but as it is blue black and never becomes black, it really belongs to the family of "coloured" writing inks". Not sure why Carvalho doesn't mention a "nearly black colour", like Anderson, or refer to it as being "very dark lilac" but there you go.

But Anderson also says that "a nigrosine ink like Diamine WOULD have resulted in a blueish hue".

We can, I think, certainly see a "blueish hue" in the example written by Robert Smith, supposedly with Diamine Ink, in September 2012 and published in his 2017 book. Smith himself refers to "bluish undertones" (citing Voller) although it seems as much to be bluish overtones to me.

The quote from Voller about "bluish undertones", incidentally, comes in a letter written by him to Nick Warren on 21 November 1994, i.e. before he had seen the Diary. This is what he said:

"Nigrosine, although a black dyestuff, does have bluish undertones and this is all the more obvious when the dyestuff concentration is relatively low".

He then goes on (I think) to say that the concentration of Nigrosine in Diamine ink is relatively low.

But what is so surprising is that over the four pages of transcript when he discusses the Diary ink at the meeting in October 1995, Voller, who is certain that the Diary ink is a Nigrosine based ink, does not mention "bluish undertones" once, either to say that he sees such undertones in the Diary (so that it is consistent with Nigrosine) or that he does not see such undertones (so that it is inconsistent with Diamine).

Perhaps he saw those undertones, perhaps not. But what strikes me is the complete lack of obviously blue undertones in Nick Warren's Diamine test example, certainly in comparison to Robert Smith's test example. In fact, Nick Warren's Diamine example would seem to me to be best described as dark grey, just like what we see in the Diary (and this was how Baxendale described it). It doesn't really matter if Nick Warren's test example has always been dark grey since the day it was written or changed to that colour because surely Voller should have mentioned that Diamine can at some point in its life acquire a dark grey colour.

I don't have the expertise to comment on any of this, as you know David, but I do have an observation to make based on the above paragraph, which I have made bold for emphasis.

On page 6 of Robert Smith's 2017 book, after quoting Voller's words to Warren: "Nigrosine, although a black dyestuff, does have bluish undertones", he goes on to write that in 1995, Warren had sent him a sample of his own writing using Diamine ink supplied by Voller, who had also supplied Shirley Harrison with two bottles.

Robert says he spotted the unmistakable "bluish undertones" of the Diamine ink used by Warren. When Shirley finally sent Robert one of her bottles of Diamine, he added some words of his own to Warren's missive, and writes:

'Visually the two samples are identical, and one can see the same bluish tinge in both...'

Now I don't know if the diary ink contains any nigrosine. Voller thought so, but if he was right, we have no idea how much of it was in the diary ink compared with the amount in liquid Diamine. I only know what my eyes tell me, that the writing on page 34, using Diamine, does look black with "bluish undertones", while page one of the diary on page 35 looks mostly dark grey, lightened in parts by the irregular fading which can be seen throughout the guardbook.

What Voller said in the October 1995 meeting was that he would have expected a Diary written with Diamine ink to be "blacker" and "more opaque". But Nick Warren actually comments in his test example that the ink is "very watery, astonishingly so at first". That's doesn't sound like a particularly opaque ink to me.

Might the opacity depend on how recently Diamine ink has been applied? I don't know, but by the time Voller saw the diary ink, he knew it had been on the paper for more than three years, whatever it was, while Warren was describing the very watery appearance of his Diamine, when first applied. So again, without knowing what his ink looked like at various intervals over the years, it's impossible to say how much less watery it may have appeared as it aged.

What is remarkable though is that Voller saw Nick Warren's test and said: "I agree that the ink of Nick's letter has taken on an appearance similar to that of the Diary, as regards fading and bronzing..."

So the Diary ink, according to Voller, has an appearance similar to Diamine ink regarding both fading and bronzing! We might add that with our own eyes we can see that they are both somewhat dark grey so there doesn't seem to be anything inconsistent with the colour of the ink.

I wonder if it is possible to maintain, therefore, that, from a purely visual examination that the Diary, the ink can be said not to be Diamine.

See above. We need more in the way of clear, direct comparisons in order to judge how any of Warren's experiments would compare today with the diary, and that's assuming there will be no further age-related changes to the appearance of the documents.

I do think it's the other way round, however, with the onus on those who still claim the diary ink could be Diamine to test the theory and try to prove it, not with an old photo posted on a message board, which is useless for the purpose, but by a professionally conducted comparison between the ingredients and their levels in the dry ink residues. If the diary ink is evenly partly Diamine, mixed with something else [sugar anyone?], it will contain all the right ingredients, just not at the same levels.

Failing that, there needs to be at the very least a direct visual comparison between the diary [not the facsimile] and Warren's experiments with Diamine [originals, not photos], if Robert Smith's comparison in his book, indicating two completely different inks, is to be successfully challenged.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I really don't mind if the Barretts were the hoaxers or not, Caz, but I am certain that the collective anachronisms point to a 20th century origin for the text of the diary. "One off instance" is enough on its own, with the other anachronisms (or near-anachronisms, if you like) only adding weight to the idea that, whoever wrote those phrases, they were very familiar with them. To explain them away as the work of an early neologist is, to my mind, untenable.

Your silence on David's "time is tight" time scale for the diary creation is deafening, Gareth.

Even louder than Booker T. & The MG's.

Anyone else?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Indeed, Caz, but why not:

With a ring on my finger
and a knife in my hand
Sir Jim spreads confusion [or: Sir Jim creates panic]
Throughout this fair land.

In other words, there's no real need for the "mayhem" to have been there at all...

What? The whole point was to play with his name, hence the capital letter M for the word 'Mayhem'!

"Sir Jim" could have written: 'With rings on my fingers and bells on my toes" for all I care, Gareth, but where's the mystery in wanting to fit the name May in there somewhere, just as Crashaw played with an anagram of his name in his own funny little rhymes centuries before? I bet you anything you like the Barretts never knew that!

HE WAS CAR

Crashaw even had to add a superfluous E to make it work!

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Thanks, Gary.

I can understand people writing about trends in types of crime as "spreading", but that only works at the group level, and not at the level of the individual. For example, we often hear that "knife crime is spreading over Britain", but nobody speaks of one person "spreading" knife crime. One person might have stabbed someone here, and another stabbing there... but that person can't be said to have "spread" stabbing from one place to the other; he has committed two separate acts of stabbing in two different places.

Besides, murder and rapine aside, the diarist does use "mayhem" specifically, which in the late 19th/early 20th century appears to have had the primary, if not sole, meaning of the infliction of bodily injury:

"With a ring on my finger
and a knife in my hand
This May spreads bodily injury (?!!!)
throughout this fair land"

That makes little sense to me either within or outside the context of the diary, but "spreads chaos/confusion" makes perfect sense at the point where the rhyme appears in the text. This is when "Maybrick" has seen the famous Blind Man's Buff cartoon in Punch, and he's laughing his wotsit off at the clueless, headless-chicken police, and that Jews and doctors are getting the blame for his deeds. In short, he's rejoicing in the chaos and confusion he's caused.

Not quite, Gareth. 'I could not stop laughing when I read Punch there for all to see was the first three letters of my surname. They are blind as they say'.

None so blind, eh?

That was the whole inspiration for the 'May comes and goes...' verses.

How can you possibly argue there was no need to use the word 'Mayhem' at all? It was the most natural choice of words one could imagine, with the image of his victims spread all over town with their innards hanging out playing inside his funny little head.

You haven't really got the hang of this, have you?

Serial murder and mutilation is the behaviour of someone who is spreading his mayhem around, and not committing just one act of bodily injury.

Love,

Angus MacSpreading
X

[Sam Flynn]

Not quite, Gareth. 'I could not stop laughing when I read Punch there for all to see was the first three letters of my surname. They are blind as they say'.

None so blind, eh?

That was the whole inspiration for the 'May comes and goes...' verses.

I know that, Caz - it's obvious, and bathetically so. It still doesn't explain why the writer thought that someone could "spread" bodily harm, unless they were using "mayhem" in the more modern, apparently 20th century, sense.

[Sam Flynn]

Your silence on David's "time is tight" time scale for the diary creation is deafening, Gareth.

Sorry, Caz, I don't quite know what you're referring to; have I missed something? If I thought something was worth commenting on, I'd have done so. Please be assured that I'm not deliberately staying silent about anything.

[caz]

It's "one-off instance", specifically, Gary - that's very important.

As to the others, as I've pointed out in the past, Gary, whilst individual words/phrases might be explicable, at a stretch, the presence of several such words/phrases in such a short document is more damning by far.

No.

Simply wrong.

'Top myself' goes back to at least 1877.

'Give her a call' was too common in Victorian times to concern anyone but you.

If a government can spread murder across the globe metaphorically in 1885, so can a serial killer spread his mayhem, metaphorically throughout England, or actually across Whitechapel.

You can't cling on to these as if they still help to damn the diary as a late 20th century artefact. They don't. They can't. Not with or without those other three little English words:

one

off

instance

What's more, one would not expect the Barretts to have known they'd be completely and utterly safe to use 'top myself', nor even to ask themselves the question, but today, in 2018, we know they would have been.

One would also not expect the Barretts to have used 'give her a call' at all, with its obviously modern 'ring' to it [pun not intended but gratefully received], but today, in 2018, we know Victorians were using the expression without even thinking of the dog and bone.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

What? The whole point was to play with his name, hence the capital letter M for the word 'Mayhem'!

But, as per my last post but one, why make a play on the name with a phrase that - I'd argue - would not have made sense in the 1880s? The impression I get is that the diarist(s) thought "May spreads mayhem" would be a really clever thing to write, but dropped a bollock because they didn't realise that the concept of "spreading mayhem" wouldn't have entered a Victorian's head (as far as I've been able to ascertain).

[Sam Flynn]

No.

Simply wrong.

'Top myself' goes back to at least 1877.

'Give her a call' was too common in Victorian times to concern anyone but you.

If a government can spread murder across the globe metaphorically in 1885, so can a serial killer spread his mayhem, metaphorically throughout England, or actually across Whitechapel.

You can't cling on to these as if they still help to damn the diary as a late 20th century artefact. They don't. They can't. Not with or without those other three little English words:

one

off

instance

What's more, one would not expect the Barretts to have known they'd be completely and utterly safe to use 'top myself', nor even to ask themselves the question, but today, in 2018, we know they would have been.

One would also not expect the Barretts to have used 'give her a call' at all, with its obviously modern 'ring' to it [pun not intended but gratefully received], but today, in 2018, we know Victorians were using the expression without even thinking of the dog and bone.

Love,

Caz
X

How commonly used and widespread were these phrases in the LVP, and among which kinds/classes of people? Was the diarist some kind of omnipresent Everyman?

To go back to "digging the beat" as an analogy. There may well have been a handful of hep cats (is that an anachronism?) back in 1937 who attended the Penguin Club in East Coast Cityville who initiated that phrase, but it would not catch on with the USA at large until later, and it wouldn't have caught on with the British population until later still. Perhaps "Daddy-o" originated at another venue in West Coast Townsville in 1939 - again, the same process of gradual, then exponential, uptake Stateside, eventually catching on across the Atlantic.

So, whilst a British "diary of a young Johnny Dankworth" purportedly written in 1940 might - just might, mind you - have contained the phrase "digging the beat" or similar, it would be extremely suspicious if it also contained the expression "Daddy-o". Indeed, it would be rather suspicious if a single American document of 1940 had contained both phrases, unless it had been authored in Townsville.

And I'm talking here about the days of mass electronic media and popular films, when the transmission of words and ideas from one person or place to another started to become easy... which was emphatically not the case in the 1880s. It is thus highly likely that the diary (Maybrick's or Dankworth's) was concocted at a time when such iffy, or even slightly iffy, phrases had become so familiar, and so widespread, that any Jack or Jill in Britain could have slipped them all into the text.

[caz]

Sorry, Caz, I don't quite know what you're referring to; have I missed something? If I thought something was worth commenting on, I'd have done so. Please be assured that I'm not deliberately staying silent about anything.

Here you are again, Gareth:

Do you seriously entertain David Orsam's tighter than tight time scale for the actual creation, based on nothing much more than Mike's January 1995 affidavit and the little red diary herring? It seems to be the only scenario left on the table these days for a Barrett forgery, but had this been proposed by Melvin Harris or John Omlor, back in the good old bad old days, I strongly suspect it would have been rejected as risible, far-fetched nonsense.

Literary agency contacted on March 9th 1992. Would they like to see the diary Mike has found? [Doreen referred to it as a 'find'.]

Guardbook finally found on March 31st.

Diary text written into it in Anne's perfectly disguised hand over the next 11 days.

Writing artificially aged as needed.

Finished diary taken to London on April 13th and shown off to the curator of 19th century manuscripts at the British Museum, who sees nothing iffy about it, despite the ink barely having time to dry on the page by then.

And no hard evidence from that day to this that either Barrett had any involvement in the inspiration, preparation, purchase of materials, drafting or handwriting - nor indeed any knowledge of who did, when or why.

For a couple of fvckwits, whose literacy and literary skills you see in the diary as barely existent, they didn't do too badly, did they?

Am I really the only one here to think this whole scenario is beyond insane?

I really would like you to say if you don't find this scenario to be beyond insane.

I also noticed how you blanked my reference to Crashaw's similar word games with his own surname.

Complete coincidence, do you think, that "May" chose to quote him, and only him, in the diary?

Or did the hoaxer know a thing or three - or four - about this long dead poet that could not have been picked up from Mike Barrett's Sphere Guide?

The fact that Crashaw played with the letters of his surname, like Maybrick in the diary.

The fact that Crashaw used the expression ''Tis love...' on at least two occasions.

The fact that Crashaw's father was vicar of the original White Chapel, London.

The fact that Crashaw and Michael Maybrick's lyricist, Fred Weatherley, were both mentioned in the Christmas Day edition of The Times, in 1884, in adjacent columns.

For a pair of fvckwits, the Barretts of Goldie Street had the luck of the very devil with their choice of poet, didn't they?

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

I don't see that any of that should preclude the Barretts from being the writers, Caz. Who knows how long the idea of hoaxing a diary had been stewing?

[caz]

How commonly used and widespread were these phrases in the LVP, and among which kinds/classes of people? Was the diarist some kind of omnipresent Everyman?

To go back to "digging the beat" as an analogy. There may well have been a handful of hep cats (is that an anachronism?) back in 1937 who attended the Penguin Club in East Coast Cityville who initiated that phrase, but it would not catch on with the USA at large until later, and it wouldn't have caught on with the British population until later still. Perhaps "Daddy-o" originated at another venue in West Coast Townsville in 1939 - again, the same process of gradual, then exponential, uptake Stateside, eventually catching on across the channel.

So, whilst a British "diary of a young Johnny Dankworth" purportedly written in 1940 might - just might, mind you - have contained the phrase "digging the beat" or similar, it would be extremely suspicious if it also contained the expression "Daddy-o". Indeed, it would be rather suspicious if a single American document of 1940 had contained both phrases, unless it had been authored in Townsville.

And I'm talking here about the days of mass electronic media and popular films, when the transmission of words and ideas from one person or place to another started to become easy... which was emphatically not the case in the 1880s.

'Top myself' would have been street slang from at least as far back as the 1870s, while 'give me a call' - before people even knew what a telephone was - was in common parlance to mean 'pay me a call/visit'.

You are protesting way too much, Gareth.

Love,

Caz
X

[Sam Flynn]

'Top myself' would have been street slang from at least as far back as the 1870s

Really? Everywhere? Amongst all social classes?

while 'give me a call' - before people even knew what a telephone was - was in common parlance to mean 'pay me a call/visit'.

I'd question that, actually, but suffice to say that to give someone a call became far more commonly used when cheap mass telephony became the norm.

You are protesting way too much, Gareth.

You're making way too many excuses, I'm afraid, Caz.