One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Mike J. G.]

Oh, I see, it’s the ‘He’s a wind-up merchant’ argument again. Missed now, now I’ve spotted it.

Nice dodge! I think Maybrick, had he had the pleasure of taking refreshment with you down the Poste House, would've playfully christened you, the Jammy Dodger. He was witty like that.

[Mike J. G.]

What's this, a tumbleweed blowing forlornly through Maybrick Town? Where is everyone? Taking refreshment down at the local Poste Office while they wait for stamps?



As good a time as any to poste (oops, forgive that misspelling, seems I've gotten to used to adding a ye olde "e" onto things) this witty poem about your main man, it's been posted before, but I rather fancy it.

{The Fabled James Maybrick}


The good Sir Jim,
he wasn't dim,
he invented expressions,
such as "one-off," he did.

He had two types of hand,
with which he would fool all the land.
A walking enigma, that you'd never understand.

"Tin match-box empty", he may well have listed.
He even drank in the 'Poste House' before it ever existed!

He was the Torso Man, and Saucy Jack,
he knew his way around London in the bitter pitch-black.

The good Sir Jim,
Jack of all trades,
arsenic, strychnine and a butcher's blade.

A diary he wrote,
to explain all his deeds,
satisfying the questions and quelling the needs.

So a salute to Sir Jim,
please raise a toast,
to the fabled James Maybrick,
and his blotchy-faced ghost.

[Iconoclast]

What's this, a tumbleweed blowing forlornly through Maybrick Town? Where is everyone?

I - for one - fully plan to re-engage the sword in defence of the Maybrick journal, but am currently tied-up re-reading the source material before unleashing upon you all final confirmation (to all bar the most determined) that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. It will be a bodice-ripping yarn, a web of lies and deceit where no-one is to be trusted and this time it's personal. Et cetera.

First, I have to plough through Christie's 'Etched in Arsenic', having just finished Ryan's 'The Poisoned Life of Mrs Maybrick' (for the second time, grrrrr), before diving into Morland's 'This Friendless Lady'. All to argue one element of the journal. Ouch!

I remain your loyal servant and such efforts are the least you should expect from the world's foremost Maybrickian.

Amen to all that your graces.

Sir Ike of Middle England Insight
Iconoclast Extraordinaire (Will Travel)
Ambassador of Truth

[Observer]

Scrooge is alive and well

t will be a bodice-ripping yarn, a web of lies and deceit where no-one is to be trusted and this time it's personal. Et cetera.

I remain your loyal servant and such efforts are the least you should expect from the world's foremost Maybrickian.

Amen to all that your graces.

Sir Ike of Middle England Insight
Iconoclast Extraordinaire (Will Travel)
Ambassador of Truth

You left a title out

"Prince of cheese"

Pass the sick bucket !!!

[Iconoclast]

I - for one - fully plan to re-engage the sword in defence of the Maybrick journal, but am currently tied-up re-reading the source material before unleashing upon you all final confirmation (to all bar the most determined) that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. It will be a bodice-ripping yarn, a web of lies and deceit where no-one is to be trusted and this time it's personal. Et cetera.

Sir Ike of Middle England Insight
Iconoclast Extraordinaire (Will Travel)
Ambassador of Truth

It's getting oh-so close now, Peeps. We may be as little as a week or so away from the spark that will undoubtedly reignite the fire in this long debate.

He's coming home
He's coming home
He's coming
Maybrick's coming home ...

Ike
Man of Letters
Three in fact

[c.d.]

Hello Ike,

I would be interested in your response to this post from another thread. Could you comment? Thanks.

Patricia Cornwell said in her video that she hired a top Forensics Document Examiner to sharpen the photo of Kelly on her bed using computer processing. After examining the wall next to the bed Cornwell said she saw a very distinctive caricature of Sickert's face. She does not mention seeing the famous F.M. initials of diary fame. She might have addressed the initials somewhere else but here she does not. Seems to be a selective case of pareidolia.

c.d.

[Iconoclast]

Patricia Cornwell said in her video that she hired a top Forensics Document Examiner to sharpen the photo of Kelly on her bed using computer processing. After examining the wall next to the bed Cornwell said she saw a very distinctive caricature of Sickert's face. She does not mention seeing the famous F.M. initials of diary fame. She might have addressed the initials somewhere else but here she does not. Seems to be a selective case of pareidolia.

Hi c.d.

I am not familiar with Cornwell's argument (generally speaking I keep myself solely to The Greatest Thread of All), but based on the limited amount you've told me, it does sound like a rather extraordinary claim bordering on pareidolia.

An acid test (not necessarily the acid test) would be whether or not Sickert's image can be seen without enhancement in the conventional version of the famous photograph. The 'conventional version' is a bit of a moot point as there is a variety of quality of versions freely available in a simple Google search, which leaves one to wonder if the versions with the clearest interpretations of 'FM' have themselves been enhanced and possibly then cited inadvertantly as the standard version. If this was the case, before you know it, the enhanced versions would be cited as strong evidence for the initials definitely being there and even arch anti-diarists would be publishing them (I'm thinking that the publishers for both Sugden and Marriott possibly fell into that error as the versions they have included in their major works are two of the clearest versions I've seen of those pesky letters).

If Sickert's fizzer can't be discerned in the standard image, it would not be helpful to Cornwell's position, and I would argue that it would be a strong argument against her view.

At the end of the day, though, I guess people like me (maybe it's just me?) cannot seek to have it both ways. I believe the letters 'FM' are clear enough on Kelly's wall. Someone else has pointed out that Frosty the Snowman left his calling card on her wall too (has he been interviewed yet about this, I wonder?) so if Cornwell says Sickert, Shearer, or Shergar is on Kelly's wall, I'd have to be amongst the very last to snort risibly and say it t'ain't so. Just 'cos you can 'see' it, doesn't mean it was intended to be there. The very essence of pareidolia, I'd say!

Obviously (caveat alert), that doesn't mean the 'FM' is not on Kelly's wall!

Ike

[Busy Beaver]

The FM could have been one of the McCarthy kid's scribbles. Perhaps a relation of John's who wrote on the wall before it got turned into a single rented room. Many an empty building even in the Victorian era has graffiti on the walls put there by the local tag team. Even condensation drips down walls and makes interesting pictures.

[Iconoclast]

The FM could have been one of the McCarthy kid's scribbles. Perhaps a relation of John's who wrote on the wall before it got turned into a single rented room. Many an empty building even in the Victorian era has graffiti on the walls put there by the local tag team. Even condensation drips down walls and makes interesting pictures.

All possible, Beavsie, but if the letters 'FM' were put on the wall pre-Jack, the only possibility that is realistic is that a potential hoaxer saw them at some point and decided to use them to build an entire back story around James Maybrick as Jack. That still works, but James Maybrick should not have worked. The back story should have fallen apart more or less immediately, but it didn't. Indeed, James Maybrick time and time again fits himself into the crimes as though he were the Whitechapel purger himself.

The only other possibility which still maintains the hoaxer's position as author of the scrapbook is that those initials were indeed on Kelly's wall, but the hoaxer didn't know this. He then wrote 'an initial here, an initial there, will tell of the whoring mother' and by sheer unmitigated blind and bloody happenstance the actual initials on her wall were identified by Feldman's research and they became inadvertant corroboration of the hoaxer's tale.

Either way, a truly astonishing act of coincidence has occurred here. Coincidence beyond reasonable likelihood.

The third view is that the initials were written by Jack the Ripper who was James Maybrick, and the story then all just neatly adds up and makes perfect sense.

It is up to the individual reader which version they find the most plausible, I guess.

Busy Ike

[Iconoclast]

So we have proven pretty much beyond any reasonable doubt that James Maybrick was Jack the Spratt McVitie, master criminal of the old East End. My rather utterly brilliant Society's Pillar nails the case against Maybrick in fairly categorical terms and the debate is over. It's good for some to keep on squabbling about whether Pearly Poll filed her nails or simply chewed them, or if Schwartz wet himself as he ran away from Berner Street, but none of that drivel actually amounts to an argument of any sort in the hunt for Jack. Just as well really, I suppose, because the hunt is over. James Maybrick was clearly Jack and there's more or less only the issue of whether it was possible for someone to write "one off instance" in 1888 (or 1889) standing in the way of worldwide recognition at last that that fifty years old Liverpool cotton merchant was our man (seems obvious when you put it like that!). Given the proven complexity of the Victorian scrapbook and the quite implausible coincidences and good fortune that work ceaselesly for the 'forger' (should James have been innocent of these famous murders), the odds are stacked against there being any other author of the crimes. James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper. Our finally knowing this was never necessarily on the cards. We - like generations before us - could have laboured and wondered and never known who the murderer was; but we are the first generation who do not need to wonder. We can simply slot James Maybrick into the crimes and the evidence and understand why he did what he did. For that, we really should be grateful to Mike Barrett, though only for that, obviously.

Iconoclast
A Genius What Proved the Solution to The Greatest Mystery Ever
And Now Onwards to the Marie Celeste!

[Iconoclast]

[Iconoclast]

That is ridiculous. Technology.

[Iconoclast]

Here's an interesting question - stimulated by more outrageous naysaying (without evidence) from Sam Flynn on another thread: Why do you think there are certain people on this site who absolutely, doggedly persist in decrying all things Maybrick despite the overwealming case against him? For example, my outstanding Society's Pillar totally nails the case against Maybrick and clearly shows him to be Jack the Ripper. Absolutely no debate about that. And yet still we have the decryers.

Ah - of course! - it's because the vast majority of so-called 'informed experts' on this site read nothing, know less, and have an agenda against the one candidate for Jack for whom we have hard evidence (a scrapbook and a watch) and endless examples of circumstantial evidence supporting his case for being Jack.

It must be dark in that world where you simply bury your head against the truth. Dark, but worryingly not that lonely, it would seem.

[Iconoclast]

Here's an interesting question - stimulated by more outrageous naysaying (without evidence) from Sam Flynn on another thread: Why do you think there are certain people on this site who absolutely, doggedly persist in decrying all things Maybrick despite the overwealming case against him? For example, my outstanding Society's Pillar totally nails the case against Maybrick and clearly shows him to be Jack the Ripper. Absolutely no debate about that. And yet still we have the decryers.

Ah - of course! - it's because the vast majority of so-called 'informed experts' on this site read nothing, know less, and have an agenda against the one candidate for Jack for whom we have hard evidence (a scrapbook and a watch) and endless examples of circumstantial evidence supporting his case for being Jack.

It must be dark in that world where you simply bury your head against the truth. Dark, but worryingly not that lonely, it would seem.

[Sam Flynn]

Here's an interesting question - stimulated by more outrageous naysaying (without evidence) from Sam Flynn on another thread

Why don't you take your one-note violin and play it on another website?