One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Iconoclast]

Are you suggesting that both the 'Eddie Lyons' and the 'in the family/Tony Devereux' provenance told by Anne are true? I don't see how that can possibly be the case, but if that's what you're saying please pass it along.

This is just my take on Keith's comments regarding the two provenances, but they appear to mirror the sentiments that Keith makes albeit without the ambiguous '100%' reference. My take on the two provenances is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to the double event of March 9, 1992, not being a coincidence but that - in truth - the one event led to the other (so the work on Battlecrease House being the reason why - otherwise inexplicably - eight miles away on the same day Eddie Lyons' fellow Saddle drinker Mike Barrett first announced to the world that he thought he might have the diary of Jack the Ripper). If this provenance were true then it explains a great deal regarding Barrett's subsequent actions which might otherwise have been misunderstood. There is not a lot of evidence supporting Anne Graham's provenance - only her testimony plus that of her father and - of course - her husband at the time. So I am 99% certain that the Battlecrease House provenance is the truth and I am not 100% convinced because 1) one shouldn't be certain of a 'truth' until it is unequivocally demonstrated to be one and 2) because of the 1% of doubt which Anne Graham's provenance puts in my mind.

I suspect that this may be what Keith was referring to when he said what he said (I forget now what he actually said) about the '100%'. No harm no foul as you Yanks love to say - perhaps Keith meant 99.99%; but whatever it was he meant (and as I say - I can't recall what he actually said), I don't think he ever meant to say "Take your pick because both of them were probably simultaneously true". They are obviously mutually exclusive (unless one argues that the scrapbook came out of Battlecrease and fell into Tony Devereux's hands before he died in August 1991 - 32 years ago yesterday if I remember correctly - and he passed it to Bongo before he himself sadly passed on).

And - really, RJ - making a point about a typo which we all spotted and perfectly understood is a cheap laugh from a guy heckling from the cheap seats, mate. Poor show.

Ike

[erobitha]

This is just my take on Keith's comments regarding the two provenances, but they appear to mirror the sentiments that Keith makes albeit without the ambiguous '100%' reference. My take on the two provenances is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to the double event of March 9, 1992, not being a coincidence but that - in truth - the one event led to the other (so the work on Battlecrease House being the reason why - otherwise inexplicably - eight miles away on the same day Eddie Lyons' fellow Saddle drinker Mike Barrett first announced to the world that he thought he might have the diary of Jack the Ripper). If this provenance were true then it explains a great deal regarding Barrett's subsequent actions which might otherwise have been misunderstood. There is not a lot of evidence supporting Anne Graham's provenance - only her testimony plus that of her father and - of course - her husband at the time. So I am 99% certain that the Battlecrease House provenance is the truth and I am not 100% convinced because 1) one shouldn't be certain of a 'truth' until it is unequivocally demonstrated to be one and 2) because of the 1% of doubt which Anne Graham's provenance puts in my mind.

I suspect that this may be what Keith was referring to when he said what he said (I forget now what he actually said) about the '100%'. No harm no foul as you Yanks love to say - perhaps Keith meant 99.99%; but whatever it was he meant (and as I say - I can't recall what he actually said), I don't think he ever meant to say "Take your pick because both of them were probably simultaneously true". They are obviously mutually exclusive (unless one argues that the scrapbook came out of Battlecrease and fell into Tony Devereux's hands before he died in August 1991 - 32 years ago yesterday if I remember correctly - and he passed it to Bongo before he himself sadly passed on).

And - really, RJ - making a point about a typo which we all spotted and perfectly understood is a cheap laugh from a guy heckling from the cheap seats, mate. Poor show.

Ike

I can't speak for Keith, but I would echo what I think he may have meant. Keith is rightly fastidious and careful not to commit 100% to any theory or speculated chain of events unless he is 100% convinced he has all the salient parts that prove it so. If he is not quite there yet, it does not mean it has no merit at all with him.

I would wager if we were to put a gun to his head today and ask him, based on the balance of evidence today, which provenance he think is more likely. My feeling is he would say the Battlecrease provenance. The issue, as I see it, is that we have yet to disprove Anne's provenance story conclusively, so it remains a possibility. It is effectively based on two oral testimonies and an engineered alibi in the Tony D provenance (my opinion). It is weak.

Comparatively, the Eddie Lyons route is absolutely teeming with documentary evidence, recorded testimonies (many), circumstantial evidence and more. On the balance of evidence, Battlecrease provenance is far more likely than Anne or Mike's own provenance stories. If we could prove Mike's story was not true, by implication, neither is Anne's, but how do we do that?

On the balance of all we have today, Battlecrease House is the best bet. Except RJ and Orsam can't place their chips on the table. They have gone all-in on a Barrett-Graham hoax. They would rather go bust than admit they may have placed the wrong bet.

[rjpalmer]

And - really, RJ - making a point about a typo which we all spotted and perfectly understood is a cheap laugh from a guy heckling from the cheap seats, mate. Poor show.

Of course, it's a poor show, Thomas--but it's also called a 'dose of one's own medicine' otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

Caz has been the Queen of the Apostrophe Police as well as the Taskmistress of the Typo Taliban for a quarter of a century on this forum--provided the poster doesn't accept her strange theories about the Maybrick Hoax. Believe and Ye Shall Not Receive.

[rjpalmer]

I would like to recommend that followers of the Barrett/Graham saga listen to Criminal, Episode #229, "A Glamour and a Mystery" hosted by Phoebe Judge (the most recent episode).

I thought it was quite interesting, and I suspect, relevant.

It tells the well-known story of the Cottingley Fairies Hoax, but towards the end we hear the voice of a now elderly woman--one of the two sisters who had hoaxed the photogenic fairies back in 1917. I think it was Elsie.

The interviewer, quizzing her in the 1970s, asked Elsie if she felt any guilt about fooling all those people who had put faith in her.

She laughed and said "no." They wanted to believe.

Every step of the way--whenever an obvious absurdity in her story was exposed--there was always a believer ready to step forward and 'justify' it. They would trip over themselves doing so.

Once, someone noticed that one of the fairies' legs didn't belong with the rest of the body. 'Of course, they don't match,' one correspondent wrote. 'Fairies are thought projections, and sometime the thoughts become garbled.'

And so, Elsie silently laughed in amusement and amazement and said nothing.

She was then asked why it took her over half a century to come forward and admit to the hoax.

She said, in so many words, that even though the believers wanted to believe, and had invented the most ridiculous excuses for maintaining their belief (cough, cough) she didn't want to embarrass them further--and specifically, she didn't want to embarrass Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Edward Gardner, the head of the Theosophical Society, who had been her two chief champions.

Until they died, she didn't have the heart to come forward.

And so, the years rolled by.

Conan Doyle succumbed in 1930, but Gardner lived into the late 1960s.

I strongly suspect that a similar sense of humanity--or is it misguided humanity in the end?--explains a certain silence out of Liverpool.

Of course, being only a dunce, I will be told that this silence is maintained to cover up the crime of her now dead ex-husband--the awful truth that he got the diary off a bloke in a pub--even though getting it off a bloke from down the pub had been her story from the very beginning, so why all the Formby/Yapp flimflam?

Even a dunce can see that Anne throwing Formby and Yapp and Billy and her own good self into the center of the fray had the diary really come from Eddie Lyons down the boozer makes no more sense than a fairy's leg being pinned to the wrong body. It makes no logical sense. It makes no emotional sense. It makes utterly no sense at all. But her silence makes sense. It makes perfect sense.

Good night.

[John Wheat]

I would like to recommend that followers of the Barrett/Graham saga listen to Criminal, Episode #229, "A Glamour and a Mystery" hosted by Phoebe Judge (the most recent episode).

I thought it was quite interesting, and I suspect, relevant.

It tells the well-known story of the Cottingley Fairies Hoax, but towards the end we hear the voice of a now elderly woman--one of the two sisters who had hoaxed the photogenic fairies back in 1917. I think it was Elsie.

The interviewer, quizzing her in the 1970s, asked Elsie if she felt any guilt about fooling all those people who had put faith in her.

She laughed and said "no." They wanted to believe.

Every step of the way--whenever an obvious absurdity in her story was exposed--there was always a believer ready to step forward and 'justify' it. They would trip over themselves doing so.

Once, someone noticed that one of the fairies' legs didn't belong with the rest of the body. 'Of course, they don't match,' one correspondent wrote. 'Fairies are thought projections, and sometime the thoughts become garbled.'

And so, Elsie silently laughed in amusement and amazement and said nothing.

She was then asked why it took her over half a century to come forward and admit to the hoax.

She said, in so many words, that even though the believers wanted to believe, and had invented the most ridiculous excuses for maintaining their belief (cough, cough) she didn't want to embarrass them further--and specifically, she didn't want to embarrass Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Edward Gardner, the head of the Theosophical Society, who had been her two chief champions.

Until they died, she didn't have the heart to come forward.

And so, the years rolled by.

Conan Doyle succumbed in 1930, but Gardner lived into the late 1960s.

I strongly suspect that a similar sense of humanity--or is it misguided humanity in the end?--explains a certain silence out of Liverpool.

Of course, being only a dunce, I will be told that this silence is maintained to cover up the crime of her now dead ex-husband--the awful truth that he got the diary off a bloke in a pub--even though getting it off a bloke from down the pub had been her story from the very beginning, so why all the Formby/Yapp flimflam?

Even a dunce can see that Anne throwing Formby and Yapp and Billy and her own good self into the center of the fray had the diary really come from Eddie Lyons down the boozer makes no more sense than a fairy's leg being pinned to the wrong body. It makes no logical sense. It makes no emotional sense. It makes utterly no sense at all. But her silence makes sense. It makes perfect sense.

Good night.

Great post RJ. It's so obvious the Diary was written by the Barretts. However for some reason some people live in fantasy land and won't accept this.
Cheers John

[caz]

Can you read and comprehend the English language?

Yes, I think I still make a reasonable fist of it. At the age of seven, I was told by my school that I had a reading and comprehension age of eleven, and when I was eleven I was awarded a scholarship to Christ's Hospital, which I turned down, not because it was a boarding school, but because the uniform was so hideous.

Apologies if I have to guess why Palmer prefers to believe Mike Barrett's unsupported lies over Tim Martin-Wright's evidence-based and independently supported recollections, but I wouldn't need to if I got a reason I could work with.

[caz]

I wonder what Anne thinks of the Eddie Lyons/Battlecrease provenance?

Palmer can ask her, Scotty, if and when he decides to gets in touch to discuss his April Fool's creation theory with her.

When she stops giggling, she can tell him what she knows, if anything, about Eddie Lyons, Brian Rawes, Arthur Rigby and Tim Martin-Wright.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

I can't speak for Keith, but I would echo what I think he may have meant. Keith is rightly fastidious and careful not to commit 100% to any theory or speculated chain of events unless he is 100% convinced he has all the salient parts that prove it so. If he is not quite there yet, it does not mean it has no merit at all with him.

I would wager if we were to put a gun to his head today and ask him, based on the balance of evidence today, which provenance he think is more likely. My feeling is he would say the Battlecrease provenance. The issue, as I see it, is that we have yet to disprove Anne's provenance story conclusively, so it remains a possibility. It is effectively based on two oral testimonies and an engineered alibi in the Tony D provenance (my opinion). It is weak.

Comparatively, the Eddie Lyons route is absolutely teeming with documentary evidence, recorded testimonies (many), circumstantial evidence and more. On the balance of evidence, Battlecrease provenance is far more likely than Anne or Mike's own provenance stories. If we could prove Mike's story was not true, by implication, neither is Anne's, but how do we do that?

On the balance of all we have today, Battlecrease House is the best bet. Except RJ and Orsam can't place their chips on the table. They have gone all-in on a Barrett-Graham hoax. They would rather go bust than admit they may have placed the wrong bet.

As I see it, ero, Keith Skinner has been around since June 1992, working on and off with the main cast, and has had much more of a close involvement with both Anne and Mike than anyone else here, so I would advise the readers and keyboard warriors to trust Keith's instincts and impressions, in conjunction with today's body of evidence [which is ever expanding and reassessed as it expands] over anyone without his lived experiences, particularly those who claim to know better, while peppering their posts with ill-disguised insults about those of us who can't accept the Barrett-Graham hoax theory as it stands, shakily, on little if anything to recommend it. I have only been around since 1999, and have had just a handful of close encounters with Anne and Mike between then and 2003. So if Keith has to weigh up Anne's story from July 1994, which appears to have the diary coming from Battlecrease into the Graham family in 1889, with the evidence for it coming from Battlecrease into the Barrett family in 1992, I fully respect his reasons for not rejecting the former outright, because I haven't walked a mile in his Barrett brogues.

You and Ike both make great points about the perils of putting all of one's eggs in the one basket, and everyone knows why the best scientists are the ones who will rarely if ever profess to have absolute certainty - even if DNA, fingerprints and CCTV have all put the one suspect at the scene of crime.

It could be Mike Barrett's long lost identical twin.

And then we'd have two affidavits claiming responsibility.

Love,

Caz
X

PS Okay, forget the dabs. I just looked it up and identical twins don't have identical paw prints.

[caz]

Can you imagine if 'Palmer' had written about the 'conservation' Tim had with his employee? I'd be hearing about it for weeks.

Consider this conversation closed.

Ah, I get it now. That's embarrassing. No excuses, I really screwed up there, didn't I?

Best focus on that, and forget about Palmer's awaited explanation for rejecting Tim Nice-NOT-Dim in favour of Bongo the Clown.

[caz]

Of course, it's a poor show, Thomas--but it's also called a 'dose of one's own medicine' otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.

Caz has been the Queen of the Apostrophe Police as well as the Taskmistress of the Typo Taliban for a quarter of a century on this forum--provided the poster doesn't accept her strange theories about the Maybrick Hoax. Believe and Ye Shall Not Receive.

If I had commented on every typo in Palmer's posts over the past year, he might have had a better reason for this sad little offering. I only tend to draw attention to typos these days if a poster makes a particularly hilarious or ironic one, while pompously claiming the higher ground.

Mea culpa regarding 'conservation'. I bet Palmer nearly wet himself over that one.

[caz]

I would like to recommend that followers of the Barrett/Graham saga listen to Criminal, Episode #229, "A Glamour and a Mystery" hosted by Phoebe Judge (the most recent episode).

I thought it was quite interesting, and I suspect, relevant.

It tells the well-known story of the Cottingley Fairies Hoax, but towards the end we hear the voice of a now elderly woman--one of the two sisters who had hoaxed the photogenic fairies back in 1917. I think it was Elsie.

The interviewer, quizzing her in the 1970s, asked Elsie if she felt any guilt about fooling all those people who had put faith in her.

She laughed and said "no." They wanted to believe.

Every step of the way--whenever an obvious absurdity in her story was exposed--there was always a believer ready to step forward and 'justify' it. They would trip over themselves doing so.

Once, someone noticed that one of the fairies' legs didn't belong with the rest of the body. 'Of course, they don't match,' one correspondent wrote. 'Fairies are thought projections, and sometime the thoughts become garbled.'

And so, Elsie silently laughed in amusement and amazement and said nothing.

She was then asked why it took her over half a century to come forward and admit to the hoax.

She said, in so many words, that even though the believers wanted to believe, and had invented the most ridiculous excuses for maintaining their belief (cough, cough) she didn't want to embarrass them further--and specifically, she didn't want to embarrass Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Edward Gardner, the head of the Theosophical Society, who had been her two chief champions.

Until they died, she didn't have the heart to come forward.

And so, the years rolled by.

Conan Doyle succumbed in 1930, but Gardner lived into the late 1960s.

I strongly suspect that a similar sense of humanity--or is it misguided humanity in the end?--explains a certain silence out of Liverpool.

Of course, being only a dunce, I will be told that this silence is maintained to cover up the crime of her now dead ex-husband--the awful truth that he got the diary off a bloke in a pub--even though getting it off a bloke from down the pub had been her story from the very beginning, so why all the Formby/Yapp flimflam?

Even a dunce can see that Anne throwing Formby and Yapp and Billy and her own good self into the center of the fray had the diary really come from Eddie Lyons down the boozer makes no more sense than a fairy's leg being pinned to the wrong body. It makes no logical sense. It makes no emotional sense. It makes utterly no sense at all. But her silence makes sense. It makes perfect sense.

Good night.

Palmer is doing a good job of trying to convince himself. Now he just has to convince the rest of us that Mike Barrett's 'hoax' was not the affidavit he swore on 5th January 1995, which has had Palmer and others falling for all manner of fairy tales ever since - as well as making up their own.

I still have no idea how Palmer is managing to juggle - with a straight face - Mike's claims from that affidavit with the decidedly odd theory that the diary represents a fictional take on the Maybrick story, composed by Anne, who was then persuaded by Mike to believe that, when he came home on 31st March 1992 with his 1908/9 piece of kit, and proceeded to rip out the 125 pages of WWI photos, including an ass by a gravestone, and then soak the cover in linseed oil, he only wanted her to help put together some sort of marketing gimmick for the story, so he might impress everyone in London. The stupid woman didn't even smell a rat when her treacherous husband of sixteen years handed her a £1 bottle of Diamine and told her to use a disguised hand - or even the wrong hand - to copy out her story from the word processor, being sure to dip the nib randomly in water from time-to-time, to give the writing an uneven faded look, which went on to fool the chemist who made the ink into believing this sales gimmick was decades old.

What on earth goes through Palmer's mind when he reads this back to himself and thinks it could possibly be anywhere within a million miles of the truth?

[caz]

To Keith Skinner:

I have no problem writing to Anne Graham, but it is hardly 'feeble' to be uncertain how to do so when someone lives in a foreign country, and I have no current contact details.

Can you supply an email address? Can you at least confirm if 'Delamore' is still current? How will I know if she has merely ignored a letter or never received it?

I would also like to respond to your claim that I am accusing Anne of having a 'hand' in the hoax. This is technically true, and I do not plan on denying it, but I have stated repeatedly that I don't believe she is morally guilty of having perpetrated a hoax. My belief is only mildly different than the belief of your late friend Martin Fido, who suggested on this very forum 20 years ago that Anne created the diary on the word processor as a piece of fiction, and Barrett took this typescript and created the physical diary. I view her as a victim of Barrett's treachery and abuse, and I assume that Martin did, too.

I do think it would be better to contact her with your blessing and your cooperation, for obvious reasons, but if you don't wish to cooperate, I will try to find other means. However, let me stress that I don't want to misstate your position, so I think it would be wise for you to state it concisely before I initial contact. Are you suggesting that both the 'Eddie Lyons' and the 'in the family/Tony Devereux' provenance told by Anne are true? I don't see how that can possibly be the case, but if that's what you're saying please pass it along.

RP

Palmer has read Chris Jones's book and seen the photograph of Chris with Anne taken in August 2021. He also interviewed Chris about the book, so I don't know why he thinks he needs Keith's 'blessing or cooperation', when Chris didn't need either. Like Palmer, Chris believes that Anne lied about diary because she knows who had a hand in creating it.

And why would Palmer be stating - or misstating - Keith's position in any case? Would he not be stating his own position and asking Anne to comment?

Why would it be 'wise' for Keith to state his current position concisely before Palmer decides whether to 'initial contact', assuming that's not a typo but an Americanism?

[caz]

And - really, RJ - making a point about a typo which we all spotted and perfectly understood is a cheap laugh from a guy heckling from the cheap seats, mate. Poor show.

Ike

Well, Ike, I trust that Palmer didn't make a typo ['before I initial contact'] towards the end of the very same post which he began by asking me:

Can you read and comprehend the English language?

Perhaps I need lessons in the American language.

But I don't mind a cheap laugh if I can return the favour.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

No wonder everyone avoids the Maybrick Hoax like the plague.

Well, I would be only too happy to avoid the Maybrick threads if nobody was posting anything to bring me back here.

Lately, it feels a bit like coming down each morning to see if our cat Monty has deposited another half-chewed mouse on the back doormat for me to clean up.

At least the cat thinks he is bringing me presents.

[rjpalmer]

He also interviewed Chris about the book, so I don't know why he thinks he needs Keith's 'blessing or cooperation', when Chris didn't need either.

Thanks again, Caz, for revealing your ongoing struggles with reading comprehension and also demonstrating why you are unsuited to act as an intermediary.

Where did I write that I 'need' Keith's cooperation?

"I do think it would be better to contact her with your blessing and your cooperation, for obvious reasons, but if you don't wish to cooperate, I will try to find other means."

As already noted, among the 'obvious reasons' is that, provided Anne is willing to discuss the matter, I wouldn't care to misrepresent Keith's view of the Eddie Lyons provenance if he somehow believes that this trove of 'compelling' evidence for it can still be reconciled with Anne's account.

But...whatever.

RP