One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[Gladiator]

Yes I did.

Then I will stop reviewing the books because I'm confident I haven't seen this in any of them (my memory's reasonably good).

I can't think why Barrett would want such a diary, other than (as you say) the obvious so I think we are awaiting the views of Ms Morris on this one?

I still can't understand wy he would want a diary from 1880-1890, though?

[jmenges]

True, Chris.

JM

[pinkmoon]

diary of jack thd ripper

Over ten years ago I met Mike Barrett for the first time I have met him several times since I wouldn't call him a friend more of an acquaintance all I can say if you were to pick someone to have involved in a conspiracy to forge anything you would not pick him I would like to point out I found Mr Barrett a charming and interesting man but I certainly got the impression he didn't really know the real truth about the diary

[Digalittledeeperwatson]

A little bit of help.

So just reread The Maybrick hoax: Donald McCormick's legacy dissertation. Suggested by Stephen Thomas. It appears the claim made in the article kills the diary. Would anyone be so kind as to provide me the rub on it?

[Jonathan H]

Well, well, well, so the 'Diary' balloon just deflates as bluster and pomposity escapes with the tiniest pin stuck by Chris.

All those books you've read and yet you are floundering like a fish flapping and choking on a boat deck.

Barrett, apparently a complete moron incapable of reading any books or dictating any kind of bit of third-rate drivel, placed an ad for a diary because he panicked that the Maybrick document--that he has said he created--would not convince and wanted to try again. Too late, and no it didn't convince.

The Ripper 'Diary' was one of the biggest flops in publishing, compared to its claims.

What this thread shows is that we are not allowed to believe, let alone say out aloud, that we think the 'Diary' is a modern hustle.

A completely straight-forward opinion based on he lack of credibility of squalid squabbles over a document which has no provenance prior to the squabblers.

But it is not allowed here by the 'Diary' die-hards and so we get Stage Two--how dare you, you despicable coward!

Though in the face of Chris' pin I see that you are shifting to Stage Three: forget Mike Barrett, move along, nothing to see here ...

[Livia]

So just reread The Maybrick hoax: Donald McCormick's legacy dissertation. Suggested by Stephen Thomas. It appears the claim made in the article kills the diary. Would anyone be so kind as to provide me the rub on it?

Well, if one's research is less than thorough, then yes,
one could make the assertion that whoever wrote the
diary used McCormick's ditty to compose his or her own
verse of a similar nature.

But if you look into the origin of the rhyme, one finds that
the original was written by an American, Septimus Winner,
in 1868 and performed by minstrels and adapted again
in 1869, substituting Blacks for Indians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Little_Indians

Here are some examples of its use in England:

In 1876, in the Sheffield Daily Telegram
of Friday 25 February, in regard to an election in Retford:

"Ten Little Yellow Boys"

Ten little yellow boys going for Bassetlaw
Causing the greatest fun the Tories ever saw

These ten little yellow boys started out to dine
But Lord Edward couldn't come and then there were nine....etc.


In 1890, The Northeastern Daily Gazette of August 14th:

A Song of the Session

Ten Government measures
Advancing in a line
Goshen got jealous
And then there were nine!


Nine Government measures
All of moment great
Barrow had an election
and then there were eight!

Chorus: One little, two little, three little, four little
five little Tory Bills....etc.



And in the Hampshire Advertiser County Paper of
31 October 1891:

A Tale of Ten Lions
("Truth's" re-versed version of an old rhyme)

No monster Lion
Basking in the sun;
Lord Randolph spoke to Lee
and then there was one

One monster Lion almost out of view
Lord Randolph fired his gun
And then there were two!

One little, two little, three little, four little, five little bullets
hissed

One little, two little, three little, four little, five little bullets
missed


And then there's Agatha Christie's 1945, "And then
there were none".

All of these examples predate McCormick by decades.

[Jonathan H]

Or it's these sub-genre of ditties that inspired McCormick's bit of typical hoaxing which then ended up in the 'Diary'.

[Gladiator]

Well, well, well, so the 'Diary' balloon just deflates as bluster and pomposity escapes with the tiniest pin stuck by Chris.

I suspect I'm being trolled here, but nevertheless I am compelled to reply.

Two things:

Chris has proved nothing, therefore pricked nothing, but as my mind is open to the possibility that I am wrong, I wish to pursue clarification of what he raises.

Please offer us some of your wisdom and clarify for us what benefit Barrett would gain from hurriedly acquiring an 1880, 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 1886, or 1887 diary?

[Chris]

Chris has proved nothing, therefore pricked nothing, but as my mind is open to the possibility that I am wrong, I wish to pursue clarification of what he raises.

I haven't tried to 'prove' anything. I simply asked a question.

And I'm not sure what you mean by 'pursuing clarification' of the question. The question is just whether you can think of any reason for him placing that advertisement apart from the obvious one. Can you?

[Gladiator]

Or it's these sub-genre of ditties that inspired McCormick's bit of typical hoaxing which then ended up in the 'Diary'.

This is going to have to be the last time I respond to you as you truly are beneath contempt.

It is irrelevant whether the 'Ten Little Indians' reference in the diary was prompted by McCormick's 1959 source (which may or may not have referenced a hoax in itself) - there is no way that this can be proven.

What is key is that Livia has shown that this does not compromise the diary's contents in any way. She has shown that the 'Ten Little Indians' verse structure was firmly established by 1888 and that McCormick's reference is thus irrelevant.

That's science, incidentally. It's evidence-based analysis not rampant, biased, opinionated posing. It shows that the argument (that the diary was based on McCormick) holds no water because the evidence shows that it could just as easily have been stimulated by the 'Ten Little Indians' rhyme well-known at the time the diary was supposedly being written.

For the record, the 'Ten Little Indians' references from the LVP were also cited in one of the main texts (Harrison I or II, or Feldman) but of course you couldn't possibly have known this as you have only read 'a few articles'.

I know we're about to get some pompous, idiotic, paranoid response from you, but - as I say - this is the last time I for one will be responding.

Gladiator

[Gladiator]

I haven't tried to 'prove' anything. I simply asked a question.

And I'm not sure what you mean by 'pursuing clarification' of the question. The question is just whether you can think of any reason for him placing that advertisement apart from the obvious one. Can you?

Hi Chris,

Point 1. I wasn't actively attempting to criticise the fact that you had raised the question, but merely attempting to stress that nothing had suddenly been proven therefore no balloons had been pricked.

Point 2 provokes the dilemma. If he had placed an advert for an 1888 or 1889 diary I would be extremely concerned. The fact that he placed an ad at all (especially seeking 20 blank pages) is deeply disconcerting, but quite why he would do so for an 1880-1887 diary is utterly beyond me.

There is a small voice inside my head which says this was covered in Harrison, Feldman, or Linder but I haven't been able to locate it. Something along the lines of his wanting to see what such a diary would have looked like, but even as I type it I can't see what he would gain from seeing an actual diary given that the document supposedly in his hands was clearly not a diary at all. Why he would want 20 blank pages is the very disconcerting bit.

'Pursuing clarification' simply means finding the source and understanding the exact nature of it. So, what exactly did Barrett say in his ad, was it quoted verbatim, did he offer an explanation for placing the ad, etc.?

Hopefully Caz can shed some light on this.

Gladiator

[Chris]

There is a small voice inside my head which says this was covered in Harrison, Feldman, or Linder but I haven't been able to locate it.

I was under the impression it was new (or newly released) information in 2007, so if it is mentioned in a book I think it would have to be a book published since then. (Though it had been known for some time in general terms that Barrett had been trying to buy a diary of the period and succeeded in buying an 1891 diary.)

'Pursuing clarification' simply means finding the source and understanding the exact nature of it. So, what exactly did Barrett say in his ad, was it quoted verbatim, did he offer an explanation for placing the ad, etc.?

Hopefully Caz can shed some light on this.

I can't see any more information about the advertisement in what I've noted of the discussion in 2007. But of course Caroline Morris may be able to add some more information.

[Jonathan H]

I apologize for using such old-fashioned language as 'coward' or 'gutless' or 'swine'--about myself by the way.

No, Stage Two of resisting a hoax is for you to now accuse me of trolling.

There is no gutter level you won't sink to, is there?

This is a public site, and is supposed to be a public debate.

Yet as I wrote before, we are not allowed to put forward the sensible theory that the 'Diary' is a modern fake, a get-rich-quick scheme that went pear-shaped. As scams by amateurs often do.

No, that is not a legit position to take.

Not unless we are prepared to endure a barrage of abuse by the 'Diary' die-hards

I have been told that this sort of skirmishing with the previous apoplectic poster is nothing, nothing, nothing compared to the acrimony of twenty or so years ago. Those days, I am reliably informed, were beyond ugly.

.

[Gladiator]

Okay, Caz Morris from the JtR Forum, dated 17 Sept 2012:

It's not clear what Mike had in mind when placing the ad on March 19th 1992. I have no precise record of the conversations he had with Doreen on the phone some ten days previously, but it's possible she said something like "How do you know that what you have is a genuine Victorian diary?" She would have wanted to sound him out before investing any time or expense inviting him and Anne down to London with it and getting Shirley involved. So the obvious thing would have been for her to get as much information as possible about this 'diary' out of Mike before making arrangements to see it for herself in the April, which would make it even more unlikely that he would be trying to purchase an alternative 'vehicle' for the recently composed text at the eleventh hour.

For what it's worth, my hunch is that something Doreen asked him about the book physically triggered the advert, to see how it compared with other diaries of the period. Either that, or he was initially worried about handing 'the' diary over to a stranger, and thought about testing the waters with a copy.

Yes, the paperwork refers to the tiny red 1891 diary which Mike was sent as a result of the ad, and has nothing to do with the Maybrick diary, for which no paper trail has been found (either for the physical book or for any of the same research trips Feldy or Shirley had to initiate to find various bits of information contained in the diary). But the theory goes that the ad was placed in the hope of getting a better vehicle for the fake diary than the scrapbook, but produced something that could not be used for obvious reasons. My point was that if the ad had produced something more useful, and if this had been used instead for the hoax, the game would indeed have been up the moment the suppliers realised what the order had been used for. So yes, you'd have to be a fool to try fooling anyone this way.

And then from later that day ...

Well we have to consider the context in which we know Mike placed the advert - ie shortly after talking to Doreen about having Jack the Ripper's Diary (a pretty sensational revelation to make), and shortly before he would be coming with Anne all the way down to London to show his precious possession to her and Shirley.

If he wasn't thinking too clearly at the time, why not? Whoever had a hand in composing the text had to be acutely aware of all the dates involved, to make the known events of Maybrick's final year, up to his death on May 11th 1889, gel with the known events during the Autumn of Terror, and make sense of all those undated entries in time and place.

In placing that ad, and specifying any dates at all, Mike shows he was aware that date had some significance, but not just how much significance. Asking for a blank, or partially blank diary from 1880 to 1890, and failing to specify which months or years the blank pages had to represent, only really makes sense in the context of wanting to see if 'the' diary (which incidentally has 17 blank pages after 'Sir Jim' signs off) was typical of others of roughly the same period - or decade. When Mike phoned Doreen, we don't even know that he had studied the thing enough (or the murders enough) to have worked out when the first entry was meant to have been written. If he only had the one date to go by - May 3rd 1889 on the last completed page - it might explain the broader date specification in the advert.

It seems to me that the critical part of Barrett's advert was the vagueness of the year (1880-1890). Nobody, in a million years, could be about to spring such a forgery upon the world and fail to note that the only diaries of any relevance would be 1888 and 1889. Imagine it: Imagine I am about to publish the hoaxed 1970 diary of Bobby Moore - England captain - which will reveal all about the accusations of theft prior to the Mexico world cup, but I need a 1970 diary to do so, so I advertise quite openly in a trade magazine for a diary from 1960-1970?

It just isn't what it might otherwise seem obviously to be ...

[Kaz]

It just isn't what it might otherwise seem obviously to be ...

Nope, not unless you want it to be.....