One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary

[rjpalmer]

... Manchester was cold and damp very much like this hell hole...'

And was Manchester 'cold and damp' the weekend of April 14th & 15th? (Or perhaps I should ask about the smallish town 25 miles to the northwest?)

One account of a football match played near Manchester on Sunday morning, April 15th, describes "splendid weather," while the following is from LLoyd's 15 April 1888.




The unfortunate Mrs. Hodgson appears to have been too drunk to grasp at the straws on the bank, and thus she drowned; I see no reason for a sober person to fall into the same error.

No, Ike; Anne and Mike, if guilty they be, never needed to be 'clever.' They only need to rely on the "Rorschach Effect." Keep in vague and let others fill in the blanks.

There were (and are) plenty of clever people willing to invent clever arguments that the hoaxer would never have dreamed of.

But enjoy yourself, and enjoy your weekend.

[erobitha]

Hi Erobitha and Yabs,

This is brilliant research - almost as good as that for my brilliant Society's Pillar (available at all good DropBox sites right this very moment!), but there is an obvious obstacle over which all great research has to clamber and I call it the Lord Orsam 100 Metre Hurdles:

If you need the Barretts to be sophisticated, determined forgers, then that’s the type of people they are. If you need them to be amateur forgers just chancing their arm and not giving a great deal of thought to their creation, then that’s the type of people they are. There is no real need at all to understand them or the reality of their world. They simply exist to be moulded into whatever type of people you wish them to be in order to support a theory or conclusion.

So how do we ever find strong evidence linking the Victorian scrapbook with James Maybrick (or, more generally, 'the truth') if the hurdles we will face are as recurring as "Well clearly that's where the hoaxers got their information from too"?

Cheers,

Ike

Hi Ike,

In absolute fairness it is a fair assumption. if such a hoaxer already had a murder (or mysterious death / suicide) in mind when they wrote the diary, and even if by per chance this was such event that was the inspiration (don't think we will ever know), they deserve an applause because this was at time regarded as an open and shut case, that so much so it was buried well within the papers, nowhere near the front pages. The hoaxer must have spent hours upon hours thumbing through old micorfilm to find this as their inspiration for just one sentence - which is mind boggling. This was of course pre internet times where I found it much more simply using a search function on the British Newspaper Archive website.

Or it is just pure luck and concidence? A drunken, middle-aged woman was found suffocated on a Sunday morning in an cotton mill area (regarded as being part of Manchester) in very curious circumstances around the the same ball-park time the hoaxer claims a murder took place of a whore who was "squeezed" to death. I can't make any aspersions on Jane Hogson's character but what we can glean from the newspapers is that she was on a pub crawl all day and evening in the company of another man who was not her husband. Anyone could be be making their very own aspersions whilst witnessing her behaviour themselves.

Funny how more and more convenient coincidences get uncovered the older the scrapbook gets. You would think more evidence (even circumstantial) would weigh against it as time wears on - not the opposite.

Regards,

Erobitha

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

Hi Ike,

In absolute fairness it is a fair assumption. if such a hoaxer already had a murder (or mysterious death / suicide) in mind when they wrote the diary, and even if by per chance this was such event that was the inspiration (don't think we will ever know), they deserve an applause because this was at time regarded as an open and shut case, that so much so it was buried well within the papers, nowhere near the front pages. The hoaxer must have spent hours upon hours thumbing through old micorfilm to find this as their inspiration for just one sentence - which is mind boggling. This was of course pre internet times where I found it much more simply using a search function on the British Newspaper Archive website.

Or it is just pure luck and concidence? A drunken, middle-aged woman was found suffocated on a Sunday morning in an cotton mill area (regarded as being part of Manchester) in very curious circumstances around the the same ball-park time the hoaxer claims a murder took place of a whore who was "squeezed" to death. I can't make any aspersions on Jane Hogson's character but what we can glean from the newspapers is that she was on a pub crawl all day and evening in the company of another man who was not her husband. Anyone could be be making their very own aspersions whilst witnessing her behaviour themselves.

Funny how more and more convenient coincidences get uncovered the older the scrapbook gets. You would think more evidence (even circumstantial) would weigh against it as time wears on - not the opposite.

Regards,

Erobitha

Hi,

I agree, there are lots of coincidences and whoever wrote the diary had a fair bit of good fortune on their side. This, however, isn't one such coincidence. It's an interesting article, but seriously, Horwich? Bolton and Bury are closer to Manchester, were they both Manchester too? It's way out, even more so by Victorian standards. And liking the death to a pre London Maybrick killing is tenuous at best. No one sat through hours of micro film looking for it, hoax or no, it's not referenced. Incidentally, being cased closed at the time, why didn't Jim realise this? He commits murder, gets away with it and doesn't mention at all the police in "Manchester" thought someone else did it?

It's a good find, and who knows what else is hidden away in the archives, but this one doesn't do it for me.

[erobitha]

Hi,

I agree, there are lots of coincidences and whoever wrote the diary had a fair bit of good fortune on their side. This, however, isn't one such coincidence. It's an interesting article, but seriously, Horwich? Bolton and Bury are closer to Manchester, were they both Manchester too? It's way out, even more so by Victorian standards. And liking the death to a pre London Maybrick killing is tenuous at best. No one sat through hours of micro film looking for it, hoax or no, it's not referenced. Incidentally, being cased closed at the time, why didn't Jim realise this? He commits murder, gets away with it and doesn't mention at all the police in "Manchester" thought someone else did it?

It's a good find, and who knows what else is hidden away in the archives, but this one doesn't do it for me.

On the face of it I would have very little factual evidence to counter. The accused was subsequently acquitted due to lack of evidence and her death treated as an accident. However, there were clear signs of at least two struggles and a man's footprint in the mud and evidence to indicate a body was dragged down.

Somebody killed her and he was let go as basically having no reason to kill her, and therefore it must have been an accident. The legal systems were not perfect and still not.

The Manchester geography thing is interesting. You are of course factually correct, but you assume just because someone calls somehwere Manchester that it also must be factually correct. Manchester had many cotton mill towns in and around close proximity to the city, so someone could quite easily feel it was all Manchester, even if the town was 20 miles north of Manchester city centre. Horwich in fact had a train station open in 1870 on the Manchester to Preston line. If we accept 40mph as the average train speeds of the time then they would be in Horwich within 30 minutes. Question is would you use general areas or be specific in the context of the era? Even with that, they would have had to have travelled out of Manchester city and back to Manchester city if they wanted to return to Liverpool. It's all Manchester to me.

[erobitha]

And was Manchester 'cold and damp' the weekend of April 14th & 15th? (Or perhaps I should ask about the smallish town 25 miles to the northwest?)

One account of a football match played near Manchester on Sunday morning, April 15th, describes "splendid weather," while the following is from LLoyd's 15 April 1888.

RJ,

Can I ask to what football match do you refer? I'd like to look it up. The extract you shared mentions nothing of the Manchester area, just England and then London.

I think you raise a fair question regarding the weather, but can you qualify whether damp means raining or post-rain or even cloudy with showers? How do we define damp?

Edit: Match report from SWINTON v WAKEFIELD in the rugby (called football then) from Saturday 14th April 1888 said there was rain after recent "cold biting east winds". Swinton is 14 miles south of Horwich. Taken from Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser - Monday 16th April 1888 (page 3)



Another convenient coincidence perhaps?

Regards,

Erobitha

[Iconoclast]

Hi Ike,

You're the resident statistician, so perhaps you could estimate the chances of any of these events happening by pure coincidence?

The floorboards are lifted in Aigburth first thing on the morning of 9th March 1992. In the afternoon, Bongo has his usual pint in the Saddle - a stone's throw from where Eddie Lyons is living - and then calls Doreen about the diary before close of business.

Bongo stupidly copies Bernard Ryan's paraphrasing into his DAiry. Bongo ends up with a direct quote from Dr Fuller.

Robbie Johnson decides to scratch JM's signature inside his brother's gold watch, after reading about a diary - yet to be authenticated - but supposedly written by JM, claiming to be JtR. Robbie has no idea what the diary handwriting looks like, or if it is signed anywhere by JM, and doesn't know about any surviving official documents bearing his signature. By guesswork alone, Robbie ends up with a very good, one might say professional likeness between his handiwork and the signature on JM's marriage licence.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

Tee hee. I suspect you ask because you already know how implausible ANY of these three are never mind them all.

I'll answer your question in a moment, but - an interesting fact about applying statistics (as if that were possible):

The OR scenario: If you want to know the odds of one, two OR three things happening, you calculate their respective odds then add them together. The resulting odds improve, but may not get particularly better (depending upon the odds that were added together). Odds of 1-in-5, 1-in-2, and 1-in-10 in the OR scenario produce an overall odds of 2-in-10 plus 5-in-10 plus 1-in-10 which equals 8-in-10. Pretty good odds, actually (this is because only any one needs to happen so the likelihood of that happening increases relative to any one of the individual odds - and this is true of all odds except certainty from which the collective odds can only drop unless they were all certain to happen in which case they stay exactly the same, naturally).

The AND scenario: If you want to know the odds of one, two AND three things happening, you calculate their respective odds then multiply them together. The resulting odds get bigger, usually much bigger. In the scenario above, the AND calculation becomes 1-in-5 times 1-in-2 times 1-in-10 which is the same as 1-in-100. Pretty poor odds, especially when compared with the OR scenario (because all of the options need to happen). You should be wary of betting your honour on an AND scenario - accumulators very rarely pay out because their collective odds are so perversely poor.

Now ...

The floorboards being lifted on the same day that Barrett rang Doreen is an easy one to calculate. All we need to know is how many days had passed between Maybrick's last entry in the DAiry and someone lifting Maybrick's floorboards for the first time) So, we'll do it the easy way. Say 100 years multiplied by 365 days. So that's 36,500 days had passed so the floorboards could have been lifted on any one of 36,500 days. Probably quite likely to happen given how many days had passed, I'd say. But here's the rub. If you said to me that someone had contacted someone about a diary of James Maybrick claiming that he was Jack the Spratt McVitie and you had asked me how likely it would be that that day was the same day the floorboards came up, I'd say 1 (how many times the 'phone call happened) in 36,500 (how many days it could have happened on). That's a phenomenally unlikely event. No-one would bet anything (never mid their honour) on those odds.

Then ...

On top of that, the diary that gets produced with five words directly attributable to Dr Fuller by Bernard Ryan and it appears that these are the only words from Ryan reproduced in the diary (I don't know this for certain so I'm making that assumption for the sake of the present exercise). The odds of choosing from Ryan only those words he chose from Fuller are astronomical as there would have been thousands of five word combinations in Ryan but the diary writer chose the exact five to mirror Dr Fuller's comment to James Maybrick about his health. We're off the scale on implausibility there, Caz.

Then ...

Robbie Johnson's ability to do a Uri Geller and predict what James Maybrick's signature might look like. Well, that's one in however many possible ways there are to write the name 'James Maybrick'. And that is a very very very very large number indeed so those odds are also way off the implausibility scale

So we times those three sets of incredibly-unlikely odds together to get a phenomenally, incredibly, impossibly unlikely series of events which absolutely should not happen if James Maybrick did not write that DAiry.

And then we factor in other incredibly unlikely events if Maybrick is innocent (and, remember, each time we add one we multiply the existing odds by the new odds to get increasingly vanishingly-small odds of ALL of these things happening by chance):

• 'Jack' is formed from the first two and last two letters in the name 'James Maybrick'
• 'Juwes' in the GSG looks rather like 'James'
• The other five significant adults in Maybrick's life can also be discerned in the GSG
• The strange expressions used in the Ripper letters appear in the Maybrick matrix (see my brilliant Society's Pillar)
• Florence Maybrick's initials appear on Mary Kelly's crime scene photograph
• 'Diego Laurenz' in a Liverpool newspaper translates to James-Florence

Do I need to go on? The brilliance of my brilliant Society's Pillar is that it shows how incredibly unlikely events just kept on happening around James Maybrick.

Once you do the math, Caz, the chances of James Maybrick NOT being Jack the Spratt McVitie are most defiitely not odds a fine lady such as you should be gambling her honour on. Stick to the Lotto, kidda.

Cheers,

Ike

[Al Bundy's Eyes]

I thought the odds were 1:18?

[Iconoclast]

I thought the odds were 1:18?

They are if you're ******* useless at statistics, Abe, and Lord O - brilliant researcher that he is - is.

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

RJ,

Can I ask to what football match do you refer? I'd like to look it up. The extract you shared mentions nothing of the Manchester area, just England and then London.

I think you raise a fair question regarding the weather, but can you qualify whether damp means raining or post-rain or even cloudy with showers? How do we define damp?

Edit: Match report from SWINTON v WAKEFIELD in the rugby (called football then) from Saturday 14th April 1888 said there was rain after recent "cold biting east winds". Swinton is 14 miles south of Horwich. Taken from Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser - Monday 16th April 1888 (page 3)


Another convenient coincidence perhaps?

Regards,

Erobitha

What was the score, by the way, Erobitha?

[erobitha]

What was the score, by the way, Erobitha?

Swinton won by two tries

[c.d.]

Hello Ike,

Juwes in the GSG looks like "jewels." Clearly a reference to the crown jewels and Queen Victoria. And "are not the men" refers to Queen Victoria being without a man after Albert died.

Can you prove me wrong? Now maybe some interpretations are better than others but in the end they are all just interpretations and only the author of the GSG knows what it means. Anybody can come up with an interpretation that supports their argument. Proving it is where it gets a bit tricky.

c.d.

[Iconoclast]

Hello Ike,

Juwes in the GSG looks like "jewels." Clearly a reference to the crown jewels and Queen Victoria. And "are not the men" refers to Queen Victoria being without a man after Albert died.

Can you prove me wrong? Now maybe some interpretations are better than others but in the end they are all just interpretations and only the author of the GSG knows what it means. Anybody can come up with an interpretation that supports their argument. Proving it is where it gets a bit tricky.

c.d.

I think you miss the point, c.d..

Does 'Juwes' look like 'Montague' or 'Aaron' or 'Lewis' or ... [195 names later] ... 'Francis'?

Can you discern any of those names in the GSG in the way you can 'James'?

In my brilliant History vs Maybrick (or whatever I called that Thread) I listed 800 male names that were common in Victorian England and challenged the reader to find even one of them in the GSG. Either no-one read the Thread (quite likely) or else no-one was able to do so.

And, later, a lightening-bolt struck me when I noticed that the other five significant adults in Maybrick's life are cryptically embedded in the GSG.

Now, before you start on about my finding what I was already looking for, let me pose the challenge to you:

Find me another candidate for Jack whose own name and that of his significant adults can be discerned in the GSG. It has to be the 'shape' of the name (in the same way I see 'The men' as 'Thomas') not some twisted alternative: for example, when my argument was originally posted, the villages all sent their idiots on conference and one of them pointed-out that you could form names from the letters in the GSG. Well, I could have done that!

Nope - you have to find me established names which are clearly discernible in contiguous letters.

I'll give you until ... ooo ... let's say The End of Time.

Cheers,

Ike

[c.d.]

Ike,

Surely someone as smart as yourself can see that you are putting forth arguments that cannot be falsified.

c.d.

[Iconoclast]

Ike,

Surely someone as smart as yourself can see that you are putting forth arguments that cannot be falsified.

c.d.

The argument that I am making is not that 'Juwes' is categorically a cryptic substitute for 'James'. I am in fact not making an argument at all!

I should perhaps be more careful with my choice of words.

I am highlighting the profoundly unlikely alignment of the strange word 'Juwes' with the very unstrange name 'James'. It's not an argument - it's a fact. The fact that it is a fact does not mean that that is actually what happened (so it is potentially historically inaccurate).

This is not a scientific proposal so it does not need to be falsifiable. It is simply an observation of fact. 'Juwes' looks like 'James' in the agreed version of the GSG. And that should not have happened if there was no reason for it to have happened (i.e., James Maybrick was fitted-up). Chance could have made that happen (but, then, you have to factor in the author's clever - but otherwise pretty meaningless - reference to "I wonder if they enjoyed my funny Jewish joke"). Chance could have done that. But - Lord! - all six of the significant adults in James Maybrick's life??? And 800 other male names alone undiscernible in the text. What are the chances of that happening by blind chance??? I can tell you: none whatsoever.

And - if chance had not played enough devilment with the GSG - it only went and produced the word 'nothing' exactly s it is produced in the DAiry! Now, I accept that the author of the DAiry could have replicated the word 'nothing' having seen it in the GSG, but for what limited end? Why just one word? You might imagine that he or she would have deliberately replicated every word of the GSG in the DAiry in order to convince us all that it was the truth they were telling.

And I emphasise that.

Cheers,

Ike

[c.d.]

Ike,

This argument is pointless. Apparently you are the only one who is able to pick up these clues. I look at the GSG and I sure as hell don't see James. If you think you can, then more power to you.

c.d.