The Diary—Old Hoax or New?

[Spider]

The diary is clearly a modern hoax.

The 'Diary' is clearly genuine.

[John G]

Mmm, yes, and Shirley Harrison said she found the term 'one-off' used in technical paperwork (belonging to a Kent engineering company) in about 1865.

Graham

I'm afraid there's something Alice in Wonderlandish about Shirley Harrison's approach to research. Firstly, she neglected to get any documentary evidence, which is a bit remiss of her, considering how crucial this piece of "evidence" was. Moreover, according to David it now transpires that it was a third party, now deceased, that told her about the document. Oh, and there's absolutely no evidence that the engineering company, Traynor's, ever existed!

Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice.

[Graham]

According to David Orsam the term "one-off", used in the diary, did not enter general usage until after the Second World War (the expression was used in the engineering industry, in a strict technical sense, from around 1922.) David has found a reference to the expression being used in the prison service, but this was from 1984.

Mmm, yes, and Shirley Harrison said she found the term 'one-off' used in technical paperwork (belonging to a Kent engineering company) in about 1865.

Graham

[caz]

The diary is clearly a modern hoax.

Well that was edifying.

Brexit is clearly a modern miracle.

[John G]

So what are we to make of Billy Graham's claim - according to Paul Feldman - that he had first seen the Diary during WW2, in 1943 if I remember correctly. Can this claim be believed, or was it merely the meanderings of a sick, elderly man? Or was he prompted into saying what Feldman wanted him to say?

Graham

According to David Orsam the term "one-off", used in the diary, did not enter general usage until after the Second World War (the expression was used in the engineering industry, in a strict technical sense, from around 1922.) David has found a reference to the expression being used in the prison service, but this was from 1984.

[caz]

It was irrelevant to the matter at hand, Caz. It was just obnoxious moralizing to score brownie points. You're better than that.

I doubt any brownie points were scored, Harry, and I don't care either way. It's just that Jacob Rees-Mogg and his obnoxious religious views really wind me up! So when you brought religion into the conversation my resistance was already low. I'm calmer now. Only a million to one chance of us leaving the EU without a deal, but at least billions of tax payers' money are being spent on precautions, just in case. I'm a little surprised, however, because I would not have thought taking precautions was something Rees-Mogg approved of. Funny old world.

If you don't have a dog in this fight, why are you so vociferous about its critics?

I'm a cat person myself. I don't care what people choose to believe about the diary, Harry. It's not going to rock our world either way, is it? I only care when they insist their beliefs represent the truth [or "the God's honest truth", to quote one of Mike Barrett's favourites - oh the irony]. A bit of proof would go a long way. I don't see any proof that Maybrick was the ripper, but nor do I see any proof that the Barretts ever saw that scrapbook minus the diary. I'm more about not believing stuff than believing it. But worst of all are those who only pretend to believe things, while encouraging others to follow suit.

Either way, the diary is "still here" because of wishful thinking. Mr Orsam has gone to great lengths to show that "one-off instance" was not a phrase used in the 19th century lexicon. Only the most diehard diarist will perform the mental gymnastics required to disregard that.

Ah no, you see, you don't get to state as a fact that the diary is only "still here" because of 'wishful thinking'. That's a belief, and it's a rather fatuous one unless you can read people's minds. The diary is here, and we are discussing it, because it's a physical artefact which not even God Almighty has been able to date yet, or attribute to any named individual(s), quick or dead.

Dr Kate Flint, lecturer in English literature at Oxford, believed the phrase "to top myself" was not recorded until 1958. Her belief, expressed in 1993, could hardly have been more wrong. More than twenty years later, Gary Barnett found it in a newspaper article of 1877 - a massive eighty years earlier. Wishful thinking and mental gymnastics have since been employed openly and unashamedly on the message boards, to downplay this significant discovery and argue that the use of the phrase in the diary is still a proven anachronism.

Love,

Caz
X

[Graham]

So what are we to make of Billy Graham's claim - according to Paul Feldman - that he had first seen the Diary during WW2, in 1943 if I remember correctly. Can this claim be believed, or was it merely the meanderings of a sick, elderly man? Or was he prompted into saying what Feldman wanted him to say?

Graham

[John G]

Hi John,

You make an interesting and useful observation. You seem to be allowing for people to have different opinions on the diary's potential value and what should be done with it [which I suppose applies to the posters here too!]. So in principle, an electrician finding this "old book" under floorboards, even though it is signed Jack the Ripper, might think it had no intrinsic value and might have little interest in it personally, and might therefore sell it on for a modest sum down his local, reasonably confident that the owner of the floorboards didn't know it was there and wouldn't miss it?

But the bloke who buys it for this modest sum, on a "no questions asked" and "no telling tales" basis, might be a very different kettle of fish, impulsively thinking of his next move and how quickly he might capitalise on his funny little bargain and turn it into a giant windfall? He wouldn't have been told where the book came from or when, so he'd have to come up with a workable tale from Liverpool, but he'd worry about that later. Hadn't the fella reassured him that no other bugger alive knows anything about it, so he can afford to be a bit creative with his story telling, as long as it leaves him as the legitimate owner, with nobody rushing to contradict him?

Yes, I can certainly see the possibilities you raise here.



It's perfectly legitimate to explore how the diary might have ended up in the possession of the Barretts, regardless of any other considerations. In fact, I don't think you can legitimately put a date on the diary, or identify its creator(s), or guess the motivation behind it, without doing so.



Mike may have been given the diary in a pub by someone, and I am inclined to believe it. But he never claimed that someone was Tony Devereux [no a] and he never claimed he was given it in a pub.

His story remained consistent and insistent, when he wasn't trying to make his forgery claims stick. He claimed Tony gave it to him, but claimed it was when he called round his house, in the same road where one of the Battlecrease electricians lived.

It's rather hard to explore how the diary ended up with anyone, without knowing what was claimed by whom.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

The Battlecrease House story is intriguing, but I think almost certainly a red herring: It would be a huge coincidence that a modern forgery (by that I mean post Second World War) would have ended up under the floorboards of James Maybrick's former residence in the early 1990s. However, if it did, then Anne must have lied: she couldn't, in these circumstances, have read the Diary in 1968/69 as she claimed because, otherwise, how did it end up under the Battlecrease floorboards?

I've been thinking about David's assertion that Mike wrote the Diary. Personally I think this unlikely, but if he did then Anne had to have some involvement. Otherwise she had no reason to respond to his confession with an alternative account, effectively defending the Diary's provenance, particularly as she claimed that she did not want the Diary published in the first place. In fact, when Mike contacted the publishers she stated that her instinct was to burn the book.

Thank you Caz and Ike for correcting my claim that Mike received the Diary from TD in a pub. This was clearly wrong, at least according to the "official" version!

[John G]

I not up-to-speed with th "diary" anymore, but it does bother me that the forger seems to have made some effort to create a fake that would pass examination - after all, Shirley went straightaway to the British Museum and a leading antiquarian bookseller and would in due course take the diary for other tests. Would the forger have anticipated this and taken the necessary action? After all, Melvyn Fairclough got a book published about the alleged Abberline diaries without the publisher apparently asking to see the diaries or seeking any independent opinion, so why would someone imagine that the Maybrick "diary" would be different? Yet apparently the forger did try to use a Victorian-like ink, obtain a period book in which to write, and do goodness-knows what else.

Yes, you make a very fair and important point. Thus, The Hitler Diary forgers clearly went to a great deal of trouble, and their efforts were initially good enough to fool the eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. However, these diaries were quickly exposed as forgeries, I.e. because they failed the forensic tests, partly because the forgers used modern ink!

I am therefore far from convinced that either Anne or Mike, or anyone in Anne's family were responsible.

Nonetheless, Mike gave confusing and contradictory accounts of how the Diary came into his possession, which can't be simply ignored. And I also find Anne's alternative account very confusing.

Thus, according to her the Diary had been in her family's possession for decades. However, nobody seems to have paid it much attention, including Anne. She states that she first saw the Diary in 1968-69, but for reasons she can't explain she doesn't tell Mike about it. She doesn't understand the content, she takes no steps to get the Diary assessed, she doesn't undertake any research, and she most definitely doesn't think that it's Jack the Ripper's Diary. In fact, she has no interest in Ripperology. In other words, she doesn't seem to pay the Diary much attention either.

However, 20 years later she decides that Mike could be inspired, by this erstwhile neglected book, into transforming its content into a novel! Never mind that he's never written a novel before. Never mind that he's rapidly descending into alcoholism. Never mind that his literacy skills are such that Anne had to "tidy up" his short magazine articles. Never mind that for 20 years Anne has apparently shown little or no interest in the Diary, to the extent that she's never even mentioned its existence to her husband, and doesn't remotely understand the content.

And instead of giving him the Diary, and then discussing her proposal with him, she decides to use TD as a covert intermediary and, mysteriously, he is under no circumstances to reveal where the book came from.

Very curious indeed.

[Graham]

If I remember correctly, Mike Barrett identified an arts supply shop as the place where he bought the ink, and it was the owner of that shop who identified the Victorian-like ink he would have sold as Diamine. Did Mike Barrett ever agree that he had used Diamine ink, or did he simply accept that Diamine was what the owner of the art shop sold him? Did anyone ever check to see whether any other Victorian-like ink was sold in that shop? If Mike had identified Diamine as the ink he used, Alex Voller's certainty that the ink wasn't Diamine would undermine Mike's story. If Mike was simply accepting the shop owner's identification of Diamine, it doesn't undermine Mike if the art shop sold alternative Victorian-like inks. Mr Voller's expert opinion that the ink had not been recently applied to the paper is, of course, important and not to be overlooked.

I can't remember, off the top of my napper, whether Mike B agreed or disagreed about whether Diamine was the ink he claimed to have used. It could be that, as Diamine is a Liverpool-based company, Mike was aware of the name and if he did mention the name Diamine, perhaps it was to add a little verisimilitude to his claim.

I think after all these years of basically fruitless debate, most people who believe the Diary is a fake link it automatically, almost as a knee-jerk reaction, to Mike Barrett, Ann Barrett, Tony Deveraux, and others - Melvin Harris's (in)famous 'nest of forgers'. For no reason other than a gut feeling, I rather think that the Diary is an old fake, but created at some point well after James Maybrick's death. By whom? Haven't a clue, although several names have been mentioned over the years both here and elsewhere. How Mike Barrett got his hands on it will, I suspect, never be known for sure - even if Ann decided one day to 'tell the whole truth'. Would she be believed?

If there was no way of identifying Maybrick DNA, what would the excercise of pulling DNA from the paper prove? And countless people have handled the diary, sometimes quite often, including me, and there is no value I can see in pulling our DNA from the paper. Also, it is entirely possible that several of those who handled the diary had also handled material once belonging to the Maybricks. I think contamination would be so high as to make the exercise worthless. But I am no authority on DNA.

I honestly wouldn't know if any descendants of James Maybrick, with/without Florrie's involvement, are still around. But I fully appreciate where you're coming from regarding this. And you're correct - DNA extraction and analysis is very sensitive, and even if just a small section of a single page were subject to testing, it would be (a) a very prolonged and tiresome process; and (b) very expensive. And somehow I can't quite see Robert Smith agreeing to his pride and joy being cut up! (That's assuming he's still the owner of the thing).

It's a bugger, isn't it? (as we say in these parts).

Graham

[PaulB]

I was just wondering if anyone has ever made the suggestion that the diary might have been written by Maybrick but that he wasn’t the ripper?

I'm sure it's been suggested, Herlock. I think every imaginable permutation has been suggested over the years. The arguments now are, as Graham says, very circular and apparently driven in the main by those who are convinced that it's a modern fake and are frustrated that this isn't a universally recognised fact. I don't blame them.

[PaulB]

All of the discussion and arguments on this thread are, of course, simply circular, and have been going on for years without anyone getting any closer to the true origins of the 'Diary'. However, if I may I'd like to make a couple of points:

1] The Chief Chemist of Diamine Inks, Liverpool, Mr Alec Voller, examined the 'Diary' at the offices of Smith Gryphon, and stated that in his opinion the 'Diary' ink was not Diamine ink. He also stated that, in his opinion, the ink did not go on the paper within recent years; and that the document was at least 90 years old (in 1995) and could be older. He added that if he had thought it was a modern ink, he would have said so.
(Ref: The Ripper Diary, Linder, Morris and Skinner, page 206). Diamine Inks was a customer of mine prior to my retirement, and I did actually meet Mr Voller, but very briefly and we had no discussion about the 'Diary', even though it was 'in the news' at the time. Not long afterwards, I also met two former employees of Diamine Inks, who had started their own ink-manufacturing business, and I did discuss the 'Diary' with them. (In fact, one of their ink products was labelled 'Jack The Ripper Ink'!) They were absolute in their belief that Voller was perfectly correct in his assessment of the age of the ink in the 'Diary', visual only that it was, and that if anyone could identify when, approximately, an ink had been put on a paper, then it was Alec Voller.

2] It has occurred to me that anyone hand-writing a document on paper, which is a very absorbent material, would without even being aware of it deposit upon that paper sufficient body fluid, skin-cells, etc., for an accurate DNA trace to be taken. Can anyone advise if the paper of the 'Diary' has ever been subjected to such an analysis? If so, I don't recall reading about it. It could well be that obtaining the DNA of James Maybrick may be impossible, as I believe his family line has died out; but the DNA of other, more modern, people who were, actually or by rumour, associated with the 'Diary', might be available. Just a point to ponder, no more.

Graham

If I remember correctly, Mike Barrett identified an arts supply shop as the place where he bought the ink, and it was the owner of that shop who identified the Victorian-like ink he would have sold as Diamine. Did Mike Barrett ever agree that he had used Diamine ink, or did he simply accept that Diamine was what the owner of the art shop sold him? Did anyone ever check to see whether any other Victorian-like ink was sold in that shop? If Mike had identified Diamine as the ink he used, Alex Voller's certainty that the ink wasn't Diamine would undermine Mike's story. If Mike was simply accepting the shop owner's identification of Diamine, it doesn't undermine Mike if the art shop sold alternative Victorian-like inks. Mr Voller's expert opinion that the ink had not been recently applied to the paper is, of course, important and not to be overlooked.

If there was no way of identifying Maybrick DNA, what would the excercise of pulling DNA from the paper prove? And countless people have handled the diary, sometimes quite often, including me, and there is no value I can see in pulling our DNA from the paper. Also, it is entirely possible that several of those who handled the diary had also handled material once belonging to the Maybricks. I think contamination would be so high as to make the exercise worthless. But I am no authority on DNA.

[Herlock Sholmes]

But why would he?? And then hide it away???

It was just a thought GUT. I can’t think of a particularly convincing reason. Could it have been some kind of twisted revenge fantasy?

[GUT]

I was just wondering if anyone has ever made the suggestion that the diary might have been written by Maybrick but that he wasn’t the ripper?

But why would he?? And then hide it away???

[Simon Wood]

Covering for his brother?