The Diary—Old Hoax or New?

[Graham]

Have recently started to re-read my Ripper books - and I have dozens and dozens of them. In Shirley Harrison's 'The Diary Of Jack The Ripper' she mentions a murder that took place in Battlecrease at some point prior to the Maybricks moving in. Anybody know anything about this? Must have completely slipped my memory (not difficult to do these days).

Graham

[Iconoclast]

Never heard that one before Ike.

Och aye tha noo Herlock, ma pal - it's an auld Scottish expression. I'm sure it's evident whit it means, ken?

[Iconoclast]

Can't see this happening, if memory serves he made personal threats to admin.

One would have to imagine that would be a rate-limiting step in the process of his rehabilitation, right enough ...

[Herlock Sholmes]

. Surely not every single thing I (for example) have written is utter mince?

Never heard that one before Ike.

[Kaz]

If there was any way Admin would consider letting him back on, I'd say Aye for one.

Obviously, we'd make it clear to Admin that this was a strictly one-off instance.

Can't see this happening, if memory serves he made personal threats to admin.

[Kaz]

To be fair to Lord Orsam, he has a frightful grasp of the wider information.

Hello Ike!

Indeed, great detective work by Lordy Orsam

How did he get his hands on those personal letters between mike and anne?

For me they prove Mike WAS capable of 'writing a sick note'.....before he succumbed to alcohol abuse and quite likely a form of dementia.

[Iconoclast]

Good to see he's taking his ban, sorry, his 'resignation' from the 'Censorship Forum' well.

To be fair to Lord Orsam, he has a frightful grasp of the wider information. There's barely a scrap of information which he is not capable of expanding through whatever means he has at his disposal. A good example is the 'Who is Jim?' newspaper article which did not conclusively prove it wasn't Our Jim it was referring to but certainly made it less likely to be him.

Where he lets himself down is in his terrible grasp of statistics (which I will be taking him up on in Society's Pillar eventually), his rather pompous tone (I much prefer his witty arrogance than his condescending ranting), and the self-evident fact that he simply criticises everything (and I mean everything)! One's argument is generally strengthened when one recognises the merit in a counter-argument. It gives credibility to the criticism, but the good Lord just criticises everything without pause for breath and - for me - it undermines his argument rather than reinforces it. Surely not every single thing I (for example) have written is utter mince? Maybe it is, but I feel that over the years I must have got something right occasionally. You'd just never know it from the hissing and screeching from Voldemort in the corner.

That said, I actually like him. I loved the sentiment behind Send in the Clowns (though I still haven't arsed myself to read it fully), and without him this Maybrick forum would be largely dead in the water. Certainly, it would have longer periods of stagnancy. If there was any way Admin would consider letting him back on, I'd say Aye for one.

Obviously, we'd make it clear to Admin that this was a strictly one-off instance.

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

Too much to quote ...

Hi Eliza,

Your long post reply to Caz is very revealing. I would estimate that you are in your early 20s, right? I say this because of your extraordinary use of the term 'Age of Ancestry.com' for the year 1992. To be specific, you couldn't have used Ancestry.com in Liverpool until around 1997, but - to be general - even then you'd have had to wait for the common application of the internet which probably wasn't available for most people until a few years after that. I vaguely recall getting my first broadband in about 2000, although you could use a dial-up service, of course, which I very much doubt the Barretts would have been investing heavily in during 1992. The internet was a boon to me in my profession, and yet we only got it (dial-up) at home in Iconoclast House in 1998.

Your long post was also full of assumptions which seemed to be heavily driven by your personal view of the world. This is fine, of course - we all do it - but we shouldn't confuse our assumptions about 'what I would have done' with 'what everyone else would have done'. Caz et alia knew Mike Barrett personally and that gave them a deep insight into the man and his many demons. His reasons for making a false confession were absolutely personal to him and those of us who did not know him should be wary of jumping to assumptions based upon what we find credulous and what we find not. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that Mike Barrett was deeply out-of-his-depth when he brought the scrapbook to London. His cack-handed discussion on the return journey with a stranger who turned out to be a journalist in which he couldn't help but reveal what he had in his possession (this incident ultimately led to the early revelation of the scrapbook's foil - James Maybrick - by the Liverpool Post in the Spring of 1993) indicates to us his immature, excitable, and unprofessional mentality - certainly not the mind of a brilliant master-forger. The Feldman video shows him to be effectively bewildered by the maelstrom he had unleased upon himself and his family. By 1995, with his marriage finally collapsing around him and the realisation dawning upon him that he had lost his precious daughter, the bewilderment - prompted by the booze - appears to have fermented into anger and an angry person will lash out with anything at anything. As I look in (from the outside) I do not see the obstacles you see. I see a simple man losing his slender grip on what he had left in his life, and making a false confession about the scrapbook could easily have been a last desperate hurrah to maintain his position within the maelstrom. If he was suffering from confabulation or any dementia-related illness, this would have simply redefined his actions - to him - as the truth of the matter, just as his eventual good health again appears to have prompted 'the truth' to be the original story which he had first told back in 1992.

I am heavily influenced by the man I see in the Feldman video, the man I read about in the seminal texts, the Radio Merseyside broadcast from 1995, his performance at the Cloak & Dagger Club in 1999, and the ongoing iteration of the views thus formed by those who knew Mike best and who come on here and tell us to be careful not to inflate his possible role in the scrapbook's history. Unless we have reason to feel a host of published authors with no apparent history of lying have collectively created a monster out of an angel, we should all listen to what they have to say about the man at the centre of the storm he probably had no idea he was making.

PS I think I have asked you this question before so please forgive me, but can you remind us which books you have read to date on the Maybrick scrapbook?

Cheers,

Ike

[Graham]

Ike and c.d.,

We lived in the States (NE Ohio) for a few years, way back when. I very quickly learned that Bud is the vilest muck ever to see the inside of a bottle. After much trial and testing, the American beer I found best suited to my highly-refined palate was Genesee Cream Ale (spelling?). However, I guzzled it just slightly chilled, not Arctic cold, and to my immense pleasure turned on a few of my closest American friends to the more refined manners of getting pissed. There was a beer shop down the road (owned by a highly-knowledgeable retired cop) and he kept a few beers from around the globe, including to my utmost amazement and terrific pleasure, an entire crate of Marston's Pedigree. The beer that made Burton great, and me sloshed. I hear that there are now micro-breweries dotted around the USA, producing quaff similar to European beers. Good luck to them.

These days, in my dotage, I find that real ale gives me terrific wind, upsetting the wife and scaring the cat, so I drink mostly lighter stuff, always out of bottles, and my current slurp is San Miguel which is widely available. I do like trying out 'new' continental beers, though.

Cheers!

Graham

[Iconoclast]

Yeah, he resigned like Butch and Sundance resigned from their life of crime while in Bolivia.

c.d.

Classic!

PS I have just discovered that you have to wait 30 seconds between posts - how bizarre!

[Iconoclast]

Hello Graham and Ike,

Graham - I would enjoy getting together and having a few pints some day...uh...you would be buying, right?

Ike - Glad to hear that "dissed" and other expressions have crossed the pond and rubbed off (or is that one-off) on you. Now if we can just get you to drink your beer a little colder and learn to drive on the correct side of the road I think you guys should be okay.

c.d.

Hi c.d.,

Graham's from the Midlands (where I now live) and the beer down here is coldish (nothing like the dreadful warm ale in London and its environs). I love the Pedigree especially (from Burton) and the Doom Bar (which I think is brewed much further south of both of us). But ultimately I'm a man from the cold cold north - raised in North Shields, Newcastle, and Scotland so my pint is as cold as I can get it! I'm embarrassed to say that I have even resorted to putting ice cubes in southern beer, it's that bad.

By the way, I'm currently watching the US version of 'The Office'. I love it! I'm practically American myself these days!

Cheers (erm, back atcha), buddy

Ike

[c.d.]

Good to see he's taking his ban, sorry, his 'resignation' from the 'Censorship Forum' well.

Yeah, he resigned like Butch and Sundance resigned from their life of crime while in Bolivia.

c.d.

[c.d.]

Hello Graham and Ike,

Graham - I would enjoy getting together and having a few pints some day...uh...you would be buying, right?

Ike - Glad to hear that "dissed" and other expressions have crossed the pond and rubbed off (or is that one-off) on you. Now if we can just get you to drink your beer a little colder and learn to drive on the correct side of the road I think you guys should be okay.

c.d.

[Eliza]

Hi Eliza,

I'm afraid logic tends to go out of the window for someone suffering from paranoia. Mike really did believe everyone had it in for him. "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me". The alcohol didn't help. If he thought his personal goose was already cooked, and couldn't see how there'd be any more golden eggs coming his way no matter what, then a confession - or claim [I prefer either word to 'admission', which implies you have already delivered a guilty verdict] that the diary was a recent fake, would at least help to strangle the goose he imagined was still busy laying golden eggs for everyone else - including his wife. You really have to know the whole story, but even then it's not easy for anyone not inside Mike's head at the time to imagine what he was going through - much of it self-inflicted, but no less painfully real for him.



As I said, you really have to know the whole story, of what was going on and when. How long is 'so long'? Mike's wife left him in early 1994, and things went rapidly downhill for him after that. By the April, Paul Feldman was pestering him with his latest theory of a blood relationship back to the Maybricks from the Barretts or Grahams. Mike was furious because he thought Feldman was going to try and prove his daughter Caroline was descended from Jack the Ripper [work that one out!]. It was just two months later, in the June, when Mike had had enough and told the newspaper he had written the diary himself. Far from trying 'as long as he could to keep the truth hidden', nobody up until that point had anything on him [Scotland Yard had found nothing and washed their hands of the diary in late 1993], and his perceived enemies, Feldman, Anne and the diary people, could not have been more surprised or shocked by his claim, which helped nobody, least of all Mike himself. The big money was finally coming in and things were set to get better.



It depends on what Mike considered his priorities at the time. If he thought the diary had done him more harm than good, and had ultimately robbed him of his precious only daughter, would he really have been more concerned about what happened to this 'allegedly monumental and historic find', which had been called a shabby hoax? "I've lost my daughter. I'm losing control of the diary. I'm losing control over my life. If I can't get my daughter back, or my life back, I will use the diary any way I can to get back at my enemies."

Love,

Caz
X

“Mike's wife left him in early 1994, and things went rapidly downhill for him after that. By the April, Paul Feldman was pestering him…”

Again, false confessions are rare—even when a suspect is under pressure during police interrogation. They most often occur when interrogation tactics cross over into abusiveness. They do not normally occur because of pending divorce (“my wife is leaving me, so I’ll confess to being a forger”..really?), nor because of another private individual’s “pestering.”

“Mike was furious because he thought Feldman was going to try and prove his daughter Caroline was descended from Jack the Ripper”—
So Mike was “furious” for two whole months regarding some bogus plan to “link” his daughter to Maybrick, aka Jack the Ripper—(how is that even possible, in the age of Ancestry.com—wherein it could easily be refuted?) But despite being “furious,” Mike gives Feldman two entire months to enact that nefarious plan (which never comes to fruition)—then (belatedly) decided the best way to counter this alleged action (which never actually took place) is to confess to forgery?

“Far from trying 'as long as he could to keep the truth hidden' nobody up until that point had anything on him …”

When I state that I think Mike tried to “keep the truth hidden” – it is regarding the diary’s provenance. He gave out several stories, all of which unraveled. Meantime, his wife was apparently trying to help him by throwing out other, equally implausible explanations. If Mike was “pestered”, it was mainly due to these conflicting, and increasingly nonsensical, cover stories. I think he got tired of being confronted with his lies and distortions —maybe feeling that his forgery was already close to being exposed—and decided to make a clean breast.

"I've lost my daughter. I'm losing control of the diary. I'm losing control over my life. If I can't get my daughter back, or my life back, I will use the diary any way I can to get back at my enemies."

Again, this would not plausibly be a rationale for false confession. One does not “reclaim control” over one’s life and family by admitting to fraud. Nor does one “get back at enemies” by admitting to fraud/ personal wrongdoing.

“You really have to know the whole story, of what was going on…”
I’m always skeptical when someone references an alleged complex, confusing “whole story," to explain what is otherwise pretty implausible. The fact is, none of the reasons put forth for false confession of forgery are plausible on their face.

[Iconoclast]

In case anyone is interested, David has added an addendum to his "Send in the Clowns" article. It is under the News heading. Not surprisingly he has "dissed" (American slang meaning to disrespect someone) us all again.

c.d.

Honestly, c.d., we have wall-to-wall American shows over here on satellite TV so we are familiar with the likes of 'dissed', in the same way as we are all now saying 'back in the day' (a term I feel was first dreamed-up in the excellent Blue Bloods) amongst an endless stream of other over-the-ponders.

My twenty year old daughter says 'pissed' instead of 'pissed off', and even has the audacity to pronounce a 'z' as 'zee' rather than 'zed'. Naturally, I am the English language police and correct her every time she does it ..

Back atcha, buddy. Hope you're enjoying your cwwoffee and donuts. Watch the mayo and the cream, though, or else all of those lucky ladies may become pissed with you. [Fist pump]

Uncle Ike