Maybrick--a Problem in Logic

[Mike J. G.]

I'm not so sure, Yabs. In my experience, neither case was, or is, 'common knowledge' to the average Liverpudlian, the average Londoner, or the average anyone in between.

Whenever I've stayed in Liverpool, the vast majority of the people I meet and speak to have never heard of the diary, or only vaguely recognise the name Maybrick. Their knowledge of the ripper murders is generally basic at best. I am therefore always pleasantly surprised when I find someone who has actually read a book or two on either subject. A working knowledge of both subjects is rarer still.

Of course, I accept that both cases must have been familiar enough to the author of the diary, whoever that was. One of the golden rules is to write about what you know, with an exception being for established authors who are commissioned to write on a subject they then have to research from scratch. As an average inexperienced writer, you'd have to be out of your tiny mind to believe you could easily combine any two historical figures in the one journal, simply by taking out two or three library books on each to improve on whatever 'common knowledge' you may already have had. Whether this prior knowledge was rudimentary or advanced, would you not want to be at Mastermind level with your two specialist subjects before writing a single sentence with confidence? And would your chosen source books [with all their differing details about the ripper murders, for example] give you that confidence? I know I couldn't have tried anything like this myself, and yet we are asked to believe that because Mike Barrett once had a few "tidied up" interviews and puzzles published, that shows he was capable of authoring the diary. I'd seriously like to know how any poster who routinely comes up with this argument would have set about the task.

Love,

Caz
X

Well, Caz, being that I live in Liverpool, and in Aigburth no less, all I can surmise is that you spent much of your time in Liverpool talking to young students or tourists, because I've met a good many people who are very familiar with the Maybricks, as most of the city were brought up on stories about the case as much as they were brought up on stories of "Spring-Heeled Jack" sitting atop the spiral of Saint Francis Xavier's.

You need only walk through the well-used subway at Aigburth Vale to see a mural on the wall of James and Florence, with the writing beneath reading: "Do you know the story of the Maybricks?" My own dad took me as a child to the house in Riversdale. I've also spoken about the fact that Whittington-Egan had a very popular series of books out during the 80's which featured the Maybricks, one of these books was in the possession of Mike Barrett, funnily enough. Besides Egan's popular local books, you've had Tom Slemen talk about the case many times, both on radio and in his weekly newspaper slots and his own popular series of books on local legends.

The diary was all over the news at the time in Liverpool, and has since been on the news or the radio, or the papers, whenever some new piece of silly "evidence" has arisen, such as the more recent offering of Michael Maybrick as a Ripper suspect. Whittington-Egan wrote about the Maybricks as far back as the late 60s.

I've no idea where this notion that neither case is common knowledge in the city came from, but it simply isn't grounded in reality. I doubt if many young people are familiar with the story, but I'm in my thirties, and I am, and I know a lot of people who are too. It was as much of a common and popular topic of conversation at tea as the Menlove Avenue murder or the Cameo cinema murder.

Somewhat unrelated, but interesting to me, I noticed Shirley Harrison in her book, the Diary of, lamenting that the Magical Mystery Tour doesn't go anywhere near Riversdale road, yet for the life of me I've no idea why the bloody hell it would! None of the Beatles lived anywhere near it!

Anyway...Allo, folks, longtime no see. Hope you're all swell and stuff. Have a jar on me, maybe at the Poste House!

[Harry D]

Anyway...Allo, folks, longtime no see. Hope you're all swell and stuff. Have a jar on me, maybe at the Poste House!

And here I thought you were a sobering influence in this thread.

[Mike J. G.]

And here I thought you were a sobering influence in this thread.

I originally read that as slobbering influence Honeshtly, I'm not pished!

[Mike J. G.]

Of course, I accept that both cases must have been familiar enough to the author of the diary, whoever that was. One of the golden rules is to write about what you know, with an exception being for established authors who are commissioned to write on a subject they then have to research from scratch. As an average inexperienced writer, you'd have to be out of your tiny mind to believe you could easily combine any two historical figures in the one journal, simply by taking out two or three library books on each to improve on whatever 'common knowledge' you may already have had. Whether this prior knowledge was rudimentary or advanced, would you not want to be at Mastermind level with your two specialist subjects before writing a single sentence with confidence? And would your chosen source books [with all their differing details about the ripper murders, for example] give you that confidence? I know I couldn't have tried anything like this myself, and yet we are asked to believe that because Mike Barrett once had a few "tidied up" interviews and puzzles published, that shows he was capable of authoring the diary. I'd seriously like to know how any poster who routinely comes up with this argument would have set about the task.

Something else I've touched on in these forums regarding this particular Maybrick case, is that the lack of understanding about hoaxes, hoaxers, and hucksters, will ultimately lead you down a very wild, and very hilarious garden path.

The constant wonderment of people who cannot grasp why a person would go to so much trouble, to so great a length, to pull the wool over our eyes, yet seemingly make silly mistakes along the way, well that's how hoaxers "work." They're people, they're as much a beacon of human error as anyone else. If you choose to omit the history of hoaxing when you regard the Maybrick diaries, then you're doing logic a disservice, simple as that.

"Everybody loves a good story. And the more unbelievable the tale, it appears, the more people are willing it to be true: convincing themselves that its ludicrous detail is unquestionable, too bizarre to be fake. Surely, they might ask, nobody would go to such lengths to lie without good reason. Time and time again, however, it seems they would do just that, and on a vast scale."

[Scott Nelson]

Interesting quote at the end there, Mike. It kind of reminds me of Harry Dam.

[Trapperologist]

Studying hoaxes is one of my favorite pass times. I’ve found out I’ve been fooled by hoaxers and at least one debunk and I know how hard it is to create a good one. This one like the others has at least 3 sides, not just real or fake. Why would one “logical” rationale apply to only one specific theory?

[Trapperologist]

One side, old hoax theory, doesn't have a story in any detail or any story at all, so how can it be judged? Is it just assumed to be unbelievable because I guess it would have to be? That's logical.

However logic is just something that "makes sense". That however doesn't constitute "common sense", much less prove anything. Example: A diary of a businessman should have a provenance. Seems logical but does it really make common sense? I don't see there being common sense to that if he's a serial killer. The same goes with the other questions of logic. We're not talking about a work of art or a business transaction. Logic gets thrown out the window but never common sense.

[Iconoclast]

We could talk all day - and so confidently! - about hoaxes, and slip in the Victorian scrapbook as a means of implying it too is one such a hoax, but unless we show it to be so, one should be at very least wary of making a false (hmmm mendacious?) claim.

To date - to my knowledge (which, as you all know, is muchos considerable) - only that venerable octogenarian himself, Lord Lucifus Orsam, has presented us with anything which even vaguely quacks like a duck when he suggested that Maybrick meant "one-off instance" when he quite reasonably actually meant "a one off instance" which is, interestingly, what he actually wrote.

Never fear, Maybrick Peeps, old Ike remains steadfast in the face of unwarranted claims against the authenticity of the Victorian scrapbook. And always will. Now there's a New Year's resolution to be proud of!

Ike

[Trapperologist]

To date - to my knowledge (which, as you all know, is muchos considerable) - only that venerable octogenarian himself, Lord Lucifus Orsam, has presented us with anything which even vaguely quacks like a duck when he suggested that Maybrick meant "one-off instance" when he quite reasonably actually meant "a one off instance" which is, interestingly, what he actually wrote.

I never heard that explanation before, Ike, but you might be right. The idiom "one off chance" existed in that time period. I think you've just shown us another reason to accept the possible existence of "one off instance" in a Victorian "diary" entry.

We already have one as the theory that it takes 70 years for "one-off instance" to evolve from "one-off" hasn't been proven. Although logical at first sight, doesn't it forget the fact that we're talking about two worlds -- the technical and common/everyday? The first examples of "one off instance" are in the 1970s, as I recall. Where are the examples of "one-off" by itself in the same, non-technical literature?

Back to the Victorian usage: Couldn't it be a bit of both perhaps - one off-instance (like you suggest, Ike) and one-off instance?

[Iconoclast]

I never heard that explanation before, Ike, but you might be right. The idiom "one off chance" existed in that time period. I think you've just shown us another reason to accept the possible existence of "one off instance" in a Victorian "diary" entry.

We already have one as the theory that it takes 70 years for "one-off instance" to evolve from "one-off" hasn't been proven. Although logical at first sight, doesn't it forget the fact that we're talking about two worlds -- the technical and common/everyday? The first examples of "one off instance" are in the 1970s, as I recall. Where are the examples of "one-off" by itself in the same, non-technical literature?

Back to the Victorian usage: Couldn't it be a bit of both perhaps - one off-instance (like you suggest, Ike) and one-off instance?

Hi Trappy,

I have argued exactly this before - that Maybrick was writing 'live', he wasn't copying a pre-existing script (not even one of Mike Barrett's mooted typescripts), and his thoughts were forming as he wrote and that they could have ended-up being ill-thought out and therefore rather clumsy. He could have just left them in because he hadn't noticed how strangely he had written, or he may have noticed and not cared (it was for his eyes only at that time so what was it to him?), or he may have noticed but been too keen to keep on documenting his disgusting thoughts. Thus, he may have written that he had hit Florrie but reassured her it would not happen again, indeed that it was "a..." something which in his mind became "a one …" [a tautology much favoured by at very least north-east Engerlanders if not north-west] over which he then mentally stumbled because he realised he didn't have the vocabulary to complete the thought process so he simply added what should have read "'off' instance". Thus, what has been interpreted (not unreasonably) as the equivalent of the frankly impossible "a one-off instance" became the equivalent of the very inarticulate and extremely unlikely "a one 'off' instance" which you correctly record as "off-instance".

Now, major league sense check here: It is far more likely that the author of the Victorian scrapbook fully intended to write "one-off instance" and that he or she missed out the vital hyphen than it is that he or she stumbled over the equivalent of "a one 'off' instance". If this was the case then we pro-scrapbookers have a major league headache because - living briefly in the real world here - that shouldn't have been possible if the juxtaposition of "one-off" and "event" or "instance" had never previously been documented nor then documented formally again until the early 1980s (I think it was). There are ways around this issue but the huge time difference (almost a century) causes our arguments to sound as contrived and hollow as the pathetic attempts of Christian Apologists to rationalise away the rather thorny instructions God gave in Exodus for owning slaves. We perhaps sound like we are trying too hard to defend our bible, and I wouldn't ever want to fall into that trap, although I have no doubt that I have lost my footing occasionally around the periphery of it from time to time.

The Silent Century where "one-off instance" is not formally in print is a very difficult piece of the jigsaw to fit in unless one accepts that we are actually dealing with the actual evidence of a hoax. I'm pretty sanguine about this. I don't believe for a moment that the scrapbook is a hoax (I think Society's Pillar makes my reasons for this fairly clear) but if it is a hoax I will shed only a few tears whilst I am applauding the remarkable trick that was played on me (and the two other people in the world who ever thought Maybrick was Jack the Ripper). I just want to know the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter at present is that we don't know for certain that James Maybrick could not reasonably have written "a one off instance" in his scrapbook in the late 1880s. I'm not sure what would make me certain that he could not have written that expression, but I do know what would make me certain he could have done - namely, an example of "one-off" and "event" or "instance" (or whatever) from significantly earlier than the 1980s, and ideally more like the 1880s. We await that example, so for now we have to accept that Lord Orsam has us by the short and curlies, even if he has lost one of his principle means of squeezing them.

Ike

[Trapperologist]

The only thing Orsam had was the earliest known published example of "one-off" (1903) and it was in a technical journal, which proves, according to general acceptance of mainstream dictionaries, that the idiom existed in technical parlance at least up to 50 years earlier so 1850 or so.

The question remains how long it takes to go from the technical term "one off" to "one off instance" in a non-technical sense which would have only showed up in daily non-technical parlance or a personal letter or journal.

That "lengthy evolution" or "spontaneous creation" would repeat itself once the term "one off" made the jump from the advanced primordial soup of the technical world into the primitive common lexicon of average people talking about everyday, "abstract" subjects. So when did that jump happen? I don't think it happened at the turn of the century.

[Trapperologist]

Now, major league sense check here: It is far more likely that the author of the Victorian scrapbook fully intended to write "one-off instance" and that he or she missed out the vital hyphen than it is that he or she stumbled over the equivalent of "a one 'off' instance". If this was the case then we pro-scrapbookers have a major league headache because - living briefly in the real world here - that shouldn't have been possible if the juxtaposition of "one-off" and "event" or "instance" had never previously been documented nor then documented formally again until the early 1980s (I think it was).

You're right about "one off instance". The earliest use was 1981 according to Google Books - Parliamentary Debates, Vol 1. 1981

The earliest example of "one off" or "a one off"* used in a non technical document - The Value of Life, Andy Crowson, 1976

That gives me a five year evolution. There are plenty of technical examples through the 60s and much earlier but no non-technical.

*Admittedly I searched for "a one off" but I don't think I was cheating there. I was just trying to avoid the other types of examples that juxtapose one and off like "picked one off the shelf".

[Trapperologist]

Studying hoaxes is one of my favorite pass times. I’ve found out I’ve been fooled by hoaxers and at least one debunk and I know how hard it is to create a good one. This one like the others has at least 3 sides, not just real or fake. Why would one “logical” rationale apply to only one specific theory?

I found a good example to compare to the watch and diary. They're the Kensington Runestone and the Beardmore Artifacts. They reinforce each other and were about 38 years apart in their supposed discovery. As Mike JG said there are plenty of people willing to create hoaxes and believe in them. The alleged Viking artifacts had support from a museum curator, a Viking historian, and had a game warden testifying as an eye witness. The point here is that, although there are plenty of people willing to go through the effort to create a hoax and to risk their reputation, or non-reputation, to believe in it, there's always a rational reason for them to do that.

They have a personal reason to create or to believe in a hoax. It validates something they believe in, or there's some gain involved.

I won't ask about Mike's motivation for allegedly forging it and framing James. People will say money but I would ask why he would even blatantly frame James and make it obvious who he was framing as Jack.

But I will ask about the believers because I don't see too much motivation for someone like Ike to believe in the diary and the watch (if they are hoaxes) the same way someone would believe in a pre-Columbian Nordic artifact. What would be Ike's reason for supporting them if they're hoaxes?

[Iconoclast]

They have a personal reason to create or to believe in a hoax. It validates something they believe in, or there's some gain involved.

But I will ask about the believers because I don't see too much motivation for someone like Ike to believe in the diary and the watch (if they are hoaxes) the same way someone would believe in a pre-Columbian Nordic artifact. What would be Ike's reason for supporting them if they're hoaxes?

Hi Trappy,

I would have to contest two false premises in your post.

Firstly, there is no requirement for a 'personal' reason to believe anything. In this case, I believe that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper primarily because of what is contained in the scrapbook and the watch and not for any 'personal' drivers whatsoever. If the hoax is finally unmasked, I'll move on, frustrated that I was wrong, but not broken by it.

Secondly, if the scrapbook and the watch were both shown to be hoaxes, I wouldn't believe in them at all, and I would be shocked if anyone else then did.

The Maybrick saga has created the sort of hostile divisions more familiar to us in religious conflicts. We should not be fooled any further by this. There is nothing religious about the Maybrick proposal. It is not a question of blind faith, however tempting it may be to think it sometimes. It's simply a question of facts - and the fact that we do not have enough of them currently to resolve this thorny (pardon the pun) issue means that the debate must go on, though the allusion to anything faith-based should most certainly not.

Amen to that, your graces …

Ike

[Abby Normal]

Hi Trappy,

I would have to contest two false premises in your post.

Firstly, there is no requirement for a 'personal' reason to believe anything. In this case, I believe that James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper primarily because of what is contained in the scrapbook and the watch and not for any 'personal' drivers whatsoever. If the hoax is finally unmasked, I'll move on, frustrated that I was wrong, but not broken by it.

Secondly, if the scrapbook and the watch were both shown to be hoaxes, I wouldn't believe in them at all, and I would be shocked if anyone else then did.

The Maybrick saga has created the sort of hostile divisions more familiar to us in religious conflicts. We should not be fooled any further by this. There is nothing religious about the Maybrick proposal. It is not a question of blind faith, however tempting it may be to think it sometimes. It's simply a question of facts - and the fact that we do not have enough of them currently to resolve this thorny (pardon the pun) issue means that the debate must go on, though the allusion to anything faith-based should most certainly not.

Amen to that, your graces …

Ike

why is thorny a pun?