Maybrick Diary Typescript 1992 (KS Ver.)

[caz]

Hi Caz.

If you want to believe that Barrett found the five-word quote in the Liverpool Library in the way he claimed he did (and welcome to the Barrett Believers Club), I'll never convince you otherwise.

All I can do is explain to you why I (and others) remain unconvinced and assume the role of non-Barrett Believers.

What does the photo from Inside Story tell us?

It tells us that the LCL complex of libraries have a copy of the book (two copies) on the public shelves. It's a massive library so this is perhaps not too surprising.

And knowing this, how did you and your co-authors find the book?

Because Mike Barrett identified the title.

And because of that, it was an easy matter for you to locate it and photograph it.

But the real question still remains: how did Mike Barrett identify the title?

It's like taking a photograph of an unearthed chest, taken from a hole in the sand underneath an unidentified palm tree, showing that Mike Barrett found Captain Kidd's treasure just like he said he did.

But that still doesn't even begin to explain how Mike could have found the chest, underneath this particular palm tree, on this particular sand dune, on this particular island, in this particular archipelago of islands.

If your only explanation is because Barrett already owned that series of books back home...then aren't you back to square one?

Well, I really think Palmer should make up his mind what he wants to argue. If Mike had one or more of the Sphere volumes at home before taking them round to Jenny's in the summer of 1994, then it follows that any book from the same series would have looked very familiar to him on the library shelves in the last week of September - assuming he could read the names above the various sections and could find his way to the small section on the History of Literature.

The treasure hunt analogy therefore doesn't work.

It's all down to whether Jenny's books included a volume 2, and whether Mike already knew its significance when he carelessly gave this 'evidence' away to her son, after using it for creating the diary.

The well-thumbed volume which Mike failed to show anyone until December 1994, when he finally gave it to Alan Gray, does not fit neatly or comfortably with the theory. And Palmer must surely see this. Nothing ever quite adds up when it comes to Mike's fakery claims. Palmer might wish to reflect on why that might be.

[rjpalmer]

The well-thumbed volume which Mike failed to show anyone until December 1994, when he finally gave it to Alan Gray, does not fit neatly or comfortably with the theory. And Palmer must surely see this. Nothing ever quite adds up when it comes to Mike's fakery claims. Palmer might wish to reflect on why that might be.

The last we hear of Gray (in very early 1998), he is referring to Barrett as 'scum' and a 'rat.' The two men had a falling out.

So how did Gray wrestle this book from Barrett six years later, when he sold it to Keith?

What is the provenance story? Barrett, when asked for the volume, simply handed it over? Do I have that right?

[caz]

What if Barrett thought the phrase 'O Costly Intercourse of Death' came from Shakespeare?

It's an entirely reasonable guess and a good place for Barrett to have started during his "serious week."

Let's do the math.

Shakespeare wrote 38 plays. These plays are made up of 118,406 individual lines. (Scholars have checked)

Barrett is going to need to scan these lines in order to try and identify the quote.

If he scans a line every half second, quickly running his finger down the line, and not taking any breaks, nor even pausing to flip the page as he goes through all 38 plays,

it will take him just under 16 and a half hours.

16.4 hours.

That's Mike's first two days--if he puts in 8 hours with no breaks and no eyestrain-- and he's failed. And he's robbed himself of lunch and any cigarette breaks over a 16-hour vigil, let alone a stop by the pub.

So now, let's pretend that Mike decides to skip the works of Marlowe and Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher --for no good reason--decides to move on the Victorians. Maybrick was a Victorian.

Mike, having a plan, goes through the major stars in alphabetical order. He starts with Matthew Arnold.

I just checked. The LCL has a copy of the collected poems of Arnold (dated 1979, so it is likely to have been there in 1992). It's 723 pages in length.

If Mike spends only 15 seconds on each page, Mike can go through four pages in a minute.

723 divided by 4 is 180 minutes. It took Mike 3 hours to give Arnold a once-over.

Refusing to give up, Mike moves on to Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Selected poems, 330 pages).

Next, he moves on to Robert Browning. The LCL has a two-volume set. Dear Lord. Volume One is 1218 pages in length. Volume Two is 1156 pages.

I'm not going to do the math but it's already Wednesday afternoon, and Barrett isn't even in the correct section of the library yet.

So, Caz, this is why I, Melvin, Karoline Leech, John Omlor and others decided twenty years ago that Barrett's tale is complete malarky.

And the only source for it is Mike Barrett.

That's enough for March. Have fun with it.

I wonder if Mike Barrett would have chuckled to see Palmer doing the 'math', before saying he is not going to do the 'math', in his heroic efforts to imagine how he might have gone about the task - if he didn't know a Sphere volume from a bar of soap.

Mike's brain in September 1994 was arguably a whole lot less encumbered. His eyes would have fallen on the small section in the library on the History of Literature and spied at least two of the familiar Sphere volumes - 2 and 6 - close to each other on the small number of shelves, and thought fondly of Jenny, who had recently given house room to books from the same series.

The rest, as they say, is [the Sphere] history.

[caz]

That Mike identified the author as Richard Crashaw and announced that the excerpt could be found in an essay in The Sphere History of Literature is not in dispute; he told this to Shirley Harrison during a phone call in the autumn of 1994, claiming he found it among the massive stacks in the Liverpool Library.

Did Mike describe finding the source among 'massive stacks'? Or is Palmer over-egging the pudding when he really ought to have no need if his argument is so strong?

Against Mike's unproven account, we have two independent witnesses that could confirm that Barrett had already owned the volume before he told Shirley of this mythical trip to the library.

Let that sink in.

Palmer has not yet, to my knowledge, substantiated this claim that anyone confirmed seeing Volume 2 of the Sphere series in Mike's possession at any time - before Tuesday 6th December 1994, when it is documented that Alan Gray took a used copy of this volume from Mike's hands. On the following day, 7th December, the Barretts were divorced.

"Mike's family" (meaning his sister) told Alan Gray that she had already seen the volume in Mike's possession before the Diary even emerged. That is, before 1992.

Where does Mike's sister name the book as volume 2? A direct quote would be nice to see, but a flying pig would be more likely.

And what was Anne Graham doing, searching for the quote in the library and 'utterly' failing? Why would she have put herself through this silly charade, if she had checked Mike's copy in early April 1992 to see how the five words appeared in the actual poem, before copying them by hand into the diary and getting the two-line format right, but two of the words wrong? Remember, the typescript they were supposedly using [and the topic of this thread, which Palmer seems to have forgotten] has all five words along the one line, so someone must have gone back to the source if the Barretts were responsible for both documents.

And Mike's brief (and ultimately estranged) girlfriend, Jenny Morrison, did too, as told to Shirley Harrison:

"Jenny still has Sphere volumes minus the relevant one which Mike took when he left + £70!"

Those words come from a handwritten note made by Keith Skinner on Thursday 5th December 1996, after Shirley phoned him. They come after he notes that Anne has obtained a copy of volume 2 from the library and is photocopying the relevant page. There is no confirmation that the 'relevant' book, which Jenny no longer has by then, was volume 2, or what she means by 'when he left' and when exactly that was. Would Jenny have known which book was 'relevant' and why, if Mike took one of them as a souvenir?

I invite you to dismiss Mike's version of events, and listen instead to Jenny Morrison and Lynne Richardson, who had no dog in the race.

Neither of whom is down on the record as confirming that Mike ever owned volume 2 - unless Palmer has a record of it that even eluded Mighty Melvin Harris, who conceded that Jenny only spoke of a number of books, and didn't name any specifically.

Back on Wednesday 12th October 1994, Shirley left a phone message for Keith, during which she said that Anne denied all knowledge of the books and the Hillsborough auction, while Mike insisted he discovered the reference at the library and later recalled that he had 'these particular books', which were the ones he had loaned to Jenny's son. He told Shirley he had an appointment that afternoon [12th] with his solicitor to discuss the divorce, and would take the 'book' with him.

For whatever reason, it didn't happen. If he went round to Jenny's expecting to find a volume 2, he failed to take anything to his solicitor that afternoon. In fact, there is no record of Mike attending the offices that day, nor at any time between 25th August 1994 and 9th January 1995, although numerous telephone calls were logged.

One of these calls was made the very next day, on Thursday 13th October 1994, and lasted half an hour. The solicitor's assistant took the call from Mike and made a note of his claimed library find, and that the phrase came from page 184 of Vol 2.

No volume 2 in sight; no mention of Mike having his own copy; and no record of it being lodged or withdrawn from his solicitor's offices at any time.

A reasonable conclusion from this sequence of events would be that if Mike assumed Jenny would have the 'relevant' book among those he had taken round that summer, he was disappointed, and had to spend the next eight weeks looking for his own copy of volume 2 in second-hand bookshops.

[caz]

The last we hear of Gray (in very early 1998), he is referring to Barrett as 'scum' and a 'rat.' The two men had a falling out.

So how did Gray wrestle this book from Barrett six years later, when he sold it to Keith?

What is the provenance story? Barrett, when asked for the volume, simply handed it over? Do I have that right?

I'm not sure what Palmer is drinking these days, but mine's a pint.

In case anyone else is as confused as Palmer, I'll say it once more: Mike handed the book over to Alan Gray on 6th December 1994. No wrestling required.

[caz]

It's high time this thread returned to topic. So my next post will concentrate on the typescript compared with the diary in relation to the Crashaw poem.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

I'm not sure what Palmer is drinking these days, but mine's a pint.

In case anyone else is as confused as Palmer, I'll say it once more: Mike handed the book over to Alan Gray on 6th December 1994. No wrestling required.

O, I have no doubt about the pint, rest assured.

Since you asked: I'm drinking water and herbal tea these days--I heartily recommend them for increased clarity of thought.

Moving along,

Melvin Harris described Vol. II as being in his possession in 2002 and Melvin died very early in 2004. What happened to Melvin's library after he died, I have no idea, but I do know that Melvin did not live in the same area of the UK as Gray.

Since Barrett and Gray parted company in the mid--1990s--and hardly on the best of terms--and thus Gray and Harris had little need of contact after that---the question as to how Gray ended up with the book that he sold to Keith Skinner for £100 that August is not as self-evident as you assume.

If the nuts-and-bolts of such minutia don't interest you, perhaps they would interest Keith. I'm just mildly curious as to how it all came to be.

* * *

The burden you bear as that all this claptrap about the Liverpool Central Library is traceable to one single, solitary, and unsupported source: Michael John Barrett.

And yet you believe him.

The same bloke whose research notes vaguely chronicle spinning the handles of microfilm readers and consulting old newspapers, etc. in the same LCL.

I remember it well. Once this was pointed out to be poppycock by your friend Lord Orsam, you readily admitted that Barrett's notes could have been made up to "impress" Shirley Harrison.

I humbly suggest that Mike's second mythical research trip to the LCL is precisely the same. He "impressed" Shirley with a story of spending a "serious week" in the LCL, when the book had been in his possession the whole time.

Ditto Mike's bogus tale of "accidentally" finding a reference to Battlecrease in a bookstore, when Martin Howells, Bonsey Thomas, and the Devereux sisters proved he had had it all the time and had lent it out to Tony Devereux in 1991.

Why you are so eager to suddenly take Barrett's word for this time around is hard grasp, but it smells a lot like self-deception and denial.

If anyone needs another reminder, this is Keith Skinner's note, dated Monday 3rd October 1994, of the phone message Shirley left for him:

'Mike seems to have found "Oh Costly Intercourse of Death" – quite by chance.
Is in the Sphere Companion To English Literature Vol 6 (MB thinks) – did not even make a note of it!'

Let's hold it right there.

While I doubt this will trouble the sleep of the few people who still believe the diary is something other than a modern hoax, more critical thinkers might wonder why Shirley is describing Mike finding the quote "quite by chance" on 3 October 1994.

What did Mike mean, 'quite by chance'?

Already trouble is brewing.

To my mind, this directly contradicts Shirley's later explanation of having specifically encouraged Barrett to search for the source of the quote, and Mike telling her he spent a "serious week" doing so in the Liverpool Library.

Why would anyone who engaged in such a long and excruciatingly boring task turn around and tell his taskmistress that he found the quote "quite by chance," when it would have been through blood, sweat, toil, and tears?

This contradiction signals that Barrett couldn't even keep a straight story when telling it to Shirley Harrison (nor could he even give her the correct citation--more evidence that Mike never left his sofa before making this phone call) and I strong suspect that Shirley later became confused about which of Mike's multiple versions to believe and to pass along to the reading public.

[rjpalmer]

Did Mike describe finding the source among 'massive stacks'? Or is Palmer over-egging the pudding when he really ought to have no need if his argument is so strong?

Let's see if this accusation holds up.

I think the term massive stacks is entirely appropriate.

Below is a photograph of one section of the Picton Reading Room at the Liverpool Central Library.




Recall that according to Keith, an independent and friendly observer muttered 'no way!' when seeing first-hand what Barrett would have been up against.

And guess what? The volume wouldn't have been in the Picton Reading Room. The great literary detective Mike Barrett could have spent a month looking and he would have failed.

Consulting maps of the place, the Liverpool Central Library is made up of several floors and annexes--multiple "libraries."

This is what led to different librarians giving different information to Melvin and Shirley all those years ago: some stating they had the volume, and others saying they didn't have the volume.

The volumes on-shelf were in the International Library on the floor underneath the Picton Reading Room, whereas Melvin had been directed to the Humanities section, which only had the volume in storage, but was not listed in the computerized catalogue.

It's all well and good to pretend how easy Mike's task would have been after he's already identified the volume for subsequent researchers.

Just as it is all well and good to publish a snapshot of a single section of one shelf in the correct library sub-section and pretend that Barrett would have been led to it like a moth to a flame.

The only way that would have happened is if Barrett knew where to look, because he already owned this series of books.

Which forces you to swallow one hell of a coincidence.

It's a no-brainer. Barrett was lying.

[caz]

So...

Crashaw's words from the typescript:

Oh costly intercourse of death


Crashaw's words from the diary itself:

Oh costly intercourse
of death


The brief extract from Crashaw's poem, reproduced halfway down page 187 of my 1970 paperback edition of Sphere volume 2, which Mike claimed was his source for the five words in the diary:

O costly intercourse
Of deaths, & worse,
Divided loves. While son & mother
Discourse alternate wounds to one another.
('Sancta Maria')


Here is the first part of Crashaw's SANCTA MARIA DOLORUM, from my 1858 edition of THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RICHARD CRASHAW:

Page 186 -

In shade of death's sad tree
Stood doleful she ;
Ah, she ! now by none other
Name to be known, alas ! But Sorrow's Mother.
Before her eyes
Her's, and the whole world's joys,
Hanging all torn, she sees, and in His woes
And pains her pangs and throes.
Each wound of His from every part,
All, more at home in Her own heart.

What kind of marble, then,
Is that cold man
Who can look on and see,
Nor keep such noble sorrow's company ?
Sure even from you,
My flints, some drops are due,
To see so many unkind swords contest
So fast for one soft breast ;
While with a faithful, mutual flood
Her eyes bleed tears, His wounds weep blood !

Top of page 187 -

O, costly intercourse
Of death's, and worse
Divided loves : while Son and Mother
Discourse alternate wounds to one another !
Quick deaths that grow
And gather as they come and go ;
His nails write swords in Her ; which soon Her heart
Pays back, with more than their own smart ;
Her swords, still growing with His pain,
Turn spears, and straight come home again...

The poem continues from there and ends on page 190.

For good measure, here are a few lines of verse from the end of page 188:

...Come, wounds ! come, darts !
Nail'd hands ! and piercèd hearts !
Come, your whole selves, Sorrow's great Son and
Mother,
Nor grudge a younger brother
Of griefs his portion, who, had all their due,
One single wound should not have left for you...


It's worth seeing the context in which the five word quote appears in the diary itself, bearing in mind that Mike would only have seen the four lines of the poem reproduced in the Sphere volume. He said the quote was a "cracking" one to include because it referred to intercourse and death, but I don't recall him explaining why it was used at that specific point in the diary text:

...I am cold curse the bastard Lowry for making
me rip I keep seeing blood pouring from
the bitches. The nightmares are hideous
I cannot stop myself from wanting to eat more.
God help me, damn you No no-one will stop me
God be damned.

Think think think write tell all prove to them
you are who you say you are make them believe
it is the truth I tell. Damn him for creating
them, damn him damn him damn him. I want
to boil boil boil. See if there eyes pop.
I need more thrills, cannot live without
my thrills. I will go on, I will go on, nothing
will stop me nothing Cut Sir Jim cut. Cut deep
deep deep.

Sir Jim will cut them all [line crossed out in diary]

Oh costly intercourse
of death

Banish the thoughts banish them banish them
ha ha ha, look towards the sensible brother
chickens running around with
their heads cut off

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Am I not a clever fellow
out foxed them all, they will never know...


Finally, spot the differences in the Barrett typescript:

...I am cold, curse the bastard Lowry for making me rip. I keep seeing blood
pouring from the bitches. The nightmares are hideous I cannot stop myself
from wanting to eat more. God help me, damn you No no one will stop me
God be damned.

think think think write tell all prove to them you are who you say you are
make them believe it is the truth I tell. Damn him for creating them,
damn him damn him hamn him. I want to boil boil boil see if their eyes
pop. I need more thrills, I will go on, I will go on, nothing will stop me
nothing. Cut Sir Jim cut. Cut deep deep deep.

* Sir Jim will cut them all * [indicating the crossed out line]

Oh costly intercourse of death

Banish the thoughts banish them banish them
ha ha ha, look towards the sensible brother
chickens running around with
their heads cut off.

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Am I not a clever fellow
out foxed them all, they will never know...


Thoughts?

I have done my best to format everything as it appears in the various sources, except for where lines are inset, which works for me on a word document but not when I try to copy and paste the inset lines over here.

Love,

Caz
X

[Pcdunn]

Good to see this, and I appreciate Palmer withdrawing the claim. I thought I was going slightly mad when I read that Shirley had ascertained that volume 2 was not on the library shelves in late September 1994. That would have been the closest Palmer had come so far to putting a spanner in the Battlecrease works.

One remaining mystery is why Mike would be telling Martine, Shirley and his solicitor that he had been to the library and found where 'o costly...' came from, at a time when he was trying to gather evidence to support his initial 'confession' to faking the diary himself. If all he had to do was to collect his volume 2 from Jenny and shove it under the noses of all the people he believed were conspiring against him, what on earth was the library story all about? At the very least he would presumably have checked that the right book was there to find, before giving people the relevant details, or it could well have proved to be yet another of his senseless lies.

As a retired academic librarian, I would like to remind us that if the instant answers of the Internet didn't exist then in the same way they do today, there was a reference book called "Bartlett's Quotations" which listed famous quotes from prose and poetry by topic, such as "love", "life", and oh, let's say, "death".

Using this book to look up a suitable quotation for The Diary, getting the title and author from it , and then finding the poem in a specific volume could be done with considetably less time and effort than Mr. Palmer's suggestion of scanning poetry anthologies of Victorian authors.

This theory still doesn't explain whether Mike actually had a copy of the Sphere series of criticism, but offers a more efficient research approach to locate a poem.

[rjpalmer]

Using this book to look up a suitable quotation for The Diary, getting the title and author from it , and then finding the poem in a specific volume could be done with considetably less time and effort than Mr. Palmer's suggestion of scanning poetry anthologies of Victorian authors.

Hi Pcdunn.

Thanks, but unfortunately what you say isn't true.

There is only one quote in the diary, and you don't seem to appreciate the utter obscurity of it.

Crashaw's obscure 17th Century religious poem is not indexed in Bartlett's.

People have checked.

In fact, it's never been found in any poetry index and Feldman's researchers failed to find it (as did Shirley Harrison) even using the assistance of librarians.

With this failing, how exactly was Barrett supposed to proceed in 1994?

[rjpalmer]

And let us recall that this librarian, even in the wildly unlikely chance they recognized these five words of Richard Crashaw, wouldn't merely need to direct Mike Barrett to Crashaw, or to his Collected Works, he or she would also have needed to direct Mike to an obscure literary essay about an entirely different author--George Herbert--included in the multiple volumed The Sphere History of Literature.

That's where Barrett 'found' the excerpt. In a book of critical essays.

There's not a librarian in the world who has read and memorized every literary essay ever written and could direct someone to the poetry excerpts found inside it. Even if the quote had been in Bartlett's, it wouldn't direct the reader to an essay inside a volume of literary criticism.

[rjpalmer]

In fact, there is no record of Mike attending the offices that day,nor at any time between 25th August 1994 and 9th January 1995, although numerous telephone calls were logged.

I wonder about the accuracy of this statement. The audio tape for 6 December 1994 certainly sounds like Gray is describing, in real time, a visit to Barrett's solicitor. There is a short break in the tape and Gray then describes The Sphere History, Volume II, as he holds it in his hand.

[rjpalmer]

I wonder about the accuracy of this statement. The audio tape for 6 December 1994 certainly sounds like Gray is describing, in real time, a visit to Barrett's solicitor. There is a short break in the tape and Gray then describes The Sphere History, Volume II, as he holds it in his hand.

Well, it's been 19 days, so I suppose I'm not going to get an answer, but let me just bump this once, and then leave it.

We're told that there is no record of Barrett having visited his solicitor between 25 August 1994 and 9 January 1995, but it sure sounds like Gray is describing a visit to Mike's solicitor on 6 December 1994, and afterwards describes the Sphere volume.

So, what's the explanation? Are these records of Mike visiting his solicitor incomplete, and thus we really have no idea when Barrett lodged the volume?

[Iconoclast]

Well, it's been 19 days, so I suppose I'm not going to get an answer, but let me just bump this once, and then leave it. We're told that there is no record of Barrett having visited his solicitor between 25 August 1994 and 9 January 1995, but it sure sounds like Gray is describing a visit to Mike's solicitor on 6 December 1994, and afterwards describes the Sphere volume. So, what's the explanation? Are these records of Mike visiting his solicitor incomplete, and thus we really have no idea when Barrett lodged the volume?

Missed this one, RJ. The November 6, 1994 tape (I think it was that one) as I recall records Mike Barrett going into his solicitor's office. This is relayed to us by Ace Detective, of course, but we can assume it was the correct solicitors. There is a delay whilst Ace awaits Barrett's return. This occurs fairly shortly thereafter. Ace then reports Mike producing a copy of the Sphere book. This moment is as close as Ace ever gets to believing that he has fulfilled his destiny and proven that Barrett hoaxed the Maybrick scrapbook.

Of course, over time, Ace sold a copy of the Sphere book to Keith Skinner (for £100).

Now, questions (as Gareth would say in The Office):

• Did Barrett go into the solicitors office with the book already on his person?
• Did he therefore come out with it again having had a brief chat with the staff in the office?
• Was the book he gave to Ace Detective the same book Ace sold to Keith Skinner?
• If so, why did it appear to be a second-hand copy with student notation added to earlier sections?

If the copy Ace Detective received from Barrett had been the copy Sphere had sent Barrett for his Hillsborough appeal and if that copy had been stored for safe keeping with Barrett's solicitor, two things should have been true:

• The book should have been pretty much pristine (certainly, there ought not to have been any notation in the earlier sections of it), and
• The solicitor should have had a record of the book being deposited with them and also a record of it having been removed again on November 6 (still to be checked), 1994.

Ace Detective appears to have only ever sold one copy of the Sphere book to anyone so it doesn't appear that he was nipping out every weekend to book shops to acquire additional copies of his new cash cow to milk. From this, one might infer that the copy he sold to Keith Skinner was his only copy and - thus - that it was the very copy that Barrett had given him back in November 1994.

If that is true, why was this book - a gift from Sphere to generate cash for a tragedy acknowledged the world over - apparently a rather dog-eared second hand copy with scribbled notes in sections far from the Crashaw quotation?

It's got me totally beat. Mike Barrett said this was the book he had lodged with his solicitors and he needed something to show Ace Detective to 'prove' that the stories he was telling him were true.

Well, how could Sphere have sent Barrett such a poor version of their book? What an insulting act that was!

Or did Ace Detective have a hoard of them in his garage to sell to Maybrick researchers should he ever come across one?

To quote the great hoaxer himself, "I just don't know".