The One Where James Maybrick was Jack the Ripper

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm really not sure what you mean by questioning my claim that 'one-off' was a term used in the LVP, Herlock? Bizarrely (and it really is bizarre) you then immediately answer your own question in the very next sentence! It is the same as claiming, "There are no blue balls other than that blue ball over there."

I said, "I don't think there is much debate about the use of 'one-off' in the LVP". Seemed pretty clear-cut when I typed it. Anyone else struggling with it, I wonder? Anyway, Lord Orsam wasn't struggling with it. In his 'One Off Article', he cited those cases he had found where the author had used the term 'one-off' or 'one off':



So why did you say "I'm really not sure what you mean by "the use of "one off" in the LVP"? Which bit of that did you not understand?

I definitely didn't make any other claim. Let's just run the one through again. I said "I don't think there is much debate about the use of 'one-off' in the LVP" and you said you didn't know what I meant by that and then immediately told everyone what it was I meant. There are no blue balls in the world and never have been, other than that one over there, and what have you.

Now, on to your attempt to "help me out".



The journalist in the 1980s who claimed 'one off' was a contemporary expression - did he say 'one off instance' (or any 'one off' event) was contemporary? The way you have typed it, you make it sound as though he or she was claiming 'one off' - an expression found by Lord Orsam in 1884 - was contemporary. To truly "help me out", I think you'll need to explain your claim a little further, don't you?

And why would a journalist in the 1980s be any kind of judge and jury over anything? They (some) are wordsmiths not etymologists - why would a journalist have any greater insight than anyone else?

And then we have your 1946 'one off job' example in which the author felt the need to explain that this was an engineering term. Hey, it's a bit like a BBC journalist in December 2024 feeling the need to clarify what 'in absentia' means, isn't it? Now, if we asked our December 2024 BBC journalist, "Did you clarify it because you thought absolutely no-one - other than you obviously - could possibly know what it meant or because you thought some people would not know what it meant?", which answer do you think you'd get?



Lord Orsam has his 'one off instance' argument and that is problematic but not conclusive. He has his 'Bunny's Aunt' argument and - frankly - I haven't stopped laughing at it yet. Then he has Mike Barrett's attempt to buy a Victorian diary in March 1992 which he uses to 'prove' that the scrapbook did not exist in its current form before March 31, 1992, and that Mike must have created it in 11 of the 12 days between then and April 13, 1992 when Mike took the scrapbook to London. And that's all he's got in his stable, Herlock. Everything else is bluff and bluster and twisting and turning and re-shaping of claims, comments, and even facts until they fit his narrative. What exactly is there to rebut other than 'one off instance' and the Victorian diary request? I've got all of his articles in my database of 800 folders and I've yet to see anything he has produced which required any serious rebutting other than those two things.

When you bought into the Lord Orsam 'legend', you really went in deep, didn't you?

I do so hope that has helped you out, Herlock.

Ike

The reason I said I wasn't sure what you meant was because I wasn't sure if you understood that in the LVP "one off" meant something very different to what it does today and very different to how it's used in the diary. In fact, I'm still not quite sure you understand this. To refer to the use of one-off in the LVP without making clear that it was only really used as a notation to signify a number in manufacturing/engineering gives an extremely misleading impression in the context of this discussion.

One thing Lord Orsam does very impressively, I think, is to demonstrate that between the first known use of the expression "one off job" in 1912 and 1945, the phrase "one off" was only ever used in respect of the manufacturing process to refer to a unique job, pattern or product. There are zero instances of it being used as in the diary to describe an event, occasion or instance (such as hitting ones' wife). You've rather missed the point of the 1946 occurrence. It's not just that the author had to explain it. It's that he didn't refer to the unique Scotsman as a one off. What he said was that the Scotsman was like a "one off job", which he made clear was a term used by engineers. That is the clearest possible demonstration that "one off" was not a stand alone expression in the English language as late as the end of the Second World War but only known with the suffix of "job" which was only really familiar to engineers. This is more than 55 years after Maybrick is supposed to have used it in the diary.

This is entirely corroborated by the Herald journalist Jack Webster who grew up in the 1930s, 40s and 50s and had obviously never heard of people being described one offs until he was at least aged 30, which knocks the idea on the head that it was a term used in conversation which simply hadn't been recorded.

What I find particularly compelling is the way Lord Orsam shows that starting in the late 1950s there is a very clear pattern of slowly increased use of what he refers to as the metaphorical use of the expression "one off". So we find one or two limited examples from the late 1950s, with it growing steadily during the 1960s and what he refers to as an explosion of use during the 1970s. It's really quite stark. What he did was use every searchable database he could find, including those which include texts from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to locate the first known examples of all the different metaphorical type "one off" expressions. Not only are there none in the LVP but there are none in the first half of the twentieth century either. One example that particularly struck me was from The Stage, searchable copies of which go back to the nineteenth century. Until the 1960s there is not a single mention of a "one off play" or a "one off drama" but after that time there are loads of examples of it. There cannot be any other explanation for this other than that "one off" was not in use in the English language before the Second World War to describe anything unique outside of a physical item or product or job in the manufacturing world.

I've never seen anyone comment on these findings or provide any other explanation for what strikes me as glaringly obvious. Naturally it's not the only problem. "bumbling buffoon", "top myself" and "spreads mayhem" are all anachronistic expressions which should not be found in an 1888 document. "bumbling buffoon" is almost as impossible as "one off instance" because the word "bumbling" wasn't used this way until Time magazine used it in the 1920s to describe bumbling politicians. Thank you for reminding me of the mistake made by the forger in thinking that Florence had gone to London to see her sick aunt, a mistake made by a barrister in court and reproduced in the secondary literature, but something which Maybrick would have known not to be true. We now know that the key to Miller's court wasn't taken away by the killer because it had gone missing long before Kelly was murdered. The breasts were not placed on the table. These were all mistakes made by the forger, something which probably won't surprise you if the forger was Michael Barrett.

Given all these glaring errors there doesn't seem to be a single reason to think that the diary is or even might be genuine. The use of the impossible "one off instance" is all the proof we need that it's a fake. I'm trying to be helpful to you to stop you wasting your time on something which the evidence demonstrates is obviously a modern creation.

[caz]

Here Ike. Below is the statement by Anne Graham that I find so remarkable but note: its value will be entirely missed unless it is examined in conjunction with other statements she made around the same time.


AG: You see, I had to be very subtle in my approach in as much that I couldn’t say to him, we don’t get it published, we write a story around it. I just sort of give it to him bit by bit to try and make him understand it’s come from his idea, it was his idea. But I couldn’t do it! I had managed to manipulate him every, years, so many things, I just [inaudible] this one [laughs ruefully].


I already gave my own commentary about it on the 'Old Hoax' thread that you have abandoned.

Could I just ask for some idea of when Anne said the above words and in what context?

If this was following her out-of-the blue claim to have secretly and impulsively given Mike the diary via Tony, when people naturally wanted her to explain why she had done such a thing, and to try and understand her reasoning, I'm really not sure what's going on, because Palmer doesn't believe a word of any of it! The only way she could make this alleged trip down to Fountains Road sound less improbable was to say it was all bound up with the state of their marriage and seemed like a good idea at the time. Warming to that theme, it became a writing project she had in mind for Mike back in 1991, to give him something to do that hadn't originated from her. In the context of having told this big fat lie, concerning a secret she never actually had, which she was supposedly keeping from Mike, she naturally had to keep adding layers, including the one about needing to be "very subtle" in her approach so he wouldn't feel manipulated. But it was all part and parcel of the same tall story she was telling everyone, if the diary didn't come from her father and Mike knew exactly where he'd got it from.

If Anne hoped that Mike would write a nice little story based on the diary Doreen was expecting to see, we know how well that went, don't we? Anne had very little say in the matter, but it wasn't because she was keeping a secret about the diary from Mike; it was because he was keeping a secret from her, and she had sore misgivings about how he had acquired it.

[Iconoclast]

Could I just ask for some idea of when Anne said the above words and in what context?

You are quite right, Caz - this is a quotation from Anne's 'Tea & Cake' January 18, 1995 interview (in truth it was a discussion) so well after she had blabbed all to Feldman back in the day (July 1994).

If Anne hoped that Mike would write a nice little story based on the diary Doreen was expecting to see, we know how well that went, don't we? Anne had very little say in the matter, but it wasn't because she was keeping a secret about the diary from Mike; it was because he was keeping a secret from her, and she had sore misgivings about how he had acquired it.

This bit never fails to cork me, Caz. What on earth did Anne seriously think Mike was going to do with the possible journal of the world's most infamous serial killer? What would her imaginary book have looked like? Would it be fictional? Would it be fact-based? And did it not occur to her that the possible journal of the world's most infamous serial killer would generate phenomenal amounts of money if it could be shown to be true (and she could not possibly have known that it wasn't true if she genuinely had used it to prop up Caroline's toy sideboard since receiving it from old Billy when he moved into his new flat)?

I find the premise for why Anne gave Mike the scrapbook - frankly - about as believable as the latter (and indeed the former) having anything whatsoever to do with its creation.

But maybe that's just me?

PS Where ya been, kidda?

Cheers,

Ike

[rjpalmer]

This bit never fails to cork me, Caz. What on earth did Anne seriously think Mike was going to do with the possible journal of the world's most infamous serial killer? What would her imaginary book have looked like? Would it be fictional? Would it be fact-based? And did it not occur to her that the possible journal of the world's most infamous serial killer would generate phenomenal amounts of money if it could be shown to be true (and she could not possibly have known that it wasn't true if she genuinely had used it to prop up Caroline's toy sideboard since receiving it from old Billy when he moved into his new flat)?

I find the premise for why Anne gave Mike the scrapbook - frankly - about as believable as the latter (and indeed the former) having anything whatsoever to do with its creation.

Where were you 25 years ago, Ike?

I, Peter Birchwood, Karoline Leech, and others were trying to tell this to Caz, Keith, and Shirley and they wouldn't hear of it.

As you now admit, Anne's story was utterly unbelievable, yet three books were written in defense of it. The best anyone could suggest was that Anne's story made sense on an "emotional level," which is how I remember Keith describing it.

Once Caz even suggested that Anne would have been "absolutely petrified and shaking like a leaf" if what she was saying on the Bob Azurdia Show was not the truth.

My how times have changed.

And yet Caz has the audacity to point out to me that Anne was lying when she was saying all this. I tried to tell her that for years.

Of course, she was lying, but that misses the point. Liars will very often bend actual events into a deceptive approximation of what really happened.

Anne does it again & again, in my opinion. That's how I see it.