The Diary — Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?​

[Herlock Sholmes]

If you weren't such a Johnny-Come-Lately, you'd already know that it has been argued. Find it yourself!

You might have missed the fact that I'm disputing it's ever been said.

We know that you're memory isn't, ahem, the most reliable, so without actual evidence we're going to have to assume that you were mistaken.

[Iconoclast]

If you want to seriously consider Barrett's story, you surely must look at what he said himself, not what was written on his behalf by another person who might well have got the story muddled up, and, in fact, when compared with what Barrett said in 1999, quite clearly did.

Just for clarity, are you actually telling us all that Alan Gray wrote Mike Barrett's affidavit of January 5, 1995 and got muddled up over dates and details and that we should ignore it all because what Barrett said in 1999 just made so much more sense?

He was a private detective with a business reputation to maintain, but you're okay with "He just cobbled together whichever bits he could remember from Mike's endless drivel over the previous few months and he presented that to be signed under oath as a true account of what happened in Mike's terribly terrible life in 1994".

I have to tell you, Lord Orsam will be turning 'round in his retirement at the mere thought of it.

Seriously, it's sacrilege to the old boy - he's probably having palpitations and ringing 999 as I type!

You've just told us that Mike Barrett did not claim that the text was written into the scrapbook by Anne in the eleven days before April 13, 1992. It seems it was all a figment of Alan Gray's imagination!

This is sensational stuff!

You missed my birthday by a few days but you've more than made up for it with this gem ...

[Herlock Sholmes]

Are you quite sure you're remembering correctly what Martin Earl told you, Caz?

I appreciate there was no obligation on the customer to accept any item located as a result of their request, but how is that relevant? Barrett did accept an item and had it sent to him.

As for the return policy, can I remind you that you posted this in the thread "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary" in #5701 on August 4, 2020, based on what Martin Earl appears to have told you, with my bold highlighting:

"Normally he would have asked for payment with the order, so it is likely that Mr Barrett specifically asked to see it before sending payment. Given the time taken before the cheque was sent [by Anne] it is highly likely Martin had to chase it, probably by phone. From memory, he says normal settlement time was the standard 30 days so he would have chased it up after that period. Customers could always return items if they were not as described."

So there are two problems here had Mike attempted to return the diary in May 1995.

The first is that the normal settlement time of 30 days had passed. You're not saying that Mike had unlimited time to return the diary are you? As a postal book selling business, Earl would surely have gone out of business fast if people could return books to him after a year and receive a full refund.

The fact that the standard 30 days for settlement had passed would surely, by itself, be an end of the matter. So we don't really need to consider whether Mike was or was not happy with the diary. But as to that, Earl said that customers could return items "if they were not as described" which, as a matter of English construction, means they could not be returned if they were as described. That makes perfect sense for a postal book service because otherwise buyers could read the books they'd received and return them even if they were in the exact condition that had been described to them. And Earl would have had to pay the person he bought the diary from who would also not have refunded if the diary was in the condition that had been described to Earl. I think the diary was exactly as had been described to Mike by Earl.

I appreciate that this post was made nearly five years ago so your memory may be rusty but, based on what you posted in 2020, there was no way Mike could have returned the diary in May 1995 and received his money back, was there?

Sorry Caz.

Just another quick correction. When I typed "May 1995" on both occasions I meant "May 1992" which was when Mike asked Anne to pay for the diary.

So the relevant lines should read:

"So there are two problems here had Mike attempted to return the diary in May 1992".

and

"I appreciate that this post was made nearly five years ago so your memory may be rusty but, based on what you posted in 2020, there was no way Mike could have returned the diary in May 1992 and received his money back, was there?"

[Iconoclast]

When Barrett told the story of the forgery at the 1999 meeting there was no suggestion from him that Devereux was involved in writing the manuscript, was there?

Forget the affidavit. It was obviously authored by Alan Gray who didn't fully understand what he was being told and couldn't get a grasp of the chronology.

Forget the Eleven-Day Evangelism?

If you insist!

[Iconoclast]

Oh I see, so Harris is a viper because he was a Ripperologist who shouldn't have been allowed to publish any Ripper suspect books while claiming that the Ripper diary was a forgery. He should have kept his mouth shut, should he, like a good little boy?
That, if I may say so, is kind of ridiculous Ike.
But why is Stewart Evans not also a viper for publishing a suspect book about Tumblety while expressing similar doubts about the Ripper diary?

Because I decide who I think is a viper and who is still on the subs bench. I think Alice Yapp was a viper. That's my prerogative.

[Iconoclast]

[QUOTE=Herlock Sholmes;n847792]

Posted in error

My favourite post of yours for some time. I've even given it a thumbs-up.

[Iconoclast]

Who has said that Barrett "was under no pressure whatsoever"? Please tell me. Where do I find this said?

If you weren't such a Johnny-Come-Lately, you'd already know that it has been argued. Find it yourself!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Goodness, I am clearly losing it. I have no recollection of claiming that Harris had said this on tape?

I'm sure you or RJ will be quick to highlight where I said it and I'm happy to be corrected but I'm starting to think I need to get out of the ripperonomy game if I'm just going to keep posting errors!

Correction: I meant to say: "He then tried to claim that Gray had said on tape that Harris wanted to see Barrett's affidavit but when I asked him for the quote he couldn't do it."

The point is the same. You were guessing on all counts when you said that Harris received a copy of Barrett's affidavit from Gray with no confidentiality strings attached. The supposed quote of Gary that you claimed to recall clearly doesn't exist otherwise Caz would have cited it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Martin Earl has stated that there was no obligation on the customer to accept any item located as a result of their request. Any item sent on approval could be returned with no payment being due if the customer wasn't happy with it. He remembered that the 1891 diary was the only item that Mike's request had produced, and he would have made the details clear when accepting his order over the phone. Even if Mike had not specified 1880-1890, he could have returned any item if it wasn't what he had wanted or expected. He was already down as a 'late payer' when he was chased over the phone, at which point Anne did the right thing and coughed up the £25 on her husband's behalf. But if she had refused to bail him out, and Martin Earl had taken it further, Mike could still have sent it back to him and I doubt it would have been worth Martin's while to try and get anything back for the time and postage spent. The request and order was in Mike's name and IIRC he was on unemployment or disability benefit at the time.

If I don't respond immediately to all questions as they are asked, it will be because I'm still only up to page 24 and I like to read and respond to posts in order unless I see a later one like this, which I can deal with straight away.

Love,

Caz
X

Are you quite sure you're remembering correctly what Martin Earl told you, Caz?

I appreciate there was no obligation on the customer to accept any item located as a result of their request, but how is that relevant? Barrett did accept an item and had it sent to him.

As for the return policy, can I remind you that you posted this in the thread "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary" in #5701 on August 4, 2020, based on what Martin Earl appears to have told you, with my bold highlighting:

"Normally he would have asked for payment with the order, so it is likely that Mr Barrett specifically asked to see it before sending payment. Given the time taken before the cheque was sent [by Anne] it is highly likely Martin had to chase it, probably by phone. From memory, he says normal settlement time was the standard 30 days so he would have chased it up after that period. Customers could always return items if they were not as described."

So there are two problems here had Mike attempted to return the diary in May 1995.

The first is that the normal settlement time of 30 days had passed. You're not saying that Mike had unlimited time to return the diary are you? As a postal book selling business, Earl would surely have gone out of business fast if people could return books to him after a year and receive a full refund.

The fact that the standard 30 days for settlement had passed would surely, by itself, be an end of the matter. So we don't really need to consider whether Mike was or was not happy with the diary. But as to that, Earl said that customers could return items "if they were not as described" which, as a matter of English construction, means they could not be returned if they were as described. That makes perfect sense for a postal book service because otherwise buyers could read the books they'd received and return them even if they were in the exact condition that had been described to them. And Earl would have had to pay the person he bought the diary from who would also not have refunded if the diary was in the condition that had been described to Earl. I think the diary was exactly as had been described to Mike by Earl.

I appreciate that this post was made nearly five years ago so your memory may be rusty but, based on what you posted in 2020, there was no way Mike could have returned the diary in May 1995 and received his money back, was there?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Well, you would say that, wouldn't you?

But if the 1999 meeting was all we had to go on, I don't think the queue to join the Barrett Debonkers Society would be very long.

Why though Tom? Why do you think I would say that? I don't care who wrote the diary. I don't even claim it was the Barretts. All I want to know, and the only thing I want to know, is why it could not be the Barretts.

All that happens in response to my question as to why the Barretts couldn't have done it, is that you keep mentioning Michael Barrett's affidavit as if it disposes of the matter. I'm telling you that this is a misguided approach. If you want to seriously consider Barrett's story, you surely must look at what he said himself, not what was written on his behalf by another person who might well have got the story muddled up, and, in fact, when compared with what Barrett said in 1999, quite clearly did.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I think I did just this morning. A guy who had a scrapbook with a Jack the Ripper confession in where the scrapbook looked genuinely old enough to be authentic might want to see how easy it would be to source such a document if what he had in his hands was a hoax.

He'd want to see if he could get one from the appropriate period. Not knowing that the scrapbook text was meant to be written by James Maybrick (he'd only just got it, remember), he thought 1880 to 1890 would be a wide enough period to search in. This is very obvious when you stop to think about it. If he had planned to hoax a tale by James Maybrick, he'd have known when Maybrick lived and died and he would have wanted to avoid the impossible options if it was dated 1890 and onwards and the inexplicable option if it was dated 1889. Simples.

Of course, if he was a hoaxer, he could have used any document with a sufficient number of blank pages in from a much larger period of time because a man in 1888 could write in a suitable document from 1842, 1856, 1869, 1874, 1880 or even 1888 - and he could have risked not getting a numbered document so he could get one from 1889 onwards - which was my point about broadening his search; but I guess we can agree that he might have assumed he would get what he wanted from the 1880s.

But - if he was a hoaxer - he'd have definitely avoided any possibility of getting a dated document from 1889 or 1890 and yet Barrett didn't!

It's almost miraculous, Ike. Every time you set out your theory for Barrett wanting the diary, whatever it is (and I don't understand it) the "appropriate period" is 1880 to 1890. Yet, when I suggest the appropriate period for doing the forgery is 1880 to 1890 suddenly you raise every objection under the sun.

As I keep saying to you, there is nothing on the face of the photograph album to suggest that it was manufactured in 1888 or 1889 let alone the 1880s. How would Barrett have known that it wasn't made in, say, 1953? If, as I suggest was the case, he couldn't possibly have known, then knowing how difficult it was to acquire a genuine diary from the period of the 1880s with blank pages, and paying for it to boot, would have told him literally nothing about whether the Jack the Ripper diary was a forgery or not. Isn't that right? Can you please make it make sense?

And knowing that the diary included 63 pages of written text, wouldn't he have needed to find out how difficult it was to acquire a diary with at least 63 blank pages? Because otherwise what he had been shown, or given, would not have been physically possible for a forger to have created, would it? Please make it make sense.

And I now see that, finally, after years of you objecting to 1890 being in Barrett's date range, you've included 1889. Thank you. But that only makes sense if Barrett envisaged a diary with printed dates, doesn't it? And then it doesn't really make sense because why they hell would Maybrick have written of his 1888 adventures in a diary with printed dates for 1881? That would have been utterly mental. If, on the other hand, Barrett envisaged a diary as a blank journal into which an individual would write their daily entries of varying lengths, it all makes perfect sense because he just needed paper from the appropriate period which even you have defined as being 1880 to 1890. For some reason, though, you seem physically unable to consider as a possibility that Barrett could have envisaged such a diary even though such things are extremely widespread and frequently used for personal diaries as opposed to appointment diaries with printed dates and limited daily space.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Just as he could have discovered at any time after this, from a book, that he didn't need paper from 1890 because his obscure choice for Jack was well and truly dead.



You need to be careful here because it has been argued here that Barrett was under no pressure whatsoever because he didn't agree the meeting of April 13 until early April itself. If he was under pressure, simples, just change the meeting date back a few weeks to take the strain off. So he wasn't desperate and out of options and, anyway, he had the O&L auction of March 31 looming in which there was sure to be a scrapbook possibly from the period he actually needed.



Where we get is to highlight the strained reasoning which squeezes Michael Barrett into a frame marked 'Hoaxer'.



such a lack of imagination you confess to!

Who has said that Barrett "was under no pressure whatsoever"? Please tell me. Where do I find this said?

If he'd arranged to meet with Doreen at some point in the near future, he must surely have been under some pressure, even if the date of the meeting had not yet been fixed. The fact that he was desperate and out of options doesn't preclude the fact that he could have delayed meeting Doreen but there was only so much time he could put it off. If we assume he was the forger, he didn't have the luxury of spending months searching around the country for a suitable item in which to write the diary. That's the point I was making. He'd (supposedly) found something and while not perfect it would have to do. Now, he could finally set up the meeting with Doreen. That, at least, is the theory as I understand it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes, and no doubt Devereux's ghost appeared at the breakfast table to oversee the creation and look daggers at Mike Barrett for killing him off to provide a provenance. Anne probably had to send Caroline to her room when her Dad had a fit and started accusing a man who wasn't there of shaking his gory locks at him.

Love,

Caz
X

When Barrett told the story of the forgery at the 1999 meeting there was no suggestion from him that Devereux was involved in writing the manuscript, was there?

Forget the affidavit. It was obviously authored by Alan Gray who didn't fully understand what he was being told and couldn't get a grasp of the chronology.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I could have sworn I made this clear in two posts recently but I'll say it more explicitly this time so that everyone gets it: I refer to Harris as a 'viper' because he misappropriated the word 'integrity' to his anti-scrapbook activities when he knew that he had a book coming out naming a different subject. You cannot mouth-off about being full of 'integrity' when you have such a cloud of vested interest about to burst overhead and expect us all to take you seriously.

It's no more complicated than that - his 'Committee for Integrity' was a means of masking what very well may have been his real underlying concerns about the emergence of the scrapbook.

Oh I see, so Harris is a viper because he was a Ripperologist who shouldn't have been allowed to publish any Ripper suspect books while claiming that the Ripper diary was a forgery. He should have kept his mouth shut, should he, like a good little boy?

That, if I may say so, is kind of ridiculous Ike.

But why is Stewart Evans not also a viper for publishing a suspect book about Tumblety while expressing similar doubts about the Ripper diary?

[Herlock Sholmes]

[QUOTE=Iconoclast;n847764]

Posted in error