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

[Iconoclast]

So what I would do or would not do is of no consequence. But if the question is: Have I made bad purchasing decisions in my life? I certainly have. Could I see myself getting it wrong when buying a diary unseen over the telephone? Absolutely I can. Might I have said in Mike's position that I would take that 1891 diary? Yes, I can envisage doing so if I'd pictured in my mind a diary with totally blank pages which is entirely plausible. For me, as I've said many times, personal diaries are written in exercise books or notebooks without printed dates.

How psychologically compromised (some might just call it 'dense') would you or Mike Barrett (now that we seem to be conflating the two) have to be to not be able to ask the question, "Does it have '1891' printed throughout it?".

Remember, in our hypothetical situation, you are considering accepting an 1891 diary for an 1888 hoax. Did you remember that bit?

It feels like you're saying that - if you wanted a bag of walnuts - you'd go into the local grocer's shop and ask, "Do you sell bags of nuts?". If the grocer then said, "Yes", you'd just say "Okay, I'll take one, please".

Maybe you would. But how dense would you feel when you got outside, opened the bag, and found that it was a bag of Brazil nuts?

This - if you haven't already worked out - is a truly dense discussion as far as I am concerned. There is no reasonable, realistic, plausible scenario in my head whereby a man requiring what Mike Barrett required would make so little effort to find out whether so inappropriate a diary could possibly be suitable for his needs. But you clearly do, and I suspect that's where we will always differ.

I'll remind you that no-one is coming to your defence with this facile position you are taking. Or - more to the point - your Love Dad's position now that he has retired from all public life. Being a lone voice in the wilderness is no crime (I should know), but - if I were you - I'd give some thought to whether that lone voice of yours in the wilderness sounds to the rest of us like you're howling at the Moon.

[Iconoclast]

So finally, and let me capture this for posterity:

"Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888"

That, my friend, is somewhat different from your previous bombastic claims that "everyone" knew that an 1888 or 1891 diary would have had printed dates.
...

The problem for you is that you do need to prove what Mike thought about Victorian diaries because you do attempt to make a positive point about the red diary but that just brings us back to the now famous quote:

"Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888"

You must be truly dense if you think we can't see through what you are doing here. You are (apparently deliberately) ignoring the crucial point and homing-in on an irrelevant point for distraction purposes.

'Everyone' aged around 40 in 1992 would have seen at some point in their lives a few, tens, scores, even hundreds of dated diaries. This is rather crucial so if you disagree with me, please clarify why you feel this statement is incorrect so that we can address it in logical order.

Assuming that you will accept that that was the case, my point is made: whatever anyone knew or did not know about dated diaries in 1888 becomes an irrelevant distraction - they do not need to know anything whatsoever to still be alert to the possibility that what existed in the 1950s-1990s might have existed in 1888. They don't need to do any research. They don't need to check. They just need to be aware of the possibility that dated diaries existed in 1888 by dint of knowing they exist in 1992.

I don't think any of this is so far controversial, but - again - if you disagree, please raise it so we can discuss it in logical order.

So, if it was inconceivable that Mike Barrett had never in his entire lifetime seen dated diaries, then when he wanted a diary for his 1888 hoax (as you believe he did) he must have done so from a position of knowing it was a possibility that dated diaries for 1888 existed at some point in the past. Clearly, this would then imply that he must have done so from a position of knowing it was a possibility that dated diaries for 1889-1891 existed at some point in the past. This is my position. If you disagree, please raise it so we can discuss it in logical order.

I think - if we have got this far - my point is then rather obvious. To be frank, I feel that one has to be astonishingly dense to have forced me to have made these rather obvious points, but - there you go - you have.

So, just in case you still don't see where this has all led to: Mike Barrett in 1992 must have been aware of dated diaries in his lifetime so - on being offered a diary for 1891 - he must have immediately realised the danger to him of not asking the obvious question, "Is it dated '1891' throughout?", and if the answer came back that Earl did not know, then the obvious question then becomes, "Could you make a quick 'phonically and check because £66 is a lot of money to me on my invalidity benefits?".

The fact that Barrett just accepted the tiny 1891 diary therefore tells us that he was not bothered about whether it contained '1891' throughout it or not.

I don't think I can make this any simpler, and - honestly - I think I'm possibly the victim of a childish wind-up, but we'll see soon enough when we get the inevitable distraction reply.

[Lombro2]

Then how come the "support" for your position isn't enough for you to say that Michael Barrett definitely wrote it.

Do you only have abundant or sufficient evidence to say that "maybe" he wrote it? And that anyone who says he definitely didn't do it s a fantasist? What kind of a "position" is that? Socratic, anyone?

It's like arguing with water as to whether it's wet. I can't seem to pin it down.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Look, the sheer lack of support for your position regarding the small 1891 diary is proof positive that everyone reading these posts is thinking, Why does he keep pretending that Mike Barrett wouldn't have checked if the 1891 diary had '1891' printed throughout it?

Or people are wondering how you can possibly even begin to say what Mike Barrett would or would not have done in the unusual and unprecedented situation he found himself in one day in March 1992.

I also have to say that the supposed "sheer lack of support" for my position exists in your imagination only.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Just out of interest, if you approached me to find you a diary suitable for what you know is to be a hoaxed 1888 record of someone's thoughts, and I came back to you and said I had found you a small 1891 diary, would you just say, Excellent, I'll take it?

Let's not play the 'proof' game when you don't have any proofs, mate - that's just a dense argument.

Look, you can keep being a bit dense, but no-one's falling for it. We can see you're being dense. The question is, are you being dense or just pretending to be dense?

The question you are asking me is a silly question which bears no relationship to the factual scenario we are dealing with.

We are not dealing with a situation where someone has found me a small 1891 diary. The scenario we need to imagine is that I know nothing about Victorian diaries but I'm in desperate need of one with blank pages to create my forgery and I'm told over the telephone by a dealer, who I don't know and have only spoken to once before in my life, but who I've instructed to find me a Victorian diary with blank pages, that an 1891 diary has been found with nearly all blank pages. I can't see the diary, and I know that the dealer hasn't seen it, but, apart from being outside my preferred decade, it would seem that he has found what I've asked him to find. I badly want the diary as soon as possible so I tell him to send it to me so I can get it my hands on it and I'll worry about payment later. (In fact I never even pay for it, I run to my wife to do so.)

The other reason why your question is silly is because it ignores all the psychological pressures that would have existed during the telephone call.

Let me give you an example. The comedian Paul Smith tells a story of how he went into a luxury high end car dealership simply to browse and ended up purchasing a very expensive car which he could in no way afford simply because he felt insulted by someone else in the shop who implied he couldn't afford it (which he couldn't). Would I do the same thing? I very much doubt it. But you just can't say that everyone will do the same thing in the same situation especially in one where there must be some degree of psychological pressure.

So what I would do or would not do is of no consequence. But if the question is: Have I made bad purchasing decisions in my life? I certainly have. Could I see myself getting it wrong when buying a diary unseen over the telephone? Absolutely I can. Might I have said in Mike's position that I would take that 1891 diary? Yes, I can envisage doing so if I'd pictured in my mind a diary with totally blank pages which is entirely plausible. For me, as I've said many times, personal diaries are written in exercise books or notebooks without printed dates.

[Herlock Sholmes]

You ask your question so strangely - it's like you're phrasing it in order to look as though it means anything!

Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888, but none of it matters because that is not the issue which should be pre-occupying our thoughts. The question that one needs to answer is, Why would Mike Barrett not have thought there would be dated diaries in 1888?

To use your own analogy, if he were seeking a 1588 diary, he surely could not have known if there were dated diaries in 1588 so he'd definitely have to check that first. So why would that not apply in 1888 also?

If we do not know something, and that something is clearly very blatantly important to us, it is the thing that we would do first - resolving our doubts.

If Mike thought, I don't know if there were dated diaries in 1888, his next thought would have to be, I should check not, I'll assume there weren't.

Your argument is so gossamer thin, I can't believe you are acting so utterly dense and - worse - thinking no-one will notice how dense you are being.

God, please say you aren't going to say I haven't answered your question and then just ask it again, are you?

So finally, and let me capture this for posterity:

"Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888"

That, my friend, is somewhat different from your previous bombastic claims that "everyone" knew that an 1888 or 1891 diary would have had printed dates.

Now we have our starting position which is that we have no idea what Mike Barrett knew or did not know about 1888 or 1891 diaries, your entire argument is dead in the water.

But I will deal with the question:

"Why would Mike Barrett not have thought there would be dated diaries in 1888?"

The answer is because it was a bloody long time ago, in Victorian times, when things were very different to what they were in 1992. I very much doubt that there are very many people outside of this forum today who will know, if asked, that pre-printed diaries didn't start until 1812 and probably very few in the forum who knew it until I posted it. I had absolutely no idea myself until I googled it.

I'll bet if you ask the average person in the street when they think pre-printed diaries were first commercially available, a LOT will give a year after 1888. If you did a multiple choice answer of (a) 1712, (b) 1812 or (c) 1912 I have no doubt that a significant number will choose 1912.

So what we're back to is your fanciful belief that Mike Barrett, if he didn't know or wasn't sure, would have asked someone. But that is purely your belief. It has no basis in fact. Lots of people have assumptions in their head which they never challenge for their entire life. We don't know if Mike gave it any real thought at all. We have no idea what thoughts popped into head about diaries but, if his assumption was that in the olden days people wrote diaries with quill pens in what you would call notebooks or exercise books, that's game over. Can you say he didn't have that assumption in his head? Of course you can't.

He may even have seen a Victorian diary in his life, many of which, as you now know, didn't have printed dates on their covers or on the pages. So his assumption might have been backed up by his actual experience. We literally have no idea.

I don't need to prove anything Mike was thinking because I make no positive point about the red diary.

The problem for you is that you do need to prove what Mike thought about Victorian diaries because you do attempt to make a positive point about the red diary but that just brings us back to the now famous quote:

"Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888"

[Iconoclast]

Look, the sheer lack of support for your position regarding the small 1891 diary is proof positive that everyone reading these posts is thinking, Why does he keep pretending that Mike Barrett wouldn't have checked if the 1891 diary had '1891' printed throughout it?

[Iconoclast]

Surely the critical flaw in every single post you make on this subject is that you write with 20/20 hindsight. Yes, you know today what the 1891 diary looks like. But Mike didn't when he was being offered it over the telephone, and there is zero evidence he was told anything about printed dates.
The only way you seem to get round this issue is to say that Mike would have asked questions. To which the simple and obvious reply is, not necessarily.
And that "not necessarily" is all I need because I make no positive point about the red diary. Whereas it's all you've got to counter the problem of Mike seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages. If you can prove that Mike either knew or would have asked about printed dates in the 1891 diary, go ahead and knock yourself out. Let's see that proof. But we've been discussing this for weeks if not months and you've produced nothing Ike.

Just out of interest, if you approached me to find you a diary suitable for what you know is to be a hoaxed 1888 record of someone's thoughts, and I came back to you and said I had found you a small 1891 diary, would you just say, Excellent, I'll take it?

Let's not play the 'proof' game when you don't have any proofs, mate - that's just a dense argument.

Look, you can keep being a bit dense, but no-one's falling for it. We can see you're being dense. The question is, are you being dense or just pretending to be dense?

[Iconoclast]

How do you know that Mike was aware that pre-printed diaries existed in the late 19th century?

You ask your question so strangely - it's like you're phrasing it in order to look as though it means anything!

Obviously, no-one other than Mike knew what Mike Barrett thought about or was aware of regarding dated diaries in 1888, but none of it matters because that is not the issue which should be pre-occupying our thoughts. The question that one needs to answer is, Why would Mike Barrett not have thought there would be dated diaries in 1888?

To use your own analogy, if he were seeking a 1588 diary, he surely could not have known if there were dated diaries in 1588 so he'd definitely have to check that first. So why would that not apply in 1888 also?

If we do not know something, and that something is clearly very blatantly important to us, it is the thing that we would do first - resolving our doubts.

If Mike thought, I don't know if there were dated diaries in 1888, his next thought would have to be, I should check not, I'll assume there weren't.

Your argument is so gossamer thin, I can't believe you are acting so utterly dense and - worse - thinking no-one will notice how dense you are being.

God, please say you aren't going to say I haven't answered your question and then just ask it again, are you?

[Scott Nelson]

Increasingly, the whole schtick around here is to pretend that people have said something that they haven't said and then invent imaginary complications that make no sense.

So true, RJ.

[rjpalmer]

the misspellings and grammatical errors in Anne's private conversation

that should read correspondence.

[Herlock Sholmes]

I think you'll find (if you do one of those you-said-this-four-billion-years-ago searches) that I included this type of diary in my definition of 'diaries'.

A document which has dates in it or a document which has places specifically reserved for dates has very clearly been produced to act as a diary (and I agree with your friend that the maximum value is to be had from skipping the dreadful days when nothing much happens - though, in this case, I would go further and suggest that a common or garden notebook does an even better job because it just feels uber-personalised without the little spaces for the dates) but that's not the point in the case of Mike Barrett's purchase of the 1891 diary.

According to the likes of you and Sholmes, Mike was seeking a suitable document to hoax the 1888 thoughts of a fictional James Maybrick into. This fact changes the game completely. He's gone from someone looking for a diary (with dates, with spaces for dates, or even an old notebook which could function as a record of someone's thoughts) - so a search in the general sense - to someone needing a document that could possibly pass for an 1888 record of someone's thoughts - so a search in the specific sense).

I'm so bored with this linguistic knitting. I agree that an 1891 diary with the appropriate characteristics could function as an 1888 diary but I stress that - within that - I reserve the right to expect someone seeking a very specific type of 'diary' to ask the simple questions to confirm its suitability for their very specific objective.

Bored, RJ. I'm completely bored with it. Let's not do this one again. Mike Barrett accepting a tiny 1891 diary is all the proof any of us need that this was NOT evidence that he was seeking to hoax the 1888 thoughts of a man who might have been Jack the Ripper. So - ipso facto - he must have wanted it for some other purpose.

Surely the critical flaw in every single post you make on this subject is that you write with 20/20 hindsight. Yes, you know today what the 1891 diary looks like. But Mike didn't when he was being offered it over the telephone, and there is zero evidence he was told anything about printed dates.

The only way you seem to get round this issue is to say that Mike would have asked questions. To which the simple and obvious reply is, not necessarily.

And that "not necessarily" is all I need because I make no positive point about the red diary. Whereas it's all you've got to counter the problem of Mike seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages. If you can prove that Mike either knew or would have asked about printed dates in the 1891 diary, go ahead and knock yourself out. Let's see that proof. But we've been discussing this for weeks if not months and you've produced nothing Ike.

[rjpalmer]

Of course, as someone pointed out, only a week or so later Anne assured Doreen that the diary would be kept securely in a safe in case the house burnt down.

Actually, wasn't her rationale that there had been burglaries in the neighborhood? Or alleged burglaries?

Yet, I'm insane for suggesting that Anne was conflicted about the diary. Typing up bogus research notes one minute, deeply reluctant to attend the book launch later.

Fighting Mike over the diary one moment (allegedly) and worried about burglars the next. Signing the collaboration agreement but refusing royalty cheques.

I don't think it's insanity that makes me see these things...I think it is simple observation.

[rjpalmer]

Oh dear. The mental gymnastics needed, to make Anne do what Palmer wants her to have done, while claiming that Martin Fido got it nearly right. Martin evidently didn't consider Anne to have been so afraid of Mike's violent abuse that she would have copied out the 63 pages herself, but only on the assumption that he would be sent packing by the people in London - to arrive home and violently abuse her again for muffing it.

You're badly misrepresenting Martin Fido's thinking.

The only reason he gave for Anne not being the penperson is that he felt the spelling and grammar in the diary were too sloppy for Anne--that it was beneath her abilities. So, he opted for Anne being the author and Mike being the penman---the exact opposite of what Barrett said in his secret affidavit.

But it's clear from his post that Martin only had access to the 'professional' typed report on Liverpool laundries that Anne had created for Feldman. So this left a false impression. Had he seen the misspellings and grammatical errors in Anne's private conversation he might have had second thoughts.

The rest of your post is just the same half-baked grandstanding. As if you're going to convince me that what I'm saying isn't entirely valid.

Your own theory has Anne "enabling" Barrett by typing up his bogus notes and backdating them to August 1991 and going along with the Devereux deception, etc. etc.

You then ridiculously dismiss this as of no importance by leaning on Anne's own explanation that she wanted a "professional" presentation [for Mike's stolen goods!!]

It's beyond ridiculous.

You couldn't make it up - except that Palmer just did. Did Anne have no fear of what Mike might do if she had succeeded in destroying it instead?

And here I thought you BELIEVED Little Caroline's story of Anne and Mike wrestling for the diary on the kitchen floor?

She may or might not have feared for her life, but if the story is true, she certainly had a greater fear that Barrett would damage both their reputations by trying to publish this malarky.

Of course, as someone pointed out, only a week or so later Anne assured Doreen that the diary would be kept securely in a safe in case the house burnt down.

Sounds again like someone who couldn't keep her stories straight...or very inconsistent and conflicted....but hey...you once met her....you can read her like a book....!

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

[Herlock Sholmes]

I'm genuinely struggling to believe that the question was asked in good faith. To have asked it in good faith would have required someone in 2025 to have lived an entire lifetime with no awareness of dated diaries; and to imply the same might be true of someone in 1992 would have required that someone to have lived an entire lifetime with no awareness of dated diaries. It is a facile position to take simply to try to get around an impossible detail in the tale of the 1891 diary.

Yes, I am literally crying in the corner. With my old friend, laughter.

You've replied to a quote by Caz about "research" but I didn't mention research.

The question was:

How do you know that Mike was aware that pre-printed diaries existed in the late 19th century?

Can we have your answer?

Is it supposed to be that "everyone" in 1992 knew this? If so, can we have some empirical evidence to support such an outrageous and obviously false claim.

To be clear, the question is not whether Mike had an "awareness of dated diaries". The question is whether he knew that such diaries existed in the late 19th century, in circumstances where they didn't exist prior to 1812. Do you want to now address the actual question that I've asked you? Ike?