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

[rjpalmer]

If someone grabbed an old photo album, it would have a Provenance.

The provenance was never competently checked until after the records were pulped.

I've always been leery of Kevin Whay's statement, too. No one wants their business, no matter how innocently, connected to a fraud, a scam, a counterfeit. That goes double if the business deals in antiques.

[Lombro2]

If someone grabbed an old photo album, it would have a Provenance. One that doesn’t involve things like pictures of donkeys, and non-existent auction tickets.

If it was in the wall or the floor, and was stolen and fenced, it wouldn’t.

[Scott Nelson]

What about a plastered-over cupboard? Attic? Safe? Locked drawer in old desk? Buried in the ground? etc.... etc....

Or someone just grabbed an old photo-album to write in.

[Lombro2]

We’ll never know where it came from?

That’s a strong mark for the floorboard theory.

[Scott Nelson]

Devereux’s daughter saw the book in Tony’s possession and asked if she could borrow it. He told her it was Barrett’s. Why on earth would he have invented that lie many months before the diary emerged?

Paul Feldman went further and said that Mike’s name was written inside the front cover. No one has been able to show that was misinformation.

Either way, it’s a strong mark against the floorboard theory.

Maybe it wasn't a lie? It could have belonged to Tony. Could Devereux have been compiling research notes or a draft diary?
I agree about the origin. We'll never know exactly where the diary came from.

[rjpalmer]

RJ, I suggested that Anne's 'in her family for years' claim could have meant that Billy owned the photo album and gave it to the forger after removing the photos and scrap paper clippings. Billy Graham's involvement was possibly nothing else beyond that.

Devereux may be a different story. Can we be sure Tales of Liverpool wasn't his book instead of Mike's? I thought Devereux's daughters didn't live with him at that time (early 1990s). Would they necessarily have known what their father was up to most of the time?

Devereux’s daughter saw the book in Tony’s possession and asked if she could borrow it. He told her it was Barrett’s. Why on earth would he have invented that lie many months before the diary emerged?

Paul Feldman went further and said that Mike’s name was written inside the front cover. No one has been able to show that was misinformation.

Either way, it’s a strong mark against the floorboard theory.

[Scott Nelson]

Scott Nelson has thrown out a couple of names, but--with apologies to Scott--I simply can't take them seriously; accusing Tony Devereux or Billy Graham is like ignoring the twenty-pound note on the sidewalk and instead reaching for a farthing. Graham was barely literate, and Devereux didn't own a single book. His daughters said he wrote in block lettering like Barrett. The one book Tony did have in his possession--with two chapters on the Maybrick case--belonged to Mike Barrett.

RJ, I suggested that Anne's 'in her family for years' claim could have meant that Billy owned the photo album and gave it to the forger after removing the photos and scrap paper clippings. Billy Graham's involvement was possibly nothing else beyond that.

Devereux may be a different story. Can we be sure Tales of Liverpool wasn't his book instead of Mike's? I thought Devereux's daughters didn't live with him at that time (early 1990s). Would they necessarily have known what their father was up to most of the time?

[Lombro2]

According to Mike, she might have become untechnically Feldman’s wife. She was playing both.

She was confident it was a real document or an old document and not a shoddy hoax she cooked up. Otherwise why throw two boyfriends and exes under the bus?

[rjpalmer]

My husband is a budding filmmaker and my family had this film lying around for ages.

Ah, but when Anne Graham began spreading these porkies (and she persisted in this malarky for years) she was only technically Mike's wife. She had left him six months earlier (very soon after the book launch) and had filed for divorce the day after he began to spill the beans to the Liverpool Post.

There was no love lost between the two and if the diary was something Barrett had bought down at the pub it was no skin off Anne's nose; she would have tossed him under the bus in Soho second. There certainly doesn't appear to be any evidence that the diary ever brought their marriage anything but misery.

Her behavior does make sense, though, if she had been up to her elbows in the diary's creation. That she was sticking her neck out to cover for Ed Lyons and her ex-husband's thievery has no credibility at all.

And the Battlecrease Caper is bosh, anyway.

According to his children, Tony Devereux was a non-reader. According to Harrison, he didn't own a single book.

Yet of all the hundreds of thousands of books Barrett could have lent this non-reader, the book he did lend him in 1991 had two chapters on the Maybrick case.

That means Barrett already had Maybrick on his mind long before Dodd had the electrical work done.

That's one hell of a coincidence for you to swallow.

Bon appetite!

[Lombro2]

With the cat out of the bag, Anne incorporated Barrett's writing aspirations into her own cover story. That's how I see it.

That's how I see it too, with the Fence Theory.

If Roger Patterson stole the P-G Film and gave it to Gimlin to fence, isn't this is how Mrs Gimlin would react?

My husband is a budding filmmaker and my family had this film lying around for ages.

[Lombro2]

Hi, Caz,

Does the fact that Anne used Mike's writing in her family "cover story" make it look like Anne was actually confident that this was authentic document and not a forgery written by a literary forger? Or was she just confident that it was an old document?

RJ made a good point about Anne saying her husband was a budding writer when it's like saying he was a poor painter peddling a Picasso. She was obviously confident about something to stick her neck out so much.... If it was a forgery, why not just pretend ignorance. Not say "Oh I'm helping my husband write a book (don't read anything into that) but I didn't want him to know it came from me because I'm a good wife who walks three feet behind." She stuck her neck out with a strange story because she was confident about the diary.

Or with her tremendous forging ability.

[rjpalmer]

I was cleaning up one of my old laptops and came across the following photographs and thought I'd post them. These were discovered by David Barrat during his excellent research into Look-In and Celebrity and Chat magazines that had published Barrett's work in the 1980s. I don't recall if he ever posted these on his blog, but he was kind enough to send them to me a few years ago and he deserves the credit for their discovery. They represent a sort of snapshot in time--a rare glimpse at Barrett's happier days. My apologies if these have been posted before, but I don't recall they have been.

It will be recalled that Richard Whittington-Egan reported that Barrett once wrote a feature article about the singer Kylie Minogue but did not give a date for this. Barrett's claim was ridiculed by the diary's supporters, of course, who dismissed it as one of Mike's "tall tales," but Barrett did interview national celebrities--a fact on record. David B. discovered that Kylie was interviewed in six different issues of Look-in in the late 1980s, though no journalist was ever credited. It's possible these quotes came from an interview conducted by Barrett or that a full interview might still be located and RWE's claim was slightly garbled--not that it particularly matters, since the reality of Barrett's freelance writing career has already been established.

Anyway, the following photos and snippets appeared in Look-In Magazine on 15 July 1989, one of the vehicles for Barrett's work. I don't think it is a coincidence that the children discussing Kylie Minogue are none other than Barrett's own daughter Caroline and her cousin or stepcousin Christopher Grimes.

Enjoy.

[rjpalmer]

I certainly haven't seen a single other candidate put forward.

Scott Nelson has thrown out a couple of names, but--with apologies to Scott--I simply can't take them seriously; accusing Tony Devereux or Billy Graham is like ignoring the twenty-pound note on the sidewalk and instead reaching for a farthing. Graham was barely literate, and Devereux didn't own a single book. His daughters said he wrote in block lettering like Barrett. The one book Tony did have in his possession--with two chapters on the Maybrick case--belonged to Mike Barrett.

No; the Barretts were the writers who were (jointly or separately) submitting articles to magazines in the 1980s and kept it a secret. They were the ones telling shifting tales. They were the ones who made a profit. They were the ones who had (jointly or separately) tried to obtain the blank Victorian diary. Barrett both publicly and privately confessed--weird behavior for an innocent man---and Barrett, in my view, demonstrated inside knowledge.

Look at this way. If Barrett wasn't involved, and had no idea who wrote the diary, he was extremely lucky. He was lucky that the art shop he pointed out to Harold Brough did indeed sell an iron gall ink with nigrosine and chloroacetamide. He was lucky that his '11 day' boast fits the obscure timeline. He was lucky that his claim that Bernard Ryan's book was the only one he read conforms to a textual analysis of the diary--Christie or Moreland or RWE, etc. wouldn't have worked. He was lucky in that Anne's handwriting does contain some weird idiosyncrasies that we see in the diary. It far easier could not have. Barrett was abnormally lucky to have traced the 'O Costly' quote to an obscure essay and to have had a girlfriend who remembers the Sphere books being in his possession. It's far too much for me to swallow, but others apparently are satisfied that Mike was simply an unsuspecting dupe. His bizarre lies and strange habits of confessing and retracting were indeed strange, but I think explainable because he was a pathological liar, a heavy drinker, and a man who loved to hear himself talk and mess with people.

But Anne Graham is a free woman and is not required to talk to anyone or explain herself to anyone, so I believe we have reached the end of the line. She certainly has no intention of talking about the diary, least of all to a stranger. I strongly suspect there will be no final dénouement in our lifetimes.

[Mike J. G.]

The diary was clearly a recent creation so we need look no further than the Barretts.

Polly Nichols was clearly only recently dead so we need look no further than Charles Lechmere.

I'm sorry, Lombro, but Lechmere was in no way, shape or form, the killer of anybody.

But I agree with the Barrets being involved in the Maybrick scrapbook to some extent.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock,

There is no doubt that Anne DID expect Mike to publish the diary, and no one has ever suggested otherwise. It’s difficult understand how such basic mis understandings occur. Indeed, according to Anne, she even ENCOURAGED Mike to publish.

With one caveat--that it would be a STORY about Maybrick-as--Jack and not as a physical artifact. (Bear in mind this was Anne's own account and thus it could be a lie).

This is nothing any theorist made up--it was Anne's own justification.

I don't know if you've missed it, but Anne made a particularly strange statement to KS (Keith Skinner) and SH (Shirley Harrison) on 18 January 1995, wherein she admits to having manipulated Barrett their whole married life, and further admits to have attempted to manipulate Barrett into co-writing (with her) a joint story about Maybrick.

Transcript courtesy Tom Mitchell. My emphasis in bold.

KS: Yes, so it must have been bizarre to hear a fortune, a possible fortune, to be made and all you wanted to do was to throw the thing on the fire.
AG: Well, that was actually, you know, organised through Doreen and that, you know.
SH: Yes –
AG: When I realised –
SH: He was serious –
AG: - that he was going to get the bloody thing published –
SH: Yes, yes.
KS: Yes.
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].
KS: I asked, erm, when you were out of the room about ‘O costly intercourse of death’, the Hillsborough disaster –
SH: Yes, yes, yes.
KS: - in which, erm –
AG: Anyone want more tea?

--

For those into the diary soap opera, this is a fascinating statement.

One possibility you might wish to consider is whether both Anne and Mike wanted the 'diary' published but had a different vision of what that would entail---one wanting a fictional story and one wanting an out-and-out forgery, hence the ALLEGED hint of conflict behind-the-scenes, though I can understand why the account given by Anne’s friend Audrey might be a weak peg on which to hang a theory.

Considering that Anne is admitting to manipulating Barrett, it does raise the possibility that everyone (me included) has misjudged Anne, and she was the driving force behind the hoax. Again, that's something you must decide for yourself.

I do suggest, however, to be on particular guard against people who attempt to project Anne's own contradictory words and deeds onto any theory of the Barretts' joint involvement, thus implying the theory must be flawed; that is certainly a very poor way to proceed, and involves an entirely different question altogether, but I trust you will recognize this subterfuge when it presents itself.

Also, it was Anne who claimed that the London literary agents (who turned out to be Doreen M.) would act as a sort of 'firewall' between Barrett and the forgery being published. Again, this is nothing I made up. Anne herself claimed to have assumed that Doreen would slam the door in Barret's face once she saw the diary. Once that firewall was breeched, and Doreen was interested, one can image that Anne was either deeply upset or utterly delighted by the development, depending on what you decide about Anne's true motivations.

I'm not as rigid in my view as some would have you believe; I think it is an open question who was manipulating whom, or whether they were both manipulating each other, or whether Anne was simply telling tales after Barrett began to spill and was a willing collaborator.

Best wishes.

Hi Roger,

Apologies for the slow response.

The fact that Anne was someone who boasted of being able to manipulate her husband isn't something I've been aware of over the years, so if that's come as news to you too, it's probably been well hidden.

For some reason, Caz keeps asking me about a theory relating to Anne's behaviour which I've never expounded and I truly don't know how accurately it reflects what anyone else has said.

As far as I'm concerned, if the Barretts were the forgers, Anne could have been the mastermind behind the operation or a very reluctant participant. I just don't think there's sufficient independent evidence to know what happened inside 12 Goldie Street during that period. Caz told me about Anne in her #128 that, "It is not disputed that she had a big row with Mike over the diary at one point, and had tried but failed to destroy it." I'm not sure what she meant by "not disputed" but I do question it. It seems to me that we have only one piece of reliable evidence about Anne's intentions for the diary from this period which is that she was very protective of it. In #393, Caz told me that the evidence we have "isn't clear" if it was Mike's idea or hers to put it in a bank but, on the contrary, it seems to me that the evidence is clear that it was her idea because she told Doreen that she had asked Mike to put it in the bank for safekeeping. The fact that Caz doesn't seem to be aware of this suggests to me that Anne being very keen to protect the diary from theft or fire perhaps doesn't fit in with the image she has of Anne in her mind.

Anyway, I'm not particularly concerned about the identity of the forger(s) let alone their respective motivations. All I know is that not a single reason has been put forward in this thread, or anywhere else that I know of, as to why the Barretts couldn't have created the diary in 1992. Until I'm given such a reason I have to think that the Barretts are obvious candidates and, indeed, the most obvious candidates for the authorship of a diary which we know was written after 1945. I certainly haven't seen a single other candidate put forward.