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

[Iconoclast]

This is where I must stop you, Ike, and point out the glaring gaslighting hypocrisy of this line of attack.
I could just as easily ask why Anne didn't stop Mike from selling a fenced diary that her ex-felon husband showed up with one day in March 1992.
This is merely the pot calling the kettle black--an art form that the Diary Gang has perfected.
I'll be scolded for not quoting her directly, but I'm pretty sure your friend Caz has said, and fairly recently but certainly in the archives, that "one didn't say no to Mike" once he got something into his head. Anne herself has said this.
So, what was Anne supposed to do?
I'm merely one of the few honest commentators here (I'll, of course, included Herlock) in that I'm not wishing-away or ignoring Anne's convoluted and contradictory behavior. As far as I can gather, I am the only one who fully acknowledges it, and I admit it can be interpreted in different ways. I just don't like the gaslighting.
On one hand, a 'chirpy and friendly' Anne, almost out of the gate, talks to Doreen on the phone, with not a whisper of her not approving of the diary's publication. She also signed the collaboration agreement.
At another time, she tells her friend Keith that she tried to burn the diary and didn't want it published, and I feel some pull to accommodate Keith's belief that her account was credible, especially since it would have been an odd thing to 'coach' her daughter who seemingly confirmed it.
On one hand, Anne fully cooperates with Mike and even types up his bogus research notes--knowing they had to have to been bogus, which reeks of cooperation.
Yet again, Anne's friend Audrey, with no axe to grind, reports that Anne showed up for work, wildly upset about her husband "writing a book."
Shirley Harrison also reported, more than once, that it was like pulling teeth to get Anne to attend the book launch. That doesn't sound like a happy camper.
You and Caroline might find Anne's behavior consistent, but I'm not that delusional or incurious.
So, what is your idea, Ike, --that Anne was a fully willing and enthusiastic confederate in Mike's plan to peddle Eddy Lyon's stolen goods?? If so, why was she moping to Audrey?
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I make no apologies for noticing that all was not well with Anne Graham, no matter how much my observation is ridiculed by the members of this debate.
I'm correct in noticing it.

Good God, man, I think you need to take the same anger management classes Mike J.G. and I attend!

All your post proved was how very unlikely Paul Begg's tentative suggestion was that Tony D. and Anne had created the scrapbook to give Mike something to do.

Not sure if the rant was needed?

I worry constantly about your blood pressure, mate ...

[rjpalmer]

but how then do we explain why Anne Barrett did not put a stop to it once it got as far as Robert Smith shelling out the greenbacks

This is where I must stop you, Ike, and point out the glaring gaslighting hypocrisy of this line of attack.

I could just as easily ask why Anne didn't stop Mike from selling a fenced diary that her ex-felon husband showed up with one day in March 1992.

This is merely the pot calling the kettle black--an art form that the Diary Gang has perfected.

I'll be scolded for not quoting her directly, but I'm pretty sure your friend Caz has said, and fairly recently but certainly in the archives, that "one didn't say no to Mike" once he got something into his head. Anne herself has said this.

So, what was Anne supposed to do?

I'm merely one of the few honest commentators here (I'll, of course, included Herlock) in that I'm not wishing-away or ignoring Anne's convoluted and contradictory behavior. As far as I can gather, I am the only one who fully acknowledges it, and I admit it can be interpreted in different ways. I just don't like the gaslighting.

On one hand, a 'chirpy and friendly' Anne, almost out of the gate, talks to Doreen on the phone, with not a whisper of her not approving of the diary's publication. She also signed the collaboration agreement.

At another time, she tells her friend Keith that she tried to burn the diary and didn't want it published, and I feel some pull to accommodate Keith's belief that her account was credible, especially since it would have been an odd thing to 'coach' her daughter who seemingly confirmed it.

On one hand, Anne fully cooperates with Mike and even types up his bogus research notes--knowing they had to have to been bogus, which reeks of cooperation.

Yet again, Anne's friend Audrey, with no axe to grind, reports that Anne showed up for work, wildly upset about her husband "writing a book."

Shirley Harrison also reported, more than once, that it was like pulling teeth to get Anne to attend the book launch. That doesn't sound like a happy camper.

You and Caroline might find Anne's behavior consistent, but I'm not that delusional or incurious.

So, what is your idea, Ike, --that Anne was a fully willing and enthusiastic confederate in Mike's plan to peddle Eddy Lyon's stolen goods?? If so, why was she moping to Audrey?

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

I make no apologies for noticing that all was not well with Anne Graham, no matter how much my observation is ridiculed by the members of this debate.

I'm correct in noticing it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock -

I doubt this will interest you, but regarding the claim that Barrett "immediately" subjected the diary to an examination by "experts", I thought the following statement made to me by Keith Skinner might be of interest. (2-16-2018 'Acquiring a Victorian Diary' my emphasis added in bold).

"I know that people who have met Anne Graham find this very difficult to believe as she is a bright, intelligent lady and would have surely realised the potential value of a family heirloom. She may not have connected it to Maybrick although she did know the Granny Formby association with the Maybrick trial. But against this seemingly irrational behaviour of secreting, via a third party, the diary to her husband, has to be factored in the state of her marital situation and relationship with Mike. I had wanted to know why it had taken Mike about 5 weeks to take the diary to London to which I think Anne said it was just to do with arrangements for Caroline. But Anne had also told me how hard she tried to persuade Mike to drop the idea of bringing in people from the outside to examine the diary as she feared it would lead to the discovery that she had given it to Devereux to give to Mike, on the basis their marriage was at a point where Mike had lost all of his self esteem and was rejecting anything that came from Anne in her efforts to restore it. I remember Anne telling me that, once she had resigned herself to the reality that Mike was definitely going to take the diary to London, she thought the business appointment might as well be done professionally with an accompanying transcript. This is why I had assumed Mike had taken a copy of the transcript, printed off from his word processor, with him to London on April 13th 1992."

Make of it what you will.

Anne's rationale--a highly strange one--is that an examination of the diary would lead back to her alleged gambit with Devereux, which is bizarre. How could it? Devereux was dead and they were hardly close associates. It's sounds like another one of Anne's evasions.

Could there have been a more fundamental and obvious reason why Anne didn't want the diary examined by anyone? (Dismissing, for the moment, the possibility that she wasn't just lying to Keith. But then we have to factor in her distraught behavior to Audrey Johnson, etc).

I have my own reasons for rejecting the following suggestion, but Paul Begg once floated the theory that the Diary was created by Anne Graham and Tony Devereux as a scheme to occupy Barrett's time, so he would stay out of the boozer and focus again on the writing career that we now know he had in the mid-1980s.

Martin Fido, as previously mentioned, believed Anne wrote the diary, apparently as a work of fiction, but Barrett was the moving force behind the fraudulent relic.

Alan Gray, in rejecting Barrett's authorship, also believed Anne and Devereux wrote it.

I'm not insisting that any of these people were necessarily correct, but I do dismiss any insinuation that the idea is far-fetched and insane rubbish dreamed up by people who were not there in 1993-1996.

They were there--unlike every current contributor to this discussion.

Hi Roger,

I'm still not aware of anyone who knew the Barretts personally in the relevant period who has said they weren't capable of jointly forging the diary, even though bizarrely, I've been told that I've dismissed those views!

It seems obvious to me that if Barrett had forged the diary, he needed someone to examine and validate it, otherwise he wasn't going to make any money from it. He would, no doubt have wanted this to happen as soon as possible. It's hard to imagine what he (if the forger) must have felt when Baxendale said it was a forgery - the game was over in his mind, I would assume - but somehow Harrison ploughed on with it to publication even after the Rendell team also declared it to be a forgery. Barrett strikes me as having a paranoid personality so I could understand if the imminent exposure of him having been a journalist put so much strain on him that he confessed in June 1994. Or at least, that all seems plausible to me. I don't know if that's what actually happened.

[Iconoclast]

Didn't Martin Earl tell Barrett that nearly all of the pages in the 1891 diary were blank? Might that not be why a somewhat desperate Barrett agreed to purchase it?

Source, please, for this blatantly convenient claim which I've never heard of before.

I'm pleased to hear that you don't dispute that the wording of the advert is consistent with an an attempt to get hold of authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders. Thank you. That is helpful.

You don't need Caz or anyone else's confirmation that the wording is consistent, blah, blah, blah. That's a statement of the blindingly obvious, but not necessarily a statement of the truth. You don't really think that's helpful, you're just trying to make it look like Caz has scored an own goal. Give it a rest, man - your comments are so transparent.

What do you say is so wrong with the wording of the advert, bearing in mind that it needed to be short and concise to keep the cost down, and, obviously, keeping hindsight out of it?

OMG, what were we doing not that many posts ago???????

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't believe Anne penned the diary, Herlock, in either her normal handwriting, or so heavily disguised as to become unrecognisable and unidentifiable as her own. It's not for me to prove she didn't have the skill or the motivation, any more than it's up to us to prove the real James Maybrick didn't write it.

It's my personal conclusion that it's not Anne's handiwork, based on the entirety of the evidence to date, from 9th March 1992 where our story begins. There is no reliable independent evidence that anyone knew about the diary, in physical or theoretical form, prior to that Monday.

You are, of course, free to dispute my conclusion by reaching a different one, based on your own knowledge of the subject and the people most closely involved. But questions along the lines of: 'But why don't you believe it was Anne?', followed by: 'It was a simple enough question, so if you won't answer it, is it because you can't?' are not useful, because the answer may be very far from simple, and based on more factors than we've both had hot dinners.

Love,

Caz
X

If the diary wasn't physically written until after 9th March 1992, how could there possibly any independent evidence about the diary in a physical form before that date?

And if the only people who knew about it in theoretical form prior to it being physically created were the forgers themselves, how could there possibly be any "independent" evidence for it?

So, if that's your reason for ruling out the diary being Anne's handiwork, it doesn't seem very convincing Caz.

Also, if your own belief was that the diary was created before it reached the Barretts, how does that square with your belief that someone else (other than Maybrick or the Barretts) created it prior to 9th March? After all, if you said to us "I think Mr X created it in 1963" why wouldn't the absence of any independent evidence of its existence prior to 9th March 1992 also lead us (and you!) to doubt that it's Mr X's handiwork?

That doesn’t seem very logical.

My question to you about why you don't believe it's Anne's handwriting was really directed to whether there is anything in the diary handwriting itself, compared to Anne's normal handwriting, which means we can rule Anne out as being the diary's author, in the way that we can, I think, rule out Mike. I note that there appears to be nothing.

For that reason, I don't think it can safely be ruled out that the diary is in Anne's disguised hand. Imo of course.

[Herlock Sholmes]

'Precisely', Herlock? What is your definition of that word?

Are you claiming that the advert read:

'A diary containing authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders'?



Mike did "order" the 1891 diary - quite literally - or Martin Earl would not have sent it to him. It was located, fully described to Mike, ordered by him and sent to his home address within just a few days of the advert appearing, so he could have waited to see if a more suitable diary would turn up, or put in a second request, specifying a minimum page size and no printed dates for example. Instead, he went ahead and ordered this 'too small' diary, which was not only three years too late for Maybrick's first entry, but had the days/dates printed on every tiny page.



He would have known this when Martin Earl fully described the item over the phone, as he always did with any item located, because there was no point in ordering anything from a supplier and getting it sent to the customer if it didn't fully suit their requirements. Did Mike not bother to listen to the description? If it was only described as a diary for 1891, surely he'd have asked for more information than that, given the impossible year. Or didn't he care by late March, because his original pressing need - whatever that had been - had diminished or been resolved?



That's not what I'm disputing, Herlock. While the precise wording of the advert appears on the surface to be consistent with an attempt by Mike to obtain something with the potential to become Jack the Ripper's diary, there is also a lot wrong with the advert, if it had been worded for the purpose of faking Maybrick's diary, which would not have been conducive to finding anything to fit the bill.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

I used the word 'precisely' in the dictionary definition sense of the word.

If someone says to me "Would you like to buy this item I'm selling?" and I reply "Yes", does that mean I've 'ordered' it? I don't think so, and would suggest the more appropriate word is 'purchased'. If you say 'ordered' it gives the impression that the 1891 diary was precisely what Barrett was always seeking, which, I suggest, gives a false impression of what occurred.

Didn't Martin Earl tell Barrett that nearly all of the pages in the 1891 diary were blank? Might that not be why a somewhat desperate Barrett agreed to purchase it?

I'm pleased to hear that you don't dispute that the wording of the advert is consistent with an an attempt to get hold of authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders. Thank you. That is helpful.

What do you say is so wrong with the wording of the advert, bearing in mind that it needed to be short and concise to keep the cost down, and, obviously, keeping hindsight out of it?

[Iconoclast]

Hi Herlock -
I have my own reasons for rejecting the following suggestion, but Paul Begg once floated the theory that the Diary was created by Anne Graham and Tony Devereux as a scheme to occupy Barrett's time, so he would stay out of the boozer and focus again on the writing career that we now know he had in the mid-1980s.

The most obvious reason is that two innocent people creating a fake Jack the Ripper scrapbook to occupy a failed journo with aspirations above his station is all very honourable and commendable but how then do we explain why Anne Barrett did not put a stop to it once it got as far as Robert Smith shelling out the greenbacks for the right to publish it nor confess to her naive actions long before a single book got printed and single dollar rolled in?

Did she just suddenly turn all criminal and what have you?

[Iconoclast]

I agree with your sentiment, Baron, but one could say the same thing about writing wildly speculative fiction designed to 'stich up' Charles Allen Lechmere, the 'dogwalker' who found Polly Nichols.
To each his own, I suppose. The hourglass does indeed drain.
Discussing the now thirty-odd year old Maybrick Hoax IS a strange hobby--all the more so because it has degraded into a battle of wills among a tiny number of combatants who don't like each other very much and have no hope of ever getting a concession.
Whether this is worse than the on-going debate over the dogwalker is a matter of opinion.

Ah yes, "How many hearts have throbbed within these walls as the tolling of the neighbouring bell announced to them how fast the sands of their life were ebbing?" (Sir Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian).

I consider the pursuit of Maybrick no different to (and possibly better than) that of the elder Mrs I and I met in the park this afternoon playing Cornball (I kid ye not) whilst we were hopping our three-legged whippet cross. He (the elder - our dug is a she) was from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and - guess what???? - he was from Utah. Well, you could have blown me over with a feather. We don't have too many like him in puritanical Scotland, let me tell you. Mrs I and I couldn't buy her favourite red wine nor my favourite beers at Tesco this morning 'cos there's a ban on alcohol sales until 10am every day (I kid ye not). Anyway, Izzy Iconoclast was with us and she was amazed at how nice I was to this guy as she knows me to be the antichrist, the heretical soulless enemy of the supernatural (I kid ye not).

I was nice to him because he was a really sincerely nice guy who only tried a few times to get me to turn up to their church on Sunday.

I think he's wasting every second of his life but he clearly does not agree with me.

We shouldn't assume to evaluate what brings others comfort or pleasure or challenge in what is otherwise a fairly **** existence for many.

PS I never said I don't like you RJ. I can even see Lord Orsam and me going hammer and tongs at it over a few beers in Hell one day. I'm an easy-going bloke. I'll buy anyone a pint. Mind you, I have been attending the same anger management classes which have turned Mike J.G. into a complete teddy bear - softer than the entwined furry otters Mrs I produced for us this morning. Hope springs eternal.

Ike
Militant Atheist
And Iconoclast (I kid ye not)

[caz]

I agree with your sentiment, Baron, but one could say the same thing about writing wildly speculative fiction designed to 'stich up' Charles Allen Lechmere, the 'dogwalker' who found Polly Nichols.

To each his own, I suppose. The hourglass does indeed drain.

Discussing the now thirty-odd year old Maybrick Hoax IS a strange hobby--all the more so because it has degraded into a battle of wills among a tiny number of combatants who don't like each other very much and have no hope of ever getting a concession.

Whether this is worse than the on-going debate over the dogwalker is a matter of opinion.

No self-awareness then, of just how long Palmer has spent wasting his irreplaceable hours in 'a blatant fake like the Maybrick Diary'. He has announced his retirement from the field only to return to it, many more times than can ever be taken seriously.

I know what I'm doing here. Does he?

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I don’t know why my answer has come out like this…I typed it on Pages first which is something I regularly do and this has never happened before. Gremlins
[INDENT]The question you've asked me is the easiest one I've had to answer so far. By way of reminder, the question is:

"In that case, why do you suppose Mike stated in his confessional affidavit that the red diary was purchased and rejected in January 1990, quickly followed by the purchase of the photo album and the eleven-day diary creation, but the finished forgery was effectively 'hidden pointlessly' for over two years, because Tony Devereux, who was a party to the whole project, became severely ill."

It's all easily explained by dating errors, failure of memory and by the fact that Michael Barrett didn't, apparently, write the affidavit himself so that the author of it didn't have first hand knowledge of all the facts, and could easily have been confused by the chronology of events.

So I think it's really simple and feel that your focus on the dating issues in the affidavit, and your insistence on reading it like it's the Holy Bible whereby not a single mistake could have been made by its author (presumably Alan Gray), is preventing both you and Ike from getting to the bottom of this issue.

Ike and I don't need to get 'to the bottom of this issue', Herlock.

If you are prepared to accept there is a basic truth in Mike's affidavit, by explaining away all the problems with it, which make it less of a sworn statement, and more the dog's dinner that could never have been used in a court of law against anyone, there's nothing more to say about it. Who on earth gave you the impression that I was insisting on it reading like the Holy Bible before I could believe a word of it? How much of the Holy Bible do you think is believable anyway?

It's also disappointing to find you continuing to say things like "Mike Barrett would have been taking one hell of a risk....". What was the risk? I thought we'd established there was no risk. He had never vouched for its authenticity. Or, if you prefer, all forgers take the risk of exposure. So why should Michael Barrett have been any different?

You keep leaving out the bit about Mike taking Anne's handiwork to London, allegedly against her will and better judgment. That's the theory we have been discussing. The fact that he wasn't vouching for its authenticity is neither here nor there, because nobody could have done that, could they? He would have been taking the risk of exposing his own wife, not knowing if she'd made a rubbish job of disguising her handwriting, and exposing himself as the fraudster behind a cunning plan that would have been on a par as cunning goes with any of Baldrick's. If a forensic handwriting examiner had been commissioned as part of the initial testing process and had positively identified the writing as Anne Barrett's, all the money thus far invested would have been repayable, and if Mike had already pissed it up against the wall, he and his wife would have risked prosecution and jail time. You can't use the fact that this didn't happen as evidence that there would never have been any risk regardless, because there'd have been no risk if neither Anne nor Mike penned it, or had any idea who did.

You quoted me:

"The risk, from Anne's point of view, would have been massive in those circumstances, and yet after failing to destroy her own work when she finally twigged Mike's true intentions for it, she didn't have the three brain cells required to come up with a Plan B that would stop it getting into expert hands? Really? Is this what you believe, Herlock?"

I find it strange that you found my question 'strange', Herlock.

It's a matter of record that Anne didn't stop the diary from being published, despite RJ Palmer's strange insistence that the prospect 'terrified' her, on account of her alleged role in creating it. We are discussing this theory because there isn't another one currently being debated as far as I know - unless you would like to suggest one and open a thread for it.

If Mike had involved Anne against her will, by taking the diary to London and pretending not to know that his wife had written it, she had ways and means of making sure it never went there again and was never released for testing. Do you disagree?

I also don't get your next point which concludes "He has committed no crime". I thought your argument was that he had received stolen goods. So he's taking it to London for it to be published to expose his crime to the unknown owner of the diary? It's not making much sense to me.

I meant the crime of trying to publish a diary which could prove to be a fake. It wasn't a crime if Mike didn't know who wrote it.

If Mike got it from an electrician, in March 1992, he wouldn't have known where it had come from, so it would be the electrician potentially committing a crime if he had taken it without permission from someone else's property. Assuming the electrician wouldn't have admitted this if it was true, it would have been hard to prove that Mike had knowingly received stolen goods. It would have been the same if he'd got it the year before from a dead friend who had similarly refused to admit where he got it from. Tony could in theory have nicked it from anywhere, and Mike could not have been accused of receiving stolen goods. Even harder if it turned out later that "no effing bugger alive" had known it was ever in their own property.

You mischaracterize my opinion when you say I think the Barretts were capable of forging the diary. I don't know their capabilities. But I don't know any reason why they wouldn't have been capable. I've asked the question but no-one has told me. Saying they are the obvious candidates has nothing to do with me knowing anything about their capabilities. It's because the diary came from their house in Liverpool and no-one is known to have seen or heard of it before this. Michael Barrett tried to obtain a genuine Victorian diary with blank pages and Anne lied about why he did so, amongst other lies she appears to have told about the diary. But let's just say you made an simple mistake in the way you expressed my views. To that extent, I'm lost as to why you think I've dismissed the views of people who knew the Barretts when I say that I don't know of any reason why they wouldn't have been capable of forging the diary. I'm not aware of the views of anyone who knew the Barretts personally who've said they weren't capable of this. So how can I possibly ever have dismissed those views?

Okay then, so without knowing if either Barrett would even have been capable of forging the diary, by themselves or together, you state they are the 'obvious candidates' because it 'came from their house' and Mike made a clumsy, unexplained attempt to obtain a genuine "diary" from the 1880s - which was doomed to failure as a suitable book for forging Maybrick's diary, but would have set up a thoroughly incriminating paper trail had the attempt succeeded.

Isn't it all a bit too much like a Lechmere theorist who has no clue what his capabilities were, but believes he is the 'obvious candidate' for murder because he was there when a victim was found 'freshly killed' and then behaved in what they argue was a suspicious manner, indicative of guilt? No alternative explanation is even considered, because they claim there isn't a plausible one.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Every second that passes is one they will never get back, yet they willingly pour their energy, intellect, and precious hours into analyzing, debating, and dissecting a transparent fraud like the Maybrick Diary.

I agree with your sentiment, Baron, but one could say the same thing about writing wildly speculative fiction designed to 'stich up' Charles Allen Lechmere, the 'dogwalker' who found Polly Nichols.

To each his own, I suppose. The hourglass does indeed drain.

Discussing the now thirty-odd year old Maybrick Hoax IS a strange hobby--all the more so because it has degraded into a battle of wills among a tiny number of combatants who don't like each other very much and have no hope of ever getting a concession.

Whether this is worse than the on-going debate over the dogwalker is a matter of opinion.

[The Baron]

It baffles me how some people fail to grasp the true value of their own lives and the limited time they have on this earth.

Every second that passes is one they will never get back, yet they willingly pour their energy, intellect, and precious hours into analyzing, debating, and dissecting a transparent fraud like the Maybrick Diary.

What drives this obsession with the meaningless? Do they not realize that every moment wasted on something worthless is a moment stolen from something real, something that could have enriched their minds and their souls, or even the world?

How many of them will look back years from now and regret the time they sacrificed for nothing?

Why would anyone so generously waste their irreplaceable hours in a blatant fake like the Maybrick Diary?

Do they not realize that time spent on the worthless is time they'll never get back?



The Baron

[caz]

Do you have any idea who the people who actually knew the Barretts personally, presumably prior to 1992, whose views I've supposedly been dismissing, that she keeps talking about, are? It's beyond me.

This wasn't addressed directly to me, but I am the 'she' in this context - and also the cat's mother, as Monty is reminding me because I'm not paying him enough attention.

I merely meant people who had ever known either Mike or Anne on a personal basis, socially or otherwise, before or after 1992, who would have been more qualified than most of us here to comment on whether or not these two individuals would have been willing, able or likely, to collaborate on a literary hoax at any point during their marriage. Usually you get a few coming out of the woodwork as a result of a big local story, whether it was when the first diary book was published in October 1993 and became a bestseller, or when Mike hit the headlines again in June 1994, with his claim to have forged it. But in this case, nobody who knew Mike wanted a piece of the action by publicly supporting his claim, with any relevant inside knowledge about him as a person, and nobody who knew Anne as a person is known to have said that she would have been loyal enough to stand by Mike and say nothing, let alone help him to make it less of a complete shambles, all the while he had supposedly been planning and trying to pull off a diary scam more audacious than Konrad Kujau before him.

Love,

Caz
X

[rjpalmer]

Hi Herlock -

I doubt this will interest you, but regarding the claim that Barrett "immediately" subjected the diary to an examination by "experts", I thought the following statement made to me by Keith Skinner might be of interest. (2-16-2018 'Acquiring a Victorian Diary' my emphasis added in bold).

"I know that people who have met Anne Graham find this very difficult to believe as she is a bright, intelligent lady and would have surely realised the potential value of a family heirloom. She may not have connected it to Maybrick although she did know the Granny Formby association with the Maybrick trial. But against this seemingly irrational behaviour of secreting, via a third party, the diary to her husband, has to be factored in the state of her marital situation and relationship with Mike. I had wanted to know why it had taken Mike about 5 weeks to take the diary to London to which I think Anne said it was just to do with arrangements for Caroline. But Anne had also told me how hard she tried to persuade Mike to drop the idea of bringing in people from the outside to examine the diary as she feared it would lead to the discovery that she had given it to Devereux to give to Mike, on the basis their marriage was at a point where Mike had lost all of his self esteem and was rejecting anything that came from Anne in her efforts to restore it. I remember Anne telling me that, once she had resigned herself to the reality that Mike was definitely going to take the diary to London, she thought the business appointment might as well be done professionally with an accompanying transcript. This is why I had assumed Mike had taken a copy of the transcript, printed off from his word processor, with him to London on April 13th 1992."

Make of it what you will.

Anne's rationale--a highly strange one--is that an examination of the diary would lead back to her alleged gambit with Devereux, which is bizarre. How could it? Devereux was dead and they were hardly close associates. It's sounds like another one of Anne's evasions.

Could there have been a more fundamental and obvious reason why Anne didn't want the diary examined by anyone? (Dismissing, for the moment, the possibility that she wasn't just lying to Keith. But then we have to factor in her distraught behavior to Audrey Johnson, etc).

I have my own reasons for rejecting the following suggestion, but Paul Begg once floated the theory that the Diary was created by Anne Graham and Tony Devereux as a scheme to occupy Barrett's time, so he would stay out of the boozer and focus again on the writing career that we now know he had in the mid-1980s.

Martin Fido, as previously mentioned, believed Anne wrote the diary, apparently as a work of fiction, but Barrett was the moving force behind the fraudulent relic.

Alan Gray, in rejecting Barrett's authorship, also believed Anne and Devereux wrote it.

I'm not insisting that any of these people were necessarily correct, but I do dismiss any insinuation that the idea is far-fetched and insane rubbish dreamed up by people who were not there in 1993-1996.

They were there--unlike every current contributor to this discussion.

[caz]

Can I ask you to clarify one thing about your post. When you say "I don't believe the handwriting is Maybrick's, but I don't believe it's Anne's either" are you simply saying that you don't believe it's Anne's normal handwriting or are you saying you also don't believe it's Anne's disguised handwriting? If the latter, how can you possibly know what Anne's disguised handwriting would look like? Or are you not actually making a handwriting point at all but just saying that you don't think that Anne would have written it because you don't think she would have got involved?

I don't believe Anne penned the diary, Herlock, in either her normal handwriting, or so heavily disguised as to become unrecognisable and unidentifiable as her own. It's not for me to prove she didn't have the skill or the motivation, any more than it's up to us to prove the real James Maybrick didn't write it.

It's my personal conclusion that it's not Anne's handiwork, based on the entirety of the evidence to date, from 9th March 1992 where our story begins. There is no reliable independent evidence that anyone knew about the diary, in physical or theoretical form, prior to that Monday.

You are, of course, free to dispute my conclusion by reaching a different one, based on your own knowledge of the subject and the people most closely involved. But questions along the lines of: 'But why don't you believe it was Anne?', followed by: 'It was a simple enough question, so if you won't answer it, is it because you can't?' are not useful, because the answer may be very far from simple, and based on more factors than we've both had hot dinners.

Love,

Caz
X