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

[Herlock Sholmes]

No need to apologise for poor eyesight - unless you have ignored your eye test reminders.

Nobody wants the bailiffs to come round but they do, regardless, or it wouldn't be the 'common and very well known procedure for debt recovery' which you so eloquently describe, would it? There's even a reality show on Channel 5 tonight called: Call the Bailiffs: Time to Pay Up! Series 3, 9th out of 12 episodes.

Being a bailiff would be a cushy number if the mere threat of one beating a path to the door of the Mike Barretts of this world was enough to make them all roll over and cough up. But this is the real world, and you have rightly acknowledged the need for bailiffs to do more than growl from the sidelines at people who owe money.

If they ever come up with a show called: Repossession: Time to Pay Up - or find your locks changed while you were down the boozer pissing away your benefits, it would be a better fit for Mike Barrett and his circumstances after the breadwinner fled from his abuse, I'll grant you.

You may argue that this is all totally irrelevant, but you invoked the spectre of bailiffs, to put the willies up Mike Barrett, and have become bogged down by your own irrelevant argument.

What makes this relevant is the ease with which your argument can be refuted by the wealth of actual evidence we have about Mike's character and known behaviour.

This is nothing to do with speculation as far as I'm concerned; we all do that when the evidence is lacking, some more wildly than others. This, for me, is about how closely your arguments in general fit with the facts, the evidence and the known context. If your argument itself is irrelevant, but as easily refuted as this one, what does it say about arguments you make that are absolutely crucial to your own theory that the Barretts jointly created the diary in early April 1992?

I'm at a loss to know what you're even talking about. Is your argument that because bailiffs come round to houses of people who can't or won't pay their debts that Mike wouldn't have cared if bailiffs came knocking at his door over the sum of £25 which we know his wife had the funds to pay? It doesn't make any sense.

I guess I need to remind you that this all started because you misunderstood Earl's terms and conditions. You wrongly said that no payment needed to be made in May 1992, or at all. All I've done is draw to your attention that the red diary legally needed to be paid for or there would have been undesirable consequences. I can't think of anything more uncontroversial or less worthy of extended commentary.

[Herlock Sholmes]

It started off well with: 'It looks like...', but substituting the word 'because' for 'if' is a better look for your argument.

If we knew Mike did end up using an auction find to create the diary, none of us would be here arguing the toss.

Just sayin'.

So your argument now is that 1888 and 1889 were not in the 1880s?

The remaining tired old arguments in the rest of your post have been disposed of many times. There's nothing in them. They are obviously just a (very ineffective) way of you trying to get round the frustrating fact that you're unable to come up with a single plausible reason why Mike wanted those blank Victorian pages.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Oh, I didn't realise you had been corrected concerning your previous insistence that it is 'impossible' to positively match disguised handwriting to the individual using it.

Or is it only professional handwriting examiners who can't do this, while amateurs can 'match' whatever they like to anyone of their choosing? At least it would be consistent with the funny but sad argument that Alec Voller, who actually formulated his own ink - Diamine - wouldn't know it on the page from a bar of soap, while the amateurs saw it a mile off.

Have you been able to match the diary handwriting to Anne's? I trust you are not referring to samples she once wrote for Keith on the spur of the moment, which also look nothing like the diary handwriting. If so, I would gently suggest that if she had penned it, she'd have been mentally deficient to deliberately disguise her normal hand again for those samples, and show off a natural ability to change it at will, when she could simply have replicated her normal hand as easily as falling off a log.

So is she manipulative or mentally deficient in your view? Or both?

Did I say that the disguised handwriting can be positively matched to Anne's handwriting? No, I didn’t. If it could be positively matched, it's all over. Can it be matched though? Yes, it can.

When I speak of the handwriting match, I'm talking, as you know, about the examples of her normal handwriting which have been posted on this forum.

As for the handwriting sample that Anne provided to Keith Skinner in 1995, I asked you on 1st July (#948) to explain why this handwriting sample looks so different to her normal handwriting. I repeated this question the next day (#960) then again on 8th July (#1129) and then again on 23rd July (#1534). My question remains unanswered. Will you ever explain it? Don’t you find it ‘strange’?

Regarding your own question to me, I don't understand it. It seems like Anne wanted to ensure that a handwriting expert wasn't going to be able to compare her normal handwriting to the diary handwriting because she was worried it might be matched. I can't see why that means she has to be either manipulative or mentally deficient. Might she simply not have feared that her role in the forgery could be exposed if she provided a sample of her normal handwriting?

[Observer]

Try lower middle class, Observer, and I suspect you'd be nearer the mark. These days, he'd be called working class.

Love,

Caz
X

Yes, I tried lower middle class but decided he was better than that, and he was in my opinion. But it's all subjective isn't it ? My point was - there's no way he was a top toff

[Observer]

I guess that makes me 50% of the "people".

So 50% of the people agree with Observer. Maybrick was not a top hated toff. The top hated toffs would be lower level government workers like William Suff. We have some of those here.

Those guys are the Suff of Nightmares!

Indeed, certain one's make me quite Sickert

[caz]

It’s already been proven that the diary wasn't "in a hole". The inclusion in the diary of the expression "a one off instance" proves that it wasn't written until after 1945 and thus couldn't have been placed in any kind of hole.

Ah, so before 1946 the words 'one', 'off' and 'instance' had yet to be invented, and between 1946 and 1992, there were no holes of any kind anywhere, not even in Blackburn, Lancashire?

It's funny, but sadly not in the same way as the Edinburgh Fringe.

[caz]

I'm sorry Caz but I can’t see any connection between Mike having once committed a criminal act in stealing a lady's handbag and him having a civil liability which obliged him to pay £25 or face the bailiffs coming round. It's got nothing to do with him learning his lesson from being caught stealing. It's that he wouldn't have wanted the bailiffs to come round and end up having to pay a fee of much greater than £25. Who would? I'm not sure what it is about this common and very well known procedure for debt recovery which causes you such difficulty in understanding the issue. Anne ended up paying the debt which Mike didn't pay himself. That's what happened. How does speculation about some other hypothetical circumstance assist us in any way?

No need to apologise for poor eyesight - unless you have ignored your eye test reminders.

Nobody wants the bailiffs to come round but they do, regardless, or it wouldn't be the 'common and very well known procedure for debt recovery' which you so eloquently describe, would it? There's even a reality show on Channel 5 tonight called: Call the Bailiffs: Time to Pay Up! Series 3, 9th out of 12 episodes.

Being a bailiff would be a cushy number if the mere threat of one beating a path to the door of the Mike Barretts of this world was enough to make them all roll over and cough up. But this is the real world, and you have rightly acknowledged the need for bailiffs to do more than growl from the sidelines at people who owe money.

If they ever come up with a show called: Repossession: Time to Pay Up - or find your locks changed while you were down the boozer pissing away your benefits, it would be a better fit for Mike Barrett and his circumstances after the breadwinner fled from his abuse, I'll grant you.

You may argue that this is all totally irrelevant, but you invoked the spectre of bailiffs, to put the willies up Mike Barrett, and have become bogged down by your own irrelevant argument.

What makes this relevant is the ease with which your argument can be refuted by the wealth of actual evidence we have about Mike's character and known behaviour.

This is nothing to do with speculation as far as I'm concerned; we all do that when the evidence is lacking, some more wildly than others. This, for me, is about how closely your arguments in general fit with the facts, the evidence and the known context. If your argument itself is irrelevant, but as easily refuted as this one, what does it say about arguments you make that are absolutely crucial to your own theory that the Barretts jointly created the diary in early April 1992?

[caz]

It looks like Mike Barrett did go the whole hog and expand his date range beyond 1900 because he ended up using what would appear from its contents to be an Edwardian photograph album.

It started off well with: 'It looks like...', but substituting the word 'because' for 'if' is a better look for your argument.

If we knew Mike did end up using an auction find to create the diary, none of us would be here arguing the toss.

Just sayin'.

[caz]

I don't think it's difficult, Caz. Mike was hoping to fake a diary from the 1880s so asked Martin Earl to source a diary from the 1880s. At that time, he couldn't possibly have known that no diaries from the 1880s would be available. When he discovered that no diaries from the 1880s were available he decided to widen the range. Doesn't one normally start off with the ideal item that one would like to have and then, if that can't be achieved, settles for second or third best? Seems like ordinary human nature to me. I can’t understand why you don’t get this?

Oh, it's all too easy, Herlock, when you strip it all away from the context, as Lombro2 pointed out.

If Mike was hoping 'to fake a diary from the 1880s', it wasn't Maybrick's, was it? The text is concentrated on a limited and very specific period of his life, from the move to Battlecrease in February 1888 to his death there in May 1889. He even connects the brooding atmosphere of the house with his first murderous thoughts, shortly after moving in, and this sets the scene for all that follows.

You can dismiss the work in the house on the same day as Mike's call to London as a simple coincidence, to rid yourself of an inconvenient context, but your own context has Maybrick's personal Battlecrease diary, in the form of day-to-day entries that are undated except for the last, sitting on the word processor waiting for something suitable to house it. According to Mike's affidavit, the story was conceived and basically written while Devereux was alive, but even if you shift this part of the process much closer to March 1992, when Mike is ready to call Doreen about what will be Jack the Ripper's undated personal "diary", your context dictates that he has nothing to house the prepared text until 31st March 1992, after which it has to be handwritten into a photo album adapted for the purpose, followed by the transcript typed up from the handwritten version and printed off, for Mike to take to London with the diary itself. The available evidence favours this over the transcript being prepared and sent to Doreen after 13th April, and before the diary was deposited in the bank. Either way, your context doesn't allow much time for altering the text or the basic concept of Battlecrease 1888-9, as we get from the Maybrick diary.

Mike either researched his paper requirements before calling Martin Earl or he winged it.

With that research under his belt, an 1890 ceiling was needlessly low, as I think you would acknowledge, if grudgingly.

Without it, Mike's 1890 ceiling, upped to 1891, was too high for Maybrick datewise, and potentially too high for the paper, for all he could have known.

With just the briefest look into Konrad Kujau's biggest mistake, and how best to avoid it with Jack the Ripper's diary, it would become apparent that just one year in paper manufacture - 1955 - caught him out and got him sent to prison. All forgers take risks, I get it. But do they typically take risks that are 100% avoidable?

In Mike's case, I could believe it. But I would find it quite extraordinary if Anne didn't care whether her lying liability of a husband had covered the basics in risk limitation.

You mentioned that no diaries for 1880-90 were available, and only the tiny appointments diary for 1891, but that was just one week after a single advertisement appeared in a single issue of a single publication, so the odds were very much against Mike getting anything suitable for Maybrick's diary using that method and that wording, in such a limited time frame.

When asking for a "diary" to house whatever you believe was on the word processor by then, Mike's request for a minimum number of unused or blank pages was not particularly useful with no reference to page size - as he would soon find when the only one available by 26th March arrived in the post. It would be like asking for at least 20 pieces of string, and when asked: "How long do you want them?" Mike replies: "I want to keep them, you daft twat. I'll pay you later."

[caz]

Context or no context Lombro, your posts don't make sense.

If you haven't been concentrating, and really need the context for this issue, it's that Mike Barrett, out of the blue, one day produced a fake diary of Jack the Ripper, for which there is no evidence such a thing previously existed, after secretly attempting to acquire a genuine diary from the 1880s with blank pages. That error strewn diary contains quirky language which Barrett himself is known to have used, grammatical errors which his wife is known to have made and disguised handwriting which can be matched to his wife's handwriting. The further context is that no good evidence has been presented of anyone else having either written or discovered that diary. So you can take that context, chew on it and see how it flies.

Oh, I didn't realise you had been corrected concerning your previous insistence that it is 'impossible' to positively match disguised handwriting to the individual using it.

Or is it only professional handwriting examiners who can't do this, while amateurs can 'match' whatever they like to anyone of their choosing? At least it would be consistent with the funny but sad argument that Alec Voller, who actually formulated his own ink - Diamine - wouldn't know it on the page from a bar of soap, while the amateurs saw it a mile off.

Have you been able to match the diary handwriting to Anne's? I trust you are not referring to samples she once wrote for Keith on the spur of the moment, which also look nothing like the diary handwriting. If so, I would gently suggest that if she had penned it, she'd have been mentally deficient to deliberately disguise her normal hand again for those samples, and show off a natural ability to change it at will, when she could simply have replicated her normal hand as easily as falling off a log.

So is she manipulative or mentally deficient in your view? Or both?

[Herlock Sholmes]

The non-prior-existence of the journal and the watch don’t hurt me because I said they were in a hole. That hurts you.

But instead of trying to come up with something to prove it wasn’t in a hole, you think you can use that lack of provenance outside of the hole to pin it on the guy who got the diary a couple of hours after it was dug out.

It’s already been proven that the diary wasn't "in a hole". The inclusion in the diary of the expression "a one off instance" proves that it wasn't written until after 1945 and thus couldn't have been placed in any kind of hole.

[Lombro2]

The non-prior-existence of the journal and the watch don’t hurt me because I said they were in a hole. That hurts you.

But instead of trying to come up with something to prove it wasn’t in a hole, you think you can use that lack of provenance outside of the hole to pin it on the guy who got the diary a couple of hours after it was dug out.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Anything can make sense taken out of context.

Context is everything. The only context you give us is the presumed one that he wanted to fake a diary from the 1880s. That’s all the context you got or the only context that fits?

Try putting your story in more context and see how it flies!

Context or no context Lombro, your posts don't make sense.

If you haven't been concentrating, and really need the context for this issue, it's that Mike Barrett, out of the blue, one day produced a fake diary of Jack the Ripper, for which there is no evidence such a thing previously existed, after secretly attempting to acquire a genuine diary from the 1880s with blank pages. That error strewn diary contains quirky language which Barrett himself is known to have used, grammatical errors which his wife is known to have made and disguised handwriting which can be matched to his wife's handwriting. The further context is that no good evidence has been presented of anyone else having either written or discovered that diary. So you can take that context, chew on it and see how it flies.

[Lombro2]

Anything can make sense taken out of context.

Context is everything. The only context you give us is the presumed one that he wanted to fake a diary from the 1880s. That’s all the context you got or the only context that fits?

Try putting your story in more context and see how it flies!

[Herlock Sholmes]

How predictable.

But we were discussing Mike's only known request for a diary, which you argued was based on him having researched the history of paper manufacture and setting his date range accordingly. That was your explanation for him asking for anything between 1880 and 1890 and accepting 1891.

I don't think it's difficult, Caz. Mike was hoping to fake a diary from the 1880s so asked Martin Earl to source a diary from the 1880s. At that time, he couldn't possibly have known that no diaries from the 1880s would be available. When he discovered that no diaries from the 1880s were available he decided to widen the range. Doesn't one normally start off with the ideal item that one would like to have and then, if that can't be achieved, settles for second or third best? Seems like ordinary human nature to me. I can’t understand why you don’t get this?