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

[Herlock Sholmes]

I wasn't confused. I was just reading what Barrat had written so maybe he has confused you and you've projected that onto me.

I quoted the 1884 example because it was the earliest actual example of 'one off' (meaning quantity) but Barrat (it would be so much quicker if I was just allowed to quote him) also quotes a letter written in 1893 in which one can clearly see the ambiguity which has started to evolve around whether 'one off' was a quantity or a state of uniqueness. Recognising this awkward ambiguity, Barrat attempts to pigeonhole this use in 1893 into something distinctly other than uniqueness, but the ambiguity is there for all to see and read. It is clear that by 1893 at the very latest, the expression 'one off' is starting to be transferred from a specifically numerical concept to a more general figurative meaning. If it is first recorded in 1893, you can rest assured that this morphing of meaning has been going on for some time beforehand.

You will disagree. As will RJ. As did Barrat in his article. But it's there in black and white for anyone else less polarised to review. As I say, it would be so much quicker if I was just allowed to quote him but please - everyone - read the article and decide for yourselves instead of being told by others what you should believe. Language evolves at a far faster rate than species ever do, and this is a clear example of 'one off' evolving a subtler meaning than simply a quantity.

Barrat makes a play about the 1893 letter not saying "a one off" as if that closed the deal on its lack of similarity to Maybrick's 1888 use of "a one off" but I think this is a very small, tangential point which takes us no further to understanding whether 'one off' in 1893 could have reflected an evolution of 'one off' in 1888 which would permit Maybrick (or anyone else) to use the term figuratively.

You didn't even mention the 1893 example in your earlier post but now it's the lynchpin of your entire argument. Okay. Strange that you didn't quote the 1893 letter which was, of course, from a patternmaker to the editor of a patternmaking journal. It is, when read properly, very strong evidence that "one off instance" was an impossible expression for 1888.

Before I quote the letter, may I remind you that Barrat has said for some years that "one off" originally meant a quantity of one in patternmaking, probably derived from the concept of casting [x number] off a pattern, where, in this case, x = 1. He cited an 1885 book on pattern making which contained the information that, to prevent mistakes, a printed label was sometimes stuck on a pattern to say e.g. "Number off: Two" this would then be referred to as 2 off (or, of course, 1 off, as the case might have been).

What happened in 1893 was that the pattern maker made a pattern making joke about this practice on the basis that it had obviously been appreciated that to cast 1 off involved a more expensive process than casting, say, 1000 off. So when writing to the editor for a back issue of a pattern making journal, he wrote:

"I hope you will be able to "cast" me the January number, but do not make the usual charge for "one off"."

The quotes around "cast" and "one off" indicate that they are being used in a way different to normal.

What must be obvious to you - and would be obvious to any expert in the English language - is that the author of the letter did not say that he hoped the editor will "not make the usual charge for a "one off"? Why not? This is five years after the diary author is supposed to have casually spoken and written of "a one off instance". Why was the letter writer using what must have been a very familiar expression by now in an odd and unusual way.

The answer is because he was simply talking about a quantity. There is no indication from the context that he's referring to anything unique or not to be repeated. If anything, "one off" here means something expensive. And, indeed, in theory, a "one off job" could have acquired the meaning of an expensive job so that a "one off event" could have come to mean an expensive event. It would be a mistake for you to read into that letter the modern meaning of the term "one off" because that is not present in what was being communicated.

Cherry-pick from the masses of evidence posted by Barrat as you may, but the fact that the letter is expressed in that way, five years after 1888, demonstrates as clearly as anything can that a figurative expression such as "it was a one off instance" was nowhere near entering the English language in the year of the Ripper murders. The language needed to evolve. "one off" needed to acquire the meaning of uniqueness and unrepeatability before it could be used in any wider, figurative or metaphorical expressions. The very fact that we have zero examples of anything even close to "one off instance" before 1945 yet we have this pattern making joke in 1893 should tell you something.

But I repeat, give all the evidence Barrat's gathered to an expert in the English language, or ask Robert Smith to do so, and ask that expert for an opinion as to whether the "one off instance" sentence could possibly have been written in 1888.

[Lombro2]

I never did debunking by default but I think I quite enjoyed it. The world needs debunkers like us when people like Ike don’t think Jack is a relic hominid but is an upper dimensional.

I especially like those Alan Gray EVP sessions. Thanks for posting those. I spent an hour listening to it (it’s much better on Media Player). And I’m sure I heard the ghost of Michael Barrett say: “Ike! Get out!”

But come on! Let’s get scientific already!

[caz]

So no, there is no contradiction in the idea that Anne was both a collaborator and a woman who was terrified when she realized the diary was going to be published.

Did she try to burn it? I have no idea. It could be a pork pie, certainly. But Caroline Barrett remembers her parents fighting over the diary on the kitchen floor, and that's an odd thing to 'coach' a child. Why would they have coached her about a fight behind the scenes? It would have only raised red flags.

A concession of sorts, because it would be hard to explain why anyone would have invented a fight behind the scenes over the diary and coached their young daughter to speak about it to strangers at a later date.

What is equally hard to explain, and Palmer makes no attempt to do so, is why Anne made no further attempt to stop the diary being published, if she was 'terrified' by the prospect. It was back in Goldie Street on 13th April following Mike's trip to London. Doreen had suggested beforehand that she would have it photocopied in her office, but this only happened later, when the diary was in the bank in Liverpool. Doreen wrote to Mike to get it photocopied for Shirley, or to ask the bank to do it and send it directly to Shirley's London branch. All Doreen had by then was a transcript - which could never have been published without having the diary itself, to show prospective publishers and be submitted for tests. Anne had all the time in the world to stop the physical diary going anywhere further south than Goldie Street or their Liverpool bank. But she was apparently as clueless as she was helpless when it came to Mike's second [ever?] trip to London in early June, and was even persuaded to fork out the return train fare for him and Caroline to travel together this time with the diary to try and impress a publisher.

Or are we meant to believe that Mike secretly went to the bank to retrieve the diary, before nicking the money for the train fare from Caroline's piggy bank and heading off to Lime Street with his famous briefcase, without Anne's blessing or approval - and perhaps even without her knowledge?

[caz]

Can I ask you something Caz? By the time Mike presented Anne with the bill, had not the time passed under the vendor's standard terms and conditions within which the buyer could return an item? And couldn't it only be returned in any case if it wasn't as had been described? In which case, is it really correct that Mike could have returned it without paying?

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

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

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

You're remarkably insistent that the Barretts weren't behind the forgery, Caz but let me ask you this. Are there any alternative candidates? Who do YOU think created it?

I'll take that one, thank you, Caz.

It was James Maybrick.

[caz]

Hi Caz,

Does someone really need to prove it was a coincidence that there were workmen in an old house on a day someone else made a telephone call?

Goodness, surely that kind of thing happens every day of the week. What is there to prove?

I also think, as RJ Palmer has mentioned, that no one is spewing out the little 1891 diary, as you put it. What is relied upon is the wording of the advertisement which clearly reveals what Barrett was actually seeking.

If these were any old workmen in any old house, on any old day that any old person made any old telephone call, you'd have had the ghost of a point, Herlock.

We all know it's the wording of the advert, that produced the little 1891 diary, that gets spewed out so frequently, because it's the only evidence that can reliably be taken away from either of Mike's contradictory affidavits.

It clearly reveals what Mike was seeking, but it can't reveal why he needed to seek it, so soon after his call to London claiming to have JtR's diary - which turned out to identify Maybrick, who had lived in Battlecrease for the exact period covered by the diary. It was only called Battlecrease while the Maybricks lived there.

Tony Devereux had lived on Fountains Road until his death on 8th August 1991. Eddie Lyons was living on Fountains Road when Mike called London on 9th March 1992 about what is essentially a Battlecrease diary, and Eddie had been one of the workmen in the house formerly known as Battlecrease that same morning. If he wasn't there, he must have gone to some trouble to get accurate details of the work done that day, and who was there, in order to insist that he was among them. God knows why he'd have done that.

Your comments clearly reveal what you were seeking to do, when you reduced all this to 'workmen in an old house on a day someone else made a telephone call', but I wouldn't presume to know why you needed to do this - and in full view of your readers.

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

Do I win £5?

Yes, but you won't be able to spend it without the shopkeeper holding it up to the light and saying very loudly, "What the Hell's this - we don't take Monopoly money, you know".

[Iconoclast]

The one thing that is obvious to me is that there are chronological errors in the affidavit and that if one wants to try and understand what Barrett must have been trying to say, you need to make adjustments for those errors. Far better, it seems to me, to focus on what Barrett said in the 1999 meeting but, for some strange reason, you don't want to do that.

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

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

[Iconoclast]

I wouldn't mind, Ike but on no theory that you have put forward have you even begun to explain why Mike chose the period 1880 to 1890. On your case, he'd seen a diary dated 1889. So why didn't he ask for an 1889 diary?

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

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

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

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

[Iconoclast]

If Barrett was the forger Caz, who knows if he learnt something about dating paper. He had access to a library and he knew how to use it. His request for a diary from 1880-90 must have been made almost immediately after his first telephone call to Doreen Montgomery. He could have discovered at any time after this, from a book, that he didn't need paper from that exact decade.

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

Or he might have decided to take the risk and gamble that an Edwardian photograph album (if that's what it is) would pass muster because he was, by that time, utterly desperate and out of options.

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

Will we ever get anywhere by asking ourselves questions like this? I don't think so.

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

As for your question to me asking if he asked for a diary with blank pages "from the 1880s" having seen the year 1889 in another diary, you'll have to explain to me why he would have wanted another diary from the 1880s, especially one with blank pages, because I can't think of a single reason.

such a lack of imagination you confess to!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Afternoon Ike,

You will no doubt be reminded that Anne had no choice, because a denial could have come back to haunt her if Mike had ever regained his memory and produced the salient details himself, such as the payee's name on the cheque.

But of course, Anne did have a choice when Mike presented her with the bill for £25 for an 1891 diary, for which payment was overdue. She could have ripped him a new one and told him to return it whence it came, knowing it had been sent on approval, and that even Mike could not have 'approved' a diary that was provably and indelibly two years too late for Maybrick. With a little luck and a following wind, nothing would survive of a request that went unfulfilled, unlike a transaction that was finally completed after the customer went down on record as a 'late payer'. Instead, Anne devised a cunning plan to pay up, making sure to date the cheque after their hoax had been seen in London, hoping nobody would suspect a thing if the purchase ever came to light. Presumably she forgot by 1995 that this would not work when she allowed the payment to be traced back from May 1992 to when Mike was sent the offending article in the first instance, when Martin Earl put the date for chasing him up in his own diary.

Stupid woman - balls of brass but head like a sieve.

Love,

Caz
X

Can I ask you something Caz? By the time Mike presented Anne with the bill, had not the time passed under the vendor's standard terms and conditions within which the buyer could return an item? And couldn't it only be returned in any case if it wasn't as had been described? In which case, is it really correct that Mike could have returned it without paying?

[Herlock Sholmes]

This one wasn't aimed at me, but would Herlock concede that if the Barrett Hoax Conspiracy theorists were conned by a con artist's affidavit, they would be the childishly gullible ones, while the evil bubble bursters would be those of us who saw right through Mike's lies, and could understand his reasons for telling them?

RJ Palmer asked some time ago why someone would create a bogus confession that harmed their own financial interests. It was a fair question, except that the next one to ask would be why Mike would have made - to the best of his ability - a true confession that harmed his own financial interests. While there were several personal factors in play that could have motivated Mike to make a bogus confession, despite doing even more harm to his personal finances than he had done already, I have yet to see a single motive offered for why a liar and con artist as we all know Mike was, would have chosen to piss on his own cornflakes so needlessly, instantly and spectacularly, by going to Harold Brough in late June 1994 with a true admission to fraud, while implicating nobody but himself.

Referring to Mike's affidavit sworn in January 1995, in which he implicated a further three individuals as knowing participants and his own daughter as a silent witness, RJ Palmer observed that if this one was as bogus as his one-man band effort, here was his 'big chance' to use it to destroy Feldman, but instead he later denied its existence, lied about what it contained and even insisted that the diary was real.

At the heart of this saga, we have a man who changed his story like the weather, and this is the hand we are still dealt with today. We all make assessments of Mike’s motivations, and we are all susceptible to being wrong – even RJ Palmer. But if we could work out why Mike Barrett said one thing on one occasion, and the opposite on another – or why he would have made several contradictory claims during a single session, to the same people - we could knit fog while nailing jelly to the wall.

The only reasonably consistent theme after January 1994 was Mike's obsession with seeing Anne and Caroline again. Even then, he couldn't make up his mind, from one minute to the next, whether he hated Anne or loved her; whether he was out for revenge or just wanted her back in his life, playing happy families. He often expressed a hatred of Feldman to his face or behind his back, accompanied by more contradictory claims about the diary's origins. When he chose to implicate Anne in its creation, Mike was no doubt goading her because of the influence he could see that she and Feldman were having on each other as a result of her new provenance story. But it was all about Anne in the end. If Mike had had a genuine confession up his sleeve, which would have killed two birds with the one stone, by stopping Feldman's influence over his ex-wife and making her talk to him, he might have thought it worth the extra financial damage and potential legal consequences to himself to get the whole truth out there: publish and be damned. The fact that nothing like that happened, and Mike lamely put the affidavit containing the new allegations through Anne's door, speaks to all his energies being concentrated on his lost family unit at that point, and no renewed interest in telling the world what a great forger he was.

RJ Palmer also observed that if a man can punish his perceived enemies - Robert Smith and Paul Feldman to name but two - with a false confession, he can punish them 'even more effectively' with a true confession. At the time this read to me like a contradiction in terms. If there had been a true confession lurking somewhere among all Mike's contradictory statements, claims and affidavits, to having faked the diary, he nevertheless failed to punish a single enemy at the earliest opportunity with the affidavit dated 5th January 1995.

It's a statement of the bleedin' obvious that a true confession would have been a more effective punishment than a false one, so if Mike's affidavit had contained the truth, he could have used it to bring down all his enemies in one fell swoop. Knowing, however, that it was the biggest and most desperate pack of lies he'd ever told, he'd have had enough self-awareness to appreciate - and predict [that word again] - just how unlikely it was to succeed. People can pick whichever option they prefer, but when it finally appeared on the internet we could all see who he had been gunning for and how little effect it had on them:

'Since December 1993 I have been trying, through the press, the Publishers, the Author of the Book, Mrs Harrison, and my Agent Doreen Montgomery to expose the fraud of ' The Diary of Jack the Ripper ' ("the diary").

Nobody will believe me and in fact some very influential people in the Publishing and Film world have been doing everything to discredit me and in fact they have gone so far as to introduce a new and complete story of the original facts of the Diary and how it came to light.'

Mike's main objective was to get Anne to talk to him, so by threatening to go public with the affidavit the same argument applies: a true confession would have had far more chance of succeeding than a palpably false one. The fact that it failed to move Anne an inch is an indication of the latter. Again, people are free to dispute this, but RJ Palmer's belief that Anne was 'terrified' of being linked with the diary's creation is not supported by her total lack of response to Mike's threats and demands.

Sorry about the long post, I didn't have time to write a short one. [Thank you, Winston.]

Love,

Caz
X

I'm puzzled because you keep talking of people being conned by an affidavit. Who are these people? It seems to be only you and Ike who can't stop talking about the affidavit. What about what Barrett said at the 1999 meeting? Wouldn't it be better to look at that story Caz?But do we even need to consider what Barrett said? What about him seeking a Victorian diary with blank pages? Why did he do that?

One theory I've read as to why Barrett confessed in June 1994 was that investigators had discovered that he'd been a freelance journalist and this news was about to be published so that he feared he was going to have to answer some difficult questions as to why he hadn't mentioned this to Shirley, or indeed anyone else. He might thus have felt under enormous stress. But at this point he didn't want to drop his wife in it so claimed to have done it all himself. What do you think about that theory?

You say that Barrett changed his story "like the weather". But is that really true? Or is it just a convenient way of avoiding the fact that his story of how the forgery was done was consistent over many years?

You're remarkably insistent that the Barretts weren't behind the forgery, Caz but let me ask you this. Are there any alternative candidates? Who do YOU think created it?

[caz]

This mission you are embarked on, Ike, of finding mistakes in the affidavit is a complete waste of time. None of the errors you have mentioned assist towards disproving the forgery. If anything, they support the idea of the forgery because, when the erroneous date of Jan or Feb 1990 is corrected to March 1992, it means that the timeline of the forgery suddenly makes sense.

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

Love,

Caz
X

[Iconoclast]

I had thought that Ike's criticism of Harris was that Harris didn't do something or other with Barrett's affidavit, but when I asked him what he thinks Harris should have done, he wouldn't give me a sensible answer.

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

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

[rjpalmer]

I would have hoped that if our "little escapade" taught you one thing, Ike, it would be that anyone can make errors of memory and that to make a mistake doesn't necessarily mean that someone is lying, even if they categorically state that they've heard something on a tape which turns out not to exist.

Hi Herlock,

Rational people would concede that a hardcore drunk like Barrett might make errors in dates, and that Alan Gray's own misunderstandings might complicate things. Look at whom Gray had to deal with. If Tom Mitchell can make the errors we have recently witnessed while (one assumes) stone cold sober, what chance would the brain damaged Barrett have had?

For me, Barrett's confusion over dates is actually a compelling reason to believe that what he is describing is generally what happened, but getting the diary fanatics to leave their bubble long enough to comprehend and admit this is a lost cause. For one, the affidavit hardly has the bogus consistency and neatness of well-rehearsed false confession, but that's not what I am alluding to. Barrett consistently said it took 11 days to write the hoax. Bear in mind that Barrett couldn't even bloody well remember the year in which he contacted Earl, let alone the week or the day. And yet, when David Barrat recreated a detailed timeline using hard, provable data--the date the maroon diary would have arrived in Goldie Street, the date of the next O & L auction, the date Mike went to London, etc.--it showed that there was indeed an 11/12 day span. No one with two brain cells worth rubbing together would think that Barrett could have remembered these obscure details and then exploited them for the purpose of making an off-hand remark that no one noticed or would have believed--hoping against hope that someday David B. would work it all out! Barrett's strange, entirely irrelevant and pointless statement of creating the diary in 11 days actually CONFORMED to the chronology that Barrat compiled in a way that it shouldn't have. Perhaps this is the kind of attention to detail that is simply too subtle for the kind of people attracted to the Maybrick hoax, but I find it difficult if not impossible to "explain away."

Meanwhile, "do as I say, not as I do" is on full display if we turn our attention to the Great Battlecrease Caper. Talk about a muddled chronology of impossible events! There is more shoehorning than one sees in the footwear department at Marks and Spencer during back-to-school sales week.

Ed Lyons, having found the Diary of Jack the Ripper, trots down the driveway to alert his workmate LATER THAT SUMMER. Other workmates try to peddle the diary months after Barrett has already taken possession of it. Then we have the shifting, impossible story of Mr. Martin-Wright. Even the great day itself is a wild and improbable rush of events.

Keith Skinner once stated that diary skeptics are "too accommodating" when it comes to the Barrett/Gray affidavit, but is it not true that Keith and his fellow diary detectives were remarkably accommodating when it came to Anne Graham's shifting tales? Are those contributing to the current discussion not remarkably accommodating when it comes to the conflicting accounts and fading memories of the electricians, almost all of whom are describing rumors instead of events at which they were first-hand witnesses?