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

[Herlock Sholmes]

In his January 5, 1995 affidavit, Mike Barrett had the perfect opportunity to enumerate a long list of where he got his references from which he used in his hoaxed scrapbook but - instead - he seemed to deliberately focus on aspects of his 'creation' which were patently untrue. I wonder why that was?

If you or I had done what Barrett claimed to do, there is a good chance that our January 5, 1995 affidavits would have included:

"I got the reference to 'Punch' from the back of Fido (1987)".
"I got the reference to 'left my mark' from Fido (1987)".
"I spotted that 'Juwes' looked a bit like 'James' when I saw the GSG in [wherever]".
Et cetera.

There must have been many other references which he could have included which would have given us some degree of confidence that he had indeed been aware of a number of Ripper-related books but he chose to focus on things which he 'did' or which 'happened' which were simply untrue. It's almost as though he was - deep down - trying to show the world how little he knew and how little he had actually wanted to create that affidavit.

No?

Ike

When you talk about what should be in Barrett's affidavit, don't you have to first consider the process by which that affidavit was created? As to that, how precisely was it created? Did someone type up what he thought had occurred based on his conversations with a drunken Mike Barrett and did a drunken Barrett give the content of the affidavit any great consideration, or did he rely on the drafter for everything? How quickly was it written from start to finish? And if the person drafting it didn't think to ask the questions that you've identified, could that be the reason why the answers to them are not included in the affidavit?

[Herlock Sholmes]

One of the criticisms levelled against the case for James Maybrick - and, of course, many have been thought-up to try to disprove its potential authenticity - is that it is 'preposterous' to suggest that the 'Juwes' in the GSG were actually a simple cypher for 'James' and that James Maybrick therefore could have written the GSG as a 'funny Jewish joke' which he then mentioned in his scrapbook.

Many people on here iterate Martin Fido's original criticism (in Paul Feldman's video) but one person who noticeably did not (to my knowledge - I'm open to being corrected here as it won't make one iota to my underlying point) was that doyen of anti-scrapbookism, Melvin 'The Viper' Harris. I wonder why he would be so unexpectedly lenient over an opportunity to pile in ahead of the pile-in.

Hmmm ...

In his 1994 book which apparently sold very badly, almost certainly because of the attention being paid to Shirley Harrison's original text on Maybrick which Harris had invested so much effort in dismissing (because - as we know - he had loads of integrity just before he published a competing book about Jack the Ripper), Harris quoted his candidate Robert Donston Stephenson as claiming the following regarding the word 'Juwes' in the GSG:

[p112, The True Face of Jack the Ripper] "Now place a dot over The Third Upstroke (which dot was naturally overlooked by lantern light) and we get, plainly The Juives which, I need not tell you, is the French word for Jews".

Goodness, could it be any more obscure? But Harris is more than happy to keep quoting Stephenson's claims:

[p114] "Inspection at once shows us, then, that a dot has been overlooked by the constable who copied it, as might easily occur, especially if it were placed at some distance, after the manner of foreigners ... Therefore we place a dot above the third upstroke in the word Juwes, and we find it to be Juives, which is the French word for Jews. Strictly Juives and grammatically speaking, of course, it is the feminine form of Juifs and means 'Jewesses'."

Harris does not challenge Stephenson's self-fulfilling logic. Stephenson states, "Inspection at once shows us, then, that a dot has been overlooked by the constable who copied it, as might easily occur, especially if it were placed at some distance, after the manner of foreigners". If the dot was overlooked, how can it be said to have ever been there? This is simply a means for Stephenson to attempt to shoehorn in a dot which was not written down therefore could not be said to have been 'overlooked'. It was only overlooked if was there in the first place and if - therefore - it was meant to read 'Juives' which is what Stephenson wants us to believe.

Harris is happy to publish this errant nonsense and use it as part of his case against Stephenson. How many of us can recall the torrent of abuse which came his way at making such an unsustainable argument in order to pursue a point? Harris felt it was in line with his excessive integrity to do so therefore Harris - the original antiscrapbookist - must have found it equally acceptable to interpret 'Juwes' as a clever little cypher for 'James'.

Ike

I’ve got to ask why you always refer to the late Melvin Harris a "viper"? Is it simply because he didn't think the diary was genuine?

Is your point that because Harris might have made mistakes when writing a book about Stephenson, this means that the diary is more likely to be authentic?

Otherwise, I can't honestly see the purpose in attacking Harris's theory about Stephenson in a thread about the Maybrick diary.