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

[Herlock Sholmes]

As an aside first, just back from Coventry (not Liverpool, RJ) with a Midlands cold starting and reading Robert Smith's True History of the Diary of Jack the Ripper again in bed last night with half a cup of hot milk stirred into my half a cup of 10-year old malt, I was struck by this comment:

"On 22nd June [this is 1994, by the way], just five days after Montgomery's note to Anne [Barrett], Shirley Harrison and Sally Evemy, her business partner and researcher, were paying a visit to Jenny's [a new friend of Mike Barrett] home, where Barrett was staying. It was at that moment when he first dropped the bombshell, claiming that he himself had forged the diary. Harrison described his shocking announcement in her book: "He was bitter and angry that he had not seen his daughter and threatened to tell everything to the national press." Fuelled by alcohol, he didn't care that he was giving the lie to the diary being handed to him by Tony Devereux. In his manic state, he was determined to "get back at Anne" (as he would later explain) and destroy Feldman's theory that the diary "had been in Anne's family for years", even if it meant smashing the diary's credibility as an authentic Victorian document, as well as the book's publication prospects and his future income from it. Revenge on Anne for leaving him, for interfering in his relationship with Jenny, and for depriving him of Caroline (as he believed), had tipped him over the edge into irrationality."

Barrett had claimed that he had been trying since December 1993 to reveal the truth through Shirley Harrison. She mustn't have had very good hearing, I guess. Take home message? The January 5, 1995 affidavit signed (but almost certainly not solely authored) by Mike Barrett is a worthless piece of mince and should never be relied on for anything. The evidence for this reaches right to the heart of that viper Melvin Harris who had done so much to kill the scrapbook at source because of all that integrity he was building up inside him as he saw the prospects of his 1994 work on Stephenson go gradually down the pan. The viperous viper had the affidavit in his hands in January 1995 and he did absolutely nothing with it. All that integrity and he sat on this explosive 'truth' about the scrapbook which he had courted for so long through Alan Gray!

Anyway, back to your original question, I do not believe that I implied that I myself was not also guilty of hoisting up the old canards? I think I used the term 'we' at least once. I am frequently wrong about details and sometimes I do not practice what I preach, and therefore perhaps I am inadvertently hypocritical. This is not because I don't care about the truth but because my memory occasionally lets me down when I post and occasionally it bedfellow - logic - too.

Anyway, just a quick post back form me in between the Lemsips and the water of life ...

Ike

Hope you’re feeling better?


Ike, mate, you're basically obsessing over a typo. Yes, the affidavit contains some dating errors but, as you've pointed out, it wasn't solely authored by Barrett. Didn’t he claim that he forged the diary in June 1994, so the Dec 1993 date is an obvious mistake. How can it possibly be of any significance?

Who, in any case, is relying on Barrett's affidavit for anything?

Can you explain why you keep referring to Melvin Harris as a viper? Is it simply because he didn't think the diary was genuine?

In respect of your criticism of Harris for doing "nothing" with Barrett's affidavit, can you kindly answer some questions for me. When did Harris receive a copy of Barrett's affidavit? Who gave it to him? Assuming he was given a copy, were there any confidentiality conditions attached to his being given it which prevented him from circulating it? What exactly do you think he should have done with it?

[rjpalmer]

Why are you citing how long ink takes to dry, RJ? What possible insight are you offering us here? The issue in question is how quickly ink separates.

I'm getting whiplash, Ike.

The insight I'm offering is that both you and Jay Hartley have made the ridiculous assertion that Baxendale meant the ink would have been 'dripping' (your word) off the page when he never said any such thing and ink dries in a matter of seconds.

If you were concerned with how quickly the ink separated from the paper during the ink solubility test (conducted fully 4 months after the diary was brought to London) why didn't you say so, instead of insinuating that Orsam, Chittenden, and Co. believed something so ridiculous as ink dripping off a page when this was nothing more than your own mischaracterization of their beliefs?

As I've noted, it wasn't even Baxendale that made the statement. In a candid moment, Dr. B apparently told Chittenden (I say apparently because it is based on Chittenden's reporting, and we don't have a direct quote that I'm aware of) that the diary's ink had been applied about 2-3 years before August 1992. Baxendale was clearly more cautious in his initial report to Smith and Harrison.

Dr. Nickell, having lost all faith in the analysis of his own team member, Rod McNeil, opted for the far simpler test conducted by Dr. B. This is when he said that the diary's ink must have been 'barely dry' in 1992.

'Barely dry' is still dry. Does something barely dry drip? Does ink even an hour old drip?

What Nickel knew is that paper fibers and iron gall ink permanently bond over time, and indeed, iron gall ink will eventually eat into the paper. The diary's ink and paper were observed to behave radically different than the exemplars that Dr. B knew were genuinely old. He--a document examiner for many years at the Home Office--knew then that something was seriously wrong, and confronted by Harrison, he would not back down from this knowledge.

As for which Nickell book, until you learn some manners and quit referring to the dead as viperous, I'll allow you the pleasure of conducting your own research.

Enjoy your afternoon.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes, indeed, I have, Herlock, and - whilst it is instinctively a good challenge on the surface - it does fail rather quickly in the mind for this reason: if Barrett was seeking 'authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders' he would not need to start at 1880 and end at 1890. He unnecessarily started late (he could have used a scrapbook from 1830 if that was all he could get his hands on) and he unnecessarily ended early (a scrapbook from 1891 to, say, 1899 would presumably be just as indistinguishable as one from that other impossible year, 1890).

So, if you want that notion to be convincing, you have to argue that Barrett either didn't think it through properly or else he didn't actually make that specific request but the guy who placed the ad for Barrett is on the record (SocPill202?) as stating that he would never add defining detail which his client had not explicitly requested of him.

So, defence of this argument requires Barrett to have not thought it through sufficiently and that's good news for the argument because - let's face it - it wouldn't have been the only example on record which makes Barrett's achievement all the more astonishing in my book.

I find your response very strange, Ike. If we assume he's looking to forge a Ripper diary, he's got to start and end somewhere, hasn't he? What's wrong with the decade in which the murders occurred? 1880 to 1889 is no problem for a Ripper diary and, if we try to put ourselves in Mike's head he might not have wanted to flag the year 1889 so finished at 1890. After all, he might have hoped to have been offered a number of choices. Perhaps he was really hoping to find an 1888 diary but felt if he asked for that it would be too obvious what he was up to.

Sure an 1899 diary might have been okay but why extend the range so far? You've got to bear in mind that he must have been hoping for a diary as close to 1888 as possible. Surely he wouldn't have known at the time that whoever he bought it from wasn't going to be able to find any from the 1880s.

So I find your objection a bit strange and a bit ironic considering your arguments about the 1891 diary. If Barrett had asked for a diary from 1880 to 1899 wouldn’t you have mocked the fact that he was interested in a diary from 10 years after Maybrick's death. So I truly can't see any other date range he could have chosen than 1888 to 1889 which would satisfy you but this would not only have unnecessarily limited his options but flagged to the seller something he might not have wanted to flag.

I have to ask you why he could possibly have wanted a diary from 1880 to 1890 of any size and colour as long as it was entirely blank or had a certain number of blank pages. Any thoughts?

[Iconoclast]

Let's again return to reality.



20 to 25 seconds, folks.

Is this an admission by Ike (and to be fair, we've seen Mr. Hartley make the same comment) that he believes ink will be 'dripping' off the page 24 to 72 hours after it is written? Has he ever used a pen and ink? Has he observed this remarkable phenomenon?

The wit who said the diary's ink was 'barely dry on the page' in reference to April 1992 was Dr. Joe Nickell, a man who has written two books on document examination.

He said it for comic and dramatic effect. He was not speaking literally.

Dr. Nickell knew full well that ink dries to the touch in a matter of seconds but will further bond with the paper fiber at a chemical level over a period of months and years.

Thus, he was quite rightly shocked and amused when he later learned from the description of Dr. Baxendale's solubility test how the ink and the paper had so fully and easily separated in the solvent.

I'm no longer certain if these are serious comments or whether we are being wound-up, but it's early morning here and I have chores, so I bid y'all a good day.

Now that we know the diary was very young indeed in 1992, any progress in learning the author must be grounded in this fact.

Why are you citing how long ink takes to dry, RJ? What possible insight are you offering us here? The issue in question is how quickly ink separates.

Can you please provide a citation for Nickell’s comment? His two books are very expensive now an ID like to buy the right one.

[rjpalmer]

Hi Caz,

If we are to believe the likes of RJ and Orsam, Baxendale told Maurice Chittenden of The Sunday Times almost a year after he wrote his various reports that (and I paraphrase here) the ink was pretty much dripping out of the pages onto the floor they were that recently laid down.

Let's again return to reality.



20 to 25 seconds, folks.

Is this an admission by Ike (and to be fair, we've seen Mr. Hartley make the same comment) that he believes ink will be 'dripping' off the page 24 to 72 hours after it is written? Has he ever used a pen and ink? Has he observed this remarkable phenomenon?

The wit who said the diary's ink was 'barely dry on the page' in reference to April 1992 was Dr. Joe Nickell, a man who has written two books on document examination.

He said it for comic and dramatic effect. He was not speaking literally.

Dr. Nickell knew full well that ink dries to the touch in a matter of seconds but will further bond with the paper fiber at a chemical level over a period of months and years.

Thus, he was quite rightly shocked and amused when he later learned from the description of Dr. Baxendale's solubility test how the ink and the paper had so fully and easily separated in the solvent.

I'm no longer certain if these are serious comments or whether we are being wound-up, but it's early morning here and I have chores, so I bid y'all a good day.

Now that we know the diary was very young indeed in 1992, any progress in learning the author must be grounded in this fact.

[rjpalmer]

Yes, indeed, I have, Herlock, and - whilst it is instinctively a good challenge on the surface - it does fail rather quickly in the mind for this reason: if Barrett was seeking 'authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders' he would not need to start at 1880 and end at 1890. He unnecessarily started late (he could have used a scrapbook from 1830 if that was all he could get his hands on) and he unnecessarily ended early (a scrapbook from 1891 to, say, 1899 would presumably be just as indistinguishable as one from that other impossible year, 1890).

They must be coddin' us, Dear Boss.

Now the 'mental vegetable' Bongo Barrett is an expert on paper fiber and paper manufacturing!

Let's return to reality, folks. Shall we?

All Bongo knows, from reading Celebrity magazine, is that his German counterpart Konrad Kujua was tripped up by something he didn't know about paper manufacturing!!

And knowing that he doesn't know what he doesn't know, Bongo plays it safe and requests a diary with paper manufactured in the same general 'ballpark.'

It's not rocket science, and Bongo was no rocket scientist neither, but to maintain belief, one must sometimes be overly-subtle. Messrs. Leahy and Atkinson are currently learning the same technique in regard to the 'Tilly' letter.

And did I say how much I am enjoying this symposium?

I remember a time when the Barretts were too dim to have created a document that had (supposedly!) "fooled the experts."

Now the Barretts were far too clever and cautious to pawn off such an obvious fake! Far too clever to request paper from the 1880s instead of 1850-1900 when they are trying to bamboozle us!

Hell, they didn't even fake Maybrick's handwriting! How could they have believed for one second that even an utter moron would take the diary seriously without faking the handwriting?

Yet here we are.

So, let's add Prof. Rubenstein, Peter Wood, and Colin Wilson to Herlock's long list of people insulted by this line of argument.

You've come a long way, baby.

[Iconoclast]

Apologies, Herlock. My paraphrasing was overly generous to Baxendale. In his own words [with emphasis where due]:

'My opinion, therefore, is that the ink does not date from 1889. An exact time of origin cannot be established, but I consider it likely that it has originated since 1945.'

Hi Caz,

If we are to believe the likes of RJ and Orsam, Baxendale told Maurice Chittenden of The Sunday Times almost a year after he wrote his various reports that (and I paraphrase here) the ink was pretty much dripping out of the pages onto the floor they were that recently laid down.

Begs the question, though: why not just say that in your report? 'It was dripping wet', 'I got drenched in it', 'It must have been laid down a few months ago'.

I just can't understand why a guy who freely admitted he was very badly wrong about the properties of ink and therefore asked for his report to be kept from public view would not at least mention that it was clearly put on the paper in 1992.

I'm beat!

Cheers,

Ike

[Iconoclast]

If he hasn't, he should really ask himself why he is ignoring that possibility.

Can we now agree that I have?

After all, it was his good friend Lord Orsam who discovered that Barrett's own magazine of choice, to which he had been a frequent contributor during his secret career as a freelance writer in the 1980s, had published a piece on the Hitler Diaries, indicating that non-period paper proved to be Konrad Kujau's downfall.

Home and ******* Garden probably published an article on the Hitler diaries fiasco, RJ - I vaguely recall reading it in Whizzer and Chips and The Beano at one point! You've really got to think through your obfuscating and muddying instincts before you reveal to the world the biases you positively sweat out of every pore as you type, mate.

A real gem of a discovery.

I think I recall Watch With Mother covering it too in an episode of Camberwick Green titled Muddy the Mud Boy Gets Mainly Muddy ...

And it is impossible to be a daily record of events, because there are not enough entries. Only on the very last page is there a date. The writer dates it like he is dating his confession. There is a similar date on the last page of William Henry Bury's confession.

Wow - that must be yet ANOTHER book the otherwise apparently bewildered and hapless Mike Barrett had read in his extensive research that one wet weekend in Liverpool ...

But the important thing is that to Barrett it was a diary, thus we know what Barrett meant by a diary: a blank book, with no printed dates, to which one adds his own writing.

You're thinking too hard, RJ - it's making you sweat again. I think we can grant that even Mike Barrett had the intelligence to work out that diaries become diaries when documents are used for the purpose of recording one's inner thoughts over a period of time. It's no biggie. Ordinary, it's a scrapbook but if you skip all the scrap elements (like an ex-scrap metal dealer would do effortlessly, ha ha), you could have a diary or an autobiography or a football match report or a tale about alien abductions in Barnsley. His own decisions.

Mike, the hoaxer, was after a blank book with forensically bullet-proof pages -- at a bare minimum of twenty of them.

Well, if he was going to check how easily such a document could be located, it would make sense to check how easily such a document could be located which could easily be used for a hoax (which he could not be certain he did not already have in his hands).

But belief in this relic relies on self-deception and so it is pretended that Barrett means something else by the word 'diary'--he means a daily planner or a business memorandum constrained by dates indelibly stamped on each page. This self-deception is necessary in order to keep belief alive, even if it runs directly against what Barrett called a diary.

You've lost me ...

It is my belief that Mike was after the raw materials of a hoax because he intended to hoax the confession of James Maybrick.

Well, good for you, RJ. Just out of interest, have you ever believed something was true then found out it wasn't? Or have you lived a long life of blessed certitude without the occasional discomfort of contradiction and error?

Bizarrely, even those who irrationally doubt Barrett's involvement can only explain Mike's request to Martin Earl as Barrett's attempt to obtain the raw materials of a hoax. Ultimately, they agree with me.

They do, and - as usual - you seek to advance your case with such slender relevance to it.

In one version, Mike is doing so because he fears Mr. Lyons may be swindling him, so he wants to see if it is possible to easily obtain the raw materials of a hoax--a counter explanation that brings a smile.

You see what he's up to (again), dear readers? By slipping in the 'that brings a smile', he's saying 'Watch out, you'd be considered a complete twat around these parts if you don't agree with me'.

In another version, Mike is attempting to obtain the raw materials of a hoax in order to create his own substitute Jack the Ripper confessional in case the police come knocking for Eddy's original--another smile inducer.

I refer my dear readers to my previous response regarding RJ's barely masked threats.

We all agree that Mike's request to Earl was an attempt to obtain the raw materials for a hoax. This is progress. It only took 33 years for us to reach an agreement, so we should be able to wrap this up by the year 2058.

And how much more wonderful would it be if any of that meant anything of actual consequence???

[Iconoclast]

Hi Ike,

In #199 you asked for an answer to the question as to why Michael Barrett's affidavit included the wrong date for when Barrett started to expose the fraud. Could that question not reasonably be described as an old canard?

I have to ask though, in regard to your last question, surely you aren’t suggesting that those of us who don’t have years of experience of all things diary should bother contributing?

As an aside first, just back from Coventry (not Liverpool, RJ) with a Midlands cold starting and reading Robert Smith's True History of the Diary of Jack the Ripper again in bed last night with half a cup of hot milk stirred into my half a cup of 10-year old malt, I was struck by this comment:

"On 22nd June [this is 1994, by the way], just five days after Montgomery's note to Anne [Barrett], Shirley Harrison and Sally Evemy, her business partner and researcher, were paying a visit to Jenny's [a new friend of Mike Barrett] home, where Barrett was staying. It was at that moment when he first dropped the bombshell, claiming that he himself had forged the diary. Harrison described his shocking announcement in her book: "He was bitter and angry that he had not seen his daughter and threatened to tell everything to the national press." Fuelled by alcohol, he didn't care that he was giving the lie to the diary being handed to him by Tony Devereux. In his manic state, he was determined to "get back at Anne" (as he would later explain) and destroy Feldman's theory that the diary "had been in Anne's family for years", even if it meant smashing the diary's credibility as an authentic Victorian document, as well as the book's publication prospects and his future income from it. Revenge on Anne for leaving him, for interfering in his relationship with Jenny, and for depriving him of Caroline (as he believed), had tipped him over the edge into irrationality."

Barrett had claimed that he had been trying since December 1993 to reveal the truth through Shirley Harrison. She mustn't have had very good hearing, I guess. Take home message? The January 5, 1995 affidavit signed (but almost certainly not solely authored) by Mike Barrett is a worthless piece of mince and should never be relied on for anything. The evidence for this reaches right to the heart of that viper Melvin Harris who had done so much to kill the scrapbook at source because of all that integrity he was building up inside him as he saw the prospects of his 1994 work on Stephenson go gradually down the pan. The viperous viper had the affidavit in his hands in January 1995 and he did absolutely nothing with it. All that integrity and he sat on this explosive 'truth' about the scrapbook which he had courted for so long through Alan Gray!

Anyway, back to your original question, I do not believe that I implied that I myself was not also guilty of hoisting up the old canards? I think I used the term 'we' at least once. I am frequently wrong about details and sometimes I do not practice what I preach, and therefore perhaps I am inadvertently hypocritical. This is not because I don't care about the truth but because my memory occasionally lets me down when I post and occasionally it bedfellow - logic - too.

Anyway, just a quick post back form me in between the Lemsips and the water of life ...

Ike

[Iconoclast]

Hi Ike,

Have you considered the possibility that what Mike was attempting to get hold of was authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders?

Yes, indeed, I have, Herlock, and - whilst it is instinctively a good challenge on the surface - it does fail rather quickly in the mind for this reason: if Barrett was seeking 'authentic paper which would be scientifically indistinguishable from paper from the time of the Ripper murders' he would not need to start at 1880 and end at 1890. He unnecessarily started late (he could have used a scrapbook from 1830 if that was all he could get his hands on) and he unnecessarily ended early (a scrapbook from 1891 to, say, 1899 would presumably be just as indistinguishable as one from that other impossible year, 1890).

So, if you want that notion to be convincing, you have to argue that Barrett either didn't think it through properly or else he didn't actually make that specific request but the guy who placed the ad for Barrett is on the record (SocPill202?) as stating that he would never add defining detail which his client had not explicitly requested of him.

So, defence of this argument requires Barrett to have not thought it through sufficiently and that's good news for the argument because - let's face it - it wouldn't have been the only example on record which makes Barrett's achievement all the more astonishing in my book.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The fact that they were under no threat for their supposed "creative writing" project doesn't help you.

1. It's still a stupid thing to do so who cares if there was a legitimate threat or not

2. The real threat that they obviously seemed to fear would come from ratting out or exposing a thief or a gang of thieves. That helps the Fence Theory again.

Firstly, I'm glad you accept that there was no real risk the Barretts, assuming they were the forgers, in submitting the diary for publication
but when you say it was "a stupid thing to do" are you referring to not writing it in Maybrick's handwriting or creating the diary in general? Either way, a number of people wanted to pay them to publish it and I’ve always been under the impression that the book sold a lot of copies so perhaps the forgers were cleverer than you think?

If you believe that they "obviously seemed to fear" a thief or gang of thieves then of course you are likely to think that they obtained the diary from a thief but the idea that they were afraid of thief seems to derive from your imagination only Lombro.

As already stated, it's not the red diary that supports the idea that the Barretts forged the diary. It's the fact that Barrett was attempting to obtain a genuine diary from the decade of the Ripper murders with blank pages. Would you call that an unconnected coincidence or do you have another explanation?

[Lombro2]

Here's a question for you: How does the Red Diary help the Forgery Theory more than the Fence Theory?

We already know there was a "doppelganger" gold Verity watch. It obviously wasn't the Johnson Maybrick watch and I believe they were linked together and then the Johnson watch was given the "sock drawer" Provenance which Barrett Believers believe in.

[Lombro2]

The fact that they were under no threat for their supposed "creative writing" project doesn't help you.

1. It's still a stupid thing to do so who cares if there was a legitimate threat or not

2. The real threat that they obviously seemed to fear would come from ratting out or exposing a thief or a gang of thieves. That helps the Fence Theory again.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This all relies on 'if we assume he was the forger', which kind of makes any further argument redundant and circular, because you can make it fit the assumed narrative.

Now apply all the above reasoning to a document created by someone who is not among the named suspects, and who never had any intention of identifying themselves with it, and therefore didn't need to think about the handwriting, or any other aspect letting them down or catching them out, from the ink and paper, to the language and psycopathy, or the history and geography. That could only ever be a problem for anyone who ended up with it through happenstance, if they decided to do anything with it other than to set it alight.

Would the money motive not have gone up in flames with the diary, when Anne tried to burn it?

Love,

Caz
X

I don't think you're understanding me correctly Caz. I wasn't making any form a circular argument because I wasn't arguing that Michael Barrett was the forger. The point I was making was straightforward one - If Mike was the forger, as some people have suggested, and if the diary was exposed as a forgery, he wasn't in any serious legal peril because he never vouched for the diary's authenticity.

You must agree with that statement, surely. And it has to be predicated on the basis that Mike was the forger because there's no other way of expressing it. The only danger for Mike (as the forger) would have been if it was proven that he didn't receive the diary from Tony Devereux but was responsible for creating it. Something which would have been difficult to do. Only then would he have been in the you-know-what.

Now, the only reason I wrote what I did was because Kattrup had said in the post to which I was responding, "Diary Defenders usually portray the risk to Barrett's as immense". So the only purpose of my post was to say, in agreement with Kattrup, that, really, there was very little risk to the Barretts.

For that reason, the rest of your post about another unnamed forger makes no sense to me. You seem to be trying to make an entirely different point which bears no relation to mine or Kattrup's. This is that an unidentified forger would not have bothered recreating Maybrick's handwriting in the diary (even though they presumably could have done) because there was no risk to them if the diary was shown not to have been by James Maybrick. Leaving aside that I can't fathom why they would have wanted to create such a diary in the first place nor how it ended up with Michael Barrett, I could just as easily say that because there was no risk to them of ever being arrested for fraud, because they were unknown, they might as well have attempted to recreate Maybrick's handwriting to make the diary appear far more convincing. But when talking about unknown people with unknown motives it just seems to pointless to discuss it.

You then made another separate and disconnected point about whether the money would have gone up in flames "when Anne tried to burn it". The simple answer is that if the diary had been burnt there would have been no money to have been made from it. But what independent evidence is there that Anne really did try to burn it? She certainly didn't do a very good job of it! I may be misremembering Caz but didn’t I read something about her insisting on the diary being kept at the bank because of her fear of it going up in a house fire?

[Lombro2]

Caz, this is why you are the vindshield viper!