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

[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]

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

[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?

[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!

[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.

[Herlock Sholmes]

[QUOTE=Iconoclast;n847764]

Posted in error

[Herlock Sholmes]

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.

Oh I see, so Harris is a viper because he was a Ripperologist who shouldn't have been allowed to publish any Ripper suspect books while claiming that the Ripper diary was a forgery. He should have kept his mouth shut, should he, like a good little boy?

That, if I may say so, is kind of ridiculous Ike.

But why is Stewart Evans not also a viper for publishing a suspect book about Tumblety while expressing similar doubts about the Ripper diary?

[Herlock Sholmes]

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

When Barrett told the story of the forgery at the 1999 meeting there was no suggestion from him that Devereux was involved in writing the manuscript, was there?

Forget the affidavit. It was obviously authored by Alan Gray who didn't fully understand what he was being told and couldn't get a grasp of the chronology.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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.



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.



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



such a lack of imagination you confess to!

Who has said that Barrett "was under no pressure whatsoever"? Please tell me. Where do I find this said?

If he'd arranged to meet with Doreen at some point in the near future, he must surely have been under some pressure, even if the date of the meeting had not yet been fixed. The fact that he was desperate and out of options doesn't preclude the fact that he could have delayed meeting Doreen but there was only so much time he could put it off. If we assume he was the forger, he didn't have the luxury of spending months searching around the country for a suitable item in which to write the diary. That's the point I was making. He'd (supposedly) found something and while not perfect it would have to do. Now, he could finally set up the meeting with Doreen. That, at least, is the theory as I understand it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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!

It's almost miraculous, Ike. Every time you set out your theory for Barrett wanting the diary, whatever it is (and I don't understand it) the "appropriate period" is 1880 to 1890. Yet, when I suggest the appropriate period for doing the forgery is 1880 to 1890 suddenly you raise every objection under the sun.

As I keep saying to you, there is nothing on the face of the photograph album to suggest that it was manufactured in 1888 or 1889 let alone the 1880s. How would Barrett have known that it wasn't made in, say, 1953? If, as I suggest was the case, he couldn't possibly have known, then knowing how difficult it was to acquire a genuine diary from the period of the 1880s with blank pages, and paying for it to boot, would have told him literally nothing about whether the Jack the Ripper diary was a forgery or not. Isn't that right? Can you please make it make sense?

And knowing that the diary included 63 pages of written text, wouldn't he have needed to find out how difficult it was to acquire a diary with at least 63 blank pages? Because otherwise what he had been shown, or given, would not have been physically possible for a forger to have created, would it? Please make it make sense.

And I now see that, finally, after years of you objecting to 1890 being in Barrett's date range, you've included 1889. Thank you. But that only makes sense if Barrett envisaged a diary with printed dates, doesn't it? And then it doesn't really make sense because why they hell would Maybrick have written of his 1888 adventures in a diary with printed dates for 1881? That would have been utterly mental. If, on the other hand, Barrett envisaged a diary as a blank journal into which an individual would write their daily entries of varying lengths, it all makes perfect sense because he just needed paper from the appropriate period which even you have defined as being 1880 to 1890. For some reason, though, you seem physically unable to consider as a possibility that Barrett could have envisaged such a diary even though such things are extremely widespread and frequently used for personal diaries as opposed to appointment diaries with printed dates and limited daily space.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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.

Why though Tom? Why do you think I would say that? I don't care who wrote the diary. I don't even claim it was the Barretts. All I want to know, and the only thing I want to know, is why it could not be the Barretts.

All that happens in response to my question as to why the Barretts couldn't have done it, is that you keep mentioning Michael Barrett's affidavit as if it disposes of the matter. I'm telling you that this is a misguided approach. If you want to seriously consider Barrett's story, you surely must look at what he said himself, not what was written on his behalf by another person who might well have got the story muddled up, and, in fact, when compared with what Barrett said in 1999, quite clearly did.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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

Are you quite sure you're remembering correctly what Martin Earl told you, Caz?

I appreciate there was no obligation on the customer to accept any item located as a result of their request, but how is that relevant? Barrett did accept an item and had it sent to him.

As for the return policy, can I remind you that you posted this in the thread "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary" in #5701 on August 4, 2020, based on what Martin Earl appears to have told you, with my bold highlighting:

"Normally he would have asked for payment with the order, so it is likely that Mr Barrett specifically asked to see it before sending payment. Given the time taken before the cheque was sent [by Anne] it is highly likely Martin had to chase it, probably by phone. From memory, he says normal settlement time was the standard 30 days so he would have chased it up after that period. Customers could always return items if they were not as described."

So there are two problems here had Mike attempted to return the diary in May 1995.

The first is that the normal settlement time of 30 days had passed. You're not saying that Mike had unlimited time to return the diary are you? As a postal book selling business, Earl would surely have gone out of business fast if people could return books to him after a year and receive a full refund.

The fact that the standard 30 days for settlement had passed would surely, by itself, be an end of the matter. So we don't really need to consider whether Mike was or was not happy with the diary. But as to that, Earl said that customers could return items "if they were not as described" which, as a matter of English construction, means they could not be returned if they were as described. That makes perfect sense for a postal book service because otherwise buyers could read the books they'd received and return them even if they were in the exact condition that had been described to them. And Earl would have had to pay the person he bought the diary from who would also not have refunded if the diary was in the condition that had been described to Earl. I think the diary was exactly as had been described to Mike by Earl.

I appreciate that this post was made nearly five years ago so your memory may be rusty but, based on what you posted in 2020, there was no way Mike could have returned the diary in May 1995 and received his money back, was there?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Goodness, I am clearly losing it. I have no recollection of claiming that Harris had said this on tape?

I'm sure you or RJ will be quick to highlight where I said it and I'm happy to be corrected but I'm starting to think I need to get out of the ripperonomy game if I'm just going to keep posting errors!

Correction: I meant to say: "He then tried to claim that Gray had said on tape that Harris wanted to see Barrett's affidavit but when I asked him for the quote he couldn't do it."

The point is the same. You were guessing on all counts when you said that Harris received a copy of Barrett's affidavit from Gray with no confidentiality strings attached. The supposed quote of Gary that you claimed to recall clearly doesn't exist otherwise Caz would have cited it.

[Iconoclast]

Who has said that Barrett "was under no pressure whatsoever"? Please tell me. Where do I find this said?

If you weren't such a Johnny-Come-Lately, you'd already know that it has been argued. Find it yourself!

[Iconoclast]

[QUOTE=Herlock Sholmes;n847792]

Posted in error

My favourite post of yours for some time. I've even given it a thumbs-up.