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

[rjpalmer]

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?

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

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.

A real gem of a discovery.

Barrett wasn't about to make the same mistake, was he?

Who first named Maybrick's confessional photograph album "the diary"?

According to the authors of Inside Story, it was Michael John Barrett. It's the first line of their book. "I've got Jack the Ripper's diary, would you be interested in seeing it?" Mike crows over the telephone.

And yet, and yet--

There is not a printed date anywhere in the confessional. We can see with our own eyes that the 'old book' as some call it was entirely blank before the hoaxer added her (or his) scribbles. Many pages are still entirely blank.

The writer didn't even add her own dates.

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.

No, it is not a diary, at best it is a commonplace book of the writer's random thoughts and feelings. Or one can call it a confession. Or a confessional.

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.

Mike, the hoaxer, was after a blank book with forensically bullet-proof pages -- at a bare minimum of twenty of them. Enough to get the job done, especially if he weeded out the repetitive poetry from whatever shape the typescript was in at this point.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

But at least all three of us can finally agree on something!

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.

[caz]

We all have our own ideas, but my belief is that if someone as volatile as Barrett believed for one second that the diary was something other than the modern fake he knew it to be, he never would have transferred its ownership to Robert Smith for a one-pound note. No way.

This is the same bloke who couldn't help brag about the diary on his train ride home from London (which is what allowed Brough to trace him) and who is said to have waved his first royalty check in the air down the boozer. It is well-known that he blew his profits like a drunken sailor. If Barrett didn't know the diary was a fake, and didn't fear getting sent to the slammer, he would have tried to sell it at Sotheby's for a lot more than Johnson tried to sell the watch to Robert E. Davis. Albert Johnson might have been an innocent dupe--I can't say---but Barret surely wasn't. That Barrett sought to have the diary published--which is far more of a gray area legally--instead of selling it outright is significant in itself.

Palmer forgets that if he could only bring himself to imagine for that same single second that Mike didn't know what he had - recent hoax, older document of unknown origins or something potentially worth squillions - because he had acquired it in distinctly dodgy circumstances and knew it wasn't legitimately his own property to sell, all this head-scratching over its nominal one pound transfer to Robert, instead of taking it to Sotheby's and telling them the lies about where he got it, would instantly be relieved, down to the legally grey area of getting the contents published, and a book written about the diary, which divides the responsibility between the literary agent, publisher and author.

If the effect is exactly the same, whether the cause was that Mike knew the diary was penned very recently, or had been 'twocked'- taken without the owner's consent - then such arguments get us no further forward.

[Herlock Sholmes]

This is my point. You attempt to present an argument but we can’t get past the derivative issues which have been addressed a million times because someone will then post (having almost no knowledge of the case and no knowledge that the issues have been addressed over and over again - maybe not satisfactorily in their opinion but addressed nevertheless) and we go around again making no progress.

You know you’re onto a loser when the responses you get assure you that you’ve got literally every detail of every idea you’ve ever presented stonewall wrong. So you’re either stupid and can’t make a cogent argument without erring or else it’s not worth responding because you know there will be no real discussion or concessions of any form.

You really know it’s a forlorn journey you’re on when you present an argument which gets roundly mocked by various quarters whilst the doyens of the argument you are countering get away with exactly the same process without a word of criticism.

All anyone can ask for is that arguments are heard and given fair airtime not crushed with frequently really dreadful logic.

Finally, if you have to ask for answers to the old canards, you should know you’re in serious danger of being a Johnny-Come-Lately to this (or any other) particular debate.

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?

[Herlock Sholmes]

If it does not concern you that Barrett’s request included 1890, you really should ask yourself why you might be ignoring it.

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?

[caz]

As far as I know, it doesn't matter if an expert looks at a forged document one day after it's been forged or one year afterwards, or at least it didn't in 1992. There obviously weren't any reliable tools to enable them to differentiate between the two, other than perhaps a solubility test but not everyone seems to accept the result of the one that Baxendale did. So I'm not terribly impressed by the fact that the forger might only have just finished writing it before producing it. I suspect that's true of all or most forgers. They want to make their money as fast as they can.

Morning Herlock,

I just wanted to remind you that in this case, Mike Barrett would have wanted his wife's 'blind forgery' - if you believe RJ Palmer's theory has merit - to be mistaken for a document dating back to 1888, so there'd have been no benefit to him whatsoever if the experts in 1992 could not tell the difference between one penned yesterday and one penned a year ago. He'd have been hoping, on 13th April 1992, on the train to London, that nobody who might be invited to examine the diary that day, or in the days, weeks and months to come, would be able to distinguish between ink applied to paper in early April 1992, and ink applied when Maybrick was alive.

I still wonder what knowledge Mike would have had about such matters before you could Google it, and how confident he'd have been on a scale of one to ten, that it wouldn't go very quickly pear-shaped if he and Anne had created a document such as this one.

Surely, you have to take into account what the people who actually met or knew the Barretts would think of all this, and not just dismiss them as no more qualified, or even less qualified to comment, than those of you who don't know the real Mike or Anne from the mythical Adam and Eve - or the fictionalised Macbeth and Lady Macbeth if you prefer.

Love,

Caz
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