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

[caz]

Unless Keith Skinner’s vast collection of archival material contains the original cassette tapes that Gray was describing, ie., tapes from the years of Mike’s secret career as a freelance writer in the 1980s, it is pure conjecture that the handwriting was Mike’s.

At one point (in Inside Story) Barrett claims that Anne wrote those articles, so, if true, she would naturally have listened to the cassette tapes. We are further told by Keith Skinner in his introduction to Anne’s book that she was a meticulous organizer of the Maybrick documents and that her finding aid is (or was) still used at Kew.

Who was more likely to have labeled these tapes, Anne or the heavy drinking Bomgo Barrett?

As far as I know, Gray recognized Anne’s lettering!!!

Context is so important. If you are happy to trust Seth Linder to have heard and transcribed what Barrett is claiming about Anne at that point on the tape, and was not just going to guess if he found any words hard to hear or inaudible, then be happy to trust him with the rest of it, where Gray says: "By Christ, I've tumbled you at last. You wrote the manuscript." If the label on the tape had been in Anne's handwriting, the natural response from Mike would have been to correct Gray and say: "You've tumbled Anne at last! That's what I keep telling you: I wrote the diary on my word processor and Anne copied it out by hand. That label proves it."

There would have been no ambiguity and no possible reason for Gray's continued confusion, if Mike had not owned that letter Y on the label. Gray tells him: "You said Anne did it.... you're still saying it's all her handwriting." That's the context in which Mike responds by saying it was "fifty-fifty". He'd been too quick to go along with Gray's aha! moment to think of the implications. Realising his mistake, Mike makes another one by attempting to explain how his letter Y could be in a diary in his wife's handwriting. I'm only surprised he didn't add the word "simple" for emphasis. The following day he is back to his claim that it was all in Anne's handwriting.

This man-child doesn't care about lies he told yesterday not matching the lies he tells the same people today, or the lies he will tell tomorrow, next week or next year. He can count on having enough followers who will believe him at least some of the time, and will make excuses for even the most transparent examples of his mendacity.

Lucky fellow.

[rjpalmer]

I have to wonder Caz, why do you attribute the words "bumbling purveyor" to a "theatre man in Liverpool"? Who are you referring to? To me, it looks like those words were written by a man in London.

Who was the "bumbling purveyor" in question and why was he "bumbling"? If you can't answer this question, it may be that the word "bumbling" meant something different in this usage to what it means in "bumbling buffoon". In which case, it would be misleading to say "Clearly, 'bumbling' was used in print to describe a person or persons, a character or personality type". What seems far more clear to me, because we have it in print, in a dictionary, is that the word "bumbling" to describe an incompetent person was obsolete in England in 1888 except in some regional dialects.

Hi Mike,

I suspect your comment has flown right over Caroline's head.

Rather than debunking Professor Murray's 1888 dictionary entry, showing that 'bumbling' was regional and obsolete, Gary's research has, to my thinking, confirmed it.

If the adjective was truly in circulation, we'd expect to find dozens if not hundreds or thousands of examples of its use in print in the millions of pages of Victorian and Edwardian writing and literature now digitized.

Instead, he has found a single example and a strange and uncertain one, and you're quite right to point out that the context does not allow us to be confident that the writer in question meant bumbling in the sense of 'bungling'---that's merely an assumption on his part and Caroline's part.

One meaning of 'purveyor' is a someone who promotes something (a purveyor of the Christian faith, for instance) and could not a promoter bumble around like a bee? How do we know that the writer in question was not dropping a hint to the person's identity? A rival who wrote for The Bee, for instance?

Coming up for air, if the arguments for the diary being a genuine Victorian or Edwardian document are this obscure and tedious is it not likely that they are also wrong?

Anyone who believes the diary is a late 20th Century hoax can merely point to hundreds and thousands of examples of 'one off instance' and 'bumbling buffoon' in print. "Here they are, LOOK!!" It's that simple. There is no room for doubt.

By contrast, anyone who wants to suggest the text is Victorian is forced to guide us through a laborious and labyrinthine set of obscure and tedious and questionable arguments all designed to obscure the fact that these same phrases can't be found in print anytime between 1800 and 1935 or so.

Something's not quite right there, is it? Does the public even have the patience for it?

Have a great afternoon.

[rjpalmer]

If the label on the tape had been in Anne's handwriting, the natural response from Mike would have been to correct Gray and say: "You've tumbled Anne at last! That's what I keep telling you: I wrote the diary on my word processor and Anne copied it out by hand. That label proves it."

When did Mike Barrett ever give a 'natural response'?

Barrett's behavior and reactions were anything but predictable and rational.

I'd have to see the cassette tapes with my own eyes.

[caz]

No, the Skip Story came from Eddy in 1993. He told Robert Smith he threw a book in a skip in June of 1992. That's according to Robert Smith.

Maybe Eddy did do that in June and, if that makes it true, then it's true. But it's not the Diary.

So why is Eddy talking about a different book in a different month thrown in a real skip, or talking about a phantom book in a different month thrown in a phantom skip.

It's called muddying the water or "scrambling history", if you will, so no one will know that he stole a Diary and a Gold Watch from Battlecrease.

Hi Lombro2,

I don't think Eddie gave Robert any idea of when he was supposed to have thrown a book into a skip that was never there while he was working in Dodd's house.

There is also no evidence that Eddie was at the house in June 1992. He was there in March 1992 [on his own insistence - not from remembering the date, but from the details he was able to recall, which correspond with the documentary evidence for that job and no other] and again in July 1992, according to the timesheets and other independent witness testimony.

The skip story must have served some purpose for somebody, and you have offered one plausible explanation if Eddie was as worried as Mike Barrett was at the time about the Battlecrease rumour mill and where it might lead if unchecked. But nobody seems able to provide another reason why Eddie - or anyone else - would have agreed to meet a total stranger, Robert Smith, in a pub and would have told that story. The diary was in this stranger's possession by then, but very little information about the book itself was available to the public.

Eddie claimed to have only ever met Mike Barrett on the one occasion, when he knocked on his door to confront him about the diary and it didn't end well. He naturally had to deny the rendezvous in the Saddle, which Mike had arranged at Robert's request, or else admit to lying about only meeting Mike the once.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Mike,

I suspect your comment has flown right over Caroline's head.

Rather than debunking Professor Murray's 1888 dictionary entry, showing that 'bumbling' was regional and obsolete, Gary's research has, to my thinking, confirmed it.

If the adjective was truly in circulation, we'd expect to find dozens if not hundreds or thousands of examples of its use in print in the millions of pages of Victorian and Edwardian writing and literature now digitized.

Instead, he has found a single example and a strange and uncertain one, and you're quite right to point out that the context does not allow us to be confident that the writer in question meant bumbling in the sense of 'bungling'---that's merely an assumption on his part and Caroline's part.

One meaning of 'purveyor' is a someone who promotes something (a purveyor of the Christian faith, for instance) and could not a promoter bumble around like a bee? How do we know that the writer in question was not dropping a hint to the person's identity? A rival who wrote for The Bee, for instance?

Coming up for air, if the arguments for the diary being a genuine Victorian or Edwardian document are this obscure and tedious is it not likely that they are also wrong?

Anyone who believes the diary is a late 20th Century hoax can merely point to hundreds and thousands of examples of 'one off instance' and 'bumbling buffoon' in print. "Here they are, LOOK!!" It's that simple. There is no room for doubt.

By contrast, anyone who wants to suggest the text is Victorian is forced to guide us through a laborious and labyrinthine set of obscure and tedious and questionable arguments all designed to obscure the fact that these same phrases can't be found in print anytime between 1800 and 1935 or so.

Something's not quite right there, is it? Does the public even have the patience for it?

Have a great afternoon.

I don't know why I bother.

So many points were missed in this post that I gave up counting. It's as if Palmer didn't bother to read a single word of what I actually wrote, and was responding to something I didn't.

A bit like Herlock not bothering to read any of Gary's examples of 'bumbling' and Palmer now thinking he only found 'a single' example.

I made the point myself about the small number of examples of 'bumbling' found to date, and how that magnifies the odds against finding it attached to 'buffoon' or indeed any other noun in the dictionary.

What is the relevance of what Roach meant by 'bumbling'? I'm not 'assuming' anything about this, nor am I the one making assumptions about what the diary author meant by the same word. Could Maybrick's doctor not have been bumbling around like a bee, if Roach's purveyor could have been?

Perhaps Palmer will do me the courtesy one day of actually addressing what I have posted instead of making assumptions about my thought processes.

And perhaps pigs might fly.

[caz]

When did Mike Barrett ever give a 'natural response'?

Barrett's behavior and reactions were anything but predictable and rational.

I'd have to see the cassette tapes with my own eyes.

How convenient.

[caz]

Well it's like 'bumbling buffoon', isn't it? Until we had examples in print of 'bumbling' from the 1880s, and in Liverpool no less, used as an adjective, we were confidently assured that the word was obsolete by then and could not have been used to describe the ever popular Victorian 'buffoon' or anyone else. Funny how the obsolete b word survived to become as popular by the middle of the next century as the old familiar b word, but that's language for you: funny.

How many other examples of a 'bumbling purveyor' would anyone have expected to find in print, if the diary author had chosen these two words instead? Did the theatre man in Liverpool who put them together in a sentence realise he was at the cutting edge of language in November 1888, and may well have come up with a one off instance of this exact two-word combination?

Clearly, 'bumbling' was used in print to describe a person or persons, a character or personality type, and most likely in conversations and correspondence too, but the examples known to have survived to date are so few in number that nothing useful can be said about who could or could not have been described in that way. There must be literally scores of nouns in use in the 1880s that could have been chosen to follow 'bumbling' depending on the circumstances: bobby, bureaucrat, busybody, butcher, councillor, magistrate, medico, official, purveyor, stationmaster - I could go on [and I frequently do] but you get my drift. If the first word was rarely seen in print back then, with each example describing someone different, the chances of a 'buffoon' popping up as the second word were always going to be negligible, with so many other possibilities all vying with each other for the few opportunities available.

It's not an argument against a hoaxer who was familiar with the modern coupling of the two words and wrongly assumed they'd been commonly seen going out together in Maybrick's day. It's simply pointing out that there was nothing stopping that Liverpool theatre man from describing his "bumbling purveyor" as a "bumbling buffoon" instead. No know-it-all there to inform him it would be decades before anyone had public permission to do so. I wonder what the argument would have been, had he disobeyed this golden rule?

Posted again, with added emphasis, purely for anyone who couldn't be arsed to read it properly the first time.

I'm generous like that.

[Herlock Sholmes]

It was 1921. Easy enough to find these days.

If, in your usual cryptic way, you're correcting your previous statement that a 1919 example of "one off basis" has been found and that it was actually 1921, 33 years after Maybrick wrote "one off instance", would I be correct in thinking that it was said or published in a manufacturing context?

[Herlock Sholmes]

When Roach continued his theatrical career in London, did he get blank looks from everyone if he dared to use the word "bumbling" ever again?

Did he check in a dictionary and feel really embarrassed to find it was obsolete down south by 1888?

Have I just arrived on a different planet??

Hi Caz,

Should we really just rely on one poster as a source? It seems patently obvious to me, when read carefully, that the part about "Bumbling Purveyor" was written by Hugh J. Didcott, the London agent of Jenny Hill, who placed the advertisement in the Era. So perhaps you are on a different planet?

What we don't know is who Didcott was speaking about and why he referred to this unknown person (who apparently wrote "inane doggrel" about Jenny Hill) as a "Bumbling Purveyor".

[Herlock Sholmes]

Context is so important. If you are happy to trust Seth Linder to have heard and transcribed what Barrett is claiming about Anne at that point on the tape, and was not just going to guess if he found any words hard to hear or inaudible, then be happy to trust him with the rest of it, where Gray says: "By Christ, I've tumbled you at last. You wrote the manuscript." If the label on the tape had been in Anne's handwriting, the natural response from Mike would have been to correct Gray and say: "You've tumbled Anne at last! That's what I keep telling you: I wrote the diary on my word processor and Anne copied it out by hand. That label proves it."

There would have been no ambiguity and no possible reason for Gray's continued confusion, if Mike had not owned that letter Y on the label. Gray tells him: "You said Anne did it.... you're still saying it's all her handwriting." That's the context in which Mike responds by saying it was "fifty-fifty". He'd been too quick to go along with Gray's aha! moment to think of the implications. Realising his mistake, Mike makes another one by attempting to explain how his letter Y could be in a diary in his wife's handwriting. I'm only surprised he didn't add the word "simple" for emphasis. The following day he is back to his claim that it was all in Anne's handwriting.

This man-child doesn't care about lies he told yesterday not matching the lies he tells the same people today, or the lies he will tell tomorrow, next week or next year. He can count on having enough followers who will believe him at least some of the time, and will make excuses for even the most transparent examples of his mendacity.

Lucky fellow.

Why do we have to trust Seth Linder when we have the tapes?

As to that, what is it that you can hear on the tapes. Can you actually hear Gray saying: "By Christ, I've tumbled you at last. You wrote the manuscript", and, "You said Anne did it.... you're still saying it's all her handwriting"?Or are you relying entirely on what Seth Linder claims to have been able to hear?

We've never managed to clear this up. I certainly can't hear those words. As a result, it seems very unclear what Mike meant by "fifty fifty", assuming he said those words which are barely audible on the tape.

Also, how do you explain the contradiction between Seth Linder's notes apparently saying that Gray saw the letter "y" in a letter written by Barrett to Doreen Montgomery and your book saying that it was a "y" on the tape of an interview he'd conducted with clairvoyant Dorothy Wright. How do we know which version of the story is the correct one?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Lombro2,

I don't think Eddie gave Robert any idea of when he was supposed to have thrown a book into a skip that was never there while he was working in Dodd's house.

There is also no evidence that Eddie was at the house in June 1992. He was there in March 1992 [on his own insistence - not from remembering the date, but from the details he was able to recall, which correspond with the documentary evidence for that job and no other] and again in July 1992, according to the timesheets and other independent witness testimony.

The skip story must have served some purpose for somebody, and you have offered one plausible explanation if Eddie was as worried as Mike Barrett was at the time about the Battlecrease rumour mill and where it might lead if unchecked. But nobody seems able to provide another reason why Eddie - or anyone else - would have agreed to meet a total stranger, Robert Smith, in a pub and would have told that story. The diary was in this stranger's possession by then, but very little information about the book itself was available to the public.

Eddie claimed to have only ever met Mike Barrett on the one occasion, when he knocked on his door to confront him about the diary and it didn't end well. He naturally had to deny the rendezvous in the Saddle, which Mike had arranged at Robert's request, or else admit to lying about only meeting Mike the once.

Love,

Caz
X

When you say that the skip "was never there" could you tell me the evidence for this please?

Also, when you say that there is "no evidence" that Eddie Lyons was at the house in June 1992 what about the old daily memo book (an old book!) mentioned by Shirley Harrison at page 292 of her 2003 book, The American Connection? By way of reminder, she tells us in that book that Brian Rawes spoke to Eddie Lyons at Battlecrease "in June 1992" and that Rawes had confirmed this "by reference to an old daily memo book". What does that old daily memo book say? Was Harrison wrong?

Many thanks in advance.

[rjpalmer]

Posted again, with added emphasis, purely for anyone who couldn't be arsed to read it properly the first time.

I did read it 'properly' the first time--I simply don't agree with your logic, nor your conclusions.

You're parroting Gary Barnett's tedious argument that it was not impossible for a Victorian to have coined this phrase, even though he can offer no direct evidence that a Victorian DID coin this phrase. He made this argument in order to 'debunk' David Barrat, even though Barrat himself stated that it wasn't impossible--only that it 'lacked credibility' that 'Maybrick' (or an old hoaxer) did so. Barrat is not wrong. It does lack credibility.

One can 'spin' it however they want with long, drawn out explanations thousands of words in length. The bottom line is that we are supposed to believe the ludicrous proposition that the only straightforward, unambiguous usage of 'one off instance' and 'bumbling buffoon' so far located in millions of pages of digitized print in any texts written between 1800 and 1935 appear in the same dubious document: the Maybrick Diary of 1888-89. Both of these phrases.

Which tells me the diary wasn't written in 1888-1889, nor anytime between 1800 and 1935--a conclusion also supported by a great many other indications, including suspiciously soluble ink, the quoting of the police inventory list unpublished until the 1980s, etc. etc. Since you have no pony in the race, and are perfectly happy with the diary having been written any time before 9 March 1992, why are you so hesitant to accept this? Since there is abundant evidence that these two phrases were in wide circulation after World War II, and no evidence other than 'it wasn't impossible' that they were in circulation before World War II, why not accept what the evidence is telling you?

As for the rest of it... "whatever."

This 'debate' has ceased to serve any useful purpose, so I'll leave you to it until new information is presented.

Regards.

[caz]

Hi, Caz,

Does the fact that Anne used Mike's writing in her family "cover story" make it look like Anne was actually confident that this was authentic document and not a forgery written by a literary forger? Or was she just confident that it was an old document?

RJ made a good point about Anne saying her husband was a budding writer when it's like saying he was a poor painter peddling a Picasso. She was obviously confident about something to stick her neck out so much.... If it was a forgery, why not just pretend ignorance. Not say "Oh I'm helping my husband write a book (don't read anything into that) but I didn't want him to know it came from me because I'm a good wife who walks three feet behind." She stuck her neck out with a strange story because she was confident about the diary.

Or with her tremendous forging ability.

Hi Lombro2,

You really need to ask Palmer such questions, as our resident psychoanalyst, because I couldn't begin to explain why Anne - oh so quiet throughout 1992 and 1993 - would have gone on to make the wholly unnecessary claim, whether true, partially true or false, to have used the diary to help and encourage Mike with his writing ambitions, if the bloody thing was in her own handwriting and she was finally appreciating just how dim she had been, while all around her were shouting "fraud" and, in Mike's case, shouting louder than anyone: "It's a fraud - everybody knows it. It will eat your pets..." sorry, I got carried away there.

When Anne said she had given the diary to Mike via Tony Devereux back in 1991, the first of many inevitable questions was "why?" The explanation she gave was tied in with her life with Mike up until that time, so the diary became something to keep a frustrated writer occupied and out of the pub.

Was this the sort of cover story anyone would have told if they had created a hoax for their frustrated writer of a husband who was too fond of the demon drink at the best of times, but was now on the brink of spilling more beans than he had ever spilled warm beer? I think we need Palmer to explain the workings of Anne's mind.

Would the same cover story not have worked better for someone whose husband had brought the diary home from the pub in March 1992? Anne could have appealed to the same frustrated writer in him to use it as the basis for a story, keep him occupied and out of the pub, and not to show it to anyone if he'd got it from somewhere he shouldn't. That way, it wouldn't have mattered if the diary was genuine or not; Victorian or from the swinging sixties, and the story could have been his. But Mike saw things differently. He wanted to see a book about the diary on the shelves, but with his name attached to it as the man with the means to unmask Jack the Ripper. He couldn't do that with a fictional story, or by taking the diary to a dealer in antiques, so he contacted someone in the publishing business.

Anne was not happy about it, and wanted little to do with Doreen and Robert Smith, but she presumably trusted their instincts - and her own - that the diary had not just fallen off a tree. The book itself was clearly old enough to have been in anyone's family for many a decade, so that appears to have been good enough for her to tell her tale and not be 'terrified' that anyone would prove the contents were recent - let alone in her own hand.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Mike,

I suspect your comment has flown right over Caroline's head.

Rather than debunking Professor Murray's 1888 dictionary entry, showing that 'bumbling' was regional and obsolete, Gary's research has, to my thinking, confirmed it.

If the adjective was truly in circulation, we'd expect to find dozens if not hundreds or thousands of examples of its use in print in the millions of pages of Victorian and Edwardian writing and literature now digitized.

Instead, he has found a single example and a strange and uncertain one, and you're quite right to point out that the context does not allow us to be confident that the writer in question meant bumbling in the sense of 'bungling'---that's merely an assumption on his part and Caroline's part.

One meaning of 'purveyor' is a someone who promotes something (a purveyor of the Christian faith, for instance) and could not a promoter bumble around like a bee? How do we know that the writer in question was not dropping a hint to the person's identity? A rival who wrote for The Bee, for instance?

Coming up for air, if the arguments for the diary being a genuine Victorian or Edwardian document are this obscure and tedious is it not likely that they are also wrong?

Anyone who believes the diary is a late 20th Century hoax can merely point to hundreds and thousands of examples of 'one off instance' and 'bumbling buffoon' in print. "Here they are, LOOK!!" It's that simple. There is no room for doubt.

By contrast, anyone who wants to suggest the text is Victorian is forced to guide us through a laborious and labyrinthine set of obscure and tedious and questionable arguments all designed to obscure the fact that these same phrases can't be found in print anytime between 1800 and 1935 or so.

Something's not quite right there, is it? Does the public even have the patience for it?

Have a great afternoon.

Hi Roger,

It’s certainly a strange experience to come up against such a ‘defend or dismiss at all cost’ approach (although we do see it with other posters who will apparently try to defend a theory even when the corpse is long past resuscitation.) I’ve previously asked how long do they require to find a rebuttal for ‘one off instance?’ Another 10 years, perhaps 15 or twenty? At what point do we hear someone concede the point? I’d suggest that the answer to that will be never because if they haven’t, after 10 years of increasingly embarrassing efforts, found a rebuttal then we can say with confidence that none exists. But the ‘cause’ goes on so the door has to be left ajar so that they can keep saying “one day someone will find a rebuttal.” This is the very definition of desperation. We have seen the level of obsession on here with posters getting angry and treating others with contempt and as the ‘enemy’ because they have had the temerity to comment and even to disagree. The whole subject is riddled to the core with bias. It’s tiring watching the contortions and the ducking and weaving that goes on to defend what is very obviously (and provably) a modern forgery. As you say Roger “Something’s not quite right there…” A forgery has become as revered as The Shroud Of Turin. A cause for the faithful.

[Lombro2]

But we believe in the Gospel of Michael.