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

[caz]

I never said there was any evidence--none of us were there--I asked if you had considered the possibility.

I have, and I think it is highly plausible.

Considering possibilities with no evidence may be fun, but is ultimately futile.

The oddness of this suspicious purchase being a late payment, the oddness in how the cheque was filled out (as if Anne wanted no part of it), along with Keith still believing four years later that the diary had been ordered in May 1992 all adds up to make one wonder, and all we have against this is the word of Anne Graham--whom, by your own admission, told a whole string of lies to Keith and Feldman and Shirley.

It's odd that this odd purchase would have been left to become a late payment, if it had represented an attempt, albeit a spectacularly inept one, to source the raw materials needed to fake James Maybrick's diary. Surely it would have been wiser to have asked for more details before ordering it, or to have returned it within the 30 days if the description had been so woefully inadequate that Mike could not have been expecting what he had been sent.

Not so odd that Anne wanted no part of it, since it was undoubtedly connected with another diary that had arrived in Goldie Street in somewhat mysterious circumstances. The trick is knowing which came first.

Keith had no evidence four years later that the diary had been ordered 'pre-Doreen', just because that is what Anne thought she recalled. It is surely to his credit that he didn't assume anything further than the evidence allowed at that time, which was when the 1891 diary was actually paid for by Anne. Mike would have had every opportunity in April 1999 to tell Keith and everyone present that while Anne had paid for it in May 1992, he had begun the search for a suitable diary weeks earlier, when he had just "conned" Doreen into believing he already had Jack the Ripper's. He could have described what he had asked for, and explained why he had received something entirely different, which was uniquely unsuitable for the purpose.

We also only have Anne's word that Mike had told her that he had 'just wanted to see what a diary looked like'---which makes no sense once we see Earl's advertisement. Again, there is no evidence that Mike didn't say this, but I'm not inclined to believe it because it doesn't make any sense.

Again, the possibility is not even being considered that Mike's request was bound up with the mysterious circumstances in which he brought the scrapbook home, and may have come about as a direct result of those circumstances, rather than preceding them.

It would be entirely different if you believed that Anne was truthful with Keith about seeing the diary in the 1960s, or that there was an oral tradition linking Formby to Yapp, etc.

If that was the case, I could understand why you would believe that Anne was giving her level best cooperation.

But since you don't, I find it odd that you're bending over backwards to portray Anne as cooperative on this single, solitary occasion. She was over a barrel.

There remains no evidence that Anne felt she was 'over a barrel' in the way Palmer wants her to have been. She saw nothing to lose by helping Keith and nothing to gain by holding back what little she knew. The only danger in helping him would have been if she had helped Mike to create the diary in April 1992 and didn't know what incriminating evidence he may have stupidly left in his wake when sourcing the raw materials. Mike was never going to admit it, if he had requested the diary in connection with the one he had taken off an electrician's hands. He had already given at least two different accounts of how and when he got it, so you could say she had him over a barrel if he had tried to tell the God's honest truth about the diary for once.

Feldman had bizarre theories, but I trust his account over Anne's. I see no reason why he would tell such an odd lie to his own researcher. And then we have the MI-5 mumbo jumbo.

I don't see it as a deliberate lie on Feldman's part. He told Keith that Anne had confirmed his belief that she wasn't Anne Graham, but we don't know her actual words, so it could have been more a symptom of his own obsessive belief that he was right and was coaxing the truth out of her. Anything she said, or just the way that she said it, could have convinced Feldman that she was admitting to something that she really wasn't. Why could he not have been doing a 'Palmer' and reading too much into her words because he had already decided what she must know? Palmer can't be the only one who sees his own version of the truth in everything that woman said or left unsaid. I trust Feldman to have done much the same, in which case he'd have had no need for lies. He honestly thought he was seeing in Anne what he had been expecting to see.

[caz]

Possibly, but didn't Martin Fido remark that Anne frequently let out 'peels of girlish laughter' whenever she was nervous and wanted to quickly change the subject?

And?

Does that mean she only ever laughed in those circumstances? Might she not have found some of the arguments for a Barrett hoax to be genuinely hilarious?

[Iconoclast]

The reality is that there is no provenance for the Maybrick scrapbook, but that there are three current candidates for it:

1) The Barretts hoaxed it;
2) The Graham family had it in their possession from at least 1950; and
3) The scrapbook was taken from Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992, and found its way to Michael Barrett soon thereafter.

There have been other proposed potential back stories but none have any substance and certainly no evidence to support them.

As I see it, the evidence for each of the three canonical possibilities is as follows:

1) Michael Barrett - at the worst possible time for his credibility - gave an unsupported account of creating the hoax with Anne;
2) Anne and Billy Graham 'testified' that they had owned the scrapbook at various times since at least 1950 and Florence Maybrick used the name 'Florence Graham' on her release from confinement in 1904; and
3) Work was carried out on Battlecrease House on the same day Michael Barrett first notified anyone that he thought he had the 'diary' of Jack the Ripper, Eddie Lyons and Michael Barrett had a common locus in The Saddle pub, and Brian Rawes gave a statement to New Scotland Yard detectives that Eddie Lyons had told him on July 17, 1992, that he had found something important (Rawes even claimed Lyons had called it a diary in his statement though I don't think he ever again said this).

So, what does the evidence tell us? Well, it tells us that none of the canonical three potential provenances can be conclusively ruled in nor ruled out.

Meanwhile, proposed provenance 1 relies fundamentally on Michael Barrett's attempted purchase of a diary from 1880 to 1890 with at least twenty blank pages (and his eventual accepting of a tiny 1891 diary plastered with '1891' on every page and the inside cover). This - to most people - is good enough: the scrapbook looks shoddy and reads 'incorrectly' in places, so Michael Barrett's claims must be true.

And - yet - the 1891 diary is an ambiguous piece of evidence. What it almost certainly does do is rule out potential provenance 2 because there is no good reason to have made the purchase if Tony Devereux had given Michael the scrapbook before the former died on August 8, 1991. This isn't entirely true as it could be claimed that Barrett had the scrapbook but did not want to take the original to London in April so he was seeking a document he (or Anne) could scribble some or more of the actual scrapbook into to test the water at that first meeting. It's a possibility so it can't be ruled out but - for me - it's not a strong possibility (but that's just my opinion).

The other ambiguity lies in Michael potentially holding in his hands a priceless document which might finally reveal the name of the Whitechapel fiend but knowing that it was almost certainly liberated without the legal owner's knowledge. This fear would have presumably preyed on the ex-scrap metal dealer's mind - after all, short of winning the lottery (which would not start for another two and a half years), he had few hopes of ever improving his limited lot - so what could he do? Well, we don't know what options he considered (if any) but the purchase of the 1891 tiny diary is at least strong evidence that one of his options was to secure a Victorian diary he could pass off as the one he had if anyone ever came looking for it. It doesn't matter how much it did or it did not look like the scrapbook. It didn't matter that we might struggle today to think of who might actually come knocking at his door. We aren't holding the winning lottery ticket. He was. All he had to think was that having a genuine Victorian diary with a similar number of blank pages to that of the scrapbook would give him some possibility of keeping hold of the latter if asked about it: "Have you recently come into possession of an old book?", "Yes, I have, and here it is" (handing over 1891 diary).

It doesn't need to make sense to us here in 2025. It didn't need to make sense to anyone else in 1992. It only had to make some sort of sense to Michael Barrett in March 1992 as he held on to an old scrapbook with what appeared to be Jack the Ripper's record of events in. Can we - in all seriousness - say that the same thought would not have occurred to us in the same circumstances?

For me, then, potential provenance 3 is the one which explains most of that which we know for certain (which is very little indeed) about this baffling case.

[caz]

Morning Ike,

Mike could have been prompted by something Anne or Doreen had said at the time, to try and obtain a genuine Victorian "diary", and not just any book with blank pages that was old enough.

If he wasn't giving Anne a straight story of how he got the scrapbook, which was very likely if he lied to Doreen about getting it from Devereux in 1991 because the truth was a whole lot worse, Anne's worry would have been that if he had already blabbed about his "find" down the pub, for instance, he could bring its rightful owner straight back to Goldie Street on the heels of the diary itself - or the police, if it had recently been stolen and Mike had rashly associated himself with it. Mike would have been the one in possession if Anne thought someone was using him in this way. But if she didn't know, because Mike wasn't being straight with her, she might have realised it was better for her personally not to know.

Her question to Mike in February 1993: "Did you nick it, Mike?", asked in front of a group of strangers who had come to Liverpool to investigate the diary's origins, would have come in the 'nick' of time [ha ha], if she had suspected something of the sort back in March 1992, but had wisely kept her trap shut until that moment. Mike's comment about not splitting "on a mate", when Martin Howells was sceptical of the Devereux story and they had just learned about the electrical work done in Dodd's house, gave Anne the ideal opportunity and excuse to get in quick, in case her suspicions were about to be proved correct. She could then claim that the thought had never occurred to her when Mike was showing off the diary in London. She would be protecting herself from accusations of guilty knowledge, knowing there was nowt she could do to protect Mike, if they uncovered evidence to show the diary had indeed been "nicked".

If Anne knew it hadn't been nicked, either because she had given it to him via Devereux or they had faked it together, using a photo album bought legitimately from an awesome auction, what purpose was achieved by her question, apart from annoying Mike and putting him on the defensive, quite unnecessarily?

Love,

Caz
X

[Observer]

But you’re right.

The Ripper was Bury(ied).

So he was. I believe the first hymn sang at the funeral was "The Old Rugged Cross", better known in the East End as "The Old Rugged Lechmere"

[John Wheat]

So he was. I believe the first hymn sang at the funeral was "The Old Rugged Cross", better known in the East End as "The Old Rugged Lechmere"

This is nonsense. Bury may well have been the Ripper. Lechmere and Maybrick no chance whatsoever.