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

[Herlock Sholmes]

For some reason, a hole beginning with A is all I can think about right now.

You can word it any way you like and continue doing so until we all die of boredom. It still won't make the diary emerge from an auction beginning with A for Awesome.

It may be that all you can think of is arseholes but it still doesn't explain how a diary created after 1945 could possibly have ended up under the floorboards of Battlecrease. The fact that there isn't even a working theory means we can dismiss the idea out of hand. As for the possibility of the old photograph album having been purchased at an auction of Victorian and Edwardian effects, it's such a shame that the records of Outhwaite & Litherland for March 1992 were never examined before they were destroyed, isn't it?

[caz]

If Mike simply "wanted to see how easy or hard it was" to source a Victorian diary with blank pages, surely when Martin Earl called him to tell him that no unused or partly used diaries could be found from 1880-1890, but that one, and one only, from 1891 was available, he had his answer. Why did he need Earl to send him the 1891 diary for which he'd have to pay £25?

The 1891 diary was located pretty quickly after the request was made and the advert appeared, so we don't know how many more Victorian diaries with blank pages might have been offered if Mike had only waited a while longer, or tried alternative sources. In the scenario of wanting to see how easy or hard it might have been for a scally to hoodwink Mike with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen - and using your own argument - an 1891 diary with blank pages could, in theory, have been usable for that precise purpose. But if the description given to Mike over the phone did not go into sufficient detail to tell him that this one would have been no use at all, he'd have needed to see it to believe it, wouldn't he? He'd then know that it wasn't as easy for a forger to source something suitable for hoodwinking purposes, as simply asking for any old Victorian diary with at least 20 blank pages and snapping up the first one offered.

And that, of course, was just via one second hand bookseller in Oxford. Surely Mike must have been aware that a forger could have sourced a Victorian diary from many other sources, including antique shops, auction houses and small ad sections of newspapers, plus, of course, other second hand booksellers around the country. So why engage on such a futile exercise in the first place, which could never tell him anything useful in a million years, and then why pay £25 unnecessarily?

Er, because if Mike wasn't a forger, he would not have been as aware as a forger might have been of all these alternative sources, and of the futility of thinking a suitable genuine Victorian diary could be had from a single source in a matter of days? You seem to be arguing against yourself again, Herlock. If Mike was a forger, where is the evidence that he did try any other sources besides Martin Earl until the 1891 diary let him down, assuming he was in a bit of a hurry by then to satisfy Doreen's curiosity before she suspected 'Mr Williams' of having her on and lost interest? Why no mention in the affidavit, if he did try more than the two sources claimed? If he was a forger, why engage on such a futile exercise in the first place, by asking Martin Earl for something that no forger who knew his Maybrick onions would have done in Mike's place? Why pay £25 unnecessarily? You've already mansplained me into a coma why it was necessary for Mike to ask Anne for the £25, regardless of the futility of the exercise, so again you seem to be arguing against your own arguments.

How did he even know that the old photograph album/scrapbook/diary was Victorian, let alone from the 1880s? The only evidence of a date is in the text. If he thought it might have been a fake, it could have been a twentieth century item couldn't it?

He didn't. That's why he'd have wanted to compare a personal diary, claiming to be by Jack the Ripper, which was undated apart from the handwritten one for 1889 after the final entry, with one that was genuinely from the right period, so he could better judge if the former was likely to be the work of a scallywag, who could have used the blank pages in any old book for hoodwinking purposes - Victorian, Edwardian or later - for all Mike knew, or if it looked as if it might, just possibly, be the real deal. A forger, passing on his own handiwork to someone like Mike Barrett for a bit of a laugh, would not have had anything like the same concerns as Mike would have had, if he was the victim of someone's idea of a joke, or the receiver of stolen property - possibly both - or as the forger himself, when contacting a London literary agent and committing himself to showing her what he claimed to have in his possession.

And if it was important to Mike to see how easy or hard it was to source a Victorian diary, why did he keep the whole process secret from Shirley Harrison with whom he, and his wife, signed a collaboration agreement before the diary had even been paid for?

I'm not sure it was desperately important if Mike made the phone call on impulse, to test the waters when he hadn't a clue if the diary was fake or legit, or where it had been. There is no evidence that Anne even knew what he was up to until she learned he was being chased for the payment and threw the cheque at him. Not so much a deliberate attempt to 'keep the whole process secret' at all costs, but more a damp squib that turned out to be of no consequence once Doreen and Shirley, followed by the chaps from the British Museum and Jarndyce respectively, had seen the diary for themselves, without "sending Mike packing" for showing them a Scouser's idea of a sick joke. But it would have been wiser not to advertise the fact, if the Barretts had suspected the diary was faked, stolen or both, when they had first set eyes on it, and Mike's call to Martin Earl was a direct consequence.

You asked Jay what he made of the following quote attributed to Keith Skinner by Shirley Harrison, concerning Anne's "in the family" claim:

"I was involved from the very first and I was present at most of the meetings of Paul and Billy. If the story had been forced I would have detected it by now."

Only Keith can clarify this, but are you perhaps reading too much into the word 'forced'? Having known Feldman and Anne better than anyone commenting today, didn't Keith simply mean he would have detected it if Feldman had 'forced' the story from the lips of Anne and Billy? Keith has never doubted Feldman's sincerity in his search for the truth, in which case a lie that had to be 'forced' out of anyone would have been of no possible use or interest to him. He was only interested in proving his beliefs to be true; not in forcing anyone to say anything for the sake of it, true or false.

But it seems that he does now think that the story had been forced, so that his contemporary view and interpretation was totally wrong.

It 'seems', does it?

How about 'it seems' that Keith, after testing the various claims and theories against the evidence for longer than anyone else alive, has been forced to consider the very real possibility that when Feldman thought he was finally getting the truth out of Anne, partially supported by Billy, she knew it wasn't true, but banked on it being believed and impossible to disprove?

This is all about Feldman, and whether he was in the business of 'forcing' or 'buying' a story, which he either had no faith in himself, or knew to be false. This was not the man Keith knew, regardless of the woman in the frame. Simple as that.

I’m sorry it Jay but you are being disingenuous when you say that Mike claimed in his affidavit that the diary was purchased while Tony Devereux was still alive. This is not stated at all in the affidavit. You appear to be referring to a dating error which says that a decision was made to write the diary of Jack the Ripper around January or February 1990 but it should be obvious to you that "1990" was a mistake.

Spot the 'deliberate' mistake. If the diary was not created until April 1992, and had been conceived and written by a Barrett, what was Devereux doing in the affidavit at all, dead or alive? What is he meant to have contributed before his timely/untimely death in August 1991? If Mike owned the copy of Tales of Liverpool, which Janet Devereux had borrowed from her father back in January 1991, what did the Barretts need from Devereux in order to go ahead and forge the diary? Why did they need to wait until he had been dead for many months before proceeding?

[caz]

Indeed, think of that sketch, and know your place.

What did I say regarding pedants? Enter the dragon .....oops, slip of the tongue, enter the pedant. If you were paying attention, it was only my opinion that he belonged to the upper middle classes, therefore better than an individual of the lower middle class. Of course I should have said I considered him better off financially than an individual of the lower middle classes. I did say the whole class system was subjective though. So, know your place

Nice one, Obs.

Put it down to the pedant's revolt.

If you think the pedants are revolting, I may need to change my deodorant.

Love,

Caz of the Lowest of Lower Middles.
X

[caz]

It was your premise I was responding to, Caz. You wanted me to explain why, if he was the forger, Mike didn't go "the whole hog". My answer was that, if he was the forget, he did. Given that you've now replied to my post twice, my answer must have really upset you.

No, it just amused me as most of your diary posts do. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not so easily 'upset'. You shouldn't be taking lessons in mind reading and mind control from Palmer, who thinks I'm also easily intimated and prone to hysteria.

Neither of you seem able to tolerate your arguments being trampled into the dust by a female of the species.

[caz]

No, I don't believe you have addressed it.


Why is Anne's handwriting in the sample so markedly different from her normal handwriting in her correspondence?

I don't know that an expert couldn't detect it was hers, but my name is not Anne Graham, so you are asking the wrong person. How the heck am I supposed to answer a question like that? Anne might not think it was as 'markedly different' as you do, but again, you'd need to ask her.

You seem to forget that the correspondence of hers that we have in her hand was written to Mike before Mike had accused her of forging the diary. The only letter of hers that we have after he did so is typewritten.

What has that got to do with it? Even more reason to presume that letter was not disguised and therefore could have been submitted by Mike for a direct professional comparison with the diary when he needed proof that she had penned it.

[caz]

It may be that all you can think of is arseholes but it still doesn't explain how a diary created after 1945 could possibly have ended up under the floorboards of Battlecrease. The fact that there isn't even a working theory means we can dismiss the idea out of hand. As for the possibility of the old photograph album having been purchased at an auction of Victorian and Edwardian effects, it's such a shame that the records of Outhwaite & Litherland for March 1992 were never examined before they were destroyed, isn't it?

Yes, such a shame. I can't think what Alan Gray and Melvin Harris were doing back in 1995, when Mike claimed he had the proof of purchase for both diaries, the red and the black one, and was so determined to make Gray believe it. Either one would have provided the right date for the search if the red diary really had been purchased by Anne for forgery purposes, as Mike claimed, before the auction sale came up trumps.

Just one spin of the Barrett roulette wheel to change red to black and Mike's fortune was sealed for good or ill.

[Herlock Sholmes]

The 1891 diary was located pretty quickly after the request was made and the advert appeared, so we don't know how many more Victorian diaries with blank pages might have been offered if Mike had only waited a while longer, or tried alternative sources. In the scenario of wanting to see how easy or hard it might have been for a scally to hoodwink Mike with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen - and using your own argument - an 1891 diary with blank pages could, in theory, have been usable for that precise purpose. But if the description given to Mike over the phone did not go into sufficient detail to tell him that this one would have been no use at all, he'd have needed to see it to believe it, wouldn't he? He'd then know that it wasn't as easy for a forger to source something suitable for hoodwinking purposes, as simply asking for any old Victorian diary with at least 20 blank pages and snapping up the first one offered.



Er, because if Mike wasn't a forger, he would not have been as aware as a forger might have been of all these alternative sources, and of the futility of thinking a suitable genuine Victorian diary could be had from a single source in a matter of days? You seem to be arguing against yourself again, Herlock. If Mike was a forger, where is the evidence that he did try any other sources besides Martin Earl until the 1891 diary let him down, assuming he was in a bit of a hurry by then to satisfy Doreen's curiosity before she suspected 'Mr Williams' of having her on and lost interest? Why no mention in the affidavit, if he did try more than the two sources claimed? If he was a forger, why engage on such a futile exercise in the first place, by asking Martin Earl for something that no forger who knew his Maybrick onions would have done in Mike's place? Why pay £25 unnecessarily? You've already mansplained me into a coma why it was necessary for Mike to ask Anne for the £25, regardless of the futility of the exercise, so again you seem to be arguing against your own arguments.



He didn't. That's why he'd have wanted to compare a personal diary, claiming to be by Jack the Ripper, which was undated apart from the handwritten one for 1889 after the final entry, with one that was genuinely from the right period, so he could better judge if the former was likely to be the work of a scallywag, who could have used the blank pages in any old book for hoodwinking purposes - Victorian, Edwardian or later - for all Mike knew, or if it looked as if it might, just possibly, be the real deal. A forger, passing on his own handiwork to someone like Mike Barrett for a bit of a laugh, would not have had anything like the same concerns as Mike would have had, if he was the victim of someone's idea of a joke, or the receiver of stolen property - possibly both - or as the forger himself, when contacting a London literary agent and committing himself to showing her what he claimed to have in his possession.



I'm not sure it was desperately important if Mike made the phone call on impulse, to test the waters when he hadn't a clue if the diary was fake or legit, or where it had been. There is no evidence that Anne even knew what he was up to until she learned he was being chased for the payment and threw the cheque at him. Not so much a deliberate attempt to 'keep the whole process secret' at all costs, but more a damp squib that turned out to be of no consequence once Doreen and Shirley, followed by the chaps from the British Museum and Jarndyce respectively, had seen the diary for themselves, without "sending Mike packing" for showing them a Scouser's idea of a sick joke. But it would have been wiser not to advertise the fact, if the Barretts had suspected the diary was faked, stolen or both, when they had first set eyes on it, and Mike's call to Martin Earl was a direct consequence.

You asked Jay what he made of the following quote attributed to Keith Skinner by Shirley Harrison, concerning Anne's "in the family" claim:



Only Keith can clarify this, but are you perhaps reading too much into the word 'forced'? Having known Feldman and Anne better than anyone commenting today, didn't Keith simply mean he would have detected it if Feldman had 'forced' the story from the lips of Anne and Billy? Keith has never doubted Feldman's sincerity in his search for the truth, in which case a lie that had to be 'forced' out of anyone would have been of no possible use or interest to him. He was only interested in proving his beliefs to be true; not in forcing anyone to say anything for the sake of it, true or false.



It 'seems', does it?

How about 'it seems' that Keith, after testing the various claims and theories against the evidence for longer than anyone else alive, has been forced to consider the very real possibility that when Feldman thought he was finally getting the truth out of Anne, partially supported by Billy, she knew it wasn't true, but banked on it being believed and impossible to disprove?

This is all about Feldman, and whether he was in the business of 'forcing' or 'buying' a story, which he either had no faith in himself, or knew to be false. This was not the man Keith knew, regardless of the woman in the frame. Simple as that.



Spot the 'deliberate' mistake. If the diary was not created until April 1992, and had been conceived and written by a Barrett, what was Devereux doing in the affidavit at all, dead or alive? What is he meant to have contributed before his timely/untimely death in August 1991? If Mike owned the copy of Tales of Liverpool, which Janet Devereux had borrowed from her father back in January 1991, what did the Barretts need from Devereux in order to go ahead and forge the diary? Why did they need to wait until he had been dead for many months before proceeding?

Thank you for your reply to my post which was actually addressed to Erobitha, Caz. I was hoping he would answer my questions, rather than someone else. He had every opportunity.

I see that, once again, and regrettably, you've edited my post when quoting it so you could avoid dealing with certain parts of it. I asked Erobitha about two quotes in Shirley Harrison's book. When quoting my post you completely omitted the second quote attributed to Keith Skinner which was:

"Those who believe Anne is lying, or that she has been bought in by Paul must include me in the plot as well".

I then asked Erobitha:

"Doesn't that give you pause when it comes to weighing up Keith's views about Anne? He seems to have believed just about everything she told him, didn't he? And he was wrong to do so, wasn't he?"

That's all been ignored, just so you could selectively focus on the one quote which you preferred to focus on. But I was asking a joint question about both those quotes. You can't just pretend the second one didn't exist.

The answer you've given to my question to Erobitha as to why needed to pay £25 to see the 1891 diary makes no sense. Is it your position that if Mike had been told that there were 10 diaries from the period 1880 to 1890 available with the required number of blank pages he would have needed to have purchased them all so that he could have seen them all? For that's the logic of your position. There was absolutely no need for Mike to see the 1891 diary if all he wanted to do was to "see how easy or hard it was to source a Victorian diary with blank pages" which is what Erobitha said, because he'd already found out his answer.

You've now subtly changed the argument to Mike "wanting to see how easy or hard it might have been for a scally to hoodwink Mike with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen" That's not what Erobitha said. Not even close. It demonstrates how impossible it is to have a tag team discussion where Person A says one thing to which I reply and then Person B comes back and challenges my reply based on an entirely different premise.

If Erobitha's argument had been as you now present it I would have asked him why Mike wasn't specifically looking for a big black leather bound undated diary because that, according to you, is what he had just promised to show Doreen.

Just to be clear Caz. At no time am I arguing against myself. That Mike would have been aware that a forger could have sourced a diary from multiple sources doesn't mean he needed to search all those sources himself when looking for his diary. He'd placed his request with a professional, Martin Earl, and he waited to see what Earl came up with. Sure, he could have walked around antique shops or auction houses and scoured personal ads but why expend that effort when Earl was on the case for him? None of that means that he thought for one second that Martin Earl was the only place he or anyone else could find a Victorian diary, just the easiest route for him personally.

Your answer to my question to Erobitha about why, if Mike was wanting to see how easy or hard it was to source a Victorian diary with blank pages, he asked for one in the period 1880-90, bearing in mind that the actual Jack the Ripper diary is undated, is a logical muddle. You've switched back in your answer from Mike wanting to see how easy it might have been for someone to hoodwink him "with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen" to him now wanting to see what a genuine diary from the 1880s looked like, a thought which relied on every diary from the 1880s being exactly the same, something Mike could not have possibly believed. So seeing a single genuine Victorian diary from the period 1880 to 1890 could never in his wildest dreams have told him a single damn thing about whether the undated large black leather bound diary he'd been given, on your theory, by Eddie Lyons was real or fake.

Finally, it is entirely possible that the concept of the diary started while Tony Devereux was alive, and it might have been drafted while he was alive, we don't know. The point Erobitha was making was that Mike claimed in his affidavit that the photograph album was purchasedwhile Devereux was alive which is a different matter entirely. I do note, incidentally, that this is another example of your selective editing because you've cut out the part where I said that the fact of "1990" being a mistake in the affidavit was confirmed by a recording between Barrett and Gray on 26 January 1995, which I later corrected to 29 January 1995. Is that because the recording of 29 January 1995 is too embarrassing for you to even mention, clearly showing as it does that Barrett had made a simple dating error in January 1995 about when he came down to London with the diary thus throwing all other dates in his account out of kilter, showing that the dates stated in the affidavit were mere errors of recollection, contrary to what you've always claimed over the years?

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't know that an expert couldn't detect it was hers, but my name is not Anne Graham, so you are asking the wrong person. How the heck am I supposed to answer a question like that? Anne might not think it was as 'markedly different' as you do, but again, you'd need to ask her.



What has that got to do with it? Even more reason to presume that letter was not disguised and therefore could have been submitted by Mike for a direct professional comparison with the diary when he needed proof that she had penned it.

Okay then, let's think about it.

Anne is asked out of the blue by Keith Skinner to provide a handwriting sample in January 1995.

She could have refused but that would have been suspicious.

Once she agreed to provide a sample she had two options only.

Option 1 was that she provided a sample of her normal handwriting. On the face of it, her normal handwriting doesn't look like the diary handwriting, but then, she might have thought, what if a professional handwriting expert was able to detect similarities with the diary handwriting?

So that takes us to Option 2 which is to provide a sample of her handwriting which is itself disguised in order to look as little like the diary handwriting as possible, thus hopefully ensuring that the expert is fooled.

Perhaps on the spur of the moment she chose Option 2. Perhaps afterwards she thought that was a bit silly because Mike had some samples of her handwriting, who knows? We all do things that we later regret. Equally, though, she might have made a calculated decision that Keith was only ever going to submit one sample to a handwriting expert and that, even if Mike did give him some of her personal correspondence, he wasn't going to keep sending things to an expert, nor was anyone else, especially because her normal handwriting didn't look much like the diary handwriting on its face, so why would anyone have bothered sending it to an expert for examination, especially if an expert had already ruled her out based on the 1995 sample?

As it happens, Mike never did give Keith any samples of Anne's handwriting. Gray, however, did ask to see them (on one of the recordings) but you really need to sit down with a high quality copy of the original diary to compare her letters with those in the diary, and that wasn't available to Gray, assuming he saw them.

As it also happens, the samples of Anne's personal correspondence remained hidden for over 20 years. All anyone had to go on was the handwriting sample she provided in 1995 which looks nothing like the diary handwriting.

So, once again, if she was the forger, she did the sensible thing by disguising her handwriting for the 1995 sample. It threw everyone, including Keith Skinner, off the scent.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes, such a shame. I can't think what Alan Gray and Melvin Harris were doing back in 1995, when Mike claimed he had the proof of purchase for both diaries, the red and the black one, and was so determined to make Gray believe it. Either one would have provided the right date for the search if the red diary really had been purchased by Anne for forgery purposes, as Mike claimed, before the auction sale came up trumps.

Just one spin of the Barrett roulette wheel to change red to black and Mike's fortune was sealed for good or ill.

The 29th January 1995 recording that you seem to prefer to ignore, establishes that Alan Gray was told by Mike that he purchased the photograph album in March 1991 (because Mike thought he'd come down to London with the diary in April 1991). So Gray wasn't likely to be asking for a search of the records for March 1992. I've no idea why you mention Melvin Harris but it makes no difference who is responsible for failing to ensure that O&L's records weren't searched in the appropriate period. I wasn't apportioning blame. I was merely responding to your strange comment that whatever I say, "still won't make the diary emerge from an auction beginning with A for Awesome". I've no idea what was "awesome" about the auction, incidentally, because it seems like just another ordinary auction of Victorian and Edwardian effects held by O&L like they did every week, but my simple point was that it's impossible to prove or disprove whether the photograph album was purchased at the O&L auction on 31st March 1992 because the records for that month, which were never examined, have been destroyed. So it's no good telling me, in effect, that I can't prove that the photograph album was purchased at that auction when the records which would prove it (or disprove it) don't exist.

It's also not much point talking about receipts because receipts could be forged and would be difficult to authenticate. But it seems to me that any receipts for the items involved in the forgeries were likely to have been destroyed (for what purpose would they be kept?) and to think otherwise is to believe the liar and con artist Mike Barrett.

[Herlock Sholmes]

No, it just amused me as most of your diary posts do. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm not so easily 'upset'. You shouldn't be taking lessons in mind reading and mind control from Palmer, who thinks I'm also easily intimated and prone to hysteria.

Neither of you seem able to tolerate your arguments being trampled into the dust by a female of the species.

My post didn’t say or imply anything about you being a woman. None of my posts or Roger’s ever have. It’s disappointing that you’ve even suggested it Caz.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Yes, such a shame. I can't think what Alan Gray and Melvin Harris were doing back in 1995, when Mike claimed he had the proof of purchase for both diaries, the red and the black one, and was so determined to make Gray believe it. Either one would have provided the right date for the search if the red diary really had been purchased by Anne for forgery purposes, as Mike claimed, before the auction sale came up trumps.

Just one spin of the Barrett roulette wheel to change red to black and Mike's fortune was sealed for good or ill.

The 29th January 1995 recording that you seem to prefer to ignore, establishes that Alan Gray was told by Mike that he purchased the photograph album in March 1991 (because Mike thought he'd come down to London with the diary in April 1991). So Gray wasn't likely to be asking for a search of the records for March 1992. I've no idea why you mention Melvin Harris but it makes no difference who is responsible for failing to ensure that O&L's records weren't searched in the appropriate period. I wasn't apportioning blame. I was merely responding to your strange comment that whatever I say, "still won't make the diary emerge from an auction beginning with A for Awesome". I've no idea what was "awesome" about the auction, incidentally, because it seems like just another ordinary auction of Victorian and Edwardian effects held by O&L like they did every week, but my simple point was that it's impossible to prove or disprove whether the photograph album was purchased at the O&L auction on 31st March 1992 because the records for that month, which were never examined, have been destroyed. So it's no good telling me, in effect, that I can't prove that the photograph album was purchased at that auction when the records which would prove it (or disprove it) don't exist.

It's also not much point talking about receipts because receipts could be forged and would be difficult to authenticate. But it seems to me that any receipts for the items involved in the forgeries were likely to have been destroyed (for what purpose would they be kept?) and to think otherwise is to believe the liar and con artist Mike Barrett.

[Lombro2]

My post didn’t say or imply anything about you being a woman. None of my posts or Roger’s ever have. It’s disappointing that you’ve even suggested it Caz.

Are you kidding? RJ famously asked Caz if she knew she was a female.

You really don’t keep up.

We can’t keep up with your insults. We don’t have to.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Are you kidding? RJ famously asked Caz if she knew she was a female.

You really don’t keep up.

We can’t keep up with your insults. We don’t have to.

For someone who stresses the importance of context, you sure do like to strip away all context to produce a misleading impression.

Despite what you claim to be "famous" I had no knowledge of it and felt it was unlikely to be as you portrayed it. And so it proved when I found it in a search.

Caz famously likes to inject herself and her life experiences into these discussions and that's what happened in November 2023 after Roger described Tony Devereux as "a bloke who called his wife 'The Whore'". Caz replied that she personally knew a number of "blokes" but didn't know what they called their wives (or, rather, in her typically more ambiguous wording: "how that could be seen as evidence that I also knew what any of them called their wives...is frankly too weird to be funny"). RJ's response was to point out that men speaking about their wives with other men, during "locker room" talk, will speak more freely than when speaking to a woman. In other words, it was relevant to the very specific issue at that time whether Caz was a man or a woman. That’s the reality, which anyone can read, and yet you have tried to spin it for your own purpose.

Now there was a dispute as to whether it would have been Anne or Mike who knew that Tony called his wife 'a whore' but the fact of the matter is that Caz had brought herself and her life, and indeed her gender, into the discussion, which, I think, is always best avoided.

This issue from 2023 has nothing to do with Caz's highly offensive allegation of yesterday that neither Roger nor myself seem able to tolerate responses from Caz because she is female. It is clearly ludicrous. There is no difference in the way we respond to the same arguments whether they are made by Ike, Erobitha, Caz or Aunt or Uncle Tom Cobley. On the rare occasions you say something intelligible we respond to you in the same way. Gender has nothing to do with it and Caz's absurd statement should never have been posted.

[caz]

Thank you for your reply to my post which was actually addressed to Erobitha, Caz. I was hoping he would answer my questions, rather than someone else. He had every opportunity.

I see that, once again, and regrettably, you've edited my post when quoting it so you could avoid dealing with certain parts of it.

As it wasn't addressed to me, I'll be the judge of which 'parts' I want to quote and comment on, and which parts I don't, thank you very much. Don't you dare accuse me of editing your post so I could 'avoid' dealing with parts of it, when none of it was addressed to me in the first place. You appear to think you deserve every line in every one of your posts to be 'dealt' with by me, even if it was addressed to someone else. How do you know if Ero has had 'every opportunity' to come here and answer all your questions? Have you ever considered that you and your questions might not be high up on his list of priorities?

I asked Erobitha....

Yes, you did. If Erobitha chooses not to answer, or has not had 'every opportunity' to do so, stop acting like a spoiled brat stamping his foot because he can't get his own way and put up with it.

I then asked Erobitha....

Yes, you did.

That's all been ignored....

Not by me. You weren't asking me for my opinion.

If I don't quote and then answer every question you have asked someone else, I'm not 'pretending' any of your questions didn't exist. How could I? Anyone can refer back to an original post if they want to see the whole thing, and not just the parts quoted.

Your second quote included the word 'bought', and you may have missed it in your rush to air your personal grievances, but I did observe [and you quoted me doing so]:

This is all about Feldman, and whether he was in the business of 'forcing' or 'buying' a story, which he either had no faith in himself, or knew to be false. This was not the man Keith knew, regardless of the woman in the frame. Simple as that.

That covered all I wanted to say on the subject of Anne's story being 'forced' or 'bought' by Feldman. If Keith had detected him using such tactics and done nothing about it, he'd have been in on the 'plot'.

You've now subtly changed the argument to Mike "wanting to see how easy or hard it might have been for a scally to hoodwink Mike with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen" That's not what Erobitha said. Not even close.

No, because this is my argument and my theory [thank you, Anne Elk]. Erobitha's argument may be subtly different, but you don't have to address either. I'm not as bothered as you are by unanswered questions, nor do I keep a meticulous record of every post of mine which has failed to get a response.

It demonstrates how impossible it is to have a tag team discussion where Person A says one thing to which I reply and then Person B comes back and challenges my reply based on an entirely different premise.

That's the beauty of welcoming so many posters into our wonderful Diary World to have their say and respond whenever they like, to whatever has been posted, by anyone and to anyone. If you want a conversation to be between you and just one other person at a time, you can do that via private messages and give everyone else a jolly Herlock holiday.

If Erobitha's argument had been as you now present it I would have asked him why Mike wasn't specifically looking for a big black leather bound undated diary because that, according to you, is what he had just promised to show Doreen.

Mike wasn't specifically looking for a big black leather bound undated diary if - drum roll - he already had one, or had seen it down the pub. How hard can this be? He would only need to see something that would have been just as good for anyone faking Jack the Ripper's diary for a laugh. Assuming Mike wanted the big black leather bound diary to be genuine, but had no idea how to tell real from fake, seeing an actual Victorian diary for comparison purposes would have made sense, even if there were quicker and easier ways he could have gone about it. Do you seriously think that anyone hoodwinking Mike with Jack the Ripper's private diary would have looked specifically for the book they managed to obtain, and wouldn't have used anything else? The first book they saw that looked suitably old, contained enough unused pages and was large enough to work with, would have done the job nicely. The fact that Mike's suspected scallywag would have found and used this 'big black leather bound undated' book for their prank, is neither here nor there. It doesn't affect or alter anything.

Just to be clear Caz. At no time am I arguing against myself. That Mike would have been aware that a forger could have sourced a diary from multiple sources doesn't mean he needed to search all those sources himself when looking for his diary. He'd placed his request with a professional, Martin Earl, and he waited to see what Earl came up with. Sure, he could have walked around antique shops or auction houses and scoured personal ads but why expend that effort when Earl was on the case for him? None of that means that he thought for one second that Martin Earl was the only place he or anyone else could find a Victorian diary, just the easiest route for him personally.

Easiest, possibly, if he was in absolutely no hurry, because he'd only just called Doreen and told her he was going to York and would make contact again on his return. But presumably he'd have wanted a result sooner rather than later if he needed something for faking the diary he had promised her as soon as possible. Would he not have wanted some idea of how long he might have to wait for his request to be successful? Days? Weeks? Maybe longer, if ever? Martin Earl said it was an "unusual" request, so Mike would not have been led to expect an early result at this first attempt. It's unfortunate that he didn't mention in his affidavit that he had tried any other sources, because sitting there, wishing and hoping with the clock ticking, doesn't quite sit right if he was a budding forger on a mission to source his raw materials.

Your answer to my question to Erobitha about why, if Mike was wanting to see how easy or hard it was to source a Victorian diary with blank pages, he asked for one in the period 1880-90, bearing in mind that the actual Jack the Ripper diary is undated, is a logical muddle. You've switched back in your answer from Mike wanting to see how easy it might have been for someone to hoodwink him "with the diary he had just promised to show Doreen" to him now wanting to see what a genuine diary from the 1880s looked like, a thought which relied on every diary from the 1880s being exactly the same, something Mike could not have possibly believed. So seeing a single genuine Victorian diary from the period 1880 to 1890 could never in his wildest dreams have told him a single damn thing about whether the undated large black leather bound diary he'd been given, on your theory, by Eddie Lyons was real or fake.

You just made a logical muddle out of this and you blame me?

Genuine diaries from the 1880s were obviously not going to be exactly the same as each other. But Mike could have expected them all to look significantly different from the diary he had promised Doreen, if the big black leather bound book, dated 1889 by hand after the last entry, was from a significantly later period. He only needed to see one genuine example from the 1880s to judge whether the one he saw down the pub on the day he called Doreen looked similarly old or significantly more modern.

Finally, it is entirely possible that the concept of the diary started while Tony Devereux was alive, and it might have been drafted while he was alive, we don't know. The point Erobitha was making was that Mike claimed in his affidavit that the photograph album was purchasedwhile Devereux was alive which is a different matter entirely. I do note, incidentally, that this is another example of your selective editing because you've cut out the part where I said that the fact of "1990" being a mistake in the affidavit was confirmed by a recording between Barrett and Gray on 26 January 1995, which I later corrected to 29 January 1995. Is that because the recording of 29 January 1995 is too embarrassing for you to even mention, clearly showing as it does that Barrett had made a simple dating error in January 1995 about when he came down to London with the diary thus throwing all other dates in his account out of kilter, showing that the dates stated in the affidavit were mere errors of recollection, contrary to what you've always claimed over the years?

Well, it all depends on whether Mike was playing Alan Gray for a fool in early 1995, when claiming to have proof of purchase of the 'black' diary, and then playing the fool himself later in the year, after revealing he had found a "receipt" for the red one. Both would have been dated. At Baker Street in the July, it was revealed by Feldman that Mike had recently told Melvin Harris that this receipt was for £25 and dated 1992. Mike was there and didn't deny this. He also claimed that the "receipt" for the "black" one was currently with his solicitor [not a very original excuse, considering the farce over the Sphere book]. So why did he and Alan Gray have such a struggle even to get the year right for both purchases when preparing the affidavit, if Mike had easy access to at least one of these "receipts" at the time, from the same period in the spring of 1992?

By July 1995, Mike had claimed to have both receipts, so even if he didn't want to hand them over to Gray, or show them to anyone, he could have checked the exact dates for himself before telling Gray and Harris - either directly or via Gray - so the record could be set straight, with a note attached to the affidavit to correct the dates long before it appeared on the internet, and Gray could contact Outhwaite & Litherland again before their sales records for 31st March 1992 went into the shredder.

Of course, if Mike was lying, and only ever had a receipt for May 1992 for the £25 Anne paid for the red diary, it would explain rather a lot.

[Lombro2]

Who cares if Devereau called his wife a whore or a bitch. Maybe if the he called her honey melons and the diary author used that…?

If that’s all you got, you have nothing to bring to the real discussion. That’s why you’ve been handed your proverbials on a platter for decades now.

People on your own side have stated that.