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

[Herlock Sholmes]

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.

And this is why only about half a dozen people in the world are gullible enough to believe that the diary is genuine. You are sitting there as a member of a tiny club of desperates sticking your fingers in your ears and stamping your feet, shouting “it’s real, it’s real, it’s real.”

Bad news Lombro. It has been proven that it isn’t and no matter how much you and your little group keep desperately trying to stay afloat your sunk. You’ve been sunk for years. The only decent thing would be for you to accept it.

[Herlock Sholmes]

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?



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.



Yes, you did.



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]:



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'.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.

It was the very fact that you were replying to a post I addressed to Erobitha that I was complaining about, Caz. The fact that you edited it so as not to reply to certain parts only made it worse. I've no idea why you think it's ok to edit a post which you're replying to, even if it wasn't aimed at you. I wouldn't mind so much but you also edit posts which I address to you, like this very post in which you've failed to reproduce the quote I was complaining that you'd edited out in the first place!

I’ll remind you of that quote attributed to Keith Skinner which you don't seem to have read properly:

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

You haven't dealt with the fact of Keith having said that if anyone believed Anne was lying he must be "in the plot" too. He now must believe Anne was lying. You certainly do. So what does that say about Keith's judgement? That's what I was asking Erobitha in the second quote you've excised from my post:

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?"

If you're going to reply to posts not addressed to you, surely you should deal with the entirety of the post, and not snip out bits that are too difficult for you to reply to, which this one must be considering you've now ducked it twice.

And what Keith is reported to have said was "bought in" not "bought". So the fact that you used the word "buying" doesn't cover it because "bought in" (whatever that means) isn't the same as being bought, otherwise the word "in" is redundant. In any case, your post said, "This is all about Feldman" but that is false. It was stated by Keith to be about those who believed Anne was lying. The possibility of her having been "bought in" by Feldman was only an alternative possibility.

So your statement that, "If Keith had detected him [Feldman] using such tactics and done nothing about it, he'd have been in on the 'plot'" is not correct and doesn't meet the point. By his own words, he would have been in on the plot if Anne was lying. She was lying, wasn't she? So why wasn't Keith in on the plot? That's the point. He was clearly saying that Anne was not lying and he was staking his own reputation on that fact, wasn't he? Not a good look.

Thank you for agreeing that "Erobitha's argument may be subtly different". Yes, indeed.

You don't seem to be able to follow your own argument. You say:

"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"

Of course he was - drum roll - under your own argument, because he surely wanted to see if a Scouse scally could have obtained one. What the hell would have been the purpose of seeking something different if he wanted to know if the scally was tricking him? He would obviously have needed to know if the scally could have obtained something similar to what he was holding in his hand. It seems like you're confusing yourself. I mean, what are you talking about when you say "something that would have been just as good for anyone faking Jack the Ripper's diary for a laugh"? How would that have helped him? For in that case, it would have been something that the scally had not been able to obtain because it was being offered for sale by Martin Earl.

And in saying that Mike wanted to see "an actual Victorian diary for comparison purposes" or "to judge whether the one he saw down the pub on the day he called Doreen looked significantly old or significantly more modern" you seem to be forgetting the requirement for a minimum of 20 blank pages which makes a nonsense of this theory. If that's what he was wanting to do, he didn't need a diary with 20 blank pages, did he? But if the blank pages requirement is supposed to have had something to do with seeing if the scally was tricking him, that scally would have needed a minimum of 63 blank pages to create the diary, wouldn't he?

You must know that this doesn't make any sense. You cannot possibly be putting this forward in good faith. Why would you want to put forward such a dreadful argument Caz?

As for Mike trying other sources, I think I already said that he'd instructed a professional book dealer to find him a diary and he would understandably have been content to discover what Earl could obtain rather than spending time and effort looking to source one elsewhere. I mean, he wouldn't want to have bought something that wasn't ideal only to be told that Earl had found something perfect, perhaps a totally blank 1888 diary. That would have been a waste of money which he didn't even appear to have. It does make sense that Mike wanted to wait and see what Earl could come up with before doing anything further.

Finally, I'm at a loss to know why you and Ike keep talking about receipts. What I do know is that you've ignored the 29 January 1995 recording in which it is clear that Mike thought he'd come down to London in March 1991 (correcting himself from 1990). If Mike worked out by July 1995 that the red diary had been purchased in 1992 then well done him (and we already knew he'd worked it out by April 1999) but it shows that the dates in the January1995 affidavit were in error. Reading your posts in the archives I noted you always seemed to want to talk about the dates in the affidavit but now I give you the opportunity, you have not one word to say about the affidavit and just keep mentioning receipts. As I've already said, the O&L receipt is likely to have been destroyed in 1992. The only reason for thinking it might not have been is what Mike Barrett said, but he's a liar and a con artist so why aren't you ignoring it?

[Lombro2]

The argument that keeps being presented to me about one-off is this:

One-off did not exist before 1945. So it had to be put there by Barrett.

To me, it’s the equivalent of me saying to an evolutionist:

Dinosaurs did not exist before Adam. So the dinosaur bones had to be put there by the devil.

I wouldn’t say that in the first place, much less keep repeating it to an evolutionist.

So why would someone do what is, to me, essentially the equivalent here over and over. One off, okay. A million off? Come on!

[Herlock Sholmes]

The argument that keeps being presented to me about one-off is this:

One-off did not exist before 1945. So it had to be put there by Barrett.

To me, it’s the equivalent of me saying to an evolutionist:

Dinosaurs did not exist before Adam. So the dinosaur bones had to be put there by the devil.

I wouldn’t say that in the first place, much less keep repeating it to an evolutionist.

So why would someone do what is, to me, essentially the equivalent here over and over. One off, okay. A million off? Come on!

After all this time, Lombro, and you still don't understand what I've told you?

No one is saying that "One-off did not exist before 1945". What I've said time after time is that figurative or metaphorical type expressions involving "one off", such as "a one off instance", did not enter the English language until after 1945. In fact, the first known written usage of such an expression is 1958. The first recorded example in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1968.

I also have no idea what you mean when you say: "So it had to be put there by Barrett". Put where?

Just to be clear, the argument that Barrett (or the Barretts) created the diary is separate from the fact that expressions such as "a one off instance" did not enter the English language before 1945. So the way you've expressed it is completely wrong.

You seem to have misunderstood a different point which is that, with the diary being ceated after 1945 (which we know it was), there is no realistic way it could have ended up under the nailed down floorboards of Battlecrease in 1992, which knocks out the so-called "Battlecrease evidence" that we're not even allowed to see (and no wonder).