New Ideas and New Research on the Diary

[Herlock Sholmes]

I don't believe the Barretts wrote the diary, but I can't prove a negative. All I can do is to consider the evidence for accusing the Barretts and, because I find it totally unconvincing, I am not going to believe they did it. The onus is on the accuser to demonstrate, with hard evidence, when and how Mike obtained the scrapbook if he did so in order to create the diary, and nobody has come close to doing that.



A problem for you, maybe, but I'm happy to remain sceptical while waiting for the evidence of a hoax conspiracy. I'm not trying to convince you that I'm right to be sceptical - I don't have completely unrealistic expectations.



Yes, if the Barretts forged the diary, the sensible thing to do would have been to destroy - or at least try to destroy - anything and everything that could have proved it, but Mike tried to claim he did have such evidence, without ever substantiating that claim. The onus was on him to do so, if he wanted people to believe him.



We see the position differently. I don't care if the diary was written on 8th March 1992, although I would find that highly unlikely, but the only theory involving the Barretts in its creation dictates that it had to be handwritten between 1st and 13th April 1992, which contradicts the evidence that it already existed on 9th March. I have seen no evidence that the scrapbook was ever in an auction sale, before or after that date.

For me, seeing is believing. After the recent 'bumbling' fiasco, I realised that some people will resist believing it even when they see it, in this case the fact that the word was known, used and understood in Maybrick's Liverpool in the 1880s. I had the piss ripped out of me when I first dared to suggest that the diary author - regardless of when it was written or by whom - might have been using the Dickens character, Mr Bumble, for inspiration. But nobody had the balls or the decency to acknowledge that the word was not after all 'obsolete' or incongruous, or worse, and that the examples posted by Gary Barnett made all their own objections 'obsolete' for all time. Not a word of apology, just forget about that and move on to more fertile ground.

At least Druitt would have known what was "not cricket".

Love,

Caz
X

Caz, in 2015 you posted:'I am 100% certain that Mike got involved by pure chance, and long after the diary had been written and placed in Battlecrease'. That is surely a statement that needs substantiating. If you can't prove this, why say it? The fact you might find the involvement of the Barretts unconvincing doesn't mean they didn't forge the diary, does it? For myself, all I can say is that I'm not accusing the Barretts of anything. I just can't see why they couldn't have done it, and you certainly haven't explained why they couldn't have done it. So it seems to me that if you don't have the evidence to rule the Barretts out, you should be keeping an open mind and accepting the possibility that they might have done it. At the very least, I would suggest that you shouldn't be treating people, like myself, who think the Barretts might have done it as the enemy.

I'm aware that it's been said that Mike tried to claim that he had the auction ticket, although I've never seen any form of quote from him saying this, so, until I do, I can't form a definitive opinion, but you've always said, and I certainly accept, that Mike was a compulsive liar and we shouldn't believe anything he ever said. That's why I found it odd that you said something like "Mike could easily have proved he forged the diary by producing the auction ticket". To say such a thing is to fall for Mike's (apparent) lies. Yes, I know you didn't believe him for one second, but then why frame the question in such a way? I'm suggesting that (if he was the forger) the reality is that he couldn't easily prove that he forged the diary.

Now you've really confused me with your statement that a theory that the diary was written between 1st and 13th April 1992 "contradicts the evidence that it already existed on 9th March." What evidence are you talking about? There isn't any, surely. You can't possibly be saying it existed because the known liar, Mike, said so to Doreen can you? What else is there? Surely, no evidence at all outside of the Barretts who were telling a false story that it was in their possession long before Tony Devereux died in August 1991. So, please, if I've missed some evidence that the diary existed as a physical item on 9th March please do tell me what it is because it must be very important.

I'm not sure what the recent "bumbling" fiasco is that you mention unless it's the fact that some people bizarrely seem to think that the diarist is remotely likely to have used the expression "bumbling buffoon" in 1888 when expressions of this nature not, in fact, used by anyone until the mid-twentieth century. And the word "bumbling" WAS obsolete in the 1880s, other than in regional dialects, Caz, that's a fact recorded by a contemporary dictionary, and the "bumbling" in "bumbling buffoon" has nothing to do with the Dickens character, Mr Bumble. The ambiguous examples of the word "bumbling" provided elsewhere have changed absolutely nothing in circumstances where I had already stated it wasn't literally impossible for someone in 1888 to have written the expression "bumbling buffoon" and I've no idea who you think should be apologising to whom. But that really is a different discussion to the one in this thread, and one which simply avoids the fact that it's "one off instance" in the diary which proves that it wasn't written before 1945 and, thanks to Roger Palmer's amazing detective work, which I trust you're aware of, we can now say with some confidence that it couldn't have been written before 1988

[Herlock Sholmes]

Thanks for the quotes. I haven't had a free moment to return to the other threads yet. I hope to do so eventually.

I've already provided the information I took from the relevant newspaper articles when compiling my timeline. I know of no direct quote from Mike at that time, where he states that he had anyone helping him to forge the diary, and yes, I thought I already pointed out that everyone at the time assumed that he was claiming to be 'the' forger, not just one of them - which would be natural enough if he gave no other impression. I wasn't around at the time, but IIRC Melvin Harris later believed there were four conspirators, so take your pick.

I assume you already knew the answer, so were you asking for yourself, or for someone else?

Any more thoughts on Mike's strange telephone conversation, in Alan Gray's presence, when he told someone the diary was 100% genuine, while saying he couldn't turn round and say Anne forged it, that would take time?

Were they not mutually exclusive propositions, for the caller and Alan Gray to have grappled with? I'm happy for you to seek advice if you need it before responding.

Love,

Caz
X

Thanks my question, Caz. I don't know why you say I already knew the answer though. I certainly wasn't aware of Barrett having claimed to have written the diary by himself but I don't know everything he said in June 1994 and you claimed earlier in this thread that he "went from claiming publicly in the June that he had written the diary by himself, to telling Alan Gray several months later that Anne had assisted him." I think you must now be conceding that this wasn't an accurate statement.

I see you're asking me for my thoughts on "Mike's strange telephone conversation" which suggests you've somehow missed my post #229 in this thread in which I told you that, having listened carefully to the recording, I believe you've imagined Mike saying that "he couldn't turn round and say Anne forged it, that would take time". He doesn't mention Anne at all in that call. Do you have any thoughts on that?

As for him saying the diary is 100% genuine, which I agree he did say, we need to know who he was talking to and what the context was. Without that, it's impossible to know what Mike was doing here. We also have no idea if Gray was even listening to the conversation or if he left the room while it was taking place. The recording is very poor and, to the extent that Gray was eavesdropping the call, it's impossible to know if Mike explained to Gray what the call was about and why he'd said what he had to the person at the other end of phone

[Herlock Sholmes]

Other people's opinions are other people's opinions, Herlock.

Love,

Caz
X

Absolutely, Caz. I was merely attempting to answer your question though: "Who are these people, John, who 'go on' as though the diary [I prefer a small d] were a literary masterpiece?"

I found some others by the way:

Poster "Ron Beckett", 31 August 2008, in thread "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary" at #72: "The Isreali writing specialist thought it was a masterpiece as do other literary people who have knowledge of arsenic and strychnine addiction."

Poster "Iconoclast", a.k.a. Ike, 23 July 2019, in thread "The Diary—Old Hoax or New?" at #21: "For our post-1987 hoaxer, you are looking for a creative genius who was willing to give away his greatest masterpiece..."

Poster "Lombro2", 14 February 2025, in this thread, #39: "We (actually I and no one else) can concoct—I mean construct—a seamless narrative of how Michael Barrett created his masterpiece."

Oh and a poster called "Caz", 19 December 2017 in thread "Acquiring a Victorian Diary" at #225: "It's also the only window Mike knew would have been available to him, in which to obtain a more user friendly book and get his masterpiece penned in time for its debut in London."

And poster "Caz" again, 5 September 2023, in thread "One Incontrovertible, Unequivocal, Undeniable Fact Which Refutes the Diary" at #10061: "Crafty old Palmer. He misses out the bit about Mike taking what's already in the old book he got from Eddie, and copying it into this genuine Victorian diary, to pass off as his own literary masterpiece."

Funny old world, isn't it?

[caz]

This point rang a bell for me Caz as a couple of weeks ago I read Ike’s Society’s Pillar. I took a quick second look and one of the main themes is that the diary is not a "shabby hoax". Here are some of the things I found in that essay:

"the signs of complexity in the Maybrick scrapbook should at least dispel the myth that the document is necessarily a ‘shabby’ hoax" - page 30

The document has "A consistent narrative and psychopathology" - page 31

"As easy as it is to claim that the story which unfolds reflects a ‘shabby’ hoax, the reality is that it actually required a significant amount of attention to detail and research which – collectively – reflect a complex and intimate analysis of the known facts around Maybrick’s life and the crimes he is supposed to have committed as well as of the typical mind functioning at the time of the crimes" - page 31

Cites Professor David Cantor as saying that if not by James Maybrick himself the only other possibility for authorship of the diary was that "it was written by a shy, but emotionally disturbed genius, who combined the novelist’s art with an intelligent understanding of serial killers, the agreed facts of Jack the Ripper and James Maybrick". page 32

"this otherwise genuinely complex document" - page 32

Cites Harrison saying of Dr David Forshaw that "His principle conclusion was encouraging: he said for a forger to have faked this deceptively simple diary he would have needed to master a profound understanding of criminal psychology and the effects of drug addiction" - page 32

"Three eminent researchers in their fields have gone on the record as supporting the notion that the Victorian scrapbook is psychologically deeply complex." - page 33

Cites Canter as saying that the author of the diary was using "a powerful literary device" which would have turned into self-parody if used by "a less skilful author" - page 36

"The letter from Margaret Baillie puts paid to any assumption that the Victorian scrapbook is a slipshod piece of work. It implies that the document is either extremely well-researched or else it is authentic." - page 36

"deep complexity in the scrapbook" - page 39

"if this was the work of a hoaxer, then it is yet another excellent example of the complexity of the research which consistently underpins his work." - page 47

"If it represents the author’s attention to detail in creating a hoax, it is jaw-droppingly precise and would unequivocally prove the inherent complexity of research required to complete this otherwise apparently superficial fraud." - page 48

"It is a particularly masterly touch of the hoaxer that he has James Maybrick quite clearly laying claim to the sobriquet ‘Jack the Ripper’," - page 49

"Given the truly outstanding research conducted by whoever concocted a Jack the Ripper hoax from the life of James Maybrick, his efforts deserve to be fairer witnessed than they have been to date." - page 54

"it is a crime to have written such a hoax (as money ultimately exchanged hands as a consequence), but it is a far greater crime that the brilliance, the complexity, the audaciousness, and the good fortune of the hoax has not yet been fully appreciated" - page 55

"the reference to ‘society’s pillar’ provides a rather neat play on the final syllable of his name - ‘brick’ – a literary device which the James Maybrick (as portrayed in the Victorian scrapbook) frequently delights in." - page 63

"when the moment requires literary expansion, we get it". - page 108

When viewed as a whole, we are being told by Ike in his essay that, if the diary is a forgery, it is extremely well-researched, if not outstandingly researched, inherently and deeply complex, brilliant, masterly, audacious, with a consistent narrative and psychopathy, written by someone with a profound understanding of criminal psychology and the effects of drug addiction, an intelligent understanding of serial killers, a jaw-droppingly precise attention to detail and an ability to use literary devices and literary expansion. It seems to me that a fair summary of all that would be that Ike is saying that if the diary isn't genuine, it's a literary masterpiece. Perhaps that's the type of thing John was thinking of?

Other people's opinions are other people's opinions, Herlock.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz,

I already posted two examples from the recordings of 4th and 5th November 1994 when discussing the tapes with Ike back in February.

See my #471 and #474 of the thread "Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?" (and also Roger's #470)

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/maybrick-james/845634-the-diary-%E2%80%94-old-hoax-or-new-or-not-a-hoax-at-all-%E2%80%8B/page32#post847587

By way of reminder, using the recording dates from 1994 given on Casebook, these were:

Gray: Whose handwriting is it? Barrett: Anne's. (4th November)

Gray then asks him "How did she do the handwriting?" to which Barrett replies: "Easy. She just wrote very slow on some occasions". (4th November)

"My wife, Anne, wrote the Jack the Ripper diary, the actual manuscript". (5th November)

If you want more examples:

“Anne Barrett wrote the diary, that’s the whole point”. (5th November)

“Anne wrote it”. (6th November)

"Anne wrote the diary". (6th November)

“Anne actually wrote the manuscript”. (8th November)

“Anne wrote the f*cking diary, the manuscript”. (8th November)

If you want to know how Gray responded I suggest you listen to the recordings yourself. I don't have a note of this, but I don't recall him saying anything of the sort you've suggested.

Now that I've answered your questions Caz could you answer the one that I’ve previously asked please:

"Can you provide a quote from June 1994 in which he said he wrote the diary, including the manuscript, on his own?...are you quite sure he ever said that he did it all by himself? Or was that something everyone assumed him to be saying because he didn't mention anyone else?"

Thanks for the quotes. I haven't had a free moment to return to the other threads yet. I hope to do so eventually.

I've already provided the information I took from the relevant newspaper articles when compiling my timeline. I know of no direct quote from Mike at that time, where he states that he had anyone helping him to forge the diary, and yes, I thought I already pointed out that everyone at the time assumed that he was claiming to be 'the' forger, not just one of them - which would be natural enough if he gave no other impression. I wasn't around at the time, but IIRC Melvin Harris later believed there were four conspirators, so take your pick.

I assume you already knew the answer, so were you asking for yourself, or for someone else?

Any more thoughts on Mike's strange telephone conversation, in Alan Gray's presence, when he told someone the diary was 100% genuine, while saying he couldn't turn round and say Anne forged it, that would take time?

Were they not mutually exclusive propositions, for the caller and Alan Gray to have grappled with? I'm happy for you to seek advice if you need it before responding.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Who are these people, John, who 'go on' as though the diary [I prefer a small d] were a literary masterpiece?

Mike Barrett seemed to think it was, but I don't know of anyone else offhand. It was presumably intended to read like the private ravings of an arsenic eating tradesman, whose poetry and prose were of little merit; not the sort of thing that Dickens would have been proud of.

But may I warmly congratulate you for observing that it is written in rather a simplistic style - yes I agree - and that this 'might suggest' that the Barretts were responsible. I consider this a giant leap in the right direction on your part. It can't reasonably be put any more strongly than that, when none of us actually knew these people, as a couple or as individuals, back in the early 1990s when the story began. Not one person has come forward in all that time to say that they knew or associated with the Barretts during that period and were persuaded by Mike's later forgery claims.

Love,

Caz
X

This point rang a bell for me Caz as a couple of weeks ago I read Ike’s Society’s Pillar. I took a quick second look and one of the main themes is that the diary is not a "shabby hoax". Here are some of the things I found in that essay:

"the signs of complexity in the Maybrick scrapbook should at least dispel the myth that the document is necessarily a ‘shabby’ hoax" - page 30

The document has "A consistent narrative and psychopathology" - page 31

"As easy as it is to claim that the story which unfolds reflects a ‘shabby’ hoax, the reality is that it actually required a significant amount of attention to detail and research which – collectively – reflect a complex and intimate analysis of the known facts around Maybrick’s life and the crimes he is supposed to have committed as well as of the typical mind functioning at the time of the crimes" - page 31

Cites Professor David Cantor as saying that if not by James Maybrick himself the only other possibility for authorship of the diary was that "it was written by a shy, but emotionally disturbed genius, who combined the novelist’s art with an intelligent understanding of serial killers, the agreed facts of Jack the Ripper and James Maybrick". page 32

"this otherwise genuinely complex document" - page 32

Cites Harrison saying of Dr David Forshaw that "His principle conclusion was encouraging: he said for a forger to have faked this deceptively simple diary he would have needed to master a profound understanding of criminal psychology and the effects of drug addiction" - page 32

"Three eminent researchers in their fields have gone on the record as supporting the notion that the Victorian scrapbook is psychologically deeply complex." - page 33

Cites Canter as saying that the author of the diary was using "a powerful literary device" which would have turned into self-parody if used by "a less skilful author" - page 36

"The letter from Margaret Baillie puts paid to any assumption that the Victorian scrapbook is a slipshod piece of work. It implies that the document is either extremely well-researched or else it is authentic." - page 36

"deep complexity in the scrapbook" - page 39

"if this was the work of a hoaxer, then it is yet another excellent example of the complexity of the research which consistently underpins his work." - page 47

"If it represents the author’s attention to detail in creating a hoax, it is jaw-droppingly precise and would unequivocally prove the inherent complexity of research required to complete this otherwise apparently superficial fraud." - page 48

"It is a particularly masterly touch of the hoaxer that he has James Maybrick quite clearly laying claim to the sobriquet ‘Jack the Ripper’," - page 49

"Given the truly outstanding research conducted by whoever concocted a Jack the Ripper hoax from the life of James Maybrick, his efforts deserve to be fairer witnessed than they have been to date." - page 54

"it is a crime to have written such a hoax (as money ultimately exchanged hands as a consequence), but it is a far greater crime that the brilliance, the complexity, the audaciousness, and the good fortune of the hoax has not yet been fully appreciated" - page 55

"the reference to ‘society’s pillar’ provides a rather neat play on the final syllable of his name - ‘brick’ – a literary device which the James Maybrick (as portrayed in the Victorian scrapbook) frequently delights in." - page 63

"when the moment requires literary expansion, we get it". - page 108

When viewed as a whole, we are being told by Ike in his essay that, if the diary is a forgery, it is extremely well-researched, if not outstandingly researched, inherently and deeply complex, brilliant, masterly, audacious, with a consistent narrative and psychopathy, written by someone with a profound understanding of criminal psychology and the effects of drug addiction, an intelligent understanding of serial killers, a jaw-droppingly precise attention to detail and an ability to use literary devices and literary expansion. It seems to me that a fair summary of all that would be that Ike is saying that if the diary isn't genuine, it's a literary masterpiece. Perhaps that's the type of thing John was thinking of?

[caz]

But, Caz, surely you're making a positive claim that the Barretts didn't write the diary. In which case, the onus is on you to substantiate that claim.

I don't believe the Barretts wrote the diary, but I can't prove a negative. All I can do is to consider the evidence for accusing the Barretts and, because I find it totally unconvincing, I am not going to believe they did it. The onus is on the accuser to demonstrate, with hard evidence, when and how Mike obtained the scrapbook if he did so in order to create the diary, and nobody has come close to doing that.

If you were willing to concede that they might have done it but that you personally don't think they did, and that in your view the arguments are strongly against it, that would be fine. It's the fact that you deny the very validity of the suggestion that the Barretts could have forged it, without explaining why such a suggestion is invalid, which is the problem here.

A problem for you, maybe, but I'm happy to remain sceptical while waiting for the evidence of a hoax conspiracy. I'm not trying to convince you that I'm right to be sceptical - I don't have completely unrealistic expectations.

And just to correct you, if I may. I did not say that it is likely that no evidence existed in 1995 that Mike forged the diary. I said that it's likely that no physical evidence of the forgery existed, as, if the Barretts were the forgers, it had probably all been destroyed. That's very different from saying there was no evidence at all that they wrote it.

Yes, if the Barretts forged the diary, the sensible thing to do would have been to destroy - or at least try to destroy - anything and everything that could have proved it, but Mike tried to claim he did have such evidence, without ever substantiating that claim. The onus was on him to do so, if he wanted people to believe him.

But I don't have to prove that the Barretts forged the diary because I'm not saying they did. I'm saying that I can't see how we can rule out the possibility that they did. I just can't see why they couldn't have done it. You seem to have given it your best shot but the position remains that they are obvious candidates for having forged a diary that was obviously created after 1945 and probably after 1972 and which is not known to have been owned or seen by anyone before

We see the position differently. I don't care if the diary was written on 8th March 1992, although I would find that highly unlikely, but the only theory involving the Barretts in its creation dictates that it had to be handwritten between 1st and 13th April 1992, which contradicts the evidence that it already existed on 9th March. I have seen no evidence that the scrapbook was ever in an auction sale, before or after that date.

For me, seeing is believing. After the recent 'bumbling' fiasco, I realised that some people will resist believing it even when they see it, in this case the fact that the word was known, used and understood in Maybrick's Liverpool in the 1880s. I had the piss ripped out of me when I first dared to suggest that the diary author - regardless of when it was written or by whom - might have been using the Dickens character, Mr Bumble, for inspiration. But nobody had the balls or the decency to acknowledge that the word was not after all 'obsolete' or incongruous, or worse, and that the examples posted by Gary Barnett made all their own objections 'obsolete' for all time. Not a word of apology, just forget about that and move on to more fertile ground.

At least Druitt would have known what was "not cricket".

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Going back to this one, Herlock, before I catch up with the latest posts, could you just clarify what you meant, when you claimed that 'on multiple occasions after June 1994, from what I heard on the tapes, Mike would say "I wrote the diary" but at the same time he would say that he didn't write the manuscript, Anne did'?

Have you been able to date any of these 'multiple occasions' where you were able to hear Mike specifically telling Alan Gray that Anne wrote "the manuscript"?

If, as you later admitted, you didn't actually listen to any of the tapes dating back to before November 1994, how many occasions would 'multiple' be, and were they all before 5th January 1995, when Mike was meant to have got all his forgery ducks in a row concerning who did what, when and how?

Any clarification you can give would be helpful, particularly regarding where you heard Mike claiming, on multiple occasions, that Anne wrote the manuscript. It would be equally helpful to know how Alan Gray responded on each of these occasions - if only for the laugh. Did he eventually say: "Yes, Mike, you've told me the same thing on multiple occasions. Change the record - er, wait, no - I don't mean that literally!"

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

I already posted two examples from the recordings of 4th and 5th November 1994 when discussing the tapes with Ike back in February.

See my #471 and #474 of the thread "Old Hoax or New or Not a Hoax at All?" (and also Roger's #470)

https://forum.casebook.org/forum/ripper-discussions/suspects/maybrick-james/845634-the-diary-%E2%80%94-old-hoax-or-new-or-not-a-hoax-at-all-%E2%80%8B/page32#post847587

By way of reminder, using the recording dates from 1994 given on Casebook, these were:

Gray: Whose handwriting is it? Barrett: Anne's. (4th November)

Gray then asks him "How did she do the handwriting?" to which Barrett replies: "Easy. She just wrote very slow on some occasions". (4th November)

"My wife, Anne, wrote the Jack the Ripper diary, the actual manuscript". (5th November)

If you want more examples:

“Anne Barrett wrote the diary, that’s the whole point”. (5th November)

“Anne wrote it”. (6th November)

"Anne wrote the diary". (6th November)

“Anne actually wrote the manuscript”. (8th November)

“Anne wrote the f*cking diary, the manuscript”. (8th November)

If you want to know how Gray responded I suggest you listen to the recordings yourself. I don't have a note of this, but I don't recall him saying anything of the sort you've suggested.

Now that I've answered your questions Caz could you answer the one that I’ve previously asked please:

"Can you provide a quote from June 1994 in which he said he wrote the diary, including the manuscript, on his own?...are you quite sure he ever said that he did it all by himself? Or was that something everyone assumed him to be saying because he didn't mention anyone else?"

[caz]

Hi Caz

I would suggest that the way the Diary is written it's rather simplicstic might suggest that the Barretts wrote the diary. Some go on as though the Diary is a literary masterpiece. It really isn't.

Cheers John

Who are these people, John, who 'go on' as though the diary [I prefer a small d] were a literary masterpiece?

Mike Barrett seemed to think it was, but I don't know of anyone else offhand. It was presumably intended to read like the private ravings of an arsenic eating tradesman, whose poetry and prose were of little merit; not the sort of thing that Dickens would have been proud of.

But may I warmly congratulate you for observing that it is written in rather a simplistic style - yes I agree - and that this 'might suggest' that the Barretts were responsible. I consider this a giant leap in the right direction on your part. It can't reasonably be put any more strongly than that, when none of us actually knew these people, as a couple or as individuals, back in the early 1990s when the story began. Not one person has come forward in all that time to say that they knew or associated with the Barretts during that period and were persuaded by Mike's later forgery claims.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Are you sure it's accurate to say that Mike "went from claiming publicly in the June that he had written the diary by himself, to telling Alan Gray several months later that Anne had assisted him." Can you provide a quote from June 1994 in which he said he wrote the diary, including the manuscript, on his own? The reason I ask is that on multiple occasions after June 1994, from what I heard on the tapes, Mike would say "I wrote the diary" but at the same time he would say that he didn't write the manuscript, Anne did. So are you quite sure he ever said that he did it all by himself? Or was that something everyone assumed him to be saying because he didn't mention anyone else?

Going back to this one, Herlock, before I catch up with the latest posts, could you just clarify what you meant, when you claimed that 'on multiple occasions after June 1994, from what I heard on the tapes, Mike would say "I wrote the diary" but at the same time he would say that he didn't write the manuscript, Anne did'?

Have you been able to date any of these 'multiple occasions' where you were able to hear Mike specifically telling Alan Gray that Anne wrote "the manuscript"?

If, as you later admitted, you didn't actually listen to any of the tapes dating back to before November 1994, how many occasions would 'multiple' be, and were they all before 5th January 1995, when Mike was meant to have got all his forgery ducks in a row concerning who did what, when and how?

Any clarification you can give would be helpful, particularly regarding where you heard Mike claiming, on multiple occasions, that Anne wrote the manuscript. It would be equally helpful to know how Alan Gray responded on each of these occasions - if only for the laugh. Did he eventually say: "Yes, Mike, you've told me the same thing on multiple occasions. Change the record - er, wait, no - I don't mean that literally!"

Love,

Caz
X

[John Wheat]

True enough, John.

But I don't have to prove it was. That would take something completely new - and Herlock for one appears to have conceded the likelihood that no evidence existed for it when Mike was making his forgery claims thirty years ago, so I don't suppose any will suddenly materialise in 2025.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz

I would suggest that the way the Diary is written it's rather simplicstic might suggest that the Barretts wrote the diary. Some go on as though the Diary is a literary masterpiece. It really isn't.

Cheers John

[Herlock Sholmes]

True enough, John.

But I don't have to prove it was. That would take something completely new - and Herlock for one appears to have conceded the likelihood that no evidence existed for it when Mike was making his forgery claims thirty years ago, so I don't suppose any will suddenly materialise in 2025.

Love,

Caz
X

But, Caz, surely you're making a positive claim that the Barretts didn't write the diary. In which case, the onus is on you to substantiate that claim.

If you were willing to concede that they might have done it but that you personally don't think they did, and that in your view the arguments are strongly against it, that would be fine. It's the fact that you deny the very validity of the suggestion that the Barretts could have forged it, without explaining why such a suggestion is invalid, which is the problem here.

And just to correct you, if I may. I did not say that it is likely that no evidence existed in 1995 that Mike forged the diary. I said that it's likely that no physical evidence of the forgery existed, as, if the Barretts were the forgers, it had probably all been destroyed. That's very different from saying there was no evidence at all that they wrote it.

But I don't have to prove that the Barretts forged the diary because I'm not saying they did. I'm saying that I can't see how we can rule out the possibility that they did. I just can't see why they couldn't have done it. You seem to have given it your best shot but the position remains that they are obvious candidates for having forged a diary that was obviously created after 1945 and probably after 1972 and which is not known to have been owned or seen by anyone before

[Herlock Sholmes]

The Liverpool Daily Post first reported the story on 25th June 1994. In a signed statement to the newspaper, Mike claimed that he had compiled the diary material himself. The report quoted Mike saying he had forged the diary because he could not pay the mortgage, and thought he would write the biggest story in history because writing was the only thing he was good at, apart from being a scrap metal merchant. But he was unable to explain how he did it or answer basic questions.

On 27th June, again in the Liverpool Daily Post, Harold Brough wrote more about Mike's claims to be the greatest forger in history, having worked on the diary for five years. The previous night Mike had said his doctor had given him only days to live and that Tony Devereux had nothing to do with the diary. Mike also told of his visits to auctioneers, Outhwaite and Litherland and a shop at Bluecoat Chambers, to buy the photo album and ink respectively. He said he had ripped out the used pages in the album and typed the diary on a word processor at his Liverpool home.

I'm sure if you asked nicely, RJ Palmer would be able to post the actual articles, to see if I'm concealing anything that would suggest Mike was involving anyone else at that stage. Claiming to have been the forger would imply that it was all his own handiwork, and that's what everyone at the time assumed he was trying to claim. I am not aware that he took any steps to correct that impression using the same medium, although he admitted in the January 1995 affidavit that his handwriting was too distinctive, but by then he was involving Tony Devereux in his funny little forgery conspiracy.



The tape is available here if you really wanted to listen to Mike's actual words to check that I didn't imagine anything. I too don't understand why Mike thought he couldn't turn round and say Anne forged it - if that was the truth - in the same breath as saying it was 100% genuine [!!], which must have made about as much sense to Alan Gray, or to whoever was at the other end of the phone, as it makes to us today.



I'm not sure what you mean by this. We were discussing when Mike first told Gray that Anne had forged the diary, and you had previously said there were two occasions before the January 1995 affidavit when he did so, one of which was in October 1994, which is what I was querying. But now you say you haven't listened to any of the tapes from before November, so what - or who - was your source for the October revelation? I can only find one instance on record from before the affidavit where Mike claimed Anne wrote 'the actual manuscript'. This was on 5th November 1994. He also claimed on that occasion that he had 'stated this for some considerable time', so anything you have that could substantiate this would help. It's very similar to what he stated in his affidavit about having tried to expose the diary as a fraud since late 1993.



It was Mike who was trying to use the affidavit to blackmail Anne into contacting him, and it didn't work. Right there is the evidence that she wasn't affected by the claims Mike had made about her in that document. You said previously that Mike couldn't have proved anything if no evidence existed in June 1994 when he went to the papers. Have you ever even considered that Anne 'knew it was rubbish' because no evidence existed? There has never been any evidence that she held the pen, and no evidence that she had anything to fear from the diary handwriting possibly being identified in the future, so yes, I think she did regard Mike's efforts to blackmail her with the affidavit as pathetic and more of 'a silly annoyance' than a serious threat to go public with his accusations, which he didn't do. He couldn't 'expose' her as a forger if he couldn't prove it, and without proof there could have been libel implications for anyone running the story with nothing but the word of a drunkard who had lost his family and was so obviously out for revenge. I suspect this might be why Mike said to someone back in August 1994 that he couldn't just turn round and say Anne forged it, but it would take time. He knew he couldn't go back to Harold Brough with a new and improved version of the story, so he had to come up with a different plan of action.



You might find it 'consistent' in isolation, and I can't read Anne's mind, but speaking as a woman who left two husbands because of their controlling or abusive behaviour, I know I would consider it an attack on me personally if one of them had come out with a story like that in the months after I had left the marital home. By definition it would have implied that I was married to a forger, and had stayed with him throughout the process, until after his forgery was published and the book became a bestseller. There is no way anyone would believe I had no idea what was going on all that time, if the man I was living with had supposedly worked on it for five years. I've been called many things, but 'a mental vegetable' is not one of them as far as I know, and I doubt even RJ Palmer would think it of Anne.

On 27th June 1994 Anne asked her solicitor to start divorce proceedings. She recalled Mike's family being "very distressed" by the newspaper articles and young Caroline being in "a terrible state". Mike wasn't attacking them personally, but it didn't stop them taking it personally, to see his name splashed across the papers, as a self-confessed fraudster. Anne was the worst affected, for obvious reasons. She also said her father, Billy, was so furious that he advised her to start divorce proceedings immediately.

Billy apparently wasn't bothered that Mike could turn round at any time and reveal that he had paid for the scrapbook. That would also take time - Mike waited until his father-in-law was dead. Perhaps Caroline was only in a terrible state in the June because she remembered her Mum letting her watch while she was busy forging the diary to her Dad's dictation. Have you ever wondered what the Barretts must have been thinking, when they left their daughter alone with Feldman in early 1993, if you believe Mike was telling the truth in his affidavit, that she was a witness to the forgery being created?

Love,

Caz
X

So the answer to my question, based on the information you've provided, is that Mike did notsay in June 1994 that he wrote the diary, including the manuscript, on his own. Why not just say that Caz?

Hence he can't be said to have changed his story, only augmented it.

I thought you confirmed in #208 that Mike told Alan Gray in "late October 1994" that Anne wrote the manuscript. Have I got that wrong? If so, what did you mean by saying "Then I have nothing until late October 1994"? And what's the purpose of reminding me that I haven't listened to any of the tapes before November 1994? You've listened to them all, right? Does Mike say on one of the tapes from October 1994 that Anne wrote the manuscript or not? If not, why even mention the fact that I haven't listed to the tapes? If he does, why are you giving the impression that he doesn't? Never mind the exact words, "the actual manuscript", did he make clear to Gray in October 1994 that Anne wrote the manuscript? I need to check if you are asking me questions in good faith.

Your question, "Have you ever even considered that Anne 'knew it was rubbish' because no evidence existed?" strikes me as bizarre. If she wasn't involved in the forgery, she would have known by virtue of that fact alone that the affidavit was rubbish. It wouldn't have had anything to do with the lack of evidence.

As the conversation on 31st August seems to be important to you, I've had a listen to the recording myself. The result of the exercise is that I don't believe your summary of it is correct or anything near to being correct. Let's remind ourselves how you summarised it:

"on 16th August, while in Alan Gray's company, Mike's phone rings and he tells the person on the other end that the diary is genuine and the British Museum also passed it as genuinely Victorian. He says he'll have a word with his solicitors because he can't turn round and say Anne forged it - that takes time, it won't happen overnight, but that diary is one hundred percent genuine. "

Here's my very best transcription of what Mike can be heard saying:

“Hello….super….100% genuine…misquotes….the Sunday Times, the Sunday Times just, shall we say, attacked me…yeah, yeah…they attacked me for want of a better word…yeah, yeah… several… I’ve got to get permission as well before I can ….getting a Victorian…I’ll send it up to me solicitors… I’ll send it to me solicitors.…I can’t turn round and say yes [I have]…if you understand what I mean, you know....that’s slowly but surely, you know, and that takes time as you can well imagine, these things don’t happen overnight….but that diary is 100% genuine…so… I hope you understand…sensible….the diary….none whatsoever…it’s entirely up to you…as I say it’s 100% genuine….I mean, all they have to do is read the book themselves…100% genuine…there’s no problem.....absolutely incredible…put it that way...just the way they reacted…totally ridiculous....publishers…got nervous…ridiculous...when the paperback comes out surely….no….anyway can we talk about it tomorrow because it’s too long and complicated a story.…Yeah, it’s number 12, 12 Goldie Street, Anfield, Liverpool, L4….okay then…thank you, bye, bye.”

It's not a good quality recording but I'm confident that he never once mentions Anne during the call. It seems to me that you've imagined it. I also don't hear him mentioning the British Museum. But please feel free to provide an alternative transcript if you think your hearing is better than mine.

For the moment though, we can, I think, safely ignore your speculations as to why Mike said what you think he did in August 1994 about slowly revealing that Anne wrote the diary.

Your attempts to conjure up an explanation for Anne viewing Mike's confession, in which he didn't once mention her name, as an attack on her are wholly unconvincing in my view. I don't believe you would have regarded it as an attack on yourself either. if you were in her shoes. But it doesn't much matter. The point is that her behaviour is obviously consistent with her having helped her husband forge the diary.

The question you asked me about the Barretts leaving their daughter alone with Feldman in early 1993 applies equally to you as to me. Why weren't they worried Caroline was going to blurt out that daddy bought the diary home in the spring of last year? How could they be sure that Caroline was going to say that her daddy got the diary off Tony and that he pestered Tony with questions, even though, according to you, the diary didn't emerge until long after Tony's death? Perhaps the Barretts were supremely confident their daughter would stick to the pre-arranged story, as she appears to have done.

[caz]

To be fair though there's nothing new being brought forward by those who believe the Diary wasn't written by the Barretts.

True enough, John.

But I don't have to prove it was. That would take something completely new - and Herlock for one appears to have conceded the likelihood that no evidence existed for it when Mike was making his forgery claims thirty years ago, so I don't suppose any will suddenly materialise in 2025.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Sorry Caz, this question doesn't make any sense to me:

"If Mike didn't mention that anyone else was involved, when he made his original claim to have written the diary, how does that become evidence that others were involved, but for some reason he chose not to say so?"

Where did I say anything of the sort that causes you to ask me that?

All I did was ask you for a quote from June 1994 where Mike said he wrote the diary, including the manuscript, on his own. Can I take it from your failure to provide such a quote that he never said this?

The Liverpool Daily Post first reported the story on 25th June 1994. In a signed statement to the newspaper, Mike claimed that he had compiled the diary material himself. The report quoted Mike saying he had forged the diary because he could not pay the mortgage, and thought he would write the biggest story in history because writing was the only thing he was good at, apart from being a scrap metal merchant. But he was unable to explain how he did it or answer basic questions.

On 27th June, again in the Liverpool Daily Post, Harold Brough wrote more about Mike's claims to be the greatest forger in history, having worked on the diary for five years. The previous night Mike had said his doctor had given him only days to live and that Tony Devereux had nothing to do with the diary. Mike also told of his visits to auctioneers, Outhwaite and Litherland and a shop at Bluecoat Chambers, to buy the photo album and ink respectively. He said he had ripped out the used pages in the album and typed the diary on a word processor at his Liverpool home.

I'm sure if you asked nicely, RJ Palmer would be able to post the actual articles, to see if I'm concealing anything that would suggest Mike was involving anyone else at that stage. Claiming to have been the forger would imply that it was all his own handiwork, and that's what everyone at the time assumed he was trying to claim. I am not aware that he took any steps to correct that impression using the same medium, although he admitted in the January 1995 affidavit that his handwriting was too distinctive, but by then he was involving Tony Devereux in his funny little forgery conspiracy.

Instead, you've moved to a different subject about something Mike said on a tape in August 1994. From what you say, and this isn't a tape I've listened to, it sounds like Mike was promoting Shirley's paperback in the hope of making money from it. I'm afraid I don't understand what "he can't turn round and say Anne forged it - that takes time" could have meant. It's kind of ambiguous. It's a shame you've written that in the third person instead of reproducing what Mike said in his actual words. But I suspect we'll need to know what the other person on the phone was saying to him before we can work it out.

The tape is available here if you really wanted to listen to Mike's actual words to check that I didn't imagine anything. I too don't understand why Mike thought he couldn't turn round and say Anne forged it - if that was the truth - in the same breath as saying it was 100% genuine [!!], which must have made about as much sense to Alan Gray, or to whoever was at the other end of the phone, as it makes to us today.

I don't know the first time Mike told Gray on tape that he'd forged the diary because I've only listened to four of them from November 1994 but if it was October then great. Was Mike asked by Gray who forged the diary any earlier than this? If not, it probably explains why Mike said it at that time.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. We were discussing when Mike first told Gray that Anne had forged the diary, and you had previously said there were two occasions before the January 1995 affidavit when he did so, one of which was in October 1994, which is what I was querying. But now you say you haven't listened to any of the tapes from before November, so what - or who - was your source for the October revelation? I can only find one instance on record from before the affidavit where Mike claimed Anne wrote 'the actual manuscript'. This was on 5th November 1994. He also claimed on that occasion that he had 'stated this for some considerable time', so anything you have that could substantiate this would help. It's very similar to what he stated in his affidavit about having tried to expose the diary as a fraud since late 1993.

When you say "The evidence shows that Anne wasn't affected by Mike's claim that her handwriting was in the diary" what evidence are you talking about which shows that Anne wasn't affected by it? When you say "She knew it was rubbish" how are you possibly able to say this? Or is this something you are saying on the basis she wasn't one of the forgers? It may be that "Nobody would like to be publicly accused of forgery by their estranged partner, true or false" but, as I have been saying, it strikes me as odd to regard the threat of such an accusation as blackmail as opposed to a silly annoyance.

It was Mike who was trying to use the affidavit to blackmail Anne into contacting him, and it didn't work. Right there is the evidence that she wasn't affected by the claims Mike had made about her in that document. You said previously that Mike couldn't have proved anything if no evidence existed in June 1994 when he went to the papers. Have you ever even considered that Anne 'knew it was rubbish' because no evidence existed? There has never been any evidence that she held the pen, and no evidence that she had anything to fear from the diary handwriting possibly being identified in the future, so yes, I think she did regard Mike's efforts to blackmail her with the affidavit as pathetic and more of 'a silly annoyance' than a serious threat to go public with his accusations, which he didn't do. He couldn't 'expose' her as a forger if he couldn't prove it, and without proof there could have been libel implications for anyone running the story with nothing but the word of a drunkard who had lost his family and was so obviously out for revenge. I suspect this might be why Mike said to someone back in August 1994 that he couldn't just turn round and say Anne forged it, but it would take time. He knew he couldn't go back to Harold Brough with a new and improved version of the story, so he had to come up with a different plan of action.

Thank you for conceding that you can't explain Anne's reaction in June 1994. It's not just that she didn't take it well but she regarded it as an attack on her personally, even though she wasn't mentioned. That's the strange bit. But I would suggest that it's consistent with her being one of the forgers.

You might find it 'consistent' in isolation, and I can't read Anne's mind, but speaking as a woman who left two husbands because of their controlling or abusive behaviour, I know I would consider it an attack on me personally if one of them had come out with a story like that in the months after I had left the marital home. By definition it would have implied that I was married to a forger, and had stayed with him throughout the process, until after his forgery was published and the book became a bestseller. There is no way anyone would believe I had no idea what was going on all that time, if the man I was living with had supposedly worked on it for five years. I've been called many things, but 'a mental vegetable' is not one of them as far as I know, and I doubt even RJ Palmer would think it of Anne.

On 27th June 1994 Anne asked her solicitor to start divorce proceedings. She recalled Mike's family being "very distressed" by the newspaper articles and young Caroline being in "a terrible state". Mike wasn't attacking them personally, but it didn't stop them taking it personally, to see his name splashed across the papers, as a self-confessed fraudster. Anne was the worst affected, for obvious reasons. She also said her father, Billy, was so furious that he advised her to start divorce proceedings immediately.

Billy apparently wasn't bothered that Mike could turn round at any time and reveal that he had paid for the scrapbook. That would also take time - Mike waited until his father-in-law was dead. Perhaps Caroline was only in a terrible state in the June because she remembered her Mum letting her watch while she was busy forging the diary to her Dad's dictation. Have you ever wondered what the Barretts must have been thinking, when they left their daughter alone with Feldman in early 1993, if you believe Mike was telling the truth in his affidavit, that she was a witness to the forgery being created?

Love,

Caz
X