The Maybrick Thread (For All Things Maybrick)

[rjpalmer]

Hi Ike,

If you truly believe that you, Caroline, Keith, Jay, and James are the only ones seeking the truth, and that Orsam, Palmer, Banks, etc. are dissemblers and agents of chaos, then yes, I would agree you are wasting your time and you'd be better off forming a private email group far away from the white noise of our questions and commentary.

Best of luck to you.

Cheers.

[Iconoclast]

I guess that's what happens when you make a ridiculous argument like "Mike Barrett was never a journalist" or didn't think of himself as one.

Mike Barrett freely admitted that he submitted pieces to magazines, encouraged to do so by writing circles he had signed up to. If you want to call that professional journalism, career journalism, or just plain journalism, that's your call. It is clear that it is necessarily so in your mind in order to provide a balwark to support your key argument - that his sleepless terrors and worst fears were all coalescing in the form of Nick Warren making the same exaggerated claim that you are making in July 1994 thereby making it imperative that Mike got in there first, which basically means he simply brought forward the inevitable by a month (in your world) and denying himself any possibility of a reprieve by speaking out. I've ordered the July 9, 1994 Ripperana to see exactly what was said (which I assume Warren must have told him was coming), but it must have sent the horrors of hell down Mike's spine daily: "Oh God, they've found out that I submitted some very average interviews to some very average gossip rags some many years ago as part of a writing course I'd paid for so it's absolutely game up on my extraordinary shift to world's greatest forger and I may as well confess all now".

Of course he was between 1986 and 1988.

I don't believe Mike Barrett was ever a professional journalist. We differ.

Yet he deliberately kept this fact secret from his literary agent, of all people, and his supposed co-author, for a long period between April 1992 and June 1994, at which time he knew his secret was about to be publicly exposed by Ripperana.

As I say, the horrors of hell must have plagued him, eh? But, dear readers, please note how it was done deliberately apparently. It's important that it's done with intent to deceive because that smacks of a hoaxer. Anything less would not create the straw man Herlock wants you to throw stones at. And where is the evidence that Mike deliberately kept this earth-shattering secret secret? Well, Herlock says so. So it must be so, I guess.

You can stick your head in the sand as much as you want and live in total denial but these are the facts.

It's not a fact that Mike Barrett was a professional journalist, career journalist, or just plain journalist during those two years. He was a guy who placed around 20 articles in very accessible rags (it's not quite The Times we're talking here) for around £120 a pop (according to him). Nope, it's not a fact. It's simply your opinion which you need to spin as fact in order to pursue a specific agenda which is a very large castle built on sand.

And it's not a fact that he deliberately kept this fact secret from his literary agent, of all people, and his supposed co-author. I once scored a lovely headed goal from a corner playing for the Edinburgh University MBA team in 1988. It was a peach of a connection and I'm very proud of it. Now, I'm aware that I've never shared this fact with anyone here on Casebook before. Does that make it a secret which I deliberately withheld from my dear readers?

Where is your evidence that Mike Barrett deliberately set out to deceive Doreen Montgomery and Shirley Harrison? Clearly, just not mentioning it is not grounds for concluding there was a secret being deliberately withheld. If you answer, I think it is reasonable of me to ask you to avoid statements such as "It's obvious" or "What evidence do you have that he wasn't" - you know, the usual canards of those who have bought the Barrett-as-master-hoaxer story hook, line, and sinker.

[Iconoclast]

Hi Ike,

If you truly believe that you, Caroline, Keith, Jay, and James are the only ones seeking the truth, and that Orsam, Palmer, Banks, etc. are dissemblers and agents of chaos, then yes, I would agree you are wasting your time and you'd be better off forming a private email group far away from the white noise of our questions and commentary.

Best of luck to you.

Cheers.

But how will I protect my dear and very innocent readers from being contaminated by your clique's obfuscating and desperately implausible arguments?

Someone has to stand up to you all as you mix and mash your references to build a castle on sand - some hopelessly weak semblance of a provenance from bits here and bits there, plucking information like plooks out of cardigans and then attempting to knit them all together into a supposedly cogent whole.

The thing that I enjoy the most about this whole sorry escapade you and your ilk partake in is the confidence I derive from everything Mike Barrett ever did that tells me how banal your tired end-product always looks. I mean, I even love the fact that he was a professional journalist, forging a brilliant career as Scoop Barrett, investigating where no-one dared or could be arsed to. He was clearly crap at it otherwise he would not have been in the financial difficulties you need to identify a motive and therefore he would never have tried his hand at a ten-stretch by hoaxing a confession from one of the least-likely candidates of all time and yet he did and produced a document which thirty-plus years later cannot be unequivocally discounted as a hoax despite how patently incompetent he was at writing for a living or even just writing full stop. What sort of genius was he that he could turn such mediocrity to such genius over one wet weekend in Liverpool in the early 1990s?

[Herlock Sholmes]

Mike Barrett freely admitted that he submitted pieces to magazines, encouraged to do so by writing circles he had signed up to. If you want to call that professional journalism, career journalism, or just plain journalism, that's your call. It is clear that it is necessarily so in your mind in order to provide a balwark to support your key argument - that his sleepless terrors and worst fears were all coalescing in the form of Nick Warren making the same exaggerated claim that you are making in July 1994 thereby making it imperative that Mike got in there first, which basically means he simply brought forward the inevitable by a month (in your world) and denying himself any possibility of a reprieve by speaking out. I've ordered the July 9, 1994 Ripperana to see exactly what was said (which I assume Warren must have told him was coming), but it must have sent the horrors of hell down Mike's spine daily: "Oh God, they've found out that I submitted some very average interviews to some very average gossip rags some many years ago as part of a writing course I'd paid for so it's absolutely game up on my extraordinary shift to world's greatest forger and I may as well confess all now".



I don't believe Mike Barrett was ever a professional journalist. We differ.



As I say, the horrors of hell must have plagued him, eh? But, dear readers, please note how it was done deliberately apparently. It's important that it's done with intent to deceive because that smacks of a hoaxer. Anything less would not create the straw man Herlock wants you to throw stones at. And where is the evidence that Mike deliberately kept this earth-shattering secret secret? Well, Herlock says so. So it must be so, I guess.



It's not a fact that Mike Barrett was a professional journalist, career journalist, or just plain journalist during those two years. He was a guy who placed around 20 articles in very accessible rags (it's not quite The Times we're talking here) for around £120 a pop (according to him). Nope, it's not a fact. It's simply your opinion which you need to spin as fact in order to pursue a specific agenda which is a very large castle built on sand.

And it's not a fact that he deliberately kept this fact secret from his literary agent, of all people, and his supposed co-author. I once scored a lovely headed goal from a corner playing for the Edinburgh University MBA team in 1988. It was a peach of a connection and I'm very proud of it. Now, I'm aware that I've never shared this fact with anyone here on Casebook before. Does that make it a secret which I deliberately withheld from my dear readers?

Where is your evidence that Mike Barrett deliberately set out to deceive Doreen Montgomery and Shirley Harrison? Clearly, just not mentioning it is not grounds for concluding there was a secret being deliberately withheld. If you answer, I think it is reasonable of me to ask you to avoid statements such as "It's obvious" or "What evidence do you have that he wasn't" - you know, the usual canards of those who have bought the Barrett-as-master-hoaxer story hook, line, and sinker.

Yes, Ike, it's journalism. He was paid for it, so by definition it was professional journalism. He likely hoped for it to turn into a long-term career which didn't work out but it's irrelevant. It really is an incontrovertible fact that he was a journalist, which is all that matters. That's what he was obviously keeping secret from Doreen and Shirley. What type of writer doesn't tell their own literary agent about their previous published works?

When you receive the Ripperana article, you will see that it includes a sentence commencing: "Mr Devereux understood that Barrett was a journalist...."

Barrett was sent a draft of the article prior to publication and wrote to Nick Warren on 13th May 1994 to say:

"What you have written is defamatory....At 9 o'clock I will be seeing my Q.C. in order to take action against you....I particularly look forward to seeing you in court".

Your attribution to Barrett of the thought that Warren had merely found out that he'd written "some very average interviews to some very average gossip rags" is utterly ridiculous, He obviously wouldn't have thought of his own articles in this way, nor would he likely have thought of Celebrity and Chat, which were not gossip rags, as "average", but it doesn't matter. It's just the fact of him being a journalist and being paid for articles in two nationally published magazines, about which he'd kept secret, which is the key factor here.

I've no idea, incidentally, where you've now got the idea into your head that the articles published in Celebrity and Chat were "part of a writing course" that Mike had paid for. What is the evidence for this? If, as I rather suspect, it's the October 1993 statement, that's not what Mike said. He said he'd been encouraged to submit articles by writing circles he'd attended. That's totally different from those articles being part of a writing course. If you've started to invent things now, Ike, please stop.

I see in your response to my post that you've nothing to say about Shirley Harrison's comment that Mike "liked to call himself a journalist". Thus destroying your entire thesis in one fell swoop. You couldn't even bring yourself to quote it, let alone respond to it.

Nor do you deal with the fact that Barrett was evidently concealing from Scotland Yard in October 1993 his work for Celebrity and Chat.

And to repeat, it's utterly irrelevant how many articles Mike wrote or how much he was paid. It could have been a million articles for a billion pounds or 10 articles for a tenner a pop. It wouldn't make any difference. He kept it secret from Doreen and Shirley (and others) and that's the whole point. That was what was about to be exposed: the fact that Devereux understood he'd been a journalist. Nick Warren's article goes on to say that Devereux's family were "surprised to find his publishers describing him as an ordinary 'Liverpool bloke', scalesman at a firm of scrap-metal merchants". Exactly! The entire world had been misled about Barrett's history.

I've already given you the evidence that Barrett deliberately deceived Montgomery and Harrison. Firstly, yes it is good enough to say that he omitted the fact of his journalism. There is no way he could have told them about his life history and all his jobs without mentioning journalism. He couldn't possibly have forgotten it. He was obviously proud of it, telling Alan Gray he was the chief writer for Celebrity. There's no way he could accidentally not have mentioned it. Secondly, he obviously lied to them about when and why he had purchased a word processor. If you can't understand this it can only mean you're wilfully trying not to.

[rjpalmer]

Nor do you deal with the fact that Barrett was evidently concealing from Scotland Yard in October 1993 his work for Celebrity and Chat.

Hi Herlock -

Regarding Mike Barrett's dealings with Scotland Yard in October 1993, can I draw your attention to something Keith Skinner wrote to me back in 2018? It has considerable bearing on this unhappy discussion.




"Barrett's denial to the police in October 1993 that he owned a word processor."

The plot thickens.

Since Barrett did own a word processor and used it to submit articles to Chat and Celebrity and other magazines, the notion that Mike was entirely candid with Scotland Yard is no longer sustainable.

As you can read for yourself, this sin of omission is traceable to advice given to him by Paul Feldman.

What else Feldman knew of Barrett's journalistic career remains a matter of conjecture.

Regards.

[Herlock Sholmes]

Hi Herlock -

Regarding Mike Barrett's dealings with Scotland Yard in October 1993, can I draw your attention to something Keith Skinner wrote to me back in 2018? It has considerable bearing on this unhappy discussion.




"Barrett's denial to the police in October 1993 that he owned a word processor."

The plot thickens.

Since Barrett did own a word processor and used it to submit articles to Chat and Celebrity and other magazines, the notion that Mike was entirely candid with Scotland Yard is no longer sustainable.

As you can read for yourself, this sin of omission is traceable to advice given to him by Paul Feldman.

What else Feldman knew of Barrett's journalistic career remains a matter of conjecture.

Regards.

Hi Roger,

Yes, I don't know how anyone could possibly say that Michael Barrett's witness statement shows him being candid with Scotland Yard.

Another interesting thing to emerge from that witness statement is that it might well explain the curious statement to be found on page 172 of Caz's book in which it is stated that Anne Barrett is said to have told the authors that, "she had to tidy up the celebrity interviews he wrote for the children's magazine (for which the interviewees included Bonnie Langford, Kenneth Williams, Stan Boardman and Jimmy Cricket)". I don't know if the information that Celebrity was a children's magazine came from Anne (which would be extremely odd) or if it was something that the authors of the book assumed themselves, based on Mike's 1993 witness statement. If the latter, how ironic that Caz and her colleagues, of all people, were fooled by one of Mike's lies when it came to writing their book. Perhaps Caz will clarify for us why this statement ended up in the book.

Interestingly, Robert Smith may also have been deceived because in his 2017 book (first edition) he said that Barrett had not been an author but, "had only written a few puzzles for a children's weekly magazine, Look-in, which centred on ITV's television programmes". Even though by 2017 the fact that Barrett had written for Celebrity was common knowledge, having been included in Caz's 2003 book, somehow Smith, perhaps influenced by Barrett's October 1993 statement that he'd only written articles for a children's magazine, assumed that what he was saying was true but was actually referring to puzzles.

I don't think anyone even knew about his articles for Chat magazine until this was discovered in 2020 by someone whose name has already been mentioned enough on this forum.

[Iconoclast]

Yes, Ike, it's journalism. He was paid for it, so by definition it was professional journalism. He likely hoped for it to turn into a long-term career which didn't work out but it's irrelevant. It really is an incontrovertible fact that he was a journalist, which is all that matters.

I once - for one day - worked as a furniture removal chap. I was paid for my services - not in cash but as part of PAYE. I must remember to stick on my CV that I was a professional furniture removal technician because that, by your definition, is what I incontrovertibly was.

That's what he was obviously keeping secret from Doreen and Shirley. What type of writer doesn't tell their own literary agent about their previous published works?

I did - rather politely I thought - ask you not to reply with the scoundrel's 'obviously', but perhaps it's so ingrained in your thinking that you can't help yourself?

When you receive the Ripperana article, you will see that it includes a sentence commencing: "Mr Devereux understood that Barrett was a journalist...."

No idea what relevance this has to anything. Are we talking about what Barrett incontrovertibly was or what someone thought he was?

Your attribution to Barrett of the thought that Warren had merely found out that he'd written "some very average interviews to some very average gossip rags" is utterly ridiculous, He obviously ...

There's your favourite word again.

It's just the fact of him being a journalist and being paid for articles in two nationally published magazines ...

He published interviews. Let that sink in. He asked questions and he presumably scribbled down responses. He couldn't type it up but that's okay because his wife was a secretary and she did it for him. So at least Barrett managed to address an envelope during his brilliant career as a professional - erm - envelope-writer. Oh, she probably had to do that for him too.

... about which he'd kept secret, which is the key factor here.

Ooo, there's no getting past you, eh? He didn't mention a long-ago foray into creative writing and you see through his little ploy. Bang-to-rights-Barrett, we should call him.

I've no idea, incidentally, where you've now got the idea into your head that the articles published in Celebrity and Chat were "part of a writing course" that Mike had paid for. What is the evidence for this? If, as I rather suspect, it's the October 1993 statement, that's not what Mike said. He said he'd been encouraged to submit articles by writing circles he'd attended. That's totally different from those articles being part of a writing course. If you've started to invent things now, Ike, please stop.

Well, that's what's called being hoisted by your own petard. It's obvious that the writing circle encouraged nascent writers to place articles in the shittest rags whose level of discernment might be ever so slightly lower than real magazines. Obviously.

I see in your response to my post that you've nothing to say about Shirley Harrison's comment that Mike "liked to call himself a journalist".

I'm sure he did. He was in - for him - extremely exalted company all of a sudden. Do you think he preferred 'ex-scrap metal dealer', 'ex-convict', or 'journalist/writer [other sorts of literary roles are available]'?

Thus destroying your entire thesis in one fell swoop. You couldn't even bring yourself to quote it, let alone respond to it.

Taunting now, are we?

Oh, by the way, when you're droning on about imagined scenarios which miraculously only ever point the one way, try to make it interesting. Sometimes I have to skip your posts not because they are long but because they are so painfully repetitive.

Nor do you deal with the fact that Barrett was evidently concealing from Scotland Yard in October 1993 his work for Celebrity and Chat.

I know, I know. That whole writing thing that he simply had no choice whatsoever to admit to the boys in blue, eh? But he was smart, wasn't he? He admitted to having an interest in creative writing, mentioned his success with the young person's Look-In, but brilliantly kept schtum about the Pulitzer stuff in the cheap gossip rags. Bonesy must be kicking himself looking back, eh? He had the man in his hands and he let the greatest forger in history slip through them.

And to repeat, it's utterly irrelevant how many articles Mike wrote or how much he was paid. It could have been a million articles for a billion pounds or 10 articles for a tenner a pop. It wouldn't make any difference. He kept it secret from Doreen and Shirley (and others) and that's the whole point. That was what was about to be exposed: the fact that Devereux understood he'd been a journalist. Nick Warren's article goes on to say that Devereux's family were "surprised to find his publishers describing him as an ordinary 'Liverpool bloke', scalesman at a firm of scrap-metal merchants". Exactly! The entire world had been misled about Barrett's history.

Look, we are genuinely getting very close to the point where we don't respond to one another's posts so can I just ask a quick question? Do you genuinely believe any of the stretched-out fantasies you got from David Barrat or are you just here in between other threads about the colour of Mrs Puddleduck's socks on the night of the 'double event'? I can't decide whether you believe any it and - obviously - I find it hard to believe that otherwise intelligent people can be so fooled by such a fool (that fool being Barrett, not Barrat, obviously).

I've already given you the evidence that Barrett deliberately deceived Montgomery and Harrison.

I genuinely find it hard to believe that you think this is logical which is why I doubt you can genuinely mean what you say. You have not given me evidence of any such thing - all you have done is what you have learned at the knee of the Dark Lord, namely how to twist perfectly innocent circumstances into something obviously nefarious. You know what, it might work on the simple-minded so maybe that's good enough for you, I don't know.

Firstly, yes it is good enough to say that he omitted the fact of his journalism. There is no way he could have told them about his life history and all his jobs without mentioning journalism.

He was on invalidity benefit and taking money from some shitty pieces in the cheap, gaudy gossip rags so there's very likelihood he didn't want too mention it to anyone. Now, if you were to show us the evidence that he was employed under PAYE or that he was self-employed and duly declared his earnings so that he could pay his taxes, I'd be chanting your name in the Leazes End in a couple of week's time, but that would be real evidence, not twisted reasoning to suit a particular agenda and you only have the latter, don't you?

He couldn't possibly have forgotten it. He was obviously proud of it, telling Alan Gray he was the chief writer for Celebrity.

Context is everything [thank you, Keith Skinner]. Why was he bragging to Alan Gray?

There's no way he could accidentally not have mentioned it.

You're slipping. Surely there's obviously no way he could accidentally not have mentioned it?

Secondly, he obviously lied to them about when and why he had purchased a word processor.

And there it is - it's back! I kinda missed it for a moment there. Now, this one does appear to have been an incontrovertible lie. But I offered you a reason why he might have done that in a post earlier today so my interpretation neither trumps nor is trumped by yours. 'Thus destroying your entire thesis in one fell swoop. You couldn't even bring yourself to quote it, let alone respond to it.'

If you can't understand this it can only mean you're wilfully trying not to.

I am honestly wilfully trying to dedicate my little spare time to a review of the actual evidence (to the best of my ability and finances) which I have given freely and will give freely, but I keep having to correct faulty (that's the politest word I could use) logic which attempts to pigeonhole Mike and Anne Barrett into authorship of the Maybrick scrapbook whilst it wilfully manhandles everything that doesn't suit its argument to get there. Can you and I just call it a day and not respond to one another's posts. please? You know, just agree to absolutely disagree? I actually enjoy jousting with RJ - despite his advancing years and his complete works of The Seekers, he still has a sense of humour even if not all his own teeth. I really have no desire to take myself as seriously as you appear to take yourself. I get no pleasure from it and I can't imagine that you get any either. I really don't have time for these long-winded responses where I have so many false claims and premises to endlessly counter. It literally wears me down but I know my dear readers need to be protected from such scurrilous twisting of the innocent facts. In truth, I can only do so much and still produce my brilliant and remarkable works.

Ike

[Iconoclast]

... used it to submit articles to Chat and Celebrity and other magazines, the notion that Mike was entirely candid with Scotland Yard is no longer sustainable. As you can read for yourself, this sin of omission is traceable to advice given to him by Paul Feldman. What else Feldman knew of Barrett's journalistic career remains a matter of conjecture.

Oh gawd - here we go again ...