The Maybrick Thread (For All Things Maybrick)

[Iconoclast]

Obviously, it WAS a secret--hence Shirely being forced to revise the relevant paragraph in the 1994 paperback.

Obviously, not obviously. Your use of 'a secret' is exactly the same as your use of 'career in journalism'. It is hyperbole of the most extreme kind and I cannot let it pass without reminding everyone that these are your suppositions - your interpretations of otherwise apparently very innocuous events.

Even then she doesn't bother to revise the part about Barrett allegedly buying the word process after Tony's death in 1991 ...

I'm taking a wild guess here that she didn't know it yet.

which is another relic of Barrett's deceptions because he had bought the WP years earlier in order to submit articles to Celebrity and Chat.

Again, though, enough of the 'Barrett's deceptions' already. You don't know he was actively deceiving Shirley regarding when he bought it. And - if it transpires that he was actively deceiving her, I did offer a likely explanation for this just the other day which your acolyte claimed could not be found: Barrett had a commitment to share the research costs with Shirley, so I would suggest it is possible that he wanted to offset the cost of the WP against those so that his contribution would be less and he would therefore receive more. Supposition, yes, but you force me into them to counter the barrage of them I face from you so routinely.

O, what a tangled web.

But one of your own making, Incy.

But as always, Ike, your reaction is to mutter "nothing to see here, folks!' as you turn again to the secret writings of 'James Maybrick'. Good luck in convincing your readers to share your myopia.

Left to my own devices, I am simply reporting the known. I only have to carefully tread the sticky web in retaliation to your enveloping, threatening, single-track imagination.

How about we try just talking about the known and avoid using supposition to explain what is not known? So, we say, 'Mike Barrett had not mentioned to anyone on the current record that he had submitted pieces to national children's and gossip magazines until his witness statement to the police in October 1993'. This would be considerably less contentious than, 'Mike Barrett deliberately hid from the world that he had a career as a professional journalist until he mentioned it in his witness statement to the police in October 1993'.

Can we do that, RJ, or is the known an unknown country to you?

[rjpalmer]

To be clear here: at no point in that transcript did Nancy Steele refer to Michael Barrett - either directly or indirectly - as a journalist. That comment was reported by Nick Warren almost a year later. I guess it is possible that this (the September 1993) comment was heard by Feldman once Howells returned to London and this triggered a concern in his mind which prompted him to suggest that Barrett deny - if asked - that he owned a word processor.

I think you might be falling into the "hindsight is 20/20" trap.

A correspondent has pointed that when Martin Howells interviewed Ms. Steele in September 1993, Shirley's book was not yet out; unless she was clairvoyant, Nancy Steele could have had no way of knowing that Barrett's occupation as a professional journalist wouldn't be included in the book. Further, since Nancy only knew of Barrett as a journalist, she would have assumed that everyone else knew it, too, hence her passing reference to Barrett writing for a children's magazine---something she just said naturally and not as a 'big reveal.'

But on October 5th, the Daily Liverpool Post referred to Barrett as an "ex-scrap metal dealer." This was most likely Nancy's first exposure to the alter ego of the man her father had referred to as a journalist. And when Shirley's book hit the bookstores in Liverpool, Nancy would have seen that Mike was being portrayed only as a cook, an ex-merchant marine, and scrap metal dealer.

This no doubt explains why she later told Nick Warren in 1994 that the Devereux family was "surprised to find his publishers describing [Mike] as an 'ordinary Liverpool bloke,' scalesman at a firm of scrap-metal merchants."

Mike's journalism was not the common knowledge that you pretend it to be.

My correspondent writes: The text of Shirley's 1994 paperback was sent to the printers on 6th August 1994 (as stated on p.234 of the book) so the big question is whether the sentence highlighted in yellow in the paperback about the children's puzzles was inserted before or after Mike's confession of 28th June. "

I don't think we can assume that Shirley was privy to Feldman's research or Martin Howell's transcripts or video footage. I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that Shirley had learned of Nancy Steele's revelations in September 1993, but she might have only learned of Barrett's journalistic efforts in late June 1994.

Which would only further intensify my belief that Mike's past 'flirtation with the writing world' was a well-kept secret---though evidently known by Feldman.

[Herlock Sholmes]

What I meant by 'irrelevant is the excitement which seems to have self-generated around a) Mike having a WP and b) Feldman advising him to deny it if asked. To me, it plays no part in the history, which is now thirty-plus years older.



It just doesn't seem to have been the secret you're trying to make of it so I can't tell you a year's worth of who-told-what-to-whom. All I know is that it wasn't any kind of drama to anyone - and certainly not to Nick Warren in his Ripperana of July 1994. I can't get excited about this. It's all just supposition that we can never clarify or confirm.



As I said above, I can't tell you a year's worth of who-told-what-to-whom but what I can say is that the vast majority of water cooler moments are not recorded so hoping to find out is optimistic in the extreme, I'd say. It's all just supposition now.



Quite possibly one or both but neither amounted to the revelation of a career in journalism which you need it to be to be of any consequence whatsoever. I will never yield on this point: a few celebrity interviews in the crap rags whilst actually having a career on invalidity benefit is just not worth escalating. When there's a breeze on a sunny day, RJ, do you record it in your Victorian scrapbook as 'a typhoon hit us today'?



This I think could well have been what happened, but no-one will ever know. Feldman saw the Howell's film and thought, 'Whoa, this boy has submitted some stuff to a children's magazine - I didn't know that'. Whether that would be enough for him to advise Barrett to deny he had the Amstrad, no-one knows. It's now just supposition.



Possibly. I don't have the chronology before me. It's possible that the girls said to Bonesy that Mike thought of himself as a writer and that Bonesy therefore touched on it during his interview with Barrett in 12 Goldie Street, but only the witness statement and Anne's account of that meeting survive and neither confirms what you are suggesting. So, yet more supposition, I guess.

I'm baffled, Ike, by your statement that the revelation of Barrett's journalism was "certainly not" any "kind of drama" to Nick Warren. I cannot think on what basis you can possibly say this.

It seems to me to have been a very important part of the short article that Tony Devereux knew Barrett as a journalist. Further, the part that you have yet to even acknowledge exists in the article, is the part which says that the Devereux family were "surprised to find his publishers describing him as an ordinary 'Liverpool bloke', scalesman at a firm of scrap-metal merchants". What do you think this means? Surely what Warren was saying there, in effect, was that everyone, until then, had been lied to about Michael Barrett. He wasn't an ordinary working class bloke who'd stumbled across Jack the Ripper's diary, he was a journalist who had contributed features to magazines. Pretty earth-shattering.

Just stop to consider what effect that would have had in July 1994 in Ripper-world had Barrett not already confessed to forging the diary by that time.

Warren evidently didn't know any more than he'd been told by the Devereux family. He obviously didn't know about Celebrity or Chat. Clearly Shirley Harrison found out about Mike's work for Celebrity by November 1994 which is when Caz's book tells us she received confirmation from the editor, David Burness, that Barrett was a "valued contributor" who was "always very reliable" when he worked for Celebrity. Perhaps you could use your contacts, Ike, to discover exactly when and by whom Shirley was told that Mike had worked for Celebrity.

Also, now that you've had a bit of time to read the July 1994 issue of Ripperana, you'll have seen a reproduction of Mike Barrett's letter to Nick Warren of 13th May 1994 threatening to sue him for defamation. What part of Warren's short article do you think Barrett regarded as defamatory?