Final Nail in the Coffin

Diary Defending is now officially dead. It was killed, ironically enough, by diary defender loon Thomas Mitchell who posted some bombshell information which had previously been suppressed (and for good reason: because it demolishes the entire case for the diary having been found in Battlecrease).

If you've read any post Caroline Morris Brown has ever made about Timothy Martin-Wright, you'll know that she invariably says that there are only two possible options in assessing his account: either he was telling the truth or he was hallucinating. Well we're now told he was hallucinating!

He related to Paul Feldman a story so bizarrely untrue in 1994 that one wonders if he was sober at the time. Perhaps those longstanding rumours that he had an alcohol problem in the 1990s due to financial losses in his business, and his wife wanting to divorce him, are true after all.

Mitchell only posted the following transcript extract because he was being challenged by RJ Palmer as to whether Martin-Wright was told specifically about Jack the Ripper's diary when he spoke to Alan Dodgson (supposedly in December 1992), and he wanted to prove that he did say he was told it was the Ripper's diary but, in doing so, Mitchell scored a massive own goal and ensured that the Battlecrease provenance story is now dead in the water:

TMW: I have just been reading a very interesting book [L.O. - meaning Shirley Harrison's book].

PHF: Yes, I heard. I understand you’ve got your story to tell about it.

TMW: Yes, in fact. I’ll go back to the first, the inception of my involvement in the story which is about two years ago, I think. A guy who worked for me said, um, he knows that I collect antiques and am interested in old books etc. He said; “I saw a really interesting book that you would like in the pub the other night”. I said, “Oh yeah”. He said; “It, um, is a copy of Jack the Ripper’s Diary.” I said, “Oh yeah?”

PHF: A copy, a copy of it?

TMW: Well I asked that, and he said it was a copy of Jack the Ripper’s Diary.

So the guy claimed that his employee, Alan Dodgson, read a copy of Jack the Ripper's diary! Really? How did he manage that? Alan Dodgson, by his own account, never saw a copy of the diary! The only person Alan Dodgson ever spoke to was Alan Davies and he never saw a copy of the diary either! So why did Martin-Wright think that Dodgson had seen it in a pub?

The normal diary defender story is that Davies spoke to Dodgson while in the Bootle branch of an APS Store.

Even Mitchell seems to accept that Martin-Wright was hallucinating and had totally muddled up the story, whereby what he'd actually been told (but much later than his initial conversation with Dodgson) was that the diary was sold in a pub to some unknown person. Somehow, and inexplicably, he had evidently got it into his muddled head that Dodgson told him during their first conversation that he'd spoken to an electrician in a pub.

We can see that Martin-Wright was insistent that what Dodgson had seen in the pub was a copy of Jack the Ripper's diary. Mitchell can't explain for one second why he would have thought this, but when Feldman pressed him on the point by asking, "a copy of it?", Martin-Wright confirmed that Dodgson had told him that he'd seen a copy of Jack the Ripper's diary, even though, according to the (abbreviated) accounts of both Davies and Dodgson that we've been allowed to see, this is impossible.

Something is very very wrong here.

Even the fact that Martin-Wright believed Dodgson to have been talking about Jack the Ripper's diary doesn't match all the known evidence. We know that the source of Martin-Wright's information was Alan Dodgson whose own source was Alan Davies. Yet, when Keith Skinner spoke to Margaret Davies in 2004 - someone who seemed to know all about a discovery of something under the floorboards of Battlecrease - his note of their discussion (see Electricians' Special) doesn't include any mention of Jack the Ripper's diary whatsoever. On the contrary, what she told Keith, undoubtedly based on what her husband had told her was that:

"You'll never guess what [offered?] - old book in Doddy's house in biscuit tin plus ring".

Right. It was just an "old book". The famous "old book" that Caroline Morris-Brown keeps yammering on about. Had Margaret Davies been told that the old book was the diary of Jack the Ripper she would undoubtedly have said so when speaking to Keith Skinner.

We've already seen how befuddled the mind of Timothy Martin-Wright was in 1994, and the possibility must exist that, having read Shirley Harrison's book about the diary of Jack the Ripper, he'd managed to convince himself that the old book he'd heard about from Alan Davies was the same diary of Jack the Ripper which was the subject of Shirley's book.

The problem with assessing Martin--Wright's story is that Keith Skinner and James Johnston continue to ruthlessly withhold and suppress the transcripts of any interviews or communications with Alan Davies and Alan Dodgson. All we've ever had from those two individuals are the barest snippets of what they've supposedly said to researchers, leading to suspicions that, just as with Martin-Wright, they said things that don't fit the narrative and are unhelpful to the defence of the diary, hence the ruthless suppression.

It's almost unbelievable that the first time we've been allowed to see what Timothy Martin-Wright told Paul Feldman is September 2024, a full seven years after the Battlecrease theory was first presented, which is also twenty years after Keith Skinner obtained the infamous "timesheet" and thirty years after the conversation actually occurred. Even then, we've only been granted a snippet - itself a bombshell - so god only knows what they're still not allowing us to see.

There was one other extraordinary snippet provided from what we are told was a fifteen minute conversation. It was this bombastic exchange:

TMW: And um, I know where it came from and I know who found it and I know where he found it.

PHF: Um, are you prepared to tell me which electrician it was?

TMW: I’ve been advised by my solicitor, whom you know, not to tell you. I have just told you exactly what I was advised to tell you.

PHF: You were advised by?

TMW: My solicitor.

PHF: And is that the same as my solicitor?

TMW: No. I think they are different people within the same practice.

Look at that first line:

"I know where it came from and I know who found it and I know where he found it."

If Timothy Martin-Wright "knew" this (or thought he knew it), so did Alan Davies. So why don't Keith Skinner and James Johnston just ask Alan Davies where the diary came from, who found it and where he found it?

Well that's the remarkable thing. Alan Davies didn't know any of this from any first hand knowledge. He had, apparently, been told that Eddie Lyons found something (presumably the "old book" that his wife mentioned) under the floorboards of Battlecrease but, when asked, he said he couldn't remember who told him this.

In other words, he must have been passing on an unsourced rumour to Alan Dodgson who then passed that rumour on to Martin-Wright. For Martin-Wright to tell Feldman that he positively knew who had found the diary (but couldn't reveal that information on the advice of his solicitor, which itself is bizarre) means he must have been talking bollocks because he couldn't possibly have known anything of the sort. He could only have known what Davies was alleging, if anything.

Hold on a moment.

In the distance, I hear a weak plaintive cry of one Thomas Mitchell telling us to ignore the contradictions, muddles and impossibilities of the story of his star witness, Martin-Wright. For, as Mitchell wants to stress:

"Please be clear that the only thing that matters here is that the diary of Jack the Ripper was being discussed by at least one Portus & Rhodes electrician in 1992, before Paul Feldman came on the scene in 1993."

And you know what? He's right. It would, indeed, be significant, and require explanation, if the diary of Jack the Ripper was being discussed by at least one Portus & Rhodes electrician at any time during1992.

But where is the evidence that the discussion between Davies and Dodgson actually occurred in 1992?

It's totally non-existent, that's where.

While accepting that Martin-Wright's story is bollocks of the highest order, revealing him to be thoroughly unreliable witness, Mitchell nevertheless wants to rely on him for the date of the conversation.

That way madness lies.

Anyone who has ever dealt with a witness knows that the most unreliable part of their testimony is in dating events from the past, even the recent past, from memory alone, without the assistance of documentation. In one's mind, six months can feel like a year, a year can feel like six months, two years can feel like one year and one year can feel like two. How can Mr Muddle-Right possibly have remembered the date on which he spoke to Dodgson with any reliable degree of accuracy?

The overwhelming likelihood is that the conversation occurred in early 1993.

Mitchell knows this, which is why in every post he likes to bamboozle his readers into thinking that the Davies/Dodgson/Martin-Wright conversations have been positively and concretely dated to 1992. They have not.

Not that you'd think there was any doubt in the matter from reading Mitchell's posts.

On 30th August 2024, for example, he wrote:

"Later in 1992, Portus & Rhodes employee Alan Davies mentions a Jack the Ripper diary to Tim Martin-Wright of the newly-opened APS Security (there's an intermediary, but this is the quick version) but when Martin-Wright shows interest in seeing it, Davies has to inform him that it has been sold "in a pub in Liverpool". Davies has been off work for six months or so after a motorbike accident in the summer of 1992 so it is likely he hasn't realised that the scrapbook had long-since been sold (to Mike Barrett). This all happens in 1992, well before Paul Feldman rides into town looking for the fabled electricians who - he has been told - may have been working in Battlecrease House between one and three years ago".

The unwary reader would have no way of knowing that it's a mere estimate, based on practically nothing, that the conversation occurred in 1992. Mitchell repeatedly states it as a fact. Hence, he was at it again on 2nd September 2024:

"In late 1992, almost certainly December 1992 (as dated by the incorporation of APS Security in October 1992 as well as an entry in Tim Martin-Wright's diary - and confirmed by Tim in writing - as well as Alan Davies' recovery from his motorcycle accident in June 1992) the chronology is that Alan Davies mentions to Alan Dodgson in APS Security (a shop, by the way) about a diary of Jack the Ripper which he had known to be doing the rounds. He's been out of action for six months due to his accident so his knowledge of events is not red hot. Anyway, Alan Dodgson (remember, dear readers, this is the quick version) mentions it to his boss Tim Martin-Wright. Tim shows interest and asks to see it so Alan Dodgson tells Alan Davies who then breaks the bad news that it was sold in a pub in Liverpool (no timeframe given), and Tim forgets all about it....It's still 1992, remember, everyone."

That "almost certainly" is doing a lot of sweaty work in the phrase "almost certainly December 1992". Why is it "almost certain"? We don't even know for sure when the APS security shop opened. And shops open, they don't incorporate. Businesses incorporate. Mitchell knows exactly what he's doing when he refers to "the incorporation of APS security in October 1992". He wants the reader to think that there was some kind of official incorporation of APS Security, which means records and documents relating to that incorporation, so that the date has been confirmed. He knows full well of the existence of the hole at the very heart of his theory, which is that the October 1992 opening date is nothing more than a guess, with not a single document or piece of supporting evidence behind it. I mean, look at what James Johnston, who was in communication with the people involved, told me in 2017:

"According to the earliest accounts, the shop opened in October 1991. Thankfully, it has since been confirmed that the shop opened for trading in November 1992 - which ties in with the chronology of Alan Davies' account. November 92 is also the date cited in Robert's new book."

So the shop opened in November, according to this account! Not October.

Shortly afterwards, I expressly asked James Johnston how Tim Martin-Wright was able to date his conversation with Dodgson to December 1992. This is what he told me:

"Tim was able to date this conversation via reference to a personal diary which he kept. Keith should be able to provide more information on this - but I believe Tim recalled that the conversation with Dodgson took place around the time when he had purchased an antique hand-stand, which had been left in the APS shop for collection. Tim suggested that this could have been the impetus for Dodgson and Davies to have discussed anqtiues and Tim's penchant for curiosities. I do recall Tim mentioning that he would frequent an old curiosity shop which was not too far from APS. Further to this - Alan Dodgson told me that the conversation took place "a month or two after APS had opened" - which he dated to October/November 1992. He seemed confident of this date on account of 2017 being APS's twenty-fifth year in business."

In his posts, Mitchell didn't even bother to mention the embarrassing diary entry relating to the antique stand which can have no bearing on the date of Martin-Wright's conversation. To the extent that Martin-Wright thinks the purchase of the antique stand occurred at the same time as his conversation with Dodgson, he could simply be muddling the two events up in his mind, just as he seems to have muddled up everything about the contents of his conversation with Dodgson.

And look at the date of the opening of the APS shop which had suddenly become "October/November 1992". It's obvious that Dodgson hasn't got any records to support this date and is happy with it because APS was supposed to have been trading for 25 years in 2017. But where is the evidence which supports THAT calculation? For all we know, someone worked out 25 years on the basis that they think the shop opened in late 1992.

I asked James Johnston why he was giving me inconsistent information about the opening date of the APS store, saying November in one post but October/November in the next. I said:

"So when was it? November or October? Will it be a different month next week? I fear you are relying on people's memories. Given the importance of the date there needs to be some documentary confirmation of the shop's opening date."

This is what he told me:

"Apologies for the confusion and inconsistency on my behalf David. At the moment the most definitive date which I can give you is 26th October 1992. This came directly from Tim Martin-Wright in 2004. I am working hard to try and obtain some form of documented support for this - to make this date indisputable."

Well Johnston night have been working hard to obtain some form of documented support for this new date of 26th October 1992 in 2017, but here we are seven whole fucking years later and not a single bloody thing has been produced. Not one document to prove that the store opened on that date.

The exact opening date of the store, however, is only one part of the equation because it still doesn't help to date the conversation between Davies and Dodgson. Sure, Dodgson and Martin-Wright, both using the exact same wording, suspiciously and vaguely have said they think it occurred within a month or two of the opening of the store, but how can they be sure it wasn't three or four months after?

And what if the store actually opened on, say, 26th November 1992? Just two months after this date takes us perilously close to February 1993 when Feldman entered the scene. Four months would take us to April 1993.

According to the official diary defender story, Feldman didn't start making enquiries with the electricians until he received a faxed list of contact details of P&R employees from Colin Rhodes on 26th April 1993. But this seems to be pure assumption. How do they know that Feldman didn't start making his own enquiries in February 1993, immediately after he learnt about the electrical work at Battlecrease from Paul Dodd, and that the faxed list was only for him to mop up those electricians he hadn't been able to contact from his own enquiries.

If that's the case, Feldman could easily have set a rumour in motion as early as February 1993 among those he spoke to that the diary of Jack the Ripper had been found by a Portus & Rhodes electrician under the floorboards of Battlecrease. If Alan Davies heard this rumour he could have passed it on to Dodgson who passed it on to Timothy Martin-Wright. It's a very simple and entirely plausible chain of events.

None other than the Chief Diary Defender has admitted that it is a "fair point" that the electricians could have had ideas planted in their heads by Feldman but, in her post of 5 September 1994, she went to make a nonsense argument that Feldman couldn't possibly have planted any ideas into the head of Martin-Wright because he never met him. Thus, Caroline Morris-Brown posted:

"As for the electricians having ideas planted in their heads by Feldman, it is a fair point - or it would be if it wasn't already known, and hadn't already been repeated dozens of times, that other witnesses, including Tim Martin-Wright, Brian Rawes and Paul Dodd, were not influenced in any way by Feldman when they first heard and spoke - independently - about an alleged, and potentially important find in Battlecrease House, and gave the same name for the alleged finder."

This sentence is so stupid that it makes me wonder if the Chief Diary Defender is right in the head.

Martin-Wright obtained the entirety of his information from an electrician, Alan Davies. So, if Davies was influenced by Feldman, then so was Martin-Wright. That much should be obvious. Brian Rawes' memory of what Eddie Lyons said to him in a brief exchange the previous year could absolutely have been influenced and shaped by Feldman's theory that Eddie Lyons had found the diary. Paul Dodd has never, to the best of my knowledge, said he was aware of any discovery in Battlecrease House and I have no idea why she's included him in the list of people who identified Eddie Lyons as the person who found the diary. All Paul Dodd told Feldman was that some electrical work had been done in his house a few years earlier. I have no idea if, when he spoke to Feldman and the other researchers in February 1994, he speculated that the diary could have been found by one of the electricians who did the work and then Feldman ran with the theory, but it's never been argued before that he had some actual knowledge of a discovery.

So we go back to the Chief Diary Defender's admission that it is a "fair point" that the electricians could have had ideas planted in their heads by Feldman. Of course they could! And that is surely what happened.

Now look at it from the perspective of Martin-Wright. In February 1993, no one had heard of the discovery of the Jack the Ripper diary. It was all being kept top secret by Doreen, Shirley and Robert Smith. So, if, on the basis of Feldman's theories, Alan Davies did let slip to Alan Dodgson that he'd heard that Jack the Ripper's diary had been found by an electrician in James Maybrick's old house, and Dodgson passed the news on to his boss, that news would have been massive, and very memorable to him. But then time would have passed and Martin-Wright obviously heard no more about it other than that it had been sold in a pub (supposedly), so probably just forgot about it. He must have missed all the news reports in late 1993. Then, suddenly, in June 1994 he reads Shirley Harrison's book about the discovery of a Jack the Ripper diary. A light bulb flashes in his head: "Surely, this is the same diary I heard about ages ago, long before anyone else even knew of its existence", he thinks to himself. In June 1994, it probably felt like it had been two years earlier that he'd been told about but it might only have been 15 months earlier. Either way, the general public didn't know of its existence at the time which is why, when looking back, he must have thought that Davies had some extraordinary inside information.

What also seems to be possible is that a highly indiscreet Feldman, in breach of any secrecy agreements with Robert Smith, provided a facsimile copy of the diary of the sort that would later appear at the back of Shirley's book (or even a transcript) to, say, Alan Rigby, who then passed it round to his mates, including Davies, with Davies showing Dodgson. To that extent, maybe Martin-Davies' memory of what Dodgson told him is correct. If that WAS what happened, Feldman would surely have recognised in an instant that he himself was the source of Martin-Wright's belief, and that Davies must have circulated a facsimile of the diary that he wasn't supposed to have. This would explain why Feldman had no interest in pursuing Martin-Wright's account. He'd worked out exactly what had happened and understood perfectly well how Martin-Wright had got it into his head that the diary had been found by an electrician in Battlecrease. It had come direct from his own speculations! Martin-Wright was merely feeding Feldman's own theory back to him.

Whether this is what happened or not, it's obvious that the diary defenders need to prove that the Davies/Dodgson/Martin-Wright conversations actually did happen in 1992 as opposed to 1993. They've so far failed abjectly to do so. All we've had are people's memories of what they think happened and when they think it happened.. Well, we've seen that even Mitchell tells us that the memory of his star witness is seriously faulty. There was no viewing of a copy Jack the Ripper's diary in a pub, is what Mitchell says. But that's precisely what Martin-Wright said he was told. If he wasn't told that, he's invented it (by way of hallucination!!), and thus must be considered a highly unreliable witness with Michael Barrett levels of credibility. Yet Mitchell thinks he can nevertheless be trusted to accurately pinpoint the date of a conversation many months earlier without any actual documentation to help him refresh his memory.

In the absence of evidence, as we've seen, Mitchell has taken to stating as a fact that the Davies/Dodgson/Martin-Wright conversations occurred in 1992 and then asking us to explain it.

He first needs to prove that the conversation did occur in 1992 and thus rule out that it happened in 1993.

Martin- Wright's newly discovered credibility issue makes me more certain then ever that the conversation in question occurred in early 1993. The diary defence is dead. A Barrett forgery is now the only game in town.

LORD ORSAM

10 September 2024

BONUS POSTCRIPT: THE GREAT BAMBOOZLER

Having anonymously posted comments in response to blog articles on this website and then run away in terror after I asked him some questions he couldn't (and pointedly did not) answer, a clearly rattled Thomas Mitchell has taken to writing barbed messages aimed at me on Casebook where he knows I can't respond (because I resigned from that site in 2018). Given that Mitchell has been recently described by the moderator of Casebook as "ego driven", I have no idea why he remains a member himself but perhaps he has different ideas about self-respect than I do.

In a postscript to a post addressed to Mike J.G. on 30th August 2024, Mitchell wrote:

"PS I wrote all of the above from memory over a cup of tea on a Friday morning so if there are any errors and you've 'resigned' from the Casebook, no need to start your own website and then post endless, repetitive articles about people who get small details wrong or pull together loads of tenuous 'facts' to draw conclusions which you had already drawn before you even gave any thought to them."

Is the guy obsessed with me, or what?  Clearly rattled, like I say.

The subtle, or not so subtle, message he was trying to convey here is that the attack on diary defenders is all about correcting "small details" due to minor errors of memory, based on loads of supposedly tenuous facts (a word he feels the need to wrap in quotation marks, no doubt because he doesn’t really know what they are, as demonstrated by the majority of the the post he wrote to Mike JG) rather than being about serious and fundamental problems with their arguments.

What Mitchell tried to do was bamboozle the poor guy into thinking that the diary was found in Battlecrease.  My criticisms of him have nothing to do with him making errors of memory.  It's all about him claiming things as facts that have not been proven to be facts.  Let me annotate what he wrote to Mike (with his typo of "Rates" for "Rawes" corrected) to demonstrate.

Firstly, here is his post from 30th August in full:

Here is my response (in red) to his main paragraph:

"I would challenge your suggestion that the Battlecrease provenance story doesn't add up, though. On the contrary, it very much does: Barrett rings Rupert Crew on the very day that Eddie Lyons' employer was working on Maybrick's old floorboards [A strange way of describing the mundane installation of storage heaters which was not in any way "working on Maybrick's old floorboards"] and Eddie Lyons himself admits to having been there that day [Does he?  Does he really, though?  If that's the case, where do we find him admitting this?   Where is the transcript of any interview in which he's said it?   Where is the footage?  Neither have never been provided even though this admission is said to have been captured on camera six years ago.  It's one of the key documents that is being ruthlessly withheld and suppressed.  You'd think that if Eddie Lyons genuinely did admit to having been there that day, the diary defenders would be posting the quote, or footage of him saying this, everywhere they can non stop on a daily basis.  But no, nothing at all.   And it leads to the question: If he admitted to being there when there's no independent evidence he was, why didn’t he simply admit to finding the diary too, if that's what happened? After all, according to Feldman, he was prepared in 1993 to (falsely) agree to having found it in Battlecrease in the 1980s, so he clearly didn’t have any real concern that anything would happen to him, and, so many years after the event, there was, and remains, absolutely no realistic possibility of him ever being charged with any offence in respect of taking the diary.  There's no one else who could be harmed by him admitting it. Mike Barrett is dead.  So what could possibly be preventing him from admitting to finding and selling on the diary if he now (truthfully) admits to being there on 9th March1992?   Everything smells of fish and, in the absence of any actual evidence of Lyons admitting he was there, other, than a claim by Robert Smith who wasn't even present at the interview in which it was supposed to have happened,  we must surely conclude that he didn't actually admit anything but probably only accepted that he MIGHT have been there that day]  then he's back there in the June of 1992 and - at the very time Barrett is selling the publishing rights to Robert Smith [Smith won the right to publish the diary on Thursday 4th June 1992 after he offered a £50,000 advance in a bidding auction and he was confirmed as the successful bidder by Doreen Montgomery on 12th June. Details of the contract were then worked out (by lawyers) and the publishing agreement was signed on 29th July 1992. According to Robert Smith, Caroline Morris-Brown and, at times, Mitchell himself (see below), the Rawes/Lyons conversation is supposed to have occurred 12 days before this, on 17th July 1992, because that's the only Friday when Lyons is recorded in the "timesheets" as working at Battlecrease in 1992 (and the conversation is said to have definitely occurred on a Friday) although that date is speculative because Harrison says that Rawes was in possession of an old daily memo book by which he dated the conversation to a Friday in June 1992, and Mitchell seems, on this occasion, to be adopting that date, although the likelihood is that he's confused himself and meant to write July, not June. Either way, Mitchell doesn't even begin explain what the significance can possibly be of Eddie Lyons supposedly discussing the diary with Brian Rawes at a time when Robert Smith had already won the right to publish it. Mitchell deceptively describes June 1992 as being a time when Mike Barrett (in the present tense) was "selling the publishing rights" but he was doing no such thing. Smith was going to publish the book. Barrett wasn't selling anything. It was just a case of the contract being worked out and signed which was a process at the time being manged by Doreen, not Mike. Smith had already won the auction to publish the diary. What could any of this possibly have had to do with Eddie Lyons?] - Lyons tells Brian Rawes that he had found something and he thought it was important [If Lyons was talking about the diary, why did this conversation occur in June or July 1992 long after the supposed discovery?  Is Mitchell saying that Lyons was aware that Robert Smith was due to sign a publishing contract and mysteriously felt the urgent and compelling need to discuss the matter with Brian Rawes for no obvious reason, while Rawes was literally driving a van?  It's a mad suggestion. According to Colin Rhodes, at least one electrician definitely did find an old document at Battlecrease and was given permission to keep it but it was an old newspaper.  Might Lyons have been the person who discovered it and might this be what he was talking about to Rawes?  How can we exclude the possibility if we don't know which electrician found the old newspaper?]. Rawes assumes he means Lyons had found something that day but actually Lyons could have been guiltily admitting to something he had done months earlier. [But why?  And he didn’t appear to Rawes to be guiltily admitting anything but was smiling, moreover Lyons wasn't suggesting he had done anything wrong, merely that he had found something].   Later in 1992 [This is where the bamboozling really kicks in because Mitchell must know that it is unproven and totally unsubstantiated that the events he is about to describe occurred in 1992], Portus & Rhodes employee Alan Davies mentions a Jack the Ripper diary to Tim Martin-Wright of the newly-opened APS Security (there's an intermediary, but this is the quick version) but when Martin-Wright shows interest in seeing it, Davies has to inform him that it has been sold "in a pub in Liverpool" [But how did Davies get this idea into his head?  Astonishingly we have no idea.  Funnily enough, it was Feldman's theory in 1993 that the diary had been sold in a pub in Liverpool so one might think that Feldman is the most likely source for what Davies told Martin-Wright, but in 1993, not 1992].  Davies has been off work for six months or so after a motorbike accident in the summer of 1992 so it is likely he hasn't realised that the scrapbook had long-since been sold (to Mike Barrett [If one thinks about this for even a moment one can only conclude it is complete nonsense.   In the first place, the accident occurred long after the diary had (supposedly) been sold to Mike Barrett and long after it had (actually) been assigned to Doreen Montgomery.  But the question is not whether Davies would have known that the diary had been sold to Mike Barrett.  Rather, the question is why he would have thought, eight months after it's supposed discovery, that the diary was still for sale by Eddie Lyons to the extent that he told Martin-Wright that it was available for him to buy from Eddie, nor why he felt able to suggest a possible purchase price of £25.  So much is wrong with this story, and we've never been provided with any kind of detailed account by Davies, so we have no idea who told him about this diary in the first place or why he thought it was still for sale in December1992]. This all happens in 1992 [Another assertion of fact detached from any hard evidence. This is not an error or a small detail, it's absolutely fundamental to the entire story that it occurred in late 1992 but not one iota of proof has been provided that the conversation occurred at any time in that year.  All we've had are vague estimates from memory. One account of the story even claimed it all occurred in 1991, showing how thoroughly unreliable memory can be], well before Paul Feldman rides into town looking for the fabled electricians who - he has been told - may have been working in Battlecrease House between one and three years ago [Again, all based on an unverified assertion that the conversation occurred in 1992.  If it occurred only a few months later, it's worthless]. Martin-Wright's story dates the diary of Jack the Ripper being sold in a pub in Anfield to well before Feldman has even heard of electricians from Portus & Rhodes  [Mitchell said this before he revealed that Martin-Wright actually thought that Dodgson had seen the diary in a pub. Did Martin Wright ever say that he heard the diary was sold in a pub? No evidence has been provided. To the extent that Martin-Wright dated the story of his hearing about a Jack the Ripper diary to 1992, the fact is that he once dated it to 1991. That shows what garbage the whole thing is.  We now have a date that Mitchell likes better so he focusses on that one.]   Martin-Wright is of impeccable character (you just have to see and hear him to realise he is no idle fantasist) [This was was written by Mitchell before he revealed a snippet of Martin Wright's extraordinary conversation with Feldman in June 1994. Ironically, since posting that snippet, he has started to claim that Martin Wright told Feldman a fantasy of Dodgson reading a copy of the Jack the Ripper diary in the pub . So it's now Mitchell himself who is telling us that Martin-Wright is an idle fantasist! It's not me saying it. Mitchell keeps commenting on my website articles so he surely must know that I am saying that what has probably occurred is that Martin-Wright's memory has let him down. After all, he first said the diary was offered to him in 1991 so he clearly doesn't have a strong grip on the dates. Although not reflected in the transcript posted by Mitchell, James Johnston told me that when Martin-Wright first spoke to Feldman in June 1994 he gave a suggested range of between June 1992 and December 1992 during which the conversation might have occurred (i.e. 18 months to two years earlier) which is a very wide range. It would only have involved a slight dating error for the conversation to have occurred after Feldman got involved.   What I'm saying about Martin-Wright is that is mistaken as to when the conversation occurred] ; he is well-educated and from good stock (I'm guessing Ponteland or even Darras Hall, both on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne) [None of this means anything, either with respect to honesty or infallible memory] . He has no obvious reason to lie (nor does Brian Rawes, for that matter) [No one, other the diary defenders themselves, is accusing anyone of lying.  But these are people speaking from memory unsupported by any documentary evidence.  It is so ridiculously easy for people to mistake time periods when things occur and that is surely what has happened here] The Battlecrease provenance is very strong indeed. [It's all built on sand.   If it really was very strong, all the transcripts of the interviews with the electricians and Martin-Wright would be produced but, so far NADA….A BIG FAT ZERO. It's all being ruthlessly suppressed so that Keith Skinner's useful idiot, Tom Mitchell, can make a post exactly like the one he made, pretending that things have been established as facts which have not been established as facts, and bamboozling others who aren't aware of all the details]."

No need for me to comment on the rest of Tom's post.  The likelihood is that the text of the diary was created by Mike Barrett (possibly with the assistance of others) and transcribed by a third party (possibly his wife) during late March and early April 1992.  This is the only thing that makes sense of Mike ordering a 19th century diary with blank pages on or around 9th March 1992.  It's really one of the easiest-to-solve mysteries of all the mysteries connected with the Ripper story.

MITCHELL'S BEFUDDLEMENT

Proof of Tom Mitchell's befuddlement in saying in the above cited post that the Rawes/Lyons conversation occurred in June 1992 when only last year he was saying it was on 17th July 1992, is below:

And before we get sidetracked by someone saying that the conversation between Lyons and Rawes occurred on July 17, 1992, long after the scrapbook had been seen in London and a publishing agreement signed for it, please remember that Rawes did not say that Lyons had said he had found the book that day. Lyons has admitted (on record) to having been there on March 9, 1992, and we know he went back for the second time on July 17, 1992, by which time he must have heard about Bongo Barrett's publishing deal and feared that it was a deal to publish the 'interesting' book Lyons himself had liberated from Battlecrease House on March 9, 1992.

Again, why on earth would Rawes lie about this conversation with a clearly nervous Eddie Lyons? And why would Rawes tell Arthur Rigby about it when they got to their shared job on the afternoon of July 17, 1992? And - if he did lie about it - why did he keep on lying about it as recently as 2016?

The evidence points very strongly to Lyons liberating the scrapbook on March 9, 1992, selling it for £25 in a pub in Anfield (cf. Alan Davies), being sent back to Battlecrease on July 19, 1992, to complete the earlier work and then getting unnerved by the recollection of his earlier actions.

No doubt Tom will mark this as a "small detail" but he was accepting in April 2023 that the conversation between Rawes and Lyons, which he then dated to 17th July 1992, was long after the publishing agreement had been signed (even though he was wrong about that). But it was certainly long after Smith had won the auction to publish the book. Funny how Tom's mind now brings the conversation forward to June, which was the month the auction, and claims that Mike was in the process of selling the diary to Smith at that time. Tomorrow he will surely say something different. You just can't accept a word this loon says without independent verification (so he's much like Mike Barrett in this respect).

L.O. 10.09.24