Let's Discuss the Irregular Farce of Battlecrease Harse, or Die Laughing

[Caroline Brown]

Let’s Discuss the Irregular Farce of Battlecrease Harse, or Die Laughing

I have always found the diary text a rich source of dark humour, and I’m not at all sure it’s unintentional, which would surely be the case if its author was deadly serious about portraying the diarist as a real murderer. In fact, I’m far from convinced that the point of the piece was to identify Jack the Ripper, thus solving the Whitechapel Murders. I see it more as a practical joke that was intended to serve up a cruel and unusual punishment for a late, but little lamented cotton merchant, by turning 'Sir' James into a benighted and fiend-like dead butcher.

Others read the text and howl at the howlers, having real fits and poking fun at their silly modern faker, while I find myself smiling wryly with Sir Jim’s creator, as a very black ripping yarn comes to life and romps its way to the finishing post(e), a Victorian League of Gentlemen meets Basil Fawlty.

Faulty Battlements

The central character may not be the one holding the reins, but well and truly taken for a ride - a tragi-comic figure of fun who has a bang on the head and comes round as the Lord High & Mighty Executioner, ha ha, and Sir Basil the Bleedin’ Ripper if you please.

Battlecross Farce

Sir James is an ignorant brute with base habits, who selfishly married Flo Easy, our faulty heroine and gentlewoman born, when she was terribly young and impressionable. The plot thickens, but for many it just sickens.

Crassbattle House

I suspect that if others tried reading this 63-page potty parody, as if it had appeared as a killer serial in Punch, instead of an old scrapbook of uncertain origin, they might get the drift I’ve been getting for years, and liken it more to the fatuous fictional copper, recording his inept and ineffectual, but hilarious attempts to catch a Victorian felon, than a fatuous friend of Mike Barrett, making an inept, ineffectual, unfunny and dictionary-free attempt to pull the wool over modern eyes with a serial killer confession.

I see a very practical joker from the Good Old Days, introducing our jolly Sir Jim as: “Everyone’s Best Fiend; the Very Devil of his day; the Anathema of the Age; the Epitome of Evil Epilogists; and Hell-bent Holder of the long spoon, for cold kidney suppers with Satan.”

This is a parody that won’t lie down and die. We have yet to meet its maker. It’s not pushing up the daisies. The grim reaper is not knocking at its door, but enjoying tea and scones in another time and place. It will not cease to be, nor will it be joining the bleedin' choir invisible. And it has not been nailed to its owner’s perch. It is not an ex-parody.

[Reader’s Voice: "That’s it. I’m interrupting this undead parody sketch as it’s getting extremely silly".]

[Chris G.]

Hi Caz

Is it true that Maybrick was transported to Anfield Cemetery in a Battlecrease Harse?

Chris

[Caroline Brown]

Absolutely, Chris. Don't you know anything about this case?

When they buried Sir Jim they put him and all his eggs-crutiating poetry in the one casket.
It wasn't the coffin that carried him off but the arsenic he had recently stopped scoffin'.

Love,

Caz
X

[Scott Nelson]

I see a very practical joker from the Good Old Days, introducing our jolly Sir Jim as: “Everyone’s Best Fiend...

Me too Caz. Do you have anyone in mind?

[Chris G.]

When they buried Sir Jim they put him and all his eggs-crutiating poetry in the one casket.

Its always best to put one's eggs -- or one's beggs -- in one "barsket," something that I am certain we all agree upon.

Chris

[Magpie]

I've always thought (and often said) that the purpose of the Diary was simply to blacken Maybrick's name, and the forger simply picked what would work best to that end--accuse him of being the biggest bugaboo of the time.

[Caroline Brown]

Me too Caz. Do you have anyone in mind?

Hi Scotty,

Well, several possibles, but I haven't managed to find too many handwriting samples yet.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was a joint effort, between some of those wickedly mischievous late Victorian wags, who had the time on their hands to go in for all sorts of jolly japes, practical jokes and hoaxes.

The humorists of the day all seemed to move in similar circles and had friends and confidants in all the important little places in society, like senior policemen and so on.

I can just imagine the strong feelings circulating in the posh London clubs from the middle of 1889, that the brothers Maybrick had an awful lot to answer for in connection with the "hospitality" shown to Florie, a young highborn American, ever since she set her pretty toes on our green and pleasant land. What a crock of shi* it turned out to be for her, in every way possible.

If that diary had been found in Battlecrease in the aftermath of the trial, by someone literate who had shared those feelings of disgust, I'm not sure if anyone would have taken it seriously. But by God, it would have been humiliating for the surviving Maybricks to see the headlines about such a discovery, and far, far worse to see it serialised in the pages of any reputable newspaper or magazine.

Michael, by all accounts, was considered by many of his peers a cold and conceited social climber, whose rise to fame and fortune was making him act as if he was God's gift. He did not come out of the Battlecrease affair well at all, and many would have given an awful lot to see him taken down several pegs. As it was, he left London society and settled for the backwaters of the Isle of Wight, where the natives were no doubt easier to impress.

The G&S influences I thought I saw in the diary text back in 1999 led me straight on to the brothers Grossmith and Punch, and I foolishly imagined for a while that I might have found Jack along with the diary author, because others had insisted it would have been impossible for an old hoaxer to know or to access certain information contained in the document. Boy did I get soundly spanked and ridiculed from that point on. But actually, the Grossmiths, with all their friends and connections in high places, and known movements, would have been in a great position to know all they needed to know about the murders - and the Maybricks - to have composed that text. And they were into funny little hoaxes too.

Weedon was an actor and humorist who at some point was managing the Pavilion Theatre close to Buck's Row, and once joked with George about a dog that had barked at him in "a Whitechapel accent". George spent his honeymoon in Aigburth so he presumably knew the turf up there. Weedon knew Sims and Macnaghten personally. I see the Maybrick Diary as a kind of pitch black Diary of a Nobody Mark II.

If neither had a hand in it (and I don't think the handwriting matches), I suspect it was someone who moved in similar circles, who would also have had contacts with those in the know, who could provide the info that was not in the public domain at the time. That's why I thought Archaic might be able to help, by tracking down handwriting samples of other humorists of the day, such as burlesque writers and other Punch contributors.

Love,

Caz
X

[Chris G.]

Hi Caz

Yes but Caz I think you are looking at too early an era for your jokester hoaxters. Well first of all the Diary is not especially funny--a tragic, melodramatic psychodrama but no laugh fest. Wouldn't the Grossmiths or another satirist of the period write something funnier? Wouldn't they know how a 19th century gentleman would write?

Chris

[Scott Nelson]

Thank you for the wonderful summary of your thoughts in the post below, Caz. Does everyone see what a wealth of information someone can tell you about their views if you just ask a straight-forward question?

[SirRobertAnderson]

Wouldn't the Grossmiths or another satirist of the period write something funnier?

Chris

I hesitate to answer for Caz, but if I understand her line of thought the idea is that the Diary was written to blacken Maybrick's reputation and so making "him" witty and humorous would cut against the Diarist's goal.

BTW, I posted this on another thread but as it didn't catch any response I will sally forth again. What do we know of Maybrick's educational background? I don't believe I have ever read anything mentioning him going to college, and I do see that at age twenty he was listed as a "shipping clerk".

Wouldn't they know how a 19th century gentleman would write?

Chris

As I said before, he may very well have been the dullard amongst his family. And he was certainly no gentleman; his private life was appalling. The arsenic was the least of it.

I believe Caz is onto a very solid line of questioning and may very well have hit the nail on the head.

[Chris G.]

I hesitate to answer for Caz, but if I understand her line of thought the idea is that the Diary was written to blacken Maybrick's reputation and so making "him" witty and humorous would cut against the Diarist's goal.

BTW, I posted this on another thread but as it didn't catch any response I will sally forth again. What do we know of Maybrick's educational background? I don't believe I have ever read anything mentioning him going to college, and I do see that at age twenty he was listed as a "shipping clerk".

As did brother Michael, James Maybrick attended Liverpool College otherwise known as the Collegiate School, quite a prestigious institution then and now. I understand that the records of the school were destroyed in World War II German bombing. It would have given him a high school level education as it was more of a prep school than a "college" as such. A similar institution of the day was the Liverpool Institute for Boys where Paul McCartney was a pupil. Now closed, the old Liverpool Institute building now houses the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA) endowed by McCartney.

See this Google Books page from Christopher Jones's Maybrick A to Z (p. 182).

As I said before, he may very well have been the dullard amongst his family. And he was certainly no gentleman; his private life was appalling. The arsenic was the least of it.

We might not agree with his lifestyle and his personal habits, but to an objective observer of the day he would have been said to have been of the gentlemanly class.

I believe Caz is onto a very solid line of questioning and may very well have hit the nail on the head.

Any new line of questioning is welcome.

Chris

[SirRobertAnderson]

It would have given him a high school level education as it was more of a prep school than a "college" as such.

I've got the A-Z and my copy says there is little known about Michael and James' education but that it is likely they attended Collegiate given the family's standing and physical location. A census at one point listed the younger boys as "scholars" and Michael as a "Professor" but James had left home at that point so his education is a point of conjecture.

My take is it that he went to a good high school, but didn't go on to college and became a shipping clerk. Of course one can read too much into anything, but I think it tells us something about his intellect. (I am not implying that people that don't go to university are not intelligent; just that when you go to a prestigious high school and then don't go further it is a red flag. Ditto being a shipping clerk.)

[Chris G.]

I am not implying that people that don't go to university are not intelligent; just that when you go to a prestigious high school and then don't go further it is a red flag. Ditto being a shipping clerk.

Mmmmm. I think you are being a bit too judgemental. I went to Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool and worked as a clerk on the Liverpool docks and as a bank clerk before coming to the United States for university. I would rate the education at Quarry Bank as being of a high standard and enough to prepare one for the world even if you did not go on to university, as a number of my peers did not but still were able to function admirably in whatever positions they attained in the job market. In his day, Maybrick may have begun as a shipping clerk but he was much more than that at the time of his passing, was he not? Wouldn't it have been usual at the time for a young man to start at a lowly position and then move upward to higher positions, including management?

Chris

[SirRobertAnderson]

Wouldn't it have been usual at the time for a young man to start at a lowly position and then move upward to higher positions, including management?

Chris

But that's not what Maybrick did. His big break came when he left for the States and got into the cotton trading business.

What is interesting to me after reading the A-Z is how little we really know about James Maybrick's early days.

And I'm not being judgmental about folks that don't go to college. Far from it. Each person's reasons will be different. My dad was extraordinarily bright, far smarter than myself. Yet I've got one of them there Harvard degrees with distinction and other gold medallions pressed onto the parchment. He couldn't go to college.

However, the circumstances of Sir Jim make me suspicious.

1) Came from a good family that appears to have prized education.
2) Went to a fine high school.
3) Appears not to have gone to college when his siblings all did.
4) Became a clerk

Is this a slam dunk case ? Absolutely not. But it does raise questions about how educated the real James Maybrick was, and that in turn raises the issue of how we would have expected him to write in "his" Diary.

[Chris G.]

Hello Sir Bob

I think the real James Maybrick was reasonably well educated for a man of his day, knowledgeable enough, not exactly a dunderhead but certainly no Stephen Hawking or head of the class either. I think we could expect that he would have written reasonably well and not quite in the same way as the whomever who was masquerading as James Maybrick in the Diary that we know and love.

Chris