Lord Orsam's Blog

[Gary Barnett]

Incidentally, my copy of The Islington Murder Mystery still hasn’t arrived. Perhaps there’s been a run on the title?

There have been an impressive 7 reviews of the book on Amazon in the 8 years since it was first published, so it’s clearly selling well. Perhaps Waterstones only stockpiled 7 copies and are having to search high and low to fill my order. Or perhaps they are punishing me for my unhinged ‘one man war’ against their response to Covid19.

[Paul Butler]

Orsam started another attack... sorry, article thus:

Let's talk about the watch!
One of the world's leading self-appointed experts of antique timepieces wrote an article in the 2017 book, 'Jack The Ripper: 25 Years of Mystery: Research and Conclusion', entitled 'The Maybrick Watch: Archaeology in Gold'.

O, joy of joys - yet another attack on a researcher where he deploys his trademark sneering ‘expert’ accusation (yawn.) Unfortunately I didn’t get any further into the detail because I was sidetracked by his Lordship’s misuse of a preposition - yet again.

Surely it’s an expert on or in not of. A couple of posts back we had him saying, ‘This is the state of knowledge by a person...’ By? Shouldn’t it be of?

This is the master of English prose, the man who brags of spotting mistakes in the OED.

With any luck The Islington Murder Mystery was proof read by someone with a less cavalier attitude to prepositions. It’s a pity Michael Barratt isn’t still available. He’d have done the job for a few pints.

That'll be me Gary. I shan't piss myself off by reading it. I've probably seen the insides of more Victorian timepieces in the past forty years than that idiot has eaten hot dinners. It having been my profession. What a pillock.

[Gary Barnett]

That'll be me Gary. I shan't piss myself off by reading it. I've probably seen the insides of more Victorian timepieces in the past forty years than that idiot has eaten hot dinners. It having been my profession. What a pillock.

Ah, so your ‘self-appointment’ was by virtue of your having worked in the field for much of your adult life. Not the impression one gets from Hostile Tone.

You are wise not to have read it. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of the argument, but the tone is the usual dismissive sneering one which in my opinion completely invalidates Orsam’s argument. Who cares if he’s right when he’s such a nasty piece of work.

[Caroline Brown]

The sad thing is, he's not even worth suing. How many people out there are still visiting him in his bat cave for their dose of brain washing? I believe the latest 'guidelines for dummies' are to limit your visits to once a year and keep as much distance as you can from the toxic fumes of subjective reasoning and empty rhetoric.

The strange thing is that Orsam and Mike Barrett actually have one talent in common. They could both make even the tallest story sound like the God's honest truth to their little band of believers.

Regarding the watch, Mike boasted to Alan Gray that he had put the scratches inside it himself. If not even Orsam swallows that load of old cobblers, where does that leave Mike's boast to inside knowledge of the diary's creation? Up the Khyber, that's where.

Carry on everyone.

Love,

Caz
X

[Gary Barnett]

The sad thing is, he's not even worth suing. How many people out there are still visiting him in his bat cave for their dose of brain washing? I believe the latest 'guidelines for dummies' are to limit your visits to once a year and keep as much distance as you can from the toxic fumes of subjective reasoning and empty rhetoric.

The strange thing is that Orsam and Mike Barrett actually have one talent in common. They could both make even the tallest story sound like the God's honest truth to their little band of believers.

Regarding the watch, Mike boasted to Alan Gray that he had put the scratches inside it himself. If not even Orsam swallows that load of old cobblers, where does that leave Mike's boast to inside knowledge of the diary's creation? Up the Khyber, that's where.

Carry on everyone.

Love,

Caz
X

Meanwhile, in a bat cave somewhere in Wuhan...

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

[Caroline Brown]

In a sense, your statement goes to the heart of the matter. The same people who argue that Barrett/Graham were ‘incapable’ of creating the Diary tend to be the same people who argue that the diary’s text shows great sensitivity, an insight into the mind of a killer, mountains of obscure research, a knowledge of Gilbert and Sullivan, an early and inexplicable access to Metropolitan Police files, etc., whereas those who believe Barrett/Graham were capable of creating the Diary, tend to see the text as a ‘great farrago of nonsense,’ filled with repetition, all the usual and predictable clichés about the case, the odd malaprop or two, and was very probably cobbled together using only three or four secondary sources, particularly the books by Donald Rumbelow and Bernard Ryan.

If an abstract painting by an unknown hand showed up on the market, one’s guess as to the artist would depend on whether the viewer saw the work as a potential rival to Jackson Pollock, or as something thrown together by a chimpanzee in a few minutes.

Hi R.J,

I see what you mean, but I was confining myself to those who have been bowled over by Mike Barrett to such an extent that he has to have had a creative hand in the diary. This belief inevitably infects their judgement of the diary itself.

I read the diary first, without any preconceptions about who its author might be, or taking into account the circumstances of its emergence and those most closely involved. I don't personally see it as something to be marked, as if it were a student's essay, or a work of literature that was written to impress anyone. On the contrary, I doubt its author ever expected it to be pored over and examined for spelling mistakes or grammatical errors, and marked 'C minus - could do better'. I have long suspected the author intended to have Sir Jim write poetry and prose like a buffoon, in line with the personality being portrayed. This wasn't a hoaxer putting his own best goods in the bookshop window; it was someone having fun with the goods his fictional Sir Jim was putting in his private diary. I do wonder what you'd expect or prefer to have seen in a diary by a fictional Jack the Ripper from Liverpool.

The lack of any attempt to make the handwriting look right for the real JM supports my hunch that this was a funny little hoax, which its author didn't write to be taken seriously as a serial killer's true confession, and never dreamed it would be, by people on both sides of the fence and even those getting piles from sitting on it. I like to think our unidentified diarist would be, or would have been, highly bemused by the reaction.

I don't care when it was created, R.J. That can't be changed by wishful thinking. It may have been written as recently as the early 1990s as far as I know, but that still wouldn't mean Mike or Anne had to be in on it. An author who wanted to remain anonymous would have needed an innocent abroad to breathe life into it. Enter Mike - job done.

If people want to get their knickers in a twist about the subject, that's entirely their choice. But if I had written the diary, I would certainly continue to be bemused and amused by all the sweaty-palmed reactions to it.

And then there's the watch. There's always the watch...

Love,

Caz
X

[Caroline Brown]

Meanwhile, in a bat cave somewhere in Wuhan...

“Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!”

"What a COUNTry!"

[Gary Barnett]

I’ve taken on board Caz’s ‘advice for dummies’. Visiting this thread no more than once a year is a sensible idea. We could pick a date, nominate it as ‘Orsam Day’ and reconvene each year on that day to discuss the contribution made to the field by Lord O in the previous 12 months. But what date to choose?��

I know! April 1st.

See you then.

[R. J. Palmer]

Regarding the watch, Mike boasted to Alan Gray that he had put the scratches inside it himself. If not even Orsam swallows that load of old cobblers, where does that leave Mike's boast to inside knowledge of the diary's creation? Up the Khyber, that's where.

Hi Caz. What Mr. Gray describes sounds a wee bit like Korsakoff's Syndrome, but hey, I'm no neurologist!

Either way, if compulsive lying was evidence of innocence, the prisons would be nearly empty.

I guess the long and short of it is that I can't get past the implications of Martin Earl's advertisement, nor Baxendale's solubility test, nor Anne Graham's behavior, so when it comes to the Maybrick Diary, I'm stranded on the Isle of Dr. Orsam, with no passing ship in sight, nor even the prospect of ever seeing one. Indeed, I've been on the Isle before I was even aware of Dr. Orsam. Captain Skinner's schooner Floorboards sailed by one afternoon, but it was, in my opinion, a mirage that evaporated the closer one stared at it.

Several books have been written about the Piltdown Man hoax, and a number of theoretical co-conspirators have been named, including (inevitably?) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There is no bitterness like sectarian bitterness, and they fight over the details, but almost everyone agrees that Charles Dawson had something to do with the hoax. Barrett is Dawson.

See you next April.

Re: oönskad kritik. Jag är imponerad av att Christer Holmgren håller på tungan!

(I hope I didn't butcher that too much!)

[Cogidubnus]

I’ve taken on board Caz’s ‘advice for dummies’. Visiting this thread no more than once a year is a sensible idea. We could pick a date, nominate it as ‘Orsam Day’ and reconvene each year on that day to discuss the contribution made to the field by Lord O in the previous 12 months. But what date to choose?��

I know! April 1st.

See you then.

I prefer the 29th, or better still the 30th of February...

[R. J. Palmer]

I prefer the 29th, or better still the 30th of February...

I had a friend who was born on February 29th. Oddly, his only brother was also born on that date--eight years earlier.

I never learned whether the parents had strange mating rituals, or whether they did it deliberately in order to save on birthday gifts. Sadly, my friend died of cancer a few years ago, at the age of what he called '16.'

[Caroline Brown]

Either way, if compulsive lying was evidence of innocence, the prisons would be nearly empty.

It depends what the crime is, R.J. There is no clear proof in this case of any crime being committed, is there? If the diary could have been created, for example, by an unknown individual who died before it got into Mike the compulsive liar's hands, that person was unable to defend their reasons for writing it, and it may be that there was no intention to deceive, and it was just a silly prank that they never dreamed would be taken for a serious attempt to frame JM as JtR. I'm not sure Mike ever gave a convincing reason for the diary's existence, did he?

If the thing was found and 'liberated' from Paul Dodd's house, and Mike only learned about this at a later date, he may have feared he had committed a crime by making money out of something that rightly belonged to Dodd, which would help to explain his vehement and consistent denial of the perfect provenance. You might ask yourself why a compulsive liar would not have lied about that too, and grabbed the Battlecrease bone with both hands, once it became clear that Dodd was not going to get him or anyone else charged with theft. And yet you believe Mike was innocently telling the truth when he said the diary never came from Dodd's house.

If Mike lied about pretty much everything he ever said about the diary, because he was a compulsive liar, I reckon it's a trifle risky to sift through everything and pick out just the bits that you need to have been true, in order to maintain your belief that he must have been involved at the creation stage of the diary.

See you back here on April 1st 2021, or February 30th, whichever is the later.

Love,

Caz
X

[Trevor Marriott]

It depends what the crime is, R.J. There is no clear proof in this case of any crime being committed, is there?
X

There was an offence of obtaining property by deception, now known as fraud by false representation.

The police would also have had the powers to arrest a person on suspicion of committing these offences.

www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[Howard Brown]

May 10, 2020

https://www.orsam.co.uk/news.htm

[Kattrup]

Updated, table of contents:

We start, of course, with the People's Favourite Lord Orsam Says... but this one became so long that Lord Orsam had to create some emergency overflow articles starting with Oh Carolina! which responds to additional posts about the Maybrick Diary by Caroline Morris and then onto The Inside Story of Post #506which deals with a single post by the same person. We also have Every One's A Skinner being a compilation of the thoughts of Keith Skinner in his own words. For the conspiracy lovers amongst us we have an exciting new overflow feature called Lord Orsam's Conspiracy Corner. Then we have two new articles. Firstly Matching Boxes in which Lord Orsam takes a look at that darned empty tin match box and then, for those not so interested in the Maybrick Diary, never fear because we have Lord Orsam's response to the latest Hainsworth book about Druitt, Bridge Over Troubled Water