Albert realised by this time that his watch might be important. He told his brother Robbie about it and during the first week in June they decided to telephone Robert Smith. Towards the end of the month they also sought the support of Wallasey solicitor, Richard Nicholas. ‘I would never have dreamed of representing Albert if I was not convinced of his honesty,’ Mr Nicholas reassured me when we went to his office.
By this time, Paul Feldman had also telephoned Albert and Robbie and the brothers offered to meet him at his home on July 5th, with Richard Nicholas. They were all very excited. Paul was immediately ‘sold’ on the watch but that visit sowed in his mind the seeds of an imaginative story within a story, which eventually led to his conclusion that there were two watches — one which Albert really bought in Wallasey and for which he has a receipt, and the actual Maybrick watch which had been in Albert’s family for years. More sensationally still he also became convinced that Albert Johnson was a Maybrick!
It is an intriguing and confusing story based on the Feldman team’s discovery of a hitherto unknown nest of Maybricks and of a birthday book belonging to an Olga Maybrick Ellison who died in 1989. The book notes the name of a Mrs Johnston (as opposed to Johnson), 160 Goodwin Avenue, Bidston.
Was this name wrongly spelt and was there truly a connection?
Olga’s adopted daughter, Norma Meagher, is an Ellison by birth and so Paul Feldman’s researcher Carol Emmas went to see her in Birkenhead in July 1995. Norma recalled that in the mid-1980s Olga had told her ‘there’s a watch that James Maybrick had and someone in Goodwin Avenue has got it.’
The focus was now on Goodwin Avenue. Robbie Johnson confirmed that he and Albert had indeed lived there in the 1960s. Albert Johnson took all this with a wry smile and a pinch of salt. But he maintained that he bought the watch exactly how he said he did. So if he was a Maybrick, he said that his stumbling across this particular watch ‘is a miracle’ and being a deeply religious man, this is exactly what he meant.
Sally and I meantime had been pursuing our own line of research. We went to see Ron and Suzanne Murphy whose little shop in Sea View Road, Wallasey, was about to achieve national fame. A second meeting in February 1997 confirmed their original story and their astonishment at what had happened. ‘We’d never have sold the watch if we’d realised it could be valuable’, they laugh. ‘Some time after Mr Johnson got the watch he kept coming back and asking questions about where it came from. We honestly got a bit fed up and thought there must be something wrong. We even offered to buy it back but he said “no”. Now we know why!’
About eighteen years ago, Suzanne’s father had given them the watch when he retired, along with all the other gold stock from his shop in Lancaster, Firth Antiques. The watch was not then in working order and eventually in 1992 they sent it, with some other watches, to Tim Dundas, of The Clock Workshop, West Kirby, Wirral. He was asked to repair the movement. Later, before it was finally placed in their own shop window, Ron himself cleaned the watch and it was then that he noticed the scratches in the back. ‘I tried to buff them out with jeweller’s rouge’, he recalled ruefully.
After Albert’s discovery of what the scratches really were, the Murphys tried to find out more from Suzanne’s father who had brought the watch to him all those years before. But he was already ill with the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, and all he could recall was buying it from a chap with a Liverpool accent.
Before returning to London after that first visit, Sally and I took the watch to the Prescott Watch Museum for a professional technical description. We saw the curator, John Griffiths.
‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘a gold pocket watch hallmarked for 1846/7 at London, the casemaker’s mark being RS in an oval, the inner back marked 20789 and the initials J.O engraved in a cartouche on the outside of the back: the full plate, fusee, English lever movement inscribed on the back, Verity, Lancaster and numbered 1286.’
It was from David Thompson, superintendent of the Aladdin’s cave of a watch and clock department deep within the British Museum in London that we learned exactly what this meant. Henry Verity ran a family watch retailing business that had been founded in Lancaster around 1830. R. S. were the initials of Ralph Samuel, who by 1845 was a partner with Jacob Lewis Samuel and Co., watch and dial makers of 54 Wood Street, Liverpool, and of Clerkenwell, London. Mr Thompson was puzzled about the numbers H 9/3 and 1275 which he thought could have been produced by the implement that made the other scratches… although it could have been a repair number. Certainly, he said, the 20789 on the inside rim was a repair mark. ‘Although I have not examined the watch scientifically,’ he said, ‘I would not have any immediate reason to doubt the age of the scratches’.
It was Richard Nicholas who suggested that the brothers should take the watch to be forensically tested in the hope that they could prove the age of the scratches. Albert agreed. He knew he had nothing to fear. Richard Nicholas arranged for the brothers to see Dr Stephen Turgoose of the Corrosion Protection Centre at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). On 28th July 1993 Albert and Robbie took the watch to Manchester, in a state of considerable excitement, and left it there.
The result of that examination by scanning electron microscope was ready by August 10th 1993 and sent to Albert. It read:
On the basis of the evidence… especially the order in which the markings were made, it is clear that the engravings pre-date the vast majority of superficial surface scratch marks (all of those examined). The wear apparent on many of the engravings, evidenced by the rounded edges of the markings and ‘polishing out’ in places, would indicate a substantial age for the engravings. The actual age would depend on the cleaning or polishing regime employed, and any definition of number of years has a great degree of uncertainty and, to some extent, must remain speculation. Given these qualifications, I would be of the opinion that the engravings are likely to date back more than tens of years and possibly much longer.
‘However, whilst there is no evidence which would indicate a recent (last few years) origin of the engravings, it must be emphasised that there are no features observed which conclusively prove the age of the engravings. They could have been produced recently and deliberately artificially aged by polishing, but this would have been a complex multi-stage process using a variety of different tools, with intermediate polishing of artifical wearing stages. Also, many of the features are only resolved by the scanning electron microscope, not being readily apparent in optical microscopy, and so, if they were of recent origin, the engraver would have to be aware of the potential evidence available from this technique, indicating a considerable skill and scientific awareness.
This report had cost Albert Johnson several hundred pounds of his own money, which was proof enough to me that there was no skulduggery afoot. Had Albert forged the scratches himself, or was collaborating with anyone who had, he could not have dared to throw himself on the mercy of an independent scientist such as Dr Turgoose.
In January 1994, Albert agreed to submit the watch — at my expense this time — to a second test. It was taken to the Interface Analysis Centre at Bristol University. There, the eminent metallurgist Dr Robert Wild tested it under his electron microscope using a technique of scanning auger microscopy. His findings were better than we dared to hope. Like Dr Turgoose, Dr Wild photographed slivers of brass embedded within the scratch marks. They were blackened with age. The penultimate paragraph of his detailed report (which also stresses the need for much more lengthy work to pinpoint the precise age of the scratches) reads:
Provided the watch has remained in a normal environment, it would seem likely that the engravings were at least of several tens of years age. This would agree with the findings of Dr Turgoose (1993) and in my opinion it is unlikely that anyone would have sufficient expertise to implant aged, brass particles into the base of the engravings.
Dr Wild told Robert Smith privately that he personally felt the scratches could be as old as 1888/9.
So both Dr Turgoose and Dr Wild agreed that the likelihood of anyone acquiring the considerable technical and scientific expertise necessary to create scratches that would pass their test was very remote. Both agreed, too, that the scratches were at least several decades old, thus ruling out any possibility that the watch is a modern forgery. But even these reports did not convert the disbelievers. As late as July 7th 1997 Martin Fido (who, like all the other critics, had never met Albert Johnson) wrote to Keith Skinner: ‘while recognising the impressive two concurring lab reports on the watch I do not think they have proved the watch to be genuine; in fact without having any easy explanation for the scientific reports I think it most probably a modern forgery and most probably inspired by the diary.’
Vociferous as they were being about the Diary itself, for the most part the press response to the arrival of the watch was a disappointing, thunderous silence. Because they could not explain it, they chose to ignore it. Meanwhile Albert — who was living on a very modest income — turned down an offer from America of $40,000 for the watch. He was not interested in money.
Then, Stanley Dangar appeared from North Eastern Spain. He was a watch expert, a former member of the British Horological Society and a man with a mission. He came to England from Spain especially to see the watch and invited the Johnsons to London at his own expense. He prepared a very detailed and useful professional description of the watch, but of course was not then in a position to comment on the scratch marks.
Stanley Dangar, for reasons I never understood, decided the scratches had been recently engraved and that Bristol and Manchester Universities were wrong. He also believed the watch to be a lady’s watch. He talked to me of a ‘conspiracy’ led by Paul Feldman and he joined in the battle on the Internet to this effect and said that he was arranging simulation tests in Germany to prove that brass particles could easily be embedded in the watch artificially. Those tests did not work. ‘We had a little difficulty,’ he told me later. In fact, by April 1997, the laboratories had still failed to make brass particles stick into gold.
Stanley Dangar invited Alan Gray, a Liverpool private detective, to take statements from Tim Dundas and the Murphys. The statement from Tim Dundas, which then appeared on the Internet, said that when he cleaned the watch there were no scratches. ‘The marks on the watch relating to “Jack the Ripper” have been made on the watch since I examined and repaired it in 1992, the whole suggestion that this watch belonged to “Jack the Ripper” is completely false.’
But he also told Paul Feldman in 1994 that the watch he examined had a white face with the name ‘Verity’ on the front in black letters. Albert Johnson’s watch does not. Neither did Mr Dundas notice any initials on the back. Perhaps he had simply forgotten after all this time — or were there indeed two watches?
The Murphys are indignant. ‘He was asked only to repair the movement, not clean the watch — he would not have been needed to look inside the back at all. He would not have noticed the scratches, anyway. After all, we tried to clean them and simply because they were so faint we didn’t realise what they were! There is absolutely no doubt that the watch Mr Johnson bought from us is the watch you have seen with the scratches in the back’.
There is a sad postscript. In August 1995 Robbie Johnson was killed by a motorcycle while on holiday in southern Spain, so he never knew the end of the story. But his untimely death was regarded as ‘convenient’ by those supporting the conspiracy theory. I doubt that anyone seriously thought I was involved, but the bizarre insinuations were by now being made that not only was I an accomplice to forgery and fraud, but I was now a party to murder as well!
Robbie had a sense of humour. He would have been amused. Eventually, Stanley Dangar changed his mind and announced the latest information (not yet released) had now persuaded him that the Diary and the scratches on the watch are genuine.
In that first year, before publication, I realised that all the theories in the world would not be enough. I needed to back my own growing belief that the Diary and the watch were material evidence of an historic drama, fired by uncontrollable passions and resulting in the complete mental disintegration of one man — James Maybrick.
I was never convinced, even in those days, that science alone would give us the answers to the origins of the diary and, in the light of everything that has happened since, that original hunch has proved correct.
The watch is still ticking loudly, like a time bomb amidst the silence of its critics. The message inside it cannot be a fake. Together Albert Johnson’s watch and Michael Barrett’s Diary present powerful support for my belief that James Maybrick, a man obsessed by time was indeed, Jack the Ripper.
15
THEY WILL SUFFER JUST AS I. I WILL SEE TO THAT.
In the months before the launch of the book in October 1993, an epidemic swept England which attacked us all. We called it Rippermania. I was quite unprepared for its devastating and long-lasting repercussions.
Perhaps we should have been more alert to the dangers. There had been a little advance publicity, although we had been wary of leaking too much information. The Liverpool Echo had written an article ‘Murder on her Mind’, describing Sally (who was calling herself Sally MacDonald!) as Miss Marple. Then, in a two-page spread, The Liverpool Post finally told the sensational story as relayed to them by Phil Maddox, now a public relations director, about ‘the man on the train who may or may not own the Diary of Jack the Ripper.’
On April 7th 1993, Robert Smith met one of the Sunday Times’ most senior executives to discuss serialisation of the book. Well aware that the Sunday Times, of all newspapers, would need to examine and test the Diary carefully before going ahead, Robert Smith offered them an option agreement. For £5,000 against a final purchase price of £75,000, the Sunday Times were given access to the Diary, my preliminary commentary and any consultants on the project. Robert Smith also insisted that any experts employed by them would have to sign the standard confidentiality statement to which we were all signatories. This procedure is intended to protect both publishers and newspapers from the common practice whereby one paper attempts to print the major revelations of a book, pre-empting exclusive serialisation by another.
The Sunday Times agreed to the terms but made a highly unusual and, with hindsight, suspicious condition: should the Sunday Times decide not to go ahead with serialisation it would be entitled ‘to explain publicly why it did not proceed with the purchase but only after the commencement of the serialisation by another newspaper or on publication of the book…whichever should happen first.’
This clause clearly signalled the Sunday Times’ intention to get a good story, if nothing else, for its £5,000. I wonder if there was ever any real intention to serialise the book. However, we were confident enough in the material amassed so far to believe they would treat the Diary objectively, at least as a complex but exciting document, worthy of a place in Ripper history. I knew that there was a great deal more work to be done — nine months writing and research on a very limited budget could not do full justice to the Diary. But we did not fear an exposé because we had nothing to hide.
In America, on July 30th 1993, the Washington Post ran a story expressing doubts about the Diary. As a result the intending US publisher, Warner, commissioned their own investigation and issued a press statement that if the report were critical they would withdraw despite having made over 200,000 advance sales to booksellers.
Kenneth Rendell, a respected American antiquarian bookseller, who had been involved in exposing the Hitler diaries, was appointed to co-ordinate the Warner investigation. On August 20th, Robert Smith flew to Chicago in a spirit of friendly co-operation. He took the Diary and a number of key documents.
A team of hand-picked experts had been hurriedly assembled by Mr Rendell. This included Maureen Owens, former president of the American Questioned Document Examiners; Joe Nickell, who is best known for his work on the Turin shroud and his book Pen, Ink and Evidence; research ink chemist Robert
Kuranz and scientist Rod McNeil, who had devised an ion migration test that he claimed could date when ink was placed on paper. Rod McNeil, we were told, had worked for the FBI and the American Secret Service.
It was now 16 months since Michael Barrett had brought me the Diary; I had read it again and again, I was familiar with the emotional twists and turns on every page. I knew that all the people working by now on the various aspects of the investigation were involved because they were genuinely fascinated. As time went on and files overflowed, the Diary became more, not less, compelling. Yet after only two weeks, and on self-contradictory and flimsy evidence, the American team decided that ‘on the evidence presented in the book’ the Diary was a forgery. In other words they were sitting in judgement on my book — and not on the Diary itself.
This was despite the fact that Robert Kuranz’s test on the ink and paper agreed with Dr Eastaugh’s that there was no element in either, inconsistent with the date of 1888/9. Rod McNeil’s ion migration test revealed that he judged the Diary to have been written in 1921 — give or take 12 years. No one commented that McNeil’s report placed the Diary within 20 years of the date that we believed it to have been written and up to 84 years before its publication in 1993!
But, on the basis of this report, Warner panicked and withdrew and press headlines ricocheted around the world amid cries of ‘Fake!’ Almost no one reported that that very same week Hyperion, the publishing company owned by Disney, made Robert Smith an offer to buy US rights and to publish the book in the same month that Warner had announced. Because of the furore in the USA, Hyperion decided to include in their version of The Diary of Jack the Ripper both the Rendell report and Robert Smith’s rebuttal. It is worth repeating part of what each had to say.
The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick Page 23