The Diary of Jack the Ripper - The Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick

by Harrison, Shirley

  BRISTOL UNIVERSITY January 1994

  Technique: Thin Layer Chromotography

  Result:

  Research ink chemist Dr Eastaugh and I took the Diary to the Interface Analysis Centre of Bristol University where Dr Robert Wild ran a test on equipment similar to that used by McNeil. He concluded that such a test could not be carried out as claimed. He also said that not enough had been published about this particular test.

  ROD McNEIL October 1993

  Result:

  Rod McNeil made a statement in October 1993 which somewhat diminished that which he had given to Kenneth Rendell in September: ‘It is my strong opinion based on the Auger Sims results that the document was… created prior to 1970… as with any scientific test there is always the possibility of error associated either with the operator or the techniques itself…’

  DIAMINE INK pre 1992

  The formula of Diamine ink as it was made prior to 1992 (and if Michael Barrett forged the Diary would have been the ink sold to him) is as follows:

  Gallic Acid 0.84%

  Tannic Acid 0.42%

  Anhydrous sulphate 1.26%

  Nigrosine 0.42%

  Dextrine 1.88%

  Oxalic Acid 0.52%

  Chloroacetamide 0.26%

  Artilene Black 2.32%

  (Artilene black is a proprietary pigment dispersion from Clariant (formerly Sandoz U.K.) containing 40% of Carbon Black. Its other constituents are not relevant as they form no part of the dry ink residue.)

  Water 92.08%

  TOTAL 100%

  ANALYSIS FOR INDUSTRY October 1994

  No 409011

  Technique: Gas liquid chromatography

  Six small black dots of ink from the Diary were examined. Together these weighed 0.000583g. ‘Probably in excess of 90% of this comprised the paper of the same size to which the ink dot was attached.’

  Result: Chloroacetamide was present at a level of 6.5 parts per million.

  LEEDS UNIVERSITY November 1994

  On November 19th 1994 Keith Skinner and I took the Diary to Leeds where samples of the ink were scraped from various parts of the Diary. We also took some indisputably Victorian documents dated 1881 and 1887.

  Technique: SEM/EDX

  Thin layer chromatography

  Optical microscopy

  Result: The first test indicated the presence of a minute amount of chloroacetamide — which Leeds attributed to contamination from the control. I was unaware of this at the time and did not request, as has been suggested, a second test.

  The laboratory, of their own volition, conducted a second test. This then showed: No chloroacetamide. The Diary ink is not easily soluble. It is of the iron gallotannate type. There is no sodium. The Diary ink is the same as that on the Victorian documents.

  * * *

  These results were loudly rejected by the anti-Diary consortium. A quite unparalleled amount of paper flew from office to office and between laboratories. I was urged to do more tests, to ask Analysis and Leeds to re-stage their experiments on exactly the same footing. I wrote to every ink expert and scientific group I could find. Typical of the response was another letter from Dr Morris of Dow Chemicals. ‘You may find that the first large scale commercial use of chloroacetamide in ink was in 19XX [sic] but that does not rule out the possibility that some small shop made its own ink and tried various additives.’

  This was all very confusing.

  I asked for estimates for new tests from a range of laboratories and was quoted anything from £50 a hour to £400 per day or a total cost of about £2,000. These are apparently standard charges but were way beyond my reach. At the suggestion of Leeds University I contacted ICI at Wilton Research Centre, where was housed the finest equipment in Europe for looking at ink. Dr David Briggs replied: ‘All this amounts to several days’ work at the cost of £1,000 a day. I have to stress once again that this is not a simple standard test, far from it … Given the great uncertainties I therefore do not recommend that you pursue this approach.’

  I felt, in all honesty, I could do no more. There was one more line of action from which I felt we all might learn. I invited Alec Voller to see the Diary in London. He was then the research chemist for Diamine and was, I knew, a man who lived and breathed ink. He had told me ‘we are a dying breed’. He is — he did not want to be paid!

  ALEC VOLLER Bsc October 1995

  On Friday October 30th 1995 Alec Voller came to the offices of Smith Gryphon where he met Sally Evemy, Robert Smith, Keith Skinner, Martin Howells and me. These notes are taken from the tape recording of that meeting. The full transcript is available on request.

  Mr Voller was handed the Diary and looked at it for less than two minutes before saying:

  ‘That is not Diamine ink. What is conclusive is the physical appearance. If this were Diamine Manuscript ink or at least Diamine ink of recent manufacture, that is to say within the last 20 or 30 years, it would be blacker and more opaque than this. The opacity of this is very much poorer than one would have from Diamine Manuscript ink even if it were diluted. You see dilution would simply not produce this sort of effect.

  ‘Assuming this staining is glue… there you see a dot of ink which is beneath the glue so it’s been there a very very long time. The glue does not have the feel of modern synthetic glue…’

  At this point Mr Voller is studying the writing closely;

  ‘The colour isn’t right… From your point of view this is good news actually. As far as the dyestuff is concerned there have always been three possibilities. One was nigrosine; the other two were acid blue 93… and the third possibility which would have been distinctly bad news for you, naphthol blue-black which wasn’t discovered till 1891. This is definitely nigrosine. This means it is not a registrar’s ink, it is definitely a manuscript ink. And since Diamine Manuscript ink is the only one of its kind for many a long year and this is definitely not Diamine Manuscript ink, it puts the penmanship some considerable distance in the past.

  ‘The fading that’s occurred is quite characteristic of permanent manuscript inks of some considerable age. They don’t fade evenly; you get two consecutive lines of writing, one of which remains quite legible and one fades badly.

  ‘You see this sort of thing is very characteristic. He says “I am tired, very tired”. Obviously the pen has not been dipped in the ink again until he reaches the first word of the second sentence ‘I’ and yet the early words of the sentence have faded more than the next two words, despite the fact there was presumably more ink on the nib at this point…

  ‘Now with a modern1 ink the effect you would get in the early part of the sentence would be a more opaque and denser appearance than the end of the sentence… but the reverse is true here. ‘You see the same thing here “The devil take the Bastard I am cold curse the bastard Lowry for making me rip…” He has obviously dipped his pen in the ink at the ‘I’ and if you proceed along the sentence you can see the way the ink has faded very badly… you can see the irregular fading… with a modern ink you would get a regular fade-out along that line.

  The critical point here is the length of time the ink has been on the paper… you mention powdered inks… I daresay one can find them… we have 7,000 sachets tucked away in some cobwebby corner of Diamine. But if you add the appropriate quantity of water to the powder it would still look like new ink on the paper…’

  Keith notices a strong line through ‘shiny knife’:

  ‘It is this sort of thing that rules out a modern diluted ink… you simply wouldn’t get as bold a line as that.

  ‘Here is a line with very little fading.’ [‘tis love that will finish me’] This last line is quite badly faded except for the beginning [‘tis love that I regret’]

  At this point Mr Voller took the Diary to the window.

  ‘This is as I thought… it’s barely visible… in one or two places there is some very slight bronzing2 …tilted to the light it can just be seen… ‘the children they distract me so I ripped OPEN’�
� the bronzing is in the last word… There is some more visible on the words ‘building up’. This tells me that it is genuinely old… This bronzing effect is a chemical process which is not fully understood… you only get pronounced bronzing where the ink is a blue-black that is to say when the ink is not nigrosine. With a nigrosine base the bronzing is usually less obvious. The dyestuff here is clearly nigrosine… I have seen a considerable number of documents like that where there has been very little bronzing…

  ‘If you made up the ink in the way it is supposed to have been made up (as a modern forgery) it simply wouldn’t have faded to the extent that parts of the Diary have faded… To create this document as a modern fake you would have to start with a person of at least my experience of ink… you would have to produce a convincing effect of ageing. At the very start you need the right ink and where are you going to get the right ink….

  ‘This is where a forger would run into difficulties. There has never been a lot of literature on the subject of writing inks3… this kind of literature tends to be written by experts for other experts and a certain amount of knowledge is assumed… very often, for example, literature of that sort does not always give complete formulations… This brings us neatly to the last point… Even if you can find something that gives you a complete formulation I have yet to see one that tells you how to put it together… it’s like making a cake… to make a proper ferro-gallic ink takes a week of doing things at the right time and in the right order… there would have to be a preservative in the ink. If one assumes the ink is genuinely old, as I do, you are left only with phenol. Phenol is not too difficult to test for… the problem is quantity… you are talking about very, very minute amounts.

  ‘In Diamine you have 92% water 7.91% is the constituent parts of Diamine and of that 0.26% is the preservative chloroacetamide… Professor Roberts of UMIST [University of Manchester Science and Technology Department] has mentioned that chloroacetamide was used as a preservative in cotton, rag and wool products and paper was commonly made from rag in those days… How one would produce the irregular fading that occurs in the Diary I simply don’t know… If I were going to try and forge something I wouldn’t use a pseudo old ink at all. I could formulate an ink that would give you the right appearance… but of course it wouldn’t stand up to chemical analysis.’

  Would finding phenol as the preservative in the ink be pretty conclusive?

  ‘You could get phenol in a Victorian powdered ink… you could have it analysed… then you would have to ask… did it come from the ink or the paper? Phenol may be derived from the paper, which is an incredibly complex bag of chemical substances… even finding phenol wouldn’t be conclusive because whilst its use as an ink preservative has virtually ceased it was used between the wars.

  ‘The relevant British Standard (BS3484) demands the use of Phenol Blue Black ink, even today.’

  Mr Voller has since considered the suggestion that the Diary fading might have been produced by an accelerated fading apparatus or even a hand-held sun ray lamp. But the Diary fading is irregular and such an effect cannot be achieved artificially. ‘Besides,’ he says, ‘any exposure to U.V. radiation that was harsh enough to simulate a century’s worth of natural fading would also have a savage bleaching effect on the paper. There was nothing about the appearance of the Diary, as I recall, to suggest this.

  ‘It’s hard to be dogmatic because the rate at which fading occurs is variable but… certainly the ink did not go on the paper within recent years… you are looking at a document which in my opinion is at least 90 years old and may be older… I came with an open mind and if I thought it was a modern ink I would have said so.’

  _______________

  1 The term ‘modern ink’ may be taken throughout to indicate a nonpermanent writing ink. The comments concerning it would apply equally to an old non-permanent ink which had been on the paper for some considerable time.

  2 This term refers to the lustrous brown colour which sometimes develops in permanent inks after many years on paper. Sometimes it is very obvious, sometimes it can only be detected if the light falls on the paper from a certain angle. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen at all.

  3 In pre World War II days, there were any number of very small ink manufacturers run by people who were owner-manager and chemist rolled into one. Each had his own jealously guarded secret formulation, not to be revealed to anyone else. This is one of the reasons there is so little literature on the subject of writing inks. Few people were willing to share information.

  22

  I PRAY WHOEVER SHOULD READ THIS WILL FIND IT IN THEIR HEART TO FORGIVE ME.

  We are still on the yellow brick road to the end of the rainbow but despite the many allegations, no crocks of gold have been found, no fortunes made. The Diary continues to have an astonishingly powerful hold on all those who have responded to the challenge of interpreting its contents, whatever their final conclusions. Its influence has frequently been far from benign and the vitriol it has attracted from those convinced it is the product of a clumsy plot, has been beyond belief.

  On the other hand, the Diary has drawn the interest of a great many men and women of considerable integrity and status, from widely differing areas of expertise. They have willingly and often unpaid, spent hours of time and reams of paper dissecting its content. It will not go away. Investigating the Diary has become a labour of love.

  It was gratifying to discover that in the 1997 Reader’s Digest Encylopaedia of Essential Knowledge, James Maybrick is mentioned as a leading Ripper suspect.

  If, as Billy Graham claimed, the Diary existed in his family, at least as far back as 1943, it poses many questions. Before this date there were very few source books for Ripper material and access to archives was more difficult. The creation of a forgery at that date would have been extremely complicated.

  It is, of course, possible that Billy was lying and his daughter Anne continues to propagate the lie. Anne’s story has been likened to that of the Cottingley Fairies and the schoolgirl cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. In 1918, their controversial photographs of real life fairies at the bottom of their garden cast a spell whose magic was to captivate the public. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of many who were utterly taken in. Despite Frances’ confessions before she died, in 1986, that they had faked the photographs all that time ago, there were many who did not accept her admission. The Cottingley Fairies have not yet fluttered out of sight.

  Bill Waddell was one of those who have spent many hours talking with Anne and he told me, ‘If Anne Graham is lying she is making a far better job of it than any of the professional criminals I have met in my life.’ He should know.

  If Anne was lying, then she was also jeopardising everything she had built since the collapse of her marriage, including her daughter’s future. She was harming people she had learned to trust. She has so far profited little from the Diary — certainly not financially. She became a student at Liverpool University and her book on Florence Maybrick was published by Headline in 1999. Anne is not convinced herself that she is a descendant of Florie, but the tragedy of Florence’s life has become a genuine interest. She may have done all this, in the shadow of the knowledge that one day, if she has deceived us all, the truth will out.

  Ask yourself: if Michael and Anne forged the Diary how did they find the necessary time or money to visit the archives in London and Liverpool; to make their way to the University of Wyoming in America, where the unpublished Christie material is lodged; to pore over hundreds of pages of microfilm of national and local press; in London and Liverpool; to read and understand obscure medical literature, to locate the Grand National archives as well as read the massive literature on the Ripper and the mountain of indigestible Maybrick trial material? Besides, do they possess the necessary literary skill to create a ‘script’ which holds the attention of two of Britain’s leading psychologists?

  As it was, the strain of supporting Michael’s efforts to understand the Diary and
transcribing his notes on to a word processor was more than enough for Anne. She was near suicidal at a time when her long term marriage problems were also coming to a head and her father was dying of cancer.

  It is true that the Barretts needed money and this could have provided them with a motive. But during the most terrible row they ever had, Caroline remembers, all too well, how the couple fought, physically, on the floor — because Anne did not want Michael to get the Diary published.

  Diaryphobes should not forget that Anne was in full time work, and exhausted at the end of the day; Michael was on an invalidity pension and their domestic life was foundering. Remember too, that they lived in a typical Liverpool terraced house and would have also had to conceal all such activities from their, much-loved ll-year-old daughter, Caroline, so that there was no danger of her spilling the beans to her pals at school.

  And what about the watch? The watch which must have caused the Diary ‘forgers’ a headache when it appeared, luckily passes the examinations of two scientists.

  A nest of forgers? Who were their accomplices? Tony Devereux, former print worker who didn’t read and had no books? Billy Graham, who could hardly write and was a respected member of the British Legion? Albert Johnson, the deeply religious family man, who had never met the Barretts and knew nothing of the Maybrick story? Were these the people who conspired to write the Diary in which the historical events and text dovetail unfailingly as the plot unfolds? To home in on Maybrick himself as the villain of the piece and make him Jack the Ripper was inspired but risky casting. There are, of course, problems still unresolved. Most importantly we need to understand why the handwriting of the diary bears little resemblance to any other documents associated with Maybrick.