Willen Styn, the end of a thread…

A quick update on yesterday’s Willen Styn post.

Debra Fasano very kindly took a second look at the form I received, and her sharp eyes picked up everything I missed. In her words:-

“The Port Albany was a cargo vessel and didn’t normally carry passengers so I think he was more likely a fireman/trimmer onboard the ship. The document was filled out when the ship arrived in Fremantle and the “place of abode (abroad)” would be Penarth in Wales.

There are not many non-immigrant ship arrivals which are indexed so for cargo ships like this you would need to go to State records in real life. NSW is the only State that I know of which is indexing and digitising the manifests of all ships great and small.

The month by month is pretty much complete to 1900 but after that it gets a bit patchy, however they are all online at Ancestry. On that page there is also a link to the shipping arrivals index into Sydney and as many ships went to all ports from WA to Queensland, I checked the 1919 voyages into NSW and a fireman listed as W. Styne (or whatever!) aged 34 from Holland does turn up in 1919; someone obviously had his age wrong.

The August arrival is from New York via Adelaide (and Fremantle where the form was filled out), and the September arrival into Sydney is from Bowen and Townsville so they certainly got around.

It is quite possible that he didn’t set foot on Australian soil.“

I also had an independent email follow-up from “Cymroz”, who correctly pointed out the existence of “Lord St in Penarth, near Cardiff, where his ship came from“. Thanks for that too! I think that this all hammers a sufficiently large number of nails into that thread’s coffin. Still, I’d rather know for sure it’s not him than not know at all.

One last thing: a few weeks ago, I drew up a list of all the partially open leads I could see in the Somerton Man case that I thought stood any chance of yielding anything genuinely productive. By far the best of these was trying to better understand the story behind the “Jestyn” signature: but without any “Mr Styn” to pursue in the archives, I’m now very nearly out of ideas.

Might a quite different Mr Styn / Stijn have been a patient at Royal North Shore Hospital in 1942/1943/1944? As I recall, there was a single newspaper report which said that the nurse had given a copy of the Rubaiyat to a patient: as always with journalists, that could very well have been misheard, miscopied, misreported or invented, but right now I can see very few archival avenues left to check.

Unfortunately, according to this page, it seems as though RNSH patient records are archived only back as far as 1963. Still, it might well be worth contacting the Assistant Medical Records Manager, archives can have all kinds of odd secondary records (admission books, etc).