A couple of days ago, I listened to a ten-minute online Somerton Man piece on Radio National Breakfast with Fran Kelly, basically because Fran had Gerry Feltus phoning in to give his tuppence worth. (Am I allowed to say that Gerry didn’t seem as Royal Sovereign H pencil-sharp as normal?)
As you’d expect, there wasn’t anything there of any great surprise or interest about the Somerton Man that you wouldn’t have picked up from even a cursory reading of Cipher Mysteries over the last few years. But the other person being interviewed – Fiona Ellis-Jones, who you may possibly remember as having been the host of the ABC’s five-part “The Somerton Man Mystery” podcast – did say one thing that I at least found interesting.
What she said (at 5:07) about the Somerton Man was this: that there were “three main theories: the love child theory; the fact that it could have been a black market racketeer; or perhaps a Russian spy“. Though this is basically rehashing her podcast tag line (“Was he a scorned lover? A black market racketeer? Or a spy?”), what struck me was that the whole black marketeer crim thing I’ve been pushing at for the last few years was suddenly in the top three.
Now, even though Fiona added that her own personal favourite theory was Derek Abbott’s whole love-child / spurned lover thang, it’s not exactly news that this has always seemed far too tidily romantic to me: all it’s lacking is a neat little bow on top, which is almost never how historical research actually works out. But the good news is that a DNA profile for the Somerton Man should make this the very first theory to be comprehensively disproved, all being well. :-p
As for the whole spy theory: apologies to John Ruffels etc, but if there’s an ounce of actual historical substance to that whole hopeful hoopla beyond “The Somerton Man is mysterious; spies are mysterious; therefore the dead guy must have been a spy“, I’ve yet to see it. Though it remains possible that the DNA match map will light up all across Russia, please excuse me if I seem less than utterly enchanted. Even vague familial DNA matches should be enough to rule out most of the exotic nonsense that some like to pass off as rock solid ‘fact’ (*choke* *cough* *cough*).
Moreover, if both those much-loved dominoes clatter to the floor, the question becomes: what other possibilities are we genuinely left with? Charles Mikkelsen (a favourite of Byron Deveson) remains ~vaguely~ possible, though it has to be said that Mikkelsen’s well-documented death at sea in 1940 does tend to spoil the party vibe there somewhat. Similarly, the 1953 death announcement for Horace Charles Reynolds that I (eventually) dug up doesn’t bode well for Somerton Man fans of a muttony disposition.
Might it be that the black marketeer theory might end up one of the very few realistic dominoes left standing before very long? Just thought I’d point that out… 😐
One Last Thing…
Something I noticed a few weeks ago was that even though I’ve posted 1490 blog posts on Cipher Mysteries since 2007-ish (originally as “Voynich News”), the times people have posted an actual link to anything I’ve posted are dwindlingly few. In fact, thanks to the magic of Google Search Console, I can tell you that Google knows of only 560 external links out there, many of which are repeated several times over. (“There may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.“) Of those:
- 113 are from labatorium.eus, all of which point to a page here on the Feynman challenge cipher (why?);
- 89 are from voynich.ninja (mainly to Voynich-related pages);
- 54 from blogspot.com blogs (most of which seem to be from numberworld.blogspot.com)
- 35 from wordpress.com blogs (e.g. Koen’s herculeaf, Diane’s voynichrevisionist, and a handful of Rich’s proto57)
- 20 each from voynichportal.com (thanks JKP) and voynichrevisionist.com (thanks Diane again)
- 19 from reddit.com
- 17 from scienceblogs.de (thanks Klaus)
- 12 from zodiackillerciphers.com (thanks Dave O)
…while everything else is in single digits. How, then, has anybody ever found out about the black marketeer theory? Beats me.
Oh, and in case you’re interested, Cipher Mysteries’ pages include 7740 solid outbound links: which seems to imply I link roughly 20x more often outwards than everybody else combined links inwards. Perhaps it’s just me, but that statistic seems a bit sucky.
Just so you know how the Internet actually works.
Not into hit auto raqueteer due mainly to there being nothing in the dead man’s physical presence or his tool bix to fit the typeset unless a knife and scissors &c., come under the that category of connection . Not into romance, for quite similar reasons, particularly the lines spun by mainstream sleuths in favour of it involving the pregnant nurse which is most convenient but at anither level totally pathetic. Whatsmore the condom found in the Keane suitcase ain’t so romantic in my long experience of love as opposed to lust. With regard to spy theories such as SM’s involvement in foreign espionage; again no evidence to support it, but then again nothing contrary, which of itself might well give it some chance. The simple stuff that John Ruffles was pushing back in the good old days, has since been taken out of all proportions with the Crameresque Harry Gold/Fedosimov intro. and letter ‘Q’ spin off. As for another current line about nazi rocket scientists in their thousands being shipped over in ’47 to tool up their former V2 development at Salibury WRE, give us a break Peteb, that’s tooth fairy stuff. I’ll not discount a homegrown SB or CIS sideshow operation or excercise gone wrong with SM being an accidental but convenienly undocumented expendable victim There you go Nick we’re off and running.
Anyone give any thought to the very real possibilty that Fred Somerton’s presence may have been with us metaphorically at some point in the period since Nick Pelling got wise to the truth that medieval manuscripts were perhaps not all that popular in the colonies.. For instance take a hypothetical SM candidate from the past Thomas Keanie, he being offered up by a casual punter in belief that one with more experience would run it through the traps directly. Turns out Tom comes by during a particularly busy session for other more contempory threads doing the rounds. Upshod being that poor Tom Keanie’s monicker goes from the current page and is relegated to being an also ran and lost forever, like many another SM lookalike. So here we have real contenders like Tom Keanie or Fred Nurk now filed in archives and gone for all money, when in reality either may well turn out to be our man and on course for the Somerton Stakes in the last race to Tamam Shud . If only we periodically looked back instead of at each other’s failings. Indeed, indead.
There’s more than three reasons for killing a man, and even more for one to commit suicide.
I’d like to add a couple of thoughts.
The love child theory does not exclude the other theories. He could be both a lover and a spy or racketeer.
Tthere is more meat to the spy theory than what you exhibit here.
There are some similarities between this case and the Isdal woman case: the variegated, unsorted luggage, the lack of labels on clothes, the lack of useful documents, the apparent hurry, the stenographic/abbreviated notes. There are some suicide cases which show a few of these characteristics, but, on the other hand, there are also some clear differences between this case and other known suicide cases.
One thing that keeps afloat the whole spy theory, besides the fact other theories are not much better, in my opinion is the apparent travelling habit of the SM. He bought a train ticket for a place far away from his apparent destination, just to buy a bus ticket a few minutes (?) before getting on it: that is exactly what a spy would do, if he did so intentionally. Right now, there are not, in my opinion, good reasons to favour an accidental explanation for this fact.
Stefano Guidoni: I hear what you’re saying, but his unused train ticket would seem to be pretty lightweight evidence by just about anyone’s standards. Still, let’s hope the DNA yields enough matches to put an end to all the speculation.
Nick,
About linking. You link not least to properly credit your sources, and to allow readers to check that you have represented the sources fairly (or to correct you if you’ve made a mistake).
Other people have other reasons. I’m speaking generally now, not just Somerton man or Voynich fans.
With increasing emphasis in education on forming theories rather than, say, establishing what is, and isn’t able to be determined as objectively true, so the habit has grown of citing only such sources as give a great impression of a theory’s credibility. The reader must hunt, themselves, for matter on the other side of the scales, and too often everything including solid scholarly studies, are treated as if they were wiki articles by anonymous authors. Cut-and-paste or wholesale co-opting of the material is not recognised as plagiarism. “Who finds, owns” seems to be the idea.
A lot of this came home to me during the 12 months when my main job was tracking how different parts of the world, their media, their medical organisations, governments, and people were reacting to the pandemic.
We all noticed how evidence-indifferent people can be on social media. One person says ‘the opposite political party is made up of alien lizard men’ and soon that’s a ‘thing’ for literally millions of the chronically fearful. Or a person says, ‘You can’t contract the disease if you’re one of my sort of people (in America it was white, fit, racist males who voted Republican). People believing such ‘theories’ just don’t ask for references, and if links are offered, they are only about ‘s/he agrees with me’ links.
I tend to think that the decline in documentation generally is a sign of the trend which some social historians have noticed, towards anti-intellectualism and ‘facts by numbers’.
As you know, I’ve been protesting this sort of degradation in Voynich writings for years – both the rampant (while ill-informed) plagiarism and the refusal to properly acknowledge sources while suppressing all evidence of informed dissent. But it’s not a ‘Voynich’ thing it seems to be the line of intellectual decline in our time.
Thony Christie has just written a post about a new publication from CUP, in which (as so often recently with Singer), the editorial role and that of peer-review seems to have sadly diminished.
Thony’s review is called, “Don’t major publishers use fact checkers or copyeditors anymore?”, The Renaissance Mathematicus, https //thonyc.wordpress.com/
post is dated (May 26th., 2021).
I expect you know Thony, Nick. If not, I think you’ll like his work. Well informed and nicely grumpy.
NP you know how the internet works. Forget the links, it’s the googles that gets your theory up there (and references to it elsewhere that don’t necessarily include links).
Google: “Somerton Man Keane” – top result ciphermysteries
Google: “Somerton Man Suitcase” – ciphermysteries on the first page
Google: “Somerton Man Bus” – ciphermysteries on front page
Google: “Jestyn” – top result
Google: “T Keane” – 2nd result
etc – the results becoming even more prominent if you do some digging and decide on something more specific like “Somerton Man Smallads” (and once you get on the site you soon come across Pruzinski)
Couple that with other players mentioning it – e.g. when someone interviews our favourite spy theorist or academic, the response might start “Some people say that he was a car thief, but this doesn’t add up because….” – thus unwittingly they propagate the idea.
In any event, I have always liked the Pruzinski connection (especially throwing a suitcase of stuff in the ocean), and there is an undeniable car connection to Prosper (even if not SM himself). The closest I can get to espionage, is anomalies like his pocket contents – but that to me is more like someone randomly planting anything they have on hand (hence the 2 tickets) than spies planting a back-story (and I think if spies were involved they’d have a fairly specific, if mundane, background that they would be trying to sell (and they’d be good at it). Of course, as someone points out above “Spy” can mean many things, and there’s possible spy angles that are far less interesting than a lot of the ones being sold. To be fair, I also liked some of @JS’s angles in terms of the fairground and the racecourse – but in a funny way they’re probably more difficult to prove because they’re “plainer” or “more normal” solutions.
I think one thing that attracts people to the espionage theory is that it’s easy to explain away problems with your story “…because you know, spies”. There are numerous examples of this in the narrative of the most prominent proponents of such theories. Paraphrased and perhaps exaggerated (and A and B might encompass multiple individuals):
A: “Look, this guy is Fedosimov – look how closely he matches if we take off the spectacles”
B: “Oh yeah – but you know that’s Novikov, not Fedosimov, right?”
A: “Yeah, but the other guy (ho is FED) looks even MORE like SM”
B: “But Fedosimov was around a lot later”
A: “But we don’t know it was the same Fedosimov”
B: “ORLY? What about all this stuff that makes both Fedosimov’s align so easily?”
A: “Yeah, but it’s a common name – maybe all the spies were using it”
B: “And his wife?”
A: “Yeah it was an identity they all used”
B: “So all the spies were Fedosimov, but conveniently we can find exactly 2 of them that neatly overlap?”
A: “Oh yeah, they might have only used that identity for a couple of decades”
etc
So any “proof” contrary to the idea is dismissed as “incomplete” (which in itself is not unreasonable), but the actual explanation (sold as “this is the simplest explanation”) is continually becoming more complicated – because we can’t let go that we’re wrong.
And while I use the Fedosimov example (because it’s a particular bugbear of mine) the same goes for many other spy-related ideas – holes in the theory are gradually explained away with less and less believable ideas, and fundamentally come back to “(Although we understand all this stuff about how espionage works) we ultimately don’t really know exactly how spies did stuff because like secrets and stuff”. There’s part of me that thinks there’s a group of people who will suspect a deep conspiracy if the result of any “proof” (or id) is anything other than what they want – in fact we already see some people claiming a coverup by coppers at the time, by Feltus – and now even by the current generation of dicks looking into it. The problem with such an idea (even if it’s true) is that once the conspiracy gets that deep it is impossible to prove or disprove – because every anomaly is “the powers that be are lying to us”. Without being unnecessarily offensive (or at least more than normal) I find a lot of parallels with flat-earth believers. We can dismiss any fact as manipulated by the powers that be, but we accept the most ludicrous ideas as being provable largely because we came up with the idea.
I’ve had the rant many times before, that most (I’ll concede not all) spy theories ask us to simultaneously believe that we’re dealing with spies who are good at their craft, but also that they’re making mistakes and leaving clues that we can follow. Couple that with the idea that we have to believe that some if not all of the investigators and analysts are deliberately masking or hiding the truth – but conveniently certain others are pursuing the truth (and in reality, if such a conspiracy involved the authorities, surely dissenting voices who weren’t in on the secret would be stifled by the brass).
Of course, the inconsistent evidence makes such theories attractive – but we ignore the idea that firstly some of our sources are media (who don’t necessarily have the big picture), some are officials, and some are witnesses with varying degrees of recollection and reliability. I’m sure a most cases have conflicting witness accounts (and I’ve previously mentioned a Netflix doco that demonstrates witness unreliability quite clearly).
Here are some of the problems I have with various pieces of evidence in an espionage/conspiracy (I should note the 2 are not necessarily the same) light:
1) The TS slip simply did not have to be found. If it was planted, it serves only to attract more interest to a death you want to pass off as mundane. If it wasn’t planted, it could have just as easily been covered up as those who claim the simplicity of planting it.
2) The “code”. Like the TS slip, it’s totally unnecessary, and could easily have been dismissed by people trying for a cover up “sure there was scribblings on the piece of paper, but nothing interesting” – done. Further, what even is the purpose of them? Further, if spies have a million tools for HIDING messages, why have something in plain sight that attracts attention? The “double blind” idea is so ridiculous I’ll dismiss it without addresssing it (had that rant before if you look for it)
3) The book in the car (I’ll be honest one of the most plausible ideas is that someone is being followed and dumps the book where convenient). If you want to destory it, why not destroy it (you have the SEA at the scene of the body)? What is wrong with any of the bins you walk past – surely a trip to the tip would be more effective at losing something than putting it in a random car where it is going to look out of place? Were there no storm drains along Jetty Road you could drop something in – surely that would not only hide it for now, but do a pretty good job at destroying it too?
4) The contents of the pockets. While these are very unusual (in particular the tickets) they again attract rather than detract attention. Why would you plant evidence that makes people have to think more?
5) The handling of the body. SM was the first body in SA to be embalmed, and then we even had a bust made to prolong the opportunity for him to be identified. If you’re trying to cover this stuff up, we want to dismiss this as a suicide (or at least “uninteresting death”) as soon as possible. The more we talk about it – the longer it is in the papers, the more we harp on about the bust – the longer the story will stay around.
etc.
And I know there will be people who disagree with each of these points – and so be it. While I’ll listen to people’s ideas, I find it difficult to entertain spy theories because too much must have gone wrong. I’ll listen to such an idea, but as soon as something is dismissed “because, you know spies and secrets and stuff” I’m leaving……
My spy theory has SM being an unwitting dupe, prospective fall guy and stooly, new in town and perhaps looking for change to his fortune of late, not too fussy about to effect it. Seen for a potential patsy by a spotter for Bob Wake’s CIS mob, in Adelaide for the Air Pageant (a known) amongst other things and needing something special to impress the hard to please recently departed top dogs from MI5. All the poorly conceived, but plants that fooled the cops (and everyone since) could have been put together in a trice through enlisting local SB help in the form of it’s ex members Harry Strangway and/or Scan Sutherland. Big Bob’s Show goes down a treat, all the elements of post body discovery along with anticipated cause of death forever shrouded in mystery and CIS standing with it’s former detractors restored. That’s my Somerton Man from Uncle scenario if of course it be the one that gives Nick’s third theory any chance of centre podium place when the final analysis is drawn.
Nick,
This thing must have you in a bind, because it is the first time I’ve seen you wanting more publicity. Not a clue how Google works except a vague idea. I know if you start expressing interest in a very particular thing you didn’t in the past, it can take a day or two to realign itself to the thing it might not have anticipated you being interested in. You got me actually to post on a SM thread, and its not my thing.
Milongal,
Fedosimov reminds me a lot of B Traven, the recluse writer known mostly today for Treasue of the Sierra Madre, but whose cult following of searchers believe he might have been a front; for perhaps a group of up to 5 different writers, with unclear motives. If you read The Death Ship it seems in part he (or the writers) might be alluding to their sneakiness at this, and how he/they fooled various bueracrats and others. (it could be as well he is exactly who he what he said he was; someone who lost their ID, and got caught in the system, I just dont think so)
Even though Traven has been generally identified as Hal Croves who worked as a technical advisor on Madre’s set, it is still definitely a thing.
Its Chinatown, man.
Matthew Lewis & Milongal: it’s not that I’m suddenly angling for more publicity (and I do know that Google is kind to my pages), it’s just that I don’t really grasp how ideas are currently circulating. If there’s a whole cadre of Somerton Man theory ‘influencers’ out there (beyond the generally nice commenters here), I don’t know where it is.
Having said that, I’ve long heard (uncredited) direct echoes of this blog in many TV programmes, radio programmes & books relating to well-known cipher mysteries, so perhaps there’s a broader non-online feedback loop (i.e. via historical researchers) in play here.
Matthew Lewis: I remember watching a fascinating documentary by Robert Robinson on B. Traven many years ago. Is that on YouTube anywhere?
I think you’ve been hanging around Diane too long, Nick! Somebody mentioning a similar theory doesn’t mean they stole it from you; maybe they came up with it independently or read it elsewhere.
Gemma: I accept what you’re saying, but the point of the post was that the whole black marketeer / interstate car crim / baccarat school nitkeeper thing seems to have reached some kind of critical mass without anybody actually talking about it along the way. Basically, what happened in the middle?
Nick,
I actually didn’t find out about the SM here. I can’t remember where I did. but it was elsewhere. I am quite intersted in paranormal mysteries, so perhaps it was in a one of my compilations of them. I might be able to narrow it down. As far as B Traven goes that one belongs to my uncle. We chat every week about the wide world of weirdness and all its facets. The world does go on outside this hemisphere, and in fact I think he brought up old B, because a friend of me recommended this book called Ship of Theseus by VM Straka, in reality(?) its called S., by Doug Dorst and JJ Abrams (of Star Wars and Lost fame). When I read it around 2018ish, recommended by a friend, I could not believe it had escaped my detection as a thing, because I am a huge Lost fan. I actually mentioned it in the comments section a while back. Im guessing JJ has kept it on the deliberate downlow, though that may just be me. So I am telling you now, read it!! Cipher mysteries dude!
I did read The Man who was B Traven, by Wyatt and Robinson (didnt see the video yet), and B Traven: an Introduction by Michael Baumann who if , iirc ,is far less certain about things than Wyatt. I dont want to give away anything abou S., but it is quite B Traven and Somertonmaneque. Just because people don’t scream things from the rafters doesn’t mean they don’t talk about them.
Matt
Sorry, wasn’t suggesting you were looking for publicity – just wouldn’t surprise me if some version of the Car Racket stuff is from here – because google seems to lead here. I’ve also occasionally seen in forums your site (among others) listed as a “reliable resource” (possibly even reddit, although I’m not a regular on that) – so journos (who do some digging for their story) come for a visit and pinch a good story (unfortunately they’ll sometimes take a good story even if it doesn’t sound plausible).
I think Prosper’s link to the car industry mean people often come up with car (or car theft) related ideas, but certainly the 4 or so posts you did on the topic (including small ad analysis etc) presented the best case I’ve seen for it – and I think as a result briefly it would have been discussed on other sites (including ones you may have limited respect for).
Anywho – apologies again, didn’t mean to suggest you’re in it for publicity (I’d lay a tenner others might be – but they often market their ideas quite aggressively)
Speaking of auto rackets, if anyone at all be still interested in how Prosper got set up in the business, I’d recommend they follow a line that I started posting about over on the ultimate SM blog in early April last year when folks were more into the Corona (Covid 19) lockdowns than anything vaguely concerned with new Somerton leads. By the time ‘George’ Thomson married Queeny Willder in ’36, the fellow who officiated at his wedding in Melbourne, a Yank from Kansas named Harley Burch, along with brothers Elva and Glen, had been running flim flam rackets in Australia and New Zealand for fifteen years. The mob operated behind two fronts, Empire Art and Universal Collections out of 100 William St. Sydney, their mail order sales employing travellers from all states to push their shonky wares. I guess I covered the affair for quite some time without gaining even the slightest ripple of interest, so gave it away for more mundane stuff that was more in keeping with what was in flavour across the SM. board at the time. If folks have a notion to change up a gear, why not go across the way and get the whole deal as it all went down. I don’t feel inclined to repeat everything all over, all I can say is that these guys were bad bad news, certainly up to bumping off a wayward drummer in the team to warn others, their standover tactics in Adelaide resulting in a good write up in the press along with a fraud conviction.
Gemma – Forgive me but I don’t believe we’ve ever met.
Would you like to add a link to some of your own research?
You seem to be relying on hearsay, so let me correct a misunderstanding. I’ve not offered ‘ideas’ about Beinecke MS 408 since 2009 when i finished the initial survey stage.
What I’ve been publishing since then are brief, slightly simplified summaries of the conclusions I’ve reached after researching one question after another. My research method isn’t remarkable – the usual mixture of routine slog and bursts of ‘on the trail’ excitement. But if you have any qualifications in relevant technical studies or advanced academic studies, you’ll know that you only begin to master your speciality when you know where to go to begin finding appropriate material to answer one question or another.
I have been fortunate in both my academic training and my 35 years in my field, that it provided the right sort of background to research the images in Beinecke MS 408.
Unfortunately, a great deal of what I published was plagiarised by persons whose lack of appropriate education and experience left them struggling to contribute any new insights to the study.
Since the plagiarists (for obvious reasons) couldn’t deal honestly with what they tried to imitate, and most needed to ‘fiddle’ the material to avoid having a theory exploded, and the theory-leaders also needed to obscure the fact that there was detailed research, by a professional, disputing the worth or honesty of their propositions, so there also had to be introduced a sort of ‘frat-rule’ that one didn’t name persons who opposed the pet theory, and would get a finger-wagging if you dared break the rule.
That, Gemma, is why you are here.
To wag your finger at Nick and broadcast the idea that no-one should pay any attention to me (or anyone else) who objects to having original work badly plagiarised and then explained as serendipity.
But the old-timers know such things. Where you’ve been shows where you’re coming from.
And now Gemma – about your own interest in Beinecke MS 408 – what have you to say for yourself. (Please don’t tell me you wrote the godawful ‘bitumen’ thing… )
D.N. O’Donovan: Hope I didn’t pinch anything from your book of Beinecke MS 408 dreams circa. 2009 mate, so far most of my own Voynich conclusions which I have managed to keep in check from plagiaristic attempts by virtue of it’s plain simple logical 2018 truths. Who could have ever conceived back in those heady days of you stubborn university educated theorist intellectuals that the whole concept of their pilfered respective medieval centred observations would all come crashing down in 2018. Brought to a halt by an observant old street suit who detected some standout anomalies within the nymph and plant matter pictograms which were far to advanced technically to have been around in the days of yore vis.1404, 1428 or1465 (NP). Gawd arn’t we fortunate that it’s all over, apart from a few die hards still on the no imposter payroll.
Ah, apologies Nick, I misinterpreted the thrust of your post. Perhaps it’s just one of those things that spontaneously occurred to a lot of people at roughly the same time. It’s happened often enough in science and can lead to some great breakthroughs.
Though I have to say perhaps I’m more of a romantic than I thought, because I secretly hope the neat little love story will be true. 😉
Nick, the H C Reynolds bit doesn’t have to mean he was H C Reynolds, only that there was a card with H C Reynolds on it. The card alone, provided it had a matching photo, allowed the bearer to bypass customs in many US and UK affiliated countries. Maybe the H C Reynolds ID card did many more sea miles than H C Reynolds himself. I would like the real HC Reynolds to Rest In Peace although he may live on in his misplaced or stolen ID card.
Equally interesting is the background of the finder and her family.
Alan H: the obvious problem with the suggestion that Horace Charles Reynolds’ card might have had a longer life at sea than he himself did is that we don’t see any record of any birth-year-matching H.C.Reynolds in crew lists beyond the year or so the real Reynolds appears to have spent at sea. So I think you’re flogging a dead seahorse here, sorry. :-/
As to “the background of the finder and her family”, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. :-/
Peteb: The Gaston/Saffron link came from Xlamb and I was never able to bring it together, apart from the Eastern Suburbs where they had gravitared to towards the end of the war eg., Rushcutters Bay and Bondi which is maybe all there was to the story. Gaston had been in the navy, mostly on ships since he enlisted as a boy seaman in 1938. Abe Safron was younger and from Haberfield served as a blanket counter in the army and seems not to have done underworlding til the early fifties, by which time I think Gaston might have been living with Dad and his sister Ysabel in Gosford up the coast. Wasn’t he with the railways as a train conductor or some such on the Central Coast line? maybe, maybe not; Later he got a nice war service house at HMAS Cresswell, down around Nowra where he lived with sister until passing in the nineties? I don’t think he ever married and I recall that he was alone among the brothers in naming Prosper as his next of kin when enlisting.
…Gaston signed on for a full 12 in the RAN 1937 not ’38 and was actually nine months younger than Abe vis. 1919 as against 1920 for our matelot. Wonder what the swabbies called him at sea, surely not Gaston.
JohnS: Copy that about Abe, confirmed as a probable furphy.
Peteb: Get misca to fill you in on the dual Thomson, Von Stieglitz, Smith quasi intra family marriage and name changing during WW1 apropos RNA/DNA possibilities. She’s been savy to all this since at least 2017 when she approached me to assist with some aspect relating to a Thomson ‘come back’ VS AIF military medal winner.
She must surely have kept full records and in the present line of inquiry it would save much repeat research time.
Peteb: If you get stuck with the Thomson/Harkness geni brief, I’ve got it all in my noggin, along with the good shit that Byron, Peter and James Thomson don’t want us to see under any circumstances. Don’t believe me? than just try ‘hollerin for a Marshall’ you’ll find they’ll clam up tight as a a a drum no less.
Peteb: In re Ernie’s fourth son Gaston the matelot. I had once posed the idea of his perhaps having fathered Robin, in part because he was closer to big brother Prosper than his dad, making him his next of kin upon RAN inlistment at age 15. I changed my mind about his fatherhood aspirations after reading on the now defunct but generally reliable Marshall papers link, that the man was not into gash at all. It follows that he never married from what we know which is strangely little, though the knowledge of him living with his spinster older sister in later life points that way. Of course his twelve years at sea may also have gaven him to prefer deck sports like frigging in the rigging, jolly rogering and all those healthy shipboard pursuits. For what it’s worth I still maintain that Jessica Harkness is a dead rubber.
Peteb: Auntie Jean Downs worked at ‘The Mooney Mooney Club and with Cousin Peter and they lived down Cheero Point track which turned off the Hwy at Peter O’Brien’s fish’n chip shop. Me two uncles Bluey and Art Howarth, both burnt out WW2 diggers lived in a tent near Barney Allen’s leases and never let a chance pass to slip a stick or two from the middle racks while checking their crab traps. Dave B. must have visited with us in the very early sixties (I left in ’62) but anyway long ago and far away Jose’…I wonder how true the rumour coming from Ruth that Prosper was sterile, which if true, leaves us up Mooney Creek without squat. Since my bit on horny old Ern Thomson being the only likely contender for introduction of the deep purple ‘T’ gene into the mix, I found another contender in his sister Florence Comnie Smith Thomson who misca would have known about years before me. So let her fill in the gaps.
…My gaff with David’s second initial vis. B instead of R, brings to mind (good on you) Gordon’s insistence that the code’s last letter be an R instead of the more popular B. I’ve noticed in a post on Tbt forum just days ago that our man Clive Walker-Turner still upholds the malignant Cramer line. Will he be taken to task over his fragrant disregard of a unified front.
Steve Moxie also helped build more than a couple of Syd Hobart super yacht racers … but he never brang a sack of oysters into the lunchroom, not that I was regularly invited to dine with the winch wankers. But paymasters have certain privileges.