Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

I’ve been thinking a lot about the off-white tie found in the suitcase the Somerton Man famously left at Adelaide’s railway station. Only an American gangster (or perhaps poor old Hector St Clair) would have a white tie to go with his black shirt: and what we’re looking at isn’t even a white tie, it’s an off-white tie. Oh, and the Somerton Man didn’t even have a black shirt in his suitcase.

The tie also looks to me as though it was a working tie, i.e. an item worn many times not for show, but for use, for practicality. Any maker’s tag attached to the back of the tie had been long lost by 1948: but, as far as I can tell, there were no actual jobs in 1948 that required you to wear a white / off-white tie.

So, if the tie was of no practical use to the Somerton Man in 1948, why was he carrying it around in his suitcase? What possible value could it have had?

One answer I’ve been circling around for a while is that the tie might have been something that the Somerton Man had worn regularly some years earlier, but which still had some sentimental or nostalgic value for him.

Hence, I’m wondering whether the right questions to be asking of his off-white tie might be more to do with the reasons he had been wearing it 10 or even 20 years before 1948, say from 1930 onwards. Might it have been connected with some kind of peak experience for him?

A beige tie, perhaps?

This also begs the question of what the tie’s colour originally was, before it had been (largely) washed out. The tie famously appears close to the end of Part 1 of the 1978 Littlemore documentary, and I think you can see a tinge of faded colour to it.

A Google search does bring up a handful of beige ties, most notably for the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada. But Captain Flavelle’s (apparently 100% woollen) beige tie from WWI seems the wrong kind of material completely:

This makes me wonder whether the fabric used to make the Somerton Man’s tie might help us to date it.

But there’s something about the way only a single person (front row, fifth from right) in the following 1956 QOR Sergeants’ Mess is wearing a beige tie that strikes a distant chord:

Who is that person at the front, and why was he wearing a beige tie? Not being a specialist Army historian, I have no easy way of knowing if this is signalling some specific Army role (perhaps in Canada, or in the British Army).

A U.S. Army necktie?

However, if you search not for (the British) “tie” but for (the American) “necktie”, you’ll get a quite different set of results. For example, even Gran’ma Wikipedia’s page on U.S. Army clothes starts becoming vaguely relevant (for a pleasant change):

In 1941, the necktie for the winter uniform was black wool and the summer necktie was khaki cotton.^[4] In February 1942, a universal mohair wool necktie in olive drab shade no. 3 (OD 3) replaced both previous neckties. The OD 3 necktie was shortly superseded by a khaki cotton–wool blend necktie. […]

Officers wore black and khaki neckties with winter and summer uniforms respectively, like enlisted soldiers, until after February 1942 when the universal neckties were changed to khaki for all ranks.

A little more searching turned up that the US Army necktie came in three colours (AKA “colors”): khaki, tan, and mustard. And one problem with nailing down the precise colours these were is that the Internet seems to be flooded by reproduction US Army apparel. (As if the world really needs a load of people pretending to be WWII-era US soldiers wearing modern poly/cotton mix fabrics.)

However, the Kentucky Historical Society’s archives does have some good kit in its holdings. This item is a 1940 machine-stitched US Army khaki cotton necktie:

Similarly, the following is a United States Marine Corps khaki tropical necktie from 1937, folded and machine stitched:

Given that the first one of these two has a centre seam but the second one is folded, it’s hard to extrapolate much further on this as far as seams go. The material looks completely wrong too.

In short, while I am quite sympathetic to the suggestion that the Keane tie might have been a non-standard-issue Army dress tie that helped denote rank (say, as part of a mess uniform), I struggle to match the quality of its weave with the (frankly rather poorly put together) standard-issue US Army ties I’ve seen on the web. I also can’t satisfactorily match its colour with the ties I’ve seen, even if you try to argue it was faded. So I’m still very much open to suggestions as to where to take this next.

A Material World

Given that it seems to be a tie constructed in the modern way (as devised in 1922 and then later patented by Jesse Langsdorf in New York), we might generally date it to about 1930 or later, and perhaps place it more in North America than in the UK. There’s a nice visual overview of 20th century tie history here.

However, perhaps we’re still putting the cart before the horse, and we should instead determine the precise material that was used to make the tie, because that might help narrow the search down significantly.

Even though I think a close look at the tie rules out silk, viscose/rayon, and veltet, we’re still left with cotton, linen and wool: and arguably the most likely seems a mix of the three (i.e. where the warp and weft use different kinds of thread). Moreover, because it looks only a little ‘fluffy’, I think we can rule out its having been 100% wool.

My thoughts? Given that linen doesn’t hold its colour as well as cotton, I suspect that this was a linen-cotton mix. Yet given the bold designs of most ties of the era, its plainness still seems somewhat unsettling to me: I can’t help but wonder whether we’re missing something really obvious about this tie.

Perhaps what you’d really want here is some marvellous V&A mid-century textile specialist to help you identify the material. The next-best thing might be the following extremely helpful V&A guide to textile identification that gets you frustratingly close. If you want something a little more hands-on, the Vintage Fashion Guild has an online fabric resource that you might find more practical.

“I’ll Drink To That”

Perhaps what we instead need is a tie collector to steer us through these rapids. But wait! Here’s a British Pathé short from 1955 called “Tie Collecting aka Tie Cutting AKA Tie Collector”, featuring Alan Course (landlord of The Bear Inn in Oxford):

In fact, The Bear Inn and its collection of four and half thousand tie clippings is (according to Atlas Obscura) still there, and (allegedly) serving an excellent portion of bangers and mash in its (newly re-opened) beer garden. Can there ever have been a pub more worthy of a research visit?

Imagine, if you will, that everything about the Somerton Man is somehow embedded in the name written on the back of the off-white tie found in the suitcase left in Adelaide Station. Can we decrypt the life hidden in this writing?

Well… we can certainly try to, right? As normal, let’s examine it reaaaaally closely…

A Name of Two Halves

The first thing to notice is that the initial (followed by the dot) and the K are not only much bigger than the rest of the letters, they are also stylistically very different. Moreover, whereas the “EANE” part was written in legible compressed block capitals, there’s no easy way of telling what the initial letter at the start is – is it a ‘T’ (as SAPOL thought in 1949), or a ‘J’, or perhaps even an ‘I’ or an ‘L’? And finally, the letter K has an unusual construction (which we’ll come to later).

From all that, we start with a visual paradox: that even though the stylised (and largely indeterminate) initial letter is typical of a signature (i.e. writing made for personality), the EANE ending would seem to be more typical of clothes block marking (i.e. writing made for clarity). How can these two very different writing styles be reconciled?

My suggestion (perhaps it has been made before, I honestly don’t know) is that the writer wrote the first two letters as a signature, but then changed his mind, perhaps from the difficulty of writing on fabric. And so I suspect his writing strategy changed after writing the ‘K’, leaving us with a hybrid that was part-signature and part-clothes marking.

Because the second (block capital) half doesn’t really offer us any obvious help, we only really have a single letter to work with here – the K. However, this is a letter with a very unusual construction…

Anatomy of a ‘K’

To me, an individual’s handwriting expresses a set of compromises between an idealised set of letterforms (design) and the individual’s desire for speed (impatience), clarity (beauty), ornament (fanciness), reproducibility (consistency), or whatever. Note that I’m talking not about graphology here, but about the practicalities of real-world writing.

From that point of view, capital K is actually quite a difficult letter to write. Once you’ve formed its main vertical bar (normally downwards), you then have to lift your pen off the paper and decide where to begin your next stroke. And then, in the context of cursive writing, you have to consider how you are going to join the end of your final K stroke with the start of the following stroke. All these practical micro-decisions yield a wide range of possibilities.

Looking closer at the K, I suspect we can see three separate stroke parts (probably made by a right hander): an initial downward ‘spine’ stroke (annotated red below), a second downward diagonal stroke (blue), and a third stroke upwards and slightly curved around (green). It’s not 100% clear to me what direction the green stroke was made in (i.e away from the second stroke or towards it):

It could well be that the green stroke started at top right, looped down to the midpoint of the first stroke, and then became the start of the blue stroke. Here, the stroke sequence would be 1-3-2:

Either way, this seems a somewhat unusual and awkward way of constructing a K: but with an historian’s hat on, where might we find a corpus of signatures to compare this particular K construction against?

WWI Irish Soldier Wills

Given that Keane is a predominantly Irish surname (“Kean” appears much more in Scotland), I made a speculative leap here that a good place to look for a set of signatures would be in the Irish archives. (If there’s a far more global handwriting archive I could have used, please tell me!)

However, almost all the Irish genealogical archive holdings online (e.g. via Ancestry.com) were of official registers (Petty Sessions, even the Dog Licence Register!), which were normally filled in by a small number of official hands. Rather, what I wanted wasn’t names written by a professional hand, but a set of signatures left by ordinary people.

Usefully (but nonetheless tragically), this is where I found that the Irish archives contain a long series of Last Wills and Testaments (many on scraps of paper, and with a fair few reconstructed by witnesses from conversations) from Irish soldiers who died in WWI. Reading these, you can’t help but be affected by the senseless waste of young life: so many were just boys, bequeathing their possessions and pay to their mothers or sisters in shaky pencil in their Army Book 64.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the archival query engine wasn’t quite designed for what I was trying to do: so I first searched for all soldiers called John, drew up a list of the surnames beginning with K, and then searched all of those surnames.

This yielded about 500 individual documents; about fifty of which were missing; of the rest, roughly fifty had no signature (e.g. when the will was relayed by witnesses), so I think the final corpus size was not far off 400 signatures.

Normal Ks and Special Ks

In this sample, it seemed to me that the majority of the capital Ks were formed of a big vertical downstroke (often embellished), followed by a single second stroke (sometimes embellished) which ran from top right diagonally down left to the centre of the first stroke (often pausing to loop there) before continuing diagonally down linearly right to end up at the bottom right of the letter, ready to be cursively joined with the following letter.

Another common construction began with a big vertical downstroke, but where the pen then restarted at the centre of the vertical to form a second curved downstroke, finishing off with a third more linear stroke upwards from the centre of the vertical.

There were also some some unusual two-stroke Ks where the gap between the two strokes was so wide that it was almost unrecognisable as a K. For example, here is how Denis Kelly wrote his wife’s name, which I must admit had me completely stumped for a couple of minutes:

What we see in the Somerton Man’s K is different to all three of these, in that it has a curve at top right and a straight line at bottom right.

Matching Ks

A couple of signatures do vaguely match the Somerton Man’s K, insofar as they have a main vertical stroke, a straight diagonally right downwards stroke, and a curved diagonally right upwards stroke.

• No. 14908 Rifleman J. Keelan, 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, died 30-1-1915. Here he writes his father’s name:

• No. 16241 Private Patrick Kinsella, 6th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, died 3-2-1917.

Private Patrick Kinsella’s K was clearly the closer match of the two. (According to fold3, Kinsella was born 23-5-1884; his widow (separated) was Susan Lennon of 11 Railway St, Dublin; and his three children were Denis, Patrick & Mary Jane.)

Learning And Growing?

In my experience, people tend to attack cipher mysteries in a ‘vertical’ manner, i.e. by looking for causality, direct association, immediate linkage, relevance, etc. But sometimes historical research is better done horizontally, i.e. by building up a wider corpus and trying to situate your mystery item within that larger corpus.

What I tried to do here was a faltering first attempt at a horizontal search for the source of the marks on the tie, but I think it’s fair to say I didn’t really find anything in Ireland. Next time round, I plan to look at (mainland) British and/or American and/or Australian K shapes from this period (if I can find good signature corpora for them, all suggestions gratefully received!), to see if anything K-related happens to jump out at me.

It’s just a crying shame that we don’t have images of the other two KEAN[E] marks, or even any description of what they looked like. Unless you know better?

I’ve been raking over Ancestry.com, trying to take the search for the Somerton Man back to archival basics. For example:

• we have a first initial (T or J)
• we have a surname (Kean or Keane)
• we have a rough date of birth (1900, plus or minus five years)
• we know he had no tattoos / distinguishing markings
• his matrilineal DNA seems to be connected to the Baltic states
• we have practical reasons to connect him to America
• we have even better reasons to connect him to Australia, and yet…
• all efforts to find an Australian by that name seem to have failed.

The first half of the 20th century was a time of migrations: and I think the little we know about our mysterious man seems to echo that same mobility. Might we be able to catch a glimpse of him in the shipping records, that box of tricks so loved by genealogists? I went looking for Keans on ships…

John Hall Kean of Galashiels

Having previously put so much time into tracking down H. C. Reynolds on the R.M.S. Niagara, my Somerton Spidey Sense tingled when I saw a young J Kean working on the same ship roughly a year after Reynolds’ stint.

• 10 Oct 1919 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “cadet”, engaged 2/10/19 in Vancouver
• 28 Oct 1919 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “cadet”, age 19, born in Scotland
• 8 Apr 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “2nd grade”, engaged 27/2/20 in Sydney
• 26 Apr 1920 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “2nd grade”, age 20, born in Galashiels
• 16 May 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Sydney) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 30/4/20 in Sydney, able to read, age 20.
• 3 Jun 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 30/4/20 in Sydney, able to read, age 20.
• 21 Jun 1920 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “2nd grade steward”, age 20, born in Galashiels
• 10 Jul 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Sydney) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 24/6/20 in Sydney, age 20

These are surely all the same J. Kean, from Galashiels in Scotland.

(We also see a 21-year-old 5′ 9″ Scottish-born J. Kean arriving in California in 1921 on the S.S. Bradford. And a 5′ 5″ 160lb Scottish-born John Kean arriving in Seattle from Vancouver on 19 Dec 1922. I’m guessing these are him too,)

Knowing that, it didn’t take too long to work out that his full name was John Hall Kean, his parents were John Patrick Kean and Margaret Kean (nee Murray) (both born in Galashiels), and that he, his parents, and brothers Thomas Murray Kean and Louis Ennis Kean all emigrated from Scotland to Vancouver in 1910. (You can see them all listed in the 1911 Canada Census.) His birth date is listed there as August 1901.

We next see him working as a clerk, and getting married in 30 Jun 1923 to Vancouver-born Olympia Emily Svenciski (it’s a Polish surname). The Vancouver Daily World noted that she was the “second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Svenciski, of this city”.

However, it’s through Olympia’s findagrave entry that we find John Hall Kean’s death, on 20 Dec 1940 at Trail (a town in British Columbia).

Oh well. 🙁

John William Kean of Hull

There’s a J.W.Kean who also made a number of trips:

• 07 Nov 1920 New York, age 20, on the Justin, signed on 25 Sep 1920, Newport, News (and then immediately signed back on again)
• 07 Nov 1920 New York, he is listed as John W. Kean, “sailor”, English, British, 5′ 6″, 150lb, headed off to Pernambuco (in Brazil)
• 15 Feb 1921 New York, age 20, on the Justin, discharged
• 29 Apr 1921 Sydney, New South Wales on the SS Port Melbourne from New York via Melbourne, age 20, from Hull, “sailor”
• 22 Jun 1921 Sydney, New South Wales on the SS Port Melbourne from Wellington NZ, age 20, from Hull, “sailor”
• 14 Feb 1922 New York from Brazil on the Justin, age 20, British, signed on Nov 28th 1920, NY

Familysearch helpfully suggests a John William Kean, whose birth was registered in Hull in the Jul-Aug-Sep quarter of 1901, and who did his military service in the Royal Navy from ~1918 to ~1921.

There’s also this guy from 1930, who sounds like the same person but now with American citizenship:

• 28 Nov 1930 New York on the Capulin, John W. Kean, A.B., engages on 16 Oct 1930 in Norfolk, aged 29, American race and nationality, 5′ 6″

Personally, I think John William Kean’s height is sufficient to rule him out from being the Somerton Man, but perhaps others will feel compelled to pursue him further.

John Kean of Skerries, Dublin

The next Kean I looked at was on the Ajana in Nov 1919, an 18-year old “AB” (able-bodied seaman) arriving in Sydney from New Zealand via Melbourne.

This was probably the same John Kean of Skerries, Dublin who received his Second Mate’s Certificate of Competency on the 6th December 1922.

After a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing looking at Ireland’s Superintendant Registration (SR) Districts, the single candidate in Ireland’s (actually extremely good) online BDM database seems to be a John Keane, born 29 August 1901 in the SR District of Balrothery.

According to the register, his father John Keane was a sailor from Skerries, and his mother was Rosanna Keane (nee McGowan). (We can also see their marriage of 02 Jun 1890 online.) The “informant” was Mary Dooley of Skerries (who was “present at the birth”).

The Irish archives have one more trick for us. On 03 Mar 1930, a John Keane (a “grocer”, aged “Adult”) of Skerries married Alice Seaver (also aged “Adult”) of Skerries: John Keane’s father John Keane was noted as being a “sea captain”. It seems very likely to me that this was the same John Keane.

But… what happened to this John Keane and Alice Keane?

Note that an Alice Mary Keane died in East Geelong on 08 Nov 1999: however, we can see her living at 46 Gheringhap St in Geelong in 1937 (“home duties”) with a John Francis Keane (“labourer”), and then again in 24 Garden St in 1942, so we can almost certainly rule her out.

So the short answer is that I have no idea just yet, sorry. 🙁

A Quick Summary

I didn’t have to look very hard to find three J. Kean[e]s who each fits the broad template of what we are looking for, insofar as their lives linked Europe with both America and Australia (albeit perhaps only briefly).

And it was nice to discover that genealogy tools – when they work well – now make it almost comically easy to trace and eliminate candidates. They all have their quirks, sure: but what would take a matter of weeks or months is now very often no more than a handful of mouse-clicks away.

However, I’m also well aware that what I picked to work with were undoubtedly the lowest-hanging fruits. Having ten or more data points to work with meant that just about everything here clicked in as you’d hope.

All the same, this has left me wondering whether it might be worthwhile to build up a list of pretty much all the J/T Kean[e]s born around 1900 (say 1895-1905), and then trace them all. Even though Ireland’s BDM database lists numerous J/T Kean[e]s, it also (once you get the hang of the SR Districts etc) gives you enough other data to rule most of them in or out very quickly.

Is that crazy? Or might it actually be achievable?

James Robert Walker’s life story, smuggled out of Pentridge Jail just before his suicide, was sensationally serialized in the Argus in September 1954 to October 1954. If you want to read it, I edited it into a single downloadable file here. I found it of particular interest because in the early 1940s Walker ran his own small Melbourne baccarat school.

Walker referred to many of the people involved by their real names, or by their nicknames (such as James Coates, widely known as “The Mark Foy”).

But who were the prominent underworld people Walker used coded names for? I’m thinking specifically of:

• “The Brain”
• “Darkie”
• “The Gambler”
• “The Thing”
• “The Fix”

I decided to go looking…

Not Much Luck So Far..

In my initial mooch around the interwebs, I found very little indeed. 🙁

One of the only hints was in Robert Chuter’s “Funny People of Fitzroy Street“:

A few months ago [written in 2020] there died a man, ex-pug, ex-bookmaker, and ex-school principal who had been a habitue of Fitzroy Street for many years. Drink hastened his end. He was discovered dead sitting upon a cafe toilet, trousers around his ankles. Police knew him as “The Thing” mentioned in the Robert Walker story, published in The Argus after Walker’s suicide in Pentridge Gaol.

I’ve therefore asked Robert if he knows The Thing’s actual name, and will update this page when I hear back. But as to the other code names, I have still basically got nowhere. 🙁

As an aside, Walker’s story mentions “The Brain”‘s (claimed) remorse over the death of Taylor and ‘Snowy’ Cutmore in 1927. Given that Taylor was (according to Gangland Melbourne) connected to Harry Stokes, you might wonder whether Stokes was The Brain. Unfortunately, The Brain was (according to Walker) still alive, which would seem to rule Stokes out.

Who were all these encrypted crims? Can you decode Walker’s code names?

Carrying on with the Somerton Man Melbourne nitkeeper research thread, here’s a timeline I’ve reconstructed for the (in)famous baccarat school that Christos Paizes (AKA “Harry Carillo”) and Gerald Francis Regan ran on the first floor above the Old Canton Cafe at 158 Swanston Street, Melbourne. (Swanston St runs between Lonsdale St and Little Lonsdale St.)

Note that as of 21 Jun 1943, 158 Swanston St was advertising for a “Pantry Maid” (“over 45; £3 10/ p. wk., no night work“), so presumably the building was still in use as a cafe at that date.

Phase 1 – Baccarat still legal

Because Victoria’s gaming laws had been drafted by listing specific games that were deemed to be illegal (e.g. the Aussie favourite two-up), Melbourne police needed overwhelming physical proof in order to prosecute anyone playing a game not on the prohibited list.

As a result, this first phase of the timeline sees the police very much on the back foot. What’s more, none of the cunning stunts they used to try to gain evidence against the baccarat schools impressed the courts. For example:

16 July 1942: The Truth’s influential 18 Jun 1944 exposé (it was mentioned in Hansard) discussed how police attempts to prosecute Regan & Carello in their baccarat school in Flinders St in 1942 had miserably failed:

[…] a charge at the Petty Sessions of acting in the conduct of a common gaming house at 510 Flinders Street, was withdrawn. On that occasion, police watched a baccarat game through holes in the ceiling, but they obtained no evidence that percentages were deducted from the winnings — an all-important point in law.

By 1943, the police started to find ways of prosecuting individuals involved with these gaming schools. One target was the nitpickers (or “cockatoos”), whose job was to raise the alarm when a police raid was in progress, and who could be charged with ‘hindering’ or ‘obstruction’:

[Gerald Francis Regan] was convicted for obstructing the police, when they entered a gaming house.

By June 1944, the Melbourne baccarat scene was (as per The Truth’s exposé) well and truly flourishing: there seemed almost nothing that the police could do about it. For all The Truth’s thundering, you can’t help but notice that they did helpfully include the exact address to take your money to:

At Stokes’ schools, the game is big, but if it is a bit severe on the pocket, you can be accommodated at Regan and Carello’s school, on the first floor of a building at 158 Swanston St. You won’t like it much here, because you will find a definitely low type crowd, mostly Italians, Greeks and European refugees. In the crowd of 100, there will be about 20 women.

Phase 2 – Baccarat Made Illegal

Perhaps surprisingly, The Truth’s moralistic tabloid ranting against the baccarat schools (which incidentally made the gangsters running them so livid that they offered £500 for the identity of the person who had given the paper the inside story on both Stokes’ school and Paizes’ school) stirred up enough Victorian political indignation to change the law.

Hence from 1st July 1944, baccarat found itself added to the list of games that were illegal to play in Victoria: which meant that the police were able to steam in, door-bashing sledgehammer in hand, confident that the gaming law was (at last) on their side.

The moment this became law (1am on 1 Jul 1944), raid on a Swanston Street baccarat school led (in the Third City Court in August 1944) to a group of baccarat players being fined under the newly extended gaming laws:

When police broke into a baccarat school in Swanston-street with a sledge hammer early this morning, they found a “League of Nations Assembly” around the table.

Among the 40 players— 17 of them women— were Russians, Poles, Italians, Lebanese, Albanians, Syrians and Britons. Three men were fined £3 because they had prior convictions: the remainder £2.

Fety Murat, 33, of Drummond-street, Carlton, waiter, who had charge of the game, was fined £50. It was the first raid since legislation was passed to make baccarat illegal.

(Note that a different report gave the address as “303 Swanston St”, but perhaps 158 was the downstairs address, and 303 the upstairs address.)

Phase 3 – Shutting Down the School

Over the next year, the next phase of the police operation involved building up (what they hoped would be) a sufficiently strong case to convince the courts to close down the Old Canton Cafe baccarat school for good.

On 19 July 1945, Mr Justice Lowe at the Practice Court received the following:

An affidavit by Sub-Inspector Abley, officer in charge of the gaming police, stated that police officers had seen baccarat played on the premises. The police had visited the premises almost every night for approximately six months. The only means of access was a narrow stairway, having doors both at the top and bottom. There was a person always on guard at the top of the stairway to ensure that the police could not enter without warning. For four months, said the affidavit, the premises had been run ostensibly as a club. On many occasions the police entered the premises after a short delay, and saw people scattering from a table suitable for baccarat. After quoting various matters in his affidavit, Sub-Inspector Abley said he had reasonable grounds for suspecting that baccarat was carried on, and that the premises constituted a common gaming house.

According to a different report, the affidavit further asserted that…

[…] the persons having the control and management were Christos Paizes (alias Harry Carillo), William John Elkins, Gerald Francis Regan and Richard Thomas (alias Abishara) and a man known as Balutz.

Christos Paizes responded with his own affidavit:

[…] Christos Paizes, of Mathoura-road; Toorak, stated that, with Gerald Francis Regan, of High-street, St. Kilda, he had been the tenant of part of the first floor of the building in Swanston-street, known as the Old Canton Cafe. Since they had occupied the premises they had never been used as a common gaming house. Until January, 1945, they conducted the premises as a cafe and lounge. Since then they had conducted the premises as a proprietary club. In the club refreshments were supplied to members, who used the premises to play various games of cards and checkers, but no unlawful games were permitted on the premises. With the exception of the addition of one door on the stairway, the premises were in the same condition as when first occupied by them.

Moreover (as you’d expect), Paizes utterly denied having a nitkeeper:

Paizes denied the various allegations made in Sub-Inspector Abley’s affidavit, and said it was not true there was anyone on guard to ensure that police officers did not enter without warning.

However, Mr Justice Lowe judged that what was being run above the Old Canton Cafe was indeed a gaming house:

An order declaring that the premises formerly known as the Old Canton Cafe, Swanston-street, Melbourne, and being that portion of the first floor of the building leased by Christos Paizes were a common gaming house, was made by Mr. Justice Lowe in the Practice Court yesterday. His Honor stated that the order would take effect as from Wednesday, August 1.

And so notice was served on the premises: which effectively marked the end of Melbourne’s Golden Age of baccarat schools. Which is not to say that baccarat suddenly stopped (because it most certainly did not): rather, it was that baccarat’s gilded era had finished, and it became just a low-life activity.

A Dissenting View

Oddly, “Gangland Melbourne” (which, though lively, often seems to me to get stuff wrong) asserts that Harry Stokes (prior to his death in 1945) had (p.81):

“teamed up with Gerald Francis (‘Frank’) Regan and Lou the Lombard running games at the Canton cafe in Swanston Street. Opposed to them were Kim Lenfield, Charlie Carlton, Hymie Bayer and Abe Trunley at the Ace of Clubs, Elizabeth Street. Ralph Pring of the VRC financed the Kim Syndicate, which also ran games at 52 Collins Street. The old-time confidence man Harry ‘Dictionary Harry’ Harrison […] had also returned to Melbourne and become involved in the baccarat schools.”

Lou the Lombard would pop up again in 1951 in “Gangland Australia” (p.131), running a baccarat game “on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane”. But apart from that slightly circular reference, everything else in the above account seems a bit free-floating (as you’ll find if you try searching any of the names in Trove, apart from Dictionary Harry).

So, did The Truth completely misread the baccarat school ‘scene’? Or might the Gangland Melbourne authors have been given dud information? (I suspect the latter, but I thought I ought to mention the former.)

Alternatively, if you know of a book (say, a Melbourne police memoir?) that covers this period of time a little more reliably, please say! (And yes, I’ve read Robert Walker’s serialised memoirs, but thanks for asking.)

Phase 4 – Life After Baccarat

In April 1950, we see Richard Thomas (AKA Abishara, but now manager of the Copacabana Restaurant in Collins Street), Christos Paizes (a shareholder in the Copacabana) and Feti Murat (now a “market gardener”) in a brawl with undercover policemen in Swanston Street. “Murat, who described himself as a market gardener, said he had worked for Paizes some years ago.“

As for William John Elkins, it seems he was born in 1911; in 1938, he was “charged with having had the care and management of a gaming house”; in 1941, we can see him resisting extradition from Fitzroy to Adelaide in connection with a stolen radio; he died in 1964.

So, once again it seems that the only major player we cannot trace beyond 1944 is the mysterious Balutz.

Who Were The Two Gamblers?

If you recall, the Somerton Man was tentatively identified in 1949 as a nitkeeper:

Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

But who might these “two prominent Melbourne baccarat players” have been? Trawling through all the stories in Trove (particularly from The Truth) has thrown up various prominent baccarat player names (of course, Christos Paizes himself started as a gambler), such as:

• super-gambler (and super-litigant) Michael Pitt (who hated the press)
• James Coates (‘The Mark Foy’, murdered in 1947 so we can rule him out)

My favourite baccarat gambler news story from the period was from 18 Dec 1946, relating to a loan made on 15 Jun 1945 between two baccarat players (“Charles [Albert] Darley, outdoor salesman, of St. Kilda” [and] “Eric Allen Kermode, assistant manager of a poultry business in Camberwell“) at a baccarat school at the Canton Cafe. (The case was dismissed with costs.)

To be honest, though, unless the descendants of a 1940s baccarat player step forward to recount the hoary old Somerton Man nitkeeper camp-fire tale their (grand-)father used to tell them, this detail is probably lost to history.

Where To Look Now?

There’s no shortage of police activity documented here: six months of active surveillance on a single site would have involved amassing dossiers on every baccarat school principal, so a ton of paperwork must have been generated. But what happened to that? Can all of it simply have been lost?

There is little doubt in my mind that Victoria Police’s Archive Services Centre – dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle of police files” – contains everything we would like to know.

[…] 135,000 boxes packed floor to ceiling in a cop version of a Costco.

More than one-third have not been catalogued, and records are rudimentary at best for many others.

“It’s a rabbit warren. Police keep almost everything and it’s an organisational nightmare down there,” a former senior police commander says.

Hence it seems to me to be a reasonably safe bet that it is in there, right next to the box containing the Ark of the Covenant. Here’s hoping!