Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

The last Cipher Mysteries post (from Jo) on Hickey Taylor only had a single scratchy picture of him playing bridge backstage. However, this lack of good images prompted CM commenters to dig up a whole sequence of pictures, which I thought would be good to put into a photo timeline.

Photo Timeline

1929 “Desert Song”, found by milongal:

1930 “Whoopee” (found by Jo):

“En tour Hickey […] outside Mark Foy’s, Sydney 5.30 A.M., [ca. 1930]” (found by Jo):

193x “St Joan” (found by Jo):

1937 Sydney Sun, playing bridge backstage with the cast of “The Merry Widow”:

1945 “Desert Song” (found by Thomas):

Back to the Family Photo…

Going back to the whole family photo affair, was it really Hickey Taylor whom Charlie Webb (circled) was pranking? Personally, I don’t see it at all, but… what do you think?

(Nick: here’s a guest post [lightly edited to house style] from Melbourne-based Cipher Mysteries commenter Jo, introducing Hickey Taylor to the Somerton Man discussion. Over to you, Jo…)

Stuart Webb recently re-posted “the family photo” on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page, along with a query about one of the people on it: Hickey Taylor.  My first reaction was that “Hickey” and “Taylor” sounded like two old farmers from Camperdown (there are lots of Hickeys and Taylors there…) but commenter Poppins cleverly pointed out that Hickey Taylor was in fact a stage manager and occasional actor for J.C. Williamson’s. So… who was Hickey Taylor?

Henry Herbert “Hickey” Taylor, 1903-1962

Though born in Tasmania, Taylor’s electoral roll enrolment address across several decades is his parents’ home at 56 Surrey Road, South Yarra, right up to his death in 1962, when he was living with his widowed mother, Isabel. He spent long periods away from South Yarra with his work.

Taylor’s AusStage listing has him as being in Adelaide from the late 1940s to late 1950s – however, this was as an actor up until 1947, and then as a stage manager from 1949. If you dig through J.C. Williamson’s programs [he joined the company in 1925], you can also see that he spent long periods in Perth, e.g. as stage manager for “The Girl Friend”.

Perhaps most intriguingly, he was also the stage manager for the Adelaide run of “Under the Counter”(but not the Melbourne run), which ended on 30 November 1948. This, of course, places him in Adelaide at the time of Carl Webb’s death.

It seems that Hickey Taylor may also have been a drag performer, or to use the language of the 1940s, a female impersonator.  The Australian Queer Archives has an interview listing [p.66] (I haven’t yet managed to secure a listening appointment but have contacted them and am trying, hopefully with Poppins).

Taylor worked in his stage manager capacity with some of the most celebrated Southern Hemisphere female impersonators of the time  – e.g. Phil Jay and John Hunter of the Kiwi Revue shows.

As an aside, there have been books (and even Masters theses!) on the soldier female impersonators – theirs was a skilled and well regarded craft. They could also often be a tough bunch. Brent Coutts’ book “Crossing the Lines” is probably the most comprehensive review of the Kiwis.

I viewed Hickey Taylor’s probate document, as well as his hospital death report from the Alfred Hospital at the Public Records Office of Victoria. He died of heart complications – an unexpected death of septicaemia – in 1962.  (I’m still digesting the report and will send my photos to Nick.)  Dr Colin Ernest Seabridge, the Alfred Hospital’s Resident Medical Officer wrote “I find it impossible to state the cause of death.” There are a lot of similar words and phrases to Charlie Webb’s death and inquest documents.

Taylor was known to the hospital, he was “a depressive, with suicidal tendencies”.  He had been “under psychiatric treatment.”

He left his estate to his widowed mother and his brother and sister, this included two houses – 34 and 36 Fawkner Street, South Yarra (worth a small fortune now!)

Connections and Speculations

Was Hickey Taylor the source of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam? (Commenter Em and I believe so!).  We know that it was printed by New Zealand company Whitcombe and Tombs and that an identical copy has never been found.  (Was it a limited army print run?)  I haven’t been able to find Taylor on any New Zealand Immigration and Passenger lists in the 1940s, so I would say if the Rubaiyat came via Hickey Taylor it might well have been via a Kiwi Revue member, such as renowned female impersonator Phil Jay, who played in the same cast as Taylor in “The Girlfriend“.

We know that Charlie was fond of solving Norman McCance’s newspaper bridge problems, but there’s also a picture in the Sydney Sun of Hickey Taylor playing bridge in 1937:

We can hypothesise about the relationship between the two men and also about Carl Webb’s manicure, careful shave, well-developed calf muscles and wedge shaped feet, noted at the time of his death. We could speculate whether this was the end of an affair, an assisted suicide or a case of moving a dying Charlie somewhere where he could be found without linking him to his theatre friends. Perhaps someone else deposited the suitcase at the station? If we think about the laws and climate of the time, an anonymous death makes a certain amount of sense: Victoria only removed the death penalty for sodomy in 1949. It was only between 1975 and 1997 that Australian states and territories gradually repealed their sodomy laws and began gay law reform.

It also appears that Carl may have told his family he was in Cottesloe, working as an electrician, as per the solicitor’s advertisement regarding Gladys May Scott’s will (posted on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page by Lachlan Kelly). Where was Carl between the end of 1946 and November 1948 and what was he doing?

The Tidying-Up-At-The-End Bit

I think the first Cipher Mysteries post I ever read was “On Carl Webb, Truth and Beauty” (5 August 2022) where Nick warned us against “The one true narrative”:

Maybe we can now each spin our own tidy yarn tying together personally preferred loose threads…But… by doing this, I think we’d be dancing around some sinkhole-sized gaps, not in our preferred story (which will always sound nice to our own ears), but in Carl Webb’s actual story.

What was the American connection? Had Webb travelled to America? Did Doff give Webb the Rubaiyat? Did Webb have a replacement partner lined up? Might he actually have been gay, and married Doff to hide his sexuality? What instruments did he make … Did he have a police record?

My own interest here was first sparked when Bromby Street was mentioned: I initially felt sure the Somerton Man case had something to do with signals intelligence (there were at least fourteen different signals intelligence related sites in the local area during World War II). But I think we should now add a relationship with Hickey Taylor to the list of possible narratives to consider. Might the story have more in common with that of poor Alan Turing, needlessly persecuted because of his sexual preference for men?

I suspect this one may have legs (with well-defined calf muscles?).

Finally: thank you John Sanders for initially pointing out that Gerald Keane had travelled to New Zealand – I think that put us on this track, and thank you also Poppins for finding Hickey Taylor.  Punters: keep the commentary “noice” or Aunty Jack will “rip your bloody arms off!” (Sorry Nick, Aunty Jack is an old Australian reference, from before my time here!) And thanks Nick for promoting my comment to a post; it gives a good opportunity for further sleuthing and mature reflection.

Much as I’ve enjoyed looking through old J. C. Williamson programmes and Melbourne bridge columns hunting for Gerald Keane and Carl Webb, I can’t help but wonder if it’s time for a new research angle.

I mean, tracking Dermott Derham ‘Derry’ George (of 13 Wandeen Road, S.E.6, mechanic in 1939 Victoria census) and his wife Rita Mabel (nee Dixon, married 1942 in Victoria, maybe at Hoffman’s Road, Keilor, home duties in 1946 Victoria census, died in Keilor in 1998), and I guess his brother Dermott James George and Olga Burge George (both at 13 Wandeen Road in 1939, and again in 1941) is all very well, but it’s not really much of anything. Oh, and driving in his 746 c.c. M.G.J. in 1935, and his M.G. J4 in 1937 and 1938 and 1938 again for the Light Car Club? Nope, not that gripped, sorry.

So what’s next?

Masonic Registers and Card Indexes, maybe?

This is what I’m thinking might possibly give us a lead on Gerald Keane and/or Carl Webb.

There’s a whole load of Australian Masonic Registers and Card Indexes 1830-1991 now being digitised and prepared for publication on familysearch.org, which is just the kind of thing I like to trawl through just in case. (But it’s not up yet.) Similarly, the Museum of Freemasonry in NSW also has digitised a lot of its Masonic records, though these are not yet available online. Still, you’d have thought the Adelaide Masonic Centre Museum at 254 North Terrace, Adelaide and its Grand Lodge Library (the J. R. Robertson Masonic Memorial Library) might have something like the card indexes each Lodge had, right?

Wrong! Because it turns out that tons (almost literally) of masonic registers and card indexes from South Australia have been lodged (if you’ll excuse the pun) in an Australian archive, including a downloadable finding aid listing all the individual documents – I know because I actually read it a few months back. But… I have since lost my copy of that file and now can’t find it again. Which is unbelievably annoying.

So, can anyone help me find this document again?

Royal Adelaide Hospital

Carl Webb was not a well man. At the time of his death, he had an enlarged spleen (which must surely have been hugely painful), and it appears (from his hair) that he had been exposed to dangerously high (and as yet unexplained) levels of lead some 2-3 weeks before his death. Moreover, it seems likely to me that what killed him was an overdose of heart medication (though whether that was self-inflicted, deliberate, or merely accidental is a quite separate issue).

TL;DR – Carl Webb was not, as the phrase goes, a happy bunny.

Hence, I’ve long wondered whether Webb might have been admitted to (and discharged) from a hospital in the month before his death – and given that he was found on Somerton Beach, I’ve specifically wondered about the Royal Adelaide Hospital.

Interestingly, the admissions register for the RAH have been digitised up to 1961, and are accessible up to 31st December 1936. These look like this:

Now, it’s not clear to me when (or to whom) the Admissions Register scans covering November 1948 will/are be accessible. There seems no obvious reason why film # 102936290 isn’t available online, but might it be accessible in person via an LDS Family History Centre? Perhaps someone here will know what the deal is (because I certainly don’t, alas).

Update!

Though Google wasn’t as helpful as normal, I eventually found a copy of the missing document in my mobile phone’s pdf cache. It was SRG 490, “Grand Lodge of Antient, Free & Accepted Masons of Australia”, held at the State Library of South Australia. More to follow when I’ve gone through it properly…

Some Cipher Mysteries commenters have speculated that Gerald (Jerry) Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s might have connected him to the run of “Under The Counter” at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal in November 1948. But is there any actual evidence of this? Keane doesn’t appear in the UTC programme, so why should we think this is so?

From Chief Mechanist to Caretaker…

As commenter Poppins pointed out, Jerry Keane was the Chief Mechanist for J. C. Williamson’s 1937/1938 production of Victoria Regina. He was also the Chief Mechanist for the (Melbourne-based) Borovansky ballet when they went on tour in New Zealand in 1944: so I think we can reasonably presume that he was the Chief Mechanist on tour with the two production companies.

Yet at the time of his accidental death in 1960, Keane was working for J. C. Williamson’s “scenery store situated at 47 Richmond Terrace, RICHMOND as a caretaker and a storeman, and his duties were to see that the premises were secure at night and the Firedoor was closed at night” (as deposed by his fellow theatrical employee Edward James Morgan of 1 Kennedy Street, North Richmond). Which, given that he seems to have started as a caretaker in the Camperdown Mechanics Institute back in 1915, would seem to have Fate bringing him full circle back to where he began.

Maybe the Borovansky Ballet?

So, what was Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s in late 1948? We also now know that the Borovansky Ballet were popular with Australian audiences and continued touring for many years after: two productions from this time were Terra Australis (1946) and The Black Swan (1949). So it is entirely possible that he continued in his role as Chief Mechanist with the Borovansky Ballet throughout this period.

Interestingly, the NZ national library has a page listing all the ballet programmes it has for 1947, which (as you’d expect) has numerous performances by the Borovansky Ballet. This includes this lovely cover:

The NLA has plenty of photographs for the Borovansky Ballet, of which this one is my favourite (backstage for Swan Lake, 1947, taken by V. Gadsby):

However, the corresponding NZ page for 1948 has no performances at all by the Borovansky Ballet, but many performances by Ballet Rambert in association with J. C. Williamson’s (from May 1948 to June 1948). The NZ page for 1949 has none at all for either ballet company. Yet even though Ballet Rambert performed in Adelaide in November 1948 (i.e. immediately before “Under the Counter”), I saw no sign of Jerry Keane in the programme for their performance there.

Perhaps some intrepid soul will find something similar to J. C. Williamson’s Salary Book 1933-1943 (first mentioned here by one of the many ghosts of Steve Hurwood), but for 1947-1949?

Maybe “Under The Counter”?

It’s entirely possible that someone will find Jerry Keane mentioned in travel records relating to Cicely Courtneidge’s “Under The Counter” production as it finished its mammoth four-year tour in Adelaide in November 1948. So… what happened?

The performances prior to Adelaide had been in Perth, though some performances that were due to happen in Kalgoorlie after that were unfortunately cancelled “because of the coal strike“. I should perhaps note that the Perth “Workers Star” described the (admittedly fairly lightweight) show as “reactionary twaddle“:

CICELY Courtneidge’s show, Under the Counter, in Perth now, is a dirty piece of boosting for blackmarketeers, and squeezes in a few reactionary cracks at the British Labor Government and the Communists. Stooping to this kind of reactionary twaddle won’t get the big theatre magnates anywhere with Aussie audiences. They obviously found the show very boring, it hardly raised a laugh. The night the Star reviewer went His Majesty’s showed so many empty seats the box office must have made a loss on it.

The main body of the company travelled by train from Perth, arriving on Monday 15th November 1948, just a few hours before the performance. Cicely Courtneidge’s accompanist Robert Probst (who later got into hot water for disparaging the quality of Australian orchestras) flew to Adelaide on Saturday 13th November 1948 to rehearse on the Sunday. (Though Cicely Courtneidge herself may have flown on Friday 12th.)

Courtneidge went shopping on the 22nd to buy some pyjamas to take back for her husband (no, I’m not making it up), and after the show’s run had finished, went to stay at a bookmaker’s house on Palm Beach with her main man Thorley Walters. The Sydney Truth gleefully reported:

When Cicely Courtneidge and Thorley Walters left for home during the week, Palm Beach lost two of its most colorful visitors. Cicely used to prance into the surf in a bright yellow brassiere top with bright royal blue trunks and Thorley had a pair of orange trunks which used to glow in the dark. Cicely was forced to put splits in the sides of her shorts as her avoirdupois increased (she admitted putting on a stone and a half in Australia). As the sun sank to rest below the purple hills at Palm Beach Thorley’s trunks became more of an illuminated address and the sight of his luminous posterior bobbing about in the briny is some thing the locals won’t forget for a long time.

Courtneidge flew to Melbourne on 29th November 1948; and later, after a farewell party at Prince’s, she flew to Honolulu on 17th December 1948.

Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter Poppins, we now know that Carl Webb’s close relative Gerald Keane was known as Jerry Keane. This was from the souvenir programme for a J. C. Williamson production of “Victoria Regina” that ran from 1937 to 1938 (the file is dated October 1937, but the front cover has the hand-written note “Auckland NZ 1938”). Page 10 has a list of the “Heads of Stage Departments”, one of whom is:

So let’s have a look at Jerry Keane.

Gerald Thomas “Jerry” Keane

Gerald Thomas Keane was born in Ballarat East, Victoria in 1889: in 1915, he married Freda Grace Webb (1896-1964, sister of Carl Webb) in Victoria. There’s a 23 Jan 1915 news report of Gerald and “the Webb sisters” performing in a local concert. This was also the year he lost his job as caretaker of the Camperdown Mechanics Institute, as per this letter of 14 Aug 1915.

It seems that it wasn’t too long before he found employment with J. C. Williamson for, as commenter Francis pointed out, there’s an article from 20 Jul 1940 in the Camperdown Chronicle that says:

Mr. Gerald Keane, son of Mrs. Keane, of [130] Manifold street, who has been on the staff of J. C. Williamson for over twenty years was in Camperdown on Thursday, on a visit to his people. Mr. Keane has had an extended trip with the Russian ballet, visiting Adelaide, and then Brisbane.

Gerald and Freda had three children: Leo Vivian (born in Camperdown in 1915), John Russell (‘Jack’) (born in 1917), and Gwendoline Mary (born 1919). In 1943 (when his son Jack died), the family address was 194 Stewart st, East Brunswick, Victoria: before that, they lived at 226 Glenlyon Road (this was their address on Boxing Day 1940 when they were witnesses for Roy Webb’s Will). As commenter Jo pointed out, Carl Webb appears to have been living with the Keane family at that time (i.e. not long before Carl’s marriage to Dorothy).

In 1944, Gerald (“Jerry”) Keane was reported as winning £10 in a lotto in Launceston:

WHEN certain lottery prizes were announced in Launceston on Tuesday, two very excited people were prima ballerina, Dorothy Stevenson, of the visiting [Borovansky] ballet company, and Jerry Keane, chief mechanist accompanying the ballet. Hear that these two visitors collected £10 each.

The Borovansky ballet company was based in Melbourne, founded in 1939 by Edouard Borovansky and his tall wife Xenia as the “Academy of Russian Ballet above a shop in Elizabeth Street”, whose studios then (from 1940) provided the home for the Melbourne Ballet Club. According to this page:

The year 1944 brought two landmarks for Borovansky: he became a naturalised Australian, and J.C. Williamson’s backed an Australian tour that took his company from Melbourne to Adelaide, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane, and then to New Zealand. From then until 1961 – except for occasional unfortunate breaks – the Borovansky Ballet was a permanent and popular feature of J.C. Williamson’s programming […]

Over the years, highlights of the repertoire included Laurel Martyn’s Sigrid (first presented by Borovansky in 1940), Petrouchka (1951), the complete Sleeping Princess (1952), Massine’s Symphonie Fantastique (1954), Cranko’s Pineapple Poll (1954) and, from Lichine, a full-length Nutcracker (1955) and the specially-commissioned Corrida (1956). Borovansky himself explored Australian themes for three original ballets, Terra Australis (1946), The Black Swan (1949) and The Outlaw, a 1951 retelling of the Ned Kelly saga – proving that Borovansky had become, in his own words, ‘a dinkum bloody Aussie’.

[…] Borovansky’s papers and a striking self-portrait are held in the National Library of Australia.

(PS: ballerina Dorothy Stevenson was the daughter of the Bishop of Grafton. So don’t say I don’t spoil you for interesting historical facts.)

Gerald died in 1960 in Fitzroy, Victoria.

Chief Mechanist

In a touring company (usually ballet or opera, but sometimes musicals and larger productions), the Chief Mechanist (or Head Mechanist) typically reports to the Production Manager, and handles planning, logistics and staff rostering, to ensure that each night’s performance does exactly what it is says in the souvenir programme. Hence Jerry Keane “accompanying the ballet” company on tour as its Chief Mechanist makes perfect sense.

Compared to theatre productions, where Stage Assistants (and sometimes “Mechanical Staff”) typically report to a Stage Director, the role of a Mechanist would involve wrangling not just the stage but also (in modern productions) flying harnesses, animatronics, and all manner of special staging effects. You can therefore think of the Chief Mechanist was kind of a techno-magician behind the scenes, turning a performance into a memorable production.