Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

In Part One I looked afresh at the ink of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat letters, trying to get some kind of handle on what it is that we are looking at there.

However, I think there’s a huge slice of mid-century history that we’ve largely managed to overlook up until now, but that may well give us a different angle again: Australian police photography.

The ‘mother lode’ of this is a huge collection of about 100,000 negatives taken by NSW police photographers “between 1912 and the late 1960s”: this was originally uncovered in a government warehouse in 1989, but has since had books written about it, as well as travelling archive exhibitions and countless reproductions in newspapers. (It is now under the custodianship of the Historic Houses Trust of NSW.)

Fingerprints, crime scenes, mug shots, stolen goods, and (yes) even documents are there: the dead, the gloating, the defensive, the beaten, the defiant, the lost. All human life is here, though (with a nod to Anthony Burgess) perhaps the Holy Ghost remained just out of shot. Some appear strikingly anachronistic, such as the extraordinary Mrs Osbourne, who looks to me like someone circa 2009 with a thing for retro clothes:-

There’s a great description online by Peter Doyle of the research he did into this collection, that turned into his (2005) book “City of Shadows, Sydney police Photographs 1912-1948”, as well as his (2009) book “Crooks Like Us”. Perhaps a little media-theoretic for my personal taste, but stunning, unforgettable images nonetheless. (There are a fair few more online here.)

Anyway… from my reading so far, it seems that almost all police images prior to the 1950s used 6″ X 4″ glass plate negatives: it was only in the late 1940s and early 1950s that sheet film started to be used (roll film didn’t arrive until the 1950s). The white writing on the images (such as “20. MRS OSBOURNE” above) was black writing written directly onto the negative (and hence which came out white when turned positive). Text was normally, I believe, written back to front on the negative so that it would end up the correct way round when finally printed, which I suspect is why many of the captions look somewhat scratchy and upright.

We can therefore (I think) already rule out the suggestion that what we see in the Rubaiyat note might have been applied directly to a negative, because (as you can see from the archives) this was a practice used extensively with dark ink that ends up white when the negative is turned positive (as opposed to white ink that ends up dark when reversed).

We can also (I think) rule out the use of iodine vapour deposition to make the photograph: this was an early forensic technique that took the lipids left on a surface in fingerprints and (briefly) turned them brown, whereupon they could be photographed and used as evidence. However, the drawback with this technique is that the lipids left behind in this way degrade and become unusable after only a week or so: so it would seem unlikely to have been used on the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat.

(This also answers the often asked question about why the Somerton Man’s suitcase was never fingerprinted – it’s because iodine vapour deposition isn’t much use after a week, and the suitcase was only retrieved several weeks later).

We can also (I suspect, though Gordon Cramer will doubtless disagree) rule out the use of UV photography. Even though the Australian Special Investigation Bureau was formed in 1938 (it had access to up-to-date photographic equipment, and developed a “standard set of procedures for taking crime photos” according to this page), I simply don’t believe the photographer used by the SA police was in that league at all.

So what are we looking at, then? If the back part of the image isn’t a film or glass negative, we only really have three feasible scenarios left:

(1) the actual object itself, with an acetate film placed on top of it (and drawn on)
(2) a positive (developed) photograph of the image, with drawings made directly on top of the photograph
(3) a positive (developed) photograph of the image, with an acetate film placed on top of it (and drawn on).

Gordon Cramer also suggests that the photographic image may have been reversed and overexposed to yield more contrast: it’s a possibility, but I suspect we should get the opinion of a photographic historian who properly understands the nuances of mid-century dark room practice, because the image might well be good enough for an expert eye to tell.

Right now, I’m not sure which scenario will turn out to be the right one: but I suspect that there may well still be sufficient clues in the image to assist us in this. For example, it looks to me as though there is some kind of ‘clip’ in the top right hand corner of the image: might that be for holding the original image flat, or for clipping an acetate on top of the image?

Perhaps taking a closer look at some of the 1940s NSW police photographs will help to make this clear. Something to think about, anyway. 🙂

A piece in the Adelaide ‘Tiser a few days ago lays out retired policeman Gordon Cramer’s sensational-sounding Somerton Man claims – that the mysterious cipher-like Rubaiyat note linked to the Somerton Man contains “Prosigns” (a set of abbreviations when using Morse Code); that it also contains microwriting; and that some of this microwriting in fact refers to a top secret post-war British plane – the de Havilland Venom.

Gordon has been doggedly pursuing the Somerton Man’s trail for several years now… so might his diligent nose have sniffed out a whole set of truffles that everyone else has been walking past in the rotting forest of evidence?

The immediate thing to note is that there are so very many cipher history / mystery elements in play here that it’s going to take me more than a single blog post to cover them all. But I’ll start briskly with what I think is the fundamental forensic question – What happened to the Rubaiyat note to leave it the way we see it in the scans? – because Gordon’s take on this has both interesting similarities to and differences from my own.

A smooth writing surface?

First things first: Gordon and I agree (I think) that what we’re looking at is quite different from the state the page was in when it was passed to the SA police. Looking close-up at the letters (as Gordon has spent so much time doing), it is very clear (I think) that there is a ‘slide’ to the way many of them were formed, as if they had been written on a shiny / smooth / glossy surface… and hence not on the roughly-textured post-war paper of the Rubaiyat.

In particular, I think it is hard to see the “A” of the “PANETP” (above) as having been written on anything but a slippery surface: and if this holds true for the ‘A’, then it must also be true of all the other letters written in the same codicological ‘layer’.

A laundry pen?

Secondly, he and I also agree (I think) that in 1949 these marks must almost certainly have been made by an early indelible marker pen, such as a laundry pen. I’m not a laundry pen historian (there can’t be that many of them in the world, surely?), but I am reasonably sure that they would have had fairly stiff wicks / tips drawing ink from their ink reservoir. I also don’t think they would have been much fun to write with: by way of contrast, the (later) felt tip pins had tips that were much more pliable.

I further suspect that we have enough evidence to make a reasonable estimate of the physical size of the pen’s tip. Given that the size of the Whitcomb and Tombs Rubaiyat edition upon which the writing was found is 110mm x 140mm, (which Gordon describes (fairly reasonably) as a “pocket version”) and that the width of the downstroke on the A is about 13 pixels on the 1802×1440 image, I believe we can infer a line width of between 0.75mm and 0.80mm. All of which is pretty much consistent with the pen being something similar to a laundry pen of the time (note that the first Sharpie was launched fifteen years later in 1964).

Furthermore, if you look at the ‘feet’ of many of the vertical lines (as above), you can – I think – see ‘pooling’ where the ink has collected at the end of a downstroke: so my suspicion here is that the ink would seem to have been made to a ‘wetter’ formulation than the kind used in modern marker pens.

The Jestyn ‘R’?

Gordon has also recently pointed out a similarity between the (only) R in the Rubaiyat note and the first R in Jestyn’s note in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.

I agree that it’s an intriguing suggestion, but I’d caution that Jestyn’s overall ‘hand’ is slightly forward slanting and curved, while all the ‘laundry pen letters’ are distinctly upright and linear. All in all, if there is a match there, I’d say it’s a pretty thin one… but I thought I ought to say.

The first letter.

So far, so good. But it is broadly at this point that our paths diverge, so I’ll go on to consider a number of possible scenarios in the next post.

Yet there is another issue here: the “M” that is apparently visible beneath the first letter. (And yes, I know that the first letter is also an “M”: I’m talking about something that looks like a pencil “M” beneath a laundry pen “M”). A picture is well worth a thousand words here:-

If you can’t see what I’m talking about, here’s another version with the M-like lines roughly highlighted in green:-

What was used to mark out this single under-letter? Not laundry pen, nor iodine vapour, nor even UV light: to my eye, it resembles faint pencil, or perhaps pencil marks that have been partially erased and then contrast enhanced in the photographer’s dark room. Might it be that these faint lines were what all the text originally looked like, before having the marker pen layer added on top?

What I find most interesting is that this ‘under-M’ doesn’t yet square well with anybody’s ideas about this page (not even my own): and is therefore perhaps a sign that we’re all misreading this in one or more significant ways. We don’t yet know the real history of how this page was made – every account seems to be closer to hearsay than to evidence – so it’s all up for grabs. Anyway, scenarios next…

…i.e. was he a member of broadly the same group of Odd Fellows that used the Action Line Cryptogram to acrostically encrypt their initiation ceremonies?

In South Australia, Odd Fellows founded their first Lodge in Adelaide in late 1840 (according to this 1843 page from their journal), at just about the same time as a Lodge was formed in Sydney: and even today, Odd Fellows in SA are apparently still going strong.

So… looking again at the Tamam Shud text, it parallels the Action Line Cryptogram: that is, it gives cryptologists a very strong impression of having been constructed as an acrostic English ciphertext, because its letter frequency distribution closely follows the same frequency distribution pattern found in English texts.

All the same, pure acrostic cryptograms are relatively rare in the wild, because they are more mnemonic than cryptologic: they are there to remind the reader of something they already know rather than to communicate something unexpected to someone else. The more personal the message, the more unknowable its contents: and that’s they way it is, I guess.

So perhaps in this instance Marshall McLuhan is right, and the medium (an Odd Fellows-style acrostic cryptogram) is the message. If so, the most we are likely to infer from this is that it was written by someone who was (or had been) a member of an Odd Fellows Lodge, very probably in Adelaide itself. The Somerton Man may well have been down on his uppers (albeit very shiny uppers), but I expect those same shoes had likely been inside an Adelaide Lodge at some stage.

Now, Pete Bowes will likely take this as a cue for explaining why (in his belief) the contents of the suitcase were laid out in such a ceremonial way: and why the name link to recently-deceased Adelaide Freemason Tom Kean was never explored by the police. But… one thing at a time, Petey-boy, one thing at a time… 🙂