Category Archives: Tamam Shud

Archives New Zealand has made seven million historical passenger records available online through an arrangement with Utah-based familysearch.org . The transcriptions were made by network of generous volunteers (though I have to say that the quality of the transcriptions varies, where a fair few of the pages I looked at were only partially complete).

And so, following on from my previous post, I thought I’d see if any male Balts or Poles aged 40 to 60 travelled on the Wahine from New Zealand to Australia in 1947 or 1948. This turned out to be an extremely short list:

Poles on the Wahine

* 09May1947 - N Szuchmacher - 47 - Printer
* 21Nov1947 - M Zable...... - 41 - Engineer (travelled with wife + two sons)
* 05Dec1947 - M Wilniewezyb - 35 - Priest
* 18Dec1947 - N Naum....... - 52 - Manufacturer
* 31Dec1947 - S Bilgorri... - 50 - Tailor

I included Father Michal Wilniewczyc because I have a nice photograph of him on the 5th December 1947. This was the very day that the much-loved priest left the Pahiatua Polish Children’s Camp in New Zealand, where 733 Polish orphans and half-orphans had been taken in 1944. Which is a story for another post entirely. 🙂

What of the others? N Szchumacher (spelt correctly) would seem to be the “Nojach Szuchmacher” referred to in a single document in the NAA from 1946, where he is a nominee for “RYBAJZEN Jozef [aka Aizen]”, who had apparently applied for naturalization in 1943. This “Nojach Szuchmacher” was without any real doubt the Noah Schumacher who (according to the NAA) arrived at Sydney on the Wahine on 13th May 1947. If it is correct that Schumacher’s file runs through to 1955 (as it appears to), we can probably rule him out as a candidate for the Somerton Man.

“N Naum” would appear to be Norman Naum (born 18th May 1895, died 12th May 1959, buried in Karori Cemetery in Nea Zealand), so I think we can rule him out too.

The Zable family – “Mrs H Zables” (Tailoress, 41), Master B. Zable (2), and Master A. Zable (8 months), both born in New Zealand – I traced through to their naturalization application in New Zealand: Zable, Myer (Zabludowski, Mejer); Zable (Zabludowski), Hodes Mrs. All of which (eventually) let me determine that Myer Zable was a poet and that he died on 31st July 1992 in Melbourne. So we can rule him out, too.

Finally: the tailor “S Bilgorri” would appear to be Solomon Bilgorri of 31 Fouberts Place, Regents St, London W1 (very close to Carnaby Street, naturally), who travelled from London to New Zealand on the Rangitata, departing 14th Feb 1947. Might Solomon Bilgorri have been the Somerton Man? The father of Harry ‘Sonny’ Bilgorri (the famous East End tailor popular among London gangsters) was also called Solomon Bilgorri (though he was born in 6th July 1893 and died on 14th June 1973, it says here), but I suspect these were two different people… though it’s hard to be sure. (‘Bilgorri’ itself was simply the name of a town in Poland.)

A small remark in the 2013 TV documentary on the Somerton Man seems to have escaped everybody’s attention. I covered the documentary here at the time, but arguably the most interesting bit begins exactly five minutes into the video (transcript as follows):

Kate Thomson: And… there was home life, and there was outside life; but I grew up very much that there’s a barrier between the two, and the two you don’t integrate.

Charles Wooley (voiceover): Today, Kate remembers a mother who was loving, but secretive – so secretive, she now believes that her mother was a Soviet spy.

Kate Thomson: She certainly said once she was teaching English to newly arrived migrants, and at the time there’d been a small group coming from Russia into Australia, and as she said to me, “Ah, I’m surprised that I can still quite understand Russian”.

Charles Wooley (as interviewer): She dropped that bombshell!

Kate Thomson (reported speech): “Yeah, so when did you learn Russian?” “Well, that’s for me to know.”

At first sight, this would seem to achieve nothing apart from hosing a tankerful of petrol onto the already-long-burning conspiracy fires raging beneath the Somerton Man’s pyre-like heap of evidence. But in fact, if you carefully link what Kate Thomson is saying with the history of post-war migrants to Australia, a quite different picture emerges…

Postwar Migrants

I mentioned Ramunas Tarvydas’ (1997) “From Amber Coast to Apple Isle” here back in 2015 when I was first looking at the Electrolytic Zinc Co. of Australia’s mining operations in Rosebury and Risdon (both in Tasmania).

But Tarvydas’ book starts by describing how the very first wave of post-war Balts (i.e. Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians) came to Australia, from their arrival by boat in Fremantle to being allocated work.

The migration scheme had been set up by Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration: because Australia had to “populate or perish” (p.6), migration from the enormous numbers of displaced persons (“DP”s) throughout Europe was – though as politically sensitive an issue then as now – the only real option to try to lift the overall economy.

Tarvydas states that “the initial intake for Australia was restricted to single men and women between the ages of 18 and 40” (p.7). Calwell also put in place a selection policy that favoured those immigrants who happened to be “white-skinned, with blue eyes and blond hair”. Not something that modern historians would look on with any great admiration, let’s say. 🙁

The first group of migrants was known as “the First Transport or Transport I […] 729 men and 114 women” (p.7): these “First Swallows” arrived at Fremantle on 28th November 1947. Four days later, the Balts were put on the HMAS Kanimbla (an Aussie troop-carrier), arriving at Melbourne on 7th December 1947, whereupon they were taken to Bonegilla camp.

Tarvydas asserts that many of the Balts in the first waves “were political refugees rather than immigrants motivated by economics” (p.17): all the same, I’m fairly sure neither account captures the entire picture. Even so, though the USAT General Stuart Heintzelman was supposed to have carried only labourers and similar workers on its first migration run from Europe to Australia, this was clearly not the case. Many of the Balts on board had had professional careers: for example, a lady (Mrs Augustauskas) who had formerly been a pharmacist in Lithuania was initially given a cleaning job at Calvary Hospital (though she later “resat her examinations and became a fully qualified pharmacist” (p.18)).

And so the problem is…

Now that you can see the external history a little more clearly and specifically, do you see the problem with Kate Thomson’s “Soviet Spy” interpretation of what her mother Jo Thomson told her?

The Balts – who made up a very large part of the early waves of immigration into Australia – did not primarily speak Russian. And at that time (and for decades afterwards) there were no waves of Russian-speaking migrants washing onto Aussie shores.

It therefore seems highly likely to me that the migrants Jo Thomson would have been helping to learn English were Balts or possibly Poles, because they were “coming from [what had become annexed into] Russia into Australia”.

Adelaide Migrants

Postwar, the Commonwealth Migration Office was based in Adelaide. And at the beginning of 1948, it was decided that a camp should be built for migrants not too far from Adelaide: this was Woodside, but it was only opened in 1949 (so is out of our date range).

The first sight Adelaideans had of these post-war migrants was in January 1948, when a group of 65 young Balts who had been allocated to work for the Water Supply Department building a new pipeline from Happy Valley Reservoir were accommodated in tents in a paddock in Bedford Park, just south of Adelaide. The press took lots of admiring photos of the strapping young migrants:

But (just as Tarvydas says), they weren’t an obviously good fit for the work that was on offer. A spokesman for the Engineering and Water Supply Department noted: “The Balts are not very keen on pick and shovel work. Most of them are young intellectuals — musicians, draftsmen, surveyors, electricians, medical attendants, engineers, and students. Not one was a laborer by occupation. They were picked from the wrong section of the community from our point of view. We want laborers.”

Moreover, it quickly became clear that four weeks of English language classes at Bonegilla hadn’t really been enough: even an op-ed piece of the day thought that the authorities should do something about it (Why oh why? cont. p.94). The young lad Olaf Aerfeldt who was the Bedford Park Balt’s unofficial interpreter had only got there by chance, flipping a coin to choice between Australia and South America (pp.42-46): but they needed to learn English. And – as you can clearly see from this photo – they were anxious to learn, but had no lessons:

At this point, several local people – Mrs and Mrs Lyall Fricker, Peter McDonald and L. A. Tepper – stepped forward to offer their services as volunteer teachers. Though things seemed to have improved somewhat by May 1949.

Finally: I’ll leave the story of how 280 Polish ex-servicemen were discharged in Adelaide on 30th September 1947 for another day: they formed arguably the very first large wave of migrants from mainland Europe, predating the “First Swallows” by a few months. But who’s counting?

And so…

To my eyes, there seems to have probably been only a relatively small window when Jo Thomson would have been helping Adelaide migrants to learn English: late 1947 (when they started to arrive) to early 1950 (when the flow of big migration boats stopped). And there were basically no Russians at that time: mainly Balts and Poles.

If some of the migrants who had formerly lived in Bedford Park were asked if they remembered Nurse Thomson, what would they say? It would be interesting to find out, I think: it might give us a better idea of how that side of her life worked. It probably wouldn’t stop the crackling conspiracy fires (though these may well continue burning, regardless of whatever happens to be uncovered in the future), but it would be good to know, right?

Adelaide Railway Station (Again)

One last thing: while trawling through Trove, I found an Adelaide News article from 20th November 1948 about Balt women working in Adelaide Railway Station that I thought I’d share with you:

[Mrs Natalia Aerfeldt at top, Mrs Vera Plume at bottom left, and Mrs Anna Kirkmann at bottom right]

Three newly arrived Balt women working in the refreshment service at Adelaide Railway Station have husbands training as railway porters here.
A 17-year-old son of one couple is a youth cleaner in the department.
Mrs. Anna Kirkmann, who serves in the dining room, was a bank manager’s private secretary in [Estonia] before the war, and later worked for Unrra.
She arrived here with her husband, Paul Kirkmann, on Thursday as members of a party of 55 Balts.
Other railway family groups besides the Kirkmanns are Mr. Janis Plume, Mrs. Vera Plume, and their son, Roberts, who are
Latvians, and Mr. Bronius Lukavicius and Mrs. Jule Lukavicius, who are Lithuanians.
Mrs. Kirkmann is living with her brother at Glenelg. The married men and Roberts are at the railways hostel at Islington. The other women are in refreshment service quarters at Adelaide Station.
Balts with the railways total nearly 400. Seventy men are porters and cleaners; 100 are being trained for that work, and the remainder are divided between south-east gauge broadening and metropolitan maintenance work.
Mrs. Natalia Aerfeldt, also in this week’s party, is the mother of Olaf Aerfeldt, interpreter at the waterworks camp at Bedford Park. Olaf’s father has gone to Globe Timber Mills, Port Adelaide.

And so there you have it – even by late November 1948, Baltic migrants were working in Adelaide Railway Station, embedding themselves right into the very texture of the Somerton Man’s story.

Who’s to say that he himself wasn’t a migrant?

The Somerton Man – found dead on Somerton Beach near Adelaide on 1st December 1948 – had, in his fob pocket, a small slip of paper on which was printed “Tamam Shud”. It was subsequently determined that this slip had been torn out by hand from the last page of a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: and that the specific edition of the Rubaiyat had been published by Whitcombe and Tomb’s in New Zealand, as part of their “Courage And Friendship” series.

(Note: if we knew what other books in the “Courage And Friendship” series were listed on the inside front cover of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat, we’d almost certainly be able to determine the precise year in which the book was printed).

The Tasman Sea

So: given that the Rubaiyat had started in New Zealand but ended up in Australia, it seemed highly likely to me that the book and its mysterious owner had travelled across the Tasman Sea from the former to the latter between 1st January 1945 and 1st December 1948. But… exactly how did they make that journey?

To try to answer that question, I bought a copy of Peter Plowman’s (2009) Wanganella and the Australian Trans-Tasman Liners to find out. Plowman’s book covers the history of all the major passenger ships that travelled the roughly 2000km across the Tasman Sea very well, and with admirable attention to detail (the page numbers in the following refer to Plowman’s book).

It didn’t take long to discover that we would appear to have only three ships to consider: the Katoomba (briefly), the Wanganella (also briefly), and the Wahine. Let’s look at each of these three ships in turn…

Katoomba

As 1946 began, there was pressure on the Australian government to help get “the thousands of New Zealand residents who had been stranded in Australia for the duration of the war” back across the Tasman Sea (p.118).

However, this apparently simple-sounding objective proved very difficult to attain in practice. Of the ships that had seen Trans-Tasman service before the Second World War, the Awatea had been sunk en route to Gibraltar in 1942; the Monowai’s intense war-time usage had left it needing an extensive refit; while the luxurious liner Wanganella similarly needed a year’s refitting to turn it back from the hospital ship it had served as for many of the war years.

In the short term, this only really left “the veteran coastal liner Katoomba” (p.118), which had been converted to a troopship during the war: as a result, it was only able to take passengers across in what at the time was called “austerity” quarters. I found a nice picture of it here.

The Katoomba made only a single round trip, initially carrying 600 passengers and 2,000 tons of cargo out to Wellington: even so, its departure was plagued by industrial action that delayed its departure by a fortnight, before finally arriving on 6th February 1946. Its return journey terminated at Sydney on 23rd March 1946 (travelling via “Totokina and Rabaul”), (p.121), but the ship never made another journey on that route.

Wanganella

(Image from Reuben Goossens’s excellent webpage)

The Wanganella had been a beautiful (and much-loved) liner before the war, but its post-war refit took until October 1946 to complete. And its first journey then was from Sydney to “Auckland, then on to Suva, Honolulu and Vancouver. Leaving Vancouver on 27 November, Wanganella returned to Sydney on Saturday, 28th December”. (p.122).

However, its heavily anticipated (and fully-booked) second journey on 17th January 1947 fared much worse. As the gigantic ship entered Cook Strait in Wellington Harbour on the evening of 19th January 1947, it was accidentally steered onto Barrett Reef, where it remained stuck for seventeen days amidst remarkably mild weather (since then known locally as “Wanganella weather”) (p.130). Unsurprisingly, it then needed extensive mending in the shipyards before it could take to the seas again.

So as things turned out, the Wanganella’s next journey was to be 9th December 1948: and as a result, its part in our timeline comes to a close here also.

Wahine

Though the Wanganella’s much-hoped-for fortnightly sailings had been booked out for months, after its accident in the harbour put it out of commission there were simply no suitable ships to replace it with. So the Wanganella’s owners (Huddart Parker) decided to use the “veteran steamer Wahine” instead (p.136).

(Image taken from a website devoted entirely to the ship!)

It carried 300 passengers on its first journey from Wellington to Sydney on 14th February 1947: it left Sydney on the 21st February 1947. It then left Wellington on 28th February 1947, and continued a regular service for the next three months. However, the trips stopped for the (antipodean) winter on 3rd June 1947, restarting on 12th September 1947. “In all, Wahine made sixteen return trips across the Tasman Sea in 1947” (p.137).

In 1948, however, the Wahine made only ten round trips across the Tasman Sea, with its last departure being on 14th May 1948. “For the rest of 1948 there was no passenger service provided by Huddart Parker or the Union Line across the Tasman” (p.137).

And so…

It may not sound like much, but I harbour [*] a very strong suspicion that the Somerton Man travelled from New Zealand to Australia on one of these trips, with the little Whitcombe and Tomb’s “Courage and Friendship” Rubaiyat stowed [**] in his pocket.

And, moreover, I further suspect that should we list all the male passengers aged (say) between 45 and 55 who travelled on the Wahine’s twenty-six journeys during this period, we would see the Somerton Man’s name.

How many names would that yield? Perhaps three hundred or so would be my finger-in-the-air guess: but we may be able to eliminate many of them very quickly. And we may may already have seen one or two of the names from other directions (I have one particular surname in mind… but that’s a story for another day completely), which would be a highly intriguing development.

OK, so… shall we draw up a list, then?

[*] Sorry about that. 🙂
[**] And that. 😉

The “Somerton Man” gained his epithet from Somerton Beach near Adelaide, which was where his dead body was discovered in the early morning of 1st December 1948. Yet despite the mass of forensic evidence (his body and, more recently, an analysis of one of his hairs) and physical evidence (his clothes and possessions, plus his suitcase), his real identity has never been determined.

Police investigators were then led down into not so much a ‘rabbit hole’ as a labyrinthine warren of ‘twisty passages all alike’ by the tiniest of objects half-concealed in the man’s fob pocket… a tightly-furled slip of paper with the words “Tamam Shud” printed on it:

A cropped version of this appeared in the 9th June 1949 edition of the Adelaide Advertiser, just before the first Coronial inquest was due to start:

Police determined that these two words were Persian for “The End”; that they were the concluding piece of text in the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (a popular book of poetry at the time); and that they were printed in a font that was specific to the editions put out by Whitcombe and Tomb’s (a New Zealand publishing company).

As a result, the police took the opportunity of the flurry of publicity surrounding the inquest to ask anyone in the general public to come forward if they just happened to have a copy of the specific edition of the Rubaiyat from which the final two printed words (“Tamam Shud”) had been ripped out by hand. A picture of the original Rubaiyat’s front cover appeared in the 26th July 1949 Adelaide News:

Amazingly, a Rubaiyat that exactly matched this description was quickly brought forward by a publicity-shy local “businessman”: it had been discovered in the back of his car parked in Jetty Road in Glenelg, not too far from the beach where the dead man’s body had been found. And when police photographers carefully examined indentations on the back of that (now long-lost) Rubaiyat, they uncovered not only something that looked like a mysterious code, but also one or more phone numbers (and possibly even a name, though this item remains completely unconfirmed).

What of these two wonderfully specific pieces of evidence? The code-like text was speedily passed to a top Australian code breaker (almost certainly Eric Nave), but proved indecryptible. As for the phone number(s), one led to a local nurse called Jo Thompson, who denied all knowledge of the Somerton Man when asked by the police (though we now know that she did know more than she said).

At the time, however, the code and the phone-numbers were the police’s two last-gasp hopes of cracking the mystery: and when those leads went cold, so too did the case. Despite all the wild and unfounded speculation (ranging all the way from romance and illegitimacy to Cold War espionage) that the decades since have seen, this is as much as we genuinely know… the rest is just guesswork (and often highly fanciful guesswork at that).

All the same, what these very public dead-ends did manage to achieve was to intensify the mystery surrounding the unidentified dead man on Somerton Beach. Who was he? Why was he there? How did he die? What had happened?

The Rubaiyat

One of the few non-speculative research avenues open to investigation is the Rubaiyat itself. What was its story? Where did it come from?

Retired detective Gerry Feltus, the man who (literally) wrote the book on the investigation into the Somerton Man cold case, spent years trying to find Whitcombe and Tomb’s editions of the Rubaiyat (as described in his Appendix 5). Here’s a picture of what he was looking for (note the highly ornate border):

After a great deal of searching, Feltus eventually managed to locate “two first edition copies”. One, however, “was printed in a different font and there was no ‘Tamam Shud’ at the end”, so was of no direct help to his search (p.168). The following is a scan of a different copy of this same particular edition:

Yet though the other copy Feltus found was a much better match, it too was not identical: the font and layout was the same, but the front cover was smaller and squarer than the image of the cover that appeared in the media at the time, while “the page positioning differed”. (p.169)

How could it be that Feltus’s years of diligent searching had produced a copy that was nearly-but-not-quite identical? What was going on?

Whitcombe and Tomb’s

Founded in 1888 in New Zealand, Whitcombe and Tomb’s (now merged and reborn as “Whitcoulls”) was by 1948 something of an institution: it printed text books and all manner of serious-minded stuff. Here’s a photo of its Dunedin store in 1931 (which I found here):

But as WWII approached, W&T was struggling to find an edge over its many rivals: it was perceived as being staid and somewhat boring, while its competitors were building up reputations for having a stylistic edge over W&T.

If you look again at the edition above, I think you can see W&T’s inner bore emerging: even though it uses a nice enough font, overall the pages themselves are rather dull-looking – though professional, it’s completely unremarkable. The final page states:

By way of comparison, the other edition not only has a highly-decorated border on every page, it finishes with a triangular design that stresses the artistry involved in the new production – that it is “A W&T Art Production“:

Something seems to have changed…

Rubaiyat Advertisements

I suspect we can learn a lot more from the press advertisements the company took out to try to sell its Rubaiyats.

The sequence of advertisements in New Zealand Papers Past (a Kiwi version of Trove) starts with a 24th December 1936 W&T advert for a Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam at 4/6. However, I’m not sure what to make of it.

Papers Past then has the following advert from 22nd November 1941:

Pretty Booklets

The Courage and Friendship Booklets, produced by Messrs Whitcombe and Tombs Ltd. (Auckland), are enveloped ready for post, a very attractive means of conveying a Christmas greeting, The five titles issued are Bracken’s Not Understood, Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, some songs and poems of Robert Burns gathered as Sprigs o’ Heather, an anthology of Great Thoughts from famous books, and Golden Threads drawn from Trine’s “In Tune with the Infinite.” The booklets are prettily designed, two being printed in a decorative letter.

According to this November 1941 advert, these booklets were priced at 1/6 (or 1/7 posted). The posted price went up to 1/8 in 1943, when a sixth title was added to the list (“Falling Leaves, thoughts for shadowed days”).

However, an advert from 22nd April 1944 announced a new – and much more upmarket – edition:

OMAR KHAYYAM

Delight again and again over, this wise old Persian’s verses; you can never exhaust their pleasures: they carry you far beyond the four walls of everyday life – singing with sheer beauty of love, and life’s riches – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. New edition bound in dark green cloth, with illustration. 12/6

21st December 1944 saw them advertising their cheaper (1/6) Courage and Friendship version, and now with “Merrie England, songs from Shakespeare” (a seventh title) added to the list.

Similarly, the following year (29th November 1945) saw them selling the same series at 1/6, but this time with “Forget-me-nots, an anthology of friendship” (an eighth title) added to the list.

Trove aficionados can also find Australian adverts, e.g. for the Courage and Friendship series:
* 5th December 1942 (Courage And Friendship, 5 titles, 1/6 each, 1/8 posted)

Once you get to 1944, the second luxury edition appears on sale in Australia:
* 22nd January 1944 8/6, 8/10 posted
* 26th January 1944 8/6, 8/10 posted

And then there’s a third leatherette-bound W&T Rubaiyat we’re not otherwise aware of:
21st December 1946 and 25th December 1946: “THE RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM. A delightful leatherette-bound volume, suitable for presentation. Price, 5/6 (posted 5/8).”

And is this 1947 version the same as the Courage And Friendship edition, but at a slightly higher price?
* 3rd May 1947 “RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM 2/5. Postage, 2d. A compact, well illustrated edition of this evergreen classic”.

This 1947 version sounds like the 1944 luxury edition again:
* 27th September 1947 “RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM, Large gift edition, beautifully illustrated. A Whitcombe and Tombs art production. 8/6. (Posted 8/10.)”

As for this 1948 mid-price version, I’m guessing that this was the Rubaiyat published in London by Frederick Muller Ltd, because George Buday (1907-1990) was an artist and printmaker who emigrated to Britain from Hungary in 1937, and ended up living in Coulsdon (ten miles from Surbiton):
* 27th March 1948 “RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM. 3/2, postage 3d. An attractive little gift book, Illustrated with engravings by George Buday.”

So Many Rubaiyats, So Little Time!

Even though I have tried to collect as many of the Whitcombe and Tomb’s advertisements together as I can, I think it should (“Shud”?) be clear that it would take a far more determined book detective to reconstruct the exact sequence of books being published here.

The dull-looking “Printed by Whitcombe and Tombs” edition that Gerry Feltus found might conceivably be the 1936 Rubaiyat: or it might just as well be a very early version of the Courage and Friendship series.

Regardless, it seems to me that we can reduce most of Whitcombe and Tomb’s Rubaiyats into two basic families:
(1) the smaller and more compact, Courage & Friendship pocket Rubaiyats (low-end, cheap stuff for gifts)
(2) the taller and generally fancier deluxe presentation Rubaiyats (high-end, 5+ times more expensive!)

Moreover, from other stuff (to come in a follow-up post), it seems that the Courage & Friendship pocket Rubaiyats were reprinted in slightly different colours from year to year, both inside and out. For example, the decorative page borders were cream in one year and beige in the next, while the border blocked around the text was green in one edition and yellow in another. And the inside page of the front cover was reprinted at different times, because different Courage and Friendship Rubaiyats list different numbers of titles in the C&F range.

So it seems to me that if only a picture had been taken of the inside cover of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat, we’d be able to date it simply by the number of other Courage and Friendship titles listed in the same series. But perhaps there’s a note still in the police file somewhere.

Courage and Friendship Covers

The very nice “An Empty Glass” Somerton Man Wiki has rather splendidly managed to somehow collect a sequence of Whitcombe and Tomb’s Rubaiyat front covers in its page on the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat.

Its key picture looks like this:

Here you can see different printing colour schemes being used in different years: and the substantial difference between the (compact) Courage and Friendship editions on the left and the deluxe version on the right.

So, What Is Going On, Nick?

I think it’s reasonably simple. What Whitcombe and Tomb’s were doing with the Rubaiyat was dipping their corporate toes into the oversize paddling pool of design aesthetics: which is why they tried different price-points, different materials, different techniques, different sizes, etc. By and large, it seems to have been an experimental time for them.

Each Courage and Friendship printing batch seems to have had its cover printed in a different colour: if only we had a record of the list of other Courage and Friendship books in the series that appeared on the front inside flap of the cover of the Somerton Man’s book, we would be able to tell which year it had been printed.

Gerry Feltus had found the right book: just not the right year’s edition of that book, it would seem. And the reason that there was so much year-to-year variability is simply because Whitcombe and Tomb’s was trying to extricate itself from the staid, boring corner of the market it had painted itself into so relentlessly for so many years. Even though it wanted to develop its arty side, it didn’t really know what was going to work in the wider book-buying market. (Frankly, it seems to me that it never quite managed this particular trick).

And so we have reached our almost-paradoxical conclusion of the day: that even though Whitcombe and Tomb’s deluxe version of the Rubaiyat (with its gilt lettering or hand-stitched lettering) would be a more desirable book to own from the point of view of a collector, it is very probably from the far more cheap-and-cheerful 1/6 Courage and Friendship edition that the Somerton Man had ripped out his “Tamam Shud”.

And quite why he did that at all is another matter entirely! 😐

If sweary, angry, nihilistic (yet oddly well-informed) Australian rock ticks your boxes, The Drones would surely be for you. Their plinky take on the Somerton Man mystery (which they call “Taman Shud”, the genuinely incorrect Aussie spelling) starts on familiar territory…

who ditched that fox-gloved snitch?
loaded him with poison like a puffer fish
why don’t anybody feel like crying
for the Somerton somebody with the hazel eyes?
[…]
he’s gone and no one even cares at all
the earth won’t answer and the sea don’t mourn
for all of the probing into whether he exists
the question’s still as open like a radar dish
late 1948
is sending a transmission but its inchoate
[…]
why did anybody feel the need to lie
‘less that’s Warsaw on the seashore
on the day he died?
don’t nobody wonder where he’s been?
no tags no wallet
and his brains dry-cleaned

…but then quickly sprawls sideways into contemporary commentary, la-di-da-di-da.

To all of which I’d say: maybe the Somerton Man was a snitch, maybe he was poisoned, maybe he was a Soviet spy, sure, feel free to subscribe to all the long-running fantasies all you like… but maybe he was instead just a working class bloke bumping along the bottom at a time of poverty and uncertainty.

At this point, many traditional rock critics would spin away to assert (something along the lines of) that the song is ‘clearly’ using the Somerton Man’s apparent exclusion from society to amp up the band’s ongoing critique of racism and of blow-hard know-nothing Aussies (including the entire political class, left and right).

But that would, of course, be utter tosh: any song with the word ‘inchoate’ is just knobbery, albeit entertaining knobbery. I like it, though: and I guess that’s all that really counts. Here’s the video (which is even more fun than the song):

Taman Shud [lyrics]

(From Feelin’ Kinda Free (Side A))

thud thud my heart pumps blood
when ever someone talks about my taman shud
who ditched that fox-gloved snitch?
loaded him with poison like a puffer fish
why don’t anybody feel like crying
for the Somerton somebody with the hazel eyes?
why don’t anybody feel like crying
for the Somerton nobody with the hazel eyes?

thud thud my heart pumping blood
when ever someone talks about my taman shud
he’s gone and no one even cares at all
the earth won’t answer and the sea don’t mourn
i don’t give a fuck about no Anzacery
i don’t care you got it interest free
i ain’t gonna fret about Lest We Forget
fuck the Murdoch press
i don’t get hung up on any carbon tax
or Ned getting strung up for being a psychopath
i ain’t really there with any class warfare
the only thing i care about’s the

thud thud my heart pumping blood
when ever someone talks about my taman shud
he’s gone and no one even cares at all
the earth won’t answer and the sea don’t mourn
for all of the probing into whether he exists
the question’s still as open like a radar dish
late 1948
is sending a transmission but its inchoate
don’t hate me for not caring ‘bout you losing your job
i think you’re gonna suit being a welfare slob
i don’t give a toss about no southern cross
or the gulag union jack
i don’t give a fuck if you can’t stop the boats
i ain’t at a loss if Simpson’s donkey votes
i don’t care about no Andrew Bolt
or even Harold Holt
it’s clear as
mud mud my taman shud
everybody mouths off
while they’re chewin’ cud

thud thud my heart pumps blood
when ever someone talks about my taman shud
why did anybody feel the need to lie
‘less that’s Warsaw on the seashore
on the day he died?
don’t nobody wonder where he’s been?
no tags no wallet
and his brains dry-cleaned
i don’t give a fuck about fuck off we’re full
i ain’t gonna send my kids to private school
i ain’t gonna grieve about no BHP
no silver spoons or mining booms
i don’t give a fuck about your brick and tile
i don’t really care if you’re a paedophile
i don’t care about no Master Chef
it’s as appetising as a whistle blower’s doom
or any French cartoon
nothing like a prune to make the death cults bloom
why you think the whole world’s gotta be like you?
fuck western supremacy
i ain’t sitting around being gallipolized
one man’s BBQ’s another’s hunger strike
why’d i give a rat’s about your tribal tatts?
you came here in a boat you fucking [—-]
my taman shud
everybody mouths off
while they’re chewin’ cud

thud thud my heart pumps blood
when ever someone talks about my taman shud.

A new person of interest to Somerton Man researchers is Margaret Alison Bean (formerly Miss Alison Verco, and more usually referred to in the newspapers of the day as Mrs. Arnold Bean). She was a popular South Australian socialite, often mentioned by Australian newspaper social columnists such as “Lady Kitty”.

Here’s a picture of her at Joy Denbigh-Russell’s secret wedding in 1940 (she’s third from the left, in what the Daily Telegraph described as “a black angora frock and silver fox cape, and a small black velvet toque. Her corsage posy was of white hyacinths“):

The Time Line

The time period we are interested in is from Alison Verco’s wedding to Arnold Bean (Chief Inspector of Mines in Malaya) on 11th April 1947 through to her death on 5th July 1949.

9th July 1947
From Sydney comes news of Mrs. Arnold Bean, formerly Alison Verco, who has arrived from her home in Kuala Lumpur, Federated Malay States, on a visit. She plans to stay in Sydney until her husband arrives a little later to join her for long leave. Mrs. Bean is hoping also to visit Adelaide to see her many friends here.

17th July 1947
MRS. ARNOLD BEAN, formerly Miss Alison Vercoe, of Adelaide, is visiting Sydney from her home at Kuala Lumpur in Malaya; she expects her husband to join her in September.
She lunched at Prince’s this week with Mrs. Max Clark.

27th July 1947
IT’S grand to see Mrs. Arnold Bean again. She was the popular Alison Vercoe, of Adelaide, and since her marriage has been living in Malaya. Her husband will arrive in Sydney sometime in September.

4th August 1947
During a visit to Sydney to meet Mrs. Arnold Bean, formerly Alison Verco who has arrived from Kuala Lumpur, Federated Malay States, Dr. and Mrs. Ronald Verco stayed at the Hotel Australia.

31st October 1947
MR. and Mrs. Arnold Bean (she was formerly Miss Alison Verco, of Adelaide) arrived in Adelaide this week, and are staying at the Berkeley Hotel. On Monday week, Mr. and Mrs. Bean will leave to spend two months’ holiday with Mrs. H. O’H. Giles, at Victor Harbor. Mrs. Giles is Mrs. Bean’s sister.

By 30th December 1947, the couple were in Adelaide, having holidayed in Victor Harbor.

Yet on 24th January 1948, the news headline was that she was “Now Out Of Hospital“, and “living for the next few weeks in the home of her sister, Mrs. Alec McLachlan, at Pennington terace, North Adelaide. Iveagh Perry has come down from Southport, Queensland, and is staying with Mrs. Bean.”

When the McLachlan family returned from Victor Harbor a month later around 21st February 1948, the Beans moved to “Glenelg to stay with Mrs. H. P. McLachlan for a fortnight”.

20th March 1948
Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Bean, who have been staying with Mr. and Mrs. Hew O’Halloran Giles at Medindie since their return from Glenelg, will motor to Sydney tomorrow. They will spend a fortnight there while waiting to sail for their home in Kuala Lumpur, Federated Malay States.

20th March 1948
TOMORROW Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Bean will leave for Melbourne, en route for Sydney and eventually Penang. Mrs. Bean, who was formerly Alison Verco, has been in South Australia for several months.
The first part of the vacation was spent in the family house at Victor Harbor, and later she visited members of her family in town.

21st August 1948
Mrs. Arnold Bean, formerly Alison Verco, will arrive next month from Singapore on a short visit.

13th November 1948

TOP — On their way to lunch yesterday (from left) Evelyn Scarfe, her Melbourne guest Miss Thelma Halbert, Mrs. Linden Wood, and Mrs. Arnold Bean, of Singapore, (formerly Alison Verco, of Adelaide).

26th November 1948
Mrs. Arnold Bean will leave on Tuesday to fly to Singapore, where she will change planes and go on to Kuala
Lumpur to join her husband. Mrs. Bean, who was Miss Alison Verco, of Adelaide, has been staying with Miss Evelyn Scarfe at Glenelg. She hopes to return to SA next September with her husband.

30th November 1948
Visiting Adelaide from Sydney are Mrs. Charles Lloyd Jones and Mrs. B. M. Stranger. Lunching at the South Australian Hotel with Mrs. Arnold Bean, they showed smart, new styles.

1st December 1948
Mrs. Arnold Bean, who has been staying with her sister Mrs. Hew O’Halloran Giles at Medindie during the later part of her visit to Adelaide, left by plane yesterday for Sydney on her return home to Malaya.

11th March 1949
News comes from Malaya that Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Bean, of Kuala Lumpur, went to Hongkong recently for a holiday. Mrs. Bean was Miss Alison Verco, of Adelaide and Sydney.

12th April 1949
Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Bean, of Kuala Lumpur, Malaya, have arrived in Adelaide. They are in Mr. and Mrs. John Skipper’s flat, at North Adelaide, for a fortnight.

And then she died:

5th July 1949
BEAN.- On July 5, Margaret Alison, beloved wife of Arnold Bean, of 2 Palm street, Medindie.

6th July 1949
BEAN.- On July 5, Margaret Alison, beloved wife of Arnold Bean, of 2 Palm street, Medindie.

7th July 1949
BEAN.- On July 5, Margaret Alison, beloved wife of Arnold Bean, of 2 Palm street, Medindie.

17th November 1949
MARGARET ALISON BEAN Late of 2 Palm Street, Medindie in the State of South Australia. Married Woman, Deceased.- After fourteen clear days Arnold Bean of 2 Palm street Medindie aforesaid, retired mining engineer, the executor to whom probate of deceased’s will, dated 13th June 1949 was granted by the Supreme Court of South Australia in its Testamentary Causes jurisdiction, on 16th August, 1949, will APPLY to the Supreme Coutt of Victoria that its SEAL may be AFFIXED to an Exemplification of the said Probate.

J. COLIN STEDMAN solicitor 339 Collins street, Melbourne.

There has long been a tendency to frame the Somerton Man as some kind of social outsider, whether as a spy, a loner, a drifter, a criminal, or whatever. The fact that, nearly seventy years on, he remains unidentified would superficially seem to support that view.

And yet he certainly did know people.

It was revealed not so long ago by Jessica Thomson’s family that she (the nurse “Jestyn”) did know who the man was, but chose not to disclose his identity. It therefore seems highly probable (though not completely certain) that he travelled by the 11:15 bus to Glenelg for the specific purpose of visiting her or her husband Prosper Thomson, a journey that ultimately finished with the man’s lying dead on Somerton Beach.

Along with the bus ticket in the Somerton Man’s pockets, there was also an unused train ticket from Adelaide to Henley Beach. It therefore seems very likely to me (though far from certain) that he was planning to catch the 10:45 train to Henley Beach to visit someone he knew, and perhaps even leave his suitcase with them.

Hence it’s an entirely plausible (but unprovable) scenario that he telephoned his Henley Beach friend(s) when he arrived at Adelaide Station that morning but got no response, and so decided to leave his suitcase at the station and go directly to Glenelg. (Though if he had missed the 10:45 Henley Beach train and found out that the next train left after one o’clock, he might well have changed his plans for the day.)

“The charge for each article (Motor Bicycles excepted) is for day of lodging and one clear day thereafter 4d. For each subsequent day 4d.”

But that’s far from the end of our search for the Somerton Man’s social network.

A suitcase was subsequently found in the station which was connected to him not only by a thread – specifically, a certain kind of thread (“Warm Sepia of Ridgway”) that both was in the suitcase and had been used to mend his trousers – but also by the same type of jockey-style underwear that he was wearing and that was in the suitcase.

And that suitcase, amongst all its pell-mell contents, contained a number of blank prepaid letters and envelopes, about which relatively little has been said so far.

John Burton Cleland’s notes

But John Burton Cleland noticed these: and in his notes to the Coroner, he wrote:

The appearance and history and social class of the deceased as revealed by the body and contents of suitcase:

1. Age: Dr. Dwyer estimated the age as probable 40 – 45. Supported by his appearance (as preserved), hair beginning to grey, several teeth missing, no appreciable atheroma in cornoaries or aorta.

2. Height: To be checked. Slimmer than I am (vide 3 in preceding section).

3. Hair: Brushed back off forehead, no parting, fair approaching sandy-coloured turning grey, rather long for a man. This item seems important in identification. Also do many Americans brush the hair backwards, more so than Britishers

4. Had shaved recently?

5. Nails of fingers and toes clean and carefully attended to – evidently particular in his appearance. Not those expected in a hard manual worker or seaman – more of a clerk or officer class.

6. Fingers tobacco stained. Shreds of tobacco in pockets of coat worn by deceased and coat in suitcase. Heavy smoker.

7. Trousers in suitcase well-pressed. Clean shirts and jockey-pants in suitcase. Garments quite clean – one slightly soiled. Particular in his dress.

8. Air-mail stickers in suitcase – corresponded with some one at a distance – other State more likely than Britain (special air-mail letter forms usually used for latter).

9. Empty squarish envelopes in suitcase suggest Christmas cards posted before November 30 (suggests overseas rather than interstate – America or Britain?).

10. Straight nose, not Jewish. Appearance not foreign. Not circumcised – Det. Leane points out [that this] excludes Turks, Egyptians, Jews.

11. New tan shoes on body, very little worn. Look as though they had just been polished and not worn all day walking about.

12. Had he been vaccinated? I could not satisfy myself that an indefinite patch below the left shoulder was a vaccinated area. Dr. Dwyer says that many service men vaccinated has ‘takes’ and showed later very little scarring.

13. Implements probably used for stencilling. A hobby or part of his work?

Cutting to the chase here, Cleland infers from the air-mail stickers found in the suitcase that the Somerton Man was corresponding interstate, and from the “empty squarish envelopes” that he had recently sent some Christmas cards (plural) overseas.

If Cleland was correct, I suspect that we perhaps can further rule out America’s West Coast as a likely location for him to be sending Christmas cards to, simply because the post boats got there too quickly from Australia.

And if we run with the American stitching in his coat and Juicy Fruit chewing gum in his pocket, we can possibly push the balance of probability away from the UK to America’s East Coast. But might he have been born in the UK circa 1900 (and not circumcised, as was more often the practice in the US then), and be writing back to family there? This is where the evidential crystal ball becomes too hazy to read.

All the same, what surely emerges overwhelmingly from all of this is simply this: that the Somerton Man was not an unknown lone wolf. He was actually connected into a wider social network of family, friends and allies… and very possibly enemies, too.

Pete Bowes has had some comments left on his Somerton Man blog by a certain ‘Margaret Hookham’ (which, trivia fans, was actually Dame Margot Fonteyn’s real name).

In these web-weary days we live in, the default position with posters claiming to drip-feed intriguingly new Somerton Man information is that they should be considered trolls until they can prove otherwise (which has yet to ever happen, as far as I can tell)… or until they provide sufficient disproof that their research is for real. In this case, “Margaret” asserts that “ASIO records show D.D.Thomson was in Adelaide on the night of the 30th November 1948“: which sounds highly unlikely to me, given that ASIO wasn’t actually formed until 1949. Which – as starts go – is far from the best.

All the same, what intrigued me was that – despite the thick layer of apparent trollery – there was also a glimmer of genuine historical interest to be had from her comments, though probably not in the way that was intended.

Specifically: I’m interested neither by her primary claim (which involves the disappearance of Vasily Sherbakov and Miss Bogotyreva from the November 1948 LAPSTONE conference, Jessica Harkness, pregnancy, bla bla bla) nor indeed by her secondary claim (Russian spies, Australian spies, Alf Boxall, Prosper Thomson, cover story, bla bla bla), but rather by her tertiary claim: which is that Prosper Thomson, D.D.Thomson [who she says was Alf Boxall’s boss, and maybe he was, who knows?] and a man called Thomas Leonard Keane were all at the 115th Australian General Hospital (6th RAAF Hospital) in Heidelberg in 1943.

115th Australian General Hospital

Source: Australian War Memorial

It’s certainly true that Prosper Thomson was there (albeit briefly) in 1943. According to his military records (digitized online at the NAA), on 28/6/1943 he was transferred from Prince Henry Hospital to “115AgH” , but discharged two weeks later on 10/7/1943.

Moreover, it’s certainly also true that a soldier called Thomas Leonard Keane was (according to his military records) working there in 1943, presumably as a nursing orderly. And so: given that we have been looking for a “T. Keane”, and that these two men may well have met in the relatively compact setting of Heidelberg Military Hospital, it would seem to be a good idea for us to ask…

Who Was Thomas Leonard Keane?

During WWII, Keane entered the Australian military twice: firstly, in 1939 where he gave his occupation as “Dispatch Clerk”, but lied about his age, claiming that he had been born in Newport, Victoria on 6th November 1905. Having been assigned to the 2/2nd Field Regiment, he was put onto the “X list” (which listed those members of a unit who were absent, typically for medical reasons), asked to be released for “Family Reasons” (not apparently specified in the documents) and was discharged in April 1940 (discharge certificate 13139). His April 1941 application for a General Service Badge was turned down because his discharge wasn’t on actual medical grounds.

His second entry into the Army was in September 1941, where he was assigned to the 115th Australian General Hospital at Heidelberg, but this time giving his date of birth as 6th November 1898. He also gave his job as “Railway Clerk”, and listed his primary school as “St Josephs, Newport” (it was blank in his first application).

Why did he lie about his age? There’s no obvious clue, but I have a suspicion that he had served in WWI and – for some reason – wanted to avoid having that record examined. There’s a link here, service number 33556: whether this was him is no doubt something Cipher Mysteries readers will be able to determine much more easily and quickly than I could.

Finally, we know the second date of birth Keane gave is correct, because we also know when he died: 13th November 1973.

(Courtesy of BillionGraves).

Clearly, he couldn’t have been the Somerton Man. But I’ll come back to that in a moment.

Keane worked as a Nursing Orderly in 115AGH, and served outside Australia for 138 days (in Japan from 11th March 1947 to 26th July 1947), before being discharged on 8th June 1948.

Japan in 1947

This 1998 letter from Captain Barbara Ann Probyn-Smith, RAANC,(Retd), paints an all-too-vivid picture of what was going on Japan at that time.

The Japanese people had many endemic diseases in their bodies, to which we had no immunity. They included TB, HTLV-1, Japanese B Encephalitis (one epidemic in 1948 killed over 3,000) and Haemorraghic Fever.

Up the hill, behind the Kure Hospital, and opposite and above our quarters was a very sordid town, with no washing facilities, no running water, where the Japanese grew fruit and vegetables in fields manured with human excreta. A terrible smell always emanated from it. It had no sewage. They dug open trenches into which they emptied their “honey buckets” of human excreta, before it was taken to the gardens for growing fruit and vegetables. Although there were wooden covers over the trenches, there were many large cracks between the boards, permitting the entry of flies and other vermin.

If I have read his forms right, Kure Hospital was where Keane travelled to on the Manovia.

And What Of The Somerton Man?

We can see Keane’s signature and handwriting many times on the military forms:

Which, of course, we can compare with the writing on the tie in the suitcase:

Is it a match? Possibly, possibly not: the K looks like a plausible match, while the T rather less so. All the same, it’s nice to have them next to each other.

So is that the end of it? Have we driven our Holden all the way to the end of yet another Somerton Man cul-de-sac?

Well… not quite. Thomas Leonard Keane for me is emblematic of what was happening in Australia after WWII: though he had avoided front-line action, his months at the hospital in Japan must have been harrowing in a very different way. And the situation he presumably found himself in mid-to-late 1948 was surely not hugely dissimilar to that of the Somerton Man, as forensically told by his body at the time – fit, well-groomed, yet not necessarily fitting in to post-war society. They were not the same person, sure, but they may well have been “brothers in plough-shares“, or fellow-travellers in some way.

The Suitcase, Once More?

An unwritten assumption of most Somerton Man research is that the suitcase (left at Adelaide’s Railway Station) was only the Somerton Man’s. Yet even though this is a straightforward notion apparently full of common sense, it isn’t entirely as strong as you might think. It contained (if I recall correctly) clothes and shoes of different sizes: a mish-mash.

What I’m getting at here is that there’s a hypothesis that hasn’t really been considered: that the suitcase might have had more than one person’s belongings in. Might it have had some borrowed clothes, perhaps borrowed from an ally (Keane lived in the Reservoir suburb of Melbourne, and there was a good train into Adelaide from there that morning) rather than a friend? Might that person have lent his suitcase and some of his own clothes to a sick, destitute acquaintance as a short-term favour?

And then – upon the Somerton Man’s death – might the original owner of the suitcase have decided to deny all knowledge? After all, what kind of a person really wants to get themselves tangled up with a messy business like that? “Smile and wave, boys, smile and wave”, as a famous military leader put it. Would you have raised your hand?

Oh, And One Last Thing…

Finally, the last page of Thomas Leonard Keane’s file has a surprise for us all: a small sealed folder with the following stamp on it:

What information could a former nursing orderly at Heidelberg possibly have that would require being reclassified as secret until 2028?

Plenty of room for conspiracy theories, sure: but what are the odds that it gets a further thirty years of secrecy added to it even then?

For fans of the Somerton Man, there would seem to be no obvious end to the list of similar puzzling cold cases to snoop around. One I found recently first properly surfaced in October 2005 in an article by Carol Smith in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called “The cipher in room 214” (though in the sense of a non-person ‘cipher’, rather than a cryptographic cipher).

This is the case of the woman who put her name down as ‘Mary Anderson’ when she signed in to Seattle’s Hotel Vintage Park on the 9th October 1996. As Smith wrote:-

“She made no phone calls. Ordered nothing from room service. Instead, in some unknown sequence, she put out the “Do Not Disturb” sign, applied pink Estée Lauder lipstick and combed her short auburn hair. She wrote a note on hotel stationery, opened her Bible to the 23rd Psalm and mixed some cyanide into a glass of Metamucil.

Then she drank it.“

The note said:

“To whom it may concern: I have decided to end my life and no one is responsible for my death. Mary Anderson.

“P.S. I have no relatives. You can use my body as you choose.“

Like our acquaintance from a certain South Australian beach, the woman had no identification – no keys, no credit cards, no tags on her luggage, no fingerprint match. The name, New York address and phone number she had given were all false. And every tiny cluette, as with the Somerton Man, subsequently led the investigation nowhere.

To read more, there is a Doe Network entry, and – as you long-numbed Netizens doubtless already expected – a Mary Anderson cold case Facebook page, where recent postings highlight the suggestion that she may have been Mary Corinne Amos.

Though this is a possibility web researchers have long looked at, it all feels quite strange to me. Surely dental records and/or autopsy photographs should be able to rule this out or in very quickly? But this seems never to have happened, there’s no clear reason why not.

By way of comparison: in 2014, thanks to the Doe Network, a different Mary Anderson (Mary Lynn Anderson) was identified after three decades, closing an equally long-standing cold case. But it doesn’t seem obvious to me why Mary Corinne Amos hasn’t yet been forensically tested against the Room 214 ‘Mary Anderson’: so perhaps I’m missing something.

I don’t know: even though the ‘Mary Anderson’ and Somerton Man cold cases share similar problems of ‘taglessness’ (for want of a better word), I find the latter extremely hard to accept as a suicide. And that’s not because of a lack of suicide note (which are normally left in only a minority of instances), but rather because of a lack of… a whole load of different things. His death seems neither pre-planned, nor deliberate, nor misadventurous, nor even opportunistic. In that respect, the two cases seem to me to be worlds apart.

PS: when I tried to find ‘Mary Anderson’ on NamUs, I got absolutely nowhere: the cold case seems to have dropped off NamUs’s database. 🙁

Back in March 2014 (do you remember 2014? It all seems a bit of a blur), long-time Somerton Man researcher Barry Traish posted the results of his search for word sequences in Project Gutenberg that matched the (very probably) acrostic contents of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat note.

He looked for sequences whose word length was in the range eight to ten: and found 41 matches in the corpus’s 45,000 out-of-copyright texts. And here they are:

OABABDWT of a brighter and better day, when the
DWTBIMPA dynasty. When these became inevitable, M. Perier attached
TPMLIABO that point. My life is a bad one
LIABOAIA lad is a brave one, and I am
LIABOAIA literal inflicting a blow on an individual, and
LIABOAIA looked into a book of any importance, as
IABOAIAQ is a beautiful one, and I am quite
IABOAIAQ is as badly off as I am,” quivered
CITTMTSA care I took to make their stay at
CITTMTSA care is taken to make the strokes as
CITTMTSA castes. In the Tanjore Manual, the Shanans are
CITTMTSA Church in this town, Mr. Thomas Smallwood, an
CITTMTSA contemplating in turn the marshes, the sea, and
CITTMTSA conveying it to their master. The Sultan asked
ITTMTSAM I thought to myself that such a man
ITTMTSAM In talking to men–to such a man
ITTMTSAM in the textile, metal, transport, shipping, and machine
ITTMTSAM is that the men that stand around Me
ITTMTSAM it together, that Miss Thorpe should accompany Miss
ITTMTSAM itching to take me to see a man
TTMTSAMS tend to make them soft and mushy. Strawberries
TTMTSAMS than twenty miles…. There soon after midnight…. Steal
TTMTSAMS that transported me: To see a mind so
TTMTSAMS to the metropolis, to seize, at Maunsell’s shop
TTMTSAMS treat the matter too seriously, and merely said
TTMTSAMS Tshaka the Mighty, the swift and merciful stroke
TTMTSAMST* the tetragonal minerals tapiolite (= skogbolite) and mossite, so that
TMTSAMST that makes the sun and moon seem to
TMTSAMST to make their saloon a market, so that
MTSAMSTCA* me to stay; and, merely stopping to cast a
MTSAMSTG motioned the stenographer and Miss Snow to go
TSAMSTCA the sideboard; ask my sister to come and
TSAMSTCA the soldiers any more.” So the child and
TSAMSTCA the stronger, and more slimy) the Cores and
TSAMSTCA their ‘speech,’and ‘made strange their counsel.’ All
TSAMSTCA to seeke a more safe, then commodious abode
TSAMSTCAB* the scene. After mutual salutations the commissioners asked: “By
TSAMSTGA the same. All men seek to get as
TSAMSTGA the sincere among My servants to gain admittance
TSAMSTGA then summoned all my strength to gaze and
SAMSTGAB Street and Main Street, the grassy area between

Curiously, though, “66% are entirely on the last line”, which in fact highlights the difficulty you get when you try to find words that fit the other lines, particularly the first two lines. Moreover, none of the matches he found were to poems.

Why might this be? Even though Barry tried repeating the process with different letters in those cases where the letter shapes were ambiguous (e.g. M/W, etc), the results were essentially the same. Personally, I wonder whether this indicates something different: that perhaps a number of the guesses the unnamed policeman in SAPOL made for the first line were wrong… and hence that we don’t stand a chance. We really, *really* need a better scan of this page. *sigh* 🙁

But Barry’s pièce de resistance was the bacronymic poem that he composed back from the Rubaiyat initials. I think this is arguably the best attempt yet (I particularly like “and by and by” for ABAB 🙂 ), see what you think:

“My road goes on, and by and by divides,
Now two branches, into morning, past a new evening that provides,
My love is a barren oblivion, and itself alone quite certain,
It’s time to move the soul among magic stars, then gently asleep besides.”

Splendid, well done Barry! 🙂