Category Archives: Tamam Shud

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! 🙂

Historical research can carry you to all kinds of places, such as this 1917 article in the Barrier Miner, reporting on a march in County Clare:-

They marched like guardsmen to the music of their drums and fifes. In their wake came Tom Keane, the Ennis “Boy Martyr” of 16, who has won everlasting fame by reason of his imprisonment, in Galway County Gaol for the crime of drilling Sinn Feiners; the tale in Ennis is that it took “seventeen R.I.C. men to carry him to gaol and half a regiment of the Munsters to keep him there”. He was in command today of 40 children, who marched to the scene of demonstration with rare military precision behind a banner bearing the words, “Remember Dublin.”

The same Tom Keane appears in several Sinn Fein witness statements covering the years 1913 to 1921 held by the Bureau of Military History, e.g. here, here, and here. The first of the three describes how a group of Sinn Fein members, captured after shooting a police office in 1920, went on hunger strike in prison.

After four days, Thomas Keane, who was very young and delicate, was in a bad way […] The Prison Governor, Mr. Faulkner, was a nice man and was more or less in sympathy with us. He visited our cells several times night and day, especially Keane’s whose health was very much worrying the prison doctor. On the seventh day of the strike, all the men on hunger strike were released.

Presumably this was the same Tom Keane who appears in the National Archives at Kew WO 35/102/39. Always interesting to see the same event reported from both sides of the same fence:-

“Prosecution of Thomas Keane; endangering safety of a police constable; 1919; Fruoor [should actually be “Furroor”], County Clare; released on grounds of health.” (Closed For 29 years).

However, was this also the same Thomas Keane who is mentioned in the National Archives WO 35/151B/25: “Death of Thomas Keane; 4th June, 1921; Limerick.”? (Also “Closed For 29 years.”) I suspect it probably was: and so it was there that the “Boy Martyr”‘s young life seems to have ended. 🙁

Though his recent attempt at crowdfunding via Indiegogo fell well short of the mark he aimed for, Derek Abbott is back in the news again (well, Channel 9’s 9News, anyway).

Today, he’s revealed that his wife (Rachel Egan) has consented for her DNA to be put in a kind of DNA search engine: and that this has revealed potential matches with eight families in Virginia and six families in North Carolina, all of whom he has now contacted.

The particular family tree also has a connection to Thomas Jefferson, which was a nice media bonus: though that link wasn’t enough to get American crowdfunders to pony up for a ride on his seaside donkey when he partially revealed it earlier in the year. Oh well.

And there is always the possibility – I hate to mention it, but because it’s the blight of DNA paternity testing, I thought I really have to – that Rachel Egan’s grandfather was someone else entirely. Hence it could easily play out that, “Who Do You Think You Are?” final-reel style, she and Derek A will trace her grandfather but find him to be someone who definitely didn’t die on/near Somerton beach in 1948.

But, as Tamam Shudologists will be quick to point out, we have evidence of American stitching in his coat and some Juicy Fruit chewing gum in a pocket (though I’d point out he can’t have had much fun chewing gum with hardly any teeth): so it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if he was indeed an American.

Something to chew on, anyway. 😉

It’s all very well concluding (as Aussie über-codebreaker Captain Eric Nave seems to have done back in 1949, later followed by Jim Gillogly and many others) that the curious message on the Rubaiyat is acrostic rather than enciphered: but does that help us crack it at all?

Ragged Right / Rubaiyat

Because the lines are strongly ragged-right justified, others have suggested that the letters taken as a whole may well encrypt an acrostic poem: and given also that the cryptogram was itself written on the back of a soft-back book of poetry, I personally have long struggled to come up with anything that seems even half as plausible.

Note that I’m really not saying here that the Rubaiyat cryptogram is necessarily a love poem: the poems in the Rubaiyat cover many different emotions, thoughts and feelings (perhaps most famously drunkenness, regret and mortality), so there is still plenty of room for manoeuvre.

However, I think that the presence of the crossed out line #2 (“MLIAOI“) and the extremely similar (but far from identical) line #4 (“MLIABO AIAQC”) is an extremely strong indication that what we are looking at is not a transcription of something that previously existed (say, of a telegram or of a speech) but is instead a record of composition by the author him- or her-self.

That is, I think the writer was probably making up a poem in their head and was quite possibly writing down the first letters of the words in that poem as an aide-memoire to themselves. He/she started to write down line #2 but then realized it was out of order, crossed it out, and wrote down the real next line (line #3), followed by what we now see as line #4.

The first big question, then, is about what the precise relationship between line #2 and line #4 is. Clearly they are not identical: yet they seem to share many of the same words, and very likely the same rhythm and meter. Hence it seems likely that “AOI” is somehow interchangeable with “ABAOI”: though unlikely to be the same, I think it is likely that they work the same within the overall poetic framework.

I am now strongly convinced that only one of the many, many claimed solutions for these lines proposed over the last 60 years that I have seen comes close to approaching the right combination of features that match this template of likely features:

* My Life Is Almost Over, I…
* My Life Is All But Over, And I Am [Quietly Content?]

Note that the scansion and meter are both far from exact here: but as melancholy Strine poetry goes, it’s far from terrible.

What About The Rest?

Line #5 seems (to my eye) to end with an underlined ‘R’: if this is indeed an acrostic letter (and not, say, the second half of the ‘AR’ Morse Prosign for “All Received”), then I do wonder if it is short for ‘Repent’, a fairly decent (and Rubaiyat-themed) rhyme for ‘Content’.

At the same time, if line #1 and line #3 end with D and P respectively, might it be that they rhyme? What D-word and P-word pair not only rhymes but also has roughly the right stress pattern that could be of any use in Strine poetry?

My guess is that if someone were to write a programme to generate potential D-/P- rhyme pairs, there would be only be something like 20 or 30 high ranking candidates (for example, I suspect we could safely rule out ‘Damn’/’Pram’, ‘Deep’/’Peep’ and so forth). Whether that would be enough to infer the rest of those two lines from their last words is marginal at best, if not questionable. All the same, finding good rhymes to go there might well be a good start: so why not try? 🙂

The more I think about poor old Fred Pruszinski and the suitcase he took from Broken Hill to Somerton Beach perched on the back of a stolen motorbike the weekend just before the Somerton Man died, the more I want to know the rest of what happened.

In my opinion, Pruszinski’s story could well turn out to form a parallel strand of the Somerton Man’s history: while I don’t yet know how these could be linked, I do now have a strong suspicion that I’m starting to ask the right kind of questions – and to me, that’s a really big deal.

So… rewind the time and place, if you will, back to November 1948 and Broken Hill. Pruszinski was just out of school, and was an avid miniature rifle shooter (he became Honorary Secretary of Silver City Miniature Rifle Club in 1949, and then shot for West Rifle Club), and went on to work for the local mines as an engine driver: so he must surely have had a reasonably wide network of friends and acquaintances.

Many of those people will have been at Pruszinski’s (sadly early) funeral in 1953. According to newspaper reports, his pall-bearers were J. Heslop, Don Hargreaves, Don Carlin, Kevin Cook, John Winkler, and Pat Fitzpatrick (along with Don Purcell, another close friend), while F. Anderson and Jack Brownett of West Broken Hill Rifle Club were there too, along with Pruszinski’s family and doubtless many more friends and workmates.

Some of those people must surely still be alive, right? I don’t honestly believe all trace of memory of Fred Pruszinski can already have been wiped from the world’s collective mental slate. And the unusual sequence of events that happened that weekend in November 1948 must surely have been the talk of Broken Hill for some time. People talk, that’s what they do: so why not listen? 🙂

Unsurprisingly, what I want to do now is place a small advertisement in Broken Hill’s Barrier Daily Truth, saying something along the lines of:-

Can you help? I’m an historian trying to find people who knew Richard Frederick Arthur (‘Fred’) Pruszinski, formerly of 247 Williams Street, Broken Hill. He was the Honorary Secretary of Silver City Miniature Rifle Club, and then a member of West Broken Hill Rifle Club. At his funeral in 1953, his pall-bearers were Don Hargr[e]aves, Don Carlin, Kevin Cook, John Winkler, J. Heslop, and Pat Fitzpatrick, assisted by Don Purcell. Do you have any memories of Fred Pruszinski? If so, please email [email protected] , thanks very much!

It’s a pretty good first attempt, but it has a fairly obvious shortcoming: people who knew Fred Pruszinski first-hand in 1948-1953 will be quite old now (85 or so, in fact), to the point that email may not be a good first way of asking for a response – so I think that including a telephone number as well could well yield much better results.

Hence here’s my request to you lovely people: would any Cipher Mysteries reader in Australia be kind enough to volunteer to help this by putting forward their phone number for me to add to this ad?

This many years after the event, I don’t realistically expect it to raise more than two or perhaps three telephone calls (in fact, zero or one may be closer to it), but I’d like to try all the same.

Someone out there must know what Fred Pruszinski was doing back then, surely?