Category Archives: Tamam Shud

It is a sad truth that almost all we know about the Somerton Man case was known to the police by the end of 1949. However, a shining exception to this 65-year-old evidential stasis is the set of spectrometry measurements taken by some of Derek Abbott’s students in 2013. Cunningly, their subject matter was a short hair embedded in the plaster cast of the dead man (the one in the SAPOL museum): progressively burning this hair with a laser gave them spectrometric readings of the physical chemistry going on in the Somerton Man’s body very late in his life.

On the positive side, it turned out that the hair included a root, so its timeline is almost certain to cover the interesting days right up to his death. However, it is only a very short hair, so it only really gives us hints about what was happening in roughly his final fortnight.

Intriguingly, I found out this week that a new cohort of Derek Abbott’s students has recently repeated this experiment, but with a substantially longer hair. Unfortunately this second hair did not include a root, which makes calibrating the results more difficult: and the results and analysis have not yet been released.

What of the first set of results? Of all the different isotopes the students detected and graphed, one stands out very strongly: lead. (Note that the graph is time-reversed, with the root end at the left and the older end at the right.)

In a post a few months back, Gordon Cramer suggested that this lead might suggest a connection with the nearby Port Pirie, where there was a huge lead smelting works. Though he then went on to assert that the connection to the Somerton Man probably wasn’t to do with the lead as such, but was surely some kind of spy-related thing to do with uranium processing (which was also close to Port Pirie, and was just starting up in 1947/1948). But as always, Gordon is free to go off in any direction he chooses.

As for me, I’m far more concerned with the lead itself, and what its possible relationship with Port Pirie might be. Derek Abbott rightly cautions that we don’t really know what was considered a normal level of environmental lead in Adelaide in 1948 (and so we should be careful about what inferences we draw from the lead graph): but I often think that a small detail can tell its own story, and this unexpected lead trace might well be such an instance.

I’ve said before that I suspect that the Somerton Man was an overseas merchant seaman, quite probably a Third Officer with responsibility for lading and stencilling details on crates and boxes as they were stacked in a ship’s hold. At the same time, the primary way that lead left Port Pirie was by the ton, stacked into ships’ holds: as we shall see in a different post in a few days’ time, ships once loaded with lead then often travelled the 139 miles south to Port Adelaide where additional bales of wool and leather were taken on: and then finally the ship left South Australian waters for its final destination (wherever in the world that happened to be).

The Port Pirie Recorder from this period included a shipping news column (“Pirie Shipping News”), detailing arrivals, loadings and departures at the port. If we collate all this together solely for lead shipments in November 1948, this is what we find:

Arr Dep
8 – 10 Clan Maclean (2500 tons) – for United Kingdom via Port Adelaide (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
10 – 12 Ericbank (2250 tons) – for United Kingdom (Howard Smith Ltd)
11 – 13 Annam (1200 tons) – for Marseilles via Port Adelaide (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
15 – 17 American Producer (1200 tons) – for New York via Port Adelaide (Dalgety & Co. Ltd)
16 – 18 City of Delhi (2500 tons) – for United Kingdom (Elder, Smith & Co. Ltd)
18 – 20 Lanarkshire (1000 tons) – for United Kingdom (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
25 – 30 Corio (2800 tons) – for Sydney (Howard Smith Ltd)

So, what might the lead timeline be telling us? I think that if the Somerton Man was a Third Officer lading and marking up crates of lead, with a substantial spike roughly two weeks before his death in the night of 30th November 1948, then there would seem to be a good chance we can narrow down the number of boats he was working on to three or perhaps five: American Producer, City of Delhi, Lanarkshire, and possibly Annam or Ericbank.

Frustratingly, NAA: D458 Volume I (the ledger of “seamen engaged, discharged, deserted or died at Port Pirie”) only runs to 31st March 1948, which is a bit of a shame. However, there is a very substantial body (15.48 linear metres!) of archives for crew data in Adelaide in NAA record D3064:-

This series comprises lists of ships crews who visited Port Adelaide and outports.

The series basically comprises Form M + S 11(attachment) and supporting documentation. Currently documents are arranged in chronological order in calendar year blocks.

Information contained in these documents includes names, dates and places of birth, nationalities, some information regarding desertions, restricted crew members on board, crew changes, last and next port of call for ship, animal and birds on board.

So if I’m right about the story the lead timeline seems to be telling us, then anyone who wants to be the first to see the Somerton Man’s name for themselves should go to the SA archives at great speed and have a look at the D3064 (November 1948) crew lists for these ships (they’re not available online), particularly where there’s any difference between the crew that arrived and the crew that left.

Any takers? 🙂

One thing that has long bothered me about the contents of the Somerton Man’s suitcase is the white tie (the one with the “T Keane” name on it). As the always-entertaining Pete Bowes asks in a recent tomsbytwo blog post,

What manner of man carries a white tie in his luggage?

To which I’d add: what manner of man wears a white tie at all? And indeed, up until just now I had no sensible answer at all to either question (unless you count American white-tie gangster chic as a possibility). However, I just found a curious line from history, that suggests how wearing a white tie might very possibly get you killed in post-WW2 Australia…

It turns out that one of the most famous (long) white tie-wearers of the 20th century was French lawyer and fascist politician Pierre Laval (the 101st French President), one of only three men executed by the post-WW2 French High Court for political war crimes.

(“Pierre Laval a Meurisse 1931” by Agence de presse Meurisse‏ – Bibliothèque nationale de France. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

The book “Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany” by David Bird mentions (pp. 214-216) that well-known Australian Professor Kelver Hayward Hartley (1909-1998) for a while wore a white shirt and white tie in some kind of emulation of Pierre Laval, openly signalling his Nazi-aligned anti-democratic views: and so in 1939 he inevitably came to the attention of the NSW Special Branch. Though Sergeant Simons and Constable Jones wrote a report damning his politics, they concluded that he was essentially harmless, and so he survived WW2 unscathed.

So… might the white tie in the Somerton Man’s suitcase actually be a sign of his far-right political allegiance? Right now, I can’t conceive why anyone in 1948 would consciously want to place themselves under Laval’s long shadow, unless they were themselves a fascist.

Unless anyone knows better… 🙂

Did Soviet spy Arnold Deutsch die on the SS Donbass? To work towards an answer to that question, I decided to compile my own mini-history of the SS Donbass from numerous archival sources. Here’s what I found…

SS Donbass

There have been several ships called “SS Donbass” in modern times, but we’re only interested in the first of these – the one that was sunk in November 1942. Here’s what it looked like:-

This paricular SS Donbass was built in 1935, with a gross tonnage of 7925 tons and a loading capacity of 7602 tons: a decent-sized ship. Other key statistics to satisfy passing merchant marine historians:-
* Length: 140.12m
* Width: 17.94m
* Draft: 8.45m
* Machine power: 2 x 1400 hp (I think, please correct me if this is wrong)
* Max speed: 10 knots

In 1940, the ship was then transferred across from Sovtanker Steamship Company into the main fleet.

SS Donbass in Convoy PQ-17

According to this post, in mid-1942 the Donbass travelled from Buenos Aires to New York with a large consignment of oil. Once there, it was fitted with two 65mm cannon and eight heavy machine guns to allow it to defend itself, and then sent on to Reykjavik.

En route to Russia as part of the PQ-17 convoy operation, it rescued 51 men from the US transport ship SS Daniel Morgan. It repulsed 13 air attacks and 1 submarine attack, knocking down two German He-111 bombers (04th July 1942) and one Ju-88. The rescued US sailors even helped man the nose gun.

The captain (Mikhail Ivanovich Pavlov) and senior engineer (Mefodiy Martynovich Fedorov) were awarded British medals (I’m guessing Atlantic Star Medals?)

According to the crew manifests, 28 additional Russian crew members came on board in New York: I’m told that these were from the SS Ashgabat, which had not long before sunk off the American coast (but I don’t have a reference for this).

SS Donbass in Operation FB

The Donbass was not so fortunate in Operation FB, travelling from Arkhangelsk to Reykjavik. Having passed Novaya Zemlya on the way out on 4th November 1942, it was attacked by Nazi bombers the following day, but was able to use its cannons to drive them off. However, its lucky streak ended on 7th November 1942, when it was attacked by the vastly stronger German destroyer Z-27: in rapid succession, the Donbass was hit by torpedoes, its oil caught fire and set the whole ship ablaze, the Donbass split into two huge pieces fore and aft, and the front half sank.

However, the crew kept on fighting, manning the cannon and machine guns on the ablaze aft end of the ship. But when their ammunition ran out, Captain Zielke finally ordered the crew to abandon the Donbass’s dying hulk: they were left floating in the icy seas for a while, but were than picked up by the Z-27. The coordinates were: 76° 25’N, 45° 54’E.

On 9th November 1942, the fifteen captured seamen were handed to the Coast Guard at the Northern Norwegian port of Alta, and then driven to a POW camp. In February 1943, they were transported to a concentration camp for sailors in Gdynia (Poland), where they stayed until 1945 (Zielke escaped the camp but was recaptured after a month on the run). While there, however, at least four of these fifteen died of starvation. Captain Zielke, who survived, was awarded the Order of Lenin.

The Dead

Here is the memorial plaque to the SS Donbass, listing the 33 men and women who died on it that fateful day.

With Arnold Deutsch in mind 🙂 , I cross-referenced this list with the various other crew lists available. This is because I don’t even remotely believe that Deutsch would have been on the SS Donbass in both Convoy PQ-17 and Operation FB: hence I think we can almost certainly rule out anyone who was in both convoys. Or who was female.

Key:-
[*] = arrived at New York from Buenos Aires in July 1942
[A] = was taken on board from the Ashgabat
[F] = female crew member
— = (whoever was left)

Left column:
[*] Morozov Arseniy Maksimovich, 1st Assistant, 1894
— Andrianov, Mikhail Ivanovich, 2nd Assistant, ?
[*] Oparin Mikhail Nikolayevich, 3rd Assistant, 1913
[*] Kalandadze Nina Germanovna, 4th Assistant, 1918
[*] Fedorov Mefodiy Martynovich, Art. Mechanic, 1894
[*] Malakhov Ivan Dmitriyevich, 3rd engineer, 1915
[*] Gal’tsev Nikolay Stepanovich, Senior electrician, 1911
[F] Klimushcheva Iya Petrovna, Marine medic, ?
— Cheremnykh Vasiliy Nikolayevich, Boatswain, ?
— Nilov Mikhail Konstantinovich, Motorman Grade 1 (Sailor), 1911
[*] Vasil’yev Boris Mikhaylovich, Sailor, 1917
[*] Yeres’ko Filipp Grigor’yevich, Sailor, 1912
[*] Gorlachev Aleksandr Yegorovich, Sailor, 1915
[*] Butenko Fedor Vasil’yevich, Sailor, 1912
[*] Trimasov (Tremasov) Kuz’ma Andreyevich, Sailor, 1915
[*] Kochurkin (Kochkurin) Nikolay Ignat’yevich, Sailor, 1917
[A] Shibanov Aleksandr Alekseyevich, Sailor, [Aged 36]

Right column:
[*] Slobodzyan (Slabodzyan) Valentin Philippovich, Carpenter 1921
— Lavrent’yev Fedor Ivanovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1910
[*] Khachko Viktor Petrovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1912
[*] Lemza Aleksey Sergeyevich, Motorman Grade 1, 1914
[A] Radionov German Stepanovich, Motorman 1 Class, [Aged 28]
[*] Tagiyev Ismail Dzhanilovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1915
[A] Pashchenko Viktor Filippovich, Motorman Grade 1, [Aged 24]
[*] Galkin Nikolay Pavlovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1912
[*] Kuznetsov Ivan Ivanovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1914
[A] Mashchenko Petr Gordeyevich, Motorman 1 Class, [Aged 32]
[*] Mechik Leonid Aleksandrovich, Donkerman, 1908
[*] Yurkovskiy Fedor Konstantinovich, Cook, 1909
[*] Kamnev Grigoriy Timofeyevich, Chef, 1916
[F] Voronina Avgusta Aleksandrovna, Orderly, 1920
[F] Pakhtusova Agrippina Petrovna, Maid, ?
[A] Afonasenko Trofim Semenovich, Motorman 1 Class, [Aged 25]

Who is left?

If Arnold Deutsch died on board AND he appears under a different name in the lists of the dead, he must be one of the following four people:-

— Andrianov, Mikhail Ivanovich, 2nd Assistant, ?
— Cheremnykh Vasiliy Nikolayevich, Boatswain, ?
— Nilov Mikhail Konstantinovich, Motorman Grade 1 (Sailor), 1911
— Lavrent’yev Fedor Ivanovich, Motorman Grade 1, 1910

Make of that what you will.

Gordon Cramer has just posted about Edward John Rice, a machinist at Australia’s Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation, who the management there tried to dismiss in 1942 for allegedly being a Communist. They were also very annoyed about the way he tried to force Mrs Dawkins, the nice lady from the canteen, into telling him all the gossip to go into the staff magazine of which he was one of the four editors.

What inspired Gordon was what Rice apparently said to a man called Keane (a surname guaranteed to set many Somerton Man theorists aquiver with excitement):-

Mr. Ashburner (for the CAC): Do you remember when you were distributing literature in the factory telling a man named Keane that “My one wish above all is to lead a revolution in this country, and when the shooting starts you want to shoot fast”?

Rice: No. I never said anything like that. You produce this man.

Mr. Ashburner: Don’t worry, he will be produced.

Gordon Cramer then appended lots of pictures of aircraft factories and alleged microwriting to help make his case that all these pieces linked together. But why did he not look at the rest of the reports of the tribunal from that same week to see if he could find out “Keane”‘s first name?

The report Gordon cited was from the Monday 3rd August 1942 edition of the Adelaide News. But the Wednesday 5th August 1942 Daily Advertiser names the same witness as Charles Keenan:-

Mr. Charles Keenan, employee of the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation. said that Rice had distributed pamphlets to some employees. Rice said that the Friends of the Soviet Union had issued them and admitted he was a Communist. He spoke of leading a revolution.

The Thursday 6th August edition of the Sydney Morning Herald voiced Rice’s denials of these lurid claims:

Rice, in evidence, denied that he had told an employee, Keenan, that he wanted to lead a revolution, that he would shoot or cut the throats of capitalists or that he was a Communist.

I’m not keen on this being the Somerton Man’s Keane: in fact, I’d go so far as to say this identification is 100% pants. 🙂

(I’m claiming neither plaudits nor brickbats for this suggestion, it’s Pete Bowes’ bonny baby: but funnily enough, I rather like it.)

Born in 1903 in Hungary, Czechoslavakia, Vienna or somewhere else completely (nobody knows), Arnold Deutsch was a brilliant young academic (with a PhD in chemistry at just 24) with an interest in Wilhelm Reich’s sex stuff who then moved to London to become, while a psychology graduate, a devastatingly well-connected Soviet spy. In fact, the Cambridge Five (including Lil’ Kim Philby) were his boys, and it was Deutsch who came up with the strategy of embedding them deep within the Establishment.

But then in 1937 Stalin got super-edgy and paranoid, and pulled all his wildcard agents back to Moscow, to be executed and replaced by a new cadre of even more hard-core home-bred Communist crazies. However, Deutsch managed to escape that fate: and was kept on “as an expert on forgery and handwriting”, says Wikipedia (with a straight face).

However, when he finally got abroad again in the 1940s, Deutsch is believed to have died, though – as you’d expect – nobody is sure quite how, where or even when.

Might he be the Somerton Man, found dead on an Australian beach in 1948?

Facially, the photos do look quite similar: they were of similar age, and they seem to share the same propensity for mystery. And dying so publicly and yet at the same time so privately has a curious rightness to it.

Up until now, I’ve hated every single speculative spy story floated to explain the Somerton Man that crossed my path: and yet I find myself smiling with delighted intrigue at this particular one. You know, “wouldn’t it be nice if…?”

And surely the best part of it all is that Arnold Deutsch’s fingerprints must surely be somewhere – Nigel West would know, wouldn’t he? Rupert, my man, have you still got a copy of Deutsch’s file upstairs? We have a nice set of fingerprints to compare it with… 🙂

Right now, I think there is a ~35% chance that the Somerton Man was a Russian merchant seaman who had worked on a WWII Lend-Lease ship bringing goods from America to Vladivostok on the Pacific Route. We know his physical appearance, height, fingerprints, and his rough date of birth: and that he was found dead on a South Australian beach on 1st December 1948.

What struck me last night was that this might well be all we need to work with.

So at long last, I’ve finally formed a Somerton Man plan. Here’s what I’ll do (though it won’t happen in a day or even a week):-

(1) Find the Soviet crew lists for Lend-Lease ships landing on the West Coast of America during 1941-1945 (e.g. via Ancestry.com or elsewhere), and merge them into a single list.

Once this is filtered for merchant seamen of the right age (and I’ll happily take your suggestions as to what age range to filter against), my estimate is that I should have ~250 names to work with.

(2) Find out if any of these were alive in 1949 and beyond.

As I recall, there is a Maritime Cemetery in Vladivostok. My guess is that a fair few of these merchant seamen will be buried there: hopefully I’ll be able to find a nice administrative list or database to work with.

I estimate that this should reduce the list to something closer to 100 names. If other usable secondary databases exist, they might help get the list down to ~50 names.

Once I get to this point, it seems that there are four parallel strategies to follow, each of which might independently work:-

(3a) Trace these 50 names further using other Soviet databases. (Though because this was the era of Stalin’s Russia, there might well be rather less to go on than one would normally hope for).

(3b) Find crew-lists of Soviet ships arriving in or leaving from Australian ports 1943-1948 (and/or Australian alien seamen registration forms), and cross-reference against these.

(3c) Network through to retired Russian merchant seamen who worked on Lend-Lease ships and see what / who they remember. (There are, as I also recall, Homes for Retired Seamen in Vladivostok, which would seem to be a good place to start).

(3d) See if I can get a Vladivostok journalist interested enough in the story to try to run it in a paper. Who knows what might come out of it.

Perhaps one of these will work, perhaps it won’t. But it certainly beats sitting around trying to guess what “MLIABO” might conceivably stand for (“Making Love Is A Bad Option”, etc). 😉

From almost the start of the 1948 investigation into the Somerton Man, South Australian police suspected that he (a) might have worked as a Third Officer on a merchant ship, and (b) might originally have come from Eastern Europe. Add to this his connection with a nurse living in Glenelg who later claimed to have spoken Russian when she was younger, and you get what I think is a reasonably meaty hypothesis to work with – that he was a Russian merchant seaman.

But because he had an American comb, some clothes with American stitching, and a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, it also seems that he had visited America (or perhaps have some long-standing fascination with it). So how might all these pieces link together?

One fascinating maritime connection between the USA and USSR from around this time is the Lend-Lease program, which was launched by the Lend-Lease Act of 11th March 1941: note that the USA was still (theoretically) neutral then, because it did not officially join the war until 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Though Lend-Lease started a lot slower than had been intended (and there are plenty of theories about why this should have been so), it lasted until 1945 and covered all manner of items… on a truly epic scale, as per the following alphabetic list (which I found here):-

• Airplanes 22,150 units; Anti-submarine ships 105 ships; Army shoes 15,417,000 pairs;
• Building equipment in total cost US Dollars 10,910,000; Blankets 1,541,590 pieces; Buttons 257,723,498 pieces;
• Cars 51,503 units; Chemicals 842,000 tons; Cotton 106,893,000 tons;
• Detonators 903,000 units;
• Explosives 295,600 tons;
• Foodstuffs 4,478,000 tons;
• Gasoil 2,670,000 tons;
• Locomotives 1,981 units; Leather 49,860 tons;
• Motorcycles 35,170 units; Machinery in total amount US Dollars 1,078,965,000;
• Non-ferrous metals total 802,000 tons;
• Pistols 12,997 pieces;
• Rifles 8,218 pieces; Railways cars 11,155 units; Radar 445 units;
• Sub-machine guns 131,633 pieces; Ship’s Engine 7,784 units; Spirits 331,066 liters; Cargo Ships – 123 units;
• Tanks 12,700 units; Trucks 375,883 units; Tractors 8,071 units; Torpedo 197 units; Tires 3,786,000 pieces;

(In fact, Russia finally settled its Lend-Lease debt only in August 2006, but that’s another story entirely.)

This vast array of items travelled on at least 123 Lend-Lease ships, and by a variety of sea routes:-

• Pacific 8,244,000 tons (47.1% of total volume);
• Caspian via Iran 4,160,000 tons (23.8%);
• Arctic 3,964,000 tons (22.6%);
• Black Sea 681 tons (3.9%);
• Soviet Arctic Route 452,000 tons (2.6%);
• Grand Total 17,501,000 tons (i.e. 100.0%).

For the Pacific Route (which I suspect is what we’re most interested in), ships departed ports on the USA’s west coast (“principally Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Columbia River ports”). The Japanese would often intercept and examine ships on this route, because as part of the USSR-Japan Neutrality Pact, it could not be used for military cargo. These ships usually docked in the heavily-congested port of Vladivostok, before having their cargo carried 5,000 miles West by the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Also as part of this agreement, Japan only allowed the USA-supplied ships used on the Pacific route to be crewed with Russians. Crew was typically a mix of USSR merchant seamen and poorly paid USSR Navy armed guards.

Unlike the Atlantic crossing, Pacific Lend-Lease ships usually sailed individually rather than in convoy: but they were in greatest danger from submarines – German, Japanese, and American submarines all sank some Russian ships (sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally).

Incidentally, one of the most famous Lend-Lease Pacific sea captains was Anna Shchetinina, who wrote a book about her experience called “On the Seas and Beyond the Seas” («На морях и за морями») (though after WW2 she worked in the Baltic).

Might the Somerton Man have been a Soviet seaman from a merchant ship that was lost in WW2? I found a list of Soviet ships that were lost in the Pacific: but the only one with unaccounted seamen seemed to be the Uzbekistan (though this ship is marked as “Redelivered” in a different list):-

01.04.1943 – Uzbekistan (Узбекистан – one of USSR republics); Cargo ship / Far East State Shipping Company / 3400 BRT / North Western Coast USA / Wrecked / No information about losses.

Or possibly the Ilich (which doesn’t appear on the list of Lend-Lease ships, so probably wasn’t one):-

4.06.1944 – Ilich (Ильич – Second name of Lenin); Cargo passenger ship / 4166 BRT / Far East State Shipping Company / Capt.I.S.Sergeev / Port of Portland, USA / She sank alongside of berth due to unknown reasons / 1 crew (A.Arekhpaeva) was lost and 66 crew were rescued.

Or perhaps even Soviet submarine L-16, which was torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-25 on October 11, 1942 “on the approach to San Francisco while sailing in surface position, and sank.” More detail on this very interesting (and well-illustrated) page.

I really don’t know: at this stage, I’m just starting to find my way around this little slice of 20th century history, so this is more of a research log than a cipher history post. But I thought you’d like to see what’s going on here. 🙂

* * * * *

Other links and books:-

State archive of Primorsky Territory

Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East – where it is, how to use it

Records of the United States Maritime Commission

Major Jordan’s Diaries (online)

“Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945”, Hubert P. van Tuyll: Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-26688-3.

Gordon Cramer was recently looking at Paul Lawson’s 8th June 1949 work diary entry relating to the plaster cast that he was making of the Somerton Man, and noted this interesting-looking page:

Police Job
Interview with Detectives (Brown + 1)
Ring from Constable Dinham re disposal of original body

Gordon quickly builds his own theories on top of why the word “disposal” was used, but it turns out that if we follow the timeline of what happened, it all makes sense.

According to a 30th May 1949 Adelaide News story, “The SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association secretary (Mr. Alan Saunders) said today his association would pay burial costs, to prevent the victim being buried as a pauper.“. This is the first mention I’ve found of an actual burial.

Then, according to the 14th June 1949 Adelaide News, the burial itself took place at 9.30am of that morning. The service was carried out by Captain E. J. Webb of the Salvation Army, who said at the end (according to Gerry Feltus’ book, p.85) “Yes, this man has someone to love him. He is known only to God.”

Originally, only a simple wooden stake saying “UNKNOWN SOMERTON BODY” was placed there, but the headstone we see today was added a few days after the funeral by Mr. A. Collins, a Keswick monumental mason.

So it all makes sense. As far as Paul Lawson knew on the 8th June 1949, the original body (i.e. not the plaster cast he was making!) was to have been disposed of in a pauper’s burial: but a last-minute donation by the SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association at around the same time secured a proper burial, while an after-the-event donation by a local monumental mason turned the grave into something that would last.

According to the (1978) “Somerton Beach Mystery” documentary by Stuart Littlemore, flowers were left on the grave in the spring (though not every year) by an unidentified person. So perhaps Captain Webb might just have been wrong.

As normal, the answer turns out to be so painfully, staring-us-all-in-the-face obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to type.

From what I can see, the most likely scenario is that the Somerton Man’s surname was surely…

Штейн

i.e., that he was a Russian merchant seaman called Stein, who I believe died from natural causes (possibly, as Byron Deveson suggests, of neurosyphilis) in the Glenelg house of Jessica Harkness during the evening of 30th November 1948.

The reason is that I suspect “JEStyn” = “J(essica) E(llen) Штейн”, and that the two met in Royal North Shore Hospital Sydney, where she was a trainee nurse and he was a patient (where, pace Byron Deveson, he was perhaps having his syphilis treated with penicillin? Who can tell?). Whether or not they were actually married, it seems that in 1944 she felt confident enough of their relationship to take the Russian seaman’s surname when signing her name in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.

It’s a pretty specific claim, so how can it be disproved?

I’ve posted on so many separate Tamam Shud / Somerton Man topics recently (which have in turn triggered so many comments), I thought it might be a good idea to at least try to tie up a few loose threads still dangling here. “Ne’er does one door close but that another opens”. (Am I the only person who remembers “The Horrors of Ivan”?)

1. A Professorial Plug

As I mentioned here recently, the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit will be hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session with Professor Derek Abbott this Saturday. If you log in there then and post questions, he promises to try to answer them.

To be precise, the AMA session will start at the following (time zone) times:-

– Eastern Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 9pm
– Mountain Daylight Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 7pm
– Pacific Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 6pm
– Australian Central Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 10.30am
– Australian Western Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 9am
– New Zealand Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 1pm
– Central European Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 3am
– British Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 2am

Of course, the timing is (let’s say) somewhat suboptimal for European Somerton Man fans: but it is what it is, and if you do want to take part, I’m sure you’ll find a way. 🙂

If you do, here are a few good questions to warm him up with…

* How come the Somerton Man was clean-shaven?
* How come he only had a pastie for lunch and dinner?
* Do you accept the new evidence in Feltus’ Chapter 14 “A Final Twist”?
* Can the dead man’s lividity be reconciled with his position posed on the beach?
* Did anybody ever try to track down the strappers that first found the Somerton Man’s corpse?
* Why did the Somerton Man have no socks in his suitcase?
* etc etc etc 🙂

2. The Australian Codebreaker

While following up the whole how-was-the-Rubaiyat-photograph-made question, I noticed that it was sent to “decoding experts at Army Headquarters, Melbourne” (26 July 1949, Feltus p.108) and that on the next day a “Navy ‘code cracker’ was tackling the task this afternoon” (Feltus p.110).

It struck me that these news stories can only really be talking about one person: Captain Theodore Eric Nave, who his biographer Ian Pfennigwerth dubbed “Australian Codebreaker Extraordinary” (in the 2006 book “A Man of Intelligence”). I personally found this a good read, but I suspect that the details of Eric Nave’s Japanese code-breaking exploits probably proved a bit heavy on the technical cryptology side for most lay readers.

Nave was on loan from the Royal Navy to the Australian Army for eight years until 1st January 1948, when he was “attached to the Defence Signals Bureau as a serving officer”, though his “loan appointment was terminated 17:3:49”. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) was established on 16th March 1949, Nave was proposed as a possible director: however, in those paranoid times the job actually went to a Brit: Nave was instead given the role of Defence and Services Liaison Officer, starting 15th December 1949. (Incidentally, he was also appointed to the board of the Victorian Mission to Seamen in 1950, just so you know).

I feel confident that, even though Nave had managed to accrue 160 days of untaken holiday by June 1948, he was at his desk in Melbourne when the Rubaiyat photograph came in – would they honestly have given it to anyone else in the building? Would they hell, I say.

But did Nave ever write about it? And did Army Headquarters keep a copy of that photograph? Even though Pfennigwerth’s book mines many different archives, Nave’s years immediately post-war seem far more sketchy than his war years, as far as evidence goes. All the same, wouldn’t it be nice if one of these archives proved to have a little bit more of an answer for us?

3. A Close Shave?

When I posted about how the Somerton Man was oddly (given the generally accepted timeline) clean-shaven, I proposed that he might have had a long-standing beard shaved off that morning.

With the help of the numerous commenters (and having thought about this a bit more), I can see now that I was being a bit hopeful: ultimately beard science says that hair growth is probabilistic, so there ought to have been a normal mix of all three hair phases in his stubble.

And yet at the same time that doesn’t really square with the timeline and what we see. Even so, there are plenty of other possible explanations we can’t rule out: e.g. the man’s face was shaved in the morgue before the photographs were taken (which is possible); he was shaved later in the day; he was in the throes of such a debilitating (and terminal) condition that his body didn’t have the strength to grow any hairs that day; he in general grew hair slower than most people; he had pale ginger facial hair which didn’t show up as 5 o’clock shadow; and so on.

Who knows which one was right? 🙁

4. The Football Player

When I posted about Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s relentless hospital visitor, I noted that her daughter Mary Morison married a footballer called Ian McKay, and listed highlights of her life up to 1954. The reason for this particular cut-off date is simply that this is currently as far forward as the Australian newspapers archived in Trove go: 50 years back from 2014 is 1954, and any newspaper more than half a century old is deemed to be out of copyright there (just so you know).

But it turns out that Ian McKay was an Australian rules footballer of great repute, who even has a Wikipedia page devoted to him. Unfortunately, the links given there have withered and died on the webby vine: but not before being picked up by the Wayback Machine. So, according to his obituary, we know that when he died in 2010:-

“Ian is survived by his wife, Mary, and three children, Heather, Andrew and David.”

Hence it’s entirely possible I might yet speak with a member of Mrs John Morison’s family before long, which could well prove to be hugely interesting.

Finally, here’s a picture of Ian McKay at (quite literally) the height of his career in 1952:-