Category Archives: Tamam Shud

Gordon Cramer, responding to a comment about beards I left back in June on his Tamam Shud site, replied:-

“[…] I do wonder about the clean shaven image of him that was published originally, given his supposed movements he would have been without a shave for 18 hours or more before his departure yet no 5 o’clock shadow or stubble..”

The Somerton Man checked his suitcase (containing a razor and razor strop) into Adelaide Railway Station cloak room between 11.00am and noon (and he then bought a bus ticket sometime after 11:15am), while his time of death was estimated next morning as probably having been about 2am that same night: so to be precise, it seems likely that he wouldn’t have shaved for at least 15 hours.

All the same I do agree that Gordon has a point here: the Somerton Man’s perfectly clean-shaven appearance in the police photos doesn’t really square with the generally accepted timeline – 15 hours is too long to not get some kind of “5 o’clock shadow”.

Just to remind you, here’s what he looked like (once Jimmy Durham had managed to wrestle a shirt and tie onto the body):-

Timing discrepancies like this are problematic for all Tamam Shud theories, because they’re not really a matter of opinion: facial hair is controlled by physical rules, which aren’t normally bypassed. So what could explain the Somerton Man’s apparent clean-shaven-ness?

Never having grown a beard myself, I was surprised today to find out that facial hair doesn’t ‘just grow’ (i.e. continuously and mechanically): rather, it follows a set of growth rules. In a page on beard length in a beard-products-selling website, I discovered that human hair has three distinct phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen.

The anagen phase (for head hair) lasts anywhere from two to six years, and since this is the growth phase, we can say with confidence that no man’s beard can ever grow longer than it is at six years old. Now, a man’s genetics determines how long his beard’s growth phase is. […]

During the second phase (catagen), your hair stops growing. It embeds in your skin, and sort of sits there for a few months. During the final phase (telogen), a new hair starts growing in the follicle and pushes out the old hair, causing you to shed it.

The upshot for the Somerton Man, I think, is that if his facial hair didn’t obviously grow during the last 15+ hours of his life (and don’t take my word for it, click through above to the high-res images for yourself), it seems most likely to me that his facial hair – i.e. moustache and beard – wasn’t in the anagen (growth) phase, but was instead in the later catagen or telogen phases. That is, I believe this supports the idea that he had recently shaved off a long-standing (or do I mean “long-hanging”?) and therefore possibly quite substantial moustache and beard. (Hence the question: might one of the two combs in his suitcase have actually been a beard comb?)

Of course, the major alternatives to this scenario are (a) that he shaved again later in the day (problem: his razor was still in the suitcase), (b) someone else shaved him while alive (but in Glenelg?), or (c) someone else shaved him just after he had died (possible, but this does seem just a little bit unlikely – a dead guy is a dead guy, right?).

Personally, I’m running with the whole “luxurious beard” theory, but feel free to disagree. 🙂

In my previous Somerton Man post, I wondered aloud who the Mission to Seamen committee member was. Having raked through Trove, I suspect I may have an answer: I think it was Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s indefatigable hospital visitor.

Here’s the article I found (Adelaide Mail, 10th July 1954) :

Mrs. Morison has visited hundreds of sick seamen since then [1946] — men from England, India, Germany, Malaya, and many other countries. Some did not live to see their own countries again, but in their last days were attended by the Mission.

I suspect that she was the same Mrs John Morison who was honorary secretary of the Cheer-Up Society, and am sure she was the wife of Mr John Morison of North Terrace, Adelaide: their daughter Miss Mary Morison was an air hostess.

Here’s a picture from the 26th June 1948 edition of the Adelaide Mail, showing Mrs J. Morison bringing a birthday cake to (young, tanned, blue-eyed) Irish seaman Thomas Duffy, cheered on by daughter Mary (centre, back):-

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that Mrs John Morison’s actual first name was Evelyn, and that she was the daughter of Jim and Minnie Brimble, of 57 Gurrs Road, Beulah Park.

As for Mary Morison: she sunbathed at Henley Beach in 1948, trained as a TAA air hostess, got engaged to North Adelaide league footballer Ian McKay in 1949, which was also when they were married (story here), with a daughter following on 14 June 1951 called Heather (though not the famous squash player), but she still helped with the canteen at a Mission for Seamen fundraiser (in a “flat blue suit and tile red beret”) in 1952, though that’s where the print trail seems to end. A life in Trove!

Right now, that’s the extent of my knowledge of Mrs Morison: but if the Somerton Man was a foreign merchant seaman in the Royal Adelaide Hospital during 1948, the chances that he came into contact with the Mission to Seamen’s Mrs John Morison were surely very close to 100%.

I’ll post more as I find it…

I’ll start with a quick Somerton Man announcement: Professor Derek Abbott will be doing an interactive AMA session on Reddit right at the end of this month (August 2014), which will happen at the following times:-

– Eastern Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 9:00:00 p.m
– Mountain Daylight Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 7:00:00 p.m
– Pacific Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 6:00:00 p.m
– Australian Central Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 10:30:00 a.m
– Australian Western Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 9:00:00 a.m
– New Zealand Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 1:00:00 p.m
– Central European Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 3:00:00 a.m
– British Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 2:00:00 a.m

If you have Tamam Shud questions for him that have long been burning into your soul, perhaps that would be a good time and place to ask them.

Today’s post is about something oddly specific: what the South Australian police apparently didn’t find.

If we assume, quite reasonably, that the Somerton Man was the owner of the suitcase found at Adelaide railway station not long after his death, we end up with some curious gaps – a “missing list” of things that ought to be present but were not.

At his death, what he had on him was:

* 1 jacket
* 1 shirt
* 1 tie.
* 1 pullover (even though it was the middle of the hot Australian winter)
* 1 pair of trousers (made of Crusader Cloth)
* 1 singlet
* 1 pair of jockey underpants
* 1 pair of socks
* 1 pair of shoes (new-looking)
* 1 Army Club cigarette packet (containing cheaper Kensitas cigarettes)
* 1 quarter-full box of matches (Bryant and May)
* 1 half-full packet of chewing gum (Juicy Fruit)
* 2 combs
* 1 piece of rolled-up paper (famously bearing the words “Tamam Shud”)
* 1 used bus ticket to Glenelg
* 1 unused second-class rail ticket to Henley Beach.

Here are the contents of the stuff that was found in the (also new-looking) suitcase:-

Clothes

* 1 laundry bag (marked “Keane”)
* 4 ties (one marked “Kean”)
* 2 singlets (one marked “Kean”, the other with name tag torn off)
* 2 pairs of underpants
* 1 pair of slippers (size 8)
* 1 pair of trousers (‘Marco’ brand)
* 1 sports coat
* 1 yellow coat shirt
* 1 coat shirt
* 1 shirt (name tag removed)
* 1 scarf
* 6 handkerchiefs
* 1 dressing gown and cord
* 1 pair of pyjamas

Clothes accessories

* 2 coat hangers
* 1 front stud
* 1 back stud
* 1 button (brown)
* 3 safety pins
* 1 card of tan thread
* 1 tin of tan boot polish (Kiwi)

Work tools (it would seem)

* 1 scissors in sheath
* 1 knife in sheath
* 1 stencil brush
* 1 piece of light board (zinc?)
* 1 small screwdriver
* 1 pair of broken scissors
* 1 loupe (small ring shaped object)

Personal hygiene

* 1 razor strop
* 1 razor
* 1 shaving brush
* 1 toothbrush and toothpaste
* 1 soap dish (apparently green)

Correspondence

* 8 large and 1 small envelopes
* 6 pencils
* 2 air-mail stickers
* 1 rubber

Miscellaneous stuff

* 1 hairpin (in the soap dish)
* 1 piece light cord
* 1 cigarette lighter
* 1 6d coin (in the trouser pocket)
* 1 tea spoon
* 1 glass dish

Put all these pieces together, and you get a surprisingly long list of things that weren’t there:-

* Hat
* Outer coat
* Pen (or did he really write everything in pencil?)
* Money
* Ration card
* Identity card
* Wallet
* Socks
* Any kind of railway ticket (if he came to Adelaide by train)
* Any letters received

Were these all lost (in a bet in a pub?), dropped (in a fight in the street?), stolen (by strappers on the beach?), removed (by a spying clean-up crew?), or what? Nobody knows – not even Derek Abbott. It’s a first-class mystery, for sure.

What does it all mean?

Well… that’s the big question, isn’t it?

It’s certainly odd that the Somerton Man seems to have only owned a single pair of socks. I’ve wondered (elsewhere) whether he might have used his other socks to wrap his money in, and whether he had those socks in his outer coat’s pockets. I’m well aware that this, as explanations go, is both plausible and ridiculous at the same time… but if you have a better explanation, please say.

I think the absence of letters may also be telling. I feel reasonably sure that the Somerton Man had letters in his possession, but carried them in his pocket because at least one of them included the address he was travelling to.

I also suspect that the “T Kean[e]” was Adelaide Freemason Tom Kean, whose 1947 Will – I believe, but can’t prove – donated many of his clothes to a local charity, from where the Somerton Man received it.

But I think that perhaps the biggest clue of all in his possessions has yet to be properly mentioned by anyone – the dressing gown and slippers. I recently read a short “Out Among The People” article in Trove from the 7th November 1950 edition of the Adelaide ‘Tizer, which said that the Mission To Seamen visited sick seamen in hospital and supplied them with “cigarettes, fruit, toilet necessities, slippers, books, dressing gowns…”

The full extract goes like this:-

Missions To Seamen

In addition to providing wholesome entertainment for crews of visiting vessels at the Flying Angels at Port Adelaide and Outer Harbor, the Missions to Seamen also watches their interests if they are sick in hospital. A member of the committee cited cases in an enlightening account to me yesterday. “One patient, an Irish lad, has been in hospital for 3 1/2 years and recently was permitted to get up for the first time.” she said. “The hospital visitor has seen him regularly and has been able to do the manv little things his own family would have done in the way of shopping, business affairs, arranging for a wireless set, and so on. A young South African suffering from polio was visited daily and helped in his efforts to walk again in the hospital grounds in the evening. Just recently patients have been Swedish, Indian, Cornish, Scotch, English and Irish. An Indian from Pakistan has been in hospital for 20 weeks, and will soon undergo another operation.”

Devoted Nurses

My committee friend described the devotion of the nursing staff to these lonely overseas patients as wonderful. The Mission supplied cigarettes, fruit, toilet necessities, slippers, books, dressing gowns, had their laundry done when necessary; in fact, it did as far as possible take the place of the patient’s family. The men are most grateful and say they do not know what they would do without this thought and care. “I have been receiving letters from at least 10 former patients regularly for the past three years,” she told me. “Short motor drives and visits to private homes are arranged when, patients can get their doctor’s permission to do so. Two seamen were taken out and home to tea this week-end.”

Hmmm… I wonder who that female committee member was?

The simplest explanation of all?

Prediction #1: the Somerton Man was a foreign merchant seaman in Adelaide who had been taken seriously ill at sea, and had been visited in hospital by the Mission to Seamen. He was a Third Officer (hence his stencilling equipment for marking cargo.). He had written letters home overseas (hence the air mail stickers).

Prediction #2: the Somerton Man was Russian and needed an interpreter to help him get effective treatment. The nurse we know as “Jestyn” (who, we are now told, spoke Russian when she was younger) was asked in by the Mission for Seamen as a Russian-speaking volunteer – what we might nowadays call a ‘patient advocate’.

Prediction #3: the Somerton Man wrote letters to her in Russian from the hospital and sent them to her home address in Glenelg; and that she wrote back to him. This was a source of great comfort to him.

Prediction #4: the Somerton Man didn’t arrive in Adelaide from Melbourne, but was already in hospital there. Feeling terribly unwell and alone he decided to discharge himself from hospital and go and visit her in Glenelg. He put his possessions into a suitcase given to him by the Mission To Seamen (along with the dressing gown and slippers, etc) and checked it into the left luggage department of Adelaide railway station.

Prediction #5: that same morning, he did something simple that accidentally had the effect of making him hard to trace – he shaved off the beard that he had grown in hospital, to try and look as respectable as he could for meeting Jestyn.

Prediction #6: I believe that it wasn’t poison or a pastie that killed him, but whatever he had been suffering from in the hospital (causing his spleen to enlarge etc).

Given that there has been so much recent noise / banter online surrounding the origins of the Rubaiyat ciphertext photograph, perhaps it might be a good idea to look at Gerry Feltus’ definitive opinion (that I received recently by email):-

“I am led to believe that the original photograph of the ‘code’ was taken by a police photographer and countless copies were developed and sent to numerous locations, including The Advertiser where I obtained my copy. I did not find a copy of the photograph in police files or a negative thereof of same. Unless I receive evidence to the contrary I believe that the code was written on the top left side of the rear (plain white dust type cover) of a Whitcombe & Tombs pocket edition of the Rubaiyat.”

The SAPOL Historical Society does now have a copy of this photo, but it turns out that this was one of several sent to them not long ago by Gerry Feltus, who also sent them to Kerry Greenwood for her book. She had (very sensibly) contacted the SAPOL H/S, who had then asked Gerry Feltus because they didn’t have any.

As for what means was used to take the photograph, I think we can probably rely on the Adelaide News, Tuesday July 26th 1949 (as per Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man”, p.108), whose journalistic ear seems to have been close to a policehorse’s mouth:-

“Acting on the possibility that the ‘Rubaiyat’ in their possession did belong to the lieutenant [Alfred Boxall], police set out to decipher a number of block letters pencilled on the back of the book.

Although the lettering was faint, police managed to read it by using ultra-violet light.

In the belief that the lettering might be a code, a copy has been sent to decoding experts at Army Headquarters, Melbourne.”

Finally, we might also in future have to be a little more careful about timing. The Adelaide Advertiser, Monday July 25th 1949 also notes that the man who found the Rubaiyat in his car in Jetty Road, Glenelg, also claimed that he had found it about the time of the RAAF air pageant in November 1948 – in fact, this was held at Parafield on 20th November 1948, a date I don’t recall having previously seen in anybody’s Somerton Man timeline…

Gordon Cramer continues posting apace, asserting – for example – that iodine vapour deposition (also known as “iodine fuming”) and/or UV illumination could have been used in South Australian police forensic photography circa 1948.

But here at Cipher Mysteries Towers, I’m constantly besieged by weak claims built on top of this same “could have” linguistic structure: so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gordon’s repeated use of it gets my historical goat. In the case of the Somerton Man, “M R G O A B A B D” (or however you want to transcribe it) “could have” also been written by the SM, the nurse, her husband, the person who found the book, saboteurs, conspirators, many thousands of other people that we know nothing about, or indeed by aliens. As with all other cipher mysteries, how does observing that each of these scenarios is ‘possible’ move us forward, exactly?

Then again, Voynich theorist Gordon Rugg has been ploughing that same unyielding field for over a decade now, despite the fact that his possibilistic ard has turned over nothing of value in all that time. So maybe our Tamam Shud Gordon has at least six years’ catching up yet. Hmmmm. 😐

Anyway, by way of sharp contrast, I’ve put a bit of time into trying to understand the specific history of the South Australia Police (SAPOL) and its relationship with forensic photography. What techniques did SAPOL actually use, what evidence is there for this, and what can all that tell us about how the image of the page of the Rubaiyat was taken? As most long-suffering faithful Cipher Mysteries readers doubtless already know, these have the attributes of my favourite kinds of questions: evidence-based, potentially informative, archive-focused, yet in practice tricky to pursue.

So here’s what I found…

The History of SAPOL

South Australia’s policing started relatively early in 1838. Formal police photography didn’t take off in South Australia for many years, even though its Inspector Paul Foelsche took numerous photographs between 1869 and 1914 (these were kept in the family for year, before finally being shown in 1969 to local photographic historian Robert J. Noye).

According to the official SA Police history website…

The first report of [photography] being used in the Police Department was in the late 1870’s, when Detective Von Der Borch was appointed official Photographer. Later a report was submitted requesting a ventilator be installed in the work place to reduce the fumes caused when developing and printing photographs. There is no evidence to show that this science proceeded beyond experimentation until approximately 1898…

..when a certain Detective Lingwood-Smith took on the role: he developed (pun intended) the practical arts of both photography and fingerprinting, turning them into essential parts of police practice, even though the particular fingerprinting scheme he championed was discontinued in 1904. There’s a picture of Lingwood-Smith (inevitably) in the Adelaide ‘Tiser, 29th June 1922, when he claimed that there were “more than 70,000 fingerprints and photographs […] filed in the Adelaide detective office”:-

When asked if he had ever used fingerprint evidence in court, Lingwood-Smith replied that he had not: but that was simply because he had not needed to. “When confronted by their photograph and description, which we have ascertained by means of the finger prints, the offender generally owns up. There is really nothing else for him to do.”

In 1920, Lingwood-Smith passed the baton of the Photography and Fingerprint Section over to Mr. Leslie Hilland Bruce Hudd. In 1923, Bruce Hudd obtained a conviction by ingeniously taking a plaster cast of a footprint left at the scene of a crime: and moreover in 1939…

…he introduced a method for detecting thieves who stole from working companions. A powder was sprinkled onto coins and left at the scene of previous thefts. The powder was not readily visible, and when the money was noticed missing, all staff were requested to place their hands under an ultra violet light. The powder would fluoresce on the hands of the culprit.

Hudd’s photographic and fingerprint evidence was used in a fair number of court cases reported at the time, including the 1942 Hindley Street murders, the Port River murder case of 1944, and a triumphant forensic case from 1947 where a NSW sailor’s badly decomposed (roughly six-month-dead) body was identified purely from his fingerprints. This same article included a picture of Hudd:-

And those who think that the modern forensic study of ears is a new discipline will surely be surprised to read this from the Adelaide News in 1944:-

POLICE fingerprint expert Bruce Hudd is not surprised at a London ear specialist being able to say from a captured German newsreel that the Hitler shown there wasn’t the real Adolf. Today he showed me a book explaining that the shape of the ear doesn’t change from birth to death. Before fingerprint identification came in, the police relied chiefly on ears for identifying men. Fourteen points were set out in describing each ear, including the shape of the lobe, size, and angle to the head. I was shown 140 pictures of ears and saw for myself that not one was alike when an expert pointed out the differences. Even today both Mr. Hudd and Mr. Jimmy Durham, his fellow fingerprint expert, prefer to work on profile pictures showing an ear rather than full face pictures when seeking to identify men.

But even this story pales in relevance to this news piece from 1946, that answers many of my questions directly:-

From there we went to see Mr. Bruce Hudd, chief photographer and fingerprint expert — carefully pulling on our gloves before entering his den. Mr. Hudd said that he now had filed away about 50,000 sets of fingerprints of people who had been brought in on serious charges since 1906. Nowadays he sends a duplicate of all fingerprints to Central Bureau in Sydney, where a master set for the whole of Australia is kept. In Adelaide only one man has tried to beat the fingerprint experts by removing the skin from his fingers. That was the notorious ‘Shiner’ Ryan, who once rubbed the pattern off his fingers on the rough brick wall of his cell, in an effort to outwit expert Hudd. Mr. Hudd waited for the skin to grow again — then took ‘Shiner’s’ prints. Photography is playing a bigger and bigger part in the work of crime detection, and these developments are keeping Mr. Hudd and his staff busy, photographing the scenes of serious crimes, accidents, and copying documents. Ultra-violet light and infra-red rays, which reveal many clues invisible to the naked eye, are now used by the experts of the police photography section.

Incidentally, Hudd was also a dahlia enthusiast (according to Trove), who both grew them and photographed them, hand-tinting the finished product. Now not a lot of people know that. 🙂

Bringing this chapter to close, Hudd finally retired in 1952. He had been assisted in his career “by the following fingerprint experts: Frank Brice, James Durham, Alan Cliff, Dudley Aebi and Bill Low[e]”, which presumably included the three fingerprinting and photographic experts “who did nothing else and their skill was said to be second to none in Australia” back in 1932. On Hudd’s retirement, it was Aebi became the head of the department which he had first joined in 1934, with Bill Lowe also promoted beneath him.

[And yes, it was indeed Constable Patrick James “Jimmy” Durham, stationed in Adelaide, who on 3rd December 1948 took the Somerton Man’s fingerprints in the morgue, and who – with Mounted Constable Knight – then partially re-dressed the Somerton Man and photographed him too. (Feltus, “The Unknown Man”, p.42).]

The South Australian Police History Museum

Even though we have some great – and very specific – description above, I’d still really like to look directly at the South Australian Police photography archives. These are (I believe) held at the volunteer-run South Australian Police History Museum at Thebarton Police Barracks, Gaol Road, Adelaide.

They have placed lots of nice old photographs on its website, most notably transport themed ones here, a few outback ones here, firearms closeups, and uniforms.

However, none of these is the kind of evidential photography apparently used in the Somerton Man case. But there must – surely – be something in there that is similar in technique, that will help us read and reconstruct the precise science of the Rubaiyat ‘code’ photograph?

---

PS: Victoria Police museum has a vampire-killing kit in its collection, though they don’t put it on display because it doesn’t fit any of their thematic displays. Who’d be a curator, eh?

PPS: here’s something for Pete Bowes I found in “Hue & Cry”, January 2001 edition. “The Murray Pioneer October 20, 1949 DEVICE IN TREE: A parachute with a box attached was found in a gum tree on Calperum Station property, about nine miles from Renmark on Monday morning by Mr W Letton. He reported the matter to the police and Detective DO Flint and MC Brebner went out and recovered the apparatus and handed it to the local Post Office.”

PPPS: has anyone read “The Life and Times of an Unlikely Detective”, by Arthur Robert (Bob) Calvesbert?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A smooth writing surface?

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

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

A laundry pen?

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

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

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

The Jestyn ‘R’?

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

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

The first letter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple of months back, Byron Deveson left an intriguing comment on a (now somewhat over-run by spy talk and unkempt-looking) Somerton Man post here. He wrote:-

I think some of SM’s clothing came from Tom Kean, MD of Kean Oil after Kean’s death. This would explain the masonic (?) tie.

Recorder (Port Pirie) 20th January 1947 Page 1

Death Of Mr. Tom Kean
ADELAIDE, Sunday.
Mr. Tom Kean (managing director of Kean Oil Proprietary Limited) died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, on Friday night. He was a staunch worker for Legacy Club, a prominent Freemason, and a former State president of Commercial Travellers’ Association.

There was a second obit in the ‘Tizer (OK, the Adelaide Advertiser, if you insist):-

Mr. Tom Kean. who died at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, was managing director of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd. and a foundation member of the Legacy Club. Born at Dean, Victoria. Mr. Kean joined the Vacuum Oil Co. when 21 and served in Victoria, the Riverina. Tasmania and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. He was SA president of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, when he joined the first AIF and served for three years. After the war he had two more terms as president and for one term served as the united president. Later Mr. Kean formed the SA firm of Kean Oils Pty., Ltd., and was managing director when he died. As a foundation member of the Legacy Club he was an enthusiastic supporter in their appeals. A son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon survive.

And even more from the Adelaide Mail:-

Reject Who Served In First A.I.F.
A foundation member of the Legacy Club, and for 43 years a member of the Commercial Travellers’ Association, Mr. Tom Kean, died last night at his home in Brigalow avenue, Kensington Gardens, after a long illness.
Mr. Kean, who was 72, served overseas with the First A.I.F. after having been rejected four times. Although never passed for service, he was sworn in by mistake, and served in France for three years as a motor driver in an ammunition column. Mr. Kean was South Australian president of the C.T.A. when he went overseas. After his return he had two other terms as president. He was united president for one term, and was the first returned soldier to hold that office. Born at Dean, Victoria, Mr. Kean was 21 when he joined the staff of the Vacuum. Oil Co. He worked in Victoria, the Riverina, Tasmania, and New Zealand before being transferred to South Australia. After a year in the motor business, Mr. Kean formed Kean Oil Pty., Ltd., of which he was managing director at his death. He was a noted worker for the Legacy Club and charity carnivals, and was a prominent Free mason. He was buried at the Centennial Park Cemetery this afternoon. Mrs. Kean, a son, Tom, and a daughter, Elon, survive him.

Oh, and it’s in the Melbourne Argus too, so it has to be true, eh?

Byron continued in a further comment:-

If SM’s clothing marked “Kean” and “Keane” came from the deceased Tom Kean of Kean Oil, then SM must have visited, or lived in Adelaide prior to 30th November 1948. I expect Kean’s clothing would have been disposed of soon after his death in January 1947 so SM was probably in Adelaide soon after this.

Commenter Misca then quickly noted:-

BD – I’m not sure if it’s relevant but Tom’s daughter Elon killed herself in December of 1947 by jumping off of the seventh floor of the Savings Bank Building. (She is buried with her father in Centennial Park Cemetery.) Cleland reviewed her death and did not open inquiry into her death. Sutherland investigated.

There’s more description here, and a picture of the building here. Incidentally, Elon Vivienne Kean had only just got engaged to Ernest Griffin, as announced in the ‘Tizer of 6th December 1947:

KEAN — RICHARDS. — The engagement is announced of Elon, only daughter of Mrs. R. Kean and the late Tom Kean, of Kensington Gardens, to Ernest only son of Mrs. C. Griffin, of Colonel Light Gardens.

But all that aside, who was Tom Kean? It turns out he was not only the president of the Commercial Travellers’ and Warehousemen’s Association, he was also the King of Commercial Travellers (i.e. the Charity king in the CTA carnival float, is my best guess). He married in 1923.

There’s a fairly gushing description of him in the Adelaide Register of 13th September 1927 (with a picture):

Mr Tom Kean, the new President of the South Australian Commercial Travellers and Warehousemen’s Association, was born in Dean (V.), a farming district between Ballarat and Daylesford. Mr. Kean, who is 52 years of age, on leaving school went on the land, but subsequently gave it up to enter the services of the Vacuum Oil Company. He represented the organization in New Zealand, Tasmania, Riverina, and South Australia. He came to this State in 1903, and evinced so much interest in the Commercial Travellers’ Association, which he joined the following year, that he was eventually elected President in 1915. Then he enlisted and went to the front, serving with the 2nd Australian Siege Battery. He was three years at the war, and on returning to Australia again resumed work with the Vacuum Oil Company. After a time he joined Adelaide Motors Limited, but in 1924 entered into business on his own account. Last year Harrisons Ramsay, Proprietary, Limited, purchased his business, and Mr. Kean took charge of their petrol, kerosine, oil, and belting department, a position he still holds. Mr. Kean is exceedingly popular in commercial circles, and especially among the men on the road, and his election is a tribute to his ability and geniality.

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So… I suppose the question here is simply: what do I make of all this?

From a Somerton Man research perspective, the dead man’s clothes-as-worn and the clothes in the suitcase come across to me as fairly… random. Expensive things juxtaposed with hand-me-down stuff, along with shoes and slippers that don’t seem to fit the same feet. Pete Bowes is fond of looking at the omissions in the belongings (the famously missing socks!), but for me the overall pattern of what is present is one of give-me-downs, of charity. Did the Somerton Man have a secretly prosperous life, one that his clothes cunningly concealed? Really, I’d find it hard to believe such a thing. Regardless of anything else, his clothes seem to me to tell a tale of a marginal life, a life lived on the fringes or edges.

If, as per Byron Deveson, the story behind this all was that (the real) Tom Kean specified in his Will that his clothes be given to an Adelaide charity (he surely spent long enough competing for Charity Kingship in Adelaide to know every single local charity), and that this was where the Somerton Man got the dead man’s clothes, then I wouldn’t be surprised one little jot.

So… how can we find Tom Kean’s Will? Over to you all… perhaps?

There’s a curious paradox about the Somerton Man / Tamam Shud case: we seem to know a lot more about the Unknown Man (found dead on Somerton Beach in December 1948) than about the nurse Jessie Harkness (who died in 2007). Yet we now have apparently good evidence that the two were connected in some way.

So, today’s question is simply this: how were they connected? She was firmly on the map, while he was (and still is) completely off the map – what gossamer thread of historical happenstance linked these two individuals?

I’ve been thinking about this for some years: and despite the many stories I’ve heard proposed (spies, car criminals, loner sheep shearers, etc), right now only one back-story stands out as being particularly likely to me. Feel free to disagree with any (or indeed all) of it, but it goes something like this…

Late 1943: Jessie Harkness is a trainee nurse working at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH), having started there the previous year. One particular patient catches her eye, a merchant seaman called Styn or Stijn: a 3rd Officer, perhaps he’s Dutch or South African, in hospital with some kind of tropical fever. Yet as he recovers, he shows himself to be strong, fit, intelligent, poetic, charming, persuasive: they start a relationship.

1944: their relationship grows, to the point that she even starts signing her name “Jessie Styn”. But there are problems: he’s possessive and perhaps a bit too ready to fight for what he wants. When he’s fully discharged from RNSH, the war is still on and he (an alien) has to leave the country. He promises to return: Harkness gives him a copy of the Rubaiyat to remember her by, though silently her heart has perhaps already moved on.

How does it all end? The evidence seems to want to tell its own sad story:-
* 1948: a train ride, probably overnight from Melbourne;
* an unexpected visit to an empty Somerton house;
* a long wait on the beach;
* a return to the house;
* a fist-fight, fierce but brief;
* an unwell Styn vomiting, perhaps even losing a dental plate;
* Styn dead, laid on his back on a small bed with his head arching backwards over the edge;
* someone (perhaps Harkness) meticulously cleaning the dead man’s shoes;
* someone else (perhaps George) carrying Styn back to Somerton Beach in the dark of night;
* a vow of silence: We Shall Not Speak Of This Again.

Once again (as with poor old Horace Charles Reynolds), all we really have to rely on is Australian shipping records. If the back-story is correct, what ship was Styn on when he arrived so unwell in Sydney in late 1943? And did he arrive in Melbourne on a ship in the days just before 30th November 1948?