Category Archives: Tamam Shud

I’ve started the year on a positive foot, by knuckling down to a gritty task I’ve been putting off for ages – writing a dedicated Somerton Man page for the blog. OK, it’s not going to oust Gerry Feltus’ splendidly detailed “The Unknown Man”, but it covers quite a lot of ground in a thousand words. And the pictures are all basically on the money. Which is nice.

However, the reason I had been putting this off was that I wanted it to somehow reflect the edges of our knowledge about the Somerton Man, rather than get knotted up in a whole load of Wikipedia-esque meanderings. (I’m not a committee, and I didn’t want to write like one.) And yet the big question is surely… where are the edges? And what exactly is the difference between an ‘edge’ and a ‘brick wall’, hmmm?

As of early 2014, I don’t think the text is going to help us, not unless Naval Intelligence in Melbourne had (and still has!) an unannotated photograph of the cipher page – basically, I have more than a sneaking suspicion that we’ve been starting from a codicologically broken version of the page that will never sufficiently support us in our attempts to read it. And so all we have is The Man himself, in all his unidentifiable obscurity.

But we do also have the nurse, the mysterious Jestyn / Jessie / Jessica / Jo / Tina / Tyna. These days, one question I keep coming back to is whether “Jestyn” makes sense in the way she (apparently) claimed it did. I struggle to believe that particular story wholeheartedly; and when I asked Gerry Feltus about this recently, he seemed to share more than a few of my doubts. In fact, it was a bit spooky that we had travelled substantially different paths but reached almost identical positions.

At the same time, while I (almost) always enjoy Pete Bowes’ Somerton Man musings and thoughts, there’s something about his speculative take on the Unknown Man’s underdaks that rings true for me. Really, only someone answering to the name “Keane” would have “Keane” on their underpants, so I don’t honestly see any alternative to the idea that, at least some of the time, the Unknown Man did go by the name “Keane”… and if no such person existed or was missing, then it must have been a fake identity. After all, the problem with the laundry theory is that the grundies he was actually wearing had no name on. So how do you get them clean, then? That’s a mystery all of its own, I’d have thought.

I don’t know: maybe the missing link will turn out to be a Mr Keane / Styn, who changed his name as often as his underwear, and who was sweet on tiny little Jessie Harkness. Maybe Jestyn was comfortable with being Jess Styn, but didn’t want to be Jess Keane? If this is in some way right, why was the Somerton Man’s underwear Styn-free? Maybe we’ll find out in 2014, who knows!

A nice email from Byron Deveson recently prompted me to take a fresh look at the Somerton Man’s cipher page.

I used the 1802×1440 (400 dpi) scan that Professor Derek Abbott made available on his Tamam Shud Facebook page, and which Gordon Cramer kindly forwarded to me. It originally came (I believe) from the photo library at the Adelaide Advertiser: note that a version of this is on the Wikipedia page, but that looks to me to have had its contrast tweaked in the process.

Looking at this again, it seems painfully obvious (specifically from the way the marking ink failed to bleed into the paper) that what happened here was simply this:-

(1) The original page was photographed, enlarged, and fixed onto a photographic print
(2) A policeman used a marker pen to draw over the faint markings on the print
(3) The Adelaide Advertiser’s photographer photographed the annotated print

Hence I am quite sure that the long-standing belief that the SA police drew on the object itself is simply an urban myth. Conversely, the right question to ask is whether an unannotated photograph of the page still exists in the police files, because that is the one we actually need to be working from.

So… why has nobody asked this question since 1948?

Some interesting Cipher Mysteries comments arrived here today from “RT”, prodding me to take a second look at something I nosed around a while back (but then promptly forgot to blog about). Here’s what he wrote:-

RT comment #1: “I think the SM was married to Jessica.”

RT comment #2: “Has anyone thought that she could have been Mrs J E Styn. Or Van Styn? […]”

RT comment #3: “I along with others have always thought she was married to him. I think that for some reason she did a runner from him met Prosper and changed her name. He tracked her down and things went sour. That is only my opinion but you need proof. I also am very certain that Robin is the SM’s son. I think that Prosper was aware of this and accepted it. It worked well for him as his parents were very wealthy and a son would enable him to collect an increased inheritance.”

For all the ideas, notions, and speculations in there, this is a splendidly romantic secret history, albeit one woefully short of actual facts (which RT freely admits). But let’s look again at the primary evidence we do have – the “Jestyn” signature in the copy of the Rubaiyat given to Alf Boxall:-

According to Gerry Feltus: when Jessie met Boxall in 1944, she knew that he was married and had two children (his second child, a daughter called Lesley, had just been born), and she had his address in Maroubra: so I think that quite why she felt the need to sign herself with a different name “Jestyn” (or “JEstyn” as Feltus writes it) in the Rubaiyat is an open (and slightly perplexing) question. And there’s definitely a gap between the “JE” part and the “styn” part.

Another unexplained question from this time is why Jessie changed her name to Thomson several years before her husband-to-be’s divorce came through. According to RT’s (admittedly unverified) story, this was because she was ‘on the run’ from her previous partner / husband: but all we actually know for sure is that she “terminated her employment as a nurse in Sydney” in 1946, moved to Mentone near her parents, and then moved to Adelaide in early 1947, where she gave birth (to Robin) in the middle of 1947, all (again) according to the ever-reliable Gerry Feltus.

Could it be, then, that the secret history of this signature is that it is actually “J. E. Styn“, and that Jessica had taken her earlier partner’s surname? I wondered about this a while back, and so did various searches (Trove etc) for “Styn” that all turned up nothing at all promising. It all seemed to be a blank.

But today, I did another trawl over broadly the same set of archives and found a single reference I had previously missed to a Willen Styn. It’s “NAA: PP14/3 DUTCH/STYN W”, containing “STYN Willen – Nationality : Dutch – [Application Form for Registration as Alien]”, dating from 1916-1920, item barcode 5143479 in Perth. If you want to see the catalogue entry, go to the National Archives of Australia, click on RecordSearch, and then search for Willen Styn. I’ve already ordered a copy of the actual record, and will let you all know when it arrives.

Note that the PP14/3 series of archives is “the Register of aliens maintained under War Precautions (Aliens Registered) Regulations 1916”, i.e. a list of foreign nationals in Australia at the time of WW1 (presumably because Styn was Dutch). The Australian archives have plenty of related immigration files from the same period (e.g. PP14/1, which I went through the index of just in case there was some kind of misspelling of Styn in there, but to no avail).

So… I’ll say it. If “Jestyn” should properly be read as “J. E. Styn”, then might the Somerton Man be the somewhat-off-the-radar Dutchman Willen Styn? Let’s go and look for some evidence, see what we turn up.

Right now, I have a sneaking suspicion that he may turn out to be even harder to track than dear old Horace Charles Reynolds… but we shall see! So this is your cue: Cipher Mysteries research legions, please descend upon the collected Australian archives and see if you can find anything – anything at all! – about the mysterious Willen Styn. Good hunting! 🙂

The Somerton Man case crawls ever on, with talk of DNA swirling ever round in its own eternal double-helix – one strand being what Derek Abbott wants, the other being what he’s ever likely to get.

Most of the current DNA chitter-chatter was sparked by the recent 60 Minutes episode on the Somerton Man. This has just had a 4-minute video update put on the web, though sadly (and as if to demonstrate how little traditional broadcasters understand about newmedia) without extra footage of two huge-eyed kittens playing adorably with a ball of string with L337-speak subtitles saying “WE HAS OWNED THA UNKNONE MAN”. Don’t these fools know anything about YouTube?

Instead, we got what some might describe as the next best thing: Roma and Rachel Egan being interviewed in the South Australian Police Museum with an ancient stiff cursed with distorted and unrepresentative facial features. Oh, and the Somerton Man’s plaster cast was also there, but you saw that joke coming a mile off. 😉

Of course, the real reason the clip had ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor was that it didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know from the rest of the footage. But you didn’t really need me to tell you that, I’m sure.

In other news, I was a little surprised to find out that the Somerton Man has somehow developed a new life as a political football. According to a news story in The Adelaide Advertiser a few weeks back…

Shadow attorney-general Stephen Wade has given a strong hint that the Liberals, if elected in March, would dig up the body of the mystery man found dead on Somerton Beach on December 1, 1948.

“Any incoming Liberal attorney-general would need to be briefed on the matter, but my reading of the case is it’s just the sort of case the exhuming processes are designed for,” he said.

“On the one hand it’s a cold case and on the other hand it involves issues of paternity.”

So, it would seem that the Somerton Man is now such an iconic Aussie issue that votes are riding on his back. I didn’t see that coming… but there it is, make of it all what you will.

I don’t know… perhaps I’m being a bit thick here, but it still seems to me that an awful lot of DNA analysis should be done on the living before exhumation of the Unknown Man was even remotely considered.

If I was Attorney-General John Rau (and I’m not, before I get any Tamam Trolls suggesting otherwise), I’d want (and would indeed expect) any such request to be accompanied by a big fat dossier of familial genetic analysis, rather than just a fishing rod. Hence the Tamam Shud question that’s constantly hanging in the air here at Cipher Mysteries Mansions is simply this: “Where is that dossier?“

Right from the start of her book, Australian crime writer Kerry Greenwood promises a lot to the reader (but mainly to herself): to try to understand the Somerton Man, her late father Al Greenwood, and the Adelaide of 1948; and to provide some explanations. Put all that together and it is, as they say, A Pretty Big Ask.

To her credit, I have to say that she really gives it a go: and for nearly a hundred pages, she actually succeeds. She reaches out towards an authorial tone that remains human(e) and well-informed – even her reminiscences of her father are of a piece with it all, and are neither excessively nostalgic nor cloying.

In fact, up to about page 95, I really felt right there with her overall project: she knows she isn’t Gerry Feltus (and frankly the world is doing OK with exactly one Gerry Feltus) and that’s OK, but she’s trying to write something else entirely, a kind of living, wharfie-centric social history, the schoonered ley lines of the underworld writing their story in dockyard scars and watch-smugglers’ high-tide japes.

But then… the hybrid / crossover narrative range sprawled janglingly out of her non-fiction reach, into a unconvincing Eton Mess of spies, hyperdontia, Israel, Berlin, ciphers, inquests, and even (I don’t want to type it but I know I have to) H. C. Reynolds. And then finished off with a 40-page Phryne Fisher short(ish) story, that feels scratchy, misjudged and dated all at the same time.

As a writer myself, I suspect it’s reasonably clear what happened. For nearly the first half the book, Greenwood works really bloody hard to summon up a kind of writing voodoo spell that I didn’t honestly think was possible: mixing Aussie dockside wisdom with a feel for a time and a place that constantly reads as though it is about to cast a light on a devilishly shadowy corner, through sheer writing force. Greenwood successfully manages to channel her fresh-faced 1975 grape-picking self talking with her dad, often as if his curly-haired ghost was occasionally casting a wry glance over her shoulder and setting right her flights of optimistic historical theorizing. And that is where her book is absolutely at its best.

And yet the remainder of the book is just so, I don’t know, disappointing and hollow. It’s not that it can’t deliver on the elevated promises made at the start (as a reader, you don’t believe that she can, but you don’t really mind as long as you enjoy the ride); it’s just that I think she used up her personal emotional reserves and will-to-get-it-done on the parts she actually knew something about – the rest she’s basically making up, and her heart and soul weren’t in it. By page 100, she’d burnt the project’s inner candle out, and had to complete the remainder by wind-up torchlight… it just wasn’t the same. (Please correct me if you think I’m wrong.)

And so… I’m kind of stuck as to what to say. It comes across as only half the book she aimed to write, but she was trying to write a book that was at least twice as hard to write as a normal book. But can a reviewer really recommend that readers buy it to read the first half of the book? It just doesn’t sound right.

Ultimately, it’s not a ‘proper’ guide to the Somerton Man mystery (Gerry Feltus’ book is as close to that as we’ll probably see this side of an identified body), nor is it a family memoir of a lost Adelaide. And yet… all I can say is that it is what it is, and you’ll buy it if you think it will work for you.

This is just a work in progress post: I’ve taken the Beaumont family data recently posted here as comments by B Deveson and Samuel Z, and converted (most of) them into a single über-diagram.

Please let me know if this is wrong in any way!

The 60 Minutes video segment on the Somerton Man has just gone live, but you’ll have to navigate down the thumbnails on the right hand side of that page to find it – alternatively, this direct link to the video might possibly work for you.

Though it’s always nice to see Gerry Feltus and Derek Abbott on screen 🙂 , the whole point of the programme was that it also included a series of on-screen interviews with Jestyn’s direct family members (daughter Kate Thomson, daughter-in-law Roma Egan, granddaughter Rachel Egan) that revealed some new titbits of information – though (as is normally the case with cipher mysteries) only really enough to tantalize rather than definitively prove or disprove.

As a result, the things we now know are:-
* That Jessica Thomson lied to the police (as just about everyone suspected), i.e. that she did indeed know who the Somerton Man was;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that the whole mystery wasn’t “at a State Police level”;
* That Jessica Thomson told her daughter that she “was teaching English to migrants”, and could speak Russian (if a bit rustily);
* That Jessica Thomson’s daughter now believes that her mother was linked in some way to Soviet spying; and
* That Jessica Thomson’s granddaughter now suspects that the Unknown Man might well have been her actual grandfather.

The first bit of good news is that if (as claimed) Jessica did know the Somerton Man, then we can’t really call him the “Unknown Man” any more, because he was manifestly “The Known Man”. Having said that, I somehow doubt that Gerry Feltus will be changing his book’s title any time soon, though. 😉

As far as the whole Soviet spy scenario goes: ASIO (Australian Secret Intelligence Organization) had an office in Adelaide, and I expect that there is a huge amount of stuff in the archives relating to Russian spies in Australia during that edgy post-WW2 period. Of course, it may be many years yet before anything in such grey archives get declassified… but if this side of the story is even partially right, then that could – much to my surprise – well be where any kind of genuine historical answer will lie.

But all the same… if Jessica Thomson was indeed a Soviet spy, it still makes no sense that she would silently poison another Soviet spy visiting her, even if she were a double agent (other countries’ spies were often far more useful alive-and-known-about than dead-and-buried). Personally, I still think it far more likely that the Somerton Man died by accident or by someone else’s hand than by Jessica’s hand – though I really wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was she who meticulously cleaned and polished his shoes after his demise. Shame the hat was too far gone, though. 😐

Moreover, the notion that the Somerton Man was Robin Thomson’s father (and Rachel Egan’s grandfather) is still a little bit hard for me to digest. Before anything so radical as an exhumation could take place, the simplest explanation of all – that Prosper McTaggart Thomson was the biological parent of both Robin Thomson and Kate Thomson, as you’d basically expect – would surely need to be eliminated first.

Even though Y-DNA testing is not possible here (because it only works for two direct male descendants of a single male ancestor), I would be pretty sure that there must be some other DNA test that could look for some kind of shared allele pattern between Kate Thomson and Rachel Egan that would indicate whether or not they were related (or very probably related) via a shared male ancestor. (I’m not an expert on genetics, though, so please tell me if this is just plain wrong.)

Only if it could be shown beyond reasonable doubt that the two did not share such a male ancestor would it make any obvious sense to push for exhumation – so, has this kind of testing already been done? The programme was silent… but maybe such tests have already been done, who knows?

Thanks to Diane O’D for flagging that long-running Australian current affairs TV programme “60 Minutes” will be covering the Somerton Man this coming Sunday, with reporter Charles Wooley. The team were snapped filming in West Terrace Cemetery (where the Unknown Man’s body lies) last month.

For what it’s worth, I suspect that the fact that their interest and the Tamam Troll attacks on Cipher Mysteries all happened at basically the same time is not entirely coincidental. Perhaps that’s simply what happens when people stick their hot hands into historical hornets’ nests: someone’s gonna get stung.

But this is, of course, exactly how TV film-makers the world over make their programmes: their only concern is with the shining televisual jewel that finally emerges from the edit suite, not the wreckage that’s left behind by their underpaid & overstretched researchers trampling cavalierly over the cultural flowerbeds. It’s rare these days that this process yields even genuine reportage, let alone anything approaching (capital-H) History.

All the same, the programme makers have a moral responsibility to check their facts, to get their basic story straight: so let’s read their initial press release, to see what we should expect of them:-

We all know that fact is stranger than fiction and that’s very much the case with this story.

It’s the true tale of espionage, a love affair and murder – that wouldn’t be out of place in the movies.

Not a great start. Unless 60 Minutes have found a huge cache of evidence everyone else has missed completely (very unlikely), I think it’s important to say that we have:-

* no evidence of “espionage” at all – the “cipher” seems to be a list of initials of a set of phrases, nothing to do with spying
* no evidence of “a love affair” at all – all we have is a phone number in a book that seems to have been connected to the dead man
* no evidence of “murder” at all – the pathologists, lab analysts and coroners found no trace of poison, despite looking really hard

The year was 1948. Communism and democracy were wrestling for world supremacy. The nuclear arms race was in high gear. And there were spies everywhere, even in Australia.

All true (if a tad self-important and grandiose). But the probability that any of this is even remotely to do with a middle-aged bloke found dead on Somerton beach still seems extraordinarily low. I repeat: we still have not one jot of evidence that supports any of this speculation.

Against this sinister backdrop, an unidentified body was found on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach – the so-called Somerton Man.

TV loves sinister backdrops… but that doesn’t make the two things connected, or even likely to be connected.

Now, 65 years after he was buried there are moves to exhume him in an attempt to finally solve this lingering Cold War Mystery.

Professor Derek Abbott has indeed been trying to get the body exhumed. But – contrary to nearly every crime scene TV drama ever shown on television – the courts are respectful of the dead, and don’t allow them to be exhumed on a whim or on a fishing trip for physical evidence. Right now, we simply have insufficient tangible evidence to convince the courts that exhumation is a good idea, and – unless people actually do better quality research and find better quality evidence – that’s how it’s going to stay for the foreseeable future.

This Sunday, 60 Minutes will reveal for the first time the identity of the mysterious nurse who was romantically linked to the Somerton man, and talk to the woman who claims she’s the Somerton Man’s granddaughter.

Well… apart from the awkward fact that the identities of the nurse and her husband have been known by hundreds of researchers for many years now, perhaps we can be generous and say that “60 Minutes” will probably be the first to reveal it on TV.

All the same, the interview with “the woman who claims” (etc) will doubtless be interesting, if perhaps a bit speculative: though if they’ve hooked themselves a gee-new-wine Tamam Troll, that would turn the entire programme into a Tamam Train Wreck of spectacular proportions.

Let’s hope for some fast and furious fact-checking before Sunday! 🙂