Category Archives: Tamam Shud

I’ve started to amass the raw data for an open source time of death calculation for the Somerton Man.

* The Adelaide Advertiser, 30th November 1948, p.8.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 1st December 1948, p.10.
* The Adelaide Advertiser, 2nd December 1948, p.6.

30th November 1948
Sunset 7.14pm
Moon set 6.51pm – New Moon
High tide 4.52pm (6.0ft), low tide 10.10pm (2.4ft)
Temperature min 52.1°, max 76.3° [i.e. 11.2°C to 24.6°C]
Barometer 30.05 (3am), 30.09 (9am), 29.99 (3pm), 30.03 (9pm)
Relative humidity 58% (9am), 43% (3pm), 57% (9pm)

1st December 1948
Sunrise 4.56am
Moon rise 4.51am – New Moon.
High tide 4.34am (9.0ft), low tide 11.11am (1.0ft).
Temperature min 65.7°, max 96.0° [i.e. 18.7°C to 35.5°C]
Barometer 29.87 (3am), 29.86 (9am), 29.70 (3pm), 29.71 (9pm)
Relative humidity 20% (9am), 18% (3pm), 39% (9pm)

The initial surprise was that this was a short but extremely dark night – the sun and (new) moon both set around 7pm and rose just before 5am. As a result, anyone observing any event after sunset that evening / night would have had to have been relying almost entirely on street lights.

The second surprise that the high tide at 4.34am was a spring tide (i.e. a very strong tide, and nothing to do with the season ‘Spring’). That is, at the time of a New Moon, what can happen is that one of the two normal tides a day can be exaggerated by the gravitational force of the Earth, the Moon and the Sun all lining up in what is called a “syzygy“, from the Greek ζυγον meaning “yoke”. (I used to play Scrabble with my Grandma after school, and I’m sure she’d have thoroughly appreciated that word: this was the first time I’ve managed to use it in its proper context).

However, I haven’t yet found good enough information to be sure what the temperature was during the night, and I also can’t make out the wind direction or speed from Trove’s scans of the Adelaide Advertiser’s weather maps. If anyone has access to better information for these, please say!

Also, I don’t know how far up Somerton Beach the 9ft high tide would have come at 4.34am. The man’s body would surely have to have been fairly close to the sea wall, simply to have avoided been washed over by the waves. Just a thought!

While responding to Cipher Mysteries comments from the ever-interesting Byron Deveson and others today, it struck me that what we are broadly iterating towards is a kind of “open source autopsy” of the Tamam Shud / Unknown / Somerton Man. And so, my reasoning went, why not take this basic idea and really do it properly?

In short, I propose that we carry out an open source autopsy on the Unknown Man. The point of the exercise would not be to do with whether you think, believe or suspect he was a spy, a paramour, a horse doper, a car thief or whatever, but with the unassailable basic factuality his physical body tells us about what happened to him (pre- and post-mortem) in the period up to the morning of 1st December 1948.

For me, a grain of fact outweighs a ton of speculation: and I believe that by collaborating to dig out all the grains of fact we can here, we will be able to reach a position where we can build up a powerful and convincing story about what happened. Not only that, but by collecting, exposing, and validating all the physical evidence, any conclusions or inferences will be openly accessible and verifiable by all manner of modern forensic professionals.

The first step in this journey of a thousand miles, though, is evidence collection. Frankly, I’m getting a bit tired of re-reading abbreviated summaries in 60-year-old Australian newspapers about the various autopsies, coronial inquests, and pathology reports. For example, Kerry Greenwood’s recent book (I’m waiting for my copy to arrive, any day now, *sigh*) quotes John Dwyer’s pathology notes, but having direct access to these notes is surely a better place to start.

I surely can’t be the only researcher who wants to go through these reports first-hand!

So, my current list of evidence sources we would need to begin with would look something like this:-

* Dr John Berkely Bennett’s autopsy report [examined the body at 9.30am on 1st December 1948]
* Dr John Matthew Dwyer’s pathology report [carried out the post-mortem at 7:30am on 2nd December 1948]
* Dr Robert Cowan’s report [stomach, stomach contents, a liver section, a muscle section, blood and urine]
* Dr Kenneth A. Brown’s forensic odontology report [he surely wrote and submitted a report, right?]
* The coronial inquest transcript / report [“Inquest Into the Death of a Body Located at Somerton on 1st December 1948, State Records of South Australia, GX/0A/0000/1016/0B, 17th & 21st June 1949”]
* The raw data collected from what is believed to be the Unknown Man’s hair by Professor Derek Abbott’s group.

Note that I’m not interested in the police reports or in any individual claims or narratives at this stage, but only in raw physical evidence. Is there anything missing from this list? Please leave a comment if there is!

Of course, there may be particular reasons why some or all of these can’t be openly published on the Internet. But all the same, I think we should be able to publish detailed summaries of all of the physical evidence and conclusions, not just the edited highlights that prove useful to reinforce some speculative or moral narrative.

To stand any chance of making any headway, I think we need to start with the whole physical story in all its confusing, contradictory detail – because the body itself can’t speculate or lie. Is that too much to ask for?

[NP: here’s a guest post by Gordon Cramer, lightly edited to Cipher Mysteries house style and with some brief comments from me at the end]

An enormous amount of effort has been applied to this case for so many years and I agree with comments regarding the value of Gerry Feltus’ book and the work of Derek Abbott and the students at Adelaide University.

I would suggest, with great respect to all, that the following facts and questions regarding evidence and timeline be taken into consideration when reviewing this case. I hope you will bear with me whilst I attempt to unravel some aspects that I find quite unusual:

1. On December 1st 1948, the Adelaide News published a brief article on the finding of the body of a man at Somerton beach that morning. In the article the man is described as being 5ft 11 inches in height, well-built and having fair hair and hazel eyes. This information was ‘fresh’ and would have come directly from the Police and quite probably the Coroner’s officer.

If you look at the images published at the time and since, his hair was quite dark and in fact has been referred to as being auburn in colour. His eyes were later referred to as blue in colour and not hazel. You could brush this off as a simple mistake but there were quite a number of such simple mistakes as you will read.

2. On Friday 3rd December in the Advertiser, another article appeared and it refers to a ‘reconstructed’ photograph of the body of a man found on Somerton Beach. This coincides with the view I and others have that the images published at the time had in fact been altered. You of course must form your own opinion on that. The same article clearly states that his death was not natural. I mention this because it was said that the Police did not discover the fact it was an unnatural death for some time. How much credence can be placed on the published photograph’s being a true likeness of the man?

3. Around mid-January the suitcase was discovered. It contained a range of items including tools, a glass dish, a razor and more. What puzzles me, given that the death was known not to have been a natural one, is why none of the items was fingerprinted. The blade and handle on the knife, the handle on the brush, the glass dish and more were apparently not dusted for prints. In fact, the Police made it clear that the way they were able to associate the man with the suitcase was the presence of Barbour’s waxed thread used to repair the collar of his coat and a card of similar coloured thread that was found in the suitcase. Why do that when his fingerprints should have been on the items mentioned, including the card of thread and the suitcase, inside and/or outside?

3. When much later a copy of the book was found, it also was not dusted for fingerprints. It should be born in mind that Detective Jimmy Durham had earlier risen to fame because he had been able to capture a palm print from a copy of a second-hand book from a shop and that led to a successful prosecution of a lady who had stolen the book. The question here is why weren’t this book and its pages fingerprinted? The least they would have found should have been the man’s prints and who knows who else’s prints.

4. The final aspect that adds to the puzzle is the manner of his death. Most would know that it was believed with some good cause that the man had been poisoned and that Digitalis or the plant derivative had been used. At the autopsy Cleland described the man’s spleen as being three times the normal size. In a discussion with Derek Abbott his view was that the Somerton Man was very ill and that his spleen could have taken three or more days to reach that size.

Here is where any input would be greatly appreciated: for example, is it true to say that Digitalis can have this enlarging effect on the spleen? If so then we are faced with the possibility that Somerton Man had been poisoned some days earlier when he would have been in Victoria, as is widely thought, or perhaps on the train.

The question here is would a man take poison, carefully pack his suitcase supposedly with the book and then take off on a lengthy train journey not knowing if he would survive it, let alone get to Somerton beach?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[NP: my own brief comments:

(1) “…gingery coloured hair, fairly coarse and turning slightly grey at sides, back of neck and behind ears… grey eyes, clean shaven and natural teeth” according to this later police report.

(2) To be precise about the “reconstructed” picture, it was made by Police Photographer Durham, appeared in the Friday 3rd December issue of the Adelaide News, and was then referred to as a “reconstructed” photo in the Saturday 4th December issue of the Adelaide News. My own best guess is that the “reconstruction” element simply involved putting a shirt and tie on the man’s body, i.e. staging rather than photo-manipulation.

(3) The book certainly should have been fingerprinted, yes: but unfortunately detective work is often full of should haves. 🙁

(4) The man’s enlarged spleen has yet to be explained satisfactorily (and I too think it would have taken several days or indeed weeks to reach that size). But the notion that the Somerton Man was a slow-motion suicide-by-self-administered-poisoning doesn’t yet make sense to me at all. Why lug brushes and knives around if you’re about to die?

Even more to the point, I think it is well worth pointing out that the significant lividity at the back of the man’s head was highly inconsistent with the pose of his body on the beach. The distinctive lividity pattern strongly suggests to me that after dying, the man’s body was laying down (almost certainly on his back) with his head slightly lower than the rest of his body, before being carried to the beach some hours later, again almost certainly in the night hours. So, somebody took his body to the beach after a fair few hours. The pasty in his stomach sounds to me a lot like a light lunch to a man his size, so my own forensic reconstruction is that
* he died in the late afternoon [perhaps in a sequence involving vomiting into his hat and losing his dental plate, right Pete?];
* he was then laid out on his back on someone’s [probably quite small] bed with his head tipped slightly over one side;
* he was finally carried to the beach in the middle of the night to be posed with a cigarette in his mouth etc.
Feel free to comment and disagree with this, but I’m pretty sure this is as close as we can currently get to the correct sequence! ]

Probably the definitive starting point for any discussion about the sad affair of Keith Mangnoson is the inquest report into the death of his young son Clive. It’s on the Internet courtesy of the consistently intriguing blog The Marshall Files, though reading comments there tutting at the moderator of a certain other blog (*cough* Cipher Mysteries *cough*) for letting trolls get so badly out of hand did feel a tad surreal. 😐

But I digress. Let’s try to build up a picture of Keith Mangnoson’s early life…

Born on 9th May 1914 in Adelaide, Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at the age of 14 then…

“…left home and worked on farms in the country until early in 1940, when he got lost in heavy scrub country at near Nadda where he was engaged in wood cutting. After the lapse of several days he was found lying unconscious and suffering from severe sunburn in an empty horse trough. After spending several weeks in the Loxton Public Hospital under the care of the late Doctor Tanko, he was removed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and later to the Convalescent Hospital at Magill. The doctor who was attending him at the latter informed Mangnoson’s mother that her son was not responding to treatment and advised her to have him placed in the Enfield Receiving Home. He was taken to the Home where he remained for three months, and then his mother took him to a farm at Alma Plains where he stayed for a few weeks.

On May 11, 1941, Mangnoson enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces and served as a Private with the 2/48th Australian Infantry Battalion in the Middle East and later on in the Pacific Area, where he contracted malaria and suffered with war neurosis. On his return to Australia he was admitted to the Military Hospital at Northfield and remained there until he was discharged from the Services on February 7, 1945. He then returned to his mother’s home at 12, Magarey Terrace, Largs Bay and remained there until he was married in the following May.“

Remembering Mangnoson’s claim that he worked with a “Carl Thompsen” in Renmark (250km ENE of Adelaide, not too far from the SA/Victoria state border) in “1939”, we can see that this could only have been in the period before his near-death experience in Nadda (60km South of Renmark, and similarly close to the state border), and while this may conceivably have been in very early 1940, it certainly could not have been any later than that.

Renmark is surrounded by mallee scrubland (fairly arid, with lots of eucalypts): circa 1940, I presume much of this was being cleared (by woodcutters such as Mangnoson) for large-scale farming, as it has now developed a very significant grape, citrus-fruit and nut farming industry. The local papers at the time have columns talking about removing the green tinge from sultanas and whether there would be a market for flax… you get the basic idea.

Trove can also give us (thanks to the Murray Pioneer and Australian River Record, as well as the Adelaide Advertiser and the Adelaide Chronicle) several other brief glimpses into Keith Mangnoson’s early life. In March 1940, he was living in Alma and got engaged to a certain Winifred L. Williams from Renmark:-

WILLIAMS—MANGNOSON — The engagement is announced of WINIFRED L., eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Williams of Renmark, to KEITH, W., second son of Mr. and Mrs. J. Mangnoson of Alma.

On August 1 1940, Mangnoson’s name appears as one of those volunteers for National Service from Renmark whose applications had been rejected.

We also know (according to the front page of the 28th March 1940 Murray Pioneer) that this had been the “Hottest March on Record – Thirteen Centuries at Renmark… all previous records for March heat have been smashed.” (p.16: “Wanted – Wood cutters and stump splitters, Moorook district”.)

However – as normal with just about everything to do with the Mangnoson family and the Somerton Man – throughout all this I find myself playing archival catch-up with the very splendid Barry Traish, who has been raking over (and indeed generously correcting) these Trove scans for some time now. But all the same, I have my own take on what these pieces of evidence could well mean if you put them all together…

If these fragments are all separately correct, then “early in 1940” must surely have been after Mangnoson’s engagement to Winifred Williams (announced in the 7th March 1940 editions of the various newspapers) and probably more than four months before 1st August 1940 (when his application was rejected), for surely he can’t have volunteered to join the AIF while still recovering in the Enfield Receiving Home? All of which seems to me to point to the incident happening some time in mid-to-late March 1940, just after his engagement… yet there is no mention of it in any of the newspapers in Trove.

Of course, the logical question for those Australian genealogist researcher readers who have managed to hold on this far into such a TL;DR post is surely this: whatever happened to Winifred L. Williams of Renmark? Did anyone ever think to ask her about Keith Mangnoson and his 1939 Renmark workmate “Carl Thompsen”? I’m guessing that she would be in her 90s now: I know I’m jinxing it by even asking, but might she even possibly still be alive?

Despite this week’s lingering yellow downpour from Troll Land, the same period has seen a surprisingly large amount of good stuff concerning the Tamam Shud cold case / cipher mystery emerging into the light.

The first thing I rather like is Pete Bowes’ line of reasoning concerning the Unknown Man’s glass saucer, one of many curious things found in the suitcase he checked into the left-luggage room at Adelaide railway station on the morning of his death.

But why a glass saucer? Pete combines this with the Unknown Man’s fit-looking physical makeup (and hence a healthy diet, though the only thing we actually know for sure that he ate was a pastie) and his 18 (!) removed teeth to deduce that the Unknown Man must have had a dental plate fitted in his mouth, despite the fact that none was found at his autopsy. For Pete, the likeliest function of the glass saucer is as part of a bedtime ritual – taking his plate out and placing it on the saucer for the night.

I’m actually strongly convinced by this line of reasoning: and it has the ring of domestic routine to it that humanizes the Unknown Man, that helps stop us from treating his situation and life too abstractly or theoretically.

But, but, but… what happened to the Unknown Man’s dental plate? Given that it wasn’t in his mouth or his suitcase, I think there are two major scenarios to consider…

Plate scenario #1: the Unknown Man coughs his plate out while vomiting, but nobody notices its absence until after his body has been moved to the beach later.

Plate scenario #2: the Unknown Man dies, but the people in whose company he dies consciously decide to remove his plate to prevent his being identified by it before moving his body to the beach.

Up until now I haven’t really thought it hugely likely that name-tags or labels were removed from the clothes he was wearing: but add in the absence of a hat and the missing dental plate, perhaps this does all indeed amount to a pretty solid overall scenario to consider. Lots to think about there, hmmmm?

The second big idea of the week came from Cipher Mysteries commenter The Dude (see here, here, here, here, and here). Why oh why, commenteth The Dude, is it that people keep yakking about Jestyn (based on the presence of her phone number on the copy of the Rubaiyat eventually linked to the Unknown Man) when it is surely just as likely that the phone number refers not to her but to her partner-and-soon-to-be-husband Prosper Thomson? After all, Prosper used the same number for some of his taxi- and car-related small ads, even if the phone number was itself listed in the phone directory as “Sister J. E. Thomson”.

I completely agree that there are numerous permutations to consider; and suspect that the main reason people put forward such fanciful (and often ridiculous) theories about Jestyn is probably because she gave a copy of the Rubaiyat to Alf Boxall, making it easy to build up a romantic conceptual castle on top of the various fragments. But the existence of two copies of the Rubaiyat falls well short of a proof definitively connecting them: it was, after all, a popular book at the time.

Back in the real world, however, I contend it was far more likely that the Unknown Man was known just as much to Jestyn as to Prosper. It’s surely hard to keep really big secrets in a tiny little house. 😉

But The Dude goes further: given that Prosper was a car dealer and ended up in court several times for forging (or dealing in forged) car documents at a time when there was a lot of interstate car theft and fencing going on in Australia, might it be that the Unknown Man was a fellow car crim (say, from a different state), and that all the stencilling equipment in his suitcase was actually for altering car number plates?

It’s a perfectly viable hypothesis (and far more realistic than any spy hypothesis I’ve heard floated about the case over the years, for example), and one that might even be testable if we could somehow reconstruct the car ring associated with Prosper from people named in court appearances etc. The Dude is already away looking for this kind of thing, good luck with that whole line of inquiry… 🙂

But what if the truth is even simpler? After all, one of the long-standing mysteries about the Tamam Shud case which nobody ever talks about these days is whether it relates to Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at all: for it was Mangnoson who shouted out loud that he had worked with the Unknown Man in Renmark in 1939, and named him as “Carl Thompsen“.

As nearly everyone knows, though, when the Mangnosons ignored the warnings to keep quiet, things turned out very badly very quickly for all of them… but that’s another story entirely (for now). I really don’t know whether these threats were real or hoaxes: but I can’t help wondering whether all these pieces might be connected in a rather more direct way than is usually suggested.

Basically, might this “Carl Thompsen” have been a misspelled / misremembered cousin or relation of Prosper McTaggart Thomson? Might he also have been a trusted out-of-state fellow crim in the same interstate stolen car fencing ring? As always, the police have probably already followed this trail and it could all be no more than a coincidence… but I thought I’d mention it here, just in case someone has already gone hunting for all this (which normally seems to be the case).

Of course, the reason I call this the “Thompson Twins” hypothesis is that the 1980s UK pop group was named after the Tin Tin characters Thompson and Thomson (the original French bureaucrat pair were “Dupond et Dupont”), and here we find ourselves with our own Thompsen and Thomson to work with. “We are detectives, we are select”, you might say (though perhaps a little optimistically)! 😉

I’ve been looking at IP addresses of people submitting comments to Cipher Mysteries, and it looks very much as if I have unwillingly ‘acquired’ at least six different “Tamam Trolls” – that is, people leaving comments about the Somerton Man case…
* muddying the historical waters rather than clearing them
* misrepresenting evidence that is genuinely available
* defaming and indeed insulting the memory of various dead people
* suggesting speculative leads based on a whim and a half-thread of evidence
* engaging in promoting some kind of fantasy agenda with no relation to what actually happened
* pretending to be related to Jestyn
* just plain lying for reasons unknown (possibly even to themselves)

I try to be even-handed and open in how I deal with commenters on Cipher Mysteries, but – people – this is getting really boring.

Some days I wake up wondering whether these trolls are playing out some kind of anti-evidential role-playing game, where you win by “proving” that your character (randomly allocated by the dungeon master at the start of the game) was in fact the Unknown Man: and you get awarded XP every time you convince me to spend my dwindlingly small amount of money on following some spurious research lead to dig up some real evidence to prove you wrong.

If that’s even remotely true, then rock my riotous rowlocks, today’s +10 bonus bonanza goes to anonymous Aussie troll “Ayuverdica”. If you recall, he/she suggested that Thomas Lawrence Keane was the Somerton Man, based on… well, let me check my extensive notes… Keane’s mother’s surname’s being “Beaumont”. And nothing else at all as far as I can see, aside from pure whim.

Well, here are Thomas Lawrence Keane’s WW2 service records that I recently paid the NAA to digitize. Was he engaged in spying, espionage or any curious derring do? No. Was he a labourer who became a foreman but was medically discharged in 1944 because of high blood pressure? Yes.

More specifically, did Keane have grey eyes, a prominent mole on his left cheekbone and a noticeable gunshot wound scar on one thigh that still remained from his action in the First World War? Yes. So was he the Somerton Man? No, not even close. 🙁

I recently got sent off on a chase by an anonymous commenter “Ayuverdica”, raking through the Australian archives for a certain ‘Thomas Lawrence Keane’ (here, here and here) as a possible identification claim of the Somerton Man. Having then looked at all the evidence, it was clear none of it quite seemed to stack up in the way the commenter claimed: but I decided to publish it anyway (with plenty of provisos).

However, a few days later, what appears to be the same “Ayuverdica” left a comment on Pete Bowes’ blog:

i just made up the thomas lawrence keane thing on the basis he was from charters towers and married to isabella beaumont. i have no evidence beyond that. the guy was cremated in march 26 1949. is it possible that it was a fake cremation? someone elses body? convenient huh

Errm… thanks for that, thanks a lot. *sigh*

What’s more, I’ve had a lot of commenty backchat here from “Minstrel Janet” (another nearly-nameless commenter) who has been leaving a long series of comments saying what a horrible liar Jestyn was, that Jestyn was up to her neck in two murders, etc, etc, though without ever giving any obvious reason why anyone should allege such a thing. I didn’t moderate out her comments, simply because I wanted to know what drove her to say such inflammatory things… but she now claims to have abandoned Cipher Mysteries and moved on to greener forums pastures. I wish her… as tolerant a reception from the next Tamam Shud forum she happens to descend upon. (Good luck, Pete, mate.)

However, I have moderated out a string of other comments from a pair of anonymous commenters (one from New Zealand, one from Australia), who alleged a whole series of ghastly things about Jestyn and her family. Really, there seems to be something about the whole Tamam Shud case that brings out the worst in people – the most bigoted and intolerant, the quickest to condemn, the fastest jump to conclusions from scanty evidence imaginable, all of it at the same time. Why?

Perhaps it comes down to what I called (in my 2004 Masters’ dissertation) “Keatsian uncertainty”. In an 1817 letter, Keats described Shakespeare’s genius as “Negative Capability“, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason“, which he used to describe the Bard’s near-unique capacity to allow his dramatic characters to remain in a continuous state of uncertainty without feeling any urgent need to resolve their quandaries and dilemmas.

This is also very much like chess, where weaker players when presented with one or more possible captures find it almost impossible to resist the urge to resolve that overwhelming tension by capturing. Shakespeare kept his plays wonderfully interesting, said Keats, by keeping those kinds of internal tensions in play: for me, I think this exhibits both a very modern kind of epistemology and a very modern kind of story-telling. Even now, how many writers have the strength of resolve not to scratch those itches, to release the reader from those dilemmas that keep the protagonists internally caged?

Perhaps what these Somerton Man commenters are displaying is this same all-too-human urge to jump to resolution from whatever evidence is at hand, simply as a way of resolving those unbearable tensions any way they can. But for me, this is more a symptom of intellectual cowardice, when in fact finding a way of living and working with such uncertainties – however difficult that may at first seem – is the difficult, brave, but ultimately right choice.

For example: right now, we don’t know whether Jestyn was utterly complicit; or just as much a victim as the Unknown Man; or somewhere in between; or possibly even entirely unconnected. So, how does arbitrarily “deciding” which of these was true make that whole difficult situation any more manageable? How does replacing an jarring uncertainty with an irritable lie help anybody, exactly?

Anyway, if you haven’t already thrown your hands up in despair at the difficult thought of staying undecided under pressure, I think you will probably enjoy this 2010 article from Cultural Studies Review by Ruth Balint called “The Somerton Man: An Unsolved History“.

Balint documents how, as she came to grasp the Somerton Man case, she felt herself being drawn into different speculative narratives, even though the evidence doesn’t support it. As a long-time fan of historian Carlo Ginzburg’s work, I also found it interesting to see Balint bring his position to bear on the Tamam Shud evidential stack.

But perhaps it’s not such a good idea to give imagination a free rein at this point in the research. Even 65 years after the event (whatever the event was), I still suspect we have yet to do the basic factuality proper justice: and so it is arguably too early in the unfolding historical process to point the big guns of Ginzburgian imaginative reconstruction at this cold case. This isn’t peasant magic in medieval Friuli, guys, sorry.

I guess the trickiest question for historians about the case is simply this: is Tamam Shud genuinely a cold case yet, or is it still luke-warm? Really, at what stage does reconstructive speculation become fair game, and not just a way of treading smartly on (living) people’s toes?

Following my first post on “Thomas Torrance Keane” (and my second post correcting his name to “Thomas Lawrence Keane”, thanks Debra! 🙂 ), I’ve been wondering which particular archival wall I should bang my head against next. At some point in the next few months, his WW2 records should now appear on the web… but as to what they will reveal, I have no idea at all.

In Keane’s funeral notices, there was one tiny dangling thread asking to be gently tugged at: his membership of the RSSAILA, the Returned Sailor’s, Soldier’s and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia:-

KEANE.—New Farm Sub-branch, R.S.S.A.I.L.A. —The Officers and Members are invited to attend the Funeral of their late Member, Mr. T. L. Keane, to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, as per family notice. A. L Beeston, Secretary.

The RSSAILA was originally formed during WW1 as the RSSILA: with the addition of “A” (for “Airmen’s”) in 1940, it then became the RSSAILA, before eventually becoming the RSL (“Returned & Services League of Australia”) in 1965.

Descriptions of the RSSILA in its very early years that I’ve read online make it sound like a right-wing activist organization, with plenty of government and intelligence informers ensconced in key posts: but where the later RSSAILA found itself in the politically-divided post-WW2 years, I don’t know.

Anyway, I thought I’d see if any newsletters or documents pertaining to the RSSILA/RSSAILA’s New Farm Sub-branch still existed: so contacted the branch. “Unfortunately,” the answer speedily came back, “being situated on the Brisbane River, most of our records were lost in the 1974 floods that devastated Brisbane in that year.” Perhaps the South Eastern District did have a newsletter circa 1948-1949, perhaps it didn’t: nobody remembers any more, it all seems to be a bit of a haze.

Of course, there may yet be something relevant deep within the National Archives of Australia’s MS 6609 (which, as I noted before, contains “a rather scary-sounding 205 linear metres of RSL archives”, and may well not have any practical finding aid). But all the same, I think we ought to exhaust other avenues before searching for a spider in that particular dark hole. 🙂

Searching on the ever-surprising Trove did turn up something a little bit odd. In 1st February 1929, Mr. T. H. Keane was elected the assistant Hon. secretary of the South Eastern Queensland district branch: while on 21st July 1930, T. H. Keene was elected one of three vice-presidents of the District, as well as “delegate to the Federal executive”. By 20th July 1931, T. H. Keene was “acting president”, and again nominated for state vice-president: and on 1st September 1931 he appears (as “T. Keane”) in the list of delegates at the annual State conference.

Helpfully, the Brisbane Courier ran a short piece on him when he was voted in as president:-

At the meeting of the South-eastern Queensland district Executive of the R.S.S.I.L.A., held at Anzac House on Friday night, the district president was elected. The two candidates were Major Taylor (former president, resigned) and Mr. T. H. Keene (vice chairman), and the ballot resulted in the success of Mr. Keene. The new district president (Mr. T. H. Keene) has a fine record. He returned from active service with the 49th Battalion overseas for approximately three years, during which he was wounded several times. In 1919 he joined the Ithaca sub-branch of the R.S.S.I.L.A., and was later transferred to the Toowong sub-branch, where he has remained since. For five years Mr. Keene represented the Toowong sub-branch on the South-eastern Queensland district executive, and whilst a member of the latter-named body he acted as assistant honorary district secretary, vice-chairman, and delegate to the State managerial council, and recently was elected as emergency delegate to the forthcoming State executive meeting.

And yes, there’s even a photo of him:-

It is here, however, that our all-too-fine historical thread finally snaps: this particular T. H. Keene was in the 49th Battalion, whereas the Thomas Lawrence Keane we’re interested in was “late 15th & 57th Bns., 1st A.I.F.” So, despite the many overlaps and misspellings, this T. H. Keene was apparently someone else entirely. Oh well, hopefully this will prevent anyone else from haring down this particular empty rabbit hole! 😐

Having given the anonymous “Ayuverdica”‘s claim the oxygen of (a small amount of) publicity here a few days ago, a number of things quickly came to light (indeed, possibly even in record time):-

(1) As Debra Fasano speedily pointed out in a comment to that page, the man being flagged was not “Thomas Torance Keane” (as listed in the index) but rather “Thomas Lawrence Keane”, born 20 June 1892 in Queensland: his older sister Ada married Frank Charles Toten. Notices of Keane’s death appeared in the newspaper on the 26th March 1949:

FUNERAL NOTICES
KEANE.—The Relatives & Friends of Mr. & Mrs. F. C. Toten, Mr. & Mrs. L. Fuller (Argents Hill), Miss Dorothy Toten, Mr. & Mrs. A Dixon, Mr. & Mrs. J. Lohfin, & Mr. E. Toten, are invited to attend the funeral of her beloved Brother, his Brother-in-law, & their Uncle, Thomas Lawrence Keane, of 110 Terrace St., New Farm, late 15th & 57th Bns., 1st A.I.F., to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, Petrie Bight, This (Saturday) Morning, at 11 o’clock, for the Crematorium, Mt. Thompson. Service 10.45 a.m.
ALEX. GOW, Funeral Director.
KEANE.—New Farm Sub-branch, R.S.S.A.I.L.A. —The Officers and Members are invited to attend the Funeral of their late Member, Mr. T. L. Keane, to move from Alex. Gow’s Funeral Chapel, as per family notice. A. L Beeston, Secretary.

(2) As Debra also helpfully pointed out, the claimed link between Thomas Lawrence Keane’s mother (Isabella Beaumont) and the Beaumont family related to Jestyn via her brother’s wife Peggy Beaumont fails to stand up to closer examination.

As a result of all this, it is hard not to conclude that our anonymous informant “Ayuverdica” had only indirect (archive-based) and incomplete knowledge of Thomas Lawrence Keane, as opposed to direct (family or friend) knowledge. As such, the notion that the various pieces might be connected broadly in the way he/she proposed now seems excessively hopeful or speculative at best.

All the same, such historical ghosts can – in the ever-suspicious world of Somerton Man researchers – be hard to pacify once summoned. And it is difficult to disagree with the point that if (and I acknowledge that this is a big ‘if’, of course) the Somerton Man was indeed “T. Keane” as the labels on some of his clothes seem to imply, then we would be foolish to rule this particular Thomas Lawrence Keane out without checking him out properly.

And so for the sake of completeness, I’ve just paid 19 AUD to the NAA to get Thomas Lawrence Keane’s WW2 records (“1939-1948″) examined, digitized and placed online. The website says that this will take up to “90 days”, but I’ll post a link to it here as soon as this happens. 😉

Finally, “RSSAILA” stands for the “Returned Sailor’s Soldier’s Airmen’s Imperial League”, which later became the “Returned Services League” (RSL): but even though the National Archives of Australia’s MS 6609 contains a rather scary-sounding 205 linear metres of RSL archives, there doesn’t yet seem to be any online finding aid within it, and it’s not at all clear to me whether district-level (rather than state-level) archives are included in there.

Hence I’ve also contacted the relevant district-level RSL branch to see if they have any historical records (newsletters, minutes, correspondence, etc) stretching back as far as 1948-1949, just in case there’s any mention of Thomas Lawrence Keane during that period. As always, it’s a bit of a long shot but we shall hopefully see what emerges there…