Category Archives: Tamam Shud

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…

After all the recent troll-comment-posting kerfuffle here, I’ve been extra careful about checking comments before letting them onto the site. So, when a very specific identification of the Somerton Man was recently posted in a comment to Cipher Mysteries, I emailed the fairly-unlikely-sounding email address to verify it (but didn’t get a reply).

Despite this caginess, I decided to have a look anyway. Our anonymous commenter claims:-

“Thomas Torrance Keane, born in Charters Towers in 1896 to Isabella Beaumont and her husband[d] Francis C Keane. Himself a part of the extended Beaumont clan and known to the Harkness family through Thomas’s marriage to Clarice Isabella Victoria Beaumont. Although he is noted as being deceased in 1949 this is probably a red herring. He was the Somerton Man.“

As names go, “Thomas Keane” has quite a lot going for it: specifically
* the “Unknown Man” / “Somerton Man” was wearing a tie marked “T. Keane”;
* his possessions included a laundry bag marked “Keane”;
* they also included a singlet marked “Kean” (omitting the final “e”)

Having said that, at the time police seemed quite sure that nobody called “T. Keane” was missing… but it’s entirely conceivable that one might have somehow evaded their net. Furthermore, the commenter names two (both very real) roads where this Thomas Keane and his [alleged] wife [allegedly] lived:-

“The family lived in Frankston, on the Cranbourne Road and before that on Davey Street“

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How many of these specifics could I test?

Well… because Charters Towers is in Queensland, the obvious first stop was the Queensland Births / Deaths / Marriages (BDM) website. There I found item 1892/B50671 – the birth of Thomas Torance [note the single-‘r’] Keane, son of Francis Charles Keane and Isabella Beaumont. The Queensland BDM also has item 1949/B21184 – the death certificate for (without much doubt) the same Thomas Torance Keane (which I haven’t yet seen).

On Trove, I found Clarice Isobel (“Peg”) Beaumont’s 25th August 1942 wedding to Private Thomas Lawson Harkness, A.M.F., which is why she subsequently appears in the archives (1942-1980) as Clarice Isobel/Isabella Victoria Harkness:-

The charming auburn-haired bride looked sweet indeed in her gown of ivory moire taffeta, hand-embroidered, with beads and sequins at the neck, and falling full from a tight-fitting waistline. It was buttoned up the back and extended into a long train. The long sleeves came to a peak over the wrist. She wore an embroidered net veil flowing from a top-knot of double white violets. The veil was loaned by a Geelong friend. The bride carried a sheaf of white heather and double violets.

Also according to Trove, the couple had a baby daughter on 20th June 1943: they were then living at 32 Davey Street, Frankston where they stayed until at least March 1945. Note that this was Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr: his father (Thomas Lawson Harkness Sr) was a merchant seaman born in London in 1888, who moved to Australia, and married Ellen Lee in 1916.

As numerous Cipher Mysteries readers will doubtless already be shouting at their screens, Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr’s sister was none other than Jessie Ellen Harkness (b. 1921, Marrickville, NSW, d. 13/5/2007), known somewhat better as “Jestyn“. It was her phone number on the Somerton Man’s recovered Rubaiyat that first brought the police to her door: and it was her anonymity that was protected by Gerry Feltus (and others) for so many years, up until the Internet made all such politeness and civility seem untenably quaint.

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At this point, I hope you can see the problem I’m facing: I’ve been sent these anonymous messages (from “Ayuverdica”) that seem to be confusing (the very real) Thomas Lawson Harkness Jr with (the also very real, but essentially unknown) Thomas Torance Keane. Is this just an accident, memory playing tricks on someone? Or am I being set up by a particularly sophisticated online troll trying to muddy the waters for everyone, for obscure reasons currently unknown?

Really, what did Thomas Torance Keane have to do with any of this Harkness-related family history? Maybe nothing, maybe something, maybe everything. Right now, I have no idea whatsoever, I simply can’t tell.

But perhaps you can. Perhaps if we leave the Harknesses to one side and find out more about the life (and indeed the death) of Thomas Torance Keane, we will be able to eliminate him from our enquiries… or perhaps we won’t.

I don’t personally have access to Australian genealogical databases, but I know that quite a few Cipher Mysteries readers do. So this is the point where I stop and hand my (admittedly fairly thin) portfolio over to all you nice people.

Basically, what can we find out about Thomas Torance Keane? What happened to him? As always, dot dot dot… Good luck and happy hunting!

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Update: I also found the following advert in Trove, placed in the 11 Jan 1941 Sydney Morning Herald. It may or may not be related, but here it is anyway:-

Keane – Any person knowing the present or past whereabouts of Thomas Keane, the husband of the late Sarah Ann Keane (who died September 13, 1940), please communicate with The Equity Trustees Company, 472 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Victoria.

Since I started Cipher Mysteries several years ago, I’ve tried to follow a fairly laissez faire comment moderation – basically, as long as it wasn’t spammy / sweary / abusive, I’d approve it.

But recently, though, the blog has been receiving a series (i.e. they all came via the same New Zealand ISP, very close IP addresses, etc) of troll-like comments aimed squarely at XLamb, and where all the plausible-looking email addresses bounced when I tried to email them to check.

Hence I’ve reconfigured the sites plugins so that for a while (maybe longer) there will be an extra layer of comment verification in place. If you leave a comment now, you’ll be required to verify that the email address you’ve given with it is valid (though this should only happen once per email address, mind you!). If the plugin thinks that it’s suspicious-looking, it may also ask you for a CAPTCHA verification… but that shouldn’t happen very often, as I understand it.

As with all things computery, this may (of course) run into teething problems while I’m getting it going: so if you have any difficulties leaving a comment over the next few days, please email me ( nickpelling at nickpelling dot com ) and I’ll try to fix it / them. As always, the email address you give doesn’t appear on the website at all, it’s only there for me to email you if there’s some kind of problem or issue with the comment.

I’m very sorry that one person has to spoil it (a little) for everyone else, but that’s just how it goes on the Internet sometimes, I hope you understand. 😐

When “X. Lamb” unexpectedly announced that the “Tamam Shud” Unknown Man was a certain “H. C. Reynolds” (whose merchant seaman’s ID card she had), I’m sure that she was utterly convinced of the truth of what she was claiming, and that she believed it was simply a matter of time before evidence properly supporting it would emerge.

Indeed at first sight, it seemed both to me and others as though it ought to be fairly straightforward to test her claim. After all, we had a very specific data point to work with (admittedly surrounded by a whole load of media and online speculation, most of it unhelpful and distracting) – a name, a face, a date and a place of birth (Hobart, Tasmania).

Eventually, thanks mainly to solid work from Cheryl Bearden, we determined that this “H. C. Reynolds” was born in February 1900 and had the middle name Charles (which he clearly preferred to his as-yet-unknown first name “H[—–]”): and we were able to reconstruct his brief career as a merchant seaman working for the Union Steam Ship Company, the “Southern Octopus”. It was clear that this Reynolds was no fantasy, but a real flesh-and-blood person: and so, in theory, all we had to do was dig up a link between his maritime career and his life on land, and bingo – all his life would be spread before us.

Pursuing this fairly slender reed of a lead yet further, I managed to discover (from his employee records) his exact date of birth (8th February 1900): and, from the ever-useful “Log of Logs”, that ships’ logs for two of the three ships Reynolds worked on could be found in two different Australian archives. Very kindly, both Diane O’Donovan and John Kozak took the time to go and look at these two log books (one each), and found… nothing. Nada. Zero. And that, I strongly suspected at the time, was going to prove the end of the whole affair: for whatever reason, this H. Charles Reynolds seemed doggedly determined to stay just out of our archival reach. It felt hard not to conclude that we’d never be able to convincingly prove or refute X. Lamb’s assertion that he was the Unknown Man found mysteriously dead on Somerton Beach on 1st December 1948.

Frustratingly, it had been reported early on that a similarly-named-but-apparently-quite-different H. C. Reynolds (a “Horace Charles Reynolds”) had been born in Triabunna on Tasmania on 12th February 1900. But once we knew that “our” H. C. Reynolds had been born on a different day in the same month fifty or so miles away in Hobart, this was a fact that became pigeonholds in the ‘curiously coincidental but annoyingly unhelpful‘ category. And anyway, it was also reported that this particular Horace Charles Reynolds had been a poultry farmer, and that (when asked) his family didn’t believe that he had ever gone to Adelaide, let alone gone to sea. Oh well. 🙁

Step forward Debra Fasano: though a little late to the whole H. C. Reynolds party, she carved a path through the fuzz of uncertainty straight to an extremely reliable source – the “Tas BDM” (Tasmanian Births, Deaths, and Marriages) indexes on CD. And the entry she found there turned the whole story round:-

Tasmanian Federation Index 1900-1930 (CD)
Author: Macbeth Genealogical Services
Year: 2006
ISBN: 1920757082

Surname: REYNOLDS
Given name: Horace Charles
Event: Birth
Father: Edwin REYNOLDS
Mother: Mary Ann Matilda BAYLEY
Date: 8 Feb 1900
Sex: Male
Place: Davey Street, Hobart
Registration Number: 200

And with that, all the pieces finally start to fall into place. There weren’t two Horace Charles Reynolds-es born in or near Hobart in February 1900: there was, without much doubt, just the one. Debra adds:

“When looking for Horace’s birth I had a good search of the indexes and couldn’t find anyone else with a similar name, initials, or anything else that might be relevant. I am really strict about evidence and I do think that he is the person who was working as a Purser.”

As to when this Horace Charles Reynolds died, there’s a death notice in the Hobart Mercury (18 May 1953), which seems very probably the same man:-

REYNOLDS. -Suddenly, on May 16, 1953, at a private hospital, Hobart, Horace Charles Reynolds, late of Brookvale, New South Wales, aged 53 years. Private cremation.

We knew that our H. C. Reynolds was born in Hobart and got his first job in Hobart: and from this notice, it seems almost undeniable that Hobart was where he died too.

I say “almost”, because there are a few matters that remain half-open, not least of which is the matter of Reynolds’ family apparently denying that the photo was of him. I wonder, though: had someone seen a quite different Horace Reynolds from Wooroloo who died in 1954 (as per The West Australian Monday 15 March 1954 p 30) and put the two stories together? That particular Horace Reynolds was born 10th April 1903, was NX69883 in the 2nd AIF, and was a farmer married to Elizabeth. My guess is that he will turn out to be the “poultry farmer” mentioned very early on, someone quite different to the one we were actually looking for.

The Tasmanian Horace Charles Reynolds appears to have had no children: but if even if didn’t marry, it’s entirely possible that we could trace his immediate family right to the present day and perhaps ask them if we could find a photo of him – after all, 1953 wasn’t really so very long ago, was it?

Debra Fasano notes that Reynolds had two older brothers:
* Oswald Bayley Reynolds (b. ~1891) was a billing clerk who rose to become a senior bank administrator.
* Archibald Henry Reynolds (b. 1895) was (according to the 1930 and 1933 NSW electoral rolls) a clerk living in Carter Road at Brookvale in NSW.

I also noticed in Trove that Mrs Edwin Reynolds stepped down as Treasurer of her local Triabunna town committee in 1898, so it should perhaps come as no great surprise that Horace Charles Reynolds started out as an Assistant Purser, for he came from a veritable family of clerks. (Or do I mean “a fastidity of clerks”? I never can remember collective nouns).

Finally, Debra notes that a “Charles Reynolds” was also living in Carter Road in the 1930s, and working as (you guessed it) a clerk. Given that we know that our H. Charles Reynolds was already signing himself “Charles Reynolds” by 1919, and that the Horace Charles Reynolds who died in 1953 had been living in Brookvale, what are the odds that these are all pieces of the same cussedly consistent jigsaw? If there is a chink somewhere in this logical chain-mail armour, I have to say that I can’t currently see it.

Anyway, I’ve already been told off once this week for a ‘TL;DR’ (“Too Long; Didn’t Read”) post, so I’d better bring this to a close here. Perhaps someone will be able to use these details to ferret out a living relative of the various Reynolds brothers, and perhaps try to dig up a separate photograph of Horace Charles Reynolds to independently test this whole narrative. It would be nice to get proper closure on this, even if it isn’t quite the result some may have hoped for.

By the way, if you do decide to try to trace this all the way to the end, Debra suggests a number of surnames connected with the Reynolds family that may be of assistance:-

LESTER
VALENTINE
SHEA
SPENCER
FLETCHER
DENNE
ROLSTON
PAGE
TATE
MULLANE
LEVY
ALOMES
HARDY OR HARDING

Happy hunting! 😉

To celebrate Christmas this year, I thought I’d put out a whole load of small cipher mystery news stories I’ve collected, as a kind of online mystery advent calendar. Here’s Day One for you… enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * *

Melbourne novelist Kerry Greenwood has (she says) been fascinated by the Tamam Shud mystery for her whole life: and so it was perhaps inevitable that she would eventually write a book on the subject. And here it is: “Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery”, released today by NewSouth Books, and available in eBook form from Amazon at a (rather daunting) £14.24. To which price, my first reaction was “I never knew that eBooks came in hardback“.

Anyway, you can read most of Chapter One here, or you can read the full Introduction and Chapter One on Amazon’s site itself.

I’ll buy myself a copy to review over the next few days: but what is immediately clear is (a) that Kerry writes well, (b) that her book is obviously well-researched, but (c) that it’s a very different kettle of prawns to Gerry Feltus’ book. More to come…

A friend recently had a good old moan about being given directions that involved “turning right at the pub that isn’t there any more“. Just about as good a definition of what’s wrong with the world these days: perhaps we should just be grateful that our political masters haven’t found a way to privatize the roads. Errr, yet.

Hence we perhaps ought to celebrate the constancy of something that has stayed the same now for well over sixty years: the continued unknownness of The Unknown Man found on a South Australian beach on 1st December 1948, AKA the “Tamam Shud” cipher mystery. If only more things stayed the same, straws swaying lithely against the winds of modernity, eh?

All the same, the recent claim that The Unknown Man was in fact a certain “H. C. Reynolds” continues to intrigue me: I just wish there was a way to work out if this was true or not. We’ve managed to establish a solid timeline for Reynolds’ work as a young merchant seaman in and around Hobart in 1917-1919, and also to glean a few meagre facts: that he was born in Hobart on 8th Feb 1900, and that his middle name was Charles. Pretty much everything else on the pages of his personal history remains unseen to us.

Frustratingly, he was almost certainly not Horace Charles Reynolds, a lifelong poultry farmer born on the 12th February 1900 near Hobart: so much for Ancestry.com searches, hohum! 😉

A few months back, Diane O’Donovan very generously went to look at the logbooks of the RMS Niagara (a ship our HCR briefly worked on), but sadly found nothing useful… Then again, it was a particularly big ship, on which HCR only worked one round trip to Canada via Hawaii (where the ID card almost certainly came from), so perhaps a negative result shouldn’t come as a great surprise.

All of which left (according to the Log of Logs) one last set of log books to examine: and so the intrepid John Kozak stepped forward to make a journey into the sweeping suburban jungle surrounding Sydney, to track down the SS Koonya’s log books in the Kingswood reading room.

Unfortunately, it seems that even though these contain plenty of references to HCR (in the forms “Charles”, “Chas”, “H Charles” and (most commonly) “H Chas”, says John) in the log books, that is precisely as far as they go. No first name, no passing detail to try to tie to the real world, no nothing. Even though I’m really pleased that John managed to get his much-sought-after pineapple doughnuts from the cafeteria van outside the archive, as far as The Unknown Man goes it would seem as though we’re now stuck.

Is this The End? Well… mostly, although there are a few (albeit silkily fine) threads left dangling, and (as always) any one of them might possibly yield something (after all, it’s not as if we know nothing at all about HCR). He landed a job as a purser at a young age, so he must have done well at school, surely? So, here is my collection of HCR’s-school-related archival musings, perhaps one of them will point to where we should look to find HCR getting his exam results in (I guess) 1917.,,

(1) The (possible) Waratah connection. A 26th January 1918 newspaper tea-company advertorial refers to a certain “Master H Reynolds” of the mining town of Waratah. It’s a wafer thin lead, sure, but might this be our HCR? Unfortunately, a helpful lady from the Waratah Museum Society told me that “Waratah was very prone to buildings catching fire”, particularly ones with archives in, it would seem. So it’s far from clear how to follow this up. 🙁

(2) Cheryl Bearden points to the possibility (from crew manifests) that Reynolds had a younger brother (born ~1901) with first initial M. I wondered whether this might have been Maurice Reynolds (a reasonably well-known boxer, wrestler & occasional film-star), and so tracked his life back to Hutchins School in Hobart. However, according to Margaret Mason-Cox at Hutchins (who very kindly looked this up for me):-

According to the Hutchins Roll of Scholars, Maurice Davies Reynolds, born 4 July 1907, entered Hutchins 27 July 1921, no. 2507. He was the son of W B Reynolds, of ‘Hope Vale’, Mangalore, and was a boarder. He had two older brothers who attended Hutchins: Francis Lawrence (born 1901, entered 1916) and William Thomas Reynolds (born 1903, entered 1917).

As far as I can tell, they were not related to Herbert Francis Reynolds (born 1901, entered Hutchins 1910), whose father was F Reynolds, of Montpelier Road, Hobart.

Another dead end, but which at least serves to eliminate one school from our enquiries. 🙂

(3) Cheryl Bearden noted a while back that “a C. Reynolds appeared on the 1915 roster for the Junior Derwent Football team, [so] the school he [C. Reynolds] attended is probably in the Derwent area of Hobart“… but whether the H C Reynolds had already taken to calling himself C Reynolds in 1915 remains conjectural.

(4) In an email to me, “X Lamb” (the lady who originally had the HCR id card) mentioned some kind of odd family mythology around “Virgillians” (presumably St. Virgils School in Hobart, founded 1911, which would potentially make HCR one of its very first pupils) which may or indeed may not be connected to HCR. Don’t really know what to make of this, but thought I ought to mention it anyway. 🙂

Regardless, it would seem that this barely known young man remains resolutely untraceable, and his status as a possible Unknown Man candidate continues to be unknown, leaving the whole mystery as murky as ever. Rejoice in its constancy! 🙂