Category Archives: Tamam Shud

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“

---

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.

---

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!

---

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! 🙂

Might the Unknown Man found dead on an Australian beach actually be an (almost equally unknown) merchant seaman called H. C. Reynolds? It’s an intriguing claim, one based – from the emails I’ve exchanged with the Australian lady from whom it originated – partly on family mythology, and partly on anatomical comparison between photos of the Unknown Man and an ID card dated 1918. It’s entirely true that uber-Tamam-Shud-meister Gerry Feltus remains somewhat skeptical: but then again, he has seen (and indeed carefully documented) many hundreds of similar claims, which so far have all proved not to be the case.

All the same, I think it would be good if we could properly identify this Reynolds person: after all, we apparently have direct evidence of his existence (an ID card). Surely it should be easy to track someone active less than a century ago, particularly with the vastly able help of such able online researchers as Cheryl Bearden & Knox Mix?

Well… recapping the story so far, we’ve found plenty of ships’ crew manifests where Reynolds appears, worked out that his middle name was Charles, and even uncovered his date of birth (8th February 1900). The Log of Logs then pointed us to the still-extant logs for the RMS Niagara and the SS Koonya… but as of earlier this year, that was as far as we had got.

So, all we needed was someone (a) indefatigable and (b) relatively nearby to go and have a look. Step forward Cipher Mysteries regular Diane O’Donovan, who extremely kindly journeyed out to Chester Hill to have a look at the RMS Niagara logbook for us all earlier thos year. (Apologies for not posting about this before, I’ve been somewhat… distracted, let’s say).

Unfortunately, the RMS Niagara turned out to be (in her words) “a dud lead… (with)no mention of Chas Reynolds“. Generally, Diane found the logs to be “fascinating if repellant reading“:

It must have been a nightmare of a ship to work on. Seasickness in crew was defined as ‘absent without leave’ or ‘under the influence of drink’. People constantly leaving with or without their possessions. Latter was defined as ‘desertion’. So plenty of incentive for navvies to adopt another name for the next voyage.

In many ways, all of this (including drawing a blank, sadly) should be no surprise: the Niagara was a huge, busy mega-ship, and it seems likely that Reynolds was merely covering for a sick assistant purser during a single round trip, a temporary, tiny replacement cog within a giant marine machine. Anyway, here’s what Diane found:-

First was a much expurgated ships log. Second of the two was a list of passengers, not of crew.

Niagara Logbook Barcode 322 304 61 81
July 1917 (Log no.A863)
Purser was Chas. Leighton. His signature appears as countersignatory at e.g. entry at 18/8/17
An assistant baker was a T.Reynolds. taken on 5/7/17; Discharged 7/8/17 after one month and three days.
reason – “failed to be on board at departure from Vancouver”

Only legalities have been preserved in this log: Initial list of crew with offices listed; dates of hose-drills; dates of absenteeism from duty or from the ship; wages docked; births, suicide, marriages..wages receipts made out for the missing.
——–
Niagara 1918 log
Barcode 1603134 SP83/11 BOX 38
Passenger list only. (To my horror, it includes reference to race as part of each person’s description, which strikes me as quintessentially un-Australian)

Ship arrived in Sydney on April 20th., 1918.

Diane also found out that the records for the SS Koonya (a very much smaller ship, upon which Reynolds worked for a whole year, finishing up not long before it sank) are at a quite different archive at Kingswood. This was independently confirmed for me by a NSW archivist who wrote:

The Log of Logs listing is correct. We hold the 1918 SS Koonya log at our Kingswood reading room at [3/4861.2].

So, who’s now going to pick up this glacially-slow-moving baton, and be so kind as to preorder [3/4861.2] and visit the Western Sydney Records Office? John K, are you still planning to be there next month? 😉

I don’t know quite what was happening yesterday, but when today I tried a slightly different search interface at the National Archives of Australia, the RMS Niagara’s log books popped up immediately.

Remembering that our man Reynolds was apparently only covering on the RMS Niagara for a single round trip to Canada and back between 17th February 1918 and 20th April 1918, any reference to him is probably only going to appear in a single RMS Niagara log book.

And it seems as though there’s only one 1918 log book it might be: NAA item barcode 464129, a bound volume with contents dated 1917-1918 and held in Sydney, where it’s on open access and marked up as “SP2/1, LOG BOOK NIAGARA”. According to the overall series information, the set of log books held in NSW makes up 32.04 metres of shelfspace:-

Official Log Book(s) issued by the (United Kingdom) Board of Trade, some with Official Wireless Log attached. Entries have been kept in accordance with the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1894.

History Prior/Subsequent to Transfer:
Prior to transfer: State Navigation Acts only prescribed that logs could be seized if necessary. Any so seized were held in State Shipping Master’s Office and have been destroyed. The Commonwealth Navigation Act of 1912 (No. 40 of 1913) required that an official log be deposited with the Superintendent of the Mercantile Marine Office. Under a Departmental instruction of 1919, all logs other than those containing records of birth, marriages or deaths, were destroyed.

I’m also slightly intrigued by the NAA document A11803, 1918/89/729 “Correspondence (Intercepted). SS NIAGARA passengers” (1918), whatever that might be. Finally, the RMS Niagara passenger list for 20th April 1918 on arrival in Sydney (barcode 1603134 in SP83/11, specifically 8 pages in box 38) is probably exactly what Cheryl Bearden has already gone over multiple times, but you never quite know with these things. 🙂

So… who’s planning to be in Sydney any time soon? And if so, what do I have to do to persuade you to have a look for young Mr H. Charles Reynolds in this particular RMS Niagara log book?

In the ongoing Tamam Shud hunt for elusive Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, I got the chance yesterday to go through the Log of Logs, a stonking three-volume antipodean maritime bibliomanic obsession. Or rather, I’ve had a look at Volumes I and II, which (somewhat feebly) is all the British Library has of the set (bah!)

Anyway, as far as the SS Koonya goes, the LoL says that the Archive of New South Wales has eight logs including its 1918 log (shelfmark “3/4861.2”), the one we’re most interested in. However, I wasn’t able to find out any more about this at all from online catalogues of the AONSW’s holdings. So, I’ve emailed the archivists for clarification, and will hopefully have an answer back within 20 days.

Similarly for the RMS Niagara, the LoL says that Australian Archives in Sydney has 51 official logs dating from the periods 1914-1919 and 1932-1939 (shelfmark “SP2 /5418”, it seems to say). But, again, when I searched the NAA catalogues, I couldn’t find anything remotely like this (the nearest thing there was SYDMB20F010, which seems unlikely to me to be a copy of the logs).

So… how frustrating is that? A book that tells you where to look, had you been trawling the archives twenty years ago. But perhaps you have a better idea of how to find out where these have subtly migrated to? Please leave a comment here if you do! 🙂