Category Archives: Tamam Shud

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! 🙂

Just a short note: if you search PapersPast (the online newspaper archive for New Zealand) for “H C Reynolds”, you get a 1926 mention in the Waiapu Church Gazette (no, I’m not making it up) of someone with that name from Wellington taking a Theological exam. The more you search, the more you find about this Reverend H Reynolds who ended up as an Anglican missionary in Melanesia before (and indeed during) the Second World War, and whose name was often written “H V C Reynolds”. But then the trail goes cold… so could this be our elusive man, hidden from view in the Solomon Islands, Aoba, and Lower Hutt? (Not to be confused with ‘JabbaThe’, of course).

…errrr, alas no. PapersPast archives peter out after WWII, reminding us once again that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. A web-based follow-up search reveals that this Reynolds was actually Henry [Harry] Vivian Collett Reynolds (b. Sep 1902), whose years of work as a Melanesian missionary brought him recognition. So, although he was someone of the right age, location and (mostly) name, he was also definitely not our missing man. Oh well!

It turns out that there’s a decent biographical entry on HVCR in the huge Blain Biographical Directory of Anglican clergy in the South Pacific (2011 edition) (though note that the PDF formatting is a bit haphazard if you try to copy-and-paste-from it). And just in case someone strolls past here looking for more information on this Venerable Archdeacon H V C Reynolds, I’ve put together all my notes here: H V C Reynolds. There’s bound to be much more on him in the Southern Cross Log, but I stopped when I’d hit my limit for researching Anglican Melanesian missionaries, I’m sure you understand. 😉

Cheryl Bearden & I have managed to eke out lots more tiny details in our hunt for the elusive merchant seaman H C Reynolds, including his precise date of birth! And I’ve also exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady who put forward the ID card in the first place. But all in good time…

First things first: given that the three ships Reynolds worked on during his 18 months at sea were all owned by the Union Steam Ship Company (a sprawling Australasian shipping company known as the “Southern Octopus”, and at one point the largest private employer in New Zealand), I thought we might be able to find something in the USSCo’s archives. Having eventually tracked down the bulk of them to the City Archives of Wellington City Council, a very helpful archivist managed to find a short record relating to H C Reynolds in AF019:1:1 (“Pursers records [1-4] – 1879-1925“), which she noted seemed to be “the log book [listing] pursers holiday leave”. It said:-

Reynolds, H.C.:

Appt [appointed] ass [assistant] purser: Manuka 12/11/17

Jnr [Junior] Hobart Branch

50 pound Birthday 8/[2]/1900

Asig [Assigned] Koonya 15/4/18

Shore mate £75 as from 1/11/17

Resigned

Hence, I think we can now be reasonably sure that the H Charles Reynolds on the ID card was born in Hobart, Tasmania on the 8th February 1900. Curiously, this is also precisely the same date of birth listed on ancestry.com for the Horace Charles Reynolds who was born in Triabunna, Tasmania (a mere 50 miles away): which you have to say is either an extraordinary coincidence, exactly the same person, or crossed archival wires. (I’m not offering an opinion here – I prefer to find evidence rather than inflict yet more speculation upon you.)

Unfortunately, a more detailed follow-up search of AF020:1:1 (“Record of pursers services – 1883- 1919“), AF050:3:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 1-699 – 1909-1976“) and particularly AF050:4:1 (“Register of employees (shore staff), no. 700- 1399 – 1909-1976“) which “covers the year a shore staff member joined service between the years 1917-1919” failed to find even a single mention of Reynolds. Which is, of course, a great shame. 🙁

I also recently discovered PapersPast, an online archive of New Zealand newspapers: though it doesn’t have quite as flexible a search interface as Australia’s Trove, it’s still pretty good. So, now that we know Reynolds was appointed to the Manuka on the 12th November 1917, I tried trawling through the shipping columns on the editions around that date to see if he was mentioned at all (there was often a “Personal” section that mentioned appointments etc). And indeed, in the Evening Post of 14th November 1917, the shipping column noted, plausibly enough, that:

Mr H. Reynolds has joined a vessel as assistant wireless operator in place of Mr. R. K. Lewis.

However, I was unable (as always, it would seem) to find any other obvious references to him there. Cheryl Bearden was also unable to find any reference to R K Lewis. Once again, it seems that archives are mainly characterized by their solid brick wall construction, with special internal brick walls for researchers to conveniently hit their heads against repeatedly. 🙁

I also recently found an online “Index to Vessels Arrived, 1837 – 1925” in the NSW archives, listing all the Koonya’s arrivals in Sydney, which corresponded very closely to the manifests Cheryl Bearden already found, except for a missing 8th December 1918 arrival. This turned out to be another “Chas Reynolds” signature:-

* 08 Dec 1918, Koonya, arr Sydney NSW (from Melbourne). Chas Reynolds, 18 years, born Hobart, Purser.

This inspired Cheryl to look once again at the same archives whereupon she intriguingly discovered that while H C Reynolds was filling in on the RMS Niagara, a certain “M Reynolds” was working on the Manuka:-

* 02 Apr 1918, Manuka, arr Sydney NSW (from Hobart). M Reynolds, 17 years, born Tasmania, Boy.

Now, H C Reynolds couldn’t sensibly be on two ships at the same time: so could this possibly be HCR’s younger brother, covering for HCR while HCR was away on the big mail ship? If that’s right, then we may possibly now have another Reynolds to go looking for – one hopefully not quite as elusive as HCR has proved to be so far. However, Cheryl Bearden was yet again unable to find any other reference to an “M Reynolds”, so this too would seem to be a dead end (for now). 🙁

Incidentally, one thing that has bothered me was how H C Reynolds managed to get fast-tracked to a full purser’s job at such a young age (18). There seems a good chance that he had some assistance, some insider track or external accreditation to recommend him to the management. So, I dug up a couple of additional connections between Reynolds people and USSCo, one of which might possibly offer this link:-

(1) There was a well-respected Captain Reynolds, who sailed numerous ships (such as the SS Glaucus and the labour vessel Helena) around Wellington & Adelaide. Here’s a news report from the Evening Post of Captain Reynolds arriving from Surprise Island in 1917.
(2) A company called “T A Reynolds & Co” or “T A Reynolds & Partners” in Hobart bought some ships from USSCo but then sold them back to them later that year (1896). T A Reynolds were “loosely associated with USSCo” and had the contract to build the Strahan to Zeehan Railway, according to this page.

All very interesting, but sadly not even close to helpful as yet. Ah well, I’ll keep on chipping away at the mountain…

Finally, as I mentioned at the top I’ve exchanged some intriguing emails with the Anonymous Lady, who (I think it fair to say) has quite a lot on her mind, with the Unknown Man merely one of many things she is trying to resolve. She’s the person who owns the H C Reynolds ID card, and it was also her who sent that off to Professor Maciej Henneberg. As far as many of the open questions on the ID card go, she noted that:

“The underside corner of the photo was signed and matched that shown on the front. Initially I tried to remove the photo to see if any other information was there,but it was stuck down so hard it would not budge. I thought something this old would give way easily. Glues used in 1918 would be inferior to what’s around now surely? Also HCR photo has the appearance of a dimple or cleft on the chin. I almost did’nt send it due to that, however Maciej found on examination that it was only a mark on the photo. I don’t know if it was placed there deliberately. The back of the I.D.,where it states “Port of……….is empty. His status…Division 1 …….2 ……..3 is unmarked and is unsigned by the Immigration Inspector. If the I.D. was dodgy though, why not just fill it in?”

In a separate email, she mentioned that her father had somehow implied that Reynolds was some kind of artist. Interestingly, I discovered a pavement artist called Ernest Reynolds in some old Australian newspapers, who seemed a curious mix of talent, chutzpah and delusion: he called himself “King of the Pavement Artists”, and traced his lineage back on his father’s side to none other than Joshua Reynolds. There’s even a 1908 interview with him reproduced on a blog here.

In 1933, the same Ernest Reynolds also claimed to have invented a car that could travel at 100 miles an hour over poor ground [I checked AusPat, but he appears not to have patented this]. Also in 1933, he was living in Cassidy Street, Kalgoorlie, way over in Western Australia.

Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up. More as it happens…

The indefatigable Cheryl Bearden has been filling in the gaps for our elusive “H. C. Reynolds” tenuously linked to the Tamam Shud cipher mystery man, and has dug up nine more crew manifests in the Sydney archives with his name on, two of which helpfully list him as “Chas Reynolds“. (Yes, the names are slightly different, but it’s highly unlikely that there were two 18-year-old Tasmanian lads called Reynolds both working as purser on the same ship at the same time). As Reynolds’ job on the Koonya was Purser, it would be unsurprising if it was he who wrote up the crew manifests to hand in to the Sydney port authorities: so it could well be his handwriting Cheryl has been examining. Perhaps that is what he felt gave him the licence to write his first name as “Chas” rather than just an initial, who knows?

Additionally, Cheryl points out that because the Koonya crew list dated 2nd February 1919 lists his age as 18, we can narrow HCR’s possible birth date range down yet further, which is also great!

So, it seems that the person we’re looking for is H. Charles Reynolds, born in Hobart, Tasmania between 2nd and 12th February 1900, who worked for the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand for at least 18 months between 1917 and 1919 as Purser or Assistant Purser aboard the SS Manuka, the RMS Niagara, and the SS Koonya. Also known as Charles / Charlie Reynolds. 🙂

I should add that I found a truly magnificent online bibliography relating to the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand, which notes that…

The archives of the Union Steam Ship Company Ltd and Wellington Harbour Board are now at the Wellington City Archives and will be accessible to researchers which has professional archivists, a facility built for archival storage, a public Reading Room and other specialist support systems. A considerable part of the Harbour Board collection is on the public access database The archives of the Union Steam Ship Company came from its head office in Wellington.

The Wellington City Archive summary notes that the Union Steam Ship Company “started in Dunedin and in 1922 its head office shifted to Wellington”: however, if you search their archives for “Union Steam Ship”, none of the 80 hits returned seem to be relevant to what we’re looking for (staff records or correspondence). It does add that “other Union Steam Ship Company records can be found at the Hocken Library in Dunedin” at the University of Otago: here’s the summary page of their USSNZ holdings.

Now that is more appealing: AG-292 “includes a wide range of records including minutes, correspondence, financial and shareholder records, staff records, shipping information, publications, some correspondence of James Mills and the records of the John Jones Trust: AG-292-009-001/005 contains “Staff Salaries Vol. 4. 1913-1917”. Similarly, AG-922 “relates particularly to employees of the Company. It includes salary books, a list of staff, and staff newsletters” (AG-922/002 is listed as “Salaries book, Dunedin Branch. 1915-1955”). Yet having trawled through the 1000+ entries for AG-292, there’s precious little I can see related to staff records for 1917-1919 (apart from correspondence, which may or may not mention anyone).

But wait! According to the first (USSNZ bibliography) page, the Museum of Wellington City & Sea apparently has “the majority of the staff records of the Company”, so that is almost certainly where our trail for the elusive H C Reynolds leads. I’ve emailed them, and will let you know what I find out…

Finally, for any passing H C Reynolds research completists, this is the current list of crew lists we have (Cheryl’s nine new entries all preceded by *, thank you again!):-

19th November 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
* 10th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. C. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
17th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
26th January 1918. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, 17, born Australia, Assistant Purser.
17th February 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Vancouver). H. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Assistant Purser.
20th April 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Auckland). H. C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, 2nd Mate.
5th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobert, Purser.
20th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 12th June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 21st June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 30th June 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
16th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 28th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie & D’port). Chas Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
12th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & D’port). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
26th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
22nd September 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 6th October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie & Strahan). Chas Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
21st October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
4th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Burnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 18th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
* 23rd December 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
19th January 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
* 2nd February 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
9th March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Newcastle). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
31st March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 19, born Hobart, Purser.

Yet more for you on our elusive young Tasmanian merchant seaman H. C. Reynolds, who may or may not be the mysterious “Unknown Man” found dead on Somerton Beach in 1948, etc etc.

Firstly, I note with great interest Gerry Feltus’ comments on the whole H. C. Reynolds thing. He writes:-

In early February 2011, I received a letter from the woman (not identified in the article) containing comprehensive detail, a photograph of HC Reynolds and the circumstances under which it was found. This was followed up by a number of telephone conversations. I had no doubt about the authenticity of the information supplied to me. I became aware that the same photograph and details had been forwarded to a number of other interested parties. I was also advised that Professor Henneberg had advised her: “The similarity, however is substantial and in my opinion warrants further investigation.” I wrote in my reply inter alia, “I have no alternative but to accept his (Prof Henneberg) learned opinion. As I explained to you during our conversation I don’t see any resemblance to the ‘Unknown Man’. After studying his photograph for years (the Unknown Man) there is nothing in the face of Reynolds that ‘jumps out’ at me that is similar… Also Reynolds has a square chin with what appears to be a cleft or dimple, whereas the ‘Unknown Man’ has a rounded chin. My opinion, and I will stand corrected if I am wrong.” I provided details of a record relating to H Reynolds, Able Seaman, on ‘Empress of Asia’, Suez Canal 1941, and advised that I could not locate any details to authenticate the U.S. Identity Card.

It soon became obvious that a number of people were ‘tripping over each other’ to obtain information about Reynolds so I removed myself from that line of inquiry. I have not seen an official statement from Prof Henneberg. I have every respect for Prof Henneberg and accept his qualifications. If he is positive that Reynolds is identical to the ‘Unknown Man’ I will reconsider my views on the subject.

Personally, I’m not sure over whom Gerry thinks people like me would be tripping: just about every stone I examine seems to be turning over for the first time. Historically, the nice thing about the Reynolds claim is that (true or false) it should, with persistence and lashings of lateral thinking, be checkable: the more of his antipodean sea career we can find, the more chance we stand of uncovering some instance where he crosses over into another (hopefully land-based) archive or database.

What have I been doing? Well, without any access to the archival omniscience of the “Log of Logs” as yet, I’ve been trying to find log books for the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara. However, it turns out that this is complicated by the fact that ships can reasonably have multiple types of logbooks, which often overlap:
* rough logs (compiled on the go)
* smooth logs (copied out nicely)
* compass logs (or “compass error logs”)
* incident logs, and so forth.

For the SS Manuka, Archives New Zealand have a compass log but the ship’s log has been destroyed bar one fragmentary page. Similarly, MS 851 in Auckland Museum contains RMS Niagara’s compass log for 1917-1918 compiled by M. Clark-Campbell, who was presumably the third mate “C. Campbell” on board at the same time as Reynolds. However, this is probably both a rough log (because it’s for two ships Clark-Campbell served on, the Niagara and the HMNZT Willochra) and a compass log: Hamish Lindop at the Auckland Museum very kindly examined MS 851 for me, and told me that “the information in it is strictly pertaining to coordinates for sailing; it doesn’t have any information about what was happening on board or Reynolds.”

So, a bit of a dead end, really. But at least now we know that the Manuka and Niagara probably had multiple log books: hopefully the “Log of Logs” will point us to some of the others.

But that’s not the really exciting news. Cipher Mysteries regular Cheryl Bearden has been carefully trawling ancestry.com’s online copies of the crew lists arriving at Sydney, and has found (what seems to me, at least, extremely likely to be) the next section forward in young Mr Reynolds’ timeline. Unless there just happened to be two 18-year-old pursers from Hobart called Reynolds active in the same port at the same time, it seems very probable that the two were the same person, and that he preferred to be called by his middle name:-

19th November 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Wellington). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
17th December 1917. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, age 17, born Tasmania, Assistant Purser.
26th January 1918. SS Manuka: arr Sydney, NSW (from Hobart). H. Reynolds, 17, born Australia, Assistant Purser.
17th February 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Vancouver). H. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Assistant Purser.
20th April 1918. RMS Niagara: arr Sydney, NSW (from Auckland). H. C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, 2nd Mate.
5th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobert, Purser.
20th May 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
16th July 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
12th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan & D’port). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
26th August 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
22nd September 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Strahan). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
21st October 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Launceston). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
4th November 1918. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Bunnie). C. Reynolds, 18, born Hobart, Purser.
19th January 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser.
9th March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Newcastle). C. Reynolds, 18, born Tasmania, Purser. [*]
31st March 1919. SS Koonya: arr Sydney, NSW (from Devonport). C. Reynolds, 19, born Hobart, Purser.

As before, the next plausible sighting we have is of a foot-passenger called “Mr H. C. Reynolds” travelling on the TSS Ulimaroa on the 22nd November 1920. So, thank you very much indeed, Cheryl, for this nice long set of sightings! But once again this is where the Reynolds trail goes cold. 🙁

Curiously, onboard the SS Koonya in August there’s also a fireman (i.e. for stoking fires, not for putting them out!) called “R Reynolds” age 18, but born in Birkenhead. Probably just a coincidence, though. 🙂

The SS Koonya was registered in Dunedin, on New Zealand’s South Island: its Master was the 39-year-old New Zealander P. L. Molyneux. Note that the Tasmanian archives hold a number of logs and crew records for a previous ship called ‘Koonya’ (sank in 1898), which are almost certainly no use to us. The Koonya we’re interested in was, according to this online list of Tasmanian shipwrecks, a

Steel steamship, 1093/663 tons. # 109641.Built at Grangemouth, UK, as the Yukon. Owned by Union Steamship Co. Lbd 225.0 x 34.2 x 13.2 ft. In 1908, she had towed Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Nimrod 1510 miles from Lyttleton, NZ to the Antarctic Circle and was the first steamer in the Antractic. She was then employed in the New Zealand and Tasmanian coastal trades. Captain Francis Warner Jackson. Sailed from Strahan for Burnie on 3 June 1919 but failed to arrive; wrecked on Sandy Cape, Tasmania, 6 June 1919. Vessel Taviuni sent to search and found her wrecked on Sandy Cape, north west coast Tasmania. All saved. [NH],[#TS2],[DG]

Once again, we see Reynolds employed by the Union Steamship Company. However, when the Koonya went down in 1919, Reynolds was not on board! The report of the wreck that ran in Adelaide’s Register on 9th June 1919 listed the crew (who luckily all survived) as:-

Capt. F. Jackson, S. L. McDonald (chief officer), R. Sanderson (second officer), McNeill (third officer). Ward (chief engineer), Stewart (second engineer), Davis (third engineer), Thorby (chief steward), Dodd (purser), Kohler, S. Foley, and R. Millhouse (firemen), McLeod, Mulholland, Neilson, Newlands, and Stavis (A.B.s), Harris (chief cook), Alexander (assistant cook), Marshall (donkeyman), Foley, Howard, and Armstrong (trimmers), and Allen (boatswain). The names of the second steward and two other ordinary seamen were not obtainable.

It seems likely to me that between March 1919 and June 1919, Reynolds had served a full year on the Koonya and so moved on to work on another ship, most likely within the same Union Steamship Company fleet… perhaps Cheryl will now find this! All the same, the Koonya is another ship whose various logbooks I will now try to track down when I finally get to see the legendary Log of Logs…

If you’ve been following the flurry of recent posts (and indeed comments) here on the Unknown Man, you’ll know we’ve done two things:
* successfully linked the “H. C. Reynolds” on the US seamen’s temporary ID card to a young “H Reynolds” working on the SS Manuka and the RMS Niagara, and constructed a six-month timeline for his sea-life from late 1917 to early 1918; and
* eliminated pretty much every other “H C Reynolds” of broadly the right age and location.
So, the question is… where to look next?

Following the Manuka trail, there are plenty of plausible looking documents in the National Archives of Australia office in Tasmania relating to the Manuka’s arrivals in Hobart. If you just happen to be passing the State Library building at 91 Murray Street on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday and want to look these up, here are the Manuka references you’d need in volume P2005 which covers arrivals (though volume P2004 covers departures, it unfortunately has a big fat gap from June 1917 to December 1923, bah!):-
* 22 Nov 1917 – 767481 – passenger list
* 24 Nov 1917 – 767502 – ships report inwards
* 13 Dec 1917 – 767523 – passenger list
* 02 Jan 1918 – 767583 – passenger list
* 24 Jan 1918 – 767701 – passenger / crew list

Of course, it’s an outside shot that any of these would reveal (for example) H. C. Reynolds’ first name, but it’s probably worth a shot. Having said that, given that Reynolds was from Hobart, it would seem likely that he worked on other ships out of Hobart prior to Nov 1917: so it would probably be a worthwhile exercise to check the (relatively small) number of other ships’ entries in P2005 for 1917. After all, did he really land the Assistant Purser role as his first ever job on a ship? (I suspect not, but that’s just my guess…)

Alternatively, following the RMS Niagara trail, I managed to dig up the passenger manifests for Victoria and Vancouver (both in British Columbia) for what appears to be Reynolds’ final journey on the Niagara [RG 76 T-4873] and [RG 76 T-4858]. These noted the following dates:-
* 28th February 1918: dep. Sydney, New South Wales
* [no date] Suva, Fiji
* 15th March 1918: dep. Honolulu, Hawaii
* 21st March 1918: arr. Victoria, B.C.
* 22nd March 1918: arr. Vancouver, B.C.

From this, we can see that the date stamped on the US seamen’s temporary ID card was not the arrival date in Hawaii, but the departure date from Sydney. I think it likely that these cards were issued on board the Niagara at the start of the voyage by (say) the Purser – this would also account for the British date field order (which some people have flagged as implying a forgery). Sadly, though, both manifests only contain passenger lists, not crew lists: and so fail to move us any further forward. 🙁

It may seem that we’ve hit another brick wall: but given that all we’re really hoping for at this stage is Reynolds’ first name, the Australian archives still has a vast number of plausible-sounding documents for us to grind our way through, such as:-
* “Registers of ships crew engaged and discharged at South Australian outports (including Darwin).” [D8]
* “Registers of ships crew engaged for the home trade at South Australian ports” [D9]
* “Register of vessels (arrivals and departures), Port Adelaide” [D1]
* “Original Agreements and Accounts of Crew (Form M & S 3)1, with Ships Official Log Books (Form M & S 16 & 12),alphabetical series” [D13]
* “Statistical chart of ships’ movements and list of persons not required to pass education test” [SP83/11]
* Crew and passenger lists for the Port of Newcastle [C667] (even though Cairns and Townsville both have passenger lists for this period, neither seems to have crew lists).

Yet even though Reynolds was from Tasmania, I suspect that it will be New Zealand’s ships’ log books (at Archives New Zealand’s Christchurch Regional Office, descriptions accessible via Archway) that will have some answers, because the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara were both New Zealand-owned:
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Outwards (R18282773) – CAVL CH443 26 / 6/6/3
* Shipping Report Books, Foreign – Inwards (R18282772) – CAVL CH443 25 / 6/6/2

In fact, the definitive answer of where to look next may well come from the ominously huge-sounding 8-volume “Log of logs : a catalogue of logs, journals, shipboard diaries, letters, and all forms of voyage narratives, 1788 to 1988, for Australia and New Zealand, and surrounding oceans” by Ian Nicholson. If anyone reading this happens to have access to this truly stonking epitome of maritime bibliomania, please let me know if it lists the Manuka’s and Niagara’s log books and/or related crew records, thanks! Even knowing which volume(s) to be looking at would be a great help to me (the British Library only has an incomplete set).

As far as pursuing our elusive man via normal avenues, I hate to say it but we may well be out of luck. Because voting was reserved for the over-21s, the young H. C. Reynolds won’t appear on Australian electoral rolls prior to 1921, and I have a sneaking suspicion he had left Australia by then (probably for America). But if (as I suspect) he left the RMS Niagara in early 1918 for medical reasons, will he be listed in the Auckland Hospital Register of Patients Admission and Discharge, first series, Vol. 3 (1918-1920) (ref: R20388997), shelfmark “YCAB 15266 4/a D”? Hopefully we shall see… I remain optimistic! 🙂