Contract bridge was a fashionable game in the 1930s and 1940s; columns presenting bridge news and puzzles were popular recent additions to newspapers. What was appealing was that bridge problems had a human, social side that, say, chess problems lacked.
Bridge columnists ran puzzle competitions for readers not only to solve, but to compete against each other. These puzzles ranged from moderate to utterly fiendish, making use of crazy-sounding techniques like “suicide squeezes” and “triple coups” (I never once saw a single coup, never mind a triple one).
It is in this febrile atmosphere of competing Master Solvers and bridge columns that we find a series of mentions of (very probably) Carl Webb.
He also submitted a solution into a different bridge column in The Age on 24 April 1937: and indeed, by the time the results to the thirteenth bridge problem of that year came round (10 July 1937), he had sent in correct answers to a very respectable five of them.
1946
After a gap of nine years, we again see “C. Webb” submitting bridge puzzle solutions to Norman McCance’s bridge column in The Age.
He starts to submit correct answers at the start of a North (of the Yarra) vs South (of the Yarra) for the South team. His name appears three times, on 28 Mar 1946, 04 Apr 1946, and 11 Apr 1946, before disappearing again.
There are no more mentions of Webb in the bridge columns. 🙁
But then again…
So, for a long time I thought that was the end of the story. But today, I took a second look at all of Norman McCance’s bridge columns up until the end of 1948, just in case there was a Webb mention there that Trove’s OCR had mangled very slightly.
As it turned out, there wasn’t: but looked at in context, the fact that the three Webb mentions in 1946 were right at the start of a North-South competition struck me as quite interesting. Might Webb have previously been submitting entries under a pen-name?
There were certainly a few pen-names, such as “Euclid” and “Dummy”, most of which I was able to eliminate. But one particular pen-name jumped out – “Interested” of South Yarra. This person was one of the five winners (out of 169 entrants) of the competition that had only just finished: they then immediately disappeared, just as C. Webb appeared.
What I found intriguing was that, at the end of that competition, Norman McCance mentioned that “Interested” hadn’t included an address when submitting their puzzle solutions. Which does sound like a Somerton Man kind of thing.
So, perhaps Carl Webb was “Interested” of South Yarra? It’s not a bad hypothesis.
I’d also add that there’s no mention in McCance’s column (which often mentioned Victoria Bridge Union events) of Webb in any pair or team there. So it seems likely to me that he was more of a bridge puzzle solver than an active bridge player.
One last thing: considering the good bridge ‘strokes’ / validation Webb must have been getting from solving McCance’s conundrums, I don’t honestly believe he was anywhere near Melbourne after 11 March 1946.
David Morgan has very kindly sent me through a transcript (generated using ChatGPT/Glasp) of the recent ABC “Australian Story” episode on the Somerton Man. I thought it needed a post of its own, so here it is:
[00:09] I had no idea about the Somerton Man case. I’d never heard of it. It hadn’t entered my life in any way, I was just living my life. I had no idea that I held some kind of secret to solving this case or could aid in the effort to try and trace this back to a person. I knew that they would get the name one day, I knew that technology would catch up, but I did know that even though you’ve got a name, you’re not going to really understand who the man was.
[00:42] It’s fantastic to see that this man, an unknown man on a beach, now has a name, he now has a family. He now has a place. We’d love to find out, you know, what was he doing there. How did he die and why did he die? Was it natural? Was it suicide? Anything was possible, and in this case, I think that the most unexpected ending has happened and that is in itself another twist.
[01:19] I think there are some questions there that may never be solved, and the mystery will live on. MY NAME IS CHARLES On the first of December in 1948 the body was found by two trainee jockeys early in the morning that were out on the beach exercising horses. We went over to see if he was alright. And we got fairly close to him and couldn’t see him breathing and he was dead.
[02:02] A number of people did come and view the body but were unable to identify him. One of the intriguing things about the case is that all the clothes the man was wearing had the labels removed off them. So, this is what made some people think, ‘Oh maybe this guy is a spy.’. We are seeing that there was a tie with the name ‘T Keane’ on it.
[02:31] It was strange that nobody came forward to identify the body, which led to suggestions that he was from overseas, possibly from Europe, possibly from America. The doctor who carried out the post-mortem examination said the stomach was deeply congested with blood and in his opinion, death had been caused by heart failure due to poisoning.
[02:50] The Somerton Man had a really unique body. He was very well built, he was athletic, but he had these calf muscles that were really distinct, kind of like he was a ballet dancer. I think the biggest technical problem was the fact that he was thawing out, because he was, apart from being embalmed, he was deep frozen.
[03:10] The police knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep his body forever and that it would soon start to deteriorate. So they called in a taxidermist who made a plaster cast of his face. A group of locals paid for his headstone and his plot. And his headstone reads, “Here lies the unknown man”. A couple of months later they found a tiny scrolled up piece of paper in the man’s fob pocket.
[03:36] When they unrolled it, it said “Tamam Shud.” It was a mystery as to what this actually meant. It was a newspaper reporter who was well-read, and said it came from the ending of a book called The Rubaiyat written by Omar Khayyam. And it meant :the end”, or “the finish”. And this brought forward the theory that perhaps he had committed suicide.
[04:08] A man came forward to say that he had found a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and it did have the last page torn out. He handed it into police, he said it had been thrown into the back seat of his car six months earlier. So, on the back of the book were some strange letters that the police couldn’t make any sense of, and a phone number belonging to a young 27-year-old woman, who happened to live only five minutes’ walk away from where the man was found dead.
[04:43] The police paid the young nurse a visit, but she was very reluctant to talk to them. After that incident, basically they were stumped, there were no other leads. And it basically hit a brick wall, the whole case. Everyone working on the case or had an interest in the case always thought that something would come up tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.
[05:11] Podcast excerpt: Hello and welcome to the Somerton Man and today I wanted to look at the Somerton man – one of the most mysterious cold cases of all time. Over the decades, interest in this case has just continued to grow and grow to the point it’s actually considered one of Australia’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
[05:31] There are blog sites that have been set up from all over the world with amateur sleuths trying to work out who the guy is, why he was on Somerton beach and exactly how he died. I teach electronic engineering at Adelaide Uni. I just happened to be sitting in a laundrette watching my washing going around, and there was a stack of magazines beside me, and I picked one up and it was an article about the top 10 unsolved mysteries in Australia.
[06:03] And the second one was the Somerton Man case. The great thing about the maths we do is it’s not the pie-in-the-sky maths, it’s the type of maths that has great practical value… And so I thought, ‘Hey this would make a great project for my students’. And so I started building up a lot of history and background on the case.
[06:24] And I think that just sucked me in beccause I just got fascinated by it Professor Abbott has been investigating this case for so many years now and it’s completely consumed his whole being. He’s become known as one of the world leading experts on the case. So in trying to solve the case, it seemed to me the key was to find the young woman, Jo Thompson, that lived five minutes from where he died, with the hypothesis that she had been in a relationship with the Somerton Man.
[06:58] Unfortunately, she had died two years earlier, so I found out. That was a little frustrating because I was hoping that she would have some information about who this man was, and perhaps after so many years she would be prepared to say who it was, but I ended up contacting her grand-daughter, Rachel. The first time I heard about the Somerton Man was a letter that arrived, and it was sent by Professor Derek Abbott.
[07:32] It said, “I believe that you may have a link to someone involved in this case.” I developed a hypothesis that the Somerton Man and Jo Thompson knew each other. They had a child, Robin Thompson, and if this is the case then his daughter Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man. But his hypothesis seemed to be way too crazy.
[08:00] Too fanciful. It was like something that could have been made up in some fictional novel. So I went to Brisbane to meet Rachel, and we went out to dinner in a French restaurant, and talked about the case. He was also after my DNA. It’s probably the first request I’ve had for a man to do that. By then however, I was captivated by the case, and I wanted answers, so I was a willing victim.
[08:39] So the relationship moved pretty quickly. Yeah, there was some sort of spark there. Something just magically drew us together. By the following day we had decided we were going to get married. It all happened remarkably fast. So Derek and I got married in 2010 and we now have three beautiful children together.
[09:15] People would say that I had married her for her DNA, and we would laugh about it, so that is funny. Derek has essentially spent 24/7 researching the Somerton Man case. He, if it’s possible, became even more passionate about the whole case. So in 2015 we started work on extracting DNA from hairs that were found in the plaster cast of the Somerton Man, hoping this would be a way to identify him, even though these hairs are 70 years old.
[09:56] But we were only able to extract 2 per cent of the amount of DNA that we really need to form an identification. There’s an imperative to now go ahead and do an exhumation. We need it in much higher concentration levels, which we could do with the Somerton man’s teeth or his ear bone, for example. Now the man’s body will be exhumed by police with hopes modern DNA technology will be able to solve one of the state’s most enduring cold cases.
[10:29] The Somerton Man is not just a curiosity or a mystery to be solved. It’s somebody’s father, son, perhaps grandfather, uncle, brother. So when the state government announced that the exhumation was going ahead I think for some other people, they would see that as a cue for retirement. But not Derek. I think that increased his motivation to continue at even faster pace.
[10:53] I’m reasonably confident there will be enough DNA come out of this that we’ll get an identification. He thought initially that he would be allowed to participate, but that wasn’t to be. After the exhumation, everything went silent. The police kept very tight-lipped about their processes and Derek got a little restless and he went back to his three hairs that he’d extracted in 2017 and started working again.
[11:22] He was driven to find out who the man was. The professor definitely wanted to be first over the finishing line of cracking the case. So I’d been communicating with Colleen Fitzpatrick, who is the world expert in forensic genealogy from America and like me, she was totally fascinated by the Somerton Man case I asked her if she would assist.
[11:53] So here’s a closeup of the bust and can you see all these little hairs? Yes. That’s the Somerton Man’s hair. So Colleen’s expertise and she’s a pioneer in this, is getting DNA, and from that DNA finding distant cousins. There are millions of people today who voluntarily put their DNA on these family tree-type DNA sites.
[12:22] Ever wanted to explore your family tree, learn more about your ancestry or identify your ethnic background. First take a DNA test and download your results as a DNA data file. far as unidentified human remains, violent crimes, in other words, forensic cases, it’s really been a game-changer, the first new tool really in about 30 years in human identification.
[12:48]) It’s very powerful and it’s been very successful. Around this time, DNA technology began to improve significantly. Derek joined forces with Colleen, and they began to get some results. Right off the bat, it’s sort of like a miracle happened, we passed the first test. We got the good data out of the 75-year-old hair.
[13:10] Great! Two million DNA markers fell out. And it was at that point we knew that was more than enough to identify the Somerton Man. It was in a good shape to upload to those genealogy data bases for the next step, the next genealogy step. So when we first uploaded the Somerton Man’s DNA onto a genealogical website, the very top match we got was a gentleman in Victoria by the name of Jack Hargreaves, whose DNA was already there on the system.
[13:45] So, blue shows the area of significant matching, and this is huge here on chromosome 22. And so what we did is we built out Jack Hargreaves family tree. And at one stage we had as many as 4,000 people on the tree, so which one is it? It felt like I was working on a big Sudoku puzzle, moving all these relatives around until I got it.
[14:11] We looked for people with no date of death on that tree. There was one that stood out, because A: he was male, B: had roughly the right age range, and C was very closely connected to the Keane family, and as we know, the Somerton Man had the name Keane on his tie. When I saw the name Keane, that’s when my hair caught fire.
[14:36] That’s when I really knew we were on the offensive. We were going to get it because that wasn’t a coincidence. And so this turned out to be a chap called Charles Webb, who had no date of death details. Yeah, so he was born Carl Webb but he only went by the name Charles Webb. It seemed this chap had just gone off the radar after 1947.
[15:01] This could be our man, but we had no evidence, it was just a guy on a tree with no date of death. And we set out to either prove or eliminate him as being the Somerton Man And to prove it, what we had to do was see who his mother was, then tunnel down the family tree just on the mother’s side only, and find somebody alive today.
[15:25] And see if that DNA matches or not. And that turned out to be somebody in Victoria by the name of Antero. I got a call from Professor Abbott, who wanted to know if I could help do some research and do DNA test. I hadn’t even heard of the story before. And it was like, ‘Hang on a minute, is this a scam?’. It’s not every day you get someone out of the blue calling you up and wanting to help with some unidentified body or wants your DNA.
[15:54] But did some research, made sure he was who he said he was. So I volunteered to do that and did the test, sent it away. I’ve always been interested in family history, but had no idea that there was a missing person there. So when Antero’s DNA came through and it was a match to the Somerton Man, it was at this point we knew that Charles Webb was the Somerton Man and we’d finally cracked it.
[16:24] So there was a great feeling of elation, dampened by being totally exhausted at this stage. I was taken aback but was excited as well. There’s a great, great discovery. You know, I’d played my little part in working out that great mystery, it was satisfying. There’s Charles there. So, he’s my first cousin, three times removed.
[16:50] And his mother, which is Eliza Emelia Morris, her older sister is my great-great grandmother. And there’s me down the bottom. So Colleen and I decided right at that point, this was the time to make an announcement people have been hanging on for 70 years to know the answers, I didn’t see any reason to delay.
[17:15] I just wanted to get it out there. They were determined, to quote Derek, to beat the cops. And they were a bit concerned of how the news would be received as well. The police gave no deadlines on when we could expect a result. There was just nothing, no news. Now an Adelaide researcher claims to have made a major breakthrough, uncovering the identity of the infamous Somerton Man found on a beach.
[17:40] Now a man who has dedicated his adult life to investigating the case thinks DNA has provided the answer. It’s been a marathon working on this, over the last year particularly. It was mind-blowing. It was, ‘Wow, we’ve actually got a name.’ And it was a surreal moment. It took a long while to sink in that it’s not the Somerton Man’s story now, but the Charles Webb story.
[18:03] I’m not sure we’ll ever be absolutely certain, because what we would do in a forensic context normally is take a deceased DNA and compare that directly with something we know belong to them a toothbrush, a hairbrush, etcetera, DNA from that item. We haven’t got that here. As a secondary measure, we could compare the deceased DNA to a very close family member, you know, parents, children.
[18:25] Again, we don’t have that. So my concern is that we may never be able to categorically say that we know this person’s identity. I’m not going to say I believe it until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and actually confirm it, which I think they possibly will.
[18:51] Police who exhumed the Somerton Man’s remains last year are cautiously optimistic the finding is in fact a breakthrough. I am 100 per cent convinced that we have the right guy. Charles Webb is the Somerton Man. PROFESSOR DEREK ABBOTT, ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY: It turns out he wasn’t a spy, he wasn’t a ballet dancer.
[19:13] And all those crazy theories on the internet all came to nothing. So this is Rachel’s DNA compared with the Somerton Man. Down at the bottom it says ‘no shared DNA segments found.’ So, that was a flop. So we’re totally able to eliminate that hypothesis that Rachel is the granddaughter of the Somerton Man.
[19:44] The hypothesis turned out to be wrong. So, when Derek said that Mr Somerton wasn’t my grandfather, as a joke I said to him, ‘How long before you serve the divorce papers on me?’ Because the media had made a comment some years back Derek only married me for my DNA. So it’s probably somewhere around here. We told the children that Mr S as I’ve always called the Somerton Man was called Charles Webb and that he’s not related to us.
[20:18] But the Somerton Man will always form part of our family and our narrative. It’s the reason that we met, Derek and I. It brought us together. It’s been like a journey for us, together, I guess. Derek: George, I guess the mystery’s not over is it? We don’t know much abut Charles Webb, why he was here. And then not wanting to just rest there, we also then were able to find other living descendants.
[20:44] So one of the people I contacted was Stuart Webb. I’d never heard of the Somerton Man case I think Derek Abbott found me because I’d done some family tree research of my own, because my grandmother was very into the family tree or genealogy. It certainly seemed very strange to be part of this larger mystery.
[21:07] I’m kind of a regular guy, I go to work. When Derek Abbott asked me to do a DNA test, I wasn’t really crazy about the idea. I wanted to think about it a little bit further, so I put it out to my family. If anybody else would be prepared to do the DNA test? And I put my hand up straight away and said, ‘yeah, I’ll have a crack’… And everything from that point just seems to have steamrolled and rolled on and on and it’s getting bigger and bigger as we keep going.
[21:37] So I’ve got a result for you. Yes. Are you ready for this? Drumroll…So you are a great, great niece of Charles Webb So I got my DNA results and…it was happiness, it was joy. But there was also some sadness about this forgotten family member You are 396 centimorgans, so you’re right in the middle of the range, right? Awesome.
[22:12] This was a person, he wasn’t just a media hit for a little while and unsolved mystery. He was our family He was born in 1905 in Footscray, Victoria but it seems that he grew up in Springvale, in the family bakery and became an electrical instrument maker. He was one of six siblings. It’s reported in the newspapers at the time that he played community football and so this could explain his good calves and good physique generally.
[22:50] And there’s so much more we don’t know. Here’s a family photo album from pa with all the mystery inside. Check it out… I started to look back through the family history and that particular wing I’ve been able to find the first photo of Charles when he was alive, to my knowledge. Nana’s actually written on this photo and named all the people.
[23:14] So you’ve got grandma, grandpa, Charlie who’s the Somerton Man, and Roy. So you can actually see them quite distinctly. It’s amazing. Yeah. What a find. There’s also a larger family gathering with all of the Webb family as it was back then. A fantastic family day, they’re all smiling, Charles in particular is playing some kind of prank on who we think is Gerald Keane.
[23:42] I wonder where that was? I don’t know. It looks to be somewhere rural; it looks like they’re having fun. So when I first saw that, I thought, wow, this is fantastic. This is a real breakthrough. And this photo is basically taken 20 years before he died. So we’re seeing him considerably younger than the autopsy photo we’re used to looking at.
[24:07] It’s quite incredible when you look at these photos and this guy obviously went missing, and nobody really came forward. The fact that Charles Webb wasn’t reported missing, I find that sad in itself. And for no-one to reach out and find out where he was or what had happened, it’s quite heartbreaking So Uncle Harry, growing up, was there any discussion? Did you hear anything about one of the relatives going missing? No, no, no.
[24:41] There’s no recollection of that. Why didn’t any of the siblings try and find out where he went? Did they know that he’d gone to Adelaide and never came back? Or did he just go off and no-one knew where, where he was? In the end when we look at the whole situation of the Somerton Man, it does appear to be a sad story.
[25:05] In the period leading up to his death, his father died, his mum died. His brother Roy, who he seems to be close with, died. He split up with his wife as well. Charles was married to Dorothy Robertson in, I think, 1941. They didn’t have a very easy marriage… Our information comes from Dorothy’s divorce decree filed several years later.
[25:31] Dorothy described Charles as violent, threatening, moody. Not at all a happy person. He didn’t have any friends and he would be in bed by 7pm. Turns out that Charles loved to write poetry and his favourite subject that he would write about was death. This is interesting, because we know that just before Charles died, he’d discarded a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which is poetry about death.
[25:59] It all fits together. One day she came home and the whole house smelled like ether. She found him soaking wet in bed, and he said he had swallowed 50 phenobarbital tablets. This very much sounds like Charles was attempting suicide. This story turns out that it’s not some wild spy drama. It’s really a sad, tragic domestic situation.
[26:29] Eventually he moved out in April of 1947, and we don’t know what happened after that. And we find him dead on a beach in 1948 in Adelaide. So what has he been doing in that intervening year? Who knows. And why Adelaide, why did he pick Adelaide? I think Charles Webb was very broken mentally. Something had happened in his life, and he wanted just to anaesthetise himself.
[27:02] It does seem to me that some form of suicide does seem to be likely, which is what the police always suspected all along, right from the beginning I think there’s no doubt that he committed suicide. If he planned it all, he certainly planned it in a way that it would leave a great, confusing issue behind, which would bamboozle people for years.
[27:28] Imagine, this guy has been sitting there for 70 odd years, no-one knew who he was. You’re related to one of the great mysteries of Australia and indeed the world. I was a bit excited to find out all I could about the Somerton Man, now that I knew who it was and my small piece in the puzzle. I’m sure that they’ll find a few more answers to those missing questions.
[27:51] But maybe eventually down the track, probably be a few unanswered questions that we just have to live with. The person that could supply all these answers that we all would like to know is dead. He’s taking it to the grave. In the end, there was no fairytale ending, but it’s been really heart-warming to learn that the family that may not have missed him when he went missing and when he died, are now reclaiming him.
[28:20]) It’s really the start of the mystery, not the end. He died alone. He’d been buried for a long time in a cemetery without a name. Whether he’s buried again at Somerton or whether the family has other ideas, it’s just really nice that he’s got a name. So, in the playroom, we have two portraits. One is my grandmother, Jo Thomson and the other one is what Charles Webb may have looked like.
[29:12] I do find them quite disturbing. And now that I know that I’m not related, I would very much like to move those paintings on and rehome them. I would quite like to donate them to a charity. I would like to get rid of those paintings. South Australia police says further DNA work is required to positively identify the Somerton Man and that the matter “will ultimately be determined by the Coroner”.
Commenter John Sanders is convinced that the man at the right-hand-edge of the Webb family photo is Leslie William Scott, husband of Carl Webb’s sister Gladys May. Here are some notes on Mr and Mrs L. W. Scott…
Leslie William Scott
Leslie William Scott was born in 1895 to Samuel William Scott (b. 1869 Gympie, Queensland, died March 1939) and Mary Elizabeth West (1870-1950): Samuel was survived by Leslie and three other sons (“Mr. Lindsay Scott, who is attached to the railway staff and is stationed at Maffra; Mr. Walter Scott, who is a member of the Australian navy, and is stationed at the Flinders Naval Base; and Mr. Pat Scott [VX123596], of Camperdown“) and three daughters (“Mrs. F. Grayland and Mrs. M. Murnane (Terang) and Mrs. C. Bateman (Bostock’s Creek)“.
He worked for 4½ years as an apprentice printer for his father (proprietor of the Camperdown “Herald”), before heading off to fight in WWI. From his AIF records (at the NAA), he was 5 feet 11 inches, 10 st 2 lbs, 32 inch chest, fair complexion, grey eyes, fair hair, Presbyterian, and had a scar below his right knee. However, a war wound at Gallipoli in 1915 led to the amputation of his left hand, causing him to return to Australia. (An initial news report saying that he had had an arm amputated was incorrect.)
Having gained a “[Certificate] of Competency under section 171 of the Local Government Act 1915 (No.2686)” (p.863), and a brief stint as secretary to Winchelsea Shire Council, he became assistant town clerk at Essendon in 1921. From there he became Essendon’s deputy town clerk by 1929, and then – don’t gasp too hard – Essendon town clerk in 1940.
Leslie Scott lived at 15 Coats Street, Moonee Ponds (telephone FV7743), which is where his parents-in-law were living when Richard August Webb died in 1939; and also at 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon. He died on 9th September 1971 [Thanks P!]. I’ve been unable to find any photographs of him in Trove (or elsewhere).
Gladys May Scott (nee Webb)
Gladys May Webb was born in Prahran in 1897, and (according to The Age) married Leslie William Scott on 4th July 1918 at the Presbyterian Church, Camperdown.
Though Trove has many mentions of her (as honorary secretary of this, that or the other society in Essendon), she only seems to appear in a single photograph (from 1946), with the caption “Mrs Fraser [the wife of Cr. J. W. S. Fraser, Mayor of Essendon] is seen greeting Mrs L. W. Scott [on the right]“:
She died on 03 July 1955 at “her residence, 9 Peterleigh Grove, Essendon”: and in 1958 it was solicitors trying to trace Gladys’ missing brother who believed that Carl Webb might have gone to Cottesloe.
The Family Photo
Once again, here’s the family photo:
John Sanders is adamant that the man on the far right is Leslie William Scott: he certainly looks tall enough (to be Scott’s height of 5′ 11″), and does appear to be covering up his left hand area:
Is that him? And is his wife Gladys May in the family photo as well?
Other People
On the other side of the photo, there’s another man who looks a dead ringer for the guy on the right. So I do wonder whether this might be one of Leslie William Scott’s three brothers (my best guess would be that this is Lindsay Scott whose WWI physical description is practically identical to Leslie William Scott’s, but I have no actual evidence to back this up):
I also wonder whether the older couple just next to this man might be Samuel William Scott and his wife Mary Elizabeth West (i.e. the lady with the mysterious “Thing” hand on her shoulder):
(Actually, I’m pretty sure the “Thing” hand is just an optical illusion, formed of the man’s hunched up left knee / dark trousers and the right hand of the lady sitting beside her, who similarly has her left hand on the shoulder of the lady on her other side. And might this possibly be a Scott sister?)
I wonder if there are more photographs out there to be had… any more thoughts on this?
In a previous post, I wondered whether the young blonde guy that the family identified (as part of a recent ABC documentary) was indeed Carl Webb, or whether he might instead have been Carl Webb’s nephew Charles Richard Webb. It all comes down to a cluster of family photos that appears to have been taken on the same day – but what day was that?
“Webbs”
The first photo gives us four names to work with:
Here, Grandpa and Grandma are without any doubt Richard August Webb (b. 1866 Hamburg, d. 2 April 1939) and his wife Eliza Amelia Webb (nee Grace) (1870-1946), while Roy is their son Roy Webb (b. 1904). (Which Charlie the young guy tagged as “Charlie” is is the question here.) We can therefore at least be sure that this photo was taken before 2 April 1939.
Putting Carl and Roy to one side, the list of people we might therefore reasonably expect to find in a Webb family photo in the period (say) 1925 to 1939 would include:
Russell Richard Webb (registered 1893, d. 1949)
Partner: Linda Webb (b. 1888, d. 1966)
Son: Douglas Russell McCluskey (b. 1911, d. 1991)
Married Amy Sarah Harriet Tomkinson in 1917 (b. 1895, d. 2 Jun 1929 “after a long illness”)
Son Charles Richard Webb (b. 1918)
Daughter Doris Amy Webb (b. 1919) who married Norman John Tomkinson (1917-2002) in 1941
Son Norman Fred[e]rick Webb (b. 1921, d. 2008)
Daughter Ethel Elizabeth Webb (b. 1926, d. 2008) – Married Holland
Freda Grace Webb (born 1896, died 1964).
Married Gerald Thomas Keane (b. 1889, d. 1960) in 1915.
Daughter Gwen[doline] M. Keane (b. ~1919, d. ~1994) (married Dickinson)
Gladys May Webb (registered 1897), died 1955.
Married Leslie William Scott (b. 1895, d. 1961) in 1933 or earlier.
Doris Maude (‘Dot’) Webb, born 22 May 1901, died 1956.
Married Daniel William Martin (b. 1894, d. 1956)
Daughter: Norma Mary Martin (later Cass), b. 1925
External Photos
As a starting point, I wondered whether WWII enlistment photographs for some of the men might be a possible help. For example, here’s Jack Keane:
Norman Fredrick Webb’s service record (157584) has not yet been digitised, alas (so no photo here).
Norman John Tomkinson’s 3-page service record (V55745) is online here (but no photo) – he was a “Cannister Maker”, and was still “single” (aged 22) in 1940, with his father as next of kin. I think there’s a later and larger (but as yet undigitised) file here.
Douglas Russell McCluskey’s service record (V500465) is online here – he was a “munitions worker”, with his mother Linda as next of kin.
Here’s Daniel William Martin and Doris Maude (Webb) with (presumably) their young daughter Norma Mary, as per a photo uploaded to the Cass Martin family tree area of MyHeritage, which (given that Norma Mary was born in 1925), would seem to date to around 1927 or 1928:
The Cass family tree also has a nice clear (but undated) photo of Doris Maude on her own:
Similarly, here’s Norma Mary Martin (aged about 17) and her mother Doris Martin (on the right) in 1942:
There are almost certainly other photos to be had out there, but these were all I was able to find.
The Big Photo
So, we have nineteen people in the big photo, fifteen of whom we are unsure of.
Given that we have some nice clear photos of Doris Maude Martin and her husband and daughter, can we identify them as a family group here? The obvious three candidates are just to the left (as we look at it) of “Charlie” at the back:
The man at the back here looks a lot to me like (a slightly older) Daniel William Martin, with his wife Doris Maude Martin right in front of her. The little girl sitting beside Doris would then very probably be Norma Mary Martin. If this is correct, I think we might then reasonably guess Norma Mary’s age as about five, which would date this photo to around 1930. However, I’d caution that this is still not 100% certain. 🙁
So, Which Charlie is Charlie?
If the photo is from around 1930, then “Charlie” simply couldn’t be Carl Webb’s nephew Charles Richard Webb (b. 1918) – he might conceivably pass for a large sixteen-year-old, but probably not a large twelve-year-old. So I think it does seem fairly likely that the Webb family has identified a picture of Carl Webb, as they thought.
…Unless you know better?
Update (29/12/2022)
Commenter Bob Nowak points out that he suggested (in a 27/12/2022 comment here) that these three were indeed the Martins (which I somehow managed to miss):
I think (as Poppins stated earlier) the tot in the front row with her hands on her head is the daughter of Daniel and Doris Martin, Norma Mary, born 1925, sitting next to her mum Doris Maude (with her husband Daniel behind)
Wasn’t it confirmed by the family that Norma was in the family photo …. I thought that was posted here a while back. Born November 1925, she looks about 3 in the photo, taken in the Summer of ’28/’29 one would think. Maybe the question is not how high are Roy and Charlie, but how high is the little tot Norma, to date the photograph.
Since ABC’s recent “My Name Is Charles” documentary (in its “Australian Stories” strand), I’ve been sitting back trying to make sense of it all. On the one hand, the film makers did a good job of bringing a human side to the whole “Carl/Charles/Charlie Webb is the Somerton Man” story, while grabbing the best bits from all their previous Tamam Shud docos. On the other hand, I’m far from convinced the family have got the, ummm, right Charlie yet.
The Family Image
Here’s the family image from the documentary, with Charlie highlighted near the top right:
I suspect the reason that commenters here have tied themselves in knots trying to date this image is because the person identified as “Charlie” looks a bit too young, and a bit too blond:
Charles Richard Webb
Yet Carl Webb (born 1905 in Footscray) wasn’t the only Charlie in the immediate Webb family. His oldest brother Russell (born 1893) had a son Charles Richard Webb (born 1917, m.1943, etc etc):
As a reminder, the Somerton Man looked like this (admittedly on a worse day):
So, which of these two Charlies is in the family photos? Personally, I think it’s Charles Richard Webb, but over to you all, convince me either way.
A very intriguing Somerton Man-related email arrived here today from CM commenter & researcher Angela. In her quest to find out a bit more of what happened to Dorothy Jean Webb, she decided to pay the nice people at South Australian Genealogy & Heraldry Society to do some additional research for her, and wants to share her findings with everyone!
This is because Genealogy SA’s research coordinator Beryl Schahinger has just reported back to Angela to let her know that “she had found an entry in the marriage index for the District of Daly (which includes Kadina and Bute) for a Dorothy Jean Webb to Geoffrey A. Lockyer in 1952. This fits nicely with Dorothy’s divorce. Unfortunately, there is a 75-year embargo on marriage records for the State of South Australia.“
Angela has also managed to dig up the following information about Geoffrey Arthur Lockyer:
Born 12 Jan 1918 in Perth, Western Australia (WA: 224/1921).
Served in WWII.
Married for the first time in 1941 in Western Australia (WA: 334/1941; spouse: Ada Teresa Jones; Divorced in WA 1945).
He is in the WA Electoral Rolls in 1963 and 1968, at 280 Welshpool Road, Queens Park.
He died in Western Australia in Feb 1976 (WA: 738/1976), and was buried in Karrakatta Cemetery.
Also living at the 280 Welshpool Road address was a Mary Lockyer. Angela suspects either that Geoffrey and Dorothy were divorced sometime between 1952 and 1963 (i.e. he subsequently remarried), or that ~conceivably~ Dorothy Jean changed her name to “Mary”. (Findagrave.com has a likely grave for Mary Lockyer, who died 2011 in Wembley Downs aged 90, and was also buried in Karrakatta Cemetery.)
Frustrated by our collective inability to access the divorce papers that Dorothy Jean Webb attempted to serve on her (by then late) husband Carl Webb, Cipher Mysteries commenter Behrooz decided to write to the Honorable Chief Justice Anne Ferguson of Victoria. And – rather wonderfully – his polite (and quietly persuasive) request for the two documents to be released into the public domain was agreed to.
He has (just today) posted the two PDFs on his blog:
Please use the comments below to discuss what we learn from these two (I think extremely central) documents. Please also remember to thank him heartily for his efforts! 🙂
The Bare Facts
Dorothy Jean Webb says that she was a “Pharmacist and Chiropodist” prior to marrying Carl Webb. (DWA p.2)
Carl Webb “wrote many poems, most of them on the subject of death, which he claims to be his greatest desire”. (DWA p.4)
He was sullen, moody and changeable, once threatening a friend with a carving knife after losing at cards. Their marriage broke down: she described how he beat her on different occasions; forced her to move to the front room; and finally locked her out of the flat completely. (DWA p.4)
She went to stay in Lorne for 14 days, but things were no better on her return. (DWA p.5)
In March 1946, he – and I think there is no real doubt of this – tried to commit suicide by taking 40 phenobarbitol tablets. Once Dorothy had nursed him back to health, he then continued to verbally abuse her (etc) as before. (DWA. pp.5-6)
Dorothy called the St Kilda police around on several occasions, but each time Carl convinced them (she thought) that she was just imagining things. (DWA p.6)
In September 1946, not long after her father came back from Darwin, Carl offered her £60 to leave the flat: she wanted £50 plus some furniture, and they did not agree. He later said that she would get nothing from him “ever”.
She had a maintenance order (for £1/10 weekly) served on him (dated 1st May 1947) (DWA p.7). At that time, he was “working in a machine shop in Prahran” (WvW p.15), named as “Red Point Tool Co. of 66 St Johns Street Prahran” (WvW p.21).
A neighbour recalled that Webb had sold all his furniture (WvW p.17).
Trying to work out what happened to Dorothy Jean “Doff” Webb (nee Robertson), I was told a few weeks back that after getting divorced (in absentia) from Carl Webb, Doff’s subsequent partner was Kevin D’Arcy. However, even though I can see that a Kevin Alexander D’Arcy is included in various private family trees online, nobody has so far written down much about him.
So here’s my attempt to put that (at least partially) right.
Kevin Alexander D’Arcy Family Tree
I started with some of the information suggested by commenter Belinda here. It didn’t take too long to find William “Billy” D’Arcy (b. 1893 Ballarat, died 1987 Bacchus Marsh) and his wife Florence (“Flora”) Jane D’Arcy (nee McKay) (b. 1899 Warrion, died 1986 Bacchus Marsh) and their son Kevin Alexander D’Arcy (b. 4 May 1923 Melbourne, d. 21 May 1991, “Rtd Taxation Officer” in the probate record).
In the electoral rolls, we can see Kevin’s parents living in Bacchus Marsh (1949, 1954, 1958, 1963, 1967, 1972, 1977, 1980), with Kevin appearing on the rolls only in 1977 and 1980. There’s also a James Allen D’Arcy (“valuer”) who appears there in the 1960s. One family tree asserts that they had five children (but no names, no evidence).
Kevin Alexander D’Arcy Military Records
What I found interesting was that Private Kevin Alexander D’Arcy (clerk, single, enlisted 1943, VX142120, 37/52 Australian Infantry Battalion, discharged 27 Aug 1946, 5ft 5in, blue eyes, medium complexion, light brown hair, no marks or scars) was marked up as living in Boort, Victoria in 1943 with his father W. D’Arcy.
Note that the correspondence in the file lists various other addresses:
1946, 3 Kembla St, Hawthorn
1953: 62 Coppin St, Richmond
1971: 49 Keith St, Alphington 3078
Could it be that the mention of “Bute” was merely ‘Chinese Whispers’, and the place we should have been looking at was actually Boort, waaaay inland in Victoria, near Lake Boort, in the vaguely Tolkienesque shire of Loddon? What on earth has ever happened in Boort? I mean, I’m every bit as big a fan of “gourmet green tomatoes” (apparently Boort’s most famous product) as the next man (…if the next man doesn’t happen to like them very much).
And indeed, if you look at the electoral rolls for Boort in 1942, you see William “Darey” (public servant) and Flora Jane “Darey” (i.e. both misspelled!), S.R.W.S. Res., Holloway St, Boort. (But they’re in neither the 1937 nor 1949 electoral rolls for Boort.) So this whole sequence does seem to be basically correct.
But what about prior to 1943? If you search Trove for “Billy D’Arcy”, you’ll find (ignoring the lightweight boxer of the same name!) a 03 Sep 1932 Bacchus Marsh Express column called “Melton As Coursing Centre”, which mentions Billy D’Arcy.
If you further search the two Bacchus Marsh papers in Trove for “D’Arcy”, you’ll see a 28 Feb 1953 engagement of Doreen Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Mr & Mrs W. D’Arcy of Maddingley, to Andrew Connell. There’s also the 1952 marriage of Joan D’Arcy (younger daughter of Mr & Mrs W. D’Arcy) to Mr Raymond Marett.
When in October 1951 Carl Webb’s wife filed a divorce petition (apparently not knowing of his 1948 demise on/near Somerton Beach), it listed Webb’s address as “formerly of Bromby-street, South Yarra, but now of parts unknown”. The 1942 electoral rolls then helped us narrow this to 63 Bromby Street, with small ads in The Argus narrowing it further to Flat 2, 63 Bromby Street.
So now let’s take a trip baaaack in tiiiime (cue wavy transition)…
Maps of Bromby Street
Here’s the relevant section of an 1895 Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works detail map (courtesy of the State Library of Victoria), showing the tramway engine house on the left that became Kellow House, with #63 three doors down to the East (there is no #65, or #69), with a R[ight] of W[ay] down the laneway:
In this section of Map 39 from Morgan’s 1951 Street Directory, courtesy of the State Library of Victoria, the road layout hasn’t changed at all (I couldn’t find the 897 detail map of the 1948 MMBW set, bah):
Here’s the same area in Google Maps today (the Royce Hotel on the left is the former Kellow House, the Kellow Falkiner car showroom built in 1928):
Photos of Bromby Street
A few days ago, Cipher Mysteries commenter (and Melburnian) Jo headed over to Bromby Street to have a snoop around. Jo’s first photograph was taken looking down Bromby Street, where #63 is the white building on the left hand side further down the street:
The next photo shows Melbourne Grammar School (which was taken over by American forces during WWII) as viewed from the laneway beside #63:
This photo shows #63 (and the laneway going to the back) as viewed from the Melbourne Grammar side of the road:
Finally, here’s a picture of the front of Kellow House (the former car showroom that was taken over by RAAF signals during the war):
Neither Carl Webb’s family nor his wife’s family seems to have much of a clue about him; Trove and the NAA have yielded relatively little; and a (probable) two-year spell at Swinburne Junior Technical College gave us a photo id that remains more than a bit unclear. Barring any sudden new revelations (I’m not holding my breath), the current Somerton Man news cycle now seems to be drifting downwards.
Worse still, well-placed people who really ought to know better are still punting tepid speculations out to the media, which I then seem to spend most of my time disproving (or at least strongly undermining). I really wish they wouldn’t waste everyone’s time, in some quest to look ‘clever’ or ‘knowledgeable’. Inane speculation makes researching history harder, not easier: and so these people are just making it harder for actual historians to make progress. Oh, and the actual data they find seems never to actually get released.
It’s painfully hard not to conclude that all the easy wins have probably now been had, and there is no Royal Road forward – just Hard Graft Street as far as the eye can see. Get used to this view, because it’s not going away any time soon.
It’s true that we still have plenty of sensible (and unanswered) questions, e.g.:
Did Carl Webb take up the scholarship he got from Swinburne, e.g. to learn electrical engineering?
Where did he work before the war?
Where did he work during the war?
Where did he work after the war?
Did he have a police record?
Where did he live after his marriage broke down?
Did he buy or sell any more items (e.g. in the Melbourne Age)?
Did he have another relationship after his marriage broke down?
Why did he have such high levels of lead in his hair at the time of his death?
What had happened to him to cause his spleen to be so enlarged?
Was Dorothy Jean Robertson trained as a chemist? If so, where did she train?
However, few of these seem likely to cast any significant light on the end of Carl Webb’s life.
Where should we be looking next? What are we missing?
