(Nick: here’s a guest post [lightly edited to house style] from Melbourne-based Cipher Mysteries commenter Jo, introducing Hickey Taylor to the Somerton Man discussion. Over to you, Jo…)
Stuart Webb recently re-posted “the family photo” on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page, along with a query about one of the people on it: Hickey Taylor. My first reaction was that “Hickey” and “Taylor” sounded like two old farmers from Camperdown (there are lots of Hickeys and Taylors there…) but commenter Poppins cleverly pointed out that Hickey Taylor was in fact a stage manager and occasional actor for J.C. Williamson’s. So… who was Hickey Taylor?
Henry Herbert “Hickey” Taylor, 1903-1962
Though born in Tasmania, Taylor’s electoral roll enrolment address across several decades is his parents’ home at 56 Surrey Road, South Yarra, right up to his death in 1962, when he was living with his widowed mother, Isabel. He spent long periods away from South Yarra with his work.
Taylor’s AusStage listing has him as being in Adelaide from the late 1940s to late 1950s – however, this was as an actor up until 1947, and then as a stage manager from 1949. If you dig through J.C. Williamson’s programs [he joined the company in 1925], you can also see that he spent long periods in Perth, e.g. as stage manager for “The Girl Friend”.
Perhaps most intriguingly, he was also the stage manager for the Adelaide run of “Under the Counter”(but not the Melbourne run), which ended on 30 November 1948. This, of course, places him in Adelaide at the time of Carl Webb’s death.
It seems that Hickey Taylor may also have been a drag performer, or to use the language of the 1940s, a female impersonator. The Australian Queer Archives has an interview listing [p.66] (I haven’t yet managed to secure a listening appointment but have contacted them and am trying, hopefully with Poppins).
As an aside, there have been books (and even Masters theses!) on the soldier female impersonators – theirs was a skilled and well regarded craft. They could also often be a tough bunch. Brent Coutts’ book “Crossing the Lines” is probably the most comprehensive review of the Kiwis.
I viewed Hickey Taylor’s probate document, as well as his hospital death report from the Alfred Hospital at the Public Records Office of Victoria. He died of heart complications – an unexpected death of septicaemia – in 1962. (I’m still digesting the report and will send my photos to Nick.) Dr Colin Ernest Seabridge, the Alfred Hospital’s Resident Medical Officer wrote “I find it impossible to state the cause of death.” There are a lot of similar words and phrases to Charlie Webb’s death and inquest documents.
Taylor was known to the hospital, he was “a depressive, with suicidal tendencies”. He had been “under psychiatric treatment.”
He left his estate to his widowed mother and his brother and sister, this included two houses – 34 and 36 Fawkner Street, South Yarra (worth a small fortune now!)
Connections and Speculations
Was Hickey Taylor the source of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam? (Commenter Em and I believe so!). We know that it was printed by New Zealand company Whitcombe and Tombs and that an identical copy has never been found. (Was it a limited army print run?) I haven’t been able to find Taylor on any New Zealand Immigration and Passenger lists in the 1940s, so I would say if the Rubaiyat came via Hickey Taylor it might well have been via a Kiwi Revue member, such as renowned female impersonator Phil Jay, who played in the same cast as Taylor in “The Girlfriend“.
We can hypothesise about the relationship between the two men and also about Carl Webb’s manicure, careful shave, well-developed calf muscles and wedge shaped feet, noted at the time of his death. We could speculate whether this was the end of an affair, an assisted suicide or a case of moving a dying Charlie somewhere where he could be found without linking him to his theatre friends. Perhaps someone else deposited the suitcase at the station? If we think about the laws and climate of the time, an anonymous death makes a certain amount of sense: Victoria only removed the death penalty for sodomy in 1949. It was only between 1975 and 1997 that Australian states and territories gradually repealed their sodomy laws and began gay law reform.
It also appears that Carl may have told his family he was in Cottesloe, working as an electrician, as per the solicitor’s advertisement regarding Gladys May Scott’s will (posted on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page by Lachlan Kelly). Where was Carl between the end of 1946 and November 1948 and what was he doing?
The Tidying-Up-At-The-End Bit
I think the first Cipher Mysteries post I ever read was “On Carl Webb, Truth and Beauty” (5 August 2022) where Nick warned us against “The one true narrative”:
Maybe we can now each spin our own tidy yarn tying together personally preferred loose threads…But… by doing this, I think we’d be dancing around some sinkhole-sized gaps, not in our preferred story (which will always sound nice to our own ears), but in Carl Webb’s actual story.
What was the American connection? Had Webb travelled to America? Did Doff give Webb the Rubaiyat? Did Webb have a replacement partner lined up? Might he actually have been gay, and married Doff to hide his sexuality? What instruments did he make … Did he have a police record?
My own interest here was first sparked when Bromby Street was mentioned: I initially felt sure the Somerton Man case had something to do with signals intelligence (there were at least fourteen different signals intelligence related sites in the local area during World War II). But I think we should now add a relationship with Hickey Taylor to the list of possible narratives to consider. Might the story have more in common with that of poor Alan Turing, needlessly persecuted because of his sexual preference for men?
I suspect this one may have legs (with well-defined calf muscles?).
Finally: thank you John Sanders for initially pointing out that Gerald Keane had travelled to New Zealand – I think that put us on this track, and thank you also Poppins for finding Hickey Taylor. Punters: keep the commentary “noice” or Aunty Jack will “rip your bloody arms off!” (Sorry Nick, Aunty Jack is an old Australian reference, from before my time here!) And thanks Nick for promoting my comment to a post; it gives a good opportunity for further sleuthing and mature reflection.
I mean, tracking Dermott Derham ‘Derry’ George (of 13 Wandeen Road, S.E.6, mechanic in 1939 Victoria census) and his wife Rita Mabel (nee Dixon, married 1942 in Victoria, maybe at Hoffman’s Road, Keilor, home duties in 1946 Victoria census, died in Keilor in 1998), and I guess his brother Dermott James George and Olga Burge George (both at 13 Wandeen Road in 1939, and again in 1941) is all very well, but it’s not really much of anything. Oh, and driving in his 746 c.c. M.G.J. in 1935, and his M.G. J4 in 1937 and 1938 and 1938 again for the Light Car Club? Nope, not that gripped, sorry.
So what’s next?
Masonic Registers and Card Indexes, maybe?
This is what I’m thinking might possibly give us a lead on Gerald Keane and/or Carl Webb.
There’s a whole load of Australian Masonic Registers and Card Indexes 1830-1991 now being digitised and prepared for publication on familysearch.org, which is just the kind of thing I like to trawl through just in case. (But it’s not up yet.) Similarly, the Museum of Freemasonry in NSW also has digitised a lot of its Masonic records, though these are not yet available online. Still, you’d have thought the Adelaide Masonic Centre Museum at 254 North Terrace, Adelaide and its Grand Lodge Library (the J. R. Robertson Masonic Memorial Library) might have something like the card indexes each Lodge had, right?
Wrong! Because it turns out that tons (almost literally) of masonic registers and card indexes from South Australia have been lodged (if you’ll excuse the pun) in an Australian archive, including a downloadable finding aid listing all the individual documents – I know because I actually read it a few months back. But… I have since lost my copy of that file and now can’t find it again. Which is unbelievably annoying.
So, can anyone help me find this document again?
Royal Adelaide Hospital
Carl Webb was not a well man. At the time of his death, he had an enlarged spleen (which must surely have been hugely painful), and it appears (from his hair) that he had been exposed to dangerously high (and as yet unexplained) levels of lead some 2-3 weeks before his death. Moreover, it seems likely to me that what killed him was an overdose of heart medication (though whether that was self-inflicted, deliberate, or merely accidental is a quite separate issue).
TL;DR – Carl Webb was not, as the phrase goes, a happy bunny.
Hence, I’ve long wondered whether Webb might have been admitted to (and discharged) from a hospital in the month before his death – and given that he was found on Somerton Beach, I’ve specifically wondered about the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
Interestingly, the admissions register for the RAH have been digitised up to 1961, and are accessible up to 31st December 1936. These look like this:
Now, it’s not clear to me when (or to whom) the Admissions Register scans covering November 1948 will/are be accessible. There seems no obvious reason why film # 102936290 isn’t available online, but might it be accessible in person via an LDS Family History Centre? Perhaps someone here will know what the deal is (because I certainly don’t, alas).
Update!
Though Google wasn’t as helpful as normal, I eventually found a copy of the missing document in my mobile phone’s pdf cache. It was SRG 490, “Grand Lodge of Antient, Free & Accepted Masons of Australia”, held at the State Library of South Australia. More to follow when I’ve gone through it properly…
Some Cipher Mysteries commenters have speculated that Gerald (Jerry) Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s might have connected him to the run of “Under The Counter” at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal in November 1948. But is there any actual evidence of this? Keane doesn’t appear in the UTC programme, so why should we think this is so?
From Chief Mechanist to Caretaker…
As commenter Poppins pointed out, Jerry Keane was the Chief Mechanist for J. C. Williamson’s 1937/1938 production of Victoria Regina. He was also the Chief Mechanist for the (Melbourne-based) Borovansky ballet when they went on tour in New Zealand in 1944: so I think we can reasonably presume that he was the Chief Mechanist on tour with the two production companies.
Yet at the time of his accidental death in 1960, Keane was working for J. C. Williamson’s “scenery store situated at 47 Richmond Terrace, RICHMOND as a caretaker and a storeman, and his duties were to see that the premises were secure at night and the Firedoor was closed at night” (as deposed by his fellow theatrical employee Edward James Morgan of 1 Kennedy Street, North Richmond). Which, given that he seems to have started as a caretaker in the Camperdown Mechanics Institute back in 1915, would seem to have Fate bringing him full circle back to where he began.
Maybe the Borovansky Ballet?
So, what was Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s in late 1948? We also now know that the Borovansky Ballet were popular with Australian audiences and continued touring for many years after: two productions from this time were Terra Australis (1946) and The Black Swan (1949). So it is entirely possible that he continued in his role as Chief Mechanist with the Borovansky Ballet throughout this period.
However, the corresponding NZ page for 1948 has no performances at all by the Borovansky Ballet, but many performances by Ballet Rambert in association with J. C. Williamson’s (from May 1948 to June 1948). The NZ page for 1949 has none at all for either ballet company. Yet even though Ballet Rambert performed in Adelaide in November 1948 (i.e. immediately before “Under the Counter”), I saw no sign of Jerry Keane in the programme for their performance there.
Perhaps some intrepid soul will find something similar to J. C. Williamson’s Salary Book 1933-1943 (first mentioned here by one of the many ghosts of Steve Hurwood), but for 1947-1949?
Maybe “Under The Counter”?
It’s entirely possible that someone will find Jerry Keane mentioned in travel records relating to Cicely Courtneidge’s “Under The Counter” production as it finished its mammoth four-year tour in Adelaide in November 1948. So… what happened?
The performances prior to Adelaide had been in Perth, though some performances that were due to happen in Kalgoorlie after that were unfortunately cancelled “because of the coal strike“. I should perhaps note that the Perth “Workers Star” described the (admittedly fairly lightweight) show as “reactionary twaddle“:
CICELY Courtneidge’s show, Under the Counter, in Perth now, is a dirty piece of boosting for blackmarketeers, and squeezes in a few reactionary cracks at the British Labor Government and the Communists. Stooping to this kind of reactionary twaddle won’t get the big theatre magnates anywhere with Aussie audiences. They obviously found the show very boring, it hardly raised a laugh. The night the Star reviewer went His Majesty’s showed so many empty seats the box office must have made a loss on it.
The main body of the company travelled by train from Perth, arriving on Monday 15th November 1948, just a few hours before the performance. Cicely Courtneidge’s accompanist Robert Probst (who later got into hot water for disparaging the quality of Australian orchestras) flew to Adelaide on Saturday 13th November 1948 to rehearse on the Sunday. (Though Cicely Courtneidge herself may have flown on Friday 12th.)
Courtneidge went shopping on the 22nd to buy some pyjamas to take back for her husband (no, I’m not making it up), and after the show’s run had finished, went to stay at a bookmaker’s house on Palm Beach with her main man Thorley Walters. The Sydney Truth gleefully reported:
When Cicely Courtneidge and Thorley Walters left for home during the week, Palm Beach lost two of its most colorful visitors. Cicely used to prance into the surf in a bright yellow brassiere top with bright royal blue trunks and Thorley had a pair of orange trunks which used to glow in the dark. Cicely was forced to put splits in the sides of her shorts as her avoirdupois increased (she admitted putting on a stone and a half in Australia). As the sun sank to rest below the purple hills at Palm Beach Thorley’s trunks became more of an illuminated address and the sight of his luminous posterior bobbing about in the briny is some thing the locals won’t forget for a long time.
Courtneidge flew to Melbourne on 29th November 1948; and later, after a farewell party at Prince’s, she flew to Honolulu on 17th December 1948.
Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter Poppins, we now know that Carl Webb’s close relative Gerald Keane was known as Jerry Keane. This was from the souvenir programme for a J. C. Williamson production of “Victoria Regina” that ran from 1937 to 1938 (the file is dated October 1937, but the front cover has the hand-written note “Auckland NZ 1938”). Page 10 has a list of the “Heads of Stage Departments”, one of whom is:
So let’s have a look at Jerry Keane.
Gerald Thomas “Jerry” Keane
Gerald Thomas Keane was born in Ballarat East, Victoria in 1889: in 1915, he married Freda Grace Webb (1896-1964, sister of Carl Webb) in Victoria. There’s a 23 Jan 1915 news report of Gerald and “the Webb sisters” performing in a local concert. This was also the year he lost his job as caretaker of the Camperdown Mechanics Institute, as per this letter of 14 Aug 1915.
Mr. Gerald Keane, son of Mrs. Keane, of [130] Manifold street, who has been on the staff of J. C. Williamson for over twenty years was in Camperdown on Thursday, on a visit to his people. Mr. Keane has had an extended trip with the Russian ballet, visiting Adelaide, and then Brisbane.
Gerald and Freda had three children: Leo Vivian (born in Camperdown in 1915), John Russell (‘Jack’) (born in 1917), and Gwendoline Mary (born 1919). In 1943 (when his son Jack died), the family address was 194 Stewart st, East Brunswick, Victoria: before that, they lived at 226 Glenlyon Road (this was their address on Boxing Day 1940 when they were witnesses for Roy Webb’s Will). As commenter Jo pointed out, Carl Webb appears to have been living with the Keane family at that time (i.e. not long before Carl’s marriage to Dorothy).
WHEN certain lottery prizes were announced in Launceston on Tuesday, two very excited people were prima ballerina, Dorothy Stevenson, of the visiting [Borovansky] ballet company, and Jerry Keane, chief mechanist accompanying the ballet. Hear that these two visitors collected £10 each.
The Borovansky ballet company was based in Melbourne, founded in 1939 by Edouard Borovansky and his tall wife Xenia as the “Academy of Russian Ballet above a shop in Elizabeth Street”, whose studios then (from 1940) provided the home for the Melbourne Ballet Club. According to this page:
The year 1944 brought two landmarks for Borovansky: he became a naturalised Australian, and J.C. Williamson’s backed an Australian tour that took his company from Melbourne to Adelaide, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane, and then to New Zealand. From then until 1961 – except for occasional unfortunate breaks – the Borovansky Ballet was a permanent and popular feature of J.C. Williamson’s programming […]
Over the years, highlights of the repertoire included Laurel Martyn’s Sigrid (first presented by Borovansky in 1940), Petrouchka (1951), the complete Sleeping Princess (1952), Massine’s Symphonie Fantastique (1954), Cranko’s Pineapple Poll (1954) and, from Lichine, a full-length Nutcracker (1955) and the specially-commissioned Corrida (1956). Borovansky himself explored Australian themes for three original ballets, Terra Australis (1946), The Black Swan (1949) and The Outlaw, a 1951 retelling of the Ned Kelly saga – proving that Borovansky had become, in his own words, ‘a dinkum bloody Aussie’.
[…] Borovansky’s papers and a striking self-portrait are held in the National Library of Australia.
(PS: ballerina Dorothy Stevenson was the daughter of the Bishop of Grafton. So don’t say I don’t spoil you for interesting historical facts.)
Gerald died in 1960 in Fitzroy, Victoria.
Chief Mechanist
In a touring company (usually ballet or opera, but sometimes musicals and larger productions), the Chief Mechanist (or Head Mechanist) typically reports to the Production Manager, and handles planning, logistics and staff rostering, to ensure that each night’s performance does exactly what it is says in the souvenir programme. Hence Jerry Keane “accompanying the ballet” company on tour as its Chief Mechanist makes perfect sense.
Compared to theatre productions, where Stage Assistants (and sometimes “Mechanical Staff”) typically report to a Stage Director, the role of a Mechanist would involve wrangling not just the stage but also (in modern productions) flying harnesses, animatronics, and all manner of special staging effects. You can therefore think of the Chief Mechanist was kind of a techno-magician behind the scenes, turning a performance into a memorable production.
I had been looking, as you’d expect, for something completely different: but when I found out that “A Takapuna Scandal” starring Hector St Clair was available online, I thought I had to share the link with all you lovely people. Filmed around Auckland in 1927, it’s a mixture of meta-infused modernity, bad puns, and panto pratfalls. But no white ties, definitely no white ties!
Pretty much everyone and their dog now knows about the mysterious white tie (marked “J Keane” or “T Keane”, depending how you interpret the markings on it) found in the Somerton Man’s suitcase in Adelaide’s railway station. And everyone seems to have a theory about that same wretched tie (heaven knows I’ve postedmorethan enough times on this sorry subject myself).
But just to prove that, like Homer Simpson, I’ve learnt nothing from that whole experience, here’s yet another white tie theory to throw on the same miserable bonfire.
Does the white tie mean that Carl Webb (the Somerton Man) was… a fake Mason?
The Craft Baker
Even though his father, baker Richard August Webb, was a member of Malvern Lodge No. 121, nobody has yet found any evidence suggesting that Carl Webb himself was a Mason.
To be fair, Freemasonry was always (and indeed still is) an older man’s game: a quick glance at the adverts in modern glossy Freemason magazines will likely yield not lifestyle tips but “deathstyle” retirement home chic. So it should be no huge surprise if, as a younger man, Carl Webb had failed to follow his father’s floury footsteps into The Craft.
Of course, I’d like to look at the member list of Malvern Lodge No. 121 just as much as anyone else with half an interest in this whole cold case: but I have a hunch he wasn’t himself a properly paid up Mason.
The Keane Mason?
Were there other Masons in his family? Researchers commenting here have been getting a little excited of late by the connection between Carl Webb’s late brother Roy (d. 1943) and the Gavey family via Roy’s wife.
The Gaveys had some bad ‘uns, for sure: and they also had enduring links to the Masons. (I’ll leave disentangling the two as an exercise for the reader.)
But I wonder… might Carl Webb’s closest practical link to the Masons have actually been via the Keane family? He was certainly close to the Keanes: he was, as Jo pointed out, living with the Keanes prior to getting married. And it was Carl Webb’s family link to Gerald Thomas Keane that famously made the hair on Derek Abbott’s arms verticalise.
It’s therefore entirely possible that Carl Webb’s nephew John Russell Keane was the original owner of the mysterious white tie, even if it wasn’t in the list of possessions returned to his family after his untimely death during the War.
So… was this also a Masonic tie? This isn’t itself a new suggestion, but that’s actually only the first half of what I’m wondering here.
Out Of Sight, Out Of Pocket?
Anyway, if you recall Carl Webb’s timeline, he seems to have disappeared in late 1947, very possibly to become invisible to the wife he was separated from (and who had got a support order served on him at his job at Red Point Tool Co. in April 1947, of which he angrily wanted to avoid paying a penny).
Looking at the suitcase found after his death in December 1948, there’s no affluence to the rag-tag mix of clothes there. Whatever he was doing (and if that turns out to have involved interstate car smuggling, I suspect few would now raise so much as a jaded eyebrow), it doesn’t seem to have been paying well.
Hence, I suspect that during 1948, Carl Webb was both out of sight and out of pocket. And despite having lived in Melbourne all his life, he ended up dead on an Adelaide beach. (Though clothed, not the raw Prahranian.)
So I wonder: while travelling round Australia, doing whatever it was he was doing, might Carl Webb have been passing himself off as a Keane family Mason, visiting from a Melbourne lodge, to scam some Masonic hospitality?
Might he have been passing himself off as his late nephew Jack Russell?
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.
