The ever-industrious Byron Deveson recently started to attack the fallow ground of Australian police gazettes with his investigatory trowel, and as a consequence has just dug up two intriguing new Kean(e)s for us to track down.

#1. Thomas John Kean(e) of Forestville

The first interesting Kean(e) that Byron found in the South Australia Police Gazette was caught drinking alcohol illegally in Glenelg:

Thomas John Keane (38). ……breaches of the Licensing Act, Section 150 at the All Night Cafe, Glenelg. … fined two (pounds) and costs one (pound)…. Tried at Glenelg 28/1/1937.”

Keane’s stated age was 38, so this would make his year of birth 1898 (or 1899 at a stretch). According to this Adelaide ‘Tizer article from 29 Jan 1937, Thomas John Kean was a clerk from Forestville (almost certainly the Forestville that is an Adelaide suburb just beside the main road heading out towards Glenelg, not the one in northern Sydney):

Michael Hilary Galvin, tailor, of Glenelg, and Thomas John Kean, clerk, of Forestville, were each fined £2, with £1 costs, by Messrs. A. Martin and J. C. Comley, in the Glenelg Magistrates’ Court yesterday, for having on Sunday, January 17, drunk liquor on unlicensed premises known as the All Night Cafe, Moseley square.

The same All-Night Cafe was advertising for day staff in 30th November 1948, so it’s a reasonably safe bet it was open on the night that the Somerton Man died:

WAITRESS, part or full time, no night work, good hours. All Night Cafe, Glenelg. X 2182.

Perhaps this was also where the Somerton Man had his late-night pasty, who can say? It’s a better theory than just about anything I’ve heard so far.

I then went looking for Keanes in Forestville (there can’t have been that many there back then, can there?), and found a Sapper L. J. Keane from Forestville in the 1st Australian General Hospital in Heliopolis in 1916 (here and here). A Mr L. J. Keane’s mother-in-law passed away in 1921 (she was from Adelaide & had family in Broken Hill, there’s another Trove link here).

DICKER.-On the 6th November, at her residence, 52 West terrace, City, Mary Ann (relict of Joseph Dicker), and beloved mother of R Dicker, and of Mrs. L. J. Keane, of West terrace, and sister of Mrs. M. Cullard and Mr. H. F. Nott, of Broken Hill, aged 45 years.

A young May Kean of 41 First avenue, Forestville sent this joke in to the 13 Jun 1936 Adelaide Mail:

Customer— Ginger ale.
Waiter— Pale?
Customer — No; just a glass.
May Kean, 41 First avenue, Forestville — Yellow Certificate.

Are any of these Forestville Kean(e)s connected to Thomas John Kean? Whatever happened to Thomas John Kean? Any answers that Cipher Mysteries genealogists can uncover would be really appreciated!

#2. John Joseph Kean(e) of Dulwich

Given my recent post (which explored the suggestion by two Melbourne baccarat players that the Somerton Man was a ‘nitkeeper’ at a Lonsdale Street baccarat school circa 1944), Byron’s second new Keane looks like he might just be research gold.

John Joseph Keane (34) … breach of the Lottery and Gaming Act …. at Arab Street Hotel, Adelaide. Tried at Adelaide 5/9/1932.

30 Aug 1933
FINED FOR UNLICENSED WIRELESS SETS
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/128425875
The following persons were fined in the Adelaide Police Court today for having used unlicensed wireless sets:- Albert William Sutton, of Leader street, Forestville (£5 in all): John Joseph Keane, of Greenhill road, Dulwich (£1 15/); […]

14 Aug 1936
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/48169753
John Joseph Keane, laborer, of Union street. Dulwich, was fined £5, with £1 costs, by Mr. Morgan, S.M., in No. 2 Adelaide Police Court yesterday, on a charge of having on June 17 hindered Constables Mitchell and Lavender while they were endeavoring to detect liquor offences at the Imperial Hotel, city. He pleaded not guilty.

13 Aug 1936
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/131875215
Hindered Police.
John Joseph Keane, laborer, of Dulwich, was fined £5 with £1 costs by Mr. Morgan, S.M., in the Adelaide Police Court today for having hindered two members of the police force in the execution of their duty in King William street on June 17.

25 Jan 1939
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/49791434
Charged With Hindering Police
The hearing of a charge against John Joseph Kean, bookmaker’s clerk, of Union street, Dulwich, of having, on December 25, unlawfully hindered Constables Shipway and Horsnell while they were endeavoring to detect breaches of the Licensing Act, was adjourned until tomorrow by Mr. Muirhead, P.M., in the Adelaide Police Court yesterday.

John Joseph Keane (40) ……..hindering police (nit keeping) at the Seven Stars Hotel, Adelaide. Tried at Adelaide on 26/1/1939.

27 Jan 1939
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/74411920
Hindering Charge Dismissed
A charge against John Joseph Kean, bookmaker’s clerk, of Union street, Dulwich, of having, on December 25, unlawfully hindered Constables Shipway and Horsnell while they were endeavoring to detect breaches of the Licensing Act, was dismissed by Mr. Muirhead, P.M., in the Adelaide Police Court yesterday.

In case you don’t know (I certainly didn’t), Dulwich is a suburb of Eastern Adelaide, so not too far away from the Somerton Man action.

If the Somerton Man were to turn out to have been a bookmaker’s clerk (and indeed a nitkeeper), that might turn a lot of what we know about him on its head. For example, we would probably need no explanation as to why the South Australian Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association so generously paid for his burial licence, “to prevent the victim being buried as a pauper“.

So, whatever happened to “John Joseph Kean, bookmaker’s clerk, of Union street, Dulwich”?

One Final Thought…

I hope it’s not just me who noticed that there’s something a bit odd about the two Kean(e)s. Both were born in 1898: both had John in their name; both were “clerks”; both were connected to Adelaide; both were in light trouble with the police; neither seemed to be able to spell their shared surname.

Might these two men have in fact been the same person? Entries in the police gazettes of the day were rife with crims using multiple identities (often not too different from each other so they can remember them all), so this dodgy Mr Kean(e) was not the first person to have aliases.

As per my last post on the Somerton Man, I think it’s time we invested a little effort into understanding Melbourne’s baccarat schools, because two anonymous baccarat players claimed that the Somerton Man was a nitkeeper at an illegal baccarat school in Lonsdale Street in Melbourne.

Recapping, the following appeared in the Adelaide News (26th January 1949) (and Sydney Daily Telegraph and Geraldton Guardian):

Gamblers believe dead man was “nitkeeper”

Melbourne.- Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

OK, I’d agree that doesn’t give us a great deal to work with: but at the same time it is specific enough to help us build up a set of research questions.

Lonsdale Street Baccarat Schools

In Australia, baccarat had been made illegal in 1943. Unsurprisingly, Melbourne quickly found hosting a number of baccarat schools. These were typically located in large, upper-floor office spaces (so that lookouts / cockatoos / nitkeepers could quickly pass word up if there was a police raid) and with heavily barricaded doors (so that any evidence of gambling could be removed before the police managed to force their way in).

According to the Argus 1st May 1947, p.2, there had not long before been schools in “Elizabeth st, Lonsdale st, Russell st, and Bourke st”, but they had been closed down – or rather, the gambling bosses had moved their schools to less obvious locations. The glory days of the early 1940s (when the clubs were “luxuriously” kitted out, some even offering “a whole roast pig” supper) were gone.

One of these schools had been the Rendezvous Club, on the fourth floor of Fink’s Building, also known as Fink’s Club. According to the Herald 23rd July 1947, p.3, “Solo stud poker and any card game was played there, but he [John Francis Gilligan] never saw anyone playing baccarat”. Yeah, right… 😉

By August 1947, an expose in the Herald revealed that there were now three big baccarat schools in Melbourne, in Swanton Street, Lonsdale Street, and Punt Road. One of these had a lift, which was organized never to stay on the ground floor: nits checked the punters at the street level and then again at the top before the barricaded door..

In court, it emerged that Gilligan had been associated with a club in Lonsdale Street for several years. There was definitely a baccarat school in Lonsdale Street in mid-1948, according to this report in the Herald 20th July 1948, p.4:

Recently, according to a police report, a “stand-over” man drew a gun in a baccarat school in Lonsdale Street: when he ”came to” a few minutes later he was looking down the barrels of four other pistols.

Sergeant A. Biddington, the gaming police chief who closed down the Lonsdale St baccarat school in December 1948, had had to go to a tribunal the previous month, accused of drinking on the job:

Biddington said in evidence that gaming constables Buggy and Carter, who were on the Shepparton trip under his command and had given evidence against him, were not to be trusted, and in his opinion were dishonest. He had been given information that they had conspired with baccarat bosses while they should have been catching them. He had to take them off baccarat duty because of this, and they were antagonistic toward him.

Sergeant Biddington carried on trying to shut down the baccarat schools, with the next big raid in February 1949. But of course, nothing much changed, with a court case involving a shooting from April 1949, and another shooting in May 1949. More big raids in August 1949 and November 1949 (now courtesy of a “special baccarat squad led by Inspector R. Prinett”) failed to stem the same basic tide: and so it all went on.

The only other name I found associated in the newspapers with Lonsdale Street baccarat schools was Robert Brewster: but that was in 1950.

So… Where Do We Go From Here?

When someone in January 1949 says “about four years ago”, I am sure that they would definitely mean “after baccarat became illegal” (in August 1943) and before the end of the Second World War (2nd September 1945). Those were the ‘glory days’ of the Melbourne baccarat schools, when all the customers seemed rich and beautiful, and their money dropped into the gambling bosses’ hands like so much manna from heaven. So in some ways we have a tolerably narrow date range to work with.

But where might we look for names of people who might be associated with these baccarat schools? The obvious answer would be in Melbourne police records. Even if the baccarat school owners were paying off Percy Plod (and who saw that coming, eh?), plenty of raids on schools did still happen.

The Public Record Office Victoria has the 1945 Police Gazette, and – wonderfully, I think – Photo Supplements to the Police Gazette for 1944 to 1949, and another one for 1939 to 1948. These are all on open access, though some of the other police gazettes are marked as “s11” closed access.

I have read that much of the supplements was taken up with photos of recently released convicts: but might that be not such a bad place to start?

More generally, what other resources are out there? Trove has nothing much on John Francis Gilligan before 1947 (when he was shot), because in July 1936 he had been sent to jail for seven years for receiving stolen goods:

Found guilty of having received stolen goods valued at £800, Leonard Schiffman, aged 50 years, of Rose-Street, West Coburg, grocer, and John Gilligan alias Forbes, aged 29 years, of Malleson Street, Richmond, clerk, were sentenced by Judge Richardson in General Sessions to imprisonment for terms of seven years each.

The defendants’ case probably wasn’t helped much by the “burglary at the Crown Law Office of the safe and the removal of the file of documents dealing with the case“.

I do also wonder whether researchers should be (somehow) asking Victorian retirees for reminiscences on the Lonsdale Street baccarat school. Whatever wall of silence was there in the 1940s and 1950s should have fallen down long ago.

Finally, I do also wonder whether one or more of Melbourne’s baccarat detectives might have recognized the Somerton Man, but then decided not to say a word? Money is money, after all: and silence can be golden.

Seventy years ago this weekend, a man’s body was found on Somerton Beach just south-west of Adelaide: our inability to identify this “Somerton Man” or even to reconstruct any significant part of his life has turned him into one of South Australia’s favourite cold cases. His unexplained death has inspired books, novels, TV documentaries and countless web pages and blog posts: behind this mini-industry is a panoply of breathless conspiracy theories, ranging from spurned suicidal lover to Russian rocket spy to inter-state car criminal (as if anyone would even consider such a thing, hrrmmmh).

On this day, though, I think it’s time to take a rest from that whole treadmill, and to look at the Somerton Man from a quite different angle.

History, Evidence, Disappointment

Cold cases are, almost definition, historical: so to “do history” on them, we need to select both historical evidence and a historical methodology / mindset.

But even though social historians love nothing more than diaries, journals, or even tax records of ordinary people, for the Somerton Man we only have what one might call tertiary social history evidence – incidental objects of low social signification such as cigarettes, laundry tags, chewing gum, combs, and (what I would categorise as) a fairly random assortment of men’s clothes. Can we read social history clues and cues to locate the Somerton Man in a social milieu? People have tried this trick, for sure: but I think it is fair to say that this has yielded very little of use.

Similarly, even though political historians tend to work from a more high-end (yet slim) frame of reference (from Chifley to Churchill), it hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to read the mysterious unreadable note attributed to the Somerton Man as implying some kind of espionage-centric back-story for him: a Russian spy scouting out South Australia’s uranium secrets, or defecting from some international conference. Yet the supposed ‘tradecraft’ evidence holding this aloft is something that I’ve never found any genuine substance to.

Finally, despite the South Australian police’s loss of almost all its evidence (Gerry Feltus had only a small folder of fragments to work with), hundreds of newspaper articles on Trove plus the detailed text of inquest reports have yielded a fine factual slurry for researchers to sieve and then rake over in search of That Single Golden Nugget Of Information That Turns Everything Upside Down. Yet even the massed eyeballs of the Internet’s army of DIY forensic historians – sometimes derided as armchair detectives, but who have actually managed to uncover all manner of interesting evidence – have struggled to gain any significant kind of purchase on the Somerton Man’s slippy upwards slopes. What was his profession? What was his nationality? Satisfactory answers remain out of reach for even such (apparently basic) questions as “if the Somerton Man wasn’t “T. Keane”, why did his suitcase have T. Keane’s tie and underwear?”

In short, none of the historical hats we have worn when we try to understand the Somerton Man seems to have had the (mythical) power of a Holmesian deerstalker: and is the game even afoot in the way many (most?) people think it really ought to be? The answer would seem to be that it is not.

As of December 2018, I don’t believe that we have any genuine idea who the Somerton Man was, or precisely why he died (i.e. mishap, murder, or suicide), or where he had come from, or even what he was doing in Adelaide at all. For all of these, we have well-stocked warehouses of might-possibly-have-beens, for sure: but this is a situation only someone wanting to weave and embellish a story around the scanty facts could be truly satisfied with. Anyone who wants to know what happened to lead up to the Somerton Man’s death is, for now, likely to be in a state of disappointment.

Random Clothes

Putting all that accumulated historical disappointment to one side, I actually think we are very close to being able to reconstruct a little about the Somerton Man’s life and times in a useful way: and even if the precise details remain murky (and may remain so for some time), I suspect that there’s still a lot we can now say.

For a start, his clothes were not from a single shop or town or even country (some were American, some were Australian): even his shoes and slippers were different sizes. Others may disagree, but I don’t think this sartorial randomness can be read as a sign of affluence or of taste, or even of implying he was on some kind of undercover operation. Rather, to my eyes it strongly indicates that he was just plain poor – his clothing has all the hallmarks of charity donations, of Seaman’s Missions, of gifts by charity’s hospital visitors.

From all this, I strongly suspect that he, like so many others in the years immediately following WW2, was a recent immigrant to the country (he had air mail stickers in his suitcase), and quite probably not a legal one (no official record of him could be found). Exactly where he originally came from I can’t say: I suspect that the faded tan on his legs may imply that he had earlier that year been working outdoors, perhaps riding horses on a farm. Remember that Paul Lawson stated:

On looking at the deceased legs I am of the opinion that he was used to wearing high heel riding boots. I form that opinion because the muscles of his legs were formed high up behind the knees, similar to the muscles of a woman who wears high heeled shoes. [Gerry Feltus, “The Unknown Man”, p.85.]

I should also note what John Burton Cleland wrote about the air mail stickers:

Air-mail stickers in suitcase – corresponded with some one at a distance – other State more likely than Britain (special air-mail letter forms usually used for latter).

All the same, my current suspicion is that he arrived by surreptitious means (e.g. using fake papers) in Australia around October 1948, perhaps from the United States, perhaps staying in New Zealand for a period of time (where the Rubaiyat seems to have come from) en route, and – like Charles Mikkelsen – was corresponding with one or more people there. But all of that remains just a guess.

The Known Man

Who was the Somerton Man? Apart from the nurse Jessica Harkness / Jo Thomson (who told her daughter that she knew who the Somerton Man was, but wouldn’t tell the police at the time or even Gerry Feltus decades after the event), not a single person has admitted to knowing who he was. Nobody at all! As for me, I don’t believe for a New York second that the Somerton Man somehow entered Australia and made his way to Somerton Beach to die without encountering en route a whole load of people – fifty to a hundred at a minimum – who would subsequently recognize him if they wanted to. And so I think that the title of Gerry Feltus’s book – “The Unknown Man” – belies what I think will prove to be a difficult truth to swallow about the Somerton Man: that a whole set of people knew who he was, but for broadly the same reason chose to say nothing.

The Italian word for this is omertà – a code of silence surrounding Mafia criminal activities, along with a shared, mutual refusal to give any evidence to the police. (Even former police.) Everyone knows what happens to squealers, even the KGB: even though the CIA says the story about captured double agent Pyotr Popov being thrown alive into a furnace isn’t actually true, it is very likely still presented as if it were true to GRU new recruits, to persuade them of the value of “omertà-ski”. And let’s not pretend that the Novichok attack never happened, right?

Anyway, when Gerry Feltus had worked out the name of the (unnamed) nurse whose phone number was written on the specific Rubaiyat connected to the slip of paper in the dead man’s pocket, he interviewed her several times. Yet even though, as a retired police officer, he knew full well that she told him nothing of the truth surrounding the dead man that she was clearly aware of, he never really twigged why that was the case. For me, though, the reason for her prolonged silence seems all too obvious: that she was aware of the omertà surrounding the dead man, and wasn’t prepared to be the first one to say That Which Must Not Be Spoken out loud.

The presence of an Italian organized crime syndicate in Melbourne is something that became all too apparent in the 1960s, with the spate of Victoria Market murders being triggered (literally) by the accession wars following the deaths (by natural causes) of crime godfather Domenico “The Pope” Italiano and his enforcer Antonio “The Toad” Barbara in 1962. This crime group was described at the time in a secret report by John T. Cusack as follows:

It is frequently referred to by its adherents as the Society. Some, particularly outsiders, call it mafia. Actually it is not mafia. The latter is exclusively Sicilian in origin and membership. Since the Society in Australia is exclusively Calabrian, it is obviously a derivation of the ancient Calabrian Secret Criminal Society known as the L’Onorata Societa (The Honoured Society), ‘Ndrangheta (Calabrian dialect for The Honoured Society), also referred to by some as Fibia.

From my perspective, the most powerful explanation for the silence surrounding the Somerton Man would be not that nobody knew who he was, but instead that he was some kind of footsoldier in a criminal society (I would predict Melbourne, given that the Melbourne train arrived in Adelaide early). I suspect this was (in 1948) not the ‘Ndrangheta, but rather home-grown gangsters The Combine (more on that in a moment). More broadly, my inference is that lots of people knew exactly who he was, but deliberately chose to say nothing. Gerry Feltus certainly knew he was being spun a line by Jo Thomson, but perhaps he will live to be surprised by how many people knew who exactly “The (Un)known Man” was.

I hope that some day soon someone will come forward – even anonymously, seventy years on – to defy the code of silence and finally tell even a small part of the Somerton Man’s story.

Daphne Page

What was it like to deal with omertà in Australia in the late 1940s? Fortunately, we have a pretty good idea. Jo Thomson’s (soon-to-be) husband Prosper (George) Thomson got involved in a court case where he was wedged between a lady called Daphne Page and a dangerous Melbourne individual who he would not name in court. The judge seems to have taken a hearty dislike to everyone involved, somewhat reluctantly judging the case in George’s favour but ordering him to pay the costs.

From this, we know that “Early in December [1947] he [Thomson] went to Melbourne to sell a car for another man.” When a cheque from the “other man” bounced, Thomson was unable to do anything about it: and so refused to pass on the “black market balance” (that he hadn’t received) of the failed transaction to Daphne Page back in Adelaide. Page then told him she’d get her whole family to pretend that she’d instead loaned him £400 and would take him to court. In the end, the judge thought that Thomson’s (who had welched on a black market deal with Page when the Melbourne crim he’d sold to had welched on his half of a deal, and then told her to forget all about it) poor behaviour was more legally justifiable than Page’s poor behaviour: but it’s hard to feel grotesquely sympathetic towards either.

But even so, that’s what can easily happen when things as simple as buying or selling a car for its actual value are, thanks to the Price Commission, effectively pushed out onto the black market and criminalized. According to the Barrier Miner 15th June 1948, p.8:

Men in the trade said honest secondhand car dealers had almost been forced out of business during the war. Records showed that 90 per cent of all used car sales were on a friend-to-friend basis and they never passed through the trade.

So: the man the nurse Jo Thomson was living with was directly connected to dangerous Melbourne criminals who operated under a code of silence (George Thomson wouldn’t name the man in court). This is not a conjecture, this is just a consequence of being a garage proprietor and car dealer in 1948, a time when 90% of car buying and selling was done on the black market. Thomson expressed no shame or sorrow for having tried to broker a black market car deal between Daphne Page and Melbourne criminals (even if it went wrong), because that is what he had to do to stay in the car business: you might as well have asked a dog not to bark as ask him to change his ways.

Suggested Links to Melbourne

One story that appeared in the Adelaide News (26th January 1949) (and in the Sydney Daily Telegraph and Geraldton Guardian) suggested a connection between the Somerton Man and a Melbourne baccarat school:

Gamblers believe dead man was “nitkeeper”

Melbourne.- Two promininent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

Nitkeepers / cockatoos were basically lookout men, hired to stop police and undercover officers from getting inside the door: they were equally part of the street bookie’s world.

Gerry Feltus’s “The Unknown Man” (p.118) also included a cutting from the Mirror (no date given, but much later):

One Mirror “investigator” had more than just an idea to go on.

The Tamam Shud, he said, was more than just a page torn from a book.

It was the usual signature of a man who had twice stood trial for murder.

Every big baccarat player in post-war Melbourne knew who “Tamam Shud” was.

He was the enforcer!

In the hey day of a man called “Twist” he said and “Freddie The Frog” Harrison – himself executed – “Tamam Shud” was known and in [the] nether world of sly grog and illegal baccarat, feared.

Obviously the dead man had fallen afoul of the underworld and had been executed.

In fact, Melbourne detectives had investigated the same theory years before.

But this apparently promising lead had been a dead end.

Note that “Twist” (Jack Eric Twist) and Freddie “The Frog” Harrison (who was killed in 1959) were two of the five people who made up “The Combine”, controlling much of the organized crime in Melbourne in the years following WW2, via the Federated Ship Painters’ and Dockers’ Union. The others were Harold Nugent, Norman Bradshaw (AKA “Cornelius”), and Joseph Patrick “Joey” Turner (AKA “Monash”).

The Lonsdale Street Baccarat School

There’s a nice 1947 introduction to Melbourne’s gambling scene here.

Interestingly, the baccarat school on Lonsdale Street (a part of Melbourne long associated with brothels) was raided and shut down two weeks after the Somerton Man’s death. An article in the Melbourne Argus dated 16th December 1948 runs:

BACCARAT DENS BROKEN, POLICE CLAIM

Big city school closed

WITH the closing of a notorious school in Lonsdale street, city, on Tuesday night, gaming police claim they have at last broken the baccarat racket.
The school was the second last of the big games which yielded promoters thousands of pounds in the last five years.
Police say that the only other school of any consequence is operating at Elwood. They are confident this will be closed in the near future.
On Tuesday night the gaming squad served a man in Lonsdale st with papers informing him that his premises have been declared a common gaming house.
Previously, other premises in Lonsdale st and also in Swanston st, city, were also “declared.”

ENRICHED CRIMINALS

Sergeant A. Biddington, gaming police chief, said yesterday that the fight to beat the racket had been long and hard.
There were 14 schools in Melbourne two and a half years ago, all run by desperate characters. Huge sums changed hands nightly, enriching many well-known criminals.
In the last 12 months, he said, baccarat schools were raided nightly at two-hourly intervals.
Not only were the “bosses” upset but players, many of them respectable citizens and inveterate gamblers, became frightened.
The result was that attendances dwindled and some schools closed down for lack of patrons.

“COCKATOOS” BUSY

Sgt Biddington explained that it was difficult to obtain evidence against the schools. Usually they were on the top floors of buildings, and ‘cockatoos’ were able to give a warning before police ascended stairs and made a raid.
Sgt Biddington added that by closing the baccarat dens, police will break up some of the city’s worst consorting spots for criminals.

Incidentally, the (brief, and probably not 100% truthful) memoirs of Melbourne baccarat school owner Robert Walker that ran in the Melbourne Argus in 1954 is on Trove, e.g. here. In another installment, Walker describes entering the Lonsdale Street baccalat school, on his way to see The Gambler:

To get to the club in Lonsdale st., you walk up three flights of stone steps and knock on a big fireproof steel door.

I did that, and a small trapdoor was opened.

A few minutes after doing this that day, Walker got shot in the leg by the doorman (though he lived to tell the tale). But that’s another story.

Where To From Here?

If the Somerton Man was (as was claimed) associated with the Lonsdale Street baccarat school around 1945 or so, it should be possible to piece together a list of names associated with it from the Police Gazettes and newspaper articles of the day, and then rule out all those who lived past 1st December 1948, or died before then. It might well be that if we can follow this through to its logical conclusion, we would find ourselves with a very short list of names indeed – maybe three or four. What will we then find?

As always, there’s a good chance that this will be yet another Somerton Man-style dead end, a “big fireproof steel door” at the top of the stairs that we cannot get through. But whatever the Somerton Man’s reason for being in Adelaide on the day he died, perhaps this thread offers us a glimpse not of what he was doing, but of the life he was living.

For he was a real person, living his own life in his own way, even if that isn’t how we choose to live our own lives, and that’s something that tends to get marginalized: while people who treat him purely as a historical puzzle to be solved or to give them ‘closure’ in some sense aren’t looking to remember him for what he was, but for what resolving the questions around him can do for them now. Today, though, I simply want to remember the Somerton Man, and to try to imagine (however imperfectly) the life he lived and lost.

Apologies again for previously repeating the incorrect identification of “Ronald Francis” as Dr Douglas Buxton Hendrickson. However I can fully rectify that in the best way possible, by passing on today’s announcement courtesy of Gerry Feltus: from which we can say (hopefully definitively) that “Ronald Francis” – in whose car the Rubaiyat was found – was in fact chemist John Freeman of 24A Jetty Road, Glenelg.

I have established that the person who owned the car in which the relevant copy of the Rubaiyat was located and his wife are both deceased. Their next of kin have recently given me permission to release identities and details relevant to the ‘Unknown Man’ investigation. John Freeman, in December, 1948, was a Chemist, and resided with his wife in premises attached to their Chemist shop, at 24A Jetty Road, Glenelg. Their family car, a small Hillman Minx was more often than not parked in Jetty Road, outside their shop/residence.

Gerry Feltus goes on to say that he will soon be releasing more details about the interviews he carried out, which I (unsurprisingly) very much look forward to reading.

Trove had no obvious reference to John Freeman: but in January 1945, a Colin Charles Freeman did have a thief in his Jetty Road flat stealing a purse containing four pounds and six shillings. This leads us to an announcement dated 11 Sep 1945:

To whom it may concern. Declaration is hereby made that on August 20, 1945, Colin Charles Freeman and John Christian Freeman, chemists, of Adelaide, disposed of all interest and share in, and connection with, Howard Products. Aust.

With this, plus a little help from a long-running Somerton Man thread on Reddit, we can see that the two Freeman chemists were both cremated in Centennial Park:
* Colin Charles Freeman died on 23 March 1985. (Last abode: Somerton Park)
* John Christian Freeman died on 20 January 2014. (Last abode: Belair)

Both brothers are also listed as associates of the University of Adelaide in the 1955 Calendar (p.140):
* Freeman, Colin Charles…..1944
* Freeman, John Christian….1943

Beyond that, however, there seems to be little in Trove or elsewhere about either of them. Though I suspect this may improve before very long…

John Christian Freeman

According to Rootsweb:

Birth: 10 Jul 1922 in Parkside, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Note: Born: John Christian FREEMAN. Father : Charles Herbert FREEMAN. Mother : Doris Sylvia BERNAN.
Source : South Australian Births 1907 – 1928. Book : 98A Page : 358 District : Ade.

Colin Charles Freeman

According to Rootsweb:

Birth: 11 Dec 1920 in Unley, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Note: Born: Colin Charles FREEMAN. Father : Charles Herbert FREEMAN. Mother: Doris Sylvia BERNAN.
Source : South Australian Births 1907 – 1928. Book : 67A Page : 109 District : Ade.

According to the MyHeritage site:

Colin Charles Freeman was born in 1922, to Charles Herbert Freeman and Doris Sylvia Freeman [nee Bernau]
Charles was born on May 4 1897, in West Thebarton, South Australia, Australia.
Doris was born on July 18 1898, in Eaglehawk, Victoria, Australia.
Colin had 2 siblings.
Colin married Margaret Cynthia Freeman (born Grasby) on [– –] 1944, at age 22 at [——].
Margaret was born on September 25 1922, in “Xarma” Nursing Home, South Terrace, South Australia, Australia.
They had 2 children.
Colin passed away on [March 23] 1985, at age 63.

While at the University of Adelaide, he passed his Practical Inorganic Chemistry examination in 1940.

Finally: for those interested in car-related stories, Colin Charles Freeman appeared in court in regard to a driving incident in 1941:

At an Inquest yesterday into the death of Elizabeth Matthew Harrod, 71, pensioner of Milner street, Prospect, the Acting city Coroner (Mr. G. Ziesing) found that she died at the Royal Adelaide Hospital on May 24 from multiple injuries received when she was struck by a motor car on the Main North road Enfield, on the same day.
Mr. Ziesing found that the negligence of the driver, Colin Charles Freeman, chemist, of Nottage terrace, Medindle Gardens, was not sufficiently culpable to warrant his taking further action.

I’ve just had a nice email from Derek Abbott, who tells me that even though the recent documentary’s producer Wayne Groom was – for a long time – convinced that Ronald Francis was Dr Donald Buxton Hendrickson of 13 Pier-street etc etc, he is now no longer sure. Did someone come forward with a name? I now don’t know. Whatever happened to have been said or claimed at the Glenelg screening of the film, everyone involved now appears to be back-pedalling all the way off the end of Glenelg Pier. Which normally ends badly.

To be precise, the Hendrickson name first came up in 2011 when an online researcher (who had been working his way through a list of nearby doctors) ran it past Derek Abbott. Of course, because Dr Hendrickson died in 1979, Derek dismissed it as being incompatible with Gerry Feltus’s account: but as with all mildly-encrypted historical stories, there’s still plenty of room for substitution and adjustment, so who knows?

So now it looks like we may have had a false alarm here. Not sure. Really don’t know. Just thought I’d let you all know.

Thanks to online commenter Clive (who was at a screening of the Somerton Man documentary in Glenelg a short time ago), we now know that “Ronald Francis” (in whose car the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat was found) was in fact Dr Douglas Buxton Hendrickson of 13 Pier St, Glenelg. The information (announced by Derek Abbott at the showing) appeared online on Gordon Cramer’s blog, where it rapidly accreted additional notes courtesy of Byron Deveson and others.

Here’s a picture of Dr Hendrickson from 1950 (found by Clive in Trove):

We know a little more about his (non-medical) interests from this 1944 article:

DR. D. B. Hendrickson’s election to the Glenelg Council for St. Leonard’s Ward comes at an appropriate time, for it is just 105 years since his great-grandfather, the late Mr. John Lawrence) landed from Holdfast Bay at St. Leonards after a voyage from Fifeshire (Scotland). At 34. Dr. Hendrickson is the youngest member of the council. He is a brother of Lyndall Hendrickson, the violinist. He learned the piano for 18 months, when a boy. but says he then became lazy. There was certainly no sign of laziness about him in the boxing ring. A fine amateur boxer, he not only won his Adelaide University blue for boxing, but also displayed great gameness in the ring.

Other hobbies include debating, horse riding, surfing, fishing, and stamp collecting.

Dr Hendrickson’s Timeline

* 18th February 1911: born in Balaklava, South Australia.
* 15th June 1933: Married Eileen Ivy Schurgott at Claremont, South Australia
* Dec 1941: Divorced
* 25th July 1942: Married Doris Arculas Arculus Davis at Perth, WA
* 23rd September 1979: Died Adelaide

From this, it was immediately clear that Gerry Feltus (who was assigned the Somerton Man cold case after 2000, The Unknown Man pp.11) could not have interviewed Dr Hendrickson (who had died in 1979). So it seems a reasonably safe bet that it was not Hendrickson himself but rather Hendrickson’s brother-in-law with whom Gerry Feltus had talked (The Unknown Man pp.104-105). However, Dr Hendrickson had two younger sisters…

* Cynthia Elizabeth b. Gilbert, SA in 1914. (Died 7th April 2008 at Holly Residential Care, Adelaide.)
* Lyndall Maud b. Gilbert, SA in 1917.

…and hence two brothers-in-law…

* Cynthia married Sgt. John Hurst in March 1945.
* Lyndall married Surgeon-Lieut. Graeme Robson, son of Lieut.-Colonel and Mrs. O. W. E. Robson, of Mosman.

There’s a nice picture of (the very talented violinist) Lyndall Hendrickson from 1942 here:

It was reported before Lyndall’s marriage in 1946 that she planned to move to England to continue her musical career there. So… might she still be alive and living in Penzance in Cornwall (at the tender age of 101)? It’s possible.

Two Hendrickson Car Stories

Here’s the first one from 1946:

Car Licence Suspended For an Hour

One hour’s disqualification from driving his car was imposed by Mr. Coombe, S.M.. in the Adelaide Police Court today on Dr. Douglas Buxton Hendrickson, of Pier street, Glenelg, who pleaded guilty to a charge of having driven his car at Adelaide on November 2 while it was uninsured.
In addition to the disqualification he was fined £5.
For having on the same day driven his motor car while it was unregistered he was fined £1 with 10/ costs.

MINIMUM REDUCED

Mr. Coombe said that he would not have ordered any disqualification in this case had he the power to do so. However, he could reduce the minimum term of three months.
Dr. Hendrickson told the court that owing to the pressure of work during the recent measles epidemic he had overlooked the matter of the renewal of his car’s insurance and registration.
When he was stopped by motor traffic police at 11.45 a.m. on November 2 he was returning from the city, where he had been to collect measles serum.
“If my licence is suspended for any great length of time I will find it difficult to carry on my practice without inconvenience to my patients.” said Dr. Hendrickson.

Mr. Coombe said that there were special reasons why, in this case, he had decided to reduce the minimum fine and term of disqualification.
Mr. J. L. Travers appeared for Dr. Hendrickson.

And (on a lighter note) here’s the second one from 1941:

Girl Charmed A Snake; Can’t Get Rid Of It.

MISS LYNDALL HENDRICKSON, TALENTED YOUNG ADELAIDE VIOLINIST, IS SORRY NOW THAT SHE CHARMED A PYTHON.

It followed her into a car at Whyalla, when, for a bet, she charmed it with her violin music.

She had to return to Port Augusta with the python a 6½ft. pet of a Whyalla storekeeper — behind the back seat.

It was still there the next morning. The owner wants it back alive, so, if Miss Hendrickson can’t charm it out of the car with her violin, part of the car will have to be dismantled.

(Lyndall had another snake-related story reported here.)

While trawling through the dear old Adelaide Advertiser’s Law Court section for the weeks following the Somerton Man’s death (where cases from Adelaide Juvenile court were occasionally reported), I found the following story about interstate car crime, which I wanted to keep a copy of on the blog.

Interstate Men Charged

Two interstate men — Aubrey Whittle, 26, mechanic, of no fixed abode; and Leo Walsh Meyers, 22, interstate transport driver, of Southy street, Elwood, Victoria — were charged on two counts involving a sedan motor car which had been stolen from Melbourne. A third interstate man — Maurice Gleeson, 22, seaman, of Bay street, Port Melbourne — who had allegedly been in company with Whittle lately, was charged with having had insufficient lawful means of support.

Whittle pleaded guilty to having unlawfully had a motor car in his possession on November 18 without the consent of the owner, Milton Trisler, of St. Kilda, Victoria; and on the same occasion illegally used the car without the consent of the owner.

He was imprisoned for six months on each charge, to be served concurrently. He had admitted 12 previous convictions. Meyers, who had pleaded not guilty to two similar charges, was acquitted, and discharged.

AFP Hender, who prosecuted, said that Trisler’s car had been stolen from his home at St. Kilda. Several days later, it was alleged, Whittle and Meyers had taken the car to a garage at the rear of the Centralia Hotel, North terrace, Adelaide, and asked the proprietor to reduce the car. Before this could be done, defendants collected the car, took it out to a secondhand dealer at Payneham and sold it for £600, receiving £150 in cash and a cheque for £450. Defendants had stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel, North terrace, and after they had left, a maid had found two car number plates from the stolen car wrapped in newspaper in a drawer in the room.

HAD LOADED PISTOL

Meyers was also charged with having unlawfully had a pistol in his possession on November 18, which was reasonably suspected of having been stolen; and on the same occasion had an unlicensed pistol in his possession. He pleaded not guilty to the unlawful possession charge and it was dismissed.

He pleaded guilty to the second charge and was fined £25, with 7/6 costs, and the pistol was confiscated. He admitted three previous convictions, including one for a similar offence.

PCC Bartlett, in evidence, said that he questioned defendant outside the Centralia Hotel on November 18 concerning a stolen car. He searched defendant and found a loaded pistol in his pocket. When asked whether he had a licence, defendant broke away and was not recaptured until there had bern a long chase through the yards of the Adelaide Railway Station.

Gleeson pleaded not guilty to having had insufficient lawful means of support on November 18, but was found guilty and imprisoned for two months. Admitting that he gave a false name and address to Detective Harper on the same occasion. Gleeson was imprisoned for 14 days. He admitted eight previous convictions. Detective Harper, in evidence, said that he questioned Gleeson outside the Centralia Hotel and asked him whether he knew Whittle. Gleeson replied that he had been “knocking about with him” for some days. He had deserted from the vessel Dalby at Port Adelaide several weeks ago, but did not have a job.

To my eyes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle left two quite distinct legacies. The first, of course, was Sherlock Holmes, his searingly-flawed-but-unstoppably-insightful detective, whose long shadow still hangs over the entire detective fiction genre, 130+ years after A Study in Scarlet.

Yet the second was Conan Doyle’s literary conceit that one can combine wide-ranging observation with pure deduction (as opposed to merely providing a convincing scenario) so powerfully that it can completely reconstruct precisely what happened in cases of murder – which (with all legal caveats for accuracy) would need to be “beyond reasonable doubt”.

The first is fair enough, but the second… has a few issues, let’s say.

“Whatever Remains…”

“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” said Holmes in The Sign of Four, H&W’s second novel-sized outing. (Conan Doyle reprised the quote in the short stories The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet and The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier). Arguably one of the most famous Sherlock Holmes lines, this appeals not only to Holmes’ ultimate power of deduction, but also to his implicit omniscience.

Inevitably, this is precisely what the Rational Wiki’s Holmesian Fallacy web page skewers so gleefully, which itself is no more than a nice summary of numerous articles all arguing the same basic thing: that because Holmes could not possibly have conceived all the possible explanations that fitted a given case’s facts and observations, he could not have eliminated all the impossible ones.

Deduction by elimination is OK for maths problems (which are constrained by the walls of their strong logical structure), but it’s far from satisfactory for murder. My best understanding is that proof of murder is now far more often to do with demonstrating a direct forensic connection, i.e. proving a direct evidential connection between a victim’s death and the accused. Once this link is made, proving the precise details is arguably less important: that such a link has been made at all is normally enough to tell the lion’s share of a story beyond reasonable doubt.

All of which would be no more than a legalistic literary footnote for me, were it not the case that in (I would estimate) the majority of unsolved cipher theories, this kind of specious argument is wheeled out in support of the theorist’s headline claim.

Can we ever eliminate all the other possibilities in our search for the historical truth, thus rendering our preferred account the last Holmesian man standing? The answer is, of course, no: but in many ways, even attempting to do this is a misunderstanding of what historical research is all about.

Instead, once we have eliminated those (very few) hypotheses that we can prove to be genuinely impossible with the resources available to us, we then have to shift our focus onto constructing the best positive account we can. And we must accept that this will almost never be without competitors.

“The Curious Incident”

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

According to Holmes, “I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others….Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well. It was Straker who removed Silver Blaze from his stall and led him out on to the moor.”

The “curious [non-]incident” (i.e. one that really should have happened but failed to occur) is, according to this legal blog, the piece of Holmesian reasoning most often cited in court. [e.g. “Appellate Court of Connecticut cited in its recent opinion in State v. Rosado, 2012 WL 1003763 (Conn.App. 2012), to answer a hearsay question.”]

In lots of ways, noticing the absence of something is a trick that requires not only keen observation, but also a curiously un-Holmesian empathy for the rhythms, cycles, and sequences of human life. There are forensic voids (e.g. where a removed body covered a blood spatter pattern, as just about any viewer of CSI would know), but behavioural voids? Not so easy.

The Somerton Man

All of which brings me round to Australia’s curious incident of the Somerton Man. What would Sherlock Holmes have made of a death scene riddled with so many voids, so many geese that failed to cackle, so many dingoes that didn’t howl?

Naturally, the biggest absence is the lack of any identity, followed by a lack of a definitive cause of death (though the coroner put it that the death was not natural [Feltus, Ch.10]), along with a lack of any preceding timeline for the man. Beyond these ‘macro-absences’, however, there are numerous micro-absences, all of which would surely have been grist to Holmes’ mental mill:

* Overcoat but no hat
* Tickets (one used, one unused) but no money
* No wallet
* No ration card
* Absence of dirt on his shoes
* Absence of vomit on his clothes or on the beach (despite blood in his stomach)

A particular suitcase (that had been left at Adelaide Railway Station on the morning before the man’s death) then appeared as potential evidence. Once it had been strongly linked with the dead man (thanks to cotton thread), it offered an additional set of absences to puzzle over:

* No shoes (apart from the pair he was wearing)
* He had five ties but no socks (apart from the pair he was wearing)
* Air mail blank letters and six pencils but no inkpen or ink, and no received letters
* Identifying marks (“Kean”, “Keane”, “T Keane”) that led the police investigation nowhere
* Places where Labels attached to a shirt and to the suitcase itself (?) had been removed
* No medicine of any sort (yet the dead man had a significantly enlarged spleen, so one might expect him to have been to a doctor or hospital not long before)

I’ve previously blogged about the “T Keane” marks, arguing that these might well have been donated to charity following the death of local man Tom Keane in January 1947: and separately that the slippers (which were the wrong size for the dead man’s feet) and dressing gown may have been given to him by the local Mission to Seamen (Mrs John Morison was probably the Mission’s hospital visitor). But this is a thread that is hard to sustain further.

I have also blogged about the Somerton Man’s lack of socks, something which vexed Somerton Man blogger Pete Bowes several years back in a (now long-removed) series of posts. I once tried to link these with the rifle stock mysteriously left by young Fred Pruszinski on the beach in a suitcase with lots of socks. Derek Abbott in particular has long been fascinated by what story the absence of socks may be trying to tell us, so perhaps there are more pipes to be smoked before this is resolved.

No Vomit, Sherlock

If this was a setup for a Conan Doyle short story, Sherlock Holmes would surely have pointed out that because the lividity on the dead man’s neck was inconsistent with his position laid on the beach (regardless of alternative explanations Derek Abbott might construct) and there was no vomit at the scene, he most certainly did not die there. And while the absence of a wallet would normally line up with a robbery, the body’s was clearly not so much dumped on the beach as posed, cigarette carefully put in place.

All of which Holmes would no doubt class as wholly inconsistent with any suggestion that the person or persons who did that was/were random muggers. Rather, this was a person who died elsewhere (and who Holmes would perhaps speculate had been laid out horizontally on a small bed post mortem, with his head lolling backwards over the edge), and whose wallet and money (and indeed hat, it would seem) were all removed before being carried to the beach [Gerry Feltus’ “Final Twist” has an eye-witness to a man being carried onto the beach, Ch. 14].

Holmes’ next waypost would be the absence of dirt on the man’s shiny brown shoes: having left his shoe polish in his suitcase, he would surely have been unable to shine his shoes in the time between the morning and his death in the night. And so I think Holmes would triumphantly complete the story told by the lack of vomit: that in his convulsions prior to death, the dead man’s vomit had surely fallen on his hat and shoes, and that someone else – dare I say a woman, Watson? – had cleaned the shoes prior to the man’s being carried off to the beach for his final mise en scène. And though he had eaten a couple of hours before his death, there was no trace of his eating out (another behavioural void to account for): he must therefore have spent some time that evening in a house with a man and a woman, eating with one or both of them.

So: they must have known him, or else they would not have cleaned him up in the way they did: yet they must not have wanted to be linked to his death, for they attempted (unsuccessfully, it has to be said) to stage a mysterious-looking death scene for him, one that would have had no physical connection to them (a pursuit which they were more successful in).

Did those people place the “Tamam Shud” scrap of paper in his fob pocket, as part of their dramatica staging? Holmes would surely think not: whatever its relation to the Rubaiyat allegedly found in the car around that time was, that was surely a separate story entirely, one quite unknown to them. And the car would form the centrepiece of an entirely separate chapter to Conan Doyle’s short story, one perhaps enough to tempt him to draw it out into a novella-sized accoun.

“The Case of the Missing Socks”

Finally, what of the missing socks? Sherlock Holmes would, I think, have first pointed out a sock-related mystery not previously noted elswehere: that even though the dead man’s suitcase had two pairs of Jockey underpants (one clean, one used) it contained not only no socks but no dirty socks either. In what circumstances would a man have dirty underwear but no dirty socks?

Hence once you have followed all the preceding Holmesian logic through, the three pipe problem that remains is this: why would someone walk around Glenelg with a pair of dirty socks, and not leave them in their suitcase back in Adelaide? Or, rather, why would someone travel with three pairs of underwear but only a single pair of socks?

For Holmes, the idea that the dead man would have carried anything around in smelly socks would be nonsensical. So I think the only conclusion the great fictional detective could have come to – having eliminated all he considered impossible – was that the dead man had arrived in Adelaide with something wrapped up in his spare pairs of socks in his suitcase – i.e. that he had brought spare socks with him, but that he was temporarily using them for a different purpose. He had therefore been able to change his underwear that morning but not his socks (because they were being used): moreover, Holmes would have said while tapping his pipe ash out, because the man was expecting to change into his spare socks later, he was without any doubt expecting to deliver what was wrapped up those socks to its destination during that day, and in doing so retrieve his socks.

But Holmes, Watson would ask, what was he carrying in those socks? Rolls of money, perhaps?

At this, Holmes would shake his head: my dear Watson, he would reply, this was not a man of money – his suitcase contents tell stories of ordinary life, of difficult times. He could not have been carrying anything bulky, or people would have noticed: it must have therefore been something valuable on the black market yet carryable beneath an overcoat on a train, bus or tram – and if so, why wrap it in socks for any reason apart from disguising its iconic shape? Hence, having eliminating all the impossible – as I so often do – the only object it can have possibly been was… a rifle fore-end.

My goodness, Holmes, Watson would reply, I do believe you have astounded me yet again. Derek Abbott was right: I shall have to call this The Case of the Missing Socks when I write it up in years to come. And… what of Fred Pruszinski?

What of him indeed, Watson…

“Whatever Remains…” (revisited)

From my perspective, I can see how Holmesian reasoning can almost be made to work: and I would argue that in the otherwise baffling case of the Somerton Man, the kind of short story reasoning I lay out above is just about as connected a positive account as can be genuinely fitted to the evidence. Had the Somerton Man brought something into Adelaide wrapped in his spare socks, expecting to deliver it during the day? It’s a good yarn, for sure, one that could easily be shoehorned into the Holmes and Watson canon. And, moreover, The Case of the Missing Socks does justice to pretty much every aspect of the case, both found and absent.

And yet, a small amount of prodding around the edges would surely display its many cracks and holes: it all remains no more than a story. We lack evidence: and ultimately it is evidence that persuades, evidence that proves, evidence that convicts. Reasoning from that which isn’t there and from that which did not occur all the way to that which did happen is a perilous argumentative tight-rope, a place surely only well-paid QCs and conspiracy theorists would feel comfortable balancing on.

As for me, I’m only comfortable writing this all up under cover of a Sherlock Holmes-themes blog post: but right now, perhaps building on a long series of absences to assemble this kind of novelistic take is as good as we can get. :-/

A little while back, I became aware that “The Unknown Man” – which I consider to be the #1 factual account of the Somerton Man cold case / Tamam Shud mystery – was about to be republished in ebook format, and so I asked Gerry Feltus for some more details to share with you. What I thought Cipher Mysteries readers would be particularly interested in was whether he had made any changes to the original print version (which came out way back in 2010).

Incidentally, here’s a nice photo of Gerry in action, taken from this family website:

Gerry kindly emailed me back a few days ago, saying:

I didn’t make any great changes apart from identifying and providing details relative to the nurse and her husband. I am aware that their identities were continuously produced on web sites, but people who purchased my book don’t all follow web sites so it is only fair that they also have access to the details.

There’s a little more detail on his News page.

Simply The Best

Since “The Unknown Man” first appeared in print back in 2010, I have continuously recommended it to prospective Somerton Man researchers as their very best first port of call. The only possible objection international researchers could have was the (still shockingly high) cost of postage from Australia, a pox to which ebooks are thankfully immune. So the ridiculous situation where people write articles, posts or even papers about the Somerton Man that fail to cite “The Unknown Man” should now hopefully be a thing of the past: it remains the core of any good Somerton Man bibliography.

For me, what is so good about Gerry’s book is that he sensibly restricts it to the pure factuality of the case, for it should be obvious that reporting all the facts in a clear and well-structured way is an amply hard enough challenge on its own. Having said that, even though this approach leaves plenty of room for other books to explore the various hypotheses in more detail, these sadly remain unwritten. Maybe one day, who knows?

Frustratingly, there are still a few details of the case hidden under pseudonyms in “The Unknown Man” which have yet to become public, most notably the real identity of “Ronald Francis” (in the back of whose car the Rubaiyat with the torn-out “Tamam Shud” was found in late 1948) and even the real make of Francis’s car. But perhaps these will emerge into the light before too long… here’s hoping, anyway. 😉

PS: if you haven’t already read “The Unknown Man”, go away and read it now!

Here are some photographs of Glenelg and Somerton circa 1948 I’ve found along the way, that I thought some of you might like.

Glenelg Pier

On a post on his travel blog, John Pedler included three nice images of Glenelg Pier, all courtesy of Holdfast Bay History Centre photographic collection. The first two were taken in 1935 and 1936 respectively, and show the jetty aquarium:

The third image shows the pier after it was destroyed by a storm in April 1948: it was rebuilt (a little shorter) in 1969.

The Crippled Children’s Home

The State Library of South Australia holds many images of old postcards and photographs: one series was taken at the Crippled Children’s Home in 1948. The first image shows the building itself:

The second image shows some children on the beach, which must surely be Somerton Beach, right?

By way of comparison, the image from the Unredacted article looks like this:

Rubaiyats A-Plenty

If you haven’t already picked up on this, the irrepressible Barry Traish (surely the Duracell bunny of Somerton Man researchers) has recently done some digging on George Marshall’s Rubaiyat, and is now certain that it was not a false imprint. So here’s a nice collection of Rubaiyats from the post outlining his findings:

Other Images

This image of Chapman’s delicatessen in the 1940s is on sale on eBay, feel free to buy it if you like. I doubt they sold pasties, but who can tell?

Here’s a double decker bus of the era (I believe), courtesy of the Advertiser’s Adelaide Now site: