Category Archives: Tamam Shud

A month ago, I exchanged a series of emails with a nice – though somewhat retiring – correspondent, who suggested that I might consider whether the Somerton Man was in fact Charles Gazzam Hurd. Here’s Hurd and his son (Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr):

The Disappeared

The last we know of Hurd’s life (from The Doe Network) is as follows:

• On 18th Feb 1937, Hurd left his workplace at 15 William Street, Manhattan (he was a manager of a real estate and mortgage department) at a normal time
• He had dinner at a restaurant / night club on East 54th Street
• He cashed a small cheque and left
• He crashed his Ford convertible coupe “into a pillar of an elevated railway structure at 3rd Avenue and 37th Street”
• He (apparently) suffered only minor injuries, drove off but then disappeared forever

At the time this happened, he was separated from his (wealthy) wife Marie Louise Schrieber, and was living at the Kenmore Hall Hotel on 23rd Street and Lexington Avenue. She remarried within a year of Hurd’s death.

His son Charles Gazzam Hurd Jr (born 1930, died 2015) seems to have been a thoroughly lovely bloke: “one time he orchestrated an epic Halloween prank involving a séance, the ghost of Benedict Arnold, and a couple of hydrocarbon fireballs that sent several 11-year-old girls into hysterics; an event that surely would have sparked an outcry on social media today.” Rock’n’roll!

Also: Hurd’s granddaughter Amy Hurd Fetchko has been doing a lot of her own digging, and there’s a nice podcast interview with her that covers much of what she has found, triggered by her father writing his memoirs. Did CGH Jr – as he believed he remembered – watch Tarzan with his father four months after his father’s death? Or had his father committed suicide in despair (as part of her family believes)? All very mysterious.

The Theories

It’s not widely known that there’s an (actually fairly sizeable) Internet community of people who try to identify John & Jane Does, often by connecting the few facts associated with a given person (height, build, hair colour, clothing, age) with those of other individuals who have disappeared. Indeed, a few of the more successful instances have ‘broken out’ into mass media (articles, books, TV, and probably even films).

On Reddit’s r/UnresolvedMysteries, plenty of people weigh in (a) that Hurd was probably a drunk driver, and (b) given that the East River was a mere three blocks away from where he was last, therefore (c) the most likely place you’ll find both him and his car (which disappeared at the same time) is the bottom of the river. Drunk driving, depression, head injury, concussion, impulsive suicide… all these are possible and in play (not at all unreasonably, it has to be said). (Websleuths don’t hugely disagree with this.)

Amy Hurd Fetchko also suggests that her grandfather – who she says was definitely a gambler – might possibly have got into money trouble with the Mob, and as a result either got killed or just changed his name and started afresh somewhere else. (She wonders whether the restaurant / night club where he had eaten might have been a Mob joint, etc.)

Alternatively, you won’t have far to look in the broader group of (what one might call) ‘The Disappeared‘ to find middle-aged men who dropped out of their life to start a new life with a second (often bigamous) wife. So it’s not entirely surprising to find that a number of amateur investigators have proposed that Hurd might have – by some random path – have ended up dead on Somerton Beach on 1948, i.e. that he might have started afresh in Australia but ended up as the Somerton Man.

A good source on this theory is a set of (nine) pages on Unexplained Mysteries. As you’d expect, it all pivots on ear shapes and so on. But… all the same, it just feels wrong to me. Dredge the East River, save us all the hassle, OK?

(Now The Real Post Begins)

OK, even though I’ve assembled all the information on Charles Gazzam Hurd in one place above, the stuff that actually interests me here isn’t Hurd himself, but rather the swirl of stuff around ‘The Disappeared’. For me, a much better question would be about why so many people are interested in identifying John / Jane Does.

Is this about closure, doing good, being helpful, connecting to (often long dead) people in a disconnected modern world? Is it about becoming interested in something, and then repeatedly scratching some kind of previously-unnoticed research itch that never quite scabs over? Is it about just finding an online community that you can settle into, safe in the knowledge that there really aren’t any terribly bad theories? Or is it about being nosy, opinionated, mouthing off, bickering, forum fighting, disagreeing, and occasionally trolling relatives and descendants?

Or some wobbly mix of all four?

Regardless, one thing that unites almost all of these cold cases is that there is very rarely any money to be made. Unlike the Zodiac Killer (where just about everybody involved seems to have written one or more awful books, along with a fair few of the fake letters trolling the police in the 1970s), there’s no huge glory to be had in identifying nameless victims. So in many ways, ‘Doe-hunting’ is – on the face of it – a fairly harmless pursuit.

For those who try to do this in a sensible way – i.e. by going to archives and primary sources where possible, and taking a resolutely evidence-centred approach – there’s nothing much you could say is wrong with what they’re doing. What happened happened, and nothing you can do now can unhappen it, right? It’s just trying to help, right?

Sort of, yes: but also sort of no. While it’s certainly nice to help identify people who have died mysteriously without a trace, people have no alienable Human Right to be Identified in the Unlikely Event of Their Mysterious Death. And given that these searches tend to be very long-term, they consume a lot of the searcher’s life, often yielding little or nothing of significant value in return. So, putting all the “The Journey is the Destination” blather to one side, there is a personal cost to the living to be considered here: the John / Jane Doe themselves have nothing much to benefit either – after all, it’s a bit late for closure for them.

And before you channel your inner Moe and say “Think of the family! Think of the family!“: in many, many cases the family simply have no idea at all. Someone just lost touch, and for countless years they stayed lost… until the Online Cold Case Enthusiasts gleefully poked their Internet noses in, typically offering a decades-later hallucinogenic mix of sort-of-hope and victim details gleaned from scratchy old police reports.

In my opinion, the real reason people get involved tends to be something quite different: typically (I suspect) more to do with finding kinship in an online community than with an overdeveloped sense of morality or desire for natural justice. Finding Charles Gazzam Hurd’s family tree more interesting than your own family tree is all very well, but a dispassionate observer probably couldn’t help but wonder whether this does sort of hint at an awkward modern dissociation from your own basic reality, hmmm?

Blame Davina & Co? Why not!

This is also a pastime that familial DNA is rapidly transforming, making it just about as redundant as redundant can be. Why trawl through thousands of pages of scrawly old archives for years (or even decades) for a half-glimpse at something that may or may not be connected, when GEDmatch can move you closer to a rock solid answer inside a day?

Maybe it’s wrong to blame Davina and her TV buddies for making this so gosh-darn visible. All the same, it’s hard not to look at both the serried ranks of DNA-themed documentaries – national treasures (Piss-)Ant & Dec, dahlin’ Stacey Dooley, Bloodline Detectives, etc etc – and the rise in interest in DNA police cold-casery and see some kind of correlation there, right?

And as more and more people upload their DNA to databases, there seems little doubt in my mind not only that database results will become more and supportive, but also that the ever-improving familial-searching tools wrapped around them will automate more and more of the research processes involved.

At the same time, my understanding is that we’re simultaneously about to be hit by a rapid influx of AI-powered tools able to read old handwritten documents. Hence it seems highly likely to me that it won’t be too long before we see companies making this accessible at scale, where their “Google for genealogy”-style offerings pull together and automate a lot of the genealogical grunt work. (And let’s face it, most online family trees you’re likely to see are full of over-optimistic junk unsupported by any genuine evidence. So there’s a great deal to improve on here.)

So, even though we’re just about at the point where a load of researchers are getting actually quite good at genealogy and cold case research, we might also be at the start of a period where all that stuff becomes heavily automated and commoditised. And what then of online cold case forums? Computer says yes, computer says no: but either way, the computer says it.

Looking ahead, then, I expect DNA tools will obliterate not just individual cold cases but in time also the whole idea of cold cases. Similarly, I expect AI will obliterate genealogy (and why on earth haven’t LDS tried this, you’d have thought they’d be at the front of the queue?). I give it 10-15 years before they’re both as passé as wax cylinder recordings.

What Then of Cipher Mysteries?

So what then about the Somerton Man, and the Adirondack Enigma, and so forth? Yes, where cipher mysteries form just one strand of any cold case that is more of a WhoWasIt than a WhoDunnIt, I indeed think it’s a pretty safe bet that the plucky DNA genealogists will (eventually) get on board and figure out the person’s real identity.

In the case of the Zodiac Killer, police cold case teams (and the swarm of TV documentary teams kissing their poh-lice butts) must now surely be slowly grinding their way through the mass of Zodiac envelopes, stamps and other evidential gubbins looking for DNA hits. At the very least, you’d have thought – as I’m told happened not so long ago with the Cheri Jo Bates cold case – they’d have figured out which nutters sent taunting letters to the LAPD (hint: most of these probably weren’t sent by Zodiac). To be honest, it wouldn’t surprise me if 75% of those were actually sent by idiot Zodiacologists, but that’s perhaps going to be an unpopular opinion for a while yet.

However, the one thing that we’re still a loooong way from is using technology to crack top-end cipher mysteries. For example, while Hauer and Kondrak’s 2021 paper (on the Dorabella Cipher) accepted that Keith Massey’s observations were extremely strong, the authors still just waltzed past them regardless, despite their obvious inconsistency with, say, everything that they had hypothesized, written, and concluded. All of which made what would have otherwise been a basically good paper end up a bit too ‘baity’ for my taste.

So there you have the actual start of the art: known-system ciphers we can now crack in no time, but cipher mysteries? There’s no sea turtle that can hold its breath long enough for cipher mysteries to reveal their secrets. But in the end, perhaps that’s a good thing, right? 😉

I recently emailed FSSA (Forensic Science South Australia) for an update on their forensic investigation into the Somerton Man. They very kindly replied:

SA Police have carriage of the investigation to identify the Somerton Man. We have had a forensic case meeting recently in Adelaide involving Forensic Science SA, National DNA Program for Unidentified Human Remains and Missing People, and Major Crime Investigation Branch.  This has identified the sequence of a variety of forensic opportunities that will be implemented over the coming months in an effort to identify him.

This is, of course, excellent news, because it means that FSSA has determined that the Somerton Man’s exhumed remains do present a number of viable forensic opportunities to identify him, which they will be pursuing before very long.

At this point, all I can do is quote Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange“:

“Come, Watson, come!” he cried. “The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!”

Like a constipated true crime podcaster, I’m currently perched on the edge of my seat waiting for something solid to emerge. Now that SAPOL’s forensic finest (surely) have the Somerton Man’s DNA in their sweaty hands, what will it be able to tell us?

One interesting thing about DNA searching is that even if you get basically zero hits, the DNA itself can often still tell you a great deal about a person, such as:

• what part of the world they (probably) come from
• their haplogroup (& will that be the same as the haplogroup Derek Abbott’s group retrieved from the hair root?)
• their genetic predisposition to rare illnesses (e.g. uncombable hair syndrome, etc).

If the part of the world the Somerton Man’s DNA comes from is basically a small region in Ireland, it would seem to be a fairly strong indication that Kean[e] is likely to be his surname. (But with Catholic families being DNA genealogists’ best friends, you’d also expect 20+ decent hits to light up the GEDmatch globe like a Christmas tree.)

Yet if his DNA is solidly Eastern European (and with hardly any matches), you’d expect a quite different person – perhaps something like the mysterious Balutz from the baccarat school I found so hard to track down.

Though it would be nice if the DNA showed he was Charles Mikkelsen (who I think was probably also the “Carl Thompsen” remembered by Keith Mangonoson), I’m not holding out a lot of hope for that.

It also seems likely to me that any link to the Abbotts / Egans would have been trumpeted to the world’s media by now: but given the lack of trumpetry my ears are picking up, this is most probably not to be here.

All in all, it’s perhaps surprising that the list of possible Somerton Man candidates we’ve all managed to accumulate is so short: a list dominated, it has to be said, by implausible Soviet spies, defectors and perhaps even spring-heeled Ballet Russe dancers. (Spare me, O Lord, from having to read any more espionage-related posts.)

So I wonder what the next card to be played in this interminable squeeze will be?

A couple of days ago, I listened to a ten-minute online Somerton Man piece on Radio National Breakfast with Fran Kelly, basically because Fran had Gerry Feltus phoning in to give his tuppence worth. (Am I allowed to say that Gerry didn’t seem as Royal Sovereign H pencil-sharp as normal?)

As you’d expect, there wasn’t anything there of any great surprise or interest about the Somerton Man that you wouldn’t have picked up from even a cursory reading of Cipher Mysteries over the last few years. But the other person being interviewed – Fiona Ellis-Jones, who you may possibly remember as having been the host of the ABC’s five-part “The Somerton Man Mystery” podcast – did say one thing that I at least found interesting.

What she said (at 5:07) about the Somerton Man was this: that there were “three main theories: the love child theory; the fact that it could have been a black market racketeer; or perhaps a Russian spy“. Though this is basically rehashing her podcast tag line (“Was he a scorned lover? A black market racketeer? Or a spy?”), what struck me was that the whole black marketeer crim thing I’ve been pushing at for the last few years was suddenly in the top three.

Now, even though Fiona added that her own personal favourite theory was Derek Abbott’s whole love-child / spurned lover thang, it’s not exactly news that this has always seemed far too tidily romantic to me: all it’s lacking is a neat little bow on top, which is almost never how historical research actually works out. But the good news is that a DNA profile for the Somerton Man should make this the very first theory to be comprehensively disproved, all being well. :-p

As for the whole spy theory: apologies to John Ruffels etc, but if there’s an ounce of actual historical substance to that whole hopeful hoopla beyond “The Somerton Man is mysterious; spies are mysterious; therefore the dead guy must have been a spy“, I’ve yet to see it. Though it remains possible that the DNA match map will light up all across Russia, please excuse me if I seem less than utterly enchanted. Even vague familial DNA matches should be enough to rule out most of the exotic nonsense that some like to pass off as rock solid ‘fact’ (*choke* *cough* *cough*).

Moreover, if both those much-loved dominoes clatter to the floor, the question becomes: what other possibilities are we genuinely left with? Charles Mikkelsen (a favourite of Byron Deveson) remains ~vaguely~ possible, though it has to be said that Mikkelsen’s well-documented death at sea in 1940 does tend to spoil the party vibe there somewhat. Similarly, the 1953 death announcement for Horace Charles Reynolds that I (eventually) dug up doesn’t bode well for Somerton Man fans of a muttony disposition.

Might it be that the black marketeer theory might end up one of the very few realistic dominoes left standing before very long? Just thought I’d point that out… 😐

One Last Thing…

Something I noticed a few weeks ago was that even though I’ve posted 1490 blog posts on Cipher Mysteries since 2007-ish (originally as “Voynich News”), the times people have posted an actual link to anything I’ve posted are dwindlingly few. In fact, thanks to the magic of Google Search Console, I can tell you that Google knows of only 560 external links out there, many of which are repeated several times over. (“There may be many others but they haven’t been discarvard.“) Of those:

• 113 are from labatorium.eus, all of which point to a page here on the Feynman challenge cipher (why?);
• 89 are from voynich.ninja (mainly to Voynich-related pages);
• 54 from blogspot.com blogs (most of which seem to be from numberworld.blogspot.com)
• 35 from wordpress.com blogs (e.g. Koen’s herculeaf, Diane’s voynichrevisionist, and a handful of Rich’s proto57)
• 20 each from voynichportal.com (thanks JKP) and voynichrevisionist.com (thanks Diane again)
• 19 from reddit.com
• 17 from scienceblogs.de (thanks Klaus)
• 12 from zodiackillerciphers.com (thanks Dave O)

…while everything else is in single digits. How, then, has anybody ever found out about the black marketeer theory? Beats me.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, Cipher Mysteries’ pages include 7740 solid outbound links: which seems to imply I link roughly 20x more often outwards than everybody else combined links inwards. Perhaps it’s just me, but that statistic seems a bit sucky.

Just so you know how the Internet actually works.

As mentioned in a fair bit of Australia’s press, the exhumation of the Somerton Man has begun in West Terrace in the last 24 hours, with all the normal shots of PPE, tents, and mini-diggers accompanying the reports.

Once the FSSA have processed the body (in whatever parlous state it’s in) and extracted the man’s full DNA profile, the forensic investigation will doubtless continue spinning along for several weeks (e.g. carrying out physical analyses to determine the cause of his death), while the genealogists kick into the kind of high-octane action you’d expect. (I confidently predict “Tamam Shud: The Movie” will cast Vin Diesel as one of the genealogy team, you heard it here first.)

Then, with his identity established (hopefully), the properly fun part will begin: working out what was going on in November 1948, and fitting this with the pieces of the puzzle we know already into a full historical reconstruction.

Of course, the ultimate Cipher Mysteries prize in this whole endeavour would be a decryption of the mysterious note found imprinted on the back of the W&T Rubaiyat that was (believed to be) linked to the dead man. My suspicion, however, is that even knowing everything there is to know about the Somerton Man may still not make this possible.

Still, it’s clear that interesting times are now upon us, particularly for those people who have been promoting nutty Somerton Man theories for so many years. Perhaps we will even see some of them ‘upgrade’ their theories into denialist body-swap theories, i.e. “it’s the right DNA but the wrong body”. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition…

I’ve been thinking a lot about the off-white tie found in the suitcase the Somerton Man famously left at Adelaide’s railway station. Only an American gangster (or perhaps poor old Hector St Clair) would have a white tie to go with his black shirt: and what we’re looking at isn’t even a white tie, it’s an off-white tie. Oh, and the Somerton Man didn’t even have a black shirt in his suitcase.

The tie also looks to me as though it was a working tie, i.e. an item worn many times not for show, but for use, for practicality. Any maker’s tag attached to the back of the tie had been long lost by 1948: but, as far as I can tell, there were no actual jobs in 1948 that required you to wear a white / off-white tie.

So, if the tie was of no practical use to the Somerton Man in 1948, why was he carrying it around in his suitcase? What possible value could it have had?

One answer I’ve been circling around for a while is that the tie might have been something that the Somerton Man had worn regularly some years earlier, but which still had some sentimental or nostalgic value for him.

Hence, I’m wondering whether the right questions to be asking of his off-white tie might be more to do with the reasons he had been wearing it 10 or even 20 years before 1948, say from 1930 onwards. Might it have been connected with some kind of peak experience for him?

A beige tie, perhaps?

This also begs the question of what the tie’s colour originally was, before it had been (largely) washed out. The tie famously appears close to the end of Part 1 of the 1978 Littlemore documentary, and I think you can see a tinge of faded colour to it.

A Google search does bring up a handful of beige ties, most notably for the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada. But Captain Flavelle’s (apparently 100% woollen) beige tie from WWI seems the wrong kind of material completely:

This makes me wonder whether the fabric used to make the Somerton Man’s tie might help us to date it.

But there’s something about the way only a single person (front row, fifth from right) in the following 1956 QOR Sergeants’ Mess is wearing a beige tie that strikes a distant chord:

Who is that person at the front, and why was he wearing a beige tie? Not being a specialist Army historian, I have no easy way of knowing if this is signalling some specific Army role (perhaps in Canada, or in the British Army).

A U.S. Army necktie?

However, if you search not for (the British) “tie” but for (the American) “necktie”, you’ll get a quite different set of results. For example, even Gran’ma Wikipedia’s page on U.S. Army clothes starts becoming vaguely relevant (for a pleasant change):

In 1941, the necktie for the winter uniform was black wool and the summer necktie was khaki cotton.^[4] In February 1942, a universal mohair wool necktie in olive drab shade no. 3 (OD 3) replaced both previous neckties. The OD 3 necktie was shortly superseded by a khaki cotton–wool blend necktie. […]

Officers wore black and khaki neckties with winter and summer uniforms respectively, like enlisted soldiers, until after February 1942 when the universal neckties were changed to khaki for all ranks.

A little more searching turned up that the US Army necktie came in three colours (AKA “colors”): khaki, tan, and mustard. And one problem with nailing down the precise colours these were is that the Internet seems to be flooded by reproduction US Army apparel. (As if the world really needs a load of people pretending to be WWII-era US soldiers wearing modern poly/cotton mix fabrics.)

However, the Kentucky Historical Society’s archives does have some good kit in its holdings. This item is a 1940 machine-stitched US Army khaki cotton necktie:

Similarly, the following is a United States Marine Corps khaki tropical necktie from 1937, folded and machine stitched:

Given that the first one of these two has a centre seam but the second one is folded, it’s hard to extrapolate much further on this as far as seams go. The material looks completely wrong too.

In short, while I am quite sympathetic to the suggestion that the Keane tie might have been a non-standard-issue Army dress tie that helped denote rank (say, as part of a mess uniform), I struggle to match the quality of its weave with the (frankly rather poorly put together) standard-issue US Army ties I’ve seen on the web. I also can’t satisfactorily match its colour with the ties I’ve seen, even if you try to argue it was faded. So I’m still very much open to suggestions as to where to take this next.

A Material World

Given that it seems to be a tie constructed in the modern way (as devised in 1922 and then later patented by Jesse Langsdorf in New York), we might generally date it to about 1930 or later, and perhaps place it more in North America than in the UK. There’s a nice visual overview of 20th century tie history here.

However, perhaps we’re still putting the cart before the horse, and we should instead determine the precise material that was used to make the tie, because that might help narrow the search down significantly.

Even though I think a close look at the tie rules out silk, viscose/rayon, and veltet, we’re still left with cotton, linen and wool: and arguably the most likely seems a mix of the three (i.e. where the warp and weft use different kinds of thread). Moreover, because it looks only a little ‘fluffy’, I think we can rule out its having been 100% wool.

My thoughts? Given that linen doesn’t hold its colour as well as cotton, I suspect that this was a linen-cotton mix. Yet given the bold designs of most ties of the era, its plainness still seems somewhat unsettling to me: I can’t help but wonder whether we’re missing something really obvious about this tie.

Perhaps what you’d really want here is some marvellous V&A mid-century textile specialist to help you identify the material. The next-best thing might be the following extremely helpful V&A guide to textile identification that gets you frustratingly close. If you want something a little more hands-on, the Vintage Fashion Guild has an online fabric resource that you might find more practical.

“I’ll Drink To That”

Perhaps what we instead need is a tie collector to steer us through these rapids. But wait! Here’s a British Pathé short from 1955 called “Tie Collecting aka Tie Cutting AKA Tie Collector”, featuring Alan Course (landlord of The Bear Inn in Oxford):

In fact, The Bear Inn and its collection of four and half thousand tie clippings is (according to Atlas Obscura) still there, and (allegedly) serving an excellent portion of bangers and mash in its (newly re-opened) beer garden. Can there ever have been a pub more worthy of a research visit?

Imagine, if you will, that everything about the Somerton Man is somehow embedded in the name written on the back of the off-white tie found in the suitcase left in Adelaide Station. Can we decrypt the life hidden in this writing?

Well… we can certainly try to, right? As normal, let’s examine it reaaaaally closely…

A Name of Two Halves

The first thing to notice is that the initial (followed by the dot) and the K are not only much bigger than the rest of the letters, they are also stylistically very different. Moreover, whereas the “EANE” part was written in legible compressed block capitals, there’s no easy way of telling what the initial letter at the start is – is it a ‘T’ (as SAPOL thought in 1949), or a ‘J’, or perhaps even an ‘I’ or an ‘L’? And finally, the letter K has an unusual construction (which we’ll come to later).

From all that, we start with a visual paradox: that even though the stylised (and largely indeterminate) initial letter is typical of a signature (i.e. writing made for personality), the EANE ending would seem to be more typical of clothes block marking (i.e. writing made for clarity). How can these two very different writing styles be reconciled?

My suggestion (perhaps it has been made before, I honestly don’t know) is that the writer wrote the first two letters as a signature, but then changed his mind, perhaps from the difficulty of writing on fabric. And so I suspect his writing strategy changed after writing the ‘K’, leaving us with a hybrid that was part-signature and part-clothes marking.

Because the second (block capital) half doesn’t really offer us any obvious help, we only really have a single letter to work with here – the K. However, this is a letter with a very unusual construction…

Anatomy of a ‘K’

To me, an individual’s handwriting expresses a set of compromises between an idealised set of letterforms (design) and the individual’s desire for speed (impatience), clarity (beauty), ornament (fanciness), reproducibility (consistency), or whatever. Note that I’m talking not about graphology here, but about the practicalities of real-world writing.

From that point of view, capital K is actually quite a difficult letter to write. Once you’ve formed its main vertical bar (normally downwards), you then have to lift your pen off the paper and decide where to begin your next stroke. And then, in the context of cursive writing, you have to consider how you are going to join the end of your final K stroke with the start of the following stroke. All these practical micro-decisions yield a wide range of possibilities.

Looking closer at the K, I suspect we can see three separate stroke parts (probably made by a right hander): an initial downward ‘spine’ stroke (annotated red below), a second downward diagonal stroke (blue), and a third stroke upwards and slightly curved around (green). It’s not 100% clear to me what direction the green stroke was made in (i.e away from the second stroke or towards it):

It could well be that the green stroke started at top right, looped down to the midpoint of the first stroke, and then became the start of the blue stroke. Here, the stroke sequence would be 1-3-2:

Either way, this seems a somewhat unusual and awkward way of constructing a K: but with an historian’s hat on, where might we find a corpus of signatures to compare this particular K construction against?

WWI Irish Soldier Wills

Given that Keane is a predominantly Irish surname (“Kean” appears much more in Scotland), I made a speculative leap here that a good place to look for a set of signatures would be in the Irish archives. (If there’s a far more global handwriting archive I could have used, please tell me!)

However, almost all the Irish genealogical archive holdings online (e.g. via Ancestry.com) were of official registers (Petty Sessions, even the Dog Licence Register!), which were normally filled in by a small number of official hands. Rather, what I wanted wasn’t names written by a professional hand, but a set of signatures left by ordinary people.

Usefully (but nonetheless tragically), this is where I found that the Irish archives contain a long series of Last Wills and Testaments (many on scraps of paper, and with a fair few reconstructed by witnesses from conversations) from Irish soldiers who died in WWI. Reading these, you can’t help but be affected by the senseless waste of young life: so many were just boys, bequeathing their possessions and pay to their mothers or sisters in shaky pencil in their Army Book 64.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the archival query engine wasn’t quite designed for what I was trying to do: so I first searched for all soldiers called John, drew up a list of the surnames beginning with K, and then searched all of those surnames.

This yielded about 500 individual documents; about fifty of which were missing; of the rest, roughly fifty had no signature (e.g. when the will was relayed by witnesses), so I think the final corpus size was not far off 400 signatures.

Normal Ks and Special Ks

In this sample, it seemed to me that the majority of the capital Ks were formed of a big vertical downstroke (often embellished), followed by a single second stroke (sometimes embellished) which ran from top right diagonally down left to the centre of the first stroke (often pausing to loop there) before continuing diagonally down linearly right to end up at the bottom right of the letter, ready to be cursively joined with the following letter.

Another common construction began with a big vertical downstroke, but where the pen then restarted at the centre of the vertical to form a second curved downstroke, finishing off with a third more linear stroke upwards from the centre of the vertical.

There were also some some unusual two-stroke Ks where the gap between the two strokes was so wide that it was almost unrecognisable as a K. For example, here is how Denis Kelly wrote his wife’s name, which I must admit had me completely stumped for a couple of minutes:

What we see in the Somerton Man’s K is different to all three of these, in that it has a curve at top right and a straight line at bottom right.

Matching Ks

A couple of signatures do vaguely match the Somerton Man’s K, insofar as they have a main vertical stroke, a straight diagonally right downwards stroke, and a curved diagonally right upwards stroke.

• No. 14908 Rifleman J. Keelan, 2nd Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, died 30-1-1915. Here he writes his father’s name:

• No. 16241 Private Patrick Kinsella, 6th Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, died 3-2-1917.

Private Patrick Kinsella’s K was clearly the closer match of the two. (According to fold3, Kinsella was born 23-5-1884; his widow (separated) was Susan Lennon of 11 Railway St, Dublin; and his three children were Denis, Patrick & Mary Jane.)

Learning And Growing?

In my experience, people tend to attack cipher mysteries in a ‘vertical’ manner, i.e. by looking for causality, direct association, immediate linkage, relevance, etc. But sometimes historical research is better done horizontally, i.e. by building up a wider corpus and trying to situate your mystery item within that larger corpus.

What I tried to do here was a faltering first attempt at a horizontal search for the source of the marks on the tie, but I think it’s fair to say I didn’t really find anything in Ireland. Next time round, I plan to look at (mainland) British and/or American and/or Australian K shapes from this period (if I can find good signature corpora for them, all suggestions gratefully received!), to see if anything K-related happens to jump out at me.

It’s just a crying shame that we don’t have images of the other two KEAN[E] marks, or even any description of what they looked like. Unless you know better?

I’ve been raking over Ancestry.com, trying to take the search for the Somerton Man back to archival basics. For example:

• we have a first initial (T or J)
• we have a surname (Kean or Keane)
• we have a rough date of birth (1900, plus or minus five years)
• we know he had no tattoos / distinguishing markings
• his matrilineal DNA seems to be connected to the Baltic states
• we have practical reasons to connect him to America
• we have even better reasons to connect him to Australia, and yet…
• all efforts to find an Australian by that name seem to have failed.

The first half of the 20th century was a time of migrations: and I think the little we know about our mysterious man seems to echo that same mobility. Might we be able to catch a glimpse of him in the shipping records, that box of tricks so loved by genealogists? I went looking for Keans on ships…

John Hall Kean of Galashiels

Having previously put so much time into tracking down H. C. Reynolds on the R.M.S. Niagara, my Somerton Spidey Sense tingled when I saw a young J Kean working on the same ship roughly a year after Reynolds’ stint.

• 10 Oct 1919 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “cadet”, engaged 2/10/19 in Vancouver
• 28 Oct 1919 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “cadet”, age 19, born in Scotland
• 8 Apr 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “2nd grade”, engaged 27/2/20 in Sydney
• 26 Apr 1920 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “2nd grade”, age 20, born in Galashiels
• 16 May 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Sydney) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 30/4/20 in Sydney, able to read, age 20.
• 3 Jun 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Vancouver) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 30/4/20 in Sydney, able to read, age 20.
• 21 Jun 1920 Sydney, New South Wales (from Vancouver) “2nd grade steward”, age 20, born in Galashiels
• 10 Jul 1920 Honolulu, Hawaii (from Sydney) “2nd grade steward”, engaged 24/6/20 in Sydney, age 20

These are surely all the same J. Kean, from Galashiels in Scotland.

(We also see a 21-year-old 5′ 9″ Scottish-born J. Kean arriving in California in 1921 on the S.S. Bradford. And a 5′ 5″ 160lb Scottish-born John Kean arriving in Seattle from Vancouver on 19 Dec 1922. I’m guessing these are him too,)

Knowing that, it didn’t take too long to work out that his full name was John Hall Kean, his parents were John Patrick Kean and Margaret Kean (nee Murray) (both born in Galashiels), and that he, his parents, and brothers Thomas Murray Kean and Louis Ennis Kean all emigrated from Scotland to Vancouver in 1910. (You can see them all listed in the 1911 Canada Census.) His birth date is listed there as August 1901.

We next see him working as a clerk, and getting married in 30 Jun 1923 to Vancouver-born Olympia Emily Svenciski (it’s a Polish surname). The Vancouver Daily World noted that she was the “second daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Svenciski, of this city”.

However, it’s through Olympia’s findagrave entry that we find John Hall Kean’s death, on 20 Dec 1940 at Trail (a town in British Columbia).

Oh well. 🙁

John William Kean of Hull

There’s a J.W.Kean who also made a number of trips:

• 07 Nov 1920 New York, age 20, on the Justin, signed on 25 Sep 1920, Newport, News (and then immediately signed back on again)
• 07 Nov 1920 New York, he is listed as John W. Kean, “sailor”, English, British, 5′ 6″, 150lb, headed off to Pernambuco (in Brazil)
• 15 Feb 1921 New York, age 20, on the Justin, discharged
• 29 Apr 1921 Sydney, New South Wales on the SS Port Melbourne from New York via Melbourne, age 20, from Hull, “sailor”
• 22 Jun 1921 Sydney, New South Wales on the SS Port Melbourne from Wellington NZ, age 20, from Hull, “sailor”
• 14 Feb 1922 New York from Brazil on the Justin, age 20, British, signed on Nov 28th 1920, NY

Familysearch helpfully suggests a John William Kean, whose birth was registered in Hull in the Jul-Aug-Sep quarter of 1901, and who did his military service in the Royal Navy from ~1918 to ~1921.

There’s also this guy from 1930, who sounds like the same person but now with American citizenship:

• 28 Nov 1930 New York on the Capulin, John W. Kean, A.B., engages on 16 Oct 1930 in Norfolk, aged 29, American race and nationality, 5′ 6″

Personally, I think John William Kean’s height is sufficient to rule him out from being the Somerton Man, but perhaps others will feel compelled to pursue him further.

John Kean of Skerries, Dublin

The next Kean I looked at was on the Ajana in Nov 1919, an 18-year old “AB” (able-bodied seaman) arriving in Sydney from New Zealand via Melbourne.

This was probably the same John Kean of Skerries, Dublin who received his Second Mate’s Certificate of Competency on the 6th December 1922.

After a fair bit of to-ing and fro-ing looking at Ireland’s Superintendant Registration (SR) Districts, the single candidate in Ireland’s (actually extremely good) online BDM database seems to be a John Keane, born 29 August 1901 in the SR District of Balrothery.

According to the register, his father John Keane was a sailor from Skerries, and his mother was Rosanna Keane (nee McGowan). (We can also see their marriage of 02 Jun 1890 online.) The “informant” was Mary Dooley of Skerries (who was “present at the birth”).

The Irish archives have one more trick for us. On 03 Mar 1930, a John Keane (a “grocer”, aged “Adult”) of Skerries married Alice Seaver (also aged “Adult”) of Skerries: John Keane’s father John Keane was noted as being a “sea captain”. It seems very likely to me that this was the same John Keane.

But… what happened to this John Keane and Alice Keane?

Note that an Alice Mary Keane died in East Geelong on 08 Nov 1999: however, we can see her living at 46 Gheringhap St in Geelong in 1937 (“home duties”) with a John Francis Keane (“labourer”), and then again in 24 Garden St in 1942, so we can almost certainly rule her out.

So the short answer is that I have no idea just yet, sorry. 🙁

A Quick Summary

I didn’t have to look very hard to find three J. Kean[e]s who each fits the broad template of what we are looking for, insofar as their lives linked Europe with both America and Australia (albeit perhaps only briefly).

And it was nice to discover that genealogy tools – when they work well – now make it almost comically easy to trace and eliminate candidates. They all have their quirks, sure: but what would take a matter of weeks or months is now very often no more than a handful of mouse-clicks away.

However, I’m also well aware that what I picked to work with were undoubtedly the lowest-hanging fruits. Having ten or more data points to work with meant that just about everything here clicked in as you’d hope.

All the same, this has left me wondering whether it might be worthwhile to build up a list of pretty much all the J/T Kean[e]s born around 1900 (say 1895-1905), and then trace them all. Even though Ireland’s BDM database lists numerous J/T Kean[e]s, it also (once you get the hang of the SR Districts etc) gives you enough other data to rule most of them in or out very quickly.

Is that crazy? Or might it actually be achievable?

James Robert Walker’s life story, smuggled out of Pentridge Jail just before his suicide, was sensationally serialized in the Argus in September 1954 to October 1954. If you want to read it, I edited it into a single downloadable file here. I found it of particular interest because in the early 1940s Walker ran his own small Melbourne baccarat school.

Walker referred to many of the people involved by their real names, or by their nicknames (such as James Coates, widely known as “The Mark Foy”).

But who were the prominent underworld people Walker used coded names for? I’m thinking specifically of:

• “The Brain”
• “Darkie”
• “The Gambler”
• “The Thing”
• “The Fix”

I decided to go looking…

Not Much Luck So Far..

In my initial mooch around the interwebs, I found very little indeed. 🙁

One of the only hints was in Robert Chuter’s “Funny People of Fitzroy Street“:

A few months ago [written in 2020] there died a man, ex-pug, ex-bookmaker, and ex-school principal who had been a habitue of Fitzroy Street for many years. Drink hastened his end. He was discovered dead sitting upon a cafe toilet, trousers around his ankles. Police knew him as “The Thing” mentioned in the Robert Walker story, published in The Argus after Walker’s suicide in Pentridge Gaol.

I’ve therefore asked Robert if he knows The Thing’s actual name, and will update this page when I hear back. But as to the other code names, I have still basically got nowhere. 🙁

As an aside, Walker’s story mentions “The Brain”‘s (claimed) remorse over the death of Taylor and ‘Snowy’ Cutmore in 1927. Given that Taylor was (according to Gangland Melbourne) connected to Harry Stokes, you might wonder whether Stokes was The Brain. Unfortunately, The Brain was (according to Walker) still alive, which would seem to rule Stokes out.

Who were all these encrypted crims? Can you decode Walker’s code names?

Carrying on with the Somerton Man Melbourne nitkeeper research thread, here’s a timeline I’ve reconstructed for the (in)famous baccarat school that Christos Paizes (AKA “Harry Carillo”) and Gerald Francis Regan ran on the first floor above the Old Canton Cafe at 158 Swanston Street, Melbourne. (Swanston St runs between Lonsdale St and Little Lonsdale St.)

Note that as of 21 Jun 1943, 158 Swanston St was advertising for a “Pantry Maid” (“over 45; £3 10/ p. wk., no night work“), so presumably the building was still in use as a cafe at that date.

Phase 1 – Baccarat still legal

Because Victoria’s gaming laws had been drafted by listing specific games that were deemed to be illegal (e.g. the Aussie favourite two-up), Melbourne police needed overwhelming physical proof in order to prosecute anyone playing a game not on the prohibited list.

As a result, this first phase of the timeline sees the police very much on the back foot. What’s more, none of the cunning stunts they used to try to gain evidence against the baccarat schools impressed the courts. For example:

16 July 1942: The Truth’s influential 18 Jun 1944 exposé (it was mentioned in Hansard) discussed how police attempts to prosecute Regan & Carello in their baccarat school in Flinders St in 1942 had miserably failed:

[…] a charge at the Petty Sessions of acting in the conduct of a common gaming house at 510 Flinders Street, was withdrawn. On that occasion, police watched a baccarat game through holes in the ceiling, but they obtained no evidence that percentages were deducted from the winnings — an all-important point in law.

By 1943, the police started to find ways of prosecuting individuals involved with these gaming schools. One target was the nitpickers (or “cockatoos”), whose job was to raise the alarm when a police raid was in progress, and who could be charged with ‘hindering’ or ‘obstruction’:

[Gerald Francis Regan] was convicted for obstructing the police, when they entered a gaming house.

By June 1944, the Melbourne baccarat scene was (as per The Truth’s exposé) well and truly flourishing: there seemed almost nothing that the police could do about it. For all The Truth’s thundering, you can’t help but notice that they did helpfully include the exact address to take your money to:

At Stokes’ schools, the game is big, but if it is a bit severe on the pocket, you can be accommodated at Regan and Carello’s school, on the first floor of a building at 158 Swanston St. You won’t like it much here, because you will find a definitely low type crowd, mostly Italians, Greeks and European refugees. In the crowd of 100, there will be about 20 women.

Phase 2 – Baccarat Made Illegal

Perhaps surprisingly, The Truth’s moralistic tabloid ranting against the baccarat schools (which incidentally made the gangsters running them so livid that they offered £500 for the identity of the person who had given the paper the inside story on both Stokes’ school and Paizes’ school) stirred up enough Victorian political indignation to change the law.

Hence from 1st July 1944, baccarat found itself added to the list of games that were illegal to play in Victoria: which meant that the police were able to steam in, door-bashing sledgehammer in hand, confident that the gaming law was (at last) on their side.

The moment this became law (1am on 1 Jul 1944), raid on a Swanston Street baccarat school led (in the Third City Court in August 1944) to a group of baccarat players being fined under the newly extended gaming laws:

When police broke into a baccarat school in Swanston-street with a sledge hammer early this morning, they found a “League of Nations Assembly” around the table.

Among the 40 players— 17 of them women— were Russians, Poles, Italians, Lebanese, Albanians, Syrians and Britons. Three men were fined £3 because they had prior convictions: the remainder £2.

Fety Murat, 33, of Drummond-street, Carlton, waiter, who had charge of the game, was fined £50. It was the first raid since legislation was passed to make baccarat illegal.

(Note that a different report gave the address as “303 Swanston St”, but perhaps 158 was the downstairs address, and 303 the upstairs address.)

Phase 3 – Shutting Down the School

Over the next year, the next phase of the police operation involved building up (what they hoped would be) a sufficiently strong case to convince the courts to close down the Old Canton Cafe baccarat school for good.

On 19 July 1945, Mr Justice Lowe at the Practice Court received the following:

An affidavit by Sub-Inspector Abley, officer in charge of the gaming police, stated that police officers had seen baccarat played on the premises. The police had visited the premises almost every night for approximately six months. The only means of access was a narrow stairway, having doors both at the top and bottom. There was a person always on guard at the top of the stairway to ensure that the police could not enter without warning. For four months, said the affidavit, the premises had been run ostensibly as a club. On many occasions the police entered the premises after a short delay, and saw people scattering from a table suitable for baccarat. After quoting various matters in his affidavit, Sub-Inspector Abley said he had reasonable grounds for suspecting that baccarat was carried on, and that the premises constituted a common gaming house.

According to a different report, the affidavit further asserted that…

[…] the persons having the control and management were Christos Paizes (alias Harry Carillo), William John Elkins, Gerald Francis Regan and Richard Thomas (alias Abishara) and a man known as Balutz.

Christos Paizes responded with his own affidavit:

[…] Christos Paizes, of Mathoura-road; Toorak, stated that, with Gerald Francis Regan, of High-street, St. Kilda, he had been the tenant of part of the first floor of the building in Swanston-street, known as the Old Canton Cafe. Since they had occupied the premises they had never been used as a common gaming house. Until January, 1945, they conducted the premises as a cafe and lounge. Since then they had conducted the premises as a proprietary club. In the club refreshments were supplied to members, who used the premises to play various games of cards and checkers, but no unlawful games were permitted on the premises. With the exception of the addition of one door on the stairway, the premises were in the same condition as when first occupied by them.

Moreover (as you’d expect), Paizes utterly denied having a nitkeeper:

Paizes denied the various allegations made in Sub-Inspector Abley’s affidavit, and said it was not true there was anyone on guard to ensure that police officers did not enter without warning.

However, Mr Justice Lowe judged that what was being run above the Old Canton Cafe was indeed a gaming house:

An order declaring that the premises formerly known as the Old Canton Cafe, Swanston-street, Melbourne, and being that portion of the first floor of the building leased by Christos Paizes were a common gaming house, was made by Mr. Justice Lowe in the Practice Court yesterday. His Honor stated that the order would take effect as from Wednesday, August 1.

And so notice was served on the premises: which effectively marked the end of Melbourne’s Golden Age of baccarat schools. Which is not to say that baccarat suddenly stopped (because it most certainly did not): rather, it was that baccarat’s gilded era had finished, and it became just a low-life activity.

A Dissenting View

Oddly, “Gangland Melbourne” (which, though lively, often seems to me to get stuff wrong) asserts that Harry Stokes (prior to his death in 1945) had (p.81):

“teamed up with Gerald Francis (‘Frank’) Regan and Lou the Lombard running games at the Canton cafe in Swanston Street. Opposed to them were Kim Lenfield, Charlie Carlton, Hymie Bayer and Abe Trunley at the Ace of Clubs, Elizabeth Street. Ralph Pring of the VRC financed the Kim Syndicate, which also ran games at 52 Collins Street. The old-time confidence man Harry ‘Dictionary Harry’ Harrison […] had also returned to Melbourne and become involved in the baccarat schools.”

Lou the Lombard would pop up again in 1951 in “Gangland Australia” (p.131), running a baccarat game “on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Flinders Lane”. But apart from that slightly circular reference, everything else in the above account seems a bit free-floating (as you’ll find if you try searching any of the names in Trove, apart from Dictionary Harry).

So, did The Truth completely misread the baccarat school ‘scene’? Or might the Gangland Melbourne authors have been given dud information? (I suspect the latter, but I thought I ought to mention the former.)

Alternatively, if you know of a book (say, a Melbourne police memoir?) that covers this period of time a little more reliably, please say! (And yes, I’ve read Robert Walker’s serialised memoirs, but thanks for asking.)

Phase 4 – Life After Baccarat

In April 1950, we see Richard Thomas (AKA Abishara, but now manager of the Copacabana Restaurant in Collins Street), Christos Paizes (a shareholder in the Copacabana) and Feti Murat (now a “market gardener”) in a brawl with undercover policemen in Swanston Street. “Murat, who described himself as a market gardener, said he had worked for Paizes some years ago.“

As for William John Elkins, it seems he was born in 1911; in 1938, he was “charged with having had the care and management of a gaming house”; in 1941, we can see him resisting extradition from Fitzroy to Adelaide in connection with a stolen radio; he died in 1964.

So, once again it seems that the only major player we cannot trace beyond 1944 is the mysterious Balutz.

Who Were The Two Gamblers?

If you recall, the Somerton Man was tentatively identified in 1949 as a nitkeeper:

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.

But who might these “two prominent Melbourne baccarat players” have been? Trawling through all the stories in Trove (particularly from The Truth) has thrown up various prominent baccarat player names (of course, Christos Paizes himself started as a gambler), such as:

• super-gambler (and super-litigant) Michael Pitt (who hated the press)
• James Coates (‘The Mark Foy’, murdered in 1947 so we can rule him out)

My favourite baccarat gambler news story from the period was from 18 Dec 1946, relating to a loan made on 15 Jun 1945 between two baccarat players (“Charles [Albert] Darley, outdoor salesman, of St. Kilda” [and] “Eric Allen Kermode, assistant manager of a poultry business in Camberwell“) at a baccarat school at the Canton Cafe. (The case was dismissed with costs.)

To be honest, though, unless the descendants of a 1940s baccarat player step forward to recount the hoary old Somerton Man nitkeeper camp-fire tale their (grand-)father used to tell them, this detail is probably lost to history.

Where To Look Now?

There’s no shortage of police activity documented here: six months of active surveillance on a single site would have involved amassing dossiers on every baccarat school principal, so a ton of paperwork must have been generated. But what happened to that? Can all of it simply have been lost?

There is little doubt in my mind that Victoria Police’s Archive Services Centre – dubbed the “Bermuda Triangle of police files” – contains everything we would like to know.

[…] 135,000 boxes packed floor to ceiling in a cop version of a Costco.

More than one-third have not been catalogued, and records are rudimentary at best for many others.

“It’s a rabbit warren. Police keep almost everything and it’s an organisational nightmare down there,” a former senior police commander says.

Hence it seems to me to be a reasonably safe bet that it is in there, right next to the box containing the Ark of the Covenant. Here’s hoping!