Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

Byron Deveson and I have independently been reading up on the Electrolytic Zinc Company: newspaper summaries of its annual accounts for 1947-1948 (here also) show that it employed 1709 staff at Risdon plus a further 432 at its Rosebery mining operation. It was in the process of expanding its wharf at Risdon, but was generally hampered by staff shortages.

Here’s an Electrolytic Zinc job advert from 06 November 1948:

AN OPPORTUNITY FOR STEADY EMPLOYMENT IS OFFERED BY ELECTROLYTIC ZINC COMPANY OF AUSTRALASIA LIMITED, RISDON.
LEADBURNERS: Present rate of pay, £10/13/ per week.
FITTERS AND TURNERS. Present rate of pay, £9/5/ per week.
GENERAL LABOURERS: Present rate of pay, £6/16/ per week. Day work.
PLANT OPERATIVES-SHIFT WORKERS: Present average weekly earnings of shift workers working 40 hours per week on 7-day rotation range from £8/10/6 per week to £9/7/6 per week, according to class of work.
TRAIN SERVICE TO WORKS FOR ALL SHIFTS. Fare, 6d. per week.
40 HOURS PER WEEK: Day Work, 7.45 a.m. to 4.20 p.m., Mondays to Fridays. Shift Work: Day Shift, 7.45 a.m. to 3.45 p.m. Afternoon Shift, 3.45 p.m. to 11.45 p.m. Night Shift, 11.45 p.m. to 7.45 a.m.
PAID ANNUAL HOLIDAYS: 10 days, plus 10 statutory holidays per annum.
AMENITIES: Insurance Scheme, covering sickness and death. Health, medical and dental services. Cribtime store sells tobacco, confectionery, clothing, footwear, etc. Apply to Registrar personally, or by telephone W1111, or by letter to the Company, Box 634B, G.P.O., Hobart.

As Byron Deveson noted in a comment a few days ago, the Incharran and Era steamships traversed well-worn grooves, keeping the Electrolytic Zinc Company’s Risdon works supplied with zinc concentrates (both from Broken Hill via Newcastle in NSW, and from the company’s Rosebery mines on the other side of Tasmania), and then passing the lead-rich residues of its zinc extraction process onward to the huge lead smelting works in Port Pirie. At Port Pirie, the ships would then get loaded with calcines and drums of acid before returning to Tasmania. (Note that Risdon is treated as an output of Hobart.) And so it went on.

?? Oct 1948 – Newcastle (NSW)
— load roasted zinc ore concentrates (mined in Broken Hill?)
?? Oct 1948 – arrived Hobart
01 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart
02 Nov 1948 – arrived Burnie
— load zinc concentrates (mined in Rosebery?)
04 Nov 1948 – departed Burnie
05 Nov 1948 – arrived Hobart / Risdon
— unload zinc concentrates
— load zinc residues
10 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart / Risdon
14 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie
— unload 1000 tons of zinc residues and 58 empty drums
— load 4100 tons of calcines and 58 drums of acid, plus five tons of general cargo
?? Nov 1948 – departed Port Pirie
?? Nov 1948 – arrived Hobart / Risdon
— unload calcines etc
— load 1,000 tons of zinc residues
24 Nov 1948 – departed Hobart / Risdon
29 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie
02 Dec 1948 – departed Port Pirie (for Port Adelaide) “in ballast”
03 Dec 1948 – arrived Port Adelaide
09 Dec 1948 – departed Port Adelaide (for Risdon)

Note that on 17 Nov 1948, the Incharran, Moonta and Cheltenham vessels were (along with various buildings in Port Pirie) bedecked with flags to register people’s delight at the birth of a son to Princess Elizabeth and her husband the Duke of Edinburgh.

And finally: I’ve just started putting together a list of Somerton Man “known unknowns”. Which is just a clunky way of saying ‘a page full of things I know (pretty much) exist, which I haven’t yet seen, but which I’d like to’. Please feel free to suggest other things that should be on there, or ways to see any of those things (and so remove them from the list)!

Huge thanks go out to Cipher Mysteries reader Poul Gjol for responding so quickly to my request for the 3-volume Log Of Logs by posting up a link to where scans of all three Log(s) Of Logs can be downloaded.

Unfortunately, this quickly reveals that the Incharran’s logs are nowhere to be seen there: but as normal, this merely means that once again I’m starting six feet to one side of where I actually need to be. Instead, the right place to begin is by putting together a brief history of the Incharran, as culled from everybody’s favourite instant online Antipodean historical resource… Trove.

(Photo: Alex Wood)

1944 – The Empire Labrador

The Adelaide Advertiser (OK, the Tizer) ran a short piece on the Incharran and its sister ship the Inchmark not long after the two arrived in Australia in mid-November 1947:-

One of six identical ships specially built in the closing stages of the war to handle heavy lifts, the British steamer Incharran is now on her first visit to Port Adelaide with timber from Cairns. She has 659 tons of timber and 113 tons of plywood. As originally rigged, the Incharran had an 80-ton “jumbo” derrick on the mainmast and a derrick capable at taking a 50-ton lift on the foremast. These, together with the heavy-duty winches, have been removed, but the outsize tubular steel masts and heavy wire stays are still fitted. Launched as the Empire Labrador in 1944. the Incharran is an oil-burning steamer of 3,539 tons owned by Williamson & Co. of Hongkong. Like the Inchmark, owned by the same firm, which is now at No 11 berth, the Incharran carries a Chinese crew. Both ships are under charter to the Australian Shipping Board.

So the Empire Labrador was an Empire Malta class ship, and it was built in West Hartlepool by the British Government to a design that broadly copied high-capacity Scandinavian cargo ships of the day.

It’s official number was 180077, its IMO number was 5151830, and it was launched on 19th August 1944, just in case you ever feel like celebrating its birthday. There’s also a list here of the convoys it was in from then until the end of WW2.

1949 – Incharran (Williamson & Co Ltd)

Technically speaking, it was the Inch Steamship Company (a subsidiary of Williamson & Co Ltd in Hong Kong) that bought the Empire Labrador, and renamed it in its house style to “Incharran”. Before long it was taken out to Cairns in Australia in November 1947, where it had a fairly inauspicious start to life Down Under: it was discovered to be carrying 14,250 contraband cigarettes “of English and American brands” being smuggled from Hong Kong.

Before long, it seems to have been quickly re-chartered by Howard Smith Ltd (perhaps from the Australian Shipping Board?), which almost immediately put it to work batting back and forth between Risdon and Port Pirie, much as we have seen. In late 1949, it may well be that the lead-related work for it at Risdon / Port Pirie petered out, because it started to ship coal instead.

Life after Australia

Its last day in Australia was 12th January 1950, when it left Sydney for Hong Kong. From then onwards, the Incharran found itself hard at work along the Chinese coast, where it often found itself under attack from Chinese Nationalists, particularly near the Straits of Formosa (modern day Taiwan). It also ran aground in 1952 about 400 miles north of Hong Kong, and had to be salvaged from that difficult situation by ships including the British destroyer HMS Cossack.

1955 – sold to Indo-China Steam Navigation Co Ltd, renamed “Ho Sang”
1968 – sold to Golden River Shipping Corporation, renamed “Golden Sun”
1970 – scrapped.

Captain George LeFevre

The ship’s Master from 1947 continuously to at least 1953 was Captain George LeFevre.

I haven’t found out much about him: but I did find an 18th October 1932 article from the Adelaide Chronicle about a ‘Captain G. Lefevre’ who was in charge of “the Chinese-owned steamer Helikon flying the British flag” when it was taken over by Chinese pirates: very likely the same man. The Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser of 21st October 1932 has a much fuller account (detailed, though a bit slow to load).

He might also be the “Captain Lefevre” mentioned in NAA control record C1937/7600 in series SP42/1: that person arrived in Sydney on the CAPITAINE ILLIAQUER on 30th October 1937 to join the crew of the NOTOU.

And finally… the ever-reliable Port Pirie Recorder ran a story on 28th March 1949 about two Chinese crew-members (Hsu Ming Hsien and Chan San) from the Incharran, one of whom was so drunk and annoyed about not being sold a milk-based drink in a fruit shop that he attacked the shopkeeper and “broke his finger slightly”. Hsu was fined £1 with 6/3 costs on two counts, while Chan was fined 10/ with 7/6 costs for having been drunk, and £1 with 6/ costs on each of the other charges: the Master paid the fines on their behalf.

More of a request than a post: may I ask if anyone happens to have handy access to the three-volume Log of Logs?

(If you don’t already know what it is, it’s an astonishing reference work that collates references to Australian and New Zealand ships’ logs in collections all over the world – archives, museums, personal collections, everywhere.)

I am, of course, interested in digging up the logs for the Incharran that was doggedly plying the lead trade between Risdon (in Tasmania) and Port Pirie (in South Australia) in 1948. There were other merchant ships with the same name afterwards (and probably before), but that’s the particular one I really, really want to know about.

There ~appears~ to be a Big Fat Archive of merchant ships’ logs in Hobart (NAA P1196, control symbol “ALMKUK-WAUMEA”), that I found by going through all the Tasmania links here, and my guess is that the Incharran’s logs – if they’re anywhere – would probably be there. But the Log of Logs will know, it always does (pretty much), hence this request. 🙂

Note also that this page has a great description of the different types of Australian shipping forms, and also what you’re likely to find in different archives. Recommended!

Byron Deveson – and if anybody deserves an Inspector-Morse-like middle name of ‘Indefatigable’ it is surely him – recently left a series of comments on Cipher Mysteries about lead, which answered a number of questions that have been bothering me for a while. His most interesting comment began thus:-

I think that the focus should be on ships loading lead concentrates, lead ore, and “ore concentrates” “residues” and “calcines”. And also roasted zinc concentrates.The Port Pirie smelter produced lead ingots and I do not believe that anyone could mishandle these in such a way as to receive the massive dose of lead that SM appears to have received. Lead concentrates, lead ore, ore concentrates, residues and calcine, could possibly be the cause. Or roasted zinc concentrates. Lead concentrates at the time would have generally been a very fine, dusty powder, and the same for some ores and residues. If this fine powder was inhaled it could cause lead poisoning.

All of which means that while Port Pirie seems to be the right place, because of the huge lead smelting works not particularly far from where the dead man was found, so far I very likely have been looking at quite the wrong category of ships. The substantial international trade in lead ingots may be the one garnering all the kudos in the Port Pirie Recorder, but handling those ingots seems unlikely to have yielded terminally precipitous levels in the Somerton Man’s various internal lead compartments.

As so often with these archival research, the fact that this is a bright lamp post doesn’t mean it is necessarily where we should be looking beneath.

But the Port Pirie Recorder does list all the ships in and out of the port, including passenger ships and colliers (specialist coal ships). Without boring you with endless links to Trove, the non-ingot lead activity in the port from 20 October onwards looks like this:-

18 Oct – Ambassador, arrived from Melbourne
25 Oct – Ambassador, departed with 3,000 tons of concentrates

20 Oct – Era, arrived from Tasmania, with 1,047 tons of residues, 200 tons of zinc slabs, and 40 tons of general cargo.
26 Oct – Era, departed with 4,133 tons of calcines and general cargo

18 Nov – Incharran, arrived from Risdon, with 1,000 tons of residues and 58 empty drums
18 Nov – Incharran, left for Risdon with 4,100 tons of calcines, 58 drums of acid, and five tons of general cargo

22 Nov – Aeon, arrived from Port Kembla, arrived with 4,610 tons of coke and 74 tons of general cargo
02 Dec – Aeon, departed for Sydney and Port Kembla, loading lead, copper matte and speiss

29 Nov – Incharran, arrived from Risdon, with 1,000 tons of residues (Howard Smith Ltd.)
02 Dec – Incharran, departed for Port Adelaide, “in ballast”
03 Dec – Incharran, arrived at Port Adelaide
09 Dec – Incharran, departed from Port Adelaide for Risdon

Similarly, if we look at the Burnie Advocate, we can see that the Incharran was unloading calcines at Risdon on 23rd November, loading zinc at Risdon on 24th November, and sailed on the 24th November for Port Pirie with 3,539 tons.

Unsurprisingly, this is why Byron continues:-

I would look at the Incharran before any other ship because of the nature of the cargo (lead residues that are likely to be very powdery) and because the likely primitive loading and handling conditions in Tasmania could easily result in lead poisoning. Incharran seems to have been a specialist ore carrier, and it is possible that the residues from the Risdon refinery were loaded directly into the hold and that would generate clouds of dust both at the time of loading, and unloading.

Indeed, for all the Port Pirie sea traffic, the Incharran looks like just about the only “bad lead” (i.e. non-ingot lead) ship that meets the timeline criteria: so I’d tend to agree that this is where the overall “lead logic” seems to point.

I’d perhaps go slightly further: that if it is the Incharran that is involved and the timeline we have is correct, then it seems to me that the accident may well have happened during the 18th November unloading/loading at Port Pirie, but that the lead-poisoned merchant seaman then returned to Risdon (in Tasmania) on the Incharran before coming back to Port Pirie on the Incharran on the 29th November – the day before he died – and making his way to Port Adelaide, perhaps arriving early in the morning. The rest you all know by now, I hope. 🙂

All of which forms a super-plausible narrative that tightly fits the documented ship activity (and for the right class of ship) in Port Pirie: so how do we test this?

The Tasmanian archives (in the NAA and elsewhere) has a record for desertions and discharges during this period: P2562, VOLUME 1. Well worth a look, I’d say. (Note that I found this listed on this page which seems to know a little more about Tasmanian crew records in the NAA than the NAA itself does).

Alternatively, perhaps the NAA’s Tasmanian crewlists P2004 (outwards) and P2005 (inwards) series will have crew lists for the Incharran, flagging a change in crew for us: or perhaps D3064 will have crew lists for the Incharran arriving at Port Pirie. So it could be that the answer will turn out to have been in Adelaide all along: I shall ask my Adelaidean volunteer immediately just in case…

PS: incidentally, just as with poor old H. C. Reynolds, I briefly wondered whether the seaman’s employer’s archives held any personnel files from this time. The Mitchell and Dixson Libraries Manuscripts Collection, State Library of New South Wales, has 35 volumes (across 1.4m of shelving) of Howard Smith Ltd archives, item MLMSS 3565… but nothing relating to employment, alas. Just so you know! 😐

A few posts ago, I proposed that because of the unusual lead trace pattern in the Somerton Man’s hair, and the evidence broadly suggesting that he was a non-Aussie merchant seaman, we should perhaps look at the crew lists for November 1948 for the (very few) ships taking on lead at the smelter wharf at Port Pirie, not so very far away from Adelaide.

Looking at the Port Pirie Recorder from that time, only three (or possibly five) ships fit the bill (of lading): American Producer, City of Delhi, Lanarkshire, and possibly Annam or Ericbank. I asked if anybody would be so good as to go to the NAA archives in Adelaide to have a look at the crew lists in D3064 for November 1948: and a volunteer very kindly came forward (more on that later).

Here’s an update on what we have discovered so far in the pursuit of this Australian lead archive trail.

Firstly, the bad news: that D3064 unfortunately only contains crew lists for ships that enter or leave Australian waters at Port Adelaide or its outports. For ships travelling from Europe to Australia, the first and last port of call would usually instead be Fremantle (right on the western end of Australia), which is where their crews would be declared on arrival and departure. Similarly, for ships travelling from the United States, the first and last port of call would usually be Brisbane (right on the eastern end).

As a result, my determined volunteer has now doggedly ordered some quite different archives (relating to desertions) for this coming week, and I wait with great interest to see what turns up there.

All the same, if we could find out which Australian ports these five ships first entered and last left, we should be able to find their crew lists elsewhere in the NAA’s voluminous archives. So I decided to give this a go, using newspapers in Trove and various records in the NAA.

Ericbank

16 Sep 1948 – arrived at Sydney from Nauru in thick fog
17 Sep 1948 – sailed from Sydney to Port Kembla
10 Nov 1948 – arrived at Port Pirie from Melbourne
12 Nov 1948 – sailed from Port Pirie to Sydney
20 Nov 1948 – sailed from Sydney to Honiara (the capital of the Solomon Islands)

Unfortunately, it’s not clear to me which Sydney NAA archive file to consult for Sep/Nov 1948 crew lists: any suggestions?

Incidentally, while in Port Pirie, two seamen from the Ericbank were each fined £5 with 7/6 costs for taking someone’s bike for a ride, a money-making ploy that recent London mayors have taken on with enthusiasm. 🙂

Annam

01 Oct 1948 – a brief profile in the Adelaide Advertiser:-

One of the first motor ships in the world — she was built in 1913 — the 6,636-ton Danish freighter Annam, is due at Port Adelaide tomorrow morning with paper pulp, canned fish and Baltic timber, from Oslo and New Zealand.

An unusual feature of her construction is that, viewed from forward, the Annam appears to have no funnel. Although placed in the normal position, her funnel looks hardly more than an exhaust pipe for her diesel engines. The Annam has five passengers from New Zealand, all of whom will leave the ship here.

02 Oct 1948 – arrived at Adelaide from Oslo (presumably via New Zealand?)
05 Oct 1948 – unloaded “100,000 super feet” of softwoods
08 Oct 1948 – departed Port Adelaide for Port Pirie, Port Napier, Melbourne.
11 Oct 1948 – arrived in Melbourne
29 Oct 1948 – departed Melbourne “for Scandinavia” (eventually)
01 Nov 1948 – arrived Hobart (Tasmania)
04 Nov 1948 – arrived Launceston (Tasmania), to load “wool, peas and skins for Europe”
07 Nov 1948 – departed Launceston
11 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie
15 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Adelaide
18 Nov 1948 – departed Port Adelaide for Fremantle
24 Nov 1948 – arrived Fremantle from Adelaide
29 Nov 1948 – departed Fremantle for Genoa

Hence the NAA archive files to consult would seem to be D3064 for arrival (held in Adelaide) and PP1/1 (held in Darwin). However, it may also be sensible to look at the Hobart archives for crew lists, because that was where the ship was immediately before it arrived at Port Pirie.

Other details: Danish seaman Jorgen Bernhardt Olsen got so annoyed when a policeman refused his offer of a drink in Port Pirie, that he told him “if I had you in my country I would kill you”, then swung him round and ripped his clothing. (He was fined £3 with 7/6 costs).

I also found records for two 19-year-old Danish crewmen (Kurt Jensen Spuur and Kai Leo Møller) who deserted the Annam on 29th November 1948 in Fremantle. The records in the NAA relating to Kurt Jensen Spuur are openly accessible, and show (particularly if you read them backwards from the end) how the ship’s owners were obliged to put up a sizeable bond for any crew members who had absconded since arriving in the country.

Finally, I also found a picture of the Annam, and a brief summary of the Annam’s war record.

American Producer

18 Oct 1948 – arrived at Brisbane from the US, dropping off several passengers [NAA]
20 Oct 1948 – departed Brisbane for Adelaide via Sydney and Melbourne
22 Oct 1948 – arrived at Sydney, dropping off more passengers (one being the magnificently named Hilda Frankenstein) [NAA]
27 Oct 1948 – departed Sydney for Melbourne
29 Oct 1948 – arrived at Melbourne
07 Nov 1948 – departed Melbourne for Port Pirie
10 Nov 1948 – arrived Whyalla from Melbourne
16 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie from Whyalla
18 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Adelaide from Port Pirie
19 Nov 1948 – departed Port Adelaide
23 Nov 1948 – arrived Melbourne
06 Dec 1948 – arrived at Sydney from Melbourne
16 Dec 1948 – departed Sydney for Newcastle
16 Dec 1948 – arrived Newcastle
21 Dec 1948 – departed Newcastle “for Boston and New York, via Sydney and Panama”
22 Dec 1948 – arrived Sydney from Newcastle
29 Dec 1948 – departed Sydney for America

(Incidentally, it arrived in Boston around 30/31 Jan 1949.)

Hence the NAA archive files to consult would seem to be BP120/1 (held in Brisbane) for its arrival in October 1948, and whatever the Sydney crew list archive is for its departure.

City of Delhi

11 Nov 1948 – arrived Fremantle from Beira (the second largest city in Mozambique, as any fule kno).
16 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Pirie “from overseas”
18 Nov 1948 – departed Port Pirie “for United Kingdom”
19 Nov 1948 – arrived Port Adelaide
27 Nov 1948 – departed Port Adelaide for Newcastle
01 Dec 1948 – arrived Newcastle from Adelaide
03 Dec 1948 – “The City of Delhi is loading 20,000 bales of wool at Lee Wharf, Newcastle. The cargo is almost equal to all that part of growers’ wool sold at the last Newcastle sales.”
20 Dec 1948 – departed Newcastle for “UK and Continent via Sydney”
21 Dec 1948 – arrived Sydney from Newcastle
06 Jan 1949 – departed Sydney for Fremantle
14 Jan 1949 – arrived Fremantle “for oil bunkers”

I don’t know when it left Fremantle, but it was in Suez by the 8th February 1949.

Hence the NAA archive file to consult is almost certainly PP1/1 (held in Darwin).

Other stuff: Dale Collins reminiscing about his time as a steward on the City of Delhi.

Lanarkshire

14 Nov 1948 – arrived at Fremantle from Mauritius –
18 Nov 1948 – arrived at Port Pirie –
20 Nov 1948 – departed Port Pirie “for United Kingdom via Eastern states”
22 Nov 1948 – arrived Melbourne “from Mauritius”
26 Nov 1948 – departed Melbourne to Sydney
28 Nov 1948 – arrived Sydney “from South Africa”
08 Dec 1948 – departed Sydney for Melbourne
11 Dec 1948 – arrived Melbourne from Sydney
15 Dec 1948 – departed Melbourne “for Liverpool”
20 Dec 1948 – “The steamer Lanarkshire was expected to arrive in Albany from the Eastern States early this morning to lift 400 tons of refrigerated cargo from the meat works of Thomas Borthwick and Sons. The cargo comprises frozen meat, poultry and offal for the United Kingdom. The Lanarkshire will call at Fremantle en route for Britain.”
30 Dec 1948 – departed Fremantle for Liverpool

Hence the NAA archive file to consult is without much doubt PP1/1 (held in Darwin).

Unusually, this very fast (18 knots!) merchant ship had an entire profile written on it telling how it once outran a group of 17 U-Boats during WW2, as well as including profiles of some of its crew. Another article notes how it was an Empire ship, Britain’s wartime answer to America’s Liberty ships.

Might the Somerton Man have been Arnold Deutsch all along? It’s a fascinating possibility, though one for which we currently have far less evidence to work with than I would like. (Though Derek Abbott thinks Deutsch was 4″ too short and had the wrong size hands.)

Hence a few days ago, I decided to try to hunt down Deutsch’s fingerprints: after all, we have reasonable photographic copies of the Somerton Man’s fingerprints (though not the original fingerprint card(s), Derek Abbott believes, while Gordon Cramer doubts whether they’re even genuine).

Who else could I ask about this but well-known spy writer Nigel West (Rupert Allason)? To my very great delight, he quickly responded:-

Having seen Deutsch’s NKVD file in Moscow, I am reasonably sure there is not a record of his fingerprints in Russia. Nor is it likely that his Aliens Registration card with (what was then) Special Branch survives.

Of course, the NKVD file on Deutsch was precisely what I was hoping would contain his fingerprints, so this was a bit of a disappointment. But it is what it is. West’s email continued:-

However, as Deutsch drowned in the Atlantic on 7 November 1942 when the SS Donbass was sunk by a U-boat, it seems a little unlikely that his body would wash up in Australia.

You may already know that Nigel West included this account of Deutsch’s death in several of his books, such as The Historical Dictionary of Sexspionage (p.69) and The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the Russian Archives (p.113), which asserted that “[m]ortally injured, Deutsch died while heroically trying to save the lives of others“.

I also have here Ben Macintyre’s “A Spy Among Friends”, Rufina Philby’s “The Private Life of Kim Philby”, and John Costello and Oleg Tsarev’s “Deadly Illusions – The First Book from the KGB archives”. The last of these recites the same basic story, and refers to DEUTSCH File No. 32826 (as mentioned in Vol. I and Vol. II of RISA), though it is not immediately clear which parts of their account are from the file and which are not.

Of course, we now know that the SS Donbass was sunk by the German destroyer Z-27 (not by a U-Boat) in the Barents Sea (not the Atlantic), and there is no mention of Deutsch anywhere in the lists of the dead. So I think we can reasonably doubt that we have been handed down the whole story.

A sensible question is whether the SS Donbass indeed had any passengers at all. I found a very good page (in Russian) with numerous different accounts of the Donbass’s sinking. One of these accounts (Weiner BA, Soviet maritime transport in the Great Patriotic War. – Moscow: Military Publishing, 1989) asserts that 49 people died that day, whereas the memorial only lists 33 dead: however, this same account claims that the Donbass’s guns managed to land a hit on the destroyer, which seems (from the destroyer’s own logs) to be more Soviet mythology than wartime fact.

Far more persuasive to me is the complete lack of any mention of passengers – or indeed of any practical heroics from anyone who wasn’t a ranking officer on the ship (e.g. Morozov) – in any of the accounts. The final account on the site seems to have been largely taken from Captain Zielke’s account in the SMERSH files: here too passengers are conspicuously absent.

Really, I find myself struggling to link Deutsch with anything here. Have I missed anything important?

Here’s a good question: what can we infer from the varying levels of lead in the Somerton Man’s hair?

To try to answer this, I went looking for some proper science on how the human body handles lead: the root of the modern literature tree seems to be Kinetic analysis of lead metabolism in healthy humans by M B Rabinowitz, G W Wetherill, and J D Kopple, from the August 1976 issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation (what, it isn’t in your Favourites already? I’m genuinely surprised).

This introduced a “three compartment” model, i.e. that lead ingested is held in (1) the blood, (2) soft tissues, and (3) bones and teeth; and that the ways (and the rates) that the body stores lead in (and removes lead from) those compartments are quite different.

Their kinetic analysis indicated that:
* the primary (blood stream) compartment holds up to 1.9mg of lead, and has a mean life of 36±5 days;
* the secondary (soft tissue) compartment holds up to 0.6mg of lead, and has a mean life of 30 to 55 days;
* the tertiary (skeletal) compartment holds up to 200mg (!) of lead, and has a mean life of ~10000 days (!).

Of particular interest to us is the observation (from the model the three authors develop) that lead only gets into the hair from the second compartment.

All the same, some internet sites tend to cite the only-slightly-more-recent report “Toxic Trace Metals in Human and Mammalian Hair and Nails”, EPA-600 4.79-049, August 1979, US Environmental Protection Agency, Research and Development as encouraging the use of hair analysis: while other sites seem to suggest that lead hair analysis can be wildly variable without useful baselines to work with, and so using lead hair analysis is essentially “futile”.

I suspect that to build up a more balanced picture, it would make more sense to read other more biochemistry-based accounts, such as this tutorial (which runs to several pages). Here, the authors note (among many different things) that one key sign of acute lead poisoning is a blue-black “lead line” in the gingival tissues (the gums), which seems not to have been present in the Somerton Man (unless you know better?)

What, then, of the Somerton Man’s hair #1? We have a nice graph of his Pb206 isotope timeline, that Derek Abbott believes covers roughly the two week period prior to the SM’s death…

…but what does it mean?

To my eyes, it seems likely from the rapid drop in the (time-reversed) graph that the Somerton Man had experienced a high short-term exposure to lead before the start of the graph (say, a little more than two weeks before his death): the steady-state value from the left (i.e. later) half of the graph would seem to indicate an equilibrium with environmental lead. The SM’s acute exposure level (as measured in the hair, remember, and so subject to different rules to the primary compartment) would therefore seem to have been at least five times his environmental lead levels, and possibly much higher.

However, I suspect that the timeline for this hair is just too short to really be sure what is going on: it’s cut off (literally) just when things started to get interesting. But if Derek Abbott’s students can successfully match this up to hair #2’s timeline, then we might well be in business. It would also be very good to know the ratio of the various lead isotopes (Byron Deveson for one will be waiting attentively for this to be documented). Interesting times!

It is a sad truth that almost all we know about the Somerton Man case was known to the police by the end of 1949. However, a shining exception to this 65-year-old evidential stasis is the set of spectrometry measurements taken by some of Derek Abbott’s students in 2013. Cunningly, their subject matter was a short hair embedded in the plaster cast of the dead man (the one in the SAPOL museum): progressively burning this hair with a laser gave them spectrometric readings of the physical chemistry going on in the Somerton Man’s body very late in his life.

On the positive side, it turned out that the hair included a root, so its timeline is almost certain to cover the interesting days right up to his death. However, it is only a very short hair, so it only really gives us hints about what was happening in roughly his final fortnight.

Intriguingly, I found out this week that a new cohort of Derek Abbott’s students has recently repeated this experiment, but with a substantially longer hair. Unfortunately this second hair did not include a root, which makes calibrating the results more difficult: and the results and analysis have not yet been released.

What of the first set of results? Of all the different isotopes the students detected and graphed, one stands out very strongly: lead. (Note that the graph is time-reversed, with the root end at the left and the older end at the right.)

In a post a few months back, Gordon Cramer suggested that this lead might suggest a connection with the nearby Port Pirie, where there was a huge lead smelting works. Though he then went on to assert that the connection to the Somerton Man probably wasn’t to do with the lead as such, but was surely some kind of spy-related thing to do with uranium processing (which was also close to Port Pirie, and was just starting up in 1947/1948). But as always, Gordon is free to go off in any direction he chooses.

As for me, I’m far more concerned with the lead itself, and what its possible relationship with Port Pirie might be. Derek Abbott rightly cautions that we don’t really know what was considered a normal level of environmental lead in Adelaide in 1948 (and so we should be careful about what inferences we draw from the lead graph): but I often think that a small detail can tell its own story, and this unexpected lead trace might well be such an instance.

I’ve said before that I suspect that the Somerton Man was an overseas merchant seaman, quite probably a Third Officer with responsibility for lading and stencilling details on crates and boxes as they were stacked in a ship’s hold. At the same time, the primary way that lead left Port Pirie was by the ton, stacked into ships’ holds: as we shall see in a different post in a few days’ time, ships once loaded with lead then often travelled the 139 miles south to Port Adelaide where additional bales of wool and leather were taken on: and then finally the ship left South Australian waters for its final destination (wherever in the world that happened to be).

The Port Pirie Recorder from this period included a shipping news column (“Pirie Shipping News”), detailing arrivals, loadings and departures at the port. If we collate all this together solely for lead shipments in November 1948, this is what we find:

Arr Dep
8 – 10 Clan Maclean (2500 tons) – for United Kingdom via Port Adelaide (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
10 – 12 Ericbank (2250 tons) – for United Kingdom (Howard Smith Ltd)
11 – 13 Annam (1200 tons) – for Marseilles via Port Adelaide (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
15 – 17 American Producer (1200 tons) – for New York via Port Adelaide (Dalgety & Co. Ltd)
16 – 18 City of Delhi (2500 tons) – for United Kingdom (Elder, Smith & Co. Ltd)
18 – 20 Lanarkshire (1000 tons) – for United Kingdom (Gibbs, Bright & Co)
25 – 30 Corio (2800 tons) – for Sydney (Howard Smith Ltd)

So, what might the lead timeline be telling us? I think that if the Somerton Man was a Third Officer lading and marking up crates of lead, with a substantial spike roughly two weeks before his death in the night of 30th November 1948, then there would seem to be a good chance we can narrow down the number of boats he was working on to three or perhaps five: American Producer, City of Delhi, Lanarkshire, and possibly Annam or Ericbank.

Frustratingly, NAA: D458 Volume I (the ledger of “seamen engaged, discharged, deserted or died at Port Pirie”) only runs to 31st March 1948, which is a bit of a shame. However, there is a very substantial body (15.48 linear metres!) of archives for crew data in Adelaide in NAA record D3064:-

This series comprises lists of ships crews who visited Port Adelaide and outports.

The series basically comprises Form M + S 11(attachment) and supporting documentation. Currently documents are arranged in chronological order in calendar year blocks.

Information contained in these documents includes names, dates and places of birth, nationalities, some information regarding desertions, restricted crew members on board, crew changes, last and next port of call for ship, animal and birds on board.

So if I’m right about the story the lead timeline seems to be telling us, then anyone who wants to be the first to see the Somerton Man’s name for themselves should go to the SA archives at great speed and have a look at the D3064 (November 1948) crew lists for these ships (they’re not available online), particularly where there’s any difference between the crew that arrived and the crew that left.

Any takers? 🙂

One thing that has long bothered me about the contents of the Somerton Man’s suitcase is the white tie (the one with the “T Keane” name on it). As the always-entertaining Pete Bowes asks in a recent tomsbytwo blog post,

What manner of man carries a white tie in his luggage?

To which I’d add: what manner of man wears a white tie at all? And indeed, up until just now I had no sensible answer at all to either question (unless you count American white-tie gangster chic as a possibility). However, I just found a curious line from history, that suggests how wearing a white tie might very possibly get you killed in post-WW2 Australia…

It turns out that one of the most famous (long) white tie-wearers of the 20th century was French lawyer and fascist politician Pierre Laval (the 101st French President), one of only three men executed by the post-WW2 French High Court for political war crimes.

(“Pierre Laval a Meurisse 1931” by Agence de presse Meurisse‏ – Bibliothèque nationale de France. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

The book “Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Hitler’s Germany” by David Bird mentions (pp. 214-216) that well-known Australian Professor Kelver Hayward Hartley (1909-1998) for a while wore a white shirt and white tie in some kind of emulation of Pierre Laval, openly signalling his Nazi-aligned anti-democratic views: and so in 1939 he inevitably came to the attention of the NSW Special Branch. Though Sergeant Simons and Constable Jones wrote a report damning his politics, they concluded that he was essentially harmless, and so he survived WW2 unscathed.

So… might the white tie in the Somerton Man’s suitcase actually be a sign of his far-right political allegiance? Right now, I can’t conceive why anyone in 1948 would consciously want to place themselves under Laval’s long shadow, unless they were themselves a fascist.

Unless anyone knows better… 🙂