Category Archives: Historical Ciphers

From almost the start of the 1948 investigation into the Somerton Man, South Australian police suspected that he (a) might have worked as a Third Officer on a merchant ship, and (b) might originally have come from Eastern Europe. Add to this his connection with a nurse living in Glenelg who later claimed to have spoken Russian when she was younger, and you get what I think is a reasonably meaty hypothesis to work with – that he was a Russian merchant seaman.

But because he had an American comb, some clothes with American stitching, and a pack of Juicy Fruit chewing gum, it also seems that he had visited America (or perhaps have some long-standing fascination with it). So how might all these pieces link together?

One fascinating maritime connection between the USA and USSR from around this time is the Lend-Lease program, which was launched by the Lend-Lease Act of 11th March 1941: note that the USA was still (theoretically) neutral then, because it did not officially join the war until 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Though Lend-Lease started a lot slower than had been intended (and there are plenty of theories about why this should have been so), it lasted until 1945 and covered all manner of items… on a truly epic scale, as per the following alphabetic list (which I found here):-

• Airplanes 22,150 units; Anti-submarine ships 105 ships; Army shoes 15,417,000 pairs;
• Building equipment in total cost US Dollars 10,910,000; Blankets 1,541,590 pieces; Buttons 257,723,498 pieces;
• Cars 51,503 units; Chemicals 842,000 tons; Cotton 106,893,000 tons;
• Detonators 903,000 units;
• Explosives 295,600 tons;
• Foodstuffs 4,478,000 tons;
• Gasoil 2,670,000 tons;
• Locomotives 1,981 units; Leather 49,860 tons;
• Motorcycles 35,170 units; Machinery in total amount US Dollars 1,078,965,000;
• Non-ferrous metals total 802,000 tons;
• Pistols 12,997 pieces;
• Rifles 8,218 pieces; Railways cars 11,155 units; Radar 445 units;
• Sub-machine guns 131,633 pieces; Ship’s Engine 7,784 units; Spirits 331,066 liters; Cargo Ships – 123 units;
• Tanks 12,700 units; Trucks 375,883 units; Tractors 8,071 units; Torpedo 197 units; Tires 3,786,000 pieces;

(In fact, Russia finally settled its Lend-Lease debt only in August 2006, but that’s another story entirely.)

This vast array of items travelled on at least 123 Lend-Lease ships, and by a variety of sea routes:-

• Pacific 8,244,000 tons (47.1% of total volume);
• Caspian via Iran 4,160,000 tons (23.8%);
• Arctic 3,964,000 tons (22.6%);
• Black Sea 681 tons (3.9%);
• Soviet Arctic Route 452,000 tons (2.6%);
• Grand Total 17,501,000 tons (i.e. 100.0%).

For the Pacific Route (which I suspect is what we’re most interested in), ships departed ports on the USA’s west coast (“principally Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Columbia River ports”). The Japanese would often intercept and examine ships on this route, because as part of the USSR-Japan Neutrality Pact, it could not be used for military cargo. These ships usually docked in the heavily-congested port of Vladivostok, before having their cargo carried 5,000 miles West by the Trans-Siberian Railway.

Also as part of this agreement, Japan only allowed the USA-supplied ships used on the Pacific route to be crewed with Russians. Crew was typically a mix of USSR merchant seamen and poorly paid USSR Navy armed guards.

Unlike the Atlantic crossing, Pacific Lend-Lease ships usually sailed individually rather than in convoy: but they were in greatest danger from submarines – German, Japanese, and American submarines all sank some Russian ships (sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally).

Incidentally, one of the most famous Lend-Lease Pacific sea captains was Anna Shchetinina, who wrote a book about her experience called “On the Seas and Beyond the Seas” («На морях и за морями») (though after WW2 she worked in the Baltic).

Might the Somerton Man have been a Soviet seaman from a merchant ship that was lost in WW2? I found a list of Soviet ships that were lost in the Pacific: but the only one with unaccounted seamen seemed to be the Uzbekistan (though this ship is marked as “Redelivered” in a different list):-

01.04.1943 – Uzbekistan (Узбекистан – one of USSR republics); Cargo ship / Far East State Shipping Company / 3400 BRT / North Western Coast USA / Wrecked / No information about losses.

Or possibly the Ilich (which doesn’t appear on the list of Lend-Lease ships, so probably wasn’t one):-

4.06.1944 – Ilich (Ильич – Second name of Lenin); Cargo passenger ship / 4166 BRT / Far East State Shipping Company / Capt.I.S.Sergeev / Port of Portland, USA / She sank alongside of berth due to unknown reasons / 1 crew (A.Arekhpaeva) was lost and 66 crew were rescued.

Or perhaps even Soviet submarine L-16, which was torpedoed by Japanese submarine I-25 on October 11, 1942 “on the approach to San Francisco while sailing in surface position, and sank.” More detail on this very interesting (and well-illustrated) page.

I really don’t know: at this stage, I’m just starting to find my way around this little slice of 20th century history, so this is more of a research log than a cipher history post. But I thought you’d like to see what’s going on here. 🙂

* * * * *

Other links and books:-

State archive of Primorsky Territory

Russian State Historical Archive of the Far East – where it is, how to use it

Records of the United States Maritime Commission

Major Jordan’s Diaries (online)

“Feeding the Bear: American Aid to the Soviet Union, 1941-1945”, Hubert P. van Tuyll: Greenwood. ISBN 0-313-26688-3.

Gordon Cramer was recently looking at Paul Lawson’s 8th June 1949 work diary entry relating to the plaster cast that he was making of the Somerton Man, and noted this interesting-looking page:

Police Job
Interview with Detectives (Brown + 1)
Ring from Constable Dinham re disposal of original body

Gordon quickly builds his own theories on top of why the word “disposal” was used, but it turns out that if we follow the timeline of what happened, it all makes sense.

According to a 30th May 1949 Adelaide News story, “The SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association secretary (Mr. Alan Saunders) said today his association would pay burial costs, to prevent the victim being buried as a pauper.“. This is the first mention I’ve found of an actual burial.

Then, according to the 14th June 1949 Adelaide News, the burial itself took place at 9.30am of that morning. The service was carried out by Captain E. J. Webb of the Salvation Army, who said at the end (according to Gerry Feltus’ book, p.85) “Yes, this man has someone to love him. He is known only to God.”

Originally, only a simple wooden stake saying “UNKNOWN SOMERTON BODY” was placed there, but the headstone we see today was added a few days after the funeral by Mr. A. Collins, a Keswick monumental mason.

So it all makes sense. As far as Paul Lawson knew on the 8th June 1949, the original body (i.e. not the plaster cast he was making!) was to have been disposed of in a pauper’s burial: but a last-minute donation by the SA Grandstand Bookmakers’ Association at around the same time secured a proper burial, while an after-the-event donation by a local monumental mason turned the grave into something that would last.

According to the (1978) “Somerton Beach Mystery” documentary by Stuart Littlemore, flowers were left on the grave in the spring (though not every year) by an unidentified person. So perhaps Captain Webb might just have been wrong.

As normal, the answer turns out to be so painfully, staring-us-all-in-the-face obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to type.

From what I can see, the most likely scenario is that the Somerton Man’s surname was surely…

Штейн

i.e., that he was a Russian merchant seaman called Stein, who I believe died from natural causes (possibly, as Byron Deveson suggests, of neurosyphilis) in the Glenelg house of Jessica Harkness during the evening of 30th November 1948.

The reason is that I suspect “JEStyn” = “J(essica) E(llen) Штейн”, and that the two met in Royal North Shore Hospital Sydney, where she was a trainee nurse and he was a patient (where, pace Byron Deveson, he was perhaps having his syphilis treated with penicillin? Who can tell?). Whether or not they were actually married, it seems that in 1944 she felt confident enough of their relationship to take the Russian seaman’s surname when signing her name in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.

It’s a pretty specific claim, so how can it be disproved?

I’ve posted on so many separate Tamam Shud / Somerton Man topics recently (which have in turn triggered so many comments), I thought it might be a good idea to at least try to tie up a few loose threads still dangling here. “Ne’er does one door close but that another opens”. (Am I the only person who remembers “The Horrors of Ivan”?)

1. A Professorial Plug

As I mentioned here recently, the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit will be hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session with Professor Derek Abbott this Saturday. If you log in there then and post questions, he promises to try to answer them.

To be precise, the AMA session will start at the following (time zone) times:-

– Eastern Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 9pm
– Mountain Daylight Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 7pm
– Pacific Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 6pm
– Australian Central Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 10.30am
– Australian Western Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 9am
– New Zealand Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 1pm
– Central European Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 3am
– British Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 2am

Of course, the timing is (let’s say) somewhat suboptimal for European Somerton Man fans: but it is what it is, and if you do want to take part, I’m sure you’ll find a way. 🙂

If you do, here are a few good questions to warm him up with…

* How come the Somerton Man was clean-shaven?
* How come he only had a pastie for lunch and dinner?
* Do you accept the new evidence in Feltus’ Chapter 14 “A Final Twist”?
* Can the dead man’s lividity be reconciled with his position posed on the beach?
* Did anybody ever try to track down the strappers that first found the Somerton Man’s corpse?
* Why did the Somerton Man have no socks in his suitcase?
* etc etc etc 🙂

2. The Australian Codebreaker

While following up the whole how-was-the-Rubaiyat-photograph-made question, I noticed that it was sent to “decoding experts at Army Headquarters, Melbourne” (26 July 1949, Feltus p.108) and that on the next day a “Navy ‘code cracker’ was tackling the task this afternoon” (Feltus p.110).

It struck me that these news stories can only really be talking about one person: Captain Theodore Eric Nave, who his biographer Ian Pfennigwerth dubbed “Australian Codebreaker Extraordinary” (in the 2006 book “A Man of Intelligence”). I personally found this a good read, but I suspect that the details of Eric Nave’s Japanese code-breaking exploits probably proved a bit heavy on the technical cryptology side for most lay readers.

Nave was on loan from the Royal Navy to the Australian Army for eight years until 1st January 1948, when he was “attached to the Defence Signals Bureau as a serving officer”, though his “loan appointment was terminated 17:3:49”. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) was established on 16th March 1949, Nave was proposed as a possible director: however, in those paranoid times the job actually went to a Brit: Nave was instead given the role of Defence and Services Liaison Officer, starting 15th December 1949. (Incidentally, he was also appointed to the board of the Victorian Mission to Seamen in 1950, just so you know).

I feel confident that, even though Nave had managed to accrue 160 days of untaken holiday by June 1948, he was at his desk in Melbourne when the Rubaiyat photograph came in – would they honestly have given it to anyone else in the building? Would they hell, I say.

But did Nave ever write about it? And did Army Headquarters keep a copy of that photograph? Even though Pfennigwerth’s book mines many different archives, Nave’s years immediately post-war seem far more sketchy than his war years, as far as evidence goes. All the same, wouldn’t it be nice if one of these archives proved to have a little bit more of an answer for us?

3. A Close Shave?

When I posted about how the Somerton Man was oddly (given the generally accepted timeline) clean-shaven, I proposed that he might have had a long-standing beard shaved off that morning.

With the help of the numerous commenters (and having thought about this a bit more), I can see now that I was being a bit hopeful: ultimately beard science says that hair growth is probabilistic, so there ought to have been a normal mix of all three hair phases in his stubble.

And yet at the same time that doesn’t really square with the timeline and what we see. Even so, there are plenty of other possible explanations we can’t rule out: e.g. the man’s face was shaved in the morgue before the photographs were taken (which is possible); he was shaved later in the day; he was in the throes of such a debilitating (and terminal) condition that his body didn’t have the strength to grow any hairs that day; he in general grew hair slower than most people; he had pale ginger facial hair which didn’t show up as 5 o’clock shadow; and so on.

Who knows which one was right? 🙁

4. The Football Player

When I posted about Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s relentless hospital visitor, I noted that her daughter Mary Morison married a footballer called Ian McKay, and listed highlights of her life up to 1954. The reason for this particular cut-off date is simply that this is currently as far forward as the Australian newspapers archived in Trove go: 50 years back from 2014 is 1954, and any newspaper more than half a century old is deemed to be out of copyright there (just so you know).

But it turns out that Ian McKay was an Australian rules footballer of great repute, who even has a Wikipedia page devoted to him. Unfortunately, the links given there have withered and died on the webby vine: but not before being picked up by the Wayback Machine. So, according to his obituary, we know that when he died in 2010:-

“Ian is survived by his wife, Mary, and three children, Heather, Andrew and David.”

Hence it’s entirely possible I might yet speak with a member of Mrs John Morison’s family before long, which could well prove to be hugely interesting.

Finally, here’s a picture of Ian McKay at (quite literally) the height of his career in 1952:-

Gordon Cramer, responding to a comment about beards I left back in June on his Tamam Shud site, replied:-

“[…] I do wonder about the clean shaven image of him that was published originally, given his supposed movements he would have been without a shave for 18 hours or more before his departure yet no 5 o’clock shadow or stubble..”

The Somerton Man checked his suitcase (containing a razor and razor strop) into Adelaide Railway Station cloak room between 11.00am and noon (and he then bought a bus ticket sometime after 11:15am), while his time of death was estimated next morning as probably having been about 2am that same night: so to be precise, it seems likely that he wouldn’t have shaved for at least 15 hours.

All the same I do agree that Gordon has a point here: the Somerton Man’s perfectly clean-shaven appearance in the police photos doesn’t really square with the generally accepted timeline – 15 hours is too long to not get some kind of “5 o’clock shadow”.

Just to remind you, here’s what he looked like (once Jimmy Durham had managed to wrestle a shirt and tie onto the body):-

Timing discrepancies like this are problematic for all Tamam Shud theories, because they’re not really a matter of opinion: facial hair is controlled by physical rules, which aren’t normally bypassed. So what could explain the Somerton Man’s apparent clean-shaven-ness?

Never having grown a beard myself, I was surprised today to find out that facial hair doesn’t ‘just grow’ (i.e. continuously and mechanically): rather, it follows a set of growth rules. In a page on beard length in a beard-products-selling website, I discovered that human hair has three distinct phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen.

The anagen phase (for head hair) lasts anywhere from two to six years, and since this is the growth phase, we can say with confidence that no man’s beard can ever grow longer than it is at six years old. Now, a man’s genetics determines how long his beard’s growth phase is. […]

During the second phase (catagen), your hair stops growing. It embeds in your skin, and sort of sits there for a few months. During the final phase (telogen), a new hair starts growing in the follicle and pushes out the old hair, causing you to shed it.

The upshot for the Somerton Man, I think, is that if his facial hair didn’t obviously grow during the last 15+ hours of his life (and don’t take my word for it, click through above to the high-res images for yourself), it seems most likely to me that his facial hair – i.e. moustache and beard – wasn’t in the anagen (growth) phase, but was instead in the later catagen or telogen phases. That is, I believe this supports the idea that he had recently shaved off a long-standing (or do I mean “long-hanging”?) and therefore possibly quite substantial moustache and beard. (Hence the question: might one of the two combs in his suitcase have actually been a beard comb?)

Of course, the major alternatives to this scenario are (a) that he shaved again later in the day (problem: his razor was still in the suitcase), (b) someone else shaved him while alive (but in Glenelg?), or (c) someone else shaved him just after he had died (possible, but this does seem just a little bit unlikely – a dead guy is a dead guy, right?).

Personally, I’m running with the whole “luxurious beard” theory, but feel free to disagree. 🙂

In my previous Somerton Man post, I wondered aloud who the Mission to Seamen committee member was. Having raked through Trove, I suspect I may have an answer: I think it was Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s indefatigable hospital visitor.

Here’s the article I found (Adelaide Mail, 10th July 1954) :

Mrs. Morison has visited hundreds of sick seamen since then [1946] — men from England, India, Germany, Malaya, and many other countries. Some did not live to see their own countries again, but in their last days were attended by the Mission.

I suspect that she was the same Mrs John Morison who was honorary secretary of the Cheer-Up Society, and am sure she was the wife of Mr John Morison of North Terrace, Adelaide: their daughter Miss Mary Morison was an air hostess.

Here’s a picture from the 26th June 1948 edition of the Adelaide Mail, showing Mrs J. Morison bringing a birthday cake to (young, tanned, blue-eyed) Irish seaman Thomas Duffy, cheered on by daughter Mary (centre, back):-

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that Mrs John Morison’s actual first name was Evelyn, and that she was the daughter of Jim and Minnie Brimble, of 57 Gurrs Road, Beulah Park.

As for Mary Morison: she sunbathed at Henley Beach in 1948, trained as a TAA air hostess, got engaged to North Adelaide league footballer Ian McKay in 1949, which was also when they were married (story here), with a daughter following on 14 June 1951 called Heather (though not the famous squash player), but she still helped with the canteen at a Mission for Seamen fundraiser (in a “flat blue suit and tile red beret”) in 1952, though that’s where the print trail seems to end. A life in Trove!

Right now, that’s the extent of my knowledge of Mrs Morison: but if the Somerton Man was a foreign merchant seaman in the Royal Adelaide Hospital during 1948, the chances that he came into contact with the Mission to Seamen’s Mrs John Morison were surely very close to 100%.

I’ll post more as I find it…