Sektu and Henry Debosnys

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Some interesting correspondence in the last few days has brought the case of hanged murderer Henry Debosnys (along with his curious unsolved ciphers and his not-very-credible autobiography) back to mind. It has also reminded me of a number of Debosnys-related things I’ve been meaning to post to Cipher Mysteries for ages…

Sektu on the Portuguese that isn’t

Having originally posted about Debosnys here back in 2015, I’ve long meant to get round to posting links to the Sektu blog. Back in 2017, its author (someone called Brian, who now seems to have gone very quiet) attempted to see how far the clues embedded in Debosnys’ self-serving mixture of misdirections and lies could be pursued.

For example, Brian notes that even though Debosnys claimed to have been born in Portugal, the fragments of (what seems like) Portuguese in his papers aren’t really much like Portuguese:

Comoderondas inacia bêco olondo inoto para
Imbiabo kotaronc molonk niarotan pérana
[…]
inno calledaz
Ontro de palade mosa kaen faleï tonüe dhala pico indor kouniss plaira colrose, inbello monozy impiodo cara. ûntez noüméa, tintems oda formandore, artosa passat Otiva …[remaining text not clear or cut off]

Any suggestions as to what to make of this folderol?

Brian also notes that Debosnys’ Greek poem is basically an incomplete copy of Thomas Moore’s preface to his Odes of Anacreon: and separately wonders whether the ciphered lines might be Debosnys’ version of how he thought the poem should have ended. It’s an interesting suggestion, for sure.

Brian also transcribed part of Debosnys’ cipher (though he seems not to have posted his transcription anywhere), though I’d caution (just as before) that it’s not at all obvious what the best transcription strategy would be for it. He also posted some notes on what he called the “N glyph“, along with various difficulties with it.

Sektu on Debosnys’ real name

Brian made four interesting posts on trying to work out Debosnys’ real name. His first post points out that when Debosnys talks of the “franck terror“, he is almost certainly referring to “franc-tireurs“, who were volunteers (many from other countries and/or from overseas) who joined guerilla groups to fight for France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Yet as with everything else in Debosnys’ account, his claims of importance (he implies he was a leader of a group) are very probably exaggerated (for example, Brian’s second post points out that he was not Louis Delpech): but Debosnys may well have taken part.

In a more promising vein, Brian’s third post in the set goes through the passenger list of the Cimbria (which Debosnys claimed to have sailed on with his wife Judith, but which I had previously not been very impressed by). In his fourth post, he considers that Debosnys and his wife might have in fact been Jacob Pomries (a slatemaker) and his wife Elise (aged 35 and 22 on the Cimbria). But… he doesn’t actually seem hugely convinced, to be fair.

Brian also tried to pursue Debosnys’ tattoo-like handshake drawing, but without huge success. He also noted a possible connection between Debosnys’ curious middle name “Deletnack” and the (not very plausible-looking reverse anagram) M. le vicomte de Letnac, whose memories of Italy was published as a book by J. Cantel of Paris.

Finally, Brian dug up an interesting story about a “Colonel Henry” from the Paris Commune (Debosnys loosely implied that he was “Colonel Henry”). Was he Debosnys? It seems a little unlikely to me, but… who can tell?

Celestine Debosnys

One of Debosnys’ wives was called Celestine: she was born around 1839, and died in Philadelphia on the 5th March 1882 (presumably at Debosnys’ “miserable shanty […] on South 1st Street near Greenwich Point in the Quaker City”, according to the Essex County Republican, Farnsworth p.91), having starved to death. All Ancestry has to say is that she was white, and was buried in the Alms House Cemetery.

Farnsworth gives her name (once) as “Celestine Desmarais”, but I suspect that this is a conflation of “Celestine” and “Judith Desmarais” (a different dead Debosnys wife). (Note that miscamusca tumbled down an Ancestry rabbit hole chasing Canadian Adeline Desmarais’ 1865 marriage to Joseph Jourdain, but I believe that was someone else.)

It seems bizarre to me that we know so little about her, so I went a-looking myself for any Celestines in Philadelphia born close to 1839. However, I found little of interest there, not even French-born Celestine Munch (b. 6 Nov 1838, d. 12 Jan 1915). The 1870 US Census has very few Celestines in Philadelphia born 1838-1840: apart from Celestine Munch, there’s just Celestine Brown age 30 (born Pennsylvania, Sales Lady, daughter of Anthony Brown (born Baden) & Celestine (born France)).

I also looked for any women called Celestine who got married in Canada in December 1872 (as Debosnys claimed to have done), but found the Canadian search tools frustratingly inexact: perhaps Celestine Commier, Celestine Menard, Celestine Lavaris, or Celestine Lafounesse?

I also looked for any women called Celestine living in Wilmington Delaware (“as I’m sure you’re well aware”) in the 1880 Census (Debosnys claimed to have been living there in 1880), but found only Celestine J. Miller, wife of John F. Miller, with daughters Mary (14) and Cecelia (12).

As for looking in the 1880 US Census for any women called Celestine born in Canada, that yielded only Celestine Lazette (wife of Joseph (50), mother of Maggie (18), Libbie (15) and Julius (14)), in Monroe Michigan. And the only Celestine born in France living in Philadelphia was Celestine Munch.

Having said all that, it might be that someone more skilled at navigating the US Census will be able to see if anyone with a similar name was living “on South 1st Street near Greenwich Point” in 1880. You know, just in case Debosnys was lying about just about everything in his whole life. Which I certainly can’t rule out at the moment.

DNA, and why not?

Back in 2015, Byron Deveson suggested that someone should carefully recover Henry Debosnys’ DNA from the pieces in the museum (there’s a skull and, gorily enough, a hangman’s noose) and drop it into GEDmatch etc.

So why is it 2021 and nobody has thought to do this yet? Makes no sense to me.

If not off-white, then what?

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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?

“The Codebreaker” on PBS America, Wed 28 Apr 2021…

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If you are in the UK and have an interest in historical codebreaking, I’d recommend moseying over to PBS America (Freeview channel 84) this coming Wednesday evening (28 April 2021) at 8.40pm for “The Codebreaker“.

(OK, the image of her from Wikipedia, but I rather like it, OK?)

First aired in the US in January 2021, this documentary is on Elizebeth Friedman (1892-1980), whom I expect most Cipher Mysteries readers will already be well aware of:

The story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst whose painstaking work decoding thousands of messages for the US government would send notorious gangsters to prison and helped bring down a massive, near-invisible Nazi spy ring in the Second World War.

As an aside, a lot of her personal documents were made available a few years ago, leading to a rash of books being written about her life (though not all of which got published). The specific biography that “The Codebreaker” was based on is Jason Fagone’s (2017) “The Woman who Smashed Codes“.

So there ought to be a lot of intriguing raw material there to fashion a good narrative out of, rather than simply focusing on rum runners, the Doll Woman, and Sargo. Looking forward to it! 🙂

Somerton Man exhumation approved, late middlegame approaches…

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According to a big story in today’s (24 Jan Apr 2021) Adelaide Advertiser (a huge thanks to all the people who passed it my way, very much appreciated!), an application by South Australian Police last month to exhume the Somerton Man has just been approved by Attorney-General Vickie Chapman. The plan is to extract a full DNA profile, use familial DNA matches to determine his identity, and to determine his exact cause of death.

SAPOL are funding the whole process, which will be run by its Major Crimes detectives “as part of Operation Persevere” (identifying human remains in SA) and “in tandem with Operation Persist” (cold cases in SA). The exhumation itself “will be conducted using Forensic Science SA (FSSA) scientific staff and the Adelaide Cemeteries Authority”, so doubtless we will be hearing more from FSSA director Dr Linzi Wilson-Wilde along the way.

Pros and Cons

OK: on the one hand, the whole familial DNA aspect of the Somerton Man case is fascinating, and there can be few people who wouldn’t be at least a little interested to know how it plays out. Perhaps investigators will also be able to conclusively determine both his cause of death and even (say, from his hair) much of what he was doing in his final weeks and months.

But on the other hand, even though the Somerton Man (almost certainly) died from a (probably ingested) poison, was he murdered, was it suicide, was it misadventure, or just an accident? We really don’t know: I can’t help but feel that past proposals for this exhumation have looked more like DNA fishing trips than anything else.

Either way, given that tens of documentary teams are doubtless already speaking to SAPOL (if they can manage to make themselves understood through all their pitching drool), we can probably expect this next phase to be well-documented and publicly visible.

All the same, even though some may think this whole enterprise will prove to be “Bloodlines Detectives” territory (please don’t say “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, *sigh*), I personally can’t help but suspect the overwhelming bulk of the work will prove to be closer to “Long Lost Family”. Put Davina and Nicky on a plane now, you know it makes sense. 😉

Not Yet An Endgame

Having spent several years looking at so many unclear, uncertain and occasionally paradoxical aspects of the evidence (and claims) swirling around the Somerton Man case, my strong suspicion is that this is not yet the endgame phase. Even if our mysterious man’s DNA does yield an identity (and of course it may well stubbornly hold on to its secrets for a while longer), it may well take a great amount of effort to reconstruct the man’s life.

People hate to admit it, but the nice neat records which genealogists rely so heavily upon are skewed towards the middle classes. For example, documentation about the early years of Jo Thomson (the nurse whose Glenelg phone number was connected to the Somerton Man) isn’t absent because she was a woman of mystery, but rather because she was born to a poor family.

To my eyes, the suitcase clothes linked to the Somerton Man seem like a charity shop ragtag bag, as if he was down on his uppers. Hence it would be utterly unsurprising to me if he had been living in hostels, picking up only occasional work, flying under every institutional radar: which, as far as genealogical evidence goes, would be roughly the worst case scenario for making any progress.

But however this all plays out, it’s an interesting new chapter in a long-running story. We’ll have to be patient while all the machinery turns, sure – but the cogs and gears are now moving.

Introducing the “suffixity” metric (perhaps)…

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I’ve spent some time this week working on Alexander d’Agapeyeff’s 1939 challenge cipher, which seems (to me) to be a tricky combination of substitution cipher and transposition cipher. It’s also not clear to me what language the plaintext will turn out to be in: English, Russian (d’Agapeyeff was born in Russia), French, or perhaps even a Saharan language (d’Agapeyeff spent some time working as a cartographer in Lake Chad).

In practice, this meant I needed a metric reflecting how well a given piece of (transposed) text resembles language (but without knowing the language, alphabet or the substitutions): its generic “languageness”, for want of a better term.

I started by using H2 measures of entropy, but quickly became dissatisfied with the results. Rather, what I really wanted was a metric that was much ‘spikier’, i.e. that would sharply spike up the more language-like a given transposition was. But what could I use?

Calculating Suffixity

I devised the idea of using (what I call) “suffixity” as a metric, i.e.:

  • Build a suffix array (an ordered table containing the strings in each position in the text)
  • Sum up the matching length of every adjacent entry in the ordered table
  • Finally, normalise this value against the length of the ciphertext.

So for the (industry-standard) text string BANANA* (where * is the EOF character), start by listing all the strings in the order they appear in the text string:

  • BANANA*
  • ANANA*B
  • NANA*BA
  • ANA*BAN
  • NA*BANA
  • A*BANAN

Then sort these strings alphabetically:

  • A*BANAN
  • ANA*BAN
  • ANANA*B
  • BANANA*
  • NA*BANA
  • NANA*BA

Then sum up the matching lengths of adjacent entries in your ordered array:

  • strmatch(A*BANAN, ANA*BAN) = 1 —> total = 1
  • strmatch(ANA*BAN, ANANA*B) = 3 —> total = 4
  • strmatch(ANANA*B, BANANA*) = 0
  • strmatch(BANANA*, NA*BANA) = 0
  • strmatch(NA*BANA, NANA*BA) = 2 —> total = 6

Finally, normalise this raw total value (6) against the length of the text (6) to get a normalised suffixity of (6/6) = 1.0

The higher the suffixity value, the more language-like the text.

C Implementation of Suffixity

Because suffix arrays are used in the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (as a data compression guy, this is one of my favourite compression algorithms), clever computer scientists have worked out various ways to generate suffix arrays in essentially O(n) time. And so I used Yuta Mori’s sais-lite library, which implements the induced sorting algorithm (there are many others, but I was specifically looking for a simple C implementation).

My C function to calculate the matching length looks like this (no big surprises here):

static inline int strmatch(const uint8_t * a, const uint8_t * b)
{
	const uint8_t * base = &a[1];

	while (*a++ == *b++)
		;

	return (int) (a - base);
}

My C function to calculate suffixity has one extra trick (which you may or may not agree with), in that it tries to avoid rewarding tripled letters (e.g. SEPIA AARDVARK). This is not a final implementation, but I think it’s reasonably close to capturing the core idea:

#include "sais.h"

int calc_suffixity(const uint8_t * pau8Text, int * suffix_array, int len)
{
	sais(pau8Text, suffix_array, len); // Construct a suffix array

	int suffixity = 0;
	for (int i = 0; i < len - 1; i++)
	{
		const uint8_t *a = &pau8Text[suffix_array[i+0]];
		const uint8_t *b = &pau8Text[suffix_array[i+1]];
		int s = strmatch(a, b);
		if ((s >= 3) && (a[0] == a[1]) && (a[0] == a[2]))
		{
			s = 0;	// Don't reward triple letters!
		}
		suffixity += s;
	}

	return suffixity;
}

You then normalise the returned suffixity value by dividing it by the length of the text. (It could be argued that you should divide it by (length – 1), but that’s an issue for another day.)

In summary, I believe that suffixity should be an effective metric to use with hill-climbing algorithms when tackling transpositions of unknown substitutions; but, as always, there may well be many other cryptological applications for suffixity that I haven’t yet thought of. 😉

Is Suffixity Already Known By Another Name?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that suffixity is nothing new. Given that my crypto bookshelves are focused more on cryptography (code-making) than on cryptology (code-breaking), I would be very happy to hear from crypto people who know the literature well.

All the same, O(n) algorithms for building suffix arrays are fairly new, so it would not surprise me if suffix arrays had played no real part in practical code-breaking to date. We shall see!

Future posts will try applying suffixity to various codebreaking challenges. I’m already able to say much more about d’Agapeyeff’s challenge cipher than I was before, so I’m expecting that that will be a post (or two) all on its own.

Walthamstow’s Second Biggest Mystery

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Though not quite as big a mystery as why boy band East 17 was so popular, Walthamstow now has its own cipher mystery: a series of curious graffiti-ed number codes. Reuben Binns started noting these back in 2018:

Looking closely, you can see that these are typically 2-8-7 or 2-7-7 numeric codes, and that they are repeated in blocks, with the coloured pen versions written slightly more compactly, suggesting two writers:

  • 01-27203161-041514 (black
  • 01-27203161-041514 (purple)
  • 01-27203161-041514 (green)
  • 00-2720960-3349334 (black)
  • 00-2720960-3349334 (purple)
  • 00-2720960-3349334 (blue)
  • 20-27203561-1332487 (black)
  • 20-27203561-1332487 (green)
  • 20-27203561-1332487 (green)
  • 20-27203561-133487 (black) [may well be a typo for “1332487”]
  • 20-27203561-133487 (purple)

You’ll doubtless have noticed that both writers cross their sevens, which is a bit of a European ‘tell’. It’s also hard not to wonder whether the confident, expansive black-pen writer is the alpha male of the pack, while the coloured-pen writer is a younger brother or something.

However, this did not stop in 2018, with the numbers now sometimes accessorised by distinctive images of crescent moons containing hearts and a Star of David:

And there are more from 2021:

However, I think the mystery of what these numbers are has been solved. Mark Steward tweeted (earlier today) that these appear to be Playstation 2 (PS2) serial numbers, and it seems likely to me that he’s correct (image from his Tweet):

But why should this be? Since Sony’s last PS Online official game server got shut down in 2016, fan servers have kept the flickering flame of online PS2 gaming alive. These use things like Xlink Kai to form a peer-to-peer gaming service, where an individual player creates a (typically short-lived) server.

So, right now my best guess is that each numeric code is the PS2 serial number of a device being used as a fan server for playing PS2 games online (say, Call of Duty 3, or maybe GT4?).

If this is right, there’s probably some tricky way of finding where a PS2 with a particular serial number is playing online (Sony certainly can map a PS2’s serial number onto its MAC address): perhaps a player more familiar with how people play PS2 Online games in 2021 will now be so kind as to step forward and tell us how it all works?

And finally, who is playing here? From the six-pointed Star of David, you might well think it’s a group of North London Jewish boys (or possibly girls, who can tell?), who perhaps were raised in Europe rather than in the UK. However, I have to also point out that the (five-pointed) star and crescent is an Islamic motif (e.g. Turkey, Pakistan, etc), so there’s a distinct possibility that that’s what was (imperfectly) intended here instead. Just so you know. 😐

Hopefully the details will start to become clearer…

Direct From The Source

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“So, how can I help you today,” smiled Dr Wayfit breezily but briefly, “Mr., uh, Smedley?”

“I’ve been struggling in lockdown”, the man replied, looking evasively through the third floor window of the medical centre. “My mental health is suffering. I’m feeling very anxious about… the vaccines. You know.”

“For something that does so much good, there are far too many conflicting messages out there”, the doctor said. “Do you… ” – she paused, looking him squarely in the eyes – “…rely on social media for information?”

“Oh no”, the man said, his face suddenly brightening, “I get my information direct. From the source.”

The doctor’s eyes narrowed quizzically. “You mean, from epidemiologists?”

“No!” Smedley laughed raucously, his head tipping backwards. “From the Voynich Manuscript. Everything about the coronavirus is in there, everything. Look at this.” He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from an inside pocket and held it up for the doctor to see. “f69v. Proof. 100%. You can’t deny it. Even back in the 15th century, they knew. They Knew!“

Dr Wayfit shook her head. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but it’s actually a well-known fact that Wilfrid Voynich hoaxed the manuscript himself. You don’t have to look far to find well-illustrated websites arguing this point in a highly persuasive way.”

Shocked, Smedley leapt backwards towards the door, his picture of f69v clutched to his face in horror. “But… that makes no sense at all? What kind of crazy drugs are you self-administering?”

“No, it’s all just common sense”, she cooed reassuringly. “Take your f69v, for example – it’s nothing more complex than a series of brightly-coloured pipes arranged around a starfish, the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams.”

“Really? Is there even one medieval diagram remotely like it?”

She rolled her eyes extravagantly. “To be precise, it’s the same as literally millions of medieval diagrams could have been, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it that way. And so what Wilfrid Voynich was hoaxing was how any one of those million medieval diagrams could have looked, had the person drawing it chosen to draw it as a set of brightly-coloured pipes around a starfish.”

“An eight-armed starfish?”

“It’s a work of imagination, obviously.”

“But… it’s so obviously coronavirus”, Smedley spluttered, now purple in the face. “And even though I’ll happily admit that my conclusion can be difficult for some to accept, your explanation is ten times crazier. Maybe even a hundred times.”

“Look, there’s really no reason for you to feel so upset by the Voynich Manuscript. You’ve been in ‘qokdown’ for far too long, and we in VAnon are desperately keen for people to understand that…”

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“So, Dr Wayfit”, the police detective asked, looking at the body crumpled on the pavement far below the medical centre’s smashed window, the picture of f69v grasped firmly in the dead man’s hands, “you must admit this is a bit of a strange tableau, right?”

“Not really”, she replied, her eyes darting around distractedly. “The moment poor Mr Smedley told me that he thought the Voynich Manuscript had meaningful content, I knew instantly he was quite deranged. Honestly, he was a clear danger to himself, and I don’t think there’s anything I could have done to prevent this awful tragedy.”

Keane – What’s In A Name?

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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?

Kean on ships…

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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?

Can you decode Robert Walker’s code names?

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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?