This is, of the course, the single question that bothered me most after writing my most recent post on the Somerton Man. As you’d expect, almost all the Keans/Keanes I found were Scottish or Irish immigrants: but, sticking out like a sore thumb, there was a single British Joseph Kean with two Lithuanian parents. I set out to figure out what was going on there…

Lithuanian emigration

In the century and more before 1918 (when Lithuania reconstituted itself as a freestanding state), Lithuania was a region controlled by the Russian Empire. Its language (Lithuanian) and religion (almost entirely Roman Catholic) both found themselves being increasingly suppressed, as part of Imperial attempts to damp down its nationalist fervour for independence.

When Lithuanians were hit by a great famine in 1867-1868, the response of many was to emigrate: all in all, it lost 20% of its population to emigration from 1868 to 1900 or so.

In the 19th century, one of the most popular places immigrants looked to move to was Great Britain, a country that allowed pretty much anyone in. (This was to change with the 1905 Aliens Act, which gave control over immigration to the Home Secretary, a dragon-nose-snorting feeling of power that seems to define the kind of populist idiot politician who goes for that job.)

So it should be no surprise that, post-1868, Lithuanian émigré communities started to pop up in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, etc. The fifteenth century Catholic Saint Casimir Jagiellon was their patron saint, so processions, chapels and even churches dedicated to St. Casimir also started to appear (around 1900 or so).

I think this forms the basic historical narrative framework to bear in mind when trying to understand the experience and situation of Lithuanian immigrants 1800-1900.

Basic Facts About Joseph Kean

The genealogical archives give us four basic records relating to Joseph Kean:

1. His 1922 emigration from Liverpool to Philadelphia on the S.S. Pittsburgh with his wife Frances
2. His 1926 application for naturalization
3. The 1930 US Census (he is living in Cuyahoga, Cleveland, OH with wife Frances and son John).
4. The 1940 US Census (no change there)

They also tell us a few more details about Frances Kean…

• born 24th Mar 1896, died 1st Jun 1970 (when her status was “married”)
• buried in All Saints Cemetery, Northfield, Summit County, Ohio, USA

…and John Joseph Kean…

• born 3rd Nov 1923, died 30 Sep 1969
• buried in All Saints Cemetery, Northfield, Summit County, Ohio, USA

Note that there’s also a Joseph F. Kean (who died 7th March 1983) buried in All Saints Cemetery, but there’s no date of birth or picture, so it’s not yet clear to me if this is the same Joseph Kean we’re interested in.

Joseph Kean’s Family

Joseph Kean’s 1922 immigration record from the S.S. Pittsburgh includes a number of telling details:

• Though he was born in Britain, his race was “Lithuanian”
• Joseph’s occupation was “Miner”, Frances’ was “Housewife”
• Their last abode was “Manchester”
• They were heading for Cleveland, Ohio.
• The next of kin (for both him and his wife Frances) was listed as “Aunt Mrs Majaikas, 59 Lankin Lane, Liverpool” (more on her later)

However, the most interesting thing was a handwritten note that was added to the typed list – “Smirpunas, used for convenience in army“:

So it seems Joseph Kean’s given surname had originally been “Smirpunas” (or something like it), but that he had changed it to “Kean” for convenience in the British Army.

It didn’t take me long to find his parents Jonas and Antonina “Surpunas”, travelling across to Philadelphia at almost exactly the same time (but aboard the White Star Line’s S.S. Haverford), departing Liverpool on 19 Nov 1921.

We can also see miner Jonas Snirpunas (though now from Paeyerus, Russia, and only “48” years old, so obviously it was a very refreshing journey) and Antonina Snirpunas arriving in Philadelphia on 30th November 1921, along with (and here’s a surprise) English-born 17-year-old son William Snirpunas (also a miner). All three’s next of kin is marked as “Cousin Vincent Majackis, of 59 Limekiln Lane, Liverpool”.

From this we can tell that in 1921, Jonas Snirpunas was a Lithuanian-born miner (either 48 or 52, while his Lithuanian-born wife Antonina was 52), who had been living in 91 Station Road, Haydock St Helens. Which, according to Google Maps, now looks like this:

Knowing that his parents had been living in Haydock St Helens then made it easy to find Joseph Kean’s British WWI records. Private Joseph Kean 428778 of the Labouring Corps was discharged with a military pension on 6th March 1919 because of “neurasthenia” (“20%” of which was caused by military service). His address was “91 Station Road, Haydock St Helens”.

It seems that this (eight shillings a week) pension ceased on 24/5/1921, and that the paperwork was “transferred to Foreign & Colonial 5/7/[19]22”. My guess (and it’s only a guess) would be that the end of his military pension in May 1921 may have helped trigger Joseph’s emigration to America later that same year.

Regardless, Joseph’s 1927 petition for naturalization included his birth name (“Joseph Snirpunas”) and his changed name (“Joseph Kean”), and gave his birth date as 19th October 1899. His address was given as 3134 Superior Avenue, Cleveland Ohio. The dates of birth given above for his wife and son are both also confirmed here.

What next for the Snirpunas family?

Just to complete the big fat record dump, William Snirpunas married Johanna A. Feltz, and they had two daughters that I could find:

• Antionette Snirpunas (b. 30 Mar 1925 in Cleveland, Ohio, d. Jun 1984), SSN 289200917 – “Sep 1942: ANTIONETTE PETERSON SNIRPUNAS; Mar 1947: ANTIONETTE E GIBBY; Jul 1962: ANTOINETTE E HOGAN; 29 Dec 1987: ANTOINETTE HOGAN”
• Marion Snirpunas (b. 22 Dec 1927 in Cleveland Cu[yahoga] Ohio, d. 10 Oct 2004), SSN 293263472 – “Mar 1947: MARION PETERSON; Feb 1952: MARION BROWN”.

I couldn’t see what became of Jonas or Antonina Snirpunas.

Was Joseph Kean the Somerton Man?

Joseph Kean fits the bill in so many ways: a miner of the right age, a “Britisher”, an immigrant, and with Baltic DNA.

But the archives haven’t yielded all their secrets yet. Knowing his date and place of birth, we can trace his US WWII draft card, which tells us:

Weight:	155 [lbs]
Complexion:	Ruddy
Eye Colour:	Gray
Hair Colour:	Blonde
Height:	5” 7 1/2″

However, I feel fairly certain that this is also Joseph Kean, SSN 282-05-6088, born 18th October 1899, last residence 44141, Brecksville, Cuyahoga, Ohio, USA, died March 1983 – without much doubt the same Joseph Kean buried in All Saints Cemetery.

So: no, I don’t think that Joseph Kean (né Snirpunas) was the Somerton Man.

Last thoughts, Nick?

For me, the main point of chasing down this rabbit hole was to see if there was any systematic reason why a Lithuanian guy might end up with a name like Joseph Kean – such as the whole supposed “KEANIC” thing (which I never really understood).

In the end, this particular instance seems to have been nothing more complex than an immigrant opportunistically swapping one Catholic immigrant surname for another more pronounceable (and less alien) one to try to blend in in the British Army in WWI. In the big scheme of things, though, I’d be surprised if this was anything more than an outlier.

However, what I did find out was that the US Census records include a lot of detail about parental nationality: and so I wonder if there is a way to search the various US Censuses for all people called Kean or Keane whose mother was Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Finnish, or Polish.

When I tried this out, the closest Lithuanian I could find was Maurice Kean (b. ~1906) and Julius Kean (b. ~1910), whose father Samuel Kean was a Jewish tailor from Lithuania. So, no maternal match there.

No hits for Latvia or Estonia: for Poland, I found a Michael and Caroline Kean (both born in Poland) living in Chicago with all their children.

For Russia, however, I found a Jeremy Kean of 79 Garfield Ave, New London CT (b. 1900 to Benjamin and Rosie Kean, both of Russia); a Nathan Kean (b. 1900 to David and Sarah Kean, both of Russia); and so on and so on.

Essentially, it seems that the pattern being followed by a good number of Russian Jewish families was that they Americanised their names to Kean: and I would be unsurprised if this was usually from Cohen / Kohn / etc.

Of course, the Somerton Man was famously uncircumcised, so it would perhaps seem a little unlikely that he was a Cohen-turned-Kean. But… who can tell?

Ever the provocateur, Pete Bowes’ latest challenge concerns the fact that if you look at each of the four short uncrossed-out lines of mysterious text indented on the back of the Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat, the seventh letter is always A. Well, he says, what are the odds of that, then?

So Let’s Run the Numbers…

For the sake of argument, let’s work with the transcription of the four lines that appears on Wikipedia (simply because it’s somewhere to start):

W R G O A B A B D
W T B I M P A N E T P
M L I A B O A I A Q C
I T T M T S A M S T G A B

OK: it’s dead easy to see the column of four A’s Pete is highlighting, so let’s try to calculate how (un)likely that pattern is.

The four lines contain 2, 1, 3, and 2 As respectively: and no other letter appears on all four lines. So, we might reasonably wonder what the probability of this would be if you randomly anagram each of the four lines. For this to work, all four As would have to fall in the first nine columns.

• Line #2: the probability that its single A falls in any of the matchable 9 columns is 9/11. We’ll use whichever column this falls in for the rest of the calculation.
• Line #1: two As and 9 columns, probability = 2/9
• Line #3: three As and 11 columns, probability = 3/11
• Line #4: two As and 13 columns. Probability = 2/13

Multiply these four individual probabilities together (because they all have to be true simultaneously), and you get (9/11)*(2/9)*(3/11)*(2/13) = (12/1573).

So, if you randomly anagrammed each of the four lines, the odds that you would see a column of four As is roughly 1 in 131. Which I think is good to know, because it seems to rule out the possibility that any heavy-duty ciphers (where any such pattern would be destroyed) was employed here.

In short, this is looking even more like an acrostic than it did before.

All ‘Ands On Deck

The suggestion that we are looking at the first letters of four lines of poetry has been floated countless times before. Let’s face it, given that the four lines were written on the back of a book of quatrains (i.e. four-line poems), that hardly requires a huge stretch of the imagination.

But if we centre the same four odd-length lines a bit more, we can see that four As sit extremely close to the centre of each line:

    W R G O   A   B A B D
  W T B I M P   A   N E T P
  M L I A B O   A   I A Q C
I T T M T S   A   M S T G A B

Looking at this, I’m wondering if this might suggest that two or more of these very central As might be the first letter of the word AND.

Back in 2015, I discussed Barry Traish’s excellent bacronymic poem that he imaginatively reconstructed from the Rubaiyat message’s initials (note that Barry used a slightly different transcription from the one on Wikipedia):

“My road goes on, and by and by divides,
Now two branches, into morning, past a new evening that provides,
My love is a barren oblivion, and itself alone quite certain,
It’s time to move the soul among magic stars, then gently asleep besides.”

You can see that Barry has replaced the As on line #1 and line #3 with AND, so that after a short first idea (“My road goes on”) and following pause (“,”), he uses AND to link the line on to the second idea (“by and by divides”). This is a natural (if somewhat clichéd) way of constructing a simple poem.

Stress Doesn’t Have To Be Stressful

Rearranged yet another way…

    W R G O   A   B A B D
W T B I M P   A   N E T P
M L I A B O   A   I A Q C
I T T M T S   A   M S T G A B

…I’m wondering whether all the central A-words in this third arrangement are unstressed. I’m pretty sold on Barry’s “And By And By” in line #1, and it’s no surprise that the A-words Barry selected are all unstressed:

and and / a / a and alone / among asleep

Moreover: laid out like this, I’m left wondering whether the first half of the first line might have ended up too short: compared to the other three, [W/M] R G O feels like it has a beat missing. Sure, it might conceivably use words with more syllables, but that doesn’t quite feel right to me.

Errm… You Mentioned Tolkien?

Long-suffering Cipher Mysteries readers surely know that I occasionally like to drop in fairly tangential references to J. R. R. Tolkien. And why not? Tolkien loved runes and old languages, and he even very probably saw a scratchy rotoscope rotograph copy of the Voynich Manuscript that was floating around Oxford in the 1930s, back when he was an academic there.

Of course, the big thing Tolkien did in the 1930s was write The Hobbit (released in September 1937). The first edition of 1500 copies sold out quickly, and a second edition was printed immediately afterwards: despite paper shortages in WW2, it has never been out of print since.

The book was a huge success in Britain and the US: yet if you look for it in Trove, it only appears in 1937 and 1938, and then you’ll find no mention until Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring was published in the 1950s.

Why do I mention all this? Simply because I suspect the first line of the poem penned on the back of the Rubaiyat may have been ripped off from directly inspired by the poem that Bilbo recites in the last chapter of The Hobbit, at the end of his long journey back to the Shire:

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
Over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.

Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
And trees and hills they long have known.

To be precise, I suspect it wasn’t Tolkien’s scansion or rhyming or Hobbity doggerel that was the inspiration: but rather the way that the entire first line of the poem presents roads as a straightforward poetic metaphor for life’s journey long spent away but now finally back home.

And so I can’t help but suspect that the first line of the poem (with more than a small nod to Tolkien, & reinstating the Bilboesque ‘ever’ he omitted) was:

My road goes (ever) onwards; and by and by [divides?]

The Missing Child?

If you broadly accept this much (however much of a stretch you find it), then I think you also have to consider the possibility that the Somerton Man bought The Hobbit not for himself (for it was most definitely published as a children’s book), but rather to read to his young child(ren) at bedtime. (And if I had to, I’d guess that this was an eight-year-old boy circa 1938.)

(Yes, for my sins, I indeed read The Hobbit and the complete Lord of the Rings trilogy to my own son when he was young. Please therefore feel free to consider me impossibly old-fashioned, I really don’t mind.)

Putting all this together, I can’t help but feel more than a bit swayed by the (romantic and utterly speculative, but entirely plausible-sounding) notion that we might be able to glimpse the sweep of the Somerton Man’s life embedded in this single (reconstructed) first line: a man born in South Australia, living away in America, having a (Hobbit-loving) ten-year-old son in 1938, and – somewhat like Bilbo Baggins, but let’s not get too carried away, eh? – coming full circle back to the Shire South Australia in 1948.

Where he died, alas. The rest you already know.

Hopefully one day we’ll know if this was indeed how the Somerton Man’s life played out – whether we can see his world in (this) grain of sand. Or if we are – not for the first time – just kidding ourselves like hell. Who can tell?

And finally, the 1930 US Census…

As always, the Somerton Man researchers among us might now be itching to head over to the 1930 US census to look for a J. Kean[e] born around 1900 who had a child born around 1925-1930.

To save you the effort, I dropped by there myself. Here’s who I found:

• John Kean, born in Scotland in 1901, immigrated in 1922, machinist, living in Stamford, Fairfield, Connecticut with wife Jessie Kean (28, also from Scotland), daughter Mary Kean (age 1).
• John Kean, born 1897, a tile setter living in Queens, New York City with wife Florence Kean (25) and children Daniel (5), Anna (3), and Florence (1).
• John Kean, born in Scotland in 1900, immigrated in 1923, carpenter, living in Queens, New York City, with wife Isabel (26, also from Scotland) and son John Kean Jr (2).
• Joseph J Kean, born 1898, storeroom clerk in a chemical factory, living in Niagara Falls, with wife Ruth (35) and daughter Virginia (7).
• Joseph J Kean, born 1902, digger operator living in Michigan, with wife Mary (23) and children Mary (6), Joseph (5), William (3), Edward (1).
• Joseph Kean, born 1900 in England to Lithuanian parents, immigrated 1922, a carter on the elevators, living in Cleveland, Cuyahoga, Ohio with wife Frances (34, also born in England to Lithuanian parents), son John (6).
• Joseph Keane, born 1900 in Ireland, immigrated in 1923, plasterer living in New Rochelle, Westchester, New York with wife Helen (28), daughter Ritta (2), and son Joseph (0).
• John Keane, born to Irish parents, a salesman living in Yonkers, Westchester with wife Helen (26) and children Nancy (1) and Betty (3).
• John Keane, born in 1898, a manager in an asbestos factory, living in Jersey City with wife Anna (25) and daughter Doris (3).
• John Keane, born in Missouri in 1897, a confectionery proprietor, living in St. Louis Township MN with wife Edith (25) and son John (2).
• John Keane, born in New York in 1896 to Irish parents, a counterman in a restaurant, living in Manhattan with wife Bernice (35) and sons John (2) and James (1).
• John Keane, born in Ireland in 1895, immigrated in 1913, a letter carrier living in the Bronx with wife Catherine (26), and children John (1) and Margaret (0).
• John Keane, born in Illinois to Irish parents in 1895, an electrical contractor living in Chicago with wife Margret (32), and daughters Mary (7) and Betty (1).
• John Keane, born in Ireland in 1895, immigrated in 1916, a labourer living in Jersey City with wife Anna (32, also born in Ireland) and daughter Mary (5).
• James Keane, born in Ireland in 1899, immigrated in 1923, a labourer living in Chicago with wife Mary (32) and son James (0).
• James Keane, born in 1900 to Irish parents, a sugar truck chauffeur living in Brooklyn with wife Anna (26) and children Donald (6), Leonard (3) and Anna (0).
• James Keane, born in Ireland in 1898 to Irish parents, a butcher living in Newark with wife Bertha (26), and children James (3) and Betty (1)

Doubtless there are (many) others in the 1930 census who fit this (extremely speculative) pattern, but that’s the point where my will to go on gave way.

Anyone a-hunting haplogroup H4a1a1a (hi Byron!) will of course be heartened by the presence of British (but Lithuanian-parented) Joseph Kean in Cleveland OH in this list. Make of it all what you will!

And yes, he could have been all three, or indeed none of them. But please bear with me, there’s a lot of ground to cover here.

Boxing

The background here is that I suspect that in the late 1930s to the 1940s, the Somerton Man ended up as some kind of criminal ‘heavy’ (e.g. a standover man, a nitpicker, etc). My aim was to try to work backwards from there, i.e. to second-guess what the Somerton Man was doing in the 1920s.

So, my initial stab in the dark was that he might have been an unsuccessful amateur boxer: so that’s who I went digging for. What I found in Trove was that boxing turned into a really big-time Australian sport around 1929-1930, which is when you see an explosion in the number of stadiums, promoters, fighters, and sports newspaper column inches devoted to boxing.

Naturally, because some of the the clothes in the Somerton Man’s suitcase had the name “KEAN” / “KEANE” on them, my starting point was Australian boxers who shared that surname. This yielded Reg Keane (who trained at Ern Miller’s Goulburn Street gym, and boxed in 1931-1932), Billy Keane (1932), Telegraphist Keane in the Naval Reserve Championships (1933) who I suspect was V. C. Keane (1930), H. Keane of the Olympic Club, etc.

All seemed unsuccessful enough to fit the profile: reporting the bout between Bill Collins and Reg Keane, the 8th Feb 1931 Sydney Truth noted:

“The time was mostly spent with Keane picking himself off the floor. When he had been deposited there the fourth time, Joe Wallis stopped the fight and crowned Collins.”

However, this whole line of attack felt generally quite unproductive to me. The sports papers of the day seemed more concerned with the quantity of blood on the canvas and how long the loser spent in hospital after being knocked out, rather than any human interest side.

For instance, the only things that typically got reported about non-superstar boxers are their weight (because of the different weight categories), and which round they won/lost in (presumably because punters gambled on these). So there’s not a lot of grist for anyone’s historical mill there.

As an aside, I don’t believe we know the Somerton Man’s weight. Do you think he would have been a heavyweight?

Wrestling – Jack Keane Sr.

Because boxing and wrestling were often promoted together, I couldn’t help but notice two wrestlers both called Jack Keane.

The (much) older of the two was John Joseph (‘Jack’) Keane, described as having been an Irish-style wrestler. However, not only was he much too old to be the Somerton Man, he was also much too deceased (he died on 27 Nov 1938, aged 74 years). He and his wife Agnes Maude Keane (who died on 10 Mar 1947), had four children, John, Rita, Josie, and Kevin.

Trove has a few articles mentioning Jack Keane Sr: I quite liked this one from 1936, which included this picture:

I briefly got excited by the idea that his son (John Joseph Keane Jr.) might have been a wrestler too. However, even though JJK Jr was roughly the right age to be the Somerton Man, it turns out that he was the Dulwich bookmakers’ clerk who lived with his wife Clara Maude Keane in Union St, Dulwich (yes, the same clerk I spent so long trying to track down), and who died on the 20th January 1941.

Wrestling – the other Jack Keane

There was, however, an (apparently separate) wrestler called Jack Keane whose name pops up in Trove’s tiny margins. For example, here’s a 28 Jun 1932 sport story reporting a bout between Jack Kean and Jim Moore (one fall each in three five minute rounds).

Note that the best-known Australian wrestler of the day with the surname Keane was V. P. (‘Vin’) Keane, who was the South Australian amateur heavyweight wrestling champion in 1931. Because of (what I now think was) a typo in one article, it took me a while to be sure that this Vin Keane was (a) not Jack Keane by another name, and (b) still alive in 1949.

However, between 1939 and 1941, the Adelaide Sport ran an overtly female-oriented sports column called “Verities of Victoria” or “Sayings of Suzanne“. These tried to present a gossipy, ring-side view, often looking more at who was in the audience (and what fashionable clothes they were wearing) than the poor bloodied buggers slugging each other in the ring. For example, the 13 Sep 1940 Sayings of Suzanne noted that “Vin Keane’s wife was wearing the newest and latest in pastel grey at the wrestling“. Which was nice.

The reason this gets interesting is that the 19 Jan 1940 Sayings of Suzanne noted that:

“Jack Keane, who used to wrestle in a mask, saw somebody else taking the punishment for a change and Jimmy Bartlett aired yet another fancy shirt, buttercup yellow this time.”

So, if we are to believe the Adelaide Sport’s ‘Suzanne’ (and why not?), Jack Keane had in fact been a masked wrestler. But… which masked wrestler?

Masked Wrestlers in Australia

Yes, there were a fair few masked wrestlers pounding Australian canvases in the late 1920s and 1930s. Yet even by 1933, people were starting to tire of the gimmick, and there were calls to outlaw the use of masks in the ring.

Regardless, the first (and most famous) of these was Walter Miller, who was billed as the “Masked Man” and the “Masked Marvel”. Born in Poland (as Josef Banaski?), he had wrestled in America for some years, but following an injury moved out to Australia to keep wrestling while regaining his form. He was eventually unmasked in 1929.

Other American masked wrestlers active in Australia around this time included:

• The “Black Panther” (Frank Sexton)
• The “Red Shadow” (Leo Numa)
• The “Mysterious Ghost” (????)
• “Tarzan the Fearless” (named after the Buster Crabbe film; and no, I’m not making it up).

Australian masked wrestlers included Ossie Norman of Sydney (“The Masked Wrestler”) and Terry Morrison (“The Masked Man” and “The Masked Marvel”). Interestingly, Terry Morrison – who had also been a heavyweight boxer – later found himself in court in connection with an auto parts deal that went bad (he described himself to the Court as a “prospector”, though he seemed more like a somewhat self-defeating private detective along the lines of Jim Rockford).

So, which masked wrestler might Jack Keane have been? Though it is no doubt incomplete, my (self-compiled) list of Australian masked wrestlers from this era has only two names remaining: “Steel Grip” (who only seems to have wrestled once) and – my personal favourite – the “Masked Singing Wrestler“. And no, I’m really really not making this up.

Here’s the Queenslander’s account of the Masked Singing Wrestler’s fight from 22nd October 1936:

At the Bohemia Stadium on Saturday night, Bob King and the “Masked Singer” met in one of the fastest and most gruelling wrestling matches that have been seen for months. Having sung two ballads, the masked man divested himself of his dress suit to reveal a well-trained athlete in orthodox trunks. He kept his mask on. He gained two falls in the first four rounds—a Boston crab and an octopus. King gained falls in the fifth and seventh rounds, with a back-slam and body press and a variation of the Indian death lock. The end came in the eighth round, when King threw himself at his rival, who jumped clear for King to dive out of the ring on to his head. He was unable to continue, and the masked man got the decision.

We do know a little bit more about him:

The masked singing wrestler, who has returned from the South, is a pleasing type with plenty of personality and highly developed mat ability. He has defeated many opponents in a spectacular manner, while critics have praised his rendering of operatic airs.

Furthermore:

“The Masked Singing Wrestler” is said to be the possessor of a glorious tenor voice and is also claimed to be one of the greatest leg wrestlers at present in the game. He is tall, and of sinewy, muscular build.

And, on one occasion when the bout was delayed because of bad weather:

Special entertainment will be provided for patrons at the Allenstown Theatre tomorrow night, when a variety entertainment, to take the form of an Irish Night, will be presented. The popular masked singing wrestler has been engaged and will render popular Irish airs. Those who have heard this artist’s splendid voice over the air and elsewhere need no further introduction to his exceptional ability.

The Masked Singing Wrestler was briefly unmasked, but not identified:

Still not satisfied, he [O’Brien] raced across the ring and made an attack on the singer, who, caught in a surprise attack, had his mask ripped from his face. Few, however, were able to catch a glimpse of his features for he covered his face with his mask and hands, and made a hurried exit from the ring.

To summarize, we know that the MSW was a tall, sinewy wrestler from the South: and that he had a fine tenor voice and a penchant for operatic airs and Irish folk-songs, along with excellent mat work and leg work. He may even have sung on the radio.

Perhaps surprisingly, there were plenty of singing wrestlers at that time. My strong suspicion is MSW was not Jack Winrow or Russell Scarfe or the baritone Sam Burmister or Terry McGinnis or Tony Sanga or Pat Fraley but Al Costello, whose many years of poor luck in the wrestling business finally seemed to be turning around in 1948 (according to this story).

So, if ‘Suzanne’ was correct, under what name did Jack Keane wrestle while wearing a mask? I still don’t know, but I’m trying hard to find out…

Clog Dancing

Finally: going off on a little bit of a tangent, I was intrigued by Jack Keane Sr.’s other hobby: statue pedestal clog dancing.

Though almost completely forgotten now, this was a very specific form of clog dancing that begin in 1866 and was in vogue for several decades. Pedestal clog dancers would do a clog dance on a raised pedestal, whilst doing their level best to keep their upper body as rigid as a statue. Some performers (such as Henry E. Dixey) would even white themselves up to more closely resemble a dancing statue:

Oh, and just so you know, Charlie Chaplin started out as a clog dancer, as did Victorian comedian Dan Leno, along with Wilson and Keppel (though not any of the Bettys).

And so I couldn’t help but wonder: what if the Somerton Man’s curiously shaped feet and overdeveloped calf muscles (that Paul Lawson noted at the time) were a result of his having been a statue pedestal clog dancer?

So, perhaps what the Somerton Man was doing as a young man in the 1910s and 1920s was some form of clog dancing? Feel free to disagree, but that would makes more sense than just about every other foot-/calf-related SM theory I’ve heard. Just a thought!

The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.

Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.

But why so many theories?

John Does & Jane Does

In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.

Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)

Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”, I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?

Life & Death

Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:

• “[S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
• “The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
• “Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
• “The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
• “The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
• “There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.“
• “The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
• His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.

But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.

And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?

(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)

To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.

In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.

Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.

And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.

Evidence of Absence

But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.

Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?

So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.

Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).

It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.

Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.

The Missing Thread

In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.

And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.

In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.

But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?

Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.