A full account of how Walter McCann came to take two photographs of the mysterious airship appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald on Monday, April 12, 1897. The text of that article is helpfully reproduced in a Tripod website (from 2006) and on Patrick Gross’s website. The second (much better) photograph itself was reproduced by one of the Times-Herald’s etchers (pen and ink artist), who tried to make as good a copy as he could for printing on the front page.
But who was Walter McCann, and might a print of his original photograph (which he didn’t want to sell the negative of to any newspaper) still be in existence?
Walter McCann’s newsstand
The address of McCann’s newsstand was described in the article as “on Greenleaf Avenue”, “near the Northwestern Railway tracks”: according to a list the Chicago Eagle printed every month or so, it was 4340 E. Ravenswood Park. He lived in “Rogers Park”, and (in 1897) had a son, who had “won a camera not long ago in a contest for getting subscribers to a paper”. Nowadays, the shop on the corner of N. Ravenswood Avenue and W. Greenleaf Avenue in Rogers Park (and still right next to the railway line, though that is now elevated) is “Bark Place” (a pet daycare centre).
McCann saw the strange object “coming from the south” at about 5.30am, went inside to get his son’s camera, then “ran to Greenleaf Avenue and Market Street”. A quick look at Tillotson’s pocket map and street map of Chicago for 1900 reveals that Market Street was the old name for E. Ravenswood Park. Additionally, McCann’s newsstand appears to have been right next to where Rogers’ Park Station was.
Hence I think we can almost exactly place where the photograph of the airship was taken. I believe the the row of connected dots down the next road East marks the row of overhead cables (electricity poles? telephone poles?) that appear in the background in the image. Though I must confess that I don’t quite understand why the railway tracks in the image appear to curve off to the right when the railway tracks on the pocket map around Rogers’ Park Station appear to be perfectly straight.
Walter R McCann’s family tree
Familysearch.org suggests a Walter Raymond McCann, which (though not a 100% certain match) does seem pretty good. A quick spin round myheritage.com (where I still have a couple of months of subscription left) and familysearch.org yielded a quick family tree (though I’m less sure about the section in italics):
Born 17 April 1860 (Paris, Bourbon KY) to Charles McCann and Harriet Current (one of six siblings)
1900 living in Chicago, Cook IL
Died 21 October 1928 (Chicago, Cook IL)
8 May 1884 married Hannah Theodora Wright (1864-1959) in Toledo, Lucas OH
William Ray McCann (1885-1974)
11 Jan 1913 married Mildred Olive Bates, Ancon, Panama Canal Zone
Frank Bates McCann (1915-2003)
10 Dec 1938 married Virginia Elliott Newcomb (1915-1991), Hilton, Monroe NY
Walter Ray McCann (1916-1997)
21 Sep 1945 married Katharine Duvall James (1909-1996), Allegheny PA
Patrick Keith McCann (1950-2002)
19 May 1978 married Debra R Reel, in San Joaquin CA
Adriana McCann (1921-2003)
Robert Lee McCann (1887-1976)
3 Jan 1907 married Evelyn Thompson (1888-1948)
Florence Evelyn McCann (1908-2006)
Married George John Kruchten (1902-1990)
Robert Kruchten
Married Marian
Robert
Married Laurie
Patrick
Married Amy
Glenn
Married Alison
Walter Lee McCann (1911-1967)
Married Violet
John
James
Arlene
Catherine
Jeanette Ellen McCann (1923-2000)
Married Philip H Horwitz (1920-2005)
Doubtless Walter McCann had many more descendants not included here. I wonder if one or more of them have online family trees, and a family memory of the two day period in April 1897 when Walter McCann and his son’s camera were the toast of Rogers Park?
Following on from my last post on metal-clad airships, I thought I ought to look a little more closely at Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey of New York and his nitro-glycerine-pellet-powered airship design.
Dr Sumter Beauregard Battey
As is so often the case, his obituary in the New York Times (included on his findagrave.com page) is a good place to start (2 Feb 1934):
Sumter B. Battey, physician and surgeon, died yesterday at his home, 700 West 179th Street, after a brief illness of heart disease with complications.
Surviving are his second wife, Mrs. Edith Carter Battey, and a son of the first marriage, Bryan Mann Battey, of the law firm Fraser, Myers & Manley, New York City. His first wife, who died in 1917, was Dr. Sarah A. French at their marriage in 1895.
Dr Battey, son of William Henry and Frances Whatley Battey, was born seventy-two years ago on one of the family plantations at Louisville, Ga. Hew was graduated from the University of Georgia Medical College in 1885. After a period of post-graduate work he settled in New York City.
Apart from professional activities, Dr Battey was known for his attainments in the field of invention. He made several important technical contributions in the mechanical arts.
Among the ancestors of Dr. Sumter Battery were Caleb Carr, first Colonial Governor of Rhode Island, and General Stephen Heard, Governor of Georgia during the Revolution. William Henry Battey, father of Dr. Battey, was killed in the Battle of Antietam while leading his men, known as the “Battey Guards”.
Inventions
As well as the electric bicycle and airship mentioned in the previous post, Battey also invented a lighter, a liquid self-igniting device, a razor stropping device, a railway track switching mechanism, a hair waving or curling device, a “repeating mechanism for talking machines”, and a number of sewing machine-related patents. He also had a sewing machine company in East Orange, NJ, as reported in the Sewing Machine Times of 25 June 1905 (though this was voided in 1910 “for nonpayment of taxes”):
In New Jersey: The Battey Self-threading Sewing Machine Company, of 30 Halsted street, East Orange, formed to make and sell all kinds of machines and to deal in patents and inventions, and to operate plans of all kinds. The authorized capital stock is $120,000, of which $1,000 has been paid in. The incorporators are S. B. Battey and W[ade] Hampton de Fontaine, of New York, and Alfred Miller of Chicago.
The invention preceding Battey’s airship seems to have been for “The Lighting of High Gas Jets”, as reported on the 14 Dec 1889 issue of the Australian Town and Country Journal (Sydney NSW):
A new device for conveniently lighting gas jets placed above ordinary reach, as in halls, has been invented by S. Battey, of New York City. The method of lighting is by means of little percussion caps. Those pellets are held in a tube, and are fed, one at a time as required, to a cylinder which has an opening opposite the tip of the burner. After the gas has been turned on, the caps are forced up and ignited in front of the jet by a piston which is set in motion through the medium of a spring which is operated upon at the time the gas key is turned by the person using the apparatus.
Battey’s Airship in Scientific American
An article in bleedingcool.com mentions Sumter Battey in passing, because the writer is taken by the idea that the the flying machine behind the 1897 airship flap was in fact built by Moses S. Cole. However, I thought the whole paragraph was noteworthy, because it gives an insight into Battey’s patent agents:
It’s no random happenstance that an artist’s depiction of Cole’s patent in action was featured on the cover of Scientific American. as he filed his patent via that periodical’s publisher. Scientific American‘s publisher, Munn & Co., was also a patent agent, and patents filed through Munn & Co. were often featured in the magazine. In addition to Cole’s cover feature in 1887, other airship patents that the company helped file and then publicized in Scientific American during this era include Sumter Beauregard Battey’s Aerial Machine in 1892 and Herman A. J. Rieckert’s “improved airship” in 1889.
The Scientific American article on “Battey’s Aerial Ship” included a rather natty-looking depiction:
I think it’s worth including the text in full:
The principal feature of the means of aerial navigation shown in the picture consists in the method of propulsion employed, the power for this purpose being affords by discharges of small and readily regulated quantities of a high explosive, of which a very considerable amount can be carried without adding greatly to the weight of the whole apparatus. The balloon portion of this air ship is of a cigar-shaped module, having a framework of aluminum, covered with oiled silk of other suitable fabric, or with a thin envelope of aluminum, and is of sufficient size to afford, when filled with a light gas, a lifting power corresponding with the weight of the car and the load it is proposed to carry, all of the apparatus and fittings being of the lightest possible construction consistent with the necessary strength. At each side of the body are wings or side planes, to guide the ship up or down, according to the inclination given them, these vanes turning on a horizontal axis, consisting of an aluminum tube extending through the center of the body. As seen in the broken-away portion of the car shown in the main view, wire ropes or cables from these side vanes extend over pulleys with gear wheel connections within the car, so that the operator, by the movement of a lever, can regulate to a nicety the inclination of the vanes.
The propelling apparatus, in which the main novelty of this invention lies, is supported upon a hinged arm at the rear. It consists, practically, of a horizontally arranged mortar-like tube, forming the end of the arm, and above this tube, as shown in more detail in the small view, is a tubular magazine containing globular or pellet-like charges of a high explosive, with the mechanism for regulating their supply to the discharge tube. The explosions, as they take place in this tube, exert a powerful backward pressure upon the air, which may be more or less continuous, according to the power to be applied to propulsion and the rate of speed sought to be attained, an air cushion back of the explosive chamber protecting the machine from shock. The rate of discharge may be controlled through a wire extending to within easy reach of the operator within the car, while light wire cables extend from the discharge tube over pulleys to a gear wheel steering apparatus in the car, the arrangement being such that the tube may be readily swung to one side or to the other as desired, the direction of the ship in the air being thus conveniently controlled. The discharge tube thus at the same time supplies the motive force and constitutes the rudder. The charges are fed automatically to the point discharge, the pellets dropping into a shallow cup or basin, which is made by the contact to complete an electric circuit, whereby the firing is effected, each pellet completing the circuit for its own explosion and at once breaking the circuit.
It is the belief of the inventor that with one of these machines, possessing a minimum of weight, owing to the absence of machinery and the use of aluminum instead of iron or steel for the framework and all the working parts, and provided with the maximum of power, due to the nature of the force employed, a speed can be attained excelling even that of bird flight. The car may be gradually reduced in fore width and aft to a sharp vertical edge at each end, offering the least possible resistance to motion, and it is suspended by aluminum wires and cords from the entire length of the body. It is designed also that machines of this type may be used for carrying freight and for regular passenger service, and their value will be obvious for such purposes as military observations, carrying of mails and dispatches, etc. This new air ship has been presented in the United States and the principal European countries by Dr S. B. Battey, of No. 39 West Twenty-seventh Street, New York City.
Though Battey’s airship was arguably the first genuine attempt at making a rocket-powered aircraft, by 1918 the Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer was poking fun at it for using nitroglycerine for its motive power (though laughing even harder at Edwin Pynchon of Chicago, who powered his airship with dynamite).
Finally, I should briefly mention Jules Verne’s 1886 novel “Robur the Conqueror” (which was broadly adapted into a 1961 film with Vincent Price). There, the main protagonist is a megalomaniac inventor called Robur who builds a heavier-than-air battery-powered aircraft on his secret X island, takes over the meeting of the Weldon Institute (a fictional Lighter-Than-Air society in Philadelphia) and kidnaps its president to try to show them the error of their balloon-based ways, with hilarious consequences.
What Verne was tapping into (some 40 years before the Wright Brothers) was the broadly-held cultural anticipation of powered flight, along with a whole bunch of mad scientist tropes. Ultimately, what Robur conquered was the air: Sumter Battey was merely one of a whole generation of ingenious mechanics who saw no reason to wait for a Robur to turn up to do the same.
Though the whole idea of metal-clad airships sounds like a steampunk fantasy, they were in fact completely real – the US Navy famously commissioned one (the ZMC-2), and plenty of people tried (and indeed even to the present day continue to try) to build others. And the wonder-stuff that made them possible was that marvellously lightweight metal aluminium.
Here’s my brief guide to the whole genre, plus my thoughts on the 1897 Airship “flap”…
Francesco Lana de Terzi
Historically, the first glimmering of metal-clad LTA (Lighter-Than-Air) flight came circa 1670 (according to Wikipedia) from Francesco Lana de Terzi. He theorised that evacuated metal spheres could provide sufficient lift to float an airship. In reality, if he had built such rigid metal spheres, they would have collapsed under air pressure, but to be fair this was a decent first attempt. And the diagram was cool.
David Schwarz’s Two Airships
By the late 19th Century, materials and technologies had advanced so much that metal airships started to become a genuine possibility. In the 1880s, both the Russian rocket theorist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and self-taught Croatian engineer David Schwarz realised that a technological sweet spot had opened up. This was building an airship using aluminium (which had been first announced in 1825, and put into industrial production in 1856) and hydrogen (the first hydrogen-filled balloon had flown in 1783).
In 1893, Schwarz produced a test airship for the Russian Army (funded by industrialist Carl Berg) in St Petersburg. The Russian engineer Kowanko pointed out (rightly) that the design’s lack of a ballonet (an extra air bag inside the frame, used to control buoyancy, particularly at take-off) would put a great deal of strain during take-off and landing. And this is indeed what happened – the whole framework collapsed during inflation.
In 1895-7, Schwartz and Berg then built a second airship (this time for the Royal Prussian Government) at the Tempelhof field in Berlin. A test flight in October 1896 was unsuccessful because the hydrogen supplied had been insufficiently purified (and hence provided too little lift). Sadly, Schwartz died (in June 1896, aged 44) before his second metal airship was actually launched: the maiden flight was on 3rd November 1897.
Unfortunately, largely because of structural defects, the airship got no higher than 130m before a combination of problems brought it crashing down, damaging it beyond repair. But… it definitely did fly.
As an aside, Count von Zeppelin later bought all the aluminium used in the ship to reuse in his own (non-metal-skin) zeppelins: the legal agreement he had to sign to do this later gave rise to the myth that he had bought the design rights (which wasn’t true at all).
The 1897 Airship “Flap”
The (ever entertaining, but more than occasionally unreliable) journalist John Keel once wrote a book called “Operation Trojan Horse”. This described a long series of sightings in many US states of a strange airship, almost always travelling by night. This is now generally known as the 1896-1897 airship flap. Keel was convinced that it was, ummm, aliens wot dun it: but given that the descriptions of the people involved tend to be beardy and gentlemanly, this does seem a bit of a stretch.
For example, one contemporary press report gave the names of two men on board the mysterious airship as “S. E. Tillman and A. E. Dolbar”, working for “certain capitalists of New York”. Busby thinks these are Professor Amos Emerson Dolbear and Captain Samuel Escu Tillman; and speculates that the New York capitalists could well have included (gasp) William Randolph Hearst.
Interestingly, a photograph allegedly of the airship taken by a Walter McCann was printed on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, April 12 1897, and also in the Chicago Times-Herald (which I found here):
Might these have been sightings of a metal-clad airship?
C. A. Smith of San Francisco
Matt Novak’s Paleofuture blog mentioned a 1st September 1896 article in the San Francisco Call, reporting that a “Dr C. A. Smith of San Francisco” had a zinc model on display in Market Street of the aluminium & hydrogen airship he hoped to get funding to build. This model had “two wings like those of a beetle” which raised and fell every hundred turns of the airship’s main propeller, along with windows and a door. [Michael Busby’s chapter 19 also includes a 25th November 1896 interview with Smith in the San Francisco Call.]
Some of the observers of the airship reported widely in the 1896-1897 Texas “flap” (see for more about this) described an object having wings “something like that of a bat”. Curiously, C. A. Smith’s 1895 patent includes this drawing, including a distinctive pair of arched bat-like wings pivoted on each side:
At the end of his book, Busby has little doubt that what was seen flying at night in Texas and elsewhere during 1897 was [spoiler alert] C. A. Smith’s airship, just as Smith had promised in 1896. Busby further speculates that Smith (working in California) may have been a member of Charles Dellschau’s mysterious (and possibly hallucinatory) Sonora Aero Club (here’s a link to a nice story about Dellschau in The Atlantic). But… that’s just Busby’s guess, as far as I can tell.
Sumter B. Battey
Still, when a young C. G. Williams (according to a letter in the Dallas Morning News, April 19 1897) allegedly got to speak with the beardy gentleman flying the airship in Texas, the man claimed to have been developing it for many years “at a little town in the interior of New York state”.
C. E. Hite of Philadelphia, John S. Praul of the same city, J. S. Cowden of Virginia, Carl Erickson, Dr C. A. Smith of San Francisco, and Sumter B. Battey of New York. […] Mr Battey’s idea, for instance, consisted of a cigar-shaped balloon of thin aluminium, assisted by wings for upward or downward flight ; the whole thing to be propelled by a series of explosions. At the rear end was a sort of cup opening outward. Into this pellets of nitro-glycerine were to be dropped and exploded at the rate of six a minute, and the ship was to be propelled by the shocks. Mr Battey’s idea is still on the market. Mr Praul’s machine was to have been made of nickel steel and aluminium throughout, including the cylinder or balloon. [p. 429]
For me, the one oddly distinguishing feature of the airship(s) described in almost all accounts of the 1897 flap was a bright light, much like an electric arc light on the front of the train. So, my own tentative theory – for what it’s worth, and I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere else – is that what observers took to be a bright light may well have instead been the parabolic dish at the back of the airship that was so distinctive of Battey’s patented propulsion system.
Might Battey’s airship have been the source of the 1897 flap? Though I don’t know so, I think so: if ever there was a nice candidate for a Secret History documentary, this is surely it. My inbox awaits offers from the History Channel etc.
Incidentally, Battey’s address in 1918 (when his son Lieutenant Bryan Mann Battey was reported as missing in action) was “700 West One hundred and seventy-ninth street, New York, NY”, he lived 1861-1934, and his partner was Sarah Angie French. Battey isn’t mentioned in Tom Crouch’s “The Eagle Aloft”, or indeed in any airship history I’ve seen, but perhaps there’s a secret history of airships discussing Battey that I’ve yet to see. Though “Dr S. B. Battey” was a member of the Aeronautic Society of New York, and gave a talk (in 1908?) on wings on dirigibles, please let me know if you see him mentioned anywhere.
Thomas B. Slate’s “City of Glendale”
The 1920s brought a new wave of interest in making metal-clad airships not just possible, but commercially viable. Perhaps most notably, in 1921 Carl B. Fritsche founded the Metalclad Airship Corporation of Detroit (“MAC”), the company that built (as I’ll cover in a separate blog post) the ZMC-2.
But MAC was far from alone. The August 1940 edition of Flying Magazine included an article by J. Gordon Vaeth called “The Blimp Business“, which described a number of other companies who had tried to build metal-clad airships in the 1920s and 1930s.
Thomas B. Slate started up the American Mechanical Engineering Company (an “outgrowth of the Slate Aircraft Corporation”), which in 1928 built an all-metal airship called the “City of Glendale” (“in honor of the city in which it was built” [p.38]).
Though it flew tethered (i.e. as a captive balloon), the Great Depression prevented it from being finished and used commercially: and it was eventually destroyed in 1931. Gordon Vaeth’s description seems to betray a sad fondness for this airship, in that it had a beautifully simple and robust design that could be easily replicated, but that its commercial timing was catastrophically bad.
Carl B. Fritsche and Ralph Upson: the ZMC-2
The history of the ZMC-2 is a huge topic, and this post has already overrun my original target by a factor of 2x or more. So please don’t be cross with me for postponing this to a later date!
National Airship Association of California & Inter-Ocean Dirigible Corporation
Finally, Vaeth’s 1940 article mentions two other companies trying to build radical new metal-clad airships at his time of writing. The first was an all-metal airship designed by Thad Rose for the National Airship Association of California, that had “a prototype under construction”. This contained a clever central tube running down the middle of the airship, creating a vacuum at the front of the ship, pulling it forward. A Russian website I found points to a large article in the April 6, 1939 Los Angeles Times (which I haven’t yet seen), plus a screen-grab of Rose’s 1930 patent. You can see the distinctive power tube running down the centre:
The second was the Inter-Ocean Dirigible Company, which was a Virginia-based company that grew out of the Virginia Airship Company. This, too, incorporated a central (internal) power tube running from end to end: special nozzles at the inlet and outlet of the power tube “enable[d] control of the ship in any direction”. Sadly, I haven’t yet found a patent drawing or picture of this particular airship; but there’s a good chance that it was never actually built.
Your Thoughts, Nick?
The neat-and-tidy Wikipedia page on metal-clad airships is all very well, but I do suspect the succession of airships described above points to a much more interesting history. And who knows, perhaps this will also include the secret history of the 1897 airship flap?
Would it surprise me if I’m currently the only person in the world who genuinely wants to know exactly what Thomas Greenhow Williams (‘Tex’) Settle’s US Navy timeline was? No, of course it wouldn’t. So why inflict it on the world as a blog post? Too late, here it is!
Naval History Division
Settle’s US Navy biography was compiled by the Navy Office of Information Internal Relations division (OI-430), 1st April 1969. Putting all the balloon races and free-ballooning stuff (and everything that happened on the USS Portland in WWII) to one side:
6 Jun 1918 – commissioned Ensign with the class of 1919, having graduated with distinction
Jan 1920 – reported for duty in connection with fitting out the USS Whipple (in Philadelphia)
23 Apr 1920 – served as Engineer Officer on the USS Whipple, then as Navigator, then as Executive Officer
April 1922 – Postgraduate School, Annapolis, MD for aviation radio engineering, before continuing the course at Harvard University (gained Master of Science degree in June 1924)
Jul 1924 – reported for duty at NAS Lakehurst, NJ on board the airship USS Shenandoah, and then on the airship J-3
Oct 1924 – served on airship USS Los Angeles as Communications Officer, Engineering Officer, Navigator, and Executive Officer.
Feb 1929 – assigned to the Bureau of Aeronatics, Navy Department, Washington DC
Jul 1929 – served at the Goodyear Zeppelin Corporation, Akron OH as Inspector of Naval Aircraft during construction of USS Akron and USS Macon.
Jan 1934 – served as Training Officer as NAS Lakehurst, NJ
Jun 1934 – assumed command of the USS Palos (ship) in the Yangtze Patrol of the Asiatic Fleet
Winter 1934 – Senior Naval Officer and Acting Consul at Chungking
Jun 1935 – assumed command of the USS Whipple (ship)
Feb 1937 – became Fleet Communications Officer on the Staff of the Commander in Chief, Asiatic Fleet
Jun 1938 to Jun 1939 – served as Executive Officer of NAS Lakehurst
1939 to May 1940 – on senior course at the Naval War College, Newport RI
May 1940 to Apr 1941 – served on the Staff of the Naval War College, Newport RI
May 1941 – Chief of Staff and Operations Officer for Commander Cruiser Division TWO, Atlantic Fleet
Aug 1941 – Chief of Staff and Operations Officer for Commander Cruiser Division EIGHT and for Commander Cruisers, Atlantic
May 1942 – worked in the Bureau of Aeronautics and the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department, Washington DC.
Sep 1943 – in command of Fleet Airships, Pacific, and then of Fleet Airship Wing THREE
3 Mar 1944 – assumed command of USS Portland at Eniwetok. For this command, he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Legion of Merit with Combat “V”, and the Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V”.
Jul 1945 – temporary duty at Headquarters of Commander in Chief, US Fleet, Washington DC
Aug 1945 – reported to Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet.
Sep 1945 – a task force under his command evacuated ~1500 POWs and internees from the Japanese Mukden camps. He then took the surrender of Japanese naval forces in Tsingtao, China.
Nov 1945 – Task Force Commander of Commander Cruiser Division SIZ, and then Commander North China Naval Forces.
Jan 1946 – took command of the Yangtze Patrol Force
May 1946 – assumed command of Amphibious Group THREE.
Aug 1946 – reported as Chief of Naval Airship Training and Experimention (CNATE) at NAS Lakehurst, NJ
Sep 1947 – became Chief, Naval Group, American Mission for Aid to Turkey (arrived in Turkey in Jan 1948)
16 Oct 1949 – returned to Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Department
6 Feb 1950 – designated Vice Chief of Naval Material, Navy Department
Jan 1951 – took command of a Joint Army, Navy, Air Force Task Force for a classified project
Aug 1951 – Commandant of the Eighth Naval District (in New Orleans, LA)
8 Mar 1954 – Commander Amphibious Force, US Pacific Fleet
20 Aug 1956 – Chief of the Military Assistance Advisory Group, Oslo, Norway
Oct 1957 – ordered to Third Naval District for temporary duty prior to retirement
1 Dec 1957 – transferred to the Retired List of the US Navy, rank of Vice Admiral
12 Feb 1962 – ordered to return to active Naval service, joined a Defense Study Group on Military Compensation, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Washington DC
Oct 1962 – assigned to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, Navy Department.
1 Jul 1963 – released from active duty
26 Aug 1963 – headed the board on Warrant Officer, Limited Duty Officer, and Senior Chief Petty Officer Policies in the Bureau of Naval Personnel
BuAer / NAS Lakehurst / Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
The specific reason I compiled this timeline was so that I could see exactly when Tex Settle was working at BuAer and NAS Lakehurst:
Jul 1924 to Jan 1929: NAS Lakehurst
Feb 1929 to Dec 1933: Bureau of Aeronautics
Jan 1934 to May 1934: NAS Lakehurst
(…gap…)
Jun 1938 to Jun 1939: NAS Lakehurst
(…gap…)
May 1942 to Sep 1943: Bureau of Aeronautics and Office of the Chief of Naval Operations
(…gap…)
Aug 1946 to Sep 1947: NAS Lakehurst
(…gap…)
Oct 1949 to Dec 1950: Office of the Chief of Naval Operation
The last Cipher Mysteries post (from Jo) on Hickey Taylor only had a single scratchy picture of him playing bridge backstage. However, this lack of good images prompted CM commenters to dig up a whole sequence of pictures, which I thought would be good to put into a photo timeline.
Going back to the whole family photo affair, was it really Hickey Taylor whom Charlie Webb (circled) was pranking? Personally, I don’t see it at all, but… what do you think?
(Nick: here’s a guest post [lightly edited to house style] from Melbourne-based Cipher Mysteries commenter Jo, introducing Hickey Taylor to the Somerton Man discussion. Over to you, Jo…)
Stuart Webb recently re-posted “the family photo” on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page, along with a query about one of the people on it: Hickey Taylor. My first reaction was that “Hickey” and “Taylor” sounded like two old farmers from Camperdown (there are lots of Hickeys and Taylors there…) but commenter Poppins cleverly pointed out that Hickey Taylor was in fact a stage manager and occasional actor for J.C. Williamson’s. So… who was Hickey Taylor?
Henry Herbert “Hickey” Taylor, 1903-1962
Though born in Tasmania, Taylor’s electoral roll enrolment address across several decades is his parents’ home at 56 Surrey Road, South Yarra, right up to his death in 1962, when he was living with his widowed mother, Isabel. He spent long periods away from South Yarra with his work.
Taylor’s AusStage listing has him as being in Adelaide from the late 1940s to late 1950s – however, this was as an actor up until 1947, and then as a stage manager from 1949. If you dig through J.C. Williamson’s programs [he joined the company in 1925], you can also see that he spent long periods in Perth, e.g. as stage manager for “The Girl Friend”.
Perhaps most intriguingly, he was also the stage manager for the Adelaide run of “Under the Counter”(but not the Melbourne run), which ended on 30 November 1948. This, of course, places him in Adelaide at the time of Carl Webb’s death.
It seems that Hickey Taylor may also have been a drag performer, or to use the language of the 1940s, a female impersonator. The Australian Queer Archives has an interview listing [p.66] (I haven’t yet managed to secure a listening appointment but have contacted them and am trying, hopefully with Poppins).
As an aside, there have been books (and even Masters theses!) on the soldier female impersonators – theirs was a skilled and well regarded craft. They could also often be a tough bunch. Brent Coutts’ book “Crossing the Lines” is probably the most comprehensive review of the Kiwis.
I viewed Hickey Taylor’s probate document, as well as his hospital death report from the Alfred Hospital at the Public Records Office of Victoria. He died of heart complications – an unexpected death of septicaemia – in 1962. (I’m still digesting the report and will send my photos to Nick.) Dr Colin Ernest Seabridge, the Alfred Hospital’s Resident Medical Officer wrote “I find it impossible to state the cause of death.” There are a lot of similar words and phrases to Charlie Webb’s death and inquest documents.
Taylor was known to the hospital, he was “a depressive, with suicidal tendencies”. He had been “under psychiatric treatment.”
He left his estate to his widowed mother and his brother and sister, this included two houses – 34 and 36 Fawkner Street, South Yarra (worth a small fortune now!)
Connections and Speculations
Was Hickey Taylor the source of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam? (Commenter Em and I believe so!). We know that it was printed by New Zealand company Whitcombe and Tombs and that an identical copy has never been found. (Was it a limited army print run?) I haven’t been able to find Taylor on any New Zealand Immigration and Passenger lists in the 1940s, so I would say if the Rubaiyat came via Hickey Taylor it might well have been via a Kiwi Revue member, such as renowned female impersonator Phil Jay, who played in the same cast as Taylor in “The Girlfriend“.
We can hypothesise about the relationship between the two men and also about Carl Webb’s manicure, careful shave, well-developed calf muscles and wedge shaped feet, noted at the time of his death. We could speculate whether this was the end of an affair, an assisted suicide or a case of moving a dying Charlie somewhere where he could be found without linking him to his theatre friends. Perhaps someone else deposited the suitcase at the station? If we think about the laws and climate of the time, an anonymous death makes a certain amount of sense: Victoria only removed the death penalty for sodomy in 1949. It was only between 1975 and 1997 that Australian states and territories gradually repealed their sodomy laws and began gay law reform.
It also appears that Carl may have told his family he was in Cottesloe, working as an electrician, as per the solicitor’s advertisement regarding Gladys May Scott’s will (posted on Derek Abbott’s Facebook page by Lachlan Kelly). Where was Carl between the end of 1946 and November 1948 and what was he doing?
The Tidying-Up-At-The-End Bit
I think the first Cipher Mysteries post I ever read was “On Carl Webb, Truth and Beauty” (5 August 2022) where Nick warned us against “The one true narrative”:
Maybe we can now each spin our own tidy yarn tying together personally preferred loose threads…But… by doing this, I think we’d be dancing around some sinkhole-sized gaps, not in our preferred story (which will always sound nice to our own ears), but in Carl Webb’s actual story.
What was the American connection? Had Webb travelled to America? Did Doff give Webb the Rubaiyat? Did Webb have a replacement partner lined up? Might he actually have been gay, and married Doff to hide his sexuality? What instruments did he make … Did he have a police record?
My own interest here was first sparked when Bromby Street was mentioned: I initially felt sure the Somerton Man case had something to do with signals intelligence (there were at least fourteen different signals intelligence related sites in the local area during World War II). But I think we should now add a relationship with Hickey Taylor to the list of possible narratives to consider. Might the story have more in common with that of poor Alan Turing, needlessly persecuted because of his sexual preference for men?
I suspect this one may have legs (with well-defined calf muscles?).
Finally: thank you John Sanders for initially pointing out that Gerald Keane had travelled to New Zealand – I think that put us on this track, and thank you also Poppins for finding Hickey Taylor. Punters: keep the commentary “noice” or Aunty Jack will “rip your bloody arms off!” (Sorry Nick, Aunty Jack is an old Australian reference, from before my time here!) And thanks Nick for promoting my comment to a post; it gives a good opportunity for further sleuthing and mature reflection.
I mean, tracking Dermott Derham ‘Derry’ George (of 13 Wandeen Road, S.E.6, mechanic in 1939 Victoria census) and his wife Rita Mabel (nee Dixon, married 1942 in Victoria, maybe at Hoffman’s Road, Keilor, home duties in 1946 Victoria census, died in Keilor in 1998), and I guess his brother Dermott James George and Olga Burge George (both at 13 Wandeen Road in 1939, and again in 1941) is all very well, but it’s not really much of anything. Oh, and driving in his 746 c.c. M.G.J. in 1935, and his M.G. J4 in 1937 and 1938 and 1938 again for the Light Car Club? Nope, not that gripped, sorry.
So what’s next?
Masonic Registers and Card Indexes, maybe?
This is what I’m thinking might possibly give us a lead on Gerald Keane and/or Carl Webb.
There’s a whole load of Australian Masonic Registers and Card Indexes 1830-1991 now being digitised and prepared for publication on familysearch.org, which is just the kind of thing I like to trawl through just in case. (But it’s not up yet.) Similarly, the Museum of Freemasonry in NSW also has digitised a lot of its Masonic records, though these are not yet available online. Still, you’d have thought the Adelaide Masonic Centre Museum at 254 North Terrace, Adelaide and its Grand Lodge Library (the J. R. Robertson Masonic Memorial Library) might have something like the card indexes each Lodge had, right?
Wrong! Because it turns out that tons (almost literally) of masonic registers and card indexes from South Australia have been lodged (if you’ll excuse the pun) in an Australian archive, including a downloadable finding aid listing all the individual documents – I know because I actually read it a few months back. But… I have since lost my copy of that file and now can’t find it again. Which is unbelievably annoying.
So, can anyone help me find this document again?
Royal Adelaide Hospital
Carl Webb was not a well man. At the time of his death, he had an enlarged spleen (which must surely have been hugely painful), and it appears (from his hair) that he had been exposed to dangerously high (and as yet unexplained) levels of lead some 2-3 weeks before his death. Moreover, it seems likely to me that what killed him was an overdose of heart medication (though whether that was self-inflicted, deliberate, or merely accidental is a quite separate issue).
TL;DR – Carl Webb was not, as the phrase goes, a happy bunny.
Hence, I’ve long wondered whether Webb might have been admitted to (and discharged) from a hospital in the month before his death – and given that he was found on Somerton Beach, I’ve specifically wondered about the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
Interestingly, the admissions register for the RAH have been digitised up to 1961, and are accessible up to 31st December 1936. These look like this:
Now, it’s not clear to me when (or to whom) the Admissions Register scans covering November 1948 will/are be accessible. There seems no obvious reason why film # 102936290 isn’t available online, but might it be accessible in person via an LDS Family History Centre? Perhaps someone here will know what the deal is (because I certainly don’t, alas).
Update!
Though Google wasn’t as helpful as normal, I eventually found a copy of the missing document in my mobile phone’s pdf cache. It was SRG 490, “Grand Lodge of Antient, Free & Accepted Masons of Australia”, held at the State Library of South Australia. More to follow when I’ve gone through it properly…
I’ve recently had some nice correspondence with Rafał Miazga, an independent Polish researcher who, having deftly avoided getting trapped by the perils of Voynich Manuscript research, instead travelled deep down the Rohonc Codex rabbit-hole. He has posted up a (substantial) paper on academia.edu outlining both his research and his interesting (yet tentative) conclusions, which I think are well worth reading. I also thought it would be worth using this post to summarise my very high-level view of the state of play of Rohonc Codex research, plus why I think Rafał’s paper is particularly interesting.
Kiraly and Tokai
After many years of only stumbling advances, Rohonc Codex research is now broadly dominated by the work of two researchers, Lev Kiraly and Gábor Tokai. Even though Kiraly and Tokai haven’t fully published their research, there seems little doubt (even from Benedek Lang) that they are heading in the right direction with the meaning they are extracting from sets of Rohonc Codex words.
And yet their results remain highly bemusing, incomplete, and unsatisfactory. For them, Rohonc Codex words have no obvious declination or conjugation (so are more like English than Latin), and largely lack structure (many passages are more like repetitive babble than structured text).
Overall, I think it’s fair to say that K & T are trying to solve the puzzle of the Rohonc Codex from the details upwards, i.e. as a pure linguistic / syntax / grammar puzzle. But right from the start, it seems to me that they’ve been tangled in ‘word weeds’: like the Voynich Manuscript, the Rohonc Codex presents many repetitive babble-like features (though admittedly not quite at the same level), and K & T seem to be perpetually stalled by these.
Ultimately, they need the Rohonc Codex’s text to be a pure language for their methodology to work, but looking in from the outside I find it hard not to conclude that the two don’t quite fit as well as they’d like. I’ve thought from pretty much Day One that they’re missing some kind of higher-level hypothesis: they know how it works, but they can’t quite say what it is. For them, the Rohonc Codex remains an isolate, i.e. “an individual socially withdrawn or removed from society” (Merriam-Webster), and so they struggle to draw parallels or connections with other languages, other historical artefacts, or other histories.
Enter Rafał Miazga
What Rafał Miazga did is compile his own transcription, and then draw his own low-level conclusions which were largely parallel to Kiraly and Tokai (though there are many overlaps, they’re far from identical). What they do seem to me to broadly share is that the Rohonc Codex is both a religious mess (i.e. one that doesn’t quite match ‘proper’ Bible stories) and a linguistic mess. On balance, I think it’s fair to say that Rafał’s word-level account of the Rohonc Codex isn’t at all far from what Kiraly and Tokai put forward.
But here’s the big difference: Rafał also has an idea of what he strongly suspects the Rohonc Codex is – which is (probably summarising too boldly and quickly) a book written down by a profoundly deaf monk in an idiosyncratic language. That is, the Rohonc Codex is (in some way) a sign-language transcription, with a large code-book (nomenclatura) of specific signs.
This is a very bold idea, and one that I think Rafał should be commended for, as well as encouraged to explore further. Well done Rafał, keep going!
Nick’s thoughts
In some ways, what Rafał has achieved could well be a kind of Rohonc Codex “plot point” (i.e. that pivots the narrative and spins the story off into a new direction), in that it suggests other histories to look at.
For example, monks who had taken a vow of silence (Trappist, but also Cistercian and Benedictine) had their own monastic sign languages. There are plenty of websites where these are mentioned or discussed: I believe that there is a decent (if dispersed) literature on these. There are even YouTube videos where monastic sign languages are mentioned:
The primary historical question for me is therefore whether there are any other examples of transcribed monastic sign languages mentioned in the literature. I’ve suggested this to Rafał and I’m sure he will be looking for these. There are certainly partial word-lists out there, but might there be other texts?
More generally, I suggested to Rafał that he might think about looking at the Protestant Reformation in Hungary. This was a hugely complicated time for Christianity, where Catholicism, Protestantism and Unitarianism were all prominent players, with many Diets trying to broker accommodations (both religious and political) between them. This tangled picture seems to me to be mirrored by the Rohonc Codex’s own tangled religious tropes: so perhaps its author was a profoundly deaf monk whose religious rug had been pulled from under him by the Protestant Reformation?
In many ways, what a hypothesis like Rafał’s offers isn’t necessarily complete answers, but rather a way of looking at historical sources with new eyes. With luck, this might prove to be the start of a fresh chapter for the Rohonc Codex. Fingers crossed!
Some Cipher Mysteries commenters have speculated that Gerald (Jerry) Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s might have connected him to the run of “Under The Counter” at Adelaide’s Theatre Royal in November 1948. But is there any actual evidence of this? Keane doesn’t appear in the UTC programme, so why should we think this is so?
From Chief Mechanist to Caretaker…
As commenter Poppins pointed out, Jerry Keane was the Chief Mechanist for J. C. Williamson’s 1937/1938 production of Victoria Regina. He was also the Chief Mechanist for the (Melbourne-based) Borovansky ballet when they went on tour in New Zealand in 1944: so I think we can reasonably presume that he was the Chief Mechanist on tour with the two production companies.
Yet at the time of his accidental death in 1960, Keane was working for J. C. Williamson’s “scenery store situated at 47 Richmond Terrace, RICHMOND as a caretaker and a storeman, and his duties were to see that the premises were secure at night and the Firedoor was closed at night” (as deposed by his fellow theatrical employee Edward James Morgan of 1 Kennedy Street, North Richmond). Which, given that he seems to have started as a caretaker in the Camperdown Mechanics Institute back in 1915, would seem to have Fate bringing him full circle back to where he began.
Maybe the Borovansky Ballet?
So, what was Keane’s job at J. C. Williamson’s in late 1948? We also now know that the Borovansky Ballet were popular with Australian audiences and continued touring for many years after: two productions from this time were Terra Australis (1946) and The Black Swan (1949). So it is entirely possible that he continued in his role as Chief Mechanist with the Borovansky Ballet throughout this period.
However, the corresponding NZ page for 1948 has no performances at all by the Borovansky Ballet, but many performances by Ballet Rambert in association with J. C. Williamson’s (from May 1948 to June 1948). The NZ page for 1949 has none at all for either ballet company. Yet even though Ballet Rambert performed in Adelaide in November 1948 (i.e. immediately before “Under the Counter”), I saw no sign of Jerry Keane in the programme for their performance there.
Perhaps some intrepid soul will find something similar to J. C. Williamson’s Salary Book 1933-1943 (first mentioned here by one of the many ghosts of Steve Hurwood), but for 1947-1949?
Maybe “Under The Counter”?
It’s entirely possible that someone will find Jerry Keane mentioned in travel records relating to Cicely Courtneidge’s “Under The Counter” production as it finished its mammoth four-year tour in Adelaide in November 1948. So… what happened?
The performances prior to Adelaide had been in Perth, though some performances that were due to happen in Kalgoorlie after that were unfortunately cancelled “because of the coal strike“. I should perhaps note that the Perth “Workers Star” described the (admittedly fairly lightweight) show as “reactionary twaddle“:
CICELY Courtneidge’s show, Under the Counter, in Perth now, is a dirty piece of boosting for blackmarketeers, and squeezes in a few reactionary cracks at the British Labor Government and the Communists. Stooping to this kind of reactionary twaddle won’t get the big theatre magnates anywhere with Aussie audiences. They obviously found the show very boring, it hardly raised a laugh. The night the Star reviewer went His Majesty’s showed so many empty seats the box office must have made a loss on it.
The main body of the company travelled by train from Perth, arriving on Monday 15th November 1948, just a few hours before the performance. Cicely Courtneidge’s accompanist Robert Probst (who later got into hot water for disparaging the quality of Australian orchestras) flew to Adelaide on Saturday 13th November 1948 to rehearse on the Sunday. (Though Cicely Courtneidge herself may have flown on Friday 12th.)
Courtneidge went shopping on the 22nd to buy some pyjamas to take back for her husband (no, I’m not making it up), and after the show’s run had finished, went to stay at a bookmaker’s house on Palm Beach with her main man Thorley Walters. The Sydney Truth gleefully reported:
When Cicely Courtneidge and Thorley Walters left for home during the week, Palm Beach lost two of its most colorful visitors. Cicely used to prance into the surf in a bright yellow brassiere top with bright royal blue trunks and Thorley had a pair of orange trunks which used to glow in the dark. Cicely was forced to put splits in the sides of her shorts as her avoirdupois increased (she admitted putting on a stone and a half in Australia). As the sun sank to rest below the purple hills at Palm Beach Thorley’s trunks became more of an illuminated address and the sight of his luminous posterior bobbing about in the briny is some thing the locals won’t forget for a long time.
Courtneidge flew to Melbourne on 29th November 1948; and later, after a farewell party at Prince’s, she flew to Honolulu on 17th December 1948.
Thanks to Cipher Mysteries commenter Poppins, we now know that Carl Webb’s close relative Gerald Keane was known as Jerry Keane. This was from the souvenir programme for a J. C. Williamson production of “Victoria Regina” that ran from 1937 to 1938 (the file is dated October 1937, but the front cover has the hand-written note “Auckland NZ 1938”). Page 10 has a list of the “Heads of Stage Departments”, one of whom is:
So let’s have a look at Jerry Keane.
Gerald Thomas “Jerry” Keane
Gerald Thomas Keane was born in Ballarat East, Victoria in 1889: in 1915, he married Freda Grace Webb (1896-1964, sister of Carl Webb) in Victoria. There’s a 23 Jan 1915 news report of Gerald and “the Webb sisters” performing in a local concert. This was also the year he lost his job as caretaker of the Camperdown Mechanics Institute, as per this letter of 14 Aug 1915.
Mr. Gerald Keane, son of Mrs. Keane, of [130] Manifold street, who has been on the staff of J. C. Williamson for over twenty years was in Camperdown on Thursday, on a visit to his people. Mr. Keane has had an extended trip with the Russian ballet, visiting Adelaide, and then Brisbane.
Gerald and Freda had three children: Leo Vivian (born in Camperdown in 1915), John Russell (‘Jack’) (born in 1917), and Gwendoline Mary (born 1919). In 1943 (when his son Jack died), the family address was 194 Stewart st, East Brunswick, Victoria: before that, they lived at 226 Glenlyon Road (this was their address on Boxing Day 1940 when they were witnesses for Roy Webb’s Will). As commenter Jo pointed out, Carl Webb appears to have been living with the Keane family at that time (i.e. not long before Carl’s marriage to Dorothy).
WHEN certain lottery prizes were announced in Launceston on Tuesday, two very excited people were prima ballerina, Dorothy Stevenson, of the visiting [Borovansky] ballet company, and Jerry Keane, chief mechanist accompanying the ballet. Hear that these two visitors collected £10 each.
The Borovansky ballet company was based in Melbourne, founded in 1939 by Edouard Borovansky and his tall wife Xenia as the “Academy of Russian Ballet above a shop in Elizabeth Street”, whose studios then (from 1940) provided the home for the Melbourne Ballet Club. According to this page:
The year 1944 brought two landmarks for Borovansky: he became a naturalised Australian, and J.C. Williamson’s backed an Australian tour that took his company from Melbourne to Adelaide, Hobart, Launceston, Sydney and Brisbane, and then to New Zealand. From then until 1961 – except for occasional unfortunate breaks – the Borovansky Ballet was a permanent and popular feature of J.C. Williamson’s programming […]
Over the years, highlights of the repertoire included Laurel Martyn’s Sigrid (first presented by Borovansky in 1940), Petrouchka (1951), the complete Sleeping Princess (1952), Massine’s Symphonie Fantastique (1954), Cranko’s Pineapple Poll (1954) and, from Lichine, a full-length Nutcracker (1955) and the specially-commissioned Corrida (1956). Borovansky himself explored Australian themes for three original ballets, Terra Australis (1946), The Black Swan (1949) and The Outlaw, a 1951 retelling of the Ned Kelly saga – proving that Borovansky had become, in his own words, ‘a dinkum bloody Aussie’.
[…] Borovansky’s papers and a striking self-portrait are held in the National Library of Australia.
(PS: ballerina Dorothy Stevenson was the daughter of the Bishop of Grafton. So don’t say I don’t spoil you for interesting historical facts.)
Gerald died in 1960 in Fitzroy, Victoria.
Chief Mechanist
In a touring company (usually ballet or opera, but sometimes musicals and larger productions), the Chief Mechanist (or Head Mechanist) typically reports to the Production Manager, and handles planning, logistics and staff rostering, to ensure that each night’s performance does exactly what it is says in the souvenir programme. Hence Jerry Keane “accompanying the ballet” company on tour as its Chief Mechanist makes perfect sense.
Compared to theatre productions, where Stage Assistants (and sometimes “Mechanical Staff”) typically report to a Stage Director, the role of a Mechanist would involve wrangling not just the stage but also (in modern productions) flying harnesses, animatronics, and all manner of special staging effects. You can therefore think of the Chief Mechanist was kind of a techno-magician behind the scenes, turning a performance into a memorable production.
