(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).
Taylor worked in his stage manager capacity with some of the most celebrated Southern Hemisphere female impersonators of the time – e.g. Phil Jay and John Hunter of the Kiwi Revue shows.
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 know that Charlie was fond of solving Norman McCance’s newspaper bridge problems, but there’s also a picture in the Sydney Sun of Hickey Taylor playing bridge in 1937:
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.