Ever the agent provocateur, Pete Bowes has just published a post arguing that the long-standing Somerton Man story about the Hillman Minx was entirely made up. Rather than just snap at the bait, let’s examine the actual evidence and make up our own minds…

The Trigger

As we shall see below, what triggered this whole sequence was a short article in the Adelaide News mentioning the police’s search for a Rubaiyat. There had been no other mention of the Rubaiyat in any Adelaide newspaper since a brief mention at the start of the first inquest more than a month earlier, where the Rubaiyat was no more than a footnote tucked away at the end of the article. Hence the following article – which focused specifically on the police’s ongoing search for a copy of the Rubaiyat – would have come as a surprise to all but the most attentive of South Australian readers.

Adelaide News, 22nd July 1949

Although police realise they are acting on a mlIlion to one chance, a search for a book with a torn page which may throw some light on the Somerton body mystery is continuing throughout Australia.

A torn page of Fitzgerald’s translation of the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” was found in the pocket of the victim.

Det.-Sgt. Leane and Det. Brown believe the torn book may still be on the shelves of a library. They think that if they can find it, they can trace the man to the city or town he was in before he came to Adelaide With this information, it may be possible to establish his identity.

Melbourne police have made a search of public libraries and libraries in Victorian provincial towns, but have failed to find the torn volume. Although a number of city and suburban libraries have been checked here, others in country districts have not yet been investigated. The cause of death will probably never be known. A plaster cast of the victim’s head and shoulders, which was exhibited at the inquest, is now in a store room at Adelaide Museum. No request for it to be displayed has yet been made by the authorities.

The Wytkin Rubaiyat

The immediate problem we face is that newspaper reports now offer us two completely parallel narratives to consider, and they both start on the evening of the day the above report appeared.

The Adelaide Advertiser, 23rd July 1949

A bus conductor informed police last night that he believed he knew the whereabouts of a book, which, if it were the correct one, might provide a very important clue in the Somerton body mystery. […] Last night Mr. L. F. Wytkins, bus conductor, of Partridge street, Glenelg, told police that several months ago he found a book answering the description of the one required by the police. He handed it in to the lost property office at the Tramways Trust. Mr. Wytkins said he was not sure when he found the book, but he believed it to be about the time the man’s body was found on the beach at Somerton.

This was Leslie Francis Wytkin (not “Wytkins”). Here’s a photo of him in 1947 from the Adelaide News:

Wytkin died on 10th September 1991 at the age of 84, and was buried at Swan Reach cemetery, 80-odd miles north-east of Adelaide.

If there is any further mention of Wytkin’s Rubaiyat from 1949 or after, I have completely failed to notice it: so unless anyone knows better, it seems that this is where this lead both started and ended.

The Jetty Road Rubaiyat

A second, far more long-lived Rubaiyat story began at precisely the same time: that of the Jetty Road Rubaiyat:-

Adelaide News, 23rd July 1949

Fresh hope that the Somerton body mystery may be solved come today with the finding of a copy of the ‘Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ with the last page torn.

POLICE have been searching for such a book through out Australia in the hope it might provide the missing clue to the body’s identity. Last night an Adelaide businessman read of the search in ‘The News’ and recalled that in November he had found a copy of the book which had been thrown on the back seat of his car while it was parked in Jetty road, Glenelg. The book, the last page of which is torn, has been handed to police. If scientific tests, to be conducted next week, show the scrap of paper found on the dead man’s clothing had been taken from the book, police will have brought off a million to one chance.

[…] The finder of the book today handed it to Det.-Sgt. R. L. Leane. On the last page the words ‘Tamam Shud’ had been torn out. On the back of the book are several telephone numbers and a series of capital letters, written in pencil, the meaning of which have not yet been deciphered. As the scrap of paper found on the dead man had been trimmed, police were unable to identify the book merely by fitting it into the torn page. Proof will now rest with tests on the paper and the print.

Though the man was later referred to as “Ronald Francis”, that was not his real name: Gerry Feltus claims to know his real identity, and says that he spoke to him relatively recently (though he may since have passed away), but that he was elderly and unable to give any more useful details. The only extra detail we have was that he thought the book had been dumped in the back of the car around the time of the RAAF Air Display at Parafield on the 20th November 1948.

Feltus additionally noted that the man had told him that the car was a “little Hillman Minx” (“The Unknown Man”, p.105). But apart from the fact that the tear in the back page broadly matched the missing “Tamam Shud” and that the two sets of paper were a match, that’s all we ever knew about this Rubaiyat: it went missing many years ago, along with the suitcase, clothes and all the other evidence relating to the case.

Pete’s Hillman Minx Conspiracy Theory

Of course, the official line has always been that the Rubaiyat found by Wytkin was a dud and that the Jetty Road Rubaiyat was the real thing.

But Pete Bowes doesn’t like coincidences, and he thinks the fact that both Rubaiyats (re)appeared on the same evening of the same day is just too much.

And so, he mused, what if there never was a Jetty Road Rubaiyat? What if the whole Jetty Road story was just a feint, a front, a misdirection; and Wytkin’s Rubaiyat was the real one all along?

Moreover – and here’s what really seems to clinch it for him – this would mean that “Ronald Francis” was actually “Leslie Francis Wytkin” all along.

It would also mean that there never was a Hillman Minx (presumably it was Gerry Feltus who cooked that up): and hence that we can’t really trust anything the South Australian police say, because they’re all obviously Freemasons or Oddfellows or whatever, and therefore duty-bound by the code of their Lodge to protect Wytkin at all cost.

So… What Do I Think?

Pete has worked really hard at this case, and I would be entirely unsurprised if one of the many things he’s figured out along the way turns out to be the key to cracking the whole mystery: if it did, I’d be the first to applaud.

But as far this present issue goes, I’m personally happy to believe that there were indeed two quite separate Rubaiyats; that the shared trigger for their near-simultaneous appearance was the article in the Adelaide News; and that while Wytkin’s Rubaiyat didn’t have its “Tamam Shud” torn out, the Jetty Road Rubaiyat did. Sorry, Pete, but I just don’t see it.

When I was assembling the Broken Hill + Somerton Beach timeline, one thing stuck out like a non-proverbial prominently-sticking-out-thing: Henley Beach. Why did the Somerton Man…

* …buy a single ticket to Henley Beach (but not use it)
* …instead catch a bus to Somerton Beach (where he later died)?

From this simple starting point, people have constructed all kind of spy-related narratives (usually involving the Somerton Man’s being followed and hence trying to shake off his tail, TV gangster-style). But I just don’t believe them: and Gerry Feltus’ Appendix 2 would seem to rule out almost all of them in a fairly comprehensive and common-sense manner.

Similarly, the suggestion that the unused train ticket was planted in the dead man’s pocket after his death seems just a bit too contrived, a bit too ‘Hollywood’: a somewhat melodramatic thesis, one might say. Hence I also think that this will prove to be well wide of the mark.

Finally, Gerry Feltus also passes along the suggestion that a planned (but never actually built) train extension from Henley Beach station to Glenelg may have been marked up on some of the maps at the station in 1948: and hence that the Somerton Man might possibly have mistakenly bought a ticket to Henley Beach thinking he could continue directly on to Glenelg. But, once again, this seems a bit elaborate and hopeful, and is somehow missing a simple ring of truth.

Gerry, ever keen to keep his text free from the blight of speculation, never offers his own explanation for Henley Beach, but instead asks a long series of hard-to-answer questions, presumably to try to help people proposing their own Henley Beach theory to stay at least a little grounded.

So what did happen? My own chain of speculation is that the Somerton Man…

* Arrived in Adelaide on a train that morning.
* Bought a ticket to Henley Beach, where he was planning to meet someone (and perhaps drop off his suitcase with them) before going on to Glenelg after lunch.
* This was only a single ticket because that person in Henley Beach had their own car (or was there perhaps a bus service running directly between Henley Beach and Glenelg? I don’t know, but please leave a comment below if you do).
* Probably went to the City Baths to get freshened up, have a shave etc.
* Tried again to telephone that person to confirm, but got no answer.
* Hung around at the station for a while, and perhaps tried to call again just before the 10.50am train to Henley Beach departed, but changed plan when that again yielded no response.
* Left the suitcase in Adelaide Railway Station left luggage just after 11am.
* Caught the bus to St Leonards (near Glenelg) at 11.15am.

All of which speculation may not mean much, but the upshot is that I now suspect that someone else knew who the Somerton Man was: a person who I expect lived close to Henley Beach and owned a car.

From my perspective, my belief is that biggest lie about the whole Somerton Man case will turn out to be the notion that nobody (or perhaps only Jessica Thomson) knew who he was.

Rather, I suspect that a fair number of people knew exactly who he was, exactly why he was in Adelaide, and exactly how it all ended up. Not a conspiracy of action as such, but rather a mutual wall of silence. Nobody said a word: for had they done so, surely no good would have come of it.

Everyone in that network had something to lose.

Here’s a quick work-in-progress timeline for the hypothesis linking Broken Hill to the Somerton Man case.

Sunday 19 Sep 1948.
* Prosper Thomson drives his out-of-town-only taxi sedan to Broken Hill.

Saturday 25 September 1948.
* Prosper Thomson places a small ad to sell his 12-h.p. Vauxhall sedan, or to swap it for a sedan more suited to taxi runs.

Friday 26 November 1948.
* Evening: an unnamed boy steals a motorbike (belonging to William Horace Coffey, of 637 Lane Lane, Broken Hill) outside Broken Hill Central Power Station.

Saturday 27 November 1948.
* Unnamed boy dumps a suitcase on Somerton Beach.
* Unnamed boy dumps the stolen motorbike in the sand dunes at Glenelg.

Sunday 28 November 1948.
* Unnamed boy walks 12 miles to Port Noarlunga and steals a motor car (belonging to Maxwell John McCormack), but then gets arrested by police while driving North towards Adelaide.
* A man’s three-piece suit, sports trousers, a shoe, several pairs of socks and an overcoat plus a rifle stock are all found by police near the water’s edge on Somerton Beach.
* Unnamed boy confirms to police that these items were indeed all in the suitcase that he had dropped there, but that at the time the rifle still had its rifle barrel with it.

Monday 29 November 1948.
* Unnamed boy appears in Adelaide Juvenile Court and is remanded until Tuesday 6th December 1948.

Tuesday 30 November 1948.
* Broken Hill Express arrives at Adelaide Railway Station at 9.17am.
* Between 11am and 12am: Somerton Man checks a (different) suitcase into the Adelaide Railway Station cloakroom
* Between 6.15am and 2pm: Somerton Man buys a one-way train ticket to Henley Beach (from Douglas George Townsend, a student “temporarily employed by the S.A.R. as a ticket clerk”), but does not use it. (Trains to Henley Beach left at 9.30am, 10.50am, and 11.52am that morning: oddly, Henley Beach is about 10km north of Glenelg and Somerton Beach.)
* 11.15am: Somerton Man catches a bus to St Leonards from South Terraces, roughly a 2km walk from Adelaide station. (Oddly, he can catch a tram directly to Glenelg instead, but he does not do so.)
* 7.30pm: a man is seen lying on his back on the beach.
* 10.30pm: a man is seen being carried on another man’s shoulders near the beach

Wednesday 01 December 1948.
* 6am – the Somerton Man is found dead on Somerton Beach, near where the man was seen lying down the previous evening. He has no hat, no wallet, no cash, no ration cards, no identification cards: and shiny shoes. He also has no luggage docket for the suitcase he left at the station the previous day, and no onward or return train ticket.

Tuesday 06 December 1948.
* The unnamed boy (presumably) appears in Adelaide Juvenile Court again. Outcome currently unknown.

14 January 1949.
* An unclaimed suitcase is found in Adelaide Railway Station’s luggage office: mysteriously, it contains no socks. Police quickly link this to the Somerton Man.

Various Somerton Man bloggers and commenters seem to have got a bit feverish about “Clinic Distributors”, some even suggesting that it might be a euphemism for a clinic dealing with sexually transmitted diseases.

Let’s take a closer look at the constellation of ads placed in the Adelaide Advertiser by the Thomsons between 1947 and 1949 to see if we can reduce the temperature and get a bit more clarity…

Trove Adverts

Trove holds plenty of small ads placed by Prosper Thomson. The one from 1st March 1947 mentions “Clinic Distributors”, and dates to a specific period when he was looking to buy a sedan to start an out-of-town taxi business:-

MORRIS 10 h.p. saloon. Series M. 1940. same cars now selling as 1947 models for £635. This car has just been rebored, crankshaft ground, all bearings renewed, brakes relined. king pins replaced, and is definitely equal to new car and represents rare opportunity to acquire most popular sedan. Doing approx. 40 m.p. gal of petrol. We require large sedan or coupe, like Chev., Dodge or similar, suitable country traveller, on exchange basis. NSPR of Morris £298. genuine NSPR deal. See Mr. Thomson. Clinic Distributors. 200 Hindley st, business hours.

Though it has to be said that Thomson also placed a separate ad for this kind of car under his middle name, linked to GPO Box 1009J, e.g. 26th March 1947:-

WANTED urgently, tourer or roadster, by ex-serviceman, commencing business, utility will do, cash £75 to £150. Will inspect. McTaggart, Box 1009J. G.P.O.

Anyway, if we trace 200 Hindley Street forward to early 1949, we find other items for sales, e.g. 5th April 1949 and 6th April 1949:-

PAIR of binoculars. 200 Hindley st, City between 9 a.m.-5-3O p.m.

However, what seems to be the most likely explanation for all this is that 200 Hindley Street also appeared in a 3rd January 1948 job ad for Oilene Suprema Pty Ltd (a Melbourne hairdressing supply company that sold machines and supplies for steam perms etc).

LADIES’ Hairdressing Supply House requires Junior shorthand-typiste; also boy for store; 5-day week. Apply 9-10 Monday, 5th. Oilene Supreema, 200 Hindley st.

Hence my guess is that this was the city address of a hairdressing distribution company called Clinic Distributors (i.e. selling to ‘hairdressing clinics’), and that Thomson had some connection with the people working there.

Might it be that George Thomson and/or Jessica (soon-to-be) Thomson worked for Clinic Distributors at 200 Hindley Street around this time, and so used the company’s address for their small ads? It might be possible to check this: something to think about, anyway.

Other Adverts

Here’s another small-ad sale from 13th May 1948, this time with an evening telephone number L8409:-

ENGLISH cloth dress suit, as new. fit 36 in. chest. Inspect 200 Hindley St. 10-5. evening ring L8409.

Another small ad from 17th June 1950 uses the same phone number:-

AUSTIN Panel van, 1940, good order, £275. or near offer. Inspect week end, 4 Marlborough street, Henley Beach. L8409.

…and with the same address…

A.J.S. 1935 2 1/4 h.p, good condition. £35. Specialty Motor Cycle Repairs. 4 Marlborough St.. St. Peters, F5640

…and with the same address and number on 24th January 1948, but in the name of ‘Spicer’…

SPORTS racer, 2-seat Bugatti-Nash for sale; NSPR £270; accept £200. Ring. F5640. Spicer. 4 Marlborough st, St. Peters. Inspect this morn.

I’m don’t know whether or not this strand is connected to the Thomsons (I suspect it isn’t), but I thought I’d mention it anyway, having followed the trail so far. Perhaps a Cipher Mysteries reader will know the answer, they usually do. 🙂

The Broken Hill Connection

Interestingly, thanks to the diligent work of researcher Barry Traish going through Trove small ads, we can place George Thomson and his sedan taxi in Broken Hill in the second half of September 1948, vis-à-vis this ad in The Advertiser Wednesday 15th September 1948:-

NEW sedan leaving for Broken Hill Sunday, 3 seats, n/c. Phone X3239

Thomson then seems to have sold (or at least tried to sell) his sedan when he got back from Broken Hill (25th September 1948):-

VAUXHALL 12-h.p. sedan, new, 1948 model, mileage, 1,200. equipped radio and seat covers, exch. for sedan suitable for taxi, 1940 or later, G.M. or Chrysler product preferred. This is a genuine deal, based on new price both ways. No dealers, all genuine replies considered. Write, call or phone Thomson. 90a Moseley st., Glenelg. Phone X3239.

However, Thomson was not licensed to work as a taxi within the town, because he was also fined around this time for having done so (back in August 1948):-

Civil Sittings
BEFORE MR. L. E. CLARKE, SM:—
Drivers Charged.—Carrying passengers for hire in the city on August 26. while not being licensed by the City Council, cost Prosper McTaggart Thomson, of Moseley street. Glenelg. £2, with £1 19/ costs.
Mr. S. J. Jacobs for defendant.

…all of which surely explains why his ads specify “country trips, day tours, weddings &c”.

Prosper’s Rifle Advert

I’ll just paste this here for completeness: The Advertiser Saturday 18th June 1949

WANTED TO BUY
RIFLE, automatic Winchester, model 63 or similar, for cash. Thomson 90A Moseley st., Glenelg. X3239

Enough said for now! 🙂

Time for an update on various Tasmanian Somerton Man research leads, though I have to say that none of what I’ve found supports the Risdon hypothesis floated by both Byron Deveson and me (i.e. that the high level of lead in the Somerton Man’s hair probably arose from his inhaling fine lead powder as part of an industrial process, and that this could well have been at the Electrolytic Zinc Company’s Risdon plant).

Regardless, here’s what I uncovered: perhaps it will help make some other things clear.

(1) I asked the Tasmanian Information and Research Service (who I’m delighted to report were diligent, extremely helpful and informative) about various records in their holdings.

One key record was the EZ staff records in NS3753/1/93, the first item I would want to look at. However, TIRS replied that: “Unfortunately, despite a lengthy search by archive staff at our off-site repository, this file is missing“. So it seems we’re out of luck here. 🙁

(2) I also asked about AA59/1/256. TIRS noted that this file contains records dating from 1947 to 1950, and contains records relating to seven British migrants: John Bradley, Alan Clay, Frederick North, J L Targett, Henry Alfred Thompson, Kenneth Thompson, and William Handel Williams. However, there did not seem to be any records there relating to the group of Displaced Persons I was most interested in.

(3) In addition, I asked about NS569/1/602: but this seems to contain carbon copies of ship journeys carrying processed zinc to customers, i.e. sales-shipping documents. As such, it contained no mention of the Incharran (and I’d guess not the Era either) for the general period we’re interested in.

(4) I was also interested in NS569/1/796, because this was described as containing correspondence between EZ Co and the Royal Hobart Hospital. It turns out to contain carbon copies of letters from EZ Co’s General Superintendant to the Secretary at the RHH. The abundantly helpful TIRS people noted:

There are three carbons for the second half of 1948:

1. 3/8/48 – letter requesting a medical report for accident to Mr B E Davidson admitted to the hospital on 22/7/48 “suffering from burns to the face and eyes as a result of an accident whilst at work”.

2. 30/11/48 – donation of 5 pounds to the hospital

3. 6/11/48 – Insurance accident claim no. 4586 H L Paul – injury to neck on 23/7/48 returned to work 2/11/48 – Mr Paul raised the possibility of permanent injury – since he was treated by Dr Parker in hospital – request further examination by this doctor and a request for an appointment.

(5) Separately, I bought a copy of “From Amber Coast to Apple Isle: Fifty Years of Baltic Immigrants in Tasmania 1948-1998” by Ramunas Tarvydas. It’s a fascinating and evocative little read, telling the story of Baltic immigration in Tasmania, built from a combination of archival research and first-hand testimony.

From this, I now know that the set of “Displaced Persons” I was interested in all reached Australia on the SS Wooster Victory on 6/9/1948, and then arrived at Beauty Point in Tasmania on the SS Taroona on 15/10/1948 as per my last Risdon round-up post.

I liked Tarvydas’ book, not only for its useful appendices but also for its copious photographs. It paints a picture of how life was for these Balts: though initially there was clearly a lot of antagonism towards them, it seems that once they had had a fight and a beer with the blokes, they were largely accepted. Social integration, Aussie-style. 😉

Some selected quotes re Balts working at EZ Risdon:

The first job for the men from the Wooster Victory was to dig a trench for some underground cables. They used jackhammers for the first time in their lives, hard work indeed for those who had been students. For this the men were paid eleven pounds and one shilling per fortnight, of which seven pounds thirteen shillings was deducted for board. (p.39)

After their normal shift at the factory, [the Balts] would be sent down to the labouring gang on the wharf to shovel concentrates or to carry zinc ingots. They found this work very hard, and the following day they would ask for light jobs because their backs hurt or their hands blistered. The clerk would say, “Well, there’s only one bloody light job here, and I’ve got it. If you can’t work, go back to where you came from.” (p.40)

Most of the original 18 Lithuanians left the plant on the expiry of their [typically two-year] contracts: only one of these Juozas (Joe) Paskevicius, stayed till retirement, 37 years later. (p.42)

There were 18 Lithuanians and 3 Ukrainians. Tarvydas is only concerned with the 18 Lithuanians (of course) and was aware that he was working from an incomplete set of information: so here are the sixteen Balts he lists, along with their age (and page reference):-

Benys (Ben) Berzanskas – 27 – p.160
Jonas (John) Deckys – 39 – p.162
Kazimieras Degutis – 28 – p.162
Valteris Fromas – 38 – p.163
Pilypis Kairys – 38 – p.167
Vincas Milinkevicius – 28 – p.173
Juozas (Joe) Paskevicius – 25 – p.175
Juozas Petraitis – 36 – p.176
Jonas Pincius – 35 – p.176
Pranas Rupslaukis – 18 – p.179
Petras Slegaris – 43 – p.181
Jonas Slyteris – 45 – p.182
Alfonsas Stankius – 22 – p.182
Juozas Stasevicius – 31 – p.182
Stasys Valaitas – 19 – p.184
Jurgis Vasiliauskas – 37 – p.185

(There’s a photograph of fifteen of them on page 96, but as it’s a bit small I’ll ask the author if I can get a better quality scan before posting it).

Note that the two over-40s in the list – Slegaris and Slyteris – were both alive after 1948, so can be immediately ruled out as Somerton Man candidates. This leaves the two as-yet-unlisted Lithuanians and the three unknown Ukrainians: pretty slight odds, sure, but you never know. 🙂

(6) Tarvydas also mentioned a book by someone I didn’t previously know about: Australian author and historian Alison Alexander.

Hence before I delve any further into the history of EZ Co at Risdon, I really ought to get hold of her two books on the subject: “A Heritage of Welfare and Caring: The EZ Community Council, 1918–1991”, Risdon: Pasminco – Metals EZ, 1991; and “The Zinc Works: Producing Zinc at Risdon, 1916–1991”, Risdon: Pasminco – Metals EZ, 1992.

In a comment here yesterday, the ever-insightful Byron Deveson raised once again the possibility that the half-a-rifle-in-the-suitcase-with-socks case might be connected with the Somerton-Man-with-no-socks-in-his-suitcase case. Put like that, you have to admit that there is a certain harmonious balance to the suggestion. 🙂

Though the Somerton Man case we already know (often in painstaking detail), the other case hasn’t yet really been explored in great depth: as for me, until yesterday I thought it would prove to be no more than a crime of opportunity. But I have now built up a very detailed scenario of what really happened there and why – and to my surprise, it (if true) would seem to explain precisely why the Somerton Man was in Glenelg.

The Evidence

The Advertiser Monday 29th November 1948 Page 6

Mystery Somerton Find
The discovery near the water’s edge at Somerton yesterday of a man’s three-piece suit, sports trousers, a shoe, several pairs of socks and an overcoat is being investigated by police. With the clothing was a rifle stock without a barrel. The articles appeared to have been in the water for some time.

Barrier Miner (Broken Hill) 29th November 1948 page 1

Hectic Week End For B. Hill Boy.
Adelaide. – During a hectic week-end a 17-year-old Broken Hill boy is alleged to have stolen a motor cycle from Broken Hill on Friday night and ridden it to Adelaide, abandoned the cycle in the sandhills at Glenelg, dumped a suitcase containing clothing and a rifle at Somerton beach, and illegally used a motor car at Port Noarlunga.
The lad told the police that he had dumped the clothes, which were found at Somerton yesterday.
Police found the clothes and a rifle with the barrel missing, but the youth said he had left them in the suitcase. He said he walked to Port Noarlunga, where he was later arrested for allegedly having illegal use of a motor car. He appeared in the Juvenile Court today and was remanded until tomorrow week.

The Advertiser 30th November 1948 page 6

ADELAIDE JUVENILE BEFORE MR B. J. COOMBE. SM. Charge Against Youth.— Stated by the prosecution to have run away from his home in NSW, a youth of 17 was charged yesterday with having, at Port Noarlunga on Sunday, unlawfully used a motor car belonging to Maxwell John McCormack, second-hand dealer, of Stanley street North Adelaide. Prosecuting, APP Northwood said that, shortly after the disappearance of the car had been reported to the police, the youth was stopped while he was driving it along the South road. When questioned by traffic constables he admitted the offence. Defendant was remanded in custody until December 7.

Yesterday, I found out from Trove exactly whose motorbike it was: a Mr W. H. Coffey of 637 Lane Lane. Coffey initially reported that his motorbike had been stolen during the evening of Friday 26th November 1948 at some time before 12.30am, when his shift at the Central Power Station finished. The bike was later seen by police passing through Mannahill (89 miles SW of Broken Hill), halfway down the Barrier Highway and heading in the direction of Adelaide.

The Timeline

So: the unnamed youth…
* stole a motorbike from outside the Central Power Station in Broken Hill
* used it to carry a suitcase (containing a rifle and men’s clothes) hundreds of miles to south of Adelaide
* left the suitcase on Somerton Beach
* dumped the bike in the sand dunes at Glenelg
* walked 12 or so miles to Port Noarlunga
* stole a car and headed North back past Glenelg towards Western Adelaide
* was captured by police on South Road

On reflection, I’m now completely happy to rule out the notion that this whole thing was some kind of opportunistic joy-ride. But if not that, what actually happened to connect all these scattered pieces of evidence?

The Rifle Sock Scenario

Right now, I can only see a single scenario that joins all these dots… and it goes like this.

(1) Someone near Somerton Beach wants to buy a rifle, and someone in Broken Hill wants to sell a stolen rifle. This is what drives this entire scenario: everything else clicks through as a sort of logical consequence of this shady buyer-seller attempted transaction… though, as we shall see, with an unfortunate twist.

(2) The seller’s first challenge is how to get the stolen rifle from Broken Hill to Somerton Beach without carrying it himself. He finds a do-anything 17-year-old kid who’s willing to steal a motorbike and be the courier.

(3) The seller’s second challenge is how to fit (and hide) the rifle inside a suitcase. He separates the rifle barrel from the rifle stock, and uses socks to cover up the four exposed ends, to stop the two bumping noisily around in the suitcase. He then wraps them up inside a suit and an overcoat: anyone opening that suitcase would see, well, a suit inside a case. Which is what suitcases are for.

(4) The seller’s third challenge is how to make sure the suitcase’s contents wouldn’t lead straight back to him if it fell into the wrong hands. He removes all the labels from the clothes: a mechanism already eerily familiar to almost everyone who has read about the Somerton Man case.

(5) The seller’s fourth challenge is how to get the rifle from the courier to the buyer without having the courier knowing the buyer’s name or address. His answer is to tell the courier to drop the suitcase in a certain place on Somerton Beach at a certain time, presumably near to where the buyer lives or works.

(6) The plan, then, is for the buyer to collect the suitcase with the rifle in from the beach, whereupon everything is where it needs to be (apart from payment… but more on that later).

Yet even though all six steps appear to have happened exactly as they were supposed to, the suitcase should not have ended up dumped in the sea at Somerton Beach with half a rifle in: so something clearly went very wrong indeed. But what?

How Did Such a Perfect Plan Go Wrong?

Again, I can only think of a single scenario that fits and yet explains everything we see.

(7) Before leaving the beach, the buyer decides to check the contents, and discovers that the seller omitted to describe something about the rifle stock that made it completely unusable.

For example: it was a left-handed rifle stock. Or if not that, then some other utterly fundamental aspect of the rifle stock that was sufficient to destroy the viability of the whole transaction.

Whatever the precise reason, the buyer is now so mortally offended by the rifle stock that he puts it back inside the suitcase, pockets the rifle barrel, and – still in a rage – throws the suitcase and its contents into the sea, before marching off. The rifle is unusable, the deal is off: and from now on, all outcomes are possible.

How Does This Fit With The Somerton Man?

If the seller just happened to be the Somerton Man and the buyer just happened to be Prosper McTaggart Thomson (AKA George Thomson), then what happened next surely began with the remainder of the plan that they had previously agreed.

(8) The seller travels down to Adelaide on the train, and makes his way to Somerton to collect his suitcase, clothes, and payment for the rifle. With him he has a wartime knock-off copy of the Rubaiyat: written on its soft back-cover is Jessie’s Somerton telephone number X3239 (the one that Prosper used in his advertisements).

(9) When the seller arrives, he finds Thomson won’t pay him for the rifle. He launches himself angrily at George, but the younger man is fitter and faster: all the older man manages to do is scratch his hand. He asks for his suitcase: Prosper tells him he left it on the beach – neither realises that it has been found and mentioned in the Advertiser.

(10) Somehow the seller dies…

It seems both to Byron Deveson and to me that the Somerton Man had seen his levels of lead drop down in previous weeks, suggesting that he had previously had a high level of exposure to lead (probably occupational rather than just residential, and probably from lead in its powder form rather than in ingot form), but in the previous few weeks had changed his working environment. His spleen was enlarged, implying that he was fundamentally unwell: if he was sitting on the beach unwell, without money, feeling double-crossed, he could simply have died of stress.

Though pretty much any other outcome is possible, too. 🙁

The Punchline

Even when I first dreamed up the whole rifle sock scenario, I found it hard to believe: it seemed such a gossamer web of double-dealing and interstate shadiness. What, really, are the odds that the Somerton Man was selling a left-handed rifle to Prosper Thomson?

Might the Rubaiyat code simply contain directions (somehow) to help the Somerton Man get to Somerton from Adelaide?

Anyway, I’ll let Byron Deveson have the last word here, for he uncovered a piece of evidence from 1949 that perhaps ices the whole fishy cake:-

Prosper advertised for a particular type of rifle in June 1949. To me, advertising for a particular model smells fishy and suggests that Prosper was setting up an alibi in case he was ever found with the rifle that had been dumped on Somerton beach.

The Advertiser 18 June 1949 Page 17

RIFLE, automatic Winchester, model 63 or similar, for cash. Thomson 90A Moseley st., Glenelg. X3239.

What Next?

I’ve gone through all the Law Courts reports in the Advertiser for December 1948, and there seems to have been no follow-up report. But perhaps it would be worth looking at the Court files for 1948, to see if anything else is mentioned there, however small. Specificially, “GRG3/10 Court files – Adelaide Local Court” which covers from 1948 to 1970, and is held by the State Records of South Australia:-

“This series comrpises three seperate sequences of files maintained by the Adelaide Local Court from 1948 to 1970.
– Court files, annual single number, 1948 – 1970
– Australian Register of Judgement files, annual single number with ‘ARJ’ prefix, 1949 – 1968
– Register of Transferred Judgement files, annual single number with ‘RTJ’ prefix, 1948 – 1968
423 metres.”

Any ideas as to how we can identify this 17-year-old lad from Broken Hill? He may still be alive – if this scenario is right, he probably met the Somerton Man. What might he say?

While I previously focused on the Incharran (because it was active a fortnight before the Somerton Man’s death), it was Hong Kong-owned and seems to have had an almost entirely Chinese crew: and given that few would argue that the Somerton Man seemed even remotely Asian (a “Britisher” was one description used), it does seem a little unlikely that our mystery man will turn out to have been working on the Incharran.

Yet the Electrolytic Zinc Company of Australasia had a second boat plying the same zigzaggy zinc-and-lead trade route, the SS Era. I hadn’t properly considered the SS Era before because the timing seemed slightly wrong: but given that Byron Deveson now suspects that the Somerton Man’s exposure to lead could well have happened as far back as four or even five weeks before his death, the SS Era swings back into our frame and so seems well worth a close look.

The SS Era

An earlier ship called the Era was torpedoed in the Mediterranean in 1918: but we’re interested in the SS Era built in 1921 on Clydeside, and then bought in Glasgow by Australian Steamships Pty Ltd (Howard Smith Ltd), Melbourne.

I only managed to dig up a single photograph of the correct Era on this page on Howard Smith’s ships:

Whereas the Incharran was a beefy former Empire ship, I suspect that by 1948 the Era was perhaps a little long in the teeth for an interstate freighter: in 1955, she was sold “to an Eastern buyer” and then scrapped in Hong Kong.

Log Books

The ever-helpful Log of Logs volume 1 lists where many of the Era’s log books ought to be found:

1926 – 1954

13 Official logs, 1926, 1930, 1937, 1939, 1944 * AA, SA, D13;
+ 29 Official logs, 1929-41, 1945-54 * AA, Syd, SP2, SP290, & SP989;
+ Official log, 18.12.1945 – 19.6.1946 * Australian Archives, Melb, MP 49/7;
+ 6 Off.logs, 1939-40, 1942, 1949, 1951-4. ex Newcastle * AA, Syd, SP458, 528.

However, when I went a-looking for these today, the NAA’s online catalogue only seems to contain the following SS Era log books from the 1940s:

448208: SP290/2 1940/ERA/1: ERA official log book 24 April 1940 – 28 May 1940 [Box 5]
448210: SP290/2 1940/ERA/2: ERA official log book 22 May 1940 – 19 November 1940 [Box 5]
448211: SP290/2 1941/ERA/1: ERA official log book 11 June 1941 – 20 November 1941 [Box 17]
448206: SP290/2 1941/ERA/2: ERA official log book 21 November 1941 – 17 June 1942 [Box 17]
745465: C12 NN: Era Official Log Book 18/6/1942 – 21/12/1942 [Box 32]
448208: SP290/2 1945/ERA/1: ERA official log book 29 June 1945 – 17 December 1945 [Box 62]
448207: SP290/2 1946/ERA/1: SS ERA official log book 20 June 1946 – 27 November 1946 [Box 75]

(SP2/1 covers 1930 to 1939 and also includes some of Era’s wireless logs, while MP102/1 covers 1950.)

Unfortunately, even though NAA’s SP989/1 (held in Sydney) does index numerous logbooks (AEON, FIONA, MANUNDA, etc), the SS Era wasn’t listed there. My guess is that nobody has yet asked to have a look at these, and so they haven’t yet been added to the NAA’s Big Fat Online Index Of Everything. I’ve put in a request to have these indexed, so that if they do happen to cover (say) Oct 1948 to Dec 1948, we can go in and have a look. 🙂

However, I did find other things in the NAA that were related to the SS Era:-

3006282: SP958/1, NN: Agreement and Account of Crew, ERA, 27 April 1948 to 10 November 1948 [25 pages; box 76]
3006283: SP958/1, NN: Agreement and Account of Crew, ERA, 11 November 1948 to 8 May 1949 [27 pages; box 76]
7937709: SP461/1, ERA: S S Era – inspection of crew accommodation [Box 1]

In the (hopefully temporary) absence of logbooks I’ve ordered up electronic copies of 3006282 and 3006283 from the NAA, so we shall see what they contain within 30 days, all being well…