As normal, the answer turns out to be so painfully, staring-us-all-in-the-face obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to type.

From what I can see, the most likely scenario is that the Somerton Man’s surname was surely…

Штейн

i.e., that he was a Russian merchant seaman called Stein, who I believe died from natural causes (possibly, as Byron Deveson suggests, of neurosyphilis) in the Glenelg house of Jessica Harkness during the evening of 30th November 1948.

The reason is that I suspect “JEStyn” = “J(essica) E(llen) Штейн”, and that the two met in Royal North Shore Hospital Sydney, where she was a trainee nurse and he was a patient (where, pace Byron Deveson, he was perhaps having his syphilis treated with penicillin? Who can tell?). Whether or not they were actually married, it seems that in 1944 she felt confident enough of their relationship to take the Russian seaman’s surname when signing her name in Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat.

It’s a pretty specific claim, so how can it be disproved?

I’ve posted on so many separate Tamam Shud / Somerton Man topics recently (which have in turn triggered so many comments), I thought it might be a good idea to at least try to tie up a few loose threads still dangling here. “Ne’er does one door close but that another opens”. (Am I the only person who remembers “The Horrors of Ivan”?)

1. A Professorial Plug

As I mentioned here recently, the Unresolved Mysteries subreddit will be hosting an AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) session with Professor Derek Abbott this Saturday. If you log in there then and post questions, he promises to try to answer them.

To be precise, the AMA session will start at the following (time zone) times:-

– Eastern Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 9pm
– Mountain Daylight Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 7pm
– Pacific Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 6pm
– Australian Central Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 10.30am
– Australian Western Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 9am
– New Zealand Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 1pm
– Central European Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 3am
– British Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 2am

Of course, the timing is (let’s say) somewhat suboptimal for European Somerton Man fans: but it is what it is, and if you do want to take part, I’m sure you’ll find a way. 🙂

If you do, here are a few good questions to warm him up with…

* How come the Somerton Man was clean-shaven?
* How come he only had a pastie for lunch and dinner?
* Do you accept the new evidence in Feltus’ Chapter 14 “A Final Twist”?
* Can the dead man’s lividity be reconciled with his position posed on the beach?
* Did anybody ever try to track down the strappers that first found the Somerton Man’s corpse?
* Why did the Somerton Man have no socks in his suitcase?
* etc etc etc 🙂

2. The Australian Codebreaker

While following up the whole how-was-the-Rubaiyat-photograph-made question, I noticed that it was sent to “decoding experts at Army Headquarters, Melbourne” (26 July 1949, Feltus p.108) and that on the next day a “Navy ‘code cracker’ was tackling the task this afternoon” (Feltus p.110).

It struck me that these news stories can only really be talking about one person: Captain Theodore Eric Nave, who his biographer Ian Pfennigwerth dubbed “Australian Codebreaker Extraordinary” (in the 2006 book “A Man of Intelligence”). I personally found this a good read, but I suspect that the details of Eric Nave’s Japanese code-breaking exploits probably proved a bit heavy on the technical cryptology side for most lay readers.

Nave was on loan from the Royal Navy to the Australian Army for eight years until 1st January 1948, when he was “attached to the Defence Signals Bureau as a serving officer”, though his “loan appointment was terminated 17:3:49”. When the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) was established on 16th March 1949, Nave was proposed as a possible director: however, in those paranoid times the job actually went to a Brit: Nave was instead given the role of Defence and Services Liaison Officer, starting 15th December 1949. (Incidentally, he was also appointed to the board of the Victorian Mission to Seamen in 1950, just so you know).

I feel confident that, even though Nave had managed to accrue 160 days of untaken holiday by June 1948, he was at his desk in Melbourne when the Rubaiyat photograph came in – would they honestly have given it to anyone else in the building? Would they hell, I say.

But did Nave ever write about it? And did Army Headquarters keep a copy of that photograph? Even though Pfennigwerth’s book mines many different archives, Nave’s years immediately post-war seem far more sketchy than his war years, as far as evidence goes. All the same, wouldn’t it be nice if one of these archives proved to have a little bit more of an answer for us?

3. A Close Shave?

When I posted about how the Somerton Man was oddly (given the generally accepted timeline) clean-shaven, I proposed that he might have had a long-standing beard shaved off that morning.

With the help of the numerous commenters (and having thought about this a bit more), I can see now that I was being a bit hopeful: ultimately beard science says that hair growth is probabilistic, so there ought to have been a normal mix of all three hair phases in his stubble.

And yet at the same time that doesn’t really square with the timeline and what we see. Even so, there are plenty of other possible explanations we can’t rule out: e.g. the man’s face was shaved in the morgue before the photographs were taken (which is possible); he was shaved later in the day; he was in the throes of such a debilitating (and terminal) condition that his body didn’t have the strength to grow any hairs that day; he in general grew hair slower than most people; he had pale ginger facial hair which didn’t show up as 5 o’clock shadow; and so on.

Who knows which one was right? 🙁

4. The Football Player

When I posted about Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s relentless hospital visitor, I noted that her daughter Mary Morison married a footballer called Ian McKay, and listed highlights of her life up to 1954. The reason for this particular cut-off date is simply that this is currently as far forward as the Australian newspapers archived in Trove go: 50 years back from 2014 is 1954, and any newspaper more than half a century old is deemed to be out of copyright there (just so you know).

But it turns out that Ian McKay was an Australian rules footballer of great repute, who even has a Wikipedia page devoted to him. Unfortunately, the links given there have withered and died on the webby vine: but not before being picked up by the Wayback Machine. So, according to his obituary, we know that when he died in 2010:-

“Ian is survived by his wife, Mary, and three children, Heather, Andrew and David.”

Hence it’s entirely possible I might yet speak with a member of Mrs John Morison’s family before long, which could well prove to be hugely interesting.

Finally, here’s a picture of Ian McKay at (quite literally) the height of his career in 1952:-

Gordon Cramer, responding to a comment about beards I left back in June on his Tamam Shud site, replied:-

“[…] I do wonder about the clean shaven image of him that was published originally, given his supposed movements he would have been without a shave for 18 hours or more before his departure yet no 5 o’clock shadow or stubble..”

The Somerton Man checked his suitcase (containing a razor and razor strop) into Adelaide Railway Station cloak room between 11.00am and noon (and he then bought a bus ticket sometime after 11:15am), while his time of death was estimated next morning as probably having been about 2am that same night: so to be precise, it seems likely that he wouldn’t have shaved for at least 15 hours.

All the same I do agree that Gordon has a point here: the Somerton Man’s perfectly clean-shaven appearance in the police photos doesn’t really square with the generally accepted timeline – 15 hours is too long to not get some kind of “5 o’clock shadow”.

Just to remind you, here’s what he looked like (once Jimmy Durham had managed to wrestle a shirt and tie onto the body):-

Timing discrepancies like this are problematic for all Tamam Shud theories, because they’re not really a matter of opinion: facial hair is controlled by physical rules, which aren’t normally bypassed. So what could explain the Somerton Man’s apparent clean-shaven-ness?

Never having grown a beard myself, I was surprised today to find out that facial hair doesn’t ‘just grow’ (i.e. continuously and mechanically): rather, it follows a set of growth rules. In a page on beard length in a beard-products-selling website, I discovered that human hair has three distinct phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen.

The anagen phase (for head hair) lasts anywhere from two to six years, and since this is the growth phase, we can say with confidence that no man’s beard can ever grow longer than it is at six years old. Now, a man’s genetics determines how long his beard’s growth phase is. […]

During the second phase (catagen), your hair stops growing. It embeds in your skin, and sort of sits there for a few months. During the final phase (telogen), a new hair starts growing in the follicle and pushes out the old hair, causing you to shed it.

The upshot for the Somerton Man, I think, is that if his facial hair didn’t obviously grow during the last 15+ hours of his life (and don’t take my word for it, click through above to the high-res images for yourself), it seems most likely to me that his facial hair – i.e. moustache and beard – wasn’t in the anagen (growth) phase, but was instead in the later catagen or telogen phases. That is, I believe this supports the idea that he had recently shaved off a long-standing (or do I mean “long-hanging”?) and therefore possibly quite substantial moustache and beard. (Hence the question: might one of the two combs in his suitcase have actually been a beard comb?)

Of course, the major alternatives to this scenario are (a) that he shaved again later in the day (problem: his razor was still in the suitcase), (b) someone else shaved him while alive (but in Glenelg?), or (c) someone else shaved him just after he had died (possible, but this does seem just a little bit unlikely – a dead guy is a dead guy, right?).

Personally, I’m running with the whole “luxurious beard” theory, but feel free to disagree. 🙂

In my previous Somerton Man post, I wondered aloud who the Mission to Seamen committee member was. Having raked through Trove, I suspect I may have an answer: I think it was Mrs John Morison, the Adelaide Mission to Seamen’s indefatigable hospital visitor.

Here’s the article I found (Adelaide Mail, 10th July 1954) :

Mrs. Morison has visited hundreds of sick seamen since then [1946] — men from England, India, Germany, Malaya, and many other countries. Some did not live to see their own countries again, but in their last days were attended by the Mission.

I suspect that she was the same Mrs John Morison who was honorary secretary of the Cheer-Up Society, and am sure she was the wife of Mr John Morison of North Terrace, Adelaide: their daughter Miss Mary Morison was an air hostess.

Here’s a picture from the 26th June 1948 edition of the Adelaide Mail, showing Mrs J. Morison bringing a birthday cake to (young, tanned, blue-eyed) Irish seaman Thomas Duffy, cheered on by daughter Mary (centre, back):-

Oh, and I’m pretty sure that Mrs John Morison’s actual first name was Evelyn, and that she was the daughter of Jim and Minnie Brimble, of 57 Gurrs Road, Beulah Park.

As for Mary Morison: she sunbathed at Henley Beach in 1948, trained as a TAA air hostess, got engaged to North Adelaide league footballer Ian McKay in 1949, which was also when they were married (story here), with a daughter following on 14 June 1951 called Heather (though not the famous squash player), but she still helped with the canteen at a Mission for Seamen fundraiser (in a “flat blue suit and tile red beret”) in 1952, though that’s where the print trail seems to end. A life in Trove!

Right now, that’s the extent of my knowledge of Mrs Morison: but if the Somerton Man was a foreign merchant seaman in the Royal Adelaide Hospital during 1948, the chances that he came into contact with the Mission to Seamen’s Mrs John Morison were surely very close to 100%.

I’ll post more as I find it…

I’ll start with a quick Somerton Man announcement: Professor Derek Abbott will be doing an interactive AMA session on Reddit right at the end of this month (August 2014), which will happen at the following times:-

– Eastern Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 9:00:00 p.m
– Mountain Daylight Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 7:00:00 p.m
– Pacific Standard Time: Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 6:00:00 p.m
– Australian Central Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 10:30:00 a.m
– Australian Western Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 9:00:00 a.m
– New Zealand Standard Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 1:00:00 p.m
– Central European Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 3:00:00 a.m
– British Summer Time: Sunday, 31 August 2014 at 2:00:00 a.m

If you have Tamam Shud questions for him that have long been burning into your soul, perhaps that would be a good time and place to ask them.

Today’s post is about something oddly specific: what the South Australian police apparently didn’t find.

If we assume, quite reasonably, that the Somerton Man was the owner of the suitcase found at Adelaide railway station not long after his death, we end up with some curious gaps – a “missing list” of things that ought to be present but were not.

At his death, what he had on him was:

* 1 jacket
* 1 shirt
* 1 tie.
* 1 pullover (even though it was the middle of the hot Australian winter)
* 1 pair of trousers (made of Crusader Cloth)
* 1 singlet
* 1 pair of jockey underpants
* 1 pair of socks
* 1 pair of shoes (new-looking)
* 1 Army Club cigarette packet (containing cheaper Kensitas cigarettes)
* 1 quarter-full box of matches (Bryant and May)
* 1 half-full packet of chewing gum (Juicy Fruit)
* 2 combs
* 1 piece of rolled-up paper (famously bearing the words “Tamam Shud”)
* 1 used bus ticket to Glenelg
* 1 unused second-class rail ticket to Henley Beach.

Here are the contents of the stuff that was found in the (also new-looking) suitcase:-

Clothes

* 1 laundry bag (marked “Keane”)
* 4 ties (one marked “Kean”)
* 2 singlets (one marked “Kean”, the other with name tag torn off)
* 2 pairs of underpants
* 1 pair of slippers (size 8)
* 1 pair of trousers (‘Marco’ brand)
* 1 sports coat
* 1 yellow coat shirt
* 1 coat shirt
* 1 shirt (name tag removed)
* 1 scarf
* 6 handkerchiefs
* 1 dressing gown and cord
* 1 pair of pyjamas

Clothes accessories

* 2 coat hangers
* 1 front stud
* 1 back stud
* 1 button (brown)
* 3 safety pins
* 1 card of tan thread
* 1 tin of tan boot polish (Kiwi)

Work tools (it would seem)

* 1 scissors in sheath
* 1 knife in sheath
* 1 stencil brush
* 1 piece of light board (zinc?)
* 1 small screwdriver
* 1 pair of broken scissors
* 1 loupe (small ring shaped object)

Personal hygiene

* 1 razor strop
* 1 razor
* 1 shaving brush
* 1 toothbrush and toothpaste
* 1 soap dish (apparently green)

Correspondence

* 8 large and 1 small envelopes
* 6 pencils
* 2 air-mail stickers
* 1 rubber

Miscellaneous stuff

* 1 hairpin (in the soap dish)
* 1 piece light cord
* 1 cigarette lighter
* 1 6d coin (in the trouser pocket)
* 1 tea spoon
* 1 glass dish

Put all these pieces together, and you get a surprisingly long list of things that weren’t there:-

* Hat
* Outer coat
* Pen (or did he really write everything in pencil?)
* Money
* Ration card
* Identity card
* Wallet
* Socks
* Any kind of railway ticket (if he came to Adelaide by train)
* Any letters received

Were these all lost (in a bet in a pub?), dropped (in a fight in the street?), stolen (by strappers on the beach?), removed (by a spying clean-up crew?), or what? Nobody knows – not even Derek Abbott. It’s a first-class mystery, for sure.

What does it all mean?

Well… that’s the big question, isn’t it?

It’s certainly odd that the Somerton Man seems to have only owned a single pair of socks. I’ve wondered (elsewhere) whether he might have used his other socks to wrap his money in, and whether he had those socks in his outer coat’s pockets. I’m well aware that this, as explanations go, is both plausible and ridiculous at the same time… but if you have a better explanation, please say.

I think the absence of letters may also be telling. I feel reasonably sure that the Somerton Man had letters in his possession, but carried them in his pocket because at least one of them included the address he was travelling to.

I also suspect that the “T Kean[e]” was Adelaide Freemason Tom Kean, whose 1947 Will – I believe, but can’t prove – donated many of his clothes to a local charity, from where the Somerton Man received it.

But I think that perhaps the biggest clue of all in his possessions has yet to be properly mentioned by anyone – the dressing gown and slippers. I recently read a short “Out Among The People” article in Trove from the 7th November 1950 edition of the Adelaide ‘Tizer, which said that the Mission To Seamen visited sick seamen in hospital and supplied them with “cigarettes, fruit, toilet necessities, slippers, books, dressing gowns…”

The full extract goes like this:-

Missions To Seamen

In addition to providing wholesome entertainment for crews of visiting vessels at the Flying Angels at Port Adelaide and Outer Harbor, the Missions to Seamen also watches their interests if they are sick in hospital. A member of the committee cited cases in an enlightening account to me yesterday. “One patient, an Irish lad, has been in hospital for 3 1/2 years and recently was permitted to get up for the first time.” she said. “The hospital visitor has seen him regularly and has been able to do the manv little things his own family would have done in the way of shopping, business affairs, arranging for a wireless set, and so on. A young South African suffering from polio was visited daily and helped in his efforts to walk again in the hospital grounds in the evening. Just recently patients have been Swedish, Indian, Cornish, Scotch, English and Irish. An Indian from Pakistan has been in hospital for 20 weeks, and will soon undergo another operation.”

Devoted Nurses

My committee friend described the devotion of the nursing staff to these lonely overseas patients as wonderful. The Mission supplied cigarettes, fruit, toilet necessities, slippers, books, dressing gowns, had their laundry done when necessary; in fact, it did as far as possible take the place of the patient’s family. The men are most grateful and say they do not know what they would do without this thought and care. “I have been receiving letters from at least 10 former patients regularly for the past three years,” she told me. “Short motor drives and visits to private homes are arranged when, patients can get their doctor’s permission to do so. Two seamen were taken out and home to tea this week-end.”

Hmmm… I wonder who that female committee member was?

The simplest explanation of all?

Prediction #1: the Somerton Man was a foreign merchant seaman in Adelaide who had been taken seriously ill at sea, and had been visited in hospital by the Mission to Seamen. He was a Third Officer (hence his stencilling equipment for marking cargo.). He had written letters home overseas (hence the air mail stickers).

Prediction #2: the Somerton Man was Russian and needed an interpreter to help him get effective treatment. The nurse we know as “Jestyn” (who, we are now told, spoke Russian when she was younger) was asked in by the Mission for Seamen as a Russian-speaking volunteer – what we might nowadays call a ‘patient advocate’.

Prediction #3: the Somerton Man wrote letters to her in Russian from the hospital and sent them to her home address in Glenelg; and that she wrote back to him. This was a source of great comfort to him.

Prediction #4: the Somerton Man didn’t arrive in Adelaide from Melbourne, but was already in hospital there. Feeling terribly unwell and alone he decided to discharge himself from hospital and go and visit her in Glenelg. He put his possessions into a suitcase given to him by the Mission To Seamen (along with the dressing gown and slippers, etc) and checked it into the left luggage department of Adelaide railway station.

Prediction #5: that same morning, he did something simple that accidentally had the effect of making him hard to trace – he shaved off the beard that he had grown in hospital, to try and look as respectable as he could for meeting Jestyn.

Prediction #6: I believe that it wasn’t poison or a pastie that killed him, but whatever he had been suffering from in the hospital (causing his spleen to enlarge etc).

Given that there has been so much recent noise / banter online surrounding the origins of the Rubaiyat ciphertext photograph, perhaps it might be a good idea to look at Gerry Feltus’ definitive opinion (that I received recently by email):-

“I am led to believe that the original photograph of the ‘code’ was taken by a police photographer and countless copies were developed and sent to numerous locations, including The Advertiser where I obtained my copy. I did not find a copy of the photograph in police files or a negative thereof of same. Unless I receive evidence to the contrary I believe that the code was written on the top left side of the rear (plain white dust type cover) of a Whitcombe & Tombs pocket edition of the Rubaiyat.”

The SAPOL Historical Society does now have a copy of this photo, but it turns out that this was one of several sent to them not long ago by Gerry Feltus, who also sent them to Kerry Greenwood for her book. She had (very sensibly) contacted the SAPOL H/S, who had then asked Gerry Feltus because they didn’t have any.

As for what means was used to take the photograph, I think we can probably rely on the Adelaide News, Tuesday July 26th 1949 (as per Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man”, p.108), whose journalistic ear seems to have been close to a policehorse’s mouth:-

“Acting on the possibility that the ‘Rubaiyat’ in their possession did belong to the lieutenant [Alfred Boxall], police set out to decipher a number of block letters pencilled on the back of the book.

Although the lettering was faint, police managed to read it by using ultra-violet light.

In the belief that the lettering might be a code, a copy has been sent to decoding experts at Army Headquarters, Melbourne.”

Finally, we might also in future have to be a little more careful about timing. The Adelaide Advertiser, Monday July 25th 1949 also notes that the man who found the Rubaiyat in his car in Jetty Road, Glenelg, also claimed that he had found it about the time of the RAAF air pageant in November 1948 – in fact, this was held at Parafield on 20th November 1948, a date I don’t recall having previously seen in anybody’s Somerton Man timeline…

Gordon Cramer continues posting apace, asserting – for example – that iodine vapour deposition (also known as “iodine fuming”) and/or UV illumination could have been used in South Australian police forensic photography circa 1948.

But here at Cipher Mysteries Towers, I’m constantly besieged by weak claims built on top of this same “could have” linguistic structure: so it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gordon’s repeated use of it gets my historical goat. In the case of the Somerton Man, “M R G O A B A B D” (or however you want to transcribe it) “could have” also been written by the SM, the nurse, her husband, the person who found the book, saboteurs, conspirators, many thousands of other people that we know nothing about, or indeed by aliens. As with all other cipher mysteries, how does observing that each of these scenarios is ‘possible’ move us forward, exactly?

Then again, Voynich theorist Gordon Rugg has been ploughing that same unyielding field for over a decade now, despite the fact that his possibilistic ard has turned over nothing of value in all that time. So maybe our Tamam Shud Gordon has at least six years’ catching up yet. Hmmmm. 😐

Anyway, by way of sharp contrast, I’ve put a bit of time into trying to understand the specific history of the South Australia Police (SAPOL) and its relationship with forensic photography. What techniques did SAPOL actually use, what evidence is there for this, and what can all that tell us about how the image of the page of the Rubaiyat was taken? As most long-suffering faithful Cipher Mysteries readers doubtless already know, these have the attributes of my favourite kinds of questions: evidence-based, potentially informative, archive-focused, yet in practice tricky to pursue.

So here’s what I found…

The History of SAPOL

South Australia’s policing started relatively early in 1838. Formal police photography didn’t take off in South Australia for many years, even though its Inspector Paul Foelsche took numerous photographs between 1869 and 1914 (these were kept in the family for year, before finally being shown in 1969 to local photographic historian Robert J. Noye).

According to the official SA Police history website…

The first report of [photography] being used in the Police Department was in the late 1870’s, when Detective Von Der Borch was appointed official Photographer. Later a report was submitted requesting a ventilator be installed in the work place to reduce the fumes caused when developing and printing photographs. There is no evidence to show that this science proceeded beyond experimentation until approximately 1898…

..when a certain Detective Lingwood-Smith took on the role: he developed (pun intended) the practical arts of both photography and fingerprinting, turning them into essential parts of police practice, even though the particular fingerprinting scheme he championed was discontinued in 1904. There’s a picture of Lingwood-Smith (inevitably) in the Adelaide ‘Tiser, 29th June 1922, when he claimed that there were “more than 70,000 fingerprints and photographs […] filed in the Adelaide detective office”:-

When asked if he had ever used fingerprint evidence in court, Lingwood-Smith replied that he had not: but that was simply because he had not needed to. “When confronted by their photograph and description, which we have ascertained by means of the finger prints, the offender generally owns up. There is really nothing else for him to do.”

In 1920, Lingwood-Smith passed the baton of the Photography and Fingerprint Section over to Mr. Leslie Hilland Bruce Hudd. In 1923, Bruce Hudd obtained a conviction by ingeniously taking a plaster cast of a footprint left at the scene of a crime: and moreover in 1939…

…he introduced a method for detecting thieves who stole from working companions. A powder was sprinkled onto coins and left at the scene of previous thefts. The powder was not readily visible, and when the money was noticed missing, all staff were requested to place their hands under an ultra violet light. The powder would fluoresce on the hands of the culprit.

Hudd’s photographic and fingerprint evidence was used in a fair number of court cases reported at the time, including the 1942 Hindley Street murders, the Port River murder case of 1944, and a triumphant forensic case from 1947 where a NSW sailor’s badly decomposed (roughly six-month-dead) body was identified purely from his fingerprints. This same article included a picture of Hudd:-

And those who think that the modern forensic study of ears is a new discipline will surely be surprised to read this from the Adelaide News in 1944:-

POLICE fingerprint expert Bruce Hudd is not surprised at a London ear specialist being able to say from a captured German newsreel that the Hitler shown there wasn’t the real Adolf. Today he showed me a book explaining that the shape of the ear doesn’t change from birth to death. Before fingerprint identification came in, the police relied chiefly on ears for identifying men. Fourteen points were set out in describing each ear, including the shape of the lobe, size, and angle to the head. I was shown 140 pictures of ears and saw for myself that not one was alike when an expert pointed out the differences. Even today both Mr. Hudd and Mr. Jimmy Durham, his fellow fingerprint expert, prefer to work on profile pictures showing an ear rather than full face pictures when seeking to identify men.

But even this story pales in relevance to this news piece from 1946, that answers many of my questions directly:-

From there we went to see Mr. Bruce Hudd, chief photographer and fingerprint expert — carefully pulling on our gloves before entering his den. Mr. Hudd said that he now had filed away about 50,000 sets of fingerprints of people who had been brought in on serious charges since 1906. Nowadays he sends a duplicate of all fingerprints to Central Bureau in Sydney, where a master set for the whole of Australia is kept. In Adelaide only one man has tried to beat the fingerprint experts by removing the skin from his fingers. That was the notorious ‘Shiner’ Ryan, who once rubbed the pattern off his fingers on the rough brick wall of his cell, in an effort to outwit expert Hudd. Mr. Hudd waited for the skin to grow again — then took ‘Shiner’s’ prints. Photography is playing a bigger and bigger part in the work of crime detection, and these developments are keeping Mr. Hudd and his staff busy, photographing the scenes of serious crimes, accidents, and copying documents. Ultra-violet light and infra-red rays, which reveal many clues invisible to the naked eye, are now used by the experts of the police photography section.

Incidentally, Hudd was also a dahlia enthusiast (according to Trove), who both grew them and photographed them, hand-tinting the finished product. Now not a lot of people know that. 🙂

Bringing this chapter to close, Hudd finally retired in 1952. He had been assisted in his career “by the following fingerprint experts: Frank Brice, James Durham, Alan Cliff, Dudley Aebi and Bill Low[e]”, which presumably included the three fingerprinting and photographic experts “who did nothing else and their skill was said to be second to none in Australia” back in 1932. On Hudd’s retirement, it was Aebi became the head of the department which he had first joined in 1934, with Bill Lowe also promoted beneath him.

[And yes, it was indeed Constable Patrick James “Jimmy” Durham, stationed in Adelaide, who on 3rd December 1948 took the Somerton Man’s fingerprints in the morgue, and who – with Mounted Constable Knight – then partially re-dressed the Somerton Man and photographed him too. (Feltus, “The Unknown Man”, p.42).]

The South Australian Police History Museum

Even though we have some great – and very specific – description above, I’d still really like to look directly at the South Australian Police photography archives. These are (I believe) held at the volunteer-run South Australian Police History Museum at Thebarton Police Barracks, Gaol Road, Adelaide.

They have placed lots of nice old photographs on its website, most notably transport themed ones here, a few outback ones here, firearms closeups, and uniforms.

However, none of these is the kind of evidential photography apparently used in the Somerton Man case. But there must – surely – be something in there that is similar in technique, that will help us read and reconstruct the precise science of the Rubaiyat ‘code’ photograph?

---

PS: Victoria Police museum has a vampire-killing kit in its collection, though they don’t put it on display because it doesn’t fit any of their thematic displays. Who’d be a curator, eh?

PPS: here’s something for Pete Bowes I found in “Hue & Cry”, January 2001 edition. “The Murray Pioneer October 20, 1949 DEVICE IN TREE: A parachute with a box attached was found in a gum tree on Calperum Station property, about nine miles from Renmark on Monday morning by Mr W Letton. He reported the matter to the police and Detective DO Flint and MC Brebner went out and recovered the apparatus and handed it to the local Post Office.”

PPPS: has anyone read “The Life and Times of an Unlikely Detective”, by Arthur Robert (Bob) Calvesbert?