Keith Mangnoson’s first near-death experience…

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Thanks to the super-diligent Debra Fasano, we now have links to two news reports concerning Keith Mangnoson’s first disappearance in 1940 (though with his name cunningly mis-spelled as “Magnussen”). Rather than being “early in the year” (as per the inquest report discussed before), Mangnoson actually disappeared on 1st October 1940, which explains away the slight timing discrepancies that I was a little uncomfortable with before.

Seeing as these reports have apparently gone unseen for 73 years, I think it’s worth reprinting them both in full here. The first report was from the front page of the Murray Pioneer and Australian River Record, Thursday 10th October 1940:

LOST IN THE BUSH

Searchers Save Life By a Few Hours

  Keith Magnussen aged 33 years, has to thank the brothers Hall for finding him after he had been lost in the dense mallee bush in Maggea district last week. The young men were a section of a party looking for Magnussen. They saw in the distance an old horse trough, and riding up to it, found Magnussen lying in it in a semi-conscious condition and apparently dying.

  On Wednesday last week a report was received by ‘phone at the Swan Reach police station by M.C. Ridge that a man named Keith Magnussen had disappeared in a mysterious fashion on Tuesday. M.C. Ridge, a capable officer, once stationed at Alawoona, immediately sought the services of Black Tracker Jimmy James, living on the opposite side of the river.
  Both policeman and tracker then proceeded by car to Maggea, where they found that Magnussen had been employed for four months by Jack Dutton, a well known wood carter and cutter who is also postmaster at Maggea.

Story of Disappearance

  On Tuesday, it was learnt, Ernest Cook and a lad of Maggea, went out, accompanied by Magnussen, to inspect wood the latter had cut. The heaps were situated in dense mallee which covers a wide area of the district. They drove the lorry to three of the heaps and commenced loading them up, prior to carting them into Maggea. While this […….one] Magnussen said, “There is a fourth heap over there,” pointing to thick mallee some distance away. “I will walk over to that heap and wait there for you.” He then walked out of sight of the wood carters, who went on with their work.
  Later, Cook drove his truck to the heap of wood, but could see no trace of Magnussen. Cook and the lad circled round the heap and peered through the scrub but could see no trace of Magnussen. They called out many times but there was no answer. After hunting round the wood stack without finding a trace of Magnussen. Cook went back to the Maggea post office and ‘phoned the Swan Reach police.

Search Party

  On the following day a search party was organized. It consisted of M.C. Ridge, Jimmy James, the Rev. G. H. Bayley (a clergyman bushman), Messrs. J. Dutton, E. Hendrlck, and others. The search continued until dark; the whole of the country being combed thoroughly without the lost man being found, though Jimmy James was still on what he thought was the man’s tracks.
  M.C. Ridge then returned to Swan Reach, and Sergeant McElroy, of Loxton, took his place in charge of the search party. In company with P.C. Liebelt, the sergeant in his car went to Maggea and the search continued during the day.
  At about noon on the Thursday, Maurice and Ross Hall, two keen-eyed bushmen who live at Wunkar, rode close to an old stone horse trough. They fancied they saw something peculiar looking in the trough. They rode up to it and saw a man apparently dead lying in it. Dismounting, the horsemen saw it was Magnussen in what looked to them, to be a dying condition.
Magnussen had no hat on and was dressed in dark clothes. He wore tan shoes and was semi-conscious. He could not speak when questioned, but revived slightly when given water with brandy in it. His head and arms were then bathed, and after a while he was placed in Henrick’s buckboard and taken to the Loxton Hospital.

Temporary Loss of Memory?

  Dr. Tanko found Magnussen in a very bad way, but thanks to the treatment received he recovered and is now reported to be making satisfactory progress.
  From what can be ascertained Magnussen’s mind is a blank as to what happened to him after he had reached the Wood heap and walked some distance from it.

The second (and slightly later) report (from The Bunyip, Friday 18th October 1940, p.5) merely summarizes the first report, but I reproduce it here for the sake of completeness:-

LOST IN THE BUSH.

  Last week the police at Swan Reach were advised that Keith Magnussen, 31 years, was lost in the bush out from Alawoona. The officer, with Tracker Jimmy James, went out and made an all-day search without result. Next day a full party was organised, and two young men, Brothers Hall, found the wanderer in an old horse trough in a semi-conscious condition and apparently dying. Magnussen was taken to hospital and is recovering.
  The story is that Magnussen, with two others, went out to inspect wood that he had been cutting, the site being dense mallee. The lorry was driven to three heaps and loading commenced and Magnussen went off to locate the fourth heap. Later, the carters found the fourth heap, but could not locate Magnussen. They searched and hallo’ed without result, and after some hours drove to Maggea Post Office and advised the police. This was on Tuesday. At about noon on Thursday the brothers Hall, working with the search party, rode close to an old stone horse trough, and were struck by the peculiar something which appeared in the trough. It was Magnussen. He had no hat on, but otherwise was dressed. He could, not speak when questioned, but revived slightly when water and brandy were administered. He was then bathed with water brought by the party; and was taken to Loxton Hospital. The doctor found the sufferer in a very bad way. From what can now be learned, Magnussen’s mind became a blank after he had left to seek the fourth heap, and he had roamed off aimlessly into the bush.

Keith Mangnoson / “Carl Thompsen” continued…

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Probably the definitive starting point for any discussion about the sad affair of Keith Mangnoson is the inquest report into the death of his young son Clive. It’s on the Internet courtesy of the consistently intriguing blog The Marshall Files, though reading comments there tutting at the moderator of a certain other blog (*cough* Cipher Mysteries *cough*) for letting trolls get so badly out of hand did feel a tad surreal. 😐

But I digress. Let’s try to build up a picture of Keith Mangnoson’s early life…

Keith-Waldemar-Mangnoson-SX13204

Born on 9th May 1914 in Adelaide, Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at the age of 14 then…

“…left home and worked on farms in the country until early in 1940, when he got lost in heavy scrub country at near Nadda where he was engaged in wood cutting. After the lapse of several days he was found lying unconscious and suffering from severe sunburn in an empty horse trough. After spending several weeks in the Loxton Public Hospital under the care of the late Doctor Tanko, he was removed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and later to the Convalescent Hospital at Magill. The doctor who was attending him at the latter informed Mangnoson’s mother that her son was not responding to treatment and advised her to have him placed in the Enfield Receiving Home. He was taken to the Home where he remained for three months, and then his mother took him to a farm at Alma Plains where he stayed for a few weeks.

On May 11, 1941, Mangnoson enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces and served as a Private with the 2/48th Australian Infantry Battalion in the Middle East and later on in the Pacific Area, where he contracted malaria and suffered with war neurosis. On his return to Australia he was admitted to the Military Hospital at Northfield and remained there until he was discharged from the Services on February 7, 1945. He then returned to his mother’s home at 12, Magarey Terrace, Largs Bay and remained there until he was married in the following May.“

Remembering Mangnoson’s claim that he worked with a “Carl Thompsen” in Renmark (250km ENE of Adelaide, not too far from the SA/Victoria state border) in “1939”, we can see that this could only have been in the period before his near-death experience in Nadda (60km South of Renmark, and similarly close to the state border), and while this may conceivably have been in very early 1940, it certainly could not have been any later than that.

Renmark is surrounded by mallee scrubland (fairly arid, with lots of eucalypts): circa 1940, I presume much of this was being cleared (by woodcutters such as Mangnoson) for large-scale farming, as it has now developed a very significant grape, citrus-fruit and nut farming industry. The local papers at the time have columns talking about removing the green tinge from sultanas and whether there would be a market for flax… you get the basic idea.

Trove can also give us (thanks to the Murray Pioneer and Australian River Record, as well as the Adelaide Advertiser and the Adelaide Chronicle) several other brief glimpses into Keith Mangnoson’s early life. In March 1940, he was living in Alma and got engaged to a certain Winifred L. Williams from Renmark:-

WILLIAMS—MANGNOSON — The engagement is announced of WINIFRED L., eldest daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. S. Williams of Renmark, to KEITH, W., second son of Mr. and Mrs. J. Mangnoson of Alma.

On August 1 1940, Mangnoson’s name appears as one of those volunteers for National Service from Renmark whose applications had been rejected.

We also know (according to the front page of the 28th March 1940 Murray Pioneer) that this had been the “Hottest March on Record – Thirteen Centuries at Renmark… all previous records for March heat have been smashed.” (p.16: “Wanted – Wood cutters and stump splitters, Moorook district”.)

However – as normal with just about everything to do with the Mangnoson family and the Somerton Man – throughout all this I find myself playing archival catch-up with the very splendid Barry Traish, who has been raking over (and indeed generously correcting) these Trove scans for some time now. But all the same, I have my own take on what these pieces of evidence could well mean if you put them all together…

If these fragments are all separately correct, then “early in 1940” must surely have been after Mangnoson’s engagement to Winifred Williams (announced in the 7th March 1940 editions of the various newspapers) and probably more than four months before 1st August 1940 (when his application was rejected), for surely he can’t have volunteered to join the AIF while still recovering in the Enfield Receiving Home? All of which seems to me to point to the incident happening some time in mid-to-late March 1940, just after his engagement… yet there is no mention of it in any of the newspapers in Trove.

Of course, the logical question for those Australian genealogist researcher readers who have managed to hold on this far into such a TL;DR post is surely this: whatever happened to Winifred L. Williams of Renmark? Did anyone ever think to ask her about Keith Mangnoson and his 1939 Renmark workmate “Carl Thompsen”? I’m guessing that she would be in her 90s now: I know I’m jinxing it by even asking, but might she even possibly still be alive?

Codex Seraphinianus Redux, 2013 stylee…

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As a cipher mystery writer, I’ve been thinking about the Codex Seraphinianus for many years. And there’s a 2013 edition coming out right about now (allegedly the 3000-strong American first print re-run was fully pre-ordered).

What kind of a thing is it? It certainly resembles a cipher, with all the structure and nuances of calligraphy and page layout, though with the page numbering scheme the least confounding part (this turned out to be a contorted base-21 with a whole load of special rules to mess with your head). For what it’s worth, Luigi Serafini has claimed in several interviews that the text has no meaning, though curiously pretty much nobody believes he’s telling the truth. My own belief is that the text was for him probably an intellectual exercise in calligraphic and linguistic evolution, i.e. that he began with a simple personal expressive form for the text but allowed it to evolve multiple times into something that could ultimately make sense only to him. For what is more truly alien than the intensely private?

All the same, it has to be said that if the Codex were just words, however beautifully conceived and drawn, pretty much nobody would give a monkeys about it (now there’s a marketing lesson for asemic authors such as Michael Jacobson). And so it is that, in the same way that the Voynich Manuscript (which I don’t personally believe inspired Serafini even slightly) is elevated by its unworldly plant drawings, odd circular diagrams and naked nymphs into something on a genuinely higher plateau of mystery, so too does the Codex Seraphinianus manage to transcend its mere textual oddity by dint of its genuinely odd drawings.

To my eyes, Serafini’s diagrams merge the ligne claire quality of Hergé with the visual narrative of tightly-illustrated Japanese car manuals. They smell simultaneously didactic and nostalgic, an extended PDF sent to us from conceptually afar (“Contact”-style) by a dying exoplanet recalling its triumphalist heydays: 1960s America lecturing far-distant Neanderthals about How You Too can live it large in Bedrock by using The Latest Technology.

Much-admired though his surrealism is, I personally find it hard to avoid the feeling that it is almost an afterthought compared to the dominance that style and layout has over the book: these speak far more loudly of the victory of the coldly formal over the uncontrollable heat of humanity. In the end, his Codex falls perilously close to a long-winded exercise in carefully-parodied self-expression, the kind of joke where nobody’s smiling or laughing, an encyclopaedia of meticulous diagrams of rubber chicken gags.

Kudos to the man for his marketing efforts, though, for not many re-releases of old books warrant mainstream articles in Wired (including photos of Serafini), Slate and even Dangerous Minds [a big tip of the missing Somerton hat to Zodiac Dave Oranchak for passing me the links, much appreciated!]

But… I suppose I’ve well and truly got Serafini’s joke, now, such as it is. So, why did the architect have his house made backwards, exactly?

“Thompson Twins” Tamam Shud hypothesis…

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unknown

Despite this week’s lingering yellow downpour from Troll Land, the same period has seen a surprisingly large amount of good stuff concerning the Tamam Shud cold case / cipher mystery emerging into the light.

The first thing I rather like is Pete Bowes’ line of reasoning concerning the Unknown Man’s glass saucer, one of many curious things found in the suitcase he checked into the left-luggage room at Adelaide railway station on the morning of his death.

But why a glass saucer? Pete combines this with the Unknown Man’s fit-looking physical makeup (and hence a healthy diet, though the only thing we actually know for sure that he ate was a pastie) and his 18 (!) removed teeth to deduce that the Unknown Man must have had a dental plate fitted in his mouth, despite the fact that none was found at his autopsy. For Pete, the likeliest function of the glass saucer is as part of a bedtime ritual – taking his plate out and placing it on the saucer for the night.

I’m actually strongly convinced by this line of reasoning: and it has the ring of domestic routine to it that humanizes the Unknown Man, that helps stop us from treating his situation and life too abstractly or theoretically.

But, but, but… what happened to the Unknown Man’s dental plate? Given that it wasn’t in his mouth or his suitcase, I think there are two major scenarios to consider…

Plate scenario #1: the Unknown Man coughs his plate out while vomiting, but nobody notices its absence until after his body has been moved to the beach later.

Plate scenario #2: the Unknown Man dies, but the people in whose company he dies consciously decide to remove his plate to prevent his being identified by it before moving his body to the beach.

Up until now I haven’t really thought it hugely likely that name-tags or labels were removed from the clothes he was wearing: but add in the absence of a hat and the missing dental plate, perhaps this does all indeed amount to a pretty solid overall scenario to consider. Lots to think about there, hmmmm?

The second big idea of the week came from Cipher Mysteries commenter The Dude (see here, here, here, here, and here). Why oh why, commenteth The Dude, is it that people keep yakking about Jestyn (based on the presence of her phone number on the copy of the Rubaiyat eventually linked to the Unknown Man) when it is surely just as likely that the phone number refers not to her but to her partner-and-soon-to-be-husband Prosper Thomson? After all, Prosper used the same number for some of his taxi- and car-related small ads, even if the phone number was itself listed in the phone directory as “Sister J. E. Thomson”.

I completely agree that there are numerous permutations to consider; and suspect that the main reason people put forward such fanciful (and often ridiculous) theories about Jestyn is probably because she gave a copy of the Rubaiyat to Alf Boxall, making it easy to build up a romantic conceptual castle on top of the various fragments. But the existence of two copies of the Rubaiyat falls well short of a proof definitively connecting them: it was, after all, a popular book at the time.

Back in the real world, however, I contend it was far more likely that the Unknown Man was known just as much to Jestyn as to Prosper. It’s surely hard to keep really big secrets in a tiny little house. 😉

But The Dude goes further: given that Prosper was a car dealer and ended up in court several times for forging (or dealing in forged) car documents at a time when there was a lot of interstate car theft and fencing going on in Australia, might it be that the Unknown Man was a fellow car crim (say, from a different state), and that all the stencilling equipment in his suitcase was actually for altering car number plates?

It’s a perfectly viable hypothesis (and far more realistic than any spy hypothesis I’ve heard floated about the case over the years, for example), and one that might even be testable if we could somehow reconstruct the car ring associated with Prosper from people named in court appearances etc. The Dude is already away looking for this kind of thing, good luck with that whole line of inquiry… 🙂

But what if the truth is even simpler? After all, one of the long-standing mysteries about the Tamam Shud case which nobody ever talks about these days is whether it relates to Keith Waldemar Mangnoson at all: for it was Mangnoson who shouted out loud that he had worked with the Unknown Man in Renmark in 1939, and named him as “Carl Thompsen“.

As nearly everyone knows, though, when the Mangnosons ignored the warnings to keep quiet, things turned out very badly very quickly for all of them… but that’s another story entirely (for now). I really don’t know whether these threats were real or hoaxes: but I can’t help wondering whether all these pieces might be connected in a rather more direct way than is usually suggested.

Basically, might this “Carl Thompsen” have been a misspelled / misremembered cousin or relation of Prosper McTaggart Thomson? Might he also have been a trusted out-of-state fellow crim in the same interstate stolen car fencing ring? As always, the police have probably already followed this trail and it could all be no more than a coincidence… but I thought I’d mention it here, just in case someone has already gone hunting for all this (which normally seems to be the case).

Of course, the reason I call this the “Thompson Twins” hypothesis is that the 1980s UK pop group was named after the Tin Tin characters Thompson and Thomson (the original French bureaucrat pair were “Dupond et Dupont”), and here we find ourselves with our own Thompsen and Thomson to work with. “We are detectives, we are select”, you might say (though perhaps a little optimistically)! 😉

“The Unexplained Files” does the Voynich Manuscript…

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From my small corner of the world, it often seems to me that some things really are not only unexplained, but also just plain inexplicable.

For example: even though the entire world had already learnt from famed transit lounger Edward Snowden that the NSA and GCHQ are silently tapping vast swathes of the Internet and phone traffic, why is it that German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now so utterly aghast to discover that the Americans ‘may’ [*] have also been tapping her mobile? Excuse my impertinence, but does she not actually read the newspapers even slightly?

So you can see the big problem contemporary TV producers face: when matched up against modern mysteries of such massive magnitude and moral moronity, how can shows such as “The Unexplained Files” honestly expect to compete? Ohhhh, I seeeee – I hear you resignedly mumble to yourself – by including a piece on The Voynich Manuscript, that’s how. And, sadly, tragically, awfully, you’d be absolutely right.

Having talked with researchers from “The Unexplained Files” at the beginning of the year, I can honestly say that they trawled really hard to dig up some “alien” angle on the Voynich (its unearthly language, its unworldly herbs, William Romaine Newbold’s pet galaxy, putative telescopic technology, etc) to fit the show’s slack-jawed you-would-see-the-aliens-among-us-if-you-only-opened-your-stupid-dumb-eyes televisual conceit. Fox Mulder would have been so proud. Well, dumbstruck.

We gotta have us some talking heads, Mikey: so on they wheeled Gerry Kennedy and even his Royal Hoaxness Gordon Rugg for our viewing pleasure, along with several single-actor historical micro-mise-en-scènes to visually jolly the grindingly dull narrative along to its inevitable heavy question marks.

But of course, without Big Jim Finn and his Star Trek / Hebrew end-times message, or (my personal favourite) Dan Burisch and his “dangerous information” from the future-via-the-past, their overwhipped soufflé came out flatter than a losing politician’s smile.

If I described their Voynich documentary segment as “less than the sum of its parts”, it would be somewhat misleading: because none of the individual parts amounted to much at all either. Really, it was as if some poor bugger was told to eat the dismal Wikipedia Voynich article a paragraph at a time and then regurgitate it to try to entertain our new grey alien overlords. But with a gun at his or her cringing head.

File under AP (for “Alien Pants”). Or better still, just flee. Not so much “Unexplained Files” as “Inexplicably Commissioned”, sorry. 🙁

[*] weasel word included on the advice of my corporate attorneys, Fitz-Suitswell and Plunderham LLP

Thomas Lawrence Keane, and a plague of Tamam Trolls…

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I’ve been looking at IP addresses of people submitting comments to Cipher Mysteries, and it looks very much as if I have unwillingly ‘acquired’ at least six different “Tamam Trolls” – that is, people leaving comments about the Somerton Man case…
* muddying the historical waters rather than clearing them
* misrepresenting evidence that is genuinely available
* defaming and indeed insulting the memory of various dead people
* suggesting speculative leads based on a whim and a half-thread of evidence
* engaging in promoting some kind of fantasy agenda with no relation to what actually happened
* pretending to be related to Jestyn
* just plain lying for reasons unknown (possibly even to themselves)

I try to be even-handed and open in how I deal with commenters on Cipher Mysteries, but – people – this is getting really boring.

Some days I wake up wondering whether these trolls are playing out some kind of anti-evidential role-playing game, where you win by “proving” that your character (randomly allocated by the dungeon master at the start of the game) was in fact the Unknown Man: and you get awarded XP every time you convince me to spend my dwindlingly small amount of money on following some spurious research lead to dig up some real evidence to prove you wrong.

If that’s even remotely true, then rock my riotous rowlocks, today’s +10 bonus bonanza goes to anonymous Aussie troll “Ayuverdica”. If you recall, he/she suggested that Thomas Lawrence Keane was the Somerton Man, based on… well, let me check my extensive notes… Keane’s mother’s surname’s being “Beaumont”. And nothing else at all as far as I can see, aside from pure whim.

Well, here are Thomas Lawrence Keane’s WW2 service records that I recently paid the NAA to digitize. Was he engaged in spying, espionage or any curious derring do? No. Was he a labourer who became a foreman but was medically discharged in 1944 because of high blood pressure? Yes.

More specifically, did Keane have grey eyes, a prominent mole on his left cheekbone and a noticeable gunshot wound scar on one thigh that still remained from his action in the First World War? Yes. So was he the Somerton Man? No, not even close. 🙁

Allan Gillespie’s Dorabella Cipher decryption…

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As promised a long while back (i.e. before I got caught up in pirate history minutiae, etc), I had some interesting emails from Cheltenham music teacher Allan Gillespie, describing his claimed decryption of Elgar’s well-known Dorabella Cipher.

Allan’s starting point seems to have been my hunch that the Dorabella’s first two words were likely to be “Forli, Malvern”, a modest little seed which he then grew out into his own complete decryption.

Specifically, he claims that it’s a vaguely Vigenère-like polyalphabetic cipher, with the key sequence AIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFR rotated right by five places every eight plaintext characters, i.e.

AIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFR - for characters #1 to #8
NYHFRAIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPB - for characters #9 to #16
ZTDPBNYHFRAIUEGSOLXMKWCQ - for characters #17 to #24
MKWCQZTDPBNYHFRAIUEGSOLX - for characters #25 to #32
GSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFRAIUE - for characters #33 to #39 (etc)

Furthermore, Allan claims (I think) that the output from this gets mapped onto Elgar’s rotated-3 alphabet via this second table (which he presented in a transposed form to make it look as though the keyword was “HAUNTED” [+Y], but it’s actually no more than a monoalphabetic substitution alphabet):-

... N. NE E. SE S. SW W. NW
u.. A. N. E. Y. T. H. D. U.
uu. G. F. ?. R. M. I. ?. Z.
uuu ?. ?. L. B. S. ?. O. C.(Unplaced letters: K P Q W X)

Undo these two stages (he says) and you get a plaintext of:-

ForlE, Malvern Link
A. and Dai’s qko [=quick opinion?]
Met St Stephen ‘eighty six.
Wed at Brompton Oratory but owed takC Mogul ob’d.

He further believes the Dorabella cipher was “concocted by someone other than Elgar (possibly in the run-up to WWII when GC&CS were recruiting; possibly with Dora Powell’s connivance, more likely not)“.

Having said all that, I should add that I’m not entirely sure how serious Allan is about all this; and, moreover, the likelihood that Elgar would have used a messed-up Vigenère in combination with a second substitution stage seems to me to be as close to zero as makes no odds. But all the same, I’ve tried to reproduce Allan’s claim here as clearly as I can, just in case someone else wants to try to reproduce his results.

As you probably already guessed, I’m almost completely sure (as I indeed wrote to Allan at the time) that this “sits in the esteemed and excellent company of those such as Eric Sims and Tony Gaffney who have tried to solve the Dorabella’s cryptographic mystery rather at the expense of its historical mystery“. That is, neither the details (in the allegedly derived cleartext) nor the methodology (that Allan believes to have been used to encrypt the message) cast any light on Elgar, Dora Penny, their relationship, or any reason that such a devilish complex cipher system and linguistically idiosyncratic message would have been appropriate or even useful.

Allan response was that by replying in this way, I was (entirely unsurprisingly) acting in the same way that other cipher mystery establishment figures do, by working hard to “resist any attempt by an outsider to knock down [the establishment’s] battlements”.

Gosh darn it, but doesn’t it just turn out he’s got me bang to rights there? I indeed spend three nights a week chairing a secret cryptographic cabal downstairs at the Athenaeum Club library (or, failing that, Westminster School’s dining hall next to the Abbey) that decides how to misdirect plucky independent codebreakers away from the heretical and uneasy truths behind cipher mysteries. This website is, of course, simply part of our community outreach programme: and let’s face it, when the obfuscating powers of the NSA, GCHQ, and the Bilderberg Group get combined in this way, what chance do all you ordinary people stand, hmmm?

Nautilus Dorabella Cipher article…

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I was writing up a recently-claimed Dorabella Cipher decryption just now, when an incoming email clattered noisily out of the pneumatic mail tube and into my mahogany in-tray. Nicely, it contained a link to a new Dorabella Cipher article by San Francisco writer Mark MacNamara in online magazine Nautilus, jauntily entitled “The Artist of the Unbreakable Code” (i.e. Edward Elgar).

Given that I exchanged some Dorabella-related emails with MacNamara back in his summer research phase, it was no great surprise to discover – as Bill Walsh and others have kindly pointed out during today – that my, errrm, “stego-Bella” suggestion gets a short mention there. 🙂

Regardless, MacNamara covers Elgar’s enigmatic ground at a fair old pace, and works through Tim Roberts’ and Tony Gaffney’s claimed decryptions, along with their angry annoyance (if not outright outrage) at having the ridiculous stuffed shirts of the Elgar Society turn down their decryptions. Really, who were mere musicologists to tread so heavily on the toes of such ingenious and hard-working code-breakers? etc etc.

Of course, Cipher Mysteries regulars will already know what I believe: that Roberts, Gaffney and even Eric Sams produced attempts that were cryptologically clever at the expense of being historically and practically unsound. For me (and it’s just my opinion), any proposed solution should go some way towards explaining not only the message (the crypto mystery) but also the reason or necessity for the cryptographic wrapper (the historical mystery). The practical problem with these three claimed decrypts is that they are as impenetrable unenciphered as ciphered: which is also presumably why people have rarely enciphered alchemical texts. Or legal contracts. Or legislation.

Will we ever see a Dorabella decrypt that is both cryptologically sound and, as the Elgar Society required for their £1500 lucre-pile prize, “glaringly obvious”? I think it is entirely true that such a criterion is both foolishly idealistic and cryptographically inappropriate for judging most ciphertexts, so I am somewhat sympathetic towards Tony Gaffney’s condemnation. But all the same, I really don’t think our Tone has cracked this particular curate’s egg of a cipher just yet, hen’s shells or no. Perhaps hen’s teeth might be closer? 🙂

Anyway, I rather liked MacNamara’s article, and would recommend it to you with only a few minor corrections:-
(1) Elgar only called Dora Penny “Dorabella” after 1897
(2) The cipher isn’t too short to analyse – in fact, simple substitution ciphers are usually breakable with roughly 30 characters (and this has 87). With a good guess and a bit of luck, you may need only 20 characters, or even 15. Which is why it’s so odd we can’t crack it – really, if it were simple we should have more than enough “depth” to crack it.
(3) The cipher doesn’t strictly “defy” frequency analysis – it’s letter frequencies are what they are. In fact, frequency analysis makes it seem even more likely to be a simple substitution cipher. Rather, the Dorabella Cipher defies its own strong resemblance to a simple substitution cipher.
(4) Elgar not only sent Dora Penny no other ciphers (either before or after), but they never talked about ciphers in their relationship that spanned many decades.
(5) It;s not really accurate to say that I have yet “come to believe” my whole stego-Bella hypothesis. Rather, I have come to disbelieve most of the presumptions that other people have built their own theories upon: and the stego-Bella thing is just my first proper attempt to think outside the generally-accepted Dorabella crypto box. It’s early days, but we shall see where it all eventually leads…

Enjoy! 🙂

“What Don’t You Understand” webcomic, now with added Voynich…

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Online webcomic “What Don’t You Understand” by Hong Jac Ga (“A pretty strange story about a hitman, a hermit writer, and a boy who loses his memory”, translated by Rachel Ahn) has recently put up a nice Voynich-inspired episode (#24 here).

what-dont-you-understand

It’s not often you have a story with a talking cat and dog trying to train a somewhat unwilling young dark magician: for the purposes of the narrative, the Voynich Manuscript is a kind of repository of impressions, able only to be ‘read’ (or rather ‘sensed’) by someone able to tune in to the original magician’s wavelength.

And I can affirm that there are plenty of people in the real world who truly believe that they can read the Voynich Manuscript in precisely this way, i.e. purely by affinity and/or sense. So perhaps the modern world is just as magical / irrational as it ever was, lurking beneath what is no more than a thin veneer of 21st century logico-positivist supposed hyper-rationality.

Then again, maybe dogs and cats will indeed converse enigmatically long before anyone has cracked the Voynich Manuscript in this kind of way. 😉

Tamam Shud, curiouser and curiouser…

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I recently got sent off on a chase by an anonymous commenter “Ayuverdica”, raking through the Australian archives for a certain ‘Thomas Lawrence Keane’ (here, here and here) as a possible identification claim of the Somerton Man. Having then looked at all the evidence, it was clear none of it quite seemed to stack up in the way the commenter claimed: but I decided to publish it anyway (with plenty of provisos).

However, a few days later, what appears to be the same “Ayuverdica” left a comment on Pete Bowes’ blog:

i just made up the thomas lawrence keane thing on the basis he was from charters towers and married to isabella beaumont. i have no evidence beyond that. the guy was cremated in march 26 1949. is it possible that it was a fake cremation? someone elses body? convenient huh

Errm… thanks for that, thanks a lot. *sigh*

What’s more, I’ve had a lot of commenty backchat here from “Minstrel Janet” (another nearly-nameless commenter) who has been leaving a long series of comments saying what a horrible liar Jestyn was, that Jestyn was up to her neck in two murders, etc, etc, though without ever giving any obvious reason why anyone should allege such a thing. I didn’t moderate out her comments, simply because I wanted to know what drove her to say such inflammatory things… but she now claims to have abandoned Cipher Mysteries and moved on to greener forums pastures. I wish her… as tolerant a reception from the next Tamam Shud forum she happens to descend upon. (Good luck, Pete, mate.)

However, I have moderated out a string of other comments from a pair of anonymous commenters (one from New Zealand, one from Australia), who alleged a whole series of ghastly things about Jestyn and her family. Really, there seems to be something about the whole Tamam Shud case that brings out the worst in people – the most bigoted and intolerant, the quickest to condemn, the fastest jump to conclusions from scanty evidence imaginable, all of it at the same time. Why?

Perhaps it comes down to what I called (in my 2004 Masters’ dissertation) “Keatsian uncertainty”. In an 1817 letter, Keats described Shakespeare’s genius as “Negative Capability“, “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason“, which he used to describe the Bard’s near-unique capacity to allow his dramatic characters to remain in a continuous state of uncertainty without feeling any urgent need to resolve their quandaries and dilemmas.

This is also very much like chess, where weaker players when presented with one or more possible captures find it almost impossible to resist the urge to resolve that overwhelming tension by capturing. Shakespeare kept his plays wonderfully interesting, said Keats, by keeping those kinds of internal tensions in play: for me, I think this exhibits both a very modern kind of epistemology and a very modern kind of story-telling. Even now, how many writers have the strength of resolve not to scratch those itches, to release the reader from those dilemmas that keep the protagonists internally caged?

Perhaps what these Somerton Man commenters are displaying is this same all-too-human urge to jump to resolution from whatever evidence is at hand, simply as a way of resolving those unbearable tensions any way they can. But for me, this is more a symptom of intellectual cowardice, when in fact finding a way of living and working with such uncertainties – however difficult that may at first seem – is the difficult, brave, but ultimately right choice.

For example: right now, we don’t know whether Jestyn was utterly complicit; or just as much a victim as the Unknown Man; or somewhere in between; or possibly even entirely unconnected. So, how does arbitrarily “deciding” which of these was true make that whole difficult situation any more manageable? How does replacing an jarring uncertainty with an irritable lie help anybody, exactly?

Anyway, if you haven’t already thrown your hands up in despair at the difficult thought of staying undecided under pressure, I think you will probably enjoy this 2010 article from Cultural Studies Review by Ruth Balint called “The Somerton Man: An Unsolved History“.

Balint documents how, as she came to grasp the Somerton Man case, she felt herself being drawn into different speculative narratives, even though the evidence doesn’t support it. As a long-time fan of historian Carlo Ginzburg’s work, I also found it interesting to see Balint bring his position to bear on the Tamam Shud evidential stack.

But perhaps it’s not such a good idea to give imagination a free rein at this point in the research. Even 65 years after the event (whatever the event was), I still suspect we have yet to do the basic factuality proper justice: and so it is arguably too early in the unfolding historical process to point the big guns of Ginzburgian imaginative reconstruction at this cold case. This isn’t peasant magic in medieval Friuli, guys, sorry.

I guess the trickiest question for historians about the case is simply this: is Tamam Shud genuinely a cold case yet, or is it still luke-warm? Really, at what stage does reconstructive speculation become fair game, and not just a way of treading smartly on (living) people’s toes?