Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter One

On 30 November 1948, Mr John Baines Lyons, a jeweller, went for a walk with his wife along Somerton Beach, as was their habit if the weather was warm. It was the last day of spring and hot, so they were strolling along the foreshore at about 7 pm. Near the foot of the steps which led down to the beach they saw a man sitting, supported by the sea wall. As they passed, he extended his right arm and then let it fall. They concluded that he was not dead, although possibly dead drunk, and walked on.

Some time later, around 7.30 pm, a woman called Olive Constance Neill, a telephonist, saw the seated man from the road above the seafront. It was a warm night and there were other people about, including a man in his fifties, wearing a grey suit and hat, who was looking down, possibly at the man on the beach. Miss Neill directed her companion Gordon’s attention to the seated man and said, ‘Perhaps he’s dead!’ Gordon gave a cursory glance, observed that the man might indeed be dead because he wasn’t reacting to the mosquitos, and they passed on. Possibly with other things on their minds.

At about 6.50 am, the same John Lyons, who must have been a very athletic man, went for an early morning swim. When he emerged from the sea, he met a friend of his and they noticed men on horses gathered around the man Mr Lyons had seen the night before. On inspection, Mr Lyons affirmed that the man was dead. He went home to call the police and then returned to the scene. Brighton Police Station sent their Constable Moss, who found a body in which rigor was already fully established.

The man was lying with his feet toward the sea, still against the sea wall. He was well-dressed but he had no hat. He didn’t appear to have suffered any stab wounds or bullet wounds. No bruises or blood were observed and there was no disturbance of the scene. He seemed to have died, very quietly and peacefully, where he sat. His half-smoked cigarette had fallen out of his mouth and onto his lapel as he slumped but his chin was not even blistered.

And there you have him. Somerton Man as he is called these days.

My dad told me about him as though he was a myth. In a way, he is. Certainly, he has become an object over which many theories have been laid. But he is also himself, poor man – cold as a stone, slouched on the sand like a marooned sailor, with his last smoke dropping gently out of his mouth – and he deserves his dignity. He was somebody’s son. Somebody, somewhere, missed him and mourned for him. I must never write about him as though he were a thing. He wasn’t just a mystery. He was a man.

The police ambulance took Somerton Man to the Royal Adelaide Hospital on North Terrace. There, at 9.40 am, the doctor declared that life was extinct, an ancient ritual which must be enacted, even if there is absolutely no chance that life is present – for example, in a person whose head is at least 5 metres away from their body. (In case you think I am exaggerating I should say that this example comes from my own legal experience. Traffic accident.)

Life could hardly have been more extinct in Somerton Man. The doctor who declared him dead suggested that he must have had a heart attack and sent him to the morgue for a post-mortem. The body was processed in the usual way, being stripped and tagged and refrigerated. There was nothing odd about a heart attack victim, so no special notice was taken of the half-smoked cigarette, but the contents of his pockets were logged, as follows:

He had no wallet, no identity documents, no money and no passport.

My father was convinced that Somerton Man was an American because of his clothes, which he called ‘sharp’ (My dad was pretty sharp himself and had a keen eye for tailoring). Somerton Man was wearing jockey shorts and a singlet, a white shirt with a narrow tie in red, white and blue, fawn trousers, a brown knitted pullover, a brown double-breasted suit coat, socks and highly polished brown, laced shoes. Snazzy.

Somerton Man was a snappy dresser but it was a hot evening and he was wearing very heavy clothes for the weather. My own experience of Adelaide on a hot day is you find yourself wishing you could strip off your clothes at midday and bathe in the sea. Somerton Man was wearing the ensemble of someone who had come from somewhere cold, or who had nowhere to leave a change of clothes, or no lighter clothes into which he could change.

On examination of the clothes, it was found that every identifying label had been removed. This should have been the point at which someone smelt a Rodent of Unusual Size. Various commentators on this case have stated definitively that second-hand clothes always had the labels removed but as one who has dressed in op shop garments since early youth, I know this is not the case. What’s more, according to my more aged relatives, it never has been the case.

Before the seventies, when cheap mass-produced fabrics flooded into the West, clothes used to be much more valuable, by a factor of about ten, and consequently one labelled one’s clothes. In the days before iron-on glue, the labels bearing the name of the garment’s owner were usually sewn onto the manufacturer’s label. When you bought the garment in an op shop, you unpicked the original name tag and replaced it with your own. No used-clothes shop hoping for a profit would ever remove a prestigious tailor’s label from an expensive coat because the label would double the price. The only reason I can think of for removing all the labels is the concealment of Somerton Man’s identity.

Somerton Man had no money in his pockets. If he’d had any, it had gone with his wallet – if he had a wallet. And, to complete our survey of his garments, folded up into a tight little wad in his fob pocket, overlooked during the first survey, there was a scrap of paper torn out of a book that bore the words ‘Tamam Shud’. Of which, much more later.

Naked and cold, Somerton Man waited for his attending physician, whose task was to determine how he had died. The doctor in question, Dr JM Dwyer, decided that he had died of some irritant poison and sent samples of his organs – liver, muscle, blood, urine and stomach contents – for analysis. His fingerprints were taken and he was photographed. Somerton Man was now officially a Suspicious Death.

Not only Suspicious, but Unknown. While the forensic tests were performed and Somerton Man rested in his refrigerator, the police set about trying to find out who he was. Detective Strangway of Glenelg Station and his associates began by checking all the missing persons reports on hand but Somerton Man fitted none of them. Then they checked his fingerprints, which were not on record. And after that they went to the papers.

Police are almost always reluctant to make a newspaper appeal because they know they will be buried under the paperwork. Tips will flood in from people who have lost sons, brothers and, particularly, defaulting husbands and lovers all over Australia. Two people were sure that he was Robert Walsh, a woodcutter, but this positive identification was withdrawn when one of them looked at the body again and decided that it wasn’t him. In any case, Walsh was sixty-three and Somerton Man was younger and had soft hands, which woodcutters don’t, as a rule. Another firm identification as EC Johnson rather fell flat when the man concerned walked into a police station and asserted very firmly that he wasn’t dead. So Somerton Man wasn’t EC Johnson either. (Oddly, when I’m writing novels I always use Johnson as my default name for a character. If you see a Johnson in one of my books it’s because I haven’t been able to think of another name for him or her.)

I see no need to revisit all the dead ends which eventuated from this appeal. Suffice to say that Somerton Man wasn’t any of the 251 people he was, over time, thought to be. A vigorous and comprehensive rummage through all the missing persons in Australia failed to reveal his identity, although it must have eaten up a spectacular number of police man hours and cost a fortune in overtime.

While all of this was going on, the autopsy had taken place and the body wasn’t getting any fresher, so an embalming was arranged. Photographs taken before and after demonstrate the difference that embalming makes. The original police pictures show a younger, slightly plump man but after he has been embalmed, he looks aged and shrunken and not himself. If he had been an acquaintance, I might have recognised him from the original picture, but I suspect I wouldn’t have recognised the embalmed corpse. In any case, I know from experience that it is hard to identify the dead. Everything that made the face individual is gone with the last breath. The body cast they made of Somerton Man looks like a marble statue, Roman and ancient.

So far, so inconclusive. Then on 14 January, in response to a police appeal for unclaimed baggage directed to all lodging houses, hotels and railway stations, a suitcase was found in a locker at Adelaide’s Central Railway Station. It had been checked in after 11 am on 30 November 1948, the last day of Somerton Man’s life.

It was a nice, clean, respectable and not inexpensive brown leather suitcase. All the labels had been removed. In those days, labels were not tied on, as they are in airplane travel today. They were glued or pasted onto the leather. Having tried to remove some of the labels from my grandmother’s favourite suitcase because they were so pretty, I can tell you from first-hand experience that they cannot be stripped or cut off. They can only be removed by patient, gentle soaking with a sponge, which argues time and determination. Somerton Man really didn’t want anyone to know where he had been.

The suitcase contained the following items:

So what can we make of these pitiful relics? As my father said, Somerton Man had good taste in clothes, though tending towards the gaudy. His case contained only enough for a few nights, a week perhaps. No extra shirts, for a start. This was a cleanly man who changed his clothes every day. He must have owned more shirts or what was the point of having more than one tie?

The most exciting discovery in the suitcase was the orange Barbour thread, which was not sold in Australia. Identical thread had been used to repair the pocket of Somerton Man’s coat. Waxed thread is not usually used to mend clothes: it must have been an emergency repair, intended to last only until he could lay hands on a seamstress. It seemed unlikely that the Barbour thread in the suitcase and the Barbour thread in Somerton Man’s coat were not connected, so the suitcase probably belonged to Somerton Man. Also, the clothes are his size and the slippers would fit his feet.

And some of the garments in the suitcase actually had labels with a name on them. There must have been cautious rejoicing amongst the exasperated police at that point, although they should have known it was too good to be true. The name, written on a singlet, a laundry bag and a tie, was T. Keane. Or possibly T. Kean. The call went out and a local sailor named Tom Reade was said to be missing. Was Somerton Man perhaps Tom Reade?

But when Tom Reade’s shipmates viewed the body, they all said that it was not their Tom Read. Meanwhile widespread searches through maritime agencies had revealed that no one was missing a T. Keane or Kean. Rats (or the equivalent), one can hear the law enforcement persons say.

The clothes were also marked with drycleaning or laundry marks, which were applied to clothes when they were submitted for cleaning, so that the cleaner could identify them if their tag was lost. These marks were 1171/1 and 4393/7 and 3053/7 but extensive searches of laundries and drycleaners found no one who used those combinations of numbers. Notably, the only marked clothes in the suitcase, which also had a name on them were those where the name could not be removed without destroying the garment – for instance, the singlet, where the name was written inside the band in indelible ink. And it also seems reasonable to assume that Somerton Man left the names where they were because he knew that he was not Tom or any other Kean(e) – not Terence, Tipton, Trevelyan and so on. Besides, it is unusual to buy second-hand underwear. Even if you are very poor, you usually save to buy new knickers. I speak from personal experience.

So why did Somerton Man have T. Keane’s laundry bag? It’s another mystery: this matter has a plethora of them. Tom Keane was said to be a sailor, so the laundry marks may relate to a ship’s laundry. Somerton Man might have been on the same ship as Tom Keane and picked up his laundry by mistake – although that doesn’t explain the tie, given that ties are drycleaned, not laundered. Somerton Man might also have deliberately swapped his own marked garments for similar garments belonging to Tom Keane, who would probably not mind, as long as he got a singlet of some sort, although it was not kind to nick Tom Keane’s tie as well. If the name on Somerton Man’s own tie was a problem, he could have adopted the solution used when I was a child – blacking out the old name in Indian ink and writing your own beside it. Indian ink is really black.

The clothes were all examined by experts. The police called in a tailor, Hugh Possa of Gawler Place, who explained that the careful construction of the coat, with feather- stitching done by machine, was definitely American, as only the American garment industry used a feather stitching machine. So the clothes were very high value schmutter indeed. Such coats, the police were informed, were not imported. They were made up to a certain stage and then could be quickly tailored to the figure. The sort of thing which might be bought by someone who wasn’t staying long in port, but was willing to pay a high price for a beautifully made, hand-finished suit. From which he then removed the label.

Somerton Man also had very snazzy taste in nightwear. His pyjamas and gown are brightly coloured, and his felt slippers are red. My father’s taste also tended to the bright. I have a Hawaiian shirt of his that can only be viewed through dark glasses. Such things were a mark of a free spirit. Men of the time might have considered these garments to be outrageous, even effeminate. That is another thing we will never know.

It is interesting that there was sand in the cuffs of the trousers in the suitcase. Unfortunately, although its presence was noted, the sand was not examined or analysed. In the same cuffs were stumps of barley grass, which is the stuff that grabs any passing cloth and screws itself into the weave. (It has to be cut out of cat’s fur and children’s hair, because it’s as adhesive as bubble gum.) Everyone always assumes that Somerton Man had just arrived in Adelaide on the day he died but the sand in the cuffs might mean that he had been to Somerton Beach before he arrived at the station and maybe changed his clothes afterwards. Or was he landed, perhaps, with his suitcase, on another beach, brought ashore by dinghy from a ship, walking the last little way across the sand and hoping – successfully, as it happens – to avoid notice? After which, a snappy dresser might have folded those trousers into his suitcase, still with sand in the cuffs, and put on fresh ones.

Somerton Man’s shoes were clean, however, and looked to have been recently polished. He can’t have walked ashore in them. Seawater does very nasty things to leather shoes. Did he tippytoe barefoot through the waves with his shoes in his hand? Did he put them on when his feet dried and stop at the shoeshine stand near the station, after he had his wash and checked his suitcase? My father said that the Central Station shoeshine man did a wonderful job, even on army boots. If so, Somerton Man must have paid him with his very last tuppence in the world.

Last but not least, my father, drawing on his experience as a wharfie, told me that the stencilling brush, the modified knife, the screwdriver, pencils and the scissors found in Somerton Man’s suitcase were all part of a cargo master’s equipment – the stencilling brush for marking cargo and the other items for cutting or replacing seals. Cargoes were more fun back in those days. Instead of containers, which are anonymous and boring, balanced for weight, there were bales and sacks and boxes and crates, all carried by men out of ships and along gangplanks. Hard labour.

My father always said that 120 pounds of grain was a lot easier to carry than 90 pounds of potatoes. I couldn’t carry 120 pounds (or 50 kilos) of grain if my life depended on it but they did, for eight hours, up and down and along, from the hold to the deck to the truck or railway flatbed. Sometimes the bales and sacks and boxes and crates were taken up to the deck and swung out on cargo nets. That’s why wharfies had cargo hooks, formidable little hand weapons, used for handling cargo, cleaning fingernails and settling differences of opinion. Working on the docks was called ‘being under the hook’ because another hook was holding up those nets, attached to a derrick, or crane, and handled with extreme care and delicacy.

There were some lovely cargoes. My favourite was the circus. One day a monkey stole Mickey Bower’s woolly hat and had to be bribed with a hastily acquired banana to give it back. Thereafter, Mickey’s gang was always of the opinion that the hat had looked better on the chimp. Most of the circus animals were in stout iron cages that could be swung down gently to the dock but the elephants had to walk onto a cargo hoist.

You can sling a horse, because even if it struggles, it can’t actually get out of the sling, but an elephant is another matter. There was a three-inch gap between the ship and the platform at the top of that hoist and I saw the elephant’s trunk go down and feel along the gap. She clearly thought: not a chance. That’s empty air under there. A horse can be pushed but even with six men shoving, when an elephant decides she is staying put, then put is where she stays. That elephant wouldn’t allow herself to be transported until an astute handler led the baby elephant onto the hoist by its little trunk and it got down all right. Even then, it was a struggle to make sure she didn’t leap after the baby. Wharfies hated animal cargoes.

I used to love watching my father handle horses. The racehorses came over from New Zealand on our ships, the Union Steamship Company. My dad always got the job of soothing them so that they didn’t have the vapours and break something valuable, like their precious legs. A hysterical horse is a frightening thing, like a revolving chainsaw with hoofs that screams a lot. But they always behaved for my father because he had a secret weapon – a box of those XXX peppermints. They were round, flat, white tablets, so strongly flavoured that just licking one of them destroyed 55 per cent of your tastebuds and made your eyes gush water. Horses adored them. As long as his peppermints held out, even the stroppiest stud would follow my father anywhere.

Some racehorses gave no trouble. The beautiful grey, Baghdad Note, was as tame as an old farm horse. On the other hand, one of the most splendid chestnuts I have ever seen decided to improve his chances of another peppermint by biting off my father’s vest pocket with the box in, luckily not taking any of my father with it. I had been reading about those flesh-eating horses in Greek mythology and I was glad that the Union Steamship Company hadn’t had to transport them to Diomedes because I knew who would have been leading them out of their loose box.

Cargoes. Boxes and crates and sacks and bales and cases, all marked with their ports of exit and entry, all carefully stowed in the holds of the ship, so that they could be removed in order. Stowage was an art form then. A ship is not like a truck, with a low centre of gravity moving in one direction along a flat surface. It floats in an unstable medium and therefore it has to balance or the ship will cease to float. Unsecured loose cargo can punch right through the side of a vessel in heavy weather.

As a result, the position of cargo master was a skilled and responsible one, requiring a sound practical knowledge of statistics, meteorology and physics, and a talent for organisation. He kept the chart of the ship on which every stowage was marked. A cargo master has to be a concrete thinker. Otherwise, he and a lot of other people are going to get very wet. If Somerton Man was a cargo master, as my dad suspected, all of this would have been true of him. There is other evidence to suggest that he might have been a seaman of some sort and a cargo master, who would not do manual labour, might well have Somerton Man’s unmarked hands and unbroken nails.

Which brings us to the body itself and what everyone made of it.