Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery

Chapter Three

And so matters rested, with the overworked Adelaide police force receiving answers to their requests for information from all over the world. J. Edgar Hoover wrote back to say that Somerton Man’s fingerprints were not on record with the FBI and no one at Scotland Yard had identified them. Somerton Man was entirely, as police parlance says now, ‘off the grid’.

He had no passport, no demob certificate, no ration card, no seaman’s ticket, no union membership card. Without these things, or at least one of them, he would have found work hard to come by in Australia, where the police were prone to ask for identification from anyone who was in any way different – on the street late at night or consorting with known criminals (my dad said you could do that any night just by walking down Rundle Street) or simply unknown to them personally. Losing, abandoning or being robbed of his identity card was a very serious matter for Somerton Man.

I have my father’s demobilisation certificate before me and I am wearing his Redheads T-shirt, which I bought for him, as I type. He feels very close to me at the moment because I have just sorted out his papers, three years after he died. The beige booklet instructs me that Army Number VX501875 Signaller Alfred William Greenwood of West Footscray followed the correct procedure to get out of the army. On 25 March 1948, he was medically examined and X-rayed and found to be fit. On 24 April 1948, he received whatever pay was owing – twenty-four pounds and five shillings, to be exact. And suddenly he was unemployed, dropped at Central Station in Adelaide and given a railway warrant to take him back to Melbourne. No longer a number but a free man.

My father went home to see his mother and his sweetheart, my mother. (He even named his cat Jeannie, so she knew he was serious). Somerton Man, on the other hand, walked into oblivion. More can now be guessed about his movements after he arrived at Central Station on 30 November. He bought a ticket for the Henley train. He then requested a wash and a shave and was told that the station amenities were closed and he would need to go to the City Baths, which housed not only a swimming pool but an actual set of bathtubs for travellers who needed a wash. This detour would have caused him to miss the train, so when he returned to Central and checked his suitcase, all shaved and clean, he decided to take a bus. Both tickets in his pocket are now explained. I find it very pitiable that he groomed himself so neatly for what was about to come.

So, how much do we know about what happened next? Somerton Man took the bus to Glenelg and would have arrived there by noon. He is next seen sitting on the beach and – probably – dying at 7 pm on a hot night, wearing lots of clothes. His shoes are still highly polished. Where had he been in the interim? Somewhere along the way someone gave him supper – the pastie, which was still in his stomach. And in his watch pocket, folded up very small, was the last page of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the words ‘Tamam Shud’, which means, in effect, the end.

The police began another vigorous rummage through public libraries and bookshops hoping to find the actual book from which the page was torn. Amazingly, on 22 July, Mr Ronald Francis remembered that his brother-in-law had left a copy of The Rubaiyat in the glove box of his Hillman Minx. When he called to enquire, he was told that his brother-in-law had found the book on the floor of the car and put it tidily in the glove box. On 30 November the car had been parked in Moseley Street, the street above Somerton Beach.

The next day Mr Francis took the book to the police. The torn out page matched and, what’s more, it contained a code and a telephone number in pencil. The case of Somerton Man had just become even more complicated.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a free – some say unduly free – translation of a Persian poet’s series of verses. How much of The Rubaiyat is Edward FitzGerald’s work and how much comes from old Omar is a matter for conjecture. As that eminent scholar, Renaissance man and good friend Professor Dennis Pryor once told me, ‘All translation is betrayal’. One can never get translation right. All that we translators can do is to do the best that we can to convey the meaning and the spirit of the writer, taking the different historical, linguistic and social conditions into account. That’s hard enough in Latin languages, like Provençal, and it must be hideously difficult in Persian. At least Khayyam was writing social criticism and love poems, which is a universal theme – although I find it hard to fully understand why he had it in for Sufis.

From the moment it hit the bookshops in London in 1859, The Rubaiyat was a success. I suspect I would not have liked Mr FitzGerald if I had met him but he was a good poet, despite his views on women as authors. He observed at one point:

He said this in a letter to WH Thompson on 15 July 1861 and I do wish he hadn’t. I really like The Rubaiyat but I am one of the female writers of ‘little novels’ he so despises. On the other hand, Robert Browning, the widower, wrote a very ferocious poem in response to this heartless comment, so I suspect honours are about even.

Besides, one must not confuse the writer and the book, especially when the writer is a translator. The Rubaiyat is a collection of quatrains, expressing a free, unsentimental yet lyrical and definitively alcoholic view of the universe, which quite captured the Victorian imagination. They were a serious people and here was a reprobate old poet who cared for no one, with no philosophy and no religion, apart from wine, women and song. The Rubaiyat is exotic, positively reeking of the mysterious Orient, with towers and minarets and bulbul, but familiar enough in its sentiments to be easily applicable to everyday life. It is easy to remember because the verse is so beautifully scanned and rhymed.

Its most famous stanza made beautiful and poetic and luxurious the consumption of sandwiches and cordial under a tree with one’s favourite boy.

From being relatively unknown, FitzGerald became an instant celebrity and old Omar Khayyam kept him comfortable for the rest of his life, which is always nice to hear. In his introduction, FitzGerald informs us that Omar Khayyam was born in the latter half of the eleventh century and lasted until the first quarter of the twelfth. His poetic name means Tentmaker, possibly a family profession. He achieved his loafing, lazy life by being a schoolmate of a future Vizier. The four boys pledged that when one of them became powerful, he would give the others whatever they wanted. Nizam Al Mukh succeeded and gave the other two power and place.

All Khayyam wanted was an independent income and he got it: enough money to please himself. Not that he wasted his time in continuous drinking. He was an astronomer, a mathematician and a scientist. He was amongst the group of wise men who reformed the calendar. He wrote a treatise on algebra. But fortunately that left him a reasonable amount of time for lounging around under trees with houris. FitzGerald in his introduction comments:

I first found The Rubaiyat in Grandmother Greenwood’s bookcase.

When I was a child there were three sets of significant bookcases in my life, as well as the ever-present scatter and pile of ordinary books all over our house. The first was Grandma McKenzie’s bookcase, a glorious collection of Edwardian books bound in pressed cardboard with wonderful covers and titles like Ida Pfeiffer and Her Travels In Many Lands and Adventures in the Land of Ice and Snow and The Fairchild Family, the only book that my mother ever removed firmly from my grasp and would not return, even though I begged her to. At the time I sulked briefly and then grabbed another book. It was the three-volume novel The Rosary by Mrs Florence Barclay and Mother never said a word.

When I read The Fairchild Family as a grown up I understood why my mother had taken it away from me. It is a grim, severe and merciless book of Victorian morality that I would snatch out of the hands of anyone under thirty, even now. The chapter where the parents take their children to look at (and smell) the body of a murderer hanging on the gibbet to show them how crime does not pay is worthy of Edgar Allen Poe. Or Stephen King.

The second bookcase was a large and beautiful cedar construction with glass doors in my parents’ house. It contained wedding present sets of books, fragile and precious. I read all of them: Myths of Many Lands, The Collected Plays of GB Shaw, The Collected Works of Charles Fort, The Children’s Encyclopedia by Arthur Mee, The Works of Dickens.

Bookcase number three belonged to Grandma Greenwood and also contained wedding present sets, this time of Trollope and Thackeray. I read them, too. My mother specialised in poetry, so when I was at Grandma’s one Sunday as usual, I was surprised to find a lovely little book bound in limp, violet suede, containing poems I had never seen, in a form with which I was unfamiliar. I remember sitting down in Grandpa’s comfy brown leather chair, reading it in one gulp.

The grandparents were in the garden with my father, showing him something to do with a new rose. Grandpa was an accountant, who grew glorious roses and loved Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan. My father was totally uninterested in gardening and loved big bands and jazz. They had nothing in common, except us, but they maintained a polite and guarded truce. By the time they came inside and I had to go home, I had engulfed Omar Khayyam and adored it, so I asked very politely if I could borrow it. Grandma asked me if my hands were clean and told me to be very careful and put The Rubaiyat in a clean white envelope, which is what she always did with a book. I never lost or damaged one of them, not even the wedding present Trollope with pages as thin as rice paper, very easy to tear when reading under the blankets with a flashlight.

Thereafter I read Omar to my mother while we were cooking or peeling potatoes. We all liked him, even my little brother. The poems were, as FitzGerald said, a ‘Strange Farrago of Grave and Gay’. My favourite was:

Or possibly:

The Rubaiyat was a particularly appropriate book to find in Somerton Man’s possession, I would suggest, because it was both commonly available and undeniably secular. (A Communist carrying a bible, for instance, would instantly draw attention.) Beautiful editions of The Rubaiyat with hand-painted illustrations, bound in limp, purple leather, abounded. Cheap editions were everywhere. It became a good gift for someone you did not know very well. Indeed, Saki Reginald remarks, ‘I am not collecting copies of the cheaper editions of Omar Khayyam. I gave the last four that I received to the lift-boy, and I like to think of him reading them, with FitzGerald’s notes, to his aged mother’. It continues to be in print, with a last surge during the 1960s, when it was read while stoned to appreciative audiences.

The Rubaiyat found in the car near to Somerton Man was a first edition, published in 1859 by Whitcombe and Tombs. This is curious in itself. If Somerton Man or his colleagues wanted a throwaway book to use for a book code, one would have thought that they would have chosen one of the commonly available editions. In fact, there are substantial differences between the editions of 1859, 1868 and 1872, which could have an effect on decryption.

The second odd thing is that The Rubaiyat is the only thing in Somerton Man’s possession which is not strictly utilitarian. Apart from that, his belongings contain not one single thing that points to his origins or his personality. Every person who has travelled comes back with a scatter of junk in their luggage. In the days before the euro, this used to include coins of all nations, along with receipts, notes, postcards and one lost butter menthol vulcanising itself to the lining of the suitcase or backpack. I remember being touched to tears by the itemising of the contents of the pockets of dead soldiers, which always included one picture of their girl or their family or their home or their favourite railway engine. Or their dog. Also a talisman of some sort – a pebble, a shell, a holy medal.

Not so our dead man. He had envelopes but no stamps, writing paper or pen. No address book. He had buttons but no coins except those of the realm and no photo of Mum or Mr Waggles. The Rubaiyat was his only extraneous possession, probably an expensive one. Which he treated with such disdain that he – or someone else – wrote telephone numbers and a code in pencil on the end page. The code is as follows:

The second line has been struck out and is repeated in the fourth line. There is an X over the last O, which may be significant, but no one has been able to break the code and determine its significance.

Book codes usually consist of page and word numbers and they are very hard to break because you have no idea what the letters or numbers refer to, unless you have the book in your hand. That is why they were so popular with spies in the fifties and that is why, lacking the book, they still cannot be broken, even with the spiffy technology that is now available. Extensive efforts have been made by Adelaide University to break the Tamam Shud code, using as a base the idea that it is a one-time pad encryption algorithm, but they need a copy of the first edition of The Rubaiyat and so far have not been able to find one. I would suggest they enquire at the six copyright deposit libraries in Britain, established since 1610 – The British Library in London, Cambridge University, the Bodleian, and the National libraries of Scotland, Wales and Dublin – but they have probably tried that.

The retired detective Gerald Feltus, who has written an excellent book on Somerton Man, believes that the code is a series of capitals which refer to the first letters of words, in the same way as SWALK means ‘sealed with a loving kiss’. For example, the final line of the code could mean ‘It’s Time To Move To South Australia Moseley Street’. When questioned by the media, Mr Feltus did not elaborate, although perhaps he will change his mind in future, if everyone who reads this book contacts him on his website and implores him to reveal the rest of the message.

I can demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of a code made from first letters by replicating the To Do list I wrote this morning. It goes:

This means ‘Pick up drycleaning, sesame seeds, telephone interview.’ (T/a is lawyer’s shorthand for a telephone attendance.) Less obviously, ‘b pp’ is baking paper, ‘alf’ is alfoil and ‘AA bat’ means AA batteries. If I made my list into a Somerton Man code, it might read pudrcl ssta3 mbs alfbpp. And if I then ran it through an alphabet substitution, where a = k, it would read zkthiijk3crikbvrzz, which makes no sense at all. An alert code reader might notice the number of z’s and decide it was an alphabet substitution but that would just take her back to the original coded version.

Now, while you might be able to guess that p/u is pick up and dr cl is drycleaning, it is my own private knowledge that tells me that ss is sesame seeds, not sweet sauce or super sugar or swimming snakes or any other combination of things starting with ‘s’. The same goes for b pp and alf. This kind of shorthand is so personal as to be unbreakable. My friends wouldn’t be able to read it, unless I had previously sent them a list of my code words, and informed them that ss was only ever going to mean sesame seeds, which rather cuts down its use as a method of communication. On the other hand, it is only meant to remind me that I have run out of some household goods, whereas Somerton Man’s code may have had a more public significance.

Internet and text messages have made us aware of standard meanings for initials. I particularly like the phrase KTHXBAI which means ‘okay, thanks, goodbye’. New variations appear every day, a new generation of ROTFL and IMHO, not to mention new and imaginative spellings like Sk8r, which cut down the strain on the thumbs. Concerning the Somerton Man case, we might well say WTF? Frequency analysis will not reveal any meaning in a book-based code but if M always means the same word in the Tamam Shud code, why is it repeated four times – unless, perhaps, it means ‘help!’ On the evidence before us, it seems that this code must be the kind where the sender and receiver use a code book with agreed meanings for each letter or combination. And lacking the code book, this kind of code cannot be cracked.

Meanwhile, it is time to remind you that there was a telephone number pencilled on the back page of Somerton Man’s Rubaiyat, as well as a code. The telephone number was unlisted and belonged to a nurse called Teresa Powell or Johnson. (There’s that Johnson default setting again.) She lived in Moseley Street, Glenelg, just above Somerton Beach. And here the story gets very interesting.

The police questioned Teresa, who said she was not at home on 30 November but her neighbour mentioned that a strange man had called at the house. When Teresa was shown the body cast of Somerton Man, the police officer who exhibited it said ‘she was completely taken aback, to the point of giving the appearance that she was about to faint’. An odd reaction, perhaps. Nurses are, regrettably, used to death and Somerton Man’s face had been extensively plastered across the newspapers. Teresa must have already known that he was dead. If she knew him at all, that is.

When asked about the phone number in The Rubaiyat, she volunteered that she had once owned a copy while she was working at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, but in 1945 she had given it to Alfred Boxall, who was a soldier. This, as the alert reader will have noticed, is not an answer to the question. But she also said that the body cast was not of anyone she knew. The police decided to find Alf Boxall, hoping, I expect, that this mystery would finally be marked ‘closed’. But Boxall was not Somerton Man. He was alive and well, living in Randwick and working in bus maintenance. Boxall was unable to identify Somerton Man and what’s more, he produced his copy of The Rubaiyat, complete with its last words, ‘Tamam Shud’. The copy given to him by Teresa was the 1924 Sydney edition. In the front she had written what sounds to me like an invitation to begin or continue an affair, addressed to a lover.

The police seemed to have read it in the same way as I do. At any rate, when Teresa pleaded that she was now married and such exposure would damage her reputation, the police acceded to her plea that they shouldn’t allow her name to be publicly known. She was known as ‘Jestyn’, which was the name by which she signed Alf Boxall’s copy of The Rubaiyat until her real name was accidently disclosed years later. Now we know her name but since she and her son and her husband and Alf Boxall are all dead, it probably doesn’t help all that much.

Alf Boxall reported that he had given The Rubaiyat to his wife in June 1945, which argues extreme brazen effrontery, complete innocence or something even odder. Mr Boxall said he owned a copy with Jestyn’s verse in the front but Mrs Boxall showed the police a Rubaiyat with no writing in it at all. Which seems to mean that Mrs Boxall had been given a clean copy (she said she’d had it since Christmas 1944) and that Mr Boxall’s inscribed copy was still in the bookcase. There were a lot of copies of The Rubaiyat around at the time but two in one household seems extreme. Someone is fibbing, although it might be no more than the standard marital covering up of a harmless flirtation. When Mr Boxall was interviewed in 1978 by ABC TV, he insisted that Jestyn was just one of a group of nurses with whom he and his mates had the occasional swift snort when they could get away from the hospital but it seems clear that he singled her out from the group, at least to some extent.

Teresa herself is an intriguing person. In 1945 she was nursing at Royal North Shore, where she was Jestyn and unmarried. Then she moved back to her mother’s house in Melbourne, had a baby and moved to Adelaide. When she told the police that she was now married, it was not true. She had taken the name of her future husband, Prestige Johnson, whom she would marry when his divorce came through in early 1950.

When Teresa was interviewed by the indefatigable Gerald Feltus, he found her evasive, unwilling to talk about The Rubaiyat and Boxall, insisting that ‘She didn’t know anything then, and she did not know anything now’. Feltus came to the conclusion that Teresa knew the identity of Somerton Man but he also thinks that her family knows nothing about it, so there is no point in harassing them. If an acute and experienced detective like Feltus couldn’t find out what Teresa knew, then no one can.

Researchers may have hoped that after her husband died, she would reveal something interesting, such as that Somerton Man was her lover, but they were disappointed. Teresa has taken her secret, if she had a secret, to the grave.