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:
Railway ticket to Henley Beach
Bus ticket to North Glenelg
American metal comb
Packet of Juicy Fruit chewing gum
Packet of Army Club cigarettes with seven Kenistas cigarettes inside
Handkerchief
Packet of Bryant & May matches
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:
Red checked dressing gown