SOMERTON MAN: Jestyn's Poem to Alf B

The image above had been modified, every letter has been smudged over and the fine detail greyed out. the image was provided by Professor Abbott.  This is not an original image.

 This image had not been modified it was provided by ex Detective Sergeant Gerry Feltus
Please click on the image to enlarge. It is taken from the original page in the Rubaiyat given to Alf Boxall by Nurse Jestyn.

This is a copy of the original book. You might notice that the Abbott book has a different colour which may be due to lighting.

Over the years a lot has been said about Jestyn's poem to Alf Boxall but not a lot has been done in the way of taking a closer look at the poem and how the writing is structured. The poem, as many will know, is Verse 70 from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

This will be a fairly short post in that my aim to show you an image taken from the short dash next to the letter T in Jestyn's signature.

First a comment on the way that the T's were crossed, There are 6 T's in the poem being 2 in line 3, 4 in line 4 and one in Jestyn's signature.  In all 5 cases you will see that the bar is off to the right but in some cases it is higher and in others lower, of particular interest in 4 out of 5 cases it is a short bar and in one case, 'Penitence' there is no bar at all, whilst in the last T in 'Tore', the last word of the poem, the bar is almost 3 times as long as elsewhere.

The inconsistent style aroused my curiosity and thus I decided to take a closer look. I opted to view the T in Jestyn's signature and below is what I found when I took a close up:

You should be able to see a set of initials which I make out to be TK or TH. If these are indeed TK then that would open up some interesting possibilities, these would be the initials of T Keane, the name found on the tie and the laundry bag found in the Somerton Man's suitcase.


The back light effect on this image does make it look rather like a Paddle Pop stick.

In the next post we will be looking at the Somerton Man code page and another set of interesting discoveries related to the supposed 'crossed out' line in the code and a missing line uncovered.