SOMERTON MAN: HELMUTH HENDON AND WOLFGANG WAGNER,

The address shown, 12 Beach Road, was the residence of one Wolfgang Wagner, a Czech Jewish man who arrived in Australia in 1939 as a refugee.

Nothing in the least unusual about Wolfgang except a few little things:

1. He was a cousin of one Helmuth Hendon, the man who lived with Gwen 'Dorothy' Graham, friend to George Marshall.

2. He was reported to the Police for monitoring Ship movements from his well located home from where he could see across the harbour and the Royal Australian Navy base at Garden Island:

This image is from a later time but it shows Rushcutters Bay slightly to the left and in the background, the roadway is now called New Beach Road.

The letter and note on the Police file regarding suspected tracking of vessel movements:

So, what we have now is our code page and the letter Q referring to vessels being tracked, the Deloraine and the USS New Orleans and now we have someone suspected of effectively carrying out espionage activities by tracking vessels. Not only that, but this man was a cousin to Helmuth Hendon, the partner of Gwen Graham, friend of George Marshall.

Let's think about that awhile,

1. George Marshall apparently commits suicide,

2. Gwen Graham, who is a live-in partner to Helmuth Hendon, follows suit within days,

3. Wolfgang, cousin to Helmuth Hendon is suspected of monitoring ship movements on Sydney Harbour.

4. We have evidence of ship movement information being encoded on the code page, that covered a time period when Wolfgang resided in Rushcutters Bay.

5. The code page is found and associated with the mysterious death of an unknown man on Somerton Beach.

For those reading the above note to and by the Police, the inquiry regarding Wolfgang originally came from a Major Cohen who was based in Newcastle.

SOMERTON MAN: VERSE 70, TIBOR KALDOR'S LETTER, THE GOLD WATCH AD AND NOW ANOTHER INSTANCEOF DANETTA...

The research that Clive and I did on the man found dead in the Victoria Hotel in Hindley Street, two weeks to the day following the discovery of the body of the man at Somerton Beach, was extensive. It was anything but a dead end. In fact, it still has a significant bearing on the Somerton Man case.

Those of you were following this blog back then, would recall Tibor's last letter, his 'suicide' note. It seemed almost too well structured in many ways, but he was of Germanic/Jewish stock and so one could expect a certain degree of structure and formality even for something as intense as a suicide letter.

But, it wasn't just the way in which the letter had been written, on putting the contents of the letter through an acrostic decoder, we were presented with the name DANETTA. In fact on processing the first output a second time we were astonished to see the words:

 '..and see Danetta and suitcase, Danetta, Danetta, Danetta, Danetta..'

ANOTHER INSTANCE...

A second instance of the same name, DANETTA, was also found in the well-known ad about a lost gold watch. The wording of that ad also produced the name Danetta when analysed. the common feature was the fact that both the ad and TKs last letter had been so structured as to reveal the name alongside a set of 7 consecutive numbers which indicated the position of the letters contained in DANETTA.

AND THEN THERE WERE THREE!

There was some consternation if not surprise when a commenter from another blog in their efforts to discredit the findings of the name DANETTA in the ad and the letter, found the same the same name a third time only on this occasion, it was within the Verse 70 inscription made by Jestyn in a copy of the Rubaiyat that she had given to Alf Boxall. We were able to demonstrate that once again, the name DANETTA was partnered with 7 consecutive numbers which indicated the location of the relevant letters that formed the name DANETTA.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE...

The image below hardly needs any introduction, it's the code page that was later found and associated with a small torn piece of paper containing the words 'TAMAM SHUD' which in turn was found secreted in a hard to find fob pocket in the trouser waistband of the pair of trousers that the Somerton Man was wearing when his body was discovered on 1st December 1948.

It was only natural that we should make an effort and see if we could find the name DANETTA within the indented letters found on the code page.

Well we did and then again, we didn't. 

We did in so far as it was relatively easy to pick the necessary letters to form the name DANETTA from the letters on the codepage but we didn't in so far as we were not able to use seven consecutive numbers to locate and fix the position of the necessary letters D, A, N, E, T, T and A. And that, as the saying goes, appeared to be that.

But, and it's a big but, what we didn't do was to properly analyse the individual lines on the code page. As you see them above we have 9 letters in line 1, 6 letters in Line 2, 11 letters in line 3, 11 letters in line 4 and a whopping 13 letters in line 5.

But look again. Within the first 4 lines, each group of letters commences with the letter M. Look even closer now at the third and fifth lines, they are not single lines with a single group following the letter M. The third line is a shorter line, MTBI,  followed by another line, MPANETP. Moving to line 4 on the code page, it should have the letters VTT from the next line included within it such that the fifth line should read MTSA and then another line MST GAR. 

THE 7 LINE CODEPAGE

What you will read here is that there is indeed a set of consecutive numbers associated with the name DANETTA and it is found within the reformated 7 line.groups/code page.

All up we really have 7 lines with 7 letters M heading them as follows:

Each line starts with the letter M. My thoughts are that M is a signal letter that probably means 'group follows' or similar. There are micro written numbers and letters within each M and indeed within every letter and line on the codepage.

Include all letters in the 7 line sequence shown below:

MRGOABABD

MLIOAl

MTB

MPANETP

MLIABOAIAQCVTT

MTSA

MSTGAR

ANALYSIS

Letter positions can be fixed and then read from left to right or from right to left:

D = Line 1, # 1 READ Right to Left

A = Line 5, # 6 READ Right to left

N= Line 4, # 4 READ Left to Right

E= Line 4, # 5 READ Left to Right

T = Line 3, # 2 READ Left to Right

T = Line 7, # 3 READ Left to Right

A = Line 5 # 7 READ Left to Right

CONCLUSION

So, there we have it, a strict 7 number sequence linked to individual letters with the first two letters, D and A, being read from right to left and the remainder being read left to right, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7. When you look at the arrangement, there is a certain logic, 1 by itself then 2 and 3, then 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 being the outer two numbers within which we find 2,3,4 and 5

DANETTA now appears in Tibor Kaldor's last letter, in the Gold Watch ad, in Verse 70 and now the code page And each time it appears it does so in conjunction with 7 consecutive numbers which fix the positions of each letter.

Where does this leave us? We now have substantial proof that Tibor Kaldor was aware of the existence of the same code that was found in three other documents associated with the Somerton Man case. 

By default, we have Alf and Jestyn also having knowledge of this clandestine identification method.

When you bring in to play the now proven existence of microcode on the code page and in three of the four documents plus the discovery of notations of proven ship movements in Sydney Harbour in 1943, it is seemingly inarguable that what we have in the Somerton Man case is an espionage operation. And that this operation somehow involved Jestyn, Alf Boxall, the Somerton Man and Tibor Kaldor.

More to follow.

SOMERTON MAN: THE END GAME IN SIGHT: ANTI SUBMARINE DEFENCES, THE LETTER Q & THE CODE BREAKERS

THE END GAME

For some time now the focus has been on the letter Q, and it really is the key to unravelling the events and the implications surrounding the finding of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in June 1949 .


We know that the Deloraine and the New Orleans left within 35 minutes of each other but now we can  say with a high degree of certainty that the New Orleans left on the western side of the harbour close to Watson's Bay and then out to sea, it may be that the Deloraine also left by that route but it was possible that it left via the eastern side close to Georges' head.How do we know that?

Because the Sydney Harbour defences at that time included an anti-submarine net which extended between Georges' head and Green Point on Watson's Bay. Strung between solidly constructed pylons known as 'dolphins' the net had three gateways, one for large vessels another for smaller vessels and a third for much smaller craft. This third smaller gate was just 30 meters in length and was situated on the western end of the net and therefore nearer the harbour shore.

SYDNEY HARBOUR ANTI SUBMARINE DEFENCES

CAPTAIN HARVEY NEWCOMB

In charge of Sydney Harbour Defences. He later Transferred to the RAN and had an outstanding career.

He died in Adelaide, 16th January 1991. 

HMS FORMIDABLE RN, LEAVING SYDNEY HARBOUR VIA WESTERN BOOM GATE 1945

Also on the Western end but a little East of the small craft gateway, the AS net gateway was 120 meters in length and it was opened by a tug. This 'gate' was over the deepest channel in the harbour and was used for large vessels, the USS New Orleans being one such vessel having a draught of 7.16 metres.

The Eastern gate was 90 meters or so in length and was used for smaller vessels. This gate was operated by a RAN Ship, HMAS KURAMIA, a Sydney ferry converted to a boom defence vessel. HMAS Deloraine had a draught of 8 feet 6 inches well within the Eastern Gate depth of 5 metres. Interestingly both the Deloraine and the Kuramia had a common heritage, Mort's dock in Balmain.

ELECTRONIC DEFENCES

In addition to the AS net there were a series of 6 cable loops stretching for thousands of metres around the bottom of Sydney Harbour. This, then state of the art, array electronically detected movements of vessels and was monitored by a LOOP CONTROL ROOM manned by 1 officer and two ratings. The Loop Control Room was situated at Green Point as shown on the map above.

These loops were in place when 3 Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour in May 1942, the AS net was incomplete at that time with gaps of 400 metres east and west of the net. One Japanese sub, the 22, still managed to get itself entangled in the central net and was detected, the crew blew themselves up to avoid capture. Two subs were detected by the loop but were overlooked due to other traffic moving around the harbour at the time. The USS Chicago opened fire on one of the subs but not before it had sent 2 torpedos their way, one failed to explode and the other missed.

It was interesting that the Japanese subs arrived at a time not long before the net was completed, an event that occurred in August 1942. One would think that the timing was no accident and that some kind of intelligence was being gathered and sent to Japan.

LETTER Q

To this point, we have the Q giving us the names of the two ships Deloraine and New Orleans, we know what time they left thanks to the Deloraine log, we now know which side of the harbour they went from.

There is something more we can deduce, we know that both the people on board the tug on the Western end of the gate and those on the HMAS Kuramia would have known the details of these ships as would whoever was on duty in the Loop Control Room at that time. In fact, they would have been in a position to record these movements over a long period of time.

THE CODEBREAKERS

THE BOOK RECOVERED

Move on a few years and the 'code' page from the recovered Rubaiyat was handed to a local Naval code Expert believed to be Eric Nave. He would immediately have known the significance of the code page as would the codebreakers in Melbourne. Interesting that the page was handed to a Naval code man.

You can bet money that Eric Nave would have been in touch with MI immediately, even though by this time, the net was gone and the loops probably disabled and not monitored. MI would have taken action by following up just who was on duty and where. They would have been most interested in the fact that someone was apparently spying and would have been wondering if they still were. I wonder if anyone went missing in Sydney in early to mid-1949?

Put yourself in the position of the opposition, they would have known of the discovery of the torn piece and of the search for the book, they would have been more than a bit concerned about that. Then, of all the luck, the book is found and the larger letters from the indentations are published but MI had 'apparently' missed the hidden INK H writings. Not so.

What of the code breakers statements that they didn't know what the letters meant? In my view they wanted to have the opposition think that their secret was safe and that the real hidden code hadn't been discovered.

CONSPIRACY?

Was it a conspiracy by MI and Nave? No, they were looking after issues of great National security at that time and were actively pursuing what could be a major spy network.
How important was there task? Given the state of relations between the US, UK, and Australia at the time with known intelligence leaks coming from senior levels of the Australian Government, it would have been of huge importance to keep all of this under wraps for as long as possible. If those agents were still active in the service of another country, they would have moved on to other tasks. They had to be caught and dealt with, no public trials and no publicity, dealt with expediently perhaps.
This post has explained as much as I have deduced to date, the likely sequence of events and an indication of where those involved in what could have been a network, would be found. As usual there is more work to be done.

Useful Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Harbour_anti-submarine_boom_net
http://www.navy.gov.au/history/base-histories/hmas-watson-history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdMI6rj7VmQ
https://www.navyhistory.org.au/anti-submarine-defences-of-sydney-harbour-1942/

I put this post together after a very long day so please forgive any errors!

SOMERTON MAN: THE DELORAINE & THE USS NEW ORLEANS, THE BOTTOM LINE. Updated

HMAS DELORAINE J232
& USS NEW ORLEANS CA32

The Somerton Man code page has revealed one of its secrets, and there are more to come. The image of the letter Q further down this page shows just some of the micro written letters and numbers found concealed beneath the 'code' letters that were partially overwritten by the Police.  The numbers and letters correspond with the HMAS Deloraine and the USS New Orleans. We followed up by examining the Proceedings from the HMAS Deloraine and they show beyond doubt that both ships were only once in close proximity to each other. In fact the Deloraine was acting as a 'screen' for the newly repaired New Orleans as it left Sydney Harbour for its return journey to the Puget Sound Naval Base in the US.

The above image was retrieved from the Australian War Memorial website, it shows the New Orleans at sea and underway. Note the very much shortened bow, the ship had been torpedoed and the damage took 115 feet off the bow. 

The photograph was likely taken by a RAAF aircraft known to be filming close to Sydney Harbour at the time. Of note is the fact that the ship's hull number, CA 32, were not visible on the port side of the ship, probably overlooked during the repair. However, ships at the time had their numbers painted on both sides so the CA 32 number would have been visible from the Starboard side, this would have been visible from the South Head side of the harbour. A place where, incidentally, the RAN had in March 1943, a newly opened training facility for perators of ASDIC and Radar equipment. Another coinicidence perhaps is that the Officer in charge of that training facility was a Lieutenant Commander Francis.

CLOSE UP 'Q'

We can now put a day, date and indeed an approximate time to when the letter Q at least was written. According to the log files (Proceedings), the two ships were in close proximity at around: 

9 am on Sunday, 7th March, 1943

The hidden letters were revealed using a Sodium Hypochlorite development technique
as described in a 1942 British SOE manual.

It seems more than likely that the USS New Orleans, despite having had extensive repairs to its bow destroyed in a torpedo attack at the battle of  TASAAFARONGA near Guadalcanal on 30th November 1942, left Sydney Harbour bow first in contrast to its arrival there in December 1942 stern first due to the enormous amount of damage done by the torpedo.

Interestingly, the date of the torpedo attack was 6 years to the day before the Somerton Man was first spotted on the beach at Somerton. That date could, of course, be pure coincidence, but an interesting one just the same.

Another interesting fact, yet to be formally confirmed, is that the USS New Orleans left Sydney Harbour approximately 35 minutes after the Deloraine.

Ship Movement Spotting

Last year, Clive had interviewed Paul Lawson, the man who created the now famous bust of the Somerton Man. In the interview Paul dropped something of a bombshell, he stated that Jestyn was receiving details of ship movements from Alf Boxall. Alf was the Army Lieutenant who had known Jestyn in 1945. In fact, Jestyn had handwritten verse 70 of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the front of another version that she had given to Alf Boxall at their meeting at the Clifton Gardens Hotel just across the harbour from Watson's Bay, the March 1943 mooring place of  HMAS Deloraine.

The Code Page

The evidence points to the code page being the original ship movement notes possibly made by someone who was located in a position from where they could see both ships. That could be either Georges Head or South Head/Watson's Bay. Alternatively, it was written by someone who had access to the ship movement records.

J232 HMAS DELORAINE                                                                 USS NEW ORLEANS                  

Both ships shown were last seen together on Sunday 7th March 1943 when someone at South Head close to the mouth of Sydney Harbour made clandestine notes on the back of a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The same Rubaiyat that turned up in June 1949 and was associated with the body of the Somerton Man thanks to the finding of a tiny slip of paper rolled up in a hidden fob pocket which the Somerton Man was wearing at the time of his discovery.

Questions:

1. Where was Alf Boxall on 7th March 1943?

2. Where was Jestyn on that date and time?

3. Was there a third person who was in a position to make those notes?

We have every reason to think that Jestyn was in Sydney and her address was in Mosman. Not that far, a short bus ride perhaps from the area around Georges' head although it must be said that that particular area formed part of the Sydney Harbour defences at that time so access may have been restricted and only Military personnel having legitimate access.

What we do know is that the book on which the code was written turned up in Adelaide in June 1949, a piece was torn from it that contained the words TAMAM SHUD and a piece matching that torn-out area was found tightly rolled up and pushed well down into a concealed fob pocket that the Somerton Man was wearing when he was found on the beach on December 1st 1948.

What's Next

There are many more letters to be more thoroughly examined but we already know that some contain relatively clear letters and numbers, so we will be looking at those first. Best to substantiate what is known.

SOMERTON MAN: A HANDY LITTLE SHOP

Almost Midway between The Victoria Hotel and the Railway Station in Adelaide lies Blyth Street. A smallish alleyway really but during the war years it housed amongst other businesses, a handy little shop known as 'The GuideThrift Depot'. People donated goods and clothing of all different kinds and volunteers at the shop would give the proceeds to various deserving causes. Note also that the article mentions that the Thrift Depot had a stall inside the gates of the Adelaide Hospital.

Eagle-eyed Clive found this particular article in the August 26th, 1944 edition of the Mail. It was, of course, the Rubaiyat mention that caught his eye.

What the ad provides us with is further confirmation that second-hand goods and clothing were available in Adelaide and no doubt elsewhere and that people, in this case, a US serviceman, dropped in and found just the book they were looking for. Sadly the book sounds to be of a different type to our Whitcomb and Tombs version but the point is that we don't know whether the book was new or second hand, we don't know from where it was purchased nor when. It stands to reason, therefore, that, if the book was second hand, were the indentations on its back already there when the Somerton Man may have acquired it?

The Guide Thrift Depot closed its doors in 1945 I believe.

SOMERTON MAN: THE AMOROUS SAILOR ON USS NEW ORLEANS

YOU KNOW WHAT SAILORS ARE..

I guess it speaks for itself. This article was dated 28th October 1945. The date of interest for us is the date of birth of the child being September 1943, meaning that their liaison must have taken place 9 months earlier just after Christmas 1942 or early January 1943.

An article in the TRUTH  on the same day, page 15, went a little further in that it gave the date of the letter sent to Mr.Boyd's mother as January 26th, 1943 and that Mrs. Bridgland's former name was WINROW.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

SOMERTON MAN: USS NEW ORLEANS,, CA 32, A MATTER OF DETAIL. UPDATED 5th November 2018

 USS NEW ORLEANS:
EVERY PICTURE TELLS A STORY

In the previous post, we reviewed the information that was found in the letter Q on the Somerton Man code page. It very clearly told us that HMAS Deloraine, J232, had at some point been in close proximity to the USS New Orleans. Various official documentation was examined and from those documents, we were able to ascertain that the only time that the two ships were in close proximity was on Sunday <arch 7th 1943 in Sydney Harbour.

A number of questions were raised not the least of which was related to the person who had furtively written down the details of both ships and encoded that information within the letter Q, mainly just where could they have been when this was done?

The answer to that question becomes obvious when we examine the chain of events that saw the USS New Orleans end up in dry dock at Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour, bear with me, it's important:

THE BATTLE OF TASSAFARONGA

On the 30th November 1942, the USS New Orleans was engaged in a sea battle known as the battle of Tasaafaronga off Guadacanal:

In the course of the battle, the USS New Orleans was struck by a single torpedo that hit the ship in the forward magazine, it blew the bow of the ship off back to the second turret.

Before & After the torpedo strike:

8 hours after the strike, 1st December 1942 at Tulagai:

As you can see, it was nothing short of a miracle that the ship survived at all. Nonetheless, it did and the crew and others set to work camouflaging the New Orleans:

New Orleans remained at Tulagi until 12th December with the crew shoring up the damage and making the ship as ready as possible for perilous journey back to Sydney arriving at Cockatoo Island, Sydney Harbour on Christmas Eve, 1942. the journey was carried out with the ship travelling backward all the way into Sydney Harbour. 

A prefabricated stub bow was made up and fitted, this took a while; it would be fair to say that during that time the enormous damage to the Cruiser would have been well known amongst the local population.

The new bow was attached and in this photograph, you can see the relatively small Hull number '32'. 

Note that the number is on the starboard side of the ship:

Set to go on March 7th 1943, moving up Sydney Harbour to the heads 'I think' although the landscape does not look terribly familiar, it could be a test run part way up the Lane Cove River, note in this photograph we can just see the outlines of the hull number '32' on the starboard side just below the forward gun turret and the numbers appear to be darkened:

Underway on March 7th 1943, she would have steamed past the Deloraine as per the log excerpts in the previous post:

Note that the barrels of the guns from number 2 turret were removed and were actually stored towards the rear of the ship.

This last image shows the New Orleans after the permanent repair had been carried out at Puget Sound shipyard, believed to have been taken on July 30th, 1943:

THE CONCLUSION

What we can conclude is that the ships hull number, 32, may not have been visible from the Port side of the ship, in other words, it would not have been seen from Georges Head, however, given that many people would have known the identity of the strange looking ship then it is possible that the observer knew the ship was the New Orleans.

The bottom line is there is a possibility that the observer was situated on the South Head/Watson's Bay side of the harbour which was a RAN Radar/ ASDIC training installation at the time.

As an aside, the CO of the training school, first opened in January 1943, was a certain Lieutenant Commander Sidney Francis RN. Strange world :)


The Hull number for the Deloraine whilst not painted large was of a reasonable size and it was viewable from the Port side of the vessel which would also mean it would have been visible from George's Head. In fact, you could argue that it would have only been known that both ships departed together from Georges Head or North Head or close by. I don't have the date for the image below, camouflage paint was applied in different colours, in fact, there is an entry in the Deloraine's log regarding their preference for US Navy paint:

UPDATED: 5th November 2018

The Dockyards at Cockatoo Island in Sydney recorded the fact that the USS New Orleans had lost 150 feet of its length due to the torpedo attack.

SOMERTON MAN: AFTER 70 YEARS THE CODE IS CRACKED WIDE OPEN, Part 1.

HMAS DELORAINE & USS NEW ORLEANS MATCHED 

& 

SOMERTON MAN CODE CRACKED

On 7th March 1943, HMAS Deloraine passed close by the
USS New Orleans, CA 32 near Sydney.

This day, Sunday, March 7th 943 on Sydney Harbour was the only time that we have been able to categorically say that these two vessels were in close proximity. This was the only time that our 'writer' could have committed what he saw to paper. 

Thanks to intensive research we have found this match, as was described in the letter Q.  My original reading of the code sequence showed what I thought was the sequence: CA 25 or 35, however, I now know that it is CA 32 and not CA 35, the sequence can easily be misread. A closer examination I made yesterday and ahead of finding the Deloraine log reference shown above, confirmed that to be the case.

This result is thanks to some great teamwork with Clive, there were literally hundreds of pages to read and cross-reference and to track down the various locations of a number ships including the New Orleans, the Houston and the Pensacola. In fact, the Deloraine and the Pensacola had crossed paths on December 28th, 1941, not long after Pearl Harbor and again near Darwin in February 1942. Similarly, the Deloraine was in Darwin at the same time as the Houston.

We never thought for one moment that we would find a document like this where the event would actually be confirmed by a log entry, just amazing.

The above is from the log of HMAS Deloraine, J232 on 28th December 1941, you can see that it clearly states that they are to Anchor at Cape Morton and wait for the arrival of a US Convoy and TAKE ORDERS FROM USS PENSACOLA. The Hull number for the Pensacola is CA24.

Second Sighting USS Pensacola

This information absolutely confirms not only that the Delorraine would have been seen to be physically close to US Navy Cruisers but it also confirms the fact that, in one instance, they were being put in contact with one of them.

The information found in the letter Q is correct, HMAS Deloraine, J232, and the US Cruiser  USS New Orleans, CA 32 passed close by each other near Sydney, someone recorded that in microcode and subsequently that code has been cracked open. We now know for certain that microcode has existed all along and it was placed inside the large letters of the so-called 'code'.

Relevant USN Cruiser movements:

USS Houston (CA 30)  Arrived at Darwin 28 Dec 41. Departed Darwin on 10 
Feb 42 sailed to Koepang.

USS New Orleans  (CA 32)  Departed SFO on 13 Jan 42 and arrived at 
Brisbane 12 Feb 42, damaged on 30 Nov 42 at Tassafaronga, sailed on 10 
Dec 42 to Cockatoo Island, Sydney-arrived on 24 Dec 42,  On 7 Mar 43 
Sailed from Sydney to Puget Sound Navy Yard, WA

USS Pensacola  (CA 24)  Arrived at Brisbane 22 Dec 41, On 19 Jan 42 
sailed to Pearl Harbour. Sighted by HMAS Deloraine 4th January 1941 near Heath Point Lighthouse
headed South.

You will notice that mention is made of another ship, the Empire Hope. It was a British Merchant Navy ship one of a series of 'Empire' ships built for convoy work. It had been used for carrying ammunition and explosives on previous journeys. This ship was sunk just months later near Malta.

Not shown in these images is the presence of yet another Allied ship, a Destroyer, that the Deloraine crew saw on their journeys; this vessel was later to have a lengthy layover in Australia lasting for many months. We will discuss this more in our next post.

The Burning Question

One question, of course, is who saw the event and where from? Lieutenant Surgeon Robson may possibly have seen it. But, as JS very kindly pointed out, at this time he was stationed a long way North in Port Moresby at that time. The date 7th March 1943 was a Sunday and it was, therefore, a day of rest, one would think that around the harbour there would be quite a few people, families, and friends on the way to or from Church services. Quite probably, some would have been service members maybe home on leave, others would be going about their daily work, military or otherwise, on and around the harbour and its shores. Perhaps it was someone on board one of the two ships in question or maybe on board yet another ship? You would think that for someone publicly to be seen furtively writing notes down whilst watching the various ship movements on Sydney Harbour would, in those days have attracted some attention. More likely that our writer was sitting in some advantageous position close to the heads either on a ship or a land-based vantage point. All of this is yet to be examined, interesting times ahead.

When was the Rubaiyat published?

The question relates to the availability of the book ahead of the time when the two ships passed each other.

The first advert for the book for sale was on 5th December 1942, it was placed by Whitcombe and Tombs, 332 Collins Street, Melbourne. (A Tibor Kaldor haunt perhaps?)  So, as far as Australia is concerned it appears that it may not have been sold here until much later on 5th December 1942 in the Argus:

NOTE THE TITLES IN THE SERIES ( GOLDEN THREADS ANOTHER COINCIDENCE?)

The same edition of the book had in fact been advertised for sale in November 1941 in New Zealand. Credit to Nick Pelling for his post made in 2016 to that effect.

The date 7th March 1943 was quite a propitious one, as no doubt all will remember it was the day that Prince Franz Joseph ll of Lichtenstein married Countess Gina von Wildczek.  Interestingly they received messages of congratulations from both sides. Lichtenstein was and is a neutral country. I imagine my family's invitation was lost in the post.

Keep a look out for the next post, things are moving at a pace.