SOMERTON MAN: HAY BANK NOTES CODE, ONE TIME PAD?

HAY BANK NOTE

Hoping back in time to the days prior to Tibor Kaldor, we spent a lot of time looking at Australia's internment camps during WW2. You may recall that our research centred on those men and boys who arrived in Melbourne and Sydney in 1940 following their deportation from the UK.

Long story short, apart from the many and varied activities undertaken by the new arrivals specifically those who were interned in Hay Camp NSW, a man by the name of George A. Teltscher designed and produced bank notes for use within the camp. There were 3 denominations, 2 Shillings, 1 Shilling and Sixpence. In every respect, the design of these notes was stunning even more so given the fact that they had little to no equipment to speak of and relied on a local printer to complete the task.

But it was the detail of the design that interested us most. Hidden within the design of each note were examples of superbly crafted micro-writing.

In some cases that writing was clear and in plain sight as in the verse woven into the barbed wire surround of each note, 'We are here because we are here because...'. If you look carefully at the note above you should spot it. But in other cases, the writing was much less obvious, it had been deliberately concealed.

HAY BANK NOTE CODE

To the right, you can see a section of the right-hand side upright that belongs to the inner rectangular shape on the note. From a distance, it looks like a series of bars but on closer examination, you can clearly see strings of numbers with letters interspersed. Each side of the rectangle also contains additional strings. These numbers sets are different for each of the note denominations.

The question is, were these strings part of a clandestine code? Or were they just designed to prevent someone from copying and making their own notes? The answer came later when Mr Teltscher was released in 1941 and was spirited away from Australia via ship and the Panama canal to arrive in Britain where he promptly dropped out of sight until the end of the war. It is believed that he went to work with SOE.  Was this column code a kind of 'one time' pad?

Microwriting was found in numerous places on these notes and the location and style differed from each individual note with the exception of the more obvious examples, each note had been hand signed, those signatures also contained micro writing much as the JESTYN signature has in Alf Boxalls Verse 70.

The signature close up, the importance of this find is that it adds further to the evidence that micro writing hidden within a signature was practised before the SM case and may even be connected to it:

This appears to me to be pencil markings, this would be consistent with the Code page and Verse 70 micro writing.

Below fine work found in the Denomination wording as shown in the header image, here's the first close up:

GET THE PICTURE?

Every single'shade' line is actually made up of number/letter strings and not just within the letters of the denomination, even those earth red shade lines have numbers and letters.

What does this tell us? It tells us loud and clear that the internees had a ready-made clandestine communication system set up and in no time flat following their arrival in Australia. In fact they had an identical system to that found on the SM code page, Verse 70, and the torn piece.

You may recall that one ex-internee, Tibor Kaldor, was found dead in a Hindley Street Hotel in Adelaide two weeks to the day following the discovery of the Somerton Man, he had also been poisoned. In fact, he shared the same mortuary.

Another better-known ex-internee was later to be Atom Spy Klaus Fuchs, he spent his time in Canada but not before seeing the sights of a Liverpool and Isle of Man camp. He and Tibor Kaldor would have crossed paths and no doubt many others.