THE SOMERTON MAN CASE: TIBOR KALDOR, THE DATE... COMPARISON, HAY BANKNOTE

THE LAST LETTER

 The image above is taken from the last letter written by Tibor Kaldor and dated 13th December 1948 just 13 days after the finding of the body of the Somerton Man on the beach near Glenelg, South Australia. There were two pages but our focus in this post is page 1 and specifically the date shown at the top right of the page.

For those newer followers, Tibor's body was found in a bedroom at the Victoria Hotel in Hindley Street, Adelaide. Although the date on the letter is the 13th December 1948, his body wasn't discovered until the 14th December, he had died of poisoning. You will find numerous posts about Tibor on this blog, here's a starting point for you...

Tibor was an internee at the Hay Internment camp at the same time as George Teltscher, the designer of the Hay Internment Camp Banknotes.  George, I think, was in Hut 25 at Hay whilst Tibor was in Hut 17.

The image below is a comparison if you will, the left image is as you see it at the top of the page and the right image has been highlighted to show what appears to be micro written letters and numbers within the cursive written date:

To get to this stage, I enlarged the base image of the letter in high resolution, printing the result out on bleed proof paper. 

There is a similarity between the finely detailed work on the Hay 2 shilling banknote found on the previous post to this one. In that case, very small letters and numbers were written into the design, specifically what at first appeared to be strands of barbed wire and in the signature of Mr. Stahl. The characters are of approximately the same size.

Here's the Stahl signature with micro written letters and numbers:

And next, the comparison of the signature from the banknote and the date on Tibor Kaldor's last letter:

The significance of the highlighted dot in the DATE image to the right is that it was common in many forms of clandestine communication to give a 'pointer' to the intended recipient as to where a piece of code or other information was to be found. That dot is the only one found on this page of Tibor Kaldor's last letter.

I must point out that this is early days and there is more work to be done here before we reach a definite conclusion, that's underway as I write this post.

Finally, I must acknowledge the significant input into this particular aspect of the Somerton Man case by Clive Turner. It was Clive who found the newspaper clipping telling of Tibor Kaldor's death and together we researched the whole Dunera/Internee thread for some months. It was also Clive who was able to inspect the actual Kaldor File in Adelaide and get a copy of his last letter.

Thanks again, Clive.