SOMERTON MAN MYSTERY: ABLE SEAMAN CARL WEBB UPDATE...

 

...On October 6th this year I first posted on the question of whether Carl Webb born in Footscray Victoria. was the same Carl Webb who was found as an Able Seaman on board a US Freighter, The SS Golden Sun.

Here's the link to that post:

https://tamamshud.blogspot.com/2022/10/somerton-man-mystery-carl-webb-sailor.html


I was asked by a few people why I would be looking at Merchant Ship Crew Lists. A fair question. And I commented during those early weeks about just what had piqued my interest.

What drove this notion for me was quite simply the lack of any real information about Carl. We now have some family photos, 2 I think, plus one image of him as a young boy and then as a soccer team member. That plus one, I think, a newspaper article about his having sustained an injury whilst playing soccer.

FLYING UNDER THE RADAR

We are talking about a period that started with his birth in 1905 or 1906 depending on where you look, 36  and went right through to 1942 when he married. So from 1906 to 1942, 36 years, a handful of photographs and one possibly two newspaper articles where he was mentioned. Carl was well and truly under the radar. Why was that?

He attended college and passed some exams in Electrical engineering, the immediate question is, was he full-time at college, or was he attending as part of an apprenticeship? Which would mean 20% time at college and the rest working for your employer.

There are some useful resources for those years that you can find Via Google, for example, there is a history of apprenticeships in Australia which is good reading.

Here's the search term I used:
"Australian history of apprenticeships"

A TIMELINE

But that's not all you should read, social history from the 20s and especially the 1930s tell off difficult financial circumstances, high unemployment commencing in the mid 1920s for example, and leading on to 1929 and the Great Depression. I have some family knowledge of that with an Uncle of mine living in FNQ taking part in marches in the late 20s and 30s.

But, I digress, let's look again at young Carl. Off he goes to college and gets a qualification, would he really head back to the family bakery for work? Would he not be looking to make good use of his qualifications? The work scene wasn't all bad in the early 20s but from the mid-20s onwards it was somewhat more difficult.

And where was Carl in those years from say 1923 onwards? Many young men got their first taste of freedom and many took jobs in the merchant marine. What a way to see the world for those who were adventurously minded. Was Carl that way inclined? Did he take an opportunity to see the world by signing on to the crew of a US ship?

I have been working on a timeline for Carl Webb for a little while and will post that as soon as it is available.

THE RESEARCH

Initially, mine was just a passing interest but when the name Carl Webb turned up as a crewman on a ship that belonged to a line that plied their trade across the Pacific it got my attention. Thanks to Pete Davidson, I learned that in those years it was common practice for Australians to describe themselves as 'English' Passports were British with a stamp saying that the holder was from the Commonwealth of Australia. Again, you can read the recent posts on that subject with examples of paperwork and records kept including the ship's crew list, specifically, the crew list form on which Carl Webb's name appears is for 'Alien employees" not US citizens. That research is ongoing and I have contacted a number of agencies in the US regarding ship logs and crew list details in the hope that we will be able to learn if Able Seaman Carl Webb is the Carl Webb born in Footscray. If it is, that would be an interesting outcome and if he's not then it's back to the grindstone :)

Further research gave us his age and height which I raised back then in October. In fact, I mentioned that the information coming to hand from Professor Abbott's press announcements did not include details of his physical appearance, most especially not his height.

THE PLASTER BUST & WHERE TO FROM HERE

That rang a bell in relation to the plaster bust. There was no record of the height of the subject worked on by Paul Lawson, further, no one had confirmed the identity of the man to Paul Lawson, he was just taken to the morgue and asked to create a plaster bust of the man pointed out to him. In my numerous discussions with Paul, he was very clear on the matter of how the bust was created. He had used the photographs taken by Jimmy Durham shortly two days after the autopsy. His reason was that the face on the body didn't bear a resemblance to the post-autopsy photographs and that is quite definitely true.

It struck me as odd that in a fairly recent talk the son of the man who embalmed the body specifically mentioned that his father had paid a number of visits to the morgue to inspect the body and add more fluids to ensure it stayed in good condition.

My view is that the body of the man on whom Paul Lawson worked bears no resemblance to the man found on Somerton Beach. there are a number of comparison photographs in recent posts that support that view.

There is one certain way that we can find out if Carl Webb is the Somerton Man, Doctor Dwyer at the time he performed the autopsy on the man found on the beach, took a dental chart, the chart that shows that the man had 18 missing teeth. If the exhumed body, supposedly that of Carl Webb, has the same dental chart with 18 missing teeth then that would be proof positive. If there is no match of the dental charts then it's a whole new ballgame.

From here, there will be more on Carl Webb and hopefully, before too long we will get the results from the Police Forensic examination of the exhumed remains.

And a passing thought for other researchers, if Carl Was ever an appreb=ntice, then perhaps the Electrical Engineers Union would be a good place to start looking?