George Marshall was the brother of a man who was later to become Chief Minister of Singapore.
There are four interesting and often overlooked details relating to the finding of the bodies of George Marshall and 3 other men.
Firstly that the page of the Methuen 7th edition found opened on the chest of the body of George Marshall and on which the verse was found, was different to the the page number on which the same verse is to be found in previous Methuen editions.
The second unusual detail is that when found, Marshall's body was badly decomposed as the result of being left in the open for approximately 2 weeks and subjected to effects of weather, including some rain, and of local wildlife. Yet the book was found intact.
Thirdly a point which I believe to be correct, is that the body when found was lying on a newspaper which was used, to provide the date of Marshall's death.
Finally, there are just 4 verses in the Rubaiyatt from which an acrostically coded name can be extracted. The verse in the Marshall case is one of them.
In another instancd, this time it was Verse 70, a handwritten version of which was found in a copy of the Rubaiyat given to Army Lieutenant Alf Boxall by a nurse known as Jestyn in 1945. This nurse was later to be directly associated with the finding of a body on Somerton Beach in South Australia on December 1st 1948. A further copy of the Rubaiyat, a Whitcomb and Tombs pocket version, was found and associated with the man on the beach and by virtue of a telephone number found on that book, with the nurse Jestyn.
The acrostically coded name in both cases was DANETTA.
To add to these puzzling circumstances, two more instances of this coded name appearing occured and both in connection with unusual deaths.
One was the death of a Michael Goreloff in Sydney whose body was found in bushland on around 7th December 1948. The coded name DANETTA was found in a last note found with the body of and purportedly written by Goreloff.
The other death was that of Tibor Kaldor whose body was found in the Victoria hotel, Hindley Street, Adelaide on the 14th December 1948. In this case the code name DANETTA also appeared in a last letter written by Tibor Kaldor and found with his body.
Four dead men, three found within the first two weeks of December 1948, and all 4 found with the acrostically coded name DANETTA.
It might be worth looking into Basil Chilikin's background since Mysterious deaths coincided with his arrival in Australia. Shanghai Municipal Police files upto 1949 contain dossiers of both Basil and his father
ReplyDeleteHi Peter. It is interesting that he turned up when he did. Need to check the ECAFE docs to see what days he attended and whether or not he was mentioned in the surveillance exercise. The challenge being that the surveillance was strictlyimited and whilst we might see a name amongst attendees on specific days, there's no guarantee that it was actually Basil or a cover.
ReplyDeleteFor someone who was at the time only a language interpreter for Soviet delegation hired by the UN and being supposedly a Russian refugee from Shanghai he seemed to have gained a lot more publicity at the time than his status should seem to draw.
ReplyDeleteSubsequent discoveries of course of his father being highly involved as an informer to the NKVD within the white russian community
in China put aside.