Somerton Man Mystery: When All Else Fails… Updated 11th May 2025.

 Review The Evidence…

Further information on this image at the foot of this post

You might recall a similar phrase that related to problems repairing or using a piece of equipment that just refuses to work:

When All Else Fails, Read The Manual!

Obviously really isn’t it, yet time and again we ‘assume’ that we somehow have been blessed with the knowledge of how things should work almost like it’s some sort of gift. But, Alas! That rarely, if ever works out. 

A similar rule applies if you’re in the business of researching/investigating a cold case, the difference being that in cold case investigations there isn’t a manual as such. What we get to work with is coroners reports, autopsy results, police files, witness accounts and if we’re really lucky, there may be some hard evidence that has survived.

And that is or should I say was the situation with the Somerton Man case. Three vitally important pieces of information had survived being the torn slip with the words Tamam Shud printed on it which was being held by ex Detective Sergeant Gerry Feltus who once had the case on his desk. Then there’s the copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that was given to Australian Army Lieutenant Alf Boxall which had a handwritten inscription of verse 70 on one if the intro pages adjacent to the title page of the book. She had signed it Jestyn. The third piece of evidence was the ‘code page’ that was found and associated with the body of the man found on Somerton beach on December 1st 1948.

Sad to tell, the original torn slip held by Gerry Feltus has been mislaid. And sadly, once again, the copy of the Rubaiyat given to Alf Boxall by Jestyn, and which was in the possession of Professor Abbott, has also been mislaid. The good news is that while both these important pieces of evidence have recently been mislaid, we do have high resolutions photographs that we can work with. 

There is more sad news on the code page front, with regard to the original photographs of the code page taken by Police photographer Jimmy Durham in July 1949 are apparently lost and no one knows where they are. I learned this from a colleague who had made an FOI request and that was the response he received.

Thankfully we have a high-resolution image file in the form of a scan taken from the photograph supplied to the Advertiser by SA Police during the 1990s digitisation project.

Not having the originals is problematical you would think, but not so. Thankfully under SA law where original documents associated with a case are lost, high resolution images are acceptable provided that those images were taken by a competent organisation. Thus in the Somerton Man case and the mislaid evidence, the torn slip photographs were taken by the professionals at Adelaide University under the watchful eye of Professor Abbott. Similarly, the high resolution images of the Boxall Rubaiyat were taken by Professor Abbot. Finally in the matter of the code page photographs, the originals were taken by SA Police.

There have been questions raised about the quality of the image of the code page given that it was a scan. Let’s clarify that issue, if your are an amateur and you simply scan a photograph and print it out then it is possible but not certain that you can pick up artifacts from the scan process. If you have spent the time to learn and understand scanning procedures, then you can avoid the problem by carefully following the ‘manual’. To ensure that you scanned your item correctly and without artefacts, there is software available that detects their presence. That’s the process I used and no artefacts were detected. This is something that you can check for yourself of course. When it comes to taking close up images of a scan or correct printing off of images that can be accomplished in a number of  ways which you will find described in the book when published.

The matter of the Somerton Man Rubaiyat, that’s the book said to have been handed in by Mr.Freeman the chemist, to my knowledge there were at least 5 and possibly six people who saw the book. Mr.Freeman, his brother in law who initially found the book in the car, Detective Sergeant Leane who examined it, Police Photographer Jimmy Durham who photographed the back page and I suggest, removed that page from the book and Detective Brown who stated that he had seen the code page being examined by Detective Sergeant Leane. It is not certain whether the book was shown to Naval Intelligence when a copy of the code page was handed to them for analysis.

UPDATE 11th May 2025

I recalled that there was a 6th person who provided valuable information related to the book. The document viewable below,is a copy of an SA Police report signed by Detective Hopkins on 27th November 1959, includes information on the Rubaiyat that was found in a car and refers to the code page and the torn slip, interestingly he makes specific mention of the fact that the slip was torn from that book and the back leaf of it was missing. 

from an earlier post:

Recently I have been asked a number of questions regarding the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam book that was found and associated with the Somerton Man. To be more precise, the book was:

1. Thrown into the back of a car that was parked not far from the scene where the body of the Somerton Man was found.

2. In a later Police report, this same book was found with the 'back leaf missing' as per a copy of the original Police document:

I understand that there are those who doubt that the book existed, I don’t subscribe to that view, there are witnesses and other evidence to the contrary. I believe firmly that the book existed and in relatively recent posts it was shown that it was a Collin’s version and not a Whitcomb & Tombs publication as was initially claimed. 

That does raise another issue, there was a cover of a W&T version published in the press at the time but not by the Police. Similar;y there was a photograph of an open copy showing a page that had been torn suggesting that it was where the phrase Tamam Shud had been removed. Again that photograph was not published by the Police. It was in fact Detective Brown in his evidence at the inquest who was quite clear that the slip had come from a Collin’s publication. 

It is a little difficult to understand why the Police never actually published anything that named the version of the book nor did they state that the information in the press was incorrect.

There is another post to come on this subject and it covers an interesting find of a W&T Rubaiyat by Alan Hamil. Keep an eye out for it in the next week or so.

Header Image

Over the years, a great deal of time has been spent examining and improving images of the code page and other documents. True to say there have been a number of improvements even in recent times. The advent of AI tools has helped a great deal and the image at the head of this post was processed using AI and it has led  to better visibility of the micro code in the two crossed lines in the centre of the code page. This image shows that the code was written in from the top of the page giving the impression that it had been laterally inverted. You should be able to enlarge this image quite well.