Episode 1: Seven Missing Hours
On Tuesday 30 November 1948, the day before a body was found on Somerton Beach, we have searched the whole day for the Somerton Man, and he is missing. What we have instead is a trail.
The trail begins at Adelaide Railway Station: a ticket to Henley Beach, bought and never used; a suitcase handed in at the cloakroom; a bus ticket for the 11.15 service to St Leonards. Three pieces of paper, all within a short walk and a few hours of each other. The bus would have reached the end of its route at around ten to twelve. Then the trail stops. No sighting, no purchase, no witness. For some seven hours no one can say where this man was, or whether he was anywhere near Somerton at all.
At around 7 p.m. a man is seen at the foot of the steps on Somerton Beach. No one sees his face. The next morning a man is found dead at the same spot, with the train ticket and the bus ticket in his pockets. A trace, then no trace, then possibly a person.
Listen to Episode 1
Episode 1 is out now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
In this episode
- 00:00 Introduction
- 02:02 The Henley Beach train ticket: sold from the double-star booth, never clipped, never used
- 04:46 The left-luggage suitcase: what the clock stamp on the luggage ticket can and cannot tell us
- 13:18 The bus ticket to St Leonards: ticket No. 88708 and the route of the 11.15 bus
- 15:03 One timeline: what the evidence shows, and what is assumption
- 17:58 The witnesses on Somerton Beach, and a fifth man at the top of the steps
- 21:17 Bob Wake in Adelaide
- 22:29 Questions to consider, and the seven missing hours
The day in pictures
Where the trail begins: the unused ticket to Henley Beach
The ticket was sold from the double-star booth by the clerk, Douglas George Townsend. It was the first of only three Henley Beach tickets he sold that day, at some time between 6.15 in the morning and about 2 in the afternoon. It was never clipped at the platform barrier. Townsend had no recollection of the buyer. The ticket shows that a ticket was sold, not who bought it.
Where the trail stops: the 11.15 a.m. bus to St Leonards
Ticket No. 88708 was the sixth of only nine seven-penny tickets sold on that trip, issued by conductor Arthur Anzac Holderness between the railway station and the corner of West and South Terraces. The journey to St Leonards took about 35 minutes. After that, there is no record of the man anywhere until around 7 p.m. that evening.
Seven missing hours
The accepted account gives the man a busy afternoon in a seaside suburb. None of it is witnessed. No railway clerk, cloakroom attendant or bus conductor remembered him. No one reported a stranger in Glenelg or Somerton that afternoon, and no one came forward afterwards. The first sighting comes at about 7 p.m., when John Lyons and his wife saw a man lying at the foot of the steps from 15 to 20 yards away, without seeing his face.
The next morning, the two tickets in the dead man's pockets were all the police had to go on. It was not until 9 January 1949 that police visited the railway station and found the suitcase. Detective Sergeant Leane took some items from it and left the case at the station for a further five days.
So the question is not only how a man spent seven hours. It is whether anyone can show where he was at any point on 30 November at all, or whether the tickets, the suitcase and the timeline were a trail laid for investigators to follow.
Episode 2 is on its way
Episode 2 covers the discovery of the body on Somerton Beach on the morning of 1 December 1948, in the same place as the man seen there the evening before. Was it the same person? As Episode 2 will show, that is not as straightforward as it may seem. New episodes are released every three weeks on the podcast and on YouTube, and I'll post here when each one goes live.
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Sources for Episode 1
- Inquest into the death of an unknown man, Adelaide, June 1949 · evidence of D. G. Townsend (South Australian Railways), Mr North (cloakroom), E. L. Hall (Municipal Tramways Trust), J. B. Lyons, G. Strapps and O. Neil · full citation to follow
- South Australian Railways records, Adelaide to Henley Beach departures, 30 November 1948 · reference to follow
- Adelaide Railway Station departures board, photograph, 1940 · reference to follow
- Lieutenant Colonel R. (Bob) Wake, diary, November 1948 · Bob Wake Archive, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland · reference to follow
- Gerry Feltus, The Unknown Man: A Suspicious Death at Somerton Beach (2010)
Wake Archive: Documents from the Bob Wake Archive, Fryer Library, The University of Queensland, are published under the archive's arrangement with Gordon Cramer, the archive's current researcher. Items held within National Archives of Australia folders are not published.
Names: Names of people involved appear as recorded in public documents. Living descendants' private details are not published.
Have information? If you hold documents, photographs or family knowledge relating to these events, please use the contact page on this blog. Submissions are read by Gordon Cramer, kept confidential unless you agree otherwise, and passed to SA Police where relevant.
Music: Patrick Cramer.
The Tamam Shud blog is dedicated to uncovering the forensic realities of the Somerton Man case. Our mission is not to speculate, but to reconstruct the events of 1948 using primary documents, scientific modelling, and expert analysis. While the man's true identity may remain a mystery, our focus is on the evidence that reveals how he died and the networks involved. To ensure the integrity of this research, we rely solely on verifiable sources and citations, strictly excluding anonymous blog comments and forum speculation from our data.
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