The Somerton Suitcase Ticket: Was It Really Stamped at 11 o'clock?
By -Gordon332
November 08, 2026
3
Joslin Time Stamp
On 30 November 1948, someone left a brown suitcase at the cloak room of Adelaide Railway Station. The ticket it was given has been treated as fixing the time it was handed in. This post looks at the machine that may have stamped it, a police check that found nothing, and why the stamped time is a claim rather than a proof.
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Six weeks after the suitcase was left, police linked it to the unknown man found dead on Somerton beach on 1 December 1948. The cloak room ticket, number G 52703, has become one of the key pieces of evidence in the case, because it appears to tell us when the suitcase was handed in.
Note Date stamp likely applied using a separate hand date stamp machine
Luggage ticket G No 52703, front. Coronial Inquest 1949, Exhibit C.4.
The front of the ticket carries a stamp reading "Received 30 NOV 1948". The back, according to the cloak room's senior porter, Harold North, carries a clock stamp showing 11 a.m. At the 1949 inquest, North explained that this meant the ticket was issued at any time between 11 o'clock and midday. North did not issue the ticket himself. The clerk who did, R. Craig, never gave evidence, and no photograph of the back of the ticket has ever been published.
That raised a simple question: what kind of machine stamps a time that can only be read to the hour?
The search
We worked through the likely candidates one by one. The standard railway ticket press printed only the date, never the time. Factory clocking-in machines printed the minute as well as the hour, and they were floor-standing clocks, not counter stamps. Neither fitted.
Old patents pointed to another type: a hand stamp with a small clock built in, whose printing face is itself a clock dial. Australian newspapers from the 1930s and 1940s show such stamps were sold here. A 1944 Brisbane advertisement even asked for a "Josling Time Stamp", very probably a misprint for the American maker Joslin.
The Joslin Eclipse
The A. D. Joslin Manufacturing Company of Chicago, and later of Manistee, Michigan, made a desk-top time stamp called the "Eclipse" from about 1919 into the 1950s. A small clock sits on top and the stamping face sits directly underneath, so the ticket is literally stamped under the clock.
Photographs and a seller's video of surviving examples show the printing face: a ring of hour numbers with a single pointer marked AM or PM, and no printed minute hand. An impression would read "about 11 a.m." and nothing more precise: exactly what North described.
InferenceNo railway record names the machine, and the back of the ticket has never been published. But the Joslin Eclipse is the best match found so far.
An interesting find was a 1950 German made time stamp machine that specifically mentioned in its patent, the issue with earlier hour only timestamp machines which often gave incorrect readings:
from an investigative perspective as opposed to that of the researcher, the fact that the single hour machine had faults coupled with a hand date stamp raises red flags. We really cannot rely on the accuracy unless we are able to veru=ify the data with copies of other tickets reistered on that same day. Each ticket, as you can d=see in the image above, has a unique registartion number. This apparently mionor detail may become a major issue.
Two stamps, two steps
The earlier Eclipse had a single slot for loose type showing the month. Changing small day numbers by hand every day would have been fiddly. The ticket has a separate "Received" date stamp on the front. Together, these point to two devices: a date stamp on the front and a time stamp on the back.
What next
Further research needs to be done on this issue, it is an interesting matter for a number of reasons which we will discuss later.
If you hold an old South Australian Railways cloak room ticket, or know where one survives, please get in touch.
The check that found nothing
There is a further detail in the newspapers of the time. On 12 January 1949, the Adelaide News reported that detectives had already checked the railway luggage office for unclaimed baggage, "so far without result". Two days later, on 14 January, Detective Leane found the suitcase in that same office, on a rack, with its 30 November ticket attached.
"Luggage as clue to beach body", News (Adelaide), 12 January 1949, p. 1. Trove, National Library of Australia.
Date
Event
Source
12 Jan 1949
Police check of the luggage office reported "so far without result"
News, p. 1
14 Jan
Leane finds the case on a rack; some items taken to the police station
Leane, inquest pp. 22–24; Feltus, p. 61
19 Jan
The case itself is taken by police
Leane, inquest; Feltus, p. 62
Why it wasn't found the first time isn't recorded. The first check may have been a quick enquiry rather than a search, or the press may have got it wrong. Or the case may not yet have been on that rack. The article is reproduced in Gerry Feltus's book, The Unknown Man, but as far as I've been able to find, no one has set the two dates side by side before.
Feltus adds that some items were taken from the case to the police station on 14 January; he doesn't say which. The case itself stayed at the railway station until 19 January, in case someone came in to claim it. To me, as a former detective, that does not sit well as a reason for leaving an identified exhibit in railway hands for five days.
Watch Episode 1
The suitcase and the cloak room feature in the soon to be published YouTube version of Episode 1: The Somerton Dossier, Episode 1. The podcast version is here.
G. Cramer, "A ticking clock that may have stopped", tamamshud.blogspot.com, January 2026. [LINK]
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 in 1948 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 the suitcase or the cloak room, use the contact page. Submissions are read by Gordon Cramer, kept confidential unless you agree otherwise, and passed to SA Police where relevant.
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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Hey, what a good story, filled with facts and citations, not so common these days. What was in the suitcase? You sort of hint at it but don't reveal much about that. I get the drift with the process here and in your podcast. Agreed that something doesn't quite fit in place but hard to pin it down. I saw somewhere that there was a separate shirt and collar and there were collar studs found, what's your thinking on that?
Hello Tanya, thanks for stopping by. It is an interesting story, well the whole case is interesting, lots od leads and as you're probably aware, lots of claims made about all different aspects of the Somerton Man case. There are blogs that get deep in to the narratives and they're interesting conversations. Here, I avoid the narrative and the focus is on what can be proven and where is the evidence. Yoour specific question regarding the suitcase contents is a good one but a detailed response will have to wait a little while, I will be publishing an episode on that down the track, but not that far away. Regarding the separate collar issue, the suitcase contents included a front and rear collar stud, the short the man was wearing was stated to be similar to a short in the suitcase, None of the shorts in the suitcase had a separate collar and nothinbg is said in the evidence at the inquest or other documents that I have read mention a separate collar. If there is evidence then it will be interesting to read it. An aside note, my personal view is that there is reason to believe that the Somerton Man case has signs of Intelligence agency involvement so when reading through the documents or looking over the artefacts, by default you have an eye on what might indicate such an involvement and, in the case of artefacts like the suitcase contents, what items could have a dual use? Thanks again for dropping by, I hope this response is of interest for you.
Hey, what a good story, filled with facts and citations, not so common these days. What was in the suitcase? You sort of hint at it but don't reveal much about that. I get the drift with the process here and in your podcast. Agreed that something doesn't quite fit in place but hard to pin it down. I saw somewhere that there was a separate shirt and collar and there were collar studs found, what's your thinking on that?
ReplyDeleteHello Tanya, thanks for stopping by. It is an interesting story, well the whole case is interesting, lots od leads and as you're probably aware, lots of claims made about all different aspects of the Somerton Man case. There are blogs that get deep in to the narratives and they're interesting conversations. Here, I avoid the narrative and the focus is on what can be proven and where is the evidence. Yoour specific question regarding the suitcase contents is a good one but a detailed response will have to wait a little while, I will be publishing an episode on that down the track, but not that far away.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the separate collar issue, the suitcase contents included a front and rear collar stud, the short the man was wearing was stated to be similar to a short in the suitcase, None of the shorts in the suitcase had a separate collar and nothinbg is said in the evidence at the inquest or other documents that I have read mention a separate collar. If there is evidence then it will be interesting to read it.
An aside note, my personal view is that there is reason to believe that the Somerton Man case has signs of Intelligence agency involvement so when reading through the documents or looking over the artefacts, by default you have an eye on what might indicate such an involvement and, in the case of artefacts like the suitcase contents, what items could have a dual use?
Thanks again for dropping by, I hope this response is of interest for you.
Hi Gordon, What are the dimensions of that Timestamp machine, was it a hand held device?
ReplyDelete