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I can't see why not? Are they still missing?
Are they different to the Danetta posts you've made above?
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AFLW 2024 - Round 10 - Chat, game threads, injury lists, team lineups and more.
Unsolved Rubaiyat - Suspicious deaths, codes & spies
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Are they different to the Danetta posts you've made above?
Gordon1552
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They didn't appear immediately but all good now.
08 Oct 1948 - REDS AT (Williamstown) NAVAL DOCKYARDS - Daily Mercury (Mackay, Qld) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article171439470
Another rabbit hole to search for an associate of Keane and Pile....
Apparently Ewen's source in 1948 might of been Sharpley
07 Jul 1949 - COMMUNIST CELLS IN DEFENCE DEPOTS - Advocate (Burnie, Tas.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article69337381
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Another rabbit hole to search for an associate of Keane and Pile....
Apparently Ewen's source in 1948 might of been Sharpley
07 Jul 1949 - COMMUNIST CELLS IN DEFENCE DEPOTS - Advocate (Burnie, Tas.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article69337381
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What made this 55 year old man suddenly collapse and die at the Williamstown Naval Dockyards? Did he eat a bad pastie?
05 Nov 1948 - Died at Work. - Williamstown Chronicle (Vic) Ernest George Cunningham http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70724776
I'd suspect that he wouldn't of been wise to of asked Maude to prepare his lunch, after the last time she walked into a door knob.
21 Apr 1944 - Williamstown Court - Williamstown Chronicle (Vic) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70680290
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Report of Royal Commission Inquiring into the Origins, Aims, Objects and Funds of the Communist Party in Victoria and Other Related Matters 1949
View attachment VPARL1950-51No12.pdf
Sharpley's biography
So, Sharpley sells his story to Murdoch and Murdoch serialized it in his newspapers.
I'd presume that Murdoch would've hired a bunch of gumshoes to validate Sharpley's allegations before forking over the money...
Must've been a pretty dangerous task, considering that amongst others which Sharpley was dobbing on, that the gumshoes were dealing with a bunch of painters and dockers down at the naval shipyards
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View attachment VPARL1950-51No12.pdf
Sharpley's biography
So, Sharpley sells his story to Murdoch and Murdoch serialized it in his newspapers.
I'd presume that Murdoch would've hired a bunch of gumshoes to validate Sharpley's allegations before forking over the money...
Must've been a pretty dangerous task, considering that amongst others which Sharpley was dobbing on, that the gumshoes were dealing with a bunch of painters and dockers down at the naval shipyards
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Nick Pelling had touched upon the painters and dockers previously, but not in regards to their communist connections and the Clayton spy ring. If he knew that Pile is possibly connected to Harkness, I wonder if this would've got his attention? https://ciphermysteries.com/2018/12/02/seventy-years-of-the-somerton-man-mystery
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The Rubaiyat: History’s most luxurious book of poetry? Or a curse of death? http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20...us-book-of-poetry?ocid=ww.social.link.twitter via @BBC_Culture
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"“MYSTERY OF THE SOMERTON MAN”, “THE CRYSTAL SKULL’S DEATH STARE” and 8 More Horrors! #WeirdDarkness" by @WeirdDarkness via #spreaker https://www.spreaker.com/user/11472158/wd20191209_1
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Gordon1552
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2 notes from Clive about a car accident:
A spy like Horrie
ASIO has declassified secret files that shed new light on one of the most dramatic cases of Cold War espionage in Australia's historywww.smh.com.au
Extract》
However, the reality was that a major counter-espionage operation had been aborted. There were lingering questions that engaged ASIO officers for many years. Who was Marshall's mysterious contact and why had he failed to show up? Who was leaking information of such value that the KGB would supply sophisticated communications equipment?
There have been no answers, at least publicly, to these questions in more than five decades. However, declassified ASIO files now reveal that ASIO did have a prime suspect - Horace Allan Pile, an electronics components salesman who was a frequent visitor to WRE.
Born in Colac in Victoria in 1923, Pile served as a Royal Australian Air Force radar technician during the Second World War, rising to the rank of sergeant. Against the backdrop of the Western wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, he also joined the Communist Party while training at the Tocumwal RAAF base in NSW in 1943.
After he was demobbed in 1945, Pile became a Communist Party organiser in Victoria. His devotion to the cause, described by ASIO informants as ''fanatical'' and ''intense'', was such that he left his first wife, Kathleen, after she refused to join the party.
Pile moved to Adelaide in what ASIO thought were ''unusual circumstances'' in 1951. He was immediately elected to the Communist Party's state executive committee. A year later he became a full-time party organiser before becoming state secretary of the Ships Painters and Dockers Union.
Significantly, Pile was also involved with the party's ''illegal apparatus'', a network of members who avoided open political activity so that the party could operate clandestinely if the government moved to make its activities illegal. Prominent South Australian communist lawyer Elliott Johnston recalled more than four decades later that ''Horrie was sent to us by the Central Committee … to help set things up to keep the party going [in South Australia] if Menzies had succeeded in bringing in a ban.''
Johnston said Walter Seddon Clayton, a member of the party's central control commission responsible for internal discipline and security, was responsible for Pile's transfer to South Australia. Codenamed ''Klod'', Clayton was the spymaster who ran a network of Australian communist spies who passed secret government information to Soviet intelligence from 1944 to 1950.
Clayton would effectively disappear for several years in the early 1950s to avoid ASIO surveillance. Little is known of his activities in this period, but he may not have entirely ceased his espionage role.
From about 1956 Pile began to withdraw from overt party activity. In early 1959 he resigned from the Painters and Dockers and took up employment with an electrical goods company, Gerard and Goodman. Two years later he became the Adelaide sales representative for a major electronic equipment and components supplier, Jacoby Mitchell.
This was a significant development because Jacoby Mitchell was a leading supplier of electronic test equipment and instruments to the Weapons Research Establishment. As the firm's South Australian salesman and technical adviser, Pile began to visit WRE on a regular basis in early 1961.
Pile did not tell Jacoby Mitchell of his involvement with the Communist Party. Nor did he apply for a security pass and submit to a security clearance process which would have almost certainly rejected him. Instead he visited WRE under escort, and was soon passing through the main security checkpoint at least two or three times a week.
Pile was good at his job. A WRE security officer observed that ''Pile is assessed by technical personnel, with whom he deals, as being a very good technical man … Mr Pile is a very good salesman.''
Pile's work brought him into contact with technical personnel with ''wide access to very sensitive information'' including warhead fusing systems, telemetry systems and other aspects of the Bloodhound and Thunderbird surface-to-air missile projects, the Blue Steel nuclear tipped bomb, and the Australian Ikara anti-submarine missile. WRE security officers feared ''the possibility of him obtaining classified information is very real''.
By mid-December 1962, ASIO's Adelaide office somewhat belatedly concluded that Pile was a ''subject worthy of concentrated attention''. He was designated a ''suspect illegal'' - that is a spy - and placed under close surveillance.
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1. Just came across an article about a Horace Allan Pile involved in a car
accident. "News" (Adelaide) 8 Jan 1954 Page 1. I'm assuming it's our
commie friend!
2. Just had a thought! In the car accident, Horace Pile was with a Mrs
Rovka Pile, his wife, I presume?
The letter signed by a R. Harkness, could that be Rovka?
I wonder if Horace was the driver? Pile Driver?
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“When the Titanic went down on the night of April 14 1912 in the sea off the New World, its most eminent victim was a book…” French-Lebanese author Amin Maalouf may have been stretching it a bit in his 1988 historical novel Samarkand.
Completed in 1911 after two years of intensive labour by George Sutcliffe and Francis Sangorski, the book – of Edward FitzGerald’s loose Victorian interpretations of Omar Khayyám’s poems, illustrated by Elihu Vedder – came to be known as ‘The Great Omar’, as well as ‘The Book Wonderful’, on account of its sheer splendour. Gracing its gilded cover were three peacocks with bejewelled tails, surrounded by intricate patterns and floral sprays typical of medieval Persian manuscripts, while a Greek bouzouki could be seen on the back.
Over 1000 precious and semi-precious stones – rubies, turquoises, emeralds, and others – were used in its making, as well as nearly 5000 pieces of leather, silver, ivory, and ebony inlays, and 600 sheets of 22-karat gold leaf.
The story, however, didn’t end with the sinking of the Titanic, or even Sangorski’s strange death by drowning some weeks afterwards. Sutcliffe’s nephew Stanley Bray was determined to revive not only the memory of the Great Omar, but also the book itself. Using Sangorski’s original drawings, he managed – after a gruelling six years – to replicate the book, which was placed in a bank vault.
The Great Omar, it seemed, had been born under a bad sign, for, during the London Blitz of World War Two, it was – not unlike the poet’s wine jugs, symbolic of human frailty – dashed to pieces. Shaken, but not shattered, Bray once again rolled up his sleeves to produce yet another version of his uncle’s swan song. This time, however, its making wasn’t a matter of years, but decades.
Completed after 40 years of on-and-off work, Bray’s tribulations were realised in another stunning reproduction, which he loaned to the British Library, and which his estate bequeathed to the institution following his death, where it can be seen today. “I am not in the least bit superstitious,” Bray remarked shortly before his demise, “even though they do say that the peacock is a symbol of disaster”.
What was the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and who was this enigmatic personage with whom Sotheran’s, as well as innumerable others, were fascinated? An 11th-Century polymath from eastern Iran, Khayyám was revered in his lifetime for his groundbreaking work in astronomy and mathematics.
Owing to his inquisitive nature, Khayyám questioned things most around him took for granted: faith, the hereafter, and the meaning of life itself. He had little confidence in the promises of religion, with its talk of Heaven and Hell, and even expressed doubts regarding the logic of God. There was only one thing Khayyám was certain about, and which he cherished: this life.
He well understood the transience of life and the inevitability of death, and the importance of seizing the all-too-brief moment we are allotted on earth.
Although not exactly a translation of the original Persian poems, FitzGerald’s very loose interpretation captured, to no small degree, the spirit of the Rubáiyát and the poet’s Weltanschauung – hence the reference to the author as ‘FitzOmar’.
While it enjoyed little popularity upon its release, the slim yet profound volume soon came to enjoy a popularity FitzGerald could never have imagined.
Countless other editions were also produced, with every manner of illustration, by artists such as Edmund Dulac and Edmund Joseph Sullivan. One illustration by the latter, in fact, later came to grace the Grateful Dead’s self-titled 1971 album.
Elsewhere, the acclaimed short story writer Hector Hugh Munro chose the nom de plume ‘Saki’ (the title Khayyám used to address his cupbearer), while Agatha Christie’s 1942 novel The Moving Fingerhad a FitzOmar poem as its namesake. That’s not to mention the 1957 Hollywood film made about Khayyám, US actor Alfred Drake’s 1960 recitation of the entire Rubáiyát, and Martin Luther King’s quotation of him in a 1967 anti-war speech (he beat Bill Clinton to it by a few decades), amongst many other instances. In the 1950s, the Rubáiyát was so popular that more than half of it could be found in the compendiums Bartlett’s Quotations and The Oxford Book of Quotations.
FitzGerald’s rendition of the Rubáiyát is still, in spite of the prodigious liberties he took, the most well-known English version of it by far, and an English classic in its own right.
The answer lies in the timelessness of the Rubáiyát, and its universal truths that know not culture, religion, or creed.
How swiftly does this caravan of life pass;
Seek thou the moment that with joy does lapse.
Saghi, why lament tomorrow’s misfortunes today?
Bring forth the chalice, for the night shall pass.
All poetry translations by the author.
Very interesting background information.
Yes, I hit a stone wall on Pile's genealogy. Thanks for the name. It's maybe his sister. There's a tad more delving to do to confirm his Harkness connection directly to Jessica and then turn an assumption that Jessica was either a fellow traveller or an informant upon Pile and his friends, into a confirmation.2 notes from Clive about a car accident:
1. Just came across an article about a Horace Allan Pile involved in a car
accident. "News" (Adelaide) 8 Jan 1954 Page 1. I'm assuming it's our
commie friend!
2. Just had a thought! In the car accident, Horace Pile was with a Mrs
Rovka Pile, his wife, I presume?
The letter signed by a R. Harkness, could that be Rovka?
I wonder if Horace was the driver? Pile Driver?
Talking of Pile. He went to RADSchool whilst in the RAAF during the war, to become a RADAR op or technician. I came across this 1945 letter in a newspaper from a James Baird of Point Cook RAAF base when searching for people to look for associates with Keane and Pile...
09 Nov 1945 - WILLIAMSTOWN ELECTION - Williamstown Chronicle (Vic.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article70683931
Now in NAA last night I got somewhat confused. There's a massive ASIO file on James Albert Baird, but RAAF records appear to show another, James Bailie Baird, Flt Sgt, cook by trade, of Norwood SA, as most likely candidate to be our communist letter writer. http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/AutoSearch.asp?O=I&Number=4396390 Last heard from in 1968, Lines St Enfield.
Could the famous Communist Party Member, Amalgamated Metal Workers Union, trade union organiser, and Tribune correspondent, from Sydney, with 6 volumes of ASIO files be a relative? Would he have the same first name but not second?, a son?, seems unlikely? James Albert Baird born 1924 has a service record, but is it post war? It's not digitised yet. Seems to have some more digging to do.
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Gordon1552
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With it being a Mrs Vorna Pile, that could make her his sister-in-law but not his sister?
Macabre...
Sullivan’s illustrations for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam http://shahrefarang.com/en/sullivans-illustrations-for-the-rubaiyat-of-omar-khayyam/
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Sullivan’s illustrations for The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam http://shahrefarang.com/en/sullivans-illustrations-for-the-rubaiyat-of-omar-khayyam/
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Not quite so macabre... unless you consider that the first is at the bottom of the Atlantic, and the second was destroyed in the blitz.
Elihu Vedder
americanart.si.edu
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Elihu Vedder
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
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Not sure that we'd actually need to prove Pile is related to Harkness. I'm just expanding the list of acquaintances in the search for a possible Somerton Man. Somehow he's possibly come into contact with her before, if we accept that Robin is his child, and he was in contact with someone who gave her contact details to him later. The why's and how's are just suppositions to narrow the field, but it's potentiality more dead ends. The hunt is on nether the less
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Looks like Jim Baird might've been our letter writer after all.
29 Mar 1946 - HARTLEY’S BIG PROPERTY HOLDINGS - Tribune (Sydney, NSW) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article206682603
Here's a comrade of his posing with his kid.
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The problem with missing persons photos in newspapers is invariably the photos given to the papers are out of date. In some cases up to ten years out of date. This makes the search hard, but it's the best we'll get to work with, until more records in NAA are digitised.
05 Dec 1948 - WYNNUM MAN STRANGELY VANISHES - Truth (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article203223853
Leslie Royal Thornhill's service record giving his date of birth 12/1/1909
Sometimes the same picture looks younger
01 Dec 1948 - Bayside father of 6. missing - The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49931832
Sometimes the same picture looks older
23 Jan 1949 - POLICE SEEK MISSING PEOPLE - Truth (Sydney, NSW) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168885196
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05 Dec 1948 - WYNNUM MAN STRANGELY VANISHES - Truth (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article203223853
Leslie Royal Thornhill's service record giving his date of birth 12/1/1909
Sometimes the same picture looks younger
01 Dec 1948 - Bayside father of 6. missing - The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49931832
Sometimes the same picture looks older
23 Jan 1949 - POLICE SEEK MISSING PEOPLE - Truth (Sydney, NSW) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168885196
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Another problem with searching old photos is how badly reproduced they are. And then newspapers have fixed column widths, so sometimes instead of cropping a photo, they squish it, as in the preceding example where the photo of the sailor is squished and thus makes his face look long and skinny. But the clue to this is in his hat. Maybe someone can get the original from the newspaper or use paintdotnet to unsquish it?The problem with missing persons photos in newspapers is invariably the photos given to the papers are out of date. In some cases up to ten years out of date. This makes the search hard, but it's the best we'll get to work with, until more records in NAA are digitised.
05 Dec 1948 - WYNNUM MAN STRANGELY VANISHES - Truth (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article203223853
Leslie Royal Thornhill's service record giving his date of birth 12/1/1909
Sometimes the same picture looks younger
01 Dec 1948 - Bayside father of 6. missing - The Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Qld.) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article49931832
Sometimes the same picture looks older
23 Jan 1949 - POLICE SEEK MISSING PEOPLE - Truth (Sydney, NSW) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article168885196
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Gordon1552
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Best I could do, poor quality image. Just removed his hat and then cropped as near as possible to the outline and gave him a bit of a haircut. If you look at to the right of the first modified image on the forehead where it meets the hairline and then down to just on the eyebrow of the left eye, they had manually touched up the image.
In the second modified pic I broadened the image a little, not straightforward to narrow the width of the forehead without cropping it, and then smoothed over the touched up area and cropped the hairline in marginally on the right.
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I agree, the only picture of Thornhill is such poor quality that it's hard to age progress it, let alone after unsquishing whatever the newspaper did to fit it into their column width.
I'd understand why no one would think in 1948 that the picture as it was then in the newspaper would look anything like SM.
But even comparing what you've achieved, with pictures of the bust in Adelaide museum shows remarkable similarities.
We'd have to check against the autopsy in regards to height, scars and anything to indicate a limp, I think before we rule him out. The rationale, is that theres no records that Thornhill has ever been found, and that assertion seems to be supported by what I found on a genealogy site, which appears to of been uploaded by one of his daughters, which if so, she obviously has no clue of his death or any other details indicating that he never rejoined the family unit.
His service history appears to give hima reasonable chance of being in the right place at the right time to of become acquainted with Jessica when she would've conceived Robin, and by newspaper accounts it appears that he would've been hospitalised due to at least mental injuries if not physical ones after being discharged from the navy.
There maybe some discrepancies between descriptions of Thornhill and SM though, but it maybe worthwhile to consider whether they are just inaccuracies in records.
PS: Thornhill's service record indicates that he was a pastry cook. I'd be loathe to generalise, but every pastry cook I've met tends to become overweight with time. The face would've possibly been fatter with age. And being a pastry cook, he might've appreciated a good pastie when he saw one.
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Depends upon how accurate that description in the newspaper is. Thornhill doesn't have it missing in his service medical. So whether it was amputated or the joint fused meaning that it was only functionally missing becomes important, as one is obvious whilst the other might only be obvious on an alive person. That is why I question the accuracy of newspaper articles. Once SM is exhumed, they might look for skeletal deformities that would not of been apparent at the initial autopsy.
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Thornbill does fit some criteria matching SM, his clothes may even have come from the 'People's Palace', however he was suffering from depression and thought be seen bearded and dishevelled in appearance. SM may have had hands fitting a pastry chef rather than manual labour though. I read this articles intended meaning to be, that Mr. Thornbill's thumb was missing down to the first joint, and included as a distinguishing feature that would set him apart if found hospitalised with confusion / memory loss, or found deceased. SM's body was scrutinised for clues, including his finger nails, and he was said to be 'well groomed' rather than neglected (which comes with depression). If Mr. Thornbill was classified as a 'missing person' he should still be on police records as such. If his surviving children want answers with identification, they can now submit DNA to rule out SM once those results are in (if successful).
Leslie Royal Thornhill will just be parked in the possibility column whilst continuing my search. There's not much to go on as yet with him, and there's certainly plenty of apparent discrepancy between the 2, and not enough information available yet to resolve them.
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If you're discussing Mr. Thornbill as a possible SM, why don't you contact his children. You can ask them to examine old family photos where their father's dressed as a civilian. The clothes found in SM's suitcase were distinctive enough to compare to items from their father's wardrobe (white tie, tartan scarf etc.). I don't recall the article stating the nature of job he'd applied for, but this could give reason to pack a suitcase. There's nothing inside the case related to a pastry chef, but his new job could make the contents more relevant. As Prof. Henneberg believes the Seaman's I.D. photo matches SM, maybe you should compare this to Mr. Thornbill as well.
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