16 – A little provenance is required before we decide upon anything rash
As Professor Derek Abbott and the drop dead gorgeous Fiona of the Antiques Roadshow insist – provenance is everything.
I couldn’t agree more but (1) like Feltus, “I’m not going to say I believe it (Carl Webb is the Somerton Man) until such time as the police results and the forensic results that were done at the autopsy come back and confirm it, which I think they possibly will.”
And (2) like Forensic scientist and criminologist, Xanthe Mallett, “I’m not sure we’ll ever be absolutely certain.”
Because not only don’t we know the veracity of the chain of evidence that produced the hair where the Webb DNA was found…
We also don’t know who took the Webb family pictures, in addition …
We don’t know who owned the album they were found in.
We don’t know if that album was passed down through the family.
We don’t know which family member ended up with it.
We don’t know who tagged the foursome pic as Charlie, Roy and the grandparents.
We don’t know how they identified them,
… and we don’t know when they did it.
~~
The photos were taken before Stuart Webb’s great grandmother died in 1929. So no argument there. That’s her bottom row left second in. Amy.
The album surfaced only last year, meaning it had sat about gathering dust for over ninety years and during that time somebody tagged the photo, if not the day it was developed. It could have been the photographer, a cousin, uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, brother, sister, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, mother, father, grandchild or great grandchild – or any one of the in-laws, toss a coin because nobody knows. Well, maybe somebody does and if so slide us a comment and we’ll adjust what needs adjusting.
So, let’s go with the unknown family browser and pretend it’s 1954 or ’64 – ’74 even and they’re leafing through the old undated family album wanting to know who these four (as yet untagged) family members are.
Everybody knows the birthdays and ages of long dead family members these days as Ancestry provides all the details – but not so thirty years ago as Ancestry officially went online with the launch of Ancestry.com in 1996, so the family browser had to rely on somebody’s memory to identify this four, either that or find some photos that had already been tagged and although Stuart Webb says he has ‘heaps’ of them he has yet to produce even one more. But that’s the game he’s playing.
Say somebody remembers a young blonde-haired male family member living at about that time .. remembers his name: Charlie. Remembers he enlisted aged about 25.
This fellow.
Charles Richard Webb
Then they have another look at the foursome photo.
It’s got to be the same bloke second on the left. Same hair, forehead, ears look ok, face a little fatter but that’s what a beer diet does to a young bloke.
But we know it isn’t Charles Richard Webb as he was born in 1917 making him about 12 in 1929 and the blonde in the above pic is about twenty plus.
But our family browser may not have known this at the time and he thought that Charles Richard Webb was the righteous goods, so he mistakenly tagged him in the pic as Charlie.
Meaning he had the wrong man.
… and so must we because we believe him.
Deep enough?
I’ve just written it and still can’t understand it.
More: I remember last year proposing Richard was Charlie only to be shot down when Stuart confirmed the group photo date. Jo was in full agreement with me and Pelling was almost onboard. So what’s to say when the undated photo was tagged the same mistake wasn’t made?
The Somerton Man .. 
Seems PB that you are well on board with Stuart Webb’s 1925 family photo dating in which grandpa and grandma be still in their fifties, with the boys Roy and ‘Charlie’ (?) 20 and 21 respectively that about right Peteb?
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Buggered if I know mate, it’s all a mystery to me.
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PB: bit of a leg up might be in order to put you on track . For starters Stuart insists the album was passed down from his grandfather Norman Fredrick. You’ll note that no pbotos of Norman Webb have been put on display for our viewing to date unlesss under another name perhaps. Pelling hasn’t helped by ‘mistakenly’ claiming in his family photo thread header that Norman’s service record has not been digitised hence no army photo…check it out now and compare Norman’s file shot with that of older cousin Leo V.ivian Keane. Then tell us whos that laying on the grass. Now do some shuffling with the dates and you’ll see what I’m on about.
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I paid to get Norman Fredrick Webb’s service record digitised. I discovered it contained correspondence intended for the family of top cryptographer Norman Frederick Webb who served at Central Bureau (he had worked for ICI in Japan prior to WWII). Norman & Val Webb met as drivers during the war. They possibly knew Carl; Charlie was Norm’s brother, so I doubt they’d confuse the two men…
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Jo, more on that please … I’ll send flowers, money, a chat with George Clooney.
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Pete- There’s not much more to tell. The correspondence for the cryptographer’s family was from the 1990s, discussing Linda Webb, nee Paton’s service medal. She also worked in Central Bureau. Central Bureau workers were not allowed to talk about their service until the 1990s and so were often not recognised. The ABC documentary “Breaking the Code”, currently available on i-view has more on this (see the Garage Girls segment). Stuart Webb told me that his grandparents met as drivers during WWII. Carl would still be around during this time so they possibly met him (eg if Carl and Doff were invited to Leo Keanes’ wedding in 1943, or if Norm and Val were at Eliza Amelia Webb’s funeral in 1946). They would obviously know Charlie Richard Webb ie Norm’s brother. I’ve seen a photo of Charlie, Norm’s brother, as an old man but not as a younger or middle aged man, apart from the publicly available service record…I don’t think he really looks like SM. The only family photos of Carl that I’m aware of are those that were shared with the ABC, there was quite a bit of effort to find them. There was also a Cass family photo, potentially of a young Carl, around 18 years old, floating around on Facebook (found by David Morgan and Alexandrina Murray), but that was removed (the Cass family are descendants of Carl’s sister Doris Martin). There are older members of the family who do not want further family photos shared in the public domain so I doubt we’ll be seeing more. The last people alive who possible met or knew Carl would be Norma Martin who died in 2019 (the little girl in the family photo) and John Ivor Gavey (Joe Gavey’s grandson) who died in May last year…
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It seems that, as much as we hate it, we’re going to have to suck it up and wait for the DNA testing of the corpse.
To my mind, the provenance of the hair sample is fatally compromised and, in any case, possibility of contamination is pretty high. (By all accounts…every man and his dog was traipsing about that morgue)
Can you imagine if a modern day murder trial was taking place and this bit of DNA was being used to place Webb at the scene of the crime!
Any half-arsed lawyer would get it laughed out of court…yet Abbott peddles it as conclusive proof and everyone, other than us astute stinkers (I love that expression, John) seems to accept it.
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I reckon Dome’s mob are shy of a few astute thinkers after hoping one or two of them might be able to answer a few simple question. Didn’t happen. Shouldn’t have bothered.
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BTW…call me paranoid but it wouldn’t surprise me if a mysterious fire breaks out at the facility where the bod deady is being stored…and SM will forever be a mystery to everyone, (except those that made Harkness talk…and I’m 100% certain she did talk, and that’s why she seemingly got a free pass) forever.
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Guzz: seems that the fart smellers over CM way have shifted their onus of proof to some strange new things ado with Dorothy Webb cum Lockier nee Robertson’s previously visited and SM irrelevant Stratford-upon-Avon [sick] maternal lines…ps. I strongly doubt that a fire in said storeage faculty would burn anything but oxygen, there being stuff all else in there.
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Everything will be exposed … there will be weeping and the gnashing of teeth.
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Just wondering if there was ever any consensus on who the young gent in the back row of the families picnic photo between Roy and young blonde prankster?
That guy, based the males either side, looks well built / broad across his shoulders. If you had to pick a guy not to mess with based purely on that photo, picking from either Roy, middle male or the blonde prankster, who would you pick??
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Sly Dog: according to the weight of popular opinion the hulking brute you refer to be none other than big brother Russell who was described in a Victoria police gazette at age 20 as 5′ 3″ to 5′ 4″ tall and tending to be of slight build. If that’s y’man then he must have taken it as a timely hint to do some work on his body in the interim to when the pic was taken.
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Shabs reckons he’s SM ..
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The breaking news from blighty is the Liberal Dems. have won Somerton. So looks like we’re due for a change of fortune re SM investigation rebirthing at long last.
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Can’t see how our SM would manage to get himself into a Webb family fun day photo at Werribee in the mid thirties or even Surrento Park pre ’29 as some see it. Shabs opinions were not to be taken lightly by any means, but alas that was during a more productive cadetship period under firm Tbt guidance. Her initiatives may have changed their direction somewhat since then though, who’s to know.
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From what Jo’s been able to get from Stuart, seems he’s convinced one and all that no photos exist of grandfather Norm in his own Webb family album which is of course balderdash. And as for there being nobody left amongst the Webb/Keane clan who remembers Carl, that may well be the case unless Leo’s son John Robert remembered him as a child. I understand that John also supports Stuart in his dad be the lad on the grass and not Norm which will enable the pre 1929 team some added confidence.
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…what Jo forgot to tell us is that Norm was married to Hilda before Val and whilst I don’t recall the breakdown off hand. the Sanders website, as noted on myheritage, records him being the father of six. Norm’s grandson Stuart doesn’t refer to which wife’s child begat him though it is within reason that there be others in the family besides him that possess plenty of photographic reminders of the original Webbs including SM nominee ‘Charlie’.
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@Gordon 1552…Considering what that hair had been through, you’d expect it to be totally sterile. I wonder what the DNA Queen, Colleen Fitzpatrick, makes of all this?
It seems that, after a nuclear holocaust, not only would cochroaches and Keith Richards survive, but also Carl Charlie Webb’s hair.
( If only my “barnet” had been so durable…instead of beginning to retreat during the first half of the Nixon administration!)
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Guzz,
The best is yet to come…
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Or if you’re Derek Abbott, the worst.
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Precisely
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Wonder how Colleen’d make out getting sufficient testable DNA hair samples from old Chrome Dome Pelling if he went missing. Guess if he’d left his rug behind she’d give it the same treatment she got done on the alleged SM bust hair with Astrea allstars Corp for zip.
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