Coincidence is just a couple of things happening simultaneously..
Coincidence .. a writers’s best friend, a theorist’s cloak of relevance, a set of circumstances that are coincidentally relevant to those put forward as an explanation to the finding of an unidentified body on Somerton Beach on November 1st 1948.
Men of suicidal intent sometimes underline their aims by leaving a note explaining their actions – like Tibor Kaldor, a suicide who coincidentally shared a slot in the same morgue as the Somerton man and at the same time. The man we have now been told was Carl Webb: the official determination of that claim expected soon.
Other men die of natural causes like “George Webb who collapsed and died when about to enter Adelaide Oval to see Norwood play West Adelaide on Monday, 13 June, 1949.
He too would have shared a freezer slot at the morgue at about the same time Paul Lawson was doing his reconstructive work on the head and shoulders of the Somerton man.
City morgues have many freezer slots, some inhabited by known corpses, others not so.
Coincidence.
The betrayer of logic.
Not every body retrieved from the circumstances of their death has even in these days been identified though sometimes they have been linked to someone else by the most fragile of evidence.
A thread. A hair.
The Somerton Man .. 
Best coincidence might well be, having a minister of the same surname as the deceased in doing the funeral and not having any clue SM be his namesake..that is of course in the unlikely event the Unknown Man turns out to be Charlie Webb.
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There’s that.
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Perhaps the other Webb was related to Carl Webb somehow!maybe a distant relative? Maybe one body looked like the other and they went with that! Was G.Webb’s body accounted for?
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Yep
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Nine other Charles Webbs in situ at West End cemetery and one more if SM = Charlie. Now that would be a real coincidence. No?
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Then there was SM’s West Terrace slab mate from day one W. Cohen who was 5′ 10″ & strongly built. Bill died suddenly in his butchery next door but one to Freeman Chemists. Guess that might pass the coincidence test at a pinch.
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All those bodies and just be one morgue trolly, a wooden trolley that may have deposited the blood found on SM’s shirt, not to mention the odd strand of hair found stuck to Lawson’s plaster bust ..
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As was pointed out over a year ago, the blood tinted stain was found on one side only of a tear, so the chance that this was caused by a trolley is negligible and can be debunked.
It is much more likely to have been caused by something poking through the shirt while he was alive, like a (poisoned) blade put to his neck.
References to this in the notes included with the report to the coroner:
In exhibit A:
“Stain … blood in back of neck of shirt. (No stain in coat). ? from slab. Who undressed him?”
In exhibit C:
“Shirt – large blood-tinted stain in arch of shirt near tip on one side only of a tear“
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Or else the damage occurred when a nail from dislodged stair railing came in contact with the shoulder of his jacket and shirt collar as he tumbled through the gap and down to X marks the spot. I recall spinning that line once or twice over the years to great applause.
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Another Webb coincidence
It’s Jas Webb at 3 Wentworth St, Cottesloe
You’ll find it in Wise’s Perth Directory (and 1949)
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You’ll also find it in a link accompanying David Morgan’s last post of even date at CM but that’s hardly a co-incidence!
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