What do these people have in common ?
Starting with Professor Derek Abbott, then Lord Nicholas of Pelling and the learned decrypters who favour his site, Naval Intelligence, various reasonably informed personnel from Victoria, NSW and Queensland, the coterie of over-bright UoA students conscripted by Abbott to assist him in his decoding endeavours, experts in decryption, former spies, spies still in the game, the thousands of participants in the dozens of blogs, same with the hundreds of websites, many national and international newspapers, in fact anyone who has had a serious shot at making sense of the code. There must have been hundreds of thousands of them over the last 70 plus years, all beavering away at it – and of course we mustn’t forget the self proclaimed Master Of All Things Somerton Man, Christopher Gordon Cramer.
All those individuals spending countless hours looking at this:
WRGOAB A BD
MLIAOI
WTBIMP A NETP
MLIABO A IAQC
ITTMTS A AMSTGAB
… and none of them claimed to be able to discern a pattern or a coding device, a bit of hidden trickery, an identifier. A semi-sophisticated device that may have hinted at something a little devious hidden amongst the quatrains inside the RoK or something that might have assisted in deciphering the code itself.
It took an ex-slaughterhouse labourer to see what they could not. The pity is that the book itself mysteriously disappeared not long after it was allegedly handed in and before it was photographed.
The Somerton Man .. 
I take it no takers PB, not even Clive. Perhaps it be as likely as not, that your well deduced four A × 7 potential (partial) solution to the Rubaiyat code lines that fooled the experts is mearly a clever deception. The decoy stearing searchers away from the so called struck second line, which ‘I myself personally’ believe to be underlined rather than struck. Either way it does not significantly alter a potential solution being found within its MLIAOI letters, eg. May Life In Adelaide Offer Indepenence. Best I can come up with at short notice, but yous all get my drift aye?
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Yeah, no, maybe .. either that or some smart-arse cop faked it up to keep up the spy theory alive.
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Ironic that after all these years different individuals were looking at various interpretations of the code letters. Nobody twigged to the letter ‘A’ placed as the 7th letter in 4 out of the 5 lines, except for PB.
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Yeah baby … and PC Moss gets my vote for not being on the faked-up evidence payroll .. remember when he swore ‘I didn’t find the Tamam Sud slip’? What he didn’t say was ‘I didn’t find the fob pocket’ Then he owned up to not finding any matches on the body, despite what DS Leane swore. It’s all these little give-aways that has a bloke wondering whether those in the east coast stolen car business had as much sway in police and judicial circles as the Mafia had in America, not to mention the paid up pantheon of crooked cops, magistrates and judges in NSW back in the day.
I used to keep Murray Farquhar’s whisky glass topped up in the Bondi Diggers front bar back in the day and I meet one of George Freeman’s sons on a regular basis.
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Would come as no surprise that the ‘Mafia’ on the East of Australia had their fingers in all aspects of law and order in Australia, back in the late 1940’s. 4000 cars stolen in just 12 months speaks for itself. And, that’s just with cars, what other shady, criminal activities were ongoing at the same time?
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Clive .. this makes pertinent reading.
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/sydney-1960s-corruption-the-problem-lay-with-everyone-20170430-gvvk3p
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As for Gordon’s lastest offering “A Personal Note: The Somerton Man Book”, that he’s just cooked up for our reading pleasure. My advice to punters, don’t get too excited by the promised “soon to be released” advice. That being much the same as his Danetta espionage trilogy release news of long ago, for which we are still champing at the bit to get our eager hands on the first volume. Don’t hold your breath folks.
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