The Somerton Man’s Doppelgänger
The 1948 Somerton Man has been identified as Carl (Charles)Webb by professor Abbott but Sidney (or Sydney) Roy (or Ray) Mitting is a curious doppelgänger. In 1922 he attended Swinburne Technical college and was in the football team the same as Carl in 1921. Carl worked as an engineer with RedPoint Tools (making hand drills) and Sidney as an engineer for the GPO (possibly fixing telegraph/telephone wires). According to the Ancestry site, Sidney Mitting was born 17th of December 1904 (or the 8th of August 1905) in Mildura and died 21st of August 1984 in Koorlong. Carl Webb was born on the 16th of November 1905 in Footscray and died on the beach at Somerton on the 30th of November/01 December 1948.
Sidney was likely a year above Carl in Swinburne. Sidney seemed to have focused his life around playing cricket for Merbein as a younger man and as president of the club in the 1930s. Both Carl and Sidney don’t seem to have military records on the NAA site. Carl and Sidney are such high score matches to each other with facial ID that some systems may decide they are the same person — if they just looked at the broadbrush landmark similarity scores. But it would be easy to see why people ‘should have thought’ the Somerton Man on the beach was Sidney — apart from ‘perhaps’ his height. It is surprising no-one identified the Somerton Man as Sidney Mitting. Sidney seems to have kept quite a low profile and avoided newspaper reports on his life. Just like Carl Webb.
Though someone seems to have collected the records for the Mittings.
https://www.ancientfaces.com/surname/mitting-family-history/1212756
AI reconstructions (with Sidney in the middle):
Background sources:
Table Talk. Melbourne. 10th December 1931. A PRETTY little flower girl, Lesley Williams, in a primrose georgette frock, finished with little flared frills, scattered petals before Miss Edith Grace Williams as she entered St. George’s Church, Malvern, for her marriage to Mr. Sidney Ray Mitting.
The bride is the youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs W. Williams, of Box Hill, and
the bridegroom is the youngest son of Mr and Mrs W. Mitting, of Black Rock.POSTMASTER-GENERAL’S DEPARTMENT (Retirement)
Central Staff
Section 85 (2) — Sidney Roy Mitting, Engineer Class 3, 3 February 1967 (aged 62)
The Postmaster-General’s Department was responsible for:
- Postal services throughout Australia
- Telegraphic services.
Carl Webb and Dorothy Jean Robertson: The marriage was celebrated at St Matthews, Prahran on 4th October 1941.
You can do your own comparisons here. But it does have problems with poor quality images.
