A splendid “Do Not Bend” document envelope arrived here a few minutes ago (courtesy of the lovely people at the National Archives of Australia), containing the Form of Application for Registration #24041 for a certain ‘Willen Styn’ I mentioned a few days ago.
Alas, cutting straight to the chase, he’s not our Unknown Man: though he had grey eyes and was of medium build, he was only 5′ 7½” tall and had – definitively enough – a quite different left thumb-print (assuming the fingerprint chart on p.207 of Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” is correct 🙂 ).
According to the form dated 17th July 1919, this Dutchman was born in Amsterdam in 1894; signed his name “W. Stijn” (which presumably Aliens Registration Officer Hewitt miscopied or misheard as “Styn”); had arrived on the ship Port Albany from Cardiff; was working as a fireman; and lived at “15 Lord St, Penarith” (which doesn’t seem to exist, so I suspect should actually have been ’15 Lawson St, Penrith’), not too far from Penrith’s present-day Museum of Fire (one hour west of Sydney).
From all the other apparent typos on this single page form, I’d also guess he will turn out to be “Willem Stijn”. But regardless, he’s not our (unknown) man, I just thought you’d like to know. Oh well! 🙁
Incidentally, there seem to be good archival records of NSW firemen 1884-1955, so there may be more about firefighter Stijn in the Personnel record books in Western Sydney Records Centre in (dare I say it again) Kingswood. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? :-p