(A four and a half minute read).
...in my opinion, yes, I feel we are progressing. I have just returned from a twenty-minute walk to The Man of Tregantle’s grave. I’ve been there several times. Today I saw that someone had put a two pence piece on the headstone. I hadn’t noticed it before, and I looked up online to see if there was any relevance to this act. Coins left on headstones are a way to honour the deceased and show respect. Nice, I didn’t know that tradition.
I have only spoken to a few people about this search of mine, and two of them I spoke to on the way back home from my visit today. Both conversations were hugely encouraging, and this is the feeling I have had since hearing about the ‘SOME MOTHER’S SON’ headstone inscription some six months ago. I have only been actively making enquiries for about a month now.
My progress this week has been:
1) A visit to Trethill Cliffs, a twenty-minute bus ride and then forty-minute walk away from home. Trethill Cliffs is where The Man from Tregantle’s body was discovered in 1982.
2) I asked two questions to the former police officer who was at the scene of the discovery and who was then involved in the near on one year’s investigation into the identity of the body. I received the answers to my questions.
3) I have spent every evening learning more about life in the Merchant Navy, by scrolling through the forum on www.merchant-navy.net This is a great website dedicated to all those interested in the Merchant Navy, past and present. I have asked questions, presented a loose theory as to how the Man from Tregantle may have ended up on the cliffs, and subsequently have had replies and interesting information returned from some of the thousands of members from all around the world on the site.
So, back to number one on the list. I took the bus to Tregantle Fort and then walked for about forty-minutes along the Southwest Coast Footpath to where I knew, (to within about two hundred yards), where Tregantle Man’s body was found. The field in which he was found borders the B3247 road which runs between Crafthole and Torpoint, so only a short hop from the road if it was the dead of night and you were cold and tired and needed to get your head down for a rest.
The views along the coastline and out to sea are beautiful here and the main reason people visit this spot is because they are walking the coast path, or simply walking from Tregantle to Portwrinkle, a distance of around two and a half miles, just over an hour’s walk.
The sun was out whilst I was there, and I sat down for a while and chatted with T.Man always mindful that I am prying into his life, and death, and his potential desire to remain anonymous-unless he wants human help to change this condition. And I still believe that the time is right to help change this condition. I am going on my feelings. I might be wrong, but nothing tells me I am wrong so far.
Onto point number two. I asked the former police officer whether he remembered if there was any camping equipment or backpack with his body. The answer was no. Apart from his skeleton, some loose change from the nineteen seventies, his virtually destroyed passport, virtually destroyed Merchant Navy Discharge book and a copy of the Sun newspaper from nineteen seventy-eight, (how that survived I don’t know), there was nothing else found with him.
The second question I asked about was the figures around the issue date on his passport. The date was readable because it was embossed onto the passport and not written in ink. When the police investigators went to Newport Passport Headquarters, they came up with around twelve thousand possible names that were issued on the day and the day before the passport’s issue date. Throughout the ensuing months, the police officers and CID managed to whittle that figure down to twenty-three people that they couldn’t trace. Quite some feat for the early nineteen eighties. I imagine that a similar search could potentially take mere seconds in our present year of two thousand and twenty-five.
And onto point three. How interesting it has been for me to delve into the life and lives of those involved in the Merchant Navy. The website I mention above has thousands of members from all around the world. There are thousands of photographs, plenty of videos, articles on life at sea, and tens of thousands of posts on all different facets of life at sea. One of the main aims of the site is to catch up with friends of old, and you can see by flitting around the site that old friendships are found, and information is shared.
Will this site help in our potential identification of The Man from Tregantle? It could well do. It could provide that vital link between being clueless, and to solving this forty-three-year-old mystery. But it must be done, in my opinion, with the interest of The Man from Tregantle foremost. This is not a personal challenge of mine, because personal challenges can get in the way of another person’s truth being revealed. It is not our life we are talking about here; it is The Man from Tregantle’s, and we don’t know the circumstances of that life. We need, in my opinion, to tread carefully, lightly, sensitively.
And where from here? Personally, I will be spending the evenings learning more about the lives of those involved with the Merchant Navy. I have stopped sending messages to the police to ask if they still have record of T.Man’s documents. I think I have sent four in total.
This investigation may not need the help of the police though. I think if we are calm, sensitive, enquiring, positive, and above all continue to respect the life of The Man from Tregantle, then the truth of the matter should, could and hopefully will, continue to rise to the surface.
Could it be, and this is just a loose theory for the time being, that The Man from Tregantle was on his way to an upcoming job on a ship or returning from a job on a ship? He could have been hitchhiking, and walking, and just got very tired and needed a lie down. He skipped off the road into a field, found protection from some bushes, lay down, and somehow and for some reason died where he lay. A loose theory, as I say, but for me it’s one to work with, and as one of the gentlemen on the Merchant Navy site said, “It’s feasible”.
Thank you for reading this. The quest continues...calmly.