Tunbridge Wells, and a pigeony bombshell…?

Yet more dead WW2 cipher pigeon thoughts for you all (though I rather hope normal service will be resumed shortly, *sigh*).

Peter Hibbs runs a website called Pillblogs (to which commenter Germo passed me a link, thanks very much!), part of “The Defence of East Sussex Project”, a research project. But rather than throwing yet more unsubstantiated pigeon-related speculation onto the media bonfire of the last few days, Pete had some interesting opinions based on actual documents he had recently gone through to do with the military’s Eastern Command Pigeon Service set up in 1940.

Plotting the location of pigeon lofts as found in a 1940 war diary (and with the TW and DK pigeon tags fresh in his memory), Pete noticed that there were quite a few pigeon lofts in Tunbridge Wells, a mere ten or so miles south-east of Bletchingley (where our pigeon ended up dead). What’s more, when he totted up the number of pigeons in those lofts able to be used by the Eastern Command Pigeon Service, the total ended up very close to the magic number “194” (as in “NURP 40 TW 194“).

So… could TW in fact be Royal Tunbridge Wells? It’s a pretty good question, and may (despite a few apparently showstopping problems) indeed lead us all to a surprisingly good answer.

When I first started thinking about this pigeon story, I also considered Tunbridge Wells as a possibility for “TW”, but the immediate issue is that Bletchingley is simply the wrong side. Would a pigeon flying from the continent overshoot by ten miles, I wondered? Probably not, on balance.

What’s more, racing pigeons lead a simple, cosseted, safe life, and often end up living to an age of ten or more: which means that the number of newly-ringed pigeons per year in those Tunbridge Wells lofts would probably only need to be 20 or 30 (say, 40 max), far lower than would be needed to reach 194 in a single year, I would have thought.

And yet, and yet… put all these fragments together, and an entirely different possibility emerges. “TW” or “DK” could very easily be not so much a single town as a regional postcode, a grouping for a whole set of pigeon loft owners over a wide geographic area to share between them. In which case, the extraordinary possibility we should immediately consider is whether the loft to which our pigeon was returning was (whether DK/Dorking or TW/Tunbridge Wells) right in Bletchingley itself – this deceased ex-bird you sold me (etc) might already have been a street or two away from its home. Hence the old adage about most car accidents happening within half a mile of home might well have an unexpectedly pigeony analogue here!

I therefore urge the meticulous and hardworking Mr Hibbs to look again to see if there are any pigeon loft addresses listed far closer to Bletchingley itself. It may be that one of these falls within a “TW” or “DK” pigeon-postcode, something that I didn’t at all expect myself! All the same, before too long I suspect we will have a proper answer as to who the pigeon’s owner was… and he/she might just turn out to live rather closer to Bletchingley’s High Street than one might at first think. 🙂

But today’s bombshell is that I now suspect the Serjeant’s name was not “W Stott” but “W Stout” – having enhanced the image above like crazy this last day, this now seems a marginally more likely reading. Yet the Allied forces seem to have had only a single Serjeant (definitely with a ‘j’) William Stout 3650400 from St Helens in Lancashire in 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers, who died on 6th June 1944 aged 37. His grave is 1. C. 11 in Hermanville War Cemetery in Calvados, Normandy: he was the son of William and Margaret Stout, and husband of Ursula Ann Stout, all of St. Helens.

But that’s as far as straightforward web-searching has taken me – so perhaps a Cipher Mystery reader with helpful database subscriptions might see if there’s anything more we can tell about him? I know you all like a bit of a challenge… 😉

Incidentally, 253 Field Company served in France and Belgium, which would seem to be entirely consistent with what (little) we know so far: the story of much of its war is retold in “Sword of Bone: Phoney War and Dunkirk, 1940” by Anthony Rhodes, which I’ve ordered (of course) – there are copies on Abebooks and elsewhere for only a few pounds, if you are interested.

Is it Stott or Stout? The jury’s out! 🙂