Category Archives: Dorabella Cipher

There are plenty of things about Edward Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher that rarely appear in the countless gosh-wow sites that feature it on the web. And arguably one of the biggest of these is its timeline.

1886: The Liszt Fragment

The earliest instance we know of where Elgar used the ‘Dorabella’ shapes to write something down was when jotting something in the left margin of a programme for a Liszt concert at the Crystal Palace (10th April 1886). The best quality image of this fragment appears on p.134 in Craig Bauer’s magisterial “Unsolved!”, which I reproduce here:

This contains a fair few repeated shapes, which would be good grist for the cryptanalytic mill were the fragment not so darned short:

Though Anthony Thorley claimed to have ‘decrypted’ this fragment in (or before) 1977 as “GETS YOU TO JOY, AND HYSTERIOUS”, this looks just plain wrong to Bauer (and to me). This is not only because none of the repeated letter usages line up, but also because it’s basically the wrong length (Thorley’s phrase is 25 letters long, while the fragment is made up of eighteen shapes plus a terminal dash).

If this Liszt fragment is a cipher, I’m sure Big Data people wouldn’t have to try hugely hard to build up a list of all 18-letter English letter sequences with the same aBCDeCfgBhiDCBijkl pattern. Perhaps looking for matches for the 13-letter stretch from BCD to DCB might be a productive exercise?

At the same time, it is tempting to wonder whether Elgar was using these shapes as some kind of idiosyncratic musical notation. However, even though the eighteen-glyph-plus-hyphen fragment appears in the margin beside an eighteen-note arpeggiated melody (Liszt’s “allegretto pastorale” motif, which appears as “an independent episode” according to the programme notes), it has none of its musical symmetry.

So: even though the Liszt fragments looks as though it really ought to be a simple cipher (and, moreover, a simple cipher that Elgar had without any real doubt used many times before), none of the claimed decryptions put forward for it make much sense. It’s possible Elgar was using his own brand of self-pleasing nonsense verbiage but… this is as far as we can get.

1897: The Dorabella Cipher

According to her 1937 book “Edward Elgar: Memories of a Variation”, a young Dora Penny’s first met Edward Elgar on 6th December 1895. Elgar’s wife was an old friend of Dora’s stepmother, and so the couple had come to visit. Elgar and Dora talked, but not about music: rather, he wanted to know about Wolverhampton Wanderers (the club was close to the Penny’s house).

All the same, he did sit down at the piano in the drawing room before luncheon, where Dora turned over the pages for him. This proved to be a challenge, as “[w]hen it came to playing from his own manuscripts you often saw nothing but a few pencilled notes and a mark or two, when he was playing something tremendous – full orchestra and chorus perhaps“, though over time she did become “rather clever at it“.

Elgar first got to see a football match with Dora on 17th October 1896. He subsequently “was much taken with the names of some of the players – particularly Malpas. […] I have known him say when we met: ‘There you are. How’s Malpas?’ – a question I was not always able to answer.“

Her book reproduces a letter she received from Elgar with a distinctive red ‘E’ seal: all of which I think gives as close a representation of the likely content of the Dorabella Cipher as can reasonably be hoped for:

Forli Malvern March 4 [1897]
Dear Miss Penny
Here is some locomotive learning; so much nicer than mouldy music.
Alice tells me you are warbling wigorously in Worcestor wunce a week (alliteration archaically Norse).
I am very glad, but on second thoughts, as I have never heard you sing I am not sure: but perhaps some day if you are not rushing away I might arrange to show you over the Cathedral organ, K. John’s tomb and the Dane’s skin: (the Dane is dead).
By the way I have taken to ‘die-sinking’ as a recreation: here on the back of this is my parcel-post seal: I have to register all my MSS & they will not give a receipt unless they are sealed: so I put this on that my works may be Esily distinguished.
Kindest regards to everybody
Believe me sincerely yours
EDWARD ELGAR

The Dorabella Cipher is dated July 14 [18]97 and, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times or more, looks like this:

This was “the third letter [Dora Penny] had from him, if indeed it is one“: so the March 4 letter was only one of two Elgar had previously written to Dora.

As to what the Dorabella Cipher says: I’ve previously (in 2013) speculated whether the first two words might be, just as with the March 4 letter, FORLI MALVERN. And the obvious suggestion that Elgar might have also included the phrase “How’s Malpas?” is entirely possible, though untested.

All the same, I’d point out that the general character of the glyph shapes seems to change on the third line. That is, the shapes lose their variety, and become visually monotonous, bland, repetitive, even dull. It’s as though Elgar kind of lost momentum, and stopped wanting to sustain the joke. Much as I have suggested with the famous unsolved Zodiac Z340 cipher (where the top half and bottom half have different statistical profiles / patterns), I do wonder whether we might be seeing two different things grafted together here, i.e. that the third line is quite different in nature from the first two. Just a thought.

Note: it was September 1898 when Edward Elgar first called Dora Penny “Dorabella” (as a quotation from Mozart’s Così fan tutte): so the one word we should not expect to see in the Dorabella Cipher is ‘Dorabella’.

1924 or later: the Marco Elgar Cipher

Yet another place where the rotating e/ee/eee letter-shapes appear in Elgar’s papers is where he uses it as a simple pigpen-style cipher:

This we can date as having been written not before 1924, because the plaintext refers to “MARCO ELGAR”, the name of Elgar’s beloved spaniel, and who was born on 27th May 1924 (a picture of his grave is here).

While the most obvious interesting thing about this it doesn’t work for the Dorabella Cipher, there is something about this sheet that gives me the impression that what Elgar is trying to do is to reconstruct his cipher system. It is hardly a coincidence, I would say (apologies to Thomas Ernst) that another phrase enciphered on this same page is “A VERY OLD CYPHER”.

Given the roughly thirty years’ difference between the Dorabella Cipher and the Marco Elgar cipher (and the absence of any other similar letter-shapes in Elgar’s generally quite well-preserved writings), perhaps it was something he amused himself with as a young man, but which he had by the age of about 70 (he was born in 1857) just plain forgotten.

Perhaps the circular shape on this page is some kind of E-based mnemonic (i.e. that the letters of the alphabet were arranged around), but which had slipped his mind. Certainly, you can see the letter E concealed in it without much difficulty, so perhaps that was part of the game?

Undated: The Cryptogram Card

Our final Elgarian cipher shapes first appeared in Craig Bauer’s “Unsolved!”. These are on a card marked “Cryptogram” (hence “The Cryptogram Card”), but are undated:

Though the writing is tiny, there are two main runs of eee-shapes: in the one just above the word “Cryptogram”, the triple curve shape rotates around, as if (as Craig points out) it is doing a gymnastic forward roll. In the run just below the word “Cryptogram, the three sizes of right facing ‘e’ appear in descending order, followed by the next rotation round. There are also a couple of cipher letters at the top.

What we see here are more like pen trials than cryptograms: so in almost all senses there’s really nothing of importance here.

Recent Dorabella Theories

Plenty of clever people – not just Eric Sams and Tony Gaffney – have already put forward their thoughts about (and their attempted decryptions of) the Dorabella Cipher. Needless to say, not more than one of them can be right at the same time. 🙂

But the list of attempts to explain it keeps getting longer. When Klaus Schmeh blogged about the Dorabella in 2018, one of the commenters (Thomas Ernst) put forward – at some length – his notion that Dora Penny might herself have faked all Elgar’s ciphers. This is an interesting suggestion: Dora certainly had full access to Elgar’s archives for decades, so clearly had opportunity – and I can see what he’s getting at when he draws a parallel between Dora Penny’s book and Bettina von Arnim’s (1835) “Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde”, which contains numerous stories about Goethe falsely adjusted to bring Bettina herself into the foreground (think of it as a kind of literary Forrest Gump).

But I think Ernst is being far too literal when he draws negative conclusions from the way that the post-1924 Marco Elgar page “A VERY OLD CYPHER” alphabet does not work for the Dorabella Cipher. His reasoning (unless I’ve misunderstood it) is that because the two are inconsistent, at least one is not genuine. And he then goes on to argue that if one is not genuine, there’s no reason to think that they are both not genuine.

I would agree that the two are indeed inconsistent. However, the rather different inferences I draw from the Marco Elgar page are that (a) in it, Elgar gives the impression that he was trying to reconstruct a cipher system he had used as a much younger man; and (b) there was some kind of underlying symmetry to the letter-to-glyph assignments in that cipher that he simply could not remember.

So, although there are good reasons we should all be aware of the inconsistency between accounts, Ernst’s move to a full-fat hoaxed-by-Dora theory seems somewhat pessimistic and extravagant to me.

As an aside, I think it would be a good exercise to analyze the Liszt Fragment and the Dorabella Cipher to see if they are consistent or inconsistent with each other (e.g. by comparing letter contact tables etc).

Another commenter (ShadowWolf) used the same Klaus post to put forward his/her own Dorabella decrypt (which, perhaps almost inevitably, involves a cipher-style first pass and a this-is-what-Elgar-really-meant-by-that interpretational second pass, Eric Sams-style):

Plaintext:
PBS AFT DALYRENCE MEET B BECO YOUR IDEDTD ALWASE
E STUNDER E THINC OLL OR IS IT HIS CH GUISE
THNIC ABU IT ACOA

Message:
Problems after dalliance meet is because your identity always
a stutter I think all or is it his charming guise?
Think about it acolyte.

In a similar vein, Cipher Mysteries readers may possibly recall that I posted about Allan Gillespie’s Dorabella Cipher theory back in 2013: his (somewhat hybridized) theory was that the plaintext began “ForlE Malvern Link”, the encipherment used a Vigenère cipher system, but (not entirely unlike Thomas Ernst’s theory) it had been “concocted by someone other than Elgar (possibly in the run-up to WWII when GC&CS were recruiting; possibly with Dora Powell’s connivance, more likely not)“.

Another Dorabella solver is Mark Pitt, a Cleveland police officer “with an MA in crime patterns” who has already had the oxygen of publicity in the Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Guardian (to name but four). Pitt has also claimed to have decrypted the Liszt fragment: his solution for both seems to be based around Schooling’s cipher that Elgar famously cracked, with the key “PRUDENTIA”. I suspect Pitt has a (not very active) Twitter account, but that’s just my hunch. A (paywalled) Telegraph article on him from early 2019 is here.

The Two Massey Observations

Finally, a very different take on the Dorabella Cipher has been put forward by Keith Massey in an 11-minute YouTube video from 2017 (but which I only stumbled upon recently), based on two very specific observations.

His first observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains long sequences of glyphs where no two adjacent glyphs have the same number of loops. Specifically, the first line has a sequence with 12 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; the second line has a sequence with 9 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; while the third line has a sequence with 8 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row; all three sequences are near the start of their respective lines. Massey’s control experiments (two of them, which one might reasonably argue is a little bit lightweight) each yielded a single maximum of only 5 or 6 loop-number-differing glyphs in a row. (A more Oranchek-esque researcher would surely have done the experiment by anagramming the Dorabella a billion times over, but I suspect the results would have been not wildly dissimilar.)

Massey’s second observation is that the Dorabella Cipher contains way too many pairs of opposed symbols (i.e. where a glyph is immediately followed by a glyph with its same basic shape but where that second shape is rotated by 180 degrees). Massey calculates that this should on average ~5.3 times for 87 characters, but it instead occurs 12 times.

If we assume all 24 shapes are equally likely to occur (which isn’t true) across the Dorabella’s 87 characters, the probability of 13 exact opposites occurring is ((1/24)^13)*((23/24)^(87-1-13)), which Google tells me is 5.1046414e-20 (i.e. about one in twenty billion billion). Again, a more realistic (i.e. Oranchakian) way of doing this would be to anagram the ciphertext billions of times and see how often twelve exact opposites occur (i.e. using the actual distribution rather than an ideal [perfectly flat] distribution). My prediction here is that the probability there would still be no higher than one in a billion billion, so I believe this too is likely to be a statistically significant result.

Massey thinks the final nail in the Dorabella’s cryptological coffin is that these two patterns don’t overlap: he believes that

Massey’s overall conclusion is that that Elgar created the Dorabella Cipher as nonsense text to resemble a ciphertext as a joke on Dora Penny, but that this nonsense text eventually escaped to become a joke on all of us.

Even if you disagree with the full strength of his conclusion, I suspect these two Massey observations will prove difficult for anybody proposing a simple MASC as a solution (albeit typically with an interpretational second phase) to satisfactorily account for what we see in the Dorabella Cipher.

Thoughts and Conclusions

I have to say that I’m very largely with Keith Massey here, insofar as he is pointing out statistical features of the Dorabella Cipher that are highly improbable. It is almost impossible not to see that these sit awkwardly with the traditionalist (one might call it ‘Samsian‘) reading of the cryptogram’s system as a pigpen-style simple substitution cipher applied to an idiosyncratic Elgarian nonsense-wonsense text. It would be good if Massey’s observations were to be confirmed in a more statistically robust manner, but I would be surprised if the actual results proved to be vastly different.

My own suspicion (just as in 2013) remains that the Dorabella Cipher may turn out to be a stegotext visually concealing a guessable personal message (e.g. “FORLI MALVERN”) rather than a cryptotext mathematically concealing a plaintext. And I believe this is far from inconsistent with Massey’s observations, though only for the left hand half of the three lines.

But even so, I’m really not at all convinced that his observations hold true for the Liszt Fragment, which I believe was written in the same “VERY OLD CYPHER” that Elgar was trying to reconstruct in the Marco Elgar page.

So there is perhaps still work to be done on a genuine Elgar cipher here, even if Massey has indeed managed to nail down the Dorabella MASC coffin (and all credit to him if he has!).

On p.114 of Jerrold Northrop Moore’s weighty “Edward Elgar: A Creative Life”, the author notes that Elgar’s enciphered “Liszt fragment” had been decoded (in 1977, according to Anthony Thorley whose decryption it was) to read:

Gets you to joy, and hysterious

Well… it’s certainly a claim, even if ‘hysterious’ is a made-up word found nowhere else. And one of the (cryptologically, at least) interesting aspects that link this Liszt fragment and Elgar’s Dorabella Cipher is that while both of them seem unlikely to have employed complicated cipher systems, for all of that both also seem improbably hard nuts to crack. You’d certainly need a sweet nutcracker to achieve it. [*]

I’ve discussed Elgar’s Liszt fragment before, written in the left margin of an 1885/1886 Crystal Palace Saturday Concert Programme:

The cipher on its own looks like this (sorry, but I don’t have a better scan):-

It’s not a great scan, certainly: but given that though the dash looks as though it is meant to sit at the end, and there are several half-space-sized gaps, it looks as though we might be able to transliterate this as:

ABC DECFGB HID CBJKDK

What should be immediately apparent is that there is no obvious way to convert this 3 + 6 + 3 + 6 = 18 letter cryptogram into Thorley’s 25-letter “Gets you to joy, and hysterious”, without a singularly large floor space for mental acrobatics to bounce around on. (If that’s what you want to do, feel free to go ahead.)

And yet, what we undeniably have with the Liszt fragment that we don’t seem to have with the (much later) Dorabella Cipher is context, specifically a musical context. And here I can’t help but notice not only that the Liszt ciphertext seems to have been written in sets of three or sets of six, but also that the music it sits besides also has a very strong emphasis on triplets, groups of three notes.

Moreover, the 18-letter group is written immediately beside an 18-note line of music, “No. 6 Allegretto Pastorale”. Might the first be enciphering the other in some way?

a...b...c...d...e...c...f...g...b...h...i...d...c...b...j...k...d...k...
B...G#..E...B...G#..E...B...B...E...F#..G#..C#..B...G#..F#..E...F#..G#..

I can’t see any obvious cryptographic connection myself here, but I was somewhat surprised to find that nobody had apparently suggested this at least as a reasonable possibility for the Liszt fragment, far more so than for the Dorabella Cipher. (Plenty of people [e.g. Javier Atance, etc etc] have suggested that the Dorabella Cipher might be enciphering music, but that’s another story entirely).

Something to think about, anyway. 🙂

[*] Made me laugh, anyway. 🙂

As promised a long while back (i.e. before I got caught up in pirate history minutiae, etc), I had some interesting emails from Cheltenham music teacher Allan Gillespie, describing his claimed decryption of Elgar’s well-known Dorabella Cipher.

Allan’s starting point seems to have been my hunch that the Dorabella’s first two words were likely to be “Forli, Malvern”, a modest little seed which he then grew out into his own complete decryption.

Specifically, he claims that it’s a vaguely Vigenère-like polyalphabetic cipher, with the key sequence AIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFR rotated right by five places every eight plaintext characters, i.e.

AIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFR - for characters #1 to #8
NYHFRAIUEGSOLXMKWCQZTDPB - for characters #9 to #16
ZTDPBNYHFRAIUEGSOLXMKWCQ - for characters #17 to #24
MKWCQZTDPBNYHFRAIUEGSOLX - for characters #25 to #32
GSOLXMKWCQZTDPBNYHFRAIUE - for characters #33 to #39 (etc)

Furthermore, Allan claims (I think) that the output from this gets mapped onto Elgar’s rotated-3 alphabet via this second table (which he presented in a transposed form to make it look as though the keyword was “HAUNTED” [+Y], but it’s actually no more than a monoalphabetic substitution alphabet):-

... N. NE E. SE S. SW W. NW
u.. A. N. E. Y. T. H. D. U.
uu. G. F. ?. R. M. I. ?. Z.
uuu ?. ?. L. B. S. ?. O. C.(Unplaced letters: K P Q W X)

Undo these two stages (he says) and you get a plaintext of:-

ForlE, Malvern Link
A. and Dai’s qko [=quick opinion?]
Met St Stephen ‘eighty six.
Wed at Brompton Oratory but owed takC Mogul ob’d.

He further believes the Dorabella cipher was “concocted by someone other than Elgar (possibly in the run-up to WWII when GC&CS were recruiting; possibly with Dora Powell’s connivance, more likely not)“.

Having said all that, I should add that I’m not entirely sure how serious Allan is about all this; and, moreover, the likelihood that Elgar would have used a messed-up Vigenère in combination with a second substitution stage seems to me to be as close to zero as makes no odds. But all the same, I’ve tried to reproduce Allan’s claim here as clearly as I can, just in case someone else wants to try to reproduce his results.

As you probably already guessed, I’m almost completely sure (as I indeed wrote to Allan at the time) that this “sits in the esteemed and excellent company of those such as Eric Sims and Tony Gaffney who have tried to solve the Dorabella’s cryptographic mystery rather at the expense of its historical mystery“. That is, neither the details (in the allegedly derived cleartext) nor the methodology (that Allan believes to have been used to encrypt the message) cast any light on Elgar, Dora Penny, their relationship, or any reason that such a devilish complex cipher system and linguistically idiosyncratic message would have been appropriate or even useful.

Allan response was that by replying in this way, I was (entirely unsurprisingly) acting in the same way that other cipher mystery establishment figures do, by working hard to “resist any attempt by an outsider to knock down [the establishment’s] battlements”.

Gosh darn it, but doesn’t it just turn out he’s got me bang to rights there? I indeed spend three nights a week chairing a secret cryptographic cabal downstairs at the Athenaeum Club library (or, failing that, Westminster School’s dining hall next to the Abbey) that decides how to misdirect plucky independent codebreakers away from the heretical and uneasy truths behind cipher mysteries. This website is, of course, simply part of our community outreach programme: and let’s face it, when the obfuscating powers of the NSA, GCHQ, and the Bilderberg Group get combined in this way, what chance do all you ordinary people stand, hmmm?

As regular Cipher Mysteries readers will know, Edward Elgar’s most famous ciphertext is the Dorabella Cipher, a tiny cryptographic walnut that continues (more than a century after it was produced) to defy all cryptologic jackhammers sent to crack it.

A confusing part of the mystery is that in the 1920s, Elgar (re-)used the same pigpen-style “rotating-3” alphabet as a simple substitution cipher in two pages of his notebooks (the “MARCO ELGAR” / “A VERY OLD CYPHER” / “DO YOU GO TO LONDON TOMORROW?” page reproduced here. These messages are easily deciphered (helpfully, the key is reproduced on the page itself), so the two ciphertexts appear to have nothing to do with each other apart from their shared alphabet.

Furthermore, what I didn’t realise until last year (but never quite got round to mentioning here) is that Elgar re-used these same cipher shapes in two other places. Firstly, the “Liszt fragment” in the margin of an 1885/1886 Crystal Palace Saturday Concert Programme, which is basically a string of the same rotating-3 alphabet:

Tony Gaffney thinks that this is trivially solvable by using one of the “clock-face” diagrams from the 1920s notebook, but I think this mainly depends on whether you think the kind of language Tony believes the main Dorabella cipher was enciphering had the same kind of allusive & abbreviated private codewords as this (short) message.

But there is also one other place we know of in Elgar’s notes where these distinctive shapes appear, and it is in a decidedly cryptographic context. In 1896, the Pall Mall Magazine published an article with an “uncrackable” code challenge for readers, one based on the Russian Nihilist cipher. However, Elgar took such great delight in cracking it that he later had it painted on the floor: he also wrote his explanation on nine cards (“the Courage card set”).

What is odd is that ten of the rotating-3 alphabet letters appear on the first card of this set. The description given of these is of the set of eight rotating triple cup shapes, followed by an upward-facing double cup and finishing with an upward facing single cup. I haven’t seen an image of this in context, but Christian Schridde reconstructed one for one of his very readable “NumberWorld” blog posts on the Dorabella Cipher:-

In Christian’s third Dorabella post, he muses on the timeline aspects: that the Liszt fragment is more than a decade earlier than Dorabella, while the “MARCO ELGAR” page is more than two decades later. By contrast, the ink was only just dry on the Courage card set when the Dorabella cipher itself was written.

Schridde therefore wonders whether the Dorabella cipher might use some element of the Nihilist cipher (which, itself, is a kind of bodged-together mix of Polybius square and Vigenère cipher): certainly, this cipher must have been almost as fresh in Elgar’s mind as the paint on his wooden floor.

On the one hand, the fact that there are ten rotating-3 symbols on the card seems to vaguely imply that Elgar was trying to see a way of mapping a set of digits [0-9] onto his rotating-3 alphabet: which, given that the Nihilist cipher system enciphers individual plaintext letters as 2- or 3-digit numbers, does seem oddly coincidental.

And yet there is no obvious sign of digit pairing or grouping, which you’d perhaps expect if you were seeing something Polybius-style or perhaps groups of digits: the ABAB-style length pattern at the start of the Dorabella (2323121312…) quickly disappear, replaced by quite different structures (e.g. 22222 and 111111 on the second line).

At one point, I also wondered whether the sequence on the first Courage card might in fact be a kind of length-10 sequence to offset the Dorabella symbols, that I previously called a “rotating pigpen”, e.g.

+0/0, +1/0, +2/0, +3/0, +4/0, +5/0, +6/0, +7/0, 0/-1, 0/-2

Well, given that this is a reasonable possibility, I tried out a few variants of it in Excel… but nothing plausible-looking jumped out at me, which was basically what happened when I tried a similar rotating pigpen in C code hack before.

I really don’t know what’s going on with all Elgar’s cipher bits, particularly the Liszt fragment. Of his three undecrypted mini-ciphertexts, the Dorabella is in some ways the least odd – it at least looks like a proper cryptogram with proper-looking statistics, something to get your cryptologic teeth into. The mystery deepens! 🙂

In the red corner we have #1 codebreaking musicologist Eric Sams: and in the blue corner, historical mystery specialist Beatrice Gwynn! Who will be the winner in tonight’s Dorabella Cipher Ultimate Smaaaaackdooooown?

A frisson of crypto excitement ripples through the crowd as Eric Sams rises to his feet. He’s humming to himself, rhythmically pounding his gloves, and with a gleam in his eyes that’s well-earned: his 1970 Musical Times article has been in the bibliography of nearly every Dorabella Cipher article that followed. Sams certainly looks in cracking form: his article Cryptanalysis and Historical Research from Archivaria 21 (1985-1986) casts light on how he decrypted the shorthand used by William Clarke (secretary to Cromwell’s army), the shorthand used by Sir John Thompson (Prime Minister of Canada between 1892 and 1894), etc. He’s got power, reach and stamina, normally an unstoppable combination in this game, as you can also see from his many articles on cryptography at the Centro Studi Eric Sams.

But his opponent tonight, Beatrice V. Gwynn, has many tricks up her fighting sleeves, and perhaps her decades of experience looking at mysteries rather than histories will guide her to victory here. She co-authored a 1977 book on the Phaistos Disc; proposed a theory on the Voynich Manuscript (it’s apparently a hygiene manual written in left-right-mirrored Middle High German, but let’s not hold that against her); and even wrote a book on the evidence used to convict Alger Hiss (“Whittaker Chambers: The Discrepancy in the Evidence of the Typewriter”). Sure, she may not have Sams’ raw cryptanalytical clout, but perhaps she can match him for reach and stamina.

The referee’s in the centre, the seconds have left the ring and… Rrrrrround One begins. The two fighters eye each other up warily over their gloves, waiting to see who will make the first move. And it is Sams who strikes first, whipsmart and sharp as ever:

STARTS: LARKS! IT’S CHAOTIC, BUT A CLOAK OBSCURES MY NEW LETTERS, α, β
BELOW: I OWN THE DARK MAKES
E. E. SIGH WHEN YOU ARE TOO LONG GONE.

Gwynn reels on the ropes, punch-drunk from the sheer interpretativeness of Sams’ claimed decryption. But she quickly collects herself, before launching her own cryptological counter-attack (in her article “The Elgar Cipher”, The Elgar Society Newsletter 1975):-

PINCH FROM TOBACCO
DORA A RIDDLE NOON
SILENT ALONE TIME

Sams is rocked on his heels by the power of the blow (though he must surely be wondering what happened to the rest of the letters – let’s just say it’s a long story). But he soon powers back with what he thinks is a knockout blow – an unpublished 1972 article containing his raw decrypt (i.e. without his wobbly interpretation on top):-

STARTS. LARKS! IT’S EXOTIC BIT A CLOK OBSCURC MY NEW LETTEE
AB BELOW. I OIN THE WARK MAKES E.E. SIGH WHEN E ARE TOO LOMMONT.

Even though Gwynn deftly dodges the wildness of this codebreaking haymaker, Sams has a follow-on jab – pages from Elgar’s archives where he uses the same shapes to encipher “MARCO ELGAR” (the name of his dog), “A VERY OLD CYPHER”, “DO YOU GO TO LONDON?” and “THE GOLD IS BURIED UNDER THE KITCHEN FLOOR” (only kidding!).

Surprised by the primary evidence, Gwynn drops to her knees on the canvas and gets up again quickly, only to receive a standing count from the referee. As the bell rings for the end of the contest, Sams punches the air in victory and the cheer of “E-ric / E-ric / E-ric” fills the arena air. Gwynn looks desolate: have all her years of effort and striving really been trumped by Sams’ nonsensical-sounding decrypt?

At last the judges pass the result to the referee, who announces it as… A DRAW – neither side managed to land a clean punch. But wait… in all the chaos, a haunting melody starts to fills the room, quieting the crowd. It’s Javier Atance playing his claimed solution (direction 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8 = do/re/mi/fa/so/la/te/do, 1/2/3 humps = natural / flat / sharp) on a distant organ. But the sound system is quickly unplugged and the pandemonium resumes… in fact, will there ever be an end to it?

* * * * * * * * * * * *

To me, the Dorabella Cipher is a bit like the “Voynich Lite” – even though they both closely resemble simple monoalphabetic ciphers, they both employ one or more tricks that make utter fools of those who seek to break them in a classical kind of way.

Sams was keenly aware of this, and even points out that taking a traditional crypto approach will get you only as far as something like this:-

– B S C – A H C M – N E W L E – E E A B B E L O – O I N T
H E W A H C M – C S E E S A I W H E N E A R T W L O M M O N T
S T A R T S L R – I T S E A R W T I C B I T A C L O C

(or, as Decrypto 8.5 suggests, “TD INVISHE CREE ENT TEROOM HAVECNVISIDEEDNMCVEHEN YACROSSO HAD ANY A DRY MADENY CAMIT MAN IRO I”).

That’s the cryptanalytical mystery: while at the same time, the historical mystery is that Edward Elgar and Dora Penny never spoke of ciphers before or after this. What conceivable rationale would he have had for sending her a near-unbreakable cipher (disguised as a perfectly breakable cipher) in only his third ever letter to her? How can we find a solution to both of these mysteries at the same time?