The missing Lonsdale Street nitkeeper…

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Let’s start with the original 26th Jan 1949 news story in the Adelaide News, the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Geraldton Guardian, and the Age:

Melbourne.- Two prominent Melbourne baccarat players who desire to remain anonymous, believe they knew the unknown man in the “Somerton beach body mystery.”

They saw the man’s picture in a Melbourne newspaper and said they thought they recognised him as a “nitkeeper” who worked at a Lonsdale street baccarat school about four years ago. They could not recall his name.

They said the man talked to few people. He was employed at the baccarat school for about 10 weeks, then left without saying why or where he was going.

From a purely Melbourne-centric angle, the appeal for witnesses had only just appeared in the Herald (25 Jan 1949) and the Argus (25 Jan 1949). So it should be clear that the two baccarat players came forward immediately.

A few days ago, I wondered whether the man they had been thinking of might have been George Henry Newman. It’s true that Newman died in 1986, so could not have been the Somerton Man. However, given that people working at baccarat schools were generally younger than the Somerton Man, might the two baccarat players have mistaken George Henry Newman for the Somerton Man?

On balance, I think this is unlikely. Newman’s specific role in the whole baccarat ‘ecology’ was as a motor driver: that is, he would drive customers to and from the baccarat school. And he did that for years, not just for ten weeks.

So the person we’re looking for is someone quite specific and yet quite unusual (because of his age): a 40-year-old Lonsdale Street baccarat school nitkeeper circa 1945.

The annoying thing is that the Victorian police knew everything there was to know about these baccarat schools, but were unable to shut them down because of two specific factors:

  • The police had to catch punters while they were actually playing baccarat (and not other legal card games), which was actually quite a lot trickier than it sounds; and
  • The baccarat school principals bribed policemen left, right and centre to avoid the schools being shut down.

In the end, Christos Paizes’ long-running baccarat school got closed down courtesy of some kind of mealy-mouthed legal technicality, largely rustled up by Victorian politicians. And Paizes couldn’t really blame the poh-lice for that: they were too busy taking their brown envelopes to actual get him to court. Why would they ever call a halt on such a good thing?

The Missing Evidence

It seems that our well of Lonsdale Street baccarat school-related articles in Trove has now pretty much run dry. So where could we look next?

There is a ton of interesting stuff in the Victorian police archives – the NAA knows what it is, and wants to curate it, but nobody knows where it is. One day, this will come into the light, and perhaps there will be a sudden feeding frenzy from everybody with an interest in historical Melbourne crime. But… that blessed day still seems a way off just yet.

I wish I had found a list of Australian gamblers’ memoirs: anyone around Melbourne in the mid-1940s would have gone to Lonsdale Street, its baccarat Mecca. The closest I got was a series of brief articles in the Melbourne Argus of 1954, describing the memories of Melbourne baccarat school owner Robert Walker. (Incidentally, there’s a nice chapter on knockabouts in the 1986 book “Disorganized Crime”, which might still be available online.) Maybe there are more Aussie gamblers’ memoirs out there, please shout if you find any.

I therefore wonder whether the best thing to do would be to put an ad in a Melbourne newspaper – perhaps the Age, what do you think? – asking any lovely old people for their memories of Melbourne’s baccarat schools in the 1940s. Sounds like a Banker Bet to me… something to consider, anyway. 🙂

Any other suggestions for routes forward?

The difficulties of Australian archives…

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Towards the end of last year, I went through a period where I tried to finesse different ways of raking through the Australian archives to pursue the Melbourne nitkeeper research thread in the Somerton Man cold case. (Which arose because two Melbourne baccarat players came forward in early 1949 to say that they thought the man had worked as a nitkeeper at a Lonsdale Street baccarat school for about ten weeks around 1945 or so.)

Despite meticulously stepping through story after story in Trove to reconstruct what I could of the Melbourne baccarat school timeline, all I could come up with was the Romanian name “Balutz” that appeared in a single article. And when I received a nice reply from the Public Records Office Victoria helpfully suggesting I look up the (admittedly not entirely dissimilar) Greek surname Balutis, I then followed that lead as far as I could, all the way to Triantafillos Balutis and Stelios Balutis.

The pair (presumably brothers or cousins?) had arrived in Melbourne on 16 Feb 1923, both travelling in 3rd class on the RMS Ormonde: but I could find no details of what ultimately became of Triantafillos Balutis. He had lived for eight years in America (always a good box to tick for Somerton Man candidates, and the juicier the Juicy Fruit the better); had lived largely invisibly since 1930; had worked within a horse’s sneeze of the main Lonsdale Street baccarat school (which, let’s not forget, was run by the Greek Christos Paizes); and yet by around 1948 had completely disappeared from sight. No wife, no family, no funeral, no nothing.

In short, Triantafillos Balutis seemed pretty much a perfect candidate for having been the Somerton Man, if (and I know it’s very much an ‘if’) the Somerton Man had been the Melbourne nitkeeper the two gamblers claimed he was. But I was short of the last pieces of evidence that would confirm or deny it. What I needed was a cunning Aussie insider, a well-disposed researcher who would go to the Melbourne archives and ferret out the last pieces of the puzzle.

And that is indeed what happened next…

A Surreal Day Out At Shiel Street

The modern building at 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne is shared by both the National Archives of Australia and the Victorian State Archives. According to my generous (but doggedly anonymous) Melbourne mole (I’ve lightly edited their notes):

The modern bureaucracy makes visiting here quite surreal. I’ll explain why in case you have reason to go to Shiel Street in future.

The first thing to note is that there is a single reading room, and along one side of it there runs a single long L-shaped desk.  

On the shorter side of the ‘L’ is a very nice librarian who hands over the National Archives Files.  As far as possible from her, at the very top of the long side of that ‘L’ is the very nice librarian who hands over files from the Victorian State Archives.

Now, if it happens that you speak first to the NAA librarian, he or she will tell you that there is no public digital scanning facility: in fact, only the librarians are allowed to do that, and they will charge you per scan.  Otherwise you can make ordinary photocopies at about three times you’d pay elsewhere… or you can bring a camera, or use your camera-phone.

However, if you happen to speak, instead, to the very nice Victorian Archives librarian at the other end of that long desk, you will be told that there’s no charge for anything. Not only that, but they have a dedicated side room (complete with professional-looking camera) where you are free to make hi-res digital scans if you prefer.  All for no charge whatsoever. “All you need to bring is a USB stick” they will tell you over the phone.

And, oddly, neither of the nice librarians is wrong.

It seems that the commonwealth (=Federal) government won’t agree to let its records be snapped using Victorian government equipment, so if you turn up with just a USB stick for NAA docs, you’ll be out of luck.

Luckily I had both a usb and a phone… which is why I’m sending through a neat pdf of the (Victorian Archive) probate material and a whole lot of poorly-lit camera snaps of the really interesting NAA material.

Needless to say, I’m extremely grateful for the kindness this anonymous researcher hero showed.

Stelios Balutis

We can now say a little more about what happened to Stelios Balutis. In his July 1963 will, the (obviously misspelled) “Stelois Balutes” of 581 King Street West Melbourne did:

“[…] Give devise and bequeath all my Estate both real and personal unto my Trustees Upon Trust […] for my granddaughter ELEONORA ASSIKIS of Sinikismos Evangelistries Ano Skalakia Thessaloniki Greece if she attains the age of Twentyone years and if living at my death but she shall predecease me then Upon Trust for my grandson NIKOLAS ASSIKIS of the same address if he attains the age of Twentyone years and if living at my death.”

His estate amounted to $1381.15: and the notice of probate appeared in the 02 Sep 1977 edition of the Melbourne Age. The only thing I rather liked was the colour of the probate’s duty stamps (in the NAA scan):

The Victorian Archives had more about Stelios Balutis. I’ll spare you his fingerprints, but there was a perfectly nice photo of him from his 1948 passport (which I contrast-enhanced slightly for clarity):

All in all, nothing remarkable, then; but even so, more than enough to close our (admittedly small) chapter on Stelios Balutis.

Triantafillos Balutis

Because I had previously been able to access Triantafillos Balutis’ application for Australian naturalization via the NAA’s website (my attempts to do this were mainly hindered by the 20+ different spelling combinations of his first and last names), our Melbourne mole was able to find only a single page of additional information in the archives.

Luckily (or possibly unluckily, depending on your Somerton Man point of view), this was the most important page of all, because it revealed what ultimately became of him. This was from the Criminal Investigation Board, whose (small) file relating to Triantafillos Balutis’s naturalization was included separately in the NAA records.

At the end, the file noted: “Triantafillos BALUTIS appears on Passport List No. 2857 of 15/9/1949 Proceeding to Greece. CIB.”

Ships leaving Melbourne for Europe on the 15th September 1949 were (according to Trove) the Devon for London and the Port Vindex for Liverpool, or (on the 16th) the Dundalk Bay for Adelaide and Naples.

By far the most interesting one of these was the Dundalk Bay, which had just arrived from Naples accompanied by the Nelly, the two ships carrying more than a thousand migrants each from all over Europe.

The Australian archives contain nominal rolls (all nicely digitized and cross-referenced) listing all the incoming migrants for the Dundalk Bay and Nelly (in fact, these lists appear several times over). But as far as I can see, there is no sign of nominal rolls for passengers travelling in the opposite direction: presumably because nobody in their right mind would want to be going back to Europe in September 1949.

As a result, I wasn’t able to dig up anything as useful as a nominal roll for any of the three ships listed as leaving on the 15th/16th September 1949, to fully confirm the (already extremely likely) story that Triantafillos Balutis left Melbourne for Europe then.

Perhaps someone with better m4d archival sk1llz than me will be able to dig this up. But to be fair, there’s probably little point: this research strand seems to have also reached the end of its life. We’re done here, basically.

So… Back To Lonsdale Street, Then?

I’ve been thinking about this whole thing for a couple of months now, in a kind of methodological post mortem. And I think the way it all rolled out revealed weaknesses in the way I was approaching archival research. In essence, I jumped at the chance to pursue what (superficially) seemed like a substantial lead, because it seemed likely that I would be able to follow a research lead on a single person of interest right to the end line (which is indeed what happened).

Sure, this was a plausible (if slightly opportunistic / optimistic) plan, but at the same time it didn’t really amount to anything like a systematic, goal-directed attack on the archives. And in fact this was what was missing.

So, in retrospect what I should have done was try to devise ways to open up the Australian archives in respect of the Lonsdale Street baccarat schools, and particularly the Victorian police records. We know (thanks to the PROV) that there was nothing Balutz-related in the Victorian Police Gazette for 1944/1945/1946: but Balutz should only ever have been a helpful secondary angle to prise open the archival lid.

Because Christos Paizes was the big fish in the story, I now think it was Paizes’ Melbourne history that needed bringing into the light in a far more systematic way, rather than guessing and hoping.

Christos Paizes and his Henchmen…

The NAA records say that Christos Paizes was born on 5th February 1897 in Ithaca, Kionion, Greece: and that he arrived in Australia on 4th January 1914. His naturalization was in 13th August 1937, at which time his address was (the familiar-sounding address) 269-271 Lonsdale-street, Melbourne.

According to the sensational (but probably not entirely historically reliable) book “Gangland Melbourne“, Paizes (also known as ‘Harry Carillo’) allegedly had Freddie ‘The Frog’ Harrison and Norman Bradshaw ‘working’ for him. All the same, Harrison was mentioned quite openly here as having worked for Solomon’s baccarat school, so I’m not yet convinced that Gangland Melbourne completely nailed that one:

Police witnesses alleged Harrison was the constant companion of thieves, that as doorkeeper of a baccarat school in Elizabeth-street, city, he had many times given warning of the approach of police, and, that he had kept a supply of bullets in his home. Harrison said he was employed by the proprietor, Mr. Solomon, as doorman of the Rendezvous Bridge Club, until May 20. From a weekly wage of £5 he paid £3 board to his aunt, with whom he and his wife and child had been living for twelve months. He had nothing to do with the conduct of the bridge club.

He was also mentioned quite openly in this news story on Trove:

Described by detectives as former doorkeeper for a baccarat school mentioned in connection with an Elizabeth Street shooting on May 22, Frederick William Harrison, 26, of Peel Street, Windsor, laborer, successfully appealed to Judge Mitchell in General Sessions today against a three months’ gaol sentence for vagrancy.

This was the baccarat school in Fink’s Building, according to this report.

Even though Harrison was not convicted of the Elizabeth Street shooting, George Henry Newman (45) was, and in October 1947 went to jail for two years. There’s a picture of Newman in an article in the Sydney Truth, which to my eyes isn’t terrifically different from the Somerton Man:

There’s no details of when Newman was let out of jail: and Trove has no obvious further trace of him. Just sayin’, just sayin’… 😉

We know that Christos Paizes subsequently surfaced in Sydney, running (no surprises) a baccarat school there. According to the Sydney Crime Museum, (quoting the 1980 book Drug Traffic by Alfred McCoy, which – with the inevitable shipping from Australia – is currently sitting just outside my comfortable price range, though the British Library does have a copy) when casinos in the 1970s became the next ‘hot’ place for gamblers to go to:

The established Goulburn Club at 51-7 Goulburn Street, owned by George Zizinos Walker and Christos Paizes of South Coogee, simply added roulette to baccarat, recruited a bevy of hostesses, and polished up its image. 

Putting all this together: it seems to me that if the Somerton Man was in some way connected with the Lonsdale Street baccarat schools, a far better first research step would be to map out the different Melbourne schools and all the crims and thugs associated with them, and only then with that groundwork in place start to look at individuals.

Back to the Archives?

And so the actual research question finally arrives: what is the best way of using Australian archive resources to try to reconstruct the Lonsdale Street baccarat school crim network circa 1945? After all, historians now spend so much of their time mapping out social networks, why not map antisocial networks too? :-p

Hence I think it’s the NAA’s B745 series that perhaps offers us the possibility of some kind of way in. However, when our marvellous Melbourne mole specifically asked the NAA about getting access to B745, the response was:

With regards to series B745, ‘Index of offenders investigated by the Commonwealth Police’, this is a collection of index cards which the National Archives does not have in custody. Although the series is registered with us it does not appear to have ever been transferred from the Australian Federal Police. Theoretically it may still be held by them, but previous attempts to identify their whereabouts have not been successful.

And so, for a change, one research door shuts only for another to also shut. There must surely be a way of locating B745 but… it will probably take a while.

Nick’s Challenge Cipher #1 cracked by Louie Helm…

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From 1991 onwards, John Walsh – the well-known host of “America’s Most Wanted” – received a series of ominous and threatening letters signed “SCORPION”. Some of these contained a series of Zodiac-style homophonic ciphers: to date, only two of these have been released. Unsurprisingly, these are known as the “Scorpion Ciphers“: but none has yet been cracked.

However, there’s reason to believe (as I pointed out in 2017) that there are some specific regularities with the S1 (‘Scorpion #1’) ciphertext and even more so with the S5 ciphertext that we might be able to exploit. Even though both ciphers at first sight resemble the Zodiac Killer’s ciphers, the Scorpion’s seem to cycle between specific sets of homophonic symbols. In the case of the S5 ciphertext, the cycling seems particularly rigid, in that it cycles between 16 alphabets.

Cryptologically, the problem was that ‘traditional’ homophonic solvers (such as Jarlve’s excellent AZDecrypt) have no way to include extra cipher system constraints, regardless of how stringent they may be. For example, it would be a reasonable hypothesis that S5 uses only a single alphabet for each of its 16 columns: but this is not something that any current solver could use.

After a fair bit of thought, I came up with the idea of putting out a set of challenge ciphers using a completely rigid cycling homophonic cipher, to try to spark interest in solving this class of ciphertext. And so, also back in 2017, I posted up a page containing seven constrained homophonic challenge ciphers. Despite a shockingly high bounty of £10 being on offer for the best solve by the end of 2017, nobody managed to grab my cash.

http://ciphermysteries.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/06/smiley-10-pound-note.jpg

Had I made even the longest challenge cipher far too difficult? Would nobody ever solve these? Despite my doubts, I remained reasonably confident some clever person would find a way in, sooner or later…

2020: Enter Louie Helm…

And so it was with great delight that I received an email this morning from Louie Helm, asking me to check his solution. As a recap, my challenge cipher #1 (neatly arranged into its five columns) was:

121,213,310,406,516,
108,200,323,416,513,
112,208,308,409,515,
102,216,309,425,509,
114,215,309,417,507,
102,201,323,401,517,
111,200,306,408,500,
113,203,313,407,512,
103,223,313,403,511,
119,213,316,416,511,
102,204,324,418,517,
120,203,324,407,516,
105,209,312,401,504,
117,208,310,408,500,
113,203,301,425,513,
115,201,313,408,515,
115,214,308,406,501,
122,204,322,408,509,
114,209,305,412,504,
117,213,316,402,509,
100,200,310,423,513,
100,214,320,419,509,
114,209,309,419,520,
101,200,320,416,518,
120,211,313,403,509,
103,207,313,421,513,
107,209,305,407,523,
115,224,313,416,508,
102,203,306,416,514,
107,200,310,401,509,
103,212,324,

Louie’s claimed plaintext was:

THEOBJECTOFMYPROP
OSEDWORKONCYPHERI
SNOTEXACTLYWHATYO
USUPPOSEBUTMYTIME
ISNOWSOENTIRELYOC
CUPIEDTHATIHAVEBE
ENOBLIGEDTOGIVEIT
UPATLEASTFORTHENE
XTTWOORTHREEYEARS

…which was completely correct! Fantastic work, well done!!! 🙂

(Extra crypto brownie points on offer for anyone who recognizes the – admittedly somewhat obscure – source of the quotation.)

Crypto-fans may well recognize Louie’s name as having been (along with Jarlve) one half of the recent pair of solvers of Klaus Schmeh’s 1000-bigram (and then even harder 750-bigram) challenge. And here’s Louie’s cool-looking photo:

So: one last time – well done, Louie, you rock. 😉

So… How Did Louie Do It?

This is, of course, the interesting question: and Louie answered it in a forum post on zodiackillersite.com on 02 Jan 2020, which I can do no better than simply quote in full:

I solved it with AZdecrypt v1.17 using my newest 8-gram model released a few days ago on Christmas. The only modification I made was adding 15 lines of code to restrict the solver to only use one homophone for each of the five columns. The solve for cipher #1 succeeded, but the way I modified the solver to do it is very inelegant since it can quickly lock high-scoring letters into place and then deprives the hill climber of further opportunities to test them in other arrangements. A more well-tuned version of this general solution would merely penalize (but not forbid) repeated letters in each column. This would allow the solver to evolve through a less jagged solution landscape and then still eventually arrive at a 1-homophone/column solution in the end. I predict this sort of modification would likely solve cipher #2 and beyond.

Although I used the column constraint (and it appears to have been necessary for a quick solve), the larger story here is probably the recent improvements to AZdecrypt and the release of 8-gram models in 2019.

For instance, if you simply ignore Nick’s constraint and use Jarl’s state of the art solver + his best n-gram file from 2018, you would have needed an 8 word crib to quickly decrypt challenge cipher #1:

AZdecrypt v1.14 + 7-gram jarl reddit: THEOBJECTOFMYPROPOSEDWORKONCYPHER

But in 2019, Jarl moved away from his IoC-based solver to a more capable entropy-based one. This alone drops the required crib needed to solve the cipher down to 2-3 words:

AZdecrypt v1.17 +
6-gram jarl reddit: THEOBJECT — PR — CYPHER
7-gram jarl reddit: THEOBJECT — PR

And doing the same execrise with the n-gram models I’ve released during 2019 shows they progressed from needing an 8 word crib — down to just a 5 letter crib:

AZdecrypt v1.17 +
6-gram v2 (May 2019): (no cribs sufficient)
6-gram v3 (Jun 2019): THEOBJECTOFMYPROPOSEDWORKONCYPHER — ~90% correct solve
6-gram v4 (Oct 2019): THEOBJECTOFMYPROPOSEDWORKONCYPHER — 100% correct
6-gram v5 (Dec 2019): THEOBJ — PR — CYPHER

7-gram v2 (May 2019): THEOBJECT — PR — WORK
7-gram v3 (Jun 2019): THEOBJECTOF — WORK
7-gram v4 (Oct 2019): THEOBJECT — WORK
7-gram v5 (Dec 2019): THEOBJ — WORK

8-gram v2 (May 2019): THEOBJECT — WORK — CYPHER
8-gram v3 (Jun 2019): THEOBJ — WORK — YPH
8-gram v4 (Oct 2019): THEOBJ
8-gram v5 (Dec 2019): HEOBJ

Note: These are just the cribs I got to work in under a minute using a completely unmodified version of AZdecrypt. It’s quite possible that any of us using either of the last two version of AZdecrypt + beijinghouse 8-gram files could have solved this since Oct 2019 simply by letting it run long enough.

So the real story here seems to be that to crack my first challenge cipher, the three things that were necessary were not only Louie Helm’s tweaks to AZDecrypt to exploit the column constraints, but also Jarlve’s huge improvements to AZDecrypt’s homophonic solver during 2019, along with Louie’s now very extensive 8-gram files.

I think this is a great result for Louie (and for Jarl too!), and I have nothing but admiration and applause for the pair of them. Rock and roll, guys!

The (Inevitable) Crypto Punchline…

Of course, challenge cipher #1 was (numerically) the easiest one, in that it was the longest of the set. So the big test will be to see how far through the list of challenge ciphers Louie Helm’s approach will (admittedly with a bit of tidying up) now be able to reach.

Interestingly, Louie immediately noted that my challenge cipher #2 presents some obvious-looking crypto weaknesses:

  • the 1st and 10th lines (of five symbols each) are identical
  • the 4th and 19th lines are also identical, and share three consecutive symbols with line #22.

He then speculates that it might be worth attacking these patterns in cipher #2 using common words or phrases such as “THERE” / “THOSE” / “I HAVE” / “IN THE” / “IS THE” / “IT WAS”.

Personally, I haven’t looked at the plaintexts since I enciphered them two and a half years ago (and I have no intention of doing so until such time as a proposed decryption arrives here), so I’m not going to be much help. 😉

The only information I’d add is that I took each of the seven short texts from completely different places: so knowing the source of “The object of my proposed work on cypher…” shouldn’t directly assist with the others.

But what I want to now say is: good luck, everyone! The game is afoot!

BBC Dyatlov Pass post…

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Here’s a nice post from the BBC covering the Dyatlov Pass mystery, a topic I know a good number of Cipher Mysteries readers have an interest in.

Lots of people – including the Mansi, which was particularly good to see – were interviewed, and the article includes lots of excellent photographs.

Was the incident an alien incursion, or some kind of Soviet radioactive weapon experiment that went wrong? The surrounding area was subsequently quarantined for four years, and all sorts of pressure were brought to bear on people involves; it should hence be no surprise that the cogs and gears have kept turning in the conspiratorial mill for 60 years.

Igor Dyatlov post-mortem
https://dyatlovpass.com/death

As any fule kno, the three atomic building blocks of history are conspiracy, cock-up, and cover-up: and historical topics are most interesting where these three Venn diagram circles intersect. It’s appallingly easy to read the Dyatlov Pass incident as a Soviet cover-up of a cocked-up conspiracy. In a country where conspiracy theories and outright distrust of government are the norm, this is almost the default reading (unless you’re an alien buff).

So the BBC’s big news is that a new investigation is now being opened up. Perhaps some of the tissues that were analyzed and stored away will turn up, and a modern forensic analysis will reveal the truth of what happened.

But then again, in the whole sports drug cheating scandal (that is still very much ongoing), Russian labs haven’t exactly managed to cover themselves with Svetlana Khorkina-style glory. So… perhaps The Truth Isn’t Going To Be Out There Just Yet, eh Mulder? We shall see, I guess.

As for me… I think we can rule out three bears murderously angry about a group of students eating their porridge, OK?

A Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript…?

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It’s that time of year when a Voynich researcher’s mind turns to life’s most important questions. Such as whether it is possible to use Father Christmas to decrypt the Voynich Manuscript.

For a start, it’s entirely possible that there is Christmas-related imagery hidden in plain sight in the Voynich Manuscript, but we’ve just been too distracted by the details to notice them:

Before I go any further, I should say that I do know full well that what we now think of as ‘Santa Claus’ was in fact a 19th century faux-historical mash-up of loads of other stuff, and that he originally wore green clothes (not red). But I would – as spin doctors now tell us all the time – say that, wouldn’t I?

All the same, it’s probably safe to say that we would have zero luck using a 19th century cultural crossover to decrypt a 15th century object. However, we might have more luck with the layer that preceded him – by which I mean St. Nicholas.

This might be interesting because the zodiac roundel drawings in the Voynich Manuscript’s ‘zodiac’ section bear a strong resemblance to the zodiac roundel drawings found in early fifteenth century Alsace calendars (specifically 1420-1430, it’s all in the sleeves and the necklines). Hence I think there’s a reasonably good chance that what we’re looking at there is some kind of calendar – and the most important details written on calendars were feast days celebrating local saints.

If this section is indeed some kind of calendar (and it’s still speculation, remember), there’s a decent chance it was arranged not by zodiac degree but by month. But what day did the year start on in the 15th century?

Back then, this was not universally 1st January, not at all. In fact, as Rafal Prinke pointed out in 2001 (I quoted him in 2009), the Venetian year instead started on 1st March, while the Florentine year started on 25th March. The reason this is relevant is that the first zodiac sign depicted on a Voynich zodiac roundel is Pisces, which (though it astrologically / zodiacally starts in late February) was typically associated with March. (We are sufficiently certain of the folio order that we can be sure Pisces came first.)

So let’s make today’s educated guess: that the Voynich ‘zodiac’ section is actually a calendar of feast days that starts on 1st March. (It might even be some kind of wonky Cisioianus, nobody knows.) Does that give us a Father Christmas attack on the Voynich Manuscript?

Well… it might do. On the page for (according to our guess) December (it has a Sagittarius crossbowman roundel drawing in the centre), there are thirty ‘labels’ (attached to the thirty ‘nymphs’). And one of these labels might just be saying St. Nicholas, right?

As an aside: to my eyes, there are plenty of annoying (or at least slightly unsettling) details on this page:

  • It seems that the labels were added in a different ink and by a different quill
  • It seems that most (but not all) of the nymphs’ breasts were added by that same different hand
  • Some of the nymph outlines were also updated with that same quill
  • There’s a particularly badly drawn barrel outline added behind the top-left nymph just outside the largest ring
  • There’s green paint contact transfer from the facing page BUT that would seem to imply that the now-missing folio immediately afterwards (Capricorn and Aquarius) was not there when the green paint was added. Which would seem to imply that the green paint (at the very least) was added some time (probably a century or more?) after the initial composition phase(s).

But, getting back to Cisioianus (feast day mnemonics), a German 15th century Latin version for December run as follows:

  • December Barba Nico Concep et alma Lucia
  • Sanctus abinde Thomas modo Nat Steph Jo Pu Thome Sil.

We can decode this syllable by syllable to reveal the list of feast days that the mnemonic was trying to help people memorize (with a little help from Grotefend’s 1891 “Zeitrechnung des deutschen Mittelalters“, p.35):

  1. De-
  2. cem-
  3. ber
  4. Bar- – Feast of St Barbara
  5. ba
  6. Ni- – Feast of St Nicholas
  7. co
  8. Con- Feast of the Immaculate Conception
  9. cep
  10. Et
  11. Al-
  12. ma
  13. Lu- – Feast of St Lucy
  14. Ci-
  15. a
  16. Sanc-
  17. tus
  18. Ab-
  19. in
  20. de
  21. Thom- – Feast of St Thome Ap
  22. as
  23. mo-
  24. do
  25. Nat – Nativ. Domini
  26. Steph – Feast of St Stephen
  27. Jo
  28. Pu
  29. Tho- – Feast of St Thome Asp (St Thomas a Becket)
  30. me
  31. Sil – Feast of St Sylvester

What immediate emerges is that if we’re looking for St. Nicholas in the 15th century, his feast day was actually on December 6th, neatly sandwiched between St Barbara (December 4th) and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception (December 8th).

Hence if the text on this page is some kind of Cisioianus mnemonic for December, we might hope to find labels in a sequence that looks vaguely like “Bar Ba Ni Co Con“. Now, I personally can’t see anything there that quite fits this pattern at all. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. 😉

But, sadly, this is just about as far as St Nicholas’ Christmas sleigh can carry us into the speculative world of Voynich research. Happy Christmas to you all! 🙂

Pavia MS Aldini 488: “Collectio de Balneis”…

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When a comment landed here today from Diane O’Donovan about the (sometimes asserted, sometimes denied) connection between the Voynich Manuscript’s Q13 (the ‘balneo’ folios) and the late 12th century De Balneis Putolanis by Peter of Eboli, it reminded me that there’s a 15th century balneological manuscript out there I really want to know a lot more about – MS Aldini 488 “Collectio de balneis”.

Q13A vs Q13B (again)

However, before I launch into all that, I first need to recap various codicological features of Q13 before we start trying to work with it.

The first thing to know about Q13 is that its bifolios have ended up bound in the wrong order. We can tell this because a bifolio that was originally at the centre of a quire / gathering has ended up not at the middle. Moreover, following the logical through to the end leads (as per The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006) to a situation where you can reconstruct the central two bifolios’ nesting order: f84 – f78 (centre) f81 – f75.

The second thing to notice is that the drawings on these two nested Q13 bifolios (which are all about bathing ‘nymphs’) seem to sit in a quite different category from the drawings on the other three Q13 bifolios (which largely revolve around plumbing, though whether this is real or imagined is hard to say). Voynich researcher Glen Claston proposed that the first two bifolios form a balneological quire on their own (which he called “Q13B”), while the other three form a medical quire (which he called “Q13A”). Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with his specific interpretation, his basic codicological division into two separate artifacts has stood the test of time: so it seems we are looking at two separate (though similar-looking) things whose constituent bifolios have ended up interleaved. Glen also proposed that Q13B was constructed before Q13A.

The third thing to be aware of is that on the Voynich Manuscript’s page f81r (in Q13B, the bathing nymphs section), there is apparently a poem. I raised this poem section as something which we might look for parallels with in other texts when I started discussing the ‘block paradigm’ approach (where you look for structural matches between a page of enciphered text and plaintext pages from similar contemporary or earlier manuscripts). Interestingly, it seems (from the line-initial gallows characters) that the f81r poem has a 7 / 8 / 8 / 8 line structure, which would be consistent with the writer / copyist having accidentally skipped past a line within the first block of the poem.

Putting all these pieces together, the implication is that we should be looking for a block-sized match between the contents of the two “bathing nymphs” bifolios and 14th / early 15th century balneological texts (which are possibly but not necessarily illustrated). The poem embedded in the middle (it’s on the right half of the central bifolio) seems to be structured as three verses, each containing four couplets (i.e. eight lines). This is because if we can find a source match that’s tolerably close to this basic ‘block specification’, we might just be in business.

Arnold C. Klebs

Back when I was writing The Curse of the Voynich in 2006, to be honest I hadn’t yet found much balneological source material at all. It was only a little later (in 2009) that I found an online version of the (1916) article “Balneology in the Middle Ages” by Arnold C. Klebs. This mentioned a number of late medieval / early modern people who had written on the subject of baths, e.g.:

  • Giovanni de Dondis
  • Gentile da Foligno (d. 1348)
  • Ugolino Caccino of Montecatini (d. 1425)
  • Matteo Bendinelli (1489)
  • Michele Savonarola (who I already knew about)

Klebs also mentioned the printed book “De Balneis omnia quae extant” Venice, Giunta, 1553, fol., 447 leaves, which he describes as “the first text-book on balneology“.

A source Klebs also refers to specifically for German bath history is:

  • Martin, Alfred “Deutsches Badewvesen in vergangenen Tagen,” Jena, Diederichs, 1906. With 159 illustrations from old originals.

Giunta’s (1553) De Balneis Omnia

Google Books lists two separate copies of Giunta’s (1553) “De Balneis Omnia Quae Extant apud Graecos, Latinos et Arabas” (etc etc), both of which freely downloadable:

The bad news is that this is a super-heavyweight Latin compendium of balneological sources (the PDF runs to 1033 pages). However, the good news is that Giunta has assembled it from just about everyone pre-1553 who had written about baths, water etc: so there are large sections excerpting books from early authors such as Pliny, Avicenna, Aristotle, Galen, Hippocrates, along with selections from 16th century authors such as Gesner, Fuchs etc.

One thing I found was that, Pietro d’Abano’s “De Balneis” aside (which is written in hexameters), almost none of the balneo sources quoted by Giunta seem to appear in verse form. Even the promising-looking verse section on p.90 by “Ioannis et Iacobi De Dondis Patavinorum” turned out to be a poem by Claudian (370AD-404AD) (“Fons, Antenoreae vitam qui porrigis urbi, / Fataque vicinis noxia pellis aquis“).

Having said that, Giunta’s selection is entirely in Latin and far from complete. So it may well be that, if we can somehow go back to some fifteenth century collection of balneo manuscripts, we can see these in their original form – which may well be in Tuscan (rather than Latin), in verse (rather than in prose), and illustrated (rather than just text).

But where on earth would we find such an unlikely-sounding text?

Pavia, MS Aldini 488

It turns out that there really is such a text: and it is at the University of Pavia. Sadly, this “Collectio de Balneis” hasn’t yet been digitized (or if it has, its digital pages have not yet been shared outside the University of Pavia). But we do know the contents of MS Aldini 488:

Aldini 488, Collectio de Balneis. Cart., sec. XV, cc. 78 n.n., 232 x 154 mm.
c. 1: Savonarola Michele, De balneo et termis naturalibus omnibus Italiae sicque totius orbis proprietatibusque earum
c. 45: Ugolino da Montecatini, De balneis mineralibus et artificialibus
c. 61: Epigrammata de balneis puteolanis
c. 66: Consilium pro balneis de Corsena in comitatu luchano pro domino Lanzaloto de Crotis ducali consiliario
c. 67: Tura di Castello, Regula et tractatus balnei de poreta
c. 68v: Tractatus pro balneis de aquis per Petrum de Tussignano
c. 70v: Antonii Guaynerii papiensis de balneis aquis ciuitatis antiquissime que in marchionatu montisferrati sita sunt tractatus
c. 74v: De balneis secundum Petrum de Ebano
c. 75v: Tractatus de balneis secundum Gentillem
c. 76v: De balneis de Burmio secundum magistrum Petrum de Tussignano
c. 77v: Regula balnei loci de Aquaria in territorio regii
c. 78v: De balneo aque porrete
Collocazione cd: Mediateca nas bu 269
Collocazione vol. originale: Aldini 488

Because this is not yet available online, it is where – unless you happen to know better? – our current breakneck tour of balneological sources stops,

Note that there are a fair few monographs on individual balneo authors:

  • This Spanish Prezi presentation by Sergio P on Michele Savonarola lists eight manuscript versions of his book on baths (including Paris BNF Nouv. Acq. Lat 889, dating to 1452), seven printed versions of the same (1485-1562), plus four separate monographs.
  • Pietro da Tossignano’s (d. 1401) “Tractatus de regimine sanitatis” was printed in 1535 (his medical recipes are online here). Giuseppe Mazzini wrote “Vita e opera di maestro Pietro da Tossignano” in 1926 (reprinted in 2007).

As an aside, I also found an interesting chapter (in French) on the balneo literature – “Les traités médicaux sur les bains d’Acqui Terme, entre XIVe et XVIe siècles“, by Gabriella Zuccolin – from a recent book, “Sejourner au bain”. Zuccolin further notes that many of the treatises are covered at speed by Lynn Thorndike, but… they would be, wouldn’t they?

Voynich Manuscript: Letter Contact Tables

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A recent post on voynich.ninja brought up the subject of differences / similarities between Voynichese words starting with EVA ch and those starting with EVA sh. But this got me thinking more generally about the difference between ch and sh in Voynichese (i.e. in any position), and even more generally about letter contact tables.

Problems With Letter Contact Tables

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance distribution has been flattened, a normal first test is William Friedman’s Index of Coincidence (IoC). This often helps determine the period of the cryptographic means that was used to flatten it (e.g. the length of the cyclic keyword, etc). But this is not the case with the Voynich Manuscript.

For ciphertexts where the frequency instance graph is normal but the letter to letter adjacency has been disrupted, the IoC is one of the tests that can help determine the period of any structured transposition (e.g. picket fence etc) that has been carried out. But the Voynich is also not like this.

So, when cryptologists are faced by a structured ciphertext (i.e. one where the frequency instance graph more closely resembles a natural language, and where the letter adjacency also seems to follow language-like rules, the primary tool they rely on is letter contact tables. These are tables of counts (or percentages) that show how often given letters are followed by other given letters.

But for Voynichese there’s a catch: because in order to build up letter contact tables, you have to first know what the letters of the underlying text are. And whatever they might be, the one thing that they definitely are not is the letters of the EVA transcription.

Problems With EVA

The good thing about EVA was that it was designed to help Voynich researchers collaborate on the problems of Voynichese. This was because it offered a way for them to talk about Voynichese that online was (to a large degree) independent of all their competing theories about what specific combinations of Voynichese shapes or strokes genuinely made up a Voynichese letter. And there were a lot of these theories back then, a lot.

To achieve this, EVA was constructed as a clever hybrid stroke transcription alphabet, one designed to capture in a practical ‘atomic’ (i.e. stroke-oriented) way many of the more troublesome composite letter shapes you find in Voynichese. Examples of these are the four “strikethrough gallows” (EVA ckh / cth / cfh / cph), written as an ornate, tall character (a “gallows character”) but with an odd curly-legged bench character struck through it.

However, the big problem with EVA is arguably that it was too successful. Once researchers had EVA transcriptions to work with, almost all (with a few heroic exceptions) seem to have largely stopped wondering about how the letters fit together, i.e. how to parse Voynichese into tokens.

In fact, we have had a long series of Voynich theorists and analysts who look solely at Voynich ‘words’ written in EVA, because it can seem that you can work with EVA Voynichese words while ignoring the difficult business of having to parse Voynichese. So the presence of EVA transcriptions has allowed many people to write a lot of stuff bracketing out the difficult stuff that motivated the complicated transcription decisions that went into designing EVA in the first place.

As a result, few active Voynich researchers now know (or indeed seem to care much) about how Voynichese should be parsed. This is despite the fact that, thanks to the (I think somewhat less than positive) influence of the late Stephen Bax, the Voynich community now contains many linguists, for whom you might think the issue of parsing would be central.

But it turns out that parsing is typically close to the least of their concerns, in that (following Bax’s example) they typically see linguistic takes and cryptographic takes as mutually exclusive. Which is, of course, practically nonsensical: indeed, many of the best cryptologists were (and are) also linguists. Not least of these was Prescott Currier: I would in fact go so far as to say that everyone else’s analyses of Voynichese have amounted to little more than a series of minor extensions and clarifications to Currier’s deeply insightful 1970s contributions to the study of Voynichese.

Problems With Parsing

Even so, there is a further problem with parsing, one which I tried to foreground in my book “The Curse of the Voynich” (2006). This is because I think there is strong evidence that certain pairs of letters may have been used as verbose cipher pairs, i.e. pairs of glyphs used to encipher a single underlying token. These include EVA qo / ee / or / ar / ol / al / am / an / ain / aiin / aiiin / air / aiir (the jury is out on dy). However, if you follow this reasoning through, this also means that we should be highly suspicious of anywhere else the ‘o’ and ‘a’ glyphs appear, e.g. EVA ot / ok / op / of / eo etc.

If this is even partially correct, then any letter contact tables built on the component glyphs (i.e. the letter-like-shapes that such verbose pairs are made up of) would be analysing not the (real underlying) text but instead what is known as the covertext (i.e. the appearance of the text). As a result, covertext glyph contact tables would hence be almost entirely useless.

So I would say that there is a strong case to be made that almost all Voynichese parsing analyses to date have found themselves entangled by the covertext (i.e. they have been misdirected by steganographic tricks).

All the same, without a parsing scheme we have no letter contact tables: and without letter contact tables we can have no worthwhile cryptology of what is manifestly a structured text. Moreover, arguably the biggest absence in Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma” is the lack of letter contact tables, which I think sent out the wrong kind of message to readers.

Letter Contact Tables: v0.1

Despite this long list of provisos and problems, I still think it is a worthwhile exercise to try to construct letter contact tables for Voynichese: we just have to be extraordinarily wary when we do this, that’s all.

One further reason to be wary is that many of the contact tables are significantly different for Currier A and Currier B pages. So, because I contend that it makes no sense at all to try to build up letter contact pages that merge A and B pages together, I present A and B separately here.

The practical problem is that doing this properly will require a much better set of scripts than I currently have: what I’m presenting here is only a small corner of the dataset (forward contacts for ch and sh), executed very imperfectly (partly by hand). But hopefully it’s a step in the right direction and others will take it as an encouragement to go much further.

Note that I used Takahashi’s transcription, and got a number of unmatched results which I counted as ??? values. These may well be errors in the transcription or errors in my conversion of the transcription to JavaScript (which I did a decade ago). Or indeed just bit-rot in my server, I don’t know.

A ch vs B ch, Forward Contacts

A ch
(cho 1713)
—– of which (chol 531, chor 400, chod 196, chok 130, cho. 113, chot 94, chos 50, chom 28, choi 20, choy 18, chop 14, chof 12, choe 11, choa 7, choc 6, choo 5, cho- 4, chon 4, chog 2, cho??? 69)
(che 918)
—– of which (cheo 380, chey 229, chee 156, chea 64, chek 30, chet 19, ched 12, ches 8, chep 7, cher 2, cheg 1, chef 1, che. 1, che* 1, che??? 7)
(chy 544)
(cha 255)
(ch. 112)
(chk 60)
(chd 35)
(cht 31)
(chs 21)
(chch 5) (chp 5) (chsh 4) (chm 2) (chi 2) (chc 2) (chf 1) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

B ch
(che 3640)
—– of which (ched 1482, chey 597, cheo 565, chee 537, chek 119, chea 82, ches 55, chet 42, chep 25, chef 15, cher 4, cheg 4, che. 2, chel 1, che??? 117)
(chd 725)
(cho 633)
—– of which (chol 200, chod 123, chor 83, chok 65, chot 44, cho. 34, chop 7, chos 22, choa 10, chop 7, choy 4, choe 4, chof 4, choo 4, choi 2, cho= 1, cho??? 26)
(ch. 403)
(chy 331)
(cha 185)
(chk 84)
(chs 50)
(cht 38)
(chp 20)
(chch 6) (chc 6) (chsh 5) (chf 2) (chi 0) (chm 0) (chl 0) (chn 0) (chr 0) (chs 0) (ch- 0) (ch= 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:cho = 1713, while B:cho = 633
  • A:chol = 531, while B:chol = 200
  • A:chor = 397, while B:chor = 83
  • A:che = 918, while B:che = 3640
  • A:ched = 12, while B:ched = 1482
  • A:chedy = 7, while B:chedy = 1193
  • A:chd = 35, while B:chd = 725
  • A:chdy = 21, while B:chdy = 504

As an aside:

  • dy appears 765 times in A, 5574 times in B

A sh vs B sh, Forward Contacts

A sh

(sho 625)
—– of which (shol 174, sho. 143, shor 105, shod 77, shok 32, shot 22, shos 11, shoi 9, shoa 6, shoy 5, shoe 4, shom 4, shop 4, sho- 1, shof 1, shoo 1, sho??? 26)
(she 407)
—– of which (sheo 174, shee 84, shey 81, shea 20, she. 19, shek 12, shes 8, shed 3, shet 2, shep 1, sheq 1, sher 1, she??? 1)
(shy 153)
(sha 58)
(sh. 39)
(shk 13)
(shd 7)
(shch 6)
(sht 5)
(shs 3)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

B sh

(she 1997)
—– of which (shed 734, shee 386, shey 334, sheo 286, shek 78, shea 37, shet 18, shes 15, she. 13, shep 6, shef 5, shec 2, sheg 2, she* 1, shel 1, sher 1, she??? 79)
(sho 284)
—– of which (shol 89, shod 59, shor 43, shok 24, sho. 23, shot 8, shos 8, shoa 5, shoi 5, shoe 3, shof 2, shoo 2, shoy 1, shop 1, sho??? 11)
(shd 161)
(sh. 136)
(shy 104)
(sha 67)
(shk 35)
(sht 13)
(shs 12)
(shch 6)
(shsh 1)
(shf 1) (everything else 0)

Observations of interest here:

  • A:sho = 625, while B:sho = 284
  • A:shol = 174, while B:shol = 89
  • A:shor = 105, while B:shor = 43
  • A:she = 406, while B:she = 1997
  • A:shed = 3, while B:shed = 734
  • A:shedy = 2, while B:shedy = 629
  • A:shd = 7, while B:shd = 161
  • A:shdy = 3, while B:shdy = 100

Final Thoughts

The above is no more than a brief snapshot of a corner of a much larger dataset. Even here, a good number of the features of this corner have been discussed and debated for decades (some most notably by Prescott Currier).

But given that there is no shortage of EVA ch, sh, e, d in both A and B, why are EVA ched, chd, shed, and shd so sparse in A and so numerous in B?

It’s true that dy appears 7.3x more in B than in A: but even so, the ratios for ched, chedy, shed, shedy, chd, chdy, shd and shdy are even higher (123x, 170x, 244x, 314x, 20x, 24x, 23x, and 33x respectively).

Something to think about…

Dorabella Cipher: timeline, texts, and Keith Massey…

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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!).

Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich…

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On board the S.S. Ormonde (at the same time as both Triantafillos Balutis and Stelios Balutis) in February 1923, there was a very special passenger: Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich.

Let’s just say I probably won’t ever get the chance to write another blog post with even half as many references to smoking as this. On with the story!

The Duchess in Australia

The Perth Daily News of 8 Feb 1923 launched the story:

A RUSSIAN PRINCESS PASSES THROUGH ON WORLD TOUR.
Her Royal Highness the Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich, is aboard the liner Ormonde, which arrived at Fremantle this morning. Her Highness is an Englishwoman by birth, and is proceeding to Sydney, where she will be joined by His Highness the Grand Duke. Afterwards they will go to America on a tour round the world. It is stated that her Highness was formerly married to an Englis[h]man and inherited considerable money. Her present marriage took place, it is stated, only a few months ago.

The story then became more elaborate, as per the Melbourne Herald (17 Feb 1923):

If any one woman more than another is entitled to a place in the pages of a novel, she is the Princess Ivanovitch, who is at present on a tour of Australia. She has visited practically every place worth seeing in the world. She has been engaged to one of the richest men in the world, and she has married royalty. These are few of the things that have been crammed into the life of this remarkable woman. Cutting a unique figure in her quaint dress, shoes and hat — things that would being envy to the heart of a Brittany girl — and puffing smoke from a delicately-rolled cigarette, in true Bohemian style, the Princess, an elderly woman, strolled unaccompanied around Melbourne all day yesterday until late In the evening, admiring, or criticising the outstanding points of interest. Only eighteen months ago the Princess, who is an Englishwoman, having been born in Lancashire, married the Grand Duke Prince Ivanovitch, of Russia, a second cousin to the late Czar. The wedding was celebrated at San Diego. California. They had been intimately acquainted for many years.
Yearning for Travel
According to the story the Princess related to a Herald representative, the only two countries of any which she has not visited are Russia and New Zealand. She admitted that she had an unquenchable yearning for travel, and could hardly bear to remain in the one place for long. Most of her life has been taken up in travelling. The longest spell in one country she had experienced for more than 20 years was her stay in England, during the war period, when the existing regulations compelled women to remain in the country. Before marrying: Prince Ivanovitch, she was Mrs Brewster-Fuller. She has only one child living, a daughter, who is married to the Dutch Ambassador at Pekin. Prior to meeting her late husband, the Duchess was engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the world — Mr Vercker-Vercloyle-Cloy, who was on his way to New York, where the marriage was to be celebrated, when he died from double pneumonia. He contracted the illness after having jumped overboard from a ship on the South American coast in an attempt to rescue a drowning sailor.
Marie Antoinette Pearls
The entire estate of Mr Vercker-Vercloyle-Cloy was willed to the Princess. Included in the personalty left by the deceased millionaire were celebrated pearls — a three string necklace originally the possession of Marie Antoinette. “I’m terrified to wear them,” the Princess admitted. She stated that they are safely deposited in a Paris bank.
Speaking of the opinions she had already formed of Melbourne, the Princess grew enthusiastic regarding the Botanical Gardens and St. Kilda road. She said the gardens were beautiful, one of the best she has seen. While loth to draw comparisons, she couldn’t name another road in the world which excels our highway in beauty. Nevertheless she is, generally speaking. disappointed with Melbourne, particularly with the buildings and shop window- displays. “They are comparatively poor,” she remarked, citing those of Valparaiso and Buenos Ayres and other large cities south of the equator, as being a long way ahead in this respect. Princess Ivanovitch was at Oberammergau when the famous Passion play was enacted. She describes the efforts of Anton Bang and his followers as simply wonderful. Throughout her travels the Princess has kept a minute diary, and contemplates writing the history of her career.

By the time she reached Sydney, her story had expanded yet further (Brisbane Telegraph, 20 Feb 1923):

Mystery surrounds an Englishwoman described as the Grand Duchess the Princess Ivanovitch, who arrived in Sydney yesterday, aboard the Ormonde. When it was objected that that name was not to be found on the rolls of the Russian nobility she admitted that it was an assumed one. She said her husband had never told her his real name, because if it became known the Bolsheviks would confiscate his estates. She thought he was a Romanoff. “Nevertheless,” she said, “he commands what once was the Czar’s special regiment. He wears a uniform of white cloth, covered with gold […] gold helmet, with rare white plume The visitor told an extraordinary story of romance, millions, and marriage. “The Grand Duke,” she said, “is coming to Australia in the most gorgeous yacht in the world, valued at £250,000, to join me, preparatory to our sailing for New Zealand, Samoa, Honolulu, and Japan, where he resides.” Her only daughter, she said, was the wife of the ambassador for Holland. She was a widow until 18 months ago, when, she said, she married the Grand Duke in America. She was in her sixties at the time.

The Warwick Daily News (also 20 Feb 1923) named her late husband as instead “Bereker Perhoyle Clay”, and said that she had inherited twenty two million dollars, but her Russian husband “would not allow her to touch a penny of it”, la-la-la.

Inevitably, the Perth Daily News (20 Feb 1923) was starting to smell a rat:

A SHABBY “ROYALTY” – IS SHE A PRINCESS? – SYDNEY SUSPECTS HER.
SYDNEY, Tuesday.
Mystery surrounds the woman who claims to be the Russian Grand Duchess, Princess Ivanovich. Doubt has been thrown on her story. She appeared in the lounge of a fashionable hotel to-day clad in a huge white fur coat, torn in many places, and covering apparently a dilapidated blue dress. Her hands were swathed in dull jewellery ware, consisting, it seemed, of something like moonstones. She wore two huge bracelets on her arm, looking like replicas of handcuff chains. When she was told that there is no record in Russian royalty of the name of Ivanovich she admitted that this was an assumed name, and that it was used to mislead the Bolsheviks. “My husband is a Duke,” she says. “He will be here soon.” In the meantime Sydney is wondering what will be the next move of the unique visitor.

By the 21 Feb 1923, the Brisbane Daily Standard was rather enjoying the whole show:

Meanwhile Sydney is wondering what she will say next. At any rate, she is having the time of her life, even if she does smoke Capstan cigarettes.

Before she left Australia, she went up to the Jenolan Caves, travelling in the second class smoking compartment. And then, finally, she left Sydney aboard the steamer Manuka, according to the Melbourne Herald (23 Feb 1923):

SHOOK HER FISTS
Russian Duchess Angered
THREATENS TO DUCK REPORTERS
SYDNEY, Friday.
“If my husband the Duke was here he would pitch you into the sea. And if reporters or photographers dare to board my yacht, the Henriette, when she arrives here. I shall recommend that they be thrown overboard.” So sick of Sydney reporters and photographers is the woman who protests that she is the Grand Duchess of Ivanovitch that she shook her fists at pressmen who tried to bid her au revoir on her departure for New Zealand by the steamer Manuka today. The Duchess, although she had only been on board 30 minutes, was extremely popular with fellow travellers. She was found sitting forward on the main saloon deck as usual, puffing away at a cigarette.
A group of young men and several ladies was standing about her, and she was telling them a wonderful story of mansions and yachts. All seemed interested.
“Photograph Me in Bed?”
The duchess refused to be interviewed and continued to speak to her group of listeners. “Since my arrival in Sydney on Monday,” she said, “no fewer than 98 reporters have visited me. When the Ormonde reached Sydney, nine reporters came into my little cabin, and I remonstrated with them for I was not fully dressed.”
The Duchess began to cry. As she wiped her eyes, she continued: “One photographer was extremely persistent. He wanted to photograph me, and I said ‘What! Photograph me in bed? Certainly not!” “I have had a most unpleasant stay in Sydney, and I am sure my husband will protest when he gets here in his yacht. Perhaps he will not come to Sydney now.”
When the Manuka left the wharf the Duchess was leaning over the rails and smiling wistfully.

The Melbourne Herald ran a picture of her in its story the next day:

The Duchess in New Zealand

In Wellington, she stayed in the Midland Hotel, where the New Zealand Herald (3 March 1923) noted:

The titled visitor was an elderly woman and her clothes were hardly in keeping with her name, for she was dressed in a stained skirt and a much-travelled fur coat. Neither did her method of lighting a match upon her shoe suggest the grand ducal manner.

The Newcastle Sun (14 Mar 1923) continued the story:

GUEST OF HIS MAJESTY
RUSSIAN “PRINCESS”
Overstepping the Mark
WELLINGTON (N.Z.), Wednesday.
From her grand palaces at Moscow and Petrograd, and her “lovely little villa at Monte Carlo,” the “Grand Duchess Prince Ivanovich,” or, to use her numerous English names, Harriet Rushford Henrietta Southall Fuller, paid an involuntary visit to Ashburton, and as a first offending inebriate was a guest at His Majesty’s local lock-up. Fuller arrived at Ashburton on Tuesday by the Christchurch-Dunedin [ex]press, in a state of drunkenness, according to the evidence at the court, when a charge in accordance with her condition at the time of her arrival was preferred against her. It was stated that on leaving Christchurch, the ‘princess’ indulged in liquid refreshment, whisky, and so generously did she treat herself that she rapidly became a source of great annoyance to lady travellers. At Rakala, the guard decided that the “princess” had overstepped the mark, and relieved her of the rest of her whisky. Her indignation knew no bounds. Muddled with drink, and seething with temper, she achieved a remarkable state of untidiness. Her clothing was terribly disarranged. Her boots were found in another part of the car, and her stockings flapped about her ankles.
“QUITE NICE”
Fuller became altogether too unladylike in every action for her fellow passengers, and when the train reached Ashburton a constable invited the “princess” to come along. Fortunately she was under the impression that she was to be motored to Timaru, which she thought “quite nice” on the part of her Ashburton friends. The journey, however, ended abruptly at the lock-up. When she sobered up she also woke up the entire community. For a lady of 63 summers her voice possessed remarkable volume. She told the senior sergeant that who would tell Lord Jellicoe of the “frightful insult.” The sergeant, however, told the “Princess” that Lord Jellicoe had instructed him to put her in the cells. This calmed the “Princess”, strange to say. At nine o’clock the sergeant read the Riot Act, for the atmosphere was being rudely disturbed, and the neighbors were afforded little rest. Fuller had the modest sum of £8 in her possession, but she also possesses an elaborate looking passport, and much correspondence which certainly indicated that she was “somebody,” somewhere. The senior sergeant allowed her out on bail, in the sum of £3, and there was no appearance of the “Princess” in court. A constable described the appearance of the accused. “She was a disreputable sight, and in a beastly state of drunkenness,” he said. “It’s a very bad case,” observed the bench, and inflicted a fine of £3.

The NZ Truth (which I didn’t know about before) was quite taken with her, publishing this rather flattering drawing:

From Dunedin (where she had some difficulty find a hotel room), she moved onwards “by the southern express on her way to Queenstown”. She also caused a minor commotion at Timaru station, where she grabbed a refill of whisky and cigarettes in a local hotel, before legging it back yelling loudly just as the train was about to depart.

And then it was time for the journey to end, as per the Otago Daily Times of 29 March 1923:

The “Grand Duchess Princess Ivanovitch,” or Mrs Brewster Fuller, as she is otherwise known, returned to the North Island last week, and, after visiting Rotorua, will leave Auckland on April 15 for Honolulu and China, to pay a visit to her daughter, who, she says, is “Lady” Oudenyk, wife of the Ambassador for the Netherlands at Peking. The lady persists in the statement that she is the wife of the Grand Duke, whom she expects to meet in Auckland next week. They have houses, she asserts, at Rome, Venice, Paris, Monte Carlo, Lake Como (Switzerland), London, Folkestone, and Sicily, besides three homes in Russia, where her husband has lost £150,000 a year through the depreciation of the rouble. She is alleged to have recently received a letter from her agent in England, giving her news of her tenants, and stating that, as things were improving, her income would be in the region of £1200 a year from now on.

Home Again

By 19 October 1923, Mrs Fuller had arrived back in the UK, telling yet another tall tale that the Brisbane Daily Standard picked up on:

The first prize in the Best Lie About Russia competition is awarded to the London newspaper that published the following:
“STARVING RUSSIA.
The Grand Duchess Ivanovitch, cousin to the late Czar, travelling incognito as Mrs. Fuller, arrived at Southampton from Canada recently. She said that the Grand Duke recently sent 35 ship-loads of grain to his peasants, but the Bolsheviks became aware of its arrival and burned all the vessels to the water’s edge.
The starving people, who had gathered in the hope of obtaining some of the grain, rushed into the sea up to their necks, seized the burning corn and extinguishing the flames, swallowed it greedily.”
This is on such a magnificent scale that comment is difficult; but I must say that I especially like the expression, “his peasants.” – From the London “Daily Herald.”

No doubt assiduous researchers will be able to find countless other news articles documenting the Duchess’ haphazard (and smoke-filled) travels through Hawaii, America and Canada: but this is where I’ve drawn the line.

Oh, And One Last Thing…

Before all the above happened, the Manawatu Standard published this tiny news snippet on 8 Feb 1923:

The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Duorak Ivanovitch have reached Sicily in their yacht, from Venice, en route for New Zealand.

Similarly, the Feilding Star (8 Feb 1923) noted:

The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess Dvorak Ivanovitch, left Sicily in their yacht en route for New Zealand last month.

In fact, the same story appeared in Brisbane’s Daily Standard as far back as 27 Dec 1922, which I suspect was when the original set of cables was sent, warning New Zealand of the approach of Typhoon Brewster-Fuller:

We Breathe Again.
The cable man says that the Grand Duke and Duchess Bvorak [sic] Ivanovitch are yachting to New Zealand. It’s a comfort, anyway, to know that all the grand dukes were not thrown into the bread line when the Soviets took over.

Chloe Delancy (Thomas Beale Jr’s Mother)…

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Given that I’ve paid my findmypast subscription (and that money’s not coming back any time soon), I thought it might be interesting to look at the records it holds for Thomas Beale Jr‘s mother Chloe Delancy / Delancey. We know a fair bit about Thomas Beale Sr, so why not find out more about his mother?

Chloe Delancy / Delancey

As far as I can see, “Cloe Delancy” only appears in Botetourt County in the 1810 and 1820 US census records. This would seem to imply that she married, moved, or died before the 1830 census – given that there are plenty of holes in the census records, it’s sensible to be at least a bit defensive.

In the 1810 census records, she is apparently living alone (“Number of free white females age 26-44” = 1) – every other column is blank. (Hence it would seem that Thomas Beale Jr may not have been living with her then.) Other than being in Botetourt County VA, no location is given.

In the 1820 census records, there is one “free white female age 45 and up” (presumably her), one “free white female age 10-16”, and one “free white female under age 10”. The location is noted in the margin as “Fin.”, which is without any doubt Fincastle.

There’s no obvious sign of her in the 1830 Census, yet that was the year that the case Delancey vs Beale was in the Supreme Court in Louisiana, so she was presumably still alive then (unless you know better?).

(Note that there is an online genealogy mentioning a Chloe Emaline Delancy b. 1834 Rockingham NC to William D. Delancey (1785-1860) and Catherine [nee Roach] (1799-1860): but this person seems entirely unconnected.)

Virginia Cloes / Chloes?

The 1830 Census has a Chloe Switcher living in Botentourt County, but she is a F 30-40 living with a M 15-20. Similarly, the 1840 Census has a Cloe Switzer, but she is a F 40-50 living with a M 20-30: I think it’s a pretty safe bet that the two entries refer to the same person, and that this probably isn’t Chloe Delancy.

Broadening the search a little, there are eight women called Cloe in Virginia listed in the 1830 Census: Cooper, Masters, Myho, Powelson, Simmons, Whichard, and Withers (though note that these are all the head of their household).

  • Cloe Cooper: 1 x F under 5, 1 x F 20-30, 1 x F 50-60
  • Cloe Masters: 1 x M under 5, 1 x M 5-10, 2 x M 15-20, 1 x M 20-30, 1 x F 2-30, 3 x F 30-40, 1 x F 60-70
  • Cloe Myho (actually Mayho): no details of household supplied
  • Cloe Powelson: 1 x M 10-15, 1 x M 15-20, 1 x M 20-30, 1 x F 10-15, 1 x F 15-20, 1 x F 40-50 [also in 1840 and 1850 censuses]
  • Cloe Simmons: 1 x F 5-10, 1 x F 50-60
  • Cloe Whichard: 1 x M 30-40, 1 x F 20-30, 1x F 50-60
  • Cloe Withers: 1 x M 30-40, 1 x F 15-20, 1 x F 70-80

Similarly, there are sixteen women called Chloe in Virginia listed in the 1830 Census: Atkins, Buske, Cheshire, Coleman, Ellison, Gaskins, Goodrich, James, Lunsford, Mifflin, Mills, Pitman, Powell, Sitcher, Thomas, and Vanlandingham.

  • Chloe Atkins: 1 x M 20-30, 1 x F 15-20, 2 x F 50-60 [also in the 1840 census]
  • Chloe Buske: 1 x M 20-30, 3 x F 20-30, 1 x F 50-60
  • Chloe Cheshire: 1 x M under 5, 1 x M 15-20, 1 x F under 5, 1 x F 10-15, 1 x F 20-30, 1 x F 50-60 [also in the 1810 census]
  • Chloe Coleman: 1 x M under 5, 1 x M 20-30, 2 x F 5-10, 2 x F 30-40, 1 x F 60-70
  • Chloe Ellison: 1 x F 50-60 [also in the 1810, 1820 and 1840 censuses]
  • Chloe Gaskins: 1 x M under 5, 1 x M 5-10, 1 x M 10-15, 1 x F 30-40 [also in the 1850 census]
  • Chloe Goodrich: 1 x F 60-70
  • Chloe James: 1 x F 20-30, 1 x F 70-80
  • Chloe Lunsford: 2 x F 15-20, 1 x F 50-60
  • Chloe Mifflin: no details given
  • Chloe Mills: 1 x M 10-15, 1 x M 15-20, 1 x M 20-30, 2 x F 5-10, 1 x F 15-20, 1 x F 20-30
  • Chloe Pitman: 1 x F 50-60 [also in the 1840 census]
  • Chloe Powell: 1 x M 5-10, 1 x F 5-10, 1 x F 30-40
  • Chloe Sitcher/Switcher/Switzer: 1 x M 15-20, 1 x F 30-40
  • Chloe Thomas: 1 x F 20-30, 1 x F 60-70 [also in the 1820 census]
  • Chloe Vanlandingham: 1 x M 10-15, 1 x F under 5, 1 x F 10-15, 1 x F 15-20, 1 x F 40-50

Note that Cloe Cooper is also in the 1840 Census, but listed as F 80-90.

Any Other Mentions?

There is one possible mention I found, which is in the Annals of Southwest Virginia 1769-1800 (Lewis Preston Summers, 1929), p.465. There, the entry for 10th February 1796 in the minutes of the County Court mentions that the grand jury presented “Isaac Dawson and Chloe Delaney for living in an unlawful way”.

Thoughts on the US Census

I have to say I was expecting to find a little more than I did. It may be that we now have a weak indication that Chloe Delancey had two younger daughters we were (or, at the very least, I was) previously unaware of: but the limitations of the census data mean that we have (I think) no obvious paths to go down to find their names.

Has anyone got any better information on Chloe Delancey and/or her possible two daughters than this?