At last, the secret history of that dead cipher pigeon…

by ⋅ 59 Comments

I spent last Saturday at the National Archives in Kew, accompanied by fellow programmer Stu Rutter who is just as fascinated by the whole pigeon cipher mystery as I am. Between us we did a kind of “Extreme Programming” two-man research team thing, where every time one found something unexpected or cool or had an insight, he would call the other over to see, or we’d both go downstairs to the café and discuss where we’d got to over a sandwich or whatever (reminder to self: don’t choose the double chocolate muffin again, it wasn’t very good).

The big result is that we ended up (I’m pretty sure) working out the secret history of this dead pigeon… and we didn’t even need to break its cipher (though Stu’s still on the case, more on that below). I’ll divide the overall argument down into a series of individual steps so that any passing Army historian who wants to take me to task over any detail can do so nice and easily. 🙂

1. Percy was an Army pigeon

I was already pretty sure of this: when I looked up all the “A Smith”s in the armed forces, every single “Serjeant” [with a ‘j’] was in the British Army. But what emerged at the National Archives were two widely-distributed pigeon-related documents (one from 1941, the other from 29th Jan 1944) that made it absolutely clear what different colour pigeon-carried canisters meant:
WO 205/225 – see pages 1/2/3 (at the back of the folder)
* Red = US Forces + British Army
* Blue = US Forces + British RAF
* Blue with coloured disk = British RAF
* Blue with white patch = RAF
* Red with coloured disk = British Special Service
* Grey = British Special Service
* Green = British Special Service
* Black = British Civil Police
* Yellow = British Commercial

Hence our dead pigeon was an Army pigeon; or (to be more precise) a NURP pigeon commandeered by the British Army.

2. The signature is that of Lance Serjeant William Stout

Knowing for sure that we’re looking at an Army message helps us narrow down the list of suspects to (I’m quite certain) one and only one individual – Lance Serjeant William Stout of 253rd Field Company of the Royal Engineers (as predicted here before), whose war grave says he died on 6th June 1944, the day better known as D-Day. You’ll read far more about Stout further down…

3. The pigeon was sent from France by a French speaker

I’m 99% certain that the “lib. 1625” writing on the cipher message was short for “libéré” (released) in French, and hence it seems overwhelmingly likely to me that the pigeon was released in France. But because there were no Royal Engineers at all in France (or indeed in Holland or Belgium) between the Dunkirk Evacuation (27th May 1940 – 4th June 1940) and D-Day (6th June 1944), the pigeon can therefore only have been sent either on or before 4th June 1940, or on or after 6th June 1944.

This gives us two “bubbles” of historical possibility to consider, the first ending with Dunkirk, the second starting on D-Day. How can we possibly tell which one of these was the right one? And can we be even more specific?

4. The pigeons were not released on or before Dunkirk

We’re helped here by the two pigeons’ ring tag identifications. Pigeon “NURP.37.DK.76” was the 76th pigeon to be ringed in 1937 by the DK (probably Dorking, we think) group of NURP [National Union of Racing Pigeons] pigeon fanciers, while “NURP 40 TW 194” was the 194th pigeon to be ringed in 1940 by the TW (almost certainly Tunbridge Wells) group. Yet having now read up on war-time pigeon-breeding administrivia at the National Archives, I know that (a) pigeons don’t normally breed in Winter; (b) pairs of pigeons will typically produce up to three pairs of eggs in a year, starting in Spring; (c) a young bird aged 6-8 weeks is called a “squeaker” and needs a fair bit of training before it is ready to race; and (d) pigeon races held in the first part of the summer almost never involve pigeons born earlier that year.

Hence if pigeon “NURP 40 TW 194” flew on 5th June 1940, it would have had to have been born in the middle of Winter right at the start of 1940: and the chances of there having been 193 other birds born and ringed earlier in 1940 among a single group of lofts around (say) Tunbridge Wells are extremely close to zero. Once you look at it like that, I think that there is no real chance that this pigeon was sent back from the Dunkirk evacuation, because it would simply have been too young.

5. The pigeons were released on D-Day itself – 6th June 1944

Here, the letter and number groups in the ciphertext itself give us the clues we need. Having also read up on the multitude of Army ciphers used in WW2 at the NA, I’m 99% certain how the structure of the wrapper around the cipher was contructed. Firstly, whatever system was employed for the cipher itself, the AOAKN letter group (which appears at the start and at the end of the message) is very likely an obfuscated or enciphered key reference for the message as a whole. And if this is right, then 1525/6 must surely hold the time and day of the month the cipher was sent at. “1525” = 3.25pm, “6” = “6th June 1944″… i.e. D-Day itself. But as we will see with Lance Serjeant Stout, this is the only day he could have sent it… though not quite as simply as you might expect from his gravestone.

6. Lance Serjeant Stout was mortally wounded on D-Day, and died on 28th June 1944

Right before the National Archives closed on Saturday, Stu & I managed to sneak a few minutes with the 1944 War Diaries for 253rd Field Company in the locked room at the back (someone else had put these diaries aside for photocopying this precise page, which made Stu and me both wonder if he or she might be a Cipher Mysteries lurker? Well, a big hello to you if that’s you!). Here’s what the entry for D-Day says:-

Well… not really very informative, you might think at first glance. Yet here’s where Stu Rutter really shone: having taken a photo of every page for June in these War Diaries, he then checked them all that evening and was pleasantly surprised to find an informative entry discussing Stout on the 28th June 1944:-

From this, we know for sure (a) that Stout was indeed in Normandy on D-Day; (b) that he was mortally wounded near Hermanville-sur-Mer (where he was later buried in the War Cemetery); (c) that he died of his wounds on the 28th June 1944; and that (d) he was in No. 2 Platoon. Stout was an NCO (“non-commissioned officer”, i.e. someone who had advanced through the ranks, rather than parachuted in from a public school fast-track), and at 37 was doubtless older than most of the men in in his Field Company. As my friend Ian suggested, perhaps this helped make Stout something of a father figure to many, for I think there’s definitely a warm combination of respect and fondness at play in this latter entry, quite a contrast to the consciously dry detachment evident in most of the others.

Combine what we know from this with the entry for 6th June 1944, and we can see precisely what Stout was doing on D-Day: assisting the tanks of 185th Infantry Brigade as they tried (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to push inland to take the town of Caen by nightfall. But… what happened to 185th Inf Bde on D-Day?

7. Meet the unnamed NCO who spiked them all.

Having gone looking for a history of 185th Infantry Brigade, I found this web-page from a group of historical re-enactors who have a particular interest in that very brigade on that very day. Essentially, according to their accumulated history of events on D-Day, what happened is that around about 2pm, 185th Infantry Brigade’s advance was being held up by a group of Germans shooting at it from the cover of some woods. It needed help to make progress against these very well dug-in defences. The web-page continues:-

Eventually a Pole was captured who knew the way through the wire at the back of the battery. The gunners fled into the woods, harried for some hundreds of yards by the Company. The guns were then blown up by an unnamed N.C.O. of the Divisional R.E.s, who, though badly wounded, succeeded in “spiking” them all.

Who was that “unnamed NCO”? Unless anyone can demonstrate otherwise, I think it’s not being overly romantic to believe that this man was Lance Serjeant William Stout – he was an experienced NCO in the Royal Engineers, he was in No. 2 Platoon assisting 185th Infantry Brigade outside their temporary base in Hermanville, he was badly wounded, yet he did the right thing in obviously difficult and trying circumstances. If anyone can be said to be “Stout-hearted”, it was surely him.

8. What kind of cipher did he use?

According to diagrams in the documents we found in WO 193/211, Royal Engineers were only supposed to use low grade ciphers in the field. But which?

One likely candidate is the Double Transposition Cipher (introduced 5th Nov 1943 in document 32/Tels/943). Yet one problem with Double Transposition as a candidate here is that encipherers were required to finish up the message with a pure number group containing the number of letters in the cryptogram followed by a forward slash and the day of the month (i.e. “179/12”), which plainly wasn’t what was used here. For a number of reasons like this, Double Transposition was thought to be “difficult and slow to operate”… possible but not ideal for use in the field.

The other major possibility here is the low grade “Syllabic Cipher”, a system I unfortunately failed to find described in any of the National Archives documents I looked through (which, let’s face it, do tend to be more administrative than operational). However, I do know that this cipher used a book marked “BX 724”, while the Royal Engineers had their own specific version marked “BX 724/RE”: these presumably comprised tables of syllables, which were then offset / obfuscated using a key from a Daily Key Allocation List. Stu has already gone off looking for anything like this and/or any other information on the Army’s Syllabic Cipher, but please email me or leave a comment here if you know where in the archives to find more information on these!

9. After all that… what did Stout’s pigeon message say?

It’s 3pm in the afternoon of D-Day. Lance Serjeant William Stout has just destroyed the arms of a German battery to help clear the way for 185th Inf Brde to move on towards Caen. He’s wounded. He wants to get a message back to his field company, but radio traffic has to be kept to a minimum. My best guess? 185th Infantry Brigade have brought with them some pigeons and a bilingual (but English-born) translator who is also a pigeon fancier. Despite his pain, Stout writes down his message and he (or someone else) rapidly enciphers it using a Syllabic Cipher (or possibly a Double Transposition Cipher, though I somewhat doubt it). This contains 27 groups of five letters, i.e. up to 135 plaintext letters – roughly 25 to 30 words. So, perhaps we can guess it says something along the lines of… SPIKED ARMS OF GERMAN BATTERY OUTSIDE HERMANVILLE 185 INF BDE NOW MOVING FORWARD AM BADLY WOUNDED TELL WIFE AND CHILDREN ETC. He starts copying the enciphered message onto the form at 15:22 (British Time), finishes copying it at 15:25, passes it off to the bilingual pigeon fancier, who signs them off at 16:25 French Time, places them in red Army canisters, attaches them to a pair of commandeered pigeons and then releases them.

However, it’s worth remembering that of the 16,000+ pigeons released on the Continent by SOE, I believe that only around 1,250 returned safely. So perhaps unsurprisingly, it could well be that one of these two pigeons failed to make it back at all; while the other did make the 136 or so miles back to Bletchingley, which I suspect will turn out to be remarkably close to its home loft: flying at 45mph or so, the bird likely took about three hours. Yet as it briefly rested there on top of a roof at about 6.30pm at the end of what had been a thankfully clear day (or else D-Day would have been an unmitigated disaster!), could it be that someone in the house below lit an evening fire in a hearth, unknowingly sucking the poor pigeon to its death down in the chimney?

* * * * * * * * *

All of which makes a great dinner-table story, with the added bonus that a fair proportion of it is certainly true… but will this turn out to be the whole story? Perhaps we’ll find out before too long… fingers crossed that we do! 🙂

Incidentally, has anyone tried to trace Lance Serjeant William Stout’s son (also William Stout) or daughter (Urula Stout)? Perhaps they already know even more about this than we do… I for one hope they do!

2012 Advent Calendar Day #7: Voynich naiad nymph necklace…

by ⋅ 15 Comments

Sometimes I see stuff sold on eBay or elsewhere that namechecks the Voynich Manuscript in a very superficial way, like a fine sprinkling of mystery pixie dust to elevate the ordinary into the not-quite-so-ordinary. But pretty much all I’ve seen before pales when compared with this handmade jewellery sales pages patter for (I swear it’s true, I couldn’t make it up) “NECKLACE of naiad nymph erotic magick sex slave voodoo multi lovers rare djinn“.

What kind of rare genius could construct such a wondrous-sounding sequence of allusive words? Well…

“I am one of the very few. As the last single translator of the Voynich manuscript, I am the only one who knows secret norse runic knowledge, and I have made a rare & amazing strange items to share. I come from a secret sect in Iceland of Ásatrúarfélagið Alchemists of The Exalted Most High Ones of Ásatrú. As a Most High One, I have influenced world leaders and everyday people alike. My power comes from secret sources long put aside by the waning influence of Germanic Norse Paganism and forgotten by modern man. After my teacher died and I am not teaching any further, my death shall mean my secrets will die with me. Knowledge of how to translate the Voynich manuscript with runes is something no other priest, witch, or other energy worker has. Most have no idea of its meaning whatsoever. My talents are more ancient than any other source on heaven, on earth, or in the secret hollow earth cities run by the reptilians.”

Sooooo… what do you get for your 19USD or so? Apparently “two bone beads around a coyote tooth on a hemp necklace“, which yields “an item of ultimate power and wisdom, made with runic wisdom. In this case I have harnessed the powers of the Voynich Runic Writings to achieve amazingly powerful positive results“.

What strikes me most from this is that at some point in the last couple of years, the “mysterious Voynich Manuscript” cultural meme seems to have broken out of its ‘hoodoo history’ micro-cage and gone diffusely viral into the world at large. I doubt if this was triggered by anything so rational or sensible as the Voynich Centenary Conference, or even by the whole Voynich centenary itself: rather, it seems to have “just grow’d”, one twisted little step at a time.

So in many ways I suspect the whole idea of the Voynich Manuscript now finds itself at a kind of Koyaanisqatsi-like paradoxical tipping point: a physical object that remains too incredible to be properly researched, yet which is well-known enough to find itself retrospectively attached to intangible / ethereal / insubstantial subjects that lack external credibility. In our culture at large, is it too credible or too incredible? Really, I just don’t know, sorry. 🙁

2012 Advent Calendar Day #6: “The Encrypted” reveals the history of everything…

by ⋅ 12 Comments

Codes – ciphers – concealed stuff – secret histories – I love it all, really I do. But… in moderation and in balance: and the #1 reason I don’t believe in century-spanning conspiracies (of the kind so loved by trashy novelists) is not “because they’re impossible”, but because I haven’t as yet seen a single shred of evidence that actually supports the existence of such things.

Even the infamous ‘Priory of Sion’ was ultimately no more than an archival fantasy constructed by a man who believed it would help support his delusional claim to be King of France: and that was arguably the best of a bad bunch.

All of this is in my head as I turn to a new book called “The Encrypted“. Its author Loret Love claims to have found and decrypted a code more than 5,500 years old, that is hidden in plain sight in (you probably guessed already)…

“the Declaration of Independence, King Tut’s Throne, The Kensington Stone, The Statue of Liberty, Mt. Rushmore, Newport Tower, the Voynich Manuscript, and many others. Among the famous artists and writers associated with the code were Da Vinci, Jules Vern, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Francis Bacon, J.R. Tolkien, Picasso, Nostradamus, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Nikola Tesla, and Bram Stoker. All of these people, places and objects hold shocking mysteries protected and venerated by the early Knights Templar.”

Countless other historical X-Files get pulled aboard Love’s syncretic rollercoaster ride, which ultimately reveals to the world a “horrifying legacy exposing Vampires, Werewolves and shape shifting monsters“. All that and the Holy Grail too… really, if I didn’t know better I’d say the whole exercise comes across like “National Treasure” on badly cut mescaline.

What I found most, errrm, awe-inspiring when reading about “The Encrypted” was that when I looked back at my 2009 cut-out-and-keep map of historical conspiracy clichés, it was as if Love has treated that diagram as Level 1 of a giant game of ‘Conspiracy Buzzword Bingo’, and then decided to write a book around a brand new Level 2.

As a blogger, I’m supposed to operate under the guiding principle “I check out all this stuff (and then write about it) so that you don’t have to“: but in this instance, I simply can’t bring myself to buy a copy – it’s just too much, even for me. Sorry if this disappoints you!

2012 Advent Calendar Day #5: Review of Nick Redfern’s “The Pyramids and The Pentagon”…

by ⋅ 1 Comment

Nick Redfern’s book “The Pyramids and The Pentagon” is subtitled “The Government’s Top Secret Pursuit of Mystical Relices, Ancient Astronauts, and Lost Civilizations“, and its 250+ pages basically deliver what it says on the tin, although (as nearly always with this kind of thing) each short vignette seems to end with some variation on the rider ‘…but perhaps They don’t know what’s going on either‘.

What intrigued me about the book enough to buy a copy was its suggestion (repeated by Redfern on a Binnall of America podcasty interview he did) that Jonathan Swift had seen the Voynich Manuscript, and from that had (somehow) deduced that Mars had two moons (as mentioned in his book “Gulliver’s Travels”, some 150 years before Phobos and Deimos were physically observed for the first time). Redfern had the Voynich connection suggested to him by someone called “Robert Manners” (who I’ve never seen any mention of, please leave a comment here if you know who he is!), who also asserted that the NSA archives were full of other extraordinary Voynich Manuscript-related information, which will presumably all come out in the fullness of time.

To be fair, though, NASA’s view on the subject is that Swift was probably more influenced by Kepler’s ideas on Celestial Harmony, and for whom the Earth’s one moon and Jupiter’s four moons mathematically implied that Mars (in between) could well have two moons. And – to be brutally honest – it’s hard to see how Swift (who I don’t think ever ventured onto mainland Europe) would have even seen the Voynich Manuscript (which during his lifetime probably languished unseen in a Jesuit trunk or archive), let alone deduce from its deviously impenetrable script some meaning relating to two moons that telescopes would not be able to optically resolve for another century or so. It’s all a bit… thin, I have to say.

All the same, I rather enjoyed the rest of Redfern’s book: given that it had interesting stuff about the Rollright Stones, I had better pass it on at speed to my old friend Pete Edwards (who was once a Rollright Stones trustee) who is bound to enjoy that section thoroughly. As would you, I think, just… don’t take too much notice of the Voynich bit, OK? =:-o

2012 Advent Calendar Day #4: Review of “The Book of Blood & Shadow”…

by ⋅ Leave a Comment

I read Robin Wasserman’s Voynich-themed young adult novel ages ago but never got round to reviewing it here…

Curiously, though, it has to be said that the Voynich Manuscript itself only ends up playing a relatively small part in the overall story: ultimately, most of the action revolves around the discovery & translation of a series of (fictional) letters to or from (the very real) Elizabeth Weston, Edward Kelley’s literary poetess stepdaughter, each of which gradually reveals details that move the teen gothic plot towards its nicely horrific conclusion.

In the modern novelistic style, Wasserman has the various ancient artefacts protected and sought (respectively) by a Conspiracy of Basically-Good and a Conspiracy of Basically-Evil: the teen novel conceit is that despite the ridiculously amplified level of peril surrounding the main character, she tends to trust wholeheartedly pretty much any drop-dead-gorgeous young hunk (from either conspiracy) who asks her to do anything.

From a Voynich researcher’s point of view, the good stuff about this novel is that it foregrounds a lot of the gritty historical stuff that people tend not to think about much – transcription, translation, cross-referencing, etc. Yet the bad stuff about it is that the way it mythologizes Europe and romanticizes Latin translation makes it feel like it was written for Lisa Simpson – several times I imagined Lisa clutching the book to her heart and exclaiming “She didn’t dumb it down for me!” (not unlike the “Mother Simpson” episode with Glenn Close).

The book was clearly not written with me in mind, so I don’t really want to dwell too much on its nitty gritty: but even so, I get the impression it would make a very much better teen film than a book. In short: one to option rather than to read! 😉

2012 Advent Calendar Day #3: “The Boxall Code”…

by ⋅ 76 Comments

Just a quick note to say that Cipher Mysteries has just tipped over the 400,000-visit mark slightly earlier than I expected. So a hearty big Thank You to everyone who has dropped by so far – I hope there’ll be plenty more nice stuff here for you here yet to come, and please feel free to join the other 444 Cipher Mysteries subscribers by putting your email address in at the top right box!

* * * * * * * * *

Seemingly-prehistoric accounting surf dude Pete Bowes has a rigorous work ethic: “No drinks before five and no drugs before midday. This is basic. No shoes, no haircuts. No shaving. No worries.”

He also has (or seems to have) a Big Fat Theory on the Tamam Shud case: that it was Alf Boxall wot dun it (basically). He calls this his “Boxall Code”, and is drip-dripping hints to it on his blog in the tags.

The story he’s posting in a series of vignettes comes across as vivid & homely, brutal and foolish: it’s like a themed short story collection based around a (so far) unlikeable main character. But unless it turns out that Pete has the flickerings of evidence to back it up, though, that’s all it remains. Was the Unknown Man in the RAAF’s 76 Squadron in Salamaua? Possibly. But not “probably” just yet.

In many ways, I’m sympathetic to this enterprise: reconstructing history “at the edge” is a perilous business, and the twin pigeonholes of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ are often a hindrance when your research is dealing with many uncertainties simultaneously. But hopefully Pete will start to be a little less opaque about what he’s trying to do, now that he’s got into the swing of it a bit more. 🙂

2012 Advent Calendar, Day #2: A Nice Saturday Morning In Kew…

by ⋅ 5 Comments

Next Saturday (8th December 2012) morning at 9.30am or so, I’ll be at the National Archives in Kew for a WW2 dead cipher pigeon research session. If any Cipher Mysteries reader or lurker would like to come along and join in, please email me or leave a comment below, I always enjoy meeting up with other people who like all this stuff.

My basic reason for going to the National Archives is this: everyone keeps asking me questions about the dead WW2 cipher pigeon story, which would be great if I had anything like a halfway-decent answer for any of them… but in all honesty, right now I don’t. As it is, I – just like everyone else, it would seem – keep trying to latch onto half-details revealed by close examination of the pigeon’s teeny-weeny payload as if any one of them alone might be sufficient to magically elicit a definitive answer (hint: History rarely yields up her secrets so easily).

Of course, as with pretty much every historical challenge, the most reliable research approach is to build up such a strong sense of context that any individual fragment you happen to be looking at still makes sense within that much larger framework. So the immediate need here is to build up a picture of what was happening with pigeons in WW2.

However, from what I’ve learnt so far, it seems fairly clear that everyone below the stratospherically strategic level of Churchill and Viscount Alanbrooke in the British WW2 effort was working in a silo, and each silo used pigeons in a quite different way.

Hence it is easy to get sidetracked (and very possibly misled) by accounts of how individual silos (Army, RAF, RAF in the Middle East, RAF in India, National Union of Racing Pigeons, National Pigeon Service, Eastern Command Pigeon Service, etc) used and managed pigeons – moreover, it now seems unlikely to me that there will be any über-account of “Pigeons At War” out there. (Though I’m eagerly waiting for Freddy Dyke’s book to arrive, because that may prove to be as close as we can currently get).

The first question, then, is which silos we should be looking at. For me, the presence of “Sjt” in the signature is a strong – and, I suspect, necessary – indication that we are look at a pigeon used by an Army regiment. So it would seem that the right place to look for historical context would be in documents relating to the Army Pigeon Service rather than anywhere else.

Luckily the National Archives have quite a few (which I’ve listed below, having stripped out quite a few relating to the Middle East or India). I’ve marked the six I’ve preordered for next Saturday, & hope some of you will be able to join me for a peek into pigeony history. If you haven’t already got a National Archives reader’s ticket, getting one is really very straightforward (errrm, as long as you’ve got the ID with you they need) and quick (I got mine in 20 or so minutes), so come along and get yourself a ticket, should be a bit of fun!

ARMY
[*] AIR 2/4969 – (1943-1945) – ARMY (Code B, 88): Special section (Army) National Pigeon Service
[*] WO 208/1338 – (1941 Mar.-1944 Dec) – Signals; carrier pigeons
[*] WO 205/224 – (1944 Jan.-1945 Mar) – Instructions on carrier pigeons: reports
[*] WO 32/9959 – (01 January 1941 – 31 December 1942 ) – EMPLOYMENT OF MILITARY FORCES: General (Code 53(A)): Pigeon service holding unit: Royal Signals.

NATIONAL PIGEON SERVICE
[*] AIR 15/716 – (1939 Oct.- Dec) – National Pigeon Service

War Office / General
[*] WO 32/10681 – (1942 – 1947) – COMMUNICATIONS: General (Code 76(A)): Pigeon Service [file opened in 1972]
T 161/1442 – (20 July 1935 – 29 May 1947) – LIVESTOCK. Birds: Establishment of Pigeon Service for communication in time of war.

RAF
AIR 14/1581 – (01 May 1940 – 31 July 1941) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 14/1582 – (01 July 1941 – 30 September 1943 ) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 14/1583 – (01 January 1942 – 31 July 1944) – Air Ministry: Bomber Command: Registered Files. Pigeon service.
AIR 2/4129 – (01 January 1939 – 31 December 1946) – COMMUNICATIONS (Code B, 25): Pigeons: special services. [File opened in 1972]

SOE
HS 6/92 – (01 January 1942 – 31 December 1944) – GIBBON mission: Jean Ceysens; organisation of carrier pigeon information service for Political Warfare Executive (PWE).

COLUMBA (i.e. MI 14(d))
WO 208/3560 – (01 April 1941 – 31 December 1941) – COLUMBA: messages No 1 to 91.

2012 Cipher Mysteries Advent Calendar, Day #1 – Kerry Greenwood’s new Tamam Shud book…

by ⋅ 12 Comments

To celebrate Christmas this year, I thought I’d put out a whole load of small cipher mystery news stories I’ve collected, as a kind of online mystery advent calendar. Here’s Day One for you… enjoy! 🙂

* * * * * *

Melbourne novelist Kerry Greenwood has (she says) been fascinated by the Tamam Shud mystery for her whole life: and so it was perhaps inevitable that she would eventually write a book on the subject. And here it is: “Tamam Shud: The Somerton Man Mystery”, released today by NewSouth Books, and available in eBook form from Amazon at a (rather daunting) £14.24. To which price, my first reaction was “I never knew that eBooks came in hardback“.

Anyway, you can read most of Chapter One here, or you can read the full Introduction and Chapter One on Amazon’s site itself.

I’ll buy myself a copy to review over the next few days: but what is immediately clear is (a) that Kerry writes well, (b) that her book is obviously well-researched, but (c) that it’s a very different kettle of prawns to Gerry Feltus’ book. More to come…

That dead cipher pigeon – the facts…

by ⋅ 7 Comments

Looking back at the cipher pigeon media brouhaha of the last week, I think it’s time we all (myself included) stopped jumping in the air at every flickering shadow, and pause long enough to get some kind of solid perspective on what we actually know.

(1) It has been claimed that enciphered pigeon messages were as rare as, errrm, hen’s teeth. However, as (a very young) John Harding recalled it, WW2 “Pigeongram” messages were “nearly allways” in code. Moreover:-

“It was decided that use should be made of the existing pigeon fanciers who had lofts nearest to the south coast, that they should be approached and checks made as to their background, nationality and allegiance to their country, so it was that the Pigeongram Service was established and was much refined for it’s better use in the second World War.”

(2) “S[er]j[ean]t” as written on the pigeon form is most definitely an Army spelling, not an RAF spelling. Of all the military records for “A Smith” (a simple sampling methodology) I looked at, every single “Serjeant” was in an Army regiment. [Hence everything said so far about SoE and RAF bombers is probably interesting but irrelevant].

(3) The only “Serjeant” I’ve found in forces databases with a name close to the one as written on the pigeon form would seem to be “3650400 Serjeant William Stout” in 253 Field Company of the Royal Engineers. [Hence everything written about other military personnel called “Stott” is probably insteresting but irrelevant].

(4) The pigeon form was written by two hands, one English (Stout’s) and one apparently French because it uses the abbreviation “lib.” (presumably short for “lib[éré“. [Speculation: because the “7” digit in the French hand is not crossed, might it be that the second writer was French/English bilingual?]

(5) I think it is reasonably safe to infer that the pigeon found dead in a Bletchingley chimney was probably returning from France to its loft in South-East England: “DK” / “TW” could well stand for ten-mile-radius geographic areas around Dorking and Tunbridge Wells (or possibly Twickenham). [Even so, I think it’s a bit odd that nobody with access to National Union of Racing Pigeon archives has yet worked out any kind of reasonably definitive answer to this – you’d think they’d be overjoyed for pigeons to be in the news in such a big way].

(6) Even though racing pigeons do often live to ten or more, their active racing life is typically only 6-7 years. However, I’m pretty sure that Freddy Dyke said the military had a preference for young birds (so many jokes present themselves that I simply can’t bring myself to choose). Put together, these suggest the two pigeons were sent after mid-1940 (when the younger of the two pigeons was born) but before (say) 1944, because by 1945 the “[19]37” pigeon would have been 7 or 8 years old.

(7) According to Freddy Dyke, the figure of “over 200,000 pigeons” often quoted could only be reached by combining the numbers for the “National Pigeon Service, Army Pigeon Service, RAF Pigeon Service, Middle East Pigeon Service, Australian Army Signal Corps, and the Signal Corps United States Army”.

(8) If we are looking an Army pigeon, then we would probably need to look for information relating to the Army Pigeon Service / Army Carrier Pigeon Service. Luckily, there are quite a lot of documents relating to this at the National Archives in Kew. If only I had time…

If you want to read more, the best pigeon-related war book seems to be Freddy Dyke’s (2005) “Memoirs of a Wartime Teenager”. I’ve ordered myself a copy from tiny publisher Dreamstake Books (it doesn’t currently seem to be available anywhere else) – PayPal them your £8.99 + £1.99 p&p from this page.

The secret history of the hyphen…

by ⋅ 11 Comments

Elmar Vogt just posted up some nice statistical analyses of the Voynich Manuscript’s language, looking particularly at the problematic issue of line-related structure.

You see, if Voynichese is no more than a ‘simple language’ (however lost, obscure and/or artificial), there would surely be no obvious reason for words at the beginning or end of any line to show any significant differences from words in the middle of the line. And yet they do: line-initial words are slightly longer (about a character), second words are slightly shorter, while line-terminal words are slightly shorter than the average (though some of Elmar’s graphs get a bit snarled up in noise mapping this last case).

The things I infer from such line-structure observations are
(a) any fundamental asymmetry means that Voynichese can’t be a simple language, because simple languages are uniform & symmetrical
(b) it’s very probably not a complex language either, because no complex language I’ve ever seen has done this kind of thing either
(c) the first “extra” letter on the first word is either a null or performs some kind of additional function (such as a vertical “Neal key”, a notion suggested by Philip Neal many years ago)
(d) the missing letter in the second word is probably removed to balance the extra letter in the first word, i.e. to retain the original text layout, while
(e) the last word has its own statistics completely because words in the plaintext were probably split across line-ends.

In Voynichese, we see the EVA letter combination ‘-am’ predominantly at the right-hand end of lines, which has given rise to the long-standing suspicion that this might encipher a hyphen character, or a rare character (say ‘X’) appropriated to use as a hyphen character. For what conceivable kind of character would have a preference for appearing at the end of a line? In fact, the more you think about this, the stronger the likelihood that this is indeed a hyphen becomes.

But there’s an extraordinary bit of misinformation you have to dodge here: the Wikipedia page on the hyphen asserts (wrongly) that the first noted use of a hyphen in this way was with Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 with his 42-line-per-page Bible. According to this nice post, “Gutenberg’s hyphen was a short, double line, inclined to the right at a sixty degree angle”, like this:-

In fact, Gutenberg was straightforwardly emulating existing scribal practices: according to this lengthy online discussion, the double stroke hyphen was most common in the 15th century, single-stroke hyphens were certainly in use in 13th century French manuscripts (if not earlier), and that both ultimately derive from the maqaf in Hebrew manuscripts that was in use “by the end of the first millennium AD”.

So if you think Voynichese line-terminal ‘-am’ does encipher a hyphen, the original glyph as written was probably a double-stroke hyphen: moreover, I’d predict that Voynich pages containing many ‘-am’s were probably enciphered from pages that had a ruled right-hand line that the plaintext’s scribe kept bumping into! Something to think about! 🙂