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

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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…

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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”…

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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”…

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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”…

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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!

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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…

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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…

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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! 🙂

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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…

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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…

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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! 🙂

Tunbridge Wells, and a pigeony bombshell…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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