35 105 285 203 175 20 387 240 379. I am going to make a 279 94 105 4 200 some time and will send it you for your approval. Goodbye old boy, J.’
Did the numbers represent words or letters? And why, at times, had he used two numbers, rather than three? A letter, written a few days later, offered a steer. ‘If I send you a telegram in cipher,’ he told Charlie on 8 February, ‘this is the way to read it’:
Suppose the sentence which is in cipher is:
‘I hope you are quite well’ and that the numbers are: 52 109 110 11 16 400. Well – you have got to make each block of numbers up to 5 figures. So in the telegram you will have to cut off either 3 figures or 2. And let us say that we can put any numbers we like to make up the block – thus it would become 52063 10942 11072 11072 16704 40000.
It was helpful, but only up to a point. I could now see that the numbers represented words, not letters; I could grasp the principle ofadding random numbers to make up a block of five. Yet how John had arrived at ‘52’ for ‘I’ and ‘109’ for hope, and so on, was flummoxing. Without the key to the cipher, it was impossible to know.
The next letter provided a vital clue:
Old Boy, I enclose a new key. Let us use it in future. The way to use it is like this.
In old cipher key
Every word is of three figures. So in future 305 any 44.15.11. figures 415. 238x. after each word so to make each word 386. 368.181.389. figures therefore it will be like this.
In old cipher
204. 156. 415. 413. 489
In new cipher
51342. 35910. 94631. 93249. 10000
There is a note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key which you should read carefully. Every time you write or wire in cipher, when you look up a word and do not find it, you should make a note of it and say in your next letter what you have given it.
The enclosure was missing. The ‘new key’ that John had sent to Charlie was lost. Nor was there anything to be drawn from the numbers. They were nonsensical. It was the information in the last paragraph that caught my attention. The clue to the cipher lay in the reference that John had made to the ‘note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key’; he had instructed Charlie to ‘look up words’ and make a note of the ones that he could not ‘find’. Implicit in the letter was the suggestion that some sort of key to the cipher already existed. I kicked myself for being so slow. Countless times, working my way through the pages of the Muniment Rooms catalogue, I had passed the entry for the volume entitled ‘Key to Cyphers’.
The volume was listed in the section relating to the seventeenth-century material. The rooms held a large number of documents dating from the English Civil War, including a collection of coded letters which Charles I had sent from Carisbrooke Castle in the last months of his life. The ‘Key to Cyphers’ contained the King’s secretcode. Carisbrooke, on the Isle of Wight, was where he had been imprisoned before he was executed on the scaffold in January 1649. It seemed barely credible, but I was sure that John was using the cipher that the King had used in the letters that he had sent from the castle.
The cipher was one that Charlie Lindsay had known intimately. Through painstaking work, conducted over many years, he had managed to decipher a large number of the King’s letters. It was a remarkable achievement. For almost three centuries, historians had puzzled over the cryptic messages, the means by which they had been smuggled from the castle adding to their notoriety. The King had concealed them in his gloves before giving them to the gentleman usher, whose job it was to hold the gloves while he was at the dining table. He had hidden other messages in the water closet in his bedchamber. The maid who emptied his chamber pot had collected these.
I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue. John’s code had looked impossible to decipher, but with the key to the
Did the numbers represent words or letters? And why, at times, had he used two numbers, rather than three? A letter, written a few days later, offered a steer. ‘If I send you a telegram in cipher,’ he told Charlie on 8 February, ‘this is the way to read it’:
Suppose the sentence which is in cipher is:
‘I hope you are quite well’ and that the numbers are: 52 109 110 11 16 400. Well – you have got to make each block of numbers up to 5 figures. So in the telegram you will have to cut off either 3 figures or 2. And let us say that we can put any numbers we like to make up the block – thus it would become 52063 10942 11072 11072 16704 40000.
It was helpful, but only up to a point. I could now see that the numbers represented words, not letters; I could grasp the principle ofadding random numbers to make up a block of five. Yet how John had arrived at ‘52’ for ‘I’ and ‘109’ for hope, and so on, was flummoxing. Without the key to the cipher, it was impossible to know.
The next letter provided a vital clue:
Old Boy, I enclose a new key. Let us use it in future. The way to use it is like this.
In old cipher key
Every word is of three figures. So in future 305 any 44.15.11. figures 415. 238x. after each word so to make each word 386. 368.181.389. figures therefore it will be like this.
In old cipher
204. 156. 415. 413. 489
In new cipher
51342. 35910. 94631. 93249. 10000
There is a note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key which you should read carefully. Every time you write or wire in cipher, when you look up a word and do not find it, you should make a note of it and say in your next letter what you have given it.
The enclosure was missing. The ‘new key’ that John had sent to Charlie was lost. Nor was there anything to be drawn from the numbers. They were nonsensical. It was the information in the last paragraph that caught my attention. The clue to the cipher lay in the reference that John had made to the ‘note at the top-right-hand corner of the second page of the key’; he had instructed Charlie to ‘look up words’ and make a note of the ones that he could not ‘find’. Implicit in the letter was the suggestion that some sort of key to the cipher already existed. I kicked myself for being so slow. Countless times, working my way through the pages of the Muniment Rooms catalogue, I had passed the entry for the volume entitled ‘Key to Cyphers’.
The volume was listed in the section relating to the seventeenth-century material. The rooms held a large number of documents dating from the English Civil War, including a collection of coded letters which Charles I had sent from Carisbrooke Castle in the last months of his life. The ‘Key to Cyphers’ contained the King’s secretcode. Carisbrooke, on the Isle of Wight, was where he had been imprisoned before he was executed on the scaffold in January 1649. It seemed barely credible, but I was sure that John was using the cipher that the King had used in the letters that he had sent from the castle.
The cipher was one that Charlie Lindsay had known intimately. Through painstaking work, conducted over many years, he had managed to decipher a large number of the King’s letters. It was a remarkable achievement. For almost three centuries, historians had puzzled over the cryptic messages, the means by which they had been smuggled from the castle adding to their notoriety. The King had concealed them in his gloves before giving them to the gentleman usher, whose job it was to hold the gloves while he was at the dining table. He had hidden other messages in the water closet in his bedchamber. The maid who emptied his chamber pot had collected these.
I got up from my desk to fetch the catalogue. John’s code had looked impossible to decipher, but with the key to the
Similar Books
