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Enigma Variations
Rick HHogben
In August 2009 PPM, under the heading “What tthe
Postman ccouldn’t rread”, Harry Hicks wrote about the
codes and devices that senders have used to hide the
meaning of their message. More recently I found that
I have in my collection my own example of a coded
card, rather more baffling than just written backwards
or upside down.
One Sunday at the
Bloomsbury I searched
as usual for sailing
vessels, but without
great success - as with
any collection, the
more one has the
more difficult it is to
find anything new.
As a parting gesture,
before going home I
looked, as I often do,
at one dealer’s stock
of New Zealand
cards. It was quite a
small bundle, but in
it was a real photo
card of Dannevirke
High School. This
was a great “find”,
as my father had
taught there early
in his career and
had later been
Headmaster for seven
years, and it was the
school where I had started
my own secondary
education.
I was so delighted with the
front of this card that I
didn’t really study the
back until some time
after I had read Harry
Hicks’ article. When I
did, I found it bore a
message that looks as
if it needs the attention
of Bletchley Park - a
mixture of long-hand
written words, a selection
of block capital letters,
some of them separated
by full-stops, a
figure 5, and two blots
which might or might
not be part of the message.
It even poses an
additional difficulty not
faced by those who tackled
the Enigma code; our
war-time code breakers
decyphering messages
between the German
naval command and individual
U-boats at least
knew that the solution they
sought would be in German.
But this card was sent
from an English - speaking
country to a man with a
Spanish name at an address
in Spain, so the message
could be in either English or
Spanish - or, for that matter,
in Esperanto!
There is one other possibility,
admittedly rather
remote, suggested by the
name of the sender. New
Zealand was settled mostly
from Britain, but when
Southern Hawke’s Bay,
where Dannevirke is situated,
was first developed in
26 Picture Postcard Monthly December 2009
the 1870s, it also received a
number of assisted-passage
immigrants from Scandinavia.
I don’t know how
long the use of their native
languages persisted, but
names certainly fit; I was at
school in the 1930s with
boys named Hansen,
Johansson, Christopherson
and so on. And the sender’s
name on this card,
Berntsen, might be Scandinavian
too....
The original core school building. The
stamp has been carefully removed from the card, and with it the
post-mark date, but from the new extension visible on the left, the view
probably dates from the early 1920s.
I remain baffled; the
code-breakers at Bletchley
Park had the support of one
of the world’s first computers,
a massive machine filling
a whole room. I do not
have even a small lap-top,
and my decyphering practice
is limited to the occasional
cryptic crossword
puzzle. So any solutions
will be gratefully received,
on a postcard of course -
and in plain language!
The cryptic message,
together with the sender’s name and
address. The card was published by the well-known Wellington
firm, Tanner Bros. Ltd., in their “Maoriland Photographic Series”. The printing and the
rather faint NZ palm, a frequent feature of their cards, are in green. In the bottom right
corner is the rubber stamp of a postal history dealer in Madrid. I wonder how it ended up
in London.
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