As I left my office last week, in which I work on a Monday as an unpaid volunteer, I nearly tripped over a couple of BID660 and BID580 machines {still with their plug fields and card readers} and a box containing half a dozen SP02628 Callsign encryption and decryption devices that we used to call "fruit machines". I am amazed to see the size of the BID machines when they are not locked into their customary 19-inch racks. Of course, many years ago all this now junk was TOP SECRET, whose job it was to change highly sensitive plain language into a cipher which literally, nobody ever cracked. I spent many years of my life using this type of equipment, and when I came across the book I talk about below, its contents were almost second nature to me. I found it fascinating, and I am sure that those of you out there with a comparable background to that of my own, will at least find this short page interesting. I hope so.
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was of course universally used by all literate people of Nelson's time, although in the mid to late 18th century and early 19th century not all had yet mastered the art. For those who had, exchanging written correspondence was a laboured event indeed, with long waits before an answer was received. No airmail; no first class post [rather like today in 2005] and a stage coach, which conveyed the letters, likely to be intercepted by highwaymen often resulting in the mail being lost. | ||
Nelson was brought up in a period where other forms of communicating were the norm, when flags, sound signals, and the guard-boat [in harbour] made or conveyed signals around the gathered fleet. Outside this gathered group of ships, sending and receiving signals was painfully slow often taking a couple of weeks to get an answer, and admirals had to despatch small sloops or frigates [called pickets] from their group to act as messengers. On land, messages were passed from the Admiralty by semaphore involving many semaphore towers each within sight of one another. This was regularly used from London to Chatham and to Portsmouth. You may occasionally see a church flying a white ensign {most fly the flag of St George}, and this is allowed because once upon a time, that church, probably because it was the tallest building in the area, had a semaphore tower on top of it and was part of the Defence Communications System of the 18th and 19th centuries. | ||||
Also by Nelson's time, codes, albeit in their infancy, had been formulated and were used mainly for military purpose. However, they were codes employed for speed [brevity] rather than for security and were rarely seen or intercepted by the enemy. On the other hand [pardon the pun] hand written letters regularly used a secret code just in case they were intercepted. Today, still considering brevity and speed, much of what is in the International Code of Signals [INTCO], used by all sea farers and which transcends all languages and national custom/rules/regulations, comes from the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the early 19th century. It therefore started with naval sayings, doings, manoeuvres and the like, and picked-up mercantile terms as it grew in size to its present volume. | ||||
Land armies therefore had an advantage over naval fleets, by using semaphore signals over long ranges, heliograph signals, fast horses in relays, hot-air balloons, spies, fifth columnists etc to extend their communications, but for Nelson and his captains, the crows-nest was as good as it got. Moreover, for the next 80 or so years, naval fleet communications were stuck in a time warp, whilst army communications had a head start. |