The Burning Issue of the Day

by T E Kinsey

  In January 1910, Asquith called a General Election, which ran from 15 January to 10 February. The aim was to secure another Liberal victory, giving him the mandate to pass the budget.

  In January 1910, the WSPU formally suspended all militant action for the duration of the election. They continued to campaign, but window breaking and demonstrations stopped.

  The result of the election was a hung parliament, with the Liberals having to get the support of Labour and the Irish National Party to secure a majority. The budget got through in April but another election was called at the end of the year, this time because the Irish wanted a law to prevent the Lords from blocking legislation again. The result was another hung parliament, but the same allegiances formed and The Parliament Act was passed in 1911.

  Notes on the text

  The WSPU really did rent a shop at 37 Queen’s Road in Bristol in 1908 and used it as their base in the city until 1917. The shop still stands and is almost exactly as it was in 1908, except that the decorative upper-storey windows have been replaced. I wasn’t able to get access to the upstairs of the shop, but the nice chaps in the barber’s next door let me see the layout of their own building, which they assured me was very similar.

  The objections to women’s suffrage given by various characters throughout the book were genuine arguments put forward by articulate, well-educated men during the early years of the twentieth century (including the one about big hats in Parliament).

  Some members of the WSPU really did learn martial arts. Edith Garrud was a suffragette who trained to become an instructor in the Japanese martial art of jiu-jitsu. By 1910 she was running courses to pass her skills on to WSPU members. Generally speaking, jiu-jitsu makes use of the principle of using an attacker’s own strength and energy against him and was considered the best self-defence technique for use by women against larger, stronger opponents (until 1990, the minimum height for a police officer in England was 5´10˝). Her trainees soon became known as suffrajitsus and received a good deal of press coverage as they defended themselves against attacks by the police. A few years later, thirty of these specially trained suffragettes were recruited to ‘The Bodyguard’ to protect Emmeline Pankhurst.

  Lady Hardcastle invents the 4-4-2 formation for Association football more than seventy years before it was widely used by top-level teams. There’s no reason for her to do this, it just made me laugh.

  Whiteladies Road in Bristol is named after the order of white-robed Carmelite nuns who owned some of the land there. Blackboy Hill links the top of Whiteladies Road to the Downs and was probably named after a pub that once stood there. The origins of the pub’s name are disputed but neither that, nor the mention of ‘white ladies’, has anything to do with Bristol’s shameful history as a centre of the slave trade.

  There really was a fish and chip shop in a half-timbered building at the bottom of Christmas Steps in 1910. It was one of the first chippies in England and, until recently, one of the longest surviving. The building itself is thought to date from the thirteenth century and there’s some debate about exactly when it became a chip shop in the late nineteenth century, but it was definitely serving fish and chips by 1910. Christmas Steps are still there, and the building is still there, but at the time of writing the chip shop is closed.

  The theatrical costumiers near Old Market is an invention, but the Empire Theatre on the corner of Old Market and Captain Carey’s Lane was indeed Bristol’s most famous music hall. Captain Carey’s Lane no longer exists and no trace of the theatre nor the pub attached to it (the White Hart) remains.

  Sheldon Bush and Patent Shot Company Limited is a real company and its ‘new’ shot tower (built in 1969) is a Grade II-listed building on Cheese Lane. The original tower was built in 1782 just down the road by William Watts, who is credited with the invention of the method of making lead shot by pouring thin streams of molten lead from a great height into a vat of water. As the lead falls, it forms droplets that solidify as they hit the water, making neatly spherical shot.

  Avonmouth Docks, together with the slightly newer Royal Portbury Docks, were built to address the difficulties of navigating the River Avon to get to the old docks in the centre of the city. The Severn Estuary has the third highest tidal range in the world (15 m/48 ft) and the Avon, which drains into it, is all but empty at low tide, making it unnavigable by large vessels for great parts of the day. Incidentally, my favourite (and the most likely) explanation of the phrase ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’ is a reference to the old docks in the city. Before the locks were built at Cumberland Basin to make a ‘floating harbour’ in the middle of town (one which wasn’t affected by tides), ships in the docks would be beached at low tide and would come to rest slightly on their sides. Being merely ‘shipshape’ (i.e. in good order) wasn’t enough – all cargo had to be carefully loaded and secured in the ‘Bristol fashion’ to ensure no loss or damage occurred when the ships tilted over. Thus ‘shipshape and Bristol fashion’ is the very acme of good order. Where was I? Ah, yes, Avonmouth Docks are real and had been fully operational for thirty years by the time of our story. The layout, though, is entirely invented to suit the purposes of the action. Just so you know.

  How Emily Cracked the Code

  The Vigenère cipher was the final refinement to an encryption method first proposed in the 1460s by an Italian scholar rejoicing in the name of Leon Battista Alberti. Over the next hundred years, several other people had a bash at it before the idea was perfected by French diplomat Blaise de Vigenère, who published his work in a book entitled Traicté des Chiffres (‘A Treatise on Ciphers’) in 1586.

  This new encryption method takes the simple Caesar or ‘shift’ cipher and adds a twist which made it – for a while at least – impossible to crack, earning it the name le chiffre indéchiffrable – the undecipherable cipher.

  Instead of using just one Caesar shift, it uses several, defined by a ‘keyword’. Let’s say the keyword is DOG. The first letter of the plaintext would be encrypted using a Caesar shift starting with D – a->D, b->E, c->F, etc. The second letter is encrypted using a Caesar shift starting with O – a->O, b->P, c->Q, etc. The third letter uses the letter G as its starting point, and the fourth returns to the D, then O, then G, and so on to the end of the message.

  Cryptanalysts had already worked out that a Caesar cipher can be broken simply by counting up all the letters. Languages use the letters of their alphabet according to their own unique pattern. In English the most commonly used letter is E, followed by T, A, O, I, N, and so on. In French, in case you’re interested, the first six most commonly used letters are E, S, A, I, T, N, while in Swedish they’re E, A, N, R, T, S. Once you know the expected frequency of every letter, it’s a simple matter to count up the numbers of each letter in the cipher-text and compare it with the standard pattern to see how much the alphabet has been shifted by.

  Because the Vigenère cipher uses a rotating set of Caesar shifts, that frequency analysis doesn’t work, leaving early cryptanalysts stumped. In 1854 (or possibly 1846), Charles Babbage (he of the mechanical computer) cracked the cipher but didn’t publish his method. In 1863, a method was published by Major Friedrich Wilhelm Kasiski of the German army and it is generally assumed that Babbage did it the same way.

  The method (as used by Lady Hardcastle in the story) relies on the assumption that certain groups of letters recur regularly in any given language. In English, for instance, we see groups like ‘th’, ‘sh’, ‘ea’, and ‘ed’ all the time. In a long enough plaintext, it’s possible that some groups of letters will be encrypted more than once with the same part of the keyword so that they also appear in the cipher-text as repeated groups.

  The Babbage/Kasiski trick is to look for repeated letter combinations in the cipher-text and note how far apart they are. If you get enough repeated groups, this gap will give you a clue as to the length of the keyword.

  In Brookfield’s cipher-text, for instance, the letters ‘db’ occur together eleven times. Some
of the gaps (I confess I didn’t count them all) are 33, 33, 18, 300, 228. ‘lvc’ crops up three times and one of the gaps is 204 characters. ‘mnbi’ appears twice with a gap of 72. There are many other combinations but a pattern is already beginning to emerge. With two exceptions, the largest common factor of all those gaps is 6 – there’s a chance that the keyword might be six letters long. Looking at more repeated groups, the number 6 keeps coming up. Obviously that doesn’t rule out 2 or 3, but Emily assumed that a two- or three-letter keyword would be too simple and plumped for 6.

  You might have noticed that 33 doesn’t divide neatly by 6. Looking again, though, the gap between the first and third appearance is 66 letters, so it might be safe to ignore the middle one as an unlucky coincidence.

  Working from the hypothesis that the keyword is six-letters long, she broke up the text into groups of six and carried out a frequency analysis of the first letter in each group, then the second, and so on. She ended up with six frequency charts which she could compare with the chart for plaintext English.

  The first group is a pretty good fit for a Caesar shift of L. The second letter seems to fit a shift to I. At this point, knowing your cryptographer can come in handy. A six-letter keyword beginning LI–, chosen by someone who was in love with Lizzie . . . It’s not a massive leap to fill in the blanks with ZZIE. A quick check reveals that those letters do tally with the frequency analysis, and the business of decryption can begin.

  I just thought you might like to know that it’s possible to decrypt the message and that it’s not just another bit of authorial flim-flam.

  About the Author

  Photo © 2018 Clifton Photographic Company

  T E Kinsey grew up in London and read history at Bristol University. He worked for a number of years as a magazine features writer before falling into the glamorous world of the Internet, where he edited content for a very famous entertainment website for quite a few years more. After helping to raise three children, learning to scuba dive and to play the drums and the mandolin (though never, disappointingly, all at the same time), he decided the time was right to get back to writing. The Burning Issue of the Day is the fifth story in a series of mysteries starring Lady Hardcastle.