Who can decipher this coded newspaper ad from 1893?
A newspaper advertisement from 1893 contains a coded passage. Presumably, this cannot be solved unambiguously.
The book “The Agony Column Codes & Ciphers” by Jean Palmer (real name: Tony Gaffney) is a real treasure trove. More than 1,000 encrypted newspaper advertisements from Victorian England are printed in it. Tony Gaffney has solved many of them himself, but there remain enough unsolved ones. On Cipherbrain I have already reported several times about cryptograms from this book (for example here, here, here, here and here).
Quelle/Source: Gaffney
An advertisement from 1893
Today I would like to present another encoded advertisement from Tony’s book, the solution of which is unknown to me. It is from the Evening Standard and was published on May 5, 1893. It has the following wording:
A.C.O. (CLAUDE). – Dear Gertrude is with me, and has told me everything. I have persuaded her to remain here meantime, and give you one last chance. So far, her people are unaware that she has left you. If you are even now willing to submit to her conditions – which I thoroughly and cordially approve – all will yet be well, as she is ready, after you have complied with her conditions, to forgive and return. So that there may be no possibility of mistake, understand Gertrude’s unalterable conditions are t – y – c – h – a – t – t – d – y – t – a – l – o – h – k – a – b – b – h – m – s – w – w – a – b – r – a – m – t – p – a – t – h – s – i – t – f – w – G – e – t – p – y. Do, my dear Claude, think twice before you refuse this your last chance – I used to have some influence over you – for my sake, as well as your dear wife, and last, but not least, for your own sake: do before it is too late agree to Gertrude’s terms. If you agree, no one, except myself, will know, and Gertrude refused either to write herself or allow me to do so, and will return any letter from you unopened, so you must reply to this in same way. – M.C.E. (MURIEL)
As you can see, most of the ad is written in plain text. Apparently, here a woman named Muriel is asking a man (her brother?) named Claude to come to an agreement with his wife named Gertrude, who has involuntarily left him. Claude is supposed to accept Gertrude’s terms in order to continue the marriage.
A lost cause?
Cryptographically interesting is the following sequence of letters that encodes Gertrude’s non-negotiable conditions for her return (I will use the term “Gertrude cryptogram” for this):
t – y – c – h – a – t – t – d – y – t – a – l – o – h – k – a – b – b – h – m – s – w – w – a – b – r – a – m – t – p – a – t – h – s – i – t – f – w – G – e – t – p – y.
If you look at the letter frequencies in the Gertrude cryptogram, you will notice that there is only one E, but several Ts. The W is represented three times. All in all, the frequencies speak for an abbreviation cipher. In other words, the individual letters are probably word initials which, when written out, form the plain text. This assumption is strengthened by the fact that a capital letter is contained in the text, while otherwise only lower case letters occur. The capital letter, a G, could stand for “Gertrude”.
On the subject of abbreviation ciphers, there is a chapter in my book “Codebreaking: A Practical Guide”, which I wrote with Elonka Dunin. There you can also read that the Freemasons have written numerous books that are coded in this way (if you call abbreviating a cipher). Here is an example, which, however, does not come from the Freemasons, but from the (similarly organized) Oddfellows:
Quelle/Source: Hansky
Unfortunately, abbreviation ciphers are usually not uniquely solvable. The only way to determine the plaintext is often to find it in another piece of writing. In the case of the Oddfellows book, my blog readers (in particular Gordian Knauss) succeeded, as you can read here.
The Gertrude cryptogram from the Evening Standard ad is also not uniquely solvable at first – it could, for example, begin with “take your chance,” “thank you, child,” or some other sequence of words, with no way to identify a possible solution as correct or incorrect.
Is it possible to find the matching plaintext in another source? Claude, the recipient of this message, must have had this possibility, otherwise this ad makes no sense. Unfortunately, it is quite unlikely that it will be possible to get hold of this text today. But who knows, maybe my readers have an idea. I will gladly accept comments on this.
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Further reading: Die verschlüsselten Postkarten von Florence Maud Golding
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