At its very basic, morse is a way of representing alphabets containing letters, numbers and some punctuation by dots & dashes which can be read or understood by visual or audio methods. Its a way of representing letters by sound. Learning to write the alphabet is not learning a new language - it simply represents the letters in a language you already know.
There are numerous tales about smuggling in Robin Hood's Bay, Whitby, Staithes & Scarborough. and its often claimed these places contain numerous smuggler’s tunnels. There are a number of documented stories about smugglers and the press gang operating in or from the vRobin Hood's bay and elsewhere.. The few accounts of smuggling were collected by JR Harrison of Whitby and published in the Yorkshire Weekly Post of September, 1936.
The largest so called smuggler's' tunnel enters the sea at the Wayfoot in Robin Hood's Bay and It was built to cover Kings Beck to allow extra buildings to be built above it.. It was built sometime prior to 1680. The tunnel is only about 100 yards long and dark. There is a junction with another beck, Marna Dale joining it and this stream is the one which enters the village a little way upstream from Albion street. There are two or perhaps three small, now filled in, holes in the roof of the tunnel. Non is larger than 1ft in width.
It is the most unlikely place to use for any smuggling. It is dark, often flowing with a decent amount of water and the two or three very small holes, now blocked, are in the roof of the tunnel, just about head hight. They would be far too small to have had someone climb in or out. Only relatively small items could be lifted in easily. You would also need some kind of lighting - and at night any smuggler could be seen by anyone either looking in the tunnel or outside. The tunnel echos noise and rather difficult to use.. It is sometimes claimed that the beck would be used to smuggle goods out of the village. However, the beck is overlooked by the main village road on one side and Chapel Street on the other. I'd also suggest that it would be difficult to use the beck to take any quantities of smuggled goods out of the village.
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| Kings Beck from the bridge. |
Until until the public sewer was built in modern times all the sewerage was deposited into the beck and many of the houses on Chapel street still have small ‘outhouses’, which once contained toilets. The becks running through the village would be full of human waste. These small tunnels were almost certainly built to carry sewerage from the domestic houses above.
There’s lots of tales of smuggled goods being passed from house to house from one end of the village to the other. Again this is extremely unlikely and totally impractical. Any smuggler would have to arrange for an occupant of all the houses to be present & ready to pass goods from one house to another - and that is assuming every house would have some kind of hatch to pass things from one house to the other.. It would be an extremely slow event and of course would fail completely if one or more occupants were absent from home. There is also the additional risk that if the Revenue men did a search every house in the chain it would likely have some contraband still in it to be passed to the next house. In the 1700s village it would be much more practical to send someone up the bank and keep watch for the customs/revenue men and give warning to those further down the village..
Lots of house owners have said they've discovered blocked up holes in walls and these were used for smuggling These are blocked up windows rendered unusable when the adjoining property was extended upwards, therefore blocking off the light to the the next door property. Planning laws weren't quite what they are now!.
Likewise a number of people carrying out renovations have discovered below their floors large chambers or rooms often with no obvious entrance/exit. These were almost certainly normal cellars and simply used as a cold store for normal perishable goods and longs since fallen into disuse. Cellars are a common enojugh feature in many houses elsewhere.
These and other tunnels are often claimed as smuggler's tunnels without considering any other purpose for their existence. The ones I've seen or actually been in, appear totally impractical for that use. There's a Sutcliffe photograph of Bay taken from the scaur / beach area showing several houses with narrow wooden shoots going over the cliff and exiting onto the beach. These were simply wood or metal shoots for for getting rid of sewerage and or other waste as are the many other 'smugglers' tunnels discovered during building work.
There is ‘talk’, of a similar smugglers tunnel leading from the basement of the Cutty Sark pub in Whitby and other houses, to the harbour . At high tides any tunnel below street level would be subject to flooding. And of course that means you could not enter it from the harbour side either. And of course if it entered the harbour, anyone would be able to see it and of course know about it’s existence - including the customs men. Certainly if I lived in the Cutty Sark which is only a few yards from the harbour I'd find it quicker and safer to use the harbour side itself when the coast was clear.
Aside from the impractical use of such small tunnels for smuggling purposes we must also consider the extreme difficulties of constructing these tunnels and hiding their construction from the Revenue men, let alone getting permission from other house owners to tunnel under their property.
Smuggling in the British Isles - A history, by Richard Platt.
A History of Robin Hood's Bay, by Barrie Farnill, published by the NYMNP
Travelling north along the A1 recently, I saw three people stood at the side of the road holding a sign marked ‘Scotland’ as the traffic passed by. You don’t see many hitch hikers these days and these were the first I’d seen for three or four years. Like many folk I’ve done a lot hitch hiking in my younger days and some of it by unconventional means including hitching on a plane, but my wife Trish even managing a trip on an oil-tanker along with her four children.
Both these trips were done prior to 1980.
Hitching by plane
I worked in the Shetlands and was on a regular flight to Glasgow. I would normally have disembarked and traveled by train to Whitby. On the plane I ended up sitting next to the stewardess at the rear and when she was done with the trolley we chatted. I wondered where she lived and she said Newcastle. I commiserated on her misfortune on having further to travel when the plane terminated in Glasgow. “Oh, it doesn’t”, she replied, “It’s going on to to Teesside – I'll get off there!.” “Any chance of a lift –I live in Whitby”, I asked, with no hope of being told yes.
To my surprise she said she'd ask the captain then added there would be a few more on board who probably would prefer to get off at Teesside instead of Glasgow. Looking down the cabin I could see several others who would love the chance to continue on to Teesside including at least another two who lived in Whitby. Not wanting to give her too much of an extra work load, I told her, half jokingly, that if we could stay on board I’d do her duties for her, something I could do easily as I’d flown on this route with the same airline nearly 40 times in the last three years.
As she disappeared to the flight deck I didn’t hold my breath, as I thought my cheeky request would promptly be turned down. She returned a minutes later saying that the captain was happy with us staying on board, so several of us remained seated as the aircraft discharged most of the passengers at Glasgow and we took off again for the flight to Teesside. As we readied to take off she proffered the microphone and said, “Go on then!”. I made the usual announcements over the PA and whilst the stewardess remained seated I later took the trolley down the aisle handing out cold drinks to my work mates, receiving many ribald comments along the way. Forty minutes later we were in Teesside airport and the three of us from Whitby jumped into a taxi and were soon in town. Probably the fastest possible trip ever made from the Shetland Isles to Whitby by far.
I thought this mode of transport was pretty unique for hitching until I met Trish some years later and she told me of her trip to the Isles of Scilly, this being even more of an accomplishment as she did it with four young children in tow.
Trish takes up her story:-
We’d often been to the Isles of Scilly by boat, by helicopter and by small plane. But that had been from England and we now lived on the East coast of Ireland and had four young children so it was much more complicated and expensive. It seemed impossible but my then husband who worked for an oil company had a brainwave – he would speak to the captain of one of the tankers that came into the port about getting a lift on board ship. After conversations with the parent company in Germany the captain agreed that they would take us to and from the Isle of Scilly, but we had to organise a pick up in the Atlantic off the Scillies. It sounded good but was complicated and this was long before mobile phones! Firstly we had to think of how we’d get picked up. Fortunately because we’d been before we had contacts who put us in touch with one of the local fisherman who agreed to pick us up. Easy? Not really because the arrival of ‘our’ tanker, The Aztec, depended on the weather. It would only be alongside in Ireland for as long as it took to discharge the oil and would be off again a few hours later. I had to have everything packed and organised for six of us and be ready for off when I received the phone call. The fishing boat had to be contacted about our ETA and to complicate things even more we were staying on St Martins, a small off island, so had to be taken off the fishing boat into a rowing boat as my then husband had to go to customs on the main island.
The day and the time came, and we were off, down the Irish sea, and twenty-five miles off the tip of Cornwall to the islands. It was rough and we were seasick but the crew made us welcome and the children had a great time when they weren’t being sick. We arrived and anchored and there was the fishing boat waiting just off the Round Island Lighthouse. Being a tanker it was fairly easy to transfer except that we had a four year old, and a thirteen month old and both had to be handed over to the fisherman. As we approached land a small rowing boat met us and we were rowed ashore whilst my husband headed off to Customs.
Our two weeks holiday started to stretch to three as off shore gales prevented the tanker from approaching the isles. We ran out of money, had to live off rabbits we caught and blackberries and crab apples we picked.
Near the end of the third week a message came through that a tanker, the Sioux was approaching our pick up point. We grabbed our stuff and walked down to the beach and all the locals came down to wave us off. We stood watching with a full moon lighting up the sea and as we climbed into the rowing boat we could see the lights of the tanker as it waited for us off Round Island. Lifting the children into the arms of one of the crew bending over the safety rail, onto the ship in the dark was a bit scary but the children declared it a great adventure!.
I doubt hitching a lift by plane or ship would be possible now.
Six weeks. That’s how long the solicitor in Ireland told us it would take to complete the purchase of our house we’d agreed to buy in Lissacaha, Co. Cork. Before we even put our house on the market in England, someone Trish’s niece knew found out we were moving and offered to buy it. So I gave my employer six weeks notice, packed my bags and six weeks later I set off in our tiny VW campervan with our cat, leaving Mrs P (Trish), who moved into her brother’s house, to complete her degree course in England to join me later. I’d the promise of some work in Ireland as a management trainer, and with the sale of our house quickly completed we’d just got enough money to pay for the house in Ireland and complete the work needed to make it liveable. Until the sale was completed I could live in the campervan if I needed.
The warning signs came slowly. First the guy who’d promised me the work vanished, taking my reference books and other material I’d lent him with him.
The weeks passed by. I heard nothing from the solicitors. Our’s told us he’d heard nothing from the vendor’s solicitor. So I contacted the vendor who lived up the road from ‘our’ house and she assured me things were progressing normally. Rather than live in the camper she agreed to my request to live, temporarily, in the house we were buying from her. More weeks passed without hearing anything. Another reassurance from the vendor, but this time she told me I’d have to move out as her solicitor in the big city of Cork had told her I shouldn’t be in the property.
So I collected my few possessions (and our cat!) and moved out. A few more weeks passed without any contact from the solicitors. Our solicitor discovered that the delay was caused because the vendor’s solicitor couldn’t find the title deeds to the property. The vendor assured me the solicitor had them and that she was pushing him into competition.
Even more time passed. A tiny campervan is not the place to live in and by now i’d learned enough about the vendor from locals to suggest we ‘formalise’ the situation by offering to to rent in the meantime. She accepted immediately and the cat and myself moved back in that day.
Yet more time passed and hearing nothing from our solicitors I contacted them again and was told in no uncertain terms that not having title deeds to the property meant that parting with your money meant you may end up with no money and no house. He told me clearly that if he was in my shoes he’d walk away from the purchase. I now had no job, no house and our dream was disappearing fast. Another visit to the vendor and again I was told by her that she was definitely wanting to sell the house and she’d been in contact with her solicitor only the previous day to see what was happening. Clearly nothing!. But she handed me a copy of the deeds to the property she claimed she was selling us.
Further disappointment came when I discovered the threshold for paying stamp duty in Ireland was so low that we’d have to add an additional several thousand pounds which we did not have, to our budget. Our dream was crumbling in front of our eyes as we’d absolutely no spare money and hadn’t anticipated this extra cost.
We’d sold the house in England. We had no house, no job, income or money. Things were not going well. This was overcome by a 'brown paper job', the details of which I won't go into but it amounted to me and the owner going to the bank, drawing out several thousand pounds and giving it to her in cash.
Trish visited me during a break from her studies. and we went to our solicitor who again spelt out the dire consequences of attempting to buy something without any title deeds. In desperation I handed him the copy of the deeds & property folio map the vendor had given me. He gave them one glance and flicked them onto his desk.. “This isn’t the right property”, he pointed out. I asked him how he knew and he explained the property portfolio number wasn’t the same one as the vendor’s solicitor had been selling. But I knew it was the right house as I could clearly recognise the layout of it on the map. This I told the solicitor. “Are you sure?”, he asked. “OH yes - 100%,” I have qualification in hill/mountain walking, I spend a lot of time map reading in the UK and europe, and then pointed out the relevant features on the property map. He wasn’t convinced and looked in his files for the copy of deed he’d got from Doody’s, the vendor’s solicitor, in Cork. “Look”, he said in triumph, “Her ye are, the property file number is different - your map isn’t the right house”. This time I plucked the copy from him and examined document & map. It was immediately clear to me that the property deeds & map he’d got was in fact the vendor’s own one - the one she was living in now. This I told our solicitor who still wasn’t entirely convinced so I patiently explained that I had no doubt and could easily recognise all the features on both both property maps and I carefully pointed these out on the two respective maps. I had no doubt her solicitor was attempting to sell us the wrong house - her own house!.
Rural Ireland is a very parochial place. He gave it some thought and then said he could recall selling the very same house many years ago for a previous vendor and went away to look for the relevant files. A while later he returned and dusted these off on the desk. Sure enough they were identical in layout and proved I was right.
The vendor’s solicitor had been trying to sell us the wrong house - the one the vendor was actually living in right now. We called Doody’s in Cork city. Clearly the big man in cork wasn’t used to be being told by by an unemployed Englishman he was selling the wrong house. He spoke to confirm what I’d said. But the matter of the ‘missing’ deeds still remained.
The vendor wan’t entirely happy with her solicitor and told him she’d trusted him with the deeds long ago when she’d taken out the mortgage on the house she was now living in. Our solicitor had an eureka moment. He asked which house had she taken out the mortgage for and checked with her solicitors to enquire which house he’d registered the mortgage with. It was the wrong house!! All the years she’d lived there and thought she’d actually had a mortgage on her own house whilst in fact her solicitor had taken out a mortgage on ‘our’ property and consequently the deeds were safe in the hands of the mortgage lender. To add to her anger it also meant that the property she’d been living in for many years was never insured as the insurance, tied to the mortgage, was also taken out for the house we were purchasing.
A week or two later the house was legally ours.
See it here::-https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3144970274483656463
That of course was not the end of the matter. The previous occupant was Ian Bailey, the most infamous self confessed murder in Ireland and he had now he moved a 100m up the road with the women we bought the house from. During his High Court court case where he attempted to sue all the newspapers we had endless visits and interviews with the press, police and overseas film crews. I was even on the front page of on of the irish red-tops.
I wrote a couple of articles about him here:-
Living next to a suspected Killer
A quick Google for "Ian Bailey Cork, will turn up thousands of posts.
I joined the Royal Navy as a Radio Operator in 1966.
Morse was taught as apart of our Radio Operator training course which lasted about 35 weeks. This included breaks for conventional holidays if they occurred whilst in training. Training ran 5 days per week and the hours were approximately 8am - 5pm.
In addition to morse we were also taught subjects such as cryptography, voice & morse procedures, touch typing, message handling, radio organisation Visual/tactical signalling, and so on. Morse was just one of the elements of the course. The morse lessons lasted perhaps an hour or maybe two hours per day.
I distinctively remember arriving at the RN Signal School, HMS Mercury in near Petersfield Hampshire, on the Friday evening after having completed six weeks of basic naval training (knots, marching, seamanship etc. at another naval establishment). I was interested in how the RN was going to teach me morse. Much to my surprise I found out as soon as we arrived. It wasn’t a sophisticated method. We were greeted by two of our instructors, who introduced themselves and told us to pair up. They gave each pair a set of flash cards with the CW character on one side and the letter on the reverse. He then told us, “You’ve the weekend to learn the 26 letters". “Get on with it and we’ll be starting on Monday”. We were left much to our own devices for the rest of the weekend. As you would expect, learning morse on our own was rather a lot to expect from a group of teenagers, but I guess it kept us occupied and out of trouble over the weekend. I’m not sure if anyone managed to learn the complete alphabet though.
On the Monday morning the flash cards were taken away and the next few lessons the instructor took us through the morse characters with him sending the individual letters on a key and getting us to learn the ones we didn’t know. I cannot quite remember how exactly how he did this but from speaking to other Radio Operators from around the same time it appeared that instructors all followed one of two methods. One was by going through all the letters comprising of dits (E I S H etc.,), or dashes, etc., then A U V , then perhaps N D B etc., and so on. Other instructors simply chose to start with A B C D and continue through the alphabet.. Either way it was not too long before we all had grasped the sound of the letters of the alphabet as we were encouraged to refer to morse characters by their sounds, such as, 'didah' for the letter A. Once we could read all the letters and punctuations we started listening to pre-recorded tapes..
Not long after the course commenced we were given a morse aptitude test. This consisted of having to listen to morse characters being sent and write down the corresponding sequence of dots and dashes. I cannot remember the speed the characters were being sent at but I was having problems telling dots from dashes. A number of us failed, including me but luckily we were told that it didn’t matter as the Navy was simply trialling the test. All of us managed to complete the course without problems.
I remember very early in the course the instructor playing a tape of morse at 20 wpm and telling us this was the goal we would achieve. I certainly could not recognise or identify dits, dots, dashes, characters or words. To me it sounded unachievable. We certainly did not use Farnsworth or Koch methods of learning.
The pre-recorded tapes contained a combination of ;
a) Plain language texts, often from popular or classical books,
b) Foreign language texts, and;
c) Groups of 5 random letters.
Random groups and foreign language texts were used as it prevents you from guessing what letter might be coming next. Whilst anticipating what comes next sometimes helps we were taught to write what we heard and therefore avoiding incorrect guesses. This was important. We were required to print what we heard.
The emphases was on accuracy and we were clearly being taught to read anything sent in morse code.
I cannot remember what speed the first tapes were sent at, but probably less than 10 wpm. But I do know we did start with the characters sent slow enough so everyone could recognise identify what dits and dahs were being sent.
We certainly did not use Farnsworth spacing, or Koch
Over the coming weeks we were also introduced to punctuation and miscellaneous characters, and the common letters utilised in other languages such as Á È, Ö Ü and so on.
Once the class achieved around 94% or more accuracy the speed of the tapes was increased by one or two wpm. This was achieved by increasing the character speed and reducing the time between letters etc.,
As the weeks passed by we also listened to morse being sent by hand on a straight key and to morse being sent over the airwaves, with background noise/static. This of course made it a little harder but more realistic. As trainee RO’s we were also being taught to touch type in another class and once we’d gained a decent ability to touch type we also learned to copy morse directly onto a typewriter.
Or course we had breaks at weekends and holidays. Several days of not listening to morse meant that when we resumed our classes we struggled for a while getting our previous speed back up.
Over the 35 weeks the speed was increased until we could all read morse at 20wpm at 98% accuracy. We were required to do two tests, one using a pen and an other test done using a typewriter.
As the course progressed we were later taught to send morse by hand. . As we’d also learned about different wireless telegraphy procedures and the format of military signals, these too became a part of both the morse reception and the morse transmission classes. The pass rate for morse transmission was 15wpm @ 80%. This may seem rather low but the RN knew that having reached that degree of proficiency we’d soon became much more proficient when we were posted to our first ships. A year after I joined my first ship my ability to send and received morse had increased considerably and I was able to send on a straight key at over 22 wpm with 100% accuracy. Likewise I could easily copy morse at 25wpm by hand or typewriter.
As far as I can recall no one failed to learn morse or failed the course, and although I remember coming out of some morse lessons rather exhausted I wouldn’t say learning morse was difficult. There was no ‘plateau’ phase often mentioned by people who learn morse on their own. Learning morse was certainly no different from learning to touch type which we did using a method I think may have been the ‘Pitman Method” and much of the typing was done to music with distinct beats. This was quite fun - especially as we were all typing exactly the same scripts at the same time and it was amusing when someone made a mistake and the class rhythm was shaken somewhat.
All our instructors were Petty Officers or Chief Petty Officers. As far as I can remember, all of them were also trained and qualified instructors. Without exception they were good instructors, patient and encouraging. We were certainly not shouted at or insulted.
Just about every merchant navy operator I have met learned in much the same way. Military training is costly, both in time and money If there was a faster or better method of teaching I’m sure the RN and commercial institutions such as Marconi Marine, would have adopted better ways a long time ago!
NOTES:- 'Instant Character Recognition', & 'Instant Word Recognition', were never mentioned, although I've heard many amateurs use the terms. The ability to recognise characters & words, 'instantly' simply comes with practice and familiarity.
Like commercial operators we were taught not to anticipate or guess what was being sent and to write/record what we heard. Having said that the ability to anticipate what is being sent can sometimes be helpful. This is one of the reasons we listened to foreign languages and random groups. We were being taught to read morse at 20 wpm regardless of what was being sent.
Some differences on learning on your own and learning in a structured group.
As for the so called 'difficulty', of learning morse. I think there are a number of issues for most learners. This is based on a comparison between my experience of learning morse as a 16 yr old in the RN (Learning Morse in the Royal Navy) and that of hams in my radio club who've tried to learn morse (and failed).
My experience of learning morse is not particularly different from other servicemen or commercial operators I've met over the years.
1. We were mostly teenagers or early 20's
2. We had to attend lessons
3. There were no distractions
4. The instructors were (in my case), also qualified trainers/teachers - they knew how to teach us.
5. The method/s used had evolved over many years and was tried and tested.
6. The instructors were there in the lesson with you to help, encourage, humour and clarify any issues.
7. You got a job out of it at the end, which for many was the start of a long career.
Compared to my experience or knowledge of how hams appear to learn morse.
1. Often a solitary experience = no one to help/clarify, encourage etc.,
2. Family life gets in the way.
3. Work gets in the way.
4. Other distractions get in the way!!
5. Numerous choices of learning, many of which appear to be based on someone's experience of learning or trying to learn morse on their own.
6. No particular target to reach.
7. No understanding of what's involved or how long it might take to learn morse.
8. Age! I think the older you are it might just be harder to learn some new skills such as morse.
9. And if you drop out you've still got a life (and job).
Some things are simply easier learned if you are taught how to do them by someone else. Touch typing would be a good example. I can also remember my failed attempts to learn how to Eskimo role a kayak on my own with a 'book of instructions', with me. Then someone showed me - success!!! Driving a car might be another better example!!
There are some erroneous beliefs about learning morse, which I believe simply make learning it harder. Many hams who learned morse on their own talk about the ability to 'Copy Behind' - copying one or two letters behind what is being sent. I'm not a believer in trying - or attempting to "copy behind is either desirable or necessary to teach it. I think it just happens as you gain experience and the speed of the morse increases.".
I can copy over 30wpm. I'd guess I must be 'copying behind', in that as I'm writing down one character the next one is either being sent or has already been sent. I think it is just what automatically happens when you are listening to faster morse especially as your speed increases. You obviously have to write down a character after its been sent (not as its being sent!!), so beyond a certain speed there is an overlap which means your are still writing/typing or even thinking about the character that has just been sent, whilst the next one is being sent.
Its certainly not something I deliberately do and I'm not aware of it when I'm receiving morse. I've never heard any radio operators or trainers ever mention it.
So attempting to copy 'behind', is really just an exercise in making it harder for yourself. I'm sure if I deliberately attempted to copy one or two characters behind then my brain just would not manage it.
I think copying behind is just what happens automatically and not something deliberate.
Another erroneous belief is telling learners never write anything down and from the start only do 'head copy'. Again this is something that comes automatically. None of the military and civilian operators I know were taught to 'head copy', yet all could if they wished. I think trying to tell new learners of morse to head copy from the start is simply making the learning of morse more difficult because it compels the learner to memorise the letters, words and sentences being sent in their heads when they are still familiarising themselves with recognising the individual morse characters.
Note: My experience of learning morse was just at the start of the decline of widespread use of morse at sea. Older contemporaries of mine were required to read morse at 22wpm, and around 1975 the requirement had dropped from 20wpm to 18wpm. RATT/RTTY & Satellite communications were becoming increasingly fitted to both commercial shipping and military ships Morse was on its way out.
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