A new system for learning Morse - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

important 22 words per minute required to qualify as an RAF air signaller. Under that old system most students had temporary mental plateaux at around 8, 12, and 18 words per minute. Quite why those particular speeds were stumbling blocks, no-one seemed to understand. If each plateau was surmounted most, but by no means all, students usually rapidly progressed to the next one. Eventually every student reached a speed which was his ultimate limit. Some students could never progress beyond 4 or 8 wpm and left the course for pastures new. Those who failed to reach 22 words per minute were given further training and another test. If they failed again at 22 wpm, they failed the course. I eventually passed official tests sending Morse at 28 words per minute and reading at 30 words per minute and I was jolly proud of those results.

I can hear people thinking ‘but it all depends on the length of the word, doesn’t it?’ Well, yes and no. English plain language text was deemed to average 5 letters per word. Thus 22 words per minute meant roughly 110 characters per minute. Occasionally our instructors would send us a test passage including a significant number of extra-long words just to alleviate their own boredom and to see us struggle. Other RAF tests consisted of what was known as ‘syco’. (I have never seen ‘syco’ written down before this – I have always assumed it was an abbreviation for synthetic code but I may be wrong.) Syco consisted of groups of 4 characters – three random letters and one number in any combination. Unlike plain language, it was impossible to ‘read ahead’ and guess what the next character was going to be. The final test in syco was also at 22 groups per minute. Pedants will now point out that 22 groups of syco per minute were only 88 characters – but standard Morse numerals are combinations of five dots and dashes whereas the longest English letters have only four and most have less. Are you still with me?

In the RAF’s new system that was first used on my course at Swanton Morley, the individual Morse characters were played to us at the equivalent of 22 words per minute from the outset. So in Lesson 1, when most of us did not know a single Morse symbol, we listened on headphones to code generated by a punched tape machine, watched the instructor write the corresponding letter on the blackboard, and then we wrote the letter down in our note books. Initially there was a seven second gap between each character so we had plenty of time to listen, watch and write. We learned the symbols by the association between sound, sight and writing – and it worked. We didn't need to know ‘p’ was dot-dash-dash-dot: all we needed to know was the particular sound that represented the letter P.

The instructor uttered not a single word during the entire lesson because the system was supposed to be suitable for use with any language. New characters were introduced with each new tape until we knew them all. In subsequent tapes the gap between characters  was steadily reduced until, eventually, we were reading Morse at a true 22 words per minute. To give you an idea of how fast that is, just try writing down, legibly, sentences when someone is reading them to you at 22 words per minute. It is not easy!  Signallers' logs, being legal documents, had to be perfectly legible.

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