Learning Morse

I found that after receiving a long passage of high speed Morse code, I had not the least idea of the content of that passage. In other words, as I used to say, ‘the Morse wrote itself down without any help from me!’

I was a student on AS39 Course at the Air Signallers’ School at RAF Swanton Morley in 1956. We were the first to learn Morse by a new method. Up until this time, the combinations of dots and dashes that make up the Morse Code had to be learned by various old-fashioned but well-tried methods. Instructors the world over swore by their own favourite method and so there were many different ways of trying to simplify the learning process. For example, some advocated learning the opposites first. ‘A’ was dot-dash while ‘N’ was dash-dot. ‘W’ was dot-dash-dash; ‘G’ was dash-dash-dot, ‘Z’ was dash-dash-dot-dot while its opposite was the less useful ‘ü’  (u umlaut) ­ less useful for RAF air signallers anyway! Other instructors recommended first learning the letters made up only of dots or dashes. So, one dot was ‘e’, two dots were ‘i’, three dots were ‘s’; one dash was ‘t’, two dashes were ‘m’, three dashes were ‘o’ and so on. How many of today’s teenagers realise, or care, that the signal telling them that their mobile phone has just received a text message is the Morse code signal for SMS? Come to think of it, how many of them know what SMS stands for?

There were very short transmission gaps between letters and between words so that there should be no confusion about where one letter or word ended and the next one started. A dash was supposed to be equal in length to three dots and the gap between words was meant to be equal in length to seven dots. Who dreamed that up? Nobody ever tried to count these intervals! In practice, confusion only arose when the transmission speed was very slow; then it could be well-nigh impossible to differentiate between, for example, ‘ttt’, ‘tm’ or ‘o’. That thought leads me to a small digression.

The international distress signal when sent by Morse is not, as most non-telegraphists think it is, the letters SOS. To be strictly accurate, it is a single symbol made up of three dots-three dashes-three dots – sent without any breaks between. It was introduced by Germany in April 1905 and internationally the following year. (Incidentally Marconi Maritime Company communicators used CQD as the Morse distress signal from 1904 until as late as the Titanic disaster in 1912.) Apparently the nine-component SOS symbol was chosen by Germany because it was long enough to ensure that it would not be confused with any other, and it was also very easy to remember. Only later did someone suggest that SOS was an acronym for “Save Our Souls”. Perhaps that someone was an Englishman who wanted to get his own back on the Frenchman who had coined “M’aidez!”, which became Mayday in English, as the voice equivalent of SOS. Nevertheless, on the only occasion when I heard SOS sent in anger, the distressed operator certainly transmitted it as three individual letters rather than as a single symbol. When written down in material aimed at professional signallers, there should be a horizontal bar above the three letters, thus, SOS, to indicate this is a special symbol not the three individual letters. (NB In some browsers the over-lining may not show up).

A whole range of punctuation signs, accented letters, and wireless telegraphy procedural signs are formed by joining various letters together without a break. These are the so-called ‘barred letters’. To mention just three: the full stop is AAA; a comma is MIM; but perhaps the most frequently used was IMI, which represented either a question mark or ‘please repeat’, depending on who sent it. To be strictly accurate I had better mention that in military, as distinct from civilian, Morse the question mark should be transmitted as INT (presumably shorthand for interrogative) to distinguish between a question and a 'please repeat'  but in my experience this convention was not always strictly adhered to. In our official written logs we had to write in the bars over barred letters otherwise it would count as an error.

Under the earlier teaching system, once all the letters, numbers, punctuation signs, and the various other special symbols, had been learned, it was just a matter of gaining speed until students reached, or failed to reach, the all 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 did not 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.

The instructors, mainly former World War 2 wireless operators of one sort or another, were initially as sceptical about the new system as we students were. Each tape lasted for a mind-boggling 40 minutes and there were 49 of them – why 49 rather than 50 we never asked or discovered. I have to admit that as we progressed the gaps between symbols began to seem interminably long. At about 16 words per minute I had enough time to write the letters immaculately instead of in my usual scrawl. Indeed, in one lesson at about 16 words per minute, I wrote the entire 40 minute sequence down twice on separate pieces of paper as it was being transmitted, just for the Hell of it – and still got zero errors.

Reading ahead in a plain language Morse message and guessing what the next letter might be was absolutely verboten. If you missed a letter due to interference or a momentary lapse of concentration, it was tempting to guess what it might have been by the context. We were told that operationally this was totally unacceptable because the originator of the message, unknown to whoever might receive the message, might have deliberately misspelled a word for security reasons or as part of a cipher. Towards the end of our training, when our instructors reverted to sending the code manually instead of by machine, they would occasionally misspell words deliberately, or introduce grammatical errors, to catch out any of us who had been tempted to read ahead. A missed letter counted as one error, but a wrong letter counted as two, and a few of those made all the difference between a pass and a fail.

At speeds above about 20 words per minute there was no longer any time to make corrections anyway. If you had second thoughts about what a character might have been, spending time thinking about it merely meant that you missed the next few characters. Worrying about characters you had completely missed meant that you missed the next few and so on.

There were two curious aspects to writing down Morse sent at more than 22 wpm, which I and several others on the course used to ponder. We found that when writing down plain language texts we lagged the transmission by anything up to six characters. This seemed to make it easier to join the letters together into written words. This had nothing to do with the forbidden practice of ‘reading ahead’: in fact it was 'writing behind',  the hand holding the pencil lagging behind what the brain had heard. This led to the second curious aspect. I found that after receiving a long passage of high speed Morse code, I had not the least idea of the content of that passage. In other words, as I used to say, ‘the Morse wrote itself down without any help from me!’ Some of our eastern European instructors used to lapse into a variety of foreign languages in the middle of a passage of English (including a sprinkling of accented letters which we did not recognise) and I was not always aware of this until the end of the test when I had time to read over what I had written and found that I had a number of blanks where the unfamiliar letters had been transmitted. One of our instructors was a former Polish Air Force signaller and when he lapsed into Polish Morse there was absolutely no way we could have read that ahead!! (We used to get our own back by cheekily pointing out that his pronunciation of English left a lot to be desired!)

There is little reason to learn Morse these days and it is quite difficult to find Morse radio transmissions on the short waves, apart from dedicated radio amateurs. (I used to be GM3MEX when I was stationed at RAF Kinloss, Scotland, in 1957, and ZB1LQ when I was one of only two licensed amateurs on the island of Malta in 1958/9). However, although I have not used Morse for several decades, I discovered recently that I can still read it at about 20 words per minute but I can no longer write it down at those speeds because, with advancing years, my pen hand no longer works that fast! However, I can type it straight into the word processor at 20 wpm, but that's another matter.  (If you want any more on Morse signals try here)

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