Swanton Morley - and learning Morse Code - Tony Cunnane's Life and Times

I was a student on AS39 Course at the Air Signallers’ School at RAF Swanton Morley in 1956. We quickly learned that the courses were beginning to run down because of a decreasing requirement for air signallers. (So much for what my Boss at Hemswell had told me!) Until we arrived, new courses had been starting every two weeks. However, the next course to start after us was AS41 a month later and the last ever courses were AS45 and AS48. In the meantime young commissioned officers were arriving to start the first Air Electronics Courses but they were kept well away from us. The school was renamed the Air Electronics School on 1 April 1957 but that then closed down at the end of 1957 and moved to Hullavington.

We on AS39 were the first to learn Morse by a new method. Up until that 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?

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, as the voice equivalent of SOS, “M’aidez!”, which later became Mayday in English. 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.

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.

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 the bars over barred letters otherwise it would be marked as an error. The image above left shows how they should be written. XXX-barred  was the Morse sign for Urgency - one degree of emergency less than SOS/Mayday. Click here to read of an occasion when I had to send an Urgency signal in flight for real.

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