The Crusades were built on one message, that judeo-christian sacred sites in Jerusalem should be rescued from Islamic rule. But that message encompassed many strands, land grabbing, religious intolerance and manipulation of the masses towards political ambition.
This new project
is radio based, an experimental drama made with children in Liverpool
which explores this notion of messaging and specifically the mass movement
of children towards a common goal.Based on real events of the 12th Century
when 10000 European children tried to march to Jerusalem.
In devising the educational content for the Crusade project I decided
that I wanted to inspire the collaborators into thinking about messages
as tangible elements that had to move from one place to the next and give
them examples of that. The method of transporting a message often affects
the content of the message, in interesting ways. We invited two experts,
a morse code radio expert and an expert in psychic communication. These
are transcriptions/accounts of the talks they gave at the primary school
during a week of project workshops. Elements from these talks fed directly
into how we approached on line devising in chat rooms and in the classroom.
Mandy:
Im
really pleased to introduce George Robbins.You can call him George. Were
really lucky to find him and really lucky he could come here today, George
is an expert in morse code and hes going to talk to us today about it.
I probably know as much as you guys do about morse code, apart from maybe
Kyle because he said his grandfather does it, but morse code is a way
of sending messages and our workshop this week is looking at the different
ways there are to communicate messages, specifically over distance, so
george is going to tell us what morse code is how it developed, what it
consists of, how it works.
George:
The person who
did the early development tests of morse code was named
Samuel Morse…and he was an American.And he was an artist, but
he was also interested in communication by electricity.There was very
little communication at that time there was no television, no radio, everything
had to come through batteries and the first morse it wasn’t dits
and das it was clicks and clacks.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the pictures(to see a western)
and you see a railway station in the states and the baddies are robbing
the place and someone goes to the railway station and the guy whos running
the railway station is also a telgraphist and he sends the news and it
goes, click click,( demonstrates on his equiment) and that was called
American morse and its not used now although at that time it served very
well.
Thing is they had a lot of trouble with buffalo when they were laying
the lines, putting up the telegraph lines and there were big herds of
buffaloes and they used to like to scratch themselves on the poles and
they’d knock the poles down and they had great trouble keeping the
poles up, and then the Indians would attack the poles, they’d come
and maybe steal the wire for their own purposes.
So they ran the lines between railway stations and this was the type of
thing theyd use(points to a wooden based instrument), theyd connect one
to another one to another one and there might be fifty or sixty miles
between a station, and the messages were relayed between each point. And
they had to be spelled out there was no single letter that could tell
you a lot, the whole message had to be spelled out in morse, letter by
letter,so the first thing you’ve got to do is learn morse, so Samuel
Morse was the one who invented the code.
He went along to a printers and looked at which was the most used letter
and it was an E, so he decided to use one dit for E.
A is dit da ._
B is da dit dit dit _..
you say it the way it sounds you don’t say dots and dashes the way
its written down.so A is dit dah, not dot dash, it IS dot dash but that’s
not the way you say it.
One of the things that brought morse code to the fore, well you’ve
all heard of the seventh cavalry, General Custer, and he sent half his
regiment one way and the other half fell in with the Indians. Chief Sitting
Bull to be exact, and half the regiment were massacred, (the seventh cavalry
were fighting in iraq by the way, they’re a very long standing regiment)…so
when the other half came upon the regiment the only thing they found alive,
though badly wounded, was a horse. So they got the horse down to the river
and on to a boat…and it took ten days from where the massacre happened
to where they could get to a place to send a message back to the east.
They went down the Missouri river and the Yellow river and they got the
horse back, and it was taken to the regimental depot and they fixed its
wounds and when the boat got to the railway station, that’s where
they sent the message from. They asked for a fast line in other words
they wanted to get straight through to the headquarters in Washington,
and the telegraphist said "what’s wrong," and they said
ALL OF CUSTER’S ARE KILLED
The only thing that was left was the horse.
(The horse was never ridden again, it was dressed up and taken out on
parade in all its finery and it lived for another thirty years which is
more than the average life for a horse…but anyway, the message was
sent from the first railway station they found)
Mandy:George can I just ask…the message is very short for such a
huge event that’s obviously because they have to get the message
through quickly with the least amount of letters…?Exactly.One of
the operators spent 22 hours spelling it all out(the whole story in individual
letters) and I had a copy of one of the papers but that was the headline
ALL CUSTER’s KILLED.
The horse belonged to Captain Reno and the horse was called Comanche but
that’s just by the way and so anyway, that whole story was told in
clicks and clacks.
Mandy:
They asked for a fast line…that was, what? Bypassing all the little in between stations?
George:
Correct, also a fast line would mean that you would need to be a good
operator on a "fast line" so there were two operators on that
message and they did it between them.
So that was one of the events that brought telegraphy to the fore.
The railways in America used to rely on these machines and on good telegraphists.
There were even some good women telegraphists, The thing was you never
saw who you were talking to because the distances between them was so
big, and people used to build up ideas and try to arrange meetings and
there was a cartoon of a man with a beautiful picture of a lady in his
mind’s eye and in reality he was talking to an old man hahahaha!
Mandy:
George I wanted to ask about these times, the cavalry and the indians that you have already mentioned, what would have been the nature of the messages people were ending then, what did people want to tell each other?
George:
Everything, military messages, it was used by the general public, it got
to the stage where you could even transfer money and one person had said
oooh ill make it even money because I don’t want the loose change
to fall out of the line..no idea how it worked you see.
So anyway,that was this type of morse, clicks and clacks and all it needed
was a telephone line or possibly just one line with an earth connection
Quite recently up until the 1940s the british railways used a form of
morse called ting tang. And that was like a bell. Clicks and clacks are
made by KOB, key on base, instruments.
Mandy:So what we are looking at here is how when people started to want
to communicate through a vast country like america and then back to where
they had came from in europe, we had a situation where the necessity to
communicate was the mother of invention.
George:And they thought this was absoloutely wonderful. The first message
to go across the United States sent by Samuel Morse was
WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT?
Sent from one side of america to the other.
Mandy:
So what does this message mean what has god wrought? It means what has god done and the thing is later on, whenever people first started hearing radio, they thought they were hearing mystical voices, historically, people who were experimenting with radio were considered tricksters because radio seemed like a kind of miracle and people couldn’t believe what they were hearing.
George:
Bunuel was an operator during the american civil war and they started
making telegraphic equipment, even through the 1940s bunuel equipment
was shipped to Europe and used then.
And its difficult to find this stuff now, I’m a member of the British
Vintage Wireless Society.
This piece here is 110 years old and it still works.
There was an american company called weston electric and they used to
provide telephone lines free for their own staff so they could use morse
to communicate instead of talking and that was free. And clicks and clacks
american morse was faster than british dots and dashes.
Goes on to demonstrate wooden key on board and then electric morse pump
handle action.
This is a pump handle key this is a modern one, the sort of thing that’s
used on ships.
Mandy:
Is that still used on ships?
George:
Well morse on ships is finished now, morse is gone, theres no morse any
more.
I used to supply a fair amount of radio gear to firms and there was a
firm I took some vhf radio telephones in to and this fella had this thing
like a suitcase set up over by a window and he said, Im just trying this,
its satellite communication, and he opened the case, turned the lid round
so it was facing the window and it had a compass, just like a boyscouts
and he put it on a bearing which he knew and picks up the microphone and
puts a call out saying he wants to commission this set and an american
lady’s voice came back and he gave his numbers and she said ok youre
on line, and I said, where is that? And he said it’s a satellite
over the atlantic and I said, the radio officers job is finished, noone
is going to pay a guy to put out dits and dashes anymore with this stuff
and that was ten fifteen years ago and that’s the way its gone.
The last stronghold of morse is in India and third world countries, China,
some of the African countries.
Mandy:
Oh! That’s important for us to think about…the fact that a communication system which is defunct for us is still being used in other countries, this shows how the first world has access to technology that other developing countries mught not have. If we think about the internet for example, a massive portion of the worlds population don’t have access to that, and this method, morse code is cheap and accessible and makes sense as a way to talk.
George:
Now Chinese and japanese morse is complicated…..
Mandy:
The reason Japanese and Chinese morse would be complicated is because their alphabet is much bigger than ours, they write in a character based way.
George:
A friend of mine joined the navy and they sent him on a course to learn japanese morse, he was a royal marine seaman and he was put on one of the big battleships and they were cruising along the japanese coast.
Mandy:
In the 1940s america was at war with japan that’s why it was important to learn japanese morse.
George:
They heard these
instructions for torpedo boats to be sent and he had to go and tell the
commander to leave the area immediately and he was a very high ranking
officer but he had to take the orders of just an ordinary seaman.
Another interesting thing is some of the american
indian tribes had a dialect and they used to call them morse talkers
but they werent talking morse, they were communicating messages in wartime
for the Americans that other people couldn’t interpret.
Mandy:Could we hear SOS? What does SOS stand for?
Kids:
Save our souls
George:
Oh well, now, SOS was only used because that was an easy clear signal to transmit it wasn’t because of what it stood for.
Mandy:
George who do you communicate with by radio?
George:
People in America, Australia, all over.
Thing is,I don’t like morse you know, its too slow. It’s only
about nine words a minute, I did morse in the infantry with a transmitter
and a box strapped to my leg, and in the last gulf war, not this one,
sand got into the satellite equipment and they had to get morse operators
whod been sitting at home watching the war on tv, they had to get them
to come in and man the signals.
George then proceeded to teach the kids how to write their names in morse. They tested his skills by transmitting their names to him and they made a slogan in morse.