Signals

Just down the road from me, there's a King George post-box. I went past it the other day and it got me thinking - what's the oldest post-box in the UK? Well, it turns out that it's not too far away at all, in Holwell, Dorset. I've got time off at the moment so I thought I might as well go and visit, whilst remaining open to detours en route. 

I set off with a level of trepidation, the A31 has been closed lately due to wildfires and I thought there might be a ton of extra traffic but it turned out to be plain sailing. Driving through the affected area, things felt different - very 'open' and some obviously burnt vegetation but fortunately it didn't look quite as apocalyptic as I imagined it might. Some horses were roaming around the area, seemingly still able to feed but no doubt there's been lots of wildlife losses due to some careless BBQer or tobacco enthusiast. 

Much of the UK looks like this at the moment, I don't know if this specific field is supposed to be yellow but it's fair to say that the vista overall shouldn't be looking this bleached. The summer has been extremely hot with very little rainfall which has led to the aforementioned wildfires and loss of crops. How much of this is set to be the new normal remains to be seen...

Anyway, I reached Barnes Cross in Holwell a bit before 10AM having made excellent progress. I spotted the post-box instantly and my heart sank as I realised it sits right in front of someone's house - nowhere to hide, just a bloke trying to look nonchalant, holding a camera and taking a photo of a post-box. I pulled over a little way down the road and began the process of trying to hype myself up to actually do it, and in that instant a car pulls up behind me. I can't really explain how quiet this place is, this is not a town or a destination so I was amazed to even see another car, let alone have one parking and trying to ruin my day. Anyway, she left after a couple of minutes so I sidled up to the post box, stepped out into the road, lined up my frame and took the picture below.

That's actually a bit of a lie, I took another one before that but it wasn't as good. This octagonal pillar box was installed in 1853 and it really is the oldest on mainland UK - It's a shame to need that qualification but there's an older one on Guernsey (OK fine, that's not in the UK but...look I'm not getting into a territorial argument on here)

Last night I read the Wikipedia page entitled Cryptanalysis of the Enigma - It's a pretty big read but it doesn't skimp on technical details and I really enjoyed it. I've not been to Bletchley, or seen the films (I'm not really a film guy) but I have read a fair amount about Enigma and with that in mind, imagine my absolute delight when on the way to the post-box, I saw a sign for the Royal Signals Museum. I had set off with the post-box as my destination but with absolute permission to do whatever I wanted. I'd considered a butterfly sanctuary I saw marked on Google Maps but somehow had no idea about this museum. Obviously I had to go. 

The museum itself is actually within Blandford Camp which is an active military base and so I needed to get my photo taken, and my car registered at a checkpoint so there was already some low-level drama to the visit. 

Not really my best side but a passable photo I suppose. I was told to give way to marching soldiers, to go to the museum and not drive round freely. Naturally I missed the turning to the museum and ended up deep in the camp, which was actually far more like a little housing estate. Turned around before I was apprehended by military police, though!

This post isn't going to be a detailed list of all of the things that you can see at the museum but I've added a gallery to the bottom of the post so you can flick through some of my photos but this is by no means an exhaustive collection of what's on display. 

Once I'd paid my £12 entry (with gift-aid included) I entered into the first exhibit and it really does start at the beginning. 

A really nicely created model with watercolour background, this is the Admiralty Shutter Telegraph which existed at the camp from 1806 until 1825 and was used to send text based signals. 

Whilst I was looking at this model, a couple of grandparents and a grandson (assumed) came in behind me and it put me in mind of a younger me, in some imagined museum, likely looking for the first bit of 'interactivity' available. This was a source of some amusement to me because of course this is how all kids behave - they don't want to read panels of text, they want to push things and flip switches. Fortunately for this guy, there's quite a bit of that going on in the museum but this theme did cause a couple of points of amusement to me. As a solo visitor I was able to surreptitiously intercept a few comments and conversations between guardians and their spawn :D 

The museum has hidden some hedgehogs and mice around the place, I assume in an attempt to give younger ones something to capture their attentions, I suspect ultimately they'd like this to lead to them reading the text that the hedgehog hides behind but somewhat predictably it resulted in some zooming around hunting for the next one to tick off on their clipboard. I heard what I can really only describe as 'despair' in one Nan's voice as she told her husband 'She hasn't seen those ones'. 

I digress. When I saw this machine, the M-290-B Converter, I got a little excited. 

I didn't know anything about this prior to reading the associated card but this let me know it was a hagelin cypher machine but in my mind, where there's WWII era cypher machines, there's surely... 

ENIGMA! I saw this and was chuffed - it's such a serendipitous event - I had no idea I'd be going to this museum whilst I was reading about Enigma last night and there I was, in front of a 3-rotor model with the plug board (Steckerbrett). It's far beyond the scope of this blog post to explain the intricacies of the machine but if you're at all interested I recommend reading the Wikipedia article I mentioned earlier. I'm going to have to visit Bletchley to see a 4 rotor model. 

Please look at the gallery below for more photos of the museum. 

I'd spent a couple of hours in the museum and thought I'd call it a day, but then I realised I wasn't very far away from Poole and at Poole is the Mathmos lava lamp factory & showroom. I had a lava lamp in my teens but recently fancied getting one again so decided to visit, safe in the knowledge that if I bought one, I could likely claim reimbursement due to my upcoming birthday. 

At the Mathmos factory & showroom, there is a sign that looks globular, like lava, pointing with an arrow to the showroom. However, it kind of looks like it might be pointing at the entry buzzer, so I pressed the buzzer. And waited, waited a bit more, and then a woman opened the door only to inform me that this was the offices and the show room was the next door down. I gestured and muttered about the sign and the entry buzzer, she assured me it happens all the time, I assured her she was being very polite. 

Ultimately I did manage to get access to the showroom and it's exactly what you'd imagine - some huge lava lamps and then a wall showing every imaginable format of lamp, in every colour combination. 

Mathmos are regarded as the absolute best lava lamps that exist - British resident lava lamp enthusiasts are the envy of the Americans, who can't get Mathmos lamps there without considerable extra expense. They're the originals, and they've been making them continuously since 1963. Anyway, I picked one out and made the purchase. Reimbursement guaranteed. (I've gone for the Black Vinyl Astro, violet, with orange lava. I can't show you what it looks like, because it's not my birthday yet!) 

I'm always keen to find a throughline for these blogposts and you might be surprised to hear that I can tenuously link the lava lamps to my museum day out, and the post-box. The post-box, of course, is one type of signal; the Royal Signals Museum and its exhibits about encrypted communication; and finally, there's internet infrastructure company Cloudflare. A while back they posted about how they use a wall of 100 lava lamps to create the entropy required for random numbers used in their cryptography. I did say it was tenuous...

Anyway, once all of that was done, I decided to make the trip home. I'm considering today a resounding success - a journey with a destination but with the hope of finding something on the way. The post-box had delivered its message.