Dorabella Cipher

The Dorabella Cipher is an enciphered letter written by composer Edward Elgar to Dora Penny, which was accompanied by another dated July 14, 1897.

In July 1897 the Penny family invited Edward and Alice Elgar to stay at the Wolverhampton Rectory for a few days.

Edward Elgar inserted a note with cryptic writing: he pencilled the name 'Miss Penny' on the reverse.

Fascinated by local language and culture, he possessed a few traditional talismans decorated with arcane glyphs.

And if Dora recalled this when writing her memoirs, it might account for the fact the coded message was referred to as an 'inscription' when communicating with the director of SOAS many years later.

In December 2011, Canadian cryptographer enthusiast Richard Henderson claimed[6] to have found the correct clear text, encoded once again as a simple substitution cipher (with two letters as nulls), although some details remain to be worked out.

In July 2020, Wayne Packwood claimed in the journal Musical Opinion to have produced a complete decryption:[7] A WOMAN IS LIKE CHESS ONE HAS TO MAKE MANY SACRIFICES FOR ITS QUEEN IT IS VICTORY SHE COMMANDS NOT DO BETTERThe secondary message below was identified as the word RATS, which Packwood believed was a playful acknowledgement from Sir Edward to the individual that broke his cipher.

These entries, though, having matched Elgar's symbols to the alphabet, invariably ended up with a fairly arbitrary sequence of letters.

... [T]he results read as a disconnected chain of bizarre utterances, such as an imaginative mind could conjure up from any group of random letters".