Five Words That Frightened MI5
In the spring of 1944 the Daily Telegraph crossword printed, one after another, the most closely guarded words in Britain.
The five
2 May - UTAH, from "One of the U.S." The American 4th Assault Division's beach.
22 May - OMAHA, from "Red Indian on the Missouri." The American 1st Assault Division's beach.
27 May - OVERLORD, from "…but some bigwig like this has stolen some of it at times." The name of the entire invasion.
30 May - MULBERRY, from "This bush is a centre of nursery revolutions." The floating harbours to be towed across the Channel.
1 June - NEPTUNE, from "Britannia and he hold to the same thing." The naval assault phase.
Five days later the landings began.
The deflating footnote
The Telegraph's own long-serving crossword editor supplied the detail that ought to accompany the story everywhere and almost never does: in the preceding months, the solutions JUNO, GOLD and SWORD had also appeared. Those are the three British beaches. They attracted no attention whatsoever, because they're perfectly ordinary crossword words.
The famous five are the survivors of a much larger and much duller set of coincidences. That does not explain OVERLORD or MULBERRY away. It does mean the pattern was assembled partly in hindsight.
There was also precedent. In August 1942 the solution DIEPPE was set on the seventeenth and published on the eighteenth. The raid took place on the nineteenth, and cost more than half the men who got ashore. A senior intelligence officer recalled an immediate and exhaustive inquiry involving MI5, which concluded it was a remarkable coincidence - a complete fluke.
The visit
The compiler was Leonard Dawe, a man in his fifties who had been setting the Telegraph crossword since it began in 1925, and who was headmaster of the Strand School, evacuated from Tulse Hill to Effingham in Surrey.
Two MI5 officers called at his house in Leatherhead. Dawe said nothing publicly for fourteen years, and then described it on the BBC in 1958:
"They turned me inside out and collected naval intelligence. They went to Bury St Edmunds where my senior colleague Melville Jones was living and put him through the works… But they eventually decided not to shoot us after all."
The school's head boy watched an official-looking car arrive and his headmaster get into it. The boys, he said later, were astonished at the idea that Dawe might be a traitor. He was a member of the local golf club.
It's often written that Dawe was arrested. The paper's own reporting says he was questioned and released. The stronger word appears to be an embellishment.
The schoolboy
Forty years later, in 1984, the Telegraph revisited the story - and the editor, alarmed all over again, quietly had his puzzles desk check whether any Falklands codewords had turned up during the recent conflict. None had.
Days after the piece ran, a letter arrived from Ronald French, by then a property manager in Wolverhampton, who had been fourteen years old and a pupil at the Strand School in 1944.
Dawe, he said, used to call boys into his study and have them fill blank grids with whatever words came into their heads; he wrote the clues afterwards. French had been obsessed with the American and Canadian troops camped near the school - playing truant to visit, running errands in his army cadet uniform, spending whole weekends there, once driving a tank. The soldiers talked freely in front of him because he was obviously not a German spy.
"Everyone knew the outline invasion plan and they knew the various codewords… Hundreds of kids must have known what I knew."
After D-Day, French said, Dawe sent for him, asked him point blank where the words had come from, demanded to see his notebooks, and was horrified. The books were burned. French swore on the Bible to say nothing, and kept that oath for forty years.
How much of it stands up
More than sceptics allow, and less than the story needs.
For it: a second former pupil confirmed, independently and in writing, that Dawe really did have boys fill his grids. Fraternisation with the troops is separately attested by other boys. The other solutions Dawe printed that spring - warden, Poland, aircraft, disarm - read exactly like the vocabulary of excited teenagers. And there's a tantalising loose end: that second pupil recalled reading a letter in The Times in 1980, four years before French came forward, in which yet another old boy confessed to the same thing. Nobody has ever located it.
Against it: French came forward at fifty-four, immediately after national publicity, with no document to support him, and - by his own admission - no memory of actually writing the words into the grids. He remembers the aftermath, not the act. The notebooks were destroyed. Some historians have dismissed the whole account as embellishment, though those doing the dismissing are rarely named.
The empty file
There's one more thing, and it's the most striking.
We searched the National Archives catalogue, including the Security Service records, for Leonard Dawe, for the Telegraph crossword, for the investigation itself. There is nothing. No MI5 file on the affair appears ever to have been released or catalogued.
So this is what eighty years have left us: something appeared in a newspaper that shouldn't have; MI5 genuinely investigated; nobody was ever shown to have leaked anything; and the tidy schoolboy ending is a plausible, partly corroborated story resting on testimony no one can check and evidence that was burned.
The Telegraph's own crossword editor put it best, and declined to call it closed. Somewhere, she wrote, someone will clear out an attic.