WWII Cryptic Codes (Called Joeys?)

[Clare Sudbery]

This is a special plea (or rather, two) on behalf of my mother...

She's trying to identify a novel she once read. She thinks it might be by either Elizabeth Bowen or Graham Greene, but all she can remember is one small plot detail. Apparently it wasn't particularly important to the book, it was just background.

There were these young women who did an unskilled job for a code-breaking department during World War II: They had to sit there constantly scanning columns of 8-figure numbers, and looking for the ones which looked wrong. They knew they looked wrong, but they couldn't say why. They didn't know how they did it but they would have to draw rings around the special numbers (which were known as joeys), and then their supervisors would collect them. They could only do it for a few months and then they would lose the ability. Sometimes they worked better in pairs.

Of course, now I'm intrigued too, although not by the novel as such. Is this true? Did these women really exist? How fascinating if they did. What was special about the joeys?

My mother would also like to know... can rats climb up sewage pipes and round S-bends? That is to say, can rats come out of the sewers and into people's homes via their toilet bowls?

That is all. Answers on a postcard please. Well all right then, below.

[Julie T]

Don't know about the book, but the place to find out about wartime codebreaking, whether the joey thing was true or not, would be here:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/

I took my kids to one of their educational tour days with lectures Oct before last, and it was fascinating.
Maybe you could try emailing them.

[Phil Reynolds]

There's no mention of "joeys" in Andrew Hodges' biography of Alan Turing, which goes into a fair amount of detail about the cryptanalytic methods used at Bletchley. Mind you, it's now nearly three decades since Hodges was researching his book and of course a lot more information has come to light in the interim.

[Ian Volante]

My mother would also like to know... can rats climb up sewage pipes and round S-bends? That is to say, can rats come out of the sewers and into people's homes via their toilet bowls?

That is all. Answers on a postcard please. Well all right then, below.

I believe that it's not uncommon for rats to come up through toilets, and in such places it's also not uncommon for toilet lids to be held down with bricks.