Thank you to everyone who took part in The Queen’s Code Book Challenge. The competition is now closed. We will notify the winner and runners up in due course.
The competition question hidden in Message 7 was:
Question: Can you list all the 16 countries of which Her Majesty is Queen?
The Answer is:
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Australia
- Bahamas
- Barbados
- Belize
- Canada
- Grenada
- Jamaica
- New Zealand
- Papua New Guinea
- Saint Kitts and Nevis
- Saint Lucia
- Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
- Solomon Islands
- Tuvalu
- The United Kingdom
Download the answer book (pdf, 924KBs)
To mark Her Majesty’s visit to Bletchley Park in July 2011, The Queen issued a Code Book Challenge to schoolchildren.
The challenge was open to everyone, but was aimed especially at children between the ages of 13 and 16 as a summer project. It could also be used as a classroom teaching aid.
For those of you who still wish to try this challenge:
The challenge is to use the attached Code Book to work out what the encoded messages say. Six messages have been constructed. The instructions are contained with the Code Book. Take care to read them carefully.
The codebook is a simplified version of an original codebook which would have been produced by the British Government Code & Cypher School, GCHQ's predecessor, for British agents operating behind enemy lines the Second World War. It would have been printed onto silk so that it could be sewn into the lining of a jacket to avoid detection. Agents would have sent and received messages using this code back to their headquarters in Britain.
Good Luck!
Download the Code Book (pdf, 1.67MBs)
Download the answer book (pdf, 924KBs)
You must have Adobe Reader installed to view these document, click here to download adobe reader.
