Rudi took from behind the sofa a heavy-looking attaché case and opened it by swiping a cardkey down its side and then typing in a long combination on the lockpad on top. He took out a rolled-up paper map and two old-looking books, one thick with battered cardboard covers, the other a thin leather-bound notebook.
“In case you need some background,” he said, handing over the notebook, “the map’s of the Line. Standard stuff you can buy anywhere. This,” holding up the thick book, “is a 1912 railway timetable for the South of England. And I have no idea what any of it means.”
Lev took the notebook and opened it. Tucked inside the cover were five sheets of paper covered with printed columns of numbers and letters. No, not printed… Lev ran his fingertip over the back of one of the sheets, felt the slight embossing of the typewriter. These sheets had been typed a very long time ago.
He laid them aside and paged through the notebook. More columns of numbers and letters, closely written in ink, in a clear, careful hand. He checked inside the front and back covers and both endpapers, but there were no pencil jottings, no idle calculations that might give a clue to the cypher being used.
“This may take a little while,” he said.
Rudi shrugged and limped over to examine the room’s minibar. “If it takes a while, it takes a while, Professor. I know these things mustn’t be rushed.”
Lev shrugged. He unrolled the laptop and scanner, plugged in the newly-purchased hard drive, and began the process of booting everything together.
2.
OF PARTICULAR INTEREST to cartographical students, Sheet 2000 – the so-called ‘Millennial Sheet’ – is the only surviving sheet produced by the ‘Alternative Survey’ begun by General H. Whitton-Whyte in 1770.
Quite why General Whitton-Whyte undertook his own survey of the British Isles, when the same work was being carried out by the Ordnance Survey, is not known.
Indeed, much of the history of the family is shrouded in mystery. Very little remains to us of the early history of the Whitton-Whytes. In Bryce’s Great Families Of The County Of Staffordshire (Angel and Pediment, 1887), the family merits only a footnote appended to an entry concerning the Bracewells of Leek. In the 1888 edition of the book this footnote mentions a rumour extant in the county over a century before that the Whitton-Whytes had ‘fallen upon hard times due to an illness’ which forced them to sell their house, Whetstones, to the Bracewell family, and move to London. The footnote is omitted from later editions of Bryce.
In Seichais’ Cartographie Anglaises (Spurrier, 1901), Whitton-Whyte is included mainly because of his ‘eccentric system of numbering sheets,’ sheets apparently being given the first number which entered the General’s head on the day of publication. Some of these numbers ran to many digits (forty-seven in the case of the Birmingham sheet) and abridged numbers – so-called ‘Whyte Numbers’ – were later appended to the sheets for ease of cataloguing.
Of the Survey itself, details are only available of the later stages. Apocryphal stories abound of Whitton-Whyte’s wild-haired figure tramping the Western Isles of Scotland or the Yorkshire Dales, theodolite in hand and – in the early days of the Survey at any rate – attended by a small army of helpers drawn from his lost estates in Staffordshire.
Clearly, it would have been impossible for one man to undertake such a survey on his own, and there are records surviving in Cumbria, Peeblesshire and Kent which suggest that the General hired local men where it was possible, while keeping a firm hand on the overall control of the project.
In many areas this contracting-out of the work may account for the friction reputed to have existed between Whitton-Whyte and the Ordnance Survey, which in a number of instances was surveying for its own maps at the same time as the General’s men were surveying for his. It’s said that on several occasions this friction erupted in violence.
There is a story, retold in Grey’s Maps and Mapmakers Of The British Isles (Pitt & Sefton, 1892), relating to the theft of Ordnance Survey field drawings of Cornwall and noting – though there is no evidence that they were responsible – that Whitton-Whyte’s Survey was known to be in the same area at the same time as the Ordnance men.
Comparison of publication dates, says Grey, reveals that Sheet 178923 of the Alternative Survey (Northern Cornwall) was published in less than half the time of the other sheets. However, it should be noted that, save for Sheet 2000, no records of publication dates have survived to the present day, and therefore it is impossible to authenticate Grey’s thinly-veiled accusation.
In total, the Alternative Survey lasted one hundred and twenty years. In his scholarly work Mapa i Pamięc (Map And Memory) (Zakopane, 1920) Walerian Mazowiecki even blames the Survey for the eventual downfall of the Whitton-Whyte family.
Only one full set of the Survey was ever collected, these stored in the ‘Map Room’ of the Whitton-Whytes’ townhouse in Islington. All but one version of Sheet 2000 – which was on loan to Mr S. J. Rolfe of the British Museum at the time – were destroyed, along with the rest of the collection, when the house burned down in July 1912, and our subsequent knowledge of its history has been gleaned from examination of surviving notes and field drawings.
As with so many of the other sheets of the Alternative Survey, the survey of Sheet 2000 is based on existing data. It used the Hounslow Heath baseline measured by General William Roy in 1784. Whitton-Whyte is said to have remeasured the baseline a month later, and pronounced it ‘adequate.’ Thereafter, this sheet, covering the area to the west of London, conforms in general to the triangulations which resulted in Ordnance Survey Sheet 7. Whether Whitton-Whyte actually made any measurements of his own beyond checking Roy’s baseline is a matter of conjecture.
It is believed from contemporary accounts that twelve field drawings were prepared for draughtsmen in late August 1820, when proof copies of Ordnance Survey Sheet 7 were already circulating. Whether any of these proofs fell into the hands of the Whitton-Whyte Survey is not known.
What is known is that Henry Hoskyns, who undertook the reduction of the field drawings to a form ready for engraving, made a flurry of revisions at the end of August, and was heard by his apprentice, James Summers, to exclaim that the detail of the drawings was ‘as inaccurate as it is possible to be.’
This outburst, and the subsequent revisions, led to Whitton-Whyte breaking off all relations with Hoskyns – who had been involved in the draughting of virtually all the Alternative Survey sheets, man and boy. Hoskyns, his eyesight already failing, became totally blind later that year, and, unable to work, was buried in a pauper’s grave when he died six years later.
It’s said that, following the disagreement with Hoskyns, Whitton-Whyte himself reinstituted the original state of the map and delivered the draught in person to its engraver, Mortimer Heathcoate, charging him to ‘change not one line nor one triangulation point.’
General Whitton-Whyte never lived to see the publication of Sheet 2000. In September 1822, aged eighty, he suffered a stroke while travelling through Dorset, and died at Poole two days later. It is a testimony to the old man’s stamina that, despite the difficulties of travel around England, Scotland and Wales in those days, he had managed to cover so much of the country during his life.