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In the pre internet days, when communication went through various manual means like telephone exchanges, there were codewords known by various people to announc
by iso1631 6y ago
In the pre internet days, when communication went through various manual means like telephone exchanges, there were codewords known by various people to announce royal deaths without it leaking. The death of the Queen for example has to be announced to all commonwealth country leaders at the exact same time, which means coordination, which means following certain plans, but limiting the information to make sure it's not leaked.
Of course with the internet means they code words are widely known (they were also named on The Crown) - and indeed trending on twitter, which is amusing given how some documentation still says they are super secret. The information can't be easily kept underwraps now as the chance of someone scooping it on twitter increases with the number of people aware of it and the time taken, I suspect there's only a few minutes between the palace announcing it to bbc/sky/itn and the embargo time - certainly BBC didn't have enough time to get Huw Edwards in for example (he's in now)
Other bridges includ(ed)
Menai (Charles - Price of Wales, Menai Bridge is from Bangor to Anglesey)
Tay (Queen Mother, near balmoral which I think was her ancestral home)
London (Queen, London being the captial)
Forth being the bridge at Edinburgh, so makes sense for the Duke of Edinburh)
Not sure if William has one, maybe it would be the River Cam.
- SamBam 6y agoFunnily enough, I just watched the episode from the Crown yesterday when the Queen explains to Philip that they all have bridge code names, and what his is.
- aaronax 6y agoSince the code words are related to what they reference in some way, I find it difficult to believe that they were ever intended for a serious purpose. Maybe they are useful for clarity of communication in some way, but certainly not for secrecy (which would probably require randomly selecting names from a word list).
- iso1631 6y ago"Secret" is a relative term, up until about 10 years ago I suspect very few had heard of it, I'd be interested in anything online before 2016 referring to them (there was big media coverage in 2017) The specific details however aren't public knowlege, with various secrecy levels, and there are various different plans depending on the situation (what happens if the queen was on a plane that crashed for example, or what if Charles died in an avalanche in Austria), and plans of course are constantly changing (what happens if there's a massive pandemic which means people can't congregate in their millions to pay respects as they did with Diana, what happens if the news is leaked on twitter before coordinated official announcement)
- dingaling 6y agoTangential but that's also a key difference between US and UK codenames for military operations. uK names are picked from a list of deliberately neutral words ( SHADER and NEWCOMBE being two currently active ).