1978

How it was before radar

(c) The Canadian Amateur magazine

Radio Amateurs of Canada Inc.

CARF Publications

Reprinted with permission

Cecil Kenny, recently retired from DOC HQ in Ottawa, reminisces in the DOC ' publication `Modulation'. Back in the thirties, Cec held the call VE1JS and then VE1FC. He interspersed his 'hamming' with stints at sea with the RCMP preventive section. Recalling his days aboard the cutter 'Fleur-de-lis', Cec tells of shadowing rum runners and trailing them until they escaped in darkness, fog or storm because they had no radar then.

As Cec tells it, "...The rum runners' objective was to rendezvous with ashore boat which would take part of its load of between 1,000 and 5,000 kegs or cases of liquor and land it at some isolated point on the Nova Scotia coast for transportation to thirsty markets. When the rum runner disposed of its cargo, it went back to the mother ship, lying on one of the fishing banks with a cargo of up to 20,000 kegs or cases.

"One August day that year we were standing by one of the many rum runners operating off the Atlantic coast. I looked at the rum runner's shortwave antenna strung between its stub masts. If the rum runner's communications were picked up and deciphered, it would be possible to intercept and seize the ship and its cargo at the drop site inside the

three-mile limit.

"This would cut down on monotonous and usually fruitless trailing of rum runners. It also could save thousands of gallons of fuel oil. Not having a shortwave receiver, I obtained the parts on our next trip into port and constructed one, ready to intercept the signals of the next rum runner we came across.

"The opportunity was not long in coming. I feverishly tuned across the dial. Being so close, the rum runner's key clicks soon led to the frequency of operation, about 60 metres or five megahertz (MHz) in today's parlance. The rolling of both ships made it difficult to follow the signal up and down the dial with one hand while writing down the coded messages with the other.

"The signals of other rum runners and the shore station were soon picked up. After many days of recording enough "Traffic", together with the runner's give-away practice of interspersing the code with plain language, I was successful in deciphering the messages.

"Our ship's radio station was then supplied with a much more efficient Marconi short-wave receiver. The RCMP's marine section at Halifax Marconi short-wave receiver. The RCMP's marine section at Halifax was kept informed of rum runners' movements and intentions. After a few months of this, I was transferred ashore where I carried on a oneman monitoring and cryptanalysis bureau from my home in Halifax until 1939.

"While seizures were made as a result of the interception and deciphering of rum runners' signals, many times the rum runner was intercepted at the drop but got away in his faster boat, sometimes in a hail of machine gun fire from the cutter.

"Once the rum-running control station, apparently aware it was being monitored, called "RCMP" a number of times, using some choice epithets. Nevertheless, we had the last laugh. The control station had just given instructions for a drop at Portapique in the Bay of Fundy.

Although the rum boat got away, the liquor-laden trucks were seized.

"By late winter and spring 1939, several prosecutions had been instituted against liquor traffickers for conspiring to defraud the government of lawful revenue. Besides the radio traffic being available as evidence, coded telegrams sent between persons in the Maritimes and St. Pierre-Miquelon suspected of trafficking in liquor had been subpoenaed. I had decoded a large number of these messages which were also presented in evidence.

"The information contained in them, as well as the radiocommunications intercepted over the years provided valuable evidence which assisted in bringing the suspects to court. In the trials that followed I appeared as a witness to testify in support of this evidence. Convictions followed.

"The use and acceptance of deciphered messages as evidence is believed to be unique in Canadian jurisprudence."

(Cecil Kenny, after a short stint in the navy during WWII, ran a DOC monitoring facility on the east coast and has many other interesting tales, including his station's involvement in the "Bismarck" chase)