The story behind the Dorak Affair sounds as if it were drawn from the pages of one of those old-fashioned adventure spy stories – John Buchan meets Eric Ambler with a touch of Conan Doyle – but otherwise I am completely unqualified to pronounce on its likely veracity.
I was however intrigued by a single detail from the scant documentary evidence, on which Aaronovitch hangs his own theory of what happened.
A letter, purportedly from the mystery beauty who met Mallaart on a Turkish train, uses a capital ‘I’ to represent the figure ‘1’ in dates. Letters typed by Mallaart’s wife during that same period use the same trope.
Aaronovitch tells us that the same point was picked up by Suzan Mazur, who wrote about the Dorak affair for Scoop in 2005 quoting only this use of the letter I in support of her contention that the two women shared ‘identical style features’ in their typescripts. Mazur also quotes a spokesperson for the Department of English at Oxford who said that ‘outside Oxford/Cambridge scholarly circles dating a letter with Roman numerals is just not done and was not done, even 40 years ago’.
Well that is just not the case. Early typewriters (such as the one we had at home when I was a girl), the all-metal heavy ones with letters attached to the ends of metal rods, frequently lacked numerical keys for both nought and one. Letter O stood in for zero, but it was a matter of personal taste whether capital ‘I’ or lower case ‘l’ did duty for figure one. Many people preferred I –& not just in dates; the picture of Mellaart’s letter to the bank which is included in the Scoop article shows 'I' being used consistently for both serial numbers & money.
Perhaps the Hedgehog family was too irredeemably non-u to understand which things were just not done, but my mother had her 1930s shorthand & typing certificates from school, worked first in an office before she made her escape, & she taught me to use ‘I’. But then she was always keen that her daughter be independent minded.
One’s preference might well depend on the font being used. With many fonts the use of a lower case l will leave an annoying & distracting gap before the next digit & put columns of figures out of line; this is avoided by the use of capital I
And Stephen Fry, who is never wrong about anything, told us not so long ago, on Radio 4 no less, that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to make dates easier to type by placing the I just below the 8.
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