“Whither Victoria and with whom” riddle

The “Whither Victoria and with whom” riddle is the second verse to emerge from the challenge surrounding the theft of the Penny Black stamp from the Bath Postal Museum. Its four lines turn a familiar royal name into a question about a “lady,” a “locked room,” and the number seventeen. Broadcast publicly and interpreted in both police and Bloodhounds discussion, it works less as an immediately decipherable instruction than as a compact machine for generating competing explanations.

Appearance and Circulation

The riddle reached BBC Radio Bristol on a sheet of A4 paper, without a covering note, in the afternoon post. After the four o’clock news headlines, the presenter introduced it as a possible link to the earlier cryptic verse, which police had said was almost certainly connected with the million-pound theft of the Penny Black stamp from the Bath Postal Museum. The item invited listeners to judge whether the new verse was a hoax or a genuine clue, and promised that it would be passed to the police. In this way, the poem’s circulation itself became part of the challenge: it was offered not privately to investigators but to a listening public encouraged to solve it.

The producer had telephoned the Bath police before the broadcast. A radio was therefore tuned in at the station, and the control room heard the verse, including Peter Diamond; John Wigfull listened separately upstairs. The presenter’s repetition made the poem available to listeners and detectives at once, while its questions supplied no clear key. A detective sergeant’s complaint that the case was becoming like party games registers the friction between a real investigation and a clue designed to solicit guesses.

Wording and Interpretive Problems

The four lines read: “ 'Whither Victoria and with whom- / The Grand Old Queen? / Look for the lady in the locked room / At seventeen.'” The opening asks where Victoria is going and with whom, then recasts her as the “Grand Old Queen.” That language points toward a royal figure, but does not settle whether Victoria is a person, an object, or a verbal route to something else. The final two lines shift from that broad allusion to a search instruction, yet leave each of its terms unsettled: which lady, which locked room, and what does seventeen identify?

At a police discussion, Wigfull proposed that the first two lines coded a reference to a cover. In postal usage, a cover is an envelope attached to a datemark, comparable to the first-day covers sold when a new stamp set is issued. This reading gives the language of Victoria and the Grand Old Queen a possible connection to the stamp case, but it does not by itself explain the remaining clues. Wigfull therefore treated the riddle as a sequence of open questions rather than a message whose meaning was already established.

He considered whether the lady might again refer to Victoria and the cover, while allowing that it could point elsewhere. The number seventeen might connect to a seventeen-year-old woman, and the locked room might refer to a local story or memory of a young woman kept confined. His examples—a prisoner, a mental patient, or a nun—are speculative possibilities, not identifications. Another suggestion at the meeting was that seventeen could form part of an address. The multiplicity of these proposals shows how the verse directs attention without confirming which association is relevant.

Readings Among the Bloodhounds

The riddle also becomes a subject of discussion among the Bloodhounds. Jessica frames the wider case as one in which police were tipped off about a planned theft of a Turner painting from the Victoria Gallery, increased security in response, and were bluffed while the actual target was the stamp. Against that background, the repeated reference to Victoria seems especially suggestive, but Jessica calls the latest riddle a separate, greater challenge rather than presenting its meaning as solved.

Miss Chilmark reads the wording as a sequence of possible tricks. “Look for the lady” recalls the card trick known as Find the Lady; “the locked room” evokes the locked-room mystery Milo had mentioned the previous week. She hears an undertone of hocus-pocus in the combination. Her reading connects the poem’s clues to forms of misdirection and puzzle-making, rather than identifying a particular woman or room. The discussion is interrupted before an answer is given, leaving the interpretation open.

Function in the Case

The riddle’s importance lies in the gap between its confident imperative and its unresolved references. It appears to promise that a lady can be found by looking in a particular locked room, yet the police and the Bloodhounds cannot agree on what the key nouns designate. The number seventeen may be an age or an address; Victoria may point toward the postal cover or invite another association. Each proposal narrows attention, but none in these scenes closes the case.

Its public broadcast also changes the scale of the puzzle. The first verse had already drawn a connection between the theft and a cryptic poem; this second effort makes listeners potential interpreters while ensuring that investigators hear the clue at the same time. The result is both an investigative prompt and a performance of detection: the audience is given enough structure to speculate, but not enough to distinguish a correct reading from the many possibilities the wording invites.