Alan Cowell still dines out on his pigeons story 30+ years on

Three decades after he used carrier pigeons to get news out of Africa for Reuters, former correspondent Alan Cowell (photo)​, is still dining out on the tale. Three years ago he regaled colleagues at a Paris Dinosaurs’ lunch with his account of flying pigeons in 1979 - as The Baron reported under the headline “Spot the pigeon fancier”.

That was more than a century after Paul Julius Reuter used pigeons to transmit news and stock price information between Brussels and Aachen in 1850.

Cowell (Reuters 1972-1981 in Bonn, Ankara, Lusaka, Beirut and Salisbury - present day Harare) was the last Reuters correspondent to use pigeons. Now he has shared the yarn with readers of the International Herald Tribune, Paris-based global edition of The New York Times. He thought of it when he was reporting about the skeleton of a World War II RAF pigeon found recently in the chimney of an English country house - A Bird Skeleton, a Code and, Maybe, a Top Secret.

You can read his blog in full at The Foreign Correspondent and the Carrier Pigeon, but here’s the gist: Cowell, embedded with New Zealand special forces, was at a remote encampment in the Matabeleland bush as colonial Rhodesia prepared to become independent Zimbabwe in 1980. Communications were a problem. Remember, this was the pre-mobile era. “No telex, fax or even cleft stick runners of the kind evoked in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’,” as Cowell remembers it.

“But an editor in Bulawayo offered the use of carrier pigeons from the loft of a friend. The birds became the exclusive means of sending stories back, via a distant pigeon loft, to my employers at the time, the Reuters News Agency...

“Like the pigeons I used in Zimbabwe, the wartime pigeons flying back from Normandy to southern England sometimes flew in pairs, one goading the other to fly faster, as racing pigeons are bred to do.

“But that meant writing my stories twice over: a copy for each bird. I used the tissue paper from a 30-pack of the local Madison cigarettes for my articles; 400 words would just fit in spidery script. The wartime birds whose destiny formed the basis of my article had their messages written in code on a standard military form with their identity numbers and a coded address: XO2, apparently the Bomber Command of The Royal Air Force.

“Each time I sent up a first, single bird, it would sit in a tree until the second bird joined it and they headed off together to the loft in Bulawayo. I got so frustrated after a few days that, when the first bird with the story headed for its arboreal perch, I scrawled a message and attached it to the second bird: ‘This bird is accompanying the bird that’s got the story.’

“When I launched that bird, however, it flew off alone to Bulawayo, while the bird with the story headed off in the opposite direction on coordinates that would take it to the Kalahari desert. It did manage to get home some 12 hours later, but only after the Bulawayo Chronicle had run an article about a strange event at the pigeon loft when a bird arrived saying it was accompanying the bird with the story, but sight of that bird was there none.

“Since then, I have had a fondness for the birds and have rarely if ever chosen to eat pigeon. But I have dined out on the story plenty of times.”

Cowell’s latest book is a novel, The Paris Correspondent, published by Duckworth in Britain, Overlook in the United States. ■