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Background and Inspiration

Before the actress Diana Dors’ died in 1984, it’s claimed she hid over £2 million in various bank accounts and safety deposit boxes across the UK. 18 months before her death, Diana had given her son Mark Dawson an envelope containing a sheet of code that would reveal the whereabouts of her millions. Diana Dors also told her son that her third husband, Alan Lake, had the key to the code but when he died just five months after Dors death it looked as though the location of her millions would be lost forever. Determined to discover his late mother’s fortune, in 2003 her son sought out forensic specialists to help him crack the code. The results astounded everyone.

Dors and her husband had used a 16th century method of encryption called the Vigenère cipher and after working out the decryption key (Dors’ real name) they cracked the code. Their joy was short lived however as Mark discovered he only had half the information and the search for the other half continues to this day..
Codes and enigmas, especially the Diana Dors mystery have always fascinated me. Every piece of work I have produced has hidden pictures and encoded letters or words included within them. However it’s only with my latest tour, ‘Far Beyond Driven’ that I have had the opportunity to create my own enigma, placing an encoded word into the collection. I spent two weeks working out the best way to encode all the words into my paintings before I picked up a paintbrush. I hope it gives you as much fun decoding it as I had encoding it!

Encoded using the Caesar cipher, all the letters when found make one word. Some pieces contain more than one letter; others pieces require a mirror, whilst two are representations of the word themselves.  It will require logic, calculation and lateral thinking to find all the letters; it is not as easy as spotting letters painted into the work, they will need to be worked out from the clues provided.

Good luck!

- The closing date for all entries is the 31st August 2007 -


The Clues

Two have no letters but give a word with a beginning whilst the bullies are missing one of their number.

Does Roman time hold more than one secret?

With a mirror you can ring the changes but only two from the front and three from the end will work.

Windows show more than just the length of the day.

For your final step find three from the left and three from the right remembering only one will do.


Decoding the word

To give you a start here is an insight into one of the more simple clues…

‘… the bullies are missing one of their number’

In the piece ‘Shadows without a Sun’ take the clue literally, after reading the story from the brochure you will realise the characters on the left cliff are bullies and that I’m the one on the right cliff; count the bullies and minus me. That should give you 15-1=14. Then using the alphabet count 14 from the left (the same side as the bullies) this should give you an ‘N’.

Now apply the Caesar cipher to decode it as shown below
On the entry form or on this website you will find two sets of letters, look up ‘N’ on the Caesar side (the one that starts with ‘F’), you will find it’s the ninth letter so go to the Alphabet line and count up nine spaces. You now have the true decrypted letter ‘I’.



 Click HERE to download this Codex