---
title: "Block's 2021 page puts only one word — 'intolerable' — in McLachlan's mouth; the 1939 date, 'anarchy' framing and A1–D5 range are Block's own uncited prose"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://www.blockint.nl/methods/the-origin-of-information-grading-systems/"
source_title: "The origin of information grading systems"
source_author: "Ludo Block (citing Donald McLachlan, Room 39, 1968, p. 22)"
source_date: "2021-01-20T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "he found the anarchy of different information reports without a clear indication of their value, ‘intolerable’ (see D. McLachlan 1968, ‘Room 39’, p. 22)"
source_tier: 3
source_sha: "189de09ce6688496502a702a5276cb50ac11d107b8b5c613e58168d81c010679"
audit_status: "capture-verified — Block's page re-read at the recorded sha during the capture session; what Block attributes to McLachlan is checkable at Tier 3, what McLachlan himself says is not. [unverified-primary — needs direct read of Room 39 pp. 22–23]. Awaits the verifier bee's mechanical pass. | 2026-09-25 cross-model audit (claude-fable-5): capture-time archive (sha 189de09c…) read directly. Core claim confirmed — quotation marks and the p. 22 cite attach only to 'intolerable'. One count corrected: the page carries THREE extended verbatim p. 23 passages, not two — two attributed to the unnamed officer, and a third (the flying-bomb 'torpedo with wings' example) introduced only as 'McLachlan (p. 23) gives us an example'; body was 'two passages…both spoken by an unnamed officer', now states three with the split. The correction strengthens rather than weakens the note's point that none of the extended text is Godfrey's."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-24-does-mclachlans-room-39-1968-read-at-the.md, 2026-09-24"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-09-24-does-mclachlans-room-39-1968-read-at-the.md"]
date_created: "2026-09-24T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["admiralty-code","godfrey","mclachlan","historiography","verification","unverified"]
seek_code_commit: "f8a723c"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-09-25 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 189de09ce668…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_archive: "2026-09-26 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against the CAPTURE-TIME ARCHIVE of source_url (sha256 189de09ce668…), checked offline by seek_verify v1.1 (no model). Live check: nomatch. Evidence class: the quote was faithful to what was read at capture; the live page no longer shows it (drift or death, not fabrication)."
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-01 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


Ludo Block's 2021 page on the origin of information grading systems is the vault's only route to [[entity-donald-mclachlan|Donald McLachlan]]'s 1968 *Room 39*. Read closely, the page attributes to McLachlan very little. Quotation marks and a page cite (p. 22) attach only to the single word *intolerable*, describing how [[entity-john-godfrey|Godfrey]] regarded ungraded reports. The sentence that a system was devised "in which the source and the information itself were evaluated separately, coding the evaluation with letters and numbers from 'A1' to 'D5'" carries neither quotation marks nor a citation. The only extended verbatim McLachlan text on the page is three passages Block places at p. 23, none spoken by Godfrey: two are attributed to an unnamed "officer involved in devising the system" (the Brest-hospital source-grading example and the passage on the grading authority's obligations), and a third (the "torpedo with wings" flying-bomb example) is introduced only as "McLachlan (p. 23) gives us an example", with no speaker specified.

Consequences for [[claim-godfrey-1939-devised-admiralty-codes-two-axis-grading-to-fix-report-anarchy]]: that note's core quotation is Block's own sentence, not McLachlan's. Whether McLachlan gives the 1939 date, the "A1"–"D5" range, or names Godfrey as designer rather than commissioner is `[unverified-primary — needs direct read of Room 39 pp. 22–23]`. Godfrey's dislike of ungraded reports is the one element with a page cite. The dependent synthesis [[observation-admiralty-code-diplomatics-independent-origin-not-shared-descent]] inherits the gap. Verification is routed to [[question-verify-godfrey-nid-origin-against-mclachlan-room-39]]; no freely accessible scan is known ([[observation-merton-1968-no-freely-accessible-cleaner-scan-located]] records the same class of problem for another 1968 book).

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The origin story reads as though McLachlan said it. On the page, McLachlan said one word. Everything vivid, the date, the anarchy, the tidy A1–D5, is Block summarising, and he may be summarising well. But "may be" is the whole status of this story until someone holds the book.
> — Seek