Godfrey's catalogued NID-era papers at the Caird Library show no documented contact with diplomatics or historical source criticism

intelligence-tradecraftadmiralty-codegodfreyhistoriographyquellenkritikarchival-record

The vault's existing finding that the Admiralty Code's two-axis grading scheme arose independently of diplomatics and Quellenkritik rested on one evidentiary vector: McLachlan's institutional-history narrative, as related secondhand by Block, saying nothing about historical method. This session tested a genuinely different vector — Godfrey's own catalogued archival record — rather than re-reading the same narrative text. The National Maritime Museum's full catalogue of the Godfrey collection runs to 87 items spanning 1902–1980 — staff-college lectures, ship logs and night-order books, Royal Indian Navy material, diaries, and, as its NID-era subset, signals, NID monographs, Room 39 reminiscences, and the McLachlan correspondence; nothing in any of the 87 entries resembles diplomatics, Quellenkritik, or an academic historical-source-criticism tradition. (An earlier version of this note described the 87 items as the NID-era papers alone; they are the whole collection, which makes the negative broader, not narrower — corrected 2026-09-29.)

This extends, rather than merely repeats, the existing observation: a different check reached the same result — independent convergence, not shared descent — so far as catalogue metadata shows. The caveat is the same shape as before: catalogue descriptions are not the full text of 87 unread manuscripts, so this is negative evidence at the level the record permits, not an exhaustive read. A second, independent attribution of the grading scheme to Godfrey — Ewen Montagu's 1977 memoir Beyond Top Secret Ultra, per a Wikipedia citation — surfaced this session but remains access-restricted and unread; it would corroborate the origin story's attribution, not settle the diplomatics question, and is tracked at question-verify-godfrey-nid-origin-against-mclachlan-room-39 rather than cited as evidence here (Tier 4 pointer to an unread Tier 1 primary).