Passport travel advice and history

Passport travel advice: All you ever wanted to know about Passports but were afraid to ask:

This is the history of man’s most travelled, travel document, without one your travel options are virtually nil.

A short history of passports

From a single royal letter to a modern microchip, the passport’s journey has been a long one. Please do check your passport if you are going away soon, a last minute replacement is £114

Inside your passport, Her Britannic Majesty ‘requests and requires’ the world’s governments to allow you, the bearer, ‘to pass freely without let or hindrance’.

However any UK passport holder with the misfortune to be called Robert Johnson can expect heavy-duty hindrance if they fly to America.

In March 2008, the US news programme 60 Minutes interviewed 15 Robert Johnson’s, who were constantly being interrogated because a namesake once tried to blow up a Hindu temple in Toronto.

Thus landing them on a famously long and inaccurate register known as the No Fly List. One Robert Johnson was strip-searched. Another admitted to entering airports in a “panic, sweating”.

Ye olde passe port The passports history lesson begins:

The first reference to a document enabling passengers to travel across borders is in the Old Testament’s Book of Nehemiah, in which Persian king Artaxerxes gives a letter ‘to governors of the province beyond the river’ asking them to offer court official Nehemiah safe passage.

This kind of letter is mentioned in Shakespeare’s Henry V where the king, before Agincourt, declares: ‘He which hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart; his passport shall be made.’

These letters, known as Safe Conduct, were mentioned in an act of parliament during Henry’s reign and were first granted by the Privy Council in 1540.

In medieval Europe, travellers were issued documents by local authorities so they could pass through the porte (gate) of city walls.

The counter theory is that many royal letters of request – literally called passe ports because they allowed the bearer to travel from ports in ships – were signed by the great Louis XIV.

The oldest British passport still in existence was signed by Charles I in 1641. Three years later, Charles was dethroned and Oliver Cromwell’s regime developed an early prototype of the No Fly List by decreeing that no pass be issued to citizens until they promised they would not ‘be aiding, assisting, advising or counselling against the Commonwealth’.

The No Sail List lapsed under Charles II who persuaded the secretary of the state to sign these letters so he could cavort with his floozies.

Peter the Great, Russia’s ruthless modernising tsar, introduced passports in 1719 and, ingeniously anticipating the multi-tasking 21st-century ID card, used them to control taxes and military service.

England’s letters of safe conduct were first written in Latin and English but, in 1772, the government decided to use the international language of high finance and diplomacy: French.

This didn’t change until 1858, which meant that Britain’s passports were issued in French even as the empire fought Napoleon.

The British Nationality And Status Aliens Act sounds like the dubious, legal fruit of the war on terror but, passed in 1914, it defined the first recognisably modern British passport as a single page, folded into eight, with a cardboard cover, a photograph of the bearer and a note of such details as shape of face and features.

Peace resumed in 1918 but the passport stayed and the format was internationally standardised in 1920 – the year the British version expanded into a 32-page booklet known as Old Blue – and again in 1947.

New cost of travel

Security isn’t cheap. It is essential – we wouldn’t forgive any government that ignored the risk of further 9/11s – but there is a lingering suspicion that invoking terrorism is a licence for companies and governments to print money.

The cost of a UK passport soared five-fold between 1994 and 2008. If the cost of bread had risen like that, a sliced white loaf would cost £2.75. If you choose the new eJumbo 48-page biometric passport, it will cost you £85, but it will get you into America without a visa (if your name’s not Robert Johnson).

The biometric passport stores all the information printed on the passport – and a digital description of the holder’s physical features – in a chip. The chip’s data is encrypted and protected by a key printed inside the passport.

But the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) decided the key should consist of, in this order: the passport number; the owner’s date of birth; the passport expiry date. Eager geeks soon cracked this key with a reader you can buy in shops for £174.

The Home Office insists this doesn’t matter because, a spokesman says: “Even if you had the information you would still have to counterfeit the new passport – and it has new security features.”