The Lost World of Bletchley Park Read online

  Many of the codebreakers, drawn from Oxford and Cambridge, went on to pursue the careers that might have been expected from such graduates, as senior mandarins in the Civil Service. Stuart Milner-Barry, for instance, went on to become a Treasury Under-Secretary. This did not diminish his real passion, though and after his retirement, he took up a position rather closer to his heart – that of President of the British Chess Foundation. Milner-Barry, like Hugh Alexander, had been playing tournaments since childhood. At Bletchley, he was not the greatest mathematician and recalled that certain cryptological techniques and principles had to be explained to him several times over by Gordon Welchman. But he was a renowned strategic and lateral thinker, one of the Park’s liveliest intellects. Again, we might see that a post-war working life – which involved coaxing the shattered and bankrupt British economy back into life – could have seemed staid. But there was also a sense here of a continuation of duty. The country had to be rebuilt. Both Oliver Lawn and Keith Batey also gravitated towards C.P. Snow’s ‘corridors of power’, though not before Lawn had had a brief experience of academia. Batey joined the Foreign Office almost immediately after leaving Bletchley and was transferred to the High Commission in Ottawa. With no disrespect intended to the fine citizens of Canada, this posting – after the colour and urgency of the codebreaking life – must have seemed disconcertingly sedate. Indeed, during the war itself, Batey had itched for real action, and signed on to be a pilot – his desire was indulged, for a short time, before he was whisked back to codebreaking duties. After all that, the traditions and etiquette of the Foreign Office must at times have been grinding. By 1955, he changed direction and became Secretary of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough – a much more enjoyable position that allowed him to pursue his fascination for aviation. Years later, he became Treasurer of Christ Church College, Oxford. Keith Batey was a terrific example of the formative power of a good grammar school – in his case, Carlisle. Although it would have been a slight stretch to describe Bletchley Park as a pure meritocracy, it is interesting that so many people with similar backgrounds to Batey flourished there, and went on to take their places in the Establishment. Another example is that of Lord Briggs, known widely as the pioneering social historian Asa Briggs. He was educated at Keighley Grammar School in Yorkshire. His talents were spotted by an acute teacher and Briggs made it to Cambridge aged just seventeen. This was in 1937; he was told that they wanted him to take his degree before he was put into uniform. In 1943 – and by now in uniform – Briggs was recruited to Bletchley. Afterwards, he plunged back into academia: a fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford, then later the founding light behind the new University of Sussex in the early 1960s, and Chancellor of the Open University for many years. He also wrote many influential books. So Briggs clearly found satisfaction, plus also the right avenues for his tremendous energy. Not all his contemporaries were so fortunate.

  After achieving so much in Hut 6, Keith Batey’s post-war career ranged from the Foreign Office to aviation, to high academia.

  Asa – now Lord – Briggs went on to become a pioneering social historian, author of a 5 volume history of broadcasting, as well as a prime mover behind the new University of Sussex and the Open University.

  After her stint as Bletchley liaison in the Admiralty, Sarah Baring went on to marry William Astor – they are seen here campaigning at the 1945 election

  For others, the comedown was somehow almost a matter of forgetting that Bletchley Park had ever happened. The Hon. Sarah Baring, who had worked with such dedication and zeal both at the Park and in a liaison role back at the Admiralty, found a completely different life on the very evening of VE Day; for it was then that she met William Waldorf Astor, the eldest son of Nancy Astor, and the man she was to marry. Sadly, the union did not last; they divorced in 1951, and although it was reasonably amicable, she cited the matter of the age difference (he was some twelve years older than her). Nancy Astor apparently told her daughter-in-law: ‘I think you’re a goose to leave a millionaire!’ But again, this was a time when the social landscape was shifting. In years beforehand, divorce was a matter for shame and scandal. At the dawn of the new Elizabethan age, mores were starting to become a little less rigid. She married again: Thomas Baring. And her son from her first marriage, the 4th Viscount Astor, just happens to be the stepfather of Samantha Cameron, the current Prime Minister’s wife.

  In those post-war years, Sarah Baring sometimes ran across old Bletchley colleagues at cocktail parties. She recalled that even as late as the mid-1970s, such encounters were accompanied perhaps with a smile and a wink, but absolutely no discussion; they were still bound by the Official Secrets Act. On top of this, she recalled, even if she had felt able to discuss her war work, people in general would not have wanted to listen. There came a point in those post-war years, she said, when it was considered a solecism to go on about the war itself. No one, she said, wanted to hear about it any more.

  A few of the codebreakers elected to stay on, and they became the nucleus of a new organisation that was to coalesce in 1948 – GCHQ – as we shall see in chapter twelve. Others, though, headed out on to much more quotidian paths. Several senior cryptologists went to the John Lewis Partnership, a respectable retail firm. Chief among them was Gordon Welchman, who had done so much to streamline Bletchley’s traffic analysis and turn it into the brilliantly sleek, fast and efficient outfit that it latterly became. To go from that to be a director of research for a chain of shops must have been particularly jarring: not because there is anything wrong with commercial business, but because it was such an unimaginable distance from the pressures and the satisfactions of wartime work. And clearly, Welchman could not settle – in 1948, he and his family moved to the United States. He had had his introduction there during the war, visiting in 1943 to pool cryptology ideas. In those post-war years, he went back and headed straight for the new field of computing, the science of digital compiling. Though he was of course strictly bound by the Official Secrets Act, his experience must nonetheless have been extremely valuable. In 1962 he joined the American Mitre corporation, where his extremely sensitive role was to develop new secure systems for the US armed forces. This was the sort of work that required extremely stringent security clearances. And there he stayed, quite happily, until the early 1980s, when controversy struck. Observing the numbers of former colleagues – including Peter Calvocoressi – who were now writing books about Bletchley and the use of Ultra throughout the war, Welchman felt it was important to get his own memories down. This was not out of any unpatriotic desire to breach national security: rather, it was to ensure that the complexities and brilliant breakthroughs at the Park were faithfully and clearly rendered for future generations to study. That was not how the authorities in Britain or the US saw it, though, and when Welchman published The Hut Six Story in 1982, there were all sorts of pleas and appeals for him to desist.

  Sadly, the Americans sided with the British: the result was that Welchman had his security clearance revoked. It is rather difficult now to see quite why the authorities were so agitated. Welchman added intriguing further details on the breaking of Enigma and, on a personal level, the odd splash of colour about the personalities and life at the Park. No one was betrayed, and by that time the general principle of Ultra, and the breaking of Enigma, was beginning to be widely known. But there are those who make something of a fetish of secrecy: to know something that no one else does confers a form of power. Welchman died not long afterwards, of cancer.

  Senior codebreaker Gordon Welchman’s 1982 account – viewed dimly by the authorities – is still read as a key Bletchley text; there is a wonderful description of the day that Welchman met Churchill and the two men shared a conspiratorial joke.

  Others found that life after Bletchley lacked the intensity they had all grown so used to. Messenger girl Mimi Galilee, who had been promoted to clerical and secretarial work in the Directorate, found herself acutely dissatisfied after the war. Living in L
ondon (and having worked for a time in Eastcote, the interim institution that followed Bletchley), she scratched around on unspectacular wages. Eventually, she ended up working for the BBC, at the time when it still had a studio and offices at Alexandra Palace in north London. In the course of her work there, and later for the World Service, she found herself encountering oddly familiar faces, though no one ever said anything. On one occasion in the 1970s, Mimi’s BBC superior – who had himself had some dealings with intelligence – asked her where exactly she had been during the war. And still she wouldn’t say, simply giving the stock response that she had been doing work for the Foreign Office. Her silence was part principle, and part habit; the war was a time, she recalled, when people everywhere learned to keep quiet, for fear of anything being of use to enemy agents. It might also be added that the BBC World Service in the 1970s, with its wide range of correspondents and contacts in unfriendly countries, might not have been the ideal place to be indiscreet during the Cold War.

  Jane Fawcett MBE, who became one of Britain’s foremost architectural historians. She never felt entirely secure in Bletchley’s blacked-out nocturnal streets and carried a hammer in her handbag. ‘You never knew who you might meet,’ she said.

  For a great many women after Bletchley, there was an overwhelming social pressure to return to conventional roles as home-makers, mothers and housewives. Sheila Lawn, née MacKenzie, had been drawn to Bletchley from her university in Scotland. After the war, as her husband set about building a career, she was determined that her interrupted academic studies should not be allowed to peter out. She returned to Aberdeen University, then studied Social Science at Birmingham. The couple had children and she then went on to take a personnel job with London Transport. Unusually for the time, they employed an au pair. Other women, too, were determined that this post-war settlement would not see them relegated to second-class status. Jane Fawcett – who before Bletchley had studied ballet at Sadler’s Wells under Ninette de Valois – went on to pursue quite another passion: architecture. In time, she was to head up the Victorian Society, previously chaired by Nikolaus Pevsner. And at a time, throughout the 1960s and 70s, when rapacious inner-city developers (unchallenged by apathetic politicians) were doing all they could to flatten Victorian structures and replace them with their own brutalist concrete money-spinners, it was campaigners like Jane Fawcett who were instrumental in saving so many landmarks such as St Pancras station. She was later to earn an MBE. She acknowledged the formative nature of her work at Bletchley – though in terms of aesthetics, she was never inspired by the town itself. ‘It was a dump,’ she recalled crisply.

  For some of the veterans, it was the need to keep the secret from their children that sometimes caused unexpected moments of awkwardness. Mavis Batey recalled talking to her daughter one day about the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and her daughter mentioned how her job there involved working on Floor J. ‘Oh,’ said Mrs Batey, ‘that’s ten floors down.’ Her daughter frowned and asked how her mother would have been able to work that out instantly. Mrs Batey laughed it off as an odd knack. It was actually years of working alongside Dilly Knox, and marrying letters up with numbers. And so life went on, though for the codebreakers and everyone else who had worked within those fences, there was another element of frustration: whereas all other branches of the services – from the regiments to the RAF to the Navy – got to have their regular reunions, and the warmth of shared memories and experience, those who worked either in codebreaking or in the ‘Y’ Service were denied this. When they left the Park, it was as though they had never been there. A few might have known each other socially but for the majority, their war years were consigned to the shadows, with few chances ever to meet up with peers, still less to finally openly discuss the work that they did. During the course of their work with government departments, for instance, Oliver Lawn and Keith Batey occasionally crossed paths and exchanged cheerful greetings; but both knew that any outbreak of reminiscing about the extraordinary establishment that they had worked in was theoretically punishable by a prison sentence.

  Despite Max Newman’s enthusiasm for computing, some veterans felt that excessive security meant that the UK got left behind. Research departments like this one at Manchester University, could not match the swift advances being made in the US.

  Even for the ‘boffins’, whose work after Bletchley took them into the new realm of computing, discussions were constrained. Professor Max Newman went on to head up a department of mathematics in Manchester – determined to pursue this new science of computing – and, after a period at the National Physical Laboratory, Alan Turing went up there too. In Manchester, the work was partly a means of bringing Turing’s original vision – that of a ‘thinking’ machine – into existence. Much has been written of how Turing at this point in the early 1950s fell into a sexual relationship with a young man who then stole from him; in reporting this to the police, it was Turing himself who was prosecuted, for ‘gross indecency’. Professor Max Newman and Hugh Alexander stood by him as he received that sentence of chemical castration, and lost his security clearance. After his premature death in 1954, Turing’s name fell as much into obscurity as Bletchley. It was only in the 1980s that there started to be a wider understanding of the impact that he had had – not just on the course of the war, but on the course of computing science. As with so many other veterans of Bletchley, recognition and celebration came rather too late. But for some, though, there was both pride and pleasure to be had when the secrecy lifted further and further. Some recalled with particular happiness not just the Bletchley Park reunions that the Park Trust started running in the late 1990s, but also the experience of being invited to give talks in schools, and to see a new generation of young children listen in wonder as they heard the story of how codes were cracked by hand, and how it was possible to keep a secret for years and years, and years.

  The annual reunions have been a source of great pleasure and pride to veterans.

  Together for Radio 4’s ‘The Reunion’ – from left: John Herivel, the Hon Sarah Baring, Mavis Batey, host Sue MacGregor, Lord Briggs, Ruth Bourne.

  Chapter Twelve

  BLETCHLEY AFTER THE WAR

  Post-war gloom – after all the innovation and youthful energy, Bletchley Park subsided into a greyer life as a training institution.

  The architecture and the red telephone box clearly marked Bletchley out as an archetypally English boffin establishment. But its war-time life was completely secret until the 1970s.

  The demands of peacetime were different, but no less intense in their own way. The British government still needed an establishment that – as in the pre-war years – would assiduously listen to and monitor and decode signals from all around the world. The opening stages of the Cold War were only one element in this: Britain still had an empire, and outposts, and global interests. In terms of a full-time codebreaking operation, though, it was time to vacate Bletchley Park. Commander Edward Travis, who was to stay on as the Director, now felt that it was time to move back to the capital.

  Things had rather moved on since the days when the Government Code and Cypher School was based in St James’s Park; the bulky new technology meant that such a constrained inner London setting would not be suitable. Because Russia had yet to develop the nuclear bomb – that would follow several years later – the idea of a nuclear strike on the capital was not at that stage a consideration. Nonetheless, there were other good security reasons for staying out of the centre of London, a measure of invisibility being one of them. And there were sites on the fringes of the city out of which bombe machines had been working throughout the latter stages of the war. There was Stanmore in the northwest and – several miles west of that – a large station in Eastcote, Middlesex. It was neatly positioned on the Piccadilly Line, for swift access to the centre of town, but the site itself was anonymous and leafy and suburban, and drew no attention to itself at all.

  By April 1946, the wartime clear-out of the Bletchley
site was pretty much complete. Every corner, every cranny, had been scoured for sensitive material: dropped decrypts, tiny machine components, all down to the last scrap of paper. The estate would swiftly fill up again, as we shall see below, partly with a GCHQ offshoot, but also with a variety of other functions and institutions. But some of the staff – among whom was young Mimi Galilee – decided to make the transfer. From the start, the Eastcote base itself was a slightly lowering prospect. The utilitarian concrete buildings that housed the bombes were held to be in ‘poor condition’ and ‘very cramped’. However, there was a new generation of recruits coming in; a fresh batch of mathematicians to blend in with some of the old Bletchley hands. And some of the atmosphere of the old establishment persisted in the six years or so that the newly minted GCHQ stayed at Eastcote, before its more permanent move to Cheltenham. There were chess societies, plus fondly remembered tennis and cricket matches. One veteran recalled how Hugh Alexander – while an undisputed genius both at chess and codebreaking – was less impressive near the stumps.

  Once teeming with recruits going in and out past Bletchley Park’s sentry box, flashing their passes to the military police, the immediate post-war years brought silence as the operation was closed down.