The Lost World of Bletchley Park Read online

  Historic maps depict the evolution both of the estate, and of the town. Note the ‘clay pitt’ – Bletchley later acquired extensive brickworks.

  Sir Herbert Leon: parliamentarian, wealthy stockbroker and enthusiastic squire, who played an energetic role in the life of the local community.

  Lady Fanny Leon, who presided over the estate’s busy social diary: the grand balls, the hunts, the whirl of weekend parties. She also involved herself with the local council and nursing association.

  These days, the eye is drawn to the copper cupola which seems rather awkwardly jammed on to one side of the house’s roof. Sir Herbert’s taste was eclectic, and is reflected in the contemporary dark wooden panelling, the occasional outbreaks of stained glass and the ornately plastered ballroom ceiling which the Hon. Sarah Baring said made her think of ‘drooping bosoms’. Apologists for the structure say that any prejudice against it is a manifestation of anti-Victorian sentiment, a dislike for the pre-modern, and that its merits will be seen properly in time. Whether that is the case or not, the Bletchley Park Trust is doing a terrific job in restoring it to its original glory.

  FROM LEFT TO RIGHT The estate cricket team; the rather splendid horse and trap, ready to convey guests and luggage from the station.

  Making the most of some scarce time off, the household staff gather together in their smartest array.

  An Edwardian picture postcard, hand-coloured. Note the tower at the rear of the house: it had been pulled down by the time the codebreakers arrived.

  The estate’s gardeners assembled. Their work ranged from tending rare orchids in the hot-houses to cultivating the kitchen gardens – which were later to contribute much needed fresh produce to the codebreakers’ canteen.

  This was more than just a family home; this was a house built for entertainment, and for weekend parties. The addition of extensive stables to the side were there for those who wanted to ride out into the countryside; equally, the yew tree maze and the lawns flanking the lake were there for more sedate promenades. The lake itself was supposed to have dated back hundreds of years, when it was in use as a medieval fishpond. In its new life, it became the home of noisy geese. In later years, some of Bletchley’s younger female recruits recalled being harassed by the geese as they attempted to take coffee by the water. These water features also resulted in an abundance of frogs, which were recalled with a shudder by one young Wren who dreaded the walk back through the estate at the end of a shift at midnight, in the blackout, and inadvertently treading on frogs in the darkness.

  Lady Leon rode out with the Whaddon Hunt; and the sheer numbers of Bletchley Park’s stable staff illustrate the importance of hunting to the estate.

  A memento of the 1891 election in which Sir Herbert became Bletchley’s local member of parliament. This was at a time when the vote was very restricted – how many in this picture would have been entitled to cast a ballot?

  The estate’s agricultural fairs were always popular, both with farmers, and with visitors from around the county. Firework displays were also a draw.

  Quite apart from the gardens and stables, Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny employed large numbers of domestic staff for the house. The work was constant, but the Park was regarded as a good situation.

  The courtyard is still there today, near the entrance of the building termed ‘the Cottage’, where senior codebreaker Dillwyn Knox worked.

  A 1930s glimpse of the extent of the Bletchley stables; by the time Alan Turing started work in adjacent offices, they had been cleared.

  The estate had other delicate touches, such as the beautifully tended orchid house, the extensive rose garden and the kitchen garden. The Leons employed huge numbers of local people and their in-house staff, according to the census of 1891, numbered 200 – everyone from personal maids to blacksmiths. More than this: Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny had intended the house to stand as a sort of focus for the local community, and as the years wore on, they used the grounds for agricultural fairs, horse shows and firework displays. They were popular too; a few Bletchley locals recalled how they were particularly assiduous at arranging and paying for care for the sick and the elderly, and how Sir Herbert donated playing fields and recreation grounds.

  In 1926, Sir Herbert, who had been made a baronet in 1911, died; it is said that this was the only time that the church bells of Bletchley were stopped from ringing. Sir Herbert had found their noise intensely irritating, but the local vicar had ignored all his requests to tone them down a little. On the occasion of his passing, however, it was felt that he might at least have that one comfort.

  For a few years afterwards, his widow continued to live at the house but when she died, the couple’s son, Sir George Leon, made the decision to sell the estate off. In 1938, it was bought up by Captain Hubert Faulkner, who was heading up a consortium of property speculators. There was a suggestion that he and his colleagues had plans to demolish and rebuild. However, these plans were almost immediately frozen by the intervention of the Foreign Office, and Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair. The house was acquired; the Admiral, to make up for bureaucratic slowness and stinginess, is said to have paid for the house out of his own pocket.

  Immediately it was pressed into service. Up in the far reaches of the house, near the old water tank, is a tiny room that once had enormous significance; for this was ‘Station X’. The Fleming-esque designation actually had a mundane meaning – Station 10. It was a wireless listening post, and the complicated aerial was arranged around the Wellingtonia tree outside the window. Not long after this came Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party; far from being one of Sir Herbert’s weekend entertainments, this was in effect the dress rehearsal for the Government Code and Cypher School to make the move from London and into the English countryside, a much less likely target for bombing than the streets around Whitehall and St James’s Park.

  One of the estate’s grass tennis courts, this one at Home Farm seen here in the 1930s. This outdoor pursuit was later to prove popular with cryptologists – though obtaining new balls in wartime was tricky.

  By the summer of 1939, the preparations for the move were almost complete; but it is now instructive to think of this from the point of view of all those Bletchley locals. Once a focal point for the town’s communal life, Bletchley Park was now instead a secret establishment. Questions about its use would not be answered. These local people would have been looking on as the rolls of barbed wire around the external fencing went up. In the space of a few years, the estate had gone from being a benevolent local employer and benefactor to a place about which you were not encouraged to speculate. In time, as the war started, these local people would of course have all sorts of outsiders billeted upon them. To some, the change cannot have been completely welcome.

  One of the Park’s senior figures, Nigel de Grey, wrote a rather wistful account about this stage in the life of the house. ‘There is no moment in time more beautiful than the first days of a fine autumn such as were the last days of August 1939 and the last days of peace … in such richly romantic atmospheric conditions, even the architectural vagaries of Bletchley Park were wrapped in a false mellowness and almost but never quite achieved the appearance of a stately home.’ This might have been the view of the grand de Grey, a fastidious gentleman who had been a senior figure in an auction house and who sometimes favoured a cloak. But as the Park’s work expanded, and the numbers grew, there were a number of young people for whom this place would have seemed as grand and gracious as Brideshead itself. And the place still clearly harboured echoes of happier memories. A little later on, Nigel de Grey wrote to a friend in Cairo who was clearly familiar with the old place from before the war. ‘You would not recognise your old country seat of 1938. All kinds of new buildings appear on the spacious grounds on which you used to gambol.’

  Not such a grim reaper: Nigel de Grey, one of Bletchley Park’s most senior codebreakers, enjoys the area’s bucolic charms.

  But what would Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny have thought? It
’s easy to imagine that they would have been thrilled that the house had found such a vital use. Ruth Sebag-Montefiore was a friend of the family who – as it happened – was also one of the very first to be recruited to work there. She recalled in her memoirs the house in happier times, with those weekend parties and people itching to go off riding. Yet didn’t the house in its new incarnation draw precisely the sort of people that the Leons would have found fascinating, from their near-neighbour Alfred Dillwyn Knox, whose brother had been the editor of Punch, to the swarms of girls in pearls, to visits from Lord Louis Mountbatten, and of course Winston Churchill himself? Would they not have been thrilled that Brigadier Tiltman’s first office in the house was in the old nursery, and still had Peter Rabbit wallpaper? Or that the first teleprinters were installed at the back near the ballroom? Or that the first dining room was presided over by a chef drafted in from the Ritz? Would the Leons not have been beside themselves with pleasure to see the ballroom being used so extensively by so many bright young things? Even their tennis court went on to see a remarkable amount of use in the summer months.

  For many grand country properties around the country during the war, government requisition was often no joke; the carelessness of countless troops caused all sorts of havoc and dilapidation. But Bletchley Park took on a life that somehow seemed perfectly in keeping. Like the man who built this rather eccentric house, the codebreakers who came to work there were similarly unpredictable, madly enthusiastic and sometimes lacking in what many would regard as normal taste.

  Sir George Leon, son of Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny, who made the decision to sell the estate in 1937 when his mother died.

  Chapter Two

  CONVERSION TO CODEBREAKING FACTORY

  A marvellously rare pre-war aerial shot of the estate: note the fine yew maze on the right, which had to be grubbed up to make way for huts.

  In sparse surrounds, and on a 24-hour rota, linguists would translate decrypted German messages into English. The poster is an exhortation to save fuel.

  Large though the mansion of Bletchley Park is, it was immediately apparent to the Director, Commander Denniston, that more space was going to be required. The very heart of the Park would have to be converted. And it is this Bletchley Park that we still see today. The sight of the huts has a peculiarly strong resonance; these apparently makeshift, rather doughty structures strongly convey the spirit of the war effort. It is very easy to imagine how uncomfortable they could be to work in: bitter draughts whistling through in the winter months, and the stifling airlessness of high summer. They also provide a powerful visual example of the acute nature of the work. Those who worked in Hut 4 just by the south side of the house would have had no idea about the work being carried out in Hut 1, on the house’s opposite side.

  Fittingly, the apparent anarchy of the codebreaking ethos was reflected in the way that the first of these wooden huts, and their functions and numbering, were decided in the autumn of 1939. In other words, they were extemporised – and then adapted to the different needs of different parts of the operation. For instance, Hut 1, it is thought, was originally intended as a radio transmission/reception station. It was built just to the north of the mansion. But how was it that Hut 2 immediately became known as ‘the beer hut’ and served this purpose pretty much throughout the war, serving strong refreshment to codebreakers, debutantes and Wrens alike? The atmosphere of Hut 2 was so reliably convivial that often it was almost impossible to move down the central corridor, so packed was it with people.

  Though utilitarian, the blocks were at least better heated than the wooden huts. The work was highly compartmentalised.

  A fascinating plan of the development of Bletchley Park’s codebreaking structure – giving a semblance of order to the original improvised huts.

  Linguists work through decrypts late into the night – note the heavy blackout on the window. In the foreground, an inactive Enigma machine lies open.

  The military section of the operation was initially allocated Hut 3. The original inhabitants of Hut 4 are lost to time; it went on to be occupied by codebreakers focusing on naval encryptions. These days, it is occupied by hungry visitors to Bletchley Park eager to sit down for a cup of tea and a Cornish pasty. Hut 5, meanwhile, as well as being first allocated to the naval section, had a most intriguing addition: a sunray parlour. This was not a luxury tanning booth, but a vital means for those who worked long hours in windowless rooms – such as the WAAF teleprinter operators – to try and grab a semblance of sunlight, and to keep up their vitamin D levels.

  Hut 6 was one of the earliest to find a wider fame, for it featured in the title of Gordon Welchman’s 1982 memoir of the Park’s work. It was intended to deal with army and air force Enigma messages. These would be brought in in great bundles from listening stations around the country – for instance, motorbike couriers would race up from Chatham, Kent, through the night to deliver batches of freshly intercepted messages. Welchman himself counselled his readers not to pay too close attention to the numbering of huts, as it would all be too confusing in the end.

  It seems that Alastair Denniston’s broad idea was to have all these huts arranged around the house in a sort of star shape, the better to ease communications between them and the directorate. Yet they seem to have ended up being dotted around the grounds of the house in a slightly more random fashion. Part of this was to do with plumbing, for of course these structures had to have conveniences. Also, there were other considerations, such as machinery. Hut 7, for instance, was built some distance away from all the others because it housed heavy tabulating contraptions; the noise from these devices would have been an intolerable distraction for codebreakers in other sections.

  ABOVE A cross-section of life in the different blocks and huts, including (ABOVE LEFT) the intercept control room in Hut 6 and (BOTTOM LEFT) the information collation point in the same hut; despite the advent of new technology, the work was still reliant on pencil, paper and human focus.

  It seems fair to say that the most famous of the huts is Hut 8, and this is thanks in part to the presence of Alan Turing, and the radiator to which he kept his tea-mug padlocked when he wasn’t using it. It was in this hut that some of the tensest weeks and months of the entire war were played out. Turing and his team had triumphed brilliantly in cracking the Naval Enigmas. But in 1942, Admiral Dönitz had a feeling that he needed to be more careful; and he was responsible for adding a fourth rotor to the Naval Enigma machines. This created countless more potential encryption combinations and it brought Hut 8 to a standstill for about six terrible months. Huts 3, 6 and 8 were all huddled together, and though those within were fastidious about keeping their work quiet, there was a great deal of practical inter-hut communication.

  A Bletchley hut recreation, featuring a mug chained to a radiator – a nice homage to Alan Turing, who found this was the only way to prevent his from being stolen.

  Some thought the Park had an air of ‘apparent anarchy’, yet thanks to Gordon Welchman, all aspects of work – from special coloured pencils to detailed maps – were meticulously organised.

  Young ladies operating Typex machines; long shifts working on endless chaotic jumbles of letters required dogged patience and much dedication.

  There were other outposts; the fine yew maze was grubbed up to make way for Hut 10, which dealt with low-grade coded messages – those that weren’t encrypted via the Enigma machine. Then, as well as the beverages on offer in Hut 2, there sprang up a NAAFI kiosk, which sold everything from chocolate to stockings to cigarettes (rationing permitting). Veterans recall how when the kiosk shutters went up, codebreakers came running out of their various huts and started to queue, as though they were children waiting eagerly by an ice-cream van.

  But as the war progressed, so too did the work of Bletchley; what had started out as an improvised establishment, making it up as it went along, was now getting bigger and sleeker. And the more brilliant the results that it delivered, the more was demanded of it b
y the War Office. By 1942, the codebreakers were reading and translating and analysing countless thousands of messages from every theatre of war around the world. While Hugh Alexander and his team in Hut 8 were focusing on the war in the oceans, increasing numbers of recruits were being given crash courses in Japanese language, history and culture in order to help them crowbar their way into the fearsomely complex Japanese codes.

  The huts were now joined by rather more permanent-looking structures (with greatly improved lavatorial facilities). These concrete buildings, designed to withstand bomb blasts, and positioned close to the ever-expanding teleprinter sections, were simply called ‘the Blocks’. Block A was on two floors – naval cryptography on the first floor, military on the ground. It was soon joined by Blocks B and C. The term utilitarian hardly does them justice; they were blank, pale and low. These buildings gave no hint whatsoever of the type of work that was being carried out within. But if they were less friendly-looking, they were also much more comfortable. By this stage, about 9,000 women and men were working shifts at Bletchley Park; the volume of material being produced was staggering. The work and the numbers could not have been accommodated in ever-proliferating wooden huts.