The Lost World of Bletchley Park Read online

  Senior codebreaker Frank Birch (SECOND FROM LEFT) on his graduation day from King’s College, Cambridge in 1909; Birch had an unusual hinterland as a successful theatre producer, and as a pantomime dame.

  Hugh Foss was another of the Park’s great minds, an expert on Japanese encryption. Initially recruited to the Government Code and Cypher School in 1924 on account of his unusual ability with that language (he was born in Kobe to a missionary father), he always cut a distinctive figure. Foss stood six foot five, with a red beard and a taste for wearing sandals. As the war progressed, he was put in charge of the Japanese naval section in Hut 7; veteran Wren Molly Morgan recalled that in the rare quiet periods he would relax by solving crosswords in Russian. In off-duty hours, he would also seek to relieve the intense pressure of work in spectacular displays of elegant Scottish Highland dancing. It was through this activity that young codebreaker Oliver Lawn was to meet his future wife, the linguist Sheila MacKenzie. Foss was very intense about organisation, even insisting at home that the washing-up had to be done in a very particular order, with saucers coming first.

  Slightly more grounded was Gordon Welchman, a senior mathematics lecturer at Cambridge, who distinguished himself at Bletchley with remarkable innovations (he added the ‘diagonal board’ to Turing’s ideas for the bombe machine, which greatly increased its efficacy). He was also the boffin instrumental in turning this febrile semi-detached institution into something more resembling a super-sleek efficient factory. It was his technocratic powers of organisation that made possible a system whereby countless thousands of encrypted messages, sent in from every part of the world, would be filtered through 24-hour-a-day departments, decoded, analysed, filed, and then sent upwards through the pyramid system to the War Office and then Churchill himself. Even now, the prospect is extraordinary; so many different departments, concentrating on so many different theatres of war, and decrypting and processing at prodigious speed all messages, both significant and mundane. It was Welchman who turned Bletchley into this most inspirational of factories.

  Codebreaker Hugh Alexander was obsessed by chess; female codebreakers, by contrast, were obsessed with him and his ‘dazzling blue eyes’. In the 1950s, he played – and won – chess contests against Soviet grandmasters.

  One slightly left-field codebreaker who could have been a full-time mathematician had it not been for his devotion to chess was the young and (according to many smitten women) very good-looking Hugh Alexander. Before the war, he taught at Winchester – but he won increasingly prestigious prizes at chess, and his superlative skill in that area made him an ideal Bletchley recruit. He was Alan Turing’s deputy in Hut 8, before the impractical Turing was eased out and deployed more effectively elsewhere; Alexander took over and made it a model of efficiency and speed. He was brilliant both at theory and application, but also, rather more rarely, ensuring that his colleagues remained completely motivated and pepped with enthusiasm. This quality saw him transferred later in the war to HMS Anderson in Colombo, leading a Far East codebreaking team. Indeed, so good was Alexander in what to him must have been an unexpected field that after the war he was lured back into it to join the newly formed GCHQ establishment in Cheltenham. He did so, and excelled there. Even when he got to retirement age, they could not bear to let him go. He stayed another couple of years and even after that the Americans tried to recruit him. Yet Alexander’s abiding passion throughout was chess; he wrote books on the subject and – even as his cryptography career continued – columns about chess for various newspapers.

  Even the more driven of the senior codebreakers had surprising hinterlands. While senior cryptologist Frank Birch was quite an office politician within Bletchley Park, staunchly demanding that he and his Naval Enigma team should have more time allocated to them with the bombe machines, outside codebreaking his interests were startlingly eclectic. Not only was he an actor and theatre producer who had essayed a warmly received Widow Twankey at the London Palladium, he was also a historian whose most substantial published work was a book about racehorses. Similarly, the Park’s original director Alastair Denniston had passions other than codes; as a young man he was a gifted athlete who had taken part in the 1908 Olympics.

  ABOVE AND BELOW Scenes from Denniston family life, with the Denniston children on the lake at Bletchley Park (ABOVE).

  Commander Alastair Denniston created and led the Bletchley operation until 1942.

  Commander Denniston goes to the palace to receive his Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1941.

  Young codebreakers relaxing at lunchtime – and looking for all the world like undergraduates – watch as the work of building a shelter continues.

  There is no doubt that the free-thinking ethos of Bletchley, with what Commander Denniston termed its ‘professor types’, was a source of terrific friction in intelligence departments higher up. See it from their point of view: an establishment with what seemed the loosest of hierarchies, and filled with young people like Turing who appeared to have the greatest difficulty explaining themselves to anyone not on their intellectual plane. The pressure to get a crowbar into the Naval Enigma codes – with the Battle of the Atlantic raging and Britain in grave danger of having all its supply lines cut off – could not have been greater. It is easy to imagine senior figures in Whitehall being fearful that the abstract geniuses of Bletchley might simply be too otherworldly to have any kind of success.

  Yet it was thanks to that intellectual vortex, that theoretical free-for-all, that the greatest leaps were made. Hut 6 codebreaker Keith Batey pointed out that you needed a particularly detached frame of mind to do the job effectively, commenting that one would hardly expect someone to solve a cryptic crossword with a gun being pointed at their head. For all that Alan Turing cycled through the countryside wearing a gas mask; for all the fantastical shapes thrown by Hugh Foss as he danced Eightsome Reels in the house’s ballroom; and for all of Dilly Knox’s endless capacity for writing acidly rude memos about his superiors, and his textbook mad-professor irascibility, and his apparent ability to subsist entirely on chocolate and coffee, this was the atmosphere that worked for them. There was a genuine freedom to experiment, to think, to enquire. The Honourable Sarah Baring, a naval card index recruit, repeated with feeling the sentiment that in the absence of any formal education, this was ‘her university’; and like all the best universities, there was creative rivalry and tension, internecine plotting between the huts, and ‘professor types’ with preternatural powers of focus on the apparently insoluble.

  Chapter Four

  THE GIRLS, THE PEARLS AND THE MUSICAL SERGEANTS

  Woburn Abbey – where many of Bletchley’s Wrens were billeted – was loved for its opulent scale, but hated for its poor drainage. After the war, which brought some damage, the East Front depicted here was demolished.

  One of the greatest of war archetypes: American soldiers and young British women, fraternising. At Bletchley, there was much transatlantic romance and even a couple of marriages.

  Naturally an enterprise as ambitious as Bletchley Park – with its aim to read all the messages and thus the mind of the German war machine – needed many more people than just talented mathematicians. In 1940, after Harold ‘Doc’ Keen and the British Tabulating Company had delivered the first of Turing and Welchman’s bombe machines, it was understood that these revolutionary behemoths would need dedicated operatives. So it was that the first wave of WRNS – Women’s Royal Navy recruits – arrived. This initially small band of young women had been selected for the job by means of aptitude and intelligence tests. Soon, as the number of machines grew, so did the numbers of Wrens, and they were billeted in requisitioned stately homes all around the local area, from Woburn Abbey to Wavendon Manor. Many of these young women had never even left home before. Now, they found themselves in dormitories in houses filled with Old Masters where, in certain seasons, the parkland outside would be filled with the noise of rutting deer.

  The work was obvio
usly gruelling; as we will see in chapter five the bombes were ingenious at checking through coding combinations at very high speed. But the mechanisms were delicate too, and needed constant maintenance. For Wrens on night shifts, all this fiddling around with fine wires and tweezers added a further level of strain, caused by the need for non-stop concentration over an eight-hour period. On top of which there was the noise and the fine sprays of oil that the machines would give out, making blouse cuffs black. So, in some senses, to get back on the bus and be driven back to your dormitory in the grand house, at whatever time of day and night, must have seemed like sanctuary.

  One veteran recalled that it was rather like a girls’ boarding school. Another remarked that one inconvenience at Woburn Abbey was a constant lack of hot water, not to mention a lack of facilities for drying. One Wren confessed that a little later in the war, she took to drying her underwear on a rack above the (very hot) Colossus machine.

  Women’s Royal Naval volunteers on parade. Having passed stringent intelligence and aptitude tests, thousands were sent to work at Bletchley and its out-stations around the world.

  Contrasting wartime propaganda – from exhorting proud women to volunteer, to warning of the insidious danger of exotic female spies.

  Because this was the navy, certain aspects of naval discipline and service were rigidly adhered to. Uniforms had to be just so, and the women had to be prepared to parade. But there were quirks in the system too. One veteran Wren recalled how at Bletchley Park, they didn’t receive the daily rum ration that was apportioned to all other arms of the navy. To make up for it, they got two pence daily, which, as she said, was very nice as she ‘could buy pink gin with it’. This being the time it was, there was a marked element of the glass ceiling about their work; it was generally felt that these Wrens would not be able to cope with anything other than reasonably simple (if intense) tasks. But later in the war, one young codebreaker called Gordon Preston did make an effort to see if the Wrens in his section could at least be told exactly what it was they were doing in mathematical terms, and he approached Professor Max Newman about it.

  Newman was later to be one of the Park’s most open figures, inviting good ideas from anyone on any level. But initially, it seems, he was very sceptical, proclaiming that the women wouldn’t care for the ‘intellectual’ effort. In the end, however, he was persuaded, and a series of talks for Wrens was advertised. The take-up for these lectures was tremendous. It might not exactly have been parity but at least there was a sense that information wasn’t being withheld simply because they could not have understood it.

  Smart debutante Osla Henniker-Major (LEFT) at the Whaddon point-to-point, near Bletchley, before the war; she was recruited to Bletchley partly because she had finished her education in Germany and had linguistic flair.

  Preceding the Wrens at Bletchley had been an influx of debutantes. In the earliest days of Bletchley Park, it was initially felt by some at the Foreign Office that women would be better off kept out of it altogether, on the grounds that ladies were notoriously bad at keeping secrets. This stance, which seems hilariously patronising now, was modified a little to allow for rather smart girls, many with titles, to be recruited for the more grindingly routine (yet absolutely vital) work of card indexing. The girls were hooked in via the Establishment social network and came, as one veteran said, from the ‘better sort’ of families. This is because it was felt they would have more of a sense of duty towards the nation. These antediluvian notions aside, the smart girls were a great asset to the Bletchley operation: enthusiastic, cheerful and quick-witted. The ever-present pearls tended to be tucked inside jumpers, the better to preserve them. Every decrypt would carry with it names, technical terms, geographic references, every single one of which was noted by these young women, using different-coloured pencils, and then inscribed on to index cards under every category. This meant that when terms recurred, intelligence analysts could go back to previous messages. In some cases, this fast-growing index also helped to find ways into some of the Enigma codes, the technical terms being used as ‘cribs’.

  One other advantage many of these young women brought with them was a familiarity with continental languages, having spent time abroad either finishing their education or on tour. Many of them had, in the mid-1930s, spent a substantial amount of time in Germany and had witnessed at first hand the growing ugliness of the regime, and of the society. Familiarity with that language, as well as Italian, led to a number of these young ladies being hastily recruited to the operation. Background security checks on these girls amounted to being certain that they did not share Mitford-style sympathies towards the Nazi hierarchy.

  A far cry from chilly billets: Wrens at Woburn Abbey had the run of rooms like these; also an impossibly grand lavatory and a bath, raised on a dais.

  Sarah Baring at the Derby with Mr Parker-Bowles, 1938.

  Most of the girls were largely stoical about the conditions they were presented with in this small, predominantly working-class town; for Sarah Baring, it was a long way from the cocktails that she would enjoy with friends at Claridge’s. Her friend Osla Henniker-Major (née Benning) was equally advantageously placed. At one time, she had a romance with Prince Philip, before he became engaged to Princess Elizabeth. At Bletchley, she was teased about becoming a Greek princess. Feet rather more firmly on the ground belonged to Jean Campbell-Harris (now Baroness Trumpington) and Rosamunde Pilcher (who would go on to become a successful novelist). Unlike the Wrens, who were all pitched in together, the card index women were, like the codebreakers, billeted with families around the area. Perhaps there were some allowances made to class sensibilities, for many ended up in agreeably upmarket surroundings – local rectories and manor houses – where they might be expected to find ‘their’ sort of people.

  The Honourable Sarah Baring was grateful for her lodgings, which she shared with Osla and an older codebreaker whom they did not care for. Her only complaint was the cold of the countryside; instead of the roaring fireplace that she might have expected at her family home, her room had a rather sparse electric heater. And that was not sufficient to warm the (seemingly) perpetually freezing air in winter.

  No one ever seemed entirely certain whether Bletchley Park was a military or civilian establishment, so there was a blend of uniform and everyday wear. But there were a few soldiers sent to be stationed in a camp just outside the Park. These men preferred the routine of uniform and kit inspections, though even then it was clear that this was no ordinary army camp. There was, for instance, a music tent. This contained a piano, which on one occasion was being played beautifully by Corporal Wilfred Dunwell. The wife of the chairman of the rural district council was being shown around the camp by Ian Mayo-Smith, and she remarked to him on the sweet music. He explained that Corporal Dunwell was in fact a professor of piano at one of London’s more prestigious musical academies. Mayo-Smith recalled other musical colleagues such as Sergeant Herbert Murrill, who also happened to be director of music at the BBC, and was ideally placed at Bletchley to keep half an eye on the evacuated BBC Orchestra, which was stationed a few miles away in Bedford. As we will see elsewhere, this link between music, mathematics and an aptitude for cryptology is one that was repeated at all levels throughout Bletchley Park.

  As well as the Wrens and the regular army, Bletchley also had its own contingents of Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) women and Women’s Air Force (WAAF) recruits too. One ATS, Helen Currie, arrived a little later in the war and was posted to operate machinery in the Testery (a department named after its head, Major Tester). Like everyone else, she found some shifts more testing than others. But she was also subject to military routine, and would have to sleep in an army camp. She recalled having to carry her bedding to a special ‘night hut’ (a hut set aside for those who needed to sleep in the day away from noise after a night shift) in the pouring rain and also piling into the canteen to find the only choice was ‘liver swimming in water’.

  One Wren stands
proudly in profile before the poster on which she is posing, to encourage further volunteers.

  The rigours of a military life at Bletchley were also recalled by WAAF operatives, called in to work the teleprinters, who also had rigorously sparse accommodation. They lived in Nissen huts, and were some distance away either from showers or lavatories. WAAF veteran Jeanne Isaacs recalled the ordeal on rainy nights or on bitter winter days of having to scamper across to the notably un-luxurious ablution block.

  The Park also needed secretarial staff, and messengers too. Bletchley’s youngest recruit was Mimi Galilee, aged 14 when she first walked through the gates and, in a state of some awe and indeed terror, was directed to sign the Official Secrets Act. Mimi ran messages and packages between all the huts; as a result, she gained an almost uniquely broad overview of the Park, and of who worked where. There were a great many places to which she was not allowed any kind of access; she would knock at a hut door, wait for it to be opened, and hand over the package without getting much of a glimpse inside. She answered to the formidable Miss Reid, and on occasion when her attitude was felt to be wanting, Reid threatened to tell Mimi’s mother. Mimi also looked on in some wonder at the advent of the American contingent of codebreakers; at how these smooth and confident chaps seemingly wasted no time finding romance with the women of the Park. There was little that escaped a watchful teenager’s eyes.