The Lost World of Bletchley Park Read online

  After the war, Jenkins immediately gravitated towards politics. He won the London seat of Southwark Central in 1948 and became for a while the youngest face in the Commons. Two years later, he shifted to the slightly more stable seat of Stechford in the Midlands. Following a long spell in opposition, and then Harold Wilson’s 1964 election victory, Jenkins was appointed Home Secretary in 1965 and Chancellor in 1967. It was in the former post that he became arguably the most influential politician of his generation. As with all his former colleagues at Bletchley, he kept quiet about his own role for many decades afterwards, though he frequently ran into former codebreaking colleagues in Whitehall and at cocktail parties.

  The Master of Balliol, Oxford, and university vice chancellor A.D. Lindsay. Although not at Bletchley Park himself, this celebrated academic steered a number of young recruits – including Roy Jenkins – towards the codebreaking effort.

  One of Bletchley’s more glamorous recruits was the film and theatre actress Dorothy Hyson (RIGHT), seen here co-starring with Gracie Fields in Sing As We Go (1934), a giant hit that year.

  Their love affair was as secret as Bletchley itself – but after the war, Dorothy Hyson and actor Anthony Quayle (who was in the Special Operations Executive) were happily married for many years.

  The 1917 Zimmerman Telegram – the brilliant decryption of which brought the US into WWI.

  Even more discreet was the West End actress Dorothy Hyson, who worked in Hut 8. Unlike Jenkins, she was already very famous; a household name in fact. The daughter of the actress Dorothy Dickson, Hyson was on the stage from an early age and specialised in light comedies and dramas. In the 1930s, she made the leap to film. She starred alongside Gracie Fields in the phenomenally successful Sing As We Go and was the co-star to popular comedian George Formby in Spare A Copper. She was married to the actor Robert Douglas but had met another actor, Anthony Quayle, on stage in the 1930s when they had appeared together in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There was an instant attraction, and by the time she was working at Bletchley they were having an affair. It was, by necessity and for reasons of security, a long-distance relationship. Quayle was part of the elite Special Operations Executive, ordered by Churchill to set Europe ablaze in operations ranging from sabotage to provoking local uprisings. This must have taken an extraordinary amount of courage; and yet what Quayle also recalled from his war years were his visits to Bletchley Park in order to see Hyson. He remembered that he watched Dorothy and her colleagues emerge from their huts after an all-night shift, looking pale and gaunt. He had no idea of the sort of work they were doing but it was clear that it was incredibly intense. After the war, Hyson and Quayle married. For a time, she joined John Gielgud’s Haymarket Theatre Company, then she quietly gave that up in order to concentrate on family life. Having spent so much of her time in the world of theatre, the rather different theatrics to be witnessed at Bletchley must have left her bemused.

  Nigel de Grey, who was partly responsible for the intelligence gained from the Zimmerman Telegram, worked at Bletchley within the directorate, and inspired a great deal of awe among younger subordinates. After the war, he was instrumental in setting up the new GCHQ.

  Of the senior directorate of Bletchley Park, one who had quite a high social profile was the veteran codebreaker Nigel de Grey. It was he, together with a colleague in Whitehall’s Room 40, who had broken the codes that led to the revelation of the Zimmerman Telegram of 1917. This telegram, from a German foreign minister to his opposite number in Mexico, urging that they form an alliance against America, was the catalyst for bringing the US into the First World War. Careful steps were taken to ensure the Germans believed that the telegram had been captured in Mexico, as opposed to having had their cable telegraphy intercepted and decoded. After the war, Old Etonian de Grey (born in 1886) went on to head up the Medici Society, purveyors of Old Master prints, and he was a familiar figure in London’s art circles. He was noted at Bletchley for a certain theatricality of dress sense; as it happened, he was an enthusiastic actor, and a key player with the amateur dramatic group The Old Stagers and Windsor Strollers. But after the war, a more serious business lay in store for him; he was one of the founding directors of the institution that would go on to become GCHQ.

  Poet and playright Henry Reed – here in the programme credits for Summertime – had applied his linguistic flair to Italian codes.

  The Park also had its fine share of poets; there was Frank (‘FT’) Prince, for instance, a South African-born writer and academic who in the early 1930s had had poems published in T. S. Eliot’s influential magazine The Criterion. Despite this early boost, it took a long time for his work to attract more serious notice. He met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth Bush, at Bletchley, and one of his more enduring works, ‘Soldiers Bathing’, was written around this time. But it was never going to be easy for anyone to make any kind of a living as a poet; and after the end of his codebreaking duties, he went into academia, becoming a Professor of English at Southampton. It was only many years after this that his poetry began to pick up an enthusiastic and fashionable following. The same was partly true for Henry Reed. A brilliant pupil who had taught himself Greek, Reed came to Bletchley and worked in the Italian and Japanese sections. It was here that he wrote perhaps his most famous work, ‘The Naming of Parts’, inspired initially by the drill that a sergeant would give in handling weapons. Reed had to find supplementary means to make a living after Bletchley, and he became a successful radio playwright, creating the popular long-running character Hilda Tablet.

  Perhaps the best known now of all the Bletchley poets was Vernon Watkins, who published The Lamp and the Veil, The Lady with the Unicorn and Cypress and Acacia. Before the war, he had supported himself by working in a bank. Unlike T. S. Eliot, he was pretty much forced to carry on working in a bank, describing himself as a very elderly cashier. And he might have found a certain sort of freedom of thought at Bletchley that his otherwise deadening peacetime routine could never have afforded him. While there, he met and married Gwendoline Davies. After Bletchley, he returned to Lloyds Bank and stayed there until his retirement in 1966. He died a year later, and it was only posthumously that his poetic reputation grew and was cemented. Of these poets, one might imagine that their ability to wrestle with the language, to sculpt it into the shapes they wanted, also gave them a different way of approaching the seemingly intractable chaos of the five-letter groups; a way perhaps of being able to detect glimmers of structure in them.

  After his time at Bletchley, the poet Vernon Watkins returned to his banking job; but his artistic reputation grew steadily in the 1960s and ‘70s.

  As mentioned in chapter seven, a prominent figure at Bletchley Park was Angus Wilson, who had been working for the British Museum and who, immediately after the war, would find great literary success and indeed secure the rare ability to live off his writing. An acute and merciless social observer, Wilson’s eye noted every nuance and layer of life at Bletchley. The Honourable Sarah Baring was rather impatient with him, and profoundly unsympathetic towards his depression; but what would Wilson have made of her – a one-time model for Cecil Beaton – and her beautiful society friend, Osla Benning? Wilson’s post-war short stories dwelled on the cruelties of the class system. His own sense of middle-class gentility may have been rather fragile.

  Many of Bletchley Park’s women recruits went on to enjoy illustrious careers and it is certainly possible that their successes at the Park gave them the boost they needed to make headway in what was firmly a world where women were expected to be home-makers. Mavis Lever (later Mavis Batey) made her name, for instance, as a pioneering landscape historian, a very new field. Inspired by W. G. Hoskins, she went on to have many of her own books published. On top of this, she was a prominent and active figure in the rambling movement.

  Another of the Park’s great achievers was Miriam Rothschild, awarded the CBE in 1982 and made a Dame in 2000. Her background was perhaps one of the more unusual to be found at Bletchley. Born
in 1908 into a branch of the famous banking family, Miriam developed an early passionate interest in zoology and became a formidable expert on many species, but particularly snails. In the 1930s she had worked hard to get as many Jewish children out of Germany and Austria as she could. The war brought her to Bletchley, with her fine linguistic skills and ear for German. It must have been odd for her working around the house; her own family had lived not far away and she had known and visited the Leons in the days when the place was a cheerful social hub. After the war, her passion for butterflies, moths and other insects led to her being made the first woman trustee of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. She went on to pick up eight honorary degrees.

  After Bletchley, codebreaker Angus Wilson found lasting fame as a novelist. Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956) remains his best-loved work – an acidly funny story of bitter academic rivalry and hoaxes.

  Dame Miriam Rothschild CBE, one of the Park’s true polymaths, with a fantastic ear for language and an intense scientific curiosity about the natural world.

  One of Bletchley Park’s American luminaries was William (Bill) Bundy. Born in 1917, Bundy was drafted into the Signals Corp when the US entered the war in 1941, and clearly demonstrated some sharpness and intellect; by 1943, he was in Hut 6, working under Stuart Milner-Barry and in charge of the US contingent.

  Wartime naval intelligence operative Ian Fleming was a regular visitor to Bletchley and was clearly inspired there. The 1957 007 novel From Russia With Love featured the ‘Spektor’ encryption machine.

  William (Bill) Bundy, an American cryptologist at Bletchley, was lost in admiration for the absurd Englishness of the establishment. He later went on to become a White House insider, working for John F. Kennedy.

  While in the higher echelons of government and intelligence the famed ‘Special Relationship’ was more often marked with suspicion, distrust and even naked dislike, at the codebreaking level there was a huge amount of mutual respect between the British and their American counterparts. Like Colonel Telford Taylor, Bundy fitted well into this society of tea-drinkers. He was very impressed that, despite all British archetypes, Bletchley was a near-perfect meritocracy and that military rank took second place to intellectual ability. He was also impressed to see so many women in key roles. There was, he recalled, much shared laughter over national differences, as well as an understanding on the US side that the secrecy was not just part of a stereotypical British fetish. After the war, Bundy sat for the Bar and thereafter gravitated towards politics. In the 1960s, he became a special adviser to President John F. Kennedy and then, after the latter’s assassination in 1963, was taken on by his successor Lyndon B. Johnson as Assistant Secretary of State. Bundy was in the State Department dealing with affairs in the East and was there as the US became sucked into the maelstrom that was Vietnam. After his time at the State Department he became a historian, and it was for his time at Bletchley Park that he had a special affection. ‘Though I have done many interesting things and known many interesting people,’ he said, a few years before his death in 2000, ‘my work at Bletchley Park was the most satisfying of my career.’

  There’s little doubt that a great many veterans have felt the same. In the case of all these high-profile figures, it is interesting to speculate how much the work there helped to shape their lives and careers thereafter. Surely, having faced the seemingly impossible across so many all-night shifts, life outside in a time of peace would have seemed comparatively easy? There is also the element of secret knowledge and thereby secret satisfaction; to have known that you were part of such an extraordinary team, to know that the work you did had such a profound impact on the course of the war, must have bestowed a certain inner confidence. Naturally, in cases such as those of Roy Jenkins and Miriam Rothschild, it’s also possible that Bletchley and the war were lengthy interruptions in careers and pursuits that would have happened regardless. And we might also expect that, given the exceptional nature of all the Bletchley codebreakers, it would have been odd if some had not gone on to achieve fame in their chosen paths.

  Nor is this intended to detract from the achievements of those who quietly got on with their lives afterwards – building solid careers in the Civil Service, returning to teaching, and so on. As we will see in Chapter Twelve, the years spent at Bletchley Park left an indelible mark on all those who were there. For many – rather like William Bundy – it was an emotional high-water mark remembered with aching nostalgia.

  US codebreaker General Telford Taylor – pictured here giving evidence at the 1946 Nuremberg Trials – was beguiled by the apparent lack of hierarchy at the Park and by the idea of young women like Mavis Lever taking charge.

  Chapter Ten

  BROKEN CODES AND THE COURSE OF HISTORY

  The bombing of Coventry in 1940; to this day, a source of controversy about whether the Bletchley codebreakers had advance warning.

  The memorial in Tamworth, Staffordshire, to Able Seaman Colin Grazier, who died in 1942 having courageously boarded a sinking German U-boat to retrieve invaluable Enigma material.

  If Bletchley Park had not existed – or if the codebreakers had somehow failed entirely – what would have been the effect upon the outcome of the war? Obviously such questions come freighted with an infinity of variables to be considered. But it is still possible to paint a chilling picture. Imagine, for instance, a desert war in which Rommel prevailed – crushing the British forces and first reaching Cairo, and then striking onwards towards the rich oilfields of Arabia and Persia. If the Allies had lost Egypt, it is conceivable that their invasion of France would have been delayed until 1946, by which time the Nazis might well have developed weapons more terrible than the V-1 and V-2 missiles and rockets.

  Or if that is not enough, imagine this: the Atlantic convoys, and the predatory ‘wolf packs’ of U-boats: with no regular, reliable way of tracking them, lethal numbers of Allied ships, supplies and men, would have been consigned to the frozen deep, and Britain’s supplies of food and fuel would have dropped to insupportable levels. Or even imagine Operation Overlord in 1944: think of how, without consistent reliable intelligence as to the positioning of the German divisions, the Allied landings in France could have resulted in an outright bloodbath, leaving the Nazis dominant and unbowed in Europe. Some, including President Eisenhower, believed that the work of Bletchley helped to shorten the war by two years. Professor Sir Harry Hinsley – who worked at Bletchley Park on the naval intelligence side of Enigma and later became the distinguished historian of British Intelligence – thought it might have been even more. It’s fascinating now to examine all the different points in the history of World War Two where we can see that the secret, invisible intervention of the codebreakers had the most direct and dramatic effect.

  There are the individual battles to be considered: flashpoints like the 1941 Battle of Cape Matapan. On that occasion, it was Mavis Lever’s decryption of the Italian codes in ‘The Cottage’ at Bletchley Park with Dilly Knox that helped the British Navy to rout the Italian forces. Newmanry veteran Captain Jerry Roberts cited the 1943 Battle of Kursk, where the Russians successfully pulverised the German forces, as an example of Bletchley’s far-reaching hand. For weeks before the battle, British intelligence had – with very great care so as not to give away the codebreaking secret – been passing invaluable information to the Soviets to do with German artillery, and the new materials that they were using for their tanks. Such advance information gave the Soviets a chance to explore the potential weak spots in the attacking force.

  Then there were times in 1942 when Field Marshal Rommel must have felt that he was in a boxing ring with the invisible man, receiving punches seemingly from nowhere. Curiously, the North African campaign saw the intelligence effort swinging like a pendulum. In the earlier stages, it was the Germans who had greater success in breaking through British cyphers, and listening in on British transmissions. But the Bletchley operation tightened up as the conflict intensified and – unusually – allowed
top-security Enigma codebreaking work to be carried out away from the Park, within the Heliopolis section. There were glaring risks attached to this strategy. Indeed, on one particular day in 1942 which came to be known as ‘Ash Friday’, it looked as though Rommel’s forces might have been on the point of breaking through, and the codebreakers very swiftly took all the material they had – all the papers, all the files – and made a vast bonfire so that any invaders would not be able to pick up a scrap of a sense of the work that they had been doing. The German push was a false alarm; and the hot Cairo air was filled with the grey floating embers of needlessly incinerated intelligence. Some veterans recalled the incident as a wry outbreak of black comedy. Nonetheless, throughout 1942, the Heliopolis unit, together with Bletchley back home, had the most fantastic successes in consistently unlocking the German Army Enigma ciphers. Indeed, wrote Professor Hinsley, these codebreakers provided ‘… more timely intelligence about more aspects of the enemy’s activities than any force enjoyed in any land campaign in the whole war’. Most spectacularly, the cryptologists were able – via Rommel’s communications – to monitor closely the German supply lines, which were being devastated by Allied attacks on their shipping. They could tell, practically down to the last can of petrol, exactly how his divisions were fixed and when they were at their most vulnerable.