by Kate Quinn
Before war was even declared, a handful of Oxford and Cambridge men were recruited into intelligence and set to work on Enigma, building on the genius work of Polish cryptanalysts Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski—brilliant men whose earlier Enigma breakthroughs made Bletchley Park’s success possible. The early BP cryptanalysts recruited trusted friends and acquaintances from college tutorial groups and university connections, eventually branching out to women’s colleges and secretarial pools as a scattershot organization flung across a few prefabricated huts grew into an intelligence factory employing thousands. Churchill relied heavily on Park intelligence to guide his public policy; he visited the grounds in September 1941, where he commended the codebreakers on their silence as well as their work. There was certainly some information-passing within the Park—wartime diaries and memoirs record that BP workers weren’t above discreetly trading news to keep an eye on friends and loved ones—but security to the outside was watertight: the Axis powers never found out how thoroughly Britain was reading their mail.
The burden of secrecy took its toll: illness, burnout, and breakdowns were common among BP staff. To combat the stress, a thriving social life grew up—off-duty codebreakers may not have had a Mad Hatters literary society reading books like Gone with the Wind (a bestseller of the time known for sparking controversial discussions even in the forties) or an anonymous weekly humor column, but they played in amateur dramatics, competed in chess tournaments, put on musical revues, practiced Highland dancing, and much more. The codebreakers worked hard and played hard, and veterans remember finding an open-mindedness at BP that was sorely lacking in ordinary life. Women enjoyed a level of equality with male coworkers that they were unlikely to get on the outside for years or decades; homosexual members tended to be tacitly acknowledged and accepted; people who would today be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder could work without being forced to mask their neurodivergence. BP might have appalled military personnel with its casual attitudes to dress, language, and first-naming, but it was in many ways a haven of acceptance.
Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend. I have renamed my Osla out of respect for Osla Benning’s still-living children; the real Osla was not at the famous bombing of the Café de Paris, was already married by the time her ex-boyfriend married Princess Elizabeth, and spent her life as a diplomatic wife rather than a columnist. But I have remained faithful to the broad strokes of her life in bringing my Osla to the page: lonely daughter to a frequently married society mother (who did maintain a suite at Claridge’s), irrepressible firebrand who finagled her way back to England on a purloined air ticket rather than sit out the war in Canada; polished debutante who gleefully got her hands dirty building Hurricanes before her fluent German landed her at Bletchley Park. She was introduced to Prince Philip at the beginning of the war by her friend (and fellow goddaughter of Lord Mountbatten) Sarah Norton, and the two promptly became inseparable. Philip and Osla bonded over similar privileged but lonely childhoods and a mutual penchant for pranks and fun; he gave her his naval insignia, took her out whenever he was in town, and wrote to her when at sea. The two drifted apart toward the end of the war, around the same time a young Princess Elizabeth appears to have caught Philip’s eye at a Christmas weekend following her fundraising Aladdin performance at Windsor (a performance he nearly missed after a bout of the flu while holed up at Claridge’s!).
No one can know whether Osla’s oath of secrecy might have contributed to her estrangement with Philip, or if his German connections might have caused difficulties for Osla at BP, but there was certainly doubt about Philip of Greece’s familial background in the early days. Post-Philip, Osla Benning had a short-lived engagement to a cad whose emerald ring she removed with a flippant “Never liked green stones, anyway!” before marrying John Patrick Edward Chandos Henniker-Major, a Rifle Brigade officer with a Military Cross won fighting beside Czechoslovakian partisans. He would eventually join the Foreign Office and become the eighth Baron Henniker, and he and Osla did indeed dine with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret before the royal wedding in some vague idea that Osla would give the royal bride tips on handling her husband-to-be. (No word on how or if that was discussed over the canapés!) Lord Henniker remarked wryly that the tabloids frequently tried to dig up dirt on the lifelong friendship between his wife and the Duke of Edinburgh, who stood as godfather to Osla’s eldest son. Anyone interested in the real Osla should read The Road to Station X, the memoir by her friend Sarah Baring (née Norton) of their time together at Bletchley Park, from which I repurposed many of Osla Benning’s droll one-liners and high-wire pranks for Osla Kendall.
Beth Finch is a fictional composite of two very real women. One is nameless, a codebreaker who supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown after her love affair with a married BP colleague collapsed—the woman was sent to an asylum in fear that she would divulge secret information in her broken state. The other contributor to Beth’s character and achievements is Mavis Lever, one of Bletchley Park’s stars. Mavis was recruited in her teens and became one of “Dilly’s Fillies”; all of Beth’s codebreaking achievements—the breaking of “Today’s the day minus three,” which would lead to the Cape Matapan victory; the all-L’s crib; the cracking of Abwehr Enigma—are pulled from records of Mavis Lever’s feats as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts. I dramatized Mavis’s achievements with a fictional character because I did not wish to imply that one of BP’s greatest legends went to an asylum when in the real historic record she married a Hut 6 codebreaker as brilliant as herself and served BP until the war ended. I was not able to discover what became of the nameless codebreaker confined to an asylum. Clockwell and the Kiloran Bay facility are both fictional, but institutions of that type certainly existed, functioning as dumping grounds for inconvenient women as well as mentally ill ones. Sadly, many lobotomies were performed on the mentally ill during this period—the procedure was eventually outlawed as medically barbaric, but not before thousands of patients were maimed. The most famous victim of the surgery is probably JFK’s intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy: subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy at twenty-three in an attempt to calm her emotional outbursts, she spent the remaining sixty years of her life institutionalized, reduced to the mental capacity of a toddler.
Mab is fictional, representing the many women who served as BP’s worker bees. Such women came from all walks of life, from shopgirls to lords’ daughters, and served as decodists, filers, and bombe machine operators, among many other jobs. Some found the work boring and some found it fascinating—but overall, their reminiscences speak fondly of the relaxed and egalitarian attitude at Bletchley Park. BP did not employ many women at the top levels of management and cryptanalysis, and women workers tended to be paid less than their male counterparts, but it was still a place where women’s voices were valued, and many missed its camaraderie and purpose once the war was over. Mab’s two husbands are both fictional as well; Francis Gray is modeled after Great War poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who immortalized the horror of trench warfare and lost innocence in verse, and Mike Sharpe is a tip of the hat to the hardworking RAF engineers who kept the bombe machines humming. The idea that a husband and wife could both work at Bletchley Park without realizing it at the time or telling each other afterward might seem like a soap opera twist, but it really happened, and more than once. Sometimes a couple only made the realization after decades of marriage!
Harry is based on two real-life Bletchley Park codebreakers: Maurice Zarb, a Hut 4 recruit of Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian descent who came to BP via a prominent London banking family (I included him as Harry’s cousin so as not to erase a real man from BPhistory), and Keith Batey, a brilliant Hut 6 mathematician who worked with Mavis Lever, fell in love with her over the rods and cribs, and married her. Keith, lik
e Harry and indeed many male cryptanalysts, suffered keen guilt over not being able to enlist on the front lines, and wangled permission to join the Fleet Air Arm, where he served briefly before returning to codebreaking. Bletchley Park men were frequently subjected to social shaming, both from strangers and from their own unwitting family members, for their apparent refusal to join the fight—shaming they could not refute, since they could divulge no details of their service.
Most of the other Bletchley Park people mentioned here are real: Margaret Rock, Sarah Norton, Miss Senyard, Commanders Denniston and Travis, Asa Briggs, Michael Cohen, Olive Knox, Ian Fleming (of later James Bond fame, who liaised with BP from the naval intelligence division), and Valerie Glassborow, who would become Kate Middleton’s grandmother. Alan Turing, one of the great brains of the twentieth century, was the shining light of Hut 8 and would make history later with his contributions in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was prosecuted for homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration in the fifties, a hideous miscarriage of justice for which the British government has since issued an apology. Turing died of cyanide poisoning not long after, probably self-inflicted. Dilly Knox was one of the Park’s eccentric geniuses, notorious for his absentmindedness, his Alice-in-Wonderland approach to codebreaking, and his habit of recruiting only women for his team. He did not have the mania for keeping his codebreakers in ignorance that prevailed in the other huts, stating, “Such action cripples the activities of the cryptographer who depends on cribs,” and so his ladies tended to be better informed about the nature of their work than their colleagues. Cancer forced Knox’s retirement midwar, but he worked at home until the end, reportedly on Soviet ciphers. The key to his library wall safe at Courns Wood was never found after his death, which gave me the idea to speculate what that safe could possibly have held.
Unlikely as it may seem, there really was a traitor at Bletchley Park who passed information to the Soviet Union during the war. John Cairncross worked in Hut 4 and then MI-6, and served as the basis for Giles Talbot: a red-haired individualist who became convinced that Britain was not sharing enough information with its Russian allies and took it upon himself to smuggle hundreds of decrypts out of BP to his Soviet contact. Such an activity was relatively easy, as Osla points out in The Rose Code, because the guardhouse effected no searches of departing shift workers (indeed, there would have been almost no way to efficiently search thousands of departing workers every day for tiny slips of paper). Cairncross’s spy activities were not exposed until years later when he was living abroad; thus he was never prosecuted. To the end of his life he maintained that he was a patriot and not a traitor; he claimed his actions saved thousands of Russian lives and denied ever passing intelligence to the USSR after the war. He was far from the only Soviet mole in MI-5, MI-6, and the Foreign Office: the ring known as the Cambridge Five (a group of Englishmen recruited during their university days) was uncovered in the highest reaches of British intelligence during the sixties. Some escaped to the Soviet Union and lived out the rest of their lives, others made deals; none were prosecuted. It has long been posited that there were more Soviet moles beyond Cairncross and the others—Giles Talbot was created to fill that unknown void. In my imagination, his discovery at the end of The Rose Code prompts the investigation that will eventually unearth the Cambridge Five. The Russians used their own methods of encryption during the war but definitely experimented with using captured Enigma machines, even finding ways to make them more secure postwar.
As always, I have taken some liberties with the historical record in order to serve the story. There may be some inaccuracies in the depictions of Osla, Mab, and Beth’s earliest shift work; Bletchley Park was still in its infancy in 1940, protocols changed constantly, and the day-to-day operating procedures of those early days in the huts proved very difficult to research. Osla’s indexing/filing section of Hut 4 was possibly not known as the Debutantes’ Den until 1942; the arrival of the Glassborow twins to Bletchley Park was moved up somewhat; Bettys in York didn’t lose their apostrophe until the sixties; the chemist in Bletchley village wasn’t a Boots; and although the bombe operators did receive a compressed lecture about how and why the machine functioned, that lecture wasn’t approved until later in the machines’ usage than depicted here. Mab as a civilian would probably not have worked long-term as a bombe machine operator since the bombes were serviced by Wrens (though they did need to be tall, hence my supposition that a tall civilian woman might have been called upon to fill in).
The real Osla did build airplanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory, though they may not have begun accepting women as early as I have depicted here, and she didn’t come to BP until 1941, arriving with Sarah Norton, with whom she billeted at Aspley Guise throughout her service. Osla and Philip’s romance is necessarily fictionalized, since we don’t know private details of their intimate moments. I have attempted wherever possible to use Philip’s real words (his stiff-upper-lip “I just had to get on with it” response to his own pain over his mother’s incarceration and his shattered family; his diary-entry accounts of what the Cape Matapanbattle and other naval engagements were like), but he was a self-contained man even when young, and Osla was even more bound by secrecy, so my imagination has had to put words in their mouths. I’ve done so with a respectful attempt to depict the heady first love of two young people destined to find happiness with others, who nevertheless must have shared something very genuine and important considering that they remained friends throughout their lives.
The heavy air raid on the town of Coventry in late 1944 is fictional, though the town’s devastation during an earlier raid (inspiring the German verb coventrieren) is true and became the foundation for one of Bletchley Park’s great real-life mysteries: the claim that Hut 6 broke the warning about that raid, but Churchill sacrificed the town to protect the safety of the code. To this day, some veterans insist the message break’s timing was fishy, while others insist news of the raid simply wasn’t cracked in time to effect a warning. I come down on the latter side of the argument, but when the time came to enact my own fictional drama of a raid being known in advance and no warning given, I placed it all at Coventry as a nod to the existing urban legend.
There is no evidence that the brilliant Margaret Rock, who enjoyed a long, illustrious, exceedingly secret career at GCHQ after Bletchley Park, knew about the hidden bunker where a stash of undestroyed Enigma machines and bombes were stored for a rainy day . . . but there was such a bunker until 1959, and it’s entirely possible that the machines were lent out to aid the postwar boom of computer science projects funded by many universities and corporations. Turing was involved with one such project in Manchester, and another was funded by Birkbeck College in London—but even if the Birkbeck College project borrowed a bombe from GCHQ’s bunker and had to send that machine to a maintenance lab, it was in all probability not used in an illicit off-the-books meeting of Bletchley Park codebreakers trying to catch a traitor on the eve of the royal wedding!
And yet . . . if there had ever been a dire need for BP’s brilliant personnel to dust off their skills postwar, I have no doubt that such a secret would have been flawlessly kept. Bletchley Park is at last receiving credit for its wartime achievements; the doors have been thrown open and matters that would have been unthinkable to whisper in 1941 are now discussed openly under the official Twitter handle @bletchleypark. But does that mean BP and those who worked there have shared all their secrets? Not by a long shot. There are undoubtedly stories—ciphers broken, off-the-books meetingsconvened, betrayals covered up—that have been taken to the grave.
I owe heartfelt thanks to many people who helped in the writing and researching of this novel: My mother, Kelly, this book’s first reader and invaluable critic. My husband, who has served with shipmates working in similar fields to the Bletchley Park women and advised me on portraying its stresses accurately, as well as the toll it takes on deployed personnel. My marvelous critique partner
s Stephanie Dray, Anna Ferrell, Lea Nolan, Sophie Perinot, and Stephanie Thornton, whose criticism helped whip this ungainly manuscript into shape—I would be lost without you all. My fellow historical fiction author Meghan Masterson, who named Francis Gray’s book of war poetry. My agent Kevan Lyon and editor Tessa Woodward; thank you for cheering this book every step of the way. Above all, I give my fervent thanks to Kerry Howard, Bletchley Park historian and author in her own right, who fact-checked every page of this manuscript and saved my bacon in flagging its historical errors prepublication—if any inaccuracies remain after her meticulous work, it’s entirely my own fault.
Thanks to historians, experts, and the indefatigable Bletchley Park Trust, BP’s legacy is preserved today in countless podcasts, articles, and nonfiction books, which do honor not only to the work done there but to the Park’s veterans. Donations, grants, and the unceasing labor of both scholars and volunteers have made Bletchley Park a superb historic visitors’ site—if you can manage a trip there, I highly recommend it, as the house, gardens, and surviving huts make for a fascinating walk into the past. Other sites mentioned in this book still make marvelous side trips today. Keswick, where Mab and Francis honeymoon, is beautiful if the weather is fine, and Surprise View over Derwentwater offers an astounding panorama of Lake District scenery. London is a dazzling mix of modernity and history, a far cry from its wartime, Blitz-cratered, blackout-curtained self, and Veeraswamy, where Mab and Francis had their first date, is still in business—the UK’s oldest Indian restaurant. Coventry has been rebuilt, although the roofless cathedral still stands in a poignant memorial to the attack that nearly destroyed it. York is sumptuous and historic—be sure to drop by Bettys (no apostrophe), which to this day offers up an unbeatable cream tea.
