by Alastair Denniston- Code-breaking From Room 40 to Berkeley Street
Harold Fletcher, who was in charge of administration in Hut 6, told Welchman in a letter on 26 October 1979 that, ‘I have a clear recollection that you told me that Travis had had to tell C “Either he goes or I go”’. Peter Twinn, in correspondence with Welchman, wrote that:
I do not regard him as a success. I think he failed between the wars to get GCHQ (GCCS as it was) the status & facilities it needed. And he was on a pretty good wicket in the years just before 1939. The organisation was having stunning success in reading the Spanish Civil War codes & had clearly demonstrated its potential trifling expenditure. Denniston’s posting to London was clearly demotion. Indeed Denniston said to one of my colleagues, when his posting was arranged & Travis took over ‘I am not jealous of Travis – what grieves me is the realisation that I didn’t prove man enough for the job.’132
Others took a more charitable view of AGD’s contribution to GC&CS’s early success. Ralph Bennett, a former duty officer in Hut 3, said of AGD’s removal:
Denniston had spent his life in the time of the battle of Hastings dealing with hand codes and not much information that you could use militarily. Then he found himself in charge of a huge growing organisation, a lot of us younger and in some ways thinking along different lines, and he got a bit outdated in some ways and was shunted out. It was a bit of bad luck for him because he was a very good chap but he was overtaken by events.133
According to historians Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine:
In contrast to the major difficulties that emerged in 1943 over the US Army’s desire to attack Heer [Army] and Luftwaffe Enigma, cooperation between Britain and the United States on diplomatic codebreaking was remarkably trouble-free from its start in early 1941. Partly for that reason, and partly no doubt because of the range of countries potentially involved, no formal agreement about diplomatic Sigint was ever concluded between the US War Department and GC&CS. Inevitably there were misunderstandings from time to time, but they were resolved, in no small measure due to the wise approach adopted by Alastair Denniston, who was wholeheartedly in favour of Sigint cooperation with the United States. Denniston was a man of vision on this issue, just as he had been in 1939 when he recruited Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman to join GC&CS when war with Germany was declared. Sadly, there has been insufficient recognition of his vital role in laying the foundations of GC&CS’s wartime successes and in paving the way for Britain’s important Sigint alliances with the United States.
Another and more sinister view of AGD’s removal was put forward by a former close colleague, Percy Filby. A Cambridge graduate, Filby was a captain in the Army Intelligence Corps from 1940 until 1945, first at BP then at Berkeley Street as AGD’s official number two. According to him:
Travis was deputy to Denniston and a crony of de Grey. They had endless talks in the crucial days and although they were held next door the walls were wooden and since we were almost always working in complete silence I couldn’t help hearing the conversations sometimes. De Grey’s voice was that of an actor and I knew ages before it happened that they didn’t feel Denniston could cope with the enormous increase demanded of Ultra and other problems. AGD was headstrong and didn’t like criticism; after all, he had carried the group throughout the 1930s, against criticism quite often, and now that war had actually occurred he wanted to be at the helm, in charge of the organisation he had created. Travis and de Grey were perfectly right. 134
He went on to say:
Obviously he [AGD] was disappointed and extremely bitter, but whenever I went to stay with him and with Dorothy he was relaxed. The villain of the piece was really a man named Freeborn, leader of the machine group from Letchworth. He was power hungry and realized that with AGD out of the way he could manipulate to his heart’s content. Even Travis would generally address Freeborn: ‘Mr Freeborn, we have a particularly difficult time in front of us. Do you think you could spare a few machines?’ Freeborn would look at a board and ruminate, and would finally state that if he cut A and B he could accommodate Travis. Having got his own way he attacked AGD unmercifully, and because his Hollerith machines were now all powerful he virtually controlled all but Ultra. AGD was given the sop at Berkeley Street but to the horror of Freeborn it turned into a gigantic success for AGD. We used to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week as if to prove that AGD could control and direct. ‘C’ was always on good terms with AGD and one day in 1943 he was able to turn to AGD and congratulate him on a great success, with more to come. Freeborn called me into his office and he asked me to come back to Bletchley with my team. ‘Travis will OK it if you wish’. I declined and he promised to stop further promotion.
GC&CS was under intense pressure at the end of 1941 and it appears that a number of people at BP blamed their problems on AGD. While he was comfortable in allowing creativity and innovation to flourish in the early days at BP, his non-combative personality made it difficult for him to fight the battle in Whitehall to get authority for the resources that would be needed for BP’s expansion. Travis, on the other hand, was described by Welchman as a ‘bulldog of a man’ and would prove to be the ideal person to fight the ensuing battles for resources. For all of his qualities and huge personal contribution to the ultimate success of BP, it is unlikely that AGD would have been as successful in Whitehall.
While Travis’ reputation was of one who was rough and burly, he was well respected by staff. He was visible through the Park during the war and knew many staff personally.135
Evidence of his management style compared to AGD is highlighted in a 1940 incident when Oliver Strachey had begun a petition about messing arrangements. Travis wanted to treat this as akin to ‘mutiny’. AGD wrote to him saying:
After twenty years’ experience in GC&CS, I think I may say to you that one does not expect to find the rigid discipline of a battleship among the collection of somewhat unusual civilians who form GC&CS. To endeavour to impose it would be a mistake in my mind and would not assist our war effort, we must take them as they are and try to get the best out of them. They do very stupid things, as in the present case, but they are producing what the authorities require.
By the end of 1941, AGD must have been at the end of his tether. His nature prevented him from exploiting the unexpected success at BP under his control for his own advantage. Health problems and two arduous trips to the US and Canada had kept him away from BP for months and while he hadn’t formally handed over control of BP to Travis, a lack of leadership was leading to quarrels within his organisation. Issues persisted between Menzies and the Service Ministries but he was out of touch with BP’s day to day operation. Menzies’ relations with AGD were not ideal and the two appear to have had little direct contact throughout the year. The Denniston family had just completed the move from their farmhouse accommodation to a small semi-detached house just outside the gates of BP called Friedenheim. Now AGD was to be stationed in London and quickly had to move the family back to their house in Ashtead. Fortunately, both for him and the country, he would soon find himself back in charge of an organisation more suited to his talents.
Chapter 5
Berkeley Street
The first three months of 1942 saw major offensives taking place on multiple fronts. The Soviet offensive was going well in January. The Japanese were advancing steadily down Malaya towards Singapore and British forces were trying to advance in North Africa. Naval battles were taking place along the French coast, in the North Atlantic and the Java Sea. In March, AGD and the main body of GC&CS’s Diplomatic Section moved back to London. The German Section remained temporarily at BP along with the Commercial Section until its accommodation was ready in another building in London. The Diplomatic Section was housed in former flats at Numbers 8 and 9 Berkeley Street and took up four floors capable of housing seventy-five staff. The adjoining house, Numbers 6 and 7, also had floors available with capacity for around seventy staff. This expansion space would be needed as the Japanese Section (translating and codebreaking) was rapidly expanding along with th
e Italian, Near Eastern and some of the smaller sections.
The Commercial Section later moved to two floors of Aldford House in Park Lane, which were also previously residential flats. As the section worked closely with the MEW, this located them closer to that ministry. Only occasional contact took place between the country sections at Berkeley Street and the Commercial Section at Aldford House and little contact took place between them and the Naval, Military and Air Section at BP.
AGD, with his new designation of Deputy Director (Civil) (DD(C)), now found himself in charge of an organisation much the same size as the one he had brought to BP in August 1939. Percy Filby headed up the German Diplomatic Section when it moved to Berkeley Street later in March. According to Filby, while he never heard AGD comment on the move from BP, ‘That he was crushed there was no doubt; he seldom smiled, showed unusual irritation and in general was far from his normal self.’1
However, AGD quickly threw himself into the work of his new section and was at his desk from 9.00 am until everyone else had left. He established a personal rapport with all ranks of his staff through regular visits to each country section, making suggestions but never interfering with the work. He never seemed to panic and almost all looked on him with considerable affection. AGD had recruited some excellent linguists and mathematicians. There were also several titled ladies and scholars such as Professor Adcock, Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Ernst Fetterlein. The latter was the top Russian cryptographer who had been brought out of retirement after invaluable service during WW1. He was only useful on book ciphers where insight was required. ‘Fetty’, as he was known, would arrive precisely at 9.30 am and read The Times newspaper until 10.00 am at which point he was ready to take on any task assigned to him. Filby continued to use Fetterlein when he was in his seventies, ill and at home.
Some of the older civil servants caused AGD problems as they demanded their rights which they believed to include having separate offices and other staff to do their bidding. They had worked on diplomatic material between the wars but didn’t fit in with younger experts and translators recruited by AGD. They insisted on working 10.00 am until 4.00 am rather than 9.00 am until 5.00 pm like the rest of the staff. Filby, as head of the large German section shared a room with four colleagues. One of the old guard told him that if she didn’t have a room of her own, she would not come to work. As Filby later recalled:
How Denniston mollified her I will never know, but after a week’s absence she meekly asked me if she could have a table and chair. She was an excellent translator, but with her status as the senior lady of the Foreign Office she insisted on translating only messages less than a week old! When there was nothing to her liking she brought from her drawer her manuscript of a definitive biography of Beethoven, which later became a classic.
Malcolm Kennedy worked as an intelligence translator in the Japanese Diplomatic Section from September 1939 to March 1942, and then moved to Berkeley Street until December 1942. In his diary, he offered the old guard’s view of AGD’s management style. In an entry for 4 March 1942 he wrote:
Orders definitely issued for our branch of the F.O. to return to London next week. Feel very sore about it, as the move has been manoeuvred by certain ‘interested parties’ and by gross misrepresentation of the facts, while A.G.D. is so utterly spineless, that on his own admission, he has made no attempt to point out the serious snags and difficulties involved. No small portion of the personnel who, for one reason or another, are unable to go, have had to resign and for many of us, the move will entail 4 to 5 hours travel daily to and from work with an early start (from 8 a.m.) and a late return (9 p.m. or later). And yet A.G.D. has the brass to contend that efficiency will be increased ‘in the tenser atmosphere of London’! We and others have sent in memos and made personal protests, pointing out how efficiency will be seriously affected rather than increased, but our warnings are simply brushed aside and we are censured by A.G.D. for having the temerity to question the decision. ‘I never questioned it’, he said, as though this were to his credit, though by his very admission he damns himself as utterly unfitted to be head of a show like ours. By failing to put forward his views and to point out the facts, he is guilty of negligence and incompetence and has failed deplorably in his duties as No.1.2
AGD never seemed to let such personal bitterness interfere with his efforts to drive the organisation forward. Kennedy’s diary entry for 7 March 1942 shows how AGD tried to rouse his staff for the job ahead:
A.G.D. has circulated an absolute masterpiece of fatuous ‘pep talk’ to those of us who are being sent back to London. In it he describes our coming return there as being ‘in the nature of the adventure in the middle of the war’ and says we shall be able to ‘carry out our duties more in the front line’ and that the ‘tenser atmosphere of London will urge us on still further’, though how he reconciles this with his assertion that we shall be ‘more exposed to daylight raids’ is somewhat mystifying! It is all in line however, with his remark to us the other day that, if we continued to work in the peaceful atmosphere of B.P. our work might suffer from ‘dolci furviante’.
Not all of the old guard behaved in this way and E. Earnshaw-Smith, Frederic Catty and A.G.R. Rees, to name three, fitted in well with the new recruits such as Gerald Tomlins and Stanley White who worked in Filby’s section. White, a bank official from Wallasey, near Liverpool, controlled the main linguists in the section while Tomlins, also a bank official, had a good knowledge of German knowledge.
Many of the more productive staff regularly worked fifteen-hour days, seven days per week. Few staff took leave and they rarely asked for a day off. Some were of high social status and included Dorothy Hyson (1942–5) who married the actor Anthony Quayle in 1947, Ela Beaumont (1942–5), later the Countess of Carlisle, and Sheila Thorpe (1942–5), who married Tomlins during the war.
AGD held few staff meetings but was always well informed about the work of each section While they were kept separate with little fraternisation, AGD began holding monthly Heads of Sections meetings also attended by the Head of the Commercial Section. He worked closely with Earnshaw-Smith, the head of the Distribution and Reference (D&R) Section, as his deputy, designated as Assistant Director (Civil) (AD(C)).
By the end of the 1942 AGD, along with his administrative, trafficsorting staff and the D&R Section with typists, numbered twenty-five and occupied roughly one floor of the combined houses, joined by a door. The Axis sections staff numbered seventy-five, of which forty worked in the German Section and this grew to sixty by mid-1943. The Japanese and Italian Sections, comprising both cryptanalysts and linguists, each had twenty staff. The remaining country sections, of which the French, Portuguese, Near East and Chinese were the biggest, had fifty staff between them. During its first year of operation at Berkeley Street, AGD’s organisation circulated 13,095 translations, compared to 8,485 in 1940. The recipients included the Foreign Office, which received all of them while the Admiralty received 6,901, the War Office 6,927 and the Air Ministry 6,158. MI5 received 9,315 compared with 1,166 in 1940.
According to Filby, ‘unproductive’ sections were sent to Berkeley Street believing that it would keep AGD occupied but have little impact on the war. However, AGD had increasingly more access to Menzies as the diplomatic and commercial output became interesting and attracted his attention. Menzies, along with Admiral Cunningham, the Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, started to visit AGD on a regular basis. Travis also visited Berkeley Street and after a V1 flying bomb hit the Lansdowne Hotel in Berkeley Square and missed their rooms by a few yards, he tried to get some of the sections returned to BP on the grounds of security. This suggestion was, however, rejected by Menzies. From mid-1943, visits from the top brass were continuous and Anthony Eden gave them a dinner at the Café Royal along with a show, ‘Crest of the Waves’. AGD had finally come into his own, with his full access to Menzies restored.3
***
In early 1942, there was an information excha
nge with Arlington Hall in Washington, home to the American Signals Intelligence Service (SIS), run by William Friedman. Filby visited Arlington Hall and Solomon Kullback 4 visited first Berkeley Street and then BP in April. Kullback brought with him some German diplomatic material, and AGD was able to reciprocate with his section’s own material which included a work sheet used by a cryptographic clerk in the German embassy. He had apparently crumpled it up and thrown it into a wastepaper basket where it was recovered by a British spy in the embassy. Kullback spent two weeks at Berkeley Street.
Filby also visited Canada and discovered that tensions existed between US and Canadian intelligence agencies. The Canadians wanted to know why he was visiting the US, but Filby could only refer them to a contact in the US, as he was bound by secrecy. The Admiralty proposed an Allied wireless intelligence conference, and it took place in Washington from 6 to 16 April 1942. Unfortunately, the wireless intelligence agreement that AGD had secured with the US Navy’s OP-20-G the previous year was not working. Canada was represented by Captain Ed Drake, head of several key Canadian listening stations, Colonel William Murray, head of the Canadian Army’s wireless intelligence programme, and Commander John de Marbois, in charge of Canadian wireless interception. The Americans sent senior staff from both OP-20-G and SIS. Commander John Redman, Vice Chief of US Navy Operations, opened the conference. The British delegation was led by Humphrey Sandwith,5 head of the Admiralty’s Y service, and included Captain Roger Winn, head of the Admiralty’s U-boat tracking room. There were also representatives from Britain’s RSS and the British Foreign Office.
