The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  The comparative youth of most of the recruits was to color the atmosphere of the establishment quite deeply. They worked with tremendous vigor and intensity, but they also brought a sharp, lively creativity to their off-duty hours. These young people—many of whom were part of an emerging, strengthening middle class—found that rather than being a “pause” in their educations, Bletchley Park was to form its own peculiar kind of university experience.

  There was also to be a great deal of romance, perhaps un-surprisingly in what one veteran described as “the hothouse atmosphere” of Bletchley Park. Many who fell in love at Bletchley stayed happily married for many years afterward. Some are still married today.

  Yet this “hothouse” also imposed an extraordinary burden. The oaths of secrecy that the recruits were made to swear lasted for many decades beyond the end of the war. Husbands and wives were forbidden to discuss the work they had done there; they could not tell their parents what they had achieved, even if their parents were dying. They were not allowed to tell their children.

  Which is why, since the silence lifted in the late 1970s, the recollections of Bletchley Park veterans seem to have a special vividness and clarity; they have not been smoothed out or transformed or muddled by endless retelling. Added to this, there was a focus and intensity about life at the Park that would burn itself on to the memory.

  Architectural historian Jane Fawcett, MBE, who was recruited to the Park as a young woman in 1940, recalls the almost unfathomable sense of pressure that they were under. “We knew that what we were doing was making all the difference,” she says. “We knew that it really did depend on us.”

  “It would get too much for some,” says one veteran. “The strain really did tell.” Another veteran, S. Gorley Putt, commented: “One after another—in one way or another—we would all go off our rockers.”2

  Gorley Putt was exaggerating a little. Not everyone went off their rockers. Indeed, many Bletchley Park veterans now look back at their experiences—the frustrations, the exhausting night shifts, the flashing moments of insight and genius, even the outbreaks of youthful, high-spirited laughter—as a formative experience that they were uniquely privileged to enjoy.

  2 1938–39: The School of Codes

  Until the outbreak of war (and indeed for many years afterward), the town of Bletchley—in the north of Buckinghamshire, and sited roughly halfway between London and Birmingham—was notable chiefly for being completely unworthy of note.

  Even the well-respected architectural chronicler Nikolaus Pevsner counseled his readers against visiting the place. He felt it had nothing to offer either in terms of interesting buildings or beguiling landscape. It was a railway town, sitting on a busy junction. Bletchley’s other chief industry was the manufacture of bricks. The smell of the works had a distinct tang that hung over the town on warm summer days.

  And the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century house, with its fifty-five acres of grounds, located on the other side of the railway tracks from the main streets of Bletchley, was selected as the wartime base for the Government Code and Cypher School largely for reasons of security, as opposed to aesthetic considerations.

  Ever since 1919, all foreign encrypted messages—largely those from the fledgling Soviet Union—had been dealt with by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a small, esoteric government department which was in essence the codebreaking arm of the Foreign Office. Since the 1930s, the department had been based just around the corner from Whitehall, in Broadway Buildings, St. James’s Park; a smart London address that it shared with MI6.

  It was actually a good eighteen months before 1939 that the decision was made to move GC&CS out to the countryside. The reason was that its central London location would put it at very high risk from potential German bomber raids. The horrifying Blitzkrieg campaign in Spain had demonstrated just how lethally effective such attacks could be.

  Previously, the Bletchley Park estate had belonged to the wealthy Leon family. But in 1937, the heir, Sir George, lost interest in maintaining the trappings of country life. And thus the place went on the market. A relative of the family, Ruth Sebag-Montefiore—who quite by chance was recruited to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park herself—said of the house: “Only by stretching my imagination to the utmost could I picture the place…in its heyday, when there were hunters in the stables, house parties most weekends, and children in the top floor nurseries.”1

  By 1937, the grand house parties were over. In 1938, a small team of property developers, led by a Captain Faulkner, made the highest bid for the estate. It is reported that the head of MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, was so adamant that the move was necessary, and so frustrated by lumbering Whitehall interdepartmental bureaucracy, that he paid for the house out of his own pocket.

  Work began at once. Violent events in Europe were casting shadows. Admiral Sinclair was sharply aware—perhaps more so than many in the government—that the house and its grounds would be needed urgently.

  In May of that year, engineers from the Post Office began laying cables from the house that would connect it up to the nerve endings of Whitehall. Over the summer of 1938—which was dominated by the excruciating tension of the Munich summit and Chamberlain’s calculated but misguided appeasement of Hitler over mounting German aggression toward Czechoslovakia—“Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party,” as the codename went, came to stay at the Bletchley Park estate by way of a rehearsal.

  In fact, Captain Ridley was a naval officer with MI6. His job was to organize the logistics of the move of GC&CS (known by some jokingly as the “Golf Club and Chess Society”) from London to Bletchley. “We were told that this was a ‘rehearsal,’” wrote senior codebreaker Josh Cooper in a contemporary diary. “But we all realized that the ‘rehearsal’ might well end in a real war.”

  This 1938 rehearsal also gave an idea of the difficulties involved. The presence of so many visitors to Bletchley Park milling around the grounds was explained to the curious local people by that very “Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party” catch-all phrase. The Wodehousian flavor of the term—faintly anachronistic, even back then—was to find echoes in the years to come.

  There was a lot of work to be done. It was immediately clear that the house itself would not be large enough to accommodate the anticipated code-cracking activity. As such, wooden huts, insulated with asbestos, were to be built on the grounds. “To begin with, when there were only a handful of us, we worked in the house,” recalled Ruth Sebag-Montefiore. “Subsequently we moved into one of the wooden huts that sprang up like mushrooms.”

  Although records are not completely clear, it seems that the first of the huts—those brilliantly makeshift, weather-exposed synecdoches of British improvisational spirit, and the eventual beehives of the Bletchley operation—was built not too long after the time of the Munich crisis. Hut 1 was originally intended to house the Park’s wireless station. The huts that were built soon afterward—some of which still survive today—strike the modern eye as puzzlingly temporary structures; they put one in mind of prefab houses.

  Bletchley was both far enough away yet convenient enough to reach to make it an ideal location. And the town and surrounding villages were reckoned to have sufficient space for billeting all the codebreakers and translators. Bletchley Park itself was (and is) next to what is now referred to as the West Coast railway line. And in the days before Dr. Beeching axed so much of the network, Bletchley station teemed with activity. To the west, the railways reached Oxford; to the east Cambridge. Meanwhile, anyone traveling from London, Birmingham, Lancashire, or Glasgow could get to the town with ease. “Or relative ease,” says Sheila Lawn, who became used to these long-distance hauls. “The trains were always absolutely packed with soldiers.” Nevertheless, the location was a great boon to the many young people scattered across the country who would find themselves receiving the summons.

  Throughout 1938, work on further customizing the estate progressed at
speed. One wing of the house was demolished; the outbuildings were converted into office space.

  At the very top of the house, in a small, dingy attic room near a large water tank, lay “Station X.” In essence, it was an SIS radio listening post. Outside the tiny little window was a huge Wellingtonia tree, around which was arranged the necessary rhombic array aerial. “Station X,” a wonderfully Ian Fleming–esque designation, was in fact so named because it was simply the tenth station of its sort. The station didn’t last long there—later, it was moved six miles away to Whaddon Hall.

  There was a temporary decrease in diplomatic tension in the aftermath of Munich. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously had in his hand a piece of paper, which promised peace in our time. According to some contemporaneous Mass Observation reports, not many ordinary people were wholly convinced by this. And on the Intelligence side, the quiet, furtive preparations for the coming, inevitable conflict became ever more intense.

  Bletchley Park was placed under the control of Commander Alistair Denniston. Originally the establishment was supposed to have been run by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, but he was becoming very ill by this point and Denniston rapidly assumed day-to-day responsibility for the operation. This delegation of responsibility—with the head of MI6 being in ultimate, rather than everyday, control—was one of the elements that in the years to come was to give Bletchley Park its unusual and sometimes unpredictable flavor. It had a degree of quirky autonomy. Certainly quirky enough not to be appreciated by some senior figures in Whitehall.

  Back in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Alistair Denniston had been made head of the Government Code and Cypher School, and he presided over the department in the interwar years. When Denniston came to Bletchley Park in 1939, he saw to it that some fellow codebreakers from the early days of the department came too—including the mercurial but brilliant Alfred Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch.

  Birch had a rather unusual hinterland; as well as being incredibly sharp with codes, he was a theater actor and director with an amusingly exaggerated manner. In fact, in 1930 he had essayed a highly memorable Widow Twankey in a sumptuous West End production of Aladdin. Birch and Knox had been at Cambridge together.

  On arrival at Bletchley, “Dilly” Knox, as senior cryptographer, was allocated working space in “the Cottage”—in reality, a row of chunky converted interlinked houses—just across the courtyard from the main house, near the stables. Fifty-five-year-old Knox was, in the words of a colleague, “the mastermind behind the Enigma affair,” a gangling figure with a prominent forehead, “unruly black hair and his eyes, behind glasses, some miles away in thought.”

  Knox had been interested in ciphers since boyhood, noted the novelist (and his niece) Penelope Fitzgerald. Also as a boy, Dilly had precociously “detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions in the Sherlock Holmes stories,” wrote Fitzgerald, “and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in The Sign of Four.”2

  He was also a man prone to terrific bursts of temper, and quickly became noted by his colleagues for the fact that he seemed to get on much better with women than he did with men. He certainly had a most enlightened approach to the employment of women at that period—one might even be tempted to call it positive discrimination. Although that was not how many more lascivious-minded colleagues saw it at the time.

  Indeed, it was not long before the female recruits to “the Cottage” became known widely around the Park as “Dilly’s Fillies.” These days, the expression causes one of Knox’s more illustrious female recruits—Mavis Batey (née Lever)—to tut-tut and roll her eyes with good-humoured exasperation. “A myth has grown up that Dilly went around in 1939 looking at the girls arriving at Bletchley and picking the most attractive for the Cottage,” Mrs. Batey says, perhaps protesting a little too much. “That is completely untrue. Dilly took us on our qualifications.”

  Other experienced codebreakers who had served alongside Denniston in that interwar period, and who were to make such a difference at Bletchley Park, were Josh Cooper, John Jeffreys, Frank Lucas, Nigel de Grey, Oliver Strachey, and Colonel John Tiltman, an utterly brilliant veteran cryptographer.

  Oliver Strachey, related to Lytton, was noted for his colorful good humor and his intense musicality. He was a friend of Benjamin Britten. When back in London, Strachey and Britten would enjoy playing duets. As the war intensified, Strachey would find himself taking a pivotal role in the Park’s decoding of Gestapo signals, heading a special department, which in the 1940s began to slowly decrypt the hideous bureaucracy of death—the railway timetables, the numbers of people being transported—that surrounded the Holocaust.

  Also highly notable among the codebreakers was Josh Cooper, a physically imposing presence—known to some as “the Bear”—in his middle years, and singular in his mannerisms, often given to exclaiming to himself. In the very early days of Bletchley, he was rather taken with this move from London to the country. “We all sat down to lunch together at one long table in the House,” Cooper wrote. Elsewhere he recalled: “A large room on the ground floor had been set aside for Air Section.… I remember coming into a scene of chaos with a great mound of books and papers piled on the floor.”

  Cooper also noted right from the start that “service personnel wore civilian clothes in the office,” but “put on uniform to go on leave, or on duty trips to London et cetera, in order to be able to use Service travel warrants.” As a security precaution, all personal post had to be sent to Bletchley Park via a London PO box. This postal system broke down, according to Cooper, when a relative of one codebreaker “attempted to send a grand piano.”3

  Cooper’s recollections fail to include his own spectacular bouts of eccentricity; such as the later occasion, recalled by another veteran, when Cooper was present at the interrogation of a captured German pilot. When the pilot gave out a “Heil Hitler!” Cooper inadvertently did the same, and in his haste to sit down after this embarrassment ended up missing the chair and falling under his desk. But what we do hear in these accounts of the very first days of Bletchley Park is the notion of a deliberate ethos, a studied atmosphere of genteel chaos that was perhaps fostered to encourage freethinking improvisation. Certainly, the way Bletchley Park was run was to become the source of future friction in the War Office.

  The permanent staff of GC&CS—a platoon redolent of cardigans, tweed, and pipes—around this time numbered around 180. Around thirty of these people were codebreakers. The rest were Intelligence and support staff. It was swiftly understood in 1938 that rather more were going to be needed.

  And so the serious business of wider recruitment was beginning. One internal memo from February 1939 stated that “three professors will be available as soon as required,” as though such men were machine components. The looming conflict also brought a shift in attitude from GC&CS.

  In previous years, according to one veteran, the department didn’t want to use mathematicians for codebreaking. The reason was that mathematicians, as a class, were not considered temperamentally appropriate. “They were definitely persona non grata,” recalled John Herivel, himself a fine mathematician (and author of one of the Park’s greatest breakthroughs). “Supposedly because of their impractical and unreliable nature.”4

  All this was about to change dramatically. Alistair Denniston had spent a few months visiting Oxford and Cambridge, assessing the likeliest young candidates. Among them was a deeply promising young mathematician called Peter Twinn; then there was a dazzlingly clever 33-year-old mathematics lecturer, Gordon Welchman, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Welchman—a handsome fellow with an extremely neat mustache—swiftly proved to be an assiduous, enthusiastic, and fantastically ambitious recruiting officer.

  The most talented young mathematician of them all, twenty-seven-year-old Alan Turing, from King’s College, Cambridge, had been sounded out even earlier, as far back as 1937. Between them, Turin
g and Welchman would quickly prove to be crucial to the Bletchley operation. And it is of course Turing’s name that lives on, inseparable from the Park and its work. In part, the success that this brilliant, tragically misunderstood figure was to enjoy at Bletchley subsequently led to the computerized world that we live in today. But it was also at the Park that Turing was to find a rare sort of freedom before the narrow, repressive culture of the post-war years closed in on him and apparently led to his early death.

  “Turing,” commented Stuart Milner-Barry, “was a strange and ultimately a tragic figure.” That is one view. Certainly his life was short, and it ended extremely unhappily. But in a number of other senses, Alan Turing was an inspirational figure. “Alan Turing was unique,” recalled Peter Hilton. “What you realize when you get to know a genius well is that there is all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself, if not to them, I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling with Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking. It was marvelous.”5

  The popular misconception is that of a brooding, asocial homosexual, trapped in a hostile time, unable to find happiness. The story is not so simple as that. Thanks to biographies, an official apology from the government and the Prime Minister, and even a play by Hugh Whitemore, the name of Alan Turing has become, above all others, synonymous with the breaking of the Enigma codes.

  Like Dilly Knox, Turing had attended Cambridge, though by the 1930s the university’s former Edwardian atmosphere of homoerotic decadence was being gradually usurped by the apparent urgency of politics. Some accounts of Turing make mention of his high-pitched voice, his hesitating stammer, a laugh that would try the patience of even the closest of friends, and a habit of concluding any social interaction by sidling out of the room, eyes lowered, murmuring something about thanks.