The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  There was also an enthusiasm for keeping fit and outdoor pursuits. In 1942, one L. P. Wilkinson, chairman of the Bletchley Park Recreational Club, sent this wheedling memo to Commander Bradshaw: “It would be a great convenience if the Summer House beside the tennis courts could be used as a changing room for tennis players. It would require little or no alteration. May we have your permission for this?” The gracious answer was a yes.

  There were other clouds on the tennis players’ horizons: not only a shortage of balls (a wonderfully polite surviving letter in the National Archive from manufacturer Dunlop regrets the inevitability of this), but indeed a struggle to keep the court itself smooth and even. A specialist firm—En Tout Cas—“the largest makers of hard lawn tennis courts in the world”—was consulted by Commander Bradshaw over the matter of the cost of putting these faults right.4

  Emboldened, the Bletchley Park Recreation Club also put in a request for “a radiogram” and Commander Bradshaw investigated the cost of getting a good one. The model favored cost £45—at the time an extraordinary sum of money. But a further technological innovation had caught the eye of the Recreation Club: “a combined television radiogram” that would have cost an eye-watering sixty-five guineas. Sadly the records do not disclose if this item was ever purchased.

  Of course there was live music too. Bletchley had tremendous choral societies; Gordon Welchman’s fond memories of codebreakers singing madrigals on a summer evening by the side of the Grand Union Canal were but a single example.

  Again, some of the Bletchley staff had a specialized interest in their civilian lives. One was a director of music with the BBC, while by 1942, one team was led by opera singer Jean Alington, and various categories and files in Bletchley Park huts came to be named after composers and conductors. These more musical Bletchley-ites would give recitals of Brahms, and of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Added to this, they were able to draw specialized artistes to the Park to give performances. Oliver Lawn is not the only veteran to recall the occasion when world-famous pianist Myra Hess came to give an evening performance. Opera singer Peter Pears also went to the Park.

  Equally impressive was the fact that Bletchley Park organized a couple of ballet performances, again bringing professionals up from London. When one looks at the opening scene of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes—a jostling crowd of young people desperate to get into the Covent Garden opera house to see the premiere of a new, specially composed and choreographed ballet—one thinks about a generation starved of this sort of artistic stimulation. One can easily envisage how the young of Bletchley eagerly leaped on these highbrow diversions as a means of forgetting their vital but otherwise often very repetitive and grinding work.

  As the war went on, there also emerged a Cinema Club, again presumably in stark competition with the two commercial cinemas that graced Bletchley town center. This was, of course, a period in which cinema attendances in Britain were still enormously high; most people would go once, if not twice a week. Oliver Lawn recalls catching such epics as The Song of Bernadette at the Bletchley Odeon.

  One film from that period not only tells us much of the national mood at the time, but also illustrates this thirst, manifested so clearly at Bletchley Park, for something a little better. In 1944, Laurence Olivier left the navy and went to great trouble to film Shakespeare’s Henry V. Commentators have long noted how the political motivations of Henry were toned down for this film, so that the audiences might not miss the patriotic echoes of what they saw on screen: English soldiers preparing to fight on French soil, behind a charismatic leader.

  But this Henry V is far beyond a simple tub-thumping exercise in morale-boosting fervor just months and weeks before the D-Day landings; its determination is to take Shakespeare’s language—and by extension, the heritage of the audience, the culture for which they had been fighting—and make it live fully. With its score by William Walton, it was almost self-consciously a film designed to proclaim the indomitability and brilliance of English art and culture.

  At Bletchley, the Park inmates were keen cineastes, though their tastes, it seems, did not run so much to Will Hay as to more specialized productions. The Bletchley Park Cinema Club was, as one veteran recalls, more likely to show productions like Night Mail and even the odd vintage German film. Bear in mind that this was a good fifteen or twenty years before cinema even began to be regarded as an art form.

  There were language classes too (quite apart from the more formal lessons held in Japanese at Bedford for those working on “Purple”); these would include not only the usual modern languages but also Latin.

  Clubs were not just academic. There were more traditional forms of socializing too. “In Newport Pagnell,” says Sheila Lawn, “we formed a very informal club. It was more a walking club, serving coffee and tea. Anyone could come in and we met people from the same village, we were all billetees together.

  “And then on your days off,” she continues, “if one of your friends or companions had the same day off, you might agree to go away with them: be it a visit to London, if you could afford it, or into the country for a walk. When I met Oliver, I remember we went down to Stratford, by train, on one occasion and we went to a play.”

  Toward the end of the war, the dancing craze was the unlikely source of a security panic at Bletchley Park. For the time and effort put by the Bletchley authorities into providing special dancing facilities had somehow reached the ears of a London journalist. He was called Harry Procter, and he worked for the Daily Mail. In fine investigative style, Procter was now hot on the trail of the story, inspiring a terse and rather desperate Bletchley memo:

  a) The telephone exchanges at BP to be warned to be on a look-out for a call from Harry Procter of the Daily Mail. Procter will probably ask for “Bletchley” or “for the country branch of the F.O.” and will wish to speak to the Club Secretary.

  b) Should such a call come through, the operator will reply after some delay that the Club Secretary is out and ask for Mr. Procter’s number to ring him back.

  c) The “magnificent dance hall” will be laughed off and we will explain that the truth is that we have built a small temporary room in the office enclosure for recreation.5

  It is nice to see, with this gambit, that the practice of “spin” is a little older than many now assume.

  But not all press coverage of Bletchley’s out-of-hours pursuits was deemed so hostile. Among the townsfolk of Bletchley and the surrounding districts, the dramatic theatrical productions seem to have made a considerable impact. Indeed, right at the end of the war, the Bletchley Gazette reported with some regret that the Bletchley Park Drama Group was producing its last play, and looked back fondly over the last few years of productions. The newspaper’s un-bylined reporter wrote:

  The Group in the early days were in great demand in the district, and they roamed about the countryside in BP transport, giving entertainments in conjunction with the Musical Society, in village halls…subsequently, the demands became so heavy that this could not be continued.…

  The Group was indebted to the people and particularly to the traders of Bletchley who have always given lots of support—such as the loan of cutlery and furniture and, in one case, last-minute gargles!

  One of the ways the Group was able to repay was in undertaking the makeup for the Co-Operative Pageant, when something like 600 faces were made-up…

  This newspaper report pointed up the accusations raised by a few local townspeople concerning the cushy nature of the Park’s recruits’ lives—for such an apparently intensive program of theatrical excellence must surely have taken up rather a lot of time. The reporter sided with the Park, at the same time giving no hint about what actually went on there:

  A suggestion that the Park people had plenty of time for rehearsal…was quickly killed. Life at the Park had not been fun. Transport to and from their billets; awkward working hours; the strangeness of communal life; and the Drama Group had been the means of saving a lot o
f people from a mere “work, sleep and eat” existence.6

  But there was more to it than that. It was to do with the spontaneous creativity of young people who, despite the terrific responsibility of their wartime roles, were equally earnest about the importance of art and culture—things that would be vital when the war had ended and the nation was to be rebuilt and remodeled.

  24 1943–44: The Rise of the Colossus

  By the start of 1943, Dilly Knox was succumbing to illness. The previous year, requiring an operation for a returning cancer, he had gone into the hospital but was reluctant to have the operation carried out, on the grounds that a man should not be transformed “into a piece of plumbing.” And so, for the past few months, he had been working from home, a house in the nearby Chilterns, in which he lived with his wife, Olive (he and Olive Roddam had met back in the First World War in the corridors of the Admiralty; they married in 1920 and had two sons).

  Now, nursed by his wife, he knew he was dying; but he wanted to hear no expressions of sympathy from relatives and friends. As he wrote:

  A wanderer on the path

  That leads through life to death

  I was acquainted with

  The tales they tell of both

  But found in them no truth1

  It was now, however, that he learned he had been awarded the Companionship of the Order of St. Michael and St. George. His son Oliver wrote of Knox at this time:

  It was not in his nature to be daunted. By this time eighteen or nineteen years old, I was given compassionate leave to be at home during his last days. He had just been awarded the CMG. It has been explained to my mother that security considerations precluded his being given some more illustrious honor. Far too ill to travel to London, he deemed proper receipt of the honor to be a duty; he insisted on dressing and sat, shivering in front of the large log fire, as he awaited the arrival of the Palace emissary. His clothes were now far too big for him, his eyes were sunk in a gray face, but he managed the exercise all right. “Nothing is impossible,” he said.

  After the receipt of this honor, in January 1943, Knox wrote a letter to his colleagues in the Cottage. Heartfelt, and piercing to the root of the nature of Bletchley Park, it began:

  Dear Margaret,

  Mavis,

  Peter,

  Rachel etc

  Very many thanks for your and the whole section’s very kind messages of congratulation. It is, of course, a fact that the congratulations are due the other way and that awards of this sort depend entirely on the support from colleagues and associates to the Head of the Section. May I, before proceeding, refer them back…

  He then proceeded to make several rather salty points about Alistair Denniston’s attitudes toward codebreaking and codebreakers, and about the way that, as he saw it, barely analyzed messages were handed over to Intelligence men. What this was really about, however, was the shift in Bletchley Park’s underlying ethos from a brilliant amateur operation into a steely, professional one—something Knox found difficult to accept in intellectual as well as emotional terms:

  Latterly, we have recruited from…the universities. And academic tradition does not understand the idea that a half-fledged result should be removed from the scholar who obtains it and handed over to another. The discoverer loses all interest in further discovery and the recipient has no interest in the offspring of another’s brain. Until we know who will handle and circulate any result we get, the aurum irrepertum of our search will very probably be sic melius situm…

  In bidding farewell and in closing down the continuity though not, I hope, the traditions of the Cottage, I thank once more the section for their unswerving loyalty. Affectionately, Dilly.2

  The honor was sent over to Bletchley, since Knox felt that it was as much an acknowledgment of the department’s works as it was for him. Increasingly at Bletchley, his had been a singular and some might say anachronistic approach to the breaking of codes. But it none the less evoked admiration.

  “He had this feeling for looking for anomalies,” says his colleague Mavis Batey, “and as ancient scribes did things wrong when they were copying out Greek texts, Dilly would always look for that sort of thing in the codes. He was the first one to extrapolate and really get down to the business of procedural errors made by operators.”

  Mrs. Batey remembers with terrific fondness how, even in the early days of the Cottage, Knox’s eccentricities had come to the fore. He would contrive, absentmindedly, to try to leave the room via the cupboard door. He would visit the punch-card operators in his dressing gown, even if it was the dead of winter. His enthusiasm for hot baths never waned. He was—an unusual privilege this, in straitened times—allowed real milk for his coffee, which came fresh from an obliging local cow.

  And when all the changes came to Bletchley Park—not merely the gentlemanly removal of Alistair Denniston, but also the mechanized systems that were being employed to break into Enigma, Knox was extremely watchful, and also on occasion fiercely scornful. But he was no Luddite. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, Knox was fond of Alan Turing, whose Asperger tendencies were in no way reined in at Bletchley. The playwright Hugh Whitemore, in Breaking the Code, added a further, speculative layer, hinting that Knox, like Turing, had homosexual feelings and had had such relationships in the past.

  Knox died in February 1943, and a certain style and approach died with him. The old cryptographic world of classicists versed in labyrinthine antiquities had given way to a new, mathematical, technologically driven machine age: the dawn of the computer era. Knox was remarkable in having straddled two such worlds, and with such success, right until the end.

  Ingenious though the Enigma machines were, it was always inevitable that at some stage a more complex process of encoding would emerge. It was equally inevitable that, faced with such demands, the theoreticians and engineering geniuses who worked for Bletchley Park would make giant strides forward in terms of technology.

  The one name that shines out in terms of engineering ingenuity was Tommy Flowers, familiarly known as the “clever cockney.” There are some who argue that the name should be known in every household—for, they believe, he was the man who realized the dreams of Alan Turing and truly brought the computer age into being.

  In 1943, Bletchley Park had seen the establishment of a new section known as “the Newmanry.” It was set up under the aegis of mathematician Professor Max Newman from St. John’s College, Cambridge, and the idea of it was to find ways of applying more advanced machinery to codebreaking work.

  It had been Professor Newman who in the 1930s, with his lectures on “mechanical approaches” to solving mathematical problems, first led Alan Turing to start pondering on the idea of “Turing Machines.” Indeed, Newman had lectured Turing directly. Newman, born in 1897, was a very popular figure at the Park; many veterans recall his openness, and his enthusiasm for everyone sharing their ideas. An American sergeant, George Vergine, had this to say about the Professor:

  Max Newman was a marvelous fellow and I always sort of felt grateful to have known him…we used to have tea parties…which were mathematical discussions of problems, developments, techniques…a topic would be written on the blackboard and all of the analysts, including Newman, would come, tea in hand, and chew it around, and see whether it would be useful for cracking codes.3

  As well as Enigma, German High Command was now making use of Lorenz teleprinter machines to transmit encrypted messages. These used the Baudot Murray system, a series of holes (though not Morse) punched through tape, each series of five in different configurations representing a different letter of the alphabet. What made these communications—which became known around Bletchley Park as “Fish” or “Tunny”—particularly crucial was that many of them involved messages sent to and from German High Command. These were not merely communications between men out in the field; they were communications between generals and orders from the Führer himself.

  The breakthrough on this complex system was made by a y
oung chemist/mathematician called W. T. Tutte. In the meantime Alan Turing, having returned from several months in the United States, eagerly dived into discussions on the subject, having spent his voyage back reading up on the science of electronic circuits. Turing spent many weeks formulating methods through which the thing could be cracked; these were referred to as “Turingismus.” Also present at Bletchley Park was one Dr. Charles Wynn-Williams, a circuit expert brought in from radar research who had the wherewithal to build digital circuitry with electronic valves that could switch a thousand times faster than a relay.

  It was at this point that the expertise of the Dollis Hill Post Office Research Station was called upon. Dollis Hill is a pleasant suburb of northwest London that overlooks Wembley and from which central London can be seen in the distance. The establishment in question—which also played host to an underground bunker for Churchill’s use—was at the top of the hill. It was here that Tommy Flowers was based. Along with Wynn-Williams, Flowers began work on constructing a machine known—rather sweetly—as the “Heath Robinson.”

  Looking precisely like the sort of zany contraption that one of William Heath Robinson’s illustrated inventors might contrive, this machine has been described by some veterans as being “held together with elastic and bits of string.” However, no matter how comical it may have looked, it could run teleprinter tapes at high speed, like a super-fast bombe, at a rate of more than 1,000 characters a second. It was this machine that was to pave the way for its successor, Colossus.

  The Heath Robinson did its level best, especially given the exceptional nature of its speed. It demonstrated that it could be used to find the settings on one bank of the “Tunny” code wheels. While it proved possible to break such codes manually, the velocity of the machine meant that more were ordered; soon, Bletchley had twelve improved models.