The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Against this backdrop it was decided that the secrets of Bletchley must remain inviolate. In one sense, the conflict was not yet at an end. Throughout the campaigns of the early 1940s, Churchill had sanctioned careful releases to Stalin of information gleaned from Bletchley, while at the same time endeavouring as far as possible to disguise the source. It was deemed best that the Russians should have no idea what sort of decrypting advances had been made.

  Speaking of the Soviets, for Mimi Gallilee, work at BBC World Service in the 1970s offered a few faint echoes of the time that she had spent at the Park. “We were keeping a watch on world communism. We weren’t spies but we had a lot to do with dissidents. Solzhenitsyn came over. My boss was the first to have an interview and to befriend him here in the UK.

  “By the 1970s,” she adds, speaking of her own attitude to the past, “Bletchley Park was dead. Nobody would have known what I was talking about. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody.”

  Even the physical fact of the place itself seemed a little abstract to her, until one day in the 1970s, she decided upon a day trip. By this time, Bletchley was little more than a satellite to the gleaming new town of Milton Keynes. She went there with a friend whom she had known since after the war. That friend did not have any inkling.

  “At this stage, I still didn’t know about the Enigma. The only term I knew was Ultra. I knew what it meant, though not in connection with anything else…

  “So we drove along Wilton Avenue, got to the gate, and I said to my friend: ‘I used to work here during the war.’ She said, ‘Would you like to go in and have a look?’ I said, ‘I’d love to.’ But there was no one there—not that I could see, at any rate.

  “Anyway,” she continues, “one day, after the Winterbotham book was out, it was mentioned on the TV news, and my friend was watching. They talked about what was going on at the Park. My friend rang me and said, ‘I felt so proud, I heard this thing on Bletchley Park and you never said what you did there!’ And I said, ‘Well, there was nothing to say really…’”

  The physical fact of the town might have helped as a visual reminder, keeping certain memories strong, but even the smallest changes could suddenly make memory more distant. “I did not think Vicarage Walk could have changed a great deal, but it had,” wrote Gwen Watkins of the little lane in which she had been billeted during her time as a Luftwaffe codebreaker. “It was full of parked cars and expensive bicycles lying about in the lane.”

  Gwen Watkins had remembered an utterly quiet little lane, where the windows of the house were never opened and the front door was only ever used for special visitors and occasions. Now she saw a house with windows wide open, chintz curtains, music playing loudly from within. “I only wish that it had not changed,” she wrote. “I turned away, and never went there again.”3

  Curiously, as Oliver and Sheila Lawn recall, there was little in the way of official pressure to keep this silence after their time at Bletchley. It was just understood. “It was subconscious,” says Sheila Lawn, “I just never thought about talking. You’d just say that it was war work.”

  When the house and grounds were saved in 1991, they found themselves not only overwhelmed with memories but also able to talk further with one another about all that they had done—some fifty years after the war had ended. They decided in the early 1990s to make a trip to see the Park once more. Just the sight of it was a curiously emotional experience for both of them.

  “They had altered a lot since then,” says Mr. Lawn. “Buildings had been taken down. But there was much there that we remembered. It was like double vision. And I couldn’t believe having forgotten everything. It was like having a bit of your life shown to you again.” Having made themselves known to the recently set up Bletchley Park Trust, the Lawns found that their connections to the place were firmly—and amusingly—re-established.

  The Lawns, and thousands of others, had had a unique experience. Poet Vernon Watkins, who had served at Bletchley, said of his time there that it was “a situation, an era, and an excitement which cannot be repeated.” And one anonymous codebreaker, a few years ago, summed his own feelings just as acutely: “No work I have ever done in my life,” he said, “has been more fascinating or given me greater satisfaction.”

  29 The Rescue of the Park

  And so Bletchley Park’s life as the center of Britain’s cryptographic effort ended; the duties of GCHQ were transferred first to a leafy London suburb, and then to the West Country.

  But the old property in Buckinghamshire was kept going as a government concern, mainly for the training of Post Office engineers. In that immediate post-war period, the General Post Office, as it was then known, was a state-run concern. The business of telephone lines was masterminded by Whitehall as opposed to private firms.

  In the 1960s, there were some unlovely architectural additions made to Bletchley Park in the shape of a stumpy pebble-dashed block of offices facing the gate nearest the railway station. Come the 1980s and following the privatization of telephones—the new company was called British Telecom (BT)—and the advances being made in fiber-optic technology, the need for a specific training center began to dwindle.

  For a time the estate was multitasking. As well as the engineers, it also, for a while, provided a training center for employees of GCHQ. There was also a BT management school, a teacher training college, and a branch of the civil service called PACE (Property Advisers to the Civil Estate). But as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s, the old house itself was beginning to crumble, as were the many huts still dotted around. Even though the estate was handy for Milton Keynes, just a few miles away, it was clear that in business terms, its potential uses were dwindling. British Telecom did not own the land or the house; the government assumed, quite understandably, that it did. And so came the first germ of an idea to sell the land off and put it to more profitable use.

  But the house didn’t belong to the government. According to some reports, it belonged to the late Admiral Hugh Sinclair, the head of the Secret Intelligence Service, who had paid his own £7,500 for the estate back in 1937 when Whitehall was dragging its feet over the matter. The government had no business attempting to dispose of it.

  And in 1991, the newly formed Bletchley Park Trust stepped in, determined quite rightly that a site of such significance had to be preserved properly, and in such a way that members of the public would eventually be able to visit.

  The house by that stage was in a sorry state. The ballroom, with its elaborate carved and fretted ceiling, was semi-derelict and the ceiling itself had begun to disintegrate. Outside, the huts—which had survived all weathers over the space of fifty-odd years—were also in terrible condition. Yet it was immediately obvious to many—Bletchley Park veterans and non-veterans alike—that it would be worthwhile to turn the site into a proper museum where younger generations could learn of the vital work and the leaps of genius that had, arguably, made their own world possible.

  Bletchley Park was not alone when it came to the question of the sale of former war sites. Go to Eastcote now, or Dollis Hill, and you will find that these once sprawling secret institutions have been turned over to the property market. In the case of Dollis Hill, the rooms in which Tommy Flowers and his team worked so brilliantly on Colossus are now swanky apartments; Eastcote, meanwhile, was clearly a slab of real estate in an extremely affluent suburb that was simply too valuable to be let go to waste, although it was only quite recently that it was sold to developers. It scarcely has to be added that all around the country, former air bases have been transformed from semi-derelict wildernesses to business parks, eco-villages, and the like.

  Not all change is bad. There is a limit to the amount that one can learn from a potholed runway surrounded with weeds and roofless mess huts. But in the case of Bletchley, the case for preserving the site as close as possible to its wartime state was a great deal more important.

  Through extraordinary efforts of persuasion and fund-raising, the Bletchley Park Trust
painstakingly began work on transforming it into a place that the general public could come to visit and learn. And in ensuing years, Bletchley Park has found new, and rather wonderful, life as a museum. The main exhibitions, involving reconstructed huts and displays of Enigma, the Colossus, and bombe machines, are utterly fascinating, especially for younger visitors. For children—with computers in their classrooms and their bedrooms—the sight of these huge early proto-computers, with their drums and switches, wires and valves, hooks the imagination very strongly.

  And the museum is extremely popular, with an estimated 200,000 visitors per year. It is a splendid achievement. Though some of the huts, as I write, are still crumbling away—blue tarpaulins flapping in every breeze—the place has at last received a special Lottery grant for the purposes of restoration.

  To visit the Bletchley estate now is to get a vivid taste of what it must have been like to come through those main gates during the war. There is a security guard’s booth, past which are the first of the concrete blocks and huts. Then, just a couple of hundred yards or so up the driveway, you see the lake and the house itself. At weekends, the place is teeming with visitors and very often the lawn in front of the house plays host to special events, such as vintage car rallies, editions of Antiques Roadshow, or military remembrance services. In some of the huts can now be found re-creations of wartime conditions—plain desks, radio transmitter sets—that give the visitor an inkling of what it might have been like to work here.

  But the restoration of the Park serves an even better purpose. For the last twenty years or so, it has provided a wonderful point of focus for the people who were actually there. Even now, among the eight thousand or so Bletchley Park veterans, there are still those who have yet to identify themselves or have yet to revisit the Park. With each anniversary event, Ruth Bourne notes affectionately, “more come out of the woodwork.”

  Because no official staffing records were kept—if Bletchley was the utmost secret, then so also was the fact that one had worked there—it has been impossible for the Bletchley Park Trust to track all veterans down. Very often it has been a case of word of mouth, or veterans happening to have spotted a Bletchley Park–related item in the newspaper.

  But for many veterans, Bletchley Park now is in some way a cross between a social club and a shrine—just to walk through its rooms, to gaze at the dark paneling of the hallway, to be reminded of a small pothole in the driveway, is enough to trigger a flood of memories that, for many years, had to be utterly suppressed.

  Architectural historian Jane Fawcett—whose first visit back to the Park was in the autumn of 2009, some sixty-four years after she had left—recalled that the place was shabbier than it appears now. Oliver and Sheila Lawn, who had so loved the countryside around, made an expedition to drive along the green lanes that they had once cycled through; instead of which, they found themselves caught up in the endless roundabouts of Milton Keynes. Nothing ever stays the same. Yet the Park itself—together with the opportunities to meet up with people whom one was not even allowed to acknowledge for so many years—is a source of deep satisfaction, as well as enjoyment.

  Everyone else in the war had their reunions; from the RAF boys to the Land Girls, bonds were formed, friendships sealed, that carried on through the years after 1945 in the form of regular socializing and regular commemorations. The men and women of Bletchley Park were denied all this. Instead of an annual dinner dance, or even simple meet-ups for a few pints at a chosen local, they were instead left with their silent memories. Whereas for everyone else of their generation, the war was understood as the most fundamental of formative experiences, Bletchley veterans instead had a hole where acknowledged experience should have been.

  And as the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, wore on, there must have been a few private memories that became a little frayed. For if one can never discuss with anyone what one has experienced, then how is that remembrance to be kept pristine? But thankfully, the sheer intensity and uniqueness of life at the Park helped enormously in this respect, giving most recollection a laser-beam quality. And interestingly, both the Bateys and the Lawns maintain that it was a shade easier for them altogether; even though, as married couples, they found that they did not discuss the Park after the war, there was nonetheless that element of shared experience. Even a little element of complicity.

  These days, Bletchley Park veterans are most frequently asked: “But why? Why did you have to stay absolutely quiet for so long?” When any of the codebreakers goes to give a talk at a school, the pupils’ most frequently asked question is: “How on earth did you manage to keep it all secret?” In an age of Twitter, of instantaneous global mass communication, such an idea seems genuinely baffling to the young. “On top of this,” says Mavis Batey, “you’ve got programs like Newsnight talking about things like Osama bin Laden and giving away serious intelligence. It’s as if the idea of secrecy has gone.” Author Neal Ascherson, whose sister had been a Wren at Bletchley, found her discretion both admirable and astonishing. “That silence was very British,” he wrote in the Observer a few years ago. “Nobody else could have kept it and nobody was rewarded for keeping it. We wouldn’t be able to keep such silence today.”

  One answer, as previously noted, is a large measure of Cold War paranoia on behalf of the authorities, mixed with a sharp sense that a number of countries were still using encryption systems similar to the Germans. Aside from this, though, a slightly more philosophical explanation for the all-pervasive silence—as might be surmised from a wider study of the history of the intelligence services—is that secrecy has, until recently at least, been something of a British fetish.

  For secrecy, in some senses, is power—to know something that someone else does not know. The staggering achievement of Bletchley—the inspired lightning flashes of genius combined with the most dedicated work—was perhaps something that Britain could hold on to with pride as the aftermath of the war stripped the nation of its empire and its wealth, and left it desperately scrambling to find a position in this new world of East/West blocs. We might no longer have the firepower but we still did retain a native ingenuity (witness the ferocious 1950s pride concerning such innovations as the Harrier jet—we could still lead the world when it came to inventive genius). And as we moved from wartime espionage to the gathering possibilities of industrial espionage, the idea of staying mum retained not merely its importance but also its dignity.

  There is an element of old-fashioned patriotism involved too. To this day, there are a few veteran codebreakers who will not speak of what they did, and who are infuriated by anyone who does, despite the fact that the subject has been openly known about, and discussed, since the 1980s. There were, and are, those who feel that Frederick Winterbotham—the first man to go into print to reveal the Bletchley secret in 1974—was in his own way a traitor. These were secrets that had to go to the grave.

  But there is also the other side of the Bletchley Park story: the struggle for official recognition. Old soldiers have their medals, but what do the men and women of Bletchley Park have? In October 2009, Foreign Secretary David Miliband presided over a ceremony at Bletchley to award commemorative badges to all known veterans. It was a gesture, certainly, and came fast on the news of the Park’s Lottery grant, and also of the government’s posthumous apology to Alan Turing. But a commemorative badge is not quite the same as a medal.

  One Bletchley veteran, during the course of the research for this book, wrote to say that she was “sick to the back teeth” of articles about the Park placing so much emphasis on the “dancing on the lawn” and the social side of it. This, she said, was a time of war and the work was extraordinarily hard, and it is that aspect that ought to be remembered.

  Certainly it should; remembered and commemorated properly. Yet it would also be wrong to forget these other aspects of Bletchley life. The wonder of what all these men and women did is illustrated, in some ways, just as well by the recreational pursuits as the labor; for in both cases, ast
onishing efforts were made. The very idea of coming off a night shift having done hours of tiring, focused, pressurized work, and then turning one’s mind to the staging of a play, seems to me both extraordinarily admirable and brilliantly sane. “Even though I’ve had wonderful friends since,” recalled Gwen Watkins, “I’ve never again experienced that atmosphere of happiness, of enjoyment of culture, of enjoyment of everything that meant life to me.”1

  Nevertheless, it is daunting to consider now not merely the sheer intellect required, but also the powers of concentration and absolute, unsnappable patience that the work involved. And, as ever with these things, one always finds oneself asking: could this generation rise to a similar challenge?

  By coincidence, the other day, two newspaper headlines jumped out at me: one concerning the ingenuity of British creators of modern video games, and the other concerning Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who broke into the Pentagon system and who (as I write) the Americans are trying to extradite for trial.

  I am not about to draw a parallel between these people and the Bletchley codebreakers. I merely observe that British computer game experts are leading the field in what is basically an extraordinarily abstract job of feeding codes into computers, while Gary McKinnon, who is said to suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, had the ingenuity—from a perfectly ordinary home computer in north London—to hack into a mighty military system and get past all the Pentagon’s passwords and encrypted complexities. No wonder the American authorities have seemed so profoundly rattled by the case.

  The other point is that there may never again be a challenge like that presented by Enigma; for in times of future war, intelligence and code experts are extremely unlikely to be drawn from a pool of untrained amateurs. They will be sleek professionals, working in synchronization. Which only serves to highlight further the real achievement of all those men and women at Bletchley. Equipped with little more than intelligence, enthusiasm, and determination, they got stuck right into the job, persisting until they succeeded.