The Lost World of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  THE LOST WORLD OF

  Bletchley Park

  AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE

  WARTIME CODEBREAKING CENTRE

  Sinclair McKay

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1 The House and Grounds

  2 Conversion to Codebreaking Factory

  3 The Cryptologists

  4 The Girls, the Pearls and the Musical Sergeants

  5 The Machines that Changed the Future

  6 Off-Duty Hours and the Pressure Valves

  7 Bletchley the Wartime Town

  8 The Worldwide Listeners

  9 Bletchley Park’s Famous Faces

  10 Broken Codes and the Course of History

  11 What the Codebreakers did Next

  12 Bletchley After the War

  13 Rescue and Renovation

  14 Royals, Dignitaries – and James Bond

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  Rare shots from the 1937 estate sale catalogue for Bletchley Park; before the arrival of the codebreakers, the garden had a certain quiet elegance.

  INTRODUCTION

  If you did not know anything of its purpose, you would not spare a glance for the estate of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Simply to look at, the big house – and its grounds and the two-storey concrete blocks and the wooden huts all scattered around the lake – are the very definition of unremarkable. The secret nerve centre of World War Two had to be based somewhere anonymous. The establishment that was to host the most radical, brilliant intellects of a generation needed a location so undistinguished and forgettable that it would never attract the attention of Nazi spies or of Luftwaffe pilots overhead. When senior dignitaries visited the site, they were urged to do so in civilian clothes; to turn up in full military dress would alert any observers to the high importance of this institution.

  During those war years, all that the local Bletchley townspeople knew was that the big house – formerly the home of a wealthy stockbroker turned squire – was now being used for government work. They could hardly not know this: many of the young people working at the Park were billeted in their houses. Beyond that, though, they knew nothing.

  Even for those who were recruited to this establishment, and who arrived at Bletchley railway station for the first time, that sense of muffled secrecy continued until after they had got past the military sentry box at the gates of the Park, then walked along the handsome avenue of elms, entered the big house, had their induction talk and signed the Official Secrets Act. When they had sworn their silence, they were told why they had been summoned. This went for everyone: the young undergraduates, pulled away from their studies at the smarter universities; the aristocratic society girls, set on doing their bit in any way they could; the expert linguists; the retired classics masters; the cryptic-crossword-inclined Wrens; the chess champions; and also the young soldiers drawn away from the fields of conflict, pulled back home in order to fight that war with the power of their vaulting intellects. Only after they had pledged to keep quiet – the penalty for transgression was never quite made clear, but many recruits assumed that if they said anything, they would be shot – was the meaning of this strange house on the edge of an unmemorable provincial town in the middle of rather flat countryside pocked with quarries made clear to them.

  Before Bletchley Park and the war, the Government Code and Cypher School was based in 55 Broadway, St James’ Park. Prior to the move, one idea was to house codebreakers in dormitories.

  One of Bletchley Park’s brightest recruits, Stuart Milner-Barry had won the title British Boy Champion of chess in 1923.

  These days, it is very well known that Bletchley Park was the home to the British code-breaking effort during World War Two. It is common knowledge that here cryptologists pulled off the near unthinkable feat of cracking the German Enigma codes. The work that was done here had a huge, almost unquantifiable impact on the course of the conflict. Whether listening in on the lethal U-boat wolf-packs; analysing the supply lines of Rommel’s panzer divisions in the North African desert; helping to hunt down and sink the Bismarck; feeding the Germans disinformation and then monitoring the responses that resulted in V-weapons being given incorrect co-ordinates and falling short of their central London targets; even intercepting and decoding invaluable messages from the inner sanctum of German High Command in the run up to and aftermath of the Normandy landings, the codebreakers seized an invaluable advantage: a means of penetrating deep into the heart of German strategy and tactical thinking. All this without the Germans suspecting that their ‘unbreakable’ code systems had been laid bare. It is equally well understood that Bletchley Park played host to a fusion of intellectual and engineering expertise that heralded the dawn of the computer age. But during the war – and for many years and decades afterwards – such things were known only by a very few people. For a very long time, the work of Bletchley Park and the dazzling achievements pulled off by its recruits were hidden deep in the shadows; a mass of dark matter in the histories of World War Two. Those who had worked there were obliged to keep quiet for decades afterwards about what they had done. One reason for this was that a great many countries after the war were still using versions of the coding technology that these brilliant people had secretly cracked. And as the silence continued, the fortunes of the big house – an eccentric construction that in some ways mirrored the capricious and colourful personalities who had gathered to work there in the war years – waned. It found diverse new uses, largely for technical training in telephony, but its fabric was beginning to disintegrate.

  A lot of the work was grindingly tedious; but women found a voice at Bletchley they may not have had elsewhere.

  In the mid-1970s, the first narrow beam of light was shone on the Bletchley secret by one of its veterans, Captain Frederick Winterbotham, in his book The Ultra Secret. Ultra was the term used for all intelligence that had been gleaned from the successfully broken Enigma codes. Many veterans were shocked that he had chosen to break his vows; the Official Secrets Act was meant to bind one for life. Yet this book was followed, cautiously, by other mentions of Bletchley in intelligence histories. By 1981, there was just enough information for the young novelist Ian McEwan to write a BBC play called The Imitation Game, about a young woman in a World War Two codebreaking centre. More veterans’ memoirs followed; but just at the point when the name of Bletchley Park was attaining some sort of familiarity, the old house and the Park itself were facing the prospect of complete demolition and rebuilding. A site of vast – almost immeasurable – historical significance was within a whisker of being transformed into a shopping mall with a modern housing estate attached.

  Lady Fanny Leon, chatelaine of the pre-war estate was assiduous both socially and charitably.

  This book is the story both of a house and of an institution. The codebreaking establishment was regarded at the time by some locals as a special kind of lunatic asylum. In some ways, they might have had a point. Bletchley, a modest town engaged in the modest industry of brick-making, and standing on a railway junction linking London with Scotland, and Oxford with Cambridge, had never before seen such a curious and diverse range of residents. Yet there had also been some colour and variety when the house was first bought by Sir Herbert Leon in the late 19th century; he and his wife Lady Fanny brought with them an enthusiasm for riding, a passion for horticulture and hothouses, and an enthusiasm for travel which saw them return from European tours with new ideas for titivating the appearance of the house. A few of Bletchley’s wartime recruits were architects by training, and they shuddered with distaste at the exuberant mismatch of styles – an awkward cupola copper dome here, some quasi-Tudor timbering
there, and an interior flourish of what one codebreaker described as ‘lavatory gothic’.

  For some recruits, the house and the neighbouring town were very unsophisticated and primitive. For others, though, hailing from less grand upbringings, the estate had the feel of a fine university campus. And the work that was done here was carried out with similar collegiate ethos; an intoxicating blend of mad energy and discipline and even a radical absence of hierarchy. In certain departments of Bletchley Park, everyone had a voice, and every suggestion would be taken seriously. From the most experienced of senior codebreakers to the youngest of the Women’s Royal Navy volunteers operating the complex machinery, this was an establishment in which each individual contribution mattered enormously.

  Given the intense security at Bletchley Park, and the post-war determination that many of its traces be erased, it is quite remarkable just how much photographic material has survived. Not merely contemporary shots of the big house, or of the extemporised wooden huts in which so many of those eureka leaps were made – but also a wealth of images of revolutionary, proto-computing technology, such as Alan Turing’s bombe machines, or Max Newman and Tommy Flowers’ Colossus machines. Now, it has to be said that there were also a number of unauthorised photographs taken at the time: shots of Wrens and codebreakers, working machines or hunched over desks, or simply lying outside on the lawn by the lake, soaking up some sunshine. These pictures were taken for the most innocent of reasons: young people wanting some memento of this dizzyingly intense period of their lives. Now they are utterly fascinating records of a crucial point in history – but back then, those images could have got their owners into trouble. They might have been regarded by the authorities as misjudgements that in the wrong hands could have inadvertently given away vital information. Of course, they did no such thing – and that is what makes the photos here such a delight to pore over. It is as if we are all now being fully allowed in on this secret.

  The hermetic atmosphere led to a great many friendships being forged – and romances too.

  The photographs are valuable for another reason too. Because of the mathematical and technical nature of the codebreaking operation, we tend to hold mental images of Bletchley Park as a rather austere place of spartan work rooms, mind-boggling machinery and serious young people, faces drawn with the effort and the pressure of the work that they were doing. The photographs tell a subtler, warmer and in many ways much more enthusiastic story. Away from the plainness of the huts, there is another life. Codebreakers found many ingenious ways to throw off the weight of their jobs: they formed theatre companies, they played boisterous games of rounders and tennis, they skated during the deep freezes of those cold wartime winters. The photographs also enable us to see unexpected sides to famous names. Given the tragic nature of his premature death in the 1950s, it is extraordinary and rather moving now to look at photographs of Alan Turing in 1939 and beforehand; they serve as a glimpse not only of an inherent cheerfulness, but also of just how young he was when he made those astonishing mathematical breakthroughs at the Park. Youth also figures large in the images of Wrens, smiling and laughing in the summer sunshine, recovering from all-night shifts tending to mighty, mysterious machinery, but with their thoughts very much on the dances to come with American soldiers.

  The photographs also allow us to gaze with some wonder upon the technology that grew out of Bletchley Park. This is a wire-filled world, a world where the use of valves was considered revolutionary. Decades before the first microchip, here is machinery specifically designed to take on tasks that would fry the human brain. We now live in an age when very few of us would know how to reconfigure the insides of our computers. These photographs enable us to wonder at some length what it must have been like, in the middle of a dark, silent night shift, to attend to a proto-computer reaching up to ceiling height which constantly broke down and had to be adjusted with pliers.

  Some of these remarkable shots of day-to-day life were taken very discreetly – for security reasons, photography was heavily frowned upon.

  In those faces of the young Wrens and codebreakers – those admirably serious and nicely composed head shots that were standard then – we also see something of the determination and pride that enabled them to work with such vigour. Underneath all of this seems to run a seam of good humour which in such an establishment was absolutely vital.

  Within these images there is a valuable sense of context: from the blackout tape on windows, to the ordinary streets of terraced houses in which codebreakers would have moments of blinding insight into Enigma, or where exotic figures such as the writer Angus Wilson would disconcert his landlords with his very metropolitan habits and dress sense. You occasionally have to remind yourself that this was all just seventy-five years ago or so. In some ways, it feels and looks further away than that. Even more splendidly antique now, though, are the wonderful images of the house when it belonged to Sir Herbert Leon and Lady Fanny. Here really is a lost world: grand weekend parties, lavish hunt balls, stables and gardens, innumerable servants gathered together for group shots, and the Edwardian elegance of the lady of the house herself. Even from its earliest days, the life of Bletchley Park was one of sometimes unconventional fizz and energy.

  Then there are the images of the fall and rise; the slow melancholic decline of the house throughout the post-war years and then its brilliant and heartening rescue by the Bletchley Park Trust, and the glorious restoration work which is still proceeding apace. The house of Bletchley Park is – by the standards of most historical properties – a stripling, having only stood for around 130 years. Yet it has seen and played host to more extraordinary feats and achievements than a great many far older stately homes. The codebreakers have granted it a form of immortality. The words ‘Bletchley Park’ are now synonymous the world over with British genius. The eccentricity of the estate and of the codebreaking establishment are here captured in a wealth of images that help to recreate a perfectly unique point in history.

  The 1937 sales particulars; note not only the ‘pleasure grounds’ but also the enticement of ‘factory sites’ by the railway.

  Situated between Oxford and Cambridge, with London just 50 minutes away by train, Bletchley Park was perfectly positioned for the first wave of recruits.

  Chapter One

  THE HOUSE AND GROUNDS

  Bletchley Park had a beautiful cricket pitch, plus an elegant pavilion that mirrored the architecture of the main house. It was sold before the war; the pitch was later used by Bletchley Grammar School.

  When the popular BBC television series Antiques Roadshow filmed editions at Bletchley, the crowds and the queues were prodigious.

  A few years ago, the television series Antiques Roadshow featured a couple of editions filmed in front of the mansion of Bletchley Park. Were it not for the illustrious wartime history of the house, it is extremely unlikely that it would have done so. Indeed, it is questionable whether the house would have been there at all, or whether it would have been cheerfully demolished with little in the way of aesthetic regret. The house itself does have a few admirers; but its many detractors over the years have had the better lines. However, the house and the site are actually fascinating in their own right, and the estate is a beguiling snapshot of a moment of social history.

  It is thought that some sort of house – though obviously not the present one – has stood on the site of Bletchley Park since the medieval period. Ownership of the land seesawed between various families, and various houses were built and then came down. Especially notable was an 18th-century Palladian effort erected by the antiquarian Browne Willis. By this stage, the land around had been imparked, then turned back to purely agricultural use, and then imparked again. It is possible, though we will never know, that the Browne Willis incarnation of the property was the most aesthetically pleasing by a very long way. But ownership switched again and in 1805 that house was demolished and practically nothing remains in terms of records.

  Throughout muc
h of the 19th century, the site was most probably occupied by a farmhouse, lived in by a Mr Coleman. But the mansion that we see today was most probably started (again, the records are not conclusively clear) by Samuel Seckham, a businessman, surveyor and architect. This was at some point in the 1870s, when the little village of Bletchley would have been greatly expanded, thanks to the railway and the works that came with it. The locale could never really have been described as a prime beauty spot.

  Sir Herbert Leon’s mansion was originally larger, and more architecturally unified, with a west wing that was pulled down before the war.

  As well as designing this new house, at first an unassuming construction of red brick and black slate, Seckham also remodelled the gardens and the fields around, landscaping them with lakes, and also avenues of trees that would help to muffle the clanking and shrill whistle screams from the railway lines, which some have suggested he found wearing. There were also lines of limes and elms, but not long after the house was built, he decided to sell up and move elsewhere in the county. Owing to its favourable proximity to London, he probably knew that he would have no difficulty finding a buyer. The grounds and the property were then bought by Sir Herbert Leon in 1883, and it was he who decided to add to Seckham’s original.

  Sir Herbert was a successful stockbroker who went on to become very active in politics; first sitting on Buckinghamshire council and then, in 1891, getting himself elected as Liberal MP for Buckingham. David Lloyd George was a frequent visitor to the house. Sir Herbert was then defeated in 1895, but his energies found other outlets, and he helped with an organisation called the Rationalist Free Press. With Bletchley Park, he took what was rather an ordinary Victorian house and, whatever one might think of the end result, it was certainly less ordinary afterwards. His builders used the same kind of brick and slate but Sir Herbert had much grander plans involving a ballroom, a library, an extensive still-house for cold storage of dairy products, a proper suite for his wife Lady Fanny, and quarters for servants.