The Lost World of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  From translating decrypts to processing them, the work was often carried out under the watchful eye of a supervisor (LEFT). Professors would find work being thrown back at them by such figures.

  There were other crucial additions too, including a sickbay, to which a number of Wrens had to be sent – the job of operating the bombe machines, with their noise and their fiddly complexity, had induced minor nervous breakdowns in some. One operative recalled how the work – a demanding task combined with a frazzling 24-hour rota system – got the better of her at one stage. She was ordered to spend a couple of days in bed in the sickbay with a jug of water by her side. This she did and, remarkably, it did her the power of good. She got back to work straight away. There was also the crucial addition of a cafeteria. In the first days of the establishment, meals were served and taken in the dining room of the house, and there was waitress service. The cafeteria brought with it a distinctively American-style innovation: self-service.

  It also came to symbolise another important aspect of life at the Park and that was the apparent lack of fixed hierarchy. Bletchley veterans who had been among the younger codebreakers recalled how, after a gruelling all-night shift, one could go for breakfast and find oneself sitting next to a colonel on one side, and an American major on the other, with no sense that lower ranks had to take themselves elsewhere. All mingled as equals; and faced the equally daunting prospect of Woolton pies (a rationing invention which involved dispensing with the meat element and adding in a great many root vegetables), tarts that tasted of ‘cardboard’ and the very occasional meal where a salad came inadvertently garnished with some dead insects. The cafeteria staff were also very sharp and strict about portion control. One young lady, having had her main course, slipped on a pair of sunglasses and went back to the counter to try and get another helping, pretending to be someone else. Her ruse was spotted. On other occasions, American codebreakers looked on with wonder at one of the finest British archetypes. ‘They must have their tea, of course,’ noted American cryptographer William Friedman, ‘at 10.30 and 4.30.’

  An exasperated memo from the directorate concerning losses and breakages of tea crockery – note the draconian measure of instituting canteen ‘watchmen’.

  Tea was a continual sore point, if BP internal memos are anything to judge by. It was felt by the directorate at one stage that rather too much time was spent in the fetching and drinking of it. To this end, huts were provided with their own urns, which had the capacity for ‘70 cups’. But this in turn provided fresh aggravation for the canteen, which prompted another cross internal memo concerning losses and breakages of crockery. These, said the memo writer, would appear to be worse than those suffered on a man o’war. The implication was that the messy disorganised academics could not even be entrusted with teacups. And they couldn’t. Some discarded cups were found in hedges.

  Some of the American codebreakers admired the ritual British devotion to tea, but the authorities were annoyed by the amount of time each break took.

  Block C was possibly the noisiest of all the Bletchley sections; from 1943, this is where the Hollerith machines operated. These involved a card-punch system and had actually been developed for the retail world. But, rather like Alan Turing’s bombe machines, they proved adept at checking through vast quantities of information very quickly. Blocks D, E and F were to follow, and Block F was to hold its own special historical significance: the site where the computer age might be said to have properly dawned.

  The departments run by Professor Max Newman (the ‘Newmanry’) and Major Tester (the ‘Testery’) were in Block F, and it was here, later in the war, that the new German ‘Fish’ or ‘Tunny’ codes were broken. It was also here that the Colossus machine made its debut: the combined brainchild of Turing, Newman and the GPO’s Dr Tommy Flowers, Colossus was a super-fast machine working on revolutionary valve technology that could run through immense quantities of information. It was thanks to Colossus, and the efforts of the Newmanry, that encoded messages were read not merely from German High Command, but from Hitler’s office itself.

  Huge quantities of valuable information from around the world came to Bletchley via the most modern teleprinter technology.

  Added to all this in the grounds were garages (for the numerous drivers and motorcycle couriers), plus Nissen huts for the military police. For any of the Bletchley locals who had been familiar with these grounds from the Leon family’s annual summer fete, the sight of the blocks through the fencing would have looked quasi-industrial, as well as futuristic. There was something in the deliberate featurelessness of these buildings that oddly reflected the impersonality of the machine age. It is perhaps fitting that in the years immediately following the war, these blocks continued to be used by the most secretive of all Britain’s secret services: GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters). Their purpose was as a training centre for new recruits.

  Throughout all of this, Bletchley Park’s directorate confined itself to the first floor of the main house, where Nigel de Grey’s office looked out directly on to the lake. It was into the main house that each new recruit was sent upon arrival, in order to be greeted by Commander Travis, and to sign the Official Secrets Act. While part of the ground floor of the house had been converted in the early months of the war for purposes so secret that even the codebreakers were not to know (such as photographic development rooms, and a special annex for the ‘teleprinter princesses’, as the WAAFs who did this work were known), by the early 1940s it would not have been unusual for any codebreaker to wander in through the house to hear the strains of ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ (also used as the theme tune for Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs) echoing out from the ballroom, as the dancing enthusiasts trod a lively lunchtime step.

  Yet within the house some incredibly grave work continued. Brigadier Tiltman, who had an astounding aptitude for levering his way into all sorts of different codes, from Russian to Japanese, also worked alongside Oliver Strachey at one stage on receiving decrypts from Germany’s railway system. The men worked not in a hut but in one of the upstairs rooms. And so it was that, with horror, they were able to read regular reports of the numbers of men, women and children being taken to concentration camps and of numbers of ‘discharges’ from these camps. Brigadier Tiltman’s room was the nursery – the one still decorated with the Peter Rabbit wallpaper. At other points throughout his Bletchley career, it was noted that Tiltman did not like to work sitting down, and had a special desk constructed that would allow him to work standing up. And even though he had his own proud military rank, any other codebreakers nipping into the house to see him were treated with startling informality; one young recruit, in uniform, introduced himself by walking into the brigadier’s office and stamping his heels with a salute. The brigadier looked down at the young man’s army issue boots and said: ‘I say, is it really necessary for you to be wearing those?’

  Keeping the house’s secretarial staff in order was a fierce but fair PA called Doris Reid, who worked for Nigel de Grey. While the young girls who worked for her went in fear – Miss Reid was extremely rigorous in all things, from grammar to general behaviour – they also came to love her as ‘a true diamond’. Miss Reid, in her main house office, was at the administrative heart of Bletchley, succeeding in bringing a semblance of order to such matters as canteen vouchers and requests for leave.

  Night shifts played havoc with digestion; veterans recalled enduring weeks of ‘bumpy tummies’ as their metabolisms adjusted to rota work.

  In the early years, veterans recalled the establishment having at least something of the atmosphere of a country house, in the sense of its looseness and lack of formality. When Winston Churchill was to pay his visit in 1941, he would have looked out over a great muddle of wooden huts (with Huts 3 and 6 connected by means of a small wooden tunnel, through which documents could be pushed on a tea-tray, by means of a broom handle). Given the awesome dimensions of the concrete Admiralty Citadel on Horseguard’s Parade, he must
have been a little beguiled by the seeming untidiness and randomness of these higgledy-piggledy huts around the house. The later blocks spoke perhaps of a more professional approach. They certainly pointed to a future in which the art of codebreaking would become a highly processed science.

  Chapter Three

  THE CRYPTOLOGISTS

  From the lake, a 1939 glimpse both of the house and (RIGHT) the newly built Hut 6, where the German Army and Air Force codes were to be cracked.

  (FROM FRONT TO BACK) Alan Turing, Robert Augenfeld, Karl (surname unknown) and Fred Clayton. In February 1939, Turing and his friend Clayton sponsored two Jewish refugee boys from Vienna – Turing paid for Augenfeld’s education. They were in Bosham, West Sussex in August 1939 just days before Turing reported to Bletchley Park for duty.

  The eccentric, anarchic wartime boffin has become a British archetype, and the Bletchley Park story is where it finds its highest expression. We hear it in Mavis Batey’s (née Lever) affectionate account of her mentor, the veteran codebreaker Alfred Dillwyn Knox; when deep in thought, he would occasionally try to refill his pipe with sandwiches. He was also, apparently, incapable of finding the right door out of the room on the first go, heading at full tilt into store cupboards.

  ‘Dilly’ Knox (born in 1884) was a Cambridge classicist who had smashed codes during the Great War in Whitehall’s Room 40; very often inspiration would come in a bath that he had found in an office at the end of a corridor. He thought best in hot water. On one occasion, worried colleagues had to force open the door to check that he hadn’t drowned. He was engrossed in calculations.

  In the inter-war years, Knox worked with the Government Code and Cypher School, partly on Soviet encryptions, but also devising ways of defeating early versions of Enigma, which had been brought into use by Germany and also Spain. An expert on ancient papyri, Knox was fond of testing his female recruits to Bletchley with lateral teasers. ‘Which way round do the hands of a clock go?’ was one. The answer: it depends whether one is observing the clock or whether one is the clock itself. Such posers were intended as mental exercises to help when confronting intractable coding difficulties; to inculcate the habit of approaching insoluble problems from wholly unexpected angles.

  Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, photographed and sketched. A classicist who once challenged Sir Arthur Conan Doyle over the details of a Holmes story, he had a firework temper, which he always directed towards his immediate superiors.

  Mavis Lever (later Batey), who worked closely with Dilly as a 20-year-old from the University of London. He taught her how to crack codes by hand – a system using a form of slide-rule, known as ‘rodding’.

  Knox was 55 years old at the outbreak of World War Two and from the start of Bletchley’s work, there was a sense that his rigorous, time-consuming methods were being superseded by developing technology. Nevertheless, he was a force to be reckoned with, on and off duty. He was a terrifying driver, especially along country lanes; he was given to reciting Milton, and gesticulating along with the verse, his hands off the steering wheel. He also had a marked preference for working with young, attractive (and tall) women. The obvious reasons aside, there has been some suggestion that this is also because he found that women like Mavis Lever had exactly the right mental approach towards the exhausting work. In 1941, aged 20, Miss Lever was responsible for cracking the Italian Enigma codes that led to British victory in the Battle of Cape Matapan.

  Knox was matched in eccentricity by another codebreaking veteran, Joshua (Josh) Cooper, a large good-humoured Oxford classicist and linguist (an expert in Russian), known to some as ‘the bear’, who would inadvertently frighten new young recruits by suddenly shouting apparently random phrases, such as ‘Yes, that’s it!’ But Cooper’s aide, Ann Cunningham, felt moved to proclaim in later years that incidents such as the time when he threw a coffee cup into the lake because he could not think what to do with it were isolated. Although the idea that it happened just once is still beguiling.

  It should also be borne in mind that Cooper’s work in the Air Section against the Luftwaffe led to his cryptology career continuing long after the war at GCHQ. Cooper understood very well the impact that the coming computer age would have and was adept at communicating this to younger colleagues. His occasional outbreaks of falling under desks, or re-starting conversations with people weeks later at exactly the point that they had left off previously, helped to camouflage the intense seriousness with which he took his work.

  The cumulative effect of stories such as these is to help us find a frame for their unimaginably complex achievements. Yet there are other dimensions to their great innovations. Professor Max Newman, before he was recruited to Bletchley Park, had lectured Alan Turing at Cambridge, and had overseen his revolutionary paper ‘On Computable Numbers’ – a 1936 work meshing far-sighted mathematics and philosophy that heralded the coming of the computer age. Seven years later, Professor Newman was in his department, ‘the Newmanry’, working both with his apt pupil Turing and also engineering genius Dr Tommy Flowers on the Colossus machine – an electronic leap forward that would enable Bletchley to crack the more advanced German ‘Tunny’ codes. Newman was remembered not for eccentricity, but for genuine egalitarianism; ‘the Newmanry’ was renowned for its meetings where everyone could pitch in with codebreaking ideas, and also suggestions about how the department might be run more agreeably.

  Josh (Joshua) Cooper, attached to codebreaking since the 1920s, was renowned for his moments of hilarious madness, but this eccentricity disguised a brilliant intellect and astounding talent for languages. His brother Arthur also cracked codes and escaped Singapore before it fell in 1942.

  Professor Max Newman was a visionary mathematician who foresaw the spread of computers – and worked with Alan Turing and Tommy Flowers to bring that age into being. An expert pianist, with a sly wit, he was adored by those who worked in ‘the Newmanry’.

  FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, CLOCKWISE Some of Bletchley’s most inspired minds: John Herivel; Frank Birch; Jack Good; Rolf Noskwith; Peter Twinn; Harry Hinsley; Leslie Yoxall.

  Though at first glance it looks as if he is relaxing, this rare shot captures Alan Turing deep in study. Veterans recall that he was often abstracted, and that even mundane social greetings would make him look panicked.

  In recent years, some Bletchley veterans have felt that the tragedy of Alan Turing has crowded out the achievements of the Park’s other luminaries. Yet Turing’s story somehow seems to encapsulate the near-anarchic ethos of Bletchley Park’s greatest hours. As well as being arguably the finest mathematical genius of his generation, Turing was a prodigious runner, and is said to have once run along the Grand Union Canal from Bletchley all the way back to London, 48 miles away. This is to say nothing of his later adoption of a ginger cat that would – unusually – accompany him on country walks. And then of course there was the matter of his sexuality. Turing was gay at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, and punishable with a prison sentence. Turing’s eventual fate – prosecution for ‘gross indecency’, subsequent ‘chemical castration’ and loss of his security clearance – was far worse. He committed suicide in June 1954. But his time at Bletchley was touched with triumph.

  When he joined in 1938, he was just 26 years old. Together with Gordon Welchman, Turing took the principle of the Polish ‘bomba’ code-checking machines, developed in the 1930s by three brilliant Polish mathematicians, and turned them into the ‘bombes’ – vast wardrobe-sized machines (of which more in chapter five) that could run through thousands of coding combinations far faster than any number of humans. Turing went on to head up Hut 8, devoted to the problem of breaking into the Naval Enigma. This he and his team eventually did – but they hit a period of disaster when Admiral Dönitz made the decision to increase security and added a fourth rotor to the Enigma machines. Later in the war, when squaring up to the advanced technology of the German ‘Lorenz’ codes, Turing came a step closer to bringing the programmable computer to life with h
is contribution to Colossus.

  The art and science of cryptography saw a swerve in emphasis as wartime recruitment stepped up; mathematicians, previously regarded as temperamentally unsuitable, were now actively sought out, rather than the previous World War One preference for classicists. One young man, John Herivel, found a crucial way into the Red Luftwaffe codes aged just 21. Another prodigy was Oxford-educated grammar school boy Peter Twinn. He made the first successful Enigma codebreak of the war – the cracking of an old Wehrmacht message that nonetheless gave his team some leverage into the current day-to-day codes. There has been a suggestion that Turing nursed a small crush for Twinn, and indeed on one occasion asked him if he would like to go to bed. The request was politely declined, but the fact remains that Turing was remarkably open about himself, and was not shunned as a result. Bletchley recruits were more tolerant than the wider world outside.