Roy Jenkins

by John Campbell

  I always knew that it would be slightly grim, but I never quite realised how quickly all the petty little duties would crowd back upon one. I should think that the chances of getting a weekend off are quite remote, so many ridiculous little things does Robin find for one to waste time over. It really is incredible that the General managed to spend about half as much time running a division, not incompetently, as Robin does running a battery, and plagued his subordinates a great deal less too. This afternoon I had to do a barrack damage statement, which meant walking round all the billets with a little book in my hand writing down how many windows were broken etc. It seemed a symbolic first duty!

  More than anything Jenkins hated wasting time; he was impatient to get on with his career and was beginning to think that the whole army experience was a pointless cul-de-sac:

  In some ways this interlude at div. [Divisional HQ] was rather like my two months at the American Embassy. They were both slightly unusual, almost distinguished jobs. But neither of them built anything up or led to anything or lasted long enough to give me any really useful experience of anything . . . It is extraordinarily depressing to think how purposeless life has been since June 1941. Instead of being a fairly continuous stream as it had been before, it has been nothing but a series of unconnected interludes, some pleasant, some unpleasant but none of them of any long-term use . . . From a literary point of view I am slightly more well read than I was two years ago; but from every other aspect I know infinitely less and, politically, I believe that I have become less mature and much more inclined to be influenced by passing feelings.45

  Jennifer’s reply was a model of wifely wisdom:

  To answer your letter – I think that political balance and maturity are only achieved when one is thinking about the political situation constantly and to some purpose, and when one is trying to formulate and carry out a definite day to day policy. In the army you never think out the political implications of any particular situation – e.g. Italy – for any definite purpose such as a speech or article, nor are you thinking constantly and steadily about either the long term policy or the day to day tactics. In addition one is inevitably more subject to passing impressions and feelings when one’s living a life that one doesn’t like and is therefore slightly bitter and depressed . . . If you have in fact lost political maturity, I think it’s only a temporary loss, not due to any softening of the brain, but to the circumstances of the life you are living. I don’t really think that you will find the time since leaving Oxford a dead loss. You have always been most conscious of the defects of armchair politics and Army life will make it less likely that you will become a victim to these defects in the future. After all you aren’t a person who is likely to ‘mix’ v. freely and easily and probably this enforced ‘misery’ will be quite useful later on.46

  Here one gets a little taste of the quality of the political support that Jennifer gave Roy for the rest of their lives together.

  Roy was still pulling every string available to him to try to get a transfer to some more rewarding posting. Apart from anything else, there was an increasing likelihood of his being sent abroad as – in Jennifer’s words – ‘the shadow of the 2nd Front becomes more menacing’.47 At first he still hoped that his father might manage to get him a permanent job in the American Embassy; then he applied unsuccessfully for a desk job in the War Office. Finally he set about trying to get into Intelligence, to which end he started furiously trying to learn German. In his memoirs he implies that his eventual posting to Bletchley Park at the end of 1943 came out of the blue, thanks to the unprompted influence of ‘Sandy’ Lindsay exerting ‘the traditional role of Masters of Balliol . . . of placing Balliol men in what they regarded as appropriate jobs’.48 Lindsay was indeed instrumental, but he was not unprompted. Arthur had been pressing Roy’s cause on him for several months, initially through Frank Pakenham (the future Lord Longford), then a don at Christ Church. In June he had an hour’s talk with Lindsay in Oxford and told Roy that ‘The Master . . . wants to get you fixed in Maurice Allen’s show. That’s Intelligence par excellence . . . The Master is a very good friend of yours. He thinks you are a fine lad.’49, fn5 Roy wrote optimistically to Jennifer that ‘Lindsay, I gather, went so far as to say “Maurice Allen will get whom he asks for and he will ask for whom I recommend”. I hope he is right.’50 But a couple of weeks later he was not so confident. ‘I rang up my father last [night] & asked him to make yet another try at the I. Corps or something. I hope to God he can do something.’51 But for some time nothing happened. Jennifer warned against placing too much hope in Lindsay and thought Roy should make use of his temporary staff posting:

  I must say I don’t think you can count on the I.C. – Lindsay’s scheme sounds very vague and rather back door. I should be careful of turning things down. The best plan is obviously to ask the General – you are probably in the best position you will ever be for getting a good job, so it’s worth using it.52

  Writing to his parents, Roy wondered if ‘the Lindsay thing’ would ever materialise. There might be an Intelligence job in the brigade coming up. ‘Trying to decide what to do has made me thoroughly miserable for the last few days.’ Perhaps he should ask the General.53 But then in October Arthur’s efforts suddenly bore fruit. ‘I hope you are concentrating on German,’ Jennifer exulted. ‘It really is incredibly good to have heard from Intelligence in nine days. Lindsay certainly does keep his word!’54 Thus it came as no surprise, but a huge relief, that Roy was finally translated to Bletchley for the last year of the war.

  Now that they were engaged, Jennifer at least began to look forward to the time when they might be married. She had taken a fancy to Chelsea – ‘It is a very nice part of London and one we might well live in . . . There are quite a lot of small old houses that have been renovated and would suit us beautifully’55 – and even started choosing pictures: ‘I should also like a Cézanne [presumably she meant a reproduction] – preferably one of the views of Estac – the sea and the hill – and some of those Chinese drawings of animals – do you know them?’56 But she still made it clear that she had no interest in domesticity. Visiting a cousin who was about to have a baby, she wrote: ‘I only hope that if ever I produce any small giraffes or jaguars I shan’t be as bored as I am when being shown round the equipment of other people’s children.’57 Though the child when it arrived was sweeter than she expected (‘I usually hate babies’), she was still appalled by the amount of work involved in feeding and changing it. ‘One thing I am certain of is that one must have enough money to have lots of cooks, nurses etc. when one starts having children – then one leaves everything to them.’58 She was no keener on cooking and once, after staying with Jane Cole, told Roy bluntly: ‘You ought to marry her if you want to marry a good cook Darling.’59 Jennifer looked forward to a marriage of equals, like that of the great Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb:

  One does feel that with the Webbs it was vital that they should have met and had a life together, whereas with most people one feels that if they hadn’t married one person, they would have married another and got on quite as well. It is rather presumptuous to think of us after the Webbs, but I am absolutely certain that we were made for each other and that we could neither of us lead a happy or fruitful life without the other – and that really neither of us could ever find a substitute for the other.60

  While still in Sussex that autumn Roy caught ‘the worst flu I have ever had’,61 which turned into jaundice. After a miserable week being looked after by his batman, he was allowed to go home to Pontypool to the care of his mother. He was there for nearly four weeks, during which time Jennifer came down at least twice. But he complained when she did not write:

  You don’t seem to be quite as dutiful about writing this week . . . Perhaps you think that I am better and that it is not therefore so important. At any rate it must be the first time for about a year that I have written to you without having first had a letter from you!

  He spent his time feeling so
rry for himself, doing five hours of German a day (‘or even a bit more’), reading Proust (‘but not much’) and dreading going back to his battery after such a long absence.62 Far away in Italy, Tony, now on active service but still getting letters from Arthur and Hattie, heard about Roy’s illness and wrote sarcastically to his friend Philip Williams that Roy thought ‘this should entitle him not only to a wound stripe, but also to the 1939–43 Star, and I believe he is making representations to this effect in the highest quarter’.63 Roy’s relatively comfortable war would always leave him vulnerable to gibes from those like Crosland and Healey who had been tested under fire.

  Nevertheless Roy’s contribution to winning the war was as important in its way as theirs. After three months’ training at a cipher school in Bedford, playing ‘intellectual parlour games’ with an incongruous assortment of academics and other unmilitary oddballs plucked from the universities,64 he was assigned in April 1944 to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, the headquarters of the now famous but then top-secret Intelligence operation by which the British successfully cracked the supposedly unbreakable German ciphers, allowing them to read signals sent to the German commanders in the field. This brilliant achievement – made possible by the mathematical genius of Alan Turing and others less celebrated but no less important – may not have decided the outcome of the war but is usually reckoned to have shortened it by two or three years. Reading the German ‘Enigma’ codes in 1941–3 – particularly the naval codes – enabled the Allies first to sink a lot of shipping in the Mediterranean, starving Rommel of supplies that might have enabled him to take Egypt; then to halt the devastating toll of German U-boats on Allied shipping in the North Atlantic; and finally to accomplish the landings in Italy with the fewest possible casualties. Then, in a second stage from 1943, they began to be able to read German army signals sent by a non-Morse system known at Bletchley as ‘Fish’. By means of a machine called Colossus, built out of Post Office spare parts, which was the precursor of the modern computer, they gained access first to German plans on the Russian and Balkan fronts, and then to German dispositions to counter the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944.

  Colossus began operating in December 1943. Jenkins was one of a second wave of cryptanalysts, both civilian and military, recruited to decipher the material produced by this amazing breakthrough. They worked in two sections, both housed in Block F, one of several low brick buildings hurriedly built to replace the original wooden huts in which Turing and the other pioneers had worked in the early days of the war. The first section, under Professor Max Newman (and therefore known as ‘the Newmanry’), worked mathematically to reduce the astronomical probabilities to less mind-boggling proportions; the second, under Major Ralph Tester (‘the Testery’), then attempted to decode the signals by sheer intellectual ingenuity and patience. Jenkins was assigned to ‘the Testery’, where a twenty-year-old classicist recruited straight from Balliol named Donald Michie (later Professor of Machine Intelligence at Edinburgh) was given the task of teaching the ‘uniformed and exquisitely charming’ new boy the Baudot code.65 Once trained, the breakers worked day and night, in eight-hour shifts. The night shifts were the worst. Since the secrecy surrounding Bletchley was lifted in the 1970s many of those who worked there have described the brain-hurting work, the long hours of tedious frustration relieved by the occasional exhilarating success, trying to work out the possible patterns of letters that might make German words. Roy did not speak German; but he had taught himself enough over the previous few months, by reading the German émigré newspaper Die Zeitung and carefully making lists of words, to recognise words and likely combinations of them that might come up. Problem-solving of this sort suited his cast of mind; but it was grinding work, as he told one historian in 1998:

  We had to work on a semi-intuitive basis and sometimes your intuition worked and sometimes it didn’t. It was a curious life. It could be very wearing, particularly if it didn’t succeed. You could spend nights in which you got nowhere at all. You didn’t get a single break, you just tried, played around through this bleak long night with total frustration and your brain was literally raw. I remember one night when I made thirteen breaks. But there were an awful lot of nights when I was lucky if I made one. So it was exhausting.66

  ‘We tried extremely hard,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘feeling that it was the least that we could do as we sat there in safety while the assault on the European mainland was launched and V-1s and V-2s descended on London. And trying hard meant straining to get the last ounce of convoluted ingenuity out of one’s brain, rather like a gymnast who tries to bend his bones into positions more unnatural than he had ever achieved before.’67 Once, after a run of poor results, he was taken off breaking and demoted to less demanding work. This ironically coincided with his promotion to Captain (underlining that military rank counted for little or nothing at Bletchley). But after a few weeks he was relieved to be restored to the elite.

  Jenkins joined Bletchley too late to contribute to the early successes of Enigma. He did not decode any of the signals that helped save the lives of Crosland and Healey in the Italian campaign. But he was part of the team that enabled the Allied commanders to read the movements of the German forces in France before D-Day. Thanks to the ‘Fish’ decrypts, the Allies knew the whereabouts of fifty-eight out of sixty German divisions: the damage the other two were able to inflict showed that accurate intelligence was critical to the success of the invasion. In the later stages of the war, as the Germans were pushed slowly back towards Berlin, Jenkins and his colleagues broke several more ‘Fish’ links, which helped to hasten the final victory. At the time, however, and for many years afterwards they had no idea what they were achieving.

  By the end of the war there were around 9,000 people working at Bletchley – three-quarters of them young women, mainly ATS and Wrens – all sworn to absolute secrecy about what their work entailed. None of them lived on site; Roy was billeted in a nearby military camp, others in surrounding villages. But there was a thriving social life, with concerts and dances organised for the (mainly male) code-breakers and their (mainly female) assistants to maintain morale. Roy took little part in any of this: as before, he kept himself largely to himself. He was reunited with at least two Oxford contemporaries, in just the way that the same characters keep recurring in Anthony Powell’s novels: Michael Ashcroft, who had been at Bletchley since 1941 and transferred to the Newmanry in 1944; and another Balliol Old Etonian, Peter Benenson, later the founder of Amnesty International, who worked alongside Roy in the Testery. He also made one important new friend, the historian Asa Briggs, who had been deciphering Enigma (as a civilian) since 1942: he and Jenkins talked history, politics and economics and discussed the pros and cons of an academic or a political career after the war. Jenkins also proofread Briggs’ first book. But Briggs thought Roy unusual in that, faithful to Jennifer, he had no eyes for any of the highly intelligent and usually well-connected girls who comprised most of the workforce at Bletchley.68, fn6

  The secrecy of the work meant that he could write very little about it in his letters to Jennifer, except to complain of exhaustion. But at least he could now hope that he was doing something useful. Another drawback was that he got less time off. ‘The weekend seems very boring and barren without you,’ Jennifer wrote in March 1944. ‘It is quite a long time since we haven’t been able to see each other on Saturday or Sunday, even if only for a short time.’69 Their letters were still full of complicated arrangements for contriving the maximum possible time together, and miserable partings on station platforms. At first they managed about one weekend a month in either Oxford or London, until at the end of May Roy gave ‘the very dismal news that we have been placed under a travel ban’:

  We are not allowed to go more than 25 miles or be away for longer than 24 hours. That means of course that London or Henley is out of the question, but I think that, as it specifically says a radius not a distance, Oxford may be alright.fn7 As, however, it will obvi
ously make it v. difficult for us to see each other, I wonder whether you might change your plans to the extent of coming to Woburn for a certain amount of your leave.70

  There was still a neurotic edge to many of Roy’s letters. He was always assuring his ‘darling, darling giraffe’ that he loved her more than ever, as if he had never been quite certain before, or telling her that ‘last week was extraordinarily reassuring, darling’.71 After a frustrating day in London when they could not shake off Jennifer’s brother David, he wrote:

  I thought you were wonderfully beautiful yesterday, darling & I have never wanted so badly to kiss you, as you probably saw. I do love you fantastically much and I am sorry if my doubts of your love for me are irritants to you. I think that the desire for a more complete possession than one can ever attain is a necessary accompaniment to loving anyone as much as I love you. Or perhaps it is just the result of too much Proust.72

  That summer London came under attack, for the first time in three years, from flying bombs – Hitler’s last throw. Roy, safe at Bletchley, worried about Jennifer; but his anxiety only irritated her, as she explained with admirable sangfroid after one evidently fraught weekend together:

  Darling, I am sorry about being irritated, but I honestly can’t bear the continual conversation about buzz bombs . . . I do and will take care . . . but if one is to live in London one must take them casually and one must continue to work and eat. They don’t worry me nearly as much when I am actually in London, where everyone else takes them calmly, as they do when I am with, or have just been with, you. I know you are worried, darling, and it is of course natural and very reassuring to me that you should be, but please try not to repeat warnings at short notice throughout the weekend and try not to restrict the conversation to this one subject. I don’t of course mind telling you what happened during the week or day, but I find it a great strain (far greater than the buzz bombs) to talk about it the whole time. I hope you don’t mind this Darling, but I just must say it.73