Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  Arthur Watson, then editor of the Daily Telegraph, responded by hosting a competition for anyone who thought they could meet Garvin’s challenge. On 12 January, more than thirty people travelled to the newsroom on Fleet Street to tackle the crossword under controlled conditions. The crossword then appeared in the next day’s edition.

  One of the contestants that afternoon was Stanley Sedgewick, a clerk with a firm of city accountants. He had become something of a crossword whiz during his daily train journey to work. ‘I became quite good at solving the crossword puzzles appearing in the Daily Telegraph,’ he later said. ‘I went along to find about thirty other would-be fast solvers. We sat at individual tables in front of a platform of invigilators including the editor, Mr Garvin and the timekeeper.’10

  In the event, four of the contestants solved the puzzle in time and although Sedgewick was a word short when the bell rang, he impressed observers with his ingenuity and lateral thinking. The contestants were then treated to hospitality courtesy of the Daily Telegraph. ‘We were given tea in the chairman’s dining room, and dispersed with the memory of a pleasant way of spending a Saturday afternoon,’ Sedgewick said.

  It wasn’t until several weeks later that he received a letter in the post. The envelope was marked ‘Confidential’. This was a time of fraught historical drama; the world was at war. The previous year, Hitler had commenced Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia, and the United Kingdom was in a state of acute vulnerability. Sedgewick was intrigued as he picked up the missive. What could it be?

  ‘Imagine my surprise,’ he said, ‘when I received a letter . . . inviting me, as a consequence of taking part in the Daily Telegraph Crossword Time Test, to make an appointment to see Colonel Nicholls of the General Staff who would “very much like to see you on a matter of national importance”.’11

  Crossword 5,062

  Daily Telegraph, 13 January 1942

  Across

  1. A stage company (6)

  4. The direct route preferred by the Roundheads (5,3)

  9. One of the ever-greens (6)

  10. Scented (8)

  12. Course with an apt finish (5)

  13. Much that could be got from a timber merchant (5,4)

  15. We have nothing and are in debt (3)

  16. Pretend (5)

  17. Is this town ready for a flood? (6)

  22. The little fellow has some beer; it makes me lose colour, I say (6)

  24. Fashion of a famous French family (5)

  27. Tree (3)

  28. One might of course use this tool to core an apple (6,3)

  31. Once used for unofficial currency (5)

  32. Those well brought up help these over stiles (4,4)

  33. A sport in a hurry (6)

  34. Is the workshop that turns out this part of a motor a hush-hush affair? (8)

  35. An illumination functioning (6)

  Down

  1. Official instruction not to forget the servants (8)

  2. Said to be a remedy for a burn (5,3)

  3. Kind of alias (9)

  5. A disagreeable company (5)

  6. Debtors may have to this money for their debts unless of course their creditors do it to the debts (5)

  7. Boat that should be able to suit anyone (6)

  8. Gear (6)

  11. Business with the end in sight (6)

  14. The right sort of woman to start a dame school (3)

  18. ‘The war’ (anag.) (6)

  19. When hammering take care not to hit this (5,4)

  20. Making sound as a bell (8)

  21. Half a fortnight of old (8)

  23. Bird, dish or coin (3)

  25. This sign of the Zodiac has no connection with the Fishes (6)

  26. A preservative of teeth (6)

  29. Famous sculptor (5)

  30. This part of the locomotive engine would sound familiar to the golfer (5)

  *

  Bletchley Park is the name of the estate in rural Buckinghamshire, fifty miles north-west of London, where a team of men and women were assembled to work on the most secret of missions. The Enigma machine was an encryption device used by Nazi Germany across all branches of its armed forces. The devices were small, not dissimilar to a typewriter in a wooden box, with an encryption technology that consisted of an electromechanical rotor mechanism that scrambled the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. An operator would enter text on the keyboard and another would write down which of twenty-six lights above the keyboard illuminated with each key press. Many in German high command thought that it was unbreakable.

  The group at Bletchley Park was recruited by Britain’s secret intelligence services to try, among other things, to crack the Enigma. The site was a mansion that consisted of ‘an ugly mix of mock-Tudor and Gothic styles, built in red brick and dominated on one side by a large copper dome turned green by exposure to the elements’, according to Michael Smith in his superb book The Secrets of Station X. Much of the work took place in temporary wooden huts constructed in the grounds.

  Although these huts were rudimentary, they would play host to some of the most important (and fascinating) activity of the Second World War. The Bletchley Park team cracked the Enigma, providing a treasure trove of information that would prove vital to the overall war effort. Some argue that the intelligence shortened the war by up to three years. Others claim that it altered the outcome itself. Winston Churchill described Bletchley Park as ‘the goose that laid the golden egg’.

  Now, if you were recruiting a crack team of code breakers, I am guessing you would want to hire world-class mathematicians. This was precisely the approach of Alistair Denniston, a diminutive Scot, when he was asked to head up the Bletchley Park operation. In 1939, he hired Alan Turing, then a twenty-seven-year-old Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, who is widely considered among the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, and Peter Twinn, a twenty-three-year-old from Brasenose College, Oxford. Over time, more mathematicians and logicians would be added to the team.

  But Denniston, known as A. G. D. to his colleagues, had an important insight. He realised that solving a complex, multidimensional problem requires cognitive diversity. He needed a team of rebels, not a team of clones. A group of Alan Turings – even if such a group existed – could not have got the job done. This is why he cast his net wider than many thought sensible or desirable. Denniston realised that he needed coverage across the problem space.12

  As Smith notes in The Secrets of Station X, Denniston’s recruits included Leonard Foster, a scholar of German and the Renaissance, Norman Brooke Jopson, a professor of comparative philology, Hugh Last, the historian, and A. H. Campbell, a legal philosopher. He also tapped up J. R. R. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Although Tolkien took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School, he ultimately decided to stay in Oxford. Cryptography’s loss was literature’s gain: during the war years Tolkien would write the bulk of The Lord of the Rings.13

  The Bletchley Park team was diverse across multiple dimensions. They had different intellectual backgrounds, but also demographic backgrounds. Turing was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal. The majority of the staff were women, albeit often in administrative roles (Bletchley Park was by no means immune from the sexism in broader society). There were many high-ranking Jewish cryptanalysts. There were also people of different religions and social backgrounds.14

  Why did any of this matter when it came to cracking a code? Isn’t this just about logic and number-crunching? In fact, like all complex tasks, the challenge hinged upon multiple layers of insight. Take the conundrum that became known as ‘Cillies’. These were sequences of three letters used by German signals operators for the message settings on the machines, for which they would often use girlfriends’ names, or perhaps the first three letters of a swear word. They were called Cillies because one of the first spotted was CIL, an abbreviation of Cillie, a German girl’s name. These ‘tells’ would
help the team narrow down the task of cracking the code.15

  Code-breaking, then, is not just about understanding data, it is also about understanding people. ‘One was thinking all the time of the psychology of what it was like to be in the middle of the fighting when you were supposed to be encoding a message for your general and you had to put three or four letters in these little windows and in the heat of the battle you would put up your girlfriend’s name or dirty four-letter German words,’ one of the young female codebreakers, said. ‘I am the world’s expert on dirty German four-letter words!’16

  The desire to recruit crossword enthusiasts emerged from the same quest to gain insights from across the problem space. It might have seemed odd that the recruiters at Bletchley Park had been scrutinising the Daily Telegraph crossword competition. It might have seemed almost frivolous in a time of war. But they were operating from the holistic perspective. They had made the vital leap of imagination that crosswords have critical features in common with cryptography.

  ‘Whether it is a simple code, or something as complex as the Enigma cipher which the Bletchley codebreakers were working on, the trick is making links between letters and words,’ Smith said. ‘Crosswords are the same sort of lateral-thinking exercise.’17

  Shortly before her death in 2013, Mavis Batey, who helped to crack the Italian Enigma, which would prove crucial to Britain winning the Battle of Matapan, gave an interview which showcased her capacity for lateral thinking. ‘My daughter worked in the Bodleian Library,’ she said, ‘and one day, she mentioned she had been working on “J” floor. “J”, I said, “10 floors down”. And she looked at me oddly and asked how I could have instantly known that.’

  There was a human element, too, a point made by the science writer Tom Chivers:

  Crosswords are about getting inside the mind of your opponent, and in the same way, code-breaking was about getting inside the mind of your enemy. The code-breakers came to know the people encoding the messages individually, by their styles, as crossword-solvers come to know setters. Mavis Batey worked out that two of the Enigma machine operators had girlfriends called Rosa.18

  The letter that arrived on Stanley Sedgewick’s doorstep wasn’t a punt. It wasn’t about diversity for the sake of it. No, this was diversity precision-engineered to maximise collective intelligence. ‘It took imagination to bring together the different minds to solve a fiendishly difficult problem,’ Smith, who was an intelligence officer before becoming a journalist and author, told me.

  To put it another way, cracking the Enigma code relied on cracking a prior code: the diversity code. How easy it would have been to hire brilliant individuals of a similar ilk and background. How easy to hire mathematicians who were superb at analysing data from the Enigma machines, but might not have stopped to wonder about their human operators. By taking a step back, by pondering the blind spots in any perspective, by having the ingenuity to seek insights across the universe of useful ideas, Bletchley Park came to express a collective intelligence of an unusual and remarkable kind.

  George Steiner, the philosopher and critic, described Bletchley Park as ‘the single greatest achievement of Britain during 1939–45, perhaps during the 20th century as a whole.’ Bill Bundy, an American code-breaker who worked at Bletchley, and would go on to become Assistant Secretary of State in the US government, said that he had never worked with a group of people that was ‘more thoroughly dedicated and with such a range of skills, insight and imagination’.19

  After he received his letter, Sedgewick took up the invitation to visit Colonel Nicholls of the General Staff, who also happened to be the head of MI8, the British intelligence department. ‘I arranged to attend at Devonshire House in Piccadilly, the headquarters of MI8, and found myself among a few others who had been contacted in the same circumstances,’ he later said. ‘Thus it was that I reported to “the spy school” at 1, Albany Rd, Bedford.’

  Once he arrived at Bletchley Park, Sedgewick was put to work in Hut Ten, which focused on intercepting weather codes. These were crucial for Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force, helping them to make more informed operational decisions, but they had an additional purpose. They were used as cribs for the Enigma machine used by the German Navy.FN5

  Cracking this code turned out to be of incalculable significance, playing a key role in the Battle of the Atlantic. It enabled the convoys from America to elude the German U-Boats that lay in wait, creating an umbilical link between the United States and Europe, thus enabling Britain to benefit from the merchant supplies that were crucial to continue fighting. One source estimates that it saved up to 750,000 tons of shipping in December 1942 and January 1943 alone.

  ‘When I talked to Sedgewick a few years before his death, what struck me the most was his modesty and sense of duty,’ Smith told me. ‘He had a rather mundane job before the war, so being recruited to Bletchley Park represented a fascinating challenge. My impression is that he had the time of his life, working with a remarkable team on the most important of missions.’

  And this is how a quietly spoken clerk who learned to solve crosswords on his daily commute helped to defeat Nazi Germany. Stanley Sedgewick was a member of one of history’s finest teams of rebels.

  3

  Constructive Dissent

  I

  Shortly after midnight on 10 May 1996, Rob Hall and his team entered the Death Zone. From the South Col, the pitiless expanse of rock-hard ice and windswept boulders where they had camped overnight in gale-force winds, it was 3,117 vertical feet to the summit of the world’s highest mountain. If everything went to plan, they would be stepping onto the apex of Mount Everest, with its Buddhist prayer flags and assorted mementos, in twelve hours’ time.

  In addition to Hall, a bearded thirty-five-year-old, who was leader of the expedition, there were two further guides – Andy Harris and Mike Groom – Sherpas and eight clients. The clients were experienced climbers, but didn’t have the world-class technical credentials to climb Everest unaided. Their number included Jon Krakauer, an author and adventurer who was writing up the expedition for Outside magazine, Beck Weathers, a pathologist from Texas, with ten years of mountaineering experience, and Yasuko Namba, a forty-seven-year-old businesswoman from Tokyo who had climbed the tallest mountains on six of the world’s seven continents. A successful ascent of Everest would take her into the record books as the oldest woman to complete all Seven Summits.

  Hall was confident in his team, and his preparations. He had summited Everest four times previously and combined supreme technical skill with agility and strength. He had met Jan, his wife, on the way to an Everest attempt in 1990 (a doctor, she was working at a clinic below Base Camp) and fell in love. ‘I asked Jan to go out with me as soon as I got down from Everest,’ he would later say.1 Their first date had been climbing Mount McKinley in Alaska, and they married two years later. In 1993, they summited Everest together, only the third married couple to do so.2

  Jan usually worked out of Base Camp during Hall’s attempts on Everest, but this time she had to turn down the chance. She was seven months pregnant. That gave the climb an even greater sense of anticipation for Hall. When he returned home to New Zealand, he would experience the thrill of becoming a father for the first time. ‘I can’t wait,’ he said.

  But Hall was experienced enough to know that every step upwards would take the team ever higher into peril. The South Col is five miles above sea level, the air so thin that the climbers were now using bottled oxygen, masks strapped to their faces as their bodies cowered against the ferocious demands of the troposphere. ‘Every minute you remain at this altitude and above, your minds and bodies are deteriorating,’ Hall told his team. Krakauer would write: ‘Brain cells were dying. Our blood was growing dangerously thick and sludge-like. Capillaries in our retinas were spontaneously haemorrhaging. Even at rest, our hearts beat at a furious rate.’3

  As the group looked up at the famous triangular face of the peak known locally as Chomolungma, ‘Goddess Mothe
r of the World’, they knew the technical challenges on the final ascent would be exacting. First, the patient climb to the Balcony, headlamps illuminating the route, ropes traversing the slope, the potential for a deadly rock-fall an ever-present fear. Then, the ascent to the South Summit, steep and continuous, the rising sun bathing Lhotse to the south in phantasmagorical light.

  And then, just beneath the summit proper, the Hillary Step, named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to make the top alongside Sherpa Tenzing, and the most famous vertical face in all climbing. ‘The most formidable-looking problem on the ridge – a rock step some 40 feet high,’ Hillary would write. ‘The rock itself, smooth and almost holdless, might have been an interesting Sunday afternoon problem to a group of expert climbers in the Lake District, but here it was a barrier beyond our feeble strength to overcome.’4

  Everest is not, according to insiders, the most beautiful of the world’s peaks. It is bulky and prosaic compared with the soaring silhouettes that comprise many of the great mountains. But what it lacks in aesthetic appeal, it makes up for in mystique. ‘I stared at the peak for perhaps 30 minutes, trying to apprehend what it would be like to be standing on that gale-swept vertex,’ Krakauer wrote as he beheld the massif on the trek from the Lukla airstrip to Base Camp. ‘Although I’d ascended hundreds of mountains, Everest was so different from anything I’d previously climbed that my powers of imagination were insufficient for the task. The summit looked so cold, so impossibly far away.’

  Yet, despite its mystique, Everest is also deadly. Since the mountain had first been attempted by a British expedition in 1921, 130 climbers had died, an attrition rate of one fatality for every four climbers to reach the top.5 Perhaps the most famous death was also one of the earliest, that of George Leigh Mallory in 1924. With rudimentary equipment, but astonishing courage, the Englishman dared the final ascent on 8 June along with his companion Andrew ‘Sandy’ Irvine.FN1