The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (12 page)

Already, the question of security was paramount. Should the senior ranks of the general military be allowed to know the provenance of this rich seam of intelligence? The problem was that the more people who knew, the more chance that the Germans might learn of it too.

Something of this tension is revealed in an earlier letter written by Alistair Denniston to Commander Saunders of the Royal Navy. It began: ‘Dear Saunders – I am about to speak bluntly', and continued thus:

The memo continued, rather saltily:

Even though the Park had done very well in principle by breaking the Yellow key, the fact was that none of the intelligence it gathered was used in any form throughout the Norwegian campaign.

And, in these early days when codes were broken ‘by hand', there was already a certain amount of resistance among high-ranking officers not in the know; they were concerned about this seemingly miraculous stream of information, and whether or not it could be trusted. With the nature of Bletchley not being mentioned to anyone – especially in the early months of the war – it had to be assumed by military commanders that information was being supplied not by codebreakers, but by spies on the ground. And spies, however useful in some sense, were also notoriously unreliable. As the conflict unfolded, there were to be instances when vital tips picked up at Bletchley Park were dismissed by senior officers simply because it was felt that the information had been gleaned from untrustworthy quarters.

‘The German strategy,' wrote codebreaker Jack Copeland, ‘was to push Britain towards defeat by sinking the convoys of merchant ships that were Britain's lifeline, bringing food, raw materials, and other supplies across the Atlantic from north America.'
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Throughout 1940, those U-boat ‘wolf packs' succeeded in sinking hundreds of ships. Yet there had been a further turn in Bletchley's fortunes in February 1940. In the dark waters of the bitterly cold Firth of Clyde, near Glasgow, a German U-boat – U33 – was detected as it was laying mines in the mouth of the estuary. HMS
Gleaner
, a minesweeper, detected the craft, and released depth charges which brought it to the surface. Its crew, stranded in the open, freezing waters, were forced to surrender. On board the submarine was an Enigma machine. In the pockets of one of the submariners were three of the machine's code wheels.

Bletchley thus discovered that the naval Enigma was using a choice of eight code wheels. The Hut 8 codebreakers, led by Alan Turing, realised that they faced several colossal problems. Not only were the naval Enigma operators more disciplined than their counterparts in the army, tending to make fewer mistakes such as repeated call-signs, or the use, for test purposes, of girlfriends' names that provided codebreakers with invaluable cribs. Now, with this latest discovery, the number of potential combinations of wheel settings – millions of them – was hugely increased.

There was a further complication. The sender enciphered each message, then super-enciphered it – once by using the Enigma and the second time by hand, using bigram tables. These tables set out substitutions for pairs of letters; and the tables were changed day by day according to a very strict calendar. The task of cracking this was going to be the most formidable challenge the Park faced.

Of course, the other Huts also faced the problem of getting regular breaks into Enigma keys. While work proceeded painstakingly on Alan Turing's reinvention of the Polish ‘bombas' – machines that could check off hundreds of combinations at top speed – the terrible pressure on senior individuals remained. The growing tension is perhaps illustrated in a lengthy and emotional draft resignation letter written by Dilly Knox sometime in the spring of 1940.

Knox's health was not good, which may have contributed to the angry tone of the letter. In it, among many other things, he gave as his reasons for wanting to go slights that had been perpetrated before the start of the war. Although there is no indication as to whom the letter was finally to be addressed, it was clearly someone higher up than the Director of Bletchley Park. Indeed, given Knox's
long-standing friendship with Alistair Denniston, his view of his work is astonishingly intemperate:

And the last few paragraphs of Knox's letter contained an eyebrow-raising burst of anger:

Yet he had still not finished. The most unpleasantly acidic sentiments were saved to the very last:

The document is now held in the archives and there is no marking on it to suggest that it was sent; or if it was, how it was received. Knox stayed at Bletchley Park until his ill-health made it impossible to remain; he was, on the occasion of this letter, clearly talked down from the parapet. Alistair Denniston's son Robin was later to brilliantly understate the fraught relationship between Knox and Denniston: ‘Dilly Knox, the most brilliant of all [the staff] had not the same collegiate attitude to management.' Knox, he said, was also ‘difficult to manage'.

But under such pressure, it was perhaps inevitable that frustrations would be vented volcanically. The fascinating thing is the senior staff seemed to succeed in not taking it out on the younger people working for them. We must remind ourselves that when it came to his own team of girls, Knox was never anything less than generosity and consideration. In August 1940, he was concerned about the amount of money they were getting and wrote in a memo:

But the really impressive thing about this, and other leaps forward made with Colossus, the successor to the bombes, was that they were made in such incredibly demanding circumstances.

The months between September 1939 and the spring of 1940 had given Bletchley Park the advantage of a quiet run-up; but once Britain was caught up wholly in the conflict, this luxury was gone. From the need to try and anticipate bombing raids, to the later stalking games being played in the north Atlantic between the convoys and the U-boats, information provided by Bletchley was crucial. And the demands for it were intense. So how did the younger code-breakers deal individually with such a crushing weight of expectations? In the case of one particular Bletchley couple, it was with remarkable coolness.

As Mavis Batey says, ‘At the time, you took it as a matter of fact … we'd be given the message, with the instruction “jumbo rush” which meant absolutely all out, no one do anything else, get it through. It was all about an invasion.

‘But we had no idea where the invasion was going to be until we turned on the radio in the morning and heard that we had landed in North Africa. And we'd think, “Oh, that's what we were doing, was it?” But we never felt terribly “aren't we clever” or anything like that.

‘The authorities were very sensible about that,' adds Mrs Batey. ‘Just imagine that the codework in front of you is a crossword. If you had someone breathing down your neck and saying: “You've got to get it done in five minutes,” it wouldn't help at all.'

‘It wouldn't have done any good to get worked up about it,' says her husband Keith. ‘And you got used to doing it. When you have been in a situation before, you get less worked up about it. I dare say
if you were just plonked down and told that there was a war going on, you would get bothered about it. But given that you have been at it for several months, years … we got hardened, I suppose.

‘Some people may have got stressed but I don't know anybody who did. Whether the senior people got worked up, though,' he adds, ‘they could have done.'

In fact, Dilly Knox was not alone in getting ‘worked up'. Angus Wilson, who joined Hut 8 in the early 1940s, is now one of those Park figures who evokes the fondest and most vivid memories, even in people who did not work directly alongside him. This is probably because Wilson (like Alan Turing) made few attempts to disguise his homosexuality, or to tone down his colourful manner. ‘Angus Wilson was as queer as a coot,' says Sarah Baring, herself not inclined to tone it down. ‘And he was always losing his temper, you know, like a child.

‘I remember once, he came out of one of the huts. You know the big pond in front of the house? Well he was in a sort of state, a real paddy. Someone said to him, “Do stop it, Angus, otherwise we'll put you in the lake!” And he said: “Don't worry, I'll do it myself!” And he did. He threw himself in, and he had to be pulled out.'

Wilson clearly found the Park extremely difficult; the lake episode is described by some as a serious attempt to drown himself (although it should be pointed out that there are pictures of Wilson surrounded by hut colleagues and Wrens and looking perfectly happy, while his portrait, which hung in the National Portrait Gallery, was painted by another Bletchley Park veteran, Ann Langford-Dent). There were other Technicolor outbursts, including one occasion when he is said to have thrown a bottle of ink at a Wren.

And he did seek professional psychoanalytical help. According to his biographer Margaret Drabble, during his time at the Park, he had bad dreams about drowning in icy seas. Indeed, Wilson became a source of such concern to the Park authorities that he was offered a stay in a grand mental institution in Oxford, although
he wisely declined. It is easy to see that for a man already as tightly wound and temper-prone as Wilson, the sensation of being hemmed in, doing utterly vital yet at the same time dreary work, and living in a featureless town, must have been maddening. Whatever the case, Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown just after the war and it was while he was recuperating that he began writing short stories.

Wilson is perhaps the most perfect emblem of the stresses that could be suffered at the Park, but he was not alone. ‘There were some codebreakers who had nightmares,' says one veteran. ‘It really all could be that intense.' And Gordon Welchman's own account includes a telling detail: