The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (3 page)

Back in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Alistair Denniston had been made head of the Government Code and Cypher School, and he presided over the department in the interwar years. When Denniston came to Bletchley Park in 1939, he saw to it that some fellow codebreakers from the early days of the department came too – including the mercurial but brilliant Alfred Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch.

Birch had a rather unusual hinterland; as well as being incredibly sharp with codes, he was a theatre actor and director with an amusingly exaggerated manner. In fact, in 1930 he had essayed a highly memorable Widow Twankey in a sumptuous West End production of
Aladdin
. Birch and Knox had been at Cambridge together.

On arrival at Bletchley, ‘Dilly' Knox, as senior cryptographer, was allocated working space in ‘the Cottage' – in reality, a row of chunky converted interlinked houses – just across the courtyard from the main house, near the stables. Fifty-five-year-old Knox was, in the words of a colleague, ‘the mastermind behind the Enigma affair', a gangling figure with a prominent forehead, ‘unruly black hair and his eyes, behind glasses, some miles away in thought'.

Knox had been interested in ciphers since boyhood, noted the novelist (and his niece) Penelope Fitzgerald. Also as a boy, Dilly had precociously ‘detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions in the Sherlock Holmes stories,' wrote Fitzgerald, ‘and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in “The Sign of Four”'.
²

He was also a man prone to terrific bursts of temper, and quickly became noted by his colleagues for the fact that he seemed to get
on much better with women than he did with men. He certainly had a most enlightened approach to the employment of women at that period – one might even be tempted to call it positive discrimination. Although that was not how many more lascivious-minded colleagues saw it at the time.

Indeed, it was not long before the female recruits to ‘the Cottage' became known widely around the Park as ‘Dilly's Fillies'. These days, the expression causes one of Knox's more illustrious female recruits – Mavis Batey, née Lever – to tut-tut and roll her eyes with good-humoured exasperation. ‘A myth has grown up that Dilly went around in 1939 looking at the girls arriving at Bletchley and picking the most attractive for the Cottage,' Mrs Batey says, perhaps protesting a little too much. ‘That is completely untrue. Dilly took us on our qualifications.'

Other experienced codebreakers who had served alongside Denniston in that interwar period, and who were to make such a difference at Bletchley Park, were Josh Cooper, John Jeffreys, Frank Lucas, Nigel de Grey, Oliver Strachey and Colonel John Tiltman, an utterly brilliant veteran cryptographer.

Oliver Strachey, related to Lytton, was noted for his colourful good humour and his intense musicality. He was a friend of Benjamin Britten. When back in London, Strachey and Britten would enjoy playing duets. As the war intensified, Strachey would find himself taking a pivotal role in the Park's decoding of Gestapo signals, heading a special department which in the 1940s began to slowly decrypt the hideous bureaucracy of death – the railway timetables, the numbers of people being transported – that surrounded the Holocaust.

Also highly notable among the codebreakers was Josh Cooper, a physically imposing presence – known to some as ‘the Bear' – in his middle years, and singular in his mannerisms, often given to exclaiming to himself. In the very early days of Bletchley, he was rather taken with this move from London to the country. ‘We all sat down to lunch together at one long table in the House,' Cooper
wrote. Elsewhere he recalled, ‘a large room on the ground floor had been set aside for Air Section … I remember coming into a scene of chaos with a great mound of books and papers piled on the floor.'

Cooper also noted right from the start that ‘service personnel wore civilian clothes in the office', but ‘put on uniform to go on leave, or on duty trips to London etc., in order to be able to use Service travel warrants'. As a security precaution, all personal post had to be sent to Bletchley Park via a London PO box. This postal system broke down, according to Cooper, when a relative of one codebreaker ‘attempted to send a grand piano'.
³

Cooper's own recollections fail to include his own spectacular bouts of eccentricity; such as the later occasion, recalled by another veteran, when Cooper was present at the interrogation of a captured German pilot. When the pilot gave out a ‘Heil Hitler!' Cooper inadvertently did the same, and in his haste to sit down after this embarrassment ended up missing the chair and falling under his desk. But what we do hear in these accounts of the very first days of Bletchley Park is the notion of a deliberate ethos, a studied atmosphere of genteel chaos that was perhaps fostered to encourage freethinking improvisation. Certainly, the way Bletchley Park was run was to become the source of future friction in the War Office.

The permanent staff of GC&CS – a platoon redolent of cardigans, tweed and pipes – around this time numbered around 180. Around thirty of these people were codebreakers. The rest were Intelligence and support staff. It was swiftly understood in 1938 that rather more were going to be needed.

And so the serious business of wider recruitment was beginning. One internal memo from February 1939 stated that ‘three professors will be available as soon as required', as though such men were machine components. The looming conflict also brought a shift in attitude from GC&CS.

In previous years, according to one veteran, the department
didn't want to use mathematicians for codebreaking. The reason was that mathematicians, as a class, were not considered temperamentally appropriate. ‘They were definitely persona non grata,' recalled John Herivel, himself a fine mathematician (and author of one of the Park's greatest breakthroughs). ‘Supposedly because of their impractical and unreliable nature.'
⁴

All this was about to change dramatically. Alistair Denniston had spent a few months visiting Oxford and Cambridge, assessing the likeliest young candidates. Among them was a deeply promising young mathematician called Peter Twinn; then there was a dazzlingly clever 33-year-old mathematics lecturer, Gordon Welchman, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Welchman – a handsome fellow with an extremely neat moustache – swiftly proved to be an assiduous, enthusiastic and fantastically ambitious recruiting officer.

The most talented young mathematician of them all, 27-year-old Alan Turing, from King's College, Cambridge, had been sounded out even earlier, as far back as 1937. Between them, Turing and Welchman would quickly prove to be crucial to the Bletchley operation. And it is of course Turing's name that lives on, inseparable from the Park and its work. In part, the success that this brilliant, tragically misunderstood figure was to enjoy at Bletchley subsequently led to the computerised world that we live in today. But it was also at the Park that Turing was to find a rare sort of freedom, before the narrow, repressive culture of the post-war years closed in on him and apparently led to his early death.

‘Turing,' commented Stuart Milner-Barry, ‘was a strange and ultimately a tragic figure.' That is one view. Certainly his life was short, and it ended extremely unhappily. But in a number of other senses, Alan Turing was an inspirational figure. ‘Alan Turing was unique,' recalled Peter Hilton. ‘What you realise when you get to know a genius well is that there is all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself, if not to
them, I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling with Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking. It was marvellous.'
⁵

The popular misconception is that of a brooding, asocial homosexual, trapped in a hostile time, unable to find happiness. The story is not so simple as that. Thanks to biographies, an official apology from the government and the Prime Minister, and even a play by Hugh Whitemore, the name of Alan Turing has become, above all others, synonymous with the breaking of the Enigma codes.

Like Dilly Knox, Turing had attended Cambridge, though by the 1930s the university's former Edwardian atmosphere of homoerotic decadence was being gradually usurped by the apparent urgency of politics. Some accounts of Turing make mention of his high-pitched voice, his hesitating stammer, a laugh that would try the patience of even the closest of friends, and a habit of concluding any social interaction by sidling out of the room, eyes lowered, murmuring something about thanks.

In other words, the portrait we appear to be presented with is one of a classic borderline-Asperger's boffin. His eccentricities have been well rehearsed: among them was his bicycle, with a chain that was poised to fall off after so many rotations, which meant that Turing had to calculate exactly the moment at which to start moving the pedals backwards to avert this. And he had the habit of cycling around the countryside while wearing a full gas mask.

Yet perhaps there was a logical advantage in having a bicycle that no one else would know how to use without the thing falling to bits? And the simple fact was that Turing suffered badly from hay fever. The gas mask was a practical, if drastic, solution to the difficulty.

Moreover, unlike the usual shambling professor, Turing was remarkably physically fit. Though he had no time for organised field games, he was extremely keen on running, and took part in a great many races. Around the time he joined Bletchley Park, he had built up sufficient endurance to run marathons. It has been suggested that he channelled a great deal of sexual frustration into
these distance runs; but the real satisfaction may have derived from a sport in which he had complete control, and which relied as much on concentration and mental focus as it did on physical power.

As Sarah Baring recalls: ‘We just knew him as “The Prof”. He seemed terribly shy.' Certainly, while at Bletchley, Turing certainly was not greatly interested in social interaction. Yet he was a more radical, open, honest soul than the accounts suggest.

Turing became a Fellow of King's College before, in the late 1930s, heading for the United States, to Princeton. Building bridges between the two disciplines of mathematics and applied physics, he threw himself into the construction of a ‘Turing machine', a machine that could carry out logical binary calculations. Having seen a tide-predicting machine some years back in Liverpool, it occurred to him that the principle of this device could be applied to his own machine, greatly speeding its function.

By 1938, when it was increasingly clear that war was coming to the whole of Europe, Turing returned to England, and to King's, with his electric multiplier machine mounted on a bread-board. It was now that he decided to share his talent with the Government Code & Cypher School in the Broadway Buildings.

There he was given training sessions in the basics of code work and intelligence gathering. After one of these sessions, at Christmas 1938, he found himself working alongside Dilly Knox. Nine months before Britain went to war with Germany, Alistair Denniston had wisely started to speed up the process of cracking the problem of Enigma. At the beginning of 1939, Turing returned to Cambridge, now apprised of the intense secrecy of the matter, and began to apply himself to the intellectual challenge.

Throughout 1939, Turing and Gordon Welchman attended ‘short courses' in cryptography organised by GC&CS. Their names are to be seen on contemporary memos, in pencil, with ticks beside them, as though they were part of a school register.

But it was not just mathematicians that were needed. Other
disciplines lent themselves to the work of codebreaking equally well. One could be a historian, or a classicist. Famously, one could be an expert at solving the
Daily Telegraph
cryptic crossword in under twelve minutes. One could also be a chess expert or grand master – as indeed were young Bletchley recruit Hugh Alexander and a number of the young recruits that he in turn bought along. ‘Of course, we were also very good at Scrabble and anagrams,' says one veteran.

Secret service officer Captain Frederick Winterbotham, author of the pioneering book on Ultra, noted that many of the young people coming in had strong musical predilections; an inclination also recalled by Gordon Welchman, who summoned the rather beautiful image of youthful codebreakers ‘singing madrigals on a summer's evening' by the waters of the Grand Union Canal.

But very quickly, Alistair Denniston detected that the gentle setting itself, the house and its spacious grounds, might be regarded as a nuisance by those who worked there, many of whom were coming from London. In a letter of September 1939, to Sir Stewart Menzies, the deputy (soon-to-be) head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Denniston wrote:

In other words, the core of these teething problems was the fact that the codebreakers were finding it difficult to adjust to the change from fast metropolitan life to what many of them regarded as a provincial backwater.

It is broadly assumed nowadays that the work at Bletchley required its inmates to be near-autistic, socially inept geniuses. In
fact, the more prized quality would have been a certain nimbleness and litheness of mind, the ability to approach and solve a problem from hitherto unconsidered angles.