The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (2 page)

The Enigma machines – compact, beautifully designed devices, looking a little like typewriters with lights – were used by all the German military forces; these portable machines generated the countless millions of different letter combinations in which most coded German communications were sent.

In the early stages of the war, when the Nazis had conquered much of western Europe, Britain looked alarmingly vulnerable – relatively ill-prepared and underarmed. From the beginning, the desperate need to break the Enigma codes was about much more than simple tactical intelligence. It was about survival.

To unlock the secrets of Enigma would mean penetrating to the heart of the enemy’s campaign; it would allow the British to read the encoded messages from U-boats, from Panzer divisions, from the Gestapo. It would allow them to read Luftwaffe messages, with their clues about bombing targets, and even to read messages from High Command itself. The codebreakers of Bletchley Park aimed
at reading the enemy’s every message, and in so doing potentially trying to anticipate his every move.

And in the initial push to find some incredibly abstruse mathematical way into these constantly changing codes – all the settings were changed every night, at midnight – it was immediately apparent to the few who knew the secret that this intelligence was much more than getting a head start on the enemy. This was intelligence that could help decide the course of the war.

Most people these days are vaguely aware that the work of Bletchley and its supply of intelligence – codenamed Ultra – helped, in the words of President Eisenhower, to shorten the war by two years. Indeed, according to the eminent historian – and Bletchley Park veteran – Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, the figure should be three years. Prominent critic and essayist George Steiner went further: he stated that the work done at Bletchley was one of ‘the greatest achievements of the twentieth century’.

From the Battle of Britain to the Blitz; from Cape Matapan to El-Alamein; from Kursk to the V-1 rockets, to D-Day and Japan, the work of Bletchley Park was completely invisible, yet right at the heart of the conflict. It was a key player whose presence, at all times, had to be kept utterly hidden from the enemy. For if even a suggestion of what was happening at Bletchley were to reach German High Command, all the cryptography efforts could have been ruined. The effect on the war could have been catastrophic.

‘When you think that about nine or ten thousand people worked in all the various sections of Bletchley Park,’ says Park veteran Mavis Batey, ‘it is really quite incredible that the secret never got out. Imagine so many people keeping such a secret now.’ More than this, though. The austere wooden huts on the lawns and in the meadows played host to some of the most gifted – and quirky – individuals of their generation. Not only were there long-standing cryptographers of great genius; there were also fresh, brilliant young minds, such as Alan Turing, whose work was destined to shape the coming computer age, and the future of technology.

Also at Bletchley Park were thousands of dedicated people, mostly young, many drawn straight from university. Some came straight from sixth form.

As the war progressed, numbers grew. Alongside the academics, there were platoons of female translators and hundreds of eager Wrens, there to operate the fearsomely complicated prototype computing machines; there was also a substantial number of well-bred debutantes, sought out upon the social grapevine, and equally determined to do their bit.

A surprising number of people at Bletchley Park were either already famous, or would become famous not long after their time there. These ranged from glamorous film actress Dorothy Hyson (with occasional appearances from her paramour, actor Anthony Quayle) and novelist-to-be Angus Wilson (who was to become renowned at the Park for his stretched-out nerves, extravagantly camp mannerisms, wild temper tantrums, and richly coloured bow ties) to future Home Secretary Roy Jenkins (a ‘terrible code-breaker’). James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming, then working in London on naval intelligence, would drop by on a regular basis.

The comparative youth of most of the recruits was to colour the atmosphere of the establishment quite deeply. They worked with tremendous vigour and intensity, but they also brought a sharp, lively creativity to their off-duty hours. These young people – many of whom were part of an emerging, strengthening middle class – found that rather than being a ‘pause’ in their educations, Bletchley Park was to form its own peculiar kind of university experience.

There was also to be a great deal of romance, perhaps unsurprisingly in what one veteran described as ‘the hothouse atmosphere’ of Bletchley Park. Many who fell in love at Bletchley stayed happily married for many years afterwards. Some are still married today.

Yet this ‘hothouse’ also imposed an extraordinary burden. The oaths of secrecy that the recruits were made to swear lasted for many decades beyond the end of the war. Husbands and wives were
forbidden to discuss the work they had done there; they could not tell their parents what they had achieved, even if their parents were dying. They were not allowed to tell their children.

Which is why, since the silence lifted in the late 1970s, the recollections of Bletchley Park veterans seem to have a special vividness and clarity; they have not been smoothed out or transformed or muddled by endless retelling. Added to this, there was a focus and intensity about life at the Park that would burn itself on to the memory.

Architectural historian Jane Fawcett MBE, who was recruited to the Park as a young woman in 1940, recalls the almost unfathomable sense of pressure that they were under. ‘We knew that what we were doing was making all the difference,’ she says. ‘We knew that it really did depend on us.’

‘It would get too much for some,’ says one veteran. ‘The strain really did tell.’ Another veteran, S. Gorley Putt, commented: ‘One after another – in one way or another – we would all go off our rockers.’
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Gorley Putt was exaggerating a little. Not everyone went off their rockers. Indeed, many Bletchley Park veterans now look back at their experiences – the frustrations, the exhausting night shifts, the flashing moments of insight and genius, even the outbreaks of youthful, high-spirited laughter – as a formative experience that they were uniquely privileged to enjoy.

Until the outbreak of war (and indeed for many years afterwards), the town of Bletchley – in the north of Buckinghamshire, and sited roughly halfway between London and Birmingham – was notable chiefly for being completely unworthy of note.

Even the well-respected architectural chronicler Nikolaus Pevsner counselled his readers against visiting the place. He felt it had nothing to offer either in terms of interesting buildings or beguiling landscape. It was a railway town, sitting on a busy junction. Bletchley's other chief industry was the manufacture of bricks. The smell of the works had a distinct tang that hung over the town on warm summer days.

And the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century house, with its fifty-five acres of grounds, located on the other side of the railway tracks from the main streets of Bletchley, was selected as the wartime base for the Government Code and Cypher School largely for reasons of security, as opposed to aesthetic considerations.

Ever since 1919, all foreign encrypted messages – largely those from the fledgling Soviet Union – had been dealt with by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a small, esoteric government department which was in essence the codebreaking
arm of the Foreign Office. Since the 1930s, the department had been based just around the corner from Whitehall, in Broadway Buildings, St James's Park; a smart London address that it shared with MI6.

It was actually a good eighteen months before 1939 that the decision was made to move GC&CS out to the countryside. The reason was that its central London location would put it at very high risk from potential German bomber raids. The horrifying Blitzkrieg campaign in Spain had demonstrated just how lethally effective such attacks could be.

Previously, the Bletchley Park estate had belonged to the wealthy Leon family. But in 1937, the heir, Sir George, lost interest in maintaining the trappings of country life. And thus the place went on the market. A relative of the family, Ruth Sebag-Montefiore – who quite by chance was recruited to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park herself – said of the house: ‘Only by stretching my imagination to the utmost could I picture the place … in its heyday, when there were hunters in the stables, house-parties most weekends and children in the top floor nurseries.'
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By 1937, the grand house-parties were over. In 1938, a small team of property developers, led by a Captain Faulkner, made the highest bid for the estate. It is reported that the head of MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, was so adamant that the move was necessary, and so frustrated by lumbering Whitehall interdepartmental bureaucracy, that he paid for the house out of his own pocket.

Work began at once. Violent events in Europe were casting shadows. Admiral Sinclair was sharply aware – perhaps more so than many in the government – that the house and its grounds would be needed urgently.

In May of that year, engineers from the Post Office began laying cables from the house that would connect it up to the nerve endings of Whitehall. Over the summer of 1938 – which was dominated by the excruciating tension of the Munich summit and
Chamberlain's calculated but misguided appeasement of Hitler over mounting German aggression towards Czechoslovakia – ‘Captain Ridley's Shooting Party', as the codename went, came to stay at the Bletchley Park estate by way of a rehearsal.

In fact, Captain Ridley was a naval officer with MI6. His job was to organise the logistics of the move of GC&CS (known by some jokingly as the ‘Golf Club and Chess Society') from London to Bletchley. ‘We were told that this was a “rehearsal”,' wrote senior codebreaker Josh Cooper in a contemporary diary. ‘But we all realised that the “rehearsal” might well end in a real war.'

This 1938 rehearsal also gave an idea of the difficulties involved. The presence of so many visitors to Bletchley Park milling around the grounds was explained to the curious local people by that very ‘Captain Ridley's Shooting Party' catch-all phrase. The Wodehousian flavour of the term – faintly anachronistic, even back then – was to find echoes in the years to come.

There was a lot of work to be done. It was immediately clear that the house itself would not be large enough to accommodate the anticipated code-cracking activity. As such, wooden huts, insulated with asbestos, were to be built in the grounds. ‘To begin with, when there were only a handful of us, we worked in the house,' recalled Ruth Sebag-Montefiore. ‘Subsequently we moved into one of the wooden huts that sprang up like mushrooms.'

Although records are not completely clear, it seems that the first of the huts – those brilliantly makeshift, weather-exposed synecdoches of British improvisational spirit, and the eventual beehives of the Bletchley operation – was built not too long after the time of the Munich crisis. Hut 1 was originally intended to house the Park's wireless station. The huts that were built soon afterwards – some of which still survive today – strike the modern eye as puzzlingly temporary structures; they put one in mind of prefab houses.

Bletchley was both far enough away yet convenient enough to reach to make it an ideal location. And the town and surrounding villages were reckoned to have sufficient space for billeting all the
codebreakers and translators. Bletchley Park itself was (and is) next to what is now referred to as the West Coast railway line. And in the days before Dr Beeching axed so much of the network, Bletchley station teemed with activity. To the west, the railways reached Oxford; to the east Cambridge. Meanwhile, anyone travelling from London, Birmingham, Lancashire or Glasgow could get to the town with ease. ‘Or relative ease,' says Sheila Lawn, who became used to these long-distance hauls. ‘The trains were always absolutely packed with soldiers.' Nevertheless, the location was a great boon to the many young people scattered across the country who would find themselves receiving the summons.

Throughout 1938, work on further customising the estate progressed at speed. One wing of the house was demolished; the outbuildings were converted into office space.

At the very top of the house, in a small, dingy attic room near a large water tank, lay ‘Station X'. In essence, it was an SIS radio listening post. Outside the tiny little window was a huge Wellingtonia tree, around which was arranged the necessary rhombic array aerial. ‘Station X', a wonderfully Ian Fleming-esque designation, was in fact so named because it was simply the tenth station of its sort. The station didn't last long there – later, it was moved six miles away to Whaddon Hall.

There was a temporary decrease in diplomatic tension in the aftermath of Munich. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously had in his hand a piece of paper, which promised peace in our time. According to some contemporaneous Mass Observation reports, not many ordinary people were wholly convinced by this. And on the intelligence side, the quiet, furtive preparations for the coming, inevitable conflict became ever more intense.

Bletchley Park was placed under the control of Commander Alistair Denniston. Originally the establishment was supposed to have been run by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, but he was becoming very ill by this point and Denniston rapidly assumed day-to-day responsibility for the operation. This delegation of responsibility –
with the head of MI6 being in ultimate, rather than everyday, control – was one of the elements that in the years to come was to give Bletchley Park its unusual and sometimes unpredictable flavour. It had a degree of quirky autonomy. Certainly quirky enough not to be appreciated by some senior figures in Whitehall.