The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (22 page)
Read The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Online
Authors: Sinclair McKay
Once again, the justifiable pride radiates through, finding as its focus the sudden connection with this near-mythic leader made flesh. On the subject of the address given outside Hut 6, however, Herivel went on to give a more soberingly realistic portrait of the man in whom Britain’s destiny had been entrusted:
Soon he came and scrambled on to the mound where he stood rather uneasily for a moment – for it was a miserably dark day with a cold wind. We saw before us a rather frail, oldish looking man, a trifle bowed, with wispy hair, in a black pin-striped suit with a faint red line, no bravado, no large black hat, no cigar. Then he spoke very briefly, but with deep emotion … That was
our
finest hour at Bletchley Park.
4
According to one history, when Churchill was at last about to be driven off, he lowered his car window and said to Alistair Denniston: ‘About that recruitment – I know I told you not to leave a stone unturned, but I did not mean you to take me seriously.’
Just one month later, perhaps emboldened by the great honour of that visit, Welchman, together with Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander
and Stuart Milner-Barry, wrote directly to the Prime Minister to make a special plea for more staff. In the first couple of years of the war, Welchman, by his own cheerful admission, had had no problems of any sort with recruitment. He had ‘shamelessly’ (to use his own word) gone around hiring his peers and valued colleagues from the smarter colleges, and with them coteries of their brightest undergraduates. However, as he was later to note:
This kind of piracy was to be curtailed in 1941. The government decided that the use of the best young brains in the country should be regulated. C.P. Snow, of Christ’s College Cambridge, whom I had known before the war … was put in charge of allocation of all scientists and mathematicians, and from then on I had to recruit my male staff through him.
5
Turing and Welchman were careful to state that thanks to the efforts of Commander Travis, Bletchley was well supplied in terms of technology, and specifically in terms of bombes (though by this stage there were still not that many); they were after more codebreakers, and more Wrens. One might also see that the codebreakers were subconsciously asserting their own significance and importance in the face of dumb Whitehall silence:
Dear Prime Minister,
Some weeks ago you paid us the honour of a visit, and we believe that you regard our work as important. You will have seen that, thanks largely to the energy and foresight of Commander Travis, we have been well supplied with the ‘bombes’ for the breaking of the German Enigma codes. We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it.
Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the
normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed.
Turing went on to specify exactly what each hut needed in terms of clerks, typists, Wrens, etc. And he concluded thus:
We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.
The rank-breaking letter was signed by Turing, Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander, while the man deputed to deliver it was Milner-Barry. According to one history, he arrived at 10 Downing Street and had to spend a little time gaining entrance. The trouble was that he had forgotten to bring any official identification along with him. Eventually, however, he was allowed in and directed to see Churchill’s Private Secretary, Brigadier Harvie Walker.
The brigadier was apparently extremely suspicious of this disorganised-seeming man without any of his official papers. His suspicions were not allayed by Milner-Barry’s stubborn refusal to tell the brigadier the contents of the letter he had with him. However, Harvie Walker was eventually persuaded to place the letter before Churchill; and upon reading its requests, Churchill instantly responded, telling his Chief of Staff: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ This written instruction came with a sticker at the top of the letter, with the simple phrase: ‘Action This Day.’
*
The fact that Churchill’s one visit in 1941 made such an impression
on the entire establishment is a vivid illustration of how starved it was of morale-boosting feedback. The codebreakers knew that they were not, like the RAF, ‘Glamour Boys’. There was no Battle of Britain for them to reminisce over, merely days and weeks and months of calculation, of thought, of trial and error, carried out in circumstances of such intense secrecy that there were very few to bestow praise in the first place.
Also, unlike the operatives of MI5, MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, all trained to the highest degree and imbued with the accompanying hardness, a good proportion of the personnel of Bletchley Park were academics by profession and by temperament – meaning that they would have been used to the approbation of colleagues. The secrecy of their work must – just occasionally – have been maddening, no matter how vehemently so many veterans deny it.
Churchill continued to hold the work of Bletchley Park in the very highest regard as the war progressed; later, though, we shall find how some of his decisions concerning its post-war status are held by some to have held Britain back in fighting for its place in the new world order.
Military or Civilian?
‘There was an awful lot of nonsense involving codebreakers having to join the Home Guard,’ says one veteran, recalling that it was the only time in the war that he was required to put on a military uniform. For some of the more cerebral, bespectacled young men, the very notion of taking part in all-night exercises – with cork-blackened faces, or hooting like owls, or shimmying over security fences, or simply running around with rifles and attempting to hit targets – was a cause for irritation, especially when such exercises got in the way of valuable thinking time.
Others, however – including Alan Turing – found such duties and manoeuvres amusing and diverting. But the notion that it was compulsory goes to the heart of one of Bletchley Park’s most beguiling, ambiguous and disorientating qualities.
As we have seen, the establishment was neither wholly military nor wholly civilian. Although in its earliest days, the directorate included a couple of senior military figures, such as John Tiltman, Bletchley Park was under the ultimate control of Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, which itself answered to the Foreign Office and directly to the Prime Minister. The recruitment drive, moreover, was angled almost completely towards civilians. And unlike any
military establishment, there were no drills, no parades, no training sessions – and crucially, no orders.
When one thinks now of the war, one’s natural assumption is that practically the whole of society was in some sense militarised. Certainly, if individuals received orders from the government that they were to join up, or join another service, there was rarely any question of disobedience. How was it then that a set-up of the nature of Bletchley Park – handling crucial, top secret information – lacked what one might think would be essential military discipline? From the very beginning, who would these young code-breakers and linguists answer to? And what of the army of Wrens who were to descend on the place? Were they to answer to civilian or military orders?
‘This place was very strange,’ says former Wren Jean Valentine. ‘There were the men’s services, the women’s adjoining services, and civilians. How could you impose any kind of discipline? It wouldn’t have been fair, whatever you had done. If you had set the civilians above or below the rest of us, it wouldn’t have been right. So I think the only way was just to run it … everyone was equal.’
Fellow Wren Ruth Bourne also recalls the seemingly casual air, in contrast to her later work at Eastcote, the Bletchley Park outstation in Middlesex: ‘In BP there was everybody: civilians, ATS, Wrens, WAAFs walking around. No saluting. Everybody was the same. There was no hierarchy. Eastcote was much more structured to the naval module. You saluted your officers. Whereas at Bletchley Park it was all mixed.’
Oliver Lawn found from the start that he had an extraordinary amount of freedom: ‘As far as I was concerned [the job] was absolutely self-regulating.’ Indeed, adds Mr Lawn, the work of code-breaking could not have been further from the military ethos if it had tried. He recalls: ‘Our chain of command was just the head of Hut 6. First of all, that was Gordon Welchman. Then he moved – went partly transatlantic and took a rather wider remit so we saw rather less of him.
‘Stuart Milner-Barry succeeded Welchman as the head of Hut 6. And a very good head he was. He wasn’t really a cryptographer, but he had a very good brain and a very good management and manner to look after us. And then at around the same time,’ Mr Lawn adds, ‘they had a chap called Fletcher who was a pure lay manager, and he was concerned with getting our equipment. He was concerned with the mechanics of making the bombes on time. And orders and that sort of thing. Supplies officer, in effect.
‘But Milner-Barry was the father figure that we took instructions from. Now and again we had meetings and so on and discussed with him – but it was a very loose sort of management structure, as suited academe. It was a Common Room situation. It wasn’t a service thing at all.’
In his Bletchley memoir, Peter Calvocoressi also recalls this occasionally bewildering ambiguity concerning who to report to, and in what manner:
Bletchley Park was a very unmilitary place. It paid scant attention to the hierarchies of either military rank or the civil service. Its chiefs were civilians on the payroll of the Foreign Office and there were also the pre-war veterans, most cryptographers. But these were vastly outnumbered by the wartime intake which proved to be very much greater in numbers than anyone had ever imagined. If unconsciously, Bletchley Park took its tone from them.
He continued with a fascinating insight into the minds and aspirations of those young people who
were
serving, and of what, in the early days, they had expected from the war:
Those of us who were commissioned officers wore uniform only when we felt like it – or when some top brass was expected on a visit. Bletchley Park was not a place where people went around saluting one another. Rank might be coveted for the extra pay
or, in the latter part of the war, as a mark of recognition, but it did not affect personal relations. It never seemed quite real, partly because the war itself never seemed to be anything but an interlude.
Looking back, I remember no talk about how long the war was likely to last but I do not think that anybody felt that it was going to last long enough seriously to divert the course of our lives … This was subconsciously important. It meant there was very little jockeying for position among us. Our futures and our war work were unrelated.
1
Keith Batey recalls that the arrangement, and the general mix-up of civilian and military, did not appear to cause any difficulty: ‘As far as Hut 6 and Dilly Knox’s outfit were concerned, there weren’t any service people at all. Service people were in the Intelligence section, Hut 3 and Hut 4, the Naval Section. But of course the best cryp-tographer – certainly – was Tiltman, who was a regular officer. His sidekick Morgan was also an army man.’
A naval officer seconded to the Park, Edward Thomas, also recalled this curious atmosphere:
We naval newcomers were at once impressed by the easy relations and lack of friction between those in, and out, of uniform. Despite the high tension of much of the work, a spirit of relaxation prevailed. Anyone of whatever rank or degree could approach anyone else, however venerable, with any idea or suggestion, however crazy.
This was partly because those in uniform had mostly been selected from the same walks of life as the civilians – scholarship, journalism, publishing, linguistics and so forth – and partly because these were the people who saw most clearly what stood to be lost by a Hitler victory … Service officers served gladly under civilians, and vice versa. Dons from Oxford and Cambridge worked smoothly together.
2
As regards the general question of hierarchy, it is worth remembering that the British had a very long tradition of looking to the ‘intellectual amateur’ when it came to matters of intelligence. In some ways, Dilly Knox and his fellow individualists in Room 40 were the perfectly logical culmination of a historically long-standing British approach.
If one reaches back to the sixteenth century, for instance – Elizabeth I’s court, and the frightening proto police-state activities of Sir Francis Walsingham’s ‘Star Chamber’ – one already sees the trope of clever young men being hired from Oxford or Cambridge for intelligence activity. The prime example is playwright Christopher Marlowe. He was recruited to travel through Europe, reporting back on suspected papist plots against the Protestant Queen.
As the years and centuries wear on, we continue to see that British intelligence is partly a military affair, but remains mostly one involving talented civilians. Historian Rebecca Ratcliff cites Lord Baden Powell, founder of the Scout movement, drawing pictures of butterfly wings that concealed diagrams of Turkish fortresses. And in popular fiction of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, the heroes of William Le Queux’s astonishingly successful spy thrillers were all gifted amateurs; smart, well-connected, well-educated men who would be called upon by friendly faces in the Foreign Office to investigate the diabolical schemes of enemy powers. Perhaps even more pertinently, there is the archetype of the gifted eccentric: what figure in English culture better fits this description than Sherlock Holmes?
