The Secrets of Station X (20 page)
Read The Secrets of Station X Online
Authors: Michael Smith
Knox’s belief that he should have control over the way the
material
he decyphered was reported and his rage at the ‘monstrous’ way in which Bletchley Park material was passed on to London by intelligence reporters who ignored vital nuances or ‘corrected’ things without consultation were recurring themes of his letters to Denniston. Knox was a classics scholar of some repute; not the least among his cryptographic achievements had been his completion of the work of Walter Headlam, his tutor
at Cambridge, in reconstructing the Mimes of the Greek poet Herodas from the worm-eaten papyri found in 1889 in the ruins of an ancient Egyptian city 100 miles south of Cairo. He had turned down the post of Professor of Classics at Leeds University during the inter-war years in order to continue codebreaking.
As a scholar, for of all Bletchley Park I am by breeding,
education
, profession and general recognition almost the foremost scholar, to concede your monstrous theory of collecting
material
for others is impossible. By profession in all his contacts a scholar is bound to see his research through from the raw material to the final text. From 1920–1936, I was always able to proceed as a scholar, and I simply cannot understand, nor I imagine can the many other scholars at BP, understand your grocer’s theories of ‘window dressing’. Had these been applied to art scholarship, science, and philosophy, had the inventor no right to the development and publication of his discourses, we would still be in the Dark Ages.
Knox followed this rant with yet another threat of resignation before ending his letter with the words: ‘a small grouse…. Yours ever, A. D. Knox.’
Denniston was himself unwell during this period, but his response to Knox’s somewhat pompous claims to a superior position due to his ability as ‘a scholar’ belies a reputation as a poor man-manager.
My dear Dilly,
Thank you for your letter. I am glad that you are frank and open with me. I know we disagree fundamentally as to how this show should be run but I am convinced that my way is better than yours and likely to have wider and more effective results. If you do design a super Rolls-Royce that is no reason why you should yourself drive the thing up to the house, especially if you are not a very good driver… Do you
want to be the inventor and the car-driver? You are Knox, a scholar with a European reputation, who knows more about the inside of a machine than anybody else. The exigencies of war need that latter gift of yours, though few people are aware of it. The exploitation of your results can be left to others so long as there are new fields for you to explore.
Within days of that exchange, Knox had made a major
breakthrough
, working out the internal mechanisms of the
Abwehr
Enigma and reading a message that had been sent on it.
‘Knox has again justified his reputation as our most original investigator of Enigma problems,’ Denniston said in a letter to Menzies.
He has started on the reconstruction of the machine used by the German agents and possibly other German authorities. He read one message on 8 December. He attributes the success to two young girl members of his staff, Miss Rock and Miss Lever, and he gives them all the credit. He is of course the leader, but no doubt has selected and trained his staff to assist him in his somewhat unusual methods. You should understand that it will be some weeks, possibly months, before there will be a regular stream of these ISOS machine telegrams.
The first of the messages, known as ISK for Illicit Services Knox, was issued on Christmas Day 1941. The value of the ISK messages to the Double Cross system is impossible to overstate. They alone gave the Double Cross Committee the absolute certainty that the Germans believed the false intelligence they were being fed and showed whether or not individual double agents were trusted or under suspicion, in which case steps could be taken to remedy the situation. Two months later, Mavis Lever solved a separate
Abwehr
Enigma machine, known as GGG, which was used near the Spanish border. By the spring of 1942, the information collected from the Bletchley Park
decrypts had built up such a good picture of
Abwehr
operations in the UK that Robertson was able to state categorically that MI5 now controlled all the German agents operating in Britain. The Double Cross Committee was able to watch the Germans making arrangements to send agents to Britain and discussing the value of their reports, Robertson wrote. ‘In two or three cases we have been able to observe the action (which has been rapid and extensive) taken by the Germans upon the basis of these agents’ reports.’
The breaking of the
Abwehr
Enigma was to be the last of Knox’s many codebreaking achievements. Although he
occasionally
came into work, for the most part he worked from home until his death from cancer on 27 February 1943. Shortly before his death, he was made a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG), the award normally made to those whose achievements on behalf of their country cannot be made public. He was probably the only codebreaker in any country to make a successful transition from the hand cyphers and book codes of the First World War to the breaking of the complex machine cyphers like Enigma of the Second World War and his work on the Herodas
Mimiambi
suggests an even greater span of ability. But Knox was far more than that. At his funeral, his great friend from school days at Eton and his studies at Cambridge, John Maynard Keynes, described him as being ‘sceptical of most things except those that really matter, that is affection and reason’.
*
The attack on Malaya took place first in ‘real time’ even though it occurred on 8 December; the difference being due to the fact that Pearl Harbor was the other side of the international dateline.
D
enniston was being overtaken by a new world inhabited by younger men whose undoubted skills combined gifts for political manoeuvring that matched their ability as
codebreakers
. These men saw Denniston as weak and regarded the direct, more forthright approach adopted by Travis as much more likely to obtain the vital equipment and personnel they would need to break Enigma during the sustained fighting that was inevitable once Allied forces invaded Europe.
The differences in approach between Denniston and Travis are well illustrated in an exchange between the two men early on in the war when Knox’s great friend Oliver Strachey
organised
a petition of complaint over the messing arrangements. Travis appears to have regarded the organisation of the
petition
as akin to mutiny. Denniston’s response was to admonish Strachey but he also wrote a memo to Travis urging him to accept that there was no need for rigid naval discipline among the codebreakers at Bletchley Park. Denniston promised that he would talk to all those who had signed the petition, but added:
I do not however think that the morale of GC&CS is in any way affected by Strachey’s present action. So far as I’m aware the attitude of all the staff is keener than it has ever been. All know that they are assisting to the best of their ability in an effort that is bearing fruit on nearly every branch. I cannot agree with your suggestion that Strachey had any intention of encouraging discontent.
After twenty years’ experience in GC&CS, I think I may say to you that one does not expect to find the rigid discipline of a battleship among the collection of somewhat unusual civilians who form GC&CS. To endeavour to impose it would be a mistake in my mind and would not assist our war effort, we must take them as they are and try to get the best out of them. They do very stupid things, as in the present case, but they are producing what the authorities require.
The American gift of the Japanese
Purple
machine led Denniston to set up a new Japanese section in Hut 7, which was vacant because Freeborn’s Hollerith machinery had been moved to larger accommodation. Hugh Foss, the head of the new section, was a pre-war machine specialist who had broken the previous Japanese diplomatic machine cypher known as
Red
and had until now been assisting the naval codebreakers in Hut 8, where he’d made a notable temporary break into
Shark
. Denniston appears to have assumed that the section would cover Japanese diplomatic, Army, Air and Naval cyphers but, in all
probability
because the Army and Air cyphers were covered by the Wireless Experimental Centre just outside Delhi, Hut 7 only covered Japanese diplomatic and naval cyphers, and initially concentrated solely on the
Purple
and
Red
Japanese diplomatic machine cyphers.
Hugh Foss was undoubtedly a brilliant codebreaker but he had many eccentricities both at work and at home. He wore a red beard and sandals, leading the Americans to nickname him affectionately ‘Lease-Lend Jesus’. His cousin Elizabeth Browning, who was now also working in the Naval Section, was a regular visitor to his home. ‘I saw a lot of Hugh and Alison Foss,’ she said.
They lived in a bungalow at Aspley Guise with their two small children, one of whom was my goddaughter. The house was always chaotic, as Hugh’s wife was a darling but almost totally
incompetent domestically. Hugh went home pretty well every day at 4.30 in order to put the children to bed, get supper, and do what he could to organise things. An example of their
modus
vivendi
was the highly complicated arrangement for
washing-up
(dreamed up, needless to say, by Hugh). Every article was supposed to be washed in a particular order – saucers first (as least polluted by human lips); then teaspoons; then sideplates; then pudding plates; soup bowls; main course plates; knives; glasses; cups; forks; pudding and soup spoons; and finally
saucepans
. As these were usually stacked on the floor the dogs were a great help. The theory of this procedure in the days before washing-up machines may have been excellent but in practice one usually found two or three days’ washing up waiting to be done, with plates and dishes piled around and in the sink. If one tried to help there would be shrieks of: ‘Oh you mustn’t do the cups yet, saucers first’. There was also in theory some weird arrangement so that things Hugh was supposed to put away were located at distances appropriate to his great height and long arms, while Alison, who was small and dumpy, had a shorter range. But in practice things ended up pretty well anywhere. I remember having lunch there one day with Hugh’s muddy boots on the table beside me to remind him they needed cleaning.
By the end of 1941, the increase in the numbers of people had brought a dramatic improvement in the social life. Phoebe Senyard spent her first Christmas of the war at home. ‘I returned on Boxing Day to find everyone gradually returning to normal after having spent a riotous time, everyone going out of their way to make everyone else enjoy themselves.’
The Christmas of 1941 was the last to be held in the old dining hall in the mansion with a traditional dinner and a fancy dress dance in the school hall. The highlight of the festive period was the revue, run by Bill Marchant, a former German master at Harrow who became deputy head of Hut 3. ‘The revues took place once a year about Christmas or New Year,’ said Barbara
Abernethy. ‘They were produced by Bill and his wife and they really were excellent because they had good people who wrote the stuff like Patrick Wilkinson and a man called Patrick Barraclough, who was Hinsley’s tutor at St John’s.’
The revues were not just popular with the staff, recalled Travis’s daughter Valerie. Her father would invite senior service officers to Bletchley as a means of improving relations between the codebreakers and Whitehall. ‘My father always used to have a tremendous party, inviting all the top brass down from London for the revue and they loved it. The little man who was the caterer for Bletchley Park had a wonderful line in the black market and he used to produce the most sumptuous feasts.’
The quality of the revues was not just the result of the
standard
of writing, but also the number of professional actors and musicians at Bletchley. Pamela Gibson was a professional actress before Birch recruited her for his Naval Section.
I spoke German quite well and I had a letter from a rather
interfering
godmother who said she was sure I was doing splendid work entertaining the troops but she knew a girl who had just gone to a very secret place and was doing fascinating work and they needed people with languages. That made me feel I was fiddling while Rome burnt. So I wrote off to the address they sent me and thought no more about it. I had just been offered a part in a play when I got a telegram from Frank Birch asking me to meet him at the Admiralty. He gave me several tests and said: ‘Well, I suppose we could offer you a job’ and I said: ‘Well, you know about the stage, what would you do if you were me?’ He said: ‘The stage can wait, the war can’t.’ So I went to Bletchley.
It was while taking part in one of the revues that she met Jim Rose, her future husband, who worked in Hut 3. Rose recalled writing a sketch in which she was acting.
We had a brilliant chap called Bill Marchant who was deputy
head of Hut 3 who was a minor C. B. Cochrane and created a revue every Christmas. A lot of very bright people were there and wrote music and lyrics. I wrote a sketch and Pam was acting in it. No one was allowed to go to rehearsals but at that time I was going to Washington just before Christmas so I was allowed in and this glorious vision of loveliness stepped down from the stage and said: ‘Your sketch isn’t bad.’
The fact that so many clever people were gathered in the one place meant that even if the performances were sometimes not up to professional standards, the scripts were always good, said Christine Brooke-Rose, then a young WAAF officer working in one of the Hut 3 research sections.
There was a sort of hall just outside Bletchley Park itself, a brick hall with a stage with shows once a year at Christmas. There were a lot of people with talent there who wrote bits and there were a few actors doing their bit for the war and a lot of amateurs. It was like a university revue, like Footlights. We thought they were splendid. I’ve no idea if they really were. The performances may not have been so great but I think the scripts were fairly good because there were a lot of very bright people there. We would go up to London to see a play or a concert. There were people like Peter Calvocoressi who would give musical evenings in their billets. I remember Brin Newton-John, an RAF officer in Hut 3 whose daughter Olivia became a well-known pop star, would sing German
Lieder
. People went cycling around the countryside and there were a lot of love affairs going on.
There were a number of debutantes working in the various indexes or as drivers who determined to liven Bletchley Park up. ‘We gave what we thought were splendid parties,’ recalled Pamela Gibson, who was head of the naval index where many of the debs worked.
A girl called Maxime Birley, the Comtesse de la Falaise as
she became, was a great beauty and mad about France and I remember her giving a party at which we all had to be very French. People would change partners quite a lot. We were rather contained in a way out place and you could only travel if you managed to get transport so there was a good deal of changing of partners.
Stanley Sedgewick organised twice-weekly dances, many of them fancy-dress, and also provided modern dance lessons. ‘This was in the Big Band era of Glenn Miller and I engaged the dance bands of the RAF at nearby Halton and a US Air Force bomber base and demonstrations of jitterbugging.’
On one occasion, a bus-load of the debs and Wrens,
including
Adrienne Farrell, were invited to a dance in a hanger at a nearby American base where Glenn Miller’s Band was playing.
The hangar was crowded and in semi-darkness, lit only by swirling coloured spotlights and resounding with the superb but deafening noise of the band. As each of us entered we were grabbed by one of the waiting line of airmen. After the first dance, I looked eagerly round for my next partner. Alas, we were expected to stay with the same person all evening. I think my partner was as disappointed as I was. On the way home, I noticed with some puzzlement that the bus was half empty.
More erudite tastes were catered for by the Bletchley Park Recreational Club which included a library, a drama group, musical and choral societies as well as bridge, chess, fencing and Scottish dancing sections. Hugh Foss, head of the Japanese section, was in charge of the Scottish dancing in which Denniston himself took part. ‘I used to do choral singing and Scottish Country dancing in the evenings which was
wonderful
exercise,’ said Valerie Travis. ‘With Hugh Foss, who was a member of the Chelsea Reel School, in command we did it properly. I danced an eight some reel with the 51st Highland
Division at one of the Wrenneries. The Wrens gave marvellous dances out at Woburn.’
Ann Lavell recalled that the choral society was also run by an expert, James Robertson, the conductor.
There was a little church just behind the Park and they did a little Sunday service for the workers and Julie Lydekker and I sang in that and then, right at the end of things James Robertson ran a choir. He was quite a well-known conductor. He conducted at Sadlers Wells when he escaped from GCHQ. He went to Australia and died there. So it was quite an
excitement
being in his choir.
Then there was Angus Wilson who was a really quite considerable novelist and was one of the famous
homosexuals
at Bletchley. He wore a bow tie, which was a bit unusual in those days, and I can picture him in the Beer Hut, where there was a bar and people went for a booze in the evenings or lunchtime, quite a haunt. He had a very funny high voice and I remember hearing this above the hubbub in there. Even then he was known as a novelist [sic] but he became really quite considerable, very well thought of.
The eclectic mix of people based at Station X was an eye-opener for many of the young men and women who found themselves there. Diana Russell Clarke had the time of her life at Bletchley Park.
We all had a marvellous time, all these young men, not attached. We had a very gay time going out to pubs for supper together when we were free. A lot of romance went on, very definitely a lot of romance. The whole thing was absolutely tremendous fun. It’s rather awful in the middle of the war. We had to be there, it was an emergency and I think we all put our hearts into it. But I think we all enjoyed being there.
The increasing success of Bletchley Park in producing vital
intelligence
,
not just from Enigma but also from Oshima’s highly detailed messages from Berlin to Tokyo and from lower level naval and
Luftwaffe
codes and cyphers, led to a power struggle within Hut 3 for control of the
Ultra
intelligence reports. The number of Enigma messages had grown from fifty decrypts a day when Hut 3 was first set up to 1,300 a day, making them increasingly important to the service departments and a source of influence that some within MI6 wanted to use for their own purposes. The advisers provided by the Military and Air Sections of MI6 tried to take control of the Hut 3 reporting. The attempted coup was led by Squadron-Leader Robert Humphreys, who had been put into Hut 3 by Frederick Winterbottom, the head of Section IV, the Air Section of MI6. Lucas recalled:
Humphreys had the highest technical qualifications through his real mastery both of intelligence and of German, but
unfortunately
he aimed at securing control over the organisation for himself. Moreover, he tried to set up within Hut 3 a semi-
independent
and almost rival organisation responsible to himself. It cannot be doubted that he made a great contribution to our work and also to getting it taken seriously at the highest levels. Nevertheless, he caused great dissension and disturbance.
