The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (34 page)

At Bletchley, the Park inmates were keen cineastes, though their tastes, it seems, did not run so much to Will Hay as to more specialised productions. The Bletchley Park Cinema Club was, as one veteran recalls, more likely to show productions like
Night Train
and even the odd vintage German film. Bear in mind that this was a good fifteen or twenty years before cinema even began to be regarded as an art form.

There were language classes too (quite apart from the more formal lessons held in Japanese at Bedford for those working on ‘Purple’); these would include not only the usual modern languages, but also Latin.

Clubs were not just academic. There were more traditional forms of socialising too. ‘In Newport Pagnell,’ says Sheila Lawn, ‘we formed a very informal club. It was more a walking club, serving coffee and tea. Anyone could come in and we met people from the same village, we were all billetees together.

‘And then on your days off,’ she continues, ‘if one of your friends or companions had the same day off, you might agree to go away with them: be it a visit to London, if you could afford it, or into the country for a walk. When I met Oliver, I remember we went down to Stratford, by train, on one occasion and we went to a play.’

Towards the end of the war, the dancing craze was the unlikely source of a security panic at Bletchley Park. For the time and effort
put by the Bletchley authorities into providing special dancing facilities had somehow reached the ears of a London journalist. He was called Harry Procter, and he worked for the
Daily Mail
. In fine investigative style, Procter was now hot on the trail of the story, inspiring a terse and rather desperate Bletchley memo:

It is nice to see, with this gambit, that the practice of ‘spin’ is a little older than many now assume.

But not all press coverage of Bletchley’s out-of-hours pursuits was deemed so hostile. Among the townsfolk of Bletchley and the surrounding districts, the dramatic theatrical productions seem to have made a considerable impact. Indeed, right at the end of the war, the
Bletchley Gazette
reported with some regret that the Bletchley Park Drama Group was producing its last play, and looked back fondly over the last few years of productions. The newspaper’s un-bylined reporter wrote:

This newspaper report pointed up the accusations raised by a few local townspeople concerning the cushy nature of the Park’s recruits’ lives – for such an apparently intensive programme of theatrical excellence must surely have taken up rather a lot of time. The reporter sided with the Park, at the same time giving no hint about what actually went on there:

But there was more to it than that. It was to do with the spontaneous creativity of young people who, despite the terrific responsibility of their wartime roles, were equally earnest about the importance of art and culture – things that would be vital when the war had ended and the nation was to be rebuilt and remodelled.

By the start of 1943, Dilly Knox was succumbing to illness. The previous year, requiring an operation for a returning cancer, he had gone into hospital but was reluctant to have the operation carried out, on the grounds that a man should not be transformed ‘into a piece of plumbing'. And so, for the past few months, he had been working from home, a house in the nearby Chilterns, in which he lived with his wife Olive (he and Olive Roddam had met back in the First World War in the corridors of the Admiralty; they married in 1920 and had two sons).

Now, nursed by his wife, he knew he was dying; but he wanted to hear no expressions of sympathy from relatives and friends. As he wrote:

It was now, however, that he learned he had been awarded the Companionship of the Order of St Michael and St George. His son Oliver wrote of Knox at this time:

After the receipt of this honour, in January 1943, Knox wrote a letter to his colleagues in the Cottage. Heartfelt, and piercing to the root of the nature of Bletchley Park, it began:

He then proceeded to make several rather salty points about Alistair Denniston's attitudes towards codebreaking and code-breakers, and about the way that, as he saw it, barely analysed
messages were handed over to intelligence men. What this was really about, however, was the shift in Bletchley Park's underlying ethos from a brilliant amateur operation into a steely, professional one – something Knox found difficult to accept in intellectual as well as emotional terms:

The honour was sent over to Bletchley, since Knox felt that it was as much an acknowledgement of the department's works as it was for him. Increasingly at Bletchley, his had been a singular and some might say anachronistic approach to the breaking of codes. But it none the less evoked admiration.

‘He had this feeling for looking for anomalies,' says his colleague Mavis Batey, ‘and as ancient scribes did things wrong when they were copying out Greek texts, Dilly would always look for that sort of thing in the codes. He was the first one to extrapolate and really get down to the business of procedural errors made by operators.'

Mrs Batey remembers with terrific fondness how, even in the early days of the Cottage, Knox's eccentricities had come to the fore. He would contrive, absent-mindedly, to try to leave the room via the cupboard door. He would visit the punch-card operators in his dressing gown, even if it was the dead of winter. His enthusiasm
for hot baths never waned. He was – an unusual privilege this, in straitened times – allowed real milk for his coffee, which came fresh from an obliging local cow.

And when all the changes came to Bletchley Park – not merely the gentlemanly removal of Alistair Denniston, but also the mechanised systems that were being employed to break into Enigma, Knox was extremely watchful, and also on occasion fiercely scornful. But he was no Luddite. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, Knox was fond of Alan Turing, whose Asperger tendencies were in no way reined in at Bletchley. The playwright Hugh Whitemore, in
Breaking the Code
, added a further, speculative layer, hinting that Knox, like Turing, had homosexual feelings and had had such relationships in the past.

Knox died in February 1943, and a certain style and approach died with him. The old cryptographic world of classicists versed in labyrinthine antiquities had given way to a new, mathematical, technologically driven machine age; the dawn of the computer era. Knox was remarkable in having straddled two such worlds, and with such success, right until the end.

Ingenious though the Enigma machines were, it was always inevitable that at some stage a more complex process of encoding would emerge. It was equally inevitable that, faced with such demands, the theoreticians and engineering geniuses who worked for Bletchley Park would make giant strides forward in terms of technology.

The one name that shines out in terms of engineering ingenuity was Tommy Flowers, familiarly known as the ‘clever cockney'. There are some who argue that the name should be known in every household – for, they believe, he was the man who realised the dreams of Alan Turing and truly brought the computer age into being.

In 1943, Bletchley Park had seen the establishment of a new section known as ‘The Newmanry'. It was set up under the aegis of
mathematician Professor Max Newman from St John's College, Cambridge, and the idea of it was to find ways of applying more advanced machinery to codebreaking work.

It had been Professor Newman who in the 1930s, with his lectures on ‘mechanical approaches' to solving mathematical problems, first led Alan Turing to start pondering on the idea of ‘Turing Machines'. Indeed, Newman had lectured Turing directly. Newman, born in 1897, was a very popular figure at the Park; many veterans recall his openness, and his enthusiasm for everyone sharing their ideas. An American sergeant, George Vergine, had this to say about the Professor:

As well as Enigma, German High Command was now making use of Lorenz teleprinter machines to transmit encrypted messages. These used the Baudot Murray system, a series of holes (though not Morse) punched through tape, each series of five in different configurations representing a different letter of the alphabet. What made these communications – which became known around Bletchley Park as ‘Fish' or ‘Tunny' – particularly crucial was that many of them involved messages sent to and from German High Command. These were not merely communications between men out in the field; they were communications between generals and orders from the Führer himself.

The breakthrough on this complex system was made by a young chemist/mathematician called W.T. Tutte. In the meantime Alan Turing, having returned from several months in the USA, eagerly
dived into discussions on the subject, having spent his voyage back reading up on the science of electronic circuits. Turing spent many weeks formulating methods through which the thing could be cracked; these were referred to as ‘Turingismus'. Also present at Bletchley Park was one Dr Charles Wynn-Williams, a circuit expert brought in from radar research who had the wherewithal to build digital circuitry with electronic valves that could switch a thousand times faster than a relay.

It was at this point that the expertise of the Dollis Hill Post Office Research Station was called upon. Dollis Hill is a pleasant suburb of north-west London that overlooks Wembley and from which central London can be seen in the distance. The establishment in question – which also played host to an underground bunker for Churchill's use – was at the top of the hill. It was here that Tommy Flowers was based. Along with Wynn-Williams, Flowers began work on constructing a machine known – rather sweetly – as the ‘Heath Robinson'.

Looking precisely like the sort of zany contraption that one of William Heath Robinson's illustrated inventors might contrive, this machine has been described by some veterans as being ‘held together with elastic and bits of string'. However, no matter how comical it may have looked, it could run teleprinter tapes at high speed, like a super-fast bombe, at a rate of over 1,000 characters a second. It was this machine that was to pave the way for its successor, Colossus.