The Secret Listeners

by Sinclair McKay

  Here, in these grounds fifty miles to the north of London, they would be introduced to the gravest secret of the war. Every intercepted enemy message, every signal from every captain, commander, military division, battleship, U-boat; all these encrypted communications, jumbled up into seemingly random letters in groups of four and five, and transmitted by radio, were gathered in by the many listening posts around the British coastline. And they were all assiduously sent on to Bletchley Park. It was here, in these nondescript huts, that the most powerful intellects of a generation struggled with a proposition that German High Command considered completely insoluble: that of outwitting – and mastering – its ingenious Enigma encoding technology.

  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 codebreaker’). 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 after wards. 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.’

  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.

  The Lost World of Bletchley Park

  ISBN: 978-1-78131-279-7

  INTRODUCTION

  If you did not know anything of its purpose, you would not spare a glance for the estate of Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Simply to look at, the big house – and its grounds and the two-storey concrete blocks and the wooden huts all scattered around the lake – are the very definition of unremarkable. The secret nerve centre of World War Two had to be based somewhere anonymous. The establishment that was to host the most radical, brilliant intellects of a generation needed a location so undistinguished and forgettable that it would never attract the attention of Nazi spies or of Luftwaffe pilots overhead. When senior dignitaries visited the site, they were urged to do so in civilian clothes; to turn up in full military dress would alert any observers to the high importance of this institution.

  Rare shots from the 1937 estate sale catalogue for Bletchley Park; before the arrival of the codebreakers, the garden had a certain quiet elegance.

  During those war years, all that the local Bletchley townspeople knew was that the big house – formerly the home of a wealthy s
tockbroker turned squire – was now being used for government work. They could hardly not know this: many of the young people working at the Park were billeted in their houses. Beyond that, though, they knew nothing.

  Even for those who were recruited to this establishment, and who arrived at Bletchley railway station for the first time, that sense of muffled secrecy continued until after they had got past the military sentry box at the gates of the Park, then walked along the handsome avenue of elms, entered the big house, had their induction talk and signed the Official Secrets Act. When they had sworn their silence, they were told why they had been summoned. This went for everyone: the young undergraduates, pulled away from their studies at the smarter universities; the aristocratic society girls, set on doing their bit in any way they could; the expert linguists; the retired classics masters; the cryptic-crossword-inclined Wrens; the chess champions; and also the young soldiers drawn away from the fields of conflict, pulled back home in order to fight that war with the power of their vaulting intellects. Only after they had pledged to keep quiet – the penalty for transgression was never quite made clear, but many recruits assumed that if they said anything, they would be shot – was the meaning of this strange house on the edge of an unmemorable provincial town in the middle of rather flat countryside pocked with quarries made clear to them.

  Before Bletchley Park and the war, the Government Code and Cypher School was based in 55 Broadway, St James’ Park. Prior to the move, one idea was to house codebreakers in dormitories.

  One of Bletchley Park’s brightest recruits, Stuart Milner-Barry had won the title British Boy Champion of chess in 1923.

  These days, it is very well known that Bletchley Park was the home to the British code-breaking effort during World War Two. It is common knowledge that here cryptologists pulled off the near unthinkable feat of cracking the German Enigma codes. The work that was done here had a huge, almost unquantifiable impact on the course of the conflict. Whether listening in on the lethal U-boat wolf-packs; analysing the supply lines of Rommel’s panzer divisions in the North African desert; helping to hunt down and sink the Bismarck; feeding the Germans disinformation and then monitoring the responses that resulted in V-weapons being given incorrect co-ordinates and falling short of their central London targets; even intercepting and decoding invaluable messages from the inner sanctum of German High Command in the run up to and aftermath of the Normandy landings, the codebreakers seized an invaluable advantage: a means of penetrating deep into the heart of German strategy and tactical thinking. All this without the Germans suspecting that their ‘unbreakable’ code systems had been laid bare. It is equally well understood that Bletchley Park played host to a fusion of intellectual and engineering expertise that heralded the dawn of the computer age. But during the war – and for many years and decades afterwards – such things were known only by a very few people. For a very long time, the work of Bletchley Park and the dazzling achievements pulled off by its recruits were hidden deep in the shadows; a mass of dark matter in the histories of World War Two. Those who had worked there were obliged to keep quiet for decades afterwards about what they had done. One reason for this was that a great many countries after the war were still using versions of the coding technology that these brilliant people had secretly cracked. And as the silence continued, the fortunes of the big house – an eccentric construction that in some ways mirrored the capricious and colourful personalities who had gathered to work there in the war years – waned. It found diverse new uses, largely for technical training in telephony, but its fabric was beginning to disintegrate.

  A lot of the work was grindingly tedious; but women found a voice at Bletchley they may not have had elsewhere.

  In the mid-1970s, the first narrow beam of light was shone on the Bletchley secret by one of its veterans, Captain Frederick Winterbotham, in his book The Ultra Secret. Ultra was the term used for all intelligence that had been gleaned from the successfully broken Enigma codes. Many veterans were shocked that he had chosen to break his vows; the Official Secrets Act was meant to bind one for life. Yet this book was followed, cautiously, by other mentions of Bletchley in intelligence histories. By 1981, there was just enough information for the young novelist Ian McEwan to write a BBC play called The Imitation Game, about a young woman in a World War Two codebreaking centre. More veterans’ memoirs followed; but just at the point when the name of Bletchley Park was attaining some sort of familiarity, the old house and the Park itself were facing the prospect of complete demolition and rebuilding. A site of vast – almost immeasurable – historical significance was within a whisker of being transformed into a shopping mall with a modern housing estate attached.

  Lady Fanny Leon, chatelaine of the pre-war estate was assiduous both socially and charitably.

  This book is the story both of a house and of an institution. The codebreaking establishment was regarded at the time by some locals as a special kind of lunatic asylum. In some ways, they might have had a point. Bletchley, a modest town engaged in the modest industry of brick-making, and standing on a railway junction linking London with Scotland, and Oxford with Cambridge, had never before seen such a curious and diverse range of residents. Yet there had also been some colour and variety when the house was first bought by Sir Herbert Leon in the late 19th century; he and his wife Lady Fanny brought with them an enthusiasm for riding, a passion for horticulture and hothouses, and an enthusiasm for travel which saw them return from European tours with new ideas for titivating the appearance of the house. A few of Bletchley’s wartime recruits were architects by training, and they shuddered with distaste at the exuberant mismatch of styles – an awkward cupola copper dome here, some quasi-Tudor timbering there, and an interior flourish of what one codebreaker described as ‘lavatory gothic’.

  For some recruits, the house and the neighbouring town were very unsophisticated and primitive. For others, though, hailing from less grand upbringings, the estate had the feel of a fine university campus. And the work that was done here was carried out with similar collegiate ethos; an intoxicating blend of mad energy and discipline and even a radical absence of hierarchy. In certain departments of Bletchley Park, everyone had a voice, and every suggestion would be taken seriously. From the most experienced of senior codebreakers to the youngest of the Women’s Royal Navy volunteers operating the complex machinery, this was an establishment in which each individual contribution mattered enormously.

  Given the intense security at Bletchley Park, and the post-war determination that many of its traces be erased, it is quite remarkable just how much photographic material has survived. Not merely contemporary shots of the big house, or of the extemporised wooden huts in which so many of those eureka leaps were made – but also a wealth of images of revolutionary, proto-computing technology, such as Alan Turing’s bombe machines, or Max Newman and Tommy Flowers’ Colossus machines. Now, it has to be said that there were also a number of unauthorised photographs taken at the time: shots of Wrens and codebreakers, working machines or hunched over desks, or simply lying outside on the lawn by the lake, soaking up some sunshine. These pictures were taken for the most innocent of reasons: young people wanting some memento of this dizzyingly intense period of their lives. Now they are utterly fascinating records of a crucial point in history – but back then, those images could have got their owners into trouble. They might have been regarded by the authorities as misjudgements that in the wrong hands could have inadvertently given away vital information. Of course, they did no such thing – and that is what makes the photos here such a delight to pore over. It is as if we are all now being fully allowed in on this secret.

  The hermetic atmosphere led to a great many friendships being forged – and romances too.

  The photographs are valuable for another reason too. Because of the mathematical and technical nature of the codebreaking operation, we tend to hold mental images of Bletchley Park as a rather austere place of spartan work rooms, mind-boggling machinery and seri
ous young people, faces drawn with the effort and the pressure of the work that they were doing. The photographs tell a subtler, warmer and in many ways much more enthusiastic story. Away from the plainness of the huts, there is another life. Codebreakers found many ingenious ways to throw off the weight of their jobs: they formed theatre companies, they played boisterous games of rounders and tennis, they skated during the deep freezes of those cold wartime winters. The photographs also enable us to see unexpected sides to famous names. Given the tragic nature of his premature death in the 1950s, it is extraordinary and rather moving now to look at photographs of Alan Turing in 1939 and beforehand; they serve as a glimpse not only of an inherent cheerfulness, but also of just how young he was when he made those astonishing mathematical breakthroughs at the Park. Youth also figures large in the images of Wrens, smiling and laughing in the summer sunshine, recovering from all-night shifts tending to mighty, mysterious machinery, but with their thoughts very much on the dances to come with American soldiers.

  The photographs also allow us to gaze with some wonder upon the technology that grew out of Bletchley Park. This is a wire-filled world, a world where the use of valves was considered revolutionary. Decades before the first microchip, here is machinery specifically designed to take on tasks that would fry the human brain. We now live in an age when very few of us would know how to reconfigure the insides of our computers. These photographs enable us to wonder at some length what it must have been like, in the middle of a dark, silent night shift, to attend to a proto-computer reaching up to ceiling height which constantly broke down and had to be adjusted with pliers.