Thirty Secret Years

by Robin Denniston

  My father’s ability to make friends with his close colleagues was a major factor in his management style, and ultimately in the success of his undertakings. As an example, recent releases to the National Archives at Kew throw light on the early days of Bletchley Park, from the first arrival of Captain Ridley’s hunting party to the autumn of 1939 when Knox and my father had returned from Poland with the Enigma machine. HW 14/1 discloses AGD submitting to Admiral Sinclair, his friend and boss and a tower of strength to him ‘that the whole of GC&CS stays at Bletchley…. The large schoolroom is practically empty and it is proposed to put the commercial (i.e. diplomatic) section there. There is now under consideration a plan for the erection of huts just outside the grounds of BP to house the Service sections, including their necessary expansion, thereby facilitating the necessary expansion of various sections of SIS.’ Sinclair envisaged the whole of MI6 stationed at BP, a scheme which would have been abhorrent to his successor, Stewart Menzies (minghis) who preferred clubland, whereas Sinclair, though he valued his creature comforts too, brought his own chef to Bletchley with him on his exploratory survey of BP’s amenities, had more strategic plans. Unfortunately by Christmas both the chief of SIS since 1919 and his chef had died, the latter having committed suicide.

  By now my father had trusted colleagues to share the load, chief among them Josh Cooper who recalled in 1975, ‘At first our living conditions at Bletchley were very similar to what they had been in the Munich Crisis (of 1939)…. There was as yet no pneumatic tube system at Bletchley, and very few messengers to get texts (i.e. deciphered GAF Enigma intercepts) from the teleprinter room to Air Section (Cooper’s responsibility) and vice versa, so we used a contraption in which messages were put into holes drilled through large wooden balls, and rolled down an inclined gutter’. Cooper, whom I remember as a kindly, deaf man eager to help me rehabilitate my father, had worked at GC&CS before the war and eventually became head of research and development in GCHQ in Cheltenham, as Peter Wright revealed in his Spycatcher, a long and valuable career in signals intelligence.

  This was only equalled by that of Brigadier John Tiltman, my father’s other most valued colleague and lifetime friend till their deaths, who at BP headed the military section. Tiltman’s remarkable career in signals intelligence - he could be said to have all but invented the modern science of deciphering British diplomatic and military intercepts - has already been set out in Ralph Erskine’s fine monograph on his work and has thus had his rehabilitation. Tiltman wrote to me about my father and their friendship in 1981, remembering their years together and deploring the manner in which he had been rejected in February 1942.

  Tiltman had the same gift of friendship as AGD but tended to go his own way and did not enjoy collegiate life. Equally non-collegiate - surprising for a Cambridge don - was Frank Birch. He was an experienced cipherbreaker of long standing, and had worked at GC&CS before the war, and of course was one of the Room 40 OB veterans of WW1. It was he who wrote the musical for Room 40 staff, ID 25 in Wonderland, in which many of his colleagues there, including my father and Dilly Knox, took part. He certainly had a vein of mercurial humour, but less innocent and childish than Knox’s. Between the wars, when not teaching and lecturing at King’s College, Cambridge, he came to London during the pantomime season where he was in much in demand to play Widow Twankey, a cross-dressing character that somehow suited him. We saw him at more than one winter pantomime.

  By 1939 when he rejoined GC&CS, his secret career blossomed and by early 1941 my father directed that all naval Enigma material was to be sent to him. Now naval Enigma was Britain’s key to not losing the U-Boat war, so that Frank Birch’s achievements proved of national importance. What part he played in my father’s leadership crisis of early 1942 I do not know, but since everyone except Josh Cooper and John Tiltman supported the move, he must have been in the majority party. He remained within the high command at BP and after the war was one of the chief authors of the official secret history. His prose style was rather leaden compared to de Grey’s but his factual account of naval enigma is at Kew and available to diligent researchers. For some reason he and I did not like each other, though my mother and sister liked him, and he was always respectful to my father. He invited us all to go swimming at Ranelagh where he was a member, and I remember watching his heavy, lumpish torso surmounted by a jowlish face and thinking ‘he’s up to no good’. Later I cast him as one of the great Cambridge nest of spies - say no.7 - but there is no evidence in the record or anecdotally of his playing that part. He was married to a Russian aristocrat and they were childless.

  Dilly Knox, the most brilliant of all of them had not the same collegiate attitude to management but, despite that, spearheaded nearly all of BP’s early crypt-analytical successes, and though difficult to manage, was as upset as any when my father left Bletchley in 1942.

  Gordon Welchman, a Cambridge mathematician interviewed and accepted for BP by my father who struck up friendly relations with several senior BP mandarins, brought valuable organisational skills to bear on both technical and managerial problems as well as his teeming mathematical brain - he could think not just laterally but three-dimensionally, one veteran recalled, thus quickly inventing the diagonal plugboard which speeded up the ‘research’ (cryptanalytical) process at a time when speed was vital to get the messages to the service ministries in time for serving officers to use them in their daily tactics as well as their strategic planning. He dedicated The Hut 6 Story to Rejewski, Knox, Denniston and Travis.

  Nigel de Grey was the oldest, though perhaps not the closest, of my father’s friends and colleagues. The co-breaker of the Zimmerman telegram in 1917, he became a publisher in the interwar period but remained in touch with GC&CS, and he befriended my sister and me by giving us Medici prints of impressionists like Monet at Christmas time. He was first to hear of my success at the Challenge - the Westminster scholarship without which I would not be able to go to the school - from my mother whom I rang when the welcome greetings telegram from Downsend told them the news, and de Grey told both parents that that was the biggest intellectual hurdle, and that a glowing future in academia was thereby assured. He was quite wrong.

  At BP de Grey’s contribution from 1939 towards the breaking of Enigma was equal to Knox’s or Cooper’s or Tiltman’s. He broke the Abwehr code which supplied us with daily information about Nazi atrocities against German and Eastern European Jewry, but he was also the colleague who ungently thrust my father from his job as BP’s supreme in February 1942. Their friendship did not survive this, and de Grey’s own later account of GC&CS before the war seems to have been the product of the anti-Denniston attitudes that had developed by 1944-45, to counter which my father wrote ‘The GC&CS between the Wars’ which appears at Chapter 5.

  Another cryptographer who appears in the literature of signals intelligence was Hugh Foss who accompanied my father on their abortive secret conference to Paris in 1938 with the French and Poles. Foss had worked at GC&CS since the 1920’s and was a skilled cryptanalyst who played only a small part, according to the record, at BP. Another friend who visited us at Stapleford Mill Farm was a Cambridge don called F. L. Lucas whom I remember but can find no record of his BP work. Finally, not from GC&CS but from the top of MI6, Valentine Vivian (deputy to Menzies, ‘C’) and his wife became family friends of my parents since he retired as a colonel from the Indian army and lived at Ashtead to be near us. Vivian is largely a figure of fun, unfortunately, and Philby treats him mercilessly in his memoir My Silent War, but he alone came to my father’s funeral in the New Forest in 1961 and told me what great work my father had down for his country and for the free world.

  Ernst Fetterlein was a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution of October 1918. He and his wife escaped from Petrograd via a Swedish steamer, and landed at Tilbury to be interviewed by Sinclair who knew at once he had struck gold because Fetterlein had been the Tsar’s chief cryptographer, and sported a large ruby ring his master had presented to him s
hortly before his murder. His breaking of the diplomatic ciphers of the new Soviet diplomats, Krassin and Kamanev, proved the greatest achievement of GC&CS in the early 1920s when British ministers revealed Broadway Buildings’ successes at deciphering, interpreting and distributing evidence of Soviet revolutionary perfidy, much to my father’s disgust. Thereafter the Fetterleins became friends of my parents and spent each Christmas Day with us at 48, Tedworth Square, bringing more expensive presents for us children than our parents could afford. Fetterlein did not go to Bletchley in 1939 with the rest of the diplomatic and service team, perhaps because Russia was deemed less important, as a neutral till 1938, and only became an ally (so ineligible for message interception) in the summer of 1941. Fetterlein’s death in 1944 was noted in my father’s diary for that year, as was Knox’s.

  Less important than his gift of friendship but not without significance throughout his life was the fact that my father was a keen sportsman, and became such a star hockey player at left half that he played for Scotland in the 1908 Olympics. He went on playing hockey, later tennis and squash and golf through middle to old age and since he was a kindly father taught me to play tennis and squash - though not hockey - and golf: for in 1937 we spent our summer holiday in Scotland and the pro at North Berwick - one of the sacred cities of that game - he showed me how to aim for the ‘sixpence beneath the ball’ and to swing so that in my teens I was a single figure handicap player and on a good day could beat my father - who was so pleased about this that he wrote to his friend and colleague William Friedman about it in the mid-1950s. In 1939 we spent several golf weekends at Barton-on-Sea (we had sold the bungalow in Fairfield Road by that time) and enjoyed the modest luxury of a seaside hotel. Between rounds we spoke little about non-golfing matters as neither of us was good at smalltalk, or conversation in general when not on pre-arranged topics. He must have known war was close since a few weeks after our last golfing weekend he went to Warsaw to collect an Enigma machine, but we did not discuss politics. He continued to play tennis and squash on return to Ashtead in 1942, and even after his retirement from the FO when he worked for a few months as foreign language teacher at Downsend school near Leatherhead, where I had been a pupil and whence I won my Westminster scholarship. But coaching cricket in your 60’s is too strenuous and he retired properly to the New Forest where golf continued to be his passion and his pastime. He also grew vegetables with great care and attention.

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  V

  Four separate factors had a profound effect on my father’s career from mid-1940 onwards.

  The first was the unexpected success achieved at Bletchley under his control and afterwards.

  The second was his temperamental inability to exploit these for his own advantage and the consequent missed opportunities that others later identified for the enhancement of the work itself.

  The third is a severe illness which struck him down and nearly killed him in 1941, but from which he was later to make a full recovery; indeed, he concluded his professional career on a high note of success which remained known to few and with which a later section of this monograph deals.

  The fourth was the American involvement.

  The success of Ultra in World War II is now history, though some war historians differ as to the extent of its influence in shortening the duration of hostilities. The success was due to a number of factors, for which the long pre-war preparatory years of interception, cryptanalysis, and distribution - integrated but secret - provided an invaluable base. Enigma could not have been broken in Britain in 1940 without Knox’s theoretical work in the 1930s and without the mathematical genius of Turing and the technological solutions of Welchman. But the information provided still needed processing in a secure fashion, and this task, given the parlous state of the British war effort, the contrasting requirements and temperaments of commanders in the field and at GHQ, and the lack of an integrated hierarchy of leadership below the War Cabinet, was at least as taxing as the others. In all these AGD played a part. Perhaps the most crucial was the first, where he alone had the lifelong experience of and commitment to a total service of secret intelligence provision from cryptanalysis. Others came and went and came again. Newcomers were quick to learn. But the main instructor and implementer was AGD.

  He was also at the heart of Y intelligence (interception of morse messages), vital to the GC&CS output, though increasingly overshadowed by Ultra. Oliver Strachey and Dilwyn Knox were both running important self-standing cipher-breaking units. The secret Abwehr codes – which revealed Nazi atrocities in Eastern Europe - were being read for some time before Enigma came on stream. Traffic between Madrid and Berlin was being read early on. Bletchley Park had become an organization producing signals intelligence vital to the daily conduct of the war in Europe, and this both gives a context for the early days at Bletchley Park and illustrates some of the pressures created by the very successes of its cryptanalysis. AGD was not, however, a man who found leadership easy. He lacked self-confidence. He was a highly intelligent self-made Scot who found it difficult to play a commanding role amongst the bureaucrats and politicians with whom he had to deal. He doubted the discretion of most people outside the secret service, including his own superiors. He was no delegator. In essence he ran a one-man operation months long after it should have become a management structure. This had advantages as well as disadvantages. Professional recruits, as we have seen, appreciated the informal atmosphere in which much of their best work was accomplished. Security was maintained on the basis of highly individual commitment. But access to funds for expansion was badly hampered and it was not long before some of the new arrivals came together with some veterans, including de Grey and Birch and particularly Edward Travis who deputized for AGD during his 1941 hospitalization. They eventually decided to recommend to Menzies the replacement of Denniston by Travis. AGD was not cut out for high-profile leadership and his previous experience was no help in his predicament.

  The organization of office life at Bletchley from 1939 to 1941 and the palace revolution that ensued is not available to the ordinary researcher and one has to rely on memories. P. W. Filby* remembers:

  Travis was deputy to Denniston and a crony of de Grey. They had endless talks in the crucial days and although they were held next door the walls were wooden and since we were almost always working in complete silence I couldn’t help hearing the conversation sometimes. De Grey’s voice was that of an actor and I knew ages before it happened that they didn’t feel Denniston could cope with the enormous increase demanded of Ultra and other problems. AGD was headstrong and didn’t like criticism; after all, he had carried the group throughout the 1930s, against criticism quite often, and now that war had actually occurred he wanted to be at the helm, in charge of the organization he had created. Travis and de Grey were perfectly right.

  Other accounts of the February 1942 bouleversement at BP include Gordon Welchman’s account in his Hut 6 Story. It is difficult, of course, to be impartial. To a brilliant young mathematician like Turing it must have seemed inexplicable, and culpable, that sufficient resources were still not available as late as the end of 1941 to carry out the tasks described in his famous letter to Churchill. In Whitehall the prime objective remained to draft the best people into the armed forces: Bletchley Park then carried no cachet. Turing remained amazed at the authorities’ inability to convince both Menzies and the War Cabinet of the importance of what was going on. Yet my father had spent years building the operation to its present size and shape, with Treasury parsimony and Foreign Office indifference as a constant companion. And it was AGD who had had the foresight to recruit Turing the day war broke out.

  * * *

  VI

  The year of crisis for AGD would be 1941, the year in which he had to spend precious weeks and months in hospital at a time when Bletchley Park was growing exponentially with the early successes of Ultra, when the American involvement, as a prospective wartime ally and as sharer of the secret, was becoming
ever closer, and when the new scale and nature of the organization he headed made the eccentric nature of his leadership particularly vulnerable. His diary entries for the early weeks of the year show regular meetings of the Y committee and with the DNI, the DMI, and Menzies, and visits from Americans, French, and Poles. But on 27 February a stone in his bladder was diagnosed (and a five-guinea bill for X-rays was noted). On 10 March he left Bletchley and three days later was operated on. Hospital bills ate up most of his net salary of £104 for that and subsequent months. He was discharged on 14 April but immediately contracted orchitis and was hospitalized at Ashridge until early May. A period of convalescence followed. He returned to the office on 9 June after nearly three months. Edward Travis, his number two, was in day-to-day command and by early August 1941 AGD had received authorization to make two arduous, and as it turned out vitally important personal visits to Canada and the USA. He left for the United States, flying via Newfoundland on 11 August, and his diary noted the questions he had for his American hosts. He dined with William Friedman on the 18th and returned to England on the 23 August. Expenses included a hotel bill of £41.