The Lost World of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  Bletchley Park’s activities were moved to the London suburb of Eastcote – the base is seen from above. These days, it has been cleared to make way for luxury flats.

  The workload also remained impressively heavy; this was the time of a continued (and in peacetime unprecedented) signals/intelligence understanding between Britain and America – the UK–USA alliance. Because Britain’s territories – the Empire and the Commonwealth – were still so extraordinarily extensive, the Americans were in a few cases rather reliant on these far-flung outposts for crucial intercepts and intelligence. The British Empire would dissolve with remarkable speed over the course of the next twenty years but until then, the fledgling GCHQ already had a mighty burden to shoulder. In the early 1950s, the size of the operation – plus the new threat of nuclear strike from a Soviet Union that had started testing its own weapons – necessitated a further move. This was to a location that in some ways would prove to be the true spiritual successor to that 55-acre Buckinghamshire estate. Under the guise of roving civil servants on the look-out for new office space, GCHQ operatives scouted out various candidates outside London; at one point, even Canada was mooted as a potential base. But soon they found what they were looking for: a smart county town which by coincidence had a collection of government offices that were being wound down. The site had space and – crucially – capacity for a great number of telephone landlines. The proposal was put to a frankly delighted Cheltenham town council (which had been anxious about the offices closing down). Now the town of Cheltenham would have an entirely new community descending upon it, engaged upon work every bit as highly confidential and sensitive as that conducted at Bletchley. And as well as Hugh Alexander, there were other veterans such as Arthur Bonsall (later to rise to great prominence) and GCHQ’s new Director, Sir Eric Jones.

  The huts and the blocks were left echoing and empty, and all the technology was stripped out. Some was sent on to Eastcote in Middlesex – and some of the Bletchley staff went with it.

  Ration books were still in use well into the early 1950s. Veterans recalled the grimness of that post-war austerity – by contrast, the Bletchley canteen seemed a cornucopia.

  Considering the extemporisation of Bletchley’s early days, its later organisation was meticulous and technocratic.

  GCHQ kept one prominent link with the old Bletchley Park site: this is where its Central Training School was now based. But the old huts and the house also played host to some other concerns. The General Post Office also used the estate as a training centre – this, broadly, for telecommunications operatives, working on high-frequency transmitters and receivers. Again, though, technology swiftly began to outstrip these: satellites would become the next big thing. There was also an unexpected technological upset there: namely, the electrification of the West Coast railway line in the early 1970s, which apparently interfered with the radio masts on the site. Rubbing alongside all of this, though, was a teacher training college for women (which arrived in 1948), then later a hostel and even a magistrates’ court. By the late 1960s, the area had a fresh centre of gravity, in the form of the new town of Milton Keynes – an urban development that swallowed some of the old local villages. It was (and is) just four miles from Bletchley. In the mid-1980s, when the GPO was privatised by Mrs Thatcher’s government and transformed into British Telecom, the company stayed on the site for training purposes for several more years. On top of this, the Civil Aviation Authority also had space there at this time. It must have been a puzzling and rather louring prospect though: a few of the old wartime huts had been demolished, but some – plus the great featureless concrete blocks – remained. Some of them had even been renovated to an extent, in order to form study bedrooms for the training centre. Thus various different branches of organisations added their own frankly unlovely 1970s contribution: anonymous square slabs of glass and concrete. There was no clue as to the estate’s wonderful – and colourful – wartime life, at least until the mid-1970s, when the silence began to lift. Even after this, in the 1980s, it must have been tricky to associate this drab and anonymous estate with the inspiration and ingenuity it had housed just a few years previously. And the house itself was slowly beginning to disintegrate.

  Wilton Hall had been constructed for the codebreakers – but it later found new life as a venue for acts like The Rolling Stones and The John Barry Seven.

  In 1976, the teacher training college left the estate. Eleven years later, in 1987, so too did the training arm of GCHQ. In 1993, British Telecom packed up its operations there, as did the Civil Aviation Authority branch. There came a perilous point where the house was facing a similarly bleak prospect to the one presented some fifty-five years earlier when Sir George Leon sold up: it could quite easily have been demolished, as indeed could the huts and blocks. If it had not been for the determination of a few passionate individuals, the physical legacy of Bletchley Park might have been lost for ever.

  Loon pants and mini-skirts aside, Bletchley Park at least continued the tradition of young people gathered together in one institution – now used for telecoms training – and making full use of the ballroom.

  Chapter Thirteen

  RESCUE AND RENOVATION

  Before the Bletchley Park Trust was formed, many of the huts and blocks had fallen into a state of advanced and creeping dilapidation.

  The sorry state of Hut 3 in the early 1990s – yet in another sense, it was remarkable that such makeshift, temporary structures were still standing.

  Barely one hundred years after it was built, Bletchley Park – by the early 1990s – was facing the prospect of being turned into a vast supermarket and a new housing development. It was empty and disused. The huts were rotting; and because of leaks in the roof, the main house was similarly falling apart. It presented a melancholic spectacle. In 1991, the local Bletchley Historical and Archaeological Association was convinced that those who had worked there would never again have a chance to see it; and so the society set about tracking down as many Bletchley Park veterans as it could.

  The idea was that the veterans would be invited to a grand farewell party. Most of them would not have seen the site since the war. Thanks to some assiduous research, not to mention the putting out of many feelers, the society managed to muster an impressive 400 veterans for the occasion. The event turned out to be terrifically moving and – for those on the committee of the society – fantastically eye-opening. Suddenly the continued neglect of this historic location felt absurd and also – given the scale of the Park’s achievements – outrageous.

  The Bletchley Park Trust raised awareness that these buildings had great historical significance, and should be preserved for future generations.

  Rebuilding and repair work has involved years of hard work and assiduous fund-raising.

  And it was at this point that these Bletchley enthusiasts seriously set to work on preserving the Park as best they could. The tactics were laudably clever. One local councillor in Milton Keynes had noted, for instance, that the great avenues of old trees planted in the era of the Leons, and before, were as much under threat as any of the buildings; and he saw to it in 1992 that a conservation order was slapped on them. This had the knock-on effect of safeguarding a substantial proportion of the Park. That same year, the Bletchley Park Trust was formed. The estate and its lands were tangled up in a labyrinth of ownership, between British Telecom and the aviation arm of the Civil Service. And it was with these bodies that the Trust sailed into immediate negotiations. Time was against them; for instance, in the main house the ballroom, with its ornate plaster ceiling of ‘drooping bosoms’ as Sarah Baring had so poetically put it, was in grave danger of collapse. If they did not act fast, then there would be precious little legacy to preserve at all.

  Even the sturdier blocks – the buildings that had once housed the most secret technology in Europe – were not immune to neglect and entropy.

  HRH the Duke of Kent became the Trust’s chief patron and in 1994 the site was tentatively
opened to the public as a sparse – but deeply atmospheric – museum. To begin with, this was a very limited operation, with the Park opened up once every other weekend. But the story of Bletchley was now at last starting to become more widely known. In 1995, a novel by journalist-turned-author Robert Harris became a bestseller: Enigma. It was a fictionalised thriller set in and around the Park – rich in atmospheric description, and true to the enormous tensions and anxieties that the work had produced. This romanticised account of the codebreakers’ work could only have been a help and it was around this time that the museum began operating more regular opening hours. There was also the publication of Code Breakers – a collection of essays from a range of veterans, pulled together by Harry Hinsley and Alan Stripp, which laid out in full detail, complete with wiring diagrams, how those miracles of decryption had been achieved. On top of this was a steady increase in press interest, particularly on those occasions when codebreaking veterans made their first returns to the Park since the war. The significance of the estate was gaining wider recognition. And by the end of the decade, the Bletchley Park Trust had secured a valuable concession: a 250-year leasehold on the most historic areas of the Park.

  The film Enigma (2001), starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, and based on the Robert Harris novel, helped attract publicity for the Park and its museum, even though the story’s Polish villain went down badly with some.

  Broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, himself the centre of an enigma, when a stolen machine was sent in a parcel to his Newsnight office.

  Then there were the films – one a tremendous hit, the other a source of wild exasperation. Michael Apted’s 2001 screen version of Enigma, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, was not filmed at the Park itself – instead, the location was the very much grander and prettier Chicheley Hall, also in Buckinghamshire (which had actually seen service during the war as a base for the Special Operations Executive). Nonetheless, the success of the film generated an enormous amount of interest in the real Park. At the time of its release, Oliver and Sheila Lawn were interviewed by the press and asked – continually – if they were the couple on whom the romantic leads in the film were based. They played along with the brouhaha with great good humour. The other film, one that still evokes sharp in-breaths of irritation, was U-571 (2000). This told the story of how an Enigma machine was captured from a German submarine in 1942 by the Americans, and how it was entirely thanks to them that the codes were cracked. In the end titles, there was an acknowledgement to the British sailors of HMS Bulldog, who had carried out the real operation against U-110 in 1941, some months before the US entered the war. Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with a questioner in the House of Commons who declared it an ‘affront’. Yet this seething controversy had the upside of focusing attention upon the real heroes of the Enigma story.

  The late Tony Sale – a computer expert whose meticulous recreation of the Colossus machine was a stupendous feat, and a huge Bletchley attraction.

  The strangest episode during this period was when, in 2000, a four-rotor Abwehr Enigma machine was stolen from the Park, despite security; some time after, the Park received ransom notes, demanding extortionate sums for its return or it would be destroyed. Then, in a bizarre twist, the machine was posted to the BBC office of the presenter Jeremy Paxman. Odd though the story was, it alerted a wider public to the idea of guided tours around the Park. And the return of the machine also highlighted how the Park was working to safeguard this still mysterious heritage. Secret history was now being bathed in the gaudiest limelight, and deservedly so.

  By 2004, the museum was thriving (even if the Park’s finances were not), with an array of fascinating displays, and it was opening every day. What also gave it tremendous appeal to visitors was the small army of dedicated volunteers who kept the place running – not least of which were the veterans who gave superb informed tours. Former Wrens Ruth Bourne and Jean Valentine were not merely experts, but also captivating public speakers. Word spread further and more and more special visiting parties came in. Added to this were enthusiasts such as the computer expert Tony Sale. His epic reconstruction of the Colossus machine – the original blueprints of which had, as we have seen, been consigned to the flames – stands as a monument both to his acute ingenuity but also to his dedication. For a younger generation that takes iPads for granted, to gaze now upon this recreation is to understand the painstaking and often mad brilliance of those taking the first steps in computing. Very few of them would be able to operate it with any confidence that they were doing it right. The same might be true of the bombe reconstructions: in broad terms, that was the era when technology first leaped ahead of its operators, the workings and functions of these new machines many times more esoteric than even the most advanced radio set. These Bletchley attractions – the re-builds, plus the original Enigma machines, plus the refreshingly un-dumbed-down displays – were starting to attract ever greater numbers. The Park Trust also found another valuable revenue stream: that of letting out serviced office accommodation within the estate. It could also be used for business and commercial conferences, as none of these activities would impinge on the Park’s historical areas in any way. Yet still the future was far from secure and, despite the milling visitors, the house and the huts still needed a huge amount of work. In the case of the huts, a couple of these buildings had tarpaulins for roofs. These structures had only been built to last five or six years – no one during the war would have anticipated that anyone would have wanted to see them fifty or sixty years afterwards.

  HRH The Duke of Kent (CENTRE) became Bletchley Park’s patron in the earliest days of the Trust and has worked hard to help secure its future.

  The Duke inspects the Colossus rebuild with Dr Tommy Flowers (LEFT) and Tony Sale (RIGHT) first visiting the Park in 1994.

  Unfortunately the once-grand cricket pavilion has been under threat of demolition for years. The decay on some parts of the estate – and in the main house – was heartbreaking to see. Happily, there are huge renovation projects in progress.

  In 2008 there came, at last, the sense that the importance of the site was being recognised in more official circles: English Heritage gave £330,000 for the much-needed repair of the house’s roof. By now, the Park’s annual reunions for veterans, held every September, were not merely a part of the local calendar, but an event to which visitors came from all over the country. There was – and still is – something ineffably moving about seeing the once silent, once invisible codebreakers and Wrens lining up proudly in front of the house for the group photograph after the service of remembrance.

  The house and its grounds have been restored to a proud state that Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny Leon might have recognised. Taken from the exact same view as on page 26.

  The rescue of the house and huts and blocks, which looked in the early 1990s beyond the realms of possibility, had found – nearly – a firm footing, a grounded stability. All of that was made possible not merely by the initial committee, but also by the terrific enthusiasm of volunteers and veterans alike. Their work combined to pull off the most remarkable of all feats: it recreated, unselfconsciously, the slightly anarchic, extemporised feel of the wartime establishment. It wasn’t just the look of the place that had been preserved, it was the feel and the ethos of it too. The visitors wandering around had no difficulty at all in picturing distracted codebreakers throwing cups into lakes, or in the huts hunched over columns of five-letter groups, or in the house, being ushered through to sign the Official Secrets Act. The spirit had remained.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ROYALS, DIGNITARIES – AND JAMES BOND

  The renovated Bletchley Park now attracts around 200,000 visitors a year, and further improvements are in progress.

  Her Majesty the Queen meets veteran codebreakers Oliver and Sheila Lawn on a visit in 2011. In her speech, she gave ‘heartfelt thanks’ to all Bletchley’s recruits ‘on behalf of a grateful nation’.

  Money is one thing – but that alo
ne does not breathe fresh life into institutions. So while the Park’s recent success in securing the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund is terrific (and a tribute to the ceaseless work of Dr Sue Black and Simon Greenish MBE, among many others) we must also acknowledge how the increasing interest of the great and the good has been helping the Park too. The presence of celebrities never hurts; and broadcaster and writer Stephen Fry has been continually vocal in his support. He has visited the Park a few times and never wastes an opportunity to publicise it either on his television shows or in among his thousands of Tweets. Nor should any other show-business support be viewed in snobbish terms: whatever generates interest in the Park is also helping to preserve it.

  One of the more agreeable problems the Park now faces is that huge numbers of film and television crews are besieging it on an almost daily basis. There are the frequent occasions when news stories break – wartime racing pigeons carrying codes, for instance – to thrust Bletchley back into the spotlight. Take the recent story, unearthed by Michael Smith, that Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 during the war because of her espionage/detective novel N or M?, which featured a character called Major Bletchley. Christie happened to be friends with Dilly Knox; MI5 wanted to know if she was trying to tip a sinister wink to enemy powers. The answer, of course, was no, not even remotely. It was simply a coincidence. Yet such tales tend to bring the world’s cameras to the Park, and they have to be fitted in around all the visitors.