In January 1939 Major Bertrand arranged for a group of British technicians to visit Paris, and gave them one of the last legacies of his secret agent, a message sent on Enigma, both in clear and code. It dated from before the modifications; still, it was precious. But while the Department of Communications were still considering it the Poles succeeded in reconstructing the current Enigma. With only the specifications for 1931–34, which have already been described, they managed to build a working model, a good deal larger than the original, but still only half a metre square.
In July 1938 an invitation arrived to a conference, this time not in Paris, but in Poland itself. The British deputation was to consist of Commander A. G. Denniston, Dilly’s superior since the days of Room 40, a Naval Commander from the Admiralty and Dilly himself. At Courn’s Wood the two boys, neither of whom had any idea what their father did, were amazed to see an Admiral in full uniform sitting in the draughty dining room. What could he want? Two weeks later, the deputation flew to Warsaw.
Major Bertrand had the delicate task of creating a friendly atmosphere. The English party were booked into the Hotel Bristol, and that evening he took them out to the celebrated Restaurant Crystal. Here the Naval Commander ate and drank too much, Denniston remained discreet, and Dilly, in Bertrand’s words, appeared “froid, nerveux, ascète”, scarcely touching the numerous courses, and concentrating only on the matter in hand. The next morning they went to the “house in the woods”—the secret radio and intelligence station at Mokotov-Pyry, a few kilometres from Warsaw, hidden underneath a concrete shelter and almost invisible, among its thick surrounding trees, from the air. The Poles were waiting at the bottom of a flight of damp steps. After the best Bertrand could do by way of congratulations and introductions, they gave a demonstration of their model.
Dilly had been working for the past twelve months on the problem of the sequence of letters on the Enigma keyboard. Now he was told what it was. It was ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ.
Dilly’s reaction was characteristic. He was furious. It was a swindle, not because he had failed to solve it, but because it was too easy. Games should be worth playing. The keyboard was, it turned out, not a significant factor at all. During lunch, which was taken at the Restaurant Bacchus, and at which the Naval Commander was actually sick from overeating, Dilly sat hunched in his loose-fitting suit, unresponsive and groaning slightly. He only just rallied sufficiently to make a polite farewell.
He was deeply grateful to Bertrand, but he was outraged. A problem which had been presented to him as too difficult had turned out to be too simple. He intended, however, never to make the same miscalculation again.
When Poland was invaded in September 1939, Bertrand succeeded in evacuating both the Poles and the reconstituted machines to the Château de Vignolles, where he had his hands full not only with a heavy and dangerous routine but with British liaison officers “authorized to know all”, who complained that they could not get a decent cup of tea. In spite of this, he sent the Foreign Office a model of the machine. In July 1939 he had met Dilly briefly in London when he came over to arrange a system for the exchange of information; this was vitally important, because Enigma made 4,789 changes of key between the occupation of Poland and the invasion of France.
In 1939 the Department of Communications was moved down to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, which was given the name of Station X. Bletchley was selected simply as being more or less equidistant from Oxford and Cambridge, since the Foreign Office remained faithful to Blinker Hall’s principle of recruiting dons as cryptographers. As it happened, Bletchley was also an important railway junction, and it might have been expected that the tracks, gleaming in the moonlight, would make a good target for enemy bombers—in fact the R.A.F., before the development of radar, used them for a “steer”—but this disadvantage was outweighed by its convenience for professors. Confidence was justified. Although many of the personnel, accustomed to the lecture room, spoke openly and much too loudly, and on one occasion a quantity of secret decodes were brought in from the ordinary rubbish heap, the secret was kept, and Bletchley never suffered a severe attack from the air.
The house itself was a large Victorian Tudor-Gothic mansion, whose ample grounds sloped down to the railway. It had been much done up by Sir Herbert Leon, a prosperous merchant, and the panelled, crocketed rooms had been fitted with majestic plumbing. The perimeter was wired, and guarded by the R.A.F. regiment, whose N.C.O.s warned the men that if they didn’t look lively they would be sent “inside the Park”, suggesting that it was now a kind of lunatic asylum. There were passwords for entry and exit, but Dilly could never remember any of them, or where they were kept.
Lodgings had to be found for the cryptographers in Bletchley, which was still a little railway town, so that the wives of engine drivers, cleaners and shunters now had billeted on them an unfamiliar Elite. The small front parlours were taken over by very advanced bridge games, and experts in symbolic logic worked out on a sliding scale the exact amount everyone should pay for cocoa and biscuits. Before long chess-players were recruited to the department, and the champions, Alexander and Golombek, demonstrated the romantic and classical styles of chess. These were intellects at play. Those who solved problems in the bath, however, were at a loss, because few of the billets had bathrooms. Even before rationing there were grievous shortages of pipe tobacco and copies of The Times in Bletchley, and the corner newsagents developed a serious power complex. Then, gradually, hotels and country houses were taken over for the higher administrative grades.
Dilly himself always slept in the office, going back to Courn’s Wood once a week. His driving was worse than ever. His mind was totally elsewhere. Fortunately he drove slowly. “It’s amazing how people smile, and apologise to you, when you knock them over,” he remarked.
In time the buildings inside the Park walls extended into blocks of huts and cafeterias, and by the end of the war the personnel numbered more than seven thousand, increased by observers and liaison men and important visitors in uniform. With all this Dilly had nothing to do. At first his department consisted of ten people, though these included, besides Peter Twinn, two very brilliant and sympathetic young women, Margaret Rock and Mavis Lever (now Mrs Batey). They were accommodated in a small cottage overlooking the old stable yard.
He would, however, need more ciphering clerks—not the vast numbers which eventually made the Treasury complain that “Bletchley was using up all the girls in the country,” but still, a section of his own. Into this task Dilly entered with quite unexpected enthusiasm, and when the assistants arrived down from London with the files they were surprised to find him surrounded with pretty girls, all of them, for some reason, very tall, whom he had recruited for the work. The girls took from four to six months to train, though this was not undertaken by Dilly, who never trained anybody, but by a capable and understanding woman, Mrs Helen Morris. They worked on the equations in three eight-hour shifts, and when Dilly wanted to speak to them or to the punch-card operators who registered the encipherments as dots, he would limp across from the cottage, often in his grey dressing gown, indifferent to rain and snow, to tell them his new idea.
The cottage suited Dilly, though it had disadvantages. The walls were coated with whitewash, which rubbed off on visiting admirals who were seen to brush their uniforms furtively. The two downstairs rooms were connected by a cupboard, which Dilly frequently mistook for the door. His voice could be heard inside, resounding hollowly. To get his hot bath he had to go to a special hut adjoining the main buildings. But the isolation was precious and he could have coffee with real milk, supplied to him by a lady who lived nearby, and kept her own cow.
The invasion of France had changed the nature of the work completely. When the Germans crossed the border, Bertrand moved his organization from pillar to post, and by a heroic effort kept it functioning even when the French Higher Command was giving up. It proved impossible, however, to transfer the “factory” out of France and he entrus
ted some of the best of his Polish cryptographers to a passeur, who was to smuggle them into Spain across the Pyrenees. This man sold them to the Nazis. Meanwhile the Germans, on the eve of the invasion, had begun to work a completely new version of Enigma, a new setting programme, a new keyboard, a new arrangement of wires. All the solutions had to be started again. The Department of Communications temporarily “went deaf”.
Dilly’s particular corner of the work was the Spy Enigma Variation. This was not used by enemy agents in the field—the machine was too heavy to carry about easily—but by the German Embassies in neutral countries and in the occupied zones. As a problem, the Variation was crucial, because the traffic, if it could be read, told not only the enemy plans but what they knew and did not know, or mistakenly thought they knew, about ours. The Variations used by the German Army, Navy and Air Force were assigned to different departments, or “huts”, which, as the war went on, required expert administration and an automatic routine to handle the enormous volume of material. This did not interest Dilly, who was not an organization man. Possibly he would not have adapted to computer-based techniques, but then he was not a technical man either. He was, essentially, what he had been in Room 40, an idea-struck man.
He could, for example, look at a mass of cipher text and pick out unerringly the parts that might be of help towards a solution and therefore should be tried first. There is no rule for doing this; it is a matter of instinct, though instinct, Headlam always said, is the natural way of discovering what happens. The “way in” they were hoping for in 1940 was through the indicators, that is, the date and number at the beginning of each signal, which could be solved in time by trial and error, and the padding, or nonsense words, which were used to fill up a message; these were issued to the German cipher clerks in lists; one of them was Rosengarten, which surely must have taken Dilly back twenty-odd years or so to the Rosen of Schiller.
The mechanical work was done by the tall girls, and largely consisted of solving equations and of arranging and rearranging the dots which represented the transpositions of letters, until every alternative likely or possible in a message sent at that time and place had been tried. They had elementary devices to measure the displacements, invented by the Department, and known as “creeping subtractors”. To describe the groupings, and perhaps to amuse the patient clerks, Dilly invented a special language, “beetling”, “lobstering”, “if one cow can cross the road so can two” and so on. Combined with his hesitant way of speaking, this made decipherment, to the outsider, seem quite as unintelligible as the cipher itself. American observers who came for a briefing were unable to make head or tail of their notes; beetles, cows, lobsters … They asked if they might see the working papers, and, after some search, were shown the backs of some old envelopes. They wanted to know the office routine, but there wasn’t any.
Dilly had written on things with purple ink, which faded, or with a blunt pencil, and when everything seemed to be going reasonably well he had taken his staff out and treated them to the best dinner that the Seven Bells public house could provide. Perhaps all this sounded like the deliberate holding-back of information, but it was not. There was no further explanation to give.
Occasionally the terrible Knox temper would blaze up, and then Dilly’s language was cutting and intemperate. This was particularly the case if he thought that anyone at the Park was using the war to promote a business career. Otherwise his kindness was unfailing—at least to the women, for it sometimes had to be pointed out to him that he should be kind, also, to men. Hadn’t one said the right thing? You haven’t said anything; you haven’t spoken to him at all for two weeks. And Dilly would lope out again, to redress the wrong.
As the months went by the Park, like any other human society, began to find a communal life; the cryptographers danced, and skated on the lake, and there was cricket, though Dilly no longer bowled his slow spinners. The Local Defence Volunteers he did join, and his staff thought it was lucky that no live ammunition was issued, but here they were wrong. Dilly, in spite of his poor eyesight, was a very good shot.
There were old friends at Bletchley, among them the inscrutable Frank Birch, who had rejoined the Department, and had the distinction of being one of the few people ever to refuse to employ Kim Philby (he turned him down on the grounds that Bletchley would not be able to offer him enough money). Dilly also made new acquaintances, and became particularly fond of the young genius Alan Turing, who was responsible for expressing the solutions and possibilities in mathematical form. Turing’s vagaries were worthy of the high standard of Bletchley. Doubtful of the future of sterling, he had wheeled away two ingots of silver bullion in a pram and buried them as an investment, but later he could not remember the place, and they are still lying unclaimed beneath one of the post-war housing estates of Bletchley. As early as 1937 he had suggested a “universal computing machine” and had showed that there were mathematical problems which would not be computable; he was largely responsible for devising a way to read the settings of Enigma. During his idle moments, however, Turing had worked out the likelihood, on the data the Department had so far, of a complete solution. The odds were more than 50,000 to one against.
The Spy Enigma cipher texts piled higher and higher, still without any significant way in. One day a huge sack of torn and burnt papers came in, salvaged from a German vessel, and Dilly amazed the staff by the eager skill with which he pieced them together. He telephoned for colleagues from Cambridge, who hurried over to help him. In spirit he was back at the British Museum, among the papyri.
Although he had now added mushrooms and gruel to his strange daily diet, the old stomach trouble was recurring, and he never felt really well. His solicitor, E. S. P. Haynes, had said that dentists were to blame; obviously Nature intended all animals to die as soon as their teeth dropped out, whereas human beings insisted on living on, to experience intolerable illnesses. Dilly liked to refer systems back to Nature, though he himself would be hard to fit into any hypothesis of biological survival. To and fro he drove to Courn’s Wood, reciting choliambics or Lycidas, determined that whatever happened he would survive long enough to see the solution of Spy Enigma.
Not long after the outbreak of war, Wilfred, as has been explained in the last chapter, was homeless. When Edward Wynne had been offered the Bishopric of Ely he had consulted the O.G.S., as their rule required, and Wilfred had told him that, “on the whole, you’d make less mess of being a bishop than anyone else I can think of”; and after Wynne’s departure he was in the unfamiliar position of having material possessions to give away—he was able to send the new Bishop the forks, spoons and crockery which he had bought himself for the Oratory. Of course, this did not mean that Wilfred was any the less a member of the O.G.S.; indeed, in 1941 he was elected Superior, and the impression he made on the brotherhood was as clear as Eddie’s upon Punch. But in 1940 he was faced with Ronnie’s recurrent problem of where to go next.
Wilfred could live anywhere; but if the house in Lady Margaret Road had outlived its usefulness, it meant leaving his garden. A tenderness for the plants you have raised from seed and the earth you have turned over a thousand times seems one of the most allowable of earthly attachments. House and garden, however, went to the Franciscans, and subsequently to the Lucy Cavendish Foundation for mature women students.
A suggestion came from Pembroke. Meredith Dewey, the chaplain, had volunteered to serve with the Navy. Wilfred was asked to take his place for the duration of the war.
Cambridge was preparing for what was called “the emergency”. The college gates were blocked with sandbags, treasures were sent away, the Director of the Fitzwilliam, a bachelor, had fifty invalid women quartered upon him. In March 1941 Pembroke itself went up in a blaze which started in its R.A.F. Initial Training Wing, and the New Buildings stood roofless for about a hundred yards. Wilfred, arriving with his old bike and his old clothes, gave a valuable sense of continuity with the past. In a few weeks he had taken over the gardens. The
y were given over to the wartime cultivation of vegetables, but he managed to retain enough ground to construct a rockery.
He was to teach theology, history and logic to the undergraduates. Many of these were short-course students, soon due to join the forces, and hoping if they survived to return to Cambridge. They needed all the care that he could give them. “Examiners found that they could recognise his pupils,” Canon Dodds has written, “both by the direction of their interest and by a certain freedom of approach; possibly the less able men found him somewhat puzzling.”
It was the old story: Wilfred took getting used to. This was particularly the case for the young men whom he took down on reading vacations to Knill. The fishing had now become a syndicate of Eddie, Wilfred and Bishop Wynne, Wilfred retaining the right to debit any sums spent on beer for Mr. Moses, the water-bailiff, “in order to reconcile him to the idea of the syndicate.” Wilfred caught about a hundred and fifty trout a year, and grew a large quantity of potatoes, some of which he sent to Eddie in London as “swill for the trough”. Bishop Wynne, with all the latest equipment, caught little.
The Knox Brothers Page 27