Dilly

by Batey, Mavis;

  Peace, Peace, Oh for some peace!

  Miss Roddam says Knox does not please her

  When instead of a mat he makes use of her hat

  And knocks out his pipe on the geyser.

  But the pièce de résistance was Birch’s skit, which begins at the time in May 1917 that William James, now promoted to captain, took over as head, when Room 40 became ID25, and carries on to demobilisation. It does include a backward look to the Battle of Jutland and the Zimmermann telegram and Dilly manages to get in a passing reference to his brother Ronnie, who had left before Room 40 became ID25.

  The pantomime begins with Alice walking down Whitehall one day, when suddenly out of an upstairs window a sheet of paper fluttered down at her feet. She picked it up when her nurse was looking the other way, and written on it were the words: ‘Ballybunion – Short begins- ud-sn-dd-um-um-vvv-depresses key-fierce x’s and wipers.’ Alice couldn’t make a word of sense out of it. For members of Room 40, however, this was a recognisable preamble to an encoded message, giving the call-signs and chit-chat of the German station sending it out. Ballybunion was meant to be the British wireless interception station that had picked it up, which in the early days was Hunstanton. Without the intercept operators in what became known as the ‘Y Service’, the amount of material available to Room 40 to decode would have been considerably less; they became extraordinarily efficient in tracking down what was called the ‘fist’ of the individual German wireless operators. German wireless stations changed their call-signs frequently for security reasons so the ‘fist’, the idiosyncratic way in which individual operators tapped out their Morse messages, was a very good way of identifying stations – hence the note in the signal about the ‘fierce’ way in which the fictional operator intercepted at Ballybunion taps his Xs.

  As soon as Alice touched the gobbledegook message a curious feeling of growing smaller came over her and the people in the street started to fade away. As in her previous adventures, the first person Alice met, fortuitously, was the White Rabbit. He was ‘obviously very important’ and, as always in the Lewis Carroll stories, in a great hurry.

  He was dressed in his Sunday best – spats, spectacles, and a little black coat, and kept doing up and undoing its buttons with nervousness. ‘Dear me, dear me,’ Alice heard him say as he passed her, ‘it’s past ten. I shall be late for the DIND. I must be there when he comes round. I always am,’ and with that he bustled out of earshot.

  The White Rabbit was Birch’s depiction of Frank Adcock, who was partly responsible for getting his fellow Kingsmen, Birch and Knox, into Room 40 and would play a similar role at the start of the Second World War. His friends describe him as a small round man with twinkling eyes behind thick glasses and that is how the Room 40 cartoonist, G. P. Mackeson, portrays him in the printed edition of the pantomime. The White Rabbit bustles off very disconcerted as he thought he was going to be late for the boss, who was of course the famous ‘Blinker’ Hall, the director of the Intelligence Division or DID, who for some reason the White Rabbit calls DIND.

  Alice gave chase and, whereas in the previous adventures Lewis Carroll gave her she fell down a rabbit hole, in Birch’s version she fell down a mysterious tube under an arch in the Admiralty Old Building. This was the pneumatic tube that delivered the messages to the codebreakers so instead of falling on leaves at the bottom, she ended up in a wire cage in a large room, Room 40, where there was someone waiting to extricate the shuttle full of gobbledegook messages that had preceded her in her fall.

  She appeared to be in a sort of cage of golden wire, through which she could see into an immense room where there were many huge creatures. But Alice remembered that she herself had shrunk and supposed that they were all really only a normal size, except perhaps for one quite little man seated at a desk in the far corner of the window.

  The ‘Little Man’ was Alastair Denniston, who was very small in real life, and Alice learned later that he never left his post and had a bed brought in beside his desk. He would see codes and ciphers through during the interwar years to become operational head of Bletchley Park, where he was still called ‘the Little Man’ by his old colleagues.

  Alice was hoping to meet the boss, whom the White Rabbit had called the DIND and was so fussed about, but she would not do so until the end of the pantomime. She looked at all the rooms numbered along the passage, but the numbers appeared to have nothing to do with each other and they all said No Admittance.

  At last, just as she turned the corner of a narrow dark passage, she ran into a large creature, who looked like a cross between a Labour member and Sir Francis Drake. He kept on turning out his pockets and poking into the dark corners.

  ‘Mornin’, Miss,’ said this gentleman in a voice husky – with emotion, Alice thought. ‘’Ave you seen a bed anywhere?’

  ‘No,’ replied Alice, ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘I’ve lost a bed,’ he went on. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if it weren’t that hungry creature in 53. Very careless ’e is. Tried to bathe in it, I daresay, and swallowed it.’

  The ‘hungry creature’ in room 53 who was inclined to bathe was, of course, Dilly. When Alice asked the husky-voiced creature the way to the DIND, she was told she ought first to see his deputy, Captain James. ‘Nice chap, Captain James. Knows ’is place.’ James was the only person who was actually named in the skit, all the others being given Carrollian guises. Dilly’s poem, which Alice is later forced to recite, describes him thus:

  The Captain in Room 54

  Employs men and girls by the score.

  But organisation

  Leaves no occupation

  For the Captain himself any more.

  The occupation that had made poor James famous was blowing bubbles. He never lived down the portrait painted by his grandfather, Sir John Millais. It depicted the five-year-old James as an angelic small boy entranced with blowing bubbles. It was taken over by Pears as a soap advertisement and appeared on hundreds of hoardings. Inevitably he was nicknamed ‘Bubbles’ James.

  Alice, by standing on tiptoe, could see one room marked ‘The Mansion House’ and underneath it the words ‘This was the Lord Mayor’s Show’. This was Room 45, Blinker Hall’s successful diplomatic section, which he set up in 1915 under Sir George Young. Ben Faudel-Phillips was now in charge. Faudel-Phillips’s father and grandfather had both been Lord Mayors of London and his colleagues said that he looked like one. He didn’t appear to be on show at the moment; however, Dilly’s poem, which Alice found herself reciting, claimed:

  It is commonly thought we derive

  Great blessing from Room 45.

  Our courtly Lord Mayor,

  By his policy there,

  Has rescued the Empire alive.

  Alice then met the Dormouse, Nigel de Grey, of Zimmermann telegram fame. The creatures were pushing and dragging him into a passage.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alice, who felt sorry for the poor creature. Whereupon they all screamed: ‘He does his own work and minds his own business. We don’t want that sort of thing here,’ and pushed him out of the room.

  There was still resentment about the way in which, on Hall’s strict orders, de Grey had to keep silent about Room 40 and the success of the Zimmermann telegram, which brought America into the war. He had been awarded the OBE, the first recognition ever to be given to a codebreaker, which clearly irked his colleagues. When Alice met him he was wearing a coronet.

  Alice was about to meet the various types of intelligence officers who provided the back-up for the codebreakers. Leonard Willoughby, later a professor, an expert on German literature, was featured as ‘the Grumbling Willow’ because he resented having to log everything down in triplicate. ‘Nobby’ Clarke, depicted as the Chief Clerk in the pantomime, was the call-sign expert and always emphasised how much information could be obtained from messages even without decoding, by analysing the communications and the operator chatter, as he had done during the Battle of Jutland. As an experiment, probabl
y set up by Frank Birch, Clarke had a special room set aside where the officers were given German signals as they arrived down the tube and told to interpret what they implied for the use of Operations, and then at the end of the day to examine the decodes to assess how they had fared. In Dilly’s view, it seemed a rather pointless exercise, as he made clear in the poem which Alice recites:

  Our minds are unable to fix

  The uses of Room 56.

  Yet they show no compunction

  Concerning their function,

  No scruple of conscience pricks.

  After meeting a number of different members of Room 40, all disguised as ‘huge creatures’, it was time for Alice to see what codebreaking was all about and so she is sent to find Dilly Knox. Birch was really in his element when he came to caricature his friend and collaborator, now Room 40’s chief cryptographer, whom he portrayed as the Dodo and had working in a room with the notice ‘Mixed Bathing’ on the door. Lewis Carroll had seen himself in that guise in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

  ‘I’ll just hand you over to Dilly the Dodo,’ said the guide hoarsely, ‘and then you won’t want me any more, so I think I’ll step out and see a man about a dog.’

  ‘What, another friend?’ ejaculated Alice.

  ‘Yes, another one,’ he replied shortly.

  Alice was just wondering if he had a great many friends and if they all had dogs, when he opened the door, pushed Alice inside and, with a shout of ‘Tea ready, Gentlemen, please’ disappeared, slamming the door behind her.

  The room was a very tiny one, ‘no bigger than a bathing machine’, Alice thought, and the table in the middle was so big that you could only just squeeze between it and the wall. Alice had plenty of time to take everything in because none of the creatures there took any notice of her. They were all scowling very hard at the table in front of them.

  ‘Please can you tell me which is Dilly the Dodo?’ Alice inquired politely after a minute or two.

  ‘I am,’ replied one of the creatures, jumping up.

  Alice thought he was the queerest bird she had ever seen. He was so long and lean, and he had outgrown his clothes, and his face was like a pang of hunger.

  Describing Alice’s confrontation with the Dodo, Birch has fun with Dilly’s dependence on his secretary, soon to be his wife, Olive Roddam, and his love of Greek. Dilly also managed to get a reference to his brother Ronnie converting to Roman Catholicism inserted into the pantomime, although Ronnie had left some time previously and was now in the throes of becoming a Roman Catholic priest. Perhaps the most important allusion is to the material the Dodo was working on. Dilly was rightly proud of having broken the German Imperial Navy’s three-letter flag code and so the Dodo was anxious to explain this to Alice.

  ‘I was told to come to you,’ said Alice, rather disconcerted.

  ‘You must ask the Secretary, ask the Secretary,’ he answered with a wave of the paw. ‘It is unconstitutional to approach me except through the Secretary,’ and he sat down again.

  Alice hesitated for a few seconds, but thought she would try again. ‘Isn’t it rather a small room?’ she began.

  ‘Not really,’ said the Dodo huffily; ‘not really a small room. It’s just the right size, when you come to think. Of course, you know the Greek definition of the ideal room?’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ Alice apologised.

  ‘The ideal room is such’, the Dodo quoted, ‘that a man standing in the centre can touch floor, ceiling and all four walls.’

  ‘Really?’ said Alice, at a loss for anything better to say. Then she went on: ‘But you can’t stand in the middle of this room, because of the table.’

  ‘I don’t see the difficulty,’ he snapped.

  Alice thought the creature very hard to please, but she hastened to change the conversation. ‘So you are very fond of Greek?’ she inquired.

  ‘Greek or Latin, Latin or Greek,’ he replied. ‘I love all the Classics. That’s why I brought my brother here. He’s a Roman, you know.’

  Alice couldn’t see how a Dodo could have a Roman brother, but, before she could ask for an explanation, he went on more kindly: ‘Perhaps you would like to see some of my work,’ and he handed her a sheet of very dirty paper on which a spider with inky feet appeared to have been crawling.

  ‘It looks very clever,’ Alice suggested politely, ‘but I’m afraid it’s all Greek to me.’

  ‘That’s why I like it so much,’ the Dodo smiled. ‘Let me explain it to you. It’s three-letter stuff, you see, so we have one person for each letter.’

  ‘But there are four of you,’ countered Alice.

  ‘You know the rule, don’t you?’ he said pityingly. ‘One for each letter and one for the pot.’

  Alice thought she had never heard such nonsense.

  Alice in ID25 also refers of course to Dilly’s bath in his ‘very tiny room’. Room 53 had the only bath in the Admiralty, which is why Dilly had chosen it, as he was addicted to solving problems in a soapy, steamy atmosphere. As Alice says in the poem she recites:

  The sailor in Room 53

  Has never, it’s true, been to sea,

  But though not in a boat,

  He has yet served afloat –

  In a bath at the Admiralty.

  Dilly could not be portrayed by Birch without some reference to his absent-mindedness so he has the Dodo fumbling in his pockets for something he appears to have lost.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asked Alice.

  ‘I’ve lost my spectacles,’ cried the Dodo angrily, as he turned up the chairs and table. ‘Where are my spectacles?’ and he glared angrily at the Secretary.

  ‘I expect they are in that,’ jerked the Secretary, pointing to a tobacco-pouch on the table.

  ‘Of course, of course,’ cried the Dodo foolishly. He opened the pouch and there, sure enough, were the spectacles.

  Alice could not help asking the strange creature why he kept his glasses in a tobacco-pouch.

  ‘A little idea of mine,’ he smirked. ‘Rather ingenious, don’t you think? You see, by this means, when I find my spectacles I remember my tobacco.’

  ‘But where is it?’ asked Alice, puzzled.

  ‘Well, if the spectacles are in the tobacco pouch, the tobacco must be in the spectacle case. It follows, you know, by logic,’ and with that he took his spectacle-case from his pocket and opened it. Inside was not tobacco at all, but a long and thin ham sandwich. Alice was about to ask for an explanation when the Dodo went on triumphantly: ‘You see how it works? Now this serves to remind me that I am hungry.’

  Poor Alice was now completely bewildered, but she managed to ask: ‘Can’t you remember when you are hungry?’

  ‘I’m always hungry,’ he gobbled, ‘but I can’t always remember it. Being hungry’, he went on with his mouth full, ‘is like being in debt. You always are, but you sometimes need to be reminded of it. That’s why I work at night. You see, you get more meals that way. The Night Watch’, he murmured dreamily, ‘is very generous. And that reminds me,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘it’s tea-time. Come on!’ And seizing Alice by the hand he ran with her out of the room.

  The Dodo then takes Alice to Birch’s equivalent of the Mad Hatter’s tea party, although in a reference to the vital part of the codebreaking process, breaking the keys, this becomes a ‘key party’. Alice is offered a few unappetising crumbs of cake.

  Alice was thinking how she could refuse without giving offence, when the Dodo, who had been stuffing silently all this time, suddenly jumped up and doddered past her, crying: ‘I must go to Room 40 and find fault with things. Come along.’

  The director, Rear-Admiral ‘Blinker’ Hall, the DIND in Birch’s parody, now occupied the original Room 40 and Dilly always found plenty to complain about. He was well known for his habit of sending in resignations, although he knew they could never be accepted. Finally Alice does get to meet the DIND and Alastair Denniston, the Little Man, explains the joke behind the ‘N’ inserted into Hall’
s pantomime title.

  A trumpet sounded and the door flew open. At the same time all the creatures woke up and jumped to their feet. ‘It’s the DIND, the DIND,’ they shouted in chorus.

  ‘What does “the DIND” mean?’ Alice asked the Little Man.

  ‘Ssh!’ he whispered. ‘It’s French, you know.’

  Alice was a clever girl who knew French and it did not take her long to understand that Rear-Admiral Sir William Hall, who was so pleased with himself, was a DIND-on, a turkey cock. Birch also uses the Denniston character, the Little Man, to make a jibe at the wealth of Hall’s two personal assistants, Lord Herschell and Claud Serocold.

  At this moment an imposing figure strutted into the room between two other creatures, scarcely less impressive.

  ‘Who are his companions?’ Alice asked in an undertone.

  ‘They’re his Banks,’ answered the Little Man.

  ‘Banks!’ ejaculated Alice.

  ‘Yes – he’s always between them, you know – like a river.’

  ‘Oh, I see. I thought you meant money banks.’

  ‘I might have,’ vaguely muttered the Little Man.

  The announcement that the war was over had just come through and the DIND had a tray of flags to give out but not everyone was pleased with the distribution. When the creatures heard that some would have to be demobilised, there was a fierce argument and it was decided that Alice must be the first to go. By now she was understandably getting pretty fed up with them and, to their consternation, told them that, this being so, she would blow their cover. Birch, who was later appointed editor of the official history of signals intelligence, had the last laugh, however, as his pantomime was put on the secret list, although some copies were retained by those involved for private circulation. Denniston’s copy is in Churchill College Archives Centre, Cambridge and the quotations in this article are from Dilly Knox’s own copy of Alice in ID25.