He had also been approached by an American, Ernest Bell, who with his son, was writing a book about BP and was involved in a legal battle with the NSA over the release of documents. Bell had also spoken to Admiral Farnhill, Secretary of the D-Notice Committee, and he seemed to have obtained a surprising amount of detail about naval Ultra. The BBC letter and the approach from Bell filled Welchman with a sense of urgency. He had to make progress on the book as quickly as possible.
By early September 1976, he had engaged John Cushman Associates to represent him and Cushman himself would be handling all dealings with publishers. Welchman planned to hand over a completed draft to Cushman in New York by 5 October. It was being typed by MITRE staff who were sworn to secrecy, He also had the services of MITRE’s writer/editor Bob Coltman to help him prepare the manuscript. In late September, MITRE had given Welchman a new consultancy contract for forty-five hours’ writing per month from October to January. The writing would relate to one of the principal themes of the book. He warned Cushman that they still needed approval from the proper authorities and that some parts of the book might come under fire. He had been careful to omit information which he thought GCHQ and the NSA might feel was too sensitive. Following their meeting in New York, Cushman had read the manuscript carefully by the end of November. His view was that the manuscript was not in a form that was saleable to a general publisher. He summarized his by saying:
The principal point, then, is to make the book more chronological, more colourful (using illustrative anecdotes) and less technical. The emphasis should be on people; their efforts, problems, and achievements as well as their characters. Then the true worth of Bletchley Park and Hut 6 can be seen through the eyes of one of the chief architects
Welchman responded by saying that he and Coltman believed that the faults in structure could be fixed and he hoped to have a detailed plan for restructuring and completion of a draft within two weeks. Cushman suggested that Welchman send him the restructuring plan first before redrafting the manuscript. Welchman had agreed to be interviewed for the BBC’s Secret War series and its producer, Fisher Dilke, arrived to do this on 22 December 1976. Dilke was very frank with Welchman, who was a bit irritated to hear that GCHQ had warned Dilke to ‘be careful with Welchman, who is a slippery customer’. However, he refrained from commenting on this in his answers to Dilke’s questions. Dilke gave Welchman the impression that GCHQ had given the BBC approval to discuss matters previously considered off-limits. On the day before the interview, Dilke tried for hours to get him to talk about how the sheet stacking method worked but Welchman just kept on reading him extracts from Goodall’s letter from 1974 (discussed above in the Prologue and in Chapter 10). He absolutely refused to go beyond the boundaries implied by that letter until he had received specific clearance from GCHQ. In the end, he persuaded Dilke to let him talk about things that would be of general interest but not offensive to GCHQ.
Both Calvocoressi and Milner-Barry had also been filmed at Bletchley Park and the programme was transmitted at 9.25 p.m. on 9 February 1977. According to Milner-Barry, the whole programme had been done by the BBC in close consultation with Admiral Farnhill of the D-Notice Committee and through him with GCHQ. His view was that anything that appeared would have, if not GCHQ’s approval, at least its passive acquiescence. In any event, much to his annoyance, Milner-Barry was not used in the programme. Calvocoressi gave an excellent explanation of how a short and quite innocuous decrypted message was used together with information on Hut 3’s card index, to produce useful intelligence. Of the three it was Welchman who featured most prominently in the programme.
Harold Fletcher had watched it with great interest and although he had retired from GCHQ in 1971, he was still in touch with the sole Hut 6 survivor in GCHQ, Malcolm Chamberlain, who provided GCHQ’s view. According to Fletcher:
They were rather peeved with the BBC, who, after the preliminary consultation, apparently implied to at least some of the interviewees that GCHQ had widened the door a little more than they had. I don’t know what they said to you, but GCHQ was particularly worried by the interview with Max Newman, and tried to put the matter right by a little pruning. So it appears you could say that GCHQ was by no means outraged but not altogether happy with at least one part of the programme
The following year the BBC published a book titled The Secret War by Brian Johnson based on the series.
On 11 January 1977, Welchman had received a letter from Ronald Lewin, an old friend of Winterbotham’s.10 Lewin was a military historian and had written books on Rommel and Montgomery, Churchill’s war administration and Field Marshal Slim. He was engaged in writing a general survey of Ultra, covering its pre-history, the whole system of processing and distributing intelligence that spread outwards from Bletchley and, in particular, the impact of Ultra intelligence on operations in the field. He claimed to have clearance from the Secretary of State for Defence, subject to submitting his final text to the authorities for approval. Welchman sent a copy to Cushman, who knew of the book as Lewin’s London agent was an affiliate of his. While he had never met Lewin, he assured Welchman that his book was completely different from the one that Lewin was writing. Welchman had nearly completed the restructuring suggested by Cushman and he was in good spirits as his contract with MITRE for work on NATO’s new battlefield communications system had been extended to 30 September. He had not been impressed with Lewin’s initial approach in which he had used Winterbotham’s name but, after speaking with him, his attitude had changed. Lewin seemed first-rate and potentially a valuable ally. Lewin visited Welchman in Newburyport on 22 February and they had very profitable discussions. Lewin showed Welchman an advance copy of Patrick Beesly’s book Very Special Intelligence on how naval Ultra intelligence was used, but they agreed that it covered up disastrous mistakes made by the British Admiralty which should be publicized as a warning for the future.
By 18 March Welchman had sent Cushman another draft and was busy making further refinements. He agreed to meet Cushman in his New York office on 27 April and drop off the new material a day earlier. Parts Two and Three were now called The First Year and The Rest of the War, names that would be retained in the final draft of the book.
Lewin sent Welchman notes from his interview with Milner-Barry on 14 April. Milner-Barry had said that there had been great frustration in Hut 6 about the inability to obtain sufficient staff and equipment and that Welchman had written the letter to Churchill, on the basis that it was no good addressing it to anyone else. Milner-Barry and his counterpart in Hut 8, Hugh Alexander, signed it along with Turing. While yielding results, it had also produced a not inconsiderable rocket from Alastair Denniston and Stewart Menzies of MI 6. However, Milner-Barry had got the impression that they were in fact rather amused and rather pleased in spite of the by-passing of the chain of command. In his interview with Lewin, Milner-Barry expressed the view that, by the winter of 1940, Denniston was a ‘busted flush’ and incapable of the organizational effort that was necessary if BP was to be put on a war footing. This was certainly not Welchman’s belief. In his reply to Lewin’s letter, dated 7 May 1977, Welchman took great exception to these comments. He had checked with a former secretary in GC&CS management before and during the war who had confirmed that Denniston’s departure from BP was due to a serious illness. He then went on to say, quite surprisingly, given the sharpness of his memory, that: ‘Oddly enough I have no recollection at all of having written a letter to Churchill.’
In early June, Welchman had a phone call from Fisher Dilke of the BBC. The Secret War series had been sold to IBM who intended to sponsor it on major American TV networks. Dilke believed that it would now be much easier to get permission to write a book as a result of the reactions to the series. Meanwhile, Welchman and his MITRE colleague Bob Coltman were trying to create clearer mental pictures of some of the technical details of Welchman’s story such as the Jeffreys apparatus, the ‘brush’ sensing of standard punched card equipment and the use of t
his equipment in Harold Keen’s bombe. The mention of the term ‘female’ in connection with the Jeffreys sheets reminded Welchman that he had not yet mentioned any of the real females who worked in Hut 6, particularly the early recruits in the Registration Room. He remarked to Cushman that it was ‘sad that I was far too busy to take advantage of the society of so many attractive and intelligent young women’.
Welchman decided to send the latest draft of the book to Cochrane at Penguin and, by September, Cochrane had informed Cushman that he wanted the book and had made an offer for the hardcover (Allen Lane) and paperback (Penguin) rights. This coincided with some other good news – MITRE had offered him a contract for another year. He also started to be concerned about his tax position if the book was a financial success. According to US tax law, any income earned before he reached his seventy-second birthday in June 1978 would be heavily taxed.
In November 1977, Welchman was having heart problems and he had to go into hospital. He required a pacemaker but by December was back hard at work on all fronts. Unfortunately, Viking had declined to make an offer for a hardcover version of the book for the American market. However, Cushman had already sent it to McGraw-Hill. Bruce Lee, an editor in their General Books division, was enthusiastic about it.
In March 1978 Welchman was contacted by Andrew Hodges, a British mathematician, who had been commissioned by the publishers André Deutsch in London and Harper and Row in New York to write a biography of Alan Turing. He had been told about the bombe and the diagonal board in confidence by someone who had worked at BP during the war and had some idea of the individual contributions of Welchman and Turing. However, he didn’t want to write anything without checking its accuracy with Welchman. As the first volume of Hinsley’s Official History was known to be in preparation (and was to be published in November 1979), Hodges did not think he would be too constrained by official secrecy. He was not to know that the Official History would be almost devoid of technical detail. Hodges subsequently visited Newburyport in early October 1978 and was greeted warmly by Welchman, whom he later described as being very charming. Hodges was surprised by Welchman’s vitality and by his young family. As he said in a follow-up letter to Welchman after the visit: ‘I had a sense of time-warp in your house, it was hard to believe I was with someone who was Turing’s senior.’
At the end of 1978 Welchman at last was offered a contract by an American publisher, McGraw-Hill, which he decided to accept. Lee encouraged him to develop his last part on lessons for today. He also assigned a young writer, Neill Rosenfeld, to work with him on the manuscript. While this wasn’t quite what Cochrane from Penguin had had in mind in 1976, it did offer Welchman a general reader’s perspective, because Rosenfeld was not a technical expert. It also allowed a professional writer to help craft his narrative. After reading the manuscript, Rosenfeld submitted a number of questions to Welchman which irritated him. Rosenfeld had taken on the role of the ‘dumbest reader’, a standard editorial technique. There was a slight lull in the work as Rosenfeld was getting married in January 1979 and Welchman had a very bad bout of flu. They agreed to meet when Rosenfeld returned from his honeymoon in Jamaica. Welchman did produce some notes about Rosenfeld’s attempt at producing a ‘technical draft’, covering the description of the Enigma machine and some related technologies. He believed that the draft was full of technical errors and could not be used. Rosenfeld had also described Knox’s reaction when Welchman told him about his rediscovery of the Polish ‘Netz’ method being accompanied by a ‘slightly amused smile’. This was out of character for Knox as Welchman went on to explain:
He was furious, and most unpleasant. He didn’t even have the courtesy to tell me about his plans, or about whatever progress Jeffreys had made at that point. I had said something of this in an earlier draft, but deleted it because I did not want to run Knox down. However, in view of what has been written about him fairly recently, I think I can reveal that, on this occasion, he behaved badly.
As with Denniston, Welchman would not let a particular episode with a colleague distort his overall view of them. He would spend the rest of his life giving due credit to both Denniston and Knox for their magnificent achievements. However, as a result of books such as Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers, published in 1977, he felt that he could now give an account of his dealings with Knox.
McGraw-Hill had drawn up a list of questions to put to ‘Bletchley alumni’. In the main, Welchman wanted to avoid compromising former colleagues, so the questions were of a general nature and intended to solicit colourful anecdotes. However, he felt that it would almost be insulting to pose such questions to former colleagues whom he had worked so closely with. For example, question seven was:
What was your office like? What were the decorations, the desk, the atmosphere? If there was a window, what was the view? Were there any smells or leaking pipes or anything annoying or endearing about the place? Were there any pets kept at BP by you or others, such as a cat that might have wandered around the work area? Did you share the office with anyone and, if so, with whom: how were your relations? Did you or your co-workers have any particular work habits – coffee drinking, doodling, pencil chewing, humming, whistling, pacing, paper clip twisting, etc?
In early January Welchman confided to Fletcher, who was not at all surprised, that he was writing a book and that hardly anyone in Britain knew about it apart from Milner-Barry and Calvocoressi. He did not want to approach former colleagues for comments on the technical parts of the book until he had approval from Admiral Farnhill and his committee. He did hope, however, that Fletcher would be able to help with non-sensitive matters and with recollections that would add colour. One particular problem he was having was remembering names and their exact spellings. He was also having trouble remembering the sequence of events which led to the bombe which could deal with the German Navy’s introduction in 1942 of a four-wheel Enigma machine. Welchman’s own diaries revealed that he had a series of meetings with Frank Birch, the head of the naval section at BP, between 7 December 1942 and 5 April 1943. Birch had been grilling him about whether everything possible was being done. He also had been to Dollis Hill on 29 March 1943 to talk to Radley and Flowers, but he couldn’t remember at what point Keen was brought into the picture about the four-wheel problem.
On 3 April 1979, Fletcher sent Welchman a thirty-four-page handwritten letter. It was as if Welchman had pulled out a plug and released thirty-four years of memories, some technical, some personal, which had been bottled up inside for all those years. Fletcher ended with a few personal thoughts:
You ask if I can remember anything about you or your behaviour which made me mad. If there were, they must have been trivial, because I don’t remember any. There were, however, two things which I found trying, though they are not quite what I think you are looking for. The first I have already mentioned viz your tendency to credit me with a better brain than I possessed. You were far too busy for me to protest too violently, and in any case, I must have got there in the end, despite some nasty moments. The second stems from the fact that you always had more stamina, mental and physical, than I had; there were occasions when I was just about done and itching to get home and rest, but no! there was just one more problem to discuss.
If you would like to know my feelings about BP which built up over the years, it goes something like this. There is no doubt that BP made a very big, sometimes possibly even decisive, contribution to the successful prosecution of the war; and we were part of this organisation. On the basis that no one is indispensable, there must have been someone who could have done the job that you did, though there can’t have been many. For me, there must have been many thousands who could have done the job I did, but the point is that they didn’t do it – I did, and I know that I did it reasonably well. And I have never ceased to be thankful.
Welchman used Fletcher as a sounding board until the end of the year and, for his part, Fletcher read early drafts and made comments where appropriate
about the accuracy of names and dates. As Welchman had been keen from the start to give Denniston the credit due to him, he must have been startled by one comment made by Fletcher:
Denniston was still in post as Director when I arrived in August 1941. I had several dealings with him when doing my stint as Hut 6 Duty Officer. He left during the winter of 1941/42, but I do not remember the exact date. I have a clear recollection that you told me that Travis had told ‘C’ ‘Either he goes or I go.’
Another former colleague, Houston Wallace, was able to shed a little light on some of Welchman’s tasks as Assistant Director Mechanization. After being recruited by Fletcher, with Welchman’s approval, he had served as Fletcher’s assistant in Hut 6. When Welchman moved into his new job in 1943, Wallace became his assistant. He had fond memories of the house in Woburn Sands that he and his sister Hope shared with James Wardrop and his wife. Wardrop worked in Hut 8 as an Italian linguist but left BP in 1943. For the rest of the war, the Wallaces shared their house with Bob Amys and his wife. Amys was at BP throughout the war and set up Hut 8’s Registration Room. They were all still good friends, over thirty years later. Unfortunately, Hope was quite ill at this point (and would die in April 1979) and Wallace did not have much time to devote to recalling wartime events. Despite this, Welchman, as tenacious as ever, kept gently prodding Wallace.
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