by Sue Black
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Hey just checked the #bpark petition: 19 014! U guys rock! X
7:35 PM – 22 Feb 09
Even on a day out with my family I was honing my Twitter skills and knowledge. Our day trip to Brighton had been a great lesson: I now knew that Twitter was an incredible tool for very quickly getting recommendations and ideas from experts, and then being able to interact with those experts – even if it was just to make puns.
In February 2009 I sent 468 tweets
11
Dilly’s girl
“Dilly Knox had so many ideas; bright idea after bright idea, going off like a Catherine Wheel.”
—Mavis Batey
As the war became larger and ever more complex, Station X expanded to cope with the needs of the military. In addition to the mansion and garage, several brick-built structures popped up and were named Blocks A-H. Between them they handled such things as intelligence, code breaking, transmitting and receiving radio and telegraph messages, and traffic analysis. Block D was involved with Enigma decoding along with huts 3, 6, and 8. Block F housed the Newmanry and Testery (of which more later). And Block H was home to Tunny[22] code breaking and Colossus – the forerunner of all modern computers.
Then there were the huts. At the peak of activity there were 18 large operational huts and scores of smaller huts containing baths, changing rooms, a barber shop and other amenities. They were around 40ft by 16ft in size and the partitions inside – to make offices, etc. – were subject to change at short notice as different needs developed. The huts’ internal layouts sometimes changed during working hours. One Wren describes a character called Commander Mackenzie, an ex-stage scenery expert, who was “always shifting the partitions about. Once I was typing and suddenly his saw came through the partition I was facing and narrowly missed my head.” Bob Watson, a carpenter employed by BP, recalls, “It wasn’t a rush putting up the huts, it was a panic. The contractors whacked them up and we all went along behind them sealing and lining them out. Then Hubert [Faulkner] came round with whoever was going to be in charge of the hut and marked out partitions. Then the coffin makers[23] went berserk putting partitions up and bashing on – you could get them up in one weekend with 20 or 30 people.”
Because no paperwork was retained after the war, no one is entirely sure how many huts there were on site. Some estimates suggest that over 50 were built, expanded, replaced and/or demolished in a constant flurry of construction and destruction. However, certain huts remained fairly static. Hut 1 initially housed the Wireless Station but later became an admin office and a Bombe maintenance workshop. The very first Bombe, called “Victory”, was housed there. Hut 2 was a recreational hut – the NAAFI – where staff on down-time could have a beer or a cup of tea and relax. It also housed a lending library. Hut 3 was involved in translation and analysis of Army and Air Force decrypts, while Hut 4 and Hut 8 (Alan Turing’s hut) worked on cracking Naval Enigma and Hagelin24 ciphered messages. Meanwhile, Hut 6 worked on Army and Air Force Enigma, Hut 5 studied Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese military ciphers, and Hut 7 concerned itself with Japanese Naval codes and intelligence. Huts 9 and 18 were the domain of ISOS (Intelligence Section Oliver Strachey), so named as Strachey, a veteran codebreaker from WWI, handled intelligence from captured or surrendered Nazi spies who were “turned” so that disinformation could be passed back to the Germans; the section was nicknamed “Illicit Services by Oliver Strachey”. Hut 10 was home to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) – what would become MI6 – and people studying Air Force and meteorological transmissions. Hut 11 was the Bombe building, Hut 14 was the communications centre, and Hut 15 housed SIXTA, paradoxically standing for “Hut Six Traffic Analysis”; often a hut’s number became so strongly associated with the work performed inside that even when the work was moved to another building it was still referred to by the original hut designation. SIXTA worked on analysing the content of radio messages. Hut 16 was ISK (Intelligence Service Knox), Dilly Knox’s team that deciphered messages from the Abwehr, Germany’s intelligence gathering network. There was no Hut 13 due to a belief that the name would bring bad luck.
The population of Station X soon became too great to be housed on-site, and so staff were billeted in nearby towns and villages; 8,902 of them in total. As they were unable to talk about their work, innuendo, spicy rumour and spurious theory soon filled the void. After seeing the eccentricities exhibited by some of the older men, some even came to believe that it was some sort of mental hospital. Among those men were Peter Twinn, Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and John Jeffreys, who all reported to BP the day after war was declared. Later recruits included mathematicians Derek Taunt, Jack Good, Bill Tutte and Max Newman, historian Harry Hinsley, and chess champions Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry.
On January 23rd 1940, Knox, Jeffreys, Twinn and Turing broke the German Army Enigma settings. A short while later they broke the Luftwaffe’s. The fact that Enigma had been broken became a secret of the highest priority. All references to such decoded messages were, from that point on, referred to simply as Ultra. Meanwhile, to cover up the truth of how the Allies appeared to have successfully second-guessed enemy plans on several occasions, a story was constructed and “leaked” to the Nazis that intelligence reports had reached Britain via an MI6 network led by a spy codenamed Boniface.[25]
At Station X itself, the staff were constantly reminded of the need for secrecy. One security notice said, “Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut.”
“The compartmentalisation of knowledge was particular to Bletchley Park,” adds cryptanalyst Oliver Lawn. “The workers knew nothing about what anyone else did.” No one ever went into a hut that they didn’t work in.
“It just became second nature,” says Jean Valentine. “We only had half an hour to eat during an eight hour shift so I got to eat at the Mansion as it was too far to walk to the canteen by the main gate. And you met people from other huts and you had no idea who they were. You talked about the weather and where you came from; anything to pad out the conversation because you simply could not talk about your work. It was the same with our social life, such as it was. Bletchley wasn’t a very attractive place and we only had two plain clothes passes a week. We went to the village hop on a Saturday night and we saw a picture occasionally in somewhere like Aylesbury. But when you left the hut you were working in, that was it. You didn’t speak about the work to anyone. You didn’t even discuss it with the people you worked with.” And, of course, no one could tell their loved ones what they were up to. “I couldn’t tell my mother where I was, but she assumed I was all right,” says Barbara Abernethy, PA to Alastair Denniston. “She put her trust not in the Lord, but in the Foreign Office. For some reason she told people her daughter was in a place called Ashby-de-la-Zouch. Never heard of it.”
The codebreakers were now working around the clock in shifts to decode as many intercepted messages as possible. One major breakthrough was made by a young woman who had been recruited to BP from University College London, where she’d been studying German literature. Mavis Lever, better known to us today by her married name of Mavis Batey, had been at Zurich University doing research when the threat of war became very real. “I got out just in time,” she says. “And because I spoke German I was then employed during 1939 in what they called the Phoney war – trying to stop the war from escalating by tracking and, if possible, stopping commodities being stockpiled by the Nazis and their allies.” It was while doing such work that Mavis was asked to look through reams of Morse code messages to try to work out patterns. “One location had everyone stumped,” she says. “I’d been told to look for a location called something like St Goch so I was chasing all around the world looking for it. And then, I suppose out of ignorance really, I asked someone, ‘How do we know when there’s a capita
l letter in Morse code?’ and was told that, ‘We don’t’. So I said, ‘Then how do we know it’s Saint something?’ I then wondered if looking at it differently would help so I wrote the letters down on a piece of paper – STGOCH – and it suddenly occurred to me that it might mean Santiago, Chile. Everyone was slightly taken aback, as was I. It was just one of those spur of the moment things, like when you suddenly see the answer to a cryptic crossword clue. And I suppose they thought, ‘Here’s a bright young thing’, and that it was the sort of thing that Dilly Knox would like. At any rate, I found myself packed off to Bletchley Park to work with him.”
Mavis became part of Knox’s team in one of the cottages. “When I first arrived and met Dilly for the first time, he looked up at me through wreaths of pipe smoke and said, ‘Have you got a pencil? Because we’re breaking machines.’ Of course I had no idea what he was talking about and I’d never heard of Enigma. He then said, ‘Here look, have a go,’ and passed this huge bundle of gibberish to me. I recall saying something about it ‘all being Greek to me’ and he said, ‘I wish it were!’ It turned out that he was a scholar and a linguist and he knew his ancient Greek.”
Knox had four brilliant women codebreakers on his team: Mavis, Margaret Rock, Ruth Briggs and Joan Clarke. Clarke would eventually become Deputy Head of Hut 8 under Alan Turing, one of only a handful of women in management positions on the estate – but more on her later. Little is known of Ruth Briggs other than that she was a “talented codebreaker”. But Margaret Rock has been described by historian and author Kerry Howard as “the fourth or fifth best of the whole Enigma staff and quite as useful as some of the professors, yet was only ever referred to as a ‘linguist’, never a codebreaker. Her love of numbers and talent for code breaking during the war years led to a long and successful career at GCHQ.”
Between October and December 1941, Dilly’s team broke the Abwehr Enigma cipher, which allowed the allies to be one step ahead of the German spy network in Britain and feed misinformation back to Hitler. Dilly Knox gave Margaret and Mavis all the credit for the break.
“He was a courteous and kind man and he was always concerned for our welfare,” says Mavis. “As our unit began to expand, he surrounded himself with young and often attractive women and many people misinterpreted this. After all, when he’d started, all he’d had were mathematicians like Turing, Welchman and Peter Tring. Some Whitehall wags suggested that GC&CS actually stood for the ‘Golf, Cheese and Chess Society’ but that was because they weren’t aware of the gravity of the secret work being done. Dilly was always an absolute gentleman – I called him my White Knight – and it turned out that he’d chosen his staff not by looks but by CV. Far from selecting beauties for some kind of harem, he hadn’t seen any of them before they arrived. We were all interviewed by this dreadful Miss Moore, a fierce lady in the Foreign Office. Dilly chose people who were language oriented. There was an actress and some girls who’d been at drama school and they were quite glamorous but they also understood rhythms and patterns of speech. Dilly was always looking for rhythms and patterns. There were linguists like me and one girl was a speech therapist. We were always referred to as ‘Dilly’s Girls’ or ‘Dilly’s Fillies’, even in places like Whitehall, but he chose us because he liked the fact we were intelligent, made good coffee and we could pick up his ideas and work on them while he came up with more. It was no use asking the mathematicians because they were too busy with their own ideas. But we could give him the attention he needed and try to pin down his ideas and try them. Some worked, some didn’t, but he was never short of them. He was an extraordinary man.”
Mavis’ biggest breakthrough came in early 1941 when she successfully broke the Italian Navy Enigma codes for the first time and deciphered a message about manoeuvres near Greece. “Like Dilly said, we were ‘breaking machines’ with a pencil and using just the code books,” she explains. “We did have a small Bombe machine later on to help us. Knox had worked on decoding for many years and Alan Turing used his methodology in his own work, to mechanise the decoding. But, to begin with there was just pencil and paper and hours of concentration.”
The first Italian message that Mavis translated was the rather ominous: “Today is the day minus three”. Further deciphering revealed that a fleet of Italian ships was gathering and preparing to attack allied convoys near the Matapan Peninsula. A suitable cover story was arranged – in this case despatching a reconnaissance aircraft to the area to make a “lucky” sighting – and a taskforce of Allied warships was secretly positioned to intercept the unwary Italians. The resulting Battle of Matapan was the Italian Navy’s worst defeat of the war.[26]
The codebreakers rarely got to see the results of their efforts but, on this occasion, a mistyped telegram was sent through congratulating “Dilly and his guts”. The telegram was subsequently corrected to “girls not guts”. A few days later, the commander of the victorious British Naval task force, Admiral Andrew Cunningham, visited Bletchley Park to personally congratulate “Dilly’s fillies” on their work.
“Our sense of elation knew no bounds when Cunningham came down in person to congratulate us,” recalls Mavis. “It did wonders for morale.’
By the end of the war, Dilly Knox’s team had deciphered over 140,000 messages. But they were just one team among many.
12
The campaign gains momentum
Things were really starting to take off. I’d spoken to so many people about Bletchley Park now that I was used to it being my main topic of conversation, wherever I was and whomever I was with. I started receiving lots of offers to speak about Bletchley Park and the campaign at conferences and events. My piece in the Telegraph, “Save Bletchley Park: why I am ashamed to be British”, received 135 comments, which showed me that there really was public interest.
I and many others carried on tweeting requests for everyone to sign the petition asking the government to help Bletchley Park. We were all hoping that it would reach the number one spot and then receive a response from the government. I wrote on my blog:
People on Twitter have been absolutely fabulous and extremely supportive of the campaign, I actually think that Twitter in a way will save Bletchley Park.
Since the start of the campaign less than nine months before, so many people, the vast majority of whom I’d never met, had taken up the mantle themselves, writing, tweeting, speaking, and generally getting the message out to a wider audience. On the social media front, I was particularly pleased that 217 people had almost instantly joined the “Save Bletchley Park” (changed in 2013 to “We love Bletchley Park”) group on LinkedIn that I’d set up. Isn’t social media wonderful? In just a few moments I had created a space where 217 people interested in saving Bletchley Park could interact with each other. PR people had started noticing us too. The campaign was being used as an example of how to use social media for online marketing and engaging an audience. I felt like we really were gaining the traction and support we needed.
I was also now in regular touch with Jerry and Mei Roberts. Mei let me know that Jerry was going to be giving a keynote talk at UCL, following on from the talk that @sizemore, Jamillah and I had attended the previous month. I was delighted. Jerry played such a key role in getting across the importance and gravitas of the achievements at Bletchley Park and, as he had actually been there, was an absolute mine of information on what it was like during World War II.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
Capt. Jerry Roberts (UCL German 1939-41) . . . ticket details here: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/german/aboutus/events.htm #bpark I’m going :)
4:23 PM – 25 Feb 09
I signed up for the talk straight away and encouraged everyone else on Twitter to do the same.
Meanwhile, Tuttle was still enabling me to meet lots of really interesting and social media-savvy people. I was making great friends from all over London and the south of England. Every week I would chat to a few more people about Ble
tchley Park, aiming to first get them excited about the place and its importance and then to get them to actually go and visit.
It’s great to look back at my tweets from that time and see tweets to people that I now count as friends. At the time I was only just getting to know them.
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@cliveflint have a great time at #bpark! Let
@bletchleypark know ur going.
9:46 AM – 21 Feb 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@marksimpkins hey! Didn’t realize u were at #tuttle yesterday, we could have had a chat. Ah well. Next time :)
8:55 AM – 21 Feb 09
Sue Black
@Dr_Black
@benjaminellis meant to chat to u @ #tuttle yesterday, hopefully next time. Have a great weekend :)
8:53 AM – 21 Feb 09
Through Tuttle I was spreading the word and getting to know lots of people who were really interested in Bletchley Park. Several people asked me to speak about Bletchley Park at their events. Mike Sizemore introduced me to a guy called Toby Moores (@Sleepydog) who ran an organisation called Amplified, which was all about using social media, blogging and technology to amplify messages. Toby asked me to speak at their next “unconference”, and I happily agreed – it seemed like it would be right up my alley.
Amplified ’09 was a great event. Every single person that I spoke to there had something interesting to say. Looking back, it really was a time of early adopters from all different backgrounds finding each other through social media, mainly Twitter, and getting together to discuss what was important to us. We were all intelligent and curious about the world, and it was as if we had all been given access to another dimension of communication which connected us and brought us together. It felt like a very exciting time to be alive.