by Sue Black
The Enigma Reunion
In September each year Bletchley Park hold the annual Enigma Reunion. It is an opportunity for Bletchley Park veterans to visit the site and meet up with old friends. I was delighted that this year I had been invited to the dinner the evening before the reunion to have a chat with veterans and get to hear some of their stories about their time at Bletchley. I do love the history of Bletchley Park, and of course I’m interested in its contribution to computer science, but what I felt was missing from the campaign was the human face of Bletchley Park. I wanted to know what it had really been like for these, mainly young, female veterans. What had it been like when they first arrived? What did they do in their spare time? Where did they live? What did they do for fun?
With these sorts of questions in mind, I drove up to the hotel near Bletchley in September 2009. I put my bags in my room and then went downstairs to mingle and chat to some of the veterans. I was so excited to find out more about what it was like to be a young woman in the 1940s, arriving and then working at Bletchley Park during the war.
I walked into the dining room, which was full of old ladies with white hair, probably about 80 of them, and a few old men too. I wondered what stories they would tell me. I went over and sat down at a table with seven or eight women and started chatting to them. I told them that I was an academic computer scientist with a love of Bletchley Park, that I’d started a campaign to raise awareness of Bletchley Park, and that I’d love to know more about their time there. I wanted to know what it had been like working there, but also what it had been like outside of work. What had they done socially? Had they got into any scrapes?
They were all lovely. We started talking about how they had ended up at Bletchley Park and what their first impressions were. Most had been about 18 years old when they went to Bletchley and had not really known where they were going. Some had been recommended by schoolteachers or head teachers, others weren’t really sure who had put them forward. Some of the ladies talked about asking their father’s permission to go and help with the war effort and of being excited about what they were going to be doing, whilst at the same time having not much idea of what that might actually be.
Most were asked to arrive at Bletchley station but not given much more information. The ladies were mostly billeted out at Woburn Abbey, a stately home down the road from Bletchley, and bussed in and out according to their shifts. They spoke of working in the huts, so freezing cold in the winter that they worked wrapped in blankets, so hot in the summer at times that it was unbearable. No heating and no air conditioning. Eight hour shifts around the clock. No chatting during work hours and definitely no discussion of any of the work that they were doing. I’ve not spoken to anyone who worked at Bletchley at this kind of level who knew anything about what anyone else was doing. They had all signed the Official Secrets Act on arrival and there was no way that they would even think of breaking it.
It sounded like the ladies at Woburn Abbey had been better off than others who had been billeted with families around the village. At least at Woburn, even though they couldn’t talk about what they were doing at the Park, the ladies could have fun and chat about other things together. There were some sad stories of women who had been billeted with families, but they were unable to tell the families anything about what they were doing at work, and they were unable to talk about it at home either. It was never said explicitly, but the impression I got was that some of the women had found this very hard to bear at times, and some had become depressed, possibly even suicidal. Imagine being an 18-year-old girl away from home for the first time, working all day, being unable to speak about it, and then going “home” to a family who ask you what you are doing, but not being allowed to tell them anything. It must have been extremely difficult for many people.
I asked the ladies what they did for fun. They must have had some laughs. One of the ladies said to another, Do you remember that time we nicked the vicar’s bicycle to go to a dance?
We all laughed and I thought to myself, “This is exactly the sort of thing that I was interested in finding out!”
There was a discussion about going to dances in London and catching the last train back to Bletchley, getting a few hours’ sleep and then going back to work. One of the ladies then told what has become my favourite Bletchley Park story. She said that when she had been billeted at Woburn Abbey, several of the local RAF officers had been getting into trouble for flying low over the Abbey and were called in to see their superior officer to find out what they were playing at. The officers eventually admitted that they had been flying low over Woburn Abbey to try to get a glimpse of the young female WRNS sunbathing topless in the summer months on the roof of the Abbey.
We all laughed at the story. I guess I love it because it shows that wartime or not, people are still people. It gives a sense that despite the awfulness of war and the relentlessness of being a young person working hard under complete secrecy, fun can still be had.
How wonderful to sit with a group of 80-year-old ladies, listening to them telling stories about what they got up to as teenagers during the war. We carried on chatting over dinner, and at the end of the evening I went to bed feeling extraordinarily lucky to have met these amazing women and honoured to have spent time speaking with them. My passion to save Bletchley Park was leading me to meet all sorts of wonderful people. There was a life lesson for me right there. Always follow your passion: it will lead you to unimaginable wonders and new depths of understanding about people and about life.
Amplified recordings
The next day I got up, had breakfast and drove over to Bletchley Park. I’d had an awesome night chatting to female veterans and hearing their stories, and today we were going to try capture some of those stories for posterity.
A few months previously, I had given a talk at the Amplified unconference in London. I had been introduced to Amplified – an organisation that encourages people to share ideas using social media – by Mike Sizemore, who had, I’m sure you will remember, been the first person to get in touch with me via Twitter wanting to talk about Bletchley Park. Over the ensuing months I had got to know various people connected to Amplified. I’d subsequently met both Toby Moores, who had set up Amplified, and Steve Lawson, a talented solo bass player amongst other things, at the Tuttle club. I’d had a few conversations with Toby, Steve, Mike, and Christian Payne about the Bletchley Park Enigma Reunion and how I really wanted to record as many of the veterans’ memories as possible before it was too late. The veterans were all over 80 years old, and each time I saw any of them I worried that it might be the last time I did. That might sound morbid, but I really wanted to make sure that we captured as much information about what went on at Bletchley as possible, and I knew that once the veterans were gone all of that knowledge would be lost forever. That really didn’t bear thinking about.
Thankfully Toby, Steve, Mike and Christian were all up for interviewing and recording veterans, with Toby and Amplified funding some additional people to help us out. In the end we had quite a team working together on the day, including many people that I now hold really dear to my heart for being there with me during our first attempt to capture the veterans’ memories on a large scale. They include Hannah Nicklin, Benjamin Ellis, Maggie Philbin, Matt Rawlinson, Kate Day, Julia Higginbottom, and Julia’s husband, Nat.
On the day itself, we all met up at around 10am in a designated room in the Mansion House. There was a programme of events scheduled for the veterans across the day, including talks. I told everyone about my chats with them the night before, including the stories about the vicar’s bicycle and the topless sunbathing on the roof of Woburn Abbey. We decided that it was probably best to just take in the day, wander around, and interview people that looked or sounded interesting – they certainly wouldn’t be in short supply.
maggie philbin
@maggiephilbin
RT @Dr_Black OMG!! WRNS sunbathing topless
at Woburn Abbey causing havoc bcos RAF pilots flying low to have a look!! #bpark70 #bpark
10:36 PM – 5 Sep 09
We all spent the whole day interviewing veterans. Maggie Philbin alone conducted 19 interviews, Benjamin Ellis took loads of photos, and Julia and Nat set up an interview room in one of the cottages and had a stream of people come through. Xander Cansell from Amplified cleverly pulled all of our content together and put it on a website created especially for the occasion. I spoke to a couple of veterans, but my main role was to find interesting people and connect them with our expert interviewers. I also spent a lot of the day tweeting about what was going on, including links to the interview content that everyone was posting, and generally sharing my immense enthusiasm for everything that was going on all around me.
Not only did we interview many veterans, but I also got to revel in the joy of introducing a really smart and fabulous bunch of social media-savvy people to Bletchley Park and of seeing how excited they got about the amazing conversations they were having.
In September 2009 I sent 1168 tweets
15
Turing’s treasure
“Mathematical reasoning may be regarded rather schematically as the exercise of a combination of two facilities, which we may call intuition and ingenuity.”
—Alan Turing
There has been so much written about Alan Turing, and several TV dramas and feature films have been made, most recently The Imitation Game (2014) starring Benedict Cumberbatch. Turing was a complex, brilliant and deeply troubled man, but his achievements at Bletchley Park and beyond, for which he was awarded the OBE in 1945, were extraordinary. Station X purposely looked out for people who saw the world through different eyes than the rest of us do; puzzle-setters, lateral thinkers, conundrum solvers and cryptographers. Famously, during his morale-boosting visit in 1941, Winston Churchill remarked to Alastair Denniston: “I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally.”
From the earliest of ages, Turing displayed an obsessive dedication to achieving the results he wanted. On his very first day at Sherborne School in Dorset, the 1926 General Strike put paid to his attending. However, the 13-year-old Turing was so fixated upon getting there that he cycled the 60 miles from his home in Southampton, stopping overnight at an inn. Despite this level of enthusiasm, he didn’t always do well at school because he put his efforts into the things that interested him rather than the work that his teachers wanted him to do. His English teacher wrote that he produced “slipshod, dirty work” and that he could not “forgive the stupidity of his attitude towards sane discussion on the New Testament”. Sherborne’s headmaster described him as “the sort of boy who is bound to be a problem for any school or community”. He was nearly stopped from taking the School Certificate – the equivalent in those days of O-levels or GCSEs – but after studying mathematics in the Sixth Form, he began to excel and eventually won himself a place at Cambridge.
In 1934 he graduated from King’s College with a first class honours in mathematics. Having demonstrated a very high level of competence and understanding, he was elected as a fellow in 1935 at the age of just 22. His first real sorties into the world that would later become programmable computing started there, with the creation of hypothetical “Turing Machines” that could perform any conceivable mathematical calculation as long as it could be represented as an algorithm. He also considered the possibility of a “Universal Turing Machine” that could perform any function run by a “Turing Machine”. What he was proposing, in fact, was a computing device that could run many different computer programs all performing different functions. He had predicted the shape of all computers to come, at least ten years before it was possible to build such a thing. He continued to explore the possibilities of computing machines when, between 1936 and 1938, he worked at Princeton University in New Jersey, USA. After gaining his PhD, he returned to Cambridge but also began to work part-time for the GC&CS.
At the outbreak of war, he and several other mathematicians were moved to Station X. Turing was initially posted working with the brilliant Dilly Knox. This marked a major shift in code breaking thinking; until Turing’s appointment, cryptography had been the province of Classicists and experts on language. Turing and his colleagues brought a wholly different set of skills to bear and heralded the age of mathematical and mechanical analysis.
Most biographers seem to agree that Knox and Turing got on quite well despite the differences in their ages and backgrounds. This might have been because both were somewhat eccentric in behaviour. Turing – known to his colleagues as “Prof” – famously turned up for work during periods of high pollen count wearing a full-face, service issue gas mask and, later, when he moved into Hut 8, he would chain his tin mug to a radiator to prevent it being used by anyone else. A champion runner, who only just missed out on representing Great Britain in the 1948 Olympics due to an injury, he would sometimes run the 40+ miles from Bletchley to London for important meetings. He also favoured using a bicycle, although his chain had a habit of regularly slipping off. Typically, Turing didn’t get it mended. Instead, he worked out the frequency of chain slippage and would stop the bike just before he believed it was about to happen so he could fit the chain back into the worn teeth of the cogs.
A natural loner, Turing would often disappear up into a nearby hayloft to work alone on a problem and didn’t take his meals in the canteen or the Mansion. Mavis Batey tells a story of how two women, Claire Harding and Elizabeth Grainger, set up a pulley system to winch meals up to him in a basket during breaks. Knox wrote at the time: “Turing is very difficult to anchor down. He is very clever but quite irresponsible and throws out suggestions of all sorts of merit. I have just, but only just, enough authority and ability to keep his ideas in some sort of order and discipline. But he is very nice about it all.” It’s possible that the brilliant Dilly Knox didn’t recognise that Turing’s way of “throwing out suggestions” was very similar to his own behaviour. But despite his love of solitude, Turing did make some good friends at BP. He was a frequent dinner visitor to Max Newman’s house and regularly played chess against his son, William. Amazingly, Turing would often play with his back to the board, able to keep the positions of all the pieces in his head. William also tells a story about how Turing once popped in on them while they were out and couldn’t leave without somehow telling them that he’d been. His solution was to scratch a message into a leaf and post it through their letterbox.
Turing’s first major contribution to the work at BP was producing, with Gordon Welchman, the functional specifications for what became the Bombe machines. Turing’s groundbreaking idea – and how the machine differed from the Polish Bomba – was that it searched for contradictions. By inputting a stretch of ciphertext and some corresponding plaintext, such as a crib, it could search through all possible settings of the Enigma machine and discard all of those that couldn’t possibly have led to the encipherment. This allowed the Bombes to bypass all the least likely Enigma settings for that day and focus on the most probable. While this was going on, Turing was also working as a top-level intelligence officer liaising with the USA. He visited several times to share new cryptological developments.[37]
His next big success came in 1942 with the breaking of the hugely complicated German Naval Enigma system. He apparently took it on because no one else was tackling it and he would “get it all to himself”. The breaking of the code, which meant working out the Indicator, allowed the Admiralty to track the U-boat “wolf packs” in the Atlantic that were preying upon allied ships bringing in vital supplies from America.
The Naval Enigma was tougher than other Enigmas to decode because, firstly, the Navy had added two additional rotors to the machine, bringing the total to five and pushing the number of possible rotor combinations from 60 to 336. They also introduced a new system for the Indicators, super-enciphering them by using something called bigram
and trigram tables.[38] It was no longer possible to use the usual code breaking methods to work out the possible rotor combinations and the Indicator, so Turing invented a new code breaking technique called banburismus, a punch card system that allowed parts of messages to be compared to find common features. Banburismus was a way of identifying the right-hand (fast) and middle rotor in use, thus reducing the possible rotor orders from 336 to as little as 20. His punch cards, or “banburies”, created in the nearby town of Banbury by a small army of workers, helped the code breakers look for common bigrams and trigrams that would provide a possible method of attack on the cipher.
Turing is sometimes called “the father of computing” and his name is often mentioned in the same breath as Colossus, the ancestor of pretty much every programmable computer that we have today. However, Turing had little to do with computers themselves and was only involved in a peripheral way with Colossus. He is, perhaps, more rightly called “the father of computer science”.
Colossus was actually designed and built by a brilliant Post Office engineer called Tommy Flowers to tackle the fiendishly complex Lorenz cipher.[39] Although Turing wasn’t directly involved, he was the man who suggested Tommy Flowers for the job, and he contributed tools for calculating probability that could be used by Colossus in cryptoanalysis. It could be said that Turing created the language that Colossus would use in answering complex mathematical questions.[40]
Once the various Enigma and Lorenz ciphers were being decrypted as a matter of course, Turing became a kind of all-purpose troubleshooter for the whole Station X network, going where he was needed to solve problems. He spent much of his time learning electronics and, with Donald Bayley, designed and built a functioning portable voice “scrambler” communications machine codenamed Delilah. But he was also preoccupied with an extraordinary idea: that it was possible to make a physical, working version of his hypothetical Universal Turing Machine.