Saving Bletchley Park

by Sue Black

  The Bletchley Park estate soon fell silent and empty. Disposing of it turned out to be problematic because the government technically didn’t own it; the late Admiral Hugh Sinclair had paid for it from his own personal fortune back in 1937 when Whitehall was still umming and erring over whether to fund it. And so, for a while, it was loaned or rented out to various bodies: GCHQ trained engineers there and the GPO, which had become British Telecom, used it as a management school. A teacher training college took over one block of buildings and several small government departments squatted in others. But, in the meantime, the iconic huts were getting colder and damper and the house itself was soon in need of repairs. In 1987, after a 50 year association with British Intelligence, Bletchley Park was finally decommissioned. Talks began with respect to possibly selling off the estate for housing development and/or development of an out-of-town retail and supermarket site.

  Meanwhile, the story of what happened at Bletchley Park during the war finally went public in 1974 with the publication of F W Winterbotham’s controversial book The Ultra Secret: the inside story of Operation Ultra, Bletchley Park and Enigma.

  Epilogue

  On 18th June 2014, the Duchess of Cambridge, arguably one of the world’s most influential women, visited Bletchley Park to open the new visitor centre. Bletchley Park management had been delighted to discover in 2013 that both the Duchess’ grandmother and great aunt had worked at Bletchley Park during WWII, and they had set about getting her involved. It was a real coup getting the Duchess to open the visitor centre, and it had the desired effect: Bletchley Park was on the front page of most of the national press the next day.

  Me and Steve Colgan at Bletchley Park I was invited to Bletchley Park on the day and took Steve Colgan as my plus one. Steve is a great friend and has kindly been working with me to add the historical elements to this book. We had a great day. It was absolutely wonderful to see the huts in their newly restored state – they have been renovated to look almost exactly as they would have looked during WWII. Inside each hut, images of people have been projected onto the walls, and as you walk into the room, audio of a conversation that might have been held there plays. I remembered the fantasy I’d had when I’d visited Bletchley Park with Jamillah Knowles, Mike Sizemore, and Christian Payne at the beginning of the campaign – that Bletchley Park could be a sort of living museum where history came alive. I think that vision has been realised. Being there now feels as close as it possibly can to stepping back in time and really experiencing the WWII code breaking environment. It is breathtakingly evocative of another time.

  The campaign that I started in 2008 took three years to achieve its goal: to make sure that Bletchley Park will be here to tell its story, not just for our generation, but for our children and our grandchildren. The campaign was a sustained effort by hundreds, possibly thousands of people, all wanting to make a change in the world that they believed needed to happen. At the beginning, we had no idea whether it would work. The campaign had many ups and downs, joys and sorrows, successes and setbacks, quite a few of which you have read about. We didn’t know if our efforts would work, but we kept going regardless because we wanted the change to happen.

  At the beginning of the campaign, I thought it would take about six months before everyone saw our point of view, came on board with what we were trying to achieve, and made sure that Bletchley Park was financially stable. At the time of writing, that was six years ago. The campaign took much longer than I expected, but we made that change happen. We did it, and it was all absolutely worth all of the effort.

  Even now though, the management at Bletchley Park, the Bletchley Park Trust and The National Museum of Computing still have to work hard to get funding and support for what they are doing. More and more people are realising the fundamental importance of Bletchley Park in our history and that we owe so much to the people that worked there – this is wonderful. What’s still needed, though, is financial support.

  Your purchase of this book will help, as we are giving ten per cent of profits to the Bletchley Park Trust and The National Museum of Computing. What I would really love, however, is for any of you that are in a position to, to set up a small regular payment to either, or both, trusts. The trusts are working hard to preserve our extremely important heritage. It doesn’t need to be much – perhaps £5 per month – but if a critical mass of people do that, I know it will make a real, sustained difference.

  And now at this final point it’s over to you. Is there any change that you would like to see happen in the world? If you believe in something strongly I strongly urge you to follow your instincts and make that change happen. If you don’t try, you will never know what you might have been able to achieve.

  Me and Steve at the Unbound office

  Endnotes

  1. All names used are the names people had while working at BP and its outstations.

  2. Members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) have traditionally been nicknamed “Wrens”. The Women’s Auxiliary Air Force staff were known as WAAFs.

  3. From a 2009 article she wrote for Ayton School’s Old Scholars’ Association. http://aytonoldscholars.org/magazines/magazine_09/mag2009_bletchley_park.html

  4. At the peak of activity, 33,003 miles were being covered by 130 drivers/riders every day.

  5. Once the code-breaking work began the radio aerials were moved to nearby Whaddon Hall to avoid drawing attention to the BP site.

  6. Quoted in Richmond, J. (2002) “Classics and Intelligence”. Classics Ireland, Volume 9. Classical Association of Ireland.

  7. The GC&CS was created in 1919. It eventually became what we know today as GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in 1946 and is now based in Cheltenham.

  8. Named after the eponymous hero of the 1899 comedy “The Gay Lord Quex” by Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. Quex is described in the play as “the wickedest man in London” and, like the fictional character, Sinclair lived extraordinarily well, eating the finest foods, keeping an enviable cellar and smoking expensive cigars which he kept in a crocodile skin case.

  9. Although he did manage to decipher the text of the seemingly unfathomable Herodus papyrus as the result.

  10. The wartime blackouts were a serious problem for anyone that needed to get around at night as vehicles were not allowed to show lights. One solution to this was to paint white lines on kerbs and around roadside objects such as lamp posts and trees. They could be seen in dim light from ground level but not by the Luftwaffe bombers high overhead. Some paint is still visible on trees today. However, the system wasn’t ideal and accidents still happened. Several Bletchley Park dispatch riders were killed by collisions during the war.

  11. Later on, a fourth rotor would also be added.

  12. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-sir-howard-smith-1346505. html

  13. They are also sometimes known as Jeffries Sheets as codebreaker John Jeffries became BP’s expert in their use.

  14. Kozaczuk, W. (1984) Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher was Broken, and how it was Read by the Allies in World War Two. Edited and translated by Christopher Kasparek. Revised and augmented translation with appendices by Marian Rejewski. Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America.

  15. Quoted from the 1999 PBS documentary World War II: Mind of a Code Breaker.

  16. Abwehr was the name used for German military intelligence.

  17. From a 1993 Security Group Seminar presentation by Hinsley called “The influence of Ultra in the Second World War”.

  18. BTM would also make copies of the Polish Enigma Double machines that were christened “Letchworth Enigmas”.

  19. This indicator is where Dilly Knox had found his “Cillis”.

  20. Figures from May 1945, when BP was at its largest, taken from Figuring It Out at Bletchley Park 1939 – 1945 by Kerry Howard and John Gallehawk.

  21.
Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes – essentially a bar and canteen for people to relax in.

  22. The Lorenz cipher machine was used in coded teleprinter transmissions. The British codename for all such messages was “fish” and the machine itself was nicknamed a “tunny” (another name for the blue-finned tuna).

  23. Coffin makers were among the teams of local woodworking professionals brought in to do the construction work.

  24. Pocket-sized encoding machines invented by Swedish cryptographer Boris Hagelin in the 1930s.

  25. There is a persistent story that, in order to keep secret the fact that BP had cracked Enigma, Winston Churchill “sacrificed” the city of Coventry to German bombers. I’ve even had people try to tell me that this is the origin of the phrase “being sent to Coventry”. The truth is that the story stems from a 1974 war memoir by one Group Captain F W Winterbotham and the story has been challenged by historians and Station X veterans ever since. Peter Calvocoressi, who was head of the Air Section at Bletchley Park, which translated and analysed all deciphered Luftwaffe messages, has said that Churchill was under the impression that the raid was to be on London. Others have stated that a message was received with details of massive bombing raids destined for UK cities but that the coded location “KORN” used by the Germans for Coventry wasn’t yet known to UK military intelligence. The “Historic Coventry” website says that the RAF did detect the wave of bombers approaching the city which did give some time for preparations. However, despite 6,700 rounds being fired off by ground defences, the massive 515 bomber attack on 14th November 1940 killed over 500 people, destroyed 4,300 homes and damaged a third of all buildings in the city. One third of the city’s munitions factories – the German’s main target – were destroyed. As for the “sent to Coventry” story, it is significantly older than WWII, probably dating to the 1730s.

  26. The use of a cover story involving a spotter plane or ship became common practice to keep secret the fact that Enigma had been cracked. And it did produce secondary propaganda benefits. Harry Hinsley says that “As a consequence of [this procedure] the Germans and the Italians assumed that we had 400 submarines whereas we had 25. And they assumed that we had a huge reconnaissance Air Force on Malta, whereas we had three aeroplanes!”

  27. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/jan/18/features11.g2

  28. The Karno family were a big name in entertainment, particularly music hall. Fred Karno (1866-1941) is credited with inventing the “custard pie in the face” gag and, at one time, had both Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel working for him as comic actors. Many of the routines they developed with Karno ended up in their earliest silent films.

  29. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/60/a2377460.shtml

  30. After the end of the First World War, Knox co-wrote (with Frank Birch) an entire Carroll-inspired play called Alice in ID25. He also named many of the component parts of cribs and ciphers after animals like beetles, starfish and lobsters because Carroll used so many animals in his stories. http://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/development/old-member-publications/2007/alice-i-d-25&print=true

  31. http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/nov/22/ann-cunningham-obituary

  32. It’s easy to see why the quality and amount of food might have been an issue. Rationing was in place and yet BP had to conjure up over 22,000 meals every day when staffing was at its highest. It was a far cry from Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party and its Savoy Grill chef.

  33. http://www.hertsad.co.uk/news/bletchley_park_remembered_by_harpenden_woman_1_827524

  34. It should be noted that Tandy’s son Miles, who has researched his father’s life in detail, remains sceptical about this story. While the serendipitous seaweed/logbook story is true, the method of his recruiting may just be a witty yarn. Tandy was an accomplished linguist and researcher and may well have been recruited to BP for those skills.

  35. Seaweeds are a form of algae.

  36. These poems, of course, were later to be turned into the award-winning stage show Cats by Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

  37. Like the aforementioned Coventry story, there is absolutely no truth to the urban myth that British Intelligence held back information about the attack on Pearl Harbour in order to force the Americans to get involved in the war effort.

  38. Bigrams and trigrams are commonly found pairs or trios of letters e.g. (in English) ou, th, st, ing, ert etc. They stand out from random groups like pk, hd, yts, mnb etc.

  39. Not Enigma, as some websites suggest – that was the domain of the Turing/Welchman Bombes.

  40. We’ll learn more about this machine and others in a later chapter.

  41. http://mosaicscience.com/story/how-zebra-got-its-stripes-alan-turing

  42. There is a persistent urban myth that the logo on all Apple products – an apple with a bite out of it – is a tribute to Turing. Sadly, it isn’t true. The logo’s designer, Rob Janoff, has said that he didn’t know anything about Turing and that the bite was added for scale. The logo needed to look like an apple – no matter how small it as reproduced – rather than something like a cherry. Maybe that’s because a number of early competitors also had fruit-based names and logos like Apricot, Tangerine and Acorn. Even today, there are Raspberry Pis, and Blackberry and Orange mobile phones.

  43. One aspect he particularly hated was that the female hormones caused him to develop breast tissue. Remember, this was a man who prided himself on his physique and who nearly represented the UK in the Olympics.

  44. Bletchley station used to be on a branch line that connected Oxford to Cambridge, which was one of the reasons why BP was chosen as an ideal location. That line no longer exists and trains now run through Bletchley connecting London to Liverpool and the Midlands (and I’m told by commuter friends that it is still quite commonplace for there to be “line problems at Bletchley”). Incidentally, there is a story that Christie came up with the name of Miss Marple after being stuck at Marple station, near Stockport.

  45. Auxiliary Territorial Service – the women’s branch of the army during WWII. In 1949 it became the Women’s Royal Army Corps.

  46. W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944) was a British illustrator famed for his gadgets that invariably used hugely complicated systems to perform simple tasks like breaking an egg or heating a bath. In the USA, illustrator Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) did much the same kind of thing.

  47. The original couple of MKIs were upgraded to become MKIIs.

  48. Report number NR 857 CBCB28 1153A BRITISH BOMBE, written by staff of the United States Army 6812th Division Signal Security Detachment (Prov), seconded to Eastcote in North London between February 1944 and May 1945.

  49. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/04/AR2007090402069.html

  50. There was an element of luck involved too; the Japanese ciphers were due to be replaced at the beginning of April 1942. However, slow distribution meant that they didn’t change until the end of May. Midway was fought on the 4th of June.

  51. The “D” in D-Day doesn’t stand for any particular word. D-Day is a military codename for “the day on which an operation commences or is due to commence”. There are codes for days and hours using most letters of the alphabet. E-Day is code for “the day on which a military exercise commences”. F-Day means “the day that reserve forces are mobilised”. H-Hour is “the specific time at which an operation or exercise commences, or is due to commence”. There have been many D-Days although most people only associate the term with Operation Overlord.

  52. The film was appallingly retitled Hell, Heaven or Hoboken for the US market. It’s quite a delicious fact that, in the film, M E Clifton James played himself . . . playing himself and Monty. Clifton James was originally contacted by the Army’s film unit after he’d been spotted playing Montgomery in a patriotic revue. The officer who recruited him was another actor, the then Lieutenant-Colonel David N
iven.

  53. From Top Secret Ultra.

  54. From The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay.

  55. Saying that, the sick rate never got higher than 5 per cent of staff.

  56. From Marion Hill’s Bletchley Park People.

  Dr Sue Black left home and school at 16, married at 20 and had three children by the age of 23. At 25, as a single parent living on a council estate in Brixton, she decided to get an education. Sue studied maths at Southwark College, then gained a degree in computing and a PhD in software engineering at London South Bank University. She was head of a computer science department at the University of Westminster for several years before her current role: Senior Research Associate at University College London.

  In 2001, Sue set up the UK’s first online network for women in tech –

  BCSWomen. It was this that led her to Bletchley Park for the first time in 2003 and to starting a campaign to save it in 2008.

  Passionate about the way that technology and education can change lives, Sue is now a social entrepreneur, writer and public speaker who has won numerous awards, including being one of the “50 most inspiring women in European tech”. Sue writes regularly in the UK national press about technology. Her current startup #techmums works with disadvantaged families, teaching mums tech skills to empower them, build their confidence and get them excited about the opportunities that being tech-savvy brings.

  Sue now has four children and has recently become a grandmother. Yay!

  Saving Bletchley Park is Sue’s first book. At the time of funding, it was the fastest ever crowdfunded book in the world. Sue would love to hear from you,

  so please tweet her @Dr_Black using the hashtag for the book #savingbletchley.

  * * *

  Stevyn Colgan is an author, artist, songwriter, public speaker and oddly-spelled Cornishman.