The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (23 page)

And so, as we have seen through the amiable ramshackleness of the Admiralty’s Room 40 throughout the First World War, it was clearly felt in the late 1930s to be important that the ‘boffins’ had space and freedom to think their brilliant thoughts. This meant that they were to be unencumbered by the restrictions and discipline imposed on everyone else.

In terms of taking charge of one’s day-to-day work, there was the
matter of who would be in charge of the various codebreaking and translating activities. The huts would have their ‘heads’; but the sense of hierarchy was a great deal looser than that, as Mavis Batey recalls. She also remembers how, when a group of American soldiers came to visit the Park prior to a team of them working there, they were rather taken aback by what seemed to be an almost stereotypical British attitude: ‘There was no one really to consult. You could ask Dilly – but he wasn’t very good at explaining. And in any case, a newcomer with a bright idea could be just as good as anyone.

‘And that is the beauty of the whole ethics and background of the Park and its work … it just so happened that I was in charge the day one of the Americans came round,’ Mrs Batey adds. ‘He couldn’t believe that he was being told how to break codes by a nineteenyear-old – but I had got a corner into the work and I knew what I was doing.’

According to Rebecca Ratcliff’s scholarly account, there was something of the commune about the way everyone worked at the Park:

Perhaps there were outbreaks of resentment, as opposed to dissent – some service personnel regarded the civilians as being rather spoiled and pampered, with their games of tennis and their picnics, and suspected them of having somehow dodged their duty.

Later in the war, there were those, such as Captain Jerry Roberts, who although in the Service, were deemed more valuable working (as he did) on the ‘Tunny’ codes. But did Captain Roberts never feel a pang of frustration that his orders were to remain in the Park?

‘I suppose I should have been unhappy that I wasn’t fighting the true fight but this never bothered me,’ Captain Roberts now says. ‘One knew that this was immensely more important than any other single contribution that you could make as a soldier, or as an officer.’

But by 1942, the understandable harrying of the cryptographers by the services – with inevitable conflict about whether the navy or the military should be accorded more time for their respective codes to be run through the bombe machines – was never-ending. Some kind of a solution was eventually reached. ‘A sudden demand by Hut 8 for a large number of machines would seriously disrupt the programme and the question of how many bombes for Naval, and how quickly, was often a difficult one to answer satisfactorily,’ recalled one veteran. ‘Moreover, only the technicians could answer it; the intelligence sections could lay down orders of priority in general terms, but the detailed decisions depended upon technical considerations. A body of five bombe controllers was therefore formed and a rota arranged, so that one of us was always on duty and available to act as bombe controller.’

Those men in civvies at Bletchley Park had their chance to fulfil a certain kind of service obligation, chiefly in the form of the Home Guard. For some, this proved to be an onerous distraction. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I’d be engaged on breaking a cipher or something, and then had to put it down and pretend to go and be a … it was bloody silly, especially in 1944 when there was no danger of invasion. It was organised, we all had to do it, and we all had these stupid uniforms too. It really was fatuous.’

Conversely, Oliver Lawn found this dash of military experience provided some welcome light relief away from the serious business
of cracking ciphers. ‘We all joined the Home Guard, where we had fun and games. And we went out on to the fields beyond Bletchley and watched to see if any German parachutes came in overnight.

‘Academics in the Home Guard were great fun,’ he adds. ‘You can imagine, Dad’s Army, some of them, the most brilliant, were the most extreme … Though one or two had army backgrounds. There was one chap called Michael Bannister, whose father was in the army. Bannister was very much the army type, and he tried to bring in all the army stuff, but without success. So he was the exception. We were very lame.’

Alan Turing was initially rather taken with the idea of Home Guard duty, as it was an opportunity to learn how to shoot; and his shot, as it turned out, was much more accurate than a lot of people’s. However, Turing’s interest in this activity waned sharply once his shot had been perfected, and around 1942, when after several years of anxiety, the prospect of a Nazi invasion of Britain had receded, he began to absent himself from parades.

The authorities were irritated by Turing’s apparently casual approach, insisting that since he had signed up for Home Guard duties, he was under military law. Turing calmly pointed out to the furious officers in question that he was no such thing, and that he had stated as much on the form that he had signed. One of the questions on the form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard, you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written his answer: ‘No’. Naturally, no one had noticed.

Despite the fact that the women, including the Wrens, at the Park greatly outnumbered the men, there was still the fact that the men were of course very firmly in charge. In the case of the Wrens, there would always be a male officer somewhere. For the civilian women, it was a matter of answering to the heads of huts, be they Gordon Welchman or blond, blue-eyed ‘knockout’ Hugh Alexander.

In matters of uniform too, there were the views of the ladies to consider. The Hon. Sarah Baring says that the presence of a military
man always perked things up a little in the section in which she worked: ‘There were very few service people, mostly civilian. But there were a few uniforms, which we thought was terribly exciting. If you saw a naval uniform, or an air force uniform, it was lovely. For instance, word would get round that someone from the navy had dropped in. And that was very exciting because it was quite rare.’

In terms of hierarchy, Sarah Baring gives a vivid account of that very lack of structure – a tale that contrives to combine military, civilian and class sensibilities into one imbroglio. ‘One morning, I was working as usual in the Index Room when I heard many footsteps outside. The door opened and in walked my godfather. At that time, he was Vice Admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations and naturally privy to Ultra. He was accompanied by a lot of top brass and harassed looking Bletchley staff.

‘I managed to splutter in my astonishment: “Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?” “Oh,” he said, “I knew you were here and thought I would see how you’re getting on; show me the system of your cross reference index.” Pink with embarrassment, I showed him, conscious of the waves of anger behind from the learned code-breakers …

‘I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled,’ she adds. ‘Doom descended the next morning with a peremptory demand to see Commander Travis forthwith. He asked me how I had dared to ask the Chief of Combined Ops to visit the Index. I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing about the visit and that he was my godfather. He believed that I spoke the truth and, bless him, lent me a hankie to blow my nose.’

For Mimi Gallilee, promoted from messenger girl to clerical duties within the house itself, it was immediately clear that it was the figures in the house who held sway. Her sixteen-year-old self was a little in awe of these men, with their smart secretaries: ‘I went to work directly under Nigel de Grey’s secretary,’ she says. ‘And she taught me all sorts of little things. Everything from that point of
view was more interesting, because it was in codes, or about things that I didn’t understand.’

Mrs Gallilee also recalls that for all the apparent lack of military structure, this was still an age in which one did not speak out of turn. Especially not if one was very young: ‘Sometimes I used to do Mr de Grey’s bits of typing, and anything that he wanted. Take tea and coffee into him. He was a very silent man. Grim. Forbidding. I was afraid of him. I wouldn’t have dared to put a foot wrong. One was terribly respectful of him.

‘Others, like Harry Hinsley – well, he was one of us. He was lovely and we called him Harry and I believe he was the only boss there that we called by his Christian name. Certainly not Commander Travis or Captain Hastings or the rest of them. Colonel Tiltman was always Colonel Tiltman. We would never have thought to call them by their first names.’

Mimi Gallilee had authority issues of her own, and they concerned her own immediate boss, Miss Reed. For the senior women in administration had a reputation for ferocity very much more intimidating than the men. Mimi recalls: ‘Miss Reed used to train me and coach me in the right way to present myself to the world. She said to me once: “I must have a talk with your mother some day, she really ought to know about some of these things that you’ve been doing.” What she meant was the way that I was behaving in the office.

‘And at the end of the day, I’d get home and I’d say to my mother: “Please let me leave. I hate her, I hate her!” Poor Miss Reed. It was only after the war that I realised what a gem she was.’

‘You mustn’t think that it was all harmony at BP,’ says one veteran. ‘There were some pretty ferocious internal squabbles too.’ As 1942 dawned, some of these internal pressures were finally to erupt.

While it enjoyed the untrammelled and deep admiration of Churchill, the quasi-academic atmosphere of Bletchley Park was not otherwise viewed outside with universal approbation. Particularly, it appears, within certain corners of Whitehall, there was disquiet concerning the way that information was parcelled out. And after the difficulties and frustrations of the previous year, with the immensely long struggle to finally break the naval Enigma, the Park was coming under fresh pressure from various directions.

Thanks to Dilly Knox, Bletchley Park had at the end of 1941 scored another tremendous, almost priceless success in the cracking of the Abwehr code – that is, the codes used by the German military intelligence service. The Abwehr used a subtly different Enigma machine, and the breaking of the Abwehr code was something of a personal triumph for Knox – now so ill with cancer that he was working from home.

Back at Bletchley, Oliver Strachey was specifically assigned to monitor messages between Abwehr HQ and its agents. And the
decrypted messages were to prove to the security services the success of an audacious operation known as the ‘Double-Cross’ system.

The idea was that captured Abwehr agents should be left in their positions and simply turned by the British – in other words, made to work as ‘double agents’. That way, not only could all German espionage within Britain be monitored but also, the information that these agents sought from the British for their German paymasters would tell MI5 exactly what German intelligence did and did not know about such things as defences and planned manoeuvres.

There was another terrific advantage: the reports that the German agents made, in code, would be followed through the Abwehr networks, helping to break the keys for their particular Enigma cipher.

Such a plan now sounds almost too preposterous to work; and yet it did, handsomely. Captured German agents were given a stark choice: either face a firing squad or obey the orders of an MI5 officer. Once turned, the agents were given information to feed back to their German masters. Most of this was accurate, though inconsequential; some, crucially, was completely false. In other words, these agents were used for strategic deception. As the war went on, one such agent, Wulf Schmidt, known as ‘Harry Tate’, was so spectacularly successful that not only did the British secret service consider him ‘a pearl’, the Germans were even more pleased with him and awarded him the Iron Cross.

As Kim Philby (himself turned down for a job at the Park, as we shall find later) noted in his otherwise not wholly reliable memoirs, the breaking of the Abwehr code also gave Bletchley Park a weird glimpse of ‘the intimate life of German intelligence officers’:

But the beginning of 1942 was a time of crisis for the British forces. Although it seemed that the campaign to eject the Germans and Italians from North Africa had been going well in the Western Desert – the capture of Benghazi on Christmas Day had proved a national tonic – General Rommel suddenly turned and struck back with force. The British were back almost where they had begun.

February 1942 brought disaster on another front: the fall of Singapore. General Percival was forced to surrender to the Japanese on 15 February, and to lead a staggering 62,000 men into captivity as prisoners of war. Many of these soldiers were subsequently pushed into slave labour in conditions of horrific brutality, facing systematic beatings and beheadings as well as malnutrition, dehydration and diseases such as beri-beri.