Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [0]
Sinclair McKay writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday and has written books about James Bond and Hammer horror for Aurum. His next book is about the Overseas Listening Service during World War II, to be published by Aurum in 2012. He lives in London.
‘Recreate[s] the unique atmosphere of this extraordinary place … remarkable’
Daily Telegraph
‘… a portrait of one of the most remarkable brain factories the world has ever seen’
Max Hastings
‘Revealing and entertaining’
Mail on Sunday
‘This very readable and competent book captures well the extraordinary atmosphere of eccentrics working hard together in almost complete secrecy’
Guardian
‘Amazingly, this is the first oral history of life at the Buckinghamshire country house’
Oldie
‘This book is a fitting tribute to a very British kind of genius’
Waterstones Books Quarterly
‘An interesting and amusing book’
Britain at War
Acknowledgements
With a great many thanks, first of all, to Kelsey Griffin, Director of the Museum at Bletchley Park, for introducing me to such brilliant people. Among all those, and other, brilliant people, thanks are also due to the Honourable Sarah Baring, to Mavis and Keith Batey, Ruth Bourne, Mimi Gallilee, Simon Greenish, John Herivel, Oliver and Sheila Lawn, Trudie Marshall, Geoffrey Pidgeon, Veronica Plowman, Nicolas Ridley, Captain Jerry Roberts, Sarah and John Standing and especially to Jean Valentine. Thanks also to the Bletchley Park Trust – which has made the museum such an invaluable and fascinating draw for generations to come.
Contents
Praise
Title Page
Acknowledgements
1 Reporting for Duty
2 1938–39: The School of Codes
3 1939: Rounding Up the Brightest and the Best
4 The House and the Surrounding Country
5 1939: How Do You Break the Unbreakable?
6 1939–40: The Enigma Initiation
7 Freezing Billets and Outdoor Loos
8 1940: The First Glimmers of Light
9 1940: Inspiration – and Intensity
10 1940: The Coming of the Bombes
11 1940: Enigma and the Blitz
12 Bletchley and the Class Question
13 1941: The Battle of the Atlantic
14 Food, Booze and Too Much Tea
15 1941: The Wrens and their Larks
16 1941: Bletchley and Churchill
17 Military or Civilian?
18 1942: Grave Setbacks and Internal Strife
19 The Rules of Attraction
20 1943: A Very Special Relationship
21 1943: The Hazards of Careless Talk
22 Bletchley and the Russians
23 The Cultural Life of Bletchley Park
24 1943–44: The Rise of the Colossus
25 1944–45: D-Day and the End of the War
26 1945 and After: The Immediate Aftermath
27 Bletchley’s Intellectual Legacy
28 After Bletchley: The Silence Descends
29 The Rescue of the Park
Notes
Index
Copyright
1 Reporting for Duty
Sarah Baring – and her good friend Osla Henniker-Major – received the summons by means of a terse telegram. She remembers that it read: ‘You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, in four days time. Your postal address is Box 111, c/o The Foreign Office. That is all you need to know.’
These two aristocratic young women arrived one evening in the spring of 1941, having travelled by rail from Euston. Their journey had been rendered a little fraught by a male fellow passenger sitting opposite in their compartment, apparently manipulating himself obscenely through his trouser pockets. After some whispered conference, the two outraged young women decided that Osla should deal with the grubby man by reaching up to the luggage rack and then ‘accidentally dropping their case of gramophone records’ on his lap. The man got the message and ‘fled up the corridor’.
Just over an hour later, they were there. ‘We decanted ourselves from the train at Bletchley station,’ recalls the Honourable Sarah Baring, ‘and then, weighed down by our luggage, we staggered up a rutted narrow path. On the side of the tracks, there was an eight foot high chained fence. It was topped by a roll of barbed wire.’
The boundary of the Bletchley Park