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The Group was indebted to the people and particularly to the traders of Bletchley who have always given lots of support – such as the loan of cutlery and furniture and, in one case, last minute gargles!

One of the ways the Group was able to repay was in undertaking the make-up for the Co-Operative Pageant, when something like 600 faces were made-up …

This newspaper report pointed up the accusations raised by a few local townspeople concerning the cushy nature of the Park’s recruits’ lives – for such an apparently intensive programme of theatrical excellence must surely have taken up rather a lot of time. The reporter sided with the Park, at the same time giving no hint about what actually went on there:

A suggestion that the Park people had plenty of time for rehearsal … was quickly killed. Life at the Park had not been fun. Transport to and from their billets; awkward working hours; the strangeness of communal life; and the Drama Group had been the means of saving a lot of people from a mere ‘work, sleep and eat’ existence.6

But there was more to it than that. It was to do with the spontaneous creativity of young people who, despite the terrific responsibility of their wartime roles, were equally earnest about the importance of art and culture – things that would be vital when the war had ended and the nation was to be rebuilt and remodelled.

24 1943–44: The Rise of the Colossus

By the start of 1943, Dilly Knox was succumbing to illness. The previous year, requiring an operation for a returning cancer, he had gone into hospital but was reluctant to have the operation carried out, on the grounds that a man should not be transformed ‘into a piece of plumbing’. And so, for the past few months, he had been working from home, a house in the nearby Chilterns, in which he lived with his wife Olive (he and Olive Roddam had met back in the First World War in the corridors of the Admiralty; they married in 1920 and had two sons).

Now, nursed by his wife, he knew he was dying; but he wanted to hear no expressions of sympathy from relatives and friends. As he wrote:

A wanderer on the path

That leads through life to death

I was acquainted with

The tales they tell of both

But found in them no truth1

It was now, however, that he learned he had been awarded the Companionship of the Order of St Michael and St George. His son Oliver wrote of Knox at this time:

It was not in his nature to be daunted. By this time eighteen or nineteen years old, I was given compassionate leave to be at home during his last days. He had just been awarded the CMG. It has been explained to my mother that security considerations precluded his being given some more illustrious honour. Far too ill to travel to London, he deemed proper receipt of the honour to be a duty; he insisted on dressing and sat, shivering in front of the large log fire, as he awaited the arrival of the Palace emissary. His clothes were now far too big for him, his eyes were sunk in a grey face, but he managed the exercise all right. ‘Nothing is impossible,’ he said.

After the receipt of this honour, in January 1943, Knox wrote a letter to his colleagues in the Cottage. Heartfelt, and piercing to the root of the nature of Bletchley Park, it began:

Dear Margaret,

Mavis,

Peter,

Rachel etc

Very many thanks for your and the whole section’s very kind messages of congratulation. It is, of course, a fact that the congratulations are due the other way and that awards of this sort depend entirely on the support from colleagues and associates to the Head of the Section. May I, before proceeding, refer them back …

He then proceeded to make several rather salty points about Alistair Denniston’s attitudes towards codebreaking and code-breakers, and about the way that, as he saw it, barely analysed messages were handed over to intelligence men. What this was really about, however, was the shift in Bletchley Park’s underlying ethos from a brilliant amateur