Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [118]
Latterly, we have recruited from … the universities. And Academic tradition does not understand the idea that a half-fledged result should be removed from the scholar who obtains it and handed over to another. The discoverer loses all interest in further discovery and the recipient has no interest in the offspring of another’s brain. Until we know who will handle and circulate any result we get, the aurum irrepertum of our search will very probably be sic melius situm …
In bidding farewell and in closing down the continuity though not, I hope, the traditions of the Cottage, I thank once more the section for their unswerving loyalty. Affectionately, Dilly.2
The honour was sent over to Bletchley, since Knox felt that it was as much an acknowledgement of the department’s works as it was for him. Increasingly at Bletchley, his had been a singular and some might say anachronistic approach to the breaking of codes. But it none the less evoked admiration.
‘He had this feeling for looking for anomalies,’ says his colleague Mavis Batey, ‘and as ancient scribes did things wrong when they were copying out Greek texts, Dilly would always look for that sort of thing in the codes. He was the first one to extrapolate and really get down to the business of procedural errors made by operators.’
Mrs Batey remembers with terrific fondness how, even in the early days of the Cottage, Knox’s eccentricities had come to the fore. He would contrive, absent-mindedly, to try to leave the room via the cupboard door. He would visit the punch-card operators in his dressing gown, even if it was the dead of winter. His enthusiasm for hot baths never waned. He was – an unusual privilege this, in straitened times – allowed real milk for his coffee, which came fresh from an obliging local cow.
And when all the changes came to Bletchley Park – not merely the gentlemanly removal of Alistair Denniston, but also the mechanised systems that were being employed to break into Enigma, Knox was extremely watchful, and also on occasion fiercely scornful. But he was no Luddite. According to Penelope Fitzgerald, Knox was fond of Alan Turing, whose Asperger tendencies were in no way reined in at Bletchley. The playwright Hugh Whitemore, in Breaking the Code, added a further, speculative layer, hinting that Knox, like Turing, had homosexual feelings and had had such relationships in the past.
Knox died in February 1943, and a certain style and approach died with him. The old cryptographic world of classicists versed in labyrinthine antiquities had given way to a new, mathematical, technologically driven machine age; the dawn of the computer era. Knox was remarkable in having straddled two such worlds, and with such success, right until the end.
Ingenious though the Enigma machines were, it was always inevitable that at some stage a more complex process of encoding would emerge. It was equally inevitable that, faced with such demands, the theoreticians and engineering geniuses who worked for Bletchley Park would make giant strides forward in terms of technology.
The one name that shines out in terms of engineering ingenuity was Tommy Flowers, familiarly known as the ‘clever cockney’. There are some who argue that the name should be known in every household – for, they believe, he was the man who realised the dreams of Alan Turing and truly brought the computer age into being.
In 1943, Bletchley Park had seen the establishment of a new section known as ‘The Newmanry’. It was set up under the aegis of mathematician Professor Max Newman from St John’s College, Cambridge, and the idea of it was to find ways of applying more advanced machinery to codebreaking work.
It had been Professor Newman who in the 1930s, with his lectures on ‘mechanical approaches’ to solving mathematical problems, first led Alan Turing to start pondering on the idea of ‘Turing Machines’. Indeed, Newman had lectured Turing directly. Newman, born in 1897, was a very