• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Colossus and Heath Robinson machines were also taken to pieces. Anything that remained was kept either at Stanmore or Eastcote in Middlesex. The bombe machines that remained at Eastcote, however, did not stop, for they now had other sorts of traffic and signals intelligence to decode.

For most of those who had worked at the Park though, the conflict was over; and many of those young people now had a shattered country to rebuild. One is tempted to look back across the years and see idealism in that enthusiasm; but it might be more accurate to say that this was a time for unflinching realism, and even a certain sense of apprehension.

26 1945 and After: The Immediate Aftermath

All the thousands of young cryptographers and linguists and Wrens were at last able to turn their thoughts to the futures that they had planned for themselves, futures that had been held in limbo for the last six years. Yet there was also a destabilising sense of abstraction, like walking out into a white fog. According to a few of the veterans, there was, surprisingly, no intensive debriefing session. Apart from the instruction that silence was to be maintained at all costs, these young people went out into the world to begin their careers.

‘There was nothing,’ says Oliver Lawn of his final days at Bletchley Park. ‘Nothing at all. You signed the Official Secrets Act.’ His wife Sheila says: ‘I don’t remember any final lecture. We had just escaped from this dreadful war, and therefore anything that was secret then was secret now.’

For Roy Jenkins’s fellow ‘Tunny’ codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts, his military role was not to end for some time, an experience common to many. Immediately after Bletchley, he was seconded into War Crimes work.

‘I regarded my time in War Crimes as a great nuisance,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t demobilised until 1947. And looking back, I regard it as the only time in my life where I didn’t make progress and didn’t contribute an awful lot. But shortly after that, I met a middle-aged Belgian lady. Her husband had been a lawyer, and during the war, they had sheltered British airmen, or Allied airmen, shot down, and trying to make their way back to Britain to join the air force again.

‘She had written a diary – they actually had an airman hidden in the house when the Gestapo came to call. The Gestapo searched up and down, but didn’t find him, and went away disappointed. So the airman emerged and everybody congratulated themselves. And the Gestapo came back. Because that is what they did, that was their trick. This Belgian woman never saw her husband again. She got away by pretending to be doolally. The president of her tribunal was a civilised man and let her go.

‘But she had this diary and she wanted someone to translate it. So I did that and it was published as a book.’

After that, though, Captain Roberts found that he had to find a career that was rather more diverting than the one that he had originally planned: ‘When I studied German, at University College, London, it had been with the purpose of joining the Foreign Office. I am eternally grateful that I never joined the Foreign Office. I went into market research side of an international advertising agency.’ The work took him all over the world at a time when not many British people travelled at all. ‘And for the rest of that time,’ he says, ‘it was market research, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had my own company in the 1970s. The travel was very welcome!’ It was also sufficiently absorbing to counter the frustration of never being able to talk about Bletchley.

Similarly, for Gordon Welchman, who had brought so many invaluable innovations and systems to Bletchley Park, the end of the war marked a turning point; the prospect of returning to his old, academic life in Cambridge seemed utterly impossible. Towards the end of the war, and with his enthusiasm for the nature of organisations, he had began to help in drafting the future of Government Communication Headquarters – what was