Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [137]
‘Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind … it is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.’
Quite so. In this day and age – one that Turing might possibly have felt more comfortable in – there is a greater general understanding of his philosophy concerning the nature of the mind, and in particular of the electronic mind. The work that he began has led to illimitable advances.
27 Bletchley’s Intellectual Legacy
‘There was a pub in the village of Stony Stratford that some of the chaps at Bletchley went to,’ says Y Service veteran Geoffrey Pidgeon. ‘And it was there you’d get the sight of, say, four chaps, all gathered together with their beers, and talking in Greek.’
In discussing the Park and its impact on the lives of those who worked there, a great many veterans acknowledge the other side of what they gained; it was a kind of university education by proxy, even if their own academic studies had become a little fuzzy round the edges. The full range of what the Park gave them only became clear to them in the years that followed the war.
In general terms, the Second World War brought with it not merely a will to win, but also a determination that what came afterwards would make life better for everyone. It was during the years of the war that the great social changes of the National Health Service and of the Welfare State were conceived, proposed through the Beveridge Report, debated and agreed.
But there was more than that; in cultural terms, there seemed a strong thirst for the wider dissemination of knowledge. The notion that great art, and literature, and music, and thought, should be shared among as many people as possible, as opposed to simply appealing to privileged elites. Rather than being a ‘pause’ in their young lives, Bletchley provided an unexpected and unusual further education, as many veterans of the Park have told me; an education which they would never have had in any other circumstances.
The question of money was very important; in the years before and during the war technological developments were already putting great works of art directly into more hands. Bryan Magee recalls in his memoirs that when he was a boy in the 1930s and 40s, gramophone records became slightly cheaper and more widely available; this in turn allowed him, as a boy, to listen to more and more great performances of classical music. And the effect of this was life-changing; the music alone awoke in him the sense of so many other possibilities, so much other art to be explored.1
Those years also saw the introduction of the paperback book, which instantly made literature affordable for many more people. Previously, most had to rely upon their public libraries; wonderful though these institutions once were, you could only borrow a book for two weeks at a time. If you could actually buy it, and own it, your time spent studying it was limitless.
We learn through the diaries of Mass Observation that the war years brought an even greater enthusiasm for cinema, and in particular the glossy, expensive escapism of Hollywood. We also learn, though, through some of these day-to-day diaries that most people seemed to have a highly tuned critical faculty, and that some films that we would regard today as classics were dismissed sharply at the time as nonsense by these diarists.
For the young people of Bletchley, this sense of intellectual openness and curiosity was strong. Even for those who were not drawn directly from university, there had been a sense of culture in the air. Mimi Gallilee recalls with especial fondness the library within the house itself. Others had brought their libraries with them.
‘We were much into Freud,’ recalls Mavis Batey.