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But there is also the other side of Bletchley Park story: the struggle for official recognition. Old soldiers have their medals; but what do the men and women of Bletchley Park have? In October 2009, Foreign Secretary David Miliband presided over a ceremony at Bletchley to award commemorative badges to all known veterans. It was a gesture, certainly, and came fast on the news of the Park’s lottery grant, and also of the government’s posthumous apology to Alan Turing. But a commemorative badge is not quite the same as a medal.

One Bletchley veteran, during the course of the research for this book, wrote to say that she was ‘sick to the back teeth’ of articles about the Park placing so much emphasis on the ‘dancing on the lawn’ and the social side of it. This, she said, was a time of war and the work was extraordinarily hard, and it is that aspect that ought to be remembered.

Certainly it should; remembered and commemorated properly. Yet it would also be wrong to forget these other aspects of Bletchley life. The wonder of what all these men and women did is illustrated, in some ways, just as well by the recreational pursuits as the labour; for in both cases, astonishing efforts were made. The very idea of coming off a night shift having done hours of tiring, focused, pressurised work, and then turning one’s mind to the staging of a play, seems to me both extraordinarily admirable and brilliantly sane. ‘Even though I’ve had wonderful friends since,’ recalled Gwen Watkins, ‘I’ve never again experienced that atmosphere of happiness, of enjoyment of culture, of enjoyment of everything that meant life to me.’1

Nevertheless, it is daunting to consider now not merely the sheer intellect required, but also the powers of concentration and absolute, unsnappable patience that the work involved. And, as ever with these things, one always finds oneself asking: could this generation rise to a similar challenge?

By coincidence, the other day, two newspaper headlines jumped out at me; one concerning the ingenuity of British creators of modern video games, and the other concerning Gary McKinnon, the computer hacker who broke into the Pentagon system and who (as I write) the Americans are trying to extradite for trial.

I am not about to draw a parallel between these people and the Bletchley codebreakers. I merely observe that British computer game experts are leading the field in what is basically an extraordinarily abstract job of feeding codes into computers; while Gary McKinnon, who is said to suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, had the ingenuity – from a perfectly ordinary home computer in north London – to hack into a mighty military system and get past all the Pentagon’s passwords and encrypted complexities. No wonder the American authorities have seemed so profoundly rattled by the case.

The other point is that there may never again be a challenge like that presented by Enigma; for in times of future war, intelligence and code experts are extremely unlikely to be drawn from a pool of untrained amateurs. They will be sleek professionals, working in synchronisation. Which only serves to highlight further the real achievement of all those men and women at Bletchley. Equipped with little more than intelligence, enthusiasm and determination, they got stuck right into the job, persisting until they succeeded.

It might be true that their story lacks the pyrotechnic thrills of the bomber boys, or the icy suspense of the Atlantic convoys, and it might well be that this is one of the reasons that recognition has been so long in coming. Yet, as Eisenhower said, these were the men and women who shortened the war by two years.

And there are countless thousands of people across the continent who survived, who just might not have done without the brilliance of Bletchley Park.

Notes

1 Reporting for Duty

1 Memo in the National Archives. Most documents cited in this book are held within the HW 62 series, with the exception of a few in HW 25 and HW 67

2 S. Gorley Putt, quoted