Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [17]
And as the war went on, this oddly proportioned house was also to play a central role in some of the livelier recreational activities – nude outdoor bathing aside – enjoyed by the codebreakers.
5 1939: How Do You Break the Unbreakable?
From the day war was declared, the whole of Britain was, in a sense, mobilised. It was not merely the men waiting for their call-up papers. Everyone was set to do precisely as they were instructed by government officials, from giving homes to evacuee schoolchildren to taking jobs in factories. This sense of a total unity of purpose stretching across millions of people might seem a little difficult to imagine. What makes it easier is to bear in mind the very real, and acute, fear of invasion.
Austria, Czechoslovakia and now Poland had fallen to the Germans’ unprecedentedly swift and shockingly ruthless military machine. The young people of Britain found it all too easy to envisage those same ineluctable forces crossing the 22-mile distance across the Channel. For many, the very idea was literally the stuff of nightmares.
It was quite simple, explains Ruth Bourne, who was to become a Wren at Bletchley and elsewhere during the war. ‘More than anything else in the world, you didn’t want the Germans to win. Particularly me with my Jewish antecedents – I would not have wished anyone remotely connected with the Nazi situation to win.’
And in those first few weeks – amid the darkly ominous quiet that took hold in Britain during the so-called Phoney War – the directorate at Bletchley Park knew that one of the most urgent priorities was to secure a break into the German navy’s Enigma messages. The prospect was a daunting one; that of cracking an enemy code system that was universally considered unbreakable.
In times of conflict, an island nation becomes uniquely vulnerable; if the enemy gains mastery over the seas, it will swiftly find ways to cut supplies of food and equipment to that island’s shores. And it was immediately clear that the German navy, with its U-boats, would aim to strangle Britain’s lifelines. It was for that reason that Bletchley Park’s director, Alistair Denniston, had taken the precaution of surrounding himself with so many of the cryptography experts with whom he had worked since the First World War.
Commander Denniston was known by some as ‘the little man’. A literal (and unkind) nickname referring to his short stature, it also obscured his many talents. He was trilingual; unusually, as a young man, he didn’t go to a British university, attending instead the Sorbonne and Bonn University. Denniston had also been something of an athlete in his youth: he played hockey in the 1908 Olympics for the Scottish team. Judging by the many memos that he sent in his time at Bletchley Park, and which have now surfaced in the archives, he was also a man of uncommon patience, especially when dealing with volcanic, quirky or short-tempered colleagues.
Perhaps in some ways Denniston was a little too diplomatic. According to his son Robin, the establishment that Denniston founded was brilliant, but he himself ‘was not … a man who found leadership easy. He lacked self-confidence. He was a highly intelligent self-made Scot who found it difficult to play a commanding role among the bureaucrats and politicians with whom he had to deal.’1 Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) veteran Aileen Clayton said that Denniston ‘seemed more like a professor than a naval officer … I was immediately impressed by his kindness.’2
But there were those who saw how Denniston