Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [18]
Denniston had been an expert on cryptography since the start of the First World War, when, as a young man, he had been summoned to the Admiralty, the chiefs of which had been eager to use his German expertise. In 1914, the Admiralty realised the tactical value of decoding and translating German naval signals, before distributing them throughout the British navy to give the forces a chance of being a step ahead.
During the First World War, the cryptographers had gathered in the department within the rambling Admiralty building known as Room 40. As a naval concern, Room 40 was in a perpetual state of rivalry with its army equivalent. Between 1914 and 1918, Denniston and his Room 40 colleagues acquired skills that went far beyond languages. And the stupendous feats of logic which they deployed to break into coded signals were noted by a fascinated young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty.
A naval operation it might have been, but Room 40 also had an atmosphere of academic informality. This was deepened with the arrival, in 1916, of the ferociously intelligent – and in some ways, simply ferocious – King’s College scholar called Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox.
Knox was a classicist, but of an extremely unusual calibre: he was an expert on ancient papyri. This, ironically, provided him with the perfect flair and skill for codework. It would serve him especially well when squaring up to the challenge of Enigma.
Intriguingly, the First World War demands of Room 40 had dragged this irritable scholar away from deciphering one particularly beautiful and breathtakingly valuable papyrus found in southern Egypt: the 2,000-year-old Mimiambi of Herodas. Consisting of satiric dialogues only previously known by virtue of being mentioned in other Greek works, the discovery was wildly exciting to the academic world, much as if Aristotle’s Second Book of Poetics had been found.
Over the space of many years, Knox had travelled between Cambridge and the British Museum in Bloomsbury, there to study the intensely complicated strips of papyrus. The nature of Herodas’s dialogues was earthy, involving delinquents, brothels, slaves, sex-shops, flagellation and other such salty topics. But complications arose in deciphering such matters as where the speech breaks came, and indeed what was speech and what was not, and also in identifying errors of copying, since the papyrus may have been inscribed as a copy by an insufficiently attentive servant.
Then there was the question of how the crumbling text should be reassembled – how to ensure that the order was correct and that the pieces of the jigsaw were not out of place. This was a matter not merely of great classical learning or ability with language, but something of a cryptographical problem too. So when Knox was pulled into Room 40, the match seemed appropriate.
As soon as he arrived at work at the Admiralty in 1916, Knox bagged a room at the end of a long, untidy, undusted corridor; the room, arrestingly, also had a bath within it. This suited him extremely well; Knox was inordinately fond of hot baths.
And his department had an enormous early triumph: the decrypting of the so-called ‘Zimmerman Telegram’ – a message from the German foreign minister to the German ambassador in Mexico, urging that Mexico be encouraged into an alliance against the United States. It was this intelligence that brought America decisively into the First World War.
There was love (and laughter) in those dusty Room 40 corridors too; Alistair Denniston met his wife-to-be in the department. ‘The camaraderie of the members of Room 40,’ wrote Denniston’s son Robin, ‘all of whose names are inscribed on a silver salver which was given to Denniston and his bride on the occasion of their wedding in 1917, was borne out at the end of the war by … a pantomime, sung by all present. It was written by Frank Birch, himself one of the original cryptographers