Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [23]
This vagueness of structure, combined with the nature of the personnel that Bletchley Park acquired, was the cause of some initial discomfort and bewilderment in Whitehall. As veteran and historian Harry Hinsley wrote of the organisation of the Park:
[It] remained a loose collection of groups rather than forming a single, tidy organisation … Professors, lecturers and undergraduates, chessmasters and experts from the principal museums, barristers and antiquarian booksellers, some of them in uniform and some civilians on the books of the Foreign Office or the Service ministries – such for the most part were the individuals who inaugurated and manned the various cells which sprang up within or alongside the original sections.
They contributed by their variety and individuality to the lack of uniformity. There is also no doubt that they thrived on it, as they did on the absence at GC&CS of any emphasis on rank or insistence on hierarchy.1
Lord Dacre, then Hugh Trevor-Roper, was attached to Intelligence at the time and quite often passed through the Park. He was reported as saying that the early years of Bletchley were marked with ‘friendly informality verging on apparent anarchy’.
Perhaps the only parallel with the call-up to the military was that the summons for Bletchley was not questioned by anyone who received it. However, unlike the weeks of careful training that one received for military service – the weapons-handling, the exercises – Bletchley seems to have been something of a plunge pool. For the early codebreakers and linguists alike, there was an element of being parachuted straight in to their new lives with little in the way of instruction. There are those who recall short, intensive courses for beginners being held in a nearby school; according to others, there wasn’t even that.
‘It was all pretty quick,’ says John Herivel. ‘I think especially for those of us who arrived in the early days. I was shown the Enigma, and packed off to see Alan Turing and Tony Kendrick. They were, in a sense, my teachers.’
Oliver Lawn, who arrived a little later, found himself feeling quite gung-ho about the nature of the challenges that lay ahead. He recalls: ‘These were basically mathematical problems and I had been trained as a mathematician, to spend my life doing these problems. This was just another form of problem.’
According to Mavis Batey the whole thing was more random than that. She recalls with some amusement the startlingly hands-off approach when she first joined Dilly Knox in the Cottage: ‘We were all thrown in at the deep end. No one knew how the blessed thing worked. When I first arrived, I was told, “We are breaking machines, have you got a pencil?”
‘And that was it. You got no explanation. I never saw an Enigma machine. Dilly Knox was able to reduce it – I won’t say to a game, but a sort of linguistic puzzle. It was rather like driving a car while having no idea what goes on under the bonnet.’
Mathematician Keith Batey is amused to this day about his initiation to the new, esoteric world of Enigma: ‘I arrived with two other chaps from the maths tripos. We were greeted at the Registry and were immediately given a quick lecture on the German wireless network. And I didn’t pay much attention because I was focusing on these highly nubile young ladies who were wandering about the Park.
‘Anyway, after twenty minutes of this lecture, which told us absolutely nothing,’ continues Mr Batey, ‘we were handed over to Hugh Alexander, who was the chess champion. He sat us down in front of what later turned out to be a steckered Enigma, and he talked about it. It didn’t have a battery, it didn’t work. And then we were just told to get on with it. That was the cryptographic training.’
Bletchley Park seemed an organic kind of institution. Perhaps,