Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [24]
Meanwhile, Alistair Denniston’s administrative difficulties were growing. There were problems involving accommodation for all the staff. An adjacent school – Elmers School – had to be requisitioned as more huts underwent construction.
Looking at these old huts now, one cannot help wondering why the authorities did not base the codebreaking activity in rather more comfortable, better-built space. One possible answer is that at that stage, no one anticipated the war lasting long enough for permanent structures to be needed. After all, even up until the summer of 1939, there were many who believed that Chamberlain’s government would, of necessity, allow Hitler to get away with further acts of aggression throughout Europe. Perhaps another consideration was that it was vital that no unfriendly attention was drawn to the Park. Not only would extensive building work raise questions, it would also be more easily visible from the air by enemy reconnaissance pilots.
And so a series of huts were constructed and accorded separate functions, decided by the sorts of codes that were to be read. By the side of the house was Hut 4, which was to become the Naval Section hut. Hut 5 was to become the Military (and later, the Japanese) Section. Other huts, such as Hut 8, the home of the Naval Enigma operation, followed not too long afterwards.
Hut 3 – which, together with Hut 6, seemed to form the hub of the operation – was nominated in part for army/air intercepts and Intelligence work; Hut 6 was where air force keys were to be read. Hut 1 eventually came to house the first experimental Turing bombe deciphering machine. (And according to Mimi Gallilee, ‘Hut 2 was for beer, tea and relaxation.’)
From the very start, for the sake of security, the functions of each hut were kept as separate from each other as possible. Personnel were instructed that inter-hut discussions were forbidden. Absolute secrecy was a given. ‘You just assumed,’ says Keith Batey drily, ‘that you’d be shot.’ Recruits would be allocated to their hut and, during working hours, would be metaphorically hermetically sealed within. No one else, save the occasional messenger, would be allowed entry.
Even though the word ‘hut’ implies a cramped construction, these were long structures, with central passageways and rooms off either side. There were plain windows (shuttered at night for blackout purposes), floors of squeaky lino, basic desks and chairs. Green-shaded lights hung from the ceiling. A great many people worked side by side among plain filing cabinets; the rooms were suffocating in the summer sun, and draughty and cold in the depths of winter. As one cryptologist commented: ‘Nothing … seemed less likely to house great matters than the ramshackle wooden building (its atmosphere nauseating at night when the blackout imprisoned the fumes from leaky coke-burning stoves) to which I reported …’
Heating was a perennial problem. Mittens were commonplace. Added to this was a faintly comical, Heath Robinson dimension: messages were passed between some huts by means of an extemporised wooden ‘tunnel’ and propelled by means of a tray with wheels on the bottom, and a long broom-handle.
John Herivel recalled the unique atmosphere in the ill-ventilated and sporadically heated huts. There were the big tables, covered with maps. Then there were the spartan lights giving out yellowish light on the simple desks and the bare whitewashed walls. Mr Herivel recalls that he was ‘provided with a blackboard set on a low table’ so that he could write while seated. And before him was a desk piled with intercepted messages.
The phrase ‘need to know