• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 377 0

’ was constantly evoked. Even for the young messenger girl, Mimi Gallilee, moving from hut to hut delivering the post and packages, entry was sometimes forbidden. Even though her older sister worked in Hut 10 alongside Josh Cooper, Mrs Gallilee recalls: ‘I never knew what my sister did in Hut 10. I never even asked her. She wouldn’t have told me anyway. She knew where I worked. Later, when I was promoted and moved into office work at the house, she never came to my department. I had to go to Hut 10 on a few occasions for my own department. I’d be asked to go over to Commander This or Squadron Leader That in Hut 10 and I’d see my sister sometimes.

‘On the few occasions when I had to go over to her Hut, to talk to someone – if it was in the room she was working, I can remember seeing pieces of paper – not slips of paper but sets of figures. And so my sister would have been working on figures or letters, I don’t know which.’

As the work of the Park continued to expand, so too did the demands for space. The Secret Intelligence Service had now, briefly, evacuated to Bletchley. They were occupying the upper floors of the house, though thanks not only to issues of space but also to straightforward operational concerns, they did not stay long. Meanwhile, in the early days, the ground floor played host to GC&CS, with the numbers growing daily. The corridors of the house were full of trestle tables. The telephone exchange was in the ballroom. The Naval Section, for a while, had to find a temporary home in the library.

For Dilly Knox, Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, sanctuary was found in the Cottage. By this time, Turing, then just turned twenty-eight, was already at work on the design of his revolutionary ‘bombe’ machine.

In these first few months, the irascible Dilly Knox was beginning to take stock of the people that he had gathered around him. In a handwritten letter to Denniston, he reported of his young underlings: ‘As you know, Joan H is a great personal friend of my family and myself. But as a secretary, she is frankly a flop.’ Knox then gave his bullet-pointed appraisals of the others:

A few notes on senior staff:

a) Kendrick is quite admirable. It is a pity I have put him in the [Elmers] school since, tho’ he has a lot to learn, he is the obvious second (or first?) in command.

b) Welchman is doing well and is v keen. I hope to get him back here [from Elmers School] to learn about the machines.

c) Twinn is still very keen and not afraid of work.

Knox’s attitude towards the young Alan Turing was more ambivalent:

He is very difficult to anchor down.

He is very clever but quite irresponsible and throws out a mass of suggestions of all degrees of merit. I have just, but only just, enough authority and ability to keep him and his ideas in some sort of order and discipline. But he is very nice about it all.2

For a little while, there was some tension between Dilly Knox and Gordon Welchman. Knox as the senior cryptographer felt that the Cottage was overcrowded. So Welchman was exiled to the nearby temporarily requisitioned Elmers School (as the memo cited above indicates, Knox was keen that the exile should be short). The idea was that, rather than codebreaking, Welchman would be trying to crack the slightly different problem of ‘traffic analysis’. This involved studying the origins of intercepted signals to work out where they came from, and thereby hopefully making deductions about military movements.

Welchman wrongly inferred from his exile that Knox had taken a dislike to him; as a result, he seemed to suffer slightly from wounded pride. It also seems to be the case that Welchman wasn’t smitten by Knox himself. Years later, he wrote: ‘He was neither an organisation man nor a technical man. He was, essentially, an idea-struck man … By and large Dilly seems to have disliked most of the men with whom he came into contact.’3

Knox might well have smelled something to his distaste about the younger man; for very early on, Welchman was working on schemes to restructure and reorganise the entire codebreaking operation,