Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [42]
Being paid, or otherwise rewarded, seemed almost a curiosity. It was also something of a holiday even from professional mathematics, for the kind of work required was more on the line of ingenious application of elementary ideas, rather than pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge. It was like a solid diet of the hard puzzles in the New Statesman, with the difference that no one knew that solutions existed.9
For the young codebreakers, working in hermetically sealed departments, under the strictest instructions not even to talk to one another about their work, there was another factor that rendered it sometimes a little abstract. Josh Cooper, in a rare moment of disclosure intended to raise morale, once praised a young codebreaker’s work by saying that it was ‘helping to save lives in the Atlantic’. But information was generally almost non-existent. ‘What you didn’t know was the effect that this was all having upon the war,’ says Oliver Lawn. ‘You see, we knew no more than the public news bulletins, which were obviously censored.’
Very occasionally, there would be a shockingly vivid reminder of what was going on outside. ‘The only time I actually realised what we were doing was when I was shown a notebook,’ recalled Gwen Watkins. ‘It had just been captured and rushed to Bletchley from a captured plane, and of course we had no plastic envelopes or anything then, the poor thing was just given to me as it was. And I was horrified to see a huge bloodstain on it. The blood round the edges was drying, but the blood in the middle was still wet.
‘And I realised then that somewhere there was this German. This German air-crew bleeding, still bleeding while I was decoding. That did bring the war very close.’10
But these moments were vastly outnumbered by the sense of simply getting on with it, working almost in a void – a feeling to which the nature of the shift system itself contributed. Veterans recall starting a shift, with perhaps a pile of intercepts waiting either to be cracked or to be translated. Segregated in different huts, and under strict instructions never to discuss their work outside the Park, when the shift came to an end and it was time either to go back to a billet in town, or even for a bicycle ride in the countryside, there was little else one could do but pass the baton to those coming in on the following shift. And try to forget about it all, as indeed they were instructed to do.
‘I don’t think it was particularly intense,’ says Keith Batey, drily. ‘Well, mathematicians tend to be phlegmatic.’
The mathematicians stayed so. But as the war progressed, elements of friction and stress within the organisation of the Park itself would come to the fore and be felt by all. Before that, though, came Bletchley Park’s magnificent moment of technological breakthrough – the introduction of the bombe machines.
10 1940:The Coming of the Bombes
Secret service officer Frederick Winterbotham described the bombe as ‘like some Eastern goddess who was destined to become the oracle of Bletchley’.1 The machine’s origins were more prosaic, although inspiration had its place in their development.
Alan Turing had, among other attributes, a tremendous gift for building things from scratch. When it came to electrical experiments, he was the master of what popular fiction authors always describe as ‘lash-ups’. Even in the years that followed the war, with all the technological progress that had been made, Turing’s devices tended to fulfil the stereotype of the mad scientist’s invention: a labyrinth of wires trailing everywhere, held together with sticking plaster. Prior to his premature death in 1954, his home in Manchester was filled with extraordinary and sometimes pungent chemical experiments.
Turing had fixed upon the idea of a ‘Universal Turing Machine’ in the 1930s; the inspiration