Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [6]
There was a temporary decrease in diplomatic tension in the aftermath of Munich. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously had in his hand a piece of paper, which promised peace in our time. According to some contemporaneous Mass Observation reports, not many ordinary people were wholly convinced by this. And on the intelligence side, the quiet, furtive preparations for the coming, inevitable conflict became ever more intense.
Bletchley Park was placed under the control of Commander Alistair Denniston. Originally the establishment was supposed to have been run by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, but he was becoming very ill by this point and Denniston rapidly assumed day-to-day responsibility for the operation. This delegation of responsibility – with the head of MI6 being in ultimate, rather than everyday, control – was one of the elements that in the years to come was to give Bletchley Park its unusual and sometimes unpredictable flavour. It had a degree of quirky autonomy. Certainly quirky enough not to be appreciated by some senior figures in Whitehall.
Back in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Alistair Denniston had been made head of the Government Code and Cypher School, and he presided over the department in the interwar years. When Denniston came to Bletchley Park in 1939, he saw to it that some fellow codebreakers from the early days of the department came too – including the mercurial but brilliant Alfred Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch.
Birch had a rather unusual hinterland; as well as being incredibly sharp with codes, he was a theatre actor and director with an amusingly exaggerated manner. In fact, in 1930 he had essayed a highly memorable Widow Twankey in a sumptuous West End production of Aladdin. Birch and Knox had been at Cambridge together.
On arrival at Bletchley, ‘Dilly’ Knox, as senior cryptographer, was allocated working space in ‘the Cottage’ – in reality, a row of chunky converted interlinked houses – just across the courtyard from the main house, near the stables. Fifty-five-year-old Knox was, in the words of a colleague, ‘the mastermind behind the Enigma affair’, a gangling figure with a prominent forehead, ‘unruly black hair and his eyes, behind glasses, some miles away in thought’.
Knox had been interested in ciphers since boyhood, noted the novelist (and his niece) Penelope Fitzgerald. Also as a boy, Dilly had precociously ‘detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions in the Sherlock Holmes stories,’ wrote Fitzgerald, ‘and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in “The Sign of Four”’.2
He was also a man prone to terrific bursts of temper, and quickly became noted by his colleagues for the fact that he seemed to get on much better with women than he did with men. He certainly had a most enlightened approach to the employment of women at that period – one might even be tempted to call it positive discrimination. Although that was not how many more lascivious-minded colleagues saw it at the time.
Indeed, it was not long before the female recruits to ‘the Cottage’ became known widely around the Park as ‘Dilly’s Fillies’. These days, the expression causes one of Knox’s more illustrious female recruits – Mavis Batey, née Lever – to tut-tut and roll her eyes with good-humoured exasperation. ‘A myth has grown up that Dilly went around in 1939 looking at the girls arriving at Bletchley and picking the most attractive for the Cottage,’ Mrs Batey says, perhaps protesting a little too much. ‘That is completely untrue. Dilly took us on our qualifications.’
Other experienced codebreakers who had served alongside Denniston in that interwar period, and who were to make such a difference at Bletchley Park, were Josh Cooper, John Jeffreys, Frank Lucas, Nigel de Grey, Oliver Strachey and Colonel John Tiltman, an utterly brilliant