Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [7]
Oliver Strachey, related to Lytton, was noted for his colourful good humour and his intense musicality. He was a friend of Benjamin Britten. When back in London, Strachey and Britten would enjoy playing duets. As the war intensified, Strachey would find himself taking a pivotal role in the Park’s decoding of Gestapo signals, heading a special department which in the 1940s began to slowly decrypt the hideous bureaucracy of death – the railway timetables, the numbers of people being transported – that surrounded the Holocaust.
Also highly notable among the codebreakers was Josh Cooper, a physically imposing presence – known to some as ‘the Bear’ – in his middle years, and singular in his mannerisms, often given to exclaiming to himself. In the very early days of Bletchley, he was rather taken with this move from London to the country. ‘We all sat down to lunch together at one long table in the House,’ Cooper wrote. Elsewhere he recalled, ‘a large room on the ground floor had been set aside for Air Section … I remember coming into a scene of chaos with a great mound of books and papers piled on the floor.’
Cooper also noted right from the start that ‘service personnel wore civilian clothes in the office’, but ‘put on uniform to go on leave, or on duty trips to London etc., in order to be able to use Service travel warrants’. As a security precaution, all personal post had to be sent to Bletchley Park via a London PO box. This postal system broke down, according to Cooper, when a relative of one codebreaker ‘attempted to send a grand piano’.3
Cooper’s own recollections fail to include his own spectacular bouts of eccentricity; such as the later occasion, recalled by another veteran, when Cooper was present at the interrogation of a captured German pilot. When the pilot gave out a ‘Heil Hitler!’ Cooper inadvertently did the same, and in his haste to sit down after this embarrassment ended up missing the chair and falling under his desk. But what we do hear in these accounts of the very first days of Bletchley Park is the notion of a deliberate ethos, a studied atmosphere of genteel chaos that was perhaps fostered to encourage freethinking improvisation. Certainly, the way Bletchley Park was run was to become the source of future friction in the War Office.
The permanent staff of GC&CS – a platoon redolent of cardigans, tweed and pipes – around this time numbered around 180. Around thirty of these people were codebreakers. The rest were Intelligence and support staff. It was swiftly understood in 1938 that rather more were going to be needed.
And so the serious business of wider recruitment was beginning. One internal memo from February 1939 stated that ‘three professors will be available as soon as required’, as though such men were machine components. The looming conflict also brought a shift in attitude from GC&CS.
In previous years, according to one veteran, the department didn’t want to use mathematicians for codebreaking. The reason was that mathematicians, as a class, were not considered temperamentally appropriate. ‘They were definitely persona non grata,’ recalled John Herivel, himself a fine mathematician (and author of one of the Park’s greatest breakthroughs). ‘Supposedly because of their impractical and unreliable nature.’4
All this was about to change dramatically. Alistair Denniston had spent a few months visiting Oxford and Cambridge, assessing the likeliest young candidates. Among them was a deeply promising young mathematician called Peter Twinn; then there was a dazzlingly clever 33-year-old mathematics lecturer, Gordon Welchman, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Welchman – a handsome fellow with an extremely neat moustache – swiftly proved to be an assiduous, enthusiastic and fantastically ambitious recruiting officer.
The most talented young mathematician of them all, 27-year-old Alan Turing, from King’s College, Cambridge, had been sounded out even earlier, as far back as 1937. Between them, Turing and Welchman would quickly prove to be crucial to the Bletchley operation.