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For many years after the war, it was asserted that the most common dream5 had by British people was that of the Queen unexpectedly dropping round for tea. In a similar way, the figure of Winston Churchill loomed very large in the minds of Bletchley Park operatives, and not merely because they found him an inspirational figure. The psychology seems to run deeper than that. Is it possible to hear, through various accounts, a yearning for proper recognition?

Gordon Welchman recorded the day in September 1941 when Churchill paid a visit to Bletchley Park. Welchman’s account, in his book The Hut Six Story, appears to have a pleasing dimension of wish-fulfilment to it:

Winston Churchill himself came to visit us. Travis took him on a tour of the many Bletchley Park activities. The tour was to include a visit to my office, and I had been told to prepare a speech of a certain length, say ten minutes. When the party turned up, a bit behind schedule, Travis whispered, somewhat loudly, ‘Five minutes, Welchman.’ I started with my prepared opening gambit, which was ‘I would like to make three points,’ and proceeded to make the first two points more hurriedly than I planned.

Travis then said, ‘That’s enough, Welchman,’ whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink and said, ‘I think there was a third point, Welchman.’1

Winston, indeed! Not to mention the ‘grand’ schoolboy wink, which seems to have the effect of placing both men on the same level – a level above the officious-seeming Travis. Welchman added, more appropriately: ‘We were fortunate in having an inspiring national leader in Winston Churchill, whose oratory had a powerful effect.’

But Churchill’s relationship with Bletchley Park was of the greatest importance. It was not simply a question of the grand old man granting the codebreakers extra resources for machinery or staff, or even bestowing upon them a fresh tennis court. It was a crucial question of respect. Respect that, one senses occasionally through various accounts, the Park was not necessarily receiving in other parts of Whitehall, or from the intelligence services.

Churchill had been fascinated by the business of cryptography, and indeed of secret intelligence, since before the First World War. He had seen ingenious espionage ploys and counter-ploys in action during his youthful exploits in different parts of the Empire; he had a hand in the setting up of the Room 40 cryptography division at Admiralty; in the 1920s, he took a keen interest in the intelligence agents who could glean most information on the Soviets.

So naturally, when he at last became Prime Minister in May 1940, just two weeks after Bletchley Park broke into the German air force Enigma, Churchill had no doubts how vital the operation was. From the moment he arrived in Downing Street, he insisted on having a daily buff-coloured box of intercepts sent on to him – a box that was sometimes delivered personally by ‘C’, the head of the SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies. The key to this box was kept on Churchill’s key-ring.

Only a handful of other people – military and civilian – were permitted to know from where these decrypts emanated, and if ever they should have cause to refer to them, they used the obscuring term ‘Boniface’. Churchill himself sometimes referred to these bundles of intelligence as his ‘eggs’, a reference to the Bletchley ‘geese that never cackled’. For everyone else – generals and ministers alike – the source was, to all intents and purposes, a number of fictional spies. It was only in 1941 that the intelligence produced from the decrypts started to be known by the term ‘Ultra’.

This intense secrecy could prove a source of vexation to other government departments such as the Foreign Office, and indeed to the military top brass. The Prime Minister was ‘liable to spring upon them undigested snippets of information of which they had not heard’. Added to this irritation, from the outset of the war there were those high