Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [74]
This kind of piracy was to be curtailed in 1941. The government decided that the use of the best young brains in the country should be regulated. C.P. Snow, of Christ’s College Cambridge, whom I had known before the war … was put in charge of allocation of all scientists and mathematicians, and from then on I had to recruit my male staff through him.5
Turing and Welchman were careful to state that thanks to the efforts of Commander Travis, Bletchley was well supplied in terms of technology, and specifically in terms of bombes (though by this stage there were still not that many); they were after more codebreakers, and more Wrens. One might also see that the codebreakers were subconsciously asserting their own significance and importance in the face of dumb Whitehall silence:
Dear Prime Minister,
Some weeks ago you paid us the honour of a visit, and we believe that you regard our work as important. You will have seen that, thanks largely to the energy and foresight of Commander Travis, we have been well supplied with the ‘bombes’ for the breaking of the German Enigma codes. We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it.
Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed.
Turing went on to specify exactly what each hut needed in terms of clerks, typists, Wrens, etc. And he concluded thus:
We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.
The rank-breaking letter was signed by Turing, Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander, while the man deputed to deliver it was Milner-Barry. According to one history, he arrived at 10 Downing Street and had to spend a little time gaining entrance. The trouble was that he had forgotten to bring any official identification along with him. Eventually, however, he was allowed in and directed to see Churchill’s Private Secretary, Brigadier Harvie Walker.
The brigadier was apparently extremely suspicious of this disorganised-seeming man without any of his official papers. His suspicions were not allayed by Milner-Barry’s stubborn refusal to tell the brigadier the contents of the letter he had with him. However, Harvie Walker was eventually persuaded to place the letter before Churchill; and upon reading its requests, Churchill instantly responded, telling his Chief of Staff: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ This written instruction came with a sticker at the top of the letter, with the simple phrase: ‘Action This Day.’
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The fact that Churchill’s one visit in 1941 made such an impression on the entire establishment is a vivid illustration of how starved it was of morale-boosting feedback. The codebreakers knew that they were not, like the RAF, ‘Glamour Boys’. There was no Battle of Britain for them to reminisce over, merely days and weeks and months of calculation, of thought, of trial and error, carried out in circumstances of such intense secrecy that there were very few to bestow praise in the first place.
Also, unlike the operatives of MI5, MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, all trained to the highest degree and imbued with the accompanying hardness, a good proportion of the personnel of Bletchley Park were academics by profession and by temperament – meaning that they would have been