Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [76]
‘But Milner-Barry was the father figure that we took instructions from. Now and again we had meetings and so on and discussed with him – but it was a very loose sort of management structure, as suited academe. It was a Common Room situation. It wasn’t a service thing at all.’
In his Bletchley memoir, Peter Calvocoressi also recalls this occasionally bewildering ambiguity concerning who to report to, and in what manner:
Bletchley Park was a very unmilitary place. It paid scant attention to the hierarchies of either military rank or the civil service. Its chiefs were civilians on the payroll of the Foreign Office and there were also the pre-war veterans, most cryptographers. But these were vastly outnumbered by the wartime intake which proved to be very much greater in numbers than anyone had ever imagined. If unconsciously, Bletchley Park took its tone from them.
He continued with a fascinating insight into the minds and aspirations of those young people who were serving, and of what, in the early days, they had expected from the war:
Those of us who were commissioned officers wore uniform only when we felt like it – or when some top brass was expected on a visit. Bletchley Park was not a place where people went around saluting one another. Rank might be coveted for the extra pay or, in the latter part of the war, as a mark of recognition, but it did not affect personal relations. It never seemed quite real, partly because the war itself never seemed to be anything but an interlude.
Looking back, I remember no talk about how long the war was likely to last but I do not think that anybody felt that it was going to last long enough seriously to divert the course of our lives … This was subconsciously important. It meant there was very little jockeying for position among us. Our futures and our war work were unrelated.1
Keith Batey recalls that the arrangement, and the general mix-up of civilian and military, did not appear to cause any difficulty: ‘As far as Hut 6 and Dilly Knox’s outfit were concerned, there weren’t any service people at all. Service people were in the Intelligence section, Hut 3 and Hut 4, the Naval Section. But of course the best cryp-tographer – certainly – was Tiltman, who was a regular officer. His sidekick Morgan was also an army man.’
A naval officer seconded to the Park, Edward Thomas, also recalled this curious atmosphere:
We naval newcomers were at once impressed by the easy relations and lack of friction between those in, and out, of uniform. Despite the high tension of much of the work, a spirit of relaxation prevailed. Anyone of whatever rank or degree could approach anyone else, however venerable, with any idea or suggestion, however crazy.
This was partly because those in uniform had mostly been selected from the same walks of life as the civilians – scholarship, journalism, publishing, linguistics and so forth – and partly because these were the people who saw most clearly what stood to be lost by a Hitler victory … Service officers served gladly under civilians, and vice versa. Dons from Oxford and Cambridge worked smoothly together.2
As regards the general question of hierarchy, it is worth remembering that the British had a very long tradition of looking to the ‘intellectual amateur’ when it came to matters of intelligence. In some ways, Dilly Knox and his fellow individualists in Room 40 were the perfectly logical culmination of a historically long-standing British approach.
If one reaches back to the sixteenth century, for instance – Elizabeth I’s court, and the frightening proto police-state activities of Sir Francis Walsingham’s ‘Star Chamber’ – one already sees the trope of clever young men being hired from Oxford or Cambridge for intelligence activity. The prime example is playwright Christopher Marlowe. He was recruited to travel through Europe, reporting back on suspected