Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [77]
As the years and centuries wear on, we continue to see that British intelligence is partly a military affair, but remains mostly one involving talented civilians. Historian Rebecca Ratcliff cites Lord Baden Powell, founder of the Scout movement, drawing pictures of butterfly wings that concealed diagrams of Turkish fortresses. And in popular fiction of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, the heroes of William Le Queux’s astonishingly successful spy thrillers were all gifted amateurs; smart, well-connected, well-educated men who would be called upon by friendly faces in the Foreign Office to investigate the diabolical schemes of enemy powers. Perhaps even more pertinently, there is the archetype of the gifted eccentric: what figure in English culture better fits this description than Sherlock Holmes?
And so, as we have seen through the amiable ramshackleness of the Admiralty’s Room 40 throughout the First World War, it was clearly felt in the late 1930s to be important that the ‘boffins’ had space and freedom to think their brilliant thoughts. This meant that they were to be unencumbered by the restrictions and discipline imposed on everyone else.
In terms of taking charge of one’s day-to-day work, there was the matter of who would be in charge of the various codebreaking and translating activities. The huts would have their ‘heads’; but the sense of hierarchy was a great deal looser than that, as Mavis Batey recalls. She also remembers how, when a group of American soldiers came to visit the Park prior to a team of them working there, they were rather taken aback by what seemed to be an almost stereotypical British attitude: ‘There was no one really to consult. You could ask Dilly – but he wasn’t very good at explaining. And in any case, a newcomer with a bright idea could be just as good as anyone.
‘And that is the beauty of the whole ethics and background of the Park and its work … it just so happened that I was in charge the day one of the Americans came round,’ Mrs Batey adds. ‘He couldn’t believe that he was being told how to break codes by a nineteenyear-old – but I had got a corner into the work and I knew what I was doing.’
According to Rebecca Ratcliff’s scholarly account, there was something of the commune about the way everyone worked at the Park:
Co-operation began within each hut. The Watch, responsible for translation and forwarding of decrypts, encouraged collaboration. Members translated their decrypts around a table and frequently consulted each other on challenging difficulties. This encouragement of exchange included the clerical staff. One secretary described the ‘Soviet’ meetings, ‘where any grievance was aired and any suggestion was examined,’ whoever the speaker. This collaborative attitude ‘did away with any underground feeling of dissent’.3
Perhaps there were outbreaks of resentment, as opposed to dissent – some service personnel regarded the civilians as being rather spoiled and pampered, with their games of tennis and their picnics, and suspected them of having somehow dodged their duty.
Later in the war, there were those, such as Captain Jerry Roberts, who although in the Service, were deemed more valuable working (as he did) on the ‘Tunny’ codes. But did Captain Roberts never feel a pang of frustration that his orders were to remain in the Park?
‘I suppose I should have been unhappy that I wasn’t fighting the true fight but this never bothered me,’ Captain Roberts now says. ‘One knew that this was immensely more important than any other single contribution that you could make as a soldier, or as an officer.’
But by 1942, the understandable harrying of the cryptographers by the services – with inevitable conflict about whether the navy or the military should be accorded more time for their respective codes to be run through the bombe machines – was never-ending. Some kind of a solution was eventually reached. ‘A sudden demand by Hut 8 for a large number of machines would seriously disrupt the programme and the question of how many bombes