Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [83]
Of course the leaders of the different huts were going to fight each other for use of the bombe machines – it was hardly professional rivalry, it was an understanding that the lives of countless others depended upon the work that they were doing. For all the jibes about ‘ambition’ and some being ‘less scrupulous’ than others, the conflicts at Bletchley were rather more than outbreaks of office politics. For all parties concerned, the stakes could not have been higher. Many who worked there had relatives who were out in Europe, in North Africa, in the Far East, fighting. Naturally they would stop at nothing to provide all the assistance and intelligence that they possibly could.
In any case, there were a great many at Bletchley Park who saw the advent of Edward Travis as Director as unquestionably a good thing. He was a man much better able than Denniston to deal with the myriad administrative difficulties – from bombe time to security to the absurdity of tea rations – that the place regularly threw up.
Gordon Welchman clearly had a lot of time for Commander Travis, as he revealed in his memoir:
As a wartime leader, Travis had some of Winston Churchill’s qualities. He was definitely of the bulldog breed, and he liked to have things done his way, but he also had a great feeling for what it took to create happy working conditions … He would get around to all our activities, making contact with staff at all levels, and he had the gift of the human touch. Once he personally organised a picnic for Hut 6 staff, which was a tremendous success. In spite of his heavy workload after he became Director, he still showed his personal interest in our activities, including those at the bombe sites.7
It might also have been the case that the era of the gifted amateur was over, and that a new, more systematic and disciplined approach to the work was needed. With the sheer volume of traffic that was now being dealt with, day by day, hour by hour, the Park had to ensure that all this invaluable information was given to the right people. Moreover, with the coming of the machines, and the increase in personnel that this brought, there was a sense in which the functions of Bletchley were becoming industrialised.
A new class of what might be termed ‘technocrats’ were coming forward, of which cocksure young Gordon Welchman seemed the prime exemplar. The old ways of Alistair Denniston, and of Room 40, with its volatile and unpredictable individualists, had been extremely effective in their time. But how could they be expected to cope with these new and extraordinary demands? How could they match the most implacable enemy that Britain had ever seen?
Codebreaker Ralph Bennett – who had been sent to Egypt to coordinate the work of Hut 6 – came back to Bletchley Park in 1942. ‘I had left as one of a group of enthusiastic amateurs,’ he wrote. ‘I returned to a professional organisation with standards and an acknowledged reputation to maintain. Success was no longer an occasional prize, but the natural reward of relentless attention to detail.’8
There were extra recruits coming in; the brilliant young mathematician Shaun Wylie, for instance, arrived in 1941. His recruitment had in part to do with Alan Turing; for the two men had met in the late 1930s at Princeton University. A formidable intellect, Wylie was also an excellent hockey player. He joined Turing’s hut, Hut 8, and the effort to smash naval Enigma. He was to become head of crib subsection, making a special study of phrases and subjects likely to form a part of encrypted texts, such as weather conditions and the locations of Allied attacks.
And the debutantes in their pearls were proving their worth in the cross-referencing card index, which had been steadily growing and growing. Thanks to their painstaking and unimaginably tedious labours, the index was so minutely detailed that the codebreakers could now tell, for example, when Admiral Dönitz was communicating with a captain who was a personal friend,