Secret Life of Bletchley Park - McKay Sinclair [9]
By 1938, when it was increasingly clear that war was coming to the whole of Europe, Turing returned to England, and to King’s, with his electric multiplier machine mounted on a bread-board. It was now that he decided to share his talent with the Government Code & Cypher School in the Broadway Buildings.
There he was given training sessions in the basics of code work and intelligence gathering. After one of these sessions, at Christmas 1938, he found himself working alongside Dilly Knox. Nine months before Britain went to war with Germany, Alistair Denniston had wisely started to speed up the process of cracking the problem of Enigma. At the beginning of 1939, Turing returned to Cambridge, now apprised of the intense secrecy of the matter, and began to apply himself to the intellectual challenge.
Throughout 1939, Turing and Gordon Welchman attended ‘short courses’ in cryptography organised by GC&CS. Their names are to be seen on contemporary memos, in pencil, with ticks beside them, as though they were part of a school register.
But it was not just mathematicians that were needed. Other disciplines lent themselves to the work of codebreaking equally well. One could be a historian, or a classicist. Famously, one could be an expert at solving the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword in under twelve minutes. One could also be a chess expert or grand master – as indeed were young Bletchley recruit Hugh Alexander and a number of the young recruits that he in turn bought along. ‘Of course, we were also very good at Scrabble and anagrams,’ says one veteran.
Secret service officer Captain Frederick Winterbotham, author of the pioneering book on Ultra, noted that many of the young people coming in had strong musical predilections; an inclination also recalled by Gordon Welchman, who summoned the rather beautiful image of youthful codebreakers ‘singing madrigals on a summer’s evening’ by the waters of the Grand Union Canal.
But very quickly, Alistair Denniston detected that the gentle setting itself, the house and its spacious grounds, might be regarded as a nuisance by those who worked there, many of whom were coming from London. In a letter of September 1939, to Sir Stewart Menzies, the deputy (soon-to-be) head of the Secret Intelligence Service, Denniston wrote:
The Government Code and Cypher School was moved out of London by the orders of the Admiral and not by order of the Foreign Office … the work [requires] a high degree of concentration in over-crowded rooms … billeting has forced the staff to live many miles from their work, We have tried to raise a force of volunteers and ask them to give their time and their cars to help their colleagues.6
In other words, the core of these teething problems was the fact that the codebreakers were finding it difficult to adjust to the change from fast metropolitan life to what many of them regarded as a provincial backwater.
It is broadly assumed nowadays that the work at Bletchley required its inmates to be near-autistic, socially inept geniuses. In fact, the more prized quality would have been a certain nimbleness and litheness of mind, the ability to approach and solve a problem from hitherto unconsidered angles.
This was certainly the case with Enigma. The breaking of the German codes would turn out to be the result of a combination of flashes of logical and mathematical insight plus a certain psychological brilliance. And this is even without mentioning the formidable technical skills of the men who built the ‘bombe’ machines, the vast, revolutionary proto-computer constructions that could sift through the dizzying millions of potential combinations of each code.
Nor was it just codebreakers who were needed. Bletchley Park also required the services of able, fast-witted linguists – young men and women fluent especially in German.
It also needed stalwart administrative backup; people who could attend to the grindingly tedious yet crucial roles of filing and archives. For not only were there enemy transmissions to be logged, translated, decoded – they also had to be filed in such