The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Read Online Free

security precaution, all personal post had to be sent to Bletchley Park via a London PO box. This postal system broke down, according to Cooper, when a relative of one codebreaker ‘attempted to send a grand piano’. 3
    Cooper’s own recollections fail to include his own spectacular bouts of eccentricity; such as the later occasion, recalled by another veteran, when Cooper was present at the interrogation of a captured German pilot. When the pilot gave out a ‘Heil Hitler!’ Cooper inadvertently did the same, and in his haste to sit down after this embarrassment ended up missing the chair and falling under his desk. But what we do hear in these accounts of the very first days of Bletchley Park is the notion of a deliberate ethos, a studied atmosphere of genteel chaos that was perhaps fostered to encourage freethinking improvisation. Certainly, the way Bletchley Park was run was to become the source of future friction in the War Office.
    The permanent staff of GC&CS – a platoon redolent of cardigans, tweed and pipes – around this time numbered around 180. Around thirty of these people were codebreakers. The rest were Intelligence and support staff. It was swiftly understood in 1938 that rather more were going to be needed.
    And so the serious business of wider recruitment was beginning. One internal memo from February 1939 stated that ‘three professors will be available as soon as required’, as though such men were machine components. The looming conflict also brought a shift in attitude from GC&CS.
    In previous years, according to one veteran, the departmentdidn’t want to use mathematicians for codebreaking. The reason was that mathematicians, as a class, were not considered temperamentally appropriate. ‘They were definitely persona non grata,’ recalled John Herivel, himself a fine mathematician (and author of one of the Park’s greatest breakthroughs). ‘Supposedly because of their impractical and unreliable nature.’ 4
    All this was about to change dramatically. Alistair Denniston had spent a few months visiting Oxford and Cambridge, assessing the likeliest young candidates. Among them was a deeply promising young mathematician called Peter Twinn; then there was a dazzlingly clever 33-year-old mathematics lecturer, Gordon Welchman, of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Welchman – a handsome fellow with an extremely neat moustache – swiftly proved to be an assiduous, enthusiastic and fantastically ambitious recruiting officer.
    The most talented young mathematician of them all, 27-year-old Alan Turing, from King’s College, Cambridge, had been sounded out even earlier, as far back as 1937. Between them, Turing and Welchman would quickly prove to be crucial to the Bletchley operation. And it is of course Turing’s name that lives on, inseparable from the Park and its work. In part, the success that this brilliant, tragically misunderstood figure was to enjoy at Bletchley subsequently led to the computerised world that we live in today. But it was also at the Park that Turing was to find a rare sort of freedom, before the narrow, repressive culture of the post-war years closed in on him and apparently led to his early death.

    â€˜Turing,’ commented Stuart Milner-Barry, ‘was a strange and ultimately a tragic figure.’ That is one view. Certainly his life was short, and it ended extremely unhappily. But in a number of other senses, Alan Turing was an inspirational figure. ‘Alan Turing was unique,’ recalled Peter Hilton. ‘What you realise when you get to know a genius well is that there is all the difference between a very intelligent person and a genius. With very intelligent people, you talk to them, they come out with an idea, and you say to yourself, if not tothem, I could have had that idea. You never had that feeling with Turing at all. He constantly surprised you with the originality of his thinking. It was