The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Read Online Free Page B

with ticks beside them, as though they were part of a school register.
    But it was not just mathematicians that were needed. Otherdisciplines 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. Infact, 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 a way that they could be cross-referenced with other messages in the future. At the beginning, this was a role that largely fell to the higher-class sort of ‘gel’.
    There was no embarrassment about this extension of the upper-class ‘shooting party’ idea. Debutantes and daughters of ‘good families’ were actively sought after, apparently to ensure the very highest levels of security and secrecy; Alistair Denniston felt that the smarter girls would have a more acutely refined sense of duty. Such wildly generalised social assumptions were not unusual at the time. But questions of class aside, that sense of duty led these well-bred girls to undertake with great good humour some of the most breathtakingly tedious work.
    On top of all this, the Park needed secretaries, office