He’s the grand old man
For us he’s doing all that he can
Britain’s guiding star
Known near and far
Wearing his famous bulldog grin
And smoking his big cigar
It’s difficult to listen to Max Miller’s chirpy 1941 ditty now without wincing just a little. Enthusiasm is one thing, but sugary show-business sycophancy? Yet this song, ‘The Grand Old Man’, was something of a hit at the time; not merely because it was a less cynical age but because a colossal number of people felt, as soon as he took over in May 1940, that Britain was extremely lucky to have Churchill’s leadership. (Very few people, for instance, would have agreed with Evelyn Waugh’s later assertion that Churchill was wrong about most things and surrounded himself with crooks.)
For many years after the war, it was asserted that the most common dream5 had by British people was that of the Queen unexpectedly dropping round for tea. In a similar way, the figure of Winston Churchill loomed very large in the minds of Bletchley Park operatives, and not merely because they found him an inspirational figure. The psychology seems to run deeper than that. Is it possible to hear, through various accounts, a yearning for proper recognition?
Gordon Welchman recorded the day in September 1941 when Churchill paid a visit to Bletchley Park. Welchman’s account, in his book The Hut Six Story, appears to have a pleasing dimension of wish-fulfilment to it:
Winston Churchill himself came to visit us. Travis took him on a tour of the many Bletchley Park activities. The tour was to include a visit to my office, and I had been told to prepare a speech of a certain length, say ten minutes. When the party turned up, a bit behind schedule, Travis whispered, somewhat loudly, ‘Five minutes, Welchman.’ I started with my prepared opening gambit, which was ‘I would like to make three points,’ and proceeded to make the first two points more hurriedly than I planned.
Travis then said, ‘That’s enough, Welchman,’ whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink and said, ‘I think there was a third point, Welchman.’1
Winston, indeed! Not to mention the ‘grand’ schoolboy wink, which seems to have the effect of placing both men on the same level – a level above the officious-seeming Travis. Welchman added, more appropriately: ‘We were fortunate in having an inspiring national leader in Winston Churchill, whose oratory had a powerful effect.’
But Churchill’s relationship with Bletchley Park was of the greatest importance. It was not simply a question of the grand old man granting the codebreakers extra resources for machinery or staff, or even bestowing upon them a fresh tennis court. It was a crucial question of respect. Respect that, one senses occasionally through various accounts, the Park was not necessarily receiving in other parts of Whitehall, or from the intelligence services.
Churchill had been fascinated by the business of cryptography, and indeed of secret intelligence, since before the First World War. He had seen ingenious espionage ploys and counter-ploys in action during his youthful exploits in different parts of the Empire; he had a hand in the setting up of the Room 40 cryptography division at Admiralty; in the 1920s, he took a keen interest in the intelligence agents who could glean most information on the Soviets.
So naturally, when he at last became Prime Minister in May 1940, just two weeks after Bletchley Park broke into the German air force Enigma, Churchill had no doubts how vital the operation was. From the moment he arrived in Downing Street, he insisted on having a daily buff-coloured box of intercepts sent on to him – a box that was sometimes delivered personally by ‘C’, the head of the SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies. The key to this box was kept on Churchill’s key-ring.
Only a handful of other people – military and civilian – were permitted to know from where these decrypts emanated, and if ever they should have cause to refer to them, they used the obscuring term ‘Boniface’. Churchill himself sometimes referred to these bundles of intelligence as his ‘eggs’, a reference to the Bletchley ‘geese that never cackled’. For everyone else – generals and ministers alike – the source was, to all intents and purposes, a number of fictional spies. It was only in 1941 that the intelligence produced from the decrypts started to be known by the term ‘Ultra’.
This intense secrecy could prove a source of vexation to other government departments such as the Foreign Office, and indeed to the military top brass. The Prime Minister was ‘liable to spring upon them undigested snippets of information of which they had not heard’. Added to this irritation, from the outset of the war there were those high up in military command who were sceptical of the extent to which Bletchley Park could provide serious, usable, useful information. These tensions grew as the Park expanded its remit and started producing intelligence, as opposed to simply raw decrypted messages.
On the day of that unforgettable visit, in September 1941, Churchill also inspected the Hollerith machine installation in Hut 7. As one breathless eyewitness account stated:
The visitor was presented with a scene of intense activity. There were 45 machine operators in action at as many machines. Then all the machines were halted at the same instant, and in the complete silence that followed, Mr Freeborn [the man in charge of the Hollerith section] gave an introductory explanation … At the conclusion of the demonstrations, all machines were brought back into action as the visitor was conducted to the exit, but all brought to rest as Churchill paused on the threshold to make his farewells.2
Churchill’s tour also took him into Hut 8, to meet Alan Turing; according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing was ‘very nervous’.
The Prime Minister then gave a short address outside Hut 6 to a group of gathered codebreakers, in which he said: ‘You all look very innocent – one would not think you knew anything secret.’ It was here that, famously, he went on to describe his audience as ‘the geese that lay the golden eggs – and never cackle’.
John Herivel, in a lecture given to Sidney Sussex College in 2005, seemed a little less romantic and slightly more clear-eyed about this manifestation than Gordon Welchman had been. Nevertheless, his account still conveys something about the aura of true leadership:
Word suddenly reached us in Hut 6 that he was coming and those in the Machine Room … were told to stand up facing their machines. People were much more biddable in those days, so we did what we were told and for what seemed an eternity waited patiently.
Then the sound of many voices was heard in the distance, gradually becoming louder and louder and reaching a crescendo immediately behind me before subsiding when Welchman’s voice was heard saying, ‘Sir, I would like to present John Herivel, who was responsible for breaking the German Enigma last year.’
On hearing my name spoken by Welchman in this totally unexpected manner, I turned automatically to the right to find myself gazing straight into the eyes of the Prime Minister! We looked silently at each other for a moment or two before he moved on … If I had the necessary presence of mind – which I did not – I would have reminded him that the day the Military Enigma was broken was soon after that on which he himself had become Prime Minister.3
Once again, the justifiable pride radiates through, finding as its focus the sudden connection with this near-mythic leader made flesh. On the subject of the address given outside Hut 6, however, Herivel went on to give a more soberingly realistic portrait of the man in whom Britain’s destiny had been entrusted:
Soon he came and scrambled on to the mound where he stood rather uneasily for a moment – for it was a miserably dark day with a cold wind. We saw before us a rather frail, oldish looking man, a trifle bowed, with wispy hair, in a black pin-striped suit with a faint red line, no bravado, no large black hat, no cigar. Then he spoke very briefly, but with deep emotion … That was our finest hour at Bletchley Park.4
According to one history, when Churchill was at last about to be driven off, he lowered his car window and said to Alistair Denniston: ‘About that recruitment – I know I told you not to leave a stone unturned, but I did not mean you to take me seriously.’
Just one month later, perhaps emboldened by the great honour of that visit, Welchman, together with Alan Turing, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry, wrote directly to the Prime Minister to make a special plea for more staff. In the first couple of years of the war, Welchman, by his own cheerful admission, had had no problems of any sort with recruitment. He had ‘shamelessly’ (to use his own word) gone around hiring his peers and valued colleagues from the smarter colleges, and with them coteries of their brightest undergraduates. However, as he was later to note:
This kind of piracy was to be curtailed in 1941. The government decided that the use of the best young brains in the country should be regulated. C.P. Snow, of Christ’s College Cambridge, whom I had known before the war … was put in charge of allocation of all scientists and mathematicians, and from then on I had to recruit my male staff through him.5
Turing and Welchman were careful to state that thanks to the efforts of Commander Travis, Bletchley was well supplied in terms of technology, and specifically in terms of bombes (though by this stage there were still not that many); they were after more codebreakers, and more Wrens. One might also see that the codebreakers were subconsciously asserting their own significance and importance in the face of dumb Whitehall silence:
Dear Prime Minister,
Some weeks ago you paid us the honour of a visit, and we believe that you regard our work as important. You will have seen that, thanks largely to the energy and foresight of Commander Travis, we have been well supplied with the ‘bombes’ for the breaking of the German Enigma codes. We think, however, that you ought to know that this work is being held up, and in some cases is not being done at all, principally because we cannot get sufficient staff to deal with it.
Our reason for writing to you direct is that for months we have done everything that we possibly can through the normal channels, and that we despair of any early improvement without your intervention. No doubt in the long run these particular requirements will be met, but meanwhile still more precious months will have been wasted, and as our needs are continually expanding we see little hope of ever being adequately staffed.
Turing went on to specify exactly what each hut needed in terms of clerks, typists, Wrens, etc. And he concluded thus:
We have felt that we should be failing in our duty if we did not draw your attention to the facts and to the effects they are having and must continue to have on our work, unless immediate action is taken.
The rank-breaking letter was signed by Turing, Welchman, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander, while the man deputed to deliver it was Milner-Barry. According to one history, he arrived at 10 Downing Street and had to spend a little time gaining entrance. The trouble was that he had forgotten to bring any official identification along with him. Eventually, however, he was allowed in and directed to see Churchill’s Private Secretary, Brigadier Harvie Walker.
The brigadier was apparently extremely suspicious of this disorganised-seeming man without any of his official papers. His suspicions were not allayed by Milner-Barry’s stubborn refusal to tell the brigadier the contents of the letter he had with him. However, Harvie Walker was eventually persuaded to place the letter before Churchill; and upon reading its requests, Churchill instantly responded, telling his Chief of Staff: ‘Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ This written instruction came with a sticker at the top of the letter, with the simple phrase: ‘Action This Day.’
*
The fact that Churchill’s one visit in 1941 made such an impression on the entire establishment is a vivid illustration of how starved it was of morale-boosting feedback. The codebreakers knew that they were not, like the RAF, ‘Glamour Boys’. There was no Battle of Britain for them to reminisce over, merely days and weeks and months of calculation, of thought, of trial and error, carried out in circumstances of such intense secrecy that there were very few to bestow praise in the first place.
Also, unlike the operatives of MI5, MI6 and the Special Operations Executive, all trained to the highest degree and imbued with the accompanying hardness, a good proportion of the personnel of Bletchley Park were academics by profession and by temperament – meaning that they would have been used to the approbation of colleagues. The secrecy of their work must – just occasionally – have been maddening, no matter how vehemently so many veterans deny it.
Churchill continued to hold the work of Bletchley Park in the very highest regard as the war progressed; later, though, we shall find how some of his decisions concerning its post-war status are held by some to have held Britain back in fighting for its place in the new world order.