All the thousands of young cryptographers and linguists and Wrens were at last able to turn their thoughts to the futures that they had planned for themselves, futures that had been held in limbo for the last six years. Yet there was also a destabilising sense of abstraction, like walking out into a white fog. According to a few of the veterans, there was, surprisingly, no intensive debriefing session. Apart from the instruction that silence was to be maintained at all costs, these young people went out into the world to begin their careers.
‘There was nothing,’ says Oliver Lawn of his final days at Bletchley Park. ‘Nothing at all. You signed the Official Secrets Act.’ His wife Sheila says: ‘I don’t remember any final lecture. We had just escaped from this dreadful war, and therefore anything that was secret then was secret now.’
For Roy Jenkins’s fellow ‘Tunny’ codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts, his military role was not to end for some time, an experience common to many. Immediately after Bletchley, he was seconded into War Crimes work.
‘I regarded my time in War Crimes as a great nuisance,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t demobilised until 1947. And looking back, I regard it as the only time in my life where I didn’t make progress and didn’t contribute an awful lot. But shortly after that, I met a middle-aged Belgian lady. Her husband had been a lawyer, and during the war, they had sheltered British airmen, or Allied airmen, shot down, and trying to make their way back to Britain to join the air force again.
‘She had written a diary – they actually had an airman hidden in the house when the Gestapo came to call. The Gestapo searched up and down, but didn’t find him, and went away disappointed. So the airman emerged and everybody congratulated themselves. And the Gestapo came back. Because that is what they did, that was their trick. This Belgian woman never saw her husband again. She got away by pretending to be doolally. The president of her tribunal was a civilised man and let her go.
‘But she had this diary and she wanted someone to translate it. So I did that and it was published as a book.’
After that, though, Captain Roberts found that he had to find a career that was rather more diverting than the one that he had originally planned: ‘When I studied German, at University College, London, it had been with the purpose of joining the Foreign Office. I am eternally grateful that I never joined the Foreign Office. I went into market research side of an international advertising agency.’ The work took him all over the world at a time when not many British people travelled at all. ‘And for the rest of that time,’ he says, ‘it was market research, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had my own company in the 1970s. The travel was very welcome!’ It was also sufficiently absorbing to counter the frustration of never being able to talk about Bletchley.
Similarly, for Gordon Welchman, who had brought so many invaluable innovations and systems to Bletchley Park, the end of the war marked a turning point; the prospect of returning to his old, academic life in Cambridge seemed utterly impossible. Towards the end of the war, and with his enthusiasm for the nature of organisations, he had began to help in drafting the future of Government Communication Headquarters – what was later to become GCHQ.
His belief – one that flew in the face of established civil service practice – was that talented cryptologists should be able to reach the highest salary rung without also having to undertake administrative work. This was based on his experience in Hut 6, when he saw at first hand the benefits of mutual co-operation, freeing up time for thinking.
However, he found himself up against more stubborn attitudes. On top of this, Welchman believed that the British computer industry was fatally held up by the government’s reluctance to fund research – the attitude seemed to be that the government would wait until such technology was developed commercially, and then find a use for it.
He recalled that by then, he was a changed person who had been ‘thoroughly shaken out of my old academic way of life by my challenging experiences at Bletchley Park and in the United States, and it seemed impossible to return to what I had been doing before the war’. With appropriately golden references from Hugh Alexander, Welchman took up his colleague’s old post as Director of Research at the John Lewis Partnership. While being a very fine position, this does leave one wondering whether the years that immediately followed the war seemed a little anti-climactic. In 1948, Welchman discarded the department stores and set sail with his family to America, to work in the burgeoning field of computer technology. Later he joined the organisation MITRE, looking into such matters as battlefield communications systems.
For in one sense, the war hadn’t ended at all. The conflict had simply become frozen. Britain, America, and western Europe were facing an opponent every bit as implacable as Nazism. Welchman had joined the strategic struggle against the forces of the Warsaw Pact, and of Soviet military might.
Indeed, Welchman’s preference for the American way of doing things led him, eventually, to take on American citizenship. One now senses that his view of the British authorities was a little stronger than that of simple distaste. ‘People have a tendency to filter out what they do not want to hear,’ he wrote of the pre-Second World War government. ‘An appeasement-minded government in England filtered out the information on Hitler’s Germany that they were receiving from their Secret Service.’
But for other key players from Bletchley Park, life in the immediate post-war years lost that lustre of intensity. John Herivel – whose flash of inspiration one night in 1940 had had an incalculable effect upon the war effort – first went into teaching. He returned to his native Belfast, joined a school there and pretty soon found the rowdy boys absolutely intolerable. So he returned to academia and found, despite his mathematical background, that history was his real passion. He was to go on to write a history of Newton’s Principia, among many other subjects. ‘And I found that I just didn’t think about Bletchley Park,’ he says.
Messenger and typist Mimi Gallilee, who of course was so very young when she started work at Bletchley, found the immediate aftermath to be rather unsatisfactory by comparison. She says: ‘I think there were about 1,700 people left, and we went off to Eastcote, in Middlesex. We went into the quarters where the bombes were, and I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes. None of us knew. Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t know. So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the directorate …
‘Commander Loehnis was the head by then. That was in 1946. And a lot of Forces people were still at Bletchley Park. I don’t think any Forces people went down to Eastcote.’
The move to London provided Mrs Gallilee with the first dusty taste of post-war austerity; even the matter of a daily Tube fare could put a serious dent in one’s weekly living wage. Life was a constant effort to scrimp.
‘I was living in Bayswater and I would have to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,’ she says. ‘On such a low salary. I don’t think I stayed there for longer than six months. They tried to do something for me in the way of an increase in pay but you just didn’t have that kind of system and I had so long to wait until I was twenty-one. The Civil Service was very rigid, and there were no such things as merit awards in those days. The government wouldn’t have had the money to pay us anyway.’
So, after the relative comfort and even romanticism of Bletchley Park, this new prospect of dull work for low wages began to gnaw at her. ‘I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London,’ she says. ‘So I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.
‘But after maybe just a couple of days, I thought – I can’t stand this. I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.
‘I used to say, “I feel as though I’m in a different world altogether.” I saw a job advertised in the Telegraph, for BOAC [the British Overseas Airways Corporation, a precursor of British Airways]. I applied there, and got that, and I stayed with them from 1947 until about 1953. I was married by then.’
For two of the codebreakers, there was a move, conscious or not, towards helping to rebuild both the nation and its remaining colonies. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I left Bletchley Park in August 1945. I decided – wrongly, I think now, though it seemed right at the time – that I wasn’t going to go on with mathematics, so I tried for the administrative Civil Service. I got in, so for some reason I opted for the Dominions Office.
‘I had six months in the Foreign Office while I was waiting for the Civil Service exam, in the South American department. I was working with Victor Perone, who had finished a very successful career as Her Majesty’s Representative in the Vatican. A typically Edwardian gentleman, very portly, with a great gold chain across his chest. The man I really did like – I being a junior dogsbody, of course – was the chairman of the Bank of London and South America. He was Samuel Hoare – and a more polite, considerate and charming chap I have never met.’
But there was an element of an upper-class world that already seemed to be vanishing fast. Hoare, it seems, was slightly bewildered by the provenance of this new Foreign Office recruit. In the years before the war, many of those who worked for the Foreign Office very often came from the grander, titled families; they tended to have substantial private incomes, upon which they were expected to live. This was not the case with Keith Batey.
‘Samuel Hoare was puzzled,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He couldn’t understand how there could be anyone in the Foreign Office whose name he didn’t recognise. He would call me Mr Beety.’ But it was Batey who was emblematic of the future, not Sir Samuel Hoare. Mr Batey and his generation were helping to forge a new era of administration in which old school contacts were not the most important thing.
Similarly, for Oliver Lawn, the Civil Service seemed the logical career path. ‘I had a very frantic one-term lecturing in mathematics at Reading University in September 1945,’ he says. ‘By that time, I had more or less forgotten all my mathematics, in five years of doing codebreaking.
‘Then I took the Civil Service exams in the spring of 1946. I could have gone scientific or administrative civil service. I was successful in both but I decided, on the whole, to go for the administration, rather than the specialist science as a mathematician. I joined the civil service around July 1946.’
As he says, Mr Lawn was ‘directed’, as indeed was everyone else after the war. Despite the fact that almost any occupation would seem drab after the pressurised life he had been leading, this was also the correct thing for a young man of his upbringing and background. Britain was smashed to pieces, bankrupt, fading and peeling and shabby. It needed clever, expert administrators; not politicians, but men who really knew how things worked. It was Mr Lawn’s generation that was to exert the real influence in Britain in the coming years, in everything from the rebuilding of inner cities to the dismantling of Empire.
For the women who were to become their wives, this was still an era in which ladies were not expected to go out to work, despite the mass mobilisation of the female population throughout the war. When a wife became pregnant, it was understood that her career was over and that she would become a mother and a homemaker.
Having said all that, it would clearly have been a travesty if the women of Bletchley Park had led their intellects slide into abeyance. Happily, for both Sheila MacKenzie and Mavis Lever, this was emphatically not the case.
Sheila continued academically. However, her original plan to teach on the continent was still looking extremely uncertain. What shape would that continent now be taking? How much of it would be subsumed by the heavy mass of the Soviet Union? The war forced a geographical change of Sheila’s plans. She had to confine herself to British opportunities.
‘I did what you can do in Scotland, a general degree,’ Mrs Lawn says. ‘Based on the previous subjects I had done. That was quite hard work over the year. And then I did a year in Birmingham University, a post-graduate diploma in Sociology and then I went in for personnel management. A complete change. It still wasn’t easy to get abroad.’
She and Mr Lawn felt the full icy blast of austerity Britain in their first two winters after the Park. It is one of those periods which now, with some distance, is almost as difficult to imagine as the war itself. As Sheila recalls: ‘Oh, but it was cold. There was very little fuel and very little hot water. That was even worse than during the war. Everything was rationed, including potatoes and bread. And clothes were rationed until 1952, I think. When Oliver and I were married, we could only get dockets for basic furniture. But Oliver had a great-aunt who died and some of her beautiful furniture came to us. So we got a bedroom and a living room from that.’
The scrimping that went on for Sheila and Oliver’s wedding day now seems almost unthinkable. ‘My mother made do and mended. She was very good with her needle. For instance, out of two beautiful silk jumpers of the 1920s, which she had kept in a trunk, my mother was able to make three jumpers; I had two and she had one. And she remade some of her frocks for herself and for me. And my going-away – I was married in borrowed clothes, very successfully.
‘I had a lovely veil which belonged to our minister’s wife and had come through her family. I went away in army blankets, dyed a lovely maroon colour. They were made by a cousin of mine who was learning to be a tailoress. And with the tailoress she was working with, she made a suit for me – skirt, waistcoat and coat. I wore it for years. It was much admired. My undies were parachute silk. Gorgeous stuff to use. It was “make do and mend’‘ with a vengeance!’
Mavis Batey also felt certain that her future was of an academic nature, though the duties of bringing up a young family with her new husband Keith came first. ‘We were in Oxford, we went back to Christ Church, and I didn’t really get back into any kind of intellectual activity until my three children were grown. After that, I could go to the Bodleian Library every day. So I eventually picked up.’
But what of the Park’s most famous innovator and presiding genius? For Alan Turing, still only thirty-four at the end of the war, technology was drawing closer and closer to enable him to realise his concept of a ‘Turing Machine’; equally, though, his homosexuality, and the British establishment’s attitude towards it, were to contribute to his tragic – and wholly pointless – death.
The transition from war to peace seemed, initially, to make little difference to Alan Turing’s working life. After his removal as head of Hut 8 and his return from the United States, he came back to intense research. But we might also see that the post-war world outside the hermetically sealed atmosphere of Bletchley – a country with a shifting, faintly neurotic moral climate – was one in which it would be extremely difficult for him to thrive.
Late in 1944, Turing still had further cryptological challenges to take on, and he did so both at Bletchley Park and the nearby communications base, Hanslope Park. Building on ideas he had seen in the United States, he was working on a new speech encipherment system, to be given the name ‘Delilah’ – that is, a deceiver of men.
It was extraordinarily complex stuff, involving sound frequencies and bandwidths. According to Andrew Hodges, Turing, together with two new young recruits, Robin Gandy and Donald Bayley, installed himself in a corner of a Hanslope laboratory. Though this establishment, in contrast to Bletchley, was assuredly military, Turing was still very much the archetypal wartime boffin, in shiny trousers and with his unkempt hair and the unselfconsciously strange noises that he would make while working.
Turing was remarkably good with electronics, given that he was entirely self-taught, but it was Bayley who provided a certain level of organisation. There was one bout of turbulence when Turing told Bayley of his homosexuality; Bayley had only heard of such things through smutty jokes and was horrified. What might have ended in embarrassed silence escalated into a shouting match. But somehow, the two men were able to find an understanding, for Bayley continued to work with Turing, whatever he might have felt about his orientation. Indeed, their collaboration was to prove quite remarkable – if anyone could ever have realised it.
Turing first of all chose to sleep in the old house of Hanslope itself, and then, rather like Bletchley, moved into a cottage near the Park’s kitchen garden, accompanied by Robin Gandy and a ginger cat. The two men would go for walks, and the ginger cat, unusually, would go with them. If Turing was annoyed at work, or by the behaviour of those around him, he would, as ever, go off on long runs around the countryside.
Although still a top secret base, Hanslope Park wasn’t Bletchley; but in one other curious respect, it was very similar. And that is that Turing found himself pulled into a social life, a sense of community. Although more military in flavour – mess jackets at smart dinners (a dinner jacket in Turing’s case) and so forth – there were parties, dances with ATS girls, gossip and social intrigue. Turing was rather popular.
Holding as he did the unique position of eccentric boffin, he combined this with a surprisingly youthful outlook – to some he could seem even younger than thirty-four – which made him a draw for both men and women. It was an appeal that crossed ranks; he seemed to mingle as happily with the working-class Tommys as with anyone else. He even gave complicated mathematical lectures.
And as 1945 dawned, Turing and Bayley persisted with the labyrinth of wires and valves that comprised the Delilah system, conducting ever more complex work with equations and frequencies and kilohertz. By the spring, they had succeeded in enciphering a recording of a Churchill speech – the coded version sounded like the hiss of white noise. But the conflict was nearly over and there was no longer any sense of urgency. No matter how extraordinary the technical achievement, the military powers had other matters on their minds now. Encryption of this sort was low on the list of priorities.
The question now was: what parts of Turing’s scientific work would find government or even private sponsorship in peacetime? His Fellowship at King’s College was renewed for another three years, which would give him £300 per annum and academic freedom. He was also awarded the OBE; for reasons of security, such awards were rare, for fear of the citation giving away some element of the work that had been done.
However, with the lack of enthusiasm for the Delilah system – it seems the Post Office was working upon its own commercial sound encryption techniques – Turing wanted to return to the question that had been haunting him since the 1930s, that of constructing a thinking machine – an electronic brain. A Universal Turing Machine. A machine of such complexity that it could not only speedily handle any kind of mathematical calculation, but also store a memory of the process within itself.
In the 1930s, while the theory had been revolutionary, it was difficult to see how the current valve technology could keep pace with such a thing. Come 1943, and the successful operation of the Colossus machine, with its thousands of valves working in unison, and suddenly a whole new realm of possibilities opened up.
King’s was to wait: for the mathematicians and physicists at the National Physical Laboratory in south-west London had – despite the security and secrecy of the last few years – come to hear of Turing’s reputation, and wished to hire him. Turing saw this as a potential avenue for at last realising his vision. The goal was simple: the logical functionings of the mind could surely be replicated inside the electronic pulses of a machine.
In the months and years that were to follow, this work – the construction of a vast room-filling machine, all dials and wires and valves – would eventually take Turing to the University of Manchester. He bought a house in a suburb, made good friends with his next-door neighbours; and began to investigate those areas of the city in which like-minded men and opportunistic youths flashed understanding glances at one another.
Turing became involved with a young man called Arnold Murray, inviting him home for dinner. After several of these dinners, Murray was invited to stay the night. Their relationship, by Andrew Hodges’ account, was at once awkward, odd, and in some curious way affecting, with the lad finding Turing’s intellect and superior social class eye-opening.
But then money started to go missing; Turing instantly suspected Murray. Words were exchanged. After Turing’s house was burgled, Murray, slipping up, admitted that he knew the burglar in question – a lad he called Harry – and had happened to meet him a short while back when Harry had been planning a crime. Turing went to the police with the information on ‘Harry’.
But it all suddenly backfired on Turing. The police caught up with Harry, who in his statement gave an account of Arnold Murray’s numerous visits to Turing’s home. The police now decided to turn their attention to Turing.
Turing made no bones about the allegation of homosexual behaviour – indeed, while Detective Mills was round at his house, Turing gave him wine and entertained him with a few old melodies on his violin. To his closest friends, Turing had always been open about his orientation, even going so far as to make jokes about men that he found attractive. But in 1952, there was a sort of mini-hysteria in Britain surrounding the entire subject of homosexuality.
There was the celebrated case of Lord Montagu and the journalist Peter Wildeblood, not to mention an undercover officer entrapping the actor John Gielgud in a public lavatory. The subject made lurid headlines in the Sunday scandal sheets. Turing was charged with gross indecency. He did not seem to understand how anyone could possibly imagine that he had committed a crime.
At Turing’s trial, Max Newman and Hugh Alexander, now at GCHQ in Cheltenham, appeared as character witnesses. Turing was found guilty, though spared prison. Hideously, though, as part of the condition of being bound over for a year, he was also required to submit, for a limited period of about a year, to ‘Organo-Therapic Treatment’ at Manchester Royal Infirmary. In short, this was an extremely primitive form of hormone treatment involving oestrogen. Turing was, for a time, rendered impotent, and grew breasts.
Nevertheless, although the trial had obviously caused a certain amount of disquiet within Manchester University – and even though GCHQ had removed his security clearance – he had been allowed to hold on to his academic post. And by this stage, he was widely admired within the British scientific community. At conferences, mathematicians would vie for his attention. Work on the Mark II Turing machine – an even larger computer than the first – was under way. He even managed a reunion with his old colleague Don Bayley, who now lived in Woburn Sands near Bletchley. And Turing remained defiantly unapologetic about his orientation, sharing the tale of a trip to Paris where he picked up a young man who insisted on putting his trousers under the mattress in order to keep the crease sharp.
Turing nevertheless started to go for sessions with a psychiatrist. It seemed clear to some that despite his energy and good humour, the events of the trial, and the sentence, weighed heavier upon him than he liked to suggest.
Turing’s sentence expired in 1953. The University of Manchester appointed him to a Readership in the Theory of Computing, which would have made him financially secure for a great many years to come. Turing also enjoyed foreign holidays – a genuine rarity in the pre-jet age 1950s.
So there remains at least some ambiguity about the circumstances of his suicide in 1954, at the age of forty-two. He was found in bed by his housekeeper, with white foam around his mouth. There was a jar of potassium cyanide in the house, and of cyanide solution. On his bedside table was an apple, out of which several bites had been taken. The obvious conclusion: the apple had been dipped in cyanide. Indeed, author Andrew Hodges went so far as to recall how, some years back, Turing had become fascinated with the film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the wicked queen’s chilling incantation: ‘Dip the apple in the brew/Let the Sleeping Death seep through’.
According to Hodges, Turing had prepared a new will several months earlier. But the fact that he left no note, and indeed no indication whatsoever that such a course might be on his mind, has led others to speculate that his death might have had an even more macabrely random element about it.
Keith Batey is one who cannot quite believe that Turing committed suicide. He recalls: ‘When I was secretary at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, I overlapped with James Lighthill. He’d been Professor at Manchester with Turing. James said he didn’t believe Turing committed suicide. He said that he [Turing] was a great man for experimenting and he was experimenting with acidification of cyanide on coke. James said he did this while he was eating an apple and that’s how he got poisoned. He went on to say that [Turing] had bought himself two pairs of new socks three days previously. And he wouldn’t have done that if he was going to commit suicide.’
In the acclaimed Turing play Breaking the Code (1988) by Hugh Whitemore, the dramatist delicately hints at another possibility. In the final scene, Turing is enjoying a Greek holiday. He has picked up a young man. The young man says nothing and Turing assumes that he cannot speak English. As they recline, Turing, now talking almost to himself, finally talks out loud about Bletchley – about the work he did, the breakthroughs he achieved, the intolerable burden of security and secrecy. And still the Greek boy says nothing.
But from this we suddenly, chillingly, infer: what if the Greek boy was a set-up? A Soviet spy? Such things were known. If that were the case – if the boy understood every word and reported it back – would it have become plain to British security services that Turing had leaked the vital information? And if so, could they not have arranged to have had him conveniently removed?
The play ends as our speculation begins. But that is simply theatre. These days, Turing is rightly remembered for his achievements, as opposed to his eccentricities and foibles. A bust of his head now stands in the Bletchley Park museum. And in September 2009, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised – on behalf of the government and, we presume, the nation – for Turing’s prosecution. ‘He was a quite brilliant mathematician,’ said Mr Brown, praising his contribution to ‘Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship’.
‘The debt of gratitude he is owed,’ continued the Prime Minister, ‘makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of gross indecency – in effect, tried for being gay …
‘Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind … it is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.’
Quite so. In this day and age – one that Turing might possibly have felt more comfortable in – there is a greater general understanding of his philosophy concerning the nature of the mind, and in particular of the electronic mind. The work that he began has led to illimitable advances.