The music echoing out of the house on that warm spring evening, across the large green lawn and the lake, was not unusual. This Victorian mansion and the wooden huts dotted on the grass around it had echoed with everything from opera to Highland dance tunes in recent years. The young people who had been putting in round-the-clock shifts at this country property had an unusual susceptibility to melodic compositions of all kinds. They were keenly aware of the intricate structures of music. Very often, it was an invaluable pressure valve, helping to relieve the sometimes suffocating pressure that they were all under. But now, on that May evening, the soft strains of the gramophone from within the house, combined with the ripples of conversation and laughter outside, spoke of quite a different atmosphere.
It was 1945, and the war in Europe was over; but here, on this unremarkable English country estate, among the huddles of young people drinking glasses of beer and gin on the grass, looking out at the perpetually furious geese on the lake, there was also an understanding that their work could not simply end.
An entirely new world was being shaped, even in the space of those few hours and days when the Germans finally capitulated. There were teams of brilliant men and women, pioneers all, who understood very well how vital their efforts had become. From a slightly hit-and-miss operation back in 1939 to a sleek, super-efficient decryption production line which by 1945 unlocked thousands upon thousands of secret enemy communications daily, the work of Bletchley Park had played an enormous role in victory. Winston Churchill had been particularly grateful for his daily boxes of intelligence provided by these glittering intellects.
A few months before the end of the war, a triumvirate of young codebreakers had been asked to give their thoughts on facing up to new kinds of conflict. These men – senior cryptologist Gordon Welchman, Edward Crankshaw, and a 26-year-old Harry Hinsley – immediately saw where the threats of the future would come from; and they were astringent in prescribing what Bletchley Park as an institution would have to become in order to face them.
‘This organisation should cover all types of intelligence about foreign countries, including scientific, commercial and economic matters as well as diplomatic activity; for in the handling of both foreign and domestic affairs, it is important for the Government to have the best possible knowledge of developments and intentions in other countries,’ declared their top-secret jointly written memo.
‘The Services, also, in order to be fully prepared, must have all possible knowledge about the developments of methods of war that are being carried out by potential enemies.
‘Further, the organisation must be so planned that, if war should come again, the Services will have the best possible operational intelligence from the start. The applications of intelligence to civil problems may well prove to be of greater value than they could ever have been before, because it appears that the handling of foreign affairs is going to be exceedingly difficult after this war. The value of a good intelligence organisation to the Services may well be critical, because the steady development of methods of war will tend to make the first blow of an aggressor more and more devastating, giving less time for an unprepared country to develop its war potential.’1
The most senior figures at Bletchley were among the very few, before August 1945, who knew how such a ‘first blow’ might be landed: they were part of a tiny elite who had knowledge of the development of atomic weaponry at Los Alamos, New Mexico. They were aware that the United States had developed the capacity to drop atom bombs. They also knew that it would not be long before other, less friendly, powers, would develop their own equivalents. Looking back now, we tend to see the end of the war as being a neat line: one day there was fighting, the next peace. That is not at all how it seemed to many people then. If anything, there was a pervasive fear that worse was to come.
For those senior figures who worked in the Bletchley Park Directorate, overseeing the continual stream of top-secret and invaluable coded signals intelligence flowing in from every region on the earth, there was a terrifying awareness of the fragility of peace. The Park’s director, Commander Edward Travis, was thoroughly human, though, and Bletchley Park – which at that point had many thousands of people working in and around the estate and at out-stations too – found its own way of marking 8 May 1945. The Park’s administrative officer Captain Bradshaw sent out a memo to all codebreakers setting out arrangements to celebrate the great day. It was to start with appropriate solemnity; the music and laughter came later.
‘On VE Day at 0915 hours, there will be a brief Thanksgiving service, on the lawns, in front of the main building,’ the memo read. This referred to the area directly in front of the distinctive Victorian house. It was to be ‘conducted by the Rev JL Milne, Rector of St Mary’s Church, Old Bletchley’. The Reverend would have been acutely aware throughout the war of these multitudes of young men and women, many not in uniform, passing in and out of the big estate, and living and socialising in the town and surrounding villages. But the Reverend Milne, even on VE Day, would not have had the slightest idea what they were actually working on. The secret remained tightly kept, even among respected Bletchley locals.
‘In accordance with Government policy,’ Captain Bradshaw’s memo continued, ‘all staff except the minimum necessary for operational work… will be granted a paid holiday on VE Day and the day following… in anticipation of congestion on the public transport services (road and rail), staff are advised in their own interests not to attempt long-distance journeys.’2
The note of caution filtered down to all sections and departments. Women’s Royal Navy recruit Betty Flavell recalled: ‘The chief officer gave us all a pep talk. I think she thought we were all going to lose our honour, because of everyone feeling free and throwing caution to the wind. Celebrating, drinking.’3
According to codebreaker Major Neil Webster, there had indeed been quite a gaudy night. ‘Bletchley Park put on a terrific VE party,’ he wrote in his memoir, ‘a fancy dress ball with oceans to drink, a top band, our own cabaret, special décor, soft lights and all the trimmings.’4 The ‘top band’ was most likely formed of Bletchley personnel; figures such as Eric de Carteret, who was to stay on, had a genius for music. Added to this was a wide range of acting and writing talent (among the codebreakers was Angus Wilson, the soon-to-be-feted novelist); the Bletchley Park players were so accomplished that they had taken their productions around the county, and raised a great deal of money for military charities. The fancy dress for their VE Day party would have been an extension of their limitlessly inventive costume departments; and the night, for many, would have been an acknowledgment, possibly a melancholy one, that this extraordinary and intense life that they had known was almost over.
The authorities need not have worried about excess: after so many years of ferocious self-discipline, it was hardly likely that a full-scale bacchanalia would break out. In any case, victory in Europe was overshadowed by the knowledge that conflict in the Far East was still raging on. There is a photograph of a large group of Bletchley codebreakers, men and women, a few in uniform, all smiling and raising glasses. There were some who had ignored the dire warnings about the crowded railways, and hoofed it to London on the express in order to be able to catch the night of celebration there.
Everyone gave thought, though, to their colleagues across the world: the dedicated codebreakers stationed in Ceylon; in India; in the scorching sun of Heliopolis, Egypt; in the turbulent political atmosphere of Mandate Palestine. In Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), young women such as Jean Valentine, then 19, were still working deep into eerie tropical nights, burrowing into Japanese encrypted intercepts. In India, young men such as the Oxford undergraduate Alan Stripp – like so many, his university education interrupted before it got going – were still decyphering Japanese communications in sweltering huts, while coping with extraordinary heat and with ceiling fans so slow that birds would sit on them and be rotated gently.
Back at Bletchley, obviously there were warm words too. Some of these words came from a man that very few of the codebreakers, Women’s Royal Navy (Wrens) or Auxiliary Territorial Service women would ever have seen, or even been aware of. On VE Day itself, a letter from Sir Stewart Menzies was circulated. It was signed from the ‘Director General’. Sir Stewart was the head of MI6 at that time, which oversaw the work of Bletchley Park. MI6 was never publicly acknowledged or referred to. The vast majority of those working in all departments at Bletchley would have had no indication that they came under the aegis of the Secret Service. The place was so efficiently compartmentalised that most had no idea even what happened in other huts and blocks.
‘On this ever memorable day,’ Sir Stewart wrote, ‘I desire that all those who are doing duty in this Organisation [sic] should be made aware of my unbounded admiration at the way in which they have carried out their allotted tasks. Such have been the difficulties, such has been the endeavour, and such have been the constant triumphs that one senses that words of gratitude from one individual are perhaps out of place. The personal knowledge of the contribution made towards winning the war is surely the real measure of the thanks which so rightly belong to one and all in a great and inspired organisation which I have the privilege to direct. This is your finest hour.’5
The achievements had indeed been extraordinary: from the 1939 Enigma code-cracking inspiration provided by three pioneering Polish mathematicians to Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman’s development of the revolutionary ‘bombe’ machines which partially automated the decyphering of German codes; from the first cracking of the daily Luftwaffe codes to eventual triumph against the almost unthinkable complexities of the German naval Enigma; from the development of an extraordinary proto-computer that opened the door of the future to the decoding of encrypted messages from the desk of Hitler himself. The work of Bletchley Park had – as many distinguished figures were later to aver – shortened the war by two years, if not by three.
By the summer of 1945, some of the leading intellects who had shaped these codebreaking triumphs had been pulled elsewhere. In the case of Alastair Denniston, the original wartime director of the institute and the man who had assembled this quirky array of minds, his time at Bletchley had ended unhappily in 1942, when he was bumped sideways into a role in diplomatic cryptographic intelligence, heading up a much smaller department back in London.
The man whose name is now synonymous with Bletchley’s success – the mathematician Alan Turing – had himself been rather more gently removed. First, he was transferred from his position as the head of Hut 8, where he and his team had been fighting desperately to crack the apparently insoluble naval Enigmas. Rather than have him anywhere near administration, which was clearly a misuse of his almost preternatural intellect, Turing was first set to working on more advanced code and technological problems (helping Professor Max Newman and the engineer Dr Tommy Flowers to bring the Colossus, the world’s first proto-computer, into being). Then, in 1942, he was sent across to the States, to join the top-secret research work at the Bell Laboratories. Turing’s gift, as one colleague put it, was that he was capable of thinking thoughts that others would not even have thought it was possible to have. Towards the end of the war, after Turing had returned to England, he was diverted to another highly secret research establishment: Hanslope Park, just a few miles north of Bletchley, in Northamptonshire.
But back at Bletchley itself, the senior figures who worked on the first floor of the main house represented a certain sort of continuity. These codebreaking veterans were now to be the architects of the computer-age future, staying firmly in place to ensure that the organisation was ready for the new world. Their experience was beyond value. Brigadier John Tiltman, born in 1894, had joined the Government Code and Cypher School (as the operation was then known) in 1920, in the wake of the First World War. He was sent out to India for a few years, where his job involved more codebreaking duties. As the sophistication of encryption grew, so too did his ideas for unravelling it. This was still largely the pre-Enigma machine era; the Germans bought up this electric encryption technology for use in the navy in 1926, and extended it to the rest of the military thereafter. Others were still relying on less sophisticated – though still fearsomely complex – means of scrambling communications.
And this is where Tiltman’s astonishing skill came into play. Rather than rely on machinery and technology, he had an almost intuitive approach to cracking codes, a blend of mathematical, linguistic and philosophical brilliance. Returning to London and working at the Government Code and Cypher School throughout the 1920s and the 1930s, his chief focus became the agents and diplomats of the Stalin-era Soviet Union. He uncovered a quite remarkable volume of intelligence, particularly involving links between Soviet agents and organisations in Britain. Tiltman’s approach to codebreaking was, in part, immersive: he would plunge into unfamiliar languages and dialects, absorbing them completely, and in so doing pick up an instinctive feeling for the thoughts of others and the patterns of their communications. Tiltman had the most extraordinary facility for language, and later, at Bletchley, he swiftly mastered Japanese, and was responsible for running the intensive schools in the nearby town of Bedford that threw young undergraduate recruits into the esoteric mysteries of Japan’s encryption system.
In the early days of Bletchley Park, Tiltman had specialised in military codes, and in 1941 broke specific German army and railway Enigma cyphers that revealed the imminent Nazi threat to Russia. But despite his senior military rank, Brigadier Tiltman was the opposite of a uniformed martinet; indeed, he was often amused to see younger Bletchley recruits, fresh from university, working in uniform instead of perfectly acceptable civilian clothes. ‘Why are you wearing those damned silly boots?’ he asked of one uniformed codebreaker. His office in the directorate – in the house that had once belonged to the Leon family – was in what had been the family nursery. It was still decorated with Peter Rabbit wallpaper.
Working alongside him in the Bletchley Park directorate was another formidable codebreaking veteran: Nigel de Grey. Born in 1886, de Grey was an Old Etonian with quite a nuanced background. As a boy, he had shown a real gift for languages, but decided against going to university. He had aimed for the diplomatic service instead, but despite his linguistic skills, failed the exam. As a result of this, he moved into the rather more raffish, bohemian world of publishing, joining the firm Heinemann prior to the outbreak of the First World War. At the start of that conflict, Nigel De Grey served as an observer with the Balloon Corps (an unenviably vulnerable position, even by the standards of that most harrowing of conflicts), but by 1915 was drafted into naval intelligence.
This was the start of an extraordinary career; indeed, the colourful de Grey might now be said to have been at the very epicentre of some of the century’s most pivotal moments. He began working alongside other codebreakers in the Whitehall forerunner of Bletchley Park, a department called Room 40. It was here that he met Alastair Denniston and Alfred Dillwyn (‘Dilly’) Knox, with whom he was to work so closely over the next several decades. And it was here, in 1917, that he decrypted, among countless other documents, one very particular German diplomatic message. From the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, it was a telegram that had been sent across to Mexico, via the Atlantic underwater cable, to the German Ambassador there. It concerned the stepping up of submarine warfare in the Atlantic. In the telegram, Zimmermann told the ambassador that he was to approach the Mexican government with an offer of an alliance against the Americans. The reward for Mexico would be the acquisition of the southern states of Texas and Arizona.
Though the provenance of the intelligence was suitably disguised (it would not do for the Germans to see that their codes had been broken – still less would it do for the Americans and everyone else to see that the British had tapped the transatlantic cable), the news was released. As well as the resulting uproar, de Grey’s decrypt had the effect of bringing America into the First World War, which in turn helped ensure Germany’s defeat.
Yet even after this dizzying triumph, de Grey did not stay on with the Government Code and Cypher School at the end of the war; instead, he went to Piccadilly to head an art concern called The Medici Society. Its purpose, in part, was to provide prints of Old Masters to various smart figures. One such, in the inter-war years, was Winston Churchill; the Churchill archives contain correspondence between the two men discussing various art works. Home was a house in the Buckinghamshire village of Iver, close to where Pinewood Studios now stands. De Grey had married in 1910, and he and his wife had three children. This also meant that despite a privileged background, he very much needed to work. De Grey was an aesthetic soul; occasionally he was given to wearing a cloak. Because of his smart family connections, he would often spend his weekends at vast country estates, shooting. He was a keen painter himself, and was also an enthusiast amateur actor, appearing with a group calling itself the ‘Windsor Strollers’.
Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, The Medici Society ran into financial turbulence, and de Grey’s position looked precarious. After a gap of nearly 20 years, he was welcomed back into the embrace of the Government Code and Cypher School (though on a rather modest salary). Dilly Knox had been making terrific headway with different versions of the Enigma encryption machine; soon de Grey was on top of this, as well as other encryption methods. In 1941, he was one of the first people to comprehend the scale of what the Germans had planned for the Jews; breaking codes coming out of Eastern Europe, he saw and understood the meaning of orders for villages to be razed, and communications involving the logistics of mass transportation on the railways.
If Brigadier Tiltman represented the best of the military mind – ideal for analysing the territorial intentions of the Soviet empire – Nigel de Grey exemplified the value of the artistically refined codebreaker, versed not in mathematics, but in language and culture. His languid fluency would prove to be a great advantage in the late 1940s and early 1950s when dealing with the more stubborn corners of Whitehall. And the man who was their commander – Edward Travis – brought his own formidable codebreaking expertise to what, by the middle of the war, had become a dizzyingly efficient intelligence factory, unravelling thousands upon thousands of messages, from all theatres of war, every single day.
Commander Edward Travis was a bulky figure, born in 1888 in the marshy south-east-London suburb of Plumstead. He joined the navy at the age of 18 and sailed on HMS Iron Duke. His aptitude for code work was spotted early on when he decrypted some of Admiral Jellicoe’s messages to prove that the system being used was weak. By 1916, he was working full-time on naval cyphers, devising as well as decoding; and he did a great deal of work alongside the French and Italians. When the war ended, he elected to stay on full-time with the fast-developing Government Code and Cypher School. Alastair Denniston became the director and by 1925, Travis was his deputy – a state of affairs that would last until 1942. It was said of Travis – five foot seven (1.7 metres), inclining to the portly – that his gruff, brusque manner gained him few friendships, though he commanded loyalty. In fact, though, many who were to work at Bletchley and GCHQ regarded him with enormous affection.
He also caught the admiring attention of senior figures within intelligence and Whitehall. Whereas Alastair Denniston, in assembling and constructing the codebreaking teams at Bletchley Park, encouraged anarchic-seeming lateral thinking and wild abstraction, Travis was the man who kept it all very firmly rooted, and who ensured that even the airiest mathematical theorising led to concrete, well-organised results.
At a time when codebreaking representatives of all the services – the army, the RAF, the Royal Navy – were competing furiously for valuable time on Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman’s bombe machines (which could check through thousands upon thousands of potential code combinations at speeds that no human could match), it was Travis who put an end to the shrill bickering, and found a way to turn Bletchley Park from a cottage industry into a vast, slick, efficient factory. It was also thanks to Travis that in the latter years of the war, machinery and personnel materialised in ever greater numbers.
And it was in recognition of this organisational genius that Alastair Denniston was told to move aside. In a mark of Travis’s own loyalty, he refused for a couple of years to take the title of ‘Director’, sticking firmly to ‘Deputy’. Only in March 1944 did he relent. By VE Day, and the night of those fancy dress celebrations at Bletchley Park, Travis was not some distant authority figure but a man who kept closely involved with all the departments and personnel; there is some suggestion, in fact, that the lavish VE Day party was funded entirely by Travis from his own pocket.
Travis, Tiltman and de Grey were to be the cornerstones of continuity as a new, more shadowy war loomed in 1945. They would have known, throughout 1944 and 1945, that they would have to find ways to ensure that cryptography stayed ahead of vast technological leaps. But another senior Bletchley figure, who might very reasonably have been expected to stay on, had been thinking for some time of quite different enterprises. Gordon Welchman, a bullish young academic plucked from Sidney Sussex College in Cambridge, was in many ways Bletchley’s great logistical genius: as well as devising brilliant innovations, such as an addition to the bombe machines that greatly increased their calculating speed and efficacy, he was an expert in ensuring that all lines of communication between huts and machines flowed like mercury.
Welchman was an innovator who had been able to demonstrate to his superiors (and indeed on one occasion to a visiting Winston Churchill) how brilliant new technology could be melded with organisation to produce a lightning-fast stream of intelligence. It was his view – and that of Travis too – that the possibilities of this new world, hovering just at the edge of the inception of the computer, were the real future of intelligence. The cloak-and-dagger antics of MI6 were, by contrast, starting to look slightly antiquated, a fit subject for entertainment in Hitchcock films, but out of step with a fast-changing landscape.
Given all this responsibility, one might almost have expected Gordon Welchman to be officially compelled to stay – a man who simply knew too much to be allowed to go anywhere else. Yet at the end of the war, he could see setbacks to a career in cryptography. Welchman was married with three children and his ambitions, though not quite in focus, were rather larger than a place in such an organisation as the Government Code and Cypher school would allow.
Welchman, like Turing, had been sent over to America for a time in 1943, and the experience for him was an extremely happy one, from the VIP dinners on board Queen Mary on the voyage over, to the open, friendly (and by implication, breezily classless) community of cryptanalysts in Washington DC and New York. And perhaps it was this that was to set the course of Welchman’s days. He had caught the sniff of opportunity, the idea that he might be able to vault much further than what was, in essence, a modest wage packet with the civil service. So in 1945, as the Bletchley operation started to wind down, Welchman was anxious to get out. Equally, he looked back at Cambridge, at his old academic role, and realised that a return to that life would be terribly stifling and claustrophobic after all the days and months of nerve-fizzing adrenalin that he had been through. Where could a restless young man go to make some money?
At first – with a few words in the right ears from elegant fellow-codebreaker Hugh Alexander – Welchman headed into the slightly unlikely sphere of corporate life. Before the war, Hugh Alexander had worked in a senior position for the John Lewis Partnership which then, as now, ran department stores. With his recommendation, Welchman would move into the same position, commuting to central London every morning from the village of Cookham in Berkshire. Yet very quickly it would become apparent that the contrast between this and the life that he had led bordered on the bathetic. As we will see, even the codebreakers who left actually never really did so; Welchman and many others eventually reconnected with this much more satisfying secret world. How could the secret world ever let them go?
For the women, there were other, stronger, social pressures. Young female codebreakers such as Mavis Batey and Sheila Lawn, there right up until the end, had met their future husbands at Bletchley; and while Keith Batey and Oliver Lawn, young postgraduates, set their sights on the civil service, their wives would be expected to make homes. A young mother was emphatically not welcome in the workplace; she had children to look after and a house to keep. The cruelty of this was that Bletchley itself had opened up a hitherto unimaginable range of possibilities for women; at the age of 20, Mavis Batey had cracked the Italian Enigma code that resulted in British triumph at the Battle of Cape Matapan. Sheila Lawn found the most influential use for her significant linguistic skills. But in that summer of May 1945, there was one young woman who knew that she would be staying on. Joan Clarke – the only female codebreaker in Hut 8 – was a formidable mathematician. And even though she had started out at Bletchley performing largely clerical duties, her talents had quickly been recognised.
For a time, Joan Clarke had been engaged to Alan Turing. They had been on holiday together. She was very much in love; and on some level, he was too. But Turing was honest with her: he explained how he had ‘homosexual inclinations’. Such things were not as well understood in that era, and she felt that it didn’t matter. However, after a few months, Turing called the engagement off. It is a testament to them both that they remained very close friends until his tragic death in 1954.
But Joan Clarke, 23 years old when she had been recruited by Gordon Welchman for Bletchley in 1940, had proved one of the mainstays of Hut 8 following Turing’s replacement by Hugh Alexander, and then the subsequent merger with a party of American codebreakers. She had proved herself to be sinuously dextrous with Bayesian Probability Theory – a mathematical set of cartwheels that resulted in the fantastically complex codebreaking method known as Banburismus, and which greatly increased the speed of the work on the bombes. More than this: she had been notably calm in the vortex of tension of the Battle of the Atlantic, when the new four rotor Naval Enigmas would not yield, Britain’s shipping was being sent to the bottom of the ice-cold ocean in terrifying volumes, and the nation’s lifelines were being inexorably severed. The political pressure on Hut 8 throughout those months of 1942 would have been enough to drive anyone to nervous collapse. Joan Clarke and her Hut 8 colleagues knew that the only thing to do was to push on.
And now, in 1945, she was working alongside American naval cypher experts – her own field of expertise was the Shark and Dolphin keys, used by German submarines. After VE Day, naturally, her office would be very much quieter. But even by then, even with all the secrecy surrounding the work that she and her colleagues had done, the satisfaction must have been immense. On VE night, as Travis’s fancy dress party spilled out of the house into the crisp May evening air, Joan Clarke surely experienced a helium buoyancy, the sense that the aching responsibility had lifted. But like so many of her fellow codebreakers, she would have found that the work itself had bred a sort of compulsion: intense intellectual duels that had instant, concrete impact on events around the world. At this point, she was unmarried, and had no dependents. Unlike so many other women, there was nothing to stop her continuing to lead this extraordinary life. For this, her superiors would prove to be intensely grateful.
The unfathomable stress of breaking into the enemy’s every communication was one thing; being right at the heart of the secret war effort was another. The pressures that came with this unspoken knowledge were invisible. There was also a delicate element of diplomacy involved, for the British were – unprecedentedly – sharing both full intelligence and decrypting techniques with their allies, the Americans. While the military side of the Special Relationship was rather more fraught and ill-tempered than anything ‘special’, the codebreakers worked in unusual harmony. Unlike among the Allied military, there was a huge amount of mutual intellectual respect on both sides. A contingent of American codebreakers had come over to Bletchley, just as Alan Turing had been sent over to the States. And Travis was the man who kept this partnership on smooth rails, negotiating with some skill the few aspects of codebreaking work that both sides were keeping back from one another.
But the truth was that not much diplomacy was needed: the American personnel at Bletchley, some of whom worked for a unit called ‘Sixta’, had been utterly beguiled by what they had found there. Captain William Bundy was one young American cryptologist – an extremely nimble one, solving a Hut 6 coding difficulty in record time – who fell head over heels in love, not merely with the place but with the ethos, that curious blend of military and civilian. Bletchley had an apparent lack of iron hierarchy – but there was a concomitant ferocious self-discipline and self-reliance. Even though he later rose to be a defence adviser to President John F Kennedy in the White House of the early 1960s, Bundy always looked back at Bletchley as a career high-point.
The Americans were by and large the first to leave Bletchley Park after VE Day; beforehand, General Spaatz of the US Army paid a visit to the site to make a general speech to all – British and American alike – thanking them for the amazing work that they had done, and for the invaluable contribution that they had made to the victory.
This close relationship worked the other way around as well: for example, by 1943, the work of Hut 8 in burrowing into German naval codes was in part taken over by the American naval codebreaking department. The head of Hut 8, Hugh Alexander – born in 1909 and pulled into Bletchley in 1940 – focused, in turn, on the Japanese Coral cypher. There was none of the bitter competitiveness or jealousies to be found elsewhere in the military. Instead, the knotty intellectual challenges of ever-evolving encryptions seemed to provide their own satisfaction. As Travis’s VE Day party got underway, Hugh Alexander was on the other side of the world, installed for a couple of months at the codebreaking establishment in Colombo, Ceylon.
During the summer of 1945, there was much about the Far East codebreaking effort that was a little routine, but still very necessary. After his brilliant work applying some of Alan Turing’s most labyrinthine mathematical theories, Hugh Alexander might have thought that this tropical office with its bamboo roof and its nightly incursions from giant winged insects was the conclusion of his cryptological career. Indeed, for a very short while, it was. But the end of the war did not diminish Alexander’s appetite for the constant stimulation of coding challenges. His future lay in those cyphers.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 brought the world to a shocked stop. At Bletchley, among the personnel who were now left, it brought a sense, not of relief that the war was over, but of nauseous unease about the sort of world that might emerge from the ruins. The summer of 1945 had seen a certain amount of winding down – the young aristocratic ladies decanted back to London, the undergraduates prepared to resume interrupted academic careers. Indeed, the sparser staffing arrangements had already caused some tension: even more rigid shift patterns made it difficult for codebreakers to arrange things such as dental appointments.
There were outbreaks of unalloyed happiness, sometimes from Wrens who had come to detest the bombe machines, which required a great deal of tending (they frequently came shuddering to unintended halts, and wires had to be teased with tweezers, often in the small hours of the morning). Now the monsters were to be dissected. ‘I remember having to dismantle the bombes bit by bit, wire by wire, screw by screw,’ recalled one Wren. ‘We sat at tables with screwdrivers, taking out all the wire contact brushes. It had been a sin to drop a drum [the machines had rows of rotating drums] but now we were allowed to roll one down the floor of the hut. Whoopee!’
The social life was winding up too; as well as the theatrical troupe, the classical music societies and the film appreciation societies, which met in the main house, came to an end. Now one very particular task remained for the occupants of all the myriad huts and blocks: getting rid of every particle of classified intelligence. That which had not been spirited upwards into the Directorate, and thence to Whitehall, had to be destroyed. Slips of paper with five-letter groupings – indeed, every last little bit of paperwork – were to be carefully gathered up and burned in bonfires. Most of the machinery on site was to be destroyed too: the secrecy was still vital in a shifting, uncertain world. As we will see later, some vital instruments, such as the world’s first proto-computers, were to survive, but the silence surrounding that survival was so complete that their heartbroken creator had no idea.
The cleansing of the Bletchley Park estate was not perfect, as a very recent discovery has made quite plain. In 2015, workers performing restoration work at the old Hut 6 for the Bletchley Park museum were startled when a wodge of scrumpled paperwork fell from the ceiling. Upon closer examination, it turned out to be a great mass of decrypts. How and why had they been pushed into the hut’s ceiling cavity? The answer was hilariously simple: during those wartime winters, the huts were cruelly cold. The wind and freezing draughts crept in from all angles. The discarded decrypts had been used as a primitive form of insulation.
Commander Travis and his colleagues had known for some time that, once the war was over, the work of Bletchley Park would be moving back to London, or at least its suburbs. While the numbers of personnel were to be reduced to a fraction of their wartime height, the operation still needed a substantial (and secret) base from which to operate. The ideal candidate had already been in use since 1943 as an outstation, largely for the vast bombe code-checking machines tended to by armies of Wrens. The new site was fiercely utilitarian and in the winter months rather depressing. Unlike Bletchley, there was not the sociable focus of an architecturally striking grand house. The site was at Eastcote in Middlesex, near the north-western end of the Piccadilly line, and some 15 miles (24 kilometres) from central London.
A return to the Government Code and Cypher School’s pre-war HQ at St James’s Park, round the corner from Westminster, was no longer practicable. In the course of the previous six years, signals intelligence – that is, intelligence captured over the airwaves, or through intercepts, as opposed to the intelligence gathered on the ground by agents – had evolved to the most striking degree. Thanks to Turing, Welchman, Newman, Flowers and many others, bulky new technology was indispensable for unlocking encryptions. Added to that, a base was needed which also had room for a properly sized radio operation. Bletchley itself was not to be wholly abandoned by the Government Code and Cypher School; the codebreakers didn’t make the move until 1946 and even then some traces were left behind in the form of a training establishment. It was still used, right up until the 1980s. But the more compact post-war operation needed to be closer to London, as opposed to in the middle of the countryside.
There was another pressing question to be addressed by Commander Travis, and it was one that had been indirectly posed by Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, and his proprietorial letter of congratulation to all Bletchley staff. With the end of the conflict, who was now to be in charge of codes and signals intelligence? Was Travis’s team destined to become an offshoot of MI6 (and answerable purely to Sir Stewart)?
There was a strong case to be made that Bletchley’s core team should form its own department, not as a branch of MI6, but as a fully fledged organisation in its own right, answering only to the Foreign Office and to the prime minister. Obviously, the codebreakers and the secret service could hardly be completely divorced; the nature of clandestine intelligence gathering meant that overlap would be inevitable. But Commander Travis could see the shape of the future, and the scale of the work that his new team was going to have to do.
It is always officially said that during the war, once Britain and the Soviet Union had become allies against the Germans, the British stopped intercepting and decoding Russian messages. Indeed, Bletchley Park obliged further, giving Stalin the (carefully edited) fruits of their German decrypts, so that the Russian army could find the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the Wehrmacht. But the British codebreakers had – before the war broke out – been most assiduous in their blanket monitoring of Russian encrypted communications. It seems not merely decent but also rather reckless of them to have simply stopped, especially in the later stages of the war, when Stalin’s ambitions for Eastern Europe became ever clearer.
Also unprecedented had been the warm intelligence partnership between British and American codebreakers; even more unusually, it was to continue. Never before had two nations forged such a tight alliance over the sharing of top-secret material. And in this respect, once again, the British were a little ahead of their Allies. For thanks to the Y-Service – the British wireless interceptors who grabbed all messages from the airwaves and with pinpoint accuracy relayed them back to Bletchley Park – the codebreakers had operatives in every region on the earth. From Mombasa to Murmansk, Cyprus to Hong Kong, these listening posts were beyond value. America’s codebreakers (many of whom were based in Arlington Hall, a former girls’ school a little to the west of Washington DC) were greedy for the sheer volume of raw intelligence that these worldwide outposts were continuing to scoop up.
The Americans wanted to point out it was a two-way process: that their British friends would be allowed in on their own codebreaking results. In July 1945, Commander Travis wrote to his opposite number, Captain Wenger of the OP-20-G US codebreaking arm, to acknowledge this happy continuity. ‘Many thanks for your offer to continue direct cross-Atlantic communications,’ he said. ‘Fully appreciate difficulties created by economy drive, as I am experiencing them myself. Suggest that negotiations now proceeding with you may lead us both to conclude that good Atlantic channels are essential for close collaboration on future problems that may arise. Shall therefore keep subject under review…’6
Britain had its own concerns too, from the impending independence of the subcontinent of India from British rule to the feverish tensions in Palestine and the increasing pressure to honour the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which promised British support for the creation of a homeland there for the Jewish people. The need for signals intelligence did not diminish.
In those last few weeks of Bletchley Park, a local newspaper reporter wrote sadly that the Park’s theatrical troupe was disbanding, and that its talents would be dispersed far and wide. Neither he nor any of their audiences had any idea what it was that these gifted amateur actors had been doing as their day job. It is natural now to imagine with hindsight that this was symbolic of the change that was coming to the codebreakers – that frenetic yet eccentric world being replaced by something far chillier, much more professional, and far less amenable to whimsy or the sort of Bohemian behaviour that Bletchley recruits had displayed. And yet this is not so: while the site of Eastcote itself was drab, the ethos of Bletchley Park was to be transplanted; there were still battalions of bright young women and owlish young men. And they were to be joined – as symbolically befits the new age of Clement Attlee’s Labour government which came to power in 1945 – by a swarm of fresh new recruits from all sorts of social backgrounds, united by intellectual dexterity, the ease of youth and indeed a love of music – though this time, the musical form was jazz.
And it would not be long before the talents and capabilities of these younger codebreakers were to be tested: in some key regions of the earth, peace was little more than an illusion.