Of all the many wonderful figures that somehow made their way into this shadowed, esoteric world, Hugh Foss might be said to have had the most colourful background. He had been a codebreaker since the 1920s; born in Kobe, Japan, to an Anglican minister father, Foss had been educated at Marlborough school and Cambridge. After he graduated from Cambridge, he was recruited to work for the Government Code and Cypher School; his formative years in Japan would prove a particular advantage over the years and decades to come.
Yet Foss was marked out not merely because of his dazzling intellect and good humour; he also led a life that might have fitted nicely into one of novelist EF Benson’s social comedies. When we refer to espionage figures leading double lives, the expectation is usually of a dark and ironic dichotomy. Foss was the reverse: his parallel life involved an all-consuming passion for the pastime of Scottish country dancing. It was completely pervasive; and by the time he got to Eastcote, helping to construct this fresh approach to a world of signals intelligence, it had almost become an alternative career. It also had the most extraordinary effect upon his personality.
Hugh Foss was married to Alison; she was a little on the short side, whereas he was a looming sentinel of a figure at six foot five inches (1.95 metres). He had russet hair and a straggly beard. In the early 1930s, as Foss was making careful studies of the complexities of Japanese encryption techniques, Alison had a novel idea for an evening out: she took her husband along to a private house in Chelsea, west London, which was playing host to an evening of Highland reels. It is difficult to know how Alison Foss must have responded to his almost instantaneous obsession. That evening, he had declared himself enchanted; but he found the instructions for each dance seriously lacking in the sort of detail he thought they required. In the following few days, Foss had acquired himself a scholarly book on the history and techniques of traditional Highland reels. This was a world he had to enter.
So it began: cypher-cracking by day, in the rather shabby offices of the Government Code and Cypher School in Queen’s Gate, Kensington; seeking out reels come the evenings. This fascination was to continue upon the outbreak of war, and after the move to Bletchley Park. Obviously, the defeat of the Axis powers was the daily priority – but given the crushing pressure this was putting upon some of the youngest new recruits, how best was the experienced Foss to help them relax and let off steam?
Thus it was that the main mansion at Bletchley Park began hosting evenings of Highland reels. In the summer, these occasions would sometimes be moved outdoors, on the lawn in front of the lake. Naturally there were no pipers to hand; music was provided via the gramophone player. As a means of diverting anxious young minds, it certainly proved effective for one particular couple. Oliver Lawn, then 19 and working in Hut 6, and Sheila MacKenzie, also 19, and working as linguist, joined Foss’s society. Sheila, a native Scot, had had some prior experience from her Aberdonian upbringing. For young Englishman Oliver Lawn, it was exotic escapism. Their eyes met across an eightsome reel. And they became one of Bletchley Park’s many romances, and their subsequent marriage lasted for a great many decades.
It was around this stage that Hugh Foss, himself squarely English, began to transmute into a more Caledonian figure. Perhaps it was the influence of his Scottish wife. But he began to wear a kilt. Like many things at Bletchley Park, this was taken in various people’s strides. He also became noted for his militant addiction to sandals. He would never wear anything else. This is how this straggle-bearded sandaled figure came to be known by his beguiled American colleagues in Washington as ‘Lend-Lease Jesus’.
Foss’s mind could move with as much elegance and intricacy as any of the dances that he spent his spare time devising. His work burrowing into the heart of Japanese communications was invaluable. But Foss, like so many of his senior colleagues, also maintained personal habits of great particularity. At a time when women were expected to be proficient housewives, his own wife Alison was said to be spectacularly and comically bad at it, with the result that Foss would interrupt his day to go and make sure that the children made it to bed. The washing of dishes became a fraught routine for both husband and wife; they both developed an obsessive-compulsive mania for ensuring that it be done in a very precise way. Saucers had to be washed first because, apparently, they had had the least ‘contact with human lips’. One guest, on offering to carry out this chore, was told with a shriek from Foss, ‘Oh! You mustn’t do the cups yet! Saucers first!’ Yet against this was balanced the involvement of the Foss household pets. ‘The dogs are a great help!’ announced Foss of their role in the washing up routine.1
The end of the war brought Foss back from Washington, and also a return to London, to embark upon the daily Piccadilly Line tube commute to Eastcote. The Foss family lived in Chelsea, about an hour’s travel away. By this time, he and Alison were back in with their Chelsea Highland reel enthusiasts. Naturally, none of the Foss family friends had the faintest clue what it was that he was doing for a living. They could have no idea that he was at the very nerve centre of the Cold War. Indeed, if there had been any suspicions of spook activity, these would surely have been thoroughly dispelled by Foss’s great 1947 coup, when he took over the editorship of a magazine devoted to Highland reels. The fact was that it was not enough for him to enjoy the dances. He had to devise them too, and find the music to set them to. His reeling legacy – now fondly remembered by Highland dance enthusiasts – includes such routines as ‘Black Craig of Dee’, ‘Duncan MalCalman’’ and ‘Who’ll Be King But Charlie?’. Incidentally, the step moves that serve as instruction for these dances are slightly reminiscent of chess problems: letters and arrows and numbers, tightly formed around one another, elegance in a sort of mathematical shorthand. Indeed, we might almost say that they are a form of hermetic code in themselves; the natural shorthand of a remarkable mind.
Before the war, Foss’s enthusiasm had pulled in one rather spectacular convert to the pursuit: Alastair Denniston, the head of Government Code and Cypher School, and the architect of Bletchley Park’s founding successes. Denniston had an aptitude and a taste for Highland reels; perhaps as a former Olympic hockey player, he had the correct muscles and stamina to serve on the dance floor. He implored Foss and his wife to find him a suitable female partner, though. Denniston was married, but there was no suggestion of impropriety: it was simply that Mrs Denniston could not stand the idea of spending her evenings in such a fashion.
After the war, in the soot-smirched city, the skies grey with drizzle or sleet, it is easy to see that Highland reels might have offered a joyous, colourful escapism; the tartan, the pipes, the swirls and circles. In those early days of GCHQ, just as at Bletchley, the furious intensity and pressure of the work would require an equally strong pressure valve. But for Foss, this was nothing less than love. The dances presented new sorts of challenges for him. ‘A reel of three comprises three people dancing a figure of eight in the same space at the same time,’ he once declared, adding a quote from Macbeth. ‘Be bloody, bold, and resolute!’2And he had to find new converts to this terrific activity too. So it was that – in his spare time – he assumed editorship of a new paper of somewhat limited circulation: the Chelsea Reel Club Intelligencer.
The first issue contained a variety of delightful items. There were instructions for a new dance that Foss had worked out. There were detailed step moves for more established routines that Foss felt could be taught a little more effectively. Added to all this was a bonus: a logic puzzle for his readers to solve.
In that puzzle lay the only public clue to the twin delights of Foss’s life: that irrepressible, unstoppable, insanely enthusiastic urge to share not only the dances, but also vaulting intellectual challenges. There was a pleasing and curious innocence about his desire to impart the intricacies of logic problems.
Of course, that is one way that sanity is preserved; otherwise, years-long immersion in cyphers would surely have had a profoundly distorting effect on the way that one looked at the outside world. Yet this idiosyncrasy also feels peculiarly British; it is difficult to imagine such vivid eccentricity among his US counterparts, who gazed on Foss with amused delight.
Also rather distinctive was Eastcote’s openness to women at a socially conservative time. Of course, right across society, war had brought women into the workplace; but now, in peacetime, they were expected to resume their old roles as home-makers when the young men returned. For this reason, GCHQ was forced to say reluctant farewells to hugely talented young women like Mavis Lever and Sheila MacKenzie. One woman who did stay on – doubtless to the immense relief of Edward Travis and Nigel de Grey – was Joan Clarke.
Clarke had been recruited for Bletchley Park in 1940; like many of the men, she was contacted directly by her old Cambridge tutor Gordon Welchman. Clarke, a mathematician, had been supervised by Welchman for the geometry section of her degree. At that time, female mathematicians at Cambridge were rare; equally, there were not that many at Bletchley either.
Not that there was anything madly unconventional about Clarke’s upbringing. She came from a family that was both religious and rather academic: her father and other relatives had taken holy orders, and had also been fellows of Cambridge colleges. Her formative years were spent close to the glittering giant of Paxton’s Crystal Palace in a genteel suburb of south London called Upper Norwood. She went to Dulwich High School for Girls, and from there won her scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge.
Her mathematical flair and intelligence made her an obvious choice for Bletchley – but even there, amid the ‘apparent anarchy’ of this twilight zone between military and civil service – there were certain conventions and barriers that proved stubborn. One she ran across immediately: this being some several decades before the law was adjusted, it was a given that women would automatically be paid less than men. Clarke was warned before she began her codebreaking career that the initial pay would be terrible.
The career path was rather labyrinthine too. ‘In my first week, they put an extra table in for me in the room occupied by Turing, Kendrick and Twinn,’ she wrote. ‘According to [Jack] Good, I rose from the ranks of the girls in the big room; but this was obviously because of my degree.’3 In other words, Good had assumed that she had started out among the clerical card-index debutantes and the typists. Clarke noted that there was one other female cryptanalyst she knew of at the time, working with Dilly Knox in the department known as ‘The Cottage’. But she herself had been allocated to Hut 8 and very swiftly, she found herself taking positions of responsibility on night shifts, monitoring the clicking, ticking machinery – a junior version of the Bombe machine known as ‘the Baby’ – for any signs that cribs had worked. Clarke was swift to grasp Alan Turing’s thoughts and methods; it was in the course of such abstruse discussions that their relationship began.
Famously, Alan Turing and Joan Clarke got engaged to be married; just as famously, it was Turing who broke off the engagement. Though they contrived to remain good friends, there are suggestions that Clarke was more hurt by this rejection than she ever cared to let on.
And against this backdrop and the wild, terrible tension of the Battle of the Atlantic, as Clarke was fighting to break U-Boat Shark codes, the civil service rigidity about her career continued with a note of exasperating comedy. She was promoted, but to the position of a linguist. She later noted the pleasure she took in filling out the form for the position. In the box set aside for foreign languages spoken, Clarke wrote rather defiantly: ‘None’. At one stage, the then deputy director Edward Travis took her to one side and confided that further progress might only come if she joined the Women’s Royal Navy. Clarke later noted wryly that there was a general suggestion that the pay of women might be improved if they ‘had qualifications which were not relevant’, including that of trained hairdresser.4
Balancing these day-to-day frustrations was the knowledge of being at the heart of Britain’s war effort. The German navy’s Admiral Dönitz was almost unique in having suspicions that his U-Boats’ codes were being broken; he had nothing quite definite to pin this fear down, just some intuition that, occasionally, British shipping and submarines were not where they should have been expected to be. To this end – unlike any other branch of the German military – he had taken the already formidable Enigma and added an extra rotor to the machine, thus instantly generating millions more potential encoding possibilities. The nine months or so in 1942 when Hut 8 – Clarke and Turing and Twinn and Hugh Alexander – were knocked out of action by this addition were the tensest of Bletchley’s war, the pressure for them to solve this now apparently insoluble problem bearing down on them from Churchill and the entire Whitehall establishment.
This was clearly Clarke’s world; one in which a woman could achieve much without either being patronised by male colleagues or indeed sabotaged and tripped up by less competent male operatives. She recalled agreeing with a colleague that the code work – particularly on Turing’s Banburismus method – was ‘often so enthralling that the analyst due to go home at the end of the shift would be unwilling to hand over the workings’.5 The colleague had been too polite to mention that Clarke ‘had been a particular culprit, being in a billet within cycling distance instead of having to catch official transport’.6
At the end of the war, domesticity was not the only option: Clarke could very have returned to her mathematical studies at Cambridge. Indeed, her wealth of unusual experience might have propelled her into a distinguished academic career. Clarke was modest about her achievements in Hut 8. But the government knew just how crucial her efforts had been: she was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, receiving her award at Buckingham Palace in 1947.
Clarke was to maintain afterwards that it was the experience of having worked alongside a mind such as Turing’s that made her decide not to return to Cambridge. But this again sounds like modesty: for surely a love of mathematics as a philosophical pursuit was far more likely to flourish at university rather than within the confines of a Whitehall department. Instead, it is fair to speculate that life for Clarke as a codebreaker had been intensely rewarding in terms of excitement as well as the intellectual thrill of besting the enemy; and that she had no wish to see that excitement end.
And so it was that she had joined her old Hut 8 colleague Hugh Alexander, in the new concrete premises at the end of Lime Grove, Eastcote. And pleasingly, after the heartbreak of her relationship with Alan Turing, Clarke fell into a new, rather more fulfilled romantic relationship there. A new recruit to the Eastcote operation was a former military intelligence operative called Jock Murray. He was now retired from the army, and came to work as a civilian cryptanalyst. And so, amid a new kind of geopolitical tension, and the construction of a codebreaking operation that not merely tried to see into the heart of the enemy but also acted as a line of defence, the love between Clarke and Murray grew. They were to marry not too long afterwards; and aside from a brief interregnum, when Jock fell ill and had to retire from GCHQ for a while, they remained wedded to each other and to their codebreaking careers.
They had a rather charming hinterland too, Mr and Mrs Murray: a shared passion for coin collecting. They focused on historic Scottish coins, Joan settling on the 15th century as her chosen period of expertise. She not only made herself a brilliant numismatist, but her in-depth research also made her an authority on the literature and culture of 15th-century Scotland as well; certainly enough to be able to write and present a monograph to the Coin Collectors Society. Her friend Lord Stewartby wrote warmly of her nimble ability in mastering these and other areas of coin study. And not one of their fellows in the society had any idea of Mr and Mrs Murray’s day jobs. After a brief spell in Scotland while Jock Murray recuperated from his illness, the couple then moved to Cheltenham where, by this stage, the new GCHQ was based. Jock stayed there until 1971, and Joan until the date of her retirement in 1977. This means that – discounting that brief spell away – Joan Clarke had been a cryptanalyst for over 35 years. So we might downplay the influence of Alan Turing a little, and stress rather Joan Clarke’s inspirational work in the practical defensive applications of her mathematical ability; and what must also have been the excitement of being one of the very few British women who knew the nation’s most closely guarded secrets.
What Clarke had in common with figures such as Hugh Foss, Nigel de Grey and Hugh Alexander was a steel-trap intellect – deadly serious, always firing at full intensity – with a certain humorous understated dryness. The mad passion for coin collecting was the creative equivalent of Hugh Foss’s made-up Highland reels and Nigel de Grey’s fascination for amateur dramatics: in one sense, a mechanism for escaping the pressure of the work but in another, an odd almost metaphorical reflection of it. Just as Foss’s mathematical precision in formulating new dance steps had an element of fierce logic, so too did Clarke’s decyphering of the meaning of ancient coins.
The most roaringly obvious metaphor for the work at Eastcote and at Bletchley Park was chess; and chess was the parallel career of senior codebreaker Hugh Alexander. The game had been in his blood since he was very young – he won the British Boys championship in 1926 aged 17 – and even before he had been reeled in for Bletchley duties in 1940, he was already an international champion as well as a published author on the subject. Naturally, his time in Hut 8 – assuming the leadership of it in 1942 after Turing had been moved aside to work on other projects – meant that Alexander had rather less time to think about, still less play chess. After the war, his first career move had been to take up a position with the John Lewis Partnership. But like so many of his colleagues, having been at the very centre of such a monumental achievement proved to have an addictive quality; and in 1946, Alexander was back, now at Eastcote, and heading up the fresh challenges to cryptanalysis.
The work was all-absorbing; but so too was Alexander’s love for chess. The metaphor for cryptology – thinking ahead of the opponent, trying to decypher his strategy – took on greater resonance with the presence at international competitions of Soviet chess masters. It was in these contests that the new geopolitical blocs faced one another in intellectual duels; games that were a source of intense national pride, prestige and honour. In 1946 and 1947, Alexander played at two such contests in Hastings (precursors of a rather more spectacular chess coup against the Soviets in the winter of 1953, of which more later). Colleagues said of him that had it not been for his cryptanalytical work, there was every possibility that Alexander might have become a world chess champion. Indeed, it was a Soviet chess champion who paid him the warmest of compliments. Mikhail Botvinnik said of his opponent: ‘with his urge for overcoming and taming opposition, with his enthusiasm for uncompromising struggle, Alexander pioneered the way for British players to modern, complicated and daring chess’.7
Hugh Alexander also wrote a great deal about the game, in books and through a column in The Spectator magazine. Funnily enough, in discoursing about the principles of the game, and about its serious emotional, as well as intellectual, charge, Alexander might easily have been describing his Cold War opponents in his day job. ‘My experience, both of myself and other chess-players, is that it is very difficult to lose at chess with good grace,’ he wrote in one essay. ‘This is because chess being entirely a game of skill you cannot soothe your wounded vanity by thinking that the cards were against you, that you find grass so slow after hard courts, that the sun was in your eyes when you missed the catch – there are no extraneous influences on which your defeat can be blamed; you are the sole cause of your own downfall – without a mistake on your own part, you cannot lose.’8
It is very easy to imagine him delivering the following sentiment to colleagues who were finding it impossible to jemmy their way into a cypher system: ‘Try to remember that everyone loses many times and that by examining why you lost and where you played foolishly you will learn more than in any other way.’9
Oddly enough, one chess expert who knew rather more about Hugh Alexander’s secret career than most was Harry Golombek. In 1945, Golombek took up the job of full-time chess correspondent for The Times, following competitions in which Alexander took part. But he had also had the opportunity to play Alexander at Bletchley Park, for he had been there as well. Indeed, when Alexander had taken on the responsibility of Hut 8 leadership, Golombek had found the chance for some games of chess with Alexander’s colleague Alan Turing. And as with the game, so with the Park: champions deliberately sought out and recruited; the codes approached with the same lithe mental agility – and considered abstractedness – as the most knotted chess moves.
As a chess player, Alexander’s advice to others was: never let up on the aggression. What lay before them was not simply a mental conundrum. It was a duel, and the opponent had to be fought, hard. ‘Play for direct attack on the king,’ he wrote. ‘…When you are a stronger player and have had more experience you can begin position play, which is very much more difficult, and you will then find that the combinative powers developed by an attacking style will be of the greatest service to you… you will be following the example of all the leading masters of this or any other period… All the world masters… whatever their ultimate style, started as brilliant attacking players.’10
Nor was there much patience for the idea of gentlemanly scruples. Any weakness in the opponent should be ruthlessly exploited – even if the weakest players complain ‘that such tactics are unsporting’. It is easy to see the jump across to acquired code-books and cypher keys, or mistakenly twice-used one-time pads. Alexander’s aggression on the chess board was not without humour; it was after all a game. But from this starting point of conflict came some more abiding principles. ‘One of the dangers – even for very gifted players – of going over too early to the more positional styles of play is that you get afraid to attack and try to win with a complete avoidance of risk,’ he wrote. ‘I cannot emphasize too strongly that this is an aim that it is impossible to achieve and that a habit of cowardice is as fatal in chess as in everything else.’11
He also analysed the toll that the game could exact on even its most brilliant players. ‘Tournament chess is a very great strain,’ he wrote in the 1970s, a little after he finally retired from GCHQ (resisting all pleas for him to stay on). ‘To some extent the professional’s technique eases it – in so many situations he knows at once the type of plan to adopt… [but] it is hard work mentally, nervously and physically to overcome such opposition.’12 Once again, it is easy to envisage the corollary: the cypher analyst, working deep into the silent night, looping and stretching his or her mind round the fractal chaos of coded messages, under immense pressure to burrow deep into the labyrinth in order to outwit the opposing side. ‘Intensive preparation – study of one’s opponents,’ he continued, ‘… is important; one must be physically fit or one will tire and blunder… However, there are compensations. Chess is a creative activity and there is the same satisfaction in playing a fine game as an artist or scientist gets from his work.’ Alexander’s next thought was freighted with unspoken irony. ‘Moreover,’ he wrote, ‘unlike an artist, the chess player who plays fine chess gets instant recognition.’13 No such recognition for the artists of Eastcote.
But in this passage, also written in the 1970s, with all those years of experience in Soviet opponents and Soviet cyphers, Alexander wrote of the chess world: ‘Underlying the inevitable personal feuds and jealousies, there is a feeling of community in the chess world that cuts across barriers of nationality, age and class; one only has to attend an Olympiad to feel this – the often sordid disputes and incidents that mar these are nevertheless something “in the family”.’ World interest in the game was rising at that point; and this was in no small part down to the impact of Soviet players such as Boris Spassky. Was there any chance, with the rise of technology, that the contest would finally be played out? No, said Alexander. The game is ‘still not fully explored’ and ‘will continue to fascinate and infuriate its players for many years to come’.14
Alexander also displayed a flourish of admiration for the way that the Soviets had, over the last few decades, developed their ideas on the way that the game should be played. ‘With the victory of Botvinnik in the 1948 World Championship pentangular tournament,’ he wrote, ‘the period of Soviet dominance of world chess began, not to be broken until 1972 when [Bobby] Fischer wrested the championship from Russian hands. In addition to its playing success, the Soviet school has made substantial contributions to the theory of the game.’
Unlike their Russian predecessors back at the beginning of the century, said Alexander, the Soviet school took new psychological and tactical approaches. ‘One could afford… to accept weaknesses if one got sufficient tactical chances,’ he observed of their technique. The Soviet school ‘has resulted in a great revitalisation of the game, play being now more varied and interesting than ever before’.15
It was impossible that there was not a deeper, wrier note in these remarks, for even upon retirement, Alexander was still being coaxed back into the equally ancient game of cryptology, not merely by his hugely admiring colleagues at GCHQ, but also by a substantial number of fans across the Atlantic in what was by then the National Security Agency.
Curiously enough, despite the awesome intellect that allowed him to take on the world’s most serious chess players, and also the world’s most serious cryptologists, Hugh Alexander was apparently not at all attuned to the new age of electro-mechanical dazzle. ‘He regarded even driving a car as being technically beyond his reach,’ as one former Bletchley colleague, Hugh Denham, remarked warmly in a tribute paper circulated within the National Security Agency. Alexander also ‘never learnt to program’. But, added Denham, ‘he understood clearly enough what computers can do for cryptanalysis and was the loudest propagandist at GCHQ for huge increases in our computer power.’16
Indeed, the new institution was to see the return in 1948 of one of Alexander’s old chess-playing comrades: Irving John (Jack) Good, who had, since the war, been at Manchester University with Professor Max Newman working on developments in computer science. Although his precise role at Eastcote (and then Cheltenham) is still yet to be disclosed, it is not too difficult to speculate on the sort of areas Good might have specialised in.
Even though Hugh Alexander had tried returning to the John Lewis Partnership in 1945, it was not just the lack of excitement when compared to the clandestine thrill of cryptology: it was also having to work in an office where one was expected to wear black coat and striped trousers, like a bank manager of the time. Hugh Alexander was cut from rather more dashing cloth. And the essential point about him and colleagues such as Joan Clarke and Hugh Foss is that all of them would have presented faintly incongruous figures in the excessively drab and conformist cultural landscape of 1940s Britain. None of them would have been especially easy to place anywhere without their immediately standing out and perhaps also going against the institutional grain.
It has often been said of Bletchley Park that it required a certain kind of brain – not just in terms of IQ but also a certain personality and approach – to be a happy and successful codebreaker. The same must certainly be true of the institution that came afterwards. Unlike Bletchley though, these men and women did not have to prove themselves from scratch; they were building upon triumph, and in that sense commanded respect from America. But their Russian opponents were also building on a different sort of success; that of infiltration. And as well as the espionage disasters involving American atomic secrets, and the undermining of Britain’s secret services, there was a shattering blow to come in terms of cryptology too. As never before, the men and women at Eastcote were going to need all their quirky good humour and energy.