The Bletchley Park Codebreakers Read Free Page A

steam. Frank Birch wrote affectionately of Knox in his classified satirical history of Room 40,
Alice in ID25:
    The sailor in Room 53
    has never, it’s true, been to sea
    but though not in a boat
    he has served afloat –
    in a bath in the Admiralty.
    Knox’s bathtime cryptanalysis continued during his time at Bletchley Park, once causing fellow lodgers at his billet, when he failed to respond to shouted appeals through the bathroom door, to break down the door for fear that he might have passed out and drowned in the bath.
    Turing’s eccentricities make such engaging anecdotes that they are sometimes exaggerated, but there can be no doubt about their reality. His ability from a very early age to disappear into a world of his own is wonderfully captured by a drawing of him at prep school by Turing’s mother, which she presented to the school matron. The drawing, entitled ‘Hockey or Watching the Daisies Grow’, shows the ten-year-old Turing, oblivious of the vigorous game of hockey taking place around him, bending over in the middle of the pitch to inspect a clump of daisies. At Bletchley Park he chained his coffee mug to a radiator to prevent theft, sometimes cycled to work wearing a gas mask to guard against pollen, and converted his life savings into silver ingots which he buried in two locations in nearby woods. Sadly, he failed to find the ingots when the war was over. The informality and absence of rigid hierarchy at Bletchley Park enabled it to exploit the talents of unconventional and eccentric personalities who would have found it difficult to conform to military discipline or civil service routine.
    Most of the dons and other professionals recruited by Room 40 had been young. The ‘professor types’ selected by Bletchley Park were, on average, younger still. In the summer of 1939, Alastair Denniston wrote to the heads of about ten Cambridge and Oxford colleges, asking for the names of able undergraduates who could be interviewed for unspecified secret war work. Among the twenty or so recruited during the first round of interviews (repeated on a number of later occasions during the war) was the twenty-year-old Harry Hinsley, who was about to begin his third year as an undergraduate historian at St John’sCollege, Cambridge. After Pearl Harbor, when Bletchley Park needed more cryptanalysts and linguists to take newly devised crash courses in the Japanese language, the recruitment included sixth-formers as well as undergraduates – among them Alan Stripp, recruited after winning a classics scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, who later co-edited with Hinsley a volume of memoirs on Bletchley Park. During a visit to Bletchley, Churchill is said to have remarked ironically to Denniston, as he surveyed the unusually youthful staff, ‘I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me literally.’
    Recruitment to Bletchley Park broke with one important but misguided precedent established during the First World War. Room 40 had made no attempt to recruit professional mathematicians, whose supposedly introverted personalities were thought to be too far removed even from the realities of daily life for them to engage with the horrendous problems posed by the First World War. Though a prejudice normally associated with arts graduates, this jaundiced view of mathematicians appears to have been shared by the Director of Naval Education, Sir Alfred Ewing, a former Fellow of King’s and Professor of Engineering at Cambridge, who seems to have been chiefly responsible for the recruitment from King’s (where his son-in-law remained a Fellow) of Adcock, Birch and Knox. Despite his own mathematical training, Ewing evidently considered the experience of classicists, historians and linguists in making sense of difficult and complex texts a more relevant skill for cryptanalysis than mathematical expertise. Similar prejudices continued to influence the recruitment of British