The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Read Free

the manufacture of bricks. The smell of the works had a distinct tang that hung over the town on warm summer days.
    And the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century house, with its fifty-five acres of grounds, located on the other side of the railway tracks from the main streets of Bletchley, was selected as the wartime base for the Government Code and Cypher School largely for reasons of security, as opposed to aesthetic considerations.
    Ever since 1919, all foreign encrypted messages – largely those from the fledgling Soviet Union – had been dealt with by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), a small, esoteric government department which was in essence the codebreakingarm of the Foreign Office. Since the 1930s, the department had been based just around the corner from Whitehall, in Broadway Buildings, St James’s Park; a smart London address that it shared with MI6.
    It was actually a good eighteen months before 1939 that the decision was made to move GC&CS out to the countryside. The reason was that its central London location would put it at very high risk from potential German bomber raids. The horrifying Blitzkrieg campaign in Spain had demonstrated just how lethally effective such attacks could be.
    Previously, the Bletchley Park estate had belonged to the wealthy Leon family. But in 1937, the heir, Sir George, lost interest in maintaining the trappings of country life. And thus the place went on the market. A relative of the family, Ruth Sebag-Montefiore – who quite by chance was recruited to become a codebreaker at Bletchley Park herself – said of the house: ‘Only by stretching my imagination to the utmost could I picture the place … in its heyday, when there were hunters in the stables, house-parties most weekends and children in the top floor nurseries.’ 1
    By 1937, the grand house-parties were over. In 1938, a small team of property developers, led by a Captain Faulkner, made the highest bid for the estate. It is reported that the head of MI6, or the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, was so adamant that the move was necessary, and so frustrated by lumbering Whitehall interdepartmental bureaucracy, that he paid for the house out of his own pocket.
    Work began at once. Violent events in Europe were casting shadows. Admiral Sinclair was sharply aware – perhaps more so than many in the government – that the house and its grounds would be needed urgently.
    In May of that year, engineers from the Post Office began laying cables from the house that would connect it up to the nerve endings of Whitehall. Over the summer of 1938 – which was dominated by the excruciating tension of the Munich summit andChamberlain’s calculated but misguided appeasement of Hitler over mounting German aggression towards Czechoslovakia – ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’, as the codename went, came to stay at the Bletchley Park estate by way of a rehearsal.
    In fact, Captain Ridley was a naval officer with MI6. His job was to organise the logistics of the move of GC&CS (known by some jokingly as the ‘Golf Club and Chess Society’) from London to Bletchley. ‘We were told that this was a “rehearsal”,’ wrote senior codebreaker Josh Cooper in a contemporary diary. ‘But we all realised that the “rehearsal” might well end in a real war.’
    This 1938 rehearsal also gave an idea of the difficulties involved. The presence of so many visitors to Bletchley Park milling around the grounds was explained to the curious local people by that very ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’ catch-all phrase. The Wodehousian flavour of the term – faintly anachronistic, even back then – was to find echoes in the years to come.
    There was a lot of work to be done. It was immediately clear that the house itself would not be large enough to accommodate the anticipated code-cracking activity. As