The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Read Free Page A

such, wooden huts, insulated with asbestos, were to be built in the grounds. ‘To begin with, when there were only a handful of us, we worked in the house,’ recalled Ruth Sebag-Montefiore. ‘Subsequently we moved into one of the wooden huts that sprang up like mushrooms.’
    Although records are not completely clear, it seems that the first of the huts – those brilliantly makeshift, weather-exposed synecdoches of British improvisational spirit, and the eventual beehives of the Bletchley operation – was built not too long after the time of the Munich crisis. Hut 1 was originally intended to house the Park’s wireless station. The huts that were built soon afterwards – some of which still survive today – strike the modern eye as puzzlingly temporary structures; they put one in mind of prefab houses.
    Bletchley was both far enough away yet convenient enough to reach to make it an ideal location. And the town and surrounding villages were reckoned to have sufficient space for billeting all thecodebreakers and translators. Bletchley Park itself was (and is) next to what is now referred to as the West Coast railway line. And in the days before Dr Beeching axed so much of the network, Bletchley station teemed with activity. To the west, the railways reached Oxford; to the east Cambridge. Meanwhile, anyone travelling from London, Birmingham, Lancashire or Glasgow could get to the town with ease. ‘Or relative ease,’ says Sheila Lawn, who became used to these long-distance hauls. ‘The trains were always absolutely packed with soldiers.’ Nevertheless, the location was a great boon to the many young people scattered across the country who would find themselves receiving the summons.
    Throughout 1938, work on further customising the estate progressed at speed. One wing of the house was demolished; the outbuildings were converted into office space.
    At the very top of the house, in a small, dingy attic room near a large water tank, lay ‘Station X’. In essence, it was an SIS radio listening post. Outside the tiny little window was a huge Wellingtonia tree, around which was arranged the necessary rhombic array aerial. ‘Station X’, a wonderfully Ian Fleming-esque designation, was in fact so named because it was simply the tenth station of its sort. The station didn’t last long there – later, it was moved six miles away to Whaddon Hall.
    There was a temporary decrease in diplomatic tension in the aftermath of Munich. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously had in his hand a piece of paper, which promised peace in our time. According to some contemporaneous Mass Observation reports, not many ordinary people were wholly convinced by this. And on the intelligence side, the quiet, furtive preparations for the coming, inevitable conflict became ever more intense.
    Bletchley Park was placed under the control of Commander Alistair Denniston. Originally the establishment was supposed to have been run by Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, but he was becoming very ill by this point and Denniston rapidly assumed day-to-day responsibility for the operation. This delegation of responsibility –with the head of MI6 being in ultimate, rather than everyday, control – was one of the elements that in the years to come was to give Bletchley Park its unusual and sometimes unpredictable flavour. It had a degree of quirky autonomy. Certainly quirky enough not to be appreciated by some senior figures in Whitehall.
    Back in 1919, just after the end of the First World War, Alistair Denniston had been made head of the Government Code and Cypher School, and he presided over the department in the interwar years. When Denniston came to Bletchley Park in 1939, he saw to it that some fellow codebreakers from the early days of the department came too – including the mercurial but brilliant Alfred Dillwyn Knox and Frank Birch.
    Birch had a rather unusual hinterland; as well as