The Secret Life of Bletchley Park Read Free Page B

being incredibly sharp with codes, he was a theatre actor and director with an amusingly exaggerated manner. In fact, in 1930 he had essayed a highly memorable Widow Twankey in a sumptuous West End production of Aladdin . Birch and Knox had been at Cambridge together.
    On arrival at Bletchley, ‘Dilly’ Knox, as senior cryptographer, was allocated working space in ‘the Cottage’ – in reality, a row of chunky converted interlinked houses – just across the courtyard from the main house, near the stables. Fifty-five-year-old Knox was, in the words of a colleague, ‘the mastermind behind the Enigma affair’, a gangling figure with a prominent forehead, ‘unruly black hair and his eyes, behind glasses, some miles away in thought’.
    Knox had been interested in ciphers since boyhood, noted the novelist (and his niece) Penelope Fitzgerald. Also as a boy, Dilly had precociously ‘detected a number of inaccuracies, even downright contradictions in the Sherlock Holmes stories,’ wrote Fitzgerald, ‘and sent a list of them to Conan Doyle in an envelope with four dried orange pips, in allusion to the threatening letter in “The Sign of Four”’. 2
    He was also a man prone to terrific bursts of temper, and quickly became noted by his colleagues for the fact that he seemed to geton much better with women than he did with men. He certainly had a most enlightened approach to the employment of women at that period – one might even be tempted to call it positive discrimination. Although that was not how many more lascivious-minded colleagues saw it at the time.
    Indeed, it was not long before the female recruits to ‘the Cottage’ became known widely around the Park as ‘Dilly’s Fillies’. These days, the expression causes one of Knox’s more illustrious female recruits – Mavis Batey, née Lever – to tut-tut and roll her eyes with good-humoured exasperation. ‘A myth has grown up that Dilly went around in 1939 looking at the girls arriving at Bletchley and picking the most attractive for the Cottage,’ Mrs Batey says, perhaps protesting a little too much. ‘That is completely untrue. Dilly took us on our qualifications.’
    Other experienced codebreakers who had served alongside Denniston in that interwar period, and who were to make such a difference at Bletchley Park, were Josh Cooper, John Jeffreys, Frank Lucas, Nigel de Grey, Oliver Strachey and Colonel John Tiltman, an utterly brilliant veteran cryptographer.
    Oliver Strachey, related to Lytton, was noted for his colourful good humour and his intense musicality. He was a friend of Benjamin Britten. When back in London, Strachey and Britten would enjoy playing duets. As the war intensified, Strachey would find himself taking a pivotal role in the Park’s decoding of Gestapo signals, heading a special department which in the 1940s began to slowly decrypt the hideous bureaucracy of death – the railway timetables, the numbers of people being transported – that surrounded the Holocaust.
    Also highly notable among the codebreakers was Josh Cooper, a physically imposing presence – known to some as ‘the Bear’ – in his middle years, and singular in his mannerisms, often given to exclaiming to himself. In the very early days of Bletchley, he was rather taken with this move from London to the country. ‘We all sat down to lunch together at one long table in the House,’ Cooperwrote. Elsewhere he recalled, ‘a large room on the ground floor had been set aside for Air Section … I remember coming into a scene of chaos with a great mound of books and papers piled on the floor.’
    Cooper also noted right from the start that ‘service personnel wore civilian clothes in the office’, but ‘put on uniform to go on leave, or on duty trips to London etc., in order to be able to use Service travel warrants’. As a