Announcements
Wednesday, April 20. Bletchley Park Presents: Building Blocks
1 p.m. London, 8 a.m. Eastern, Register to get Zoom link.
Thursday, May 12, Willian Kent Krueger
7 p.m. Chase Center on the Riverfront, Free, but register
Trip to NYC and the Morgan Library, June 22
Village of Brandywine and Boscov's Travel, $112 for transportation and tours.
Also see Kathy Fedetz (kqfedetz@gmail.com)
About the Book: Author's Note
“The biggest bloody lunatic asylum in Britain.” A gate guard described Bletchley Park in those words—and to the bemused eyes of many, wartime BP more resembled a madhouse or a wacky university campus than a top-secret decryption facility. Codebreakers pitching tea mugs into the lake after fits of rumination; codebreakers cycling to work in gas masks to avoid hay fever; codebreakers playing rounders among the trees, sunbathing nude on the side lawn, and prank-riding laundry bins into unlocked loos—BP’s reputation for eccentricity was inevitable, given its tendency to recruit nerds and oddballs.
The staff had an extraordinarily relaxed attitude toward weird personalities; square pegs weren’t required to fit into round holes, and in consequence worked spectacularly well at their nearly impossible job.
About the Book: Author's Note
Without the achievements of the people who so thoroughly cracked the supposedly uncrackable Enigma codes used by the Axis powers, the war might very well have been lost. At the very least, it would have dragged on much longer and cost many, many more lives.
Before war was even declared, a handful of Oxford and Cambridge men were recruited into intelligence and set to work on Enigma, building on the genius work of Polish cryptanalysts Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski—brilliant men whose earlier Enigma breakthroughs made Bletchley Park’s success possible.
The early BP cryptanalysts recruited trusted friends and acquaintances from college tutorial groups and university connections, eventually branching out to women’s colleges and secretarial pools as a scattershot organization flung across a few prefabricated huts grew into an intelligence factory employing thousands.
About the Book: Author's Note
Churchill relied heavily on Park intelligence to guide his public policy; he visited the grounds in September 1941, where he commended the codebreakers on their silence as well as their work.
There was certainly some information-passing within the Park—wartime diaries and memoirs record that BP workers weren’t above discreetly trading news to keep an eye on friends and loved ones—but security to the outside was watertight: the Axis powers never found out how thoroughly Britain was reading their mail.
About the Book: Author's Note
The burden of secrecy took its toll: illness, burnout, and breakdowns were common among BP staff. To combat the stress, a thriving social life grew up—off-duty codebreakers may not have had a Mad Hatters literary society reading books like Gone with the Wind (a bestseller of the time known for sparking controversial discussions even in the forties) or an anonymous weekly humor column, but they played in amateur dramatics, competed in chess tournaments, put on musical revues, practiced Highland dancing, and much more. The codebreakers worked hard and played hard, and veterans remember finding an open-mindedness at BP that was sorely lacking in ordinary life.
About the Book: Author's Note
Women enjoyed a level of equality with male coworkers that they were unlikely to get on the outside for years or decades; homosexual members tended to be tacitly acknowledged and accepted; people who would today be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder could work without being forced to mask their neurodivergence. BP might have appalled military personnel with its casual attitudes to dress, language, and first-naming, but it was in many ways a haven of acceptance.
About the Book: Author's Note
Osla Kendall is lightly fictionalized from the real-life Osla Benning, a beautiful, effervescent, Canadian-born heiress and Hut 4 translator who was Prince Philip’s long-term wartime girlfriend.
I have renamed my Osla out of respect for Osla Benning’s still-living children; the real Osla was not at the famous bombing of the Café de Paris, was already married by the time her ex-boyfriend married Princess Elizabeth, and spent her life as a diplomatic wife rather than a columnist.
But I have remained faithful to the broad strokes of her life in bringing my Osla to the page: lonely daughter to a frequently married society mother (who did maintain a suite at Claridge’s), irrepressible firebrand who finagled her way back to England on a purloined air ticket rather than sit out the war in Canada; polished debutante who gleefully got her hands dirty building Hurricanes before her fluent German landed her at Bletchley Park.
About the Book: Author's Note
She was introduced to Prince Philip at the beginning of the war by her friend (and fellow goddaughter of Lord Mountbatten) Sarah Norton, and the two promptly became inseparable.
Philip and Osla bonded over similar privileged but lonely childhoods and a mutual penchant for pranks and fun; he gave her his naval insignia, took her out whenever he was in town, and wrote to her when at sea.
The two drifted apart toward the end of the war, around the same time a young Princess Elizabeth appears to have caught Philip’s eye at a Christmas weekend following her fundraising Aladdin performance at Windsor (a performance he nearly missed after a bout of the flu while holed up at Claridge’s!).
About the Book: Author's Note
No one can know whether Osla’s oath of secrecy might have contributed to her estrangement with Philip, or if his German connections might have caused difficulties for Osla at BP, but there was certainly doubt about Philip of Greece’s familial background in the early days.
Post-Philip, Osla Benning had a short-lived engagement to a cad whose emerald ring she removed with a flippant “Never liked green stones, anyway!” before marrying John Patrick Edward Chandos Henniker-Major, a Rifle Brigade officer with a Military Cross won fighting beside Czechoslovakian partisans.
He would eventually join the Foreign Office and become the eighth Baron Henniker, and he and Osla did indeed dine with Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret before the royal wedding in some vague idea that Osla would give the royal bride tips on handling her husband-to-be. (No word on how or if that was discussed over the canapés!)
About the Book: Author's Note
Lord Henniker remarked wryly that the tabloids frequently tried to dig up dirt on the lifelong friendship between his wife and the Duke of Edinburgh, who stood as godfather to Osla’s eldest son. Anyone interested in the real Osla should read The Road to Station X, the memoir by her friend Sarah Baring (née Norton) of their time together at Bletchley Park, from which I repurposed many of Osla Benning’s droll one-liners and high-wire pranks for Osla Kendall.
About the Book: Author's Note
Beth Finch is a fictional composite of two very real women. One is nameless, a codebreaker who supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown after her love affair with a married BP colleague collapsed—the woman was sent to an asylum in fear that she would divulge secret information in her broken state.
The other contributor to Beth’s character and achievements is Mavis Lever, one of Bletchley Park’s stars. Mavis was recruited in her teens and became one of “Dilly’s Fillies”; all of Beth’s codebreaking achievements—the breaking of “Today’s the day minus three,” which would lead to the Cape Matapan victory; the all-L’s crib; the cracking of Abwehr Enigma—are pulled from records of Mavis Lever’s feats as one of Bletchley Park’s few female cryptanalysts.
About the Book: Author's Note
I dramatized Mavis’s achievements with a fictional character because I did not wish to imply that one of BP’s greatest legends went to an asylum when in the real historic record she married a Hut 6 codebreaker as brilliant as herself and served BP until the war ended.
I was not able to discover what became of the nameless codebreaker confined to an asylum. Clockwell and the Kiloran Bay facility are both fictional, but institutions of that type certainly existed, functioning as dumping grounds for inconvenient women as well as mentally ill ones. Sadly, many lobotomies were performed on the mentally ill during this period—the procedure was eventually outlawed as medically barbaric, but not before thousands of patients were maimed. The most famous victim of the surgery is probably JFK’s intellectually disabled sister, Rosemary Kennedy: subjected to a prefrontal lobotomy at 23 to calm her emotional outbursts. She spent the remaining sixty years of her life institutionalized, reduced to the mental capacity of a toddler.
About the Book: Author's Note
Mab is fictional, representing the many women who served as BP’s worker bees. Such women came from all walks of life, from shopgirls to lords’ daughters, and served as decodists, filers, and bombe machine operators, among many other jobs. Some found the work boring and some found it fascinating—but overall, their reminiscences speak fondly of the relaxed and egalitarian attitude at Bletchley Park.
BP did not employ many women at the top levels of management and cryptanalysis, and women workers tended to be paid less than their male counterparts, but it was still a place where women’s voices were valued, and many missed its camaraderie and purpose once the war was over.
About the Book: Author's Note
Mab’s two husbands are both fictional as well; Francis Gray is modeled after Great War poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, who immortalized the horror of trench warfare and lost innocence in verse, and Mike Sharpe is a tip of the hat to the hardworking RAF engineers who kept the bombe machines humming.
The idea that a husband and wife could both work at Bletchley Park without realizing it at the time or telling each other afterward might seem like a soap opera twist, but it really happened, and more than once. Sometimes a couple only made the realization after decades of marriage!
Bletchley Park
The Turing bombe machine in Bletchley Park
About the Book: Author's Note
Harry is based on two real-life Bletchley Park codebreakers: Maurice Zarb, a Hut 4 recruit of Maltese, Arab, and Egyptian descent who came to BP via a prominent London banking family (I included him as Harry’s cousin so as not to erase a real man from BP history), and Keith Batey, a brilliant Hut 6 mathematician who worked with Mavis Lever, fell in love with her over the rods and cribs, and married her.
Keith, like Harry and indeed many male cryptanalysts, suffered keen guilt over not being able to enlist on the front lines, and wangled permission to join the Fleet Air Arm, where he served briefly before returning to codebreaking.
Bletchley Park men were frequently subjected to social shaming, both from strangers and from their own unwitting family members, for their apparent refusal to join the fight—shaming they could not refute, since they could divulge no details of their service.
About the Book: Author's Note
Most of the other Bletchley Park people mentioned here are real:
Margaret Rock, Sarah Norton, Miss Senyard, Commanders Denniston and Travis, Asa Briggs, Michael Cohen, Olive Knox, Ian Fleming (of later James Bond fame, who liaised with BP from the naval intelligence division), and Valerie Glassborow, who would become Kate Middleton’s grandmother.
Alan Turing, one of the great brains of the twentieth century, was the shining light of Hut 8 and would make history later with his contributions in the field of computer science and artificial intelligence.
He was prosecuted for homosexuality and sentenced to chemical castration in the fifties, a hideous miscarriage of justice for which the British government has since issued an apology. Turing died of cyanide poisoning not long after, probably self-inflicted.
About the Book: Author's Note
Dilly Knox was one of the Park’s eccentric geniuses, notorious for his absentmindedness, his Alice-in-Wonderland approach to codebreaking, and his habit of recruiting only women for his team.
He did not have the mania for keeping his codebreakers in ignorance that prevailed in the other huts, stating, “Such action cripples the activities of the cryptographer who depends on cribs,” and so his ladies tended to be better informed about the nature of their work than their colleagues. Cancer forced Knox’s retirement mid-war, but he worked at home until the end, reportedly on Soviet ciphers.
The key to his library wall safe at Courns Wood was never found after his death, which gave me the idea to speculate what that safe could possibly have held.
About the Book: Author's Note
Unlikely as it may seem, there really was a traitor at Bletchley Park who passed information to the Soviet Union during the war. John Cairncross worked in Hut 4 and then MI-6, and served as the basis for Giles Talbot: a red-haired individualist who became convinced that Britain was not sharing enough information with its Russian allies and took it upon himself to smuggle hundreds of decrypts out of BP to his Soviet contact.
Such an activity was relatively easy, as Osla points out in The Rose Code, because the guardhouse effected no searches of departing shift workers (indeed, there would have been almost no way to efficiently search thousands of departing workers every day for tiny slips of paper).
About the Book: Author's Note
Cairncross’s spy activities were not exposed until years later when he was living abroad; thus he was never prosecuted. To the end of his life he maintained that he was a patriot and not a traitor; he claimed his actions saved thousands of Russian lives and denied ever passing intelligence to the USSR after the war.
He was far from the only Soviet mole in MI-5, MI-6, and the Foreign Office: the ring known as the Cambridge Five (a group of Englishmen recruited during their university days) was uncovered in the highest reaches of British intelligence during the sixties. Some escaped to the Soviet Union and lived out the rest of their lives, others made deals; none were prosecuted.
About the Book: Author's Note
It has long been posited that there were more Soviet moles beyond Cairncross and the others—Giles Talbot was created to fill that unknown void. In my imagination, his discovery at the end of The Rose Code prompts the investigation that will eventually unearth the Cambridge Five.
The Russians used their own methods of encryption during the war but definitely experimented with using captured Enigma machines, even finding ways to make them more secure postwar.
As always, I have taken some liberties with the historical record in order to serve the story. There may be some inaccuracies in the depictions of Osla, Mab, and Beth’s earliest shift work; Bletchley Park was still in its infancy in 1940, protocols changed constantly, and the day-to-day operating procedures of those early days in the huts proved very difficult to research.
About the Book: Author's Note
Osla’s indexing/filing section of Hut 4 was possibly not known as the Debutantes’ Den until 1942;
the arrival of the Glassborow twins to Bletchley Park was moved up somewhat; Bettys in York didn’t lose their apostrophe until the sixties;
the chemist in Bletchley village wasn’t a Boots; and although the bombe operators did receive a compressed lecture about how and why the machine functioned, that lecture wasn’t approved until later in the machines’ usage than depicted here.
Mab as a civilian would probably not have worked long-term as a bombe machine operator since the bombes were serviced by Wrens (though they did need to be tall, hence my supposition that a tall civilian woman might have been called upon to fill in).
About the Book: Author's Note
The real Osla did build airplanes at the Hawker Siddeley factory, though they may not have begun accepting women as early as I have depicted here, and she didn’t come to BP until 1941, arriving with Sarah Norton, with whom she billeted at Aspley Guise throughout her service.
Osla and Philip’s romance is necessarily fictionalized, since we don’t know private details of their intimate moments. I have attempted wherever possible to use Philip’s real words (his stiff-upper-lip “I just had to get on with it” response to his own pain over his mother’s incarceration and his shattered family; his diary-entry accounts of what the Cape Matapanbattle and other naval engagements were like), but he was a self-contained man even when young, and Osla was even more bound by secrecy, so my imagination has had to put words in their mouths.
About the Book: Author's Note
I’ve done so with a respectful attempt to depict the heady first love of two young people destined to find happiness with others, who nevertheless must have shared something very genuine and important considering that they remained friends throughout their lives.
About the Book: Author's Note
The heavy air raid on the town of Coventry in late 1944 is fictional, though the town’s devastation during an earlier raid is true and became the foundation for one of Bletchley Park’s great real-life mysteries: the claim that Hut 6 broke the warning about that raid, but Churchill sacrificed the town to protect the safety of the code. To this day, some veterans insist the message break’s timing was fishy, while others insist news of the raid simply wasn’t cracked in time to effect a warning.
I come down on the latter side of the argument, but when the time came to enact my own fictional drama of a raid being known in advance and no warning given, I placed it all at Coventry as a nod to the existing urban legend.
About the Book: Author's Note
There is no evidence that the brilliant Margaret Rock, who enjoyed a long, illustrious, exceedingly secret career at GCHQ [Government Communications Headquarters] after Bletchley Park, knew about the hidden bunker where a stash of undestroyed Enigma machines and bombes were stored for a rainy day . . . but there was such a bunker until 1959, and it’s entirely possible that the machines were lent out to aid the postwar boom of computer science projects funded by many universities and corporations.
Turing was involved with one such project in Manchester, and another was funded by Birkbeck College in London—but even if the Birkbeck College project borrowed a bombe from GCHQ’s bunker and had to send that machine to a maintenance lab, it was in all probability not used in an illicit off-the-books meeting of Bletchley Park codebreakers trying to catch a traitor on the eve of the royal wedding!
About the Book: Author's Note
And yet . . . if there had ever been a dire need for BP’s brilliant personnel to dust off their skills postwar, I have no doubt that such a secret would have been flawlessly kept.
Bletchley Park is at last receiving credit for its wartime achievements; the doors have been thrown open and matters that would have been unthinkable to whisper in 1941 are now discussed openly under the official Twitter handle @bletchleypark.
But does that mean BP and those who worked there have shared all their secrets? Not by a long shot. There are undoubtedly stories—ciphers broken, off-the-books meetings convened, betrayals covered up—that have been taken to the grave.
In June 2014, the Duchess of Cambridge [Kate Middleton] Reopens Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park (Britannica)
The Bletchley Park site in Buckinghamshire (now in Milton Keynes), England, was about 50 miles northwest of London, conveniently located near a railway line that served both Oxford and Cambridge universities.
The property consisted of a Victorian manor house and 58 acres of grounds. The British government acquired it in 1938 and made it a station of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), designated as Station X.
At the start of the war in 1939, the station had only 200 workers, but by late 1944 it had a staff of nearly 9,000, working in three shifts around the clock.
Experts at crossword-puzzle solving and chess were among those hired.
About three-fourths of the workers were women.
Bletchley Park (Britannica)
To facilitate their work, the staff designed and built equipment, most notably the bulky electromechanical code-breaking machines called Bombes.
Later on, in January 1944, came Colossus, an early electronic computer with 1,600 vacuum tubes.
The manor house was too small to accommodate everything and everyone, so dozens of wooden outbuildings had to be built. These buildings were called huts, although some were sizable.
Turing was working in Hut 8 when he and his associates solved the Enigma.
Other new buildings were built from cement blocks and identified by letters, such as Block B.
Colossus Computer
The Colossus computer at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, England, c. 1943
Bletchley Park (Britannica)
Operations were carried out under an injunction of strict secrecy that was not lifted even after the war ended.
Only in 1974, when Frederick William Winterbotham received permission to publish his memoir, The Ultra Secret, did the world begin to learn what had been achieved at Bletchley Park.
The property is now maintained as a museum. https://bletchleypark.org.uk/
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
The site [of Bletchley Park] appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as part of the Manor of Eaton. Browne Willis built a mansion there in 1711, but after Thomas Harrison purchased the property in 1793, it was pulled down.
It was first known as Bletchley Park after its purchase by the architect Samuel Lipscomb Seckham in 1877 who built a house there. The estate of 581 acres was bought in 1883 by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon, who expanded the then-existing house into what architect Landis Gores called a "maudlin and monstrous pile" combining Victorian Gothic, Tudor, and Dutch Baroque styles.
After the death of Herbert Leon in 1926, the estate continued to be occupied by his widow Fanny until her death in 1937.
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
In 1938, the mansion and much of the site was bought by a builder for a housing estate, but in May 1938 Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6), bought the mansion and 58 acres of land for £6,000 (£392,000 today) for use by GC&CS and SIS in the event of war. He used his own money as the Government said they did not have the budget to do so.
A key advantage, as seen by Sinclair and his colleagues who inspected the site under cover as "Captain Ridley's shooting party") was Bletchley's geographical centrality. It was almost immediately adjacent to Bletchley railway station, where the "Varsity Line" between Oxford and Cambridge – whose universities were expected to supply many of the code-breakers – met the main West Coast railway line connecting London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
Watling Street, the main road linking London to the north-west (subsequently the A5) was close by, and high-volume communication links were available at the telegraph and telephone repeater station in nearby Fenny Stratford.
Bletchley Park was known as "B.P." to those who worked there. It was also known as "Station X," "London Signals Intelligence Centre," and "Government Communications Headquarters" during the war.
The formal posting of the many "Wrens" – members of the Women's Royal Naval Service – working there, was to HMS Pembroke V.
Royal Air Force names of Bletchley Park and its outstations included RAF Eastcote, RAF Lime Grove and RAF Church Green.
The postal address that staff had to use was "Room 47, Foreign Office."
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
After the war, the Government Code & Cypher School became the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), moving to Eastcote in 1946 and to Cheltenham in the 1950s. The site was used by various government agencies, including the GPO and the Civil Aviation Authority. One large building, block F, was demolished in 1987 by which time the site was being run down with tenants leaving.
In 1990 the site was at risk of being sold for housing development. However, Milton Keynes Council made it into a conservation area. Bletchley Park Trust was set up in 1991 by a group of people who recognized the site's importance, including Tony Sale who in 1994 became the first director of the Bletchley Park Museums.
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
On the day Britain declared war on Germany, Denniston, who was operational head of GC&CS from 1919 to 1942, wrote to the Foreign Office about recruiting "men of the professor type." Personal networking drove early recruitments, particularly of men from Cambridge and Oxford universities. Trustworthy women were similarly recruited for administrative and clerical jobs.
In one 1941 recruiting stratagem, The Daily Telegraph was asked to organize a crossword competition, after which promising contestants were discreetly approached about "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort."
Denniston recognized, however, that the enemy's use of electromechanical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would also be needed; Oxford's Peter Twinn joined GC&CS in February 1939; Cambridge's Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman began training in 1938 and reported to Bletchley the day after war was declared, along with John Jeffreys.
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
Later-recruited cryptanalysts included the mathematicians Derek Taunt, Jack Good, Bill Tutte, and Max Newman; historian Harry Hinsley, and chess champions Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry.
Joan Clarke was one of the few women employed at Bletchley as a full-fledged cryptanalyst.
This eclectic staff of "Boffins and Debs" (scientists and debutantes) caused GC&CS to be whimsically dubbed the "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society."
During a September 1941 morale-boosting visit, Winston Churchill reportedly remarked to Denniston: "I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally."
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
Six weeks later, having failed to get sufficient typing and unskilled staff to achieve the productivity that was possible, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Milner-Barry wrote directly to Churchill. His response was "Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."
After initial training at the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School set up by John Tiltman (initially at an RAF depot in Buckingham and later in Bedford – where it was known locally as "the Spy School") staff worked a six-day week, rotating through three shifts: 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. (the most disliked shift), and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each with a half-hour meal break. At the end of the third week, a worker went off at 8 a.m. and came back at 4 p.m., thus putting in 16 hours on that last day.
Bletchley Park (Wikipedia)—History
The irregular hours affected workers' health and social life, as well as the routines of the nearby homes at which most staff lodged. The work was tedious and demanded intense concentration; staff got one week's leave four times a year, but some "girls" collapsed and required extended rest.[42] Recruitment took place to combat a shortage of experts in Morse code and German.[43]
In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, nearly 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations. About three-quarters of these were women. Many of the women came from middle-class backgrounds and held degrees in mathematics, physics and engineering; they were given this chance due to the lack of men, who had been sent to war. They performed calculations and coding and hence were integral to the computing processes.
Bletchley Park
The female staff in Dilwyn Knox's section were sometimes termed "Dilly's Fillies." Knox's methods enabled Mavis Lever (who married mathematician and fellow code-breaker Keith Batey) and Margaret Rock to solve a German code, the Abwehr cipher.
Many of the women had backgrounds in languages, particularly French, German and Italian. Among them were Rozanne Colchester, a translator who worked mainly for the Italian air forces Section, and Cicely Mayhew, recruited straight from university, who worked in Hut 8, translating decoded German Navy signals.
For a long time, the British Government failed to acknowledge the contributions the personnel at Bletchley Park had made. Their work achieved official recognition only in 2009.
Bletchley Park
After the United States joined World War II, a number of American cryptographers were posted to Hut 3, and from May 1943 onwards there was close co-operation between British and American intelligence.
In contrast, the Soviet Union was never officially told of Bletchley Park and its activities – a reflection of Churchill's distrust of the Soviets even during the US-UK-USSR alliance imposed by the Nazi threat.
The only direct enemy damage to the site was done 20–21 November 1940 by three bombs probably intended for Bletchley railway station; Hut 4, shifted two feet off its foundation, was winched back into place as work inside continued.
Women of Bletchley Park
Margaret Osla Henniker-Major, Lady Henniker-Major (née Benning) was a Canadian debutante, who worked at Bletchley Park, was Prince Philip's first girlfriend, and later married John Henniker-Major (later 8th Baron Henniker).
Benning went to stay with her godfather Lord Mountbatten, who mentioned to her friend, and fellow god-daughter, Sarah Baring that Prince Philip (Mountbatten's nephew) did not have a girlfriend; Baring acted as matchmaker.
Women of Bletchley Park
According to Baring, "It was obvious that he was Osla's boyfriend in a simple, nice way, so to speak."
"I do know that he was her first love," says her daughter, Janie Spring. "She never told me about him for years. She just said: 'I fell in love with a naval officer.’"
Early in the war, she and Baring went to build Hurricane fighter planes at a Hawker Siddeley factory close to Slough, and shared a cottage nearby.
A few months later, by summer 1941, they were both tested on their German language skills and posted to Hut 4 at Bletchley Park, the naval section, as linguists.
Women of Bletchley Park
Joan Clarke (Joan Lowther Murray) was a cryptanalyst and numismatist. Though she did not personally seek the spotlight, her important role in the Enigma project that decrypted Nazi Germany's secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.
Jean Valentine was an operator of the bombe decryption device in Hut 11 at Bletchley Park. She was a member of the "Wrens" (Women's Royal Naval Service).[ Recently, Jean Valentine has been involved with the reconstruction of the bombe at Bletchley Park Museum, completed in 2006. She said: "Unless people come pouring through the doors, a vital piece of history is lost. The more we can educate them, the better." She demonstrates the reconstructed bombe at the Bletchley Park Museum and also leads tours there.
Women of Bletchley Park
Jane Hughes Fawcett was assigned to Hut 6, a "Decoding Room" of women only. Conditions were poor—dimly lit, poorly heated, and poorly ventilated—and the women worked long hours under extreme pressure. In Hut 6, Jane would receive the daily Enigma keys and type them into their own Typex machines. They would then determine if the messages were recognizable German.
On May 25, 1941, Hughes and several other women were briefed on the search for the German battleship Bismarck. Shortly thereafter, she decoded a message referring to the Bismarck that detailed its current position and destination in France. The Bismarck was subsequently attacked by the Royal Navy and sunk on 27 May. This was the first significant victory by the codebreakers, demonstrating the utility of the project.
Women of Bletchley Park
Her work did not come to light until decades later, during the 1990s, as it had been classified under Britain's Official Secrets Act. Compared with the publicly acknowledged heroics of the navy, Fawcett said "we felt slightly ashamed of having only done Bletchley, like also-rans. So when everything we had done, which we knew had been very hard work and incredibly demanding, suddenly showed its head and we were being asked to talk about it, it felt quite overwhelming. I'd never told a soul, not even my husband. My grandchildren were very surprised."
Women of Bletchley Park
Charlotte Elizabeth Webb (later Vine-Stevens) worked as a code breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II at the age of 18. Starting in 1941 she joined the British Auxiliary Territorial Service because, she said, she "wanted to do something more for the war effort than bake sausage rolls."
Webb grew up with a German au pair before becoming an exchange student in Germany. Upon arrival at Bletchley she was tasked with cataloging encrypted German radio messages intercepted by the British, contributing to the breaking of the German cipher Enigma. During her time at Bletchley she also worked on intercepted Japanese messages. After the war ended in Europe, Webb traveled to Washington D.C. to assist the Americans with the war in the Pacific.
Webb was made a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2015. In 2021, Webb's work at Bletchley Park was recognized by the government of France with the award of the Légion d’Honneur.
Women of Bletchley Park
Joan Elisabeth Lowther Murray, (née Clarke) was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist best known for her work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. Although she did not personally seek the spotlight, her role in the Enigma project that decrypted Nazi Germany's secret communications earned her awards and citations, such as appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), in 1946.
In June 1940, Clarke was recruited by her former academic supervisor, Gordon Welchman, worked in Hut 8, and quickly became the only female practitioner of Banburismus, a cryptanalytic process developed by Alan Turing. Clarke became deputy head of Hut 8 in 1944, although she was prevented from progressing because of her gender, and was paid less than the men. Clarke and Turing had been close friends since soon after they met, and continued to be until Turing's death in 1954.
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
From The Guardian, July 24, 2018
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Deciphering enemy code during the second world war was arguably the first role for women in tech
On Christmas Eve 1941, most people would have been gathering together with their families, wrapping (modest) presents or attending church services. Not so for 19-year-old Joan Joslin, who instead was summoned to London by the Foreign Office for an interview.
“I met a very off-putting woman named Ms. Moore who asked me all sorts of questions,” recalls the talkative veteran, now 95 and living in Essex. After a very short interview, Moore stuffed some papers into Joslin’s hands; it was a warrant to travel to a town called Bletchley.
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
“She told me: ‘You must go home and pack your case and leave at once. Don’t tell anyone where you are going. You can tell your mother you’re going to Bletchley but don’t tell her anything else.’”
Given the nature of their work, which involved cracking foreign military codes, this top-secret process was a typical way those selected to work at Bletchley Park, a mansion in Buckinghamshire, were enlisted. All were bound by oath to never speak about their roles.
It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when wartime information became declassified, that people were allowed to talk about their time there. Still, when the war was ongoing, many were excited by the prospect of a new adventure. “I was very happy because I thought it sounded like it was going to be interesting,” says Joslin.
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
First, she was first placed in Hollerith school, in a separate building to Bletchley Park, where she spent six weeks learning how to adapt Hollerith accounting machines into code-breaking machines. She also taught members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, also known as Wrens, how to work the devices.
Later, her role involved intercepting messages from Japanese aircraft and German naval vessels. “Sometimes we would solve them in a day, other times it would take weeks. We learnt all our swear words there,” she chuckles. “Messages contained awful words and naughty sayings.”
When successful, their codebreaking efforts could have a monumental impact on the war effort. The decoding of one message led to the location of the Scharnhorst, one of Germany’s most famous battleships, being revealed. Allied forces were then able to attack and defeat the ship in the Battle of the North Cape, off Norway.
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Arriving at Bletchley from the Auxiliary Territorial Service aged just 18, Betty Webb spent four years at the codebreaking center working in various roles, including intercepting German police messages, which revealed the beginning of the Holocaust with the killing of thousands of Jews on the eastern front, and paraphrasing decoded Japanese messages. Despite the importance of the messages, Webb admits she was unaware of the significance behind the complex codes.
“The messages were in groups of five letters or figures in Morse code – nothing was clear at all. Some dates appeared. It was total gibberish, but you had to register everything, so senior people could call on a date or message at any time. We knew very little of what was going on. We really were in the dark.”
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Joyce Aylard was stationed at Eastcote in London, where she operated the Bombe machine, designed by codebreaker Alan Turing to crack the Enigma code. Her role was to test different combinations to break the code. “These machines were very loud and noisy,” recalls Aylard, now 93 and living in Barnet. “I think I lost my hearing in my right ear from operating these bombes.”
When a code was broken, someone senior would come into the room and shout “job up”, she says. “So you’d stop and try another code. I was very pleased.” When the war in Europe finished, she was transferred to Bletchley Park, where she worked on cracking the Japanese code.
For Joslin, Bletchley ended up being more than just a place of work. She met Kenneth, her future husband, on her first day – although he didn’t leave a great first impression. “I arrived with another girl, who was blonde, and I was a brunette,” she recalls. “I heard him say to another engineer: ‘I’m going to have the blonde, you can have the dark one.’ I wasn’t impressed.”
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
But she worked with him for three years and the pair became great friends. “Suddenly, one day, it clicked,” she says. “He was really kind – he used to bring me a toffee every day.” Still, even though they were both working in the same room intercepting enemy secrets, they didn’t talk about their roles. “He didn’t know what I was doing, even though we were all working in an open room with each other. It was a closely guarded secret.”
Joslin also remembers Turing, the man Churchill credited with shortening the war by two years. “He was a very nice man, very shy,” she remembers. “We all used to have lunch at Bletchley on the green beside the lake, but he didn’t converse much with us. He was very eccentric. He used to do funny things like have a mug tied with a bit of string around his wrist, and because he had asthma, he used to wear a gas mask when he was cycling around on his old-fashioned bike.”
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
What saddens all of the women is that their families died without ever knowing what they achieved during the war. “Both sets of my family – my family and my husband’s – died without knowing, which makes me feel sad,” says Joslin. “I could never tell my mother anything. ”My father was very upset that he didn’t know what I did,” adds Aylard.
As we wrap up our conversation, Joslin has one last story to share. She recalls when the war ended in 1945. She and her husband had been given leave, so they left to travel to Euston. “I’ll never forget the whole station was crowded with soldiers and I just wanted to shout: ‘The war’s over.’ And I couldn’t.”
Meet the Female Codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Still, like all the women, she looks back at her time at Bletchley with the same overwhelming feeling of pride. “We all knew we were doing something good, and we all worked hard. There were no grumbles. We just got on with it.”
The Turing Bombe, Frank Carter
From the Rutherford Journal, The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (http://rutherfordjournal.org/article030108.html)
The successes in breaking Enigma ciphers at Bletchley Park contributed greatly to the defeat of the Axis powers and significantly shortened the duration of the war.
In breaking these ciphers the Bombes had a hugely important role by transforming the process of breaking the German cipher messages from slow hand based procedures to one that resembled the operation of an industrial production line.
At its peak this operation enabled some 4000 messages to be broken every day and provided the Allies with unprecedented levels of intelligence about the intentions of the enemy.
The Turing Bombe, Frank Carter
During the course of the war over 200 bombes were constructed and used operationally to break the cipher messages transmitted by all three branches of the German Armed Forces. Some of the messages transmitted by the German Abwehr (Secret Service) were also broken by means of the Bombes.
At the end of the war most of the machines were destroyed although a small number were retained for a few years before they too were scrapped, so that finally none survived. The extreme levels of secrecy surrounding the wartime activities at Bletchley resulted in the public being totally unaware of what had transpired there and of the remarkable technical innovations that had taken place.
The Turing Bombe, Frank Carter
Only after the security embargo was lifted in 1974 did it became evident that machines had played an important role in the ‘code-breaking’ work that had provided the wartime ‘Ultra’ intelligence, but no details were revealed about them or the tasks which they carried out.
Some years later in 1992 the Bletchley Park Trust was set up to establish a permanent Museum as a tribute to the remarkable people who worked at BP and to commemorate their achievements and successes.
Since none of the original Bombes had survived it was decided to set up a project that it was hoped would ultimately lead to the construction of a working machine.
The Turing Bombe, Frank Carter
This hugely ambitious task started in 1995 when GCHQ released the engineering drawings of the Bombe to the Trust. In July 2007 the newly completed machine, appropriately named ‘Phoenix’, was officially commissioned by H.R.H the Duke of Kent.
The Bombe was an essential tool in the process of breaking Enigma signals; it is not a computer, and it does not perform numerical calculations. Its wartime function was to carry out a systematic search based upon certain logical considerations, to find parts of the Enigma keys that had been used to encipher the intercepted messages. These keys were changed regularly at least once every day.
The Turing Bombe, Frank Carter
The Enigma machine generates cipher-text from the corresponding sequence of plain-text typed on its keyboard.
When a letter key is depressed the movement first causes one or more of the rotors in the machine to move and then closes a switch under the key to complete an electrical circuit that lights a lamp (one from a panel of 26 lamps) to indicate the corresponding cipher-text letter.
The convoluted wiring of the circuit passes through the interior of the rotors, and also through a device known as the plug-board. As a consequence of the movement of the rotors, the internal circuits connecting the keys to the lamps change at every keystroke.
See the original article for a detailed explanation.
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