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Bletchley Park Breakers of the Code By Jerome O'Connor
Bletchley Park, with its hulking red brick Victorian mansion, can trace its roots to a landed manor that William the Conqueror awarded to a notable commander after the Battle of Hastings. The estate passed through several succeeding families before being sold in 1883 to a London financier, Sir Herbert Leon. Through the years, the owners periodically enlarged the unassuming residence, adding a servants' wing, ice house, a new entrance hall, a library, a ballroom, and more bedrooms, as well as adding to the existing drawing and dining rooms. Though the mansion lacked architectural harmony and refinement, its location made it ideal for Government use. Bletchley Park stood midway between Oxford and Cambridge, fertile sources for young code-breakers. The main trunk highway, the A5, was only a mile distant. Across the street, the mainline Midland & Scottish Railway connected Bletchley with London's Euston station, and the nerve centers of Whitehall and Downing Street were only 42 miles from Bletchley. For all these reasons, the Government appropriated it in 1938 when war seemed imminent.
Against this background of stagnation, and in the face of the Nazi threat in late 1938, the first 30 members of the government cipher school began basic operations at Bletchley Park in the mansion's castellated tower. As the code-breakers set to work untangling the Enigma puzzle, the staff rapidly increased in size. Lawns and flower beds outside the mansion's drawing room disappeared beneath crude temporary huts. After an early visit, Churchill ordered that the Leons' cherished Victorian maze be sacrificed to make room for two tennis courts for the entertainment of the staff. At an impromptu gathering outside the mansion, the Prime Minister saluted the intelligence officers, all of whom worked in the greatest anonymity, as the "golden geese that never cackled." The odd-bodies and boffins arriving at the estate were a peculiar lot, even by the often droll standards of the time. During the First World War, linguists did most of the code-breaking work, but by the late 1930s, ciphers had grown much more diverse and puzzling, and the civilian occupations of the new code-breakers included crossword puzzle experts, mathematicians, librarians, literature dons, classicists, musicians, language instructors, historians, accountants, bankers, publishing executives, philosophers and pedagogues from museums, and owners of rare book stores. Housed in scores of huts surrounding the mansion, these savants undertook the desperate task of turning intercepted gibberish into plain-language text. The translators, linguists, and specialists focused on the four main branches of the German armed forces, and on the Abwehr (the intelligence service) and OKW—the Nazi general staff, each of which used its own variation of the German code. Naval WRENs operated the hot and noisy decoding machines. Typists transcribed German language plain-text solutions into English. In other huts, clerks catalogued mountains of intercepts, each written in longhand on file cards, into thousands of shoebox-sized cartons. Security for these secret inner workings was extensive. Troops, anti-aircraft batteries, and five RAF air bases formed a protective cordon around the complex. While these defenses would have made Bletchley Park a prickly target to attack, they were mainly stationed in the area so the large intelligence staff would blend in and not attract unwanted attention. After France fell and invasion seemed imminent, a train with engine under constant steam waited at the station to transfer the vital code-breaking equipment to Liverpool and passage to America, so the intelligence work could continue even if the Nazis overran England.
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Copyright © 2001: Primedia Enthusiast Publications, Inc. and Away.com. All Rights Reserved Image: Courtesy Bletchley Park Trust | |
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