CODE BREAKING
B L E TC H L E Y PA R K In a sleepy Buckinghamshire town a window opens on this history-changing, high-security WW2 operation centre, kept secret for decades
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T’S 1938 AND A WEALTHY ENGLISH family’s 581-acre country estate, 50 miles north of London, comes on the market. Swiftly purchased by a housing developer with an eye on its potential, given its excellent transport links, the chance to recoup much of the cost, by selling on the 58 acres immediately surrounding the mansion, proved irresistible. Little did he, or anyone else, know that the mansion would become the hub of the most closely-kept secret operation of the following seven years, home of the Government Code & Cypher School, the code-breaking heroes and heroines of Bletchley Park. The GC&CS was formed, soon after WW1 by a pragmatic merger of two armed forces departments, the Royal Navy’s NID25 and the Army’s MIiB, and based in Central London, therefore at risk if the anticipated second conflict were to happen. With the War Office unwilling to find the funds, the head of GC&CS, Admiral Sinclair, convinced that hostilities were inevitable, seized the initiative and purchased Bletchley Park in May 1938, confident of its suitability, being comfortably distant from the capital and on both the main north-south railway line and another line, which ran east-west, taking in the university cities of Cambridge and Oxford. In September of that year, as tensions with Germany increased, Commander Alastair Denniston moved the London-based office of GC&CS and MI6 to Bletchley, as a real-time evacuation in the face of imminent war. Today known as ‘Captain Ridley’s Shooting Party’, lessons learnt from the three-week deployment gave the Codebreakers a huge advantage come 1939, including the need to recruit more of the eclectic mix of specialist staff needed to make it work. For over 10 years, Nazi Germany had been communicating enciphered messages and Denniston needed both extremely clever, ‘professor’ types as crypto-analysts and, because of the electromechanical devices employed by the enemy, formally-trained advanced mathematicians. Naturally, linguists versed in German, Italian, Japanese and, later, Russian were of paramount importance. Above all, whether in senior or junior positions, all members of staff were obliged to maintain absolute secrecy, not simply about their own duties but even the very existence of ‘BP’. It is a true miracle that, overall up to à
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