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The Forgotten Genius of Gordon Welchman
At least a dozen OMs were recruited into the famous Bletchley Park Code and Cipher School in WW2, some straight from the Maths Upper Sixth. This important pipeline was set up by the Maths Beak Alan Robson (CR 1911-47) and Gordon Welchman (C3 1920-25), one of his most brilliant pupils. Sadly, due to the total, absolute and decades-long secrecy demanded from those involved, it is almost forgotten that Marlborough College produced such innovative minds like Welchman’s, who, despite being a major figure in one of the most vital projects in the Second World War, has never been properly recognised as such. James Spender (C2 1987-92) delves into the history of Enigma, the ingenuity and subsequent demise of Gordon Welchman, and the stories of Hut 6.
Marlburian Mathematicians before WWII Like many Marlburians, Gordon Welchman was the son of a clergyman, born in 1906 in Fishponds, Bristol. In 1920, six years after his elder brother, Eric, was tragically killed at Mons, he joined Marlborough on a Foundation Scholarship a term ahead of John Betjeman (B2 1920-25), and two ahead of Anthony Blunt (C3 1921-26) and Louis MacNeice (C3 1921-26). Years later, Gordon reminisced with his son Nick (C3 1954-55) of his enjoyment of cycling, music and Corps field days – so much so he would have become an Artillery officer had it not been for the inspirational Head of Maths, Alan Robson. The school was ‘at the crest of its wave of scholarship winning at this time’ wrote Thomas Worsley (C1 1921-26), in Flannelled Fool. ‘A high proportion of the boys came from bookish homes; and there was always a small hard core of
The Enigma machine and Hut 6
intellectuals at the top of the school on its scholastic side.’ A newspaper had also reported that ‘Marlborough is not a public school, it is a miracle’. The first OM to join the new Government Code and Cipher School in 1924, five years after formation from the First World War codebreakers Admiralty Room 40, was Hugh Foss (C3 1915-21), younger brother of Brigadier Charles Foss VC (C3 1899-1902). In 1927, Foss was the first British codebreaker to analyse the commercial version of the Enigma machine, identifying a weakness in what the German military thought was an ‘impregnable’ device.
Cambridge to Bletchley Welchman got a double first in Maths at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was then elected a fellow of Sidney Sussex in 1929. Former students fondly remembered his dapper dress sense and continual, unsuccessful attempts to light his pipe throughout lectures. In 1934, he started to write Introduction to Algebraic Geometry, collaborating with Alan Robson. Welchman met his first wife, Katherine, at band camp and they married in March 1937. Nick was born in January 1938. Yet, in the autumn, Welchman received a letter that changed his life, asking him ‘if, in the event of war, he would be prepared to defend King and Country by undertaking secret government work’. He was one of the ‘men of the professor type’ to attend indoctrination sessions in MI6 and he was placed on an emergency staff list to report to Bletchley Park. On 4th September 1939, Welchman packed a bag into his three-wheeler Morgan, left his wife and baby son in Cambridge to drive to Bletchley and was assigned to Enigma Research but he was soon ‘banished’ to a windowless schoolroom with one eccentric codebreaker and a pile of unencrypted Enigma messages. Yet, within weeks, he proved his value by independently rediscovering the Polish method for cracking Enigma and collaborating with the radio interception service at Chatham to develop the traffic register. His greatest innovation was adding an improved wiring scheme called the Diagonal Board to Turing’s electrical codebreaking machine, the Bombe, that greatly improved its speed by eliminating 99% of false matches. It was Welchman’s initiative to organise Bletchley Park into an efficient structure (the hut system), from which the seamless delivery of intelligence could be achieved from a mass of decrypts – an idea that may have seemed absurd in the early days of the war when solving Enigma was still an untried gamble and many officers thought that radio silence would be imposed during major operations.
Recruitment How do you find and persuade the brightest brains in the country to make a lifetime secret commitment before you can tell them what they have to do? Welchman started by hiring Trinity College friend and GB Chess Captain Stuart Milner-Barry as his deputy. He contacted Alan Robson at Marlborough and asked for the brightest boys. John Manisty (B1 1925-31), wearing his MC Corps uniform, and John Monroe (B2 1926-32) were recruited in 1940 as Bombe Controllers. Scientist George Crawford (CO 1923-29) came from the Natural History Museum. Bob Roseveare (B3 1936-41), Arthur Read (LI 1934-39) and Nigel Forward (B3 1936-41) were summoned to the Master’s Lodge and told to report to Bletchley Park in early 1941, where Nigel remembers the bewildering advice, ‘Don’t become a Cipher!’ Thirty years before equal opportunities there was the pervading belief that women couldn’t be trusted with secrets and so there were just two women amongst the 38 ‘professor types’ in the 1939 intake. Yet Welchman hired both men and women from schools and universities directly into his Hut 6 organisation. He met his first assistant, June Canney, on a Cambridge visit and drove her to Bletchley in his Morgan. He also persuaded his tutee Joan Clarke (briefly Alan Turing’s fiancée) to join. By the end of the war there were 10,000 staff – 75% of them women. Ever the gentleman, Welchman later said, ‘Sad that I was far too busy to take advantage of the society of so many intelligent and attractive young women.’
Bletchley Park Impact The first Welchman-improved Bombe codebreaking machine arrived in August 1940 during the Battle of Britain; it had an immediate strategic impact, as decrypts informed Churchill that an invasion would only be launched with air superiority. In 1941, intercepts during the Battle for Crete led to an ambush of an Italian squadron at night at Matapan. Philip Mountbatten was officer in control of the HMS Valliant searchlights when the enemy cruisers were caught. Admiral Cunningham reported ‘five ships of the enemy fleet were sunk, burned or destroyed… except for the loss of one aircraft in action, our fleet suffered no damage or casualties.’ He visited Bletchley in person to thank the codebreakers.
Wicked Uncles By October 1941, Bletchley Park was experiencing a shortage of clerical staff that was delaying work on Enigma, and the management appeared unable to obtain the resources needed. Together, Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander – also known as The Wicked Uncles – bypassed the chain of command and wrote a letter directly to Winston Churchill, outlining their difficulties. It fell to Milner-Barry to deliver it to 10 Downing Street in person on 21st October 1941. The next day, Churchill responded, ‘Action this day: Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done.’ Within a month their needs were being met.
Hut 6 Stories Welchman setup Hut 6 (which he led) as the boffin section for breaking German Army and Air Force Enigma intercepts; Hut 3 being the corresponding intelligence section for interpreting the decrypted messages and for summarising and disseminating the Ultra intelligence. Operating on 24-hour shifts, each watch started at midnight when the daily Enigma keys changed. To a chess-player like Milner-Barry it felt ‘rather like a long-running tournament with several rounds being played every day, and never any certainty that the luck would continue to hold.’ Derek Taunt wrote, ‘The old hands had worked in banks, but the rest of us were like a bunch of enthusiastic undergraduates, our exuberance and in-jokes leavened by the civilising influence of the women members of the team. The universal feeling of comradeship in a demanding but exhilarating experience was palpable. ‘In the 1940s, the use of a Christian name among colleagues usually indicated a
The Bombe codebreaking machine
considerable degree of intimacy. Here all was different. When a given name failed to provide unique identification we resorted to other devices, such as distinguishing John Manisty from John Monroe as ‘J.C.’ and ‘J.G.’ or by calling David Uzielli (CO 1932-37) by his second name Rex or his nickname ‘The Unicorn-Zebra’ from the phonetic spellers he used for his surname. Later, I was moved over to the Qwatch. Our name, a pun on Quatsch, the German for ‘rubbish’, was a typical Hut 6 in-joke. We were a close-knit group of three. In 1947, I acted as best man when the other two, Bob Roseveare and Ione Jay were married.’
When codebreakers achieved a breakthrough, it was often named after them. ‘Bobbery’ (after Bob Roseveare) was a method for determining the daily wiring of the Enigma machine. Monrovian (John Monroe) and Nigelian (Nigel Forward) wheel orders were configuration rules inferred from observation. These rules, when programmed into the Welchman-Turing Bombe, enabled the daily keys to be found more quickly.
Persecution Aged 75 and US based, Gordon Welchman was eager to set out the astonishing achievements of his team. With the Enigma machine consigned to antiquity, Welchman thought he was free to explain all in a book called The Hut Six Story. He later recalled, ‘I seemed to have a very special responsibility in that I was the only person alive with inside knowledge of a very telling episode in cryptologic history. But in April 1982, when the book had just been published, my troubles began. I was interviewed by special agents for having allegedly disclosed information about wartime cryptanalysis that is still regarded as classified in England. My security badge was taken away. So, 42 years after Hut 6 achieved its first success, I suddenly found myself branded as a security risk.’
Conclusion Of the dozen Marlburians at Bletchley, Gordon Welchman stands out as having done the most to create the innovative and adaptable organisation and explains how Marlborough ‘played a quite exceptional part in Bletchley Park’s war effort.’ Milner-Barry wrote Welchman’s obituary. ‘It was indeed a classic example of the hour producing the man. Without the fire in his belly, without the vision which again and again proved his intuition correct, and his capacity for inspiring others with his confidence, I do not believe that the task of converting the original break-through into an effective organisation for the production of up-to-date intelligence could have been achieved.’
