NavyNet - 'The Secret Life of Bletchley Park' by Sinclair McKay

The story of Bletchely Park, Enigma, Ultra, Colossus, Alan Turing etc. etc. has been gone over many times since Group Captain Fred Winterbotham let the cat out of the bag with ‘The Ultra Secret’ in 1974. I am sure it is familiar to the readership of this review. However I still found this new treatment very interesting, and so do others judging by its being on a limited two-week loan from my local library.

What we have here looks at ‘BP’ from the point of view of what it was like to work there and be unable to tell ANYONE what one was doing. Quite recently Jim Booth, a COPP veteran, told me (and others) how his sister worked there and neither, home on leave, could - or, more importantly, would - tell the other what they were doing.

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The strain of this secrecy (and, oddly, the rather relaxed, by modern standards, security that went with it) is a recurring theme of the book. There’s a man roundly abused by his own father for not being in uniform, and even on the old man’s deathbed after the war the story was not divulged. We are also given a picture of a strangely cock-eyed administration run at first largely by academic boffins, and an establishment where civilian men and women of all classes worked together, on a basis of consensus rather than discipline, with Service men and women. All had to get used to wartime standards of messing and accommodation, often living out in the primitive - to middle class townies - accommodation in villages round about. The technical background is only sketched in sufficiently to give a meaningful thread to the story and so also the war raging outside - this is not a book for crypto-geeks.

However among the humdrum there are some interesting topics given an airing and left, with a rare honesty, hanging in the air without the author trying to push some tinfoil hat agenda of his own. In particular, why was the traitor Cairncross never prosecuted? Was there any espionage significance to Philby’s visits? To what extent did we penetrate Soviet communications? Why were all but two of the Colossus machines broken up and was failure to exploit this amazing technical lead just the product of dull minds in Government? What of Turing? His situation after the war is taken up at the end of the book; there were other equally blackmailable characters at BP, working on the most secret activity of the entire war (like Angus Wilson), but some seem to be so far ‘out’ that blackmail would have been water off a duck’s back.

I have known some pretty strange boffiny geeks in my time, but in my entire life I have only known (and that was at school) one person who had the brain to do the sort of cryptanalysis these people were charged with. And I only discovered a couple of moths ago that an elderly woman who lives not a hundred yards from me was a Wren at BP. And I would not dream of asking her what she was doing. Even in this book the elderly ‘survovivrs’ only talk about the mundane aspects of their work and they never blab directly about the truly secret stuff.

The story is well researched, with well-documented sources both private and from the National Archives. The twenty photographs are well selected to convey the tone of the times.

So why review the book? Because I think that like me, for you the ‘Blimey!’s may well outnumber the ho-hums by quite a large margin. It’s low key, but telling. Therefore, three anchors.
　
Seaweed