7. An Invitation From His Majesty Words and Music by Kevin Adams
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Bletchley Park was procured as a branch of the Foreign Office – the Government Code and Cypher School – in 1938. A forerunner of GCHQ, the new GC&CS had several attributes: it was a quiet country retreat, was readily available, had a large telephone cable running nearby through the Fenny Stratford GPO repeater station, and had excellent road and rail links both for London and the North, and from Oxford and Cambridge. What it needed now was a body of discreet staff.
The recruitment drive for what became known as ‘Station X’ or ‘BP’ had to be a subtle affair. With its intensely secret function, there could be no job advertisements. However, informal networks already operating in the Establishment could be exploited: the services, the universities and the professions were all permeated with those who were known and trusted, especially needed with the national emergency of war in 1939. The qualities sought in new personnel were very special, such as the cryptanalytic bent of crossword solvers: one enthusiast remembered how, at a Daily Telegraph Competition, he had just one word to complete at the end of the allotted 12 minutes – and was soon after summoned ‘to see Colonel Nicholls of the General Staff on a confidential matter of national importance’. He was to have an invitation from His Majesty…[1] Mathematics scholars were also invited, especially from Oxbridge. One recalled: ‘I was studying mathematics at Cambridge and finished my degree in 1940 and expected then to be called up into the Army as most of my contemporaries were. Instead I was recruited for Bletchley Park by my mathematics don at Cambridge, Gordon Welchman. He had gone to Bletchley in 1939… I worked on the Enigma codes used by the German Army and Air Force.’ The draughty wooden hut of the song was the destiny of many a new BP recruit: they were ‘surrounded by an assortment of huts and outbuildings… with Nissan huts in all directions’ and working in them was always a challenge. Even Alan Turing who headed Hut 8 from 1941-44, was driven to write a letter of complaint when the working conditions were compounded by a shortage of staff for the ‘bombe[2]’: ‘In July we were promised that the testing of the ‘stories’ produced by the bombes would be taken over by the WRNS in the bombe hut and that sufficient WRNS would be provided for this purpose. It is now late October, and nothing has been done…’ In the reminiscences of over 200 people collected for Bletchley Park People[3], the abiding memory of people throughout BP – whatever their hut or room number – was, as the song reiterates, the importance of their solemn oath of secrecy and their complete isolation from others: ‘We of course never communicated or ever spoke to anybody from another room about work… We didn’t go into any of the other huts. There was no need to. We never discussed our work, even with the people we worked with while outside.’ [1] The song is part of Kevin Adams’ collection A Crossword War specially composed about Bletchley Park and can be found on https://kevadams.bandcamp.com/album/a-crossword-war [2] ‘Bombe - the name given to an electro-mechanical machine which help ed in the breaking of coded messages... Its size was at least 6ft high x 6ft wide and it was devised by Polish codebreakers at the outbreak of war. It developed into the computer of Colossus and proved to be the mechanical bridge between manual codebreaking and the computer age which began with Colossus in late 1943.’ (BP Archives) [3] Bletchley Park People by Marion Hill, pub. THP 2004, reprinted 2008 (twice), 2010, 2012; available from www.livingarchive.org.uk |
Bletchley Park
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