Mike Stratford - Bletchley Park - The Goose that laid the Golden Egg

This was Winston Churchhill’s famous quote of the work that was carried out at Bletchley Park during World War 2.

BP with its 55 acres of land, was acquired by the Head of MI6 Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair in 1937  He was so adamant that a move from central London was necessary for security reasons and so frustrated by the interdepartmental beaurocracy, that he bought the house and grounds for £7,500 with his own money.

Work began at once, with the violent events in Europe casting shadows.  The Post Office began laying cables from the house that would connect to the War Office in Whitehall. The decision was made to move the Government Code and Cypher School, forerunner to GCHQ at Cheltenham today, to BP as quickly as possible.

Recruiting staff was the priority of the day and Commander Alistair Denniston rapidly took over recruitment.  He had been the Head of GC and CS since 1919, he knew and recruited a number of fellow code breakers. He visited Oxford and Cambridge looking for the best mathematical brains in the country, he found Gordon Welchman and the most talented young mathematician of all Alan Turing, between them they would prove crucial to the BP operation. Turing had been in the USA and returned in 1938 with his new invention that could carry out logical binary calculations which led to the first Bombe machine to crack the Enigma codes.

The numbers at BP grew fast and series of wooden huts were built to accommodate the various sections of codebreakers.  There were separate buildings for each of the German military, because the Enigma codes were different between the Air Force, the Army and the Navy (which proved the most difficult to break)  There was also a Japanese code breaking hut. All decodes  were sent to Hut 6, which housed MI6, for review and onward transmission; there was no other contact between the huts as a security.

At its peak there were over 9000 people working at BP on a 24/7 three shift system and all were billeted out locally, some even at Woburn Abbey.

Always fearful their codes would be broken, the Germans continually upgraded Enigma and they brought in a four rotor machine.  The Battle of the the Atlantic was looking grim in 1942 and many ships were being lost to the U boats, however, with a stroke of good fortune, brought about by HMS Petard dropping depth charges on the German Sub U-559 and the crew abandoning ship, the Navy were able to retrieve the latest Enigma machine together with code books. Sadly the two British navy men who got the new model Enigma out of the sinking U boat, were not able to save themselves before it went down.  They were each awarded a posthumous GC for their bravery.

The six month hiatus at BP was broken as a result and the British Navy started to regain control in the Atlantic.

It was not until 1975, due to the Official Secrets Act, that the world was to find out how effective the Bletchley Park operation really was.  President Eisenhower went on record saying he believed the breaking of Enigma reduced the War by two years.

Although all the Wartime equipment in Bletchley was destroyed on the instructions of Churchill, the site continued to be used by The Post Office mainly for training engineers and in the 80’s, when it was privatised, it was used as training centre for GCHQ Employees. Come 1990 the site was showing its age and there were thoughts of redevelopment and the Government wrongly assumed they owned the site.   In1991, after some public outrage, the Bletchley Park Trust was formed to preserve it as a site of significant importance.

John Cresswell