56-621: The Newmanry was a section at Bletchley Park , the British codebreaking station during World War II . Its job was to develop and employ statistical and machine methods in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher . It worked very closely with the Testery where a complementary set of operations were performed to complete the decryption of each message. Formally called the Statistical section, it
112-418: A "maudlin and monstrous pile" combining Victorian Gothic , Tudor , and Dutch Baroque styles. At his Christmas family gatherings there was a fox hunting meet on Boxing Day with glasses of sloe gin from the butler, and the house was always "humming with servants". With 40 gardeners, a flower bed of yellow daffodils could become a sea of red tulips overnight. After the death of Herbert Leon in 1926,
168-857: A long time, the British Government failed to acknowledge the contributions the personnel at Bletchley Park had made. Their work achieved official recognition only in 2009. Properly used, the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers should have been virtually unbreakable, but flaws in German cryptographic procedures, and poor discipline among the personnel carrying them out, created vulnerabilities that made Bletchley's attacks just barely feasible. These vulnerabilities, however, could have been remedied by relatively simple improvements in enemy procedures, and such changes would certainly have been implemented had Germany had any hint of Bletchley's success. Thus
224-530: A number of sections: Air Section "3A", Military Section "3M", a small Naval Section "3N", a multi-service Research Section "3G" and a large liaison section "3L". It also housed the Traffic Analysis Section, SIXTA. An important function that allowed the synthesis of raw messages into valuable Military intelligence was the indexing and cross-referencing of information in a number of different filing systems. Intelligence reports were sent out to
280-853: A section named the Newmanry after its head Max Newman . Bletchley's work was essential to defeating the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic , and to the British naval victories in the Battle of Cape Matapan and the Battle of North Cape . In 1941, Ultra exerted a powerful effect on the North African desert campaign against German forces under General Erwin Rommel . General Sir Claude Auchinleck wrote that were it not for Ultra, "Rommel would have certainly got through to Cairo". While not changing
336-620: A translator who worked mainly for the Italian air forces Section, and Cicely Mayhew , recruited straight from university, who worked in Hut 8, translating decoded German Navy signals, as did Jane Fawcett (née Hughes) who decrypted a vital message concerning the German battleship Bismarck and after the war became an opera singer and buildings conservationist. Alan Brooke (CIGS) in his secret wartime diary frequently refers to “intercepts”: For
392-525: A variety of backgrounds – linguists and chess champions were common, and Knox's field was papyrology . The British War Office recruited top solvers of cryptic crossword puzzles, as these individuals had strong lateral thinking skills. On the day Britain declared war on Germany , Denniston wrote to the Foreign Office about recruiting "men of the professor type". Personal networking drove early recruitments, particularly of men from
448-615: Is an English country house and estate in Bletchley , Milton Keynes ( Buckinghamshire ), that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War . The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic , Tudor and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name. During World War II ,
504-531: The Enigma cipher machine, but an important minority were produced by the even more complicated twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine used for high command messages, known as Fish . Five weeks before the outbreak of war, Warsaw's Cipher Bureau revealed its achievements in breaking Enigma to astonished French and British personnel. The British used the Poles' information and techniques, and
560-533: The Enigma clone sent to them in August 1939, which greatly increased their (previously very limited) success in decrypting Enigma messages. The bombe was an electromechanical device whose function was to discover some of the daily settings of the Enigma machines on the various German military networks . Its pioneering design was developed by Alan Turing (with an important contribution from Gordon Welchman) and
616-500: The Manor of Eaton . Browne Willis built a mansion there in 1711, but after Thomas Harrison purchased the property in 1793 this was pulled down. It was first known as Bletchley Park after its purchase by the architect Samuel Lipscomb Seckham in 1877, who built a house there. The estate of 581 acres (235 ha) was bought in 1883 by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon , who expanded the then-existing house into what architect Landis Gores called
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#1732780475505672-688: The Spanish Civil War the Italian Navy used the K model of the commercial Enigma without a plugboard; this was solved by Knox in 1937. When Italy entered the war in 1940 an improved version of the machine was used, though little traffic was sent by it and there were "wholesale changes" in Italian codes and cyphers. Knox was given a new section for work on Enigma variations, which he staffed with women ("Dilly's girls"), who included Margaret Rock , Jean Perrin, Clare Harding, Rachel Ronald, Elisabeth Granger; and Mavis Lever . Mavis Lever solved
728-501: The "Golf, Cheese and Chess Society". Among those who worked there and later became famous in other fields were historian Asa Briggs , politician Roy Jenkins and novelist Angus Wilson . During a morale-boosting visit on 9 September 1941, Winston Churchill reportedly remarked to Denniston or Menzies: "I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me so literally." Six weeks later, having failed to get sufficient typing and unskilled staff to achieve
784-595: The Bletchley Park Trust. A spokesman for the Trust noted the film's existence was all the more incredible because it was "very, very rare even to have [still] photographs" of the park and its associated sites. The first personnel of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) moved to Bletchley Park on 15 August 1939. The Naval, Military, and Air Sections were on the ground floor of
840-580: The Naval Section. The female staff in Dilwyn Knox's section were sometimes termed "Dilly's Fillies". Knox's methods enabled Mavis Lever (who married mathematician and fellow code-breaker Keith Batey ) and Margaret Rock to solve a German code, the Abwehr cipher. Many of the women had backgrounds in languages, particularly French, German and Italian. Among them were Rozanne Colchester ,
896-672: The Secret Intelligence Service, the intelligence chiefs in the relevant ministries, and later on to high-level commanders in the field. Naval Enigma deciphering was in Hut ;8 , with translation in Hut 4 . Verbatim translations were sent to the Naval Intelligence Division (NID) of the Admiralty's Operational Intelligence Centre (OIC), supplemented by information from indexes as to
952-410: The building of additional accommodation. Often a hut's number became so strongly associated with the work performed inside that even when the work was moved to another building it was still referred to by the original "Hut" designation. In addition to the wooden huts, there were a number of brick-built "blocks". Most German messages decrypted at Bletchley were produced by one or another version of
1008-514: The code-breakers – met the main West Coast railway line connecting London, Birmingham , Manchester , Liverpool , Glasgow and Edinburgh . Watling Street , the main road linking London to the north-west (subsequently the A5 ) was close by, and high-volume communication links were available at the telegraph and telephone repeater station in nearby Fenny Stratford . Bletchley Park
1064-664: The cryptanalysts in the Testery (named after Ralph Tester , its head) worked out the logical structure of the machine despite not knowing its physical form. They devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, which culminated in Colossus , the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. This was designed and built by Tommy Flowers and his team at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill . The prototype first worked in December 1943,
1120-458: The daily naval Enigma key. Initially, a wireless room was established at Bletchley Park. It was set up in the mansion's water tower under the code name "Station X", a term now sometimes applied to the codebreaking efforts at Bletchley as a whole. The "X" is the Roman numeral "ten", this being the Secret Intelligence Service's tenth such station. Due to the long radio aerials stretching from
1176-617: The enemy's use of electromechanical cipher machines meant that formally trained mathematicians would also be needed; Oxford's Peter Twinn joined GC&CS in February 1939; Cambridge's Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman began training in 1938 and reported to Bletchley the day after war was declared, along with John Jeffreys . Later-recruited cryptanalysts included the mathematicians Derek Taunt , Jack Good , Bill Tutte , and Max Newman ; historian Harry Hinsley , and chess champions Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry . Joan Clarke
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#17327804755051232-533: The estate continued to be occupied by his widow Fanny Leon (née Higham) until her death in 1937. In 1938, the mansion and much of the site was bought by a builder for a housing estate, but in May 1938 Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair , head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6 ), bought the mansion and 58 acres (23 ha) of land for £6,000 (£484,000 today) for use by GC&CS and SIS in
1288-560: The estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The GC&CS team of codebreakers included John Tiltman , Dilwyn Knox , Alan Turing , Harry Golombek , Gordon Welchman , Hugh Alexander , Donald Michie , Bill Tutte and Stuart Milner-Barry . According to
1344-580: The event of war. He used his own money as the Government said they did not have the budget to do so. A key advantage seen by Sinclair and his colleagues (inspecting the site under the cover of "Captain Ridley's shooting party") was Bletchley's geographical centrality. It was almost immediately adjacent to Bletchley railway station , where the " Varsity Line " between Oxford and Cambridge – whose universities were expected to supply many of
1400-562: The events, " Ultra " decrypts featured prominently in the story of Operation SALAM , László Almásy 's mission across the desert behind Allied lines in 1942. Prior to the Normandy landings on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies knew the locations of all but two of Germany's fifty-eight Western-front divisions. Italian signals had been of interest since Italy's attack on Abyssinia in 1935. During
1456-715: The first director of the Bletchley Park Museums. Admiral Hugh Sinclair was the founder and head of GC&CS between 1919 and 1938 with Commander Alastair Denniston being operational head of the organization from 1919 to 1942, beginning with its formation from the Admiralty 's Room 40 (NID25) and the War Office 's MI1b . Key GC&CS cryptanalysts who moved from London to Bletchley Park included John Tiltman , Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox , Josh Cooper , Oliver Strachey and Nigel de Grey . These people had
1512-914: The first of the team to decode the Hagelin system, thus enabling military commanders to direct the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force to sink enemy ships carrying supplies from Europe to Rommel's Afrika Korps . This led to increased shipping losses and, from reading the intercepted traffic, the team learnt that between May and September 1941 the stock of fuel for the Luftwaffe in North Africa reduced by 90 per cent. After an intensive language course, in March 1944 Willson switched to Japanese language-based codes. Samuel Lipscomb Seckham Samuel Lipscomb Seckham ( Oxford 25 October 1827 – 4 February 1901)
1568-474: The first to be read in quantity. The German navy had much tighter procedures, and the capture of code books was needed before they could be broken. When, in February 1942, the German navy introduced the four-rotor Enigma for communications with its Atlantic U-boats, this traffic became unreadable for a period of ten months. Britain produced modified bombes, but it was the success of the US Navy Bombe that
1624-548: The intelligence Bletchley produced was considered wartime Britain's " Ultra secret" – higher even than the normally highest classification Most Secret – and security was paramount. All staff signed the Official Secrets Act (1939) and a 1942 security warning emphasised the importance of discretion even within Bletchley itself: "Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in
1680-592: The machine was engineered by Harold 'Doc' Keen of the British Tabulating Machine Company . Each machine was about 7 feet (2.1 m) high and wide, 2 feet (0.61 m) deep and weighed about a ton. At its peak, GC&CS was reading approximately 4,000 messages per day. As a hedge against enemy attack most bombes were dispersed to installations at Adstock and Wavendon (both later supplanted by installations at Stanmore and Eastcote ), and Gayhurst . Luftwaffe messages were
1736-613: The mansion, together with a telephone exchange, teleprinter room, kitchen, and dining room; the top floor was allocated to MI6 . Construction of the wooden huts began in late 1939, and Elmers School, a neighbouring boys' boarding school in a Victorian Gothic redbrick building by a church, was acquired for the Commercial and Diplomatic Sections. After the United States joined World War II, a number of American cryptographers were posted to Hut 3 , and from May 1943 onwards there
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1792-409: The meaning of technical terms and cross-references from a knowledge store of German naval technology. Where relevant to non-naval matters, they would also be passed to Hut 3. Hut 4 also decoded a manual system known as the dockyard cipher, which sometimes carried messages that were also sent on an Enigma network. Feeding these back to Hut 8 provided excellent "cribs" for Known-plaintext attacks on
1848-508: The most serious of these was that Bletchley Park had been infiltrated by John Cairncross , the notorious Soviet mole and member of the Cambridge Spy Ring , who leaked Ultra material to Moscow. Despite the high degree of secrecy surrounding Bletchley Park during the Second World War, unique and hitherto unknown amateur film footage of the outstation at nearby Whaddon Hall came to light in 2020, after being anonymously donated to
1904-482: The official historian of British Intelligence , the " Ultra " intelligence produced at Bletchley shortened the war by two to four years, and without it the outcome of the war would have been uncertain. The team at Bletchley Park devised automatic machinery to help with decryption, culminating in the development of Colossus , the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. Codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park came to an end in 1946 and all information about
1960-643: The productivity that was possible, Turing, Welchman, Alexander and Milner-Barry wrote directly to Churchill. His response was "Action this day make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done." After initial training at the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School set up by John Tiltman (initially at an RAF depot in Buckingham and later in Bedford – where it
2016-525: The public, featuring interpretive exhibits and huts that have been rebuilt to appear as they did during their wartime operations. It receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The separate National Museum of Computing , which includes a working replica Bombe machine and a rebuilt Colossus computer , is housed in Block H on the site. The site appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as part of
2072-532: The routines of the nearby homes at which most staff lodged. The work was tedious and demanded intense concentration; staff got one week's leave four times a year, but some "girls" collapsed and required extended rest. Recruitment took place to combat a shortage of experts in Morse code and German. In January 1945, at the peak of codebreaking efforts, nearly 10,000 personnel were working at Bletchley and its outstations. About three-quarters of these were women. Many of
2128-541: The signals revealing the Italian Navy's operational plans before the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, leading to a British victory. Although most Bletchley staff did not know the results of their work, Admiral Cunningham visited Bletchley in person a few weeks later to congratulate them. On entering World War II in June 1940, the Italians were using book codes for most of their military messages. The exception
2184-487: The site was at risk of being sold for housing development. However, Milton Keynes Council made it into a conservation area. Bletchley Park Trust was set up in 1991 by a group of people who recognised the site's importance. The initial trustees included Roger Bristow, Ted Enever, Peter Wescombe , Dr Peter Jarvis of the Bletchley Archaeological & Historical Society, and Tony Sale who in 1994 became
2240-518: The transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut ..." Nevertheless, there were security leaks. Jock Colville , the Assistant Private Secretary to Winston Churchill , recorded in his diary on 31 July 1941, that the newspaper proprietor Lord Camrose had discovered Ultra and that security leaks "increase in number and seriousness". Without doubt,
2296-399: The universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Trustworthy women were similarly recruited for administrative and clerical jobs. In one 1941 recruiting stratagem, The Daily Telegraph was asked to organise a crossword competition, after which promising contestants were discreetly approached about "a particular type of work as a contribution to the war effort". Denniston recognised, however, that
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2352-423: The wartime operations was classified until the mid-1970s. After the war it had various uses including as a teacher-training college and local GPO headquarters. By 1990 the huts in which the codebreakers worked were being considered for demolition and redevelopment. The Bletchley Park Trust was formed in February 1992 to save large portions of the site from development. More recently, Bletchley Park has been open to
2408-862: The wireless room, the radio station was moved from Bletchley Park to nearby Whaddon Hall to avoid drawing attention to the site. Subsequently, other listening stations – the Y-stations , such as the ones at Chicksands in Bedfordshire, Beaumanor Hall , Leicestershire (where the headquarters of the War Office "Y" Group was located) and Beeston Hill Y Station in Norfolk ;– gathered raw signals for processing at Bletchley. Coded messages were taken down by hand and sent to Bletchley on paper by motorcycle despatch riders or (later) by teleprinter. The wartime needs required
2464-410: The women came from middle-class backgrounds and held degrees in the areas of mathematics, physics and engineering; they were given chance due to the lack of men, who had been sent to war. They performed calculations and coding and hence were integral to the computing processes. Among them were Eleanor Ireland , who worked on the Colossus computers and Ruth Briggs , a German scholar, who worked within
2520-728: Was "Room 47, Foreign Office". After the war, the Government Code & Cypher School became the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), moving to Eastcote in 1946 and to Cheltenham in the 1950s. The site was used by various government agencies, including the GPO and the Civil Aviation Authority . One large building, block F, was demolished in 1987 by which time the site was being run down with tenants leaving. In 1990
2576-717: Was an English Victorian architect , developer, magistrate and brewer . He was born in Oxford , and later became the City Surveyor. He was the original architect employed by St John's College, Oxford to develop parts of North Oxford . He developed Park Town , an early and prominent estate in North Oxford. Through Seckham's efforts, the Park Town Estate Company was formed in September 1857. Such
2632-721: Was close co-operation between British and American intelligence. (See 1943 BRUSA Agreement .) In contrast, the Soviet Union was never officially told of Bletchley Park and its activities, a reflection of Churchill's distrust of the Soviets even during the US-UK-USSR alliance imposed by the Nazi threat. The only direct enemy damage to the site was done 20–21 November 1940 by three bombs probably intended for Bletchley railway station ; Hut 4, shifted two feet off its foundation,
2688-512: Was delivered to Bletchley Park in January and first worked operationally on 5 February 1944. Enhancements were developed for the Mark 2 Colossus, the first of which was working at Bletchley Park on the morning of 1 June in time for D-day . Flowers then produced one Colossus a month for the rest of the war, making a total of ten with an eleventh part-built. The machines were operated mainly by Wrens in
2744-591: Was known as "B.P." to those who worked there. " Station X " (X = Roman numeral ten), "London Signals Intelligence Centre", and " Government Communications Headquarters " were all cover names used during the war. The formal posting of the many "Wrens" – members of the Women's Royal Naval Service – working there, was to HMS Pembroke V . Royal Air Force names of Bletchley Park and its outstations included RAF Eastcote , RAF Lime Grove and RAF Church Green. The postal address that staff had to use
2800-669: Was known as the Newmanry after its founder and head, Max Newman . It was responsible for the various Robinson machines and the ten Colossus computers . Some of the cryptanalysts had joint appointments with the Testery. Initially in June 1943 the section was small: Good, Mitchie, two engineers and sixteen Wrens in a small hut. By the end of the war there were 26 cryptographers, 28 engineers, 273 Wrens with ten Colossi, three Robinsons, three Tunnies, plus twenty small electronic and electrical machines. Bletchley Park Bletchley Park
2856-450: Was known locally as "the Spy School") staff worked a six-day week, rotating through three shifts: 4 p.m. to midnight, midnight to 8 a.m. (the most disliked shift), and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., each with a half-hour meal break. At the end of the third week, a worker went off at 8 a.m. and came back at 4 p.m., thus putting in 16 hours on that last day. The irregular hours affected workers' health and social life, as well as
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#17327804755052912-589: Was one of the few women employed at Bletchley as a full-fledged cryptanalyst. When seeking to recruit more suitably advanced linguists, John Tiltman turned to Patrick Wilkinson of the Italian section for advice, and he suggested asking Lord Lindsay of Birker , of Balliol College, Oxford , S. W. Grose, and Martin Charlesworth , of St John's College, Cambridge , to recommend classical scholars or applicants to their colleges. This eclectic staff of " Boffins and Debs " (scientists and debutantes, young women of high society) caused GC&CS to be whimsically dubbed
2968-400: Was the Italian Navy , which after the Battle of Cape Matapan started using the C-38 version of the Boris Hagelin rotor-based cipher machine , particularly to route their navy and merchant marine convoys to the conflict in North Africa. As a consequence, JRM Butler recruited his former student Bernard Willson to join a team with two others in Hut 4. In June 1941, Willson became
3024-433: Was the main source of reading messages from this version of Enigma for the rest of the war. Messages were sent to and fro across the Atlantic by enciphered teleprinter links. The Lorenz messages were codenamed Tunny at Bletchley Park. They were only sent in quantity from mid-1942. The Tunny networks were used for high-level messages between German High Command and field commanders. With the help of German operator errors,
3080-399: Was the success of Park Town, he also worked on plans for Walton Manor and Norham Manor . Seckham developed Bletchley Park , which he purchased in 1877 and sold in 1883 to Sir Herbert Samuel Leon (1850–1926), a financier and Liberal MP . Bletchley Park later became famous for the World War II codebreaking effort there. In 1889, Seckham purchased and occupied Whittington Old Hall ,
3136-583: Was winched back into place as work inside continued. Initially, when only a very limited amount of Enigma traffic was being read, deciphered non-Naval Enigma messages were sent from Hut 6 to Hut 3 which handled their translation and onward transmission. Subsequently, under Group Captain Eric Jones , Hut 3 expanded to become the heart of Bletchley Park's intelligence effort, with input from decrypts of " Tunny " (Lorenz SZ42) traffic and many other sources. Early in 1942 it moved into Block D, but its functions were still referred to as Hut 3. Hut 3 contained
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