Fwd: OBITUARY : Stephen Freer, Bletchley Park decoder

Wednesday 03 May 2017

OBITUARY : Stephen Freer, Bletchley Park decoder
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Stephen Freer, who has died aged 97, was a classical scholar who 
translated works of natural history from the Latin, having served during 
the war decoding Italian and Japanese ciphers at Bletchley Park.

He was born on February 18 1920 at Little Compton, Oxfordshire, and 
educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a 
classical scholar. Having suffered ill health as a child, he was passed 
unfit for military service on the outbreak of war. Instead, in 1940, he 
was approached by the chief personnel officer of MI6 who was recruiting 
for Naval Intelligence, and later summoned to an interview in Oxford to 
which he turned up in a scruffy old jacket and flannel trousers.

“One of the people who interviewed me was Alastair Denniston [head of 
the Government Code and Cypher School],” Freer recalled in an interview, 
“and I was asked whether I was at all air-minded. I said ‘Not at all’ 
and I think my frankness rather impressed them. They also asked me 
whether I did crosswords, and I said no, in fact I really hate them!”

Despite such unpromising beginnings, he was taken on and joined the 
Bletchley Park research section under Gerry Morgan, working on 
deciphering Italian Navy messages. Every now and then, he recalled, 
“after we had deciphered a message about a convoy from Naples, a few 
days later we would read in the paper that a convoy had been bombed on 
its way to North Africa, and we thought we had achieved something there.”

One of his colleagues was William Tutte, who became famous as the main 
solver of the “Tunny” cipher used by Hitler to communicate with his 
generals. Freer recalled one occasion when a hypothesis on which Tutte 
had been working for several months turned out to be wrong and his 
reaction had been “to retire into a corner from which deep sighing was 
heard.”

In 1942 the Diplomatic Section at Bletchley was moved to London and 
Freer found himself working in the premises of an old hat shop in 
Berkeley Street and, for a spell, out of a flat in Park Lane. At one 
point he was deciphering codes used by the Free French because there was 
a fear that the organisation had been infiltrated by fascist agents.

Later he was attached to the Japanese section. He did not speak Japanese 
– all the codes were in numbers – and once a code had been broken, it 
would be taken to the translators, most of whom were diplomats or 
consuls who had served in the East and knew Japanese, but did not know 
about cryptography. Freer would later confess that the only Japanese 
words he could recall were “cherry blossom” and “goodbye”.

Freer never told his family and friends about what he was doing and 
later recalled being shocked when, in 1974, F W Winterbotham published 
The Ultra Secret about his time at Bletchley, the first book to reveal 
details of what went on there.

When the war ended, the pressure of Freer’s work during that time took 
its toll on his mental health, leaving him fragile for a number of 
years. But he went on to find great satisfaction in his work for the 
Historical Manuscripts Commission, which involved exploring the archives 
of some splendid houses. He later did voluntary work in the manuscript 
department of the Bodleian Library and then on a part-time basis at the 
Oxfordshire County Records Office.

He was an enthusiastic member of the Heraldry Society and much of his 
courtship with Frederica Dennis, whom he married in 1974, was conducted 
in damp, dark churches while he called out the description of a 
hatchment he was examining in the far reaches of the roof, all in 
heraldic language – which she had never heard before.....


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/05/03/stephen-freer-bletchley-park-decoder-obituary/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/05/03/127541362_Stephen-Freer-1-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqdODRziddS8JXpVz-XfUVRwJPRV3mEWc1JIB4HAWdEJE.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/05/03/127541368_Stephen-freer-2-xlarge_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq_WJBVU2NMeunfYi934I3ramAx7lBbxUkv80NMs4ntWA.jpg

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2017/05/03/127541367_Stephen-Freer-3-large_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpg