Fwd: OBITUARY : Jimmy Thirsk / Joan Thirsk

Tuesday 12 June 2018

OBITUARY : Jimmy Thirsk
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Intelligence analyst at Bletchley Park during the second world war who 
helped to crack the Enigma ciphers

Michael Smith

- Jimmy Thirsk joined the Intelligence Corps in 1942 and was
   first sent to Beaumanor in Leicesterhsire. A month later
   he and his colleagues moved to Bletchley Park

Jimmy Thirsk, who has died aged 104, was an intelligence analyst at 
Bletchley Park during the second world war, who worked with codebreakers 
to help crack the Enigma ciphers.

He joined the Intelligence Corps in April 1942, with no idea of what he 
was going to be doing, and was sent to Beaumanor, a large Victorian 
mansion near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, which had been 
requisitioned as a secret army base.

He was greeted by Lt Rodney Bax, the officer in charge, with the words : 
“I expect you’re wondering what you’ve let yourself in for, Bombardier 
Thirsk ?” Bax explained that he and his team were reading the “logs” 
taken by British intercept operators of German radio communications to 
work out which German units were located where and what they were doing.

Jimmy’s first question was, were the British able to read the 
machine-generated Enigma ciphers used by the German troops ? Jimmy 
recalled that Bax “told me that there had been occasional successes with 
simple ciphers but that we were not concerned with cryptography. He was 
a good liar.”

A month later, Jimmy and his colleagues moved to Bletchley Park where 
the secret was finally revealed to them by Gordon Welchman, the head of 
Hut 6 where the German army and airforce Enigma ciphers were broken.

In "The Bletchley Park Codebreakers" ( 2011 ), a volume of accounts by 
former codebreakers and historians, co-edited by Ralph Erskine and 
myself, Jimmy described what a difference this made to their work.

“It was a memorable day for all of us. Before we were told about Enigma, 
we were trying to construct a picture with a jigsaw lacking many pieces. 
Now we had a new zest for the work, with access to a wealth of 
information about the German networks we were studying.”

- Jimmy Thirsk after giving a talk at Kellogg College, Oxford,
   in 2017 standing alongside a photograph of his wife, Joan,
   who was an honorary fellow of the college.

Jimmy spent three years at Bletchley, tracking the movement of German 
army and air force networks across Europe. Loose chatter by the German 
operators, a substantial amount of analysis and clever detective work, 
plus technical systems such as direction-finding, allowed Jimmy and his 
colleagues to build up an extensive picture of what each German unit was 
doing, ensuring the Bletchley intelligence reports could give a far more 
detailed account of the forces confronting the allies.

Welchman recalled in his own account, "The Hut Six Story" ( 1997 ), that 
the codebreakers at Bletchley were “amazed” by how far Jimmy and his 
fellow analysts “had been able to get without seeing a single decode”. 
Their work provided frequent “cribs” – pieces of potential plain text 
believed to correspond with a part of the encoded message, that could be 
tested using the Bombe, an electro-mechanical device invented by Alan 
Turing – and they could often say when a message sent in one form of the 
cipher had also been sent in another, allowing both types of cipher to 
be broken.

Jimmy was born in Hull, east Yorkshire, where his father, Christian, was 
a Customs and Excise officer. He was brought up in nearby Beverley, 
initially by his mother, Clara, because his father had enlisted in the 
army at the start of the first world war.

After leaving Beverley grammar school at 16, Jimmy worked initially in 
the East Riding county library in Beverley and, after qualifying, 
crossed the Pennines to become branch librarian at Great Harwood in 
Lancashire. He was called up into the army in September 1940 and, after 
short spells in both the infantry and the artillery, applied to join the 
Intelligence Corps, which sent him first to Beaumanor and then to 
Bletchley Park.

At the end of the war in Europe, the German messages stopped coming in, 
to be replaced by French and Russian intercepts, to the consternation of 
Jimmy and some of his colleagues, who could not understand why the 
British were now collecting intelligence on their wartime allies.

“There was a group of us who didn’t like this at all and we had, not 
exactly a mutiny, but a delegation,” he said. “A group of 15 or 20 of us 
went to one of the officers in charge and made our complaint and said we 
didn’t want to do it and he said : ‘Well if you don’t want to do this 
you’re redundant.’”

While at Bletchley, Jimmy had met and fallen in love with a fellow 
intelligence analyst, Joan Watkins. They married in September 1945 and 
moved to London, where Jimmy returned to his job as a librarian, 
initially in Hornsey, north London, and Joan resumed her studies, 
becoming a leading agrarian historian.

When Jimmy retired in 1974, they moved first to Oxford, where Joan was 
reader in economic history, and then, on her retirement, to Hadlow in 
Kent. He remained active even after Joan died in 2013, taking river 
cruises along the Rhine from Amsterdam to Basle in 2016, and from Beaune 
to Avignon a year ago. Last year he received a standing ovation for a 
speech at Kellogg College, Oxford, to celebrate the college’s links to 
Bletchley Park.

Alongside his contribution to The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Jimmy 
wrote three books of his own, "A Beverley Child’s Great War" ( 2000 ), 
"Boyhood in Beverley : A Mosaic of the 1920s" (2004) and a memoir of his 
wartime service, Bletchley Park : An Inmate’s Story" ( 2008 ), which was 
typically modest, making more of what his colleagues did than of his own 
work. “A lot has been made of Bletchley being full of geniuses,” he 
said. “But most of us were just ordinary people doing our jobs.”

He is survived by his son, Martin, and daughter, Jane, four 
grandchildren, Tom, James, Tim and Kate, and a sister, Betty.

- Jimmy Thirsk, intelligence analyst and librarian, born 30 May 1914;
   died 2 June 2018


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/11/jimmy-thirsk-obituary

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/aa990305f11de87af6509bec3d1e484c52037d59/0_814_3692_2215/master/3692.jpg

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/3744cd4d7b0b563df5ff24cf04e60f2fa316872b/0_70_456_274/master/456.png

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http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/thetimes-uk/obituary.aspx?n=james-wood-thirsk-jimmy&pid=189194091

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08 Jan 2014

OBITUARY : Joan Thirsk
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Joan Thirsk was an influential historian whose time at Bletchley Park 
informed her decoding of England's agricultural past

Joan Thirsk, who has died aged 91, was the leading agricultural 
historian of her generation and had a huge impact on her field in terms 
of methodology and research.

Her greatest achievement was to explore and define regional differences 
in agricultural practice through the careful analysis of documentary 
sources, in particular probate inventories which provide evidence for 
crops, animals and equipment. This allowed different farming systems and 
local social hierarchies to be identified.

She also edited and wrote much of the fourth volume of 'The Agrarian 
History of England and Wales' series, devoted to the period 1500 to 
1640. In 1974 she was appointed general editor of the series, which she 
brought to a successful conclusion.

She ranged widely, publishing studies of the introduction of new crops 
such as woad, saffron, tobacco and liquorice in which she stressed the 
importance of the English gentry as receptors of new ideas and agents of 
change. Yet despite her eminence, agricultural history was not her first 
choice of subject.

Born Irene Joan Watkins on June 19 1922, she grew up in north London. 
 From Camden School for Girls she went up to Westfield College, London, 
where she read German and French. She was in Switzerland when war was 
declared, and went on to serve in the ATS in the Intelligence Corps at 
Bletchley Park, where she was a subaltern. There her interests turned to 
history. Deciphering codes, as she later explained, was the best 
possible training for the reading and interpretation of historical 
documents.

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After the war she embarked on a doctorate under the great economic 
historian RH Tawney, a major influence on her work, on the sales of 
sequestered Royalist land in the south-east during the Interregnum. 
After a year at the London School of Economics as an assistant lecturer 
in Sociology, in 1951 she was appointed Senior Research Fellow in the 
Department of English Local History at the University of Leicester. 
There she became a founder member of the British Agricultural History 
Society and, in 1953, published her influential Fenland Farming in the 
Sixteenth Century and an important article on the Isle of Axholme .

In these works she outlined many of the methods, approaches and sources 
which were to have such influence on her profession. In her account, the 
Lincolnshire fenlands, pre-Vermuyden’s drainage schemes, were shown to 
have been “poor respecting money, but very happy respecting their mode 
of existence”. While traditional farming systems may not have been the 
most economically productive, she argued, they possessed considerable 
social rationale.

In 1957 she published "English Peasant Farming: The Agrarian History of 
Lincolnshire from Tudor to Recent Times", about a county where she had 
been briefly evacuated during the war. Later she edited several volumes 
in the History of Lincolnshire series. The Lincolnshire study was 
followed by Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century.

Joan Thirsk was a founding member of the journal 'Past and Present' and 
it was there that she published, among other papers, her researches into 
"The Common Fields" ( 1964 ) and "The Origins of the Common Fields
( 1966 ), a reassessment of the rationale of English medieval field 
systems, showing them to be far more complex and locally varied than 
previously recognised.

In 1965 she succeeded WH Hoskins as Reader in Economic History at 
Oxford. She was a Fellow of St Hilda’s College until 1983, when she took 
early retirement, unhappy with cuts to university research budgets.

Her most influential essays, published in 1984 as "The Rural Economy of 
England", included studies of the family unit, inheritance, rural 
industry, regional specialisation, Tudor enclosures and the introduction 
and diffusion of new crops. She was also joint editor of 
"Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents" ( 1972 ), a collection made 
originally for her special subject students.

In her introduction to "The Rural Economy of England", Joan Thirsk 
observed that the study of the story of people and communities in local 
landscapes was one which appealed particularly to women. This 
perspective was also apparent in her Ford Lectures, published in 1978 as 
Economic Policy and Projects: The development of a consumer society in 
Early Modern England, and in articles such as "The Fantastical Follies 
of Fashion" ( 1973 ). In this she united her own interest in knitting 
with her rural studies, challenging the notion that knitting did not 
develop until the 16th century by pointing out that the chain mail of 
medieval armour was “in fact, a knitted garter stitch”.

She continued to write and research well into her retirement. In 1997 
she published "Alternative Agriculture : A History from the Black Death 
to the Present Day", an account of agricultural innovation inspired by a 
17th-century inventory which included, in addition to “brass cooking 
pots, cambric, gold and silver thread, hats, knives, lace, poldaves, 
ribbons, ruffs, soap and tape”, no fewer than five references to woad. 
One reviewer described it as “a firebrand of a book”.

Joan Thirsk combined scholarship with a love of domesticity, often 
treating her students and colleagues to bread and cakes she had baked 
herself, and sending hand-knitted garments for their newly-born 
offspring. One of her last projects was research into the history of 
food and diet.

Joan Thirsk was a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal 
Historical Society. She was appointed CBE in 1994.

Her standing was reflected in the publication of two festshrifts in her 
honour : "English Rural Society" ( 1990 ), edited by John Chartres and 
David Hey, and "People, Landscape and Alternative Agriculture" ( 2004 ), 
edited by RW Hoyle, her last research student at Oxford.

She married, in 1945, James Thirsk, whom she had met at Bletchley Park. 
They had a son and a daughter.

- Joan Thirsk, born June 19 1922, died October 3 2013


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10548781/Joan-Thirsk-Obituary.html

https://secure.i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02780/Joan-Thirsk_2780657b.jpg

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https://www.britac.ac.uk/sites/default/files/25%20Thirsk%201820.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Thirsk

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