Fwd: OBITUARY : Jimmy Thirsk

Wednesday 22 August 2018

OBITUARY : Jimmy Thirsk
-----------------------

Intelligence analyst who revelled in the meritocracy of Bletchley Park 
and found romance while tracking Nazi radio traffic

-  Jimmy Thirsk with a photograph of his wife, Joan

When Jimmy Thirsk joined the gifted group of intelligence analysts in 
Hut 6 at Bletchley Park he had no idea that German Enigma codes were 
being decrypted there. He had joined the Intelligence Corps in 1942 and 
was initially posted to the intercept station in the grounds of 
Beaumanor Hall, a Victorian stately home near Loughborough.

Thirsk was told by the commanding officer there that he would be reading 
the intercepted logs of German radio traffic, with the aim of assessing 
where German units were and what they were doing. He asked him if the 
British were able to read the codes generated by Germany’s Enigma 
machine. “No,” the officer told him breezily, there was little going on 
in the way of cryptography. “He was a good liar,” Thirsk said later.

-  Thirsk during the Second World War

He was soon moved to Bletchley Park, where the culture of secrecy was 
enforced under the “need-to-know” rule, largely at the expense of 
efficiency. Fortunately, Gordon Welchman, the head of Hut 6, thought 
differently and he briefed the log-readers about the breaking of Enigma. 
“It was a memorable day for all of us,” Thirsk wrote. “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.”

Intercept operators logged the ancillary information relating to Enigma 
messages, including the plain-language “chat” between German operators, 
their radio frequencies and their call signs. All the logs were sent 
each day to “Central Party”, as Thirsk and his fellow log-readers were 
known, to build a complete picture of enemy communications. By May 1943 
there were about 95 analysts studying 12,000 pages of logs each day.

He looked for messages sent in one Enigma key that were re-enciphered in 
a second key. These provided “cribs”, pieces of probable plain text 
corresponding with parts of the encoded message that could be tested 
using the Bombe, the electro-mechanical device invented by the computer 
scientist and mathematician Alan Turing.

After VE Day Thirsk and his colleagues were ordered to study Russian and 
French radio traffic, but many of them refused to work against former 
allies. “We had, not exactly a mutiny, but a delegation,” he recalled. 
“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.’ ”

James Wood Thirsk was born in Hull in 1914 and brought up in Beverley, 
Yorkshire, after the family moved to avoid the possibility of being 
bombed by Zeppelins during the First World War. His father, Christian, 
was a Customs and Excise officer, and his mother, Clara, was a 
housewife. He attended Beverley Grammar School, then worked at a library 
in the town.

He was called up by the army in 1940. Unused to hard physical exercise, 
he described infantry training as “hell”. He later applied for a 
transfer to the Intelligence Corps.

Like the rest of Bletchley Park, Central Party was a meritocracy, where 
rank did not count. Thirsk recalled that his colleagues included 
“barristers, teachers, librarians, accountants and journalists”. He fell 
in love with one of them, Joan Watkins, an officer with the Auxiliary 
Territorial Service ( ATS ). This led to complications when they moved 
from civilian billets into army barracks, since Thirsk, as a 
sergeant-major, was not supposed to fraternise with an officer in the 
camp. “We were not permitted to meet in the officers’ mess or the 
sergeants’ mess,” he recalled. “But the Bletchley Park cafeteria was 
more democratic ... a colonel could sit at the same table as a private.”

The couple married in September 1945. When Thirsk was demobbed in March 
1946, he returned to work as a librarian while Joan embarked on an 
academic career, playing a leading role in developing the discipline of 
agricultural history. They moved to Oxford, where Joan was a reader in 
economic history, when he retired in 1974. She died in 2013 ( obituary, 
November 5, 2013 ). Thirsk is survived by their daughter, Jane, who is a 
retired GP, and their son, Martin, who is an electronics engineer and 
managing director of a company making electronic burner controls. He is 
also survived by his sister, Betty, who is 103.

Thirsk was active until the last few months of his life. He appeared in 
a Channel 4 programme about centenarians in 2015, performing some 
strenuous physical exercises, and went on cruises on the Rhine and the 
Rhône. He received a standing ovation in 2017 for a speech at Kellogg 
College, Oxford, celebrating its links with Bletchley Park that had been 
forged partly by Joan, who had been a fellow.

Thirsk contributed a chapter to The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, a 
collection of essays by veterans and historians, and wrote Bletchley 
Park: An Inmate’s Story. “A lot has been made of Bletchley being full of 
geniuses,” he said. “But most of us were just ordinary people doing our 
jobs.”

James Thirsk, intelligence analyst and librarian,
was born on May 30, 1914.
He died on June 2, 2018, aged 104



https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/jimmy-thirsk-obituary-0bnmk95vs

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/methode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fed8cb126-a550-11e8-bf09-48d84bc1dddb.jpg

------------------------

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/joan-thirsk-m7rv0jzn5wh

----------------------------

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

https://fastly-io.guim.co.uk/img/media/aa990305f11de87af6509bec3d1e484c52037d59/0_814_3692_2215/master/3692.jpg

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

---------------------

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/obituaries/jimmy-thirsk-1-9208658

https://www.kentonline.co.uk/medway/news/tributes-to-wartime-codebreaker-184849/

-------------------------

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bletchley-Park-Inmates-James-Thirsk/dp/0946995885

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/519EbdxDkyL.jpg

------------------------------