Fwd: OBITUARY : Robert Churchhouse, GCHQ

Monday 15 October 2018

OBITUARY : Robert Churchhouse
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Mathematician who worked at GCHQ at the height of the Cold War and later 
lectured on the achievements of Bletchley Park

- Robert Churchhouse with the Enigma machine used by the codebreakers

Bob Churchhouse had no idea, that day in May 1952, what job the Royal 
Naval Scientific Service was considering him for. His interviewers would 
not even tell him what it was the service did, yet they seemed very 
interested in his soon to be submitted PhD thesis in number theory. 
Having quizzed him, they consulted among themselves, asked him back into 
the room, and offered him the role of “scientific officer”, a title that 
dispelled not a jot of his perplexity.

He had intended to join the Signal Corps, yet, when he mentioned this, 
he was told: “You’ll do no such thing. This will count as your National 
Service and you must serve at least two years.”

So what, Churchhouse asked, would the work actually involve ? “We can’t 
tell you that,” the man replied. All they could say was that after 
receiving his PhD he should report to GCHQ at its temporary home in 
Eastcote, west London, and be prepared to relocate to Cheltenham the 
next year.

Churchhouse duly did. On arrival he and three other recruits were shown 
into a room. The head of security then came in, locked the doors and 
windows, and said he could not speak another word until they had signed 
the Official Secrets Act. Everybody signed. He then began to talk of 
codes and ciphers; the necessity of protecting Britain’s ciphers and of 
keeping an eye on those of other countries.

Like the rest of the public at the time, Churchhouse had never heard of 
GCHQ’s code-cracking work at Bletchley Park. Indeed, it was in a manual 
of codes given to him then that Churchhouse first came across the Enigma 
machine, one state secret among the many that he would keep tight-lipped 
about during his time at GCHQ.

Robert Francis Churchhouse was born in 1927 in Collyhurst, one of the 
poorest parts of Manchester, to Robert, a window cleaner, and Agnes
( née Howard ), who worked in a cotton mill. He attended Saint Clare’s 
RC Primary School in Blackley and won a scholarship in 1939 to study at 
Saint Bede’s College, where he excelled but showed little interest in 
maths. This changed in 1942 when, while ill at home, he completed a 
trigonometry textbook for fun.

Churchhouse won a scholarship to study mathematics at the University of 
Manchester, where he was taught by Max Newman and Alan Turing, both now 
famous for their work at Bletchley Park. Their stock answer to what they 
had been doing there was : “Nothing very interesting.” Churchhouse then 
did a PhD in number theory at Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.

It was during his years there that he re-established contact with Julia 
McCarthy, whom he had met at a school dance aged 17. They arranged to 
meet on the steps of the Central Library in Manchester during the Easter 
holiday of 1950. They were married four years later and had three sons: 
Gerard and John, who became IT executives; and Robert, an accountant.

While at Cambridge Churchhouse was introduced to other people who had 
worked at Bletchley, which was a fitting prologue to his own 11 years at 
GCHQ. His academic ambitions later led him to join the fledgling Atlas 
Laboratory in Harwell, Oxfordshire, in 1963, where he became the head of 
programming.

Two years later he was asked to serve on a committee, which was chaired 
by Brian Flowers, the physicist, and was responsible for the provision 
of computers to universities. He was also asked to serve on the 
follow-up Computer Board, which he chaired. He was awarded a CBE for his 
services.

While he was on holiday in France in 1970, the principal of University 
College Cardiff called to ask if he would set up a department of 
computing mathematics. Churchhouse accepted and moved to Wales the next 
year. He set up a thriving department. As part of the senate, he oversaw 
the university’s merger with the University of Wales Institute of 
Science and Technology, which became Cardiff University. Churchhouse 
retired in 1996 and became an emeritus professor.

A lifelong Catholic, he helped to reorganise the Catholic secondary 
schools in Cardiff and served as a governor of St David’s Sixth Form 
College for 15 years. He was recognised for his service with a papal 
knighthood.

His impact at GCHQ was not limited to signals intelligence. A cricket 
fan all his life, he once took four wickets — all bowled — in one over 
during an inter-divisional match.

He would also periodically sit on GCHQ promotion boards and it was on 
one of these occasions that he was loaned the Enigma and Hagelin cipher 
machines. Although he said little even to his family about his work in 
cryptography, he was eager to tell the world about the history of his 
trade. He gave more than 80 lectures on the Enigma machine and wrote a 
book, Codes and Ciphers: Julius Caesar, the Enigma, and the Internet, 
detailing their use from Roman times to the present.


Professor Robert Churchhouse, CBE, mathematician, was born on December 
30, 1927. He died of heart failure on August 27, 2018, aged 90


https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/register/robert-churchhouse-obituary-g8dfsnms2

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