OBITUARY - Robert Roseveare

THE TIMES
January 07, 2005

OBITUARY - Robert Roseveare
---------------------------
Bletchley Park cryptographer who foiled every attempt by the Germans to
keep their signal traffic secret

THE mathematician Robert Arthur Roseveare was recruited, as soon as he
finished school, to work as a cryptographer at the Government Code and
Cipher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, north of London.
He was one of the early codebreakers who, during the Second World War,
after a short period of training, joined a team that deciphered messages
encoded by German Enigma machines..../snip/

...The Enigmas used by the German military after the end of 1938 were
typically provided with up to six rotors. Given the huge number of
different combinations their machines provided, it is not surprising that
the Germans believed that their most sensitive messages could not be
decoded. But they had not taken into account the brilliance of Roseveare
and his fellow cryptographers at Bletchley Park. With very good reason,
Winston Churchill called them the geese who laid the golden eggs and never
cackled.

Bob Roseveare was born on May 23, 1923, at Repton, Derbyshire, the only
son of a family of five. His father, Sir Martin Roseveare, taught at
Repton school. Later, the family moved to Haileybury, where his father
also taught. In 1936, Bob Roseveare won a scholarship at Marlborough
College in Wiltshire.

In 1942, Gordon Wellchman who led the codebreakers at Bletchley Park with
Alan Turing, a fellow brilliant mathematician, recruited him. Nigel
Forward, a friend of Roseveare at Marlborough, was also recruited.

Some 10,000 people worked at Bletchley. They could not all be accommodated
in the mansion in the park and so many other buildings were constructed.
These temporary buildings were called the huts. Huts 4 and 8 analysed
German naval Enigma messages; hut 5 handled German Army intelligence; and
hut 6 dealt mainly with the cryptanalysis of German Air Force (Luftwaffe)
Enigma messages.

Roseveare worked, with Forward and about 23 other cryptographers, in Hut 6
under Wellchman. He began working in the so-called Watch, a group that
worked 24 hours a day. He later moved to the Quatch (sic), a small
backroom group that decoded non-current messages; he was particularly
gifted at this work.

In 1943, the Hut 6 people moved into Block D, a much more comfortable
building. After the end of the War with Germany, Roseveare moved to the
Japanese Section and worked there until the end of the war with Japan in
August 1945.

Roseveare and Forward, and three others, met their future wives in Hut 6
at Bletchley. The five marriages proved to be exceptionally stable.

After leaving Bletchley, Roseveare took up a scholarship he had won in
1941 to St Johns College, Cambridge. Forward was a fellow undergraduate at
St Johns. Roseveare was awarded a degree in mathematics in 1947 and was
then recruited again by Gordon Wellchman who had become the personnel
director at the John Lewis Partnership.

He was a Hockey Blue at Cambridge and in 1948 toured South Africa and
Rhodesia with a mixed Oxford and Cambridge hockey team. During the tour,
he accepted an offer of a teaching post at Hilton College, Natal, South
Africa that he began in May 1949. In 1951, he moved to Michaelhouse School
in Natal, becoming head of mathematics.

In 1961, he moved to St Martins School, Johannesburg, and then to
Swaziland to help set up a multiracial school at Waterford, now one of the
group of International Schools. While there the Archbishop of Cape Town
licensed him as a lay reader.

In 1965, the family returned to England where Roseveare taught at Epsom
College. In 1970, he moved to Uppingham School, Rutland, becoming the head
of the mathematics department in 1980. He retired from Uppingham School in
1983 and then taught at the Haberdashers Monmouth School for Girls for a
year.

Bob Roseveare was fundamentally a very serious person with a deep sense of
responsibility, anxious to help and serve others. He had a cheerful
personality, a ready smile and a jovial but balanced view of life. He was
the mathematics teacher and housemaster of Matthew Parris, the Times
columnist, when he was at Waterford School.

Parris remembers Roseveare affectionately as a man of gentle merriment
with a passion for Gilbert and Sullivan and with a giggle like an ack-ack
gun. He also remembers his great patience when teaching boys who had less
ability in mathematics.

Unfortunately, the last few years of Bob Roseveares life were blighted
with Parkinsons disease. His wife and a son survive him.

Robert Roseveare, mathematician, was born on May 23, 1923. He died on
December 8, 2004, aged 81.


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1428343,00.html