NEW BOOK : "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park" by Sinclair McKay

23 Jul 2010

The Secret Life of Bletchley Park by Sinclair McKay
---------------------------------------------------

Keith Lowe is impressed by Sinclair McKay's atmospheric retelling of the 
Bletchley Park World War Two codebreaking story
 
By Keith Lowe

The story of Bletchley Park is emblematic of the bumbling but occasionally 
brilliant way that the British conducted themselves in the Second World 
War. The house was bought in 1938, when the Secret Intelligence Service 
decided, belatedly, that it might be time to expand their code-breaking 
operation. The head of SIS, Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, apparently paid for 
it out of his own pocket because Whitehall foot-dragging threatened to 
delay the project even further.

SIS then set about staffing it with anyone they could lay their hands on: 
cryptographers, mathematicians, Egyptologists, linguists, even 
astrologers. Some were recruited for their originality of thinking, and 
others because they were related to men who played golf with Bletchley 
Park’s director, Alastair Denniston. Right from the beginning there was 
an atmosphere of informality and disorganisation at the house that was 
only mitigated by the British talent for muddling through.

Staff built code-breaking machines that were held together with sticking 
plasters and pieces of string - one of these machines was actually 
called the "Heath Robinson". Occasionally there were minor explosions 
because of the tendency of careless Wrens to balance their metal mirrors 
on the electrical terminals while doing their make-up. The most advanced 
machine, the famous Colossus, might never have been built had the Post 
Office not decided to give up on government funding and pay for it 
themselves.

And yet this was the outfit that broke the "unbreakable" Enigma codes 
and, in the words of Eisenhower, shortened the war by two years.

It nurtured some of the brightest talent of a generation, and created the 
forerunner of the computer. By the end of the war, it was no longer just a 
ragbag assembly of specialists and eccentrics, but a vast and efficient 
outfit that relied less on flashes of brilliance and more on systematic 
method and hard work. Like the whole of the rest of the British war 
effort, it had evolved from amateur improvisation to 
professionalism..../snip/


....Much of this is told in the words of veterans interviewed by the
author, whose vivid descriptions evoke a world that is now all but lost.
It is their stories, and the humbling thought of what their dedication to
duty achieved, that make this book worth reading.

- Keith Lowe is the author of Inferno : the Devastation of Hamburg, 1943 
  ( Penguin )

- The Secret Life of Bletchley Park : the WWII Codebreaking Centre and
  the Men and Women Who Worked There
  by Sinclair McKay
  368PP, Aurum, £20 


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/7904262/The-Secret-Life-of-Bletchley-Park-by-Sinclair-McKay-review.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01683/mckaystory_1683705f.jpg



27th July 2010

How Widow Twankey won the war

THE SECRET LIFE OF BLETCHLEY PARK BY SINCLAIR MCKAY ( Aurum £20 )
-----------------------------------------------------------------

By James Walton

As you probably remember, that Fawlty towers episode where Basil keeps 
mentioning the war ends with one of the Germans asking: 'However did they 
win?' It's a question that springs to mind quite often during the early 
sections of the Secret Life Of Bletchley Park.

In 1938, after MI6 had acquired the Bletchley estate as a code-breaking 
centre, the first agents there went by the cunning codename of 'Captain 
Ridley's Shooting Party'. They were soon joined by such cryptanalysts as 
Frank Birch - well-known for playing Widow Twankey in an acclaimed West 
end production of Aladdin in 1930 - and John Tiltman, whose office in the 
house's former nursery was still decorated with Peter Rabbit wallpaper. 
Much of the clerical work was done by London debutantes, but only after a 
strict vetting procedure had established that they weren't 'madly in love 
with Hitler'.

When recruitment began in earnest, intelligence officers were dispatched 
to the better Oxbridge colleges to drink port, and to check that no spies 
were listening, using the traditional method of going to the door and 
looking up and down the corridor..../snip/


...McKay may not have provided a book to satisfy the scholars, but he has 
succeeded in honouring a genuinely remarkable group of people in a solid, 
often entertaining and above all warm-hearted way.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-1297825/How-Widow-Twankey-won-war-THE-SECRET-LIFE-OF-BLETCHLEY-PARK-BY-SINCLAIR-MCKAY.html

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/07/26/article-0-0029944500000190-51_468x349.jpg



27 Aug 2010

Telegraph crossword : Cracking hobby won the day
------------------------------------------------

The boffins of Bletchley cut their teeth on the Telegraph crossword,
says Sinclair McKay 

By Sinclair McKay

"We were very good at crosswords," says one of the veteran codebreakers of 
Bletchley Park, "and also anything to do with anagrams. And of course 
Scrabble."

When I wrote my book "The Secret Life of Bletchley Park" I interviewed 
brilliant men and women - mathematicians, linguists, debutantes - who 
had smashed the German Enigma codes in the Second World War. I found that 
they were not your average eggheads or scientists. Cryptography was a fine 
art that required an aptitude for lateral thinking, even a certain amount 
of psychological acuity..../snip/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/7966268/Telegraph-crossword-Cracking-hobby-won-the-day.html

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01703/p_crossword-bletch_1703737c.jpg