OBITUARY : Keith Batey

02 Sep 2010

OBITUARY : Keith Batey
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Keith Batey, who died on August 28 aged 91, was one of the leading 
codebreakers working on the German Enigma machine ciphers at Bletchley 
Park during the Second World War.

Batey was among the first mathematicians to be recruited to work in Hut 6, 
the section of the Government Code and Cipher School which broke German 
army and air force Enigma messages. He later moved to the ISK section, 
which broke the Enigma messages of the Abwehr, the German military 
intelligence service.

The initials ISK stood for Illicit Services ( Knox ) - after Alfred 
'Dilly' Knox, the brilliant codebreaker who had broken the Abwehr Enigma 
before dying of stomach cancer in 1943. ISK became operational early in 
1942 and finally expanded into a staff of more than 100. Four European 
Abwehr networks were targeted by ISK: two in the West and two in the East.

Batey himself was responsible for some important breakthroughs in 
decrypting the Abwehr Enigma system, helping MI5 to control the entire 
German espionage network in Britain. The intelligence was crucial to the 
Double Cross system - under which MI5 turned German agents sent to 
Britain and used them to feed the Abwehr false information - as it 
showed that the information was being accepted as genuine; it further 
revealed what the Germans did and did not know about the D-Day invasion 
plans..../snip/


....Batey was due to go to Canada for the Fleet Air Arm advanced flying 
course in late 1942, by which time he was engaged to Mavis Lever, a young 
female codebreaker who was working with Knox. Batey and Mavis had met when 
he helped her to solve a complex cipher problem. Mavis later recalled: "I 
was alone on the evening shift in the Cottage and this time I sought the 
help of what Dilly called 'one of the clever Cambridge mathematicians in 
Hut 6'; as luck would have it, it was Keith Batey. We put our heads 
together and in the calmer light of logic and much ersatz coffee solved 
the problem. Perhaps Welchman had a point when he said that 'the work did 
not really need mathematics but mathematicians tended to be good at it'. 
Dilly made no objections to my having sought such help and even took it in 
his stride when, after a decent interval, I told him I was going to marry 
the said 'clever mathematician from Hut 6'. He gave us a lovely wedding 
present."

The couple married in November 1942, shortly before Batey left for North 
America..../snip/

Keith Batey is survived by his wife and by a son and two daughters.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/special-forces-obituaries/7978325/Keith-Batey.html

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