OBITUARY : Robin Denniston

28-05-2012

OBITUARY : Robin Denniston
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Robin Denniston, who has died aged 85, was an influential publisher who
launched the careers of writers such as Erich Segal, John le Carré and
Anthony Sampson; in 1995, however, he gave it all up to become a country
priest.

A colleague once described Denniston as giving the impression of a “kindly
local vicar”, but observed that in his role as a publisher the impression
was a deceptive one. Behind the “facade” lay a highly trained business
mind...../snip/


....Yet Denniston himself was probably proudest of work which he carried
out in later life to celebrate the wartime achievements of his father, who
played a central role in the development of signals intelligence.

During the First World War, Commander Alastair ( “AG” ) Denniston had
served as “watch-keeper” at Room 40, Old Buildings, Whitehall, the
government’s fledgling signals intelligence centre, where he and his staff
were responsible for decrypting, translating, assessing and processing
secretly intercepted messages between the German High Command and the
Grand Fleet. In the interwar years he set up and ran the Government Code
and Cypher School, the ancestor of today’s GCHQ, spied on the Soviets,
monitored Italian aggression in the Horn of Africa, and tracked the course
of the Spanish Civil War.

In 1939 he travelled to Poland, shortly before the Nazi invasion, to fetch
an Enigma machine, and subsequently recruited the gifted team of
codebreakers at Bletchley Park that unlocked its secrets. He headed up
Bletchley Park until February 1942, when he was unceremoniously pushed
aside and effectively demoted. He retired from the service in 1945 .

Denniston’s compelling account of his father’s life, "Thirty Secret
Years", published in 2007, was an act of filial piety which brought
long-overdue recognition to his parent’s role in the early days of signals
intelligence. AG Denniston’s reputation is now acknowledged in the
official history of GCHQ..../snip/


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9293492/Robin-Denniston.html

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