DR ROBIN BOYD
Aldford House, London, Cryptanalyst in Diplomatic Research Section, February 1944 – July 1945. Interviewed November 2013.
‘I worked on the eighth floor of Aldford House, luxury flats on Park Lane. You worked with interesting colleagues, but you didn’t talk about your work’
I was in my second year at Trinity College, Dublin, studying classics. I wanted to join up and do something worthwhile, as my brother had been killed in Burma in 1942. Someone I knew at Trinity had gone to Bletchley – he never mentioned the name – and said there was a job I could apply for that was more important than piloting a Liberator. My school was arranging interviews. After his interview, in September 1943 Robin went to the Inter-Service Special Intelligence School (ISSIS) in Bedford for cryptanalysis training, then to an outstation of Bletchley Park in London. I worked on the eighth floor of Aldford House, luxury flats on Park Lane. You worked with interesting colleagues, but you didn’t talk about your work.
I was in a room full of young women trying to break into diplomatic messages that came in. We were hunting for a ‘depth’ – which may have come from an error by a cypher clerk. In Dutch signals, there was a particular nine-letter word that might be in any message. If you had two messages and bits of them were the same, you could arrange them under each other and unravel the whole thing. My work went off to Bletchley Park, and we were very conscious that we were a branch of Bletchley Park. We never got feedback or knew the result of our work. To this day I have never been there.
It was a very interesting time to be in London: Myra Hess piano recitals in the National Gallery, ballet with Margot Fonteyn – a cushy existence. So I joined ‘Dad’s Army’, manning rocket projectors in Hyde Park. I was on duty on 15 June 1944, the first night the flying bombs came over and we fired our rockets, but Mr Churchill decided we were doing more damage than anything else, so that stopped. After the war I finished my degree and went into the Ministry. Later I spent years in Australia and India. When the story of Bletchley Park came out, it awoke my interest again. I got the books, but I still thought of it as something that happened back then in a different life. It was a very good feeling when we eventually got our badges and on to the Roll of Honour, and could see our friends and colleagues there. Bletchley Park Magazine
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