© Diliff
The Admiralty Building in London, home of Room 40
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE Alice in ID25 was performed with music in 1918 to an exclusive staff group after the war had ended. Roughly 100 illustrated copies were printed and given out. Room 40 staff star as Carroll’s characters alongside some new ‘creatures’. It’s sharp stuff: Alice descends a pneumatic tube into a basket where she is filed – as if an intercept arriving at the unit. (She is classed ‘N.S.L.’, a dreaded category Denniston called ‘a living thing’ that inspired trembling sweats. It meant unknown: ‘neither sent nor logged’.) Carroll’s mad tea-party is a key-party, keys being the ‘ways in’ to German codes that changed daily from 1916 onwards.
Room 40 must have seemed an apt Wonderland, where staff slept, bathed and pored over ‘nonsense’. Chaos reigns in the parody. One creature must lose things, otherwise ‘there’d be no use having people to find them, and a lot of people would be thrown out of work’. A message arrives and is snatched by a mysterious ‘Waterflap’:
Perhaps staff were aching to do just that after four years in the Admiralty. Jibes about the ‘Waterflap’ might never be understood, but this does illustrate how intercepted messages helped to chart locations of enemy signals and fleets. Alice in ID25, and its sensitive information, remained strictly private for the decades that followed.
‘It’s a new cypher! The Fleet’s out!’ It rushed to a table on which a chart was pinned, seized hold of all the flags and plunked them into the middle of the chart. ‘Send for Captain James’ it yelled, as it upset the tables and knocked the other creatures on to the floor. ‘Send for the DIND. Send for the King! Fire! Fire! Fire!! Then it rushed to the window, threw it open and flung all the typewriters into the yard.’
Bletchley Park Magazine
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17/04/2015 16:26