MY BLETCHLEY SINCLAIR MCKAY My scant early knowledge of Bletchley Park had seeped osmotically through popular culture. There was Robert Harris’s terrific best-seller Enigma, Ian McEwan’s TV play The Imitation Game and that terrible Hollywood film U-571, in which the Americans grabbed all the credit, plus the odd news story about Enigma (such as the stolen machine being sent to Jeremy Paxman). Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the dazzling complexity, variety, colour and sheer off-the-wall humanity of Bletchley Park’s real story.
The author Sinclair McKay has written numerous books about Bletchley Park, including The Secret Life of Bletchley Park and The Lost World of Bletchley Park. Here he reveals how he became interested in its history, what drove him to research and write about it, and the stories of love and romance that he uncovered along the way.
I first began to research and write about Bletchley Park following a discussion with my publishers. Much had been written about the site, celebrating its intellectual and technical feats, but I was slightly hazy about who these Codebreakers and linguists were: how they had been recruited; what day-to-day life was like for them; how they coped with the pressure; and even what happened when there were outbreaks of romance. The Bletchley Park Trust instantly put me in touch with a wide array of Veterans. Thus began the best job of my life.
When I first visited Bletchley Park I was struck by an electric sense of awe: strolling from the railway station, through the sentry hut gate, and all the while thinking of Codebreakers some 70 years back walking up and down these same paths between the huts, very often in the pitch dark, moving with incredibly serious purpose and focus through this secret estate and leaving behind all the steam train whistles of the ordinary world outside the perimeter fence.
I hadn’t quite anticipated the sheer youthfulness of Bletchley Park, the way that it fizzed with the vitality of all those undergraduates and eager Wrens. I was particularly surprised to learn about the prevalence of romance. The codebreaking miracles performed by Turing, Knox and Welchman were one thing, but Oliver Lawn and Sheila MacKenzie falling in love while Highland dancing on the lawn outside the house was another. Given the strict
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compartmentalisation of the huts, I had somehow imagined the Directorate would hate interdepartmental relationships, and would try to thwart them. But no one tried to thwart Keith Batey and Mavis Lever as they took to sitting side by side in the canteen. Even in the nation’s most secret establishment, love found a way. It is beyond important that the stories of those who worked there are remembered. After so many decades in the shadows, their reminiscences – from the Codebreakers to the file-card indexers to the young messengers – should be celebrated at top volume. For generations of youngsters to come, these accounts of brain-knotting ingenuity, madcap eccentricity and, of course, the dawn of the computer age should serve as a constant inspiration. That is why Bletchley Park’s recognition in modern-day culture is very positive. Recently, there was a furious essay in The New York Review of Books about the film The Imitation Game, complaining of its inaccuracies. Yet on the other side of this argument, that film, which reached millions, will have stimulated an appetite to learn more about Bletchley Park’s real history. And hopefully some of those millions will be visiting the gloriously restored site and absorbing the atmosphere of a place where there were world-changing achievements so wild and brilliant that not even the big screen can contain them.
Bletchley Park Magazine
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