There was a wide array of people with different skills working at Bletchley Park. Most of the employees were maths orientated minds, chosen from top universities, particularly from Oxford and Cambridge. There were many different departments e.g. one for army codes and one for naval codes and each department had its own hut somewhere on the premises. Source D is a description of the work in hut 3 it says ‘Material came in from hut 6…They had to translate them into English’ This shows just how departmentalised the establishment was and how each hut was crucial to the operation. The workers were sworn to absolute secrecy and were simply told that what they were doing was extremely important for their country. The confidentiality was even mentioned and praised by Sir Winston Churchill who said that Bletchley Park was
“The goose that laid the golden egg and never cackled” An example of this concealment is found in source A.
‘I hadn’t a clue what was going on in the rest of the park and nobody else had a clue what we were doing, except the real high-ups.’
This source suggests that although each hut knew exactly what they were doing for their department but did not know what happened in other huts and how their work fitted into the jigsaw of Bletchley Park’s code breaking. The ‘high-ups’ that the source mentions perhaps include Alan Turing, Max Newman, Tommy Flowers and Heath Robinson all of whom had great influences on the building of the Colossus computer and the cracking of the Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The reason the government chose their code breakers so carefully was because the task at hand was extremely difficult. The chances of breaking the codes were very slim, a massive 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. To help them to even start breaking the codes the intelligent scholar-turned-code breakers built the world’s first computer, ‘Colossus.’ This proved vital for cracking both the main enigma code and also the Lorenz cipher, used by higher up ranks such as the generals and even Hitler himself. The workers monitored every message which was sent from listening stations and passed them on to Bletchley Park for these workers to attempt to interpret.
The actual work at Bletchley Park involved was quite complicated however because of the wide range of workers, each person would be doing the same thing over and over, for this reason the job was often very boring. The hours were also long considering the boring and yet difficult work such as writing down ninety letters a minute which had to be understood from Morse code. Source H shows the confined space in which the many people would have to carry out their monotonous tasks for many long hours. The job was also often very mystifying as most people did not have clearance to fully understand the degree of importance of the job; this made many people unhappy because as far as they were concerned they could have been doing the tedious job for nothing. Source B suggests this. It is a woman who worked there, upon arriving she said that ‘Most people thought…that nothing would happen and we would all go back to London.’
This shows the lack of understanding, on the workers part, of the scale of the operation.
After reviewing the evidence from the sources and working from my own knowledge and deduction I think it was vital to crack the German codes with the best intelligence there was and to keep the fact that they were being broken a secret, however, I think that the hours of tedium were at times unnecessary.
Jake Hayes
