Page 415 - The Secret Museum

EACH MEMBER OF THE ‘PARTY’ was an MI6 agent. They had come to set up a base in

which to make plans in the event of war.

They turned the water tower of the manor house into a listening station and called
it Station X, which is what Bletchley Park itself became known as during the war.
The X stood for ten, as it was the tenth such listening station established in the
country.

I headed up the rickety stairs of the tower and stood inside the original Station X,
soaking up the atmosphere: this is where listening in on the enemy began in Bletchley
Park. The room is off limits to museum visitors.

After war broke out, more and more codebreakers joined the initial team. They
were an eclectic bunch of chess grandmasters, university students, mathematicians
and musicians. Some were recruited with the help of the Daily Telegraph crossword.

Entrants sat the crossword under exam conditions, and those who completed it in less
than 12 minutes were called to Bletchley Park.

At the peak of the Second World War, 9,000 people were working in three shifts
around the clock, deciphering 6,000 messages a day that had been scrambled by the
German Enigma and Lorenz machines. Enigma was a machine which looked like a
typewriter, with keys that lit up, that was used by the Germans to encode their
messages. The deciphering team was codenamed Ultra and was kept a secret
throughout the war. Churchill referred to them only as his ‘Most Secret Source’. He

once described the sharp, bright minds who worked busily at the park as, ‘The geese
that laid the golden eggs and never cackled.’ Thanks to them his government could
anticipate the movements of the enemy. It has been said that the war ended two years
earlier than it might otherwise have done because of the work at Bletchley Park.

The codebreakers did not work out the initial solution for Enigma – they were
given it by Poland, just before the outbreak of war. The first to work out the code, in
1932, was a young Polish mathematician called Marian Rejewski and it was he who
passed on the secret to the British. The code gave everyone at the park a fighting

chance of decoding the Germans’ military messages, even though they changed their
system of encryption every day.

The Germans had no idea their codes had been broken, even though, at times,
messages were being read in England as quickly as they were by their German
recipients. Even years after the war, people who worked at Bletchley Park kept their
wartime lives a secret.

The ban on talking about Bletchley Park was officially lifted in 1974, but many of
the 2,500 veterans still alive won’t talk about what they did there. One couple met
during a Scottish dancing party on the lawn of Bletchley Park. They later married but

never once discussed their work there in 30 years of marriage.
I met curator Gillian Mason, who has been working on Bletchley Park’s archives
since 2010, in Cottage 3, the building in which the first codebreak of the war took