Bletchley Park was where one of the war's most famous - and crucial
- achievements was made: the cracking of Germany's “Enigma” code in
which its most important military communications were couched.
This country house in the Buckinghamshire countryside was home to
Britain's most brilliant mathematical brains, like Alan Turing, and
the scene of immense advances in technology - indeed, the birth of
modern computing. The military codes deciphered there were
instrumental in turning both the Battle of the Atlantic and the war
in North Africa.
But, though plenty has been written about the boffins, and the
codebreaking, fictional and non-fiction - from Robert Harris and Ian
McEwan to Andrew Hodges' biography of Turing - what of the thousands
of men and women who lived and worked there during the war? What was
life like for them - an odd, secret territory between the civilian
and the military?
Sinclair McKay's book is the first history for the general reader
of life at Bletchley Park, and an amazing compendium of memories
from people now in their eighties - of skating on the frozen lake in
the grounds (a depressed Angus Wilson, the novelist, once threw
himself in) - of a youthful Roy Jenkins, useless at codebreaking, of
the high jinks at nearby accommodation hostels - and of the
implacable secrecy that meant girlfriend and boyfriend working in
adjacent huts knew nothing about each other's work.
Pre-order the new book, Secret Listeners, by Sinclair McKay.
Published on October 4, 2012.
Before Bletchley Park could break the German war machine's code,
its daily military communications had to be monitored and recording
by “the Listening Service” - the wartime department whose bases
moved with every theatre of war: Cairo, Malta, Gibraltar, Iraq,
Cyprus, as well as having listening stations along the eastern coast
of Britain to intercept radio traffic in the European theatre. This
is the story of the - usually very young - men and women sent out to
farflung outposts to listen in for Bletchley Park, an oral history
of exotic locations and ordinary lives turned upside down by a
sudden remote posting - the heady nightlife in Cairo, filing
cabinets full of snakes in North Africa, and flights out to Delhi by
luxurious flying boat.
