Bletchley Park

This could very well be another crossover post between this and my other blog. We’ll see how it goes.

I used to be really into codebreaking. Both actually doing it and the history of it (although, more the first). So, when I saw an advertisement for a free talk by the last remaining British survivor of Bletchley Park, I jumped at the chance. Bletchley Park was teh center of codebreaking during World War II. Not just for Britain, but the Allies. It was there that most of the Enigma messages were decoded and put to use (although the Enigma was actually cracked by some Polish people who then gave the method to the British). It was also where the first real computers were created. You might be familiar with one of the big-shots that worked there, Alan Turing, from whom we get the Turing Test for artificial intelligence.

The man giving the talk was Captain Jerry Roberts, an 88-year old ex-officer of the British Army. His voice was very interesting, it was essentially constantly cracking, and almost coming out as two different notes at the same time, which made it a little difficult to listen to, but the material was interesting enough that it absolutely didn’t matter. Roberts studied German at UCL (which was, during the war, based in Aberystwyth, a nice seaside university town in Wales) and was immediately recruited for Bletchley. He was, along with relatively few others, integral to the decoding process. It seems he was more involved with the grunt work than any actually ingenious leaps and bounds, but even the grunt work demanded a huge intellect and patience. They had to guess what something might say, check it, see if it worked, and go back and forth until something resembling a message came through. This helped them figure out the day’s wheel settings, and so from that point they could easily decode anything else from that day.

What Roberts and his colleagues mainly worked on was something called the Tunny machine. Now, I had not heard of this, and so was surprised when I read in the blurb that that was what he did. Turns out, I hadn’t heard of it for good reason. Apparently, it was only declassified a few years ago (whereas the Enigma was declassified in the 1970s). It was a much more complicated—and secure—machine, with 12 wheels instead of the three (or later, four) wheels of Enigma. As such, it was used by much more important commanders, such as Rommel, Guderian, and even Hitler himself. The way this was decoded was essentially by pure chance. One German messenger screwed up a message, and so sent it again, resetting the dials to their original position. He abbreviated, left things out the second time, so it was essentially a different message to the codebreakers. This was combined by Bletchley Park with the original message, and using a process that I fail to understand, at least the way he described it, successfully deciphered the transmission, allowing future decipherments in the future.

What surprised me about Roberts himself was that he seemed to have a mission. He spent about half of the talk describing the contributions of Alan Turing, Thomas Flowers, and Bill Tutte, who were absolutely essential to the codebreaking process. Turing created the system for cracking Enigma quickly, Tutte the same for Tunny, and Flowers created the first computer ever to help them. And yet, they were hardly given anything in compensation. Turing and Flowers got a small bonus each, and a knighthood (that is supposedly a low knighthood, that basically anyone can get—I know nothing about British ranks), and Tutte got nothing. Roberts is devoting the rest of his life to getting these people the recognition they deserve. Which I think is incredibly admirable. And they deserve it. A lot of people know about Turing, but perhaps from a different context, but hardly anyone knows about the other two. Even I don’t, and I read up on Bletchley Park a while ago. That being said, this information was from a classified project, so at least Tutte’s achievements were not yet known by the general public.

I really enjoyed this talk. I wished that I had gotten to ask him a few questions, but alas he did not appear likely to attend the drinks reception afterwards. I would have liked to ask him what he did afterwards, how he felt about not being able to talk about the classified things, and so on. But I’m glad I saw this, and it’s one of the experiences I couldn’t have had were I not in London. And I’m going to go visit Bletchley Park (which is now the National Museum of Computing as well as the National Codes Centre) as soon as I get the chance.