Over the Air 36 Hours of Mobile Development

Breaking the Codes – BBC Interview with Jean Valentine

The story of codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and its massive contribution to the British war effort is probably one of the most important stories of the 20th century.

Mathematicians and analysts broke encrypted codes sent by the German Luftwaffe, army and navy and in doing so, both directed our war strategy and saved lives.

The Enigma code machine had been adopted by the whole German military machine as their method for encoding signals. They [the Germans] believed their code was completely unbreakable and that therefore their radio traffic was absolutely secure.

But at Bletchley, they worked it out, and cracked the codes on a daily basis.

 

Read more about what happened at Bletchley Park

• The story of the century! >

Many people worked on the machines that did this. The settings on the Enigma machine were changed everyday so the new settings had to be found and they had to be found quickly, if you wanted to have any chance of using the information.

Secret

Each person was an important cog in the wheel, but none of them knew what the other cogs in other huts were doing, until the mid 1970s when the secret began to emerge. Now, the important role it played during the war has gained Bletchley Park worldwide fame.

You can visit Bletchley Park daily (except Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day) to find out more, and they also hold regular events for all the family.

On May Bank Holiday Monday they held a Forties Family Festival with World War II re-enactors, a 1940s Lindyhopper dance troupe, and other 1940’s attractions, including a flypast by a Lancaster and the Red Arrows.

See the pictures

• In Pictures: Bletchley Park Forties Fun Day >

There was also a range of talks about codebreaking, including one from a former Bletchley Park Wren.

Jean Valentine worked on the Bombe codebreaking machine during the Second World War and now works as a guide at the centre. Her fascinating stories about life at Bletchley make the era come alive, and she told me more about exactly what went on.

How did you get to work at Bletchley Park?

Jean: People ask me this all the time and I don’t really know the answer. They ask did you volunteer, but how can you volunteer for something that nobody has ever heard of?! I think probably I was selected because you fill in forms when you plan to join anything, and I think the form that I filled in said something about hobbies, and I think that I said cryptic crossword puzzles. And that was enough, because they were looking for linguists and mathematicians and people who could think laterally.

What was your actual job at Bletchley Park during the war?

Jean: I looked after a machine called the Bombe, which was absolutely essential. It was needed to find the settings on the rotors of the German encryption machine Enigma and without the settings on the rotors, you would never break into it because the Enigma was so complicated, it could encrypt up to 158 million, million, million possibilities.

Jean Valentine with the Bombe in more recent times

What we did is put a menu into it, which was a crib, and the [Bombe] machine looked for the settings. When it had found them, we wrote down the answers that were on the indicator drums and we rang them through to an extension number which I now know was Hut 6. They used these letters to see if they would manage to break into the German encryptions – but I didn’t know that then! I knew somebody did it somewhere but I didn’t know where!

These machines did the equivalent work of 36 Enigmas and 200 of them were working 24 hours a day, both here and at our various outstations. Bletchley Park wasn’t a place on its own, you can’t have a place like this without back up, so we had two [outstations] in Middlesex, at Stanmore and Eastcote, and three in Buckinghamshire, at Adstock, Gayhurst and Wavendon.

Did you know exactly what you were doing and what it was for?

Jean: Well, I knew what I was doing but I didn’t know what anybody else was doing. I worked in Hut 11 here and I now know that we were working in close conjunction with a hut across the pathway from us called Hut 3 and another called Hut 6. We were all working hand in hand but we didn’t know that.

How many people were you working with in your hut?

Jean: We worked in watches and in this particular hut there were approximately 11 people working at any one time. That was 33 throughout the day because one watch was always on duty or asleep or something like that.

We were ferried back and forth from where we lived. I lived in Steeple Claydon, a little village in Buckinghamshire. It was very strange because we lived in this requisitioned house, and people must have wondered where we were going and, when we came back, where we had been, but the secret never got out.

Did nobody ask? Did you not talk or was it that kind of culture where you just thought I know there’s something going on but we’re at war so we’re not talking about it?

Jean: We were told that if anybody said what are YOU doing, we had to say we were confidential writers. Now, a writer in the navy was a clerk, so we were confidential clerks if you like. And anybody who probed further having been told that was extremely bad mannered, people didn’t do it. So that’s what we said, but amongst ourselves, the minute we left the hut we were working in, we did not talk about what we had been doing at all. We were being driven by an MT driver and you don’t talk in front of people when you sign the Official Secrets Act. You’re told not to talk, you don’t do it.

Did you know what would happen if you did?

Jean: No, there was no threat made, we were put on our honour not to speak so we didn’t. And I never did, and none of my friends did, until it all started to come out of the woodwork in the mid 1970s. Then we were free to talk a little bit about it and of course now it’s just an open secret.

So these letters that you phoned through – probably changed the course of the war in some way?

Jean: Well it would certainly give people interesting information. They had a machine, that was actually our encrypting machine modified to mimic a German Enigma, and they’d set these letters up on the machine, type in the encrypted message and if it made sense when it came out, then we got the right answer. They then sent that into the red hut which was just over the pathway. They had translators there turning the German into English and also analysts who decided who should have this information and when they should have it.

When did you first know about the part you played, and how important it was?

Jean: Well, I always knew how important it was! But when I came to work here to train as a guide, I discovered that the telephone extension number that we had was actually for Hut 6 across the pathway. But it could have been anywhere. But it was across the path and we walked past it four times a day.

So you knew what your job was, but you didn’t know how what you were doing was affecting everybody else?

Jean: No not really, no. You just assumed that you were doing some good or you wouldn’t be there. We were paid this fantastic amount of money to do it you know! When we started we got 75p a week (15 shillings) and when we were good at the job we got a pound a week and then when I got promotion I got 25 shillings a week, it was riches beyond the dreams of avarice!

And over the years you’ve pieced it all together?

Jean: Only since it became public. For years, since the end of the war until the mid 1970s, I don’t suppose I even thought about it very much. I met up with one or two companions from those days but gradually people moved away or something and I lived abroad for years so I wasn’t coming in contact with the people I had worked with. But then when I started coming to the reunions, they said ,why don’t you come and train to be a guide?’ I said ‘no, I can’t drive nearly 40 miles, do a day’s work and drive 40 miles home’. Well, that was ten years ago and I’m still doing it!

So you got hooked?!

Jean: I suppose so, I mean, you meet a lot of interesting people doing this job. There’s sort of a club like atmosphere I suppose and I enjoy what I’m doing – but I don’t enjoy the drive!

How did you feel when you found out exactly what you’d been doing?

Jean: Well, nothing really. So many years had gone by and I’d done so many other things, it was just part of my life, nice to look back on, and nice to be able to come here and see people who had a similar experience to me. I was just one of a gang doing their best. When you think I could have been in a munitions factory or in a field digging up potatoes – no thank you! I was better off here!

It must be important to you now, to work as a guide here?

Jean: I want Bletchley Park to survive and looking out here today [on the Forties Family Fun Day] we are having an absolute bonanza. We’re absolutely swamped with people, there are thousands of them here today and that’s money in the bank and that is all important. We have been helped with the repair costs but it’s the actual running of the place [that we need money for]. The stewards and the guides that you see are all volunteers but the people who do things like the catering, the gardening and the maintenance have to be paid. And we need money to do that.

Did you ever think when you were working here, how it would affect the rest of your life?

Jean: No – not at all! And I wasn’t actually here very long. I had been here a short time when a notice went up saying that the following were required to go overseas [me included]. This was to Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka and I really didn’t want to do that very much because there were U-Boats and things out there. But it did say at the bottom that those who were underage had to get their father’s permission and I knew that my father wouldn’t let me go because I was precious – I was an only child and a teenager! So I went home and told him and he said, ‘you joined up to do your bit, so wherever they need you to go, you go - permission granted!’. And he didn’t even know where it was because I couldn’t tell him. I was gobsmacked. I didn’t know the word then but it’s a useful word now!

I suppose that’s the effect that being at war had on people?

Jean: Look, at that time we were fighting for our lives. My father had been a soldier in the First World War and he was used to discipline and his theory was that if command told you to do something then you did it, you didn’t argue, and you didn’t get out of it, you did it - so I did it.

I spent 15 months in Ceylon breaking Japanese cypher. I didn’t have a machine to do that, we were breaking the Japanese meteorological code which was all in figures, and it was really a case of getting down and working it out.

So did your hobby of doing cryptic crosswords help you in anyway with your work?!

Jean: I think it trains your mind in certain directions but I don’t know if it helped me or not. It’s just a different way of looking at things really.

Listen

• Listen to Jean Valentine who worked on the Bombe >

Declassified Bletchley Park document handed to codebreaker

As reported by the BBC on September 4, 2011:

A formerly secret government document has been presented to the only surviving wartime codebreaker who wrote it.

The declassified document was handed by intelligence agency GCHQ to codebreaker Mavis Batey at Bletchley Park Mansion, Buckinghamshire earlier.

Mrs Batey, 90, had been told the report, which she last saw 66 years ago, would never be declassified.

She wrote it with her late husband Keith, Margaret Rock and Peter Twinn.

Entitled the History of Abwehr Codebreaking, the document was dubbed "Batey, Batey, Rock and Twinn" after its four authors.

It related to the German secret service, the equivalent of MI6.

Bletchley Park was a government codebreaking centre during World War II and played an important role in the Allied victory.

'Have a go'
Continue reading the main story
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Start Quote

Mavis was one of the elite at Bletchley Park”

Simon Greenish
Director, Bletchley Park Trust
At the end of the war each Bletchley Park section wrote its history.

Reports covering German naval, army and air force codebreaking have already been released but the secret service report remained classified.

Mrs Batey was one of only about three skilled female cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park, together with Margaret Rock and Joan Clarke.

Then Mavis Lever, she was 18 when she arrived at Bletchley in May 1940.

She worked under renowned codebreaker Alfred "Dilly" Knox, who greeted her with the words: "Hello, we're breaking machines. Have you got a pencil? Here, have a go."

Naval battle
Simon Greenish, director of the Bletchley Park Trust, said Mrs Batey was a national heroine.

"Mavis was one of the elite at Bletchley Park. She's one of the brightest ladies I have ever come across," he said.

"She was the person who broke the Italian codes that led to the Battle of Cape Matapan, where the Italian navy met the British navy and suffered huge losses."

He said her work was so advanced it was still relevant today, which was why the document had only just been declassified.

Mr Greenish said the presentation was especially poignant as the document allowed Mrs Batey to find out about what her husband, who died last year, had been working on during the war.

As a married couple, they were put on different sections at Bletchley Park and forbidden from talking about their work.

A short history of Bletchley Park

Early History

Fifty miles (80km) north-west of London lies Bletchley Park. In 1883, it became home to the Leon family, whose patriach was a wealthy City of London financier. Herbert Samuel Leon bought over 300 acres of land beside the London and North-Western Railway line that passed through Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, developing sixty of those acres into his country estate. At the heart of the estate, he built a mansion in a curious mixture of architectural styles. One of Bletchley's greatest benefactors, he was much loved by the local people. He was awarded a baronetcy in 1911.

Following the deaths of Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny Leon, the Park fell into the hands of property developer Captain Hubert Faulkner, who intended to demolish the buildings and sell the land as a housing site.

But the Government was about to intervene. It was 1938 and the threat of war loomed as Hitler invaded first Austria and then Czechoslovakia. The Government Code and Cypher School, then based in London, needed a safer home where its intelligence work could carry on unhindered by enemy air attacks. At a junction of major road, rail and teleprinter connections to all parts of the country, Bletchley Park was eminently suitable.

Commanded by Alastair Denniston, the Park was given the cover name Station X, being the tenth of a large number of sites acquired by MI6 for its wartime operations.

After meticulous preparation and a series of trial runs, the codebreakers arrived in earnest in August 1939. They masqueraded as 'Captain Ridley's Shooting Party' to disguise their true identity. It was to be the first instalment in one of the most remarkable stories of the Second World War.

Bletchley Park in WWII

The Enigma cypher was the backbone of German military and intelligence communications. Invented in 1918, it was initially designed to secure banking communications, but achieved little success in that sphere. The German military, however, were quick to see its potential.

They thought it to be unbreakable, and not without good reason. Enigma's complexity was bewildering. The odds against anyone who did not know the settings being able to break Enigma were a staggering 150 million million million to one.

The Poles had broken Enigma in 1932, when the encoding machine was undergoing trials with the German Army. They even managing to reconstruct a machine. At that time, the cypher altered only once every few months. With the advent of war, it changed at least once a day, effectively locking the Poles out. But in July 1939, they had passed on their knowledge to the British and the French. This enabled the codebreakers to make critical progress in working out the order in which the keys were attached to the electrical circuits, a task that had been impossible without an Enigma machine in front of them.

Armed with this knowledge, the codebreakers were then able to exploit a chink in Enigma's armour. A fundamental design flaw meant that no letter could ever be encrypted as itself; an A in the original message, for example, could never appear as an A in the code. This gave the codebreakers a toehold. Errors in messages sent by tired, stressed or lazy German operators also gave clues. In January 1940 came the first break into Enigma.

It was in Huts 3,6,4 and 8 that the highly effective Enigma decrypt teams worked. The huts operated in pairs and, for security reasons, were known only by their numbers. The codebreakers concentrating on the Army and Air Force cyphers were based in Hut 6, supported by a team in the neighbouring Hut 3 who turned the decyphered messages into intelligence reports. Hut 8 decoded messages from the German Navy, with Hut 4 the associated naval intelligence hut. Their raw material came from the 'Y' Stations: a web of wireless intercept stations dotted around Britain and in a number of countries overseas. These stations listened in to the enemy's radio messages and sent them to Bletchley Park to be decoded and analysed.

To speed up the codebreaking process, the brilliant mathematician Alan Turing developed an idea originally proposed by Polish cryptanalysts. The result was the Bombe: an electro-mechanical machine that greatly reduced the odds, and thereby the time required, to break the daily-changing Enigma keys.

Recent History

With the declaration of peace, the frenzy of codebreaking activity ceased.

On Churchill's orders, every scrap of 'incriminating' evidence was destroyed. As the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, it was vital that Britain's former ally, the USSR, should learn nothing of Bletchley Park's wartime achievements.

The thousands who had worked there departed. Some continued to use their remarkable expertise to break other countries' cyphers, working under a new name: the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

The site became home to a variety of training schools: for teachers, Post Office workers, air traffic control system engineers, and members of GCHQ. In 1987, after a fifty-year association with British Intelligence, Bletchley Park was finally decommissioned.

For decades, the codebreakers would remain silent about their achievements. It was not until the wartime information was declassified in the mid-1970s that the truth would begin to emerge. And the impact of those achievements on the outcome of the war and subsequent developments in communications still has not been recognised fully.

The Bletchley Park Trust

The Struggle to Save Bletchley Park for the Nation
Post-war Bletchley Park became home to a variety of organizations including the General Post Office (GPO), the Civil Aviation Authority and a Teacher Training College whose numerous collective employees knew nothing about the enormity of the wartime work that had gone on in the buildings they inhabited.

In 1974 FW Winterbotham, who had worked on Ultra at wartime Bletchley Park, published a book called ‘The Ultra Secret’; an extensive, although at times inaccurate, account of the work and accomplishments of the codebreaking hub. So the secret was out and the ban on talking about it was lifted although detail about ‘Britain’s Best Kept Secret’ emerged only gradually and sporadically over the years that followed.

In 1991, many of the organizations who had occupied post-war Bletchley Park had moved out and there were moves to demolish the whole site in favour of housing development and a supermarket.  In May of that year Bletchley Archaeological and Historical Society formed a small committee with the aim of tracing as many Bletchley Park Veterans as they could to invite them to a Farewell Party to mark the demise of the Bletchley Park site where they had helped shorten WW2 by two years.  On 21 October the Farewell Party was attended by over 400 veterans and the small committee of local enthusiasts was astonished and enchanted by the powerful stories these incredible people had to tell about their wartime codebeaking experiences.  At the end of the event the committee was unanimous in its conviction that this must not be a farewell.  That Bletchley Park must be saved in tribute to the work of these amazing people and as the place where their collective intellects changed the course of WW2 and the twentieth century; that the story must be kept alive for the education and enjoyment of future generations.  So the enormous battle that was to ensue for many years, to save Bletchley Park from demolition, was embarked upon.

On 10 February 1992, a young Milton Keynes Councillor, Sam Crooks had persuaded Milton Keynes Council to declare most of the remainder of the Park a conservation area by ensuring Tree Preservation Orders had been secured on the Park’s trees.  Three days later the Bletchley Park Trust was formed and embarked on complex and lengthy negotiations with the landowners PACE (Property Advisors to the Civil Estate), the government’s land agency, and British Telecom.

The small committee of local enthusiasts grew and recruited many more passionate supporters and volunteers until in 1994 the Bletchley Park Trust and its Chief Patron, HRH The Duke of Kent, opened the site to the public as a museum every other weekend.  Although the landowners had withdrawn all planning applications there was no protection from the hostile bids of property developers.  The future of the Park remained hanging in the balance for five years until 10 June 1999 when the Bletchley Park Trust, secured a pioneering deal with the landowners.  The Trust was awarded a 250 year leasehold of the core historic areas of the Park with an option to purchase it for a nominal sum 25 years later.  The battle was not over but this was a hugely significant step towards saving Bletchley Park for the nation.

By 2004, the Trust was opening the Park to the public every day as a museum.  In April 2006 Simon Greenish was appointed the new Director of the Bletchley Park Trust.  Against all odds through the sheer determination, passion and hard work of the Trust’s army of volunteers and supporters and its tiny team of staff, the Trust was surviving.  But only just.  In spite of all of its successes, Bletchley Park had reached a critical point.  Minimal maintenance had been undertaken on the site since the war and its buildings were in a desperate state of disrepair; with the codebreaking huts rotting and with the iconic mansion suffering major roof leaks endangering the very fabric of the building.

In the nick of time, in November 2008, English Heritage stepped in with investment of £330,000 to repair the mansion roof at the same time offering a further £100,000 per year for the following three years, subject to another body offering match funding, to deal with the huge backlog of maintenance and repairs.  Early in 2009, Milton Keynes Council went to the public vote as to whether they should provide this funding and responding residents voted overwhelmingly in favour.  A further landmark was reached in October 2009 when the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a first round pass for the Bletchley Park Trust application for museum development funding and awarded £460,000 to work up detailed plans.  These will be submitted early to mid 2011 in a bid to secure the £4.1 million needed to realize the plans and subject to the Trust raising the £1 million needed for match-funding the bid.  The Trust will then work on raising a further £4 million to complete the development.

Today the Trust has come a very long way from the early days of small committee meetings in the homes of the founding members.  Over the years, and against all odds, it has passionately fought and overcome the numerous and perilous threats to the very existence of Bletchley Park.  For the first time it can now balance its budgets but its finances still quiver on a knife-edge.  In addition to raising the £1 million needed to support its HLF bid it also needs short-term assistance of in the region of £250,000 per year to support its operational costs. The objective of the Trust now is to transform Bletchley Park into the world-class heritage and education centre it deserves to be, reflecting the profound significance of its impact on us all.  Its business plan shows that once the museum development has been completed, in the next three to five years, the Bletchley Park Trust will be self-supporting.

The journey of the Bletchley Park Trust continues.

The history of Bletchley Park is, to an extent, still shrouded in mystery. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this information, Bletchley Park Trust is unable to accept liability for information contained on this site, or in any other publication. If you should uncover an error, please let us know so that we may set the record straight. Please see the Contact Us section of this site for details.

Bletchley Park’s Good for Nothing challenge

Over the weekend of May 20th to 22nd a group of modern codebreakers were called on by Good For Nothing to help build useful stuff to help Bletchley Park celebrate its amazing past and create an exciting new future. Check-out some of the details below of their Bletchley Park Challenge for information and inspiration.

If you are interested in getting involved as part of the GFN community, you can find information about future events on www.goodfornoth.ning.com .

Bletchley Park’s Good for Nothing Challenge from The Pipeline Project on Vimeo:

Bletchley Park's Good for Nothing Challenge from The Pipeline Project on Vimeo.

Here was the brief for Saving Bletchley Park: