RSS/SCU Newsletter no.24
May 2006
Once again we are indebted to The Bletchley Park Trust and to Alan Cowap for not only allowing us to meet in the Mansion but also for the welcome and help given by all the staff. This is particularly appreciated by those who find walking difficult. It was considered one of the best reunions ever and I have received thanks from members and young relatives who expressed a determination to attend next year. In particular the afternoon session was very popular and several of the younger people said how it was the atmosphere created by listening to we old timers bringing up memories which gave them a strong impression of what those days were like. How they wished their parents or grandparents could have been with us.
For the benefit of the relatives in our audience who were anxious to know what their parents/grandparents were doing during the war years, the morning began with a few snippets from me about the part Radio Security Service played in our knowledge of agents due to arrive here and our control of them subsequently. It was pointed out that the code breakers for all their skill were useless without messages to break and equally without a means of distributing the results to where it was needed, sometimes in the middle of a battle. These were known as Special Liaison Units and had a more exciting time than the RSS. Bletchley Park was the middle pin of a vast intelligence-gathering network where the total numbers employed was around 50,000. Many of the messages coming into BP were via the RSS and dealt mainly with the German Abwehr traffic. The official record states that 268,000 RSS messages were deciphered at BP during the war.
Our first contributor in the morning was Bob Painter, who served at Hanslope and in the Middle East amongst other places. In Palestine he was involved in tracking down the Stern Gang, which is another story to tell. But whilst at Hanslope he had the privilege of working with Alan Turing who was one of the principal code breakers, perhaps the most significant one.
Bob Painter gave us a brief but unique personal account of his meeting Alan Turing at Hanslope. Alan was most unassuming and unaware of his own significance, being totally absorbed in his ability to think clearly and around a problem, with no sense of authority. He involved everyone in a conversation irrespective of rank or position. The immediate problem that brought him into where Bob was working was whether the use of wide-band amplifiers (used to distribute the signal from the aerials to multiple receiving banks) would introduce noise. He asked the question “How is this different from a power station supplying power to boil a kettle of water?” He went away and came back shortly afterwards with calculated answers as to how the amplifiers would operate.
Bob well remembers standing by the canteen when a REME officer came along and (breaking the rules) said “We have three weeks warning. The rockets are coming”. Captain Varney (G5RV) promptly disappeared to the south-east coast in an attempt to use some form of transmitter to jam the rocket’s control. It was thought that they were radio-controlled, so a BBC transmitter working on 56 Mc/s was taken from Woofferton near Ludlow. Although this failed to work the BBC lost a transmitter, as they never knew what had happened to it.
Lastly Bob referred to Louis Varney’s involvement in an operation using British Amateurs with G7## callsigns to see if anything might come from making contact with supposed German amateurs. [I hope to give a fuller account of this operation Flypaper and The Wilton Scheme later].
Geoffrey Pidgeon addressed us next on the subject of the action of the Trustees to sell off the land belonging to this site, national property, which he likened to selling the family silver. Geoffrey has done a tremendous amount of work writing to all the Trustees. Chris Chataway replied sending good personal wishes to Geoffrey but not to his campaign.
The area sold includes the site where the transport was situated. This site was very important because of the often-overlooked problem of conveying some 10,000 staff to and from the Park on its three-shift basis. Housing such a large number presented a problem. A hostel for such a number was quite impossible and the only solution was to billet them in private homes which meant extending over an area of north Bucks and nearby parts of Bedford to find suitable accommodation.
Geoffrey has obtained official figures showing that nearly 100 coaches were serviced and run from the transport site now sold. Over a period of three years figures were obtained and in April 1942, with 50 drivers, a total of 15,931 miles per week were run. And a year later it was 25,000 miles per week (or more than round the world in a week). In April 1944 the mileage became 28,269 and all these figures were taken from the Public Record Office. This is a significant and vital part of the functioning of the Bletchley Park wartime operation.
Getting nowhere with the Trustees Geoffrey wrote to English Partnership with a full analysis of the Trust’s financial position. He also wrote to the Heads of English Heritage, Imperial War Museum and to Gordon Brown, amongst others, as well as members of the Milton Keynes Council.
[Clearly one cannot continue to finance any organisation indefinitely by selling assets and one cannot image the London V & A, British, Science and Imperial War museums conducting their finances in this manner. For some reason the Government and Lottery managers have failed to appreciate the importance of a site which played such a vital part in the outcome of WWII].
Geoffrey is hopeful that the local planning department will see that further desecration will not take place, so that what remains of our wartime heritage can be preserved.
John Alexander and Mike Coleman combined to give an outstanding account of some of John’s extensive collection of cipher machines with examples from both home and abroad. John gave a brief outline of his background and interest and stated that although he had spent 16 years in the Police Force he was all right now. He co-operates with David White in displaying the wide range of cipher machines in B block. Whereas John is extremely interested in all types, David has to concentrate on wartime models as relevant to the war years at BP.
After the war, big advances were made in the complexity and convenience of use. John is an avid collector (many cipher machines come at a price and involve travelling far and wide), and
his prized and most expensive example was an Enigma three-rotor machine. As he explained there was a wide range of models although much the same principle was common to all: the rotors, keyboard, lamp-board and often a stecker-board. The military ones were developed from the freely available commercial type in the early thirties with the addition of stecker (pin) boards and other refinements. The three-rotor example we were shown he had obtained from Norway; it had five rotors from which three had to be selected. Enigmas had several weaknesses: one was that a letter could not be enciphered as itself (e.g. A never came out as A), another was that when one rotor made a revolution to turn its adjacent one they both moved one place together. It was also heavy on manpower as it required three operators. One to pick up the message, another one to enter the letters into the keyboard and a third to watch the lit bulbs and write down the clear text message.
Three other machines displayed were the following:
The M209 (includes M209A and B). Based on the C38 cypher machine designed and sold by Boris Hagelin. The USA bought rights to build this machine and built around 140,000 for the Army who used it as a tactical machine, for messages with a limited life, as it was not a secure machine - the Germans were breaking this system too.
The HELL 54 is based
on the Hagelin C52 from 1952, Dr Hell built post-war machines at
their Kiel factory. It is again a pinwheel design. Hagelin,
through various companies, sold cypher machines to over 120
countries. The C52 is commonly found but the H54? John
has seen only this one.
Fialka (Russian for
Violet - the colour) - a post-war super-Enigma type cypher machine
designed by FAPSI and built in Russia. This was a high level
machine distributed to Eastern Bloc countries - each country
apparently having its own rotor set. With ten wired rotors, the
ability to print plain or cypher text or to switch to punching or
reading paper tape plus a card reader (which equates to the Enigma
plug board) makes it a very useful machine. Early models were
in use during the 1950s with later models remaining in service into
the 90s. Later models included a 'Magic Circuit' that allowed a
character to be encyphered as itself.
Pictures of these are available for e-mail if requested. Dialup should be able to take them quite easily.
We assembled again in the afternoon for a very profitable general reminiscence. The young descendants present were especially fascinated to hear what wartime working was like and to get a feeling for what their parents and grandparents were doing. John Foster gave an insight, during our very stimulating afternoon session, into the task of copying down page after page of Morse-coded groups for eight hours at a time. Towards the end of one shift, with aching hands and drooping eyelids, things began to haze over until he gradually became aware that he was holding a pencil in his right hand and this pencil was moving over the paper. He then jerked himself awake and consciously continued to copy five-letter groups until the end of the message. On counting up the groups he found that the number tallied exactly with the preamble and not a group was missed.
In my turn I referred to the winter I spent billeted in Rowley Lodge. We had no fuel for heating and only an electricity supply for lighting. Undeterred and in desperation (I was studying for exams and my fingers were too cold to write) we had bypassed the fuses with a 6 inch nail, or similar, and were plugging illicit electric fires into the light sockets. When I felt the lead-covered cable, which was surface-wired along the corridors, it was almost too hot to touch. At various times, and probably at all our stations, attempts were made to fit us for front line battle. Although sensibly we, at Arkley at least, were never trusted with live ammunition, we were expected to understand the working of Bren and Sten guns. The visiting regular army instructor (Cpl Wicks) brought a couple of old samples with him. There were none on site or ever issued so the exercise seemed a bit pointless, especially as he laboured the points as if for the thickest of recruits and shouted at me for not paying attention after I had watched him dismantle a Bren gun several times. He threw it at me hoping I could not copy him, but having a mechanical aptitude I dismantled and reassembled it faster than he could. I was never his best friend after that.
John McCafferty well remembers when, along with Keith Taylor, Sgt Stead made them practice saluting a telegraph pole in Rowley Lane. I wish I had seen that; it reminded me of one winter's night as I was walking up the Arkley View Drive, I met an officer coming towards me, and being new to this job I thought I would give him a really smart salute. Unfortunately I had overlooked the fact that I was wearing a steel helmet. My fingers met the rim with an almighty crash and that hand has never been the same since. The officer must have wondered whether to put me on a charge for yelping at him. Many more contributions came from Pat, Geoffrey and others that made for a rewarding and interesting afternoon. Perhaps we can do something similar next year.
Recently I have been trying to clean up (with computer help) a Direction-finding form supplied by Gerry Openshaw. It became very shaded over the years and is hardly readable but restoration has improved it. This form was filled in at Arkley to indicate the bearing taken by each particular station. At the bottom of the form, written in longhand, it says “Occasional brgs taken from Gateshead”. Strangely we have no record of a D/F station at Gateshead, and Archie Brown, who worked there, made no mention of it in his detailed description of the site. Perhaps this mystery will be solved one day as to how a D/F station existed but was not fully used. One wonders if it was a makeshift set-up above ground. Incidentally I used to telephone Archie each morning (on the green scrambler telephone) from Arkley to take details of intercepts from him and to pass instructions back to Gateshead. I am also informed that a D/F system at Lydd was in use but again I have found no record of it at Arkley. John McCafferty assures me that it was in constant use for RSS work.
Direction finding was a
very important part of the
identification procedure. This is a much cleaned-up
copy of a D/F form supplied by Gerry. It may be the type of
form filled in at Arkley for a record after the bearings had been
plotted on the large map table. At another time I will
include a sample D/F map given to me by Lt Col. Morton Evans showing
the way the bearings were applied.
7 inches wide
On Sunday 57 people, of whom 21 were ex-service, attended the reunion. It is gratifying to see the younger generations taking an intense interest and thus being able to pass on to their children an account of what contribution their ancestors made during that period. It will not be possible to convey the true atmosphere in Britain during the years of peril any more than in any other period of history, but it is important that what was kept secret for so long should be described as best we can.
Altogether the reunion was judged, by the comments received, that it was an enjoyable and instructive event so I shall be looking for suggestions for next year. No, it is not too early to think about it. I have a couple of as-yet undeveloped ideas from members.
Please keep me informed of any changes in contact details such as e-mail addresses and broadband capabilities.
Bob King g3ase @ waitrose . com Tel: 01480 463129