On-Duty Life at the Government Code and Cypher School

Abstract

Bletchley Park’s workers are typically presented in the popular press and media as a small group of brilliant, if often somewhat eccentric, men employing the most modern machines to crack Axis codes. This picture has been developed since the ‘Ultra Secret’ was first revealed to the world by F. W. Winterbotham in 1974. Indeed, the preface to Winterbotham’s memoir conforms to the myth by stating that the ‘cipher breaking operation’ was ‘accomplished by a team of brilliant mathematicians and cryptographers’. ¹ No individual captures this image quite like Alan Turing, who has become the archetypal Bletchley Park employee. For example, the 2014 film The Imitation Game, a biopic of Turing’s life and wartime achievements, places Turing at the centre of a small handful of cryptanalysts. ² The film serves as an excellent example of the popular perception of the agency and will doubtless also contribute much to maintaining an inexorable focus on Turing and cryptanalysis in popular imagination. While the work of the cryptanalysts was, of course, at the epicentre of the agency’s function, it is easy to lose focus of the fact that the agency required a vast array of other forms of work in order to adequately operate. These other types of work, ranging from machine operation to cleaning, were vital support roles which facilitated the main work of the agency: cracking ciphers and reading messages.