Jonathan Thomas (00:21)
Welcome back to the Anglotopia podcast where we explore British history, travel and culture. I'm your host, Jonathan Thomas. And it's been called the best kept secret of World War II at a Victorian estate in Buckinghamshire. Some 10,000 people, 75 % of them women worked around the clock to crack the codes that helped win the war. Their work remained classified for 30 years after VE day. And when the story finally emerged, became the stuff of legend. But how much of what we think

we know about Bletchley Park is actually true. Today, I'm welcoming back Dr. Chris Smith, historian at Coventry University who specializes in intelligence and espionage history. Chris was on the podcast last year talking about the bombing of Coventry. Chris literally wrote the book on this subject, The Hidden History of Bletchley Park, and he's currently working on a new book, examining the myths and memory surrounding Britain's most famous secret establishment.

Like I said, the last time Chris joined us, we discussed the Covetry Blitz and the bug, the myth that Churchill sacrificed the city to protect ultra intelligence. Today, we're go deeper into the source of that intelligence, Blackley Bletchley Park itself, exploring who really worked there, what they actually did and separating the Hollywood version from historical reality. Welcome back to the podcast, Chris.

Chris Smith (01:41)
Thank you very much for having me.

Jonathan Thomas (01:43)
So glad to have you back. ⁓ So let's start at the beginning. ⁓ For listeners who may not even know Bletchley Park, or who may only know it from films like The Imitation Game, can you give us an overview of what this place actually was and why it mattered so much?

Chris Smith (02:02)
Yeah, so Bletchley Park is, as you suggested, a 19th century mansion house and estate in ⁓ Bletchley, which is now part of Milton Keynes. And during the Second World War, it was the home or the primary war station of an organization called the Government Code and Cipher School, which ⁓ is now called the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ. And it is probably roughly analogous with the ⁓ US National ⁓ Security Agency.

So basically what it's tasked with doing is protecting ⁓ British communications, so know, to make sure that it's secure so that, you know, these are code makers as well as code breakers. And secretly what it was supposed to do was to read the messages of foreign powers, be they military, diplomatic, commercial, or whatever. And that's what it does ⁓ to a very high degree of success during the Second World War.

at Bletchley.

Jonathan Thomas (03:01)
So how did this Victorian stately home get chosen as the headquarters of the Cobregan operation? What was there before the war and is it was a geographical location why they chose it? Was it because of a concentration of a lot of people? What was why was it put there specifically?

Chris Smith (03:20)
Yes, it's a really interesting question. So basically during the 1930s, the interwar period or generally, there was a terror of bombing. There was an idea that this new technology where you could bomb cities from above would basically lead to mass devastation. And so basically a lot of these agencies and governmental departments and even businesses had planned to leave London at the outbreak of the Second World War.

And there's a huge civilian evacuation program which also goes on called Operation Pied Piper, where well over a million people are asked to basically leave London and the other major cities. And GCENCS basically just does the same thing. It has this plan which is basically developed in 1937, 1938, that they all moved to ⁓ Bletchley. So why is Bletchley chosen? Well, there's another of...

Jonathan Thomas (03:49)
in a password.

Chris Smith (04:17)
really good reasons for this. For a start, it's on the major communications ⁓ hub network, I suppose, Trunk Artery, which runs from the north of Britain to the south of Britain, or from London to everywhere else, really. ⁓ And that has a repeater station at a place called Fennie Stratford, which is probably about a mile away from where Bletchley Park is. So Bletchley Park is also a large estate. It's ⁓ got hundreds of acres.

So it also has this large mansion house which you can basically put your organization into. And then it's got this room for expansion. It's also happily on the market and the head of MI6 basically purchased it with his own money, about 7,500 pounds, I believe off the top of my head. So it's got that going for it. The other thing it's got is it's also on the major train lines. So you've got the North South train line which basically goes from ⁓ Edinburgh to London or London to Edinburgh.

which is obviously really important for transport links. It's also got what's called the Varsity Line, which is the train line which goes from Oxford to Cambridge, which is obviously where the universities are. So that's a really big advantage to it as well. And then there's the A5. So this is a period before kind of motorways, but it's one of the major roads in Britain at this time, which basically runs from London to Holyhead in Wales. So it has all of this going for it.

And then it also has a town nearby or surrounds a town, ⁓ which is called Bletchley. And that means you've got, for example, hotels, you've got pubs and things like that, taverns. And then you've also got people's houses, which you can actually use to house your staff as it expands. So that's kind of why they pick Bletchley. But Bletchley is far from unique in this sense.

So lots of different organisations, many of them clandestine, all end up in the home counties surrounding London and quite a few of them in Buckinghamshire as well.

Jonathan Thomas (06:13)
so how did the operation grow from at first 150 people in 1939 to nearly 10,000 by 1945? How did this expansion happen? And how do they maintain secrecy when there's so many people involved?

Chris Smith (06:27)
Well, that's a really good question. And the answer is with great difficulty, to say the least. So the way I've described it in my various publications is that Bletchley Park almost grows by accident and demand. And it does this in an ad hoc fashion and is constantly firefighting. So when they start the war, they think it's going to be probably like the First World War, you're probably going to need a staff of around 200 to 400 people, something in that kind of order, because that's what worked in the First World War.

But because the volume of communications that you're now dealing with and the techniques which are being used to basically hide information, you need ⁓ now to mechanize this process. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the machines they use to do this later. But these are very labor intensive. You have a very labor intensive set of machines that you're using, you then have to have an administrative overhead, which means you now have to have ⁓ people, for example, the cooking and the cleaning, all that sort of thing, which increases every number of caterers, drivers.

administrators to make sure everyone gets paid, all this sort of stuff. And at the same time, you're trying to expand what you're doing to basically deal with this huge volume of information you're trying to process. And this really means that the agency on every now and occasion nearly comes unstuck because for example, its customers are saying, well, we want our information, we need this intelligence and you're not providing it fast enough. And also because you've got the foreign office, you've got the

three branches of the military services, the army, the navy, and the Royal Air Force, and they're all contributing, for example, resources, be it money or be it woman power, manpower, they want a return on their investment. And they often feel, probably wrongly, that the other branches of the services are getting a better deal out of this. And this comes to a head in 1942, in February 1942.

And the organization is basically restructured and a lot of people like the old guard, some of them end up basically being moved sideways or moved out. And people who are perhaps more attuned to kind of managing large institutions are brought in to run ⁓ the whole organization in one case, but also key sections. So one person who's brought in actually had run a biscuit factory ⁓ before his intelligence days.

But again, what we're seeing there is somebody who understands how you run a large organization. So that's kind of how this happens. So it grows very, very rapidly. It creates all these sorts of problems. So by the time we get to sort of the end of 1940, you're probably looking around 600 people who are now working here. By the time you've gone on, it's about 2000. And as you say, it keeps on growing until you get to December 1944, January 1945, where you're now looking at 10,000 people.

So you've got to, the other part of your question, if I recall was how do you keep this secret? Well, that's a really, really great question because Bletchley itself has a population in 1939 of probably around 7,000 people. And now you've brought in 10,000 more people into this town. So these people are all living either in Bletchley, in other people's ⁓ houses, this is called billeting, or they're in hostels, or they're in some of the big stately homes on mass.

and they're being billeted in villages up to sort of 30 miles away. So how do you actually keep that secret? Well, one way of doing it is you constantly remind your staff not to engage in what's called careless talk. ⁓ That's sort of ⁓ a regular reminder to them. They also have to sign the Official Secrets Act, and there's even stories of people signing it. And the person who sort of handed it to them has a gun on the table. And it's sort of the implication that if you...

If you break this secret, if you betray your country, this could potentially carry the death penalty because treason does still carry the death penalty at this point. It doesn't anymore in the UK, but it certainly did in the Second World War. So basically, they're really hot on this. And they also have some quite sort of frightening people who if it is reported back ⁓ to the organization that someone has been engaging in careless talk,

that they basically sent around to give them a good frightening. And that's actually a quote from, for one of the documents they say, send your man to give this person a good frightening. But even then there is a lot of careless talk, which does happen. And if you go to the archives in London and look at the files, the security files, there are lots of examples of people basically engaging in careless talk, which the agency really doesn't like for very obvious reasons.

biggest security breach is actually the second the subject of my second book which is available in all the bookshops hopefully called the the last Cambridge spy which is about a Soviet spy rather than a Nazi spy who basically ⁓ worked in Bletchley for a year in around 1943 ⁓ I think off the top of my head and he ⁓ leaked information for example about the Battle of Kursk or the planning for the Battle of Kursk ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (11:16)
Ha

Chris Smith (11:36)
to the Soviet Union and his name was John Cairncross and he worked as a translator at Bletchley. So this idea that it's ⁓ permanently secret can be a little bit overblown. This idea which is attributed to Churchill is this line from a fable, Aesop's fables about the golden goose or the goose who lays the golden ⁓ egg and never cackles and...

Churchill says that basically Bletchley is his goose which lays these golden eggs and again never cackles. Well, actually some of them did cackle, but on the whole, it's a remarkable feat that they actually did keep it as secret as they did for as long as they did.

Jonathan Thomas (12:17)
Well, that leads me to have two questions here. ⁓ First, did the Nazis know about Bletchley Park? Is there any evidence of that?

Chris Smith (12:25)
No, no, there's no evidence that they ever found out about it. And that's because of the extraordinary kind of things that they did to keep this a secret. So you want to keep as few people outside of Bletchley to know about this organization and this intelligence, which they called ultra intelligence as possible. So at the time there was a classification system in Britain, know, things would be, I don't know, confidential at the bottom level. And then right at the top level is something called most secret. This is the stuff which is really, really

know, state secrets of the highest level. And then they tagged on this idea of most secret ultra or ultra secrets as another form of classification on the same level, but specifically about this material, this intelligence they called ultra. And so anytime anyone is basically indoctrinated, that's the word they use, indoctrinated into the ultra secret, into ultra intelligence, they would basically be given a briefing about how you could handle this intelligence.

And this is a very few people. We're talking probably a hundred children people outside of Bletchley who know about this. And even the sort of most senior commanders in the field, they're basically given these intelligence liaison officers who basically tell them what they can and cannot do with this information and how to use it. So you could have in this case, probably quite a junior officer basically giving orders to a very senior general. So they take it really, really seriously.

Jonathan Thomas (13:50)
And so speaking of secrets and tell me more about the official secrets act. Like what does it contain? And they had to sign it, physically sign it. And while the threat of the death penalty was there, if you revealed the secrets, what in practice, what was the actual consequences if you broke the act?

Chris Smith (14:16)
Well, there's several different acts, but the one I think which is most relevant to this is the one they would have signed, I think it's from 1939, so the Official Secrets Act of 1939. basically, it would literally be the text of the act that they would look at and they'd read. And there'd be some other documents as well, which they'd also sign, which basically explain what all of this means, which they would sign. And yeah, the consequences, for example, for treason, for revealing certain types of secrets could indeed be death, if not...

you'd be lucky to get away with a long prison sentence. So for example, I ⁓ think ⁓ King, who was a spy in the interwar period, I think he got 10 years for revealing information to the Soviet Union. He'd been a cipher clerk in the British embassy, and he'd revealed information to the Soviet Union. So again, these people actually were, it was a very real consequence if you broke this.

Jonathan Thomas (15:14)
So the term station X is often used to describe Bletchley Park. What did that mean and how did the various huts and blocks organize their work to maintain these secret realms?

Chris Smith (15:28)
Okay, so station X actually refers to ⁓ MI6 in this context. So when Bletchley is first selected, it's not just GC and CS who go there, a part of ⁓ MI6 also goes there. And basically they had radio stations, communication stations, and this was basically ⁓ MI6 radio station, communication station 10. So literally X is just the Roman numeral. And it works very nicely, I think, for the mythos of Bletchley Park, but really actually just being station 10.

rather than station X. So you mentioned about the of the huts and the blocks. Was that the next part of question? Okay, yeah. So this was a system which was devised by a mathematician from Cambridge, a geometrist called Gordon Welchman, who is one of the early people to be brought into the organization. And what he does is he thinks, well, we need to have some sort of streamlined system.

Jonathan Thomas (16:04)
Yeah, yeah.

Chris Smith (16:24)
I suppose almost like a pipeline for which this information passes and it gets processed. So you've also got lots of different versions of Enigma. So the German army, for example, one particular part of it will have one form of Enigma and then another will have another part that will have a different variation of Enigma as well. So basically that's a lot of work. So what you would do is you would dedicate, for example,

particular branches of the German armed forces to one particular block. So in this case, the army and the air force, so that's the Luftwaffe in the here, they are dealt with by ⁓ HUT 6 for cryptanalysis. And then once all that kind of good mathematical stuff gets done on this stuff, and they've actually broken ⁓ the cipher system, then the information, the actual contents of the ciphers will be passed for translation and analysis in HUT 3.

So it's basically compartmentalizing these jobs, both for security purposes, but also efficiency purposes. We've also got Japanese sections. You've got Italian sections, Italian naval sections. You've got diplomatic and commercial stuff, which actually moves back to London in 1942. And you've got obviously the naval section as well. And that operates out of eight, for the crypt analysis and four for the translation in the intelligence.

So then you've also got other parts of Bletchley Park as well, which do other functions. So one of the things that you've got to do is you've got to actually store the information that you've collected. And that involves a really complicated index system, a bit like a kind of a database today on a computer, which is all done mechanically with punch cards.

so that operates out of something called C block. So the huts literally were huts, as you might imagine. So they're prefabricated huts, which are erected very, very quickly. And that comes with all sorts of problems to do with space, but also things like being very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter. Whereas the blocks which get erected a little bit later in the war, and there's quite a few of these blocks, I think it goes up to G if memory serves.

And these are basically very 1940s concrete buildings which get built. And that's again because these sections all expand so rapidly. So you can now move, I don't know, Hut 6 into one of these blocks. And that means that the old Hut 6 can now be used for some other purpose. And if you look at a map of Bletchy Park in the wall, you could see all these huts where they all are and then all these blocks, you get a sense of the scale of this organization.

Jonathan Thomas (19:00)
So there's often confusion about what exactly was being broken at Bletchley Park. Can you explain the differences between Enigma, which most people have heard of, and the other kind of codes and ciphers that they were working on?

Chris Smith (19:14)
Yeah, so one of the things that it actually tries to do is break everything that it possibly can because what it wants to try to do is to collect something called cribs. So cribs are basically bits of information that you know or can guess are going to be in a different message at some other point. you can basically, it aids the cryptanalytic process to actually know part of the solution already.

to what you're trying to break. Cause then you can kind of, I suppose, work back and work out how the code was ⁓ functions. So they try to break everything and keep everything. Cause even, you know, kind of useless information from a strategic point of view or tactical point of view might be useful in the actual crypt analytic process later. So they try to break everything. So we're not just talking about kind of listening into Hitler and things like that, which does happen. There are stuff which works on that sort of lines.

but you've got different types of ciphers throughout the war. So for quite, you know, kind of unimportant stuff, you'll have probably quite low grade, easily broken ciphers. And then you'll get your really high security stuff, which you're to want to have a very kind of powerful machine generated cipher like Enigma. And Enigma is really, really powerful for its day. It's invented at the end of the First World War, beginning of the interwar period by a man called Arthur Sherbius. And it basically resembles a typewriter.

but with a lamp board with a series of letters ⁓ indicating what letters being enciphered into. So you could press A for example and then G would light up instead and you just write down that and you'll transmit that and you could do the whole message that way. And one of things about this is it creates a cipher system, certainly the military versions of this create a cipher system which has 159 quintillion possible settings.

Which means if you have to try to brute force this, you know, just doing one letter at a time until you've done all 159 quintillion settings, that period of time is longer in seconds than the universe has existed. yeah, so it outwardly it seems very, very powerful, this cipher system, but it does have a real flaw, which is it can never in cipher itself a letter into itself. So you can press A 26 times and you'll never get A again.

So that's an inherent weakness. So understanding how the system works mathematically and technically, knowing, having cribs and having your own mechanized solutions means actually they can break this cipher system, certainly by early 1940. And then they get incredibly proficient at it as the war goes on. But then there's also even higher forms of cipher than this, suppose, which is, know, the stuff you use by the German high command, which is a machine, which is created by the

Lorenz company, which is basically a tech firm in this period and a machine called SZ40 and SZ42. And I won't bore you with the sort of the technical differences, but you just remember our old 159 quintillion number. This is now like hugely bigger even than that. That's so it's really ⁓ difficult to break. And so where they use these bomb machines, which I sort of mentioned a little bit earlier in relation to ⁓ Enigma, they actually have to invent a computer.

one of the very first ever computers to break colossus, which is actually programmable and can do basic algorithms and that sort of stuff. To be able to, yeah, for the power to be able to break this stuff. So we also have to remember it's not just the Germans, the British working on it or the Americans by this point. It's also the Italians, it's the Japanese, it's other parts of the various axis kind of world, the occupied territories.

And you're not just breaking the military stuff, you're also, for example, breaking what the police are doing. You're breaking the ciphers which are being used by the railways. So you're trying to get as much as possible to get a maximum understanding of your enemy.

Jonathan Thomas (23:09)
And you've managed to answer several questions at once. So well done. this is in the film imitation game. To dramatic effect, they say that, we can't use all the intelligence that we've gathered because if we do that, they will basically know that we've cracked their code. So.

How did the, was that, is that true for one? And how did the intelligence gathered at Bletchley Park actually get used? What was the process from when a message is intercepted to actionable action?

Chris Smith (23:42)
Okay, so you'll have to remind me the second part of that in a minute, because I'll forget. ⁓ But the way it kind of works in terms of... ⁓ Do they sacrifice things, well, to a degree possibly? Because it's absolutely true. If you use this intelligence in a stupid way, or a way which isn't careful, and the Germans get wind of the fact that you've done this, but they can deduce because of what you've done, because you're being so successful all the time in particular ways.

they can just upgrade their security measures very, very easily. And that would lock Bletchley Park out. And that actually does happen in terms of the U-boat codes or the U-boat ciphers. They introduce a fourth wheel to this system. And that basically locks Bletchley out for about 10 months during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic. so that doesn't happen because the Germans work out that they've done this, but they're worried why they're now losing the Battle of the Atlantic. And they basically just...

improve lots of areas of security, this is one of them. So what they're really terrified is of that happening. So you've got to use this intelligence in really careful way. And if you use it in a way which is, for example, like to reveal ⁓ that you've broken a cipher, they're not going to use that information. So there's a really big debate about all of this in terms of the Holocaust. So obviously the mass extermination of Jews and various other ⁓

minority groups in occupied Europe and actually knew all about what was going on. So they have references to Buchenwald, they've got references to Auschwitz, you know, from really quite early in this process. So for example, May 1942 saying, oh, well, we've killed X number of people this month in Auschwitz. And so if you know that that's going on and you know from other sources that that's going on, the question is then, well, why don't you send the RAF or the US Air Force to actually physically bomb?

Auschwitz or bomb the rail lines, other things like that. And one of the reasons that you don't want to do that is partly because what was if the Germans work out that you've broken the cipher? And that leads to a moral question about, well, would even slowing down the Holocaust be a morally justifiable thing to do? And obviously that's a question I can't answer. But from their point of view,

ending the war is what ends the Holocaust and anything which distracts you from ending the war as quickly as possible is not worth doing.

So that was the second part of your question and I have indeed forgotten it.

Jonathan Thomas (26:13)
Well, what was the process then from deciding, you know, this this is intelligence we can action and you know, how did they decide that?

Chris Smith (26:26)
Okay, yeah, so one of the things that you might do is you might come up with some sort of solution to this inherent problem of security. So for example, if you are tracking what the U-boats are doing and then a U-boat surfaces, sends a message, receives its orders, which has basically go somewhere else to some other grid point, you can then warn your convoy to get out of the way. Or you can even send your Royal Navy or US Navy destroyers to basically sink this U-boat.

But you're not gonna do that unless you've come up with some plausible reason why you would have discovered where the U-boat's gonna be. And that, for example, might be you'd send an aircraft overhead, almost as if it's a random, like an RAF spotting plane, which would then give the impression to the German Navy, no, it's not because they've broken our fancy Enigma machine, it's because they've just spotted us. They're just sending lots and lots of aircraft all the time. So this is the reason why we...

This is the reason why they know where we are. And this is the reason why we're doing bad things, because of their supremacy, basically. So you could come up with that. Another thing they do, which is again designed to allow them to utilize this intelligence as maximally as possible, is they actually invent a fictional spy who's working out of the German high command called Boniface. And so every time they talk about this stuff, they talk about Boniface being the source of this information.

And of course Boniface is a fiction and the reality is it comes from signals intelligence. So I've remembered another part of your question, which is how does the intelligence get through this process, I suppose. So you want to actually intercept the German radio communication network as ⁓ much as possible. And that's done by an organization called the Y-Service. Well, I say organization, it's kind of an umbrella organization which has lots of different parts.

Jonathan Thomas (27:59)
Thank

Chris Smith (28:21)
So basically a lot of the Y-series would be usually young women.

who will be, ⁓ for example, the civil service or they might be from the armed forces, who will be sitting somewhere in the South Downs or Kent or somewhere like that with a radio set, like ranks and ranks of radio sets, basically just ⁓ intercepting these messages and basically writing out the Morse code that they can hear in their earphones. And that's what they do all day. That's their job is just to write down all of this Morse code as precisely as possible.

And so you've got another group of stations as well. These are called direction finding stations and their job is basically to triangulate where this message has been sent from and what time and all that sort of thing. So that's really important. That's ⁓ a feed to process which we could talk about later called traffic analysis. And basically what that means is you can create a very detailed ⁓ picture, I suppose, of the radio networks which are in Germany and the occupied territories and where things are moving and all that sort of thing.

So we've got our message, which is now just some gibberish letters, and that's all it is. And that will be sent either by what's called a teleprinter, which to give the audience some sort of idea about what that is, imagine basically a fax machine in the 1940s. So it's sent electronically ⁓ to Bletchley. And that's what they, if it's a really high priority thing, like it's like the German Eighth Army, you know, or something to do with that, you're going to want to send that pretty rapidly.

For other stuff, is perhaps less important, ⁓ you're going to send by what's called a dispatch rider. everything which is sent telephotons also gets sent as a backup via a dispatch ride as well. And that's usually a person on a motorbike. That's all it is. And their job is basically to just drive up and down from Bletchley to these, these exceptions and basically deliver these messages. And that's what they, that's, that's all they do. They, they do thousands and thousands of messages.

because of the sheer scale of what's going on. So now we've got to Breachley and you've got to basically, ⁓ I suppose, what would the word be? You've got to have almost like a welcome room where you're ⁓ basically prioritizing stuff and you're registering stuff, you're providing some sort of numbers, you're creating your metadata about this thing. And ⁓ then it gets sent to the HUTs. So for example, one of the, ⁓ somebody would say HUT,

six who you know working on the Luftwaffe ciphers will take a look at it and think well how are going to break this and so they'll start doing their their cryptanalytic work on this and they'll eventually come up with what they call a menu and this menu is is for the bomb machines which have been invented and we can talk a little bit more about them later so they then get sent to the bomb room which starts off in um hut 11 and then a lot of this stuff also happens in these satellite stations which they call outstations in

place like Gayhurst, Banner, things like that. And this is the machines basically take 159 quintillion possible settings and produced it to a much more manageable number. So then the information goes back to the cryptanalyst in Hut 6 and then he or she hopefully will break the cipher. So now you've got your cipher, you can start to basically... ⁓

Jonathan Thomas (31:38)
you

Chris Smith (31:45)
strip this off the individual messages, which means you get Gumballdigook now into German plain text. And at this point, it goes to our translation and analysis hubs. And basically it goes into them. ⁓ The boss person will probably prioritize which ones they want to translate first. And then in basically almost like a semi-circle table, they'll translate this stuff. And then we checked by the boss to see if it's accurate.

And then they'll basically try to produce some sort of intelligence summary, something which you could then send to Winston Churchill, ⁓ President Roosevelt, ⁓ General Patton, whoever it might be, in some sort of usable form, which means that you've then got to encipher it yourself. So they have their own cipher machines and then away it goes. So it's basically this very kind of ⁓ streamlined production line process.

I mean, they describe this stuff as their process of being almost like Fordist in the kind of that they waste, like almost like a Ford factory. Yeah. So that's, that's basically how it happens. And then obviously you've got your other sections as well, which are doing things like indexing. So your big punch card of indexes, all that sort of stuff. So it becomes this massive, massive process.

Jonathan Thomas (32:55)
what a phenomenal sort of use of human ingenuity and effort and organization because if you think about this, if you were thinking about this problem now, especially with AI tools the way they are now, you would just feed everything into the AI who would figure out the code and translate it and spit out actionable intelligence, analyze the messages. But, you know, to think that

Back then it took 10,000 people to do that. Now it takes a single computer and a person operating that computer to do that. And it's mind boggling.

Chris Smith (33:31)
I don't know how many people work for the NSA, but I reckon it's probably about over 20,000. So these are still enormous organizations with absolutely kind of eye watering budgets. If they even tell us what the budget is, which they probably don't tell us what the full budget is. But yeah, I mean, they're still pretty much like factories even today in a lot of ways, because it's all about information processing. So yeah, these are still enormous organizations, I think, which would surprise, but obviously we're not allowed in.

Jonathan Thomas (33:46)
Yeah.

Chris Smith (34:01)
to actually see what's going on under the hood in these places, because obviously they're still very, very secret.

Jonathan Thomas (34:09)
Well, that's a great ⁓ segue into my next question is, the work at Bletchley Park remained a complete secret until 1974. Why was it kept classified for so long after the war ended when lot of this stuff was becoming common knowledge?

Chris Smith (34:26)
Yeah, so I think there's a number of reasons for this. I mean, the most important one is that after the Second World War, you've got lots of different countries who obviously want to have secret information. And the British basically, and the Americans, sell them Enigma machines, but just don't tell them that they can break them. So that's a big reason. Also, there's cryptanalytic techniques, which you don't want to release. You don't want people to even know that this is possible, it can be done at this kind of scale.

And you certainly don't want the Soviets to know this, even though obviously they actually already do know this because they've already, you know, they've had John K. Encross working at Bletchley Park. But yeah, so there's lots of Cold War reasons why you want to keep this a secret. The other, think, is cultural in the sense that these organizations have been created as top secret things. They've been told that they were never to be revealed. ⁓ And the British government doesn't even...

admit that these exist for decades and decades. It's actually quite recent that they even admit officially that they even exist. So you've got a culture of secrecy, which basically is that we're never going to talk about this stuff. I mean, that certainly in the case of MI6, that's still true today. There's no archival stuff which has been believed to be MI6. So I think it's partly cultural and it's also partly

Again, because there was actually, at least for the first few decades, there's a genuine reason why you don't want this information getting out there, you know, on a technical level. But by the time you get to 1974, this is starting to crack, I think. So, for example, you've got lots of people, know, been senior figures in the intelligence world and the Second World War, who have now probably either retired or reaching retirement age. And so they've got time on their hands.

for start. And also other secrets have started to come out as well. So there's things like the double cross system, which is basically an MI5 ⁓ spy system that all gets revealed in sort of like the 1970s as well. As do various other things which have been going on. And so there's this sort of sense, well, if they're allowed to publish and let everyone know kind of what brilliant work we did, why shouldn't we have the same right and the same privilege? And let's be honest, by 1974,

Is this technical stuff really, I mean, if you're trying to suggest that, for example, knowledge of how to break enigma matters in 1974, when everything's moved on so massively with the advent of computing, then it's just ludicrous. So there becomes a lot of pressure on the government to basically release this information. And ultimately, what if someone, example, an American who's found out about this,

publishers, how are you going to stop them publishing in the United States? You're not going to. And so that actually happens. A man called Anthony Cave Brown ⁓ wants to publish a book called Bodyguard of Secrets or Bodyguard of Lies even, and that basically reveals Ultra. And so the British government basically think, well, we've got this chap, this nice good chap called Freddie Winterbottom who's a group captain in the Second World War. He'd been in an RAF intelligence liaison officer with Bletchley.

Jonathan Thomas (37:08)
Yeah.

you

Chris Smith (37:33)
He's the kind of guy who could be trusted, will let him publish his memoirs. And obviously after vetting them. And basically they try to beat Anthony K Brown to the punchline, which they successfully do. So they want to control the narrative. So that's why it all kind of comes out in 1974.

Jonathan Thomas (37:51)
So your book is called The Hidden History of Bletchley Park and focuses on the social and gendered aspects of the organization. What kind of drew you to that?

Chris Smith (38:01)
Yeah, so the story of Bletchley Park, certainly by the time I was interested in it, when I was a student at university, and I actually come from Bletchley or just outside Bletchley. And it seemed to me, and I've spent a lot of time there, I've actually used to work there as a gardener. And one of the things that I kind of discovered is that we knew an awful lot about kind of how ultra intelligence is used. We know a lot about the big personalities.

But that didn't seem to me to be actually kind of how this organization worked. It didn't tell a very ⁓ clear picture for me. So for example, a really good example of that would be the imitation game, which we talked about a little bit earlier. That basically presents Alan Turing as being kind of the only person who really matters in this story. And I thought, actually, this isn't how the Second World War works. The Second World War works.

And it's not because of individual genius or individual bravery, even though obviously those are important. It's one because of logistics. It's one because of economics and the power which can actually kind of utilize these best or most efficiently is going to win. And that's obviously what happens. And what intelligence does and this massive bureaucracy you've created, this factory you've created allows you to basically think about

war differently and prosecute the war differently. So I was more interested in that side of things. And also thinking that, well, know, lots of the time, you know, people in these books rarely talk about the role and importance of women in them. They don't talk about this as a kind of class thing, reflecting the British class structure. They don't talk about how this organization actually worked on a kind of administrative level. And that's what I became interested in for my PhD.

Jonathan Thomas (39:46)
So the popular images of eccentric male mathematicians, pipe-smoking dons, doing crossword puzzles, how accurate is that picture?

Chris Smith (39:56)
Yeah, so it's both accurate and also very misleading. So it's accurate in the sense that you actually do get people like this working at Bletchy Park. But these are people who are going to be working probably as cryptanalysts, know, kind of the, you know, the scientists who you've actually got from universities, who you've got from either students or as professors doing this kind of heavy intellectual work. And ⁓ you might also get these people in, for example, the translation huts, the research huts, things like that.

But they're the minority at Black Sheep Park. We're probably talking in the hundreds of individuals who are like that, whereas the thousands tend to be young women aged between 18 and 25, who are probably from the armed forces or the foreign office or some other branch of the civil service. And they're basically doing all the kind of machine labor, the communications labor, the administrative work. And they basically rarely kind of get a look in in the kind of the

know, the sort of the Hollywood filmic narrative of all of this. I mean, it's, you if you wanted to produce an accurate movie about Bletchy Park, it would probably be ⁓ a woman working on a typewriter for 10 hours a day or eight hours a day. That's what it would be, which doesn't produce a, you know, a very kind of ⁓ interesting narrative for the audience. So I think we get a lot of focus on the... ⁓

the more eccentric people because it's a better story. And I think we love this idea, don't we, that the Second World War is won obviously by the kind of the, you know, the boys on the front line, you know, storming the beaches of Normandy. Or alternatively, it's won by, you know, kind of a weird sort of professor with a bit of string and a pencil in Bletchley. And that's a really kind of romantic image to it. So I think that's a lot.

of it, but that's not the reality. The reality is of a pretty well funded, very well funded, very well staffed, ⁓ very disciplined, mechanized factory. That's what we're talking about.

Jonathan Thomas (42:05)
Were there class divisions at Bletchley?

Chris Smith (42:09)
⁓ Yes and no. So ⁓ there's this sort of idea that Bletchy is a meritocracy, but it isn't, isn't. ⁓ So it is in the sense that, you you're going to probably rise up the ranks if you're the best cryptanalyst, that's absolutely right. But because Britain is a class driven society, if you're going to be getting people to do, for example, ⁓ translation, or you're going to be getting to do things like cryptanalysis, you're probably recruiting people who've got university degrees.

And now we're talking about a very small percentage of the population, most of whom are going to be middle class, upper middle class or aristocratic, are ever going to go to university. And this is also going to be pretty gendered because women by and large don't get to go to university in this period. I mean, some do, but again, is not something a lot of young ladies are going to be pushed towards doing. So in that sense, you're drawing very heavily from ⁓ basically elite parts of society or least the affluent parts of society.

which means they're all gonna probably speak in a certain way. They're gonna have had a certain probably ⁓ relatively common shared background that have been to the British public schools, for example, know, for example, Eaton, Harrow, Shareborne, Winchester, all of those sorts of things. And they're probably going to be quite affluent, so they'll have money, and they're all going to work in this kind of way. And the same is also true to a degree of the women who I mentioned earlier. So...

The largest single contributor of people to Bletch Park is the Women's Royal Naval Service, which also happens to be the most exclusive of the women's branches of the armed forces. So these tend to be middle-class women. They tend to come from good families. You'd actually have to have, I think, like a letter of reference from somebody who's probably already in the Navy to actually even be able to get in. Whereas the armies, so the women's, sorry, the Accelerated Territorial Service, which is the women's branch of the army,

that only contributes 400 people to Bletchley. And ⁓ the vast majority of the people who are in the ATS are for the working classes. So they kind of exclude the working classes from Bletchley pretty heavily. But we do get this idea of it as being this kind of egalitarian place, which has people of every single class. But really, this is a very middle class institution.

Jonathan Thomas (44:25)
So all this effort to make this intelligence and make it useful, how in practice was it used, for example, in the Battle of the Atlantic? How did it sort of turn the tide there?

Chris Smith (44:39)
Yeah, so one of the things it's used for the Battle of the Atlantic, as I alluded to earlier, is basically against the U-boat wolf packs. So Britain has a big problem and also a big advantage in that it's an island, an island nation. And it doesn't necessarily have enough resources in order to actually prosecute the war effort in the way that it would like to. But thankfully, there's the British Empire, which can provide lots of resources. There's also our generous friends in the United States.

who are providing lots of resources. But this has to basically cross the Atlantic Ocean. And the Germans realized full well that if you sink enough of this material, then Britain will eventually have to leave the war. You'll essentially won. So it basically utilizes U-boats to basically neutralize this shipping, which is traveling across the Atlantic. So.

As I mentioned before, because Bletchley is able to listen into what U-boats are up to, it basically means that they can reroute their convoys or they can attempt to actually sink and attack the U-boats. And basically when ⁓ the U-boat threat is at its worst is at the times when Bletchley is basically locked out of this material. And as soon as they basically get back into it, then basically the Kriegsmarine's ⁓

⁓ a fortune to change as a result of this. So another place where Bletchley is obviously really important is in the lead up to Operation Overlord, which is the D-Day landings. So the Allies have been basically doing a massive deception operation, basically trying to convince the Germans that they were gonna launch an invasion ⁓ basically from Kent to Calais. And they even had like these sort of made up armies.

So people sending lots of messages over the radio and they do even have like inflatable tanks. So tanks which you know, it was just quite amusing to sort of see in images of just like a guy carrying a tank. ⁓ And again, designed to suggest to the Germans that this is where this attack was gonna take place. And that's where they're gonna put your forces. So if it had been really well defended at Normandy, or certainly more defended than it is, then you can kind of imagine Omaha Beach, you know.

writ large and also significantly more deadly. But Blatchley knows that the Germans have fallen for this deception operation because they're listening to what they're saying over the radio. So they know that that has worked. So it could arguably be that D-Day takes place when it does because Blatchley has basically provided this information. Another place where it's obviously really useful is ⁓ a North Africa campaign and so on.

Another important one as well as they know that for example Operation Sea Lion, which was the proposed German invasion of Britain, had been called off because again they reported over the radios. It's really useful for example in other particular examples, so for example when they're hunting down the Bismarck, which is Germans most powerful warship, it's used to basically track and understand where they're going and they're able to basically chase it into a harbor and then eventually sink it. So it's

You know, can see clear uses for this stuff.

Jonathan Thomas (47:57)
So Alan Turing is now synonymous with Bletchley Park, but how accurate are the portrayals we see of him in films and was he really the central figure or is that an oversimplification?

Chris Smith (48:12)
So I don't know if the depictions are necessarily hugely accurate. mean, for example, the Benedict Cumberbatch version of him in the imitation game sort of demonstrates him to be quite an arrogant, even kind of unpleasant figure, which I don't think is true at all. What he was, however, was very shy, which you don't get that from Benedict Cumberbatch's performance. So elements of that are true. He's also quite eccentric. So he suffered very much from hay fever. So he'd ride his bicycle in the summer months when the pollen's out.

where he is a government-issued gas mask, which is quite a weird thing to do. He's also, I think quite rightly, this is a perennial complaint of Bletchley, is that people are the mugs and the tea and, you know, the saucers and things like that for drinking. And so Alan Turing would actually chain his mug to his radiator. So he's quite an odd guy, but obviously very brilliant and, as I said, very, very shy. He's also a gay man in Britain at this period where that's illegal.

And after the Second World War, becomes ⁓ prosecuted by the state for his homosexuality and is chemically castrated and then eventually takes his own life. So he has this almost ⁓ mythical kind of status, this legendary status, because he's like ⁓ someone who, you know, kind of, it's hard to describe really. He's like ⁓ the hero that we really needed, but we then kind of betray.

the state. So it has that romantic tragic quality to it, which obviously makes for really ⁓ brilliant drama. But in terms of what he actually does, he's hugely significant because he's the man who basically designs on a mathematical level, the bomb machines which are used to break ⁓ the enigma. So this is then improved, these designs are then improved by a man called Gordon Welshman, and the actual machines are designed on a mechanical level.

and built by a company called the British Tabulating Machine Company. yeah, so that's Alan Turing's really huge contribution to this story is designing the machine, which allows them to basically do this cryptanalytical business at a very, very rapid pace and with a huge amount of output. So that's why he's so important. He's also important in other senses as well. So for example, for a time he's the head of HUT8.

He's also really important in terms of liaising with the United States. He actually spends time in the United States, basically looking at what's going on there in terms of their cryptanalytic programs, but also their cryptographical programs. In other words, the Americans are making their own cypher systems at this period and he basically advises on them, you know, their weaknesses or their strengths. And he also reports this back to the British government as well. So he's a really important figure, actually.

But what I think becomes problematic is if we just focus on him and we focus on the romantic elements of this and zoom out from the fact that again, this is a factory with thousands of people and that's why it works. It's not because one individual is a genius, it's because they designed and developed and built this truly extraordinary system. I also think that if we focus on him and even just focus on Bletchley, we lose international dimension to all of this as well.

So Turing got the inspiration to design the bomb machines from his Polish colleagues. So the Poles in the 1930s had actually designed and broken the Enigma before the British had, at least temporarily. And they too had built a machine to do this. Unfortunately, that machine only kind of really works for about a year before the Germans upgrade their system. And they call this machine the Bomber.

Bomb machines, the Turing bombs, don't work on the same principles. They don't work on the same mathematics. But what they are is inspiration, hence the reason why the names stay very similar for Turing. So we don't want to forget that. We also don't want to forget the fact that the United States is also hugely important in this story as well. So the United States mass produces bomb machines as well. And if you've got like a problem, you you need more bomb time in Britain, then you can get on the phone.

or communicate to the Americans and they'll just do it for you with their bombs. And also the Americans have taken the lead on the Japanese stuff, which means that the British can then allocate their resources more effectively to the European theatre. And I think if we just focus on one individual, however brilliant like Alan Ture, that we lose the idea that this is again a war of economics, it's a war of logistics, a war of resources, and it's a war of mass personnel.

Jonathan Thomas (52:47)
So can you sort of explain the bomb machine and how it's different from a computer as we know it? Because many people consider it the precursor to the computer that you and I are talking on, but it was a mechanical device, not a digital device. So how is it different?

Chris Smith (53:06)
So it's an electromechanical device, which is probably more akin to a calculator than a computer, if we wanted to use that as an analogy. It's not programmable, so it can't be a computer in that sense. It just does one function. So you input what you want it to do, but it's not like you can change the algorithm, you can program the algorithm. You can't get your calculator to do the same things that you can get your computer to do. So if that analogy works.

Whereas a computer, again, has to be programmable. It has to be able to at least store some sort of memory to actually run some sort of program. So Colossus can kind of partially do that. The bomb machines can't at all.

Jonathan Thomas (53:44)
So you're currently working on a new book about Bletchley Park. what tell us about it? What are you, how is it gonna be different than your previous book? And what are you gonna cover?

Chris Smith (53:53)
Yeah, so I'm writing this with my colleague, Dr. Tom Lowles, who's also at Coventry University. And basically what we're doing in this book is looking at the afterlife, I suppose, of Bletchley Park. So initially I was interested in, for example, how do they keep this secret after 1945, and to what extent are they successful in that? And then once you get to 1974, and all of a sudden, this story is out there.

Jonathan Thomas (54:17)
So.

Chris Smith (54:19)
it opens up some really interesting questions. So for example, who's writing these early books? What kind of person is this? Does this shape the narrative that we have today? Does it buy into to certain mythologies and memories of the Second World War? And then if you've got other people writing a little bit later, for example, more women writing, does that change the way that the story is told or the way that the story then appears, for example, in media? So...

We're also looking, for example, how it's reported in newspapers, how it appears in films like The Imitation Gabe and Enigma, but also how it's ⁓ utilised in various other contexts. So, for example, how does it get used, for example, in the political debates about Brexit and Britain leaving the European Union? So how does it get used? So it's basically about the meaning of Bletchley Park and then also, of course, the afterlife of the actual estate itself, which

doesn't have an off-life because it still exists. And how it gets used by GCHQ for a while, then other parts of the British state, then it becomes a teacher training college and now it's obviously a museum. So it's basically the afterlife of Bletchley Park, both as a kind of idea but also as a sort of symbol of the Second World War, also as a physical estate.

Jonathan Thomas (55:36)
sounds really interesting and that's a great another great segue into my next question. So Bletchley Park is now famously a museum so for visitors planning a trip there what can they expect to see from the World War II era?

Chris Smith (55:50)
Well, so all the Hudson blocks are still there. Some of those have been sort of lost over the years, but a lot of the kind of the core of the site is still there, more or less as it was during the Second World War. So by the time we get to the 1990s, actually the government were planning on selling this place off. They didn't want to, it actually was owned by BT by that point, British Telecom. And they actually wanted to sell it off and basically knock it all down and make way for housing, which obviously would have been quite a loss.

And all the huts and blocks by this point were dilapidated, falling down, hadn't been maintained or looked after. And so the Bletchy Park Trust basically rescued this place from ⁓ the jaws of destruction at the hands of capitalist developers and house builders, tycoon sort of property developers.

So they do that and so then they basically set about over about 20 year period basically repairing the huts and blocks and getting them back to the standard and how they would have looked like in the Second World War and You've got lots of the machines Which they would have used for example everything from typewriters through to ⁓ bomb machines ⁓ Which have been remade since people have to like a bomb remake project. So you can see those Obviously, you can see the mansion you can see

basically lots of exhibitions on all sorts of different aspects of the wartime experience. There's also another museum at Bletchley Park as well, which is the National Computing Museum. And there they've actually got a remake of the Colossus Computer itself as well. So there's two really interesting museums on what was the old Bletchley Park site, which are well worth a trip to.

Jonathan Thomas (57:32)
You heard it guys, pay a visit. I haven't been there, I need to go there. I desperately wanna go there.

Chris Smith (57:36)
Make

sure you do the collective tools as well because they're really great.

Jonathan Thomas (57:41)
Okay, so for my last question, is there a figure from all of your research at Bletchley Park other than Turing who you think deserves more recognition in the popular consciousness?

Chris Smith (57:54)
Yeah, think for example, a lot of the women I think get a very kind of ⁓ short shrift. So I think it'd be really interesting to actually just go away and write a book about one individual woman who's basically at the very bottom of the food chain of this organization and see what her war is like compared to the story we normally get told. But if we're thinking about a more senior person who has a greater individual contribution, I think someone like ⁓ Gordon Welshman, who obviously makes the

contribution to the actual design of the bomb machines. He also comes up with the HUD system. So in some ways, I think he's actually probably a more important figure on the whole than Turing is. There's also a guy called Bill Tutte and Bill Tutte did perhaps the greatest intellectual feat possibly of the 20th century. And basically, when they, Lorenz machines, which obviously generate this, this really almost impossible to crack cipher for the period.

It's broken by ⁓ hand eventually after a long time studying it by a guy called John Tilton. And with the having cracked it, this guy built up is able to recreate based on the maths of ⁓ how the cipher system was constructed, the electrical ⁓ construction of these Lorenz machines, which allows ⁓ someone like Tommy Flowers, who's a general post office engineer, to design and build the Closser's computers.

But none of that would have been possible without this absolutely astonishing bit of ⁓ genius from Bill Tutte. And again, I don't think there's any book written about Bill Tutte, is really, really strange given that, you know, this is probably the pinnacle achievement of Bletchy Park in the Second World War is individual achievement would probably be that.

Jonathan Thomas (59:37)
fascinating stuff. Dr. Chris Smith has dedicated his career to uncovering the real stories behind Britain's intelligence history, stories that are often more complex, more human, and ultimately more fascinating than the myths that we have that have grown up around them. His work reminds us that Bletchley Park wasn't just about brilliant mathematicians cracking codes. It was about thousands of ordinary people, most of them women doing extraordinary work under extraordinary pressure, and then keeping that secret for decades.

If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or leave a comment. If you love the Anglotopia podcast, please consider joining the Friends of Anglotopia Club where you can get early access to new episodes and connect with other Britain enthusiasts. So join us next time as we explore, continue exploring the people, places, and stories that make Britain's history and culture so endlessly fascinating to discover. Thank you, Chris.

Chris Smith (1:00:29)
my pleasure. Thank you again for allowing me to wax lyrical about Bletchley Park.

Jonathan Thomas (1:00:34)
That was fantastic. Thank you.