The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

Published: 2010
Author: Sinclair McKay

Some secrets will never be uncovered

One of last year’s surprise publishing hits was Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park which looked at the men and women who worked at the secret code-breaking centre during World War II. I watched hundreds of copies being sold in one small bookshop in the lead-up to Christmas and decided that if everyone else was buying it then I would too. Yes I am that susceptible to peer pressure. I don’t usually read history, maybe one or two books every couple of years, and I know nothing about code-breaking or computers so it didn’t seem like my normal kind of book but I was intrigued by its success so decided to go for it.

McKay’s day job is as a features writer for The Telegraph and The Mail on Sunday and this journalistic background shows through. The Secret Life of Bletchley Park isn’t a dry run-through of historical facts but a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the men and women who worked at the centre. Through interviews with veterans and McKay’s studies of the National Archives we learn about how workers were recruited, their time at the park and the work that was carried out decoding enemy messages, bringing an earlier end to the war than would have been possible without their efforts.

Some of the names and anecdotes in the book are familiar including the story of Alan Turing and his work to break the German Enigma code. There’s a short exploration of Turing’s life and his subsequent conviction for homosexuality, chemical castration and death from cyanide poisoning in 1954. Turing’s is a story which shames Britain but this isn’t the book to fully explore it, this is a wider study of the operation. Instead of focusing solely on Turing, we get fascinating snippets of the lives of the code-breakers, Wrens, secretaries and others who kept the famous huts ticking over.

What struck me was that 70 plus years on, the veterans of Bletchley Park are still reticent to discuss their time there and what exactly they did to aid the war effort. Despite the seemingly lax security at the Park, the workers refused to divulge to anyone at the time what they were doing. Families were kept in the dark and young men put up with the resentment aroused by them seemingly not joining the war effort. Decades on and still the full story isn’t known because workers have passed away without ever discussing what they actually did. What surprised me was not so much that the staff of Bletchley Park were circumspect about their work but that the residents of the town of Bletchley also kept quiet. I can’t imagine that happening today, the Sun would be hacking the phones of everyone in the town, there would probably be a reality TV show and a five page spread in FHM about the Babes of Bletchley.

There is a degree of narrative about the mechanics of the code-breaking operation. Some of it went over my non-mathematical head but at the same time someone with real interest in this side of things wouldn’t have enough to keep them interested. This book is a social history, not a military or computing one and does a relatively good job as such, although I felt guilty at getting a tad bored near the end. The first half which covered the origins and initial staffing of the Park was much more interesting than the second which recounted what happened during the war. As much of the story remains unknown there was a lot of repetition and conjecture, it felt like the narrative was being stretched out. What I really learned from The Secret Life of Bletchley Park is that much is still secret and probably always will be.