Bletchley Park celebrates codebreakers who changed course of first world war | First world war

Bletchley Park celebrates codebreakers who changed course of first world war

Exhibition brings to light work of MI1(b) and Room 40, latter of which helped bring US into Great War after deciphering Zimmermann telegram

In January 1917 British codebreakers known as Room 40, named after their original cramped space at the Admiralty, intercepted and deciphered a German secret message which changed the course of the first world war, helping to bring the US into the conflict.

The Zimmermann telegram, sent from the German foreign minister to their ambassador in Mexico, urged the central American county to “make war together, make peace together”. In return for becoming a German ally, it promised the US states of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico as a prize after the war.

Deciphering the telegram was one of the greatest achievements of British codebreakers during that war, says the grandson of the publisher turned codebreaker Nigel de Grey. “Just a few days later my grandfather addressed a meeting and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to win the war.’ It was a true moment of history,” said Michael de Grey.

De Grey, who has seen the original printout of the German telegram covered with his grandfather’s distinctive handwriting, was speaking at the opening of the new permanent exhibition at Bletchley Park, the former secret codebreaking station. It is the first to celebrate a generation of codebreakers who laid the groundwork for later eccentric geniuses including Alan Turing, who played a key role in cracking the German Enigma cipher.

His grandfather never spoke about his wartime experiences, for the good reason that he continued working in military intelligence to within a few weeks of his death in 1950. De Grey’s father, John, and his aunt, Barbara, also worked at Bletchley – every generation of the family has enjoyed number and word puzzles. He says he still has letters written to him as a child by his grandfather in coloured crayon, with drawings instead of many words.

“This is an emotional day for me,” De Grey said. “This is the bit of the story that remained to be told – Bletchley Park didn’t just spring up out of nowhere.”

The characters recruited to the new service included brilliant mavericks such as Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, who liked to work while sitting in a nice deep bath of hot water. He was also very fond of poetry, and was sitting in his bath, pondering a German communication, when he spotted that the many words ending “en” might be from a poem: the words “frauen” “ Rosen” and “lieben” helped identify a verse by the poet Friedrich Schiller and crack the code.

Other codebreakers included serving army and navy personnel, but also classicists, historians, linguists, Oliver Strachey, brother of the critic and Bloomsbury set leading light Lytton, and the remarkable Claribel Spurling, said to be the only person who scored 100% in a supposedly impossible test set for potential new recruits.

Room 40, set up in the admiralty within days of the outbreak of war in 1914, and MI1(d), another secret codebreaking team set up by the War Office, operated from secret offices in London and remained bitter rivals for much of the conflict.

The Ministry of Defence originally thought their librarian, Francis Hudleston, would be able to do the job by himself, working part-time, but the unit rapidly expanded and soon included frontline teams in France, Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. The exhibition at Bletchley includes a replica of an album presented by the staff to the director, Major Malcolm Hay, when he retired in 1919, with messages, poems and puzzles in Gaelic, French, Spanish, Latin, Greek and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics

Surviving records of the units are rare, so a neatly typed list of who paid what into the tea kitty in the week to 24 September 1917 is a precious document: Strachey gave 5 shillings and 2 pence, Chichester only 1s 9d, and Captain Brooke Hunt, who must have drunk a lot of tea, £1 2s.

Like Nigel de Grey, many continued in intelligence and codebreaking after the war, when Room 40 and MI1(b) were merged as the Government Code and Cypher School, which moved to Bletchley on the eve of the second world war.

To coincide with the exhibition, Bletchley has republished a pantomime version of Alice in Wonderland, written by two of the codebreakers, which affectionately mocked their work. “Silly girl,” Alice is told when she gets lost looking for the Directional Room. “Why, it’s called the Directional Room because it’s in that direction.” The pantomime had a private performance to celebrate the end of the war, in London in December1918, but was then almost forgotten for almost century.

The exhibition also includes a copy of Jane’s Fighting Ships, a catalogue of the battleships used by every nation caught up in the war, which was used by Room 40: every time a German ship was sunk, its name was carefully crossed out in the book.

Judith Finch and Candy Connolly were also moved by the exhibition. Their grandfather was Alastair Denniston, first director of the combined service, and – they felt – much maligned in the recent Oscar-nominated film starring Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game. “Charles Dance played him as a baddie, but he was not a pompous prat,” Finch said. “He was a quiet, kind, very family-minded man, and the most far-sighted of the lot of them. It’s time the record was set straight.”

The Road to Bletchley Park, Codebreaking in World War One, Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

This article was amended on 3 August 2015 to correct the spelling of the Zimmermann telegram.

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