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Bletchley Park: a fitting memorial to our enigmatic nature | Ben Macintyre - Times Online

The campaign to save Bletchley Park, the wartime codebreaking centre, is gathering pace. Last month 97 academics and scientists wrote to this newspaper calling for the site to become a national museum of computing, in recognition of the pioneering work carried out there in the Second World War. Thousands have signed a petition urging the Government to restore the building and rotting wooden huts where Hitler's supposedly unbreakable codes were unravelled.

The campaign has tended to focus on the scientific advances, the cracking of the Enigma Code and the role of the codebreakers in hastening the end of the war. Yet Bletchley Park also stands as a monument to two often undervalued aspects of the British character - secrecy and eccentricity.

The intelligence gathered there was, simply, the best-kept secret in history, and it was created and preserved by some remarkable, and remarkably unconventional, people. The Park should be preserved as a memorial to scientific and military ingenuity, but also to the triumph of discretion and human oddity, two vital British traits that have decayed along with Bletchley Park over the past half century.

Sigmund Freud wrote: “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret.” Britain's wartime codebreakers proved him wrong. Some 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park, codenamed “Station X”. Several thousand more were privy to the intelligence gleaned from breaking the Enigma Code, codenamed “Ultra”.

For 30 years after the war, those achievements remained a secret protected by an almost sacred vow of silence. Many who worked at Bletchley Park, from senior cryptanalysts to teamakers, went to the grave without telling friends or family what they had done. Even today, when most of the documentary evidence has been declassified, some of the surviving codebreakers remain reticent, uncomfortable with discussing matters so long held in deepest trust.

The Bletchley Park cryptanalysts were, in Churchill's words, “the geese that laid the golden eggs, and never cackled”. Churchill knew from personal experience the dangers of cackling: in 1923, he was a member of the Cabinet that authorised revealing the coded contents of intercepted Soviet messages, thus compromising Britain's most important intelligence source. Moscow, alerted to the breach, switched to a new cipher system; for 20 years Britain was unable to read any secret Soviet communications.

To protect the Enigma secret in wartime was challenging enough; to preserve it for three decades after was little short of miraculous. An MI6 report immediately after the war, recently declassified, was adamant: “It will be hard for those who worked on Ultra to avoid hinting at what they did in the war. But avoid it they must.” And avoid it they did. Even after the Government finally gave them leave to cackle, many preferred silence.

In an age when a “secret” is something told to one person at a time, when bean-spilling represents a pension plan for almost anyone connected to government, from the Prime Minister's wife to the head of MI5, that seems almost unthinkable. Today's culture is confessional and immodest: nothing remains hidden for long, least of all success. But for the wartime generation, schooled in the belief that careless talk cost lives, there was nothing strange in keeping secrets, even from the closest friends and family.

The British are a naturally clubby race, and for many who worked in Bletchley Park, membership of the most exclusive elite was satisfaction enough. That is why the British make such good spies, but also such effective double agents and moles.

If secrecy was one key to success, eccentricity was another. There might have been no secret to keep had not intelligence chiefs understood the military value of the inspired misfit. The mathematicians, linguists, technicians, classicists, crossword buffs, cryptanalysts, chess champions and other boffins were, collectively, quite brilliant, the brightest and the best; many were also quite peculiar.

Even in an age when eccentricity was more tolerated, two stand out. Dilwyn “Dilly” Knox was a classical papyrus expert from Cambridge who pioneered the Enigma analysis. He often worked in his pyjamas, smoking a large pipe, into which he occasionally stuffed his sandwiches by mistake. He recruited only women to help, and only tall ones. A keen and spectacularly dangerous driver, he invented a pseudo-mathematical equation to defend his speeding. After one excursion in the lanes around Bletchley Park he remarked happily: “It's amazing how people smile and apologise to you when you knock them over.”

Still more remarkable was Alan Turing, the mathematician and logician who developed the electromagnetic bombe used to decipher Enigma messages. Shabbily dressed, notoriously absent-minded, Turing was a homosexual, a marathon runner, a loner and a genius. He cycled around in a gas mask because of his allergies, and chained his teacup to a radiator to deter thieves.

When this unlikely assortment of code-breakers arrived at Bletchley Park, locals were told they were “Colonel Ridley's shooting party”.

It is impossible to imagine any government department employing such a strange collection today, yet the rampant individualism at Bletchley Park was part of its success. Like the façade of the building itself, the codebreaking team was an idiosyncratic mixture, but left alone they experimented in directions that more conventional thinkers would never have taken.

Bletchley Park should be saved for the nation, not just in recognition of its wartime role, but also as a wider memorial to a sort of Britishness that would also benefit from restoration - discreet, modest, intellectually indomitable and heroically different.