Martin Sugarman, Archivist of the AJEX Jewish Military Museum, Hendon (Copyright of text and research); Trail devised and edited by Marcus Roberts.

	The Mansion
	Hut 4
	Original Hut 8 - German Naval Codes
	Hut 3 (South of Tennis Courts)
	Hut 6
	Hut 10
	Site of 'Newmanry' - Hut F
	Block A
	Site of Hut 7
	Block B
	C Block (1942) Card Index
	Testery
	The Lake

1. The Mansion

At the heart of the 55 acre estate at Bletchley Park, is the Victorian home of the Anglo-Jewish banking family of Sir Herbert and Lady Fanny Leon, Bt. and which later housed the codebreakers, after it was bought by the government.

Sir Herbert Leon MP and Lady Fanny Leon, were non-observant Jews. Leon was a wealthy Jewish stock-broker, MP and atheist. Both were very involved with local life around their estate and were philanthropists, but were consciously assimilated. Sir Leon's coat of arms is inscribed over the main entrance to the main building to this day.

During the War a number of Jewish women worked in the Mansion. These included Ruth Sebag-Montefiore who was born in 1916 at 12 Westbourne Terrace, London, daughter of Major Laurie and Mrs Dora Magnus (nee Spielman). Educated at Notting Hill High and Burgess Hill School near Brighton, Ruth did secretarial work afterwards and then was recommended to apply for a job with the Foreign Office in 1939. After interview at Broadway Buildings, for an unknown posting, she was sent to BP in the very early days when only a few staff had been installed and she found herself working in the main manor house itself. This was indeed ironic as the former owner (Sir Herbert Leon) was her great uncle! Later she moved to hut 10.

Ruth describes her work at BP in her book [81]. "We were sending and receiving coded telegrams to and from agents in every war zone. Each agent and each codist had two identical books, one a paperback novel, the other filled with five-figure groups of numbers. To encode the telegram you encoded the first few words - which had to contain more than fifteen letters - of a line in the novel, indicating in figure code, the page, line and five consecutive letters - which represented numbers - chosen first - and the five-figure group in the numbers book, where you were starting the message. After turning the message into figures, agent and codist proceeded, by adding or deducting one group of figures from the other to encode or decode the telegram..... you never knew from day to day what messages would reveal. Incoming telegrams consisted of all kinds of news picked up by agents - safe houses for escaped POW's and new agents, disappearance of agents, leaks, landing zones - as well as enemy troop movements, sightings of U Boats, targets for the RAF - and the number of "Z's" indicated urgency, three being most urgent. All was sent to HQ for action.

Once I saw a short telegram enquiring about the health of my cousin Tim Cohen, seriously wounded at Mareth in North Africa, signed by MI6 head, Sir Stewart Menzies, a lifelong friend of Tim's father. This was quite a coincidence as I was one of 60 working three shifts! I added an extra Z (to two) and forwarded it! Our work was so secret that we did not pay income tax; this annoyed my bank manager when I was unable to tell him what I did!

All the codists were female and from varied backgrounds, some with husbands serving, some with children - all uprooted. The early appointees were single, middle-aged and dedicated, if scatty; they formed a sort of self-appointed elite. We were younger, noisy but efficient, "and regarded with some disdain. I had yet to learn how women who are otherwise pleasant and normal human beings can behave in their working lives. A few codists left after the first month or two, unable to stand the life, but most of us stuck it out, marking time till the war was over.

Hut 10 was run by a retired general, ill at ease with 60 women, but the department head was a Miss Montgomery of the FO, whose agile mind was hidden behind a deceptively gentle Miss-Marple-Like exterior. Thin and angular, she was always neatly dressed in well-cut coats and skirts so that the long paper cuffs she wore - a fresh pair every day - to protect her sleeves, struck a bizarre note in so non-descript and conventional an appearance. The other huts were filled with brilliant minds, interesting individually, but collectively, when they poured out of the huts for breaks, gesticulating, unkempt and bespectacled, they looked like beings from another planet.
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2. Hut 4

Walter Eytan (1910 - 2001) (originally Walter George Ettinghausen) came from a German Jewish family settled in Oxford in the early 20th century, his father had in fact first come up to Oxford as a student at Queen's in 1901. During the war, Ettinghausen was a don at Queen's and was engaged in secret work, then he was called to the Enigma code breaking centre at Bletchley Park in 1941, where he led the Hut 4 team with distinction. Hut 4 provided immediate translations of codes just broken by Hut 8 - Alan Turing's hut.

He was in charge of the translator's group of Z watch in the German Naval section, Hut 4. A scholar of German from St Paul's school and a Don at Queen's College Oxford, Walter had been called up in September 1940 having already been asked to do secret work when he was at University. He had been born in Germany but as a Jew, the BP security people knew he and other Jews had a special stake in fighting Hitler. After several months army training, as number 7926780 (noted on his AJEX card, which has him also as living at 149d, Banbury Road, Oxford) he was suddenly ordered to BP with his rifle and kit and arrived as a trooper from the tank regiment wearing his shiny black boots and his polished cap badge with beret in February 1941. Walter was one of the first of the Hut 4 team. One of his team, Alec Dakin, describes "his leadership ....exercised with gentleness and understanding , and all who knew him and worked with him, loved him". It was suggested to him that he would be better to revert to a civilian as he would be dealing with very high ranking Naval Officers.

The watch had three teams working the 24 hour cycle, led by Walter, and when Hut 8 broke a code, Hut 4 was ready to do immediate translation. In one group was WREN Officer Thelma Ziman (later MBE) who had come from South Africa to fight the war, and also Ernest Ettinghausen, Walter's younger brother and antiquarian bookseller. Ernest became head of one of the shifts.

Decrypts would arrive in a wire tray in the form of sheets covered with teleprinter tapes, like a telegram, carrying German text in five-letter groups, just as in the original cipher. The sorter (Number 2) picked out those important to send to the NID (Naval Intelligence Division) at the Admiralty; number 3 wrote out the German text in clear, stapled it to the decrypt and handed it to Number 1, who translated to English and stamped it with a number. This went to WAAF (not WREN, curiously) clerks who sent it by teleprinter to the Admiralty with Number 1's initials eg WGE, Walter Ettinghausen. From here it went to commanding officers at sea. Secrecy was extremely tight and the fewest possible people at BP saw the messages.

Translation was often not so simple, as messages often arrived partly corrupted and the linguists had to make inspired guesses as to meaning, using their linguisitic skills, context, operational background, etc, to reconstitute the message. They had to acquire a knowledge of German "navalese" and built up a unique dictionary of such terms and often used the excellent library and card catalogues built up at BP to do this.

Some messages came via wireless listening stations on the coast. On occasion Walter would visit these to familiarise himself with their work or go to the NID in London to see how they worked and what their special needs may be from BP. Others spent time at sea to get to know what conditions were like. If pressure of work was great or the messages especially sensitive, Walter would operate the teleprinter himself, often at night, for security reasons.
Before it was possible to read Enigma, the teams could still guess at the meanings of some German ciphers and signals, enough to give warnings to the navy that certain German battle ships, for example, were patrolling off Norway, and how to avoid or attack them. Often they could tell an urgent message by acronyms the Germans used such as SSD (sehr sehr dringend - "very very urgent"). The messages dealt with were extremely significant and included U Boat route plots, U Boat supply ship locations, and movements of capital ships like the Bismark or Hipper. Walter and his team knew that thousands of lives depended on their work, especially during the Battle of the Atlantic. Walter said, "I knew the name of every U Boat Commander". His team helped re-route convoys to avoid them. Walter also vividly recalled the last messages of the Bismark, whose end he helped bring about in May 1941.

Eventually the section branched out into reading Italian, Vichy French and Spanish messages. As linguists, Walter remembered them having little trouble in dealing with these.

It was Walter who set up a Zionist Society at Bletchley which quite a few Jews regularly attended on a Wednesday evening at the apartment of Joe Gillis. (He was a Sunderland born mathematician from Belfast University who later became a professor at the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot, near Tel-Aviv. Among other things, Gillis broke the codes in which the Germans sent their weather reports, most important to our air forces campaign) . At these meetings they would discuss the independence of Israel and Aliyah (immigration) which many carried out after the War ended. Here, due to Walter, was founded the Professional and Technical Aliyah Association (PATWA), organised to encourage Jewish professionals to immigrate to Israel to form the nucleus of a modern, democratic nation. They did not hold religious services at BP, but did try to get home for major Festivals.

On one poignant night, in early 1944, his team intercepted a message from a German vessel in the Aegean, saying they were transporting Jews from Rhodes or Cos for Piraeus "zur Endlosung" ("for the final solution"); he had not heard this expression before but he wrote that he instinctively knew what it meant; he never forgot it and it left its mark on him till he died. It was thus indeed poetic justice, when Walter was in charge of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, years later, that it was he who initiated the original search for the notorious nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann, which culminated in Eichmann's capture by the Israeli Secret Service in 1960 in Argentina and his transport to, and trial in, Israel, leading eventually to his execution in 1962.

One of the most memorable moments came when the message about Hitler's death arrived in April 1945, from German Naval HQ. It was late at night and Walter was on duty. He decided to wire this one himself to the Admiralty and not use a WAAF assistant. It was a fitting end for a Jewish soldier at Bletchley to have been the first to see and relay such a message. Small wonder he devoted the rest of his life working for the defence of Israel.

When Winterbotham's book came out in 1974, Walter refused to read it in protest at the breaking of the oath to remain silent; not even his wife knew what he had done till the book emerged, only "that he worked at Bletchley". Walter went to Israel in 1946 and was asked to set up a school to train staff for a Foreign Service for a new nation. He was involved during the siege of Jeruslaem in the 1948 War of Independence and at Lausanne in 1949 headed the Israeli delegation and signed the first agreement between Israel and an Arab country, Egypt. Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett asked him to become director of the Foreign Ministry, which he did for eleven years before becoming Ambassador to France. He was then afterwards , Permanent Secretary of the Israeli Foreign Office. Walter remained a close personal friend of Anne Ross, a Jewish BP worker, until he died in 2001 [66]. Anne relates how for years after the war, he corresponded with his elderly landlady in Bletchley, right through his distinguished diplomatic career, until she died ; this was typical of his sensitivity and loyalty.

1263457 Albert Alfred Ernest Ettinghausen (brother of Walter -see above) also came to BP from the same Oxford College via the RAF. He was born in Munich in June 1913 although his father had been educated and brought up in England. But his father was working in Munich at the time and as a result was interned by the Germans in WW1 as an enemy alien, whilst his wife and children (Ernest and Walter) lived in Switzerland until 1919!

Head hunted because of his languages, he was given a mysterious message to go and meet someone at Bletchley Railway Station waiting room, in late 1940. He was told he would be discharged from the RAF and went straight to the Naval Section in Hut 4 in February 1941.

He spent alternate weeks at the Admiralty Citadel (underground near The Horse Guards) at first, and also spent time at Scapa Flow with the battleship King George V, to get sea experience, as well as on a North Sea convoy and a Dutch submarine! He then later began the job of translating decoded German Naval messages at BP with his brother Walter (see above) in Hut 4, with whom he was also billeted. Here he followed the same path as his brother. It was convenient that the wives of both he and Walter were living in Oxford and so visits home were simple when possible.

Lt. Michael Cohen, RNVR was born in 1924 and worked in the Japanese section at Bletchley. At the beginning of 1943 he was called up and after 2 weeks called for interview near Southampton in front of five very senior naval officers. One held up a sheaf of papers and said , "You were a student of ancient Semitic languages". Cohen said, with his strong Scots accent, he was at the Divinity School at the University of Glasgow and intended to be a rabbi. The officer handed him a page and asked him to read. "Breisheet bara Elohim et hashamayim v'et ha'aretz" (in the beginning God created heaven and earth), read Cohen. He was then told he would be sent on a Japanese language course. "Yes sir" he replied!

After a six month course in London and two weeks learning to be an officer, he was made lieutenant and sent to BP [68] where he worked with the Ettinghausen brothers on Navel codes. In the book "Codebreakers" he is mistakenly referred to as a Moslem Scots called Daoud - this is apocryphal and Ernest Ettinghausen has testifed in the taped interview with the author that this was in fact Michael Cohen from Glasgow and his idea of a joke!

Anita (b. 1924) and Muriel Bogush (b. 1928) came to Bletchley from Stamford Hill during the Blitz with their parents and family to avoid the girls being evacuated alone. Anita worked in Block A, Naval Section from 1941-46, and Muriel in Hut 4, Naval Section from 1943-45. Both worked on Japanese codes after VE Day.

Anne Ross (formerly Mendoza/Meadows) was born in June 1919 in Graham Road, Hackney, daughter of Mark and Mina Mendoza, and attended Wilton Way and then Laura Place (Clapton) Girls School.Anne's family moved to Bletchley to escape the 1940 bombing, and here she discovered staff were needed at a "Government Office" at Bletchley Park.

Anne remembers vividly the sinking of the Bismark ; Walter Ettinghausen and his second in command had cots put in the hut and were there for 48 hours during the chase. Anne remembers coming to work one morning as Walter emerged from the hut unshaven and unkempt, to announce they had got her. Decoded signals from Hut 4 had played a major part in tracking her down.

Anne was not on duty the night Hut 4 was accidentally damaged by a bomb from a lone German plane dumping its load as it limped back home. Next day she came to work and noticed no problems. Not till the end of the war was she told what had happened. The hut had been repaired and painted so secretly and quickly, she did not know.

There were terrible shortages at the time and paper and paper clips could not be had at first! Neither was Anne very impressed with the laid-back attitude, poor filing skills and slow typing of many of her colleagues. On one occasion, a long, narrow cardboard box in which her boyfriend had sent her some flowers, was recycled by Anne to store the copies of the message slips they were typing, as it was exactly the size of the slips; it was a great success, but such was the state of penury and organisation at BP! When a second box arrived a few weeks later, the hut were overjoyed. Later they had the carpenters make up racks of these so that they christened Hut 4 "the morgue" - as they resembled coffins.

Another clear memory is when Walter Ettinghausen arrived; one day a small, rotund man in large army boots (see below) marched into Hut 4, resembling as Anne thought, a younger version of Einstein. It was the beginning of a life long friendship. But as he left the hut on that day, Anne's naval officer, Beasley, announced in his upper class, pompous drawl, "good god, are we having kosher meat now?".

After applying she was interviewed by a civilian male in October 1940 ; he placed a revolver on the desk during the interview. He tried to tell her that as a Jew, she was not British enough but she argued the case of her 17th century antecedents and there was no answer to that. Her feeling at the time was that the interviewer was very anti-Semitic. However, her super typing skills got her the job and she was sent to work in the Library at BP. Later she was sent to Hut 4, the Naval section, to type out decoded messages ready for forwarding.

RN Sub Lt. Laurence Jonathan Cohen was born in London in May 1923, son of the Jewish writer Israel Cohen, and attended St Pauls School [34]; he recalls he was reading Greats at Balliol in December 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and South Asia. He was suddenly asked by his College master if he would like to learn Japanese (as there was such a shortage of translators for the GCCS). He had no idea what it would be for until he reached Bletchley (see above). They studied in Bedford six days a week under a WW1 Naval Intelligence officer, Oswald Tuck, a self made and self taught man who was an inspired teacher, and formerly served as Naval attache in Tokyo [35]. The speed of their progress embarrassed the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), who said it could never be done! Their social life centred on Bedford pubs and the concerts of the BBC Classical music section which had moved to Bedford.

Cohen recalls, " At some stage a bomb fell on our building (at BP) [Probably Hut 4 MRR - see Bogush] , a purely accidental target......we were sitting around the edge of this room and the whole ceiling fell down into the middle.....it was fortunate and we weren't hit by anything"

Joan Enid Friedman was born in November 1918 in Birmingham, to Myer and Dora (nee Tuchman); her father was a civil servant and they lived in Edgbaston. After King Edward VI School, she went to Girton College, Cambridge to read Classics from 1937-40 and then went on to teach German in schools in Southwold and Nottingham. She was then head-hunted by the Foreign Office and was sent to BP, being billeted in the nearby village of New Bradwell with a family whose son was away in the forces. Her job was in the Naval Section with Walter Ettinghausen, whom she knew well; on receiving de coded German messages, her task was to translate them into readable English before being forwarded to the various intelligence branches for use in the field. At the time of interview [84] Joan could not remember much of her life at Bletchley, but did say that her upbringing led her not to eat any non-kosher food, especially meat, and as result her diet was quite plain!
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3. Original Hut 8 - German Naval Codes

Irving John (Jack) Good , FRS, (real name Isidore Jacob Gudak) was born in 1916 in Manchester to immigrant shopkeepers, and became interested in maths and ciphers as a small boy. He was a mathematics scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge . He worked on Enigma and Tunny [11] as a cryptoanalyst [12]. Tunny/Lorenz carried messages to and from Hitler and his High Command. After being head-hunted and interviewed by Hugh Alexander ( a British chess champion like Jack ) and Gordon Welchman in 1940, Jack was sent to BP on May 27th 1941 ( the day the Bismark was sunk) to work first in Hut 8 under the great Alan Turing, breaking the German Naval Enigma codes; he was Turing's main statistical assistant and thus a main player in the game. He earned Turing's undying respect .His speciality was "Banburismus" (so called because the paper used was printed in Banbury!) which meant weighing the probability of the accuracy of a crib - ie the probable meaning of a word or words in a message, which was not quite decoded. He in fact devised a method which greatly speeded the resolving of such problems. One night Good had a dream about reversing the codes received from Enigma and was moved to try this next day on a particularly baffling code that had come in; it worked - he had solved a problem in his sleep!

Then Good was moved to Hut F in May 1943 to work on Tunny, in a section nicknamed "The Newmanry" , after its team leader Maxwell Newman (see below) . Peter Hilton also worked here (see below) as did Peter Benenson (see below) . Among Jack's refinements to the Colossus machine was a system that enabled a speeding up of the code breaking process. Post war he worked as Professor of Statistics at the University of Manchester , with Newman , but also working for GCHQ; then to Trinity, Oxford and later at the University of West Virginia.

Rolf Noskwith was born on June 19th 1919, in Chemnitz, Germany into a well-to-do textile producing family who had the foresight to leave before Hitler came to power. He was finally accepted and he arrived at BP on June 19th 1941, his 22nd birthday.

He was met and taken to Hut 8 by Alexander, where the German Naval traffic was read thanks to material captured from enemy weather ships, which had shortly before helped lead to the sinking of the Bismark. Here he worked under the direct leadership of the great Alan Turing, with Alexander as deputy.

As intercepted messages came in to Hut 8, they were logged in a Register, many being duplicates from several stations. The code had been broken by Turing, but many messages were corrupt and Rolf''s job was to guess meanings or "crib", from the German, and then they were run through the "bombe" (decoding) machine which could use hundreds of variables, until the message made sense and was decoded.

One German message Rolf decoded concerned the Struma, a ship carrying escaping Jewish refugees attempting to get to Israel, which was sunk in The Black Sea with almost all passengers killed. Rolf remembers this causing him much distress.

In late 1941, Rolf used a crib to unravel the meaning of messages about coloured flares used for identification by the German navy, an obviously important breakthrough for RN ships to use! This enabled him to go on to break the "Offizier" Enigma code, used between German Naval HQ and its U Boat Officers at sea.

His work continued through the war and in 1944 Hut 8 was moved to Block D, where he played an important part in decyphering weather ship messages which gave urgent and crucial information useful for the D Day landings. Rolf also remembers decrypting the message from Field Marshall von Witzleben after the July 1944 plot, announcing that Hitler was dead.

Hut 8 was moved to Block D in 1944.

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4. Hut 3 (South of Tennis Courts)

Lionel Loewe (1891-1987) worked on Enigma codes at Hut 3 at BP, mostly translating German, having previously worked in Intelligence in India and Ireland as well as having worked for SOE and running a small spy ring in Holland until 1940.

His main job appears to have been translating coded messages from German, especially where the codes were incomplete and good German was needed to "unravel" the true message. His son David testifies to him being constantly on night shifts.

Jim Rose - 77282 Squadron Leader, later Wing Commander, Jim Rose (US Legion of Merit) was aka Elliot Joseph Benn Rosenheim [39], born in Kensington in June 1909, son of Ernst and Julia Levy. He went to Rugby and New College Oxford, where he read Classics. His AJEX card notes his father's address at 9, Pembridge Place, W2. Before the outbreak of war he worked helping Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and then joined 609 Squadron RAF as its Intelligence Officer in September 1939. He was then sent to BP [40]. Rose specialised in assessment in the Air Intelligence section in Hut 3 , for which he had to develop a cool appraisal of the Luftwaffe's order of battle, strengths and weaknesses, on all fronts, based on information coming from Hut 6. His main job was as head of 3A - BP's main Air Advisor and he was to liase with the Air Staff and the BP cryptoanalysts, as well as maintain the delicate relations between the competing needs of all three Services. As he described, Hut 3 was centred on the Watch Room, where watchkeepers sat with the representatives of the Three Services. Together they compiled the material being decoded from the German into readable English information, prioritised it and then sent it to Commanders-in-Chief and Commanders in the Field for action. It was also indexed, so it could be cross-referenced with other information that had been received, which may then reveal patterns of developing enemy events or strategies. For a message was not just of itself, but could be related to previous and later messages to reveal other intelligence.

Rose wrote that Ultra severely cut supplies to Rommel as it enabled the RAF to constantly sink his convoys from Italy; but the aircraft were not allowed to bomb until a reconnaissance aircraft had been seen by the enemy, so as not to enable the Germans to guess Enigma had been cracked and attribute the raid instead to discovery by the aircraft. It was information from Ultra, said Rose, that brought Rommel defeat at Alamein. Rose was also selected to deal with US liason and flew to Washington with Col. Telford Taylor of US Intelligence to select Americans who could serve in the rarified atmosphere of Hut 3.

In December 1944, Rose flew urgently to SHAEF in Paris, with the military advisor at BP, Major Alan Pryce-Jones, to warn the Americans about the coming Ardennes offensive. They briefed Eisenhower's intelligence officer, General Strong. He doubted the Germans were capable. Pryce-Jones, with his suede shoes and own form of battledress, sat on the corner of Strong's desk and said, "My dear sir, if you believe that you'll believe anything". Three weeks later came the German attack . Rose added, "Hut 3 were asked to do a post-mortem ......and showed the SHAEF intelligence failure".

After the war Rose became, among other things, an international journalist and a senior manager of the Institute of Race Relations.

88920 Sqd. Ldr. Ary Thadee "Ted" Pilley was born at 123, Boulevard St Michel in Paris, on March 7th 1909, son of the famous Polish Jewish artists Leopold and Lena Pilichowski (see above).

Ted and his wife had founded and managed the Linguists Club in London in the 1930's, where clients met to speak and practice in various European languages led by a facilitator. It was his linguistic skills that led him to be recruited to BP (his wife was also screened over tea at Simpsons by a discreet and cultivated MI5 agent, as well, as she had been born in Holland!).

Ted worked in the watch room in Hut 3 with Jim Rose (see above) in the Air Intelligence section, deciding on the priority and precise and concise wording of distilled, decoded Luftwaffe messages and intelligence and to whom and in what wording, to pass them on to in the field.

W13094/192366 Captain (later Major) Jane Bennett (later Guss) ATS, from 63, Brondesbury Park in North West London, joined the Womens' Territorials in 1938 and was called up when war broke out. She was married to Capt H Guss of the USAAF and the daughter of Mrs Y Bennett. In 1940 she was sent to Field Security training in Aldershot because she had French and German linguistic skills. Her Sergeant Major was the famous commentator, Malcolm Muggeridge! Prevented from going to France by Dunkirk, she was posted next to Bletchley Park in 1940. Her first job was sorting burnt and wet captured German documents for sifting for information, then later she was sent to Hut 3. Here she was typing in German messages that had been decoded. Later still she worked with a Major Lithgow, whose job was extracting from decoded messages, any clues from call signs and radio frequencies, to help actually locate the radio stations from where these messages were coming and thence deduce the positions of various enemy units in Europe. This was used to produce maps and passed on to the military planners as required. Starting with just two people, this section grew to many by the end of the war. At war's end she stayed with Lithgow's section to work in London.
One incident Jane remember's clearly was the night Coventry was bombed. She and her comrades left to go into the shelter but she fell down the two steps outside the hut and badly gashed her leg; she carries the scar still, wounded in action!

Morris Hoffman was working in HM Customs and studying languages at Birkbeck College, London when war broke out. As he had a knowledge of German, he was referred by the College careers officer to an interview with Commander Saunders RN, in Broadway near St James Park. Morris later discovered this was the HQ of the British Secret Service. Part of the interview was to test his German, and by February 12th 1942 he was at Bletchley Park, with no idea what to expect.

Billeted in Leighton Buzzard, he was sent to work in Hut 3 and informed he would help translate German Enigma decodes passed to them from Hut 6, to which they were joined by a "hole in the wall" partition. He remembers clearly the huge wall map which showed the complete order of battle of the Luftwaffe, as BP knew it. With Morris were all kinds of other experts especially employed to evaluate messages as to level of importance (military attached), clarify technical German terms, locate tiny places on maps mentioned in codes, evaluate what the Germans knew about our messages, and so on. At one point he was allocated to assist F L Lucas (English Don at King's College, Cambridge) who worked on the destruction of the convoys to Rommel in the Mediterranean, then John Saltmarsh (King's College Librarian) on coded map references which gave Rommel's positions and intentions in North Africa and enabled the drawing by Morris of quite accurate maps for the 8th Army! Some of his maps were actually requested by Churchill. In late 1943 Saltmarsh fell ill and Morris had to take over. His particular problem became the locating on atlas and sheet maps the names of small places mentioned by the Germans where crucial HQ's may be located, and he was allocated 4 female staff to assist him in this. He also bought old Baedeker Guides from second hand shops in London to assist in this, and old German telephone directories; BP repaid his expenses.

If ever Morris spotted in the enemy messages the name of someone being transferred from one place to another known to be connected with radar or V1 research, such apparently innocuous detail may be of huge significance and it was his job to pass this to the section dealing with such intelligence. Professor Frederick Norman was in charge of such an area, and he once said - referring to information Morris had passed to him - to one of Morris's assistants, "Where Hoffman has trodden, no grass grows!". A rare compliment.

In early June 1944 - having now moved in with a Scots couple near to BP itself - he was visited by a senior officer asking for details of enemy dispositions for a map of the Cherbourg Peninsula. He finished after midnight and then went home to sleep. Early next morning he was woken by his landlord who told him he had best go to work, because "the Second Front is blazing!". Morris did his best to look surprised.

On another occasion Morris managed to deduce an entry route used for Axis submarines in the north Mediterranean; it was referred to a senior committee but not used as it was considered too sensitive ie might give a clue that the Enigma had been broken.

On matters Jewish, Morris comments that kashrut (eating kosher food) was never a problem as he went vegetarian and was treated accordingly whether in digs or the canteen. He attended the Joe Gillis evenings and met several Jewish staff from BP. One evening a policeman appeared at the door and asked why there were so many people meeting at the place. Walter and Joe refused him entry, however, and afterwards he would often be seen watching the flat from the street. One evening he stopped and warned Thelma Ziman for using her car for an unauthorized purpose, when she was in fact on her way to work!

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5. Hut 6

Phyllis Wix was born in July 1923 in Stamford Hill, Hackney [18] daughter of Abraham and Edith, and went to school at Kilburn High. After evacuation to Keswick in the Lake District she went to LSE and was then simply called for interview to Broadway (she found later this was the HQ of British Intelligence) and asked about her interest in chess, bridge, working in a team etc. She then received a letter to appear at Bletchley railway station at a certain time in July 1944.

Phyllis worked the shift system in Hut 6, sorting the teleprinter tapes into order ready for the decoders. She was a little vague about how this was done but says her team used a mock up of an Enigma machine to crib meanings using known phrases, dates, call signs etc. One incident she recalls was a letter of thanks from a senior officer in the field after D Day, describing how they had over-run a German HQ and found messages recently sent to German forces that the British Forces had read that morning, and paid tribute to the speed with which the Bletchley staff were sending them information which the Germans had just received themselves! Socially she remembers the Jewish meetings in the flat of Joe Gillis and knew the whole crowd well.

Lt. Arthur J. Levenson was one of the many American Jews who served at BP. He worked mainly in Hut 6 and then later moved to Block 5 . Secretly transported on the SS Aquitania in 1943 with about 20 members of the US Signal Corps, he was a young Mathematician, with a cover story as a pigeon expert! It was the first time he had a met an Englishman but integration was almost immediate and great friendships were made.

He remembered that the first British officers he met were suspicious of him and his men and asked them to take an army test. After, the test marker came running up and stated the results were so good that they ought to be in Intelligence

Affable and much respected he was regarded as the Commander of the Americans at Bletchley.

He remembers that the Germans, "changed the (Enigma) wheel patterns infrequently until D Day and so once you had them recovered, you were in. But after we invaded they changed the patterns every day. So we went to the boss (Edward Travis) and said we need four more of Collossus.....he went to Churchill.....so we got four more.....we could not have done without them [54]"

Levenson also related how surprised he was to see the Germans using a code indicator TOM; this turned out to be the cowboy Tom Mix and yet nobody realised he had had a following in Germany! He went on to explain how the average time for a "Bombe" computer to decrypt a German code was 15 minutes and this often resulted in BP beating the Germans in decoding it themselves; for example, A would send B a message and then B replied, "cannot read you". BP would decrypt the first message even before the Germans had done the repeat message. As a result it would be with Allied commanders before the Germans got it!
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6. Hut 10

Ruth Sebag-Montefiore worked in Hut 10 and her contribution has been noted previously in relation to the Mansion.

Hut 10 was run by a retired general, ill at ease with 60 women, but the department head was a Miss Montgomery of the FO, whose agile mind was hidden behind a deceptively gentle Miss-Marple-Like exterior. Thin and angular, she was always neatly dressed in well-cut coats and skirts so that the long paper cuffs she wore - a fresh pair every day - to protect her sleeves, struck a bizarre note in so non-descript and conventional an appearance. The other huts were filled with brilliant minds, interesting individually, but collectively, when they poured out of the huts for breaks, gesticulating, unkempt and bespectacled, they looked like beings from another planet.
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7. Site of 'Newmanry' - Hut F

Prof. Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, originally Neumann, was born in February 1897 in Chelsea, son of Herman and Sarah Pike. He served in WW1 and was a Cambridge Mathematician from St John's College. He was actually one of Alan Turing's lecturers as a student. Joining BP in September 1942, he was located first in the cryptoanalyst "Testery" section (so called after Major Tester) and then later had his own department in "The Newmanry"

in Hut F (see above) assisted by Jack Good. Newman was convinced that a machine could be built to break the codes and by May 1943 this had been done by his collaboration with technicians at the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) at Malvern. Nicknamed "Robinson" - after the cartoonist designer of fantastic machines, Heath Robinson - it was a great success and became known as Collossus, the first computer. Newman in fact broke the German Army Lorenz code (see above). He was much liked; one staff member (American Sgt. George Vergine) said, "Max Newman was a marvellous fellow, and I always sort of felt grateful to have known him....we used to have tea parties...which were mathematical discussions on problems, developments, techniques....in the small conference room....a topic would be written on the blackboard and all of the analysts, including Newman, would come tea in hand and chew it around and see whether it would be useful for cracking codes. It was very productive and afterwards it would be summarised in the research log". Peter Hilton (see above) added, "Newman was a perfect facilitator... he realised he could get the best out of us by trusting to our own good intentions...and strong motivation....he was as informal as possible...for example he gave us one week in four off...we always wrote down what we were thinking in a huge book so we could use them...he was a model academic administrator". After the war he returned to academia at Manchester University and died in 1984 in Cambridge. Displays at BP and his old College explain his contribution.

Irving John (Jack) Good, FRS, (real name Isidore Jacob Gudak) was born in 1916 in Manchester to immigrant shopkeepers, and became interested in maths and ciphers as a small boy.

He was a mathematics scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge . He worked on Enigma and Tunny as a cryptoanalyst. Tunny/Lorenz carried messages to and from Hitler and his High Command. After being head-hunted and interviewed by Hugh Alexander ( a British chess champion like Jack ) and Gordon Welchman in 1940, Jack was sent to BP on May 27th 1941 (the day the Bismark was sunk) to work first in Hut 8 under the great Alan Turing, breaking the German Naval Enigma codes; he was Turing's main statistical assistant and thus a main player in the game. He earned Turing's undying respect .His speciality was "Banburismus" (so called because the paper used was printed in Banbury!) which meant weighing the probability of the accuracy of a crib - ie the probable meaning of a word or words in a message, which was not quite decoded. He in fact devised a method which greatly speeded the resolving of such problems. One night Good had a dream about reversing the codes received from Enigma and was moved to try this next day on a particularly baffling code that had come in; it worked - he had solved a problem in his sleep!

Then Good was moved to Hut F (from Hut 8) in May 1943 to work on Tunny, in a section nicknamed "The Newmanry", after its team leader Maxwell Newman (see below) . Peter Hilton also worked here (see below) as did Peter Benenson (see below) . Among Jack's refinements to the Colossus machine was a system that enabled a speeding up of the code breaking process. Post war he worked as Professor of Statistics at the University of Manchester , with Newman , but also working for GCHQ; then to Trinity, Oxford and later at the University of West Virginia. He remained a prolific publisher and one of the real inventors of the computer as we know it today.

The site of the Hut is the green carparking area, 40m NW of the roundabout, nearest to Hut 10.
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8. Block A

Some huts were wooden but as time went on, heavily reinforced concrete buildings were added ("Blocks"), with hermetically sealed doors and windows against gas attack, and heavy window blinds against blast. It is believed that many underground bunkers also exist but none today have been exposed and it cannot be verified except by some who allege to have been in them at some stage.

Dame Miriam Louisa Rothschild-Lane was born 5th August 1908, at Polebrook in Northamptonshire daughter of a Hungarian Jewish aristocrat Roszika Wertheimstein and the British Jewish banker, Nathaniel Charles Rothschild. Miriam spent two years at Bletchley Park after being interviewed and headhunted like many other scientists at the time (she had been working on scientific war research in Plymouth). She mostly worked night shifts translating German coded messages in the Naval Section. She disliked it intensely.

Block A is immediately North of the Lake.
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9. Site of Hut 7

Michael Loewe (b.1922) had been reading classics at Oxford and was recruited to help in the war with Japan. He went on an intensive 6 month Japanese course at Bedford - a course so tough at least two other students committed suicide due to the pressure. He worked in Hut 7 and then Block B at BP on Japanese naval decodes.

The site of Hut 7 is the area of grass just North of Block A.
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10. Block B

Michael Loewe (b.1922) had been reading classics at Oxford and was recruited to help in the war with Japan. He went on an intensive 6 month Japanese course at Bedford - a course so tough at least two other students committed suicide due to the pressure. He worked in Hut 7 and then Block B at BP on Japanese naval decodes.
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11. C Block (1942) Card Index

One block at BP housed a huge card index library which stored every conceivable scrap of intelligence gathered from around the UK's Y stations and elsewhere; this was copied and sent to the Bodleian Library in Oxford should a backup ever be required. It was often consulted throughout the War by all the various Intelligence branches of the Allied Forces, and staffed by a small army of civilian female clerks.
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12. Testery

Prof. Maxwell Herman Alexander Newman, FRS, originally Neumann, was born in February 1897 in Chelsea, son of Herman and Sarah Pike. He served in WW1 and was a Cambridge Mathematician from St John's College. He was actually one of Alan Turing's lecturers as a student. Joining BP in September 1942, he was located first in the cryptoanalyst "Testery" section (so called after Major Tester) and then later had his own department in "The Newmanry"

Peter Hilton, born in London in 1923, was in his 4th year at Oxford and neither a student of maths or German - but aged 21 he was head-hunted and sent to the "Testery" (named after Major Tester) at BP. He was the only one who turned up for the interview at his College. He found code-breaking very exciting - "especially since you knew that these were vital messages" - and often worked 30 hours at a stretch. Peter remembers the Germans were so sure their codes were not being read that they did not take precautions. For example, the Germans would often begin messages with "Heil Hitler" and once that was known, and kept being used, deductions could quickly be made about the meanings of the letters. Peter also remembers the use of "Nieder mit die Englander" (Down with the English), another set phrase which allowed easy decrypting. He could never understand how Rommel, for example, did not realise his codes were being read, because all his supplies were being sunk in the Mediterranean! Equally, he claims that BP staff felt that Montgomery did not trust the Intelligence information that BP was providing him with because they were providing the military with a service that no other military had ever had in the history of warfare.
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13. The Lake

134464/1082701 Squadron Leader Nakdimon ("Naky") Shabetai Doniach. The only - and very typical - BP anecdote that was related by Naky concerned a late afternoon near the lake. A colleague, Arthur Cooper, was sipping tea with Naky as they were engaged in deep conversation. Not noticing that the tables had been taken away, Cooper gracefully and slowly was lowering his cup onto an invisible table top, and reached instead the surface of the lake, his eyes still on Naky as he spoke; the cup and saucer gently and slowly floated off into the sunset.
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