The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories by Michael Smith

Author:Michael Smith [Smith, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781313893
Publisher: MBI

7

Dilly’s Girls

Dilly Knox was deeply unhappy when the Enigma codes were taken away from him at the start of 1940. The new boy Gordon Welchman had set up Hut 6 to break the German army and air force Enigma codes and Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had gone off to work on the German naval Enigma, leaving Dilly with nothing to do. He’d been at the heart of British codebreaking successes since the start of the Great War, when he’d pieced together and decoded the charred fragments of messages from a giant German Zeppelin airship destroyed by the Russians. Without codes to break, Dilly was like a fish out of water.

When it came to piecing together fragments of secret codes, Dilly was a genius. He’d proved that when deciphering the British Museum’s Greek papyrus found in an Egyptian cave and with his greatest First World War triumph, breaking the German diplomatic codes, unlocking the 1917 telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the Mexicans that offered them parts of the United States if they’d join the war on Germany’s side. Breaking that code was one of the most important intelligence coups of the Great War, bringing the Americans into the conflict and ensuring the Allied victory.

Dilly had broken the Italian and Spanish Enigma codes before the war and he was the only British codebreaker who’d truly believed the German Enigma codes could be broken. Finally, with a bit of help from the Poles, he’d done it. He’d have preferred to have managed it on his own, of course, but his methods – and his confidence – had been proven correct. They’d even made him chief assistant on the back of his success. In theory he was the head codebreaker, and yet he now found himself cast aside, his work on Enigma taken from him by the new boys. The Cottage Enigma codebreaking section had been closed down, his staff hived off to Hut 6 or the Naval Section, and he was hidden away on his own in a tiny office in the Park’s old plum shed.

Inevitably, a resignation letter followed, complaining at the way in which the Enigma codes had been ‘stolen’ away from him. Just as inevitably, Commander Denniston refused to accept Dilly’s resignation, rightly telling him that he had unique qualities vital for the war effort. He should put his talents to work breaking new codes and leave Hut 6 to do the day-to-day grind.

The son of a bishop, Dilly was in his mid-fifties and so wildly eccentric as to put his fellow codebreakers in the shade. He wore horn-rimmed glasses without which he could see nothing and frequently stuffed them into his tobacco pouch rather than his spectacles case by mistake. Dilly was tall, thin and bald. His trousers and jackets were too short, as if he had bought them some years earlier and outgrown them by several inches, and his face always looked drawn, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

Dilly was so absent-minded that he forgot to invite two of his three brothers to his own wedding in 1920.

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