Decryption and deception

Two books just out from small publishers throw interesting light on the more secret corners of the British handling of the world war against Hitler’s Germany. Each covers a subject that was deadly secret at the time, but of critical importance for winning the war. Joan Bright Astley’s war autobiography, published to much less acclaim than it deserved in 1971, is now reprinted for a fresh generation to read; Robin Denniston describes his father’s life’s work in decipher.

The Reverend Robin Denniston, publisher turned country priest, has written a work of filial piety — a charming, even old-fashioned gesture, but one that deals with a subject of both topical and historical weight. A. G. Denniston, born in 1881, was teaching German at the naval cadet training college when war broke out in 1914, and was summoned to the Admiralty to help start from scratch, what became Room 40, Old Buildings (where it was located), and a major source of intelligence about the movements of the German High Seas Fleet. At the end of that world war, the elder Denniston was kept on as head of a tiny continuing decipher branch that worked on diplomatic rather than on military or naval ciphers between the world wars, with which he continued to work until he was elbowed out of the way by pushful competitors in 1944.

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At the end of the Thirties he took part in the decisive discussions with the Poles and the French from which our grasp of the Enigma decipher machine (which the Germans thought unbreakable) derived, an essential component in our victory. There turned out to be no room for Denniston at Bletchley Park, where younger men and better mathematicians wrestled with Enigma and still more intricate Geheimschreiber decryption; he was sidelined to Berkeley Street off Piccadilly, where he continued to provide decrypts from neutral and enemy diplomatic sources.