Again, fate and fascination draws me back to Bletchley Park. My initial stumble upon the Christopher Grey’s book “Decoding Organisation” has now been compounded by me actually reading the thing (thanks again to the good folks at Thompson Rivers University), and just this week I was lucky enough to engage with Dr Sue Black (her of Saving Bletchley Park fame) at her amazing JISCEL12 keynote.
There are many books and articles that will tell you some of the history of Bletchley, more about some of the amazing people working there, and the astonishing intellectual and technological triumph that was the repeated breaking of ciphers and encryptions previously considered unbreakable. As previously, and not to in anyway denigrate the amazing work that was done there, my interest is in Bletchley Park as a knowledge organisation and an innovative organisation – and the parallels between Bletchley and those other great repositories of genius and intellectual labour, universities
By referring to “Bletchley Park” as an organisation, I am already making a very obvious error. The work referred to above was conducted by the Government Code and Cipher School which happened to be based in and around the Bletchley Park estate during the second world war, itself born in 1919 of various intelligence functions within the Armed Forces and Foreign Office, and a forerunner of GCHQ. The school was technically placed under the purview, though not controlled or directed by, SIS (a forerunner of MI6) and the various subcultures within what we know as “Bletchley Park” rubbed together uneasily for much of the war.
Some of you may have spotted the unlikely use of the word “school” in the organisational title. The school was founded to support and train staff in the emerging field of “signals intelligence (SIGINT) during peacetime – primarily in the effective use of encryption and ciphers rather than decoding the signals of others.
At the time the centre undertook it’s most famous work, the following roles were implicit within the activity of the school:
- Interception of signals, at distributed centres across europe
- The delivery (via transport or transmission) of the content of these signals, to Bletchley.
- Decryption of signals
- Translation into english, and the de-corruption of this intelligence
- Traffic analysis (who sent signals, where, how often?)
- Intelligence assessment (what did it say? what can we learn from it?)
- Distribution to customers/ end users.
- Use of information (or not)
(list adapted from Grey (2012) p37)
Each of these processes had their own champions, just as each of the services and cultural tendencies within Bletchley had their advocates. There were frequently heated disagreements concerning the value and needs of each interest group, so much so that an external review (the Van Cutsem report, conducted by Brigadier W.E. Van Cutsem ) was conducted in 1941.
Nineteen Forty-One was, of course, a year of great peril for the UK and Europe – so the conduction of a major enquiry into the organisational structure of GC&CS in December 1941, followed by a transition to a new structure by February 1942 may strike some as faintly absurd.
Certainly the kinds of arguments that were being made have an other-worldly feel to them. Nigel De Grey, himself a superb codebreaker, wrote up a review of the work of the GC&CS after the war (which Grey quotes widely from [pp58-59]):
there was never … any clear understanding about the staffing of the service stations or any uniformity of procedure between them […]
GC&CS created a most complicated structure internally violating the official ladder of command and at the same time causing an intricate and illogical series of channels of reporting…
There is an amazing amount of primary evidence in Grey’s book, which I would strongly urge the interested to take a look at, especially the first section “The Making of Bletchley Park”. Much of this is taken from National Archive documents which are sadly not (yet) available online. I particularly want to read what Grey describes as a “satirical sketch of the various organisations involved that was written in 1940” entitled “The Kitchen Front”!
As I don’t just want to re-write the entire book, I just want to give one further example from 1941. In October a group of leading cryptanalysts wrote to Winston Churchill asking for more funding, bypassing the entire management structure at Bletchley. The interesting thing is not the obvious “a few great men” narrative, but the fact that they chose to implicitly criticise one key administrator by defending the work of another – thus leading to the demotion of the man who brought the intial structure and staff of Bletchley together, Alastair Denniston. It was office politics, writ large.
Do bear in mind also that I am not telling the story of the organisational reshuffle that broke the enigma code – many forms of Enigma has been broken even by 1940 . Rather, this is the story of an organisation in transition – a research centre that needed to add production lines to meet insatiable customer demand. (because who *doesn’t* want more intelligence?)
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I awoke on Monday to learn from our Prime Minister that we are at war. However, we appear to be at war with ourselves, with bureaucracy and our human rights. As always, universities are a microcosm of wider society, wherein we can plainly see that bureaucracy is an easy target but also an essential support mechanism. The lean, mean, fit-for-purpose, more-with-less language of business and innovation does not provide us with the safeguards and loopholes that make organisations work.
Remember, Enigma was broken whilst Bletchley was apparently in chaos. The reorganisation was primarily a way to scale up what were basically research findings into a product. Even within the new structure (post Van Cutsen), there was a research team working amongst and within the process-driven large scale decryption functions. And even in the process driven areas – you see the tales of Hut 3 (translation, evaluation and decryption of Army and Airforce intelligence) descending into near mutiny in 1942.
If you are lucky enough to work in an innovative organisation, you will see these tensions simmer and erupt again and again. Precisely because people care so much about the value of what they are doing, different conceptions can lead to heated argument. And then (hopefully) new understandings and new links forged. Often the complexities of these organisations are founded on the fractures and reformations of the positions and people involved.
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I was lucky enough to revisit the Hawthorn Building at DMU recently – it was my “first” university building, wherein I studied (and failed) pharmacy for a year in the mid-90s. If you were going to build a set of rooms to teach Pharmacy, you wouldn’t design the Hawthorn Building. Huge windows (a former arts college), a medieval archway preserved in the basement, a main lecture hall where Hendrix once played, rooms in turrets accessible only by hidden external staircases…
You wouldn’t design it like that, but you wouldn’t undesign it from that either. It is beautiful, ungainly, inspirational and the faculty doesn’t so much inhabit the building as colonise it. But in doing so it has adapted the building to suit needs passing and long term, in a way it could never do with a purpose-built facility. Organisational structures can be self-adapting and self-nurturing in the same way.
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