Why Bletchley? Location, Location, Location! The man who bought a Country Park. A presentation given at the Cambridge University Study Day Bletchley Park 2009

Perhaps I should start by saying what I am essentially not going to talk about. I am not going to talk a lot about Enigma, and cyphers, Tunny, Colossus and Bombes, the Y Service and the birth of computers.

I am going to talk about one aspect of the combination of skill, eccentricity and dedication for which Bletchley is now so famous; and I am primarily going to talk about one man.

My primary academic interest is in Scottish Military History so I am afraid that you will find a number of Scottish references throughout my presentation.

If you read the now many published works that relate to the Special Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Ultra Secret you will find scattered references to this man but I am sure that his name will be largely unknown to most of you. Although he was never to live to see it, it is my contention that this is a key man in the history of the Intelligence community and in the story of Bletchley, and he was in fact the man who bought Bletchley Park.

So who was this man who bought Bletchley and about whom we know so little? I refer to Hugh Francis Paget Sinclair. His entry in Kelly’s Handbook 1934 extends to only five tantalising lines and betrays nothing of his importance in the Bletchley story.

Born on 18th August 1873 in Southampton, Hugh was the son of Frederick and Agnes May Sinclair. His Father styled himself as “gentleman” and young Hugh joined the Royal Navy aged 13 in 1886. He progressed well and before the First World War essentially specialised in Torpedo work. His service record and confidential reports, now in the Public Record Office, show that he was considered a, “most zealous officer”, with, “excellent tact and judgement”. In 1907 at the respectable age of 34 he married Gertrude Attenborough and on the outbreak of war in 1914 he was appointed Assistant Director of the Mobilisation Division on the Admiralty War Staff.

This appointment was in many ways Sinclair’s first introduction into the fringes of the intelligence community. The Naval Intelligence Department of the British Admiralty was formed in 1882 as the Foreign Intelligence Committee. It originally had two Divisions, Foreign Intelligence and Mobilisation, to which were later added War Strategy and Defence, Trade and Coastal Defence. In 1910, only four years before the outbreak of war, war planning and strategic matters was transferred to the newly formed Naval Mobilisation Department and it was this Department, still containing a number of those who had worked in Naval Intelligence, that Sinclair joined.

Two years later on 20th September 1916 the 27,900 ton Battle Cruiser HMS Renown was completed at Fairfield’s in Govan on the Clyde and she set out for acceptance trials on the famous Arran Course. Her first Captain was Hugh Sinclair. Renown, a sister ship of the Repulse, completed these trials with flying colours including four hours at full power making an average of 32.2 knots, over 57 mph, claiming her place as a legend in the fleet.

But her Captain was somewhat of a legend too. Sinclair was described by one of his young officers as, “a very strange and original character, a clever man who shone in command of men”. Vice Admiral Brooke, also a junior officer of the period remembers:

“He had all the royal gifts and was perhaps the most intelligent and revered officer in the Fleet. An Able Seaman would refer to his appearance as, “Too ‘orrible”, and he would not have been far wrong! But he was just and usually right……The Captain took a pride in his junior officers [and] I got to know and like him very much. He had a way of asking his officers to dinner one at a time. We used to arrive in some anxieties but were immediately put at ease and given a splendid dinner. Warmed by a little wine and our superb host we became very talkative and left thinking how well we had completed. Later it dawned that he had learned all about us and we nothing about him, and, “He never forgot!”

By this time Sinclair had already acquired himself the nickname Quex, from the play, “The Gay Lord Quex” by Sir Arthur Pinero, whose hero was described as, “the wickedest man in London”. Like the Gay Lord, Sinclair, lived well; he smoked cigars from a large crocodile skin case, he kept a superb cellar and even at the height of the war he somehow managed to feed his dinner guests such delicacies as Californian peach fed ham.

Neither Renown nor Sinclair saw action but it was during his time on Renown that problems began to show in his marriage. Stormy domestic arguments could be heard in the Captain’s cabin when Gertrude came on board and his personal life showed no signs of recovery when in 1917 he became Chief of Staff of the Battle Cruiser Force.

Two years later in 1919 Sinclair was appointed as Director of Naval Intelligence and given the task of setting up the new signals intelligence agency, the Government Code and Cypher School. In charge of GC&CS was Alastair Denniston, born in Greenock and known as “the little man” and the operation was based at Watergate House, Adelphi. Sinclair inherited a highly successful organisation which had been responsible for the Royal Navy’s cryptographic work during World War One. Based on Room 40 and formerly under the leadership of Sir Alfred Ewing, later to become Vice Chancellor and Principal of Edinburgh University, Room 40 had attracted such outstanding intellects as Alastair Denniston himself, Oliver Strachey and the legendary “Dilly” Knox and in 1920 was to recruit one of Britain’s finest cryptologists Colonel John Tiltman MC, of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. Room 40 had also received much attention from Winston Churchill with whom Sinclair dined regularly.

As a sign of his rising career Hugh Sinclair was made Naval ADC to King George V in 1920 but, after his embarrassing, unfashionable divorce from Gertrude, he was moved in 1921 to be Chief of the Submarine Service an appointment that lasted until 1923. Now as a very senior Naval Officer he became deeply concerned with the considerable unrest in the Fleet and the Bolshevik menace, a concern, that for good reason, was to shape much of his future thinking and strategies through the 1920s and 1930s.

In early 1923 Captain Sir Mansfield Cumming, RN, known as “C” and Head of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) since 1909, developed severe angina and much to his delight a fellow Naval Officer Hugh Sinclair was chosen to succeed him. Cumming considered Sinclair “in every way qualified and suitable. I feel sure that in his capable hands [SIS] will grow to be very useful – it is not too much to say essential – to the Government Departments we serve”. Thus, Rear Admiral Hugh “Quex” Sinclair became Head of the Secret Service and Director of the Government Code and Cypher School housed respectively in Melbury Road and Queens’ Gate, London. The stage was set for a career which would ultimately take him to Bletchley.

Sinclair, now in the role of “C”, was immediately confronted with a complex series of problems. Relationships with the Soviets were tense and difficult and involved not only diplomatic and trade relations but also agents of the British Communist party, unrest in the Services caused by Bolshevik groups and the spread of discontent in particular in India and Afghanistan. Soviet communications were being intercepted and the code breakers were reading much of the Soviet material particularly Diplomatic traffic but a few months before Sinclair took over the situation had been thrown into complete disarray when Lord Curzon sent his ultimatum to the Soviets disclosing to them the successful British interception of their communications. The Soviet reaction, the claims of manipulation of documents and the resulting scrap between the Foreign Office and the Service Ministries all appear to have served to reinforce Hugh Sinclair’s anti Bolshevik stance.

On 22nd January 1924 the first Labour Government took office. Few of Ramsay MacDonald’s Ministers had any idea of the existence of the intelligence services or indeed that many of those self same Ministers had been the subject of surveillance. In the end it appears that only Ramsay MacDonald himself was told something of the work of SIS and the Government Code and Cypher School, the remaining Labour Cabinet continued in blissful ignorance. In the meantime many members of the Government were viewed with deep suspicion by SIS.

The Labour Government signed Anglo-Russian Treaties on 8th August 1924. The right wing Evening News immediately published their, “Money for Murderers” headline. “What Mr MacDonald…and [his] fellow dreamers about Russia are doing is to pledge the British taxpayer to lend money to the conspirators who want that money to hasten the collapse of the British Empire”. Two months later the Labour Government lost a vote of confidence and Parliament was dissolved. The highly charged election which followed centred on the “Red Menace”.

It was at this point that what was known as the Zinoviev letter came into the hands of SIS. Apparently received from a trustworthy source, the letter was from Zinoviev, the President of Comintern to the Communist Party of Great Britain instructing the CPGB to put pressure on their sympathisers in the Labour Party to intensify agitation and propaganda work in the armed forces and to prepare for the coming of the British revolution. Ramsay MacDonald drafted a strong note of protest, which it appears was sent in error before he had finally approved it, and the next day a leaked copy of the Zinoviev letter appeared in the Daily Mail. The Conservatives as a direct result won a landslide victory.

There will always be doubt as to whether the Zinoviev letter was a forgery or not and there will always be doubt as to who in the Intelligence Services leaked it. The probable candidate is Sir Reginald “Blinker” Hall Sinclair’s predecessor as Director of Naval Intelligence in Room 40 and a staunch Conservative, but we may never know. Entwined in the whole affair was also Sidney Reilly, the so called Ace of Spies, an unreliable and slightly strange maverick who worked on the fringes of the intelligence community and who a short time after the Zinoviev affair was lured across the Soviet border and shot.

After an enquiry Prime Minister Baldwin ordered a tightening of procedures and these and other incidents certainly contributed to Sinclair’s increasing insistence on secrecy. In 1925 SIS and the Government Code and Cypher School moved to 54 Broadway just opposite St James’s Park Tube Station. Sinclair had his offices on the 4th floor of the Broadway Buildings. Backing on to the Broadway Buildings is Queen Anne’s Gate where Sinclair had a flat so that he could come and go from the office without being seen. He ceased to wear uniform and his unmarried sister Evelyn, who was already acting as his assistant, kept house for him. He became immensely concerned with his personal security and that of SIS and GC&SC but he was clever enough to realise that he was high profile and well connected and he had to network with senior figures in the Government, Opposition, Foreign Office and Civil Service.

As an old seadog trained under sail, with his square jaw, broad shoulders, charming and clubbable ways he was able to adopt a certain style and eccentricity. London taxi drivers of course soon got to know the address in Broadway and came to recognise the large open-topped Lancia car that he drove around London and which was often parked in the street outside or outside the Foreign Office.

In the six years that followed Hugh Sinclair as “C” faced further enormous problems. While he is traditionally labelled somewhat accusingly as anti-Bolshevik, he was indeed anti-Bolshevik and with some justification. Proof of Soviet activities arrived on his desk daily. Financial aid from the Russians arrived to support the General Strike of 1926 and in 1927 the activities of a double agent and former Black Watch officer George Monkland, and a former member of the Royal Scots Wilfred Mcartney, led to the security raid on the All Russian Co-operative Society and the Russian Trade Delegation and the publication by the Government of material which further exposed the existence of SIS and GC&SC. The Russians immediately went to a one time pad encyphering system and from then until the War SIS worked blind.

A recurring dilemma in those years was this question of disclosure. The Soviets in particular were extremely persistent. How much to tell the public about the threat without revealing the sources, when to issue warnings to the Soviets, how much to reveal to them about what we knew and how to prevent the politicians from operating without advice was always a delicate balancing act which Sinclair had to grapple with daily.

The minority Labour Government of 1929 was followed by the Financial Crisis of 1931. The resulting cutbacks in Government expenditure hit the Services hard and SIS and GC&SC led an impoverished life on the edge with Sinclair complaining that his whole operation cost less than the expenditure of keeping one destroyer in Home waters. The organisation was not always efficient, co-ordination within the intelligence agencies, the Service Ministries and Whitehall was often poor even after the formation of the Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee in 1936, and relationships between SIS, known as “the other side”, and GC&CS were generally distant but somehow Sinclair kept his organisation together by sheer determination. Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham who joined the Service in 1929 remembers that Hugh Sinclair, “had no need or intention of allowing anyone to corrode the absolute independence of the Secret Service, the last Chief”, in his opinion, “to do so”.

“Quex” Sinclair also used his considerable social skills in the cause. His association with Churchill was of longstanding but he now began to foster a circle of friends which enabled him and SIS to survive the difficult years of the 1930s. Amongst these was Sir Robert Vansittart, known as “Van”, Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office between 1930 and 1937 (who was succeeded by Sir Alexander Cadogan), Sir Maurice Hankey, Cabinet Secretary between 1916 and 1938 and Sir Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary at the Treasury and Head of the Civil Service from 1919 to 1935.

While continuing to oversee the work of Alastair Denniston in GC&CS, Hugh Sinclair also set up a number of new sections within SIS: V Section working in collaboration with MI5 on Counter Intelligence, N Section intercepting foreign diplomatic mail, D Section for covert and paramilitary operations, ultimately to become SOE, Section 7 for economic intelligence, Section 8 for radio communications of SIS operatives and the highly secretive Z Section created to obtain intelligence from Germany and Italy and as an alternative if ever SIS were to be compromised.

To this work and to CG&CS Sinclair was able to attract a mixture of able men, trusted colleagues with whom he had served and steady hands. They included Colonel Sir Claude Dansey, formerly Station Chief in Rome founder of Z Section, Major General Lawrence Grand who became Head of D Section, Major Valentine Vivian, Counter Espionage, Frederick Winterbotham, Air Section, Leslie Lambert the Direction Finding expert and of course Colonel Stewart Menzies, Sinclair’s Deputy.

The whole system was however put under further strain by developments in Germany where Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. The cover for most SIS Station Chiefs abroad was as Passport Control Officers. Appearing as low grade junior officials their role was to filter alien applications to visit or stay in Britain and to gather intelligence through local contacts. The whole system financed itself with the Visa fees offsetting the PCOs costs. However at the critical time when PCOs based in Europe should have been concentrating on their intelligence gathering responsibilities they were besieged by applications from refugees, particularly Jewish refugees, attempting to flee the growing anti-Semitism. The pressure also led to a number of cases of abuse where PCOs had taken large bribes to provide Visas. Hugh Sinclair wrote a number of impassioned letters on the subject, and was subsequently himself accused of anti-Semitism as a result, but the fact remains that intelligence on the developments in Germany was urgently needed and as a result of the pressure on PCOs, and the fact that the German Armed Forces had begun using the apparently unbreakable Enigma, it took a long time for the magnitude of the situation in Germany to become truly apparent.

The man who appears to have influenced Sinclair’s thinking in respect of Germany was Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham RAF who joined SIS in 1929, who as a result of time spent in a German Prisoner of War Camp during the First World War spoke good German, and who travelled widely in Germany between 1934 and 1938, when his cover was blown. Through personal contacts Winterbotham succeeded in talking freely with Hitler, Arthur Rosenberg, Hess, General von Reichenau, General Kesselring and Eric Koch.

Things from here on moved quickly. In 1937 Hugh Sinclair confided in Alastair Denniston that he was, “convinced of the inevitably of war”, and, “gave instructions for the earmarking of the right type of recruit to reinforce GC&CS immediately on the outbreak of war”. The names of these people were to be placed on what was called The Emergency List. Active in this recruitment process was the Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge Frank Adcock who recruited amongst others ten Fellows of King’s and E R P Vincent from Corpus. This drive was ultimately resulted in the recruitment of Peter Twinn from Oxford, Alan Turing from King’s, Gordon Welchman from Sidney Sussex and Hugh Alexander the British Chess Champion. At this time Sinclair also recruited Richard Gambier-Parry to review and update SIS communications. This was the man who was to become the “voice” of the Ultra secret, working with his team at Whaddon Hall disseminating the vital Bletchley intelligence information to Allied forces.

In May 1938 the Czech Crisis placed Sinclair centre stage and as a result of an intercepted telephone conversation the crisis in Czechoslovakia appeared to be averted following a British warning and a substantial Czech mobilisation following the interception.

Two months later, in July 1938, Sinclair, using £7,500 of his own money, and having failed to convince the Foreign Office of the necessity of a war headquarters for SIS and GC&CS, bought 55 acres of Bletchley Park from the property developer Captain Hubert Faulkner – and history was made.

Bletchley Park Estate, at the time of the Domesday Book part of the Manor of Eaton, comprised around 581 acres. A mansion was built here in 1711 but this was pulled down sometime after 1793 and replaced by a farmhouse. On 4th June 1883 the land, including the Park, Farms and Stables, was bought by Sir Herbert Samuel Leon a City financier and Liberal MP who immediately expanded the house into the present mansion using a bemusing mixture of styles from Victorian Gothic to Tudor and Dutch Baroque. Sir Herbert died in 1926 and his wife Fanny lived on until 1937 much loved and respected in the area. The sale of the estate in 1937 failed to attract buyers and the property remained on Knight Frank and Rutley’s books for a number of months until the lots were bought by Captain Hubert Faulkner who planned to demolish the house.

It seems that Sinclair did a simple search for properties of a suitable size, about 40 to 50 miles from London, within reach of Oxford and Cambridge and with road, rail and teleprinter links. Bletchley Park filled all of these criteria.

In the summer of 1938 an evacuation rehearsal was organised under the command of SIS Officer Captain Ridley RN and some of the occupants of Broadway came here to Bletchley dining at long tables and fed by Sinclair’s favourite Chef from the Savoy Grill.

By September 1938, and amid increasingly confusing and conflicting intelligence reports emerging from Germany, Sinclair undoubtedly appreciated that nothing in Britain was ready to deal with what was to come and at the time of the Munich Crisis he took a determined stance in favour of appeasement. However in December 1938 the Admiral prepared a dossier on Hitler which included Sinclair’s insightful assessment of the man as possessing the characteristics of “fanaticism, mysticism, ruthlessness, cunning, vanity, moods of exultation and depression, fits of bitter and self righteous resentment, and what can only be termed a streak of madness; but, “he wrote, “with it all there is a great tenacity of purpose, which has often been combined with extraordinary clarity of vision”.

In May 1939 the recruitment process was further accelerated when Alastair Dennison wrote to the Heads of a number of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges and subsequently dined at several High Tables. Amongst those recruited in this search were Harry Hinsley and the great R V Jones whom I remember so well as a charming, modest and congenial Professor at Aberdeen University.

A month later in June 1939 and under great strain Sinclair took some leave. He was by all accounts clearly unwell. On 25th July in the Pyry Forest outside Warsaw Denniston and “Dilly” Knox met the Poles and they were given the secrets of Enigma.

On 15th August 1939 SIS and GC&CS moved to Bletchley. War was declared on Sunday 3rd September and a month later Sinclair although visibly ill was still at work. On 29th October he had an operation and the doctors concluded that his cancer was terminal. He died on 4th November 1939 leaving a letter recommending the appointment of Stewart Menzies as his successor, which duly occurred.

Five days later on 9th November `1939 two British agents, Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, were lured across the German/Dutch border and captured by the German SS Security Service, the so called Venlo incident. Sinclair who encouraged and authorised the encounter was to have his memory tarnished as a direct result.

In the heady years of the 1960s, and at the height of the management of the Oleg Penkovsky case, the 1920s and the 1930s were viewed with considerable derision in the Service – “the old days” as they were laughingly referred to. The astounding revelations about Ultra by Frederick Winterbotham in the 1970s further served to focus popular memory on the dramatic events that took place here at Bletchley.

I believe that the story of getting to Bletchley is part of the key to understanding the magnitude of what happened here and that Admiral Sir Hugh “Quex” Sinclair deserves at least some small share of that reflected glory.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you.

Dr D M Henderson

Queens’ College

Cambridge

May 2009