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This is Mr Edgerley's story; it has been added by Herts Libraries, with permission from the author, who understands the terms and conditions of adding his story to the website.

Background of the Edgerley family
September 1939:
Father, E G Edgerley (nearly 43); Mother, Hilda (39); Sons, Peter (15), Michael (12).
Living in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire.
Father's job: Timber control.
School: Wellington, Somerset.

1941:
Parachute landmines over Beaconsfield. Cycled to Hollybush Wood, south of town and found a small crater!

At Wellington, looked out of dormitory window and saw a German rear-gunner machine-gunning South Street on its way back (probably) from bombing Bristol.

In Junior Training Corps, learned to shoot with a 0.2 inch rifle and underwent other Army training.

End of the early days as far as I (Peter) was concerned
Then came 24 July 1942 and my 18th birthday (call-up day for the forces).

Nothing came through the post so I joined my school colleagues from Wellington at Staunton-on-Wye where we helped with corn gathering. In August I did some digging for a Beaconsfield family to earn some pocket money. Then came the summons to an interview in London with a possible offer of a war job in Special Intelligence — whatever that was. I had been recommended by my headmaster, Mr A Price, who had been asked to find candidates by a Government authority. The interview was in an office near Green Park Station, just off Piccadilly. There were five or six interviewers — some in uniform, some not. The questions asked were difficult to understand because i could not be told what the job was. However, a month or so later, I was offered the job assuming I made satisfactory progress on a course in Bedford. Using their rail warrant I reported at No 1 Albany Road, Bedford. After arriving, I soon knew it was a cryptology course and if I was reasonably good at it I would get a job at Bletchley Park.

I was found accommodation only about ten minutes walk from Albany Road. The course was conducted by Captain Andrews. The staff gave each candidate a cryptology booklet which had an exercise or two at the end of each chapter and we had to decrypt messages basing one's methods on the techniques mentioned in the chapter. No German texts were used but there was a course in the German language which was held in the nearby Embankment Hotel in a room at the back. the town had four cinemas and a theatre which put on revues with usually a comedian or so and plenty of girls. They did also put on once Bernard Shaw's, Mrs Warren's Profession. Also, the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Henry Wood or Adrian Boult was evacuated to Bedford and held concerts at the Cornmarket and the Gas Works Hall. Tickets were usually available. Then there was Dudeney and Johnson's dance hall usually called the Dujon. I had my call-up medical. Only Grade Two due to a slightly gammy knee. From then on I was a private with Army Number 14,627,301. I also got a uniform but rarely put it on.

Early in 1943 I made my move to Bletchley Park. I had to commute by train from Bedford St John Station to Bletchley Station which is very close to Bletchley Park. I put the uniform on only when there was an exercise in military procedures if the Germans sent over some paratroops or something like that. Such exercises in the countryside around Bletchley Park were discontinued later in 1943. Unknown to me then, Churchill had ordered rapid recruitment to Bletchley Park which meant no military training.

I joined the Testery. It was actually a military (ie Army) section under Major Tester who had a mixture of Army personnel and civilians mainly because there had been no time to lay on the usual training for the more recent recruits.

The Testery Section was then located in Hut 15A which was not far from the Bletchley Park mansion and just beyond the tennis court. The original staff consisted of captain Tester staff. There were five cryptanalysts plus three shift managers an six ATS girls working on the adapted teleprinters. The latter were ordinary teleprinters with an adaptation which could change the output of the machine providing it had been set correctly, into readable German. it was the job of the cryptanalysts to work out the settings for decryption (details later). At that time we could only succeed if the German operator set the machine on the same settings as another message already picked up at the UK receiving station at Knockholt in Kent. such a happening was called a "depth". Sometimes this happened very shortly after the original message was transmitted when the German machine misbehaved very shortly after the start and the operator started again on the same setting. This was called a "stagger".

It is not proposed to go into great detail of the process as that can be found in several books published in the last decade or so. However, it is worth going on to say that a teleprinter tape looks like this:

o o . o o o . . . o
o . o . . . o . o o
…â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦â¶Ä¦
. . o . . o . o o o
. o o o . o o . . o
. o . . . . o o . .
A B C D E F G H I J etc

Here the 'o's are punched holes in the ticker tape but at Bletchley Park the punched hole was always written down as "x". It was easier.

This system can cope with 26 different letters plus 6 other meanings: for numbers, exactly the same system is used as on an ordinary typewriter — ie:

QWERTYUIOP = 1234567890

The system here is, of course, not the code under discussion since it is part of the Baudot-Murray code that was used all over the world before the war and still a bit now. The German enciphering of messages was the decryption target of the Testery and later of the Newmanry as well.

The German enciphering system was able to add electronically to the plain text using five wheels, one to cover each of the five wheels from the top of the tape to the bottom. Thus, if you add A to B = you get G:

x x . NOTE
x . x
. . = . With electronic adding, x plus x = .
. x = x x plus . = x
. x x . plus . = .
A B G

A plus B = G and G plus B = A

This leads to a large number of "triplets" like this which all cryptanalysts had to know by heart.

If A was the original letter typed and B the enciphering letter, then G was the transmitted letter. A job nowadays for a computer, you might say; but they were not in existence then. However, in a hut next door, Professor Max Newman and his team were working on methods by which single messages might be decrypted without "depths" or "staggers". This effort had produced promising apparatuses by late 1943. Both Sections moved to the newly built Block F in late 1943 and took on increased numbers of people. The Testery was able to decrypt the partially decrypted messages produced by the Newmanry so that all the German output was in theory decryptable — recorded by a new station at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire. The Newmanry machines became known as Colossi. By that time, the cryptanalytical staff had increased considerably. In Room 41, we were able to decrypt the dechis as they were called and could break in at some point into the German text. In Room 40, the texts were brought back to the beginning of the message so that the ATS girls could set up their machines and thus type right from the start of the message.

In theory, perhaps another type of Colossus might have been quicker but no such machine could be considered at the time, although the Americans did produce a device, called the Dragon, which would stop if a "crib" was detected but by February 1945 it was too late. (A crib, by the way, is a frequently used section of a message, such as an address.)

About three months after D-Day, I had an alarming experience of real war. I got weekend leave and was travelling by bus from Berkhamsted Station after getting there by rail from Bletchley. En route a V1 flying bomb cut out near the top of Nashleigh Hill just outside Chesham. The bus-driver zigzagged but the flying bomb went just over us and landed the other side of an adjacent field and luckily exploded in soft ground. There was a small crowd at the bus stop at the bottom of the hill that marvelled at our luck etc.

Working six days a week, days 9-4, evenings 4-12 and nights 12-9, with a change-over on Saturdays, was quite a sweat by today's standards but you could arrange to take your day off when no-one else was doing so on your shift of five men and get your day off when it was a weekend — but not that often! Ordinary single days off could be spent in visiting Bedford, Northampton or Aylesbury or even London for, obviously, a short visit. When on day or night shift one could go to the Studio at Bletchley or the Odeon at Fenny Stratford. Wolverton and Stony Stratford also had cinemas. The WRNS girls were all at Woburn Abbey and we were sometimes invited to go what today would be called discos. Travelling out to Woburn on one of the shift buses was allowed if there was room from Bletchley Park after work, but you had the extra journey to Wolverton if — as I did — you lived in digs there.

There was a Bletchley Park club at Wolverton in a church hall where the WVS provided refreshments. I spent a lot of time in a back room playing bridge. This was a likeable recreation but I also liked going to the Galleon pub on the Grand Union canal. It was at Old Wolverton, about a mile's walk from Wolverton town centre. This had an interesting clientele with RAF aircrew, probably from Cranfield, canal bargees, Bletchley Park staff and, of course, locals. Two of the latter, Wally and Reg, played the piano and sang sometimes. It is a much bigger pub nowadays but in the War it was the tops as far as I was concerned.

Going back to Bletchley Park now: with the war in its closing stages, the 1945 workload — very heavy in 1944 — diminished a bit due to the Germans retreating to their own territory. For one thing, an ordinary telephone call would now no doubt be good enough in many circumstances. When VE Day came in May 1945, we were all a bit worried about the future and did not want to go to the Far East. I did about two months helping to decrypt Japanese cipher messages but the time lag transmission, reception, decoding and back to a mobile war in the Pacific meant that the information gained was well out of date. These codes, by the way, used words given a set of four or five digits in their codebooks and decrypted after a long set of randomly issued digits had been added using non-carrying addition. Still, we had some success.

The war ended in August and most of us left to return to our pre-war job (if we had one) or go to universities as I did. Some of the rest went to Eastcote leaving Bletchley Park to the GPO (the General Post Office) who in those days also managed the UK telephone system.

Personnel at Bletchley Park who were known to the author and have become well-known in other fields:
Roy Jenkins, Peter Benenson, Asa Briggs, Sir Edward Boyle, Peter Hilton, Alan Turing, Bill Tutte, Donald Michie and Jerry Roberts.
(not all of these people worked on Fish, the top level German cipher system)

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