Some of the individuals who played key roles in the success of
Bletchley Park in reading the secret communications of Britain's
enemies during the Second World War have become well-known figures.
However, the man who created and led the organisation based there,
from its inception in 1919 until 1942, has, surprisingly, been
overlooked - until now. In 1914 Alastair Denniston, who had been
teaching French and German at Osborne Royal Navy College, was one
of the first recruits into the Admiralty's fledgling codebreaking
section which became known as Room 40. There a team drawn from a
wide range of professions successfully decrypted intercepted German
communications throughout the First World War. After the Armistice,
Room 40 was merged with the British Army's equivalent section -
MI.1 - to form the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Initially based in London, from August 1939 GC&CS was largely
located at Bletchley Park, with Alastair Denniston as its
Operational Director. Denniston was moved in 1942 from military to
civilian intelligence at Berkeley Street, London. Small at first,
as Enigma traffic diminished towards the end of the Second World
War, diplomatic and commercial codebreaking became of increasing
importance and a vital part of Britain's signal intelligence
effort. GC&CS was renamed the Government Communications
Headquarters (GCHQ) in June 1946, and moved to the outskirts of
Cheltenham. It continues to be the UK's signal intelligence
gathering organisation. With the support and assistance of the both
the Denniston family and GCHQ, Joel Greenberg, author of Gordon
Welchman, Bletchley Park's Architect of Ultra Intelligence, has
produced this absorbing story of Commander Alexander Alastair'
Guthrie Denniston OBE, CBE, CMG, RNVR, a man whose death in 1961
was ignored by major newspapers and the very British intelligence
organisation that was his legacy. [Denniston was a] great man in
whose debt all English-speaking people will remain for a very long
time, if not for ever. That so few of them should know exactly what
he did towards achievement of victory in World War I and II is the
sad part of the untold story of his life and of his great
contribution to that victory.' -William Friedman, The doyen of
American cryptography One of the reasons for the success of
Bletchley Park, and something that I and Alastair Denniston's other
successors have striven to maintain in GCHQ, is the organisation's
ability to make space to allow individuals to flourish, both in
isolation, and within teams. He had already worked out that the
forthcoming war and the profusion of mechanical encryption devices
needed a new sort of cryptanalyst to complement the existing
staff.' -Sir Ian Lobban, Director of GCHQ 2008 to 2014
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
