The Prime Minister's Visit to Hut 7

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, visited Bletchley Park on Saturday 6 September 1941, on his way to Ditchley Park, where he would stay overnight. There are a couple of more or less plausible accounts of what happened during the visit, but his visit to Hut 7 is not one of the better known. 

Hut 7 was located north of Huts A and B, and west of Hut C, and was built early in 1940, to be occupied by the staff, led by Frederick Freeborn, who transferred there from the British Tabulating Machine Company at Letchworth and their equipment (often referred to as Hollerith machines) Hut 7 was responsible for the bulk of information processing at Bletchley Park, at its peak getting through two million punched cards each week.

I imagine that Hut 7 was chosen partly because of the number of machines it contained, partly because they could be used theatrically to impress the PM, and partly because each of the functions carried out on them could be explained to him in language he would understand, whereas, if he had been taken to see the Bombes, it would have been much harder to explain what was happening.

He would see how a message header and (say) the first ten groups of the message were punched onto cards, then see how a couple of thousand messages could be sorted: into date and time order, perhaps, or by recipient. He could see how a cipher group could be followed through several messages, and how cards could be duplicated if they were valuable as references.

All of this would be to impress upon the PM that the seemingly fantastic resources BP was requesting were not for some sort of vanity project, but rather for the machine age's version of the Room 40 he had been responsible for when it first broke into German naval codes early in November 1914.

The value of the visit came a few weeks' later when four rather naïve cryptanalysts, seeing that the holdups and shortages Bletchley Park was facing were significantly reducing the organisation's intelligence productivity, wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to unlock the delivery of resources. His answer was an instruction to his senior aides, General Ismay and Sir Edward Bridges, to 'make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done'.

Many years later Ronald Whelan MBE, one of two brothers Freeborn had brought with him to Bletchley Park in 1940 from Letchworth, remembered the visit in a memoir (TNA HW 25/22) of the work of Hut 7.

'The visit of Winston Churchill

By the time of Churchill's visit to Bletchley Park Hut 7 had become a commodious erection as compared with the modest Hut in which we had started our activities. Being a wooden structure it had been comparatively easy for workmen to tear down walls and partitions, and to tack on extensions, not once but several times, until eventually for a time we had ample accommodation for machines and operators. With such a stage to hand, Freeborn, who apart from his very high technical and administrative abilities was always a showman and an opportunist, planned a memorable demonstration of the use of Hollerith equipment in Bletchley Park on the occasion of Churchill's visit to Hut 7.

Freeborn's secretary, Miss Ellen Ford and I were waiting with Freeborn by the entrance door when Churchill strode down the path towards us, followed by three no-nonsense looking men, who were obviously his bodyguard. As Churchill entered the hut his bodyguards attempted to follow, but Churchill rounded on them and in a voice which would have done credit to that of the great huge bear, rasped "Not you", causing than to stop dead in their tracks.

On entering the Machine Room area on his exit from the Key Punching Room, the visitor was presented with a scene of intense activity. There were about 45 machine operators in action and as many or more than that number of machines. Then all the machines were halted at the same instant, and in the complete silence which followed an Introductory explanation was given to the visitor as the party stood on the threshold of the area. Then as he was conducted towards a group of twelve or more Sorters, all these machines started into action at the same moment. They were allowed to run only for a short time, and all came to rest as one, so that their function and application could be explained without distraction.

Moving from the Sorters to the Reproducers the same arrangement held; all in action on his approach, but at rest for an explanation to be given by Freeborn, the same arrangements applying for each of our various equipments.

At the conclusion of the demonstration all machines were brought into action as the visitor was conducted to the exit, but all brought to rest as he paused on the threshold as he made his farewells. But on reaching the door he turned back, first to stub out his cigar in a nearby ashtray, and then to turn to Miss Ford, to shake her hand and bid her Goodbye.

Miss Ford had a dazed look as she stared at the hand that the great man had held, then she took up the cigar butt and said it was something she would always treasure.'