Who was 'Jumbo' Travis?

I've had a couple of questions recently about 'Jumbo' Travis, Sir Edward Travis. He was Deputy Head of GC&CS from 1919-1942, then Deputy Director (Services) 1942-44, then Director GCHQ until he retired in 1952. Apart from three cryptanalysts (Alexander, Tiltman and Turing) he was the only person to have a room named after him in the Doughnut when GCHQ moved there in 2001. He was obviously a key figure, but he really isn't well known.

He passed for Paymaster in 1909 and might have had a normal Paymaster career, but found himself posted as Secretary's Clerk to Admiral Jellicoe, the  Commander in Chief on 4 August 1914. By 1916 he had been loaned to the Admiralty by Jellicoe for the compilation of cryptosystems to be used by the Fleet, Jellicoe having being astounded at Travis's breaking the codes used by the C in C himself.

When GC&CS was formed in November 1919 Travis became its number two, responsible for GC&CS's over mission, cipher security. He had a public persona as the UK's representative at international naval communications conferences, and was also responsible for acquiring the UK's first Enigma machine (now in the possession of GCHQ). He was unsuccessful as the person responsible for cipher security: although only able to advise, and not mandate, standards for security to UK ministries, his advice was dire, and he must carry a significant share of responsibility for the fact that all of UK military systems (with one exception) were being read by the Germans by June 1940. (It's interesting that the one exception, Typex, an Enigma clone made more complex than Enigma), was  designed by an RAF officer who refused to allow GC&CS any say in the design of his machine.

By 1938 Travis had been given responsibility for the Service sections of GC&CS - though I'm not aware that anybody has looked at how this came about. (Was 'C' - at that time 'Quex' Sinclair - already looking for a wartime alternative to Denniston, GC&CS's Head?) The first period of GC&CS's time at Bletchley Park is normally told in terms of Denniston's increasing  inability to manage the rapid expansion of wartime Sigint and gradually losing control, but rarely in terms of Travis's being able to be seen by everyone as the man who could make Bletchley work. 

A year after Denniston's dismissal from Bletchley Park with the diplomatic and commercial mission, Travis was able for the first time to enunciate (at least in part) a vision for Sigint in which he would create an organisation in which GC&CS/GCHQ would be in command of Sigint and the military would merely provide manpower and intelligence requirements. His mastery over the 'comitology' - bending the committee structure created to oversee Sigint to give him what he wanted - gave him complete control over Second World War Sigint in the UK. He not only achieved this, but also made himself (and GCHQ) independent of SIS, allowing 'C' to retain the title of Director-General Sigint without any control or responsibility for it. He also developed Denniston's vision of UKUSA and developed a system of Sigint sharing that neither 'C' or anybody else was able to stop (perhaps better, that neither 'C' or anybody else was able to understand).

After the war, Travis created the GCHQ which would be so successful during the Cold War. He redrew the boundary between cryptanalysis and traffic analysis and allowed Sigint to become the predominant supplier of intelligence on the Soviet bloc to defence Intelligence.

Ironically, he never understood communications security beyond the basic codebook level of the first part of the First World War, and, after having some responsibility for the dire state of British insecurity until Sir Edward Bridges began to knock heads together in 1942, was happy to see Comsec as, first of all semi-independent of GCHQ, and eventually as an agency completely (well, almost completely) independent of GCHQ.

Travis isn't well known because he falls between the stools on which the myth of Second World War British Sigint balances. He understood cryptanalysis but wasn't a cryppie. He was a manager in an organisation which thought it could do without management. He saw the big picture of 'ownership of Sigint' before anybody else, and manipulated the committee structure to enable him to 'bag' ownership for GCHQ. But mainly he had a vision for what a Sigint organisation - an intelligence organisation in which each discipline needed to produce intelligence from the interception antenna to the finished end product report - might look like, a global vision he had conceived while the people with whom he was meeting were simply fighting to place their towels on deckchairs.

Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker

Last week I spoke at the Irish Embassy in London at the launch of Jackie Uí Chionna's biography: Queen of Codes: The Secret Life of Emily Anderson, Britain's Greatest Female Code Breaker.

 

I am part of the first generation of Siginters who joined GCHQ after the Bletchley Park story had become avowed, and after the myth of Bletchley had begun to take hold (How a Tiny Number of Boffins and Chess Players Defeated Hitler and Won the War). For those of us interested in accurate history, it was a bit hard to situate the myth against the realities of Sigint in the Cold War, and I suppose it was the realisation that the myth was a myth, and that by taking back bearings from where GCHQ was at the end of the 1980s it might be possible to achieve a better and more three-dimensional understanding of wartime Sigint.

 

That in turn, under the guidance of Peter Freeman, developed into an interest in pre-Second World War Sigint: what happened in the period leading up to 1914 to turn Sigint from a vague idea in August 1914 into two going concerns by November 1914? What had the inter-war GC&CS achieved that meant that it had been factored in to war planning as a 'must-have' by 1938?

 

It was in this context that I first began to come up against references to Miss Emily Anderson. She had joined MI1(b) in 1918 from Galway University and was the only woman to become a Junior Assistant in GC&CS. She was formidable as a cryptanalyst, leading the Italian Section and recovering both Italian codebooks and the key material the Italians used for superencipherment. She trained new staff in cryptanalysis: not just members of staff, such as Wilfrid Bosworth and Josh Cooper, but also the military staff attached to GC&CS before being sent out to India or Palestine (Tiltman said that she seemed to bully his attached officers). In 1940 she had gone to Combined Bureau Middle East in Cairo to head up a detached GC&CS element to ensure that intelligence to support allied operations in that theatre was received as messages were decrypted, rather than depending on the vagaries of communications with Bletchley Park. She stayed there throughout the Western Desert Campaign, then returned to Berkeley Street to resume her work on enemy diplomatic telegrams and retired before GCHQ moved to Cheltenham. Awarded the OBE for her service in Cairo, she received after retirement the Cross of the Federal German Order of Merit for her work on transcribing the letters of Mozart and Beethoven.

 

I am normally chary of expressions like 'Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker': if she was the 'greatest' shouldn't we be able to say who was second greatest, and third, and fourth? It strikes me, though, that in this case (as in Tiltman's) her claim to the title arises from the fact that there is nobody else at all on the same level. Margaret Rock, and Joan Clarke, for example, were exceptionally talented cryptanalysts, but achieved their results as parts of a team working on different elements of the same problem, able to draw on the successes of others to take their own work forward, and at a time, and in an organisation that recognised and accepted the fact that women were as able to do this work as men. Emily Anderson's talents were such that the Admiralty effectively ignored the fact that she was a woman and turned her into an honorary man (she was the only woman Junior Assistant) and paid her at much more than the top of the female pay scale in order that she would work for GC&CS. Her work on Italian diplomatic cryptosystems was a unique triumph: she made the recoveries and built the Italian books herself, and trained staff to be able to do as she did. Her insistence on going to Egypt so that the value of her work could best be realised by allied forces was another example of an indomitable desire to ensure that her skills weren't wasted.

 

I heartily recommend Jackie's biography of Emily Anderson, and have tried to be careful here not to reveal the fruits of her research. Her book makes clear that her achievements in musicology were as important as her work on cryptanalysis – and shows that she was able to use the same techniques in both fields; and the story of her family adds an unexpected element to her story. I have followed this story for six years since I was first in contact with Jackie and am astounded at the amount of new material she has been able to find.

 

Most importantly, the book confirms that Emily Anderson really was Britain's Greatest Female Codebreaker and deserves a much more prominent place in the Pantheon than she has enjoyed hitherto.