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E-Book

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Roberts Lorenz

Breaking Hitler's Top Secret Code at Bletchley Park
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7509-8204-7
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

Breaking Hitler's Top Secret Code at Bletchley Park

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

ISBN: 978-0-7509-8204-7
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark



The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War and highlights the crucial work of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park, which prevented Britain's certain defeat in 1941. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken. For sixty years, no one knew about Lorenz or 'Tunny', or the determined group of men who finally broke the code and thus changed the course of the war. Many of them went to their deaths without anyone knowing of their achievements. Here, for the first time, senior codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts tells the complete story of this extraordinary feat of intellect and of his struggle to get his wartime colleagues the recognition they deserve. The work carried out at Bletchley Park during the war to partially automate the process of breaking Lorenz, which had previously been done entirely by hand, was groundbreaking and is recognised as having kick-started the modern computer age.

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1


LIFE IN NORTH LONDON


I was born in November 1920, in a house called ‘Morfa’ in Wembley Park Drive, which is now opposite the main entrance to Wembley Stadium in north London. My parents had arrived in London in 1915 from Rhyl, North Wales. My elder brother Arnold had been born in Wales and was already 7 years old, and my younger brother Frank came along three and a half years after me; we were both born in London.

My father (Herbert Clarke Roberts) was a bank clerk, working in the Lloyds Bank head office in the City. He originally came from Liverpool and had trained as a pharmacist, but had to change his profession as the constant standing aggravated the varicose veins in his legs. He spent the rest of his working life travelling up to the City every day, until he retired at 65.

My mother, Leticia Frances Roberts (née Hughes), was a talented pianist. She played the piano in the chapel at Warren Road, Rhyl, and also sometimes the organ at St Asaph Cathedral nearby. In 1915, when the family moved to London, she left Rhyl with the thanks of the congregation and a handsome clock inscribed to her, ‘Mrs H.C. Roberts, organist of Warren Road Chapel by friends and well-wishers on her leaving Rhyl, January 1915’. The clock still remains with me as a cherished possession. I also still have her beautiful mahogany piano stool with its engraved surround. It is the piece of furniture I am most attached to; within it are some of the sheets of music she used to play to us as children and to herself – she played the piano well.

Rhyl was where my mother was born and the family were originally located. Almost all of my mother’s friends and relatives were from North Wales and we had uncles and aunts (some of whom we never saw) in Lancashire, Chester and Manchester, as well as Liverpool, where my father’s side came from. We were one of the many families who gravitated towards London in search of better opportunities.

There was wholesale movement away from North Wales in the early years of the last century. One uncle went to Chester, where he worked for Crawford’s, the biscuit company. Another uncle, Lou, went to work in the textile industry in Manchester. A third, John, came down to London, to Finchley, where he practised as a doctor. My Auntie Minnie, whose husband was killed in the Great War leaving her with two growing children Gwylmor and Nerys, took over a grocery store with a post office in Greenford, North Ealing. Auntie Minnie’s husband was richer, and Gwylmor was able to buy a car, a relatively rare thing to own at that time, which gave him extra mobility and standing when he went into business and prospered. He also visited the US in the early 1930s when very few people made the trip.

There was yet one more refugee from Wales, our Uncle Edward. He was my mother’s youngest brother. He had a speech defect but it did not prevent him from successfully running a tobacconist shop at Sudbury Hill in north-west London. He lived over the shop and added a second store a few years later. Eventually my mother’s parents came down from Wales to live with him.

We always called them (Welsh for grandpa) and (grandma). Uncle Edward lived close to the tube station at Sudbury Hill, one stop from ours. We used to see them from time to time, as they lived nearby, about fifteen minutes’ walk away. Taid was always impeccably dressed in a full suit, complete with buttoned-up waistcoat, and a silvery beard always carefully trimmed. Nain was rather heavily built; she invariably wore longish skirts of heavy and dark materials. The chapel was taken very seriously in those days; our family had closer ties to the chapel than most because my mother played the organ on Sundays for some years.

On my father’s side, there was my grandfather Robert William Roberts and grandmother Maria Roberts (née Clarke). I never met Granny Clarke, but I heard a lot about her. I have a portrait of her (. 1850) left to me by my parents. She looked a really formidable character – a true Victorian matriarch. She must have had quite a lot of authority and respect in the family. All of her sons and her grandsons (and us) carry her name – Clarke.

I also have an original newspaper cutting of one of her sons, Frank Roberts, from the front page of the (the merged with the in 1971), which is dated Friday, 9 January 1914 and entitled ‘England may well be proud of these gallant officers’, with an article by an American writer. Uncle Frank was a third officer of the Booth liner in the Royal Navy, based in Liverpool. The newspaper wrote that he was a hero. Apparently he dived into icy water and saved five Americans from the wrecked oil ship . He later transferred to the army and was killed in action in France in 1916. He was buried at the Woburn Abbey Cemetery at Cuinchy, between Béthune and La-Bassée in the Pas-de-Calais. He is a family member of whom we can truly be proud.

Recently, I came to know another relative from my father’s side, my nephew John French and his wife Pam. I only came to meet them after they had seen me on TV. John’s grandmother Madge was my auntie. I saw her a number of times, and I knew her daughter Peggy (my cousin) well when we were both teenagers. John is Peggy’s son and as an engineer worked with a German firm based in Hampshire and has just retired aged 62. He has done a lot of work putting together the family tree and can trace the family back by five generations. It is quite fascinating to see how widespread a quite ordinary family can become.

In the old days, we hardly ever saw each other; you could hardly call our family close-knit. This was before the age of the family car and people simply did not move around as readily as they do today. You would have to go by bus or train (or both) and this could be very tiring and time consuming. Today we think nothing of driving hither and thither. This is one of the major differences in lifestyle from then to now, and it has had a huge effect.

The old Wembley Stadium in north London was built in 1923, three years after I was born in 1920. My elder brother Arnold recalled the open fields and woods which lay between our house and the River Brent before the stadium was built. The area must have become much noisier during the construction of the stadium. We had a small garden behind our house, but it stood immediately onto the street and this would no doubt have become much busier and noisier. As a result, my parents decided to move further out to Sudbury, a suburb of Wembley, 2 or 3 miles further away from central London.

The Wembley area had been largely developed already and Sudbury was the next open area in the north-west. The Piccadilly Underground line had pushed 10 miles or so further out to the west and railway stations were set at key points along the route. Around these, estates were soon built on green fields outside of Sudbury town and Sudbury Hill. New housing was put up and there was steady growth of the metropolis in this direction right up to the start of the Second World War, fifteen years later. The sheer area covered by new housing in this period was phenomenal. This was a familiar pattern as London expanded and people moved further out. The development of the Tube lines encouraged this and fostered the great outward growth of London.

Our father bought a new house at 18 Station Crescent in 1924 and we were to live there for the next twenty years or so. It was close to the Sudbury Town Underground station, three minutes’ walk away, so he was able to easily commute up to the City. Later, I was to use the railway on a daily basis to get to Latymer in Hammersmith for my schooling.

The house itself was of semi-detached design, which was quite the fashion in housing development at that time. Many streets had been built on this pattern: two houses built as one unit with a space between that and the next double unit. I used to wonder why it was developed in this way, but I suppose the design allowed the family to go in through the back door, as well as through the front door. Later, it proved even more useful because in the 1950s and 1960s many people put in a garage to house the family cars which had become so popular after the war.

We had a back garden, but it was always in the shade, cold and unfriendly. The front of the house and garden got all the sun. Our real back garden was Horsenden Hill, an open space six or seven minutes’ walk away from our house. The top of the hill itself was fifteen minutes or so away. This was the only space that remained green in our area. The Grand Junction Canal flowed a further ten minutes away. My younger brother Frank and I used to play in the woods and fields on the lower slopes round Horsenden Hill, with endless games of football and cricket using two trees as goal posts and one tree as the stumps. The hill was very pleasant territory, and if you went over the top and far enough down the other side you would come to the Grand Junction Canal and see horses on the towpath pulling barges behind them. The bargemen on board would give us a wave. At another point, near the top of the hill, the grass had been worn away. There were two or three tea trays that kids like us used to slide down the hill on. Nobody ever walked off with those tea trays – they were part of our heavenly playground on the hill.

Another reminder of the nineteenth-century mode of life was provided by an establishment 50 yards away from our house at that time. This was a smithy run by a full-time blacksmith. There was still a substantial need to shoe horses and to carry out other kinds of metalwork.

It is strange to realise the scope and pace of the changes in London over...



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