Bletchley Park

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Wednesday 12th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend on obtaining the debate and, of course, on her speech. One is constantly astonished by the noble Baroness. Even two nights ago, I happened to turn on the television and see a recorded version of “Have I Got News For You?” in which the noble Baroness appeared. I have never seen the regular panel so intimidated as they were on that occasion.

The noble Baroness has a very close and long association with Bletchley Park. Curiously, I discovered that I, too, have links, albeit rather remote ones, with Bletchley Park, although I was quite unaware of it at the time. I did my national service in 1947-48 in the air force. It was a pretty miserable time as there was no prospect of promotion or learning to fly; one was just there to make up the numbers while others were demobbed. I may have spent much of my time training for the 1948 Olympics, but I was also trained ostensibly as what was known as an “instrument basher”, where one had the responsibility of looking after aircraft instruments and so on. I did not think much of the training and I took the precaution of never going up in an aircraft which had an altimeter that I had calibrated. I was later posted to somewhere in the south of England which was responsible for testing and repairing type X machines, which were the British equivalent of the German Enigma. If there is one theme in my remarks this evening, it is that I think the type X machine has been grossly misrepresented compared with the Enigma machine. After all, the Enigma codes were broken, which was never true of the type X machine used by the British.

Reading through some of the books that have recently been published, it has become clear to me that it was not just a question of decoding the Enigma ciphers; you also had to decipher them in a form which was readable. To do that, you had to put it into a similar machine. We clearly did not have very many Enigmas, so the type X machine must have been used. I believe that that was the case. Therefore, the type X machine played a major role in the success of the whole code operation and its effect on the outcome of World War 2.

As noble Lords have pointed out, the work which was done at Bletchley was of great importance. I fear that, increasingly, we are tending to concentrate on World War 1 rather than World War 2. Perhaps this is just because it is the anniversary of World War 1. It is very strange how World War 1 seems to have captured young people’s imagination more than World War 2. However, young people may be inspired by Bletchley as the place where modern computing began, and where they can discover what it was all about, which is important.

Just before I was demobbed, I was told that the type X machines were going to be destroyed. I gather that that did not take place, but I believe that Churchill had the big machines destroyed. That was a shame, but it is good that the exhibition has those machines on display. That is as astonishing as the extraordinary decoding work that was done at Bletchley Park in the war, including by my noble friend.