All eyes and ears

Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espionage and other forms of political and military intelligence.

Both of these books aim, in their different ways, to cater for Britain’s long-standing obsession with espion- age and other forms of political and military intelligence. But they have virtually nothing else in common.

Sinclair McKay’s The Secret Life of Bletchley Park is about daily life at the famous wartime headquarters of the Government Code and Cipher School. There is very little new material to be mined about the work done at Bletchley Park. Its contribution to the course of the second world war has already been well covered in a number of memoirs, not to speak of Harry Hinsley’s outstanding volumes in the official war history series. McKay hardly sets out to say anything original. Instead his pages are filled with chatter, derived mainly from interviews with survivors, about the food, the billets, the sex, the amateur dramatics and all other things which Bletchley’s inhabitants shared with much of wartime England.

Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ is an altogether more distinguished work. It covers the story of Bletchley Park’s enigmatically named successor, the Government Communications Headquarters. It says much for the instinctive patriotism of the post-war generation that although GCHQ was a visible presence in Cheltenham from 1952, and by far the largest employer in the town, its real purpose was not widely known until Duncan Campbell wrote about it in Time Out magazine in 1976, just two years after the first public revelations about the wartime operations of Bletchley Park. Since then the main outlines of the story have become widely known, while a torrent of information and misinformation has filled in some of the details.