In April 2020, incredibly rare World War II footage of British spy staff shot at a site connected to the famous codebreaking facility Bletchley Park has been discovered and published online.
The 11-minute video is thought to be a compilation of footage shot at the Whaddon Hall facility used by communication staff from the UK's Special Intelligence Service (SIS) – also known as MI6 – from 1939 to 1945, according to a press release from the Bletchley Park Trust published.
During the war, Bletchley Park, a mansion in Buckinghamshire, England, was home to the British government's Code and Cypher School, where codebreakers famously cracked Nazi Germany's Enigma cypher.
During World War II, the Bletchley Park estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers; among its most notable early personnel the GC&CS team of codebreakers included Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry. The nature of the work there was secret until many years after the war.
Secrecy
Secrecy Properly used, the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers should have been virtually unbreakable, but flaws in German cryptographic procedures, and poor discipline among the personnel carrying them out, created vulnerabilities that made Bletchley's attacks just barely feasible. These vulnerabilities, however, could have been remedied by relatively simple improvements in enemy procedures, and such changes would certainly have been implemented had Germany had any hint of Bletchley's success. Thus the intelligence Bletchley produced was considered wartime Britain's "Ultra secret" – higher even than the normally highest classification Most Secret – and security was paramount. All staff signed the Official Secrets Act (1939) and a 1942 security warning emphasised the importance of discretion even within Bletchley itself: "Do not talk at meals. Do not talk in the transport. Do not talk travelling. Do not talk in the billet. Do not talk by your own fireside. Be careful even in your Hut ..."
Nevertheless, there were security leaks...
Video
The work that Bletchley Park and MI6 did during World War Two, was instrumental in the allies’ victory.
But until now, there hasn't been any video showing what life was like on the sites dedicated to this work. This all changed when a piece of film was anonymously donated to Bletchley Park Trust, providing an unprecedented insight into the lives of those there.
