Jove’s garcon: Don’ t ask me to tell you what I was doing at GCHQ …..shhh!

14 min readJul 24, 2017

by Jan Cosgrove

The author is retired, lives on the South Coast, and has worked mainly in the charity and voluntary sector apart from brief early spells in local government. He is national secretary of a UK children’s rights organisation and is a serving town councillor in his locality. But his first job was a very different matter ….

This is an update of an earlier version published elsewhere.

Leaving Sixth Form having failed A-levels one was in a dilemma. You see, transferring from a secondary modern co-ed at 16 with 8 O-levels, going to Cheltenham Boys Grammar single-sex was a shock. And one also had discovered the usual things that kids then and now discover…..

The existence of GCHQ (The Government Communications HQ)

also in Cheltenham was not really known to me, its work was not discussed locally or generally come to that, but after applying I found myself interviewed, and after ‘positive vetting’ (parents’ backgrounds, me checked on back as far as school in coastal Essex at age 9 …) I was working there at Oakley Park,the name for the GCHQ establishment. I suppose they took on board that Mum had worked in WWII in FANY, The Field Auxilliary Nursing Yeomanry, and where she met my Dad, Bruno Nadolczak, who was part of the Polishchicociemni and who parachuted into Poland flying from Brindisi where I ‘happened’. [Oddly, I visited Brindisi some years back with a touring London orchestra, the first morning I stepped out of the hotel, what did I see? A coach disembarking a horde of Polish students. Gave me a bit of a turn ….] Cichociemi, from Wikipaedia

In those days, GCHQ still had its policy of recruiting the odd-ball

those who viewed life from the odd angles, the other end of the telescope, a hangover from the war years, then it got much more about academic success. Now it seems they may be reverting to the old ways, so I suspect my grandson, Daniel, may be right up their street if he develops as he is.

First, security briefing, you never talk to anyone about your work

not even others in GCHQ, unless it’s an authorised part of your work. This was great, it made for lack of bores talking about work outside and also terrific parties. My mate, the redoubtable Reg, had this great basement flat in the town centre. I had the best collection of singles and always got invited.

If asked, we had to say we did communications research, any further probing was”It’s very technical” and then, it was report it. BTW, there is a myth you sign the Official Secrets Act. Only Her Majesty signs Acts of Parliament. What you do sign is a statement saying you know it is an offence to disclose matters rated under the Act to unauthorised persons. My security clearance was Q, above Top Secret, rarely Eyes Only. My wife and sons do not know what I actually did, it stays that way, Matt the eldest says “admit it Dad you were a spook” but, hey, I was a civil service clerk, honest.

To get into GCHQ, one had to pass through the security block and wave a photo pass at them. This was the subject of legend, the idea that the pass was a religious icon, because anyone who saw it grabbed it and said “Jesus Christ is that you?”

So, GCHQ was split into various Divisions

mine was H, based at the very top of the hill and in what seemed to be a former hospital type structure with a central corridor and small rooms branching from this etc.

This division was headed by the legendary Hugh Alexander, chess doyen and on of that brilliant group who worked at Bletchley Park cracking the top German codes, especially Enigma and also the next generation of machines such as the Lorenz SZ42 which the Germans swore were uncrackable. I saw an Enigma machine on a visit to Bletchley which is now the museum for this subject.

Also,another BP luminary, mathematician Shaun Wiley, who I saw reasonably frequently: he’d pop into my office “Jan, thank God you’re here, the only sane person in the whole place”.

So it was all very spooky?

Well, actually, er no. Not from where I was sitting. Oh yes, I knew what I was taking part in was, and is to this day, essential in the world in which we live. Now more in the public eye — when I worked there, its substantial funding was not revealed, it was hidden, if I recall somewhere in the budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or so I was told unofficially. Even this far on, I still have a feeling it shouldn’t be ‘out there’ in the way it is in media terms, call it ingrained habit but there you are. BTW, our sister agency in the States, the NSA, was fondly referred to as The Sieve, why precisely I don’t know.

Security was such that I had a cupboard, I had combination/key (can’t recall) and every time I went out of the room — lunch loo home et al — it was put away and locked up.

There were moments but part of it was hours of scanning paper tapes for whatever, unwinding them manually and then rewinding manually, so tedious. There was the Great Paper Tape Eater, a device for rapid rewind which either tore the tape into shreds or indeed spewed it everywhere. Developed by our Tech Wizards the other side of town at Benhall. Problems with tension I was told. I was lazy and thought, this sucks and so one day, as I had now a spare record deck with 4 speeds 16–33–45–78, I brought it into work to test my idea. Yes, unwind at 16, scan at leisure, rewind 45/78, no shredding no spewing. So Shaun sees this one day and, hey presto, later that day, Hugh Alexander and others pop in to view. I felt such a fool, but there were appreciative murmurs….. These days, there’d be a Health & Safety flap.

Remembering spewing paperwork, as a break of one month, my section boss, a truly lovely man, Leo Ferguson, engaged me on a task 25 years old, and this was the raw material to justify our getting our mitts on the new IBM 360s GCHQ had purchased, oh and did the IT boys guard them from mere louts in H Division, or anyone.

Well we had to write a routine and that was where I was taught about Fortran IV, and we wrote the routine and sent it to F Block to be run. A few days later Leo gets an agonised call and says simply that I needed to pop over to discover a small problem. And it was small, a mistake in a nesting sub-routine, in the print stage. So? Look at what has happened ….. I did, lots and lots and lots of paper all over the print room floor. Oh says I, what happened there? I was told the program had run absolutely fine but for one teenzy problem. It had printed one letter a page…. a failure in a nesting print sub-routine would one believe. Aaah, said I and retreated hastily, profusely apologising. In the end, it came out, we solved the mystery, the information was …. useless but I know now where the sun rises and if asked could devise a nifty Playfair Square, with knobs on. Some time later I took tests to enter a programming job with the Civil Service, and was told, having learned to program at GCHQ, that I was not ‘suitable’. Oo-er.

There was fun, there had to be.

Usual romances, birthday cakes and lunchtime celebrations of such. We had one lad, Roger, had an army fixation, and he got steaming in the 21st birthday lunchtime rounds, and we had to get him past security to get back into GCHQ, and I devised the game that he was part of a mission in civvies and we had to get past the enemy gates. Yes he was that steamed. So between 2 of us ensuring he stood upright we frog-marched him, quickly, hup-one-two-three… “pass display! Pass lower” and bundled him into an empty office to sleep it off. The same lad at one of Reg’s parties climbed out of the bathroom window in y-fronts at 3 am on a testicle-freezing morning, again as soldier, and I had to run after him and grapple him to retrieve him.

Ah such times, only spoilt by a resident in the block, four storeys up who couldn’t hear anything, I stood outside Reg’s window and his door, but clearly he didn’t like “goings on” so at 3am went round waking neighbours who told him to bog off, as one said, so I am getting on with an assignation, I am called to the front door by Reg,the man is there and has the cheek to drop dead right then and there. Put a right dampener I can tell you.

Even working there, one was not aware fully of what had been achieved between 1939 and 1945 by our cryptanalysts

(code-breakers, cryptographers make them) but even though there was an ordered huge destruction by Churchill of a lot of what was done after the war, it was clear, to me at least, that without that work, we would not have been on the winning side. The official line is still that this work helped shorten the war by a few years. The Enigma traffic was read to a high level, depending on the service being looked at. Sometimes 60%, but there were up and down periods, even complete loss. I am not going to rehearse here what has been better described elsewhere.

**Lorenz SZ42, set the pace for a generation of machines**

But to penetrate to that level meant it was close to mind-reading. The story about the breaking of the next generation Lorenz SZ42, using Colossus, the first programmable electronic computer, is again told elsewhere. What I can say is a) I saw a later version of C in F block, valves of a size you wouldn’t believe and b) in my view that work set the stage for so much more post-war this field. Funnily enough, a version of one of the German machines turned up on e-bay:
Secret German WW2 code machine found on eBay

The Colossus computer, what it achieved

and the rather incredible story of how it was done:
From encrypt to decrypt — the full Lorenz story

That there just 200 of these as opposed to many hundreds of Enigma is an indication as to the level of secrecy Hitler entrusted to their use. If Enigma was middle-to-high command, the SZ42 was The Mind of Hitler and his immediate cronies. When you have that degree of penetration to the enemy’s highest level, you do everything you can to protect that knowledge. I don’t have or ever expected to have any examples but if it meant sacrificing a thousand troops or a town …I am sure that was done. and had to be done. Even a people ……?

Enigma was used by the Germans in controlling the railways of Europe under their control and occupation. So when train loads filled with Jews and others transported them to concentration and extermination camps, did the code-breakers at Bletchley discover this? If so, would that have been something that, even now, a UK government would want revealed? If we had done so then it would soon have made the Germans realise they had been compromised. So much would have been lost. Relations with Israel are never easy, so imagine post-war the devastating effect of such news.

Early version of Colossus, later one in F Block at GCHQ

The development of Colossus

is credited to Post Office engineerTommy Flowers, but he was always ready to acknowledge the theoretical basis laid down by mathematician Alan Turing whose work at GCHQ played the most crucial role in the breaking of both Enigma and Lorentz, not least in the ground-breaking theoretical work he published pre-war on computing machines. If Colossus was and is anyone’s baby, it was his. Turing, truly a genius, and the fact that we read those machines encoded outputs and what that meant for the war’s outcome would have been enough to secure his honour and fame for ever, but when we look at our modern world, then we see just how extraordinary was that contribution.

The laptop recording this piece and its transmission via the internet that is a great grandchild of Colossus, I am reminded that, when Isaac Asimov wrote his famous Foundation scifi novels in the 50s etc, he envisaged a period when the Galactic Empire had existed for 30,000 years and its original home The Earth was merely a legend. So the latest What Galaxy? science/tech novelty was the minisec a natty hand held device able to do …. what your i-pad etc can do now …..
Colossus: Breaking the German ‘Tunny’ Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated History

So Turing the hero?

Well, we know the disgraceful truth, arrested in the early 50s re homosexual offences, ordered to be treated with hormones to reduce his sex drive, committed suicide. The law, not applying to female same-sex activities, based on gutter-press incitement of public dislike of such people, condemned another genius, Oscar Wilde, and hastened his premature death. Our forbears ensured through their prejudice that the UK lost one of its most brilliant sons. An odd-ball.

GCHQ recruited them, I recall the peculiar young man who was apt to walk down the hill at Oakley Park in the traffic stream making car noises, I used to rescue mould-infested cups from his room, and he eventually set himself on fire. Hugh Alexander used to fly his old iron-frame bike down the hill, no brakes and zoom into the rush traffic of the main road at the bottom regardless. Or Bud, a tanned, tanned wiry Yank from NSA whose old Ford Popular was his pride and joy, one day the driver-side door fell off, he got out, gave a considered look: “Guess m’door’s fallen off Jan” got in and drove off. You can’t forget Bud.

But it was not just Turing or Wilde, it was ordinary folk

and one of them was Ray, surname forgotten, who was, well let’s say it camp, as camp as Baden Powell’s Biggest Jamboree, as I always say. He worked in H Division, not sure what he did, we didn’t ask. After he had not been seen for a few days at work and was not on leave, Where is he? In Yorkshire, in the Ministry of Transport. Wasn’t due to move? Er, caught cottaging (a new term to me then) in the male toilets in a local park. No prosecution (oh aye),just moved. Like to the British Gulag (Yorkshire?) Having a consensual relationship then was not legal, doing things in public, very not so. Make it against the law and he’s a security risk ……

It’s ironic that Ray was considered a security risk because of a nasty-minded, venal law that criminalised him for being who he was not for a real crime. It was the law, not his being camp-gay, that made him a security risk. I wonder what happened to him, he was wry and had a sharp, acidic humour, and pouted. Not a charade, it was him. I won’t hazard how and why, we just accepted him and guessed his ‘interests’ at which oblique references he would simply shrug his shoulders and give us all that look.

Being gay when it was still a crime
and
Gay men convicted of abolished sexual offences to be pardoned

So, now Turing is pardoned. Good ho we say, and all those other gays. Well, not all, see:
MP close to tears as Justice Minister’s speech thwarts gay pardons bill to cries of ‘shame’

A Royal Pardon for Turing

and on his reputation and fame, for many other gays who also were convicted, on his posthumous coat-tails. But, wait a moment. A Pardon relates to a crime you have committed. Given that such activities for which they all we convicted are no longer criminal acts (bar with underage or vulnerable persons), I have to ask, should these things ever have been criminalised, and if the answer is ‘No’, then the State, acting for all of us, in our name, wrongly enacted such law. Qui custodit …. Who pardons the pardoners? If it is not a crime now, and as nothing in science etc has shown any sound reason for the passing of the original law, we ought, surely, for the sake of honesty and decency, to say that they never committed the crime, that our supreme national body, Parliament, was in error and acted unjustly, in a spirit of ignorance. It is not as if the point was not made at that time indeed.

What is the course open to this nation and its elected representative body? Exoneration, which means saying that the laws were a mistake. That we as a nation can recognise that and make amends. Turing surely deserves that, but Ray does as well.

GCHQ apologises for treatment of gay employees

There is one further step. Given what he and his band of ten thousand did, and what his work is meaning for mankind and will into the future, I’d nominate this shy, introverted genius for a statue somewhere very prominent indeed, built and maintained at public expense. Maybe in Parliament Square. After all, that work almost certainly saved the Mother of Parliaments and its electors from ruthless tyranny and subjugation.

Exoneration of persons convicted of gross indecency and related “homosexual offences”

What happened to my GCHQ career?

I took the internal Civil Service examinations for the Executive Officer grade, and came third in the country and fifth after the A-level candidates had been taken into account. Promotion, in GCHQ? No. No places available. Go where you’re sent or lose promotion. London, MOSS, Ministry of Social Security, Shoreditch Area Office, Hoxton was my patch. Arse of a manager. Gee thanks. The poorest part of London. Thanks a bunch, but that too opened my eyes, how people had to live. Still one of the country’s poorest areas, 39 years on.

People in 1939–45 fought not only against tyranny but for a better future. It was over 20 years by then and it wasn’t happening for the poorest, nor is it now.