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Sinclair McKay, The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The History of the Wartime Codebreaking Centre by the Men and Women Who Were There

In recent years there have been a number of new books produced on the topic of Bletchley Park that have attempted to approach the institution from a new perspective. An example of such a book would be R.A. Ratcliff’s Delusions of Intelligence that compared the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) with its German equivalents to establish why the former was successful and the latter agencies tended not to be. With this latest offering Sinclair McKay has produced a popular history of Bletchley Park but approached the story from the perspective of a social historian. The description of the book printed on the dust jacket states: ‘Sinclair McKay’s book is the first history for the general reader of life at Bletchley Park’. This is, in fact, not the case. There are several histories, for a general readership, that have attempted this same enterprise. For example, local Marion Hill produced Bletchley Park People: Churchill’s Geese That Never Cackled, which had broadly similar aims and sources to McKay’s offering. As a social history, readers who wish to see an examination of the mechanical, mathematical and intellectual processes developed to break Axis ciphers will not be well served by this book, and nor will those interested in the impact of Ultra on military strategy in the Second World War. Nonetheless, those who wish to gain an insight into the atmosphere of Bletchley Park, which McKay has attempted to recreate, may find this book both useful and interesting. Unlike the bulk of works concerned with GC&CS and Bletchley Park, this book examines in detail the lives of those who worked at the institution. The book considers issues such as class, noting that Bletchley Park was a microcosm of society whose staff was drawn from all walks of life, and how this influenced internal relationships within the institution. The book also addresses other issues such as the romances that bloomed among Bletchley Park employees, many of which resulted in enduring marriages. McKay does not make anything of these observations, usually leaving it to the reader to draw their own conclusion, nor does McKay expend any time linking the Bletchley Park experience to the wider historiography of home front life in Britain. As a result this book has little in the way of an over-arching thesis; a reflection on the intended popular, as opposed to scholarly, audience of the book.