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Review of ‘Dilly—The Man Who Broke Enigmas’ by Mavis Batey

‘‘Dilly’’ is a interesting and well-written biography of author Mavis Batey’s wartime [WW2] boss, Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, one of Britain’s most prominent codebreakers and the man responsible for Bletchley Park’s [BP] initial break into Enigma, the German cipher machine, prior to the war. Knox, a former Cambridge don who served with the Admiralty’s now famous codebreaking unit, Room 40, during the First World War, was with BP from the beginning of its organization and also masterminded the work into the breaking of the cipher generated by the more complex, four-wheel Enigma used by Abwehr, Germany’s military intelligence arm. Knox and his team of female codebreakers were also responsible for the ‘cracking’ of the Italian naval Enigma, the result of which breakthrough was a major victory by Britain’s Royal Navy over its Italian counterpart at the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941: a defeat from which the Italian navy never recovered. The story is told in Chapter Nine of this book. ‘Dilly’ is well illustrated with 31 monochrome plates and includes a five-page chronology of Knox’ life from his birth in 1884 to his premature death from abdominal cancer in 1943. Chapter headings range from ‘The making of a codebreaker’, ‘Enigma’ and ‘The Battle of Matapan’ to a set of five appendices—drawn from Knox’ work at BP—and a seven-page glossary. The book’s index is a most comprehensive one, making this a ‘must have’ item for any Enigma historian or others with an interest in WW2 codebreaking and its history. During WW2 the author, as Mavis Lever, was one of ‘Dilly’s girls’; another was Margaret Rock. This led Knox, well-known as a wit and epigrammatist, to say— ‘‘Give me a Lever and a Rock and I can move the universe!’’ Mavis came to BP as a German linguist and whilst there married another of the Park’s prominent codebreakers, Cambridge mathematician Keith Batey. She has published previously on the subjects of codebreaking, biographically on Ian Fleming, English gardens, and on the works of Lewis Carroll.