22 | 2 THE mAN wITH THE TERRIBlE TROUSERS
War. It is unlikely that poor dress sense was a positive indicator for recruitment, but it says
much for the foresight of the leaders of Bletchley Park—who were Royal Navy officers and
might be expected to care about that sort of thing—that they were willing to look beyond the
superficial and to make allowances for the eccentric, and sometimes aberrant, behaviour of
their people. So Alan’s name went on the Denniston list.
On 4 September 1939 Alan received his call and reported for duty at Bletchley Park, to where
the GC&CS had moved. In those days Bletchley Park was a very different place from what it
would later become. There were nine men of the professor type when Alan got there, and seven
more arrived the next day. Over the next few years, codebreaking at Bletchley grew from a
backroom approach modelled on the Age of Enlightenment into a huge and smoothly running
intelligence machine, outgrowing the early ramshackle huts and moving into purpose-built
accommodation, all of which one can still see there today.
Until the mid-1970s the family had little knowledge about what Alan had done at Bletchley
Park. Although we knew there had been a codebreaking effort and that Alan had been part of
it, we had no idea about its successes, its strategic or operational impact, or the significance of
figure 2.2 Alan’s graduation photograph in 1934.
Reproduced with permission from Beryl Turing.