Room 40 - Origins

Origins

In 1911, a committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence on cable communications concluded that in the event of war with Germany, German-owned submarine cables should be destroyed. On the night of 3 August 1914, the cable ship Alert located and cut Germany's five trans-Atlantic cables, which ran down the English Channel. Soon after, the six cables running between Britain and Germany were cut. As an immediate consequence, there was a significant increase in cable messages sent via cables belonging to other countries, and cables sent by wireless. These could now be intercepted, but codes and ciphers were naturally used to hide the meaning of the messages, and neither Britain nor Germany had any established organisations to decode and interpret the messages. At the start of the war, the navy had only one wireless station for intercepting messages, at Stockton. However, installations belonging to the post Office and the Marconi Company, as well as private individuals who had access to radio equipment, began recording messages from Germany.

Intercepted messages began to arrive at the Admiralty intelligence division, but no one knew what to do with them. Rear-Admiral Henry Oliver had been appointed Director of the Intelligence division in 1913. In August, 1914, his department was fully occupied with the war and none had experience of codebreaking. Instead he turned to a friend, Sir Alfred Ewing, the Director of Naval Education (DNE), who previously had been a professor of engineering with a knowledge of radio communications and who he knew had an interest in ciphers. It was not felt that education would be a priority during the expected few months duration of the war, so Ewing was asked to set up a group for decoding messages. Ewing initially turned to staff of the naval colleges Osborne and Dartmouth who were currently available due both to the school holidays and to naval students having been sent on active duty. Alastair Denniston had been teaching German but later became second in charge of Room 40, then becoming Chief of its successor after the First World War, the Government Code and Cypher School (located at Bletchley Park during the Second World War). Others from the schools worked temporarily for Room 40 until the start of the new term at the end of September. These included Charles Godfrey, the Headmaster of Osborne (whose brother became head of naval Intelligence during the Second World War), two Naval instructors, Parish and Curtiss and scientist and mathematician Professor Henderson from Greenwich Naval College. Volunteers had to work at codebreaking alongside their normal duties, the whole organisation operating from Ewing's ordinary office where codebreakers had to hide in his secretary's room whenever there were visitors concerning the ordinary duties of the DNE. Two other early recruits included R. D. Norton who had worked for the Foreign Office, and Lord Herschell, who was a linguist, an expert on Persia and an Oxford graduate. None of the recruits knew anything about codebreaking, but were chosen for a knowledge of German and a certainty they could keep the matter secret.

A similar organisation had begun in the Military intelligence department of the War Office, which become known as MI1b, and Colonel Macdonagh proposed that the two organisations should work together. Little success was achieved except to organise a system for collecting and filing messages until the French obtained copies of German military ciphers. The two organisations operated in parallel, decoding messages concerning the Western Front. A friend of Ewing's, a barrister by the name of Russell Clarke, plus a friend of his, Colonel Hippisley, approached Ewing to explain that they had been intercepting German messages. Ewing arranged for them to operate from the coastguard station at Hunstanton in Norfolk, where they were joined by another volunteer, Leslie Lambert (later becoming known as a BBC broadcaster under the name A. J. Alan). Hunstanton and Stockton formed the core of the interception service (known as 'Y' service), together with the post office and Marconi stations, which grew rapidly to the point it could intercept almost all official German messages. At the end of September, the volunteer schoolmasters returned to other duties except for Denniston, but without a means to decode German naval messages there was little specifically naval work to do.