In the months before World War Two, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) requested that Gordon Welchman, a lecturer in algebr

Gordon Welchman: the architect of 'Ultra' intelligence

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2024-11-16 20:00:02

In the months before World War Two, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) requested that Gordon Welchman, a lecturer in algebraic geometry and Dean at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, make himself available for secret work for the Foreign Office in the event of war.

In March 1939 Welchman attended a course on the principles of cryptography, and on the 4 September 1939 he arrived at Bletchley Park where he worked in a senior management role throughout World War Two.

In his first two months at Bletchley Park, Welchman independently reinvented a key part of the pre-war work of Polish cryptographers. He also laid the foundations for SIXTA, a fusion of traffic analysis - analysing patterns in communication - and cryptography - the practice of coding and decoding messages.

Welchman made key contributions to the ultimate success of Bletchley Park: He was one of the first to recognise the need for a rapid expansion of the organisation’s infrastructure for the decryption and analysis of intercepted Enigma traffic and drew up an organisational forward plan...