A Ripping Tale of Algae and Typos

April 28, 2018 5:12 AM

A British scientist who was not a code-breaker was sent in error to Bletchley Park in WWII. It turned out to be a very good mistake. Twitter thread by Florence Schechter: read to the end for more formal but less entertaining references.
posted by hawthorne (14 comments total)

It's like Drunk History, except with GIFs instead of alcohol.
posted by Doktor Zed at 5:18 AM on April 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

r/actlikeyoubelong
posted by leotrotsky at 5:34 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

Great story! But I followed the link for more information, which led me to this piece debunking the idea that it was really a typo that placed Tandy at Bletchley Park: "Tandy’s job was not to be a 'cryptographer,' but an archivist-lexicographer for cryptographers, and it is pretty obvious he was not recruited because of some typographic accident".
posted by jomato at 5:55 AM on April 28, 2018 [14 favorites]

That Colby Cosh seems a rather die-hard humbug that seems to revel in enforcing they know the REAL truth. True or not, the "cryptogam" story is a lovely little story that inspires us by allowing us to imagine a relatively mundane nobody could be instrumental in ending a war. Why does that have to be so vigorously debunked?

(Their other article linked on that page is listed as "Colby Cosh: Calm down, boys. North and South Korea have been here before")
posted by Samizdata at 6:40 AM on April 28, 2018

I think that while it's important on Cosh's part to correct the misconception that it was a typo that sent Tandy to Bletchley Park, it was serendipitous in the extreme that an expert in the preservation of waterlogged tissue was present to take care of the bigram tables rescued from a sunken submarine. To be fair to Cosh, the blogpost he links to by David J. Collard does stress that aspect.
posted by Kattullus at 6:54 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Geoffrey Tandy also had prior experience in broadcasting; though he had been a botanist, he spent time as a writer for the Criterion, focusing on broadcasting. This tied in with his 1937 Christmas readings on the BBC of T.S. Eliot's Cats poems.

Being a friend of Eliot and familiar with scientific research and use of technology, Tandy's skill set in the face of Britain's literacy concerns in the early 1940s may have lent more to his recruitment to Bletchley. Tandy's role, other than aiding with the Enigma logs, would have been as a technical writer assisting the group.
posted by Smart Dalek at 7:21 AM on April 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

That link to the military literacy test is fascinating in itself, though the test there comes from the U.S. military in WWI.
posted by Grangousier at 8:08 AM on April 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

Tandy wasn't recruited as a codebreaker. His role at Bletchley Park was to run Naval Section VI, which dealt with the technical interpretation of captured documents. Here's the description of NS VI by one of Tandy's subordinates, Vivienne Alford:

NS VI existed for the purpose of solving obscurities in the text of decrypted and otherwise translated naval messages which, with the problem underlined in green, were passed down from the translators. Most frequently it would be a reference to a component of some new weapon, such as a heat-seeking torpedo, limpet mine, or direction-finding device. The resources for identifying these objects consisted of a 'library' (at first just a few bookshelves) of Royal Navy service manuals, pilots' charts, etc., and such of their German, Italian, French, and (later) Japanese counterparts as had been obtained by capture. Useful information -- references to equipment, manufacturers, personnel (particularly U-boat commanders), geographical locations -- was fed into a battery of index drawers, to provide useful material for the elucidation of problems of translation or identification.

Tandy's colleagues were a high-powered lot, including Leonard Forster, later Professor of German at Cambridge, and Alison Fairlie, later Professor of French at Cambridge. Fairlie had just finished her doctorate on the nineteenth-century French poet Leconte de Lisle. That might not seem like a particularly useful preparation for work in naval intelligence, but as Forster later explained, it turned out to be ideal:

The method which succeeded with Leconte de Lisle was equally applicable to U-boat engines: Leconte de Lisle was a learned poet who went out of his way to deal with unfamiliar subject-matter and his poems teem with references which need to be explained; it had been Alison's job to identify them and explain them and she had developed the technique for doing so. It was not difficult to transfer it to different material in a different language.

So the idea that Tandy was recruited by mistake is, frankly, ridiculous. He was recruited because he had precisely the skills that were required: he'd been a curator at the Natural History Museum, he knew how to process technical information and he knew how to do research.

The moral of the story? Next time someone tells you that we need more STEM graduates and fewer humanities PhDs, just remember Bletchley Park. Next time they tell you that research in nineteenth-century French poetry is a waste of time, just remember Alison Fairlie. And next time they ask why we need archivists and curators, just remember Geoffrey Tandy.
posted by verstegan at 8:22 AM on April 28, 2018 [57 favorites]

This trend of stupid unrelated reaction gifs on every tweet in otherwise super interesting story threads is bad and I wish it ill.
posted by poffin boffin at 8:40 AM on April 28, 2018 [29 favorites]

I am surprised. I would expect Cosh to know that understanding is a 3-edged sword.
posted by otherchaz at 9:21 AM on April 28, 2018 [6 favorites]

> Next time someone tells you that we need more STEM graduates and fewer humanities PhDs, just remember Bletchley Park.

The Americans also relied on scholars in the liberal arts during the WW II war effort itself, as well as the postwar occupations of Germany and Japan. Among other things historians were used for determining things like where to drop bombs to affect the enemy's morale and/or avoid targets of major cultural significance (even if their advice was more-than-occasionally ignored). Others were consulted for policymaking and propaganda efforts that could be more effective for being able to address the audience from native perspectives.* It was a brief moment in time in which the US as occupier was paternalistic in a sporadically and weirdly deeply-informed sort of way.

*(The US could have instead used, say, Japanese who had recently naturalized as citizens, but to its detriment had decided racism and mandatory interment was more important.)
posted by at by at 12:10 PM on April 28, 2018 [5 favorites]

I would expect Cosh to know that understanding is a 3-edged sword.

He should listen to the music, not the song.
posted by nubs at 1:48 PM on April 28, 2018

Maybe it's because I'm an Old, but I don't get the point of larding every story with sassy reaction GIFs, one for each tweet-sized span of text. Is that meant to get the snake people to divert their attention from their fidget spinners or avocados or whatever for long enough to learn something?
posted by acb at 4:53 AM on April 29, 2018

acb, think how much typing you'd save yourself if you just posted an appropriate reaction gif of your own.
posted by peeedro at 9:11 AM on April 29, 2018