There is, of course, an important lesson to Bletchley Park, which may be perfectly well known in the secondary literature and which I have been thinking about overnight: that when war came, the authorities decided to replicate the atmosphere of a Cambridge college, specifically King’s, with as many free-thinking, independent-minded intellectuals packed into nissen huts and given creative freedom to crack the codes which they did: they were trained at least as much as classicists, historians and linguists as pure mathematicians. So, it’s a lesson in how to foster code-breaking thinking: not with a bunch of computer scientists, but a group of crossword puzzle experts who had been trained in the grammar of classical languages.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
If you watch the quiz programme Only Connect on Monday evenings on BBC2 you will find that the quiz world is full of people with all sorts of training – including in classics. Of course the trick is to look past the sort of people who get in to Oxbridge as the wealth of talent obviously goes far beyond that to include people who never went to university. We visited Bletchley about fifteen years ago when they held a family code breaking weekend. It was in a terrible state – a very strong smell of damp – but there were some of those present who had actually worked there during the war. We went because our eldest son (then aged about ten) was very into maths puzzles and the like. He is now in the final months of a PhD in computer science at Warwick (studying something to do with mathematical functions which neither his dad or I can understand). Of course the irony is that many of the people who could be put to work by the government to fathom out all sorts of issues can’t afford to do that sort of a job. As we are finding with our three adult kids, even being able to afford to rent somewhere (none of my children are looking at buying property) requires a job that pays the sort of rate that only the private sector offers.
Dear Joan, Yes, it’s a disaster that the government has lost an ability to attract people of inventive talent. Charles