In the history of cryptography, Room 40 (formally I.D. 25) was the room in the Admiralty which was the first location of the British cryptography effort during World War I. It was formed shortly after the start of the war in October 1914, as a result of codebooks and maps (containing coded squares) passed on to the Admiralty by the Russians who had seized them from the German cruiser Magdeburg when it had run aground. Two copies of the three which the warship had been carrying were recovered; one was retained by the Russians and the other passed to the British. Room 40 retained its informal name while it expanded during the war and moved into other offices. It closed in February 1919. It is estimated that Room 40 decrypted around 15,000 German communications. It was provided with copies of all interceptable communications traffic, including wireless and telegraph traffic. For the whole of its existence it was under the command of Captain (later Admiral) William 'Blinker' Hall. It was managed until 1917 by James Alfred Ewing. It played a key role in several naval engagements during the war, notably in detecting major German sorties into the North Sea that led to the battles of Dogger Bank and Jutland as the British fleet was sent out to intercept them. However probably its most important contribution was in decoding the Zimmermann Telegram, a cable from the German Foreign Office to its ambassador in Mexico. In the cable, Nigel de Gray and other cryptanalysts discovered German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann making an offer to Mexico of United States territory as an enticement to join the war as a German ally. The cable was passed to the U.S. by Captain Hall, and a scheme was devised to conceal how the plaintext had become available and how the U.S. had gotten possession of it. The cable was made public by the U.S., who shortly thereafter entered the war on the Allied side. In 1919, Room 40 was run down and merged with the British army's intelligence unit MI1b to form the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS), later housed at Bletchley Park during World War II and subsequently renamed Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and relocated to Cheltenham. http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode_04.html
CODEBOOKS There are some similarities between the way in which Britain secured its intelligence advantage in the two wars. In World War II, the German naval codebook and an Enigma coding machine were retrieved from the crippled U-boat U-110 without the Germans fully appreciating the scale of their loss. In World War I, British intelligence managed to secure three German codebooks. The most important was the codebook retrieved from the German cruiser Magdeburg when it ran aground in the Baltic in 1914. The Russians seized the ship and passed the codebook on to their British allies. When the Kaiser was advised of the Magdeburg's loss, he blithely remarked: 'Oh, well, sparks are bound to fly at a time like this.' If he had known that the Allies had secured one of his vital codebooks, he might have been much more distressed. German warships were obliged to advise fleet headquarters of their global positions on a daily basis. Possessing the codebook gave the British a vital edge in knowing the whereabouts of the German ships. German radio transmissions were intercepted at locations such as the coastguard station at Hunstanton in Norfolk and passed on to the men of Room 40 for decrypting. This intelligence advantage proved to be of great value to the British at Jutland in 1916. Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox A Greek scholar, 'Dilly' Knox was one of the original members of the Admiralty's "Room 40" SIGINT cell in the First World War, and became Chief Assistant at GC&CS in 1940. He is credited as the code breaker who achieved the first GC&CS successes against Enigma.
There are two books that are well worth reading on the workings of British Naval Intelligence: Room 40 by Patrick Beesly, ISBN 0 241 10864 0; and the classic The Zimmermann Telegram by Barbara Tuchman, ISBN 1 84212 279 7, which tells us how the US came to enter the War thanks to a British intelligence coup. Gareth
Alfred Dillwyn Knox, the fourth of six children was the son of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, and the brother of Ronald Knox, E. V. Knox and Wilfred. L. Knox He was father of Oliver Arbuthnot Knox. Alfred Dillwyn, known as "Dilly," Knox was educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, and then Eton College He studied classics at King's College, Cambridge, and was elected a fellow in 1909 He's included on the Special Forces Roll Of Honour Surname - Knox Forename - Alfred Dillwyn (Dilly) Unit - SIS (GC and CS) Rank - Civilian Number - Date Of Death - 27th February 1943 Age - 58 Gravesite - Additional Information born 23.7.1884 son of Edmund Arbuthnott Knox educated Summer Fields School,Oxford educated Eton College educated King's College,Cambridge Fellow of King's College 1909 served WW1 with Room 40,Naval Intelligence Division GC and CS until his death award C.M.G. died of cancer Hughenden, Buckinghamshire http://www.specialforcesroh.com/browse.php?mode=viewiroll&rollid=11457 Connections between King’s and codebreaking go back far beyond Bletchley Park and Churchill’s ‘geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled’. On 4 August 1914, the day that Britain went to war, the then Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Henry ‘Dummy’ Oliver, received a series of coded signals from an Admiralty wireless station. Baffled, he handed the problem over to Sir Alfred Ewing, 1898, the Director of Naval Education. A former Professorial Fellow at King’s and Professor of Engineering at Tokyo, Dundee and Cambridge, Ewing had acquired ‘an expert knowledge of radio-telegraphy’ and had briefly dabbled in codes and ciphers. By way of help, four language teachers were sent from the naval colleges at Dartmouth and Osborne during their summer vacation. (The ablest, AG ‘Alastair’ Denniston, later became operational head of interwar signals intelligence and the first head of Bletchley Park.) Apart from their knowledge of German, however, Ewing’s recruits had no qualification for codebreaking bar ‘a reputation for discretion’, and not one knew anything about cryptography. Although Ewing resigned in October 1916 to become the Vice - Chancellor of Edinburgh University, he had also taken steps to recruit ‘men of the professor type’: civilian intellectuals whom most Admirals would never have dreamed of involving in naval affairs. The single most valuable source of ‘professor types’ was King’s, with which Ewing retained close links, notably through his son-in-law, L J Wills, 1903, who was a Fellow from 1909 - 1915. Numbers grew, and in late 1914 members of his team were moved to Room 40 in the Admiralty Old Building. By May 1917, Room 40 was formally incorporated into the Naval Intelligence Department, as I.D.25. It was early in 1915 that King’s provided Room 40 with its ‘most brilliant’ member, Alfred Dillwyn ‘Dilly’ Knox, 1903. Dilly Knox was an Old Etonian classicist (briefly tutor to Harold Macmillan) who had quickly established himself as a leading King’s eccentric. Dilly did some of his best work for Room 40 lying in a bath in Room 53, claiming that codes were most easily cracked in an atmosphere of soap and steam. Two other Fellows of King’s were among the leading figures of Room 40: the ancient historian Frank Adcock, 1905, and the historian Frank Birch, 1909. ( Birch was a brilliant conversationalist and comic actor, later becoming the first Fellow of King’s to appear, in 1930, as the Widow Twankey in pantomime at the London Palladium. ) Even as an undergraduate Birch had a deep influence on Knox, liberating within him, it has been claimed, a ‘vein of wild fantasy’. Knox, who was to remain in government service as Chief Cryptographer until his death in 1943, wrote the verses, which include the following: The sailor in Room 53 Has never, it’s true, been to sea But though not in a boat He has served afloat – In a bath in the Admiralty. Room 40 had made no attempt to recruit professional mathematicians, whose supposedly introverted personalities were thought to be too far removed even from the realities of daily life for them to engage with the horrendous problems posed by the First World War. http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/development/kingsparade/issues/autumn2001.pdf
As he had been mentioned above and as he was an MP in Liverpool ... I felt I had to add this here !! I found this and thought maybe it was something of interest !!
