"The Man who broke Napoleon's codes" by Mark Urban

George Scovell was a man of low birth who, having initially trained as an engraver, joined the British army during the Napoleonic wars. This book traces his career from Captain with Sir John Moore at the time of the evacuation from Corunna to his work as an assistant quarter-master general with Wellington where he was initially responsible for a team of guides to reconnoitre and gather information, then taking on the duties of postmaster, running teams of men carrying messages, and finally as Wellington's code-breaker. The book also tells of the Peninsular campaign and includes the British attacks on the great forts of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and the great victories of Salamanca and Vitorio; Waterloo and the aftermath of his career are included in a post-script.

This is a well-told (plain and clear, rather like the prose of the Duke of Wellington himself) narrative history and it includes some very useful maps. In an original touch there is a friexe above each chapter heading which shows a quotation written in the Great Chiffre Napoleonic code and which is gradually revealed as the chapters go by.

Some of my favourite lines:

• "Captain George Scovell was a Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General ... the title itself seemed to denote 'insignificance'." (C 1)
• "While Massena had kept his mistress at Headquarters ... Marmont, although reputedly one of the most handsome men in Paris, brought no Venus to the field of Mars." (C 7)
• "Sometimes a column of infantry marching across a dusty Estremaduran plain would see the glint of a telescope on a nearby hillside and then catch sight of a silhouetted figure on horseback." (C 7)
• "An intercepted mail ... was taken by Longa, who killed 400 men who escorted it except 12, who, he says, did not show so strong an inclination to leave their bodies there." (C 17)

May 2019; 288 pages

"The Hut Six Story" by Gordon Welchman

A memoir by one of the key mathematicians who worked on cracking the Enigma code at Bletchley Park.

This explanations of the cryptanalysis is by and large too difficult for me and I suspect that my understanding of maths is significantly higher than the average reader. The history is mostly (and avowedly) written from memory; very little research has been done (or could have been done given that this book was written while Enigma was still top secret). The prose style is pedestrian: my heart sank when he explained that there had been ten steps in his thinking and he would now proceed to explain them one by one. There are times when, like most memoirs, his concern is with ensuring his own place in history and there are therefore moments when he self-indulgently takes issue with authors having an alternative point of view.

Having just watched a television programme about Mr Welchman and his Enigma success on the BBC I had some idea of what he had been doing. He was instrumental in what is now called Traffic Analysis (though he suggests that he was not the prime mover here, nor was it the most important aspect of his work) in which the German military machine was tracked by knowing which radio operator was broadcasting from where and at what times, regardless of the content of the message. Because much of the radio broadcasts contained routine parts (the full military title of the commander sending the message and of whoever was to receive it, often a weather report, often a comment saying something along the lines of 'nothing to report') 'cribs' could be constructed in which cryptanalysts would scour a coded message for such routine parts and try to deduce the key from that.  I learned that every Enigma message contained an unencrypted part and that part of this explained the key settings that the individual Enigma operator was using; since at the start this 'indicator' was given twice it provided an 'in' for the cryptanalysts (although I couldn't understand the explanation for this).

One gets quite a clear picture of Mr Welchman. During the war he often had a chauffeur driven car and he lived in a mediaeval priory. One guesses that he was quite posh before he became a Cambridge fellow!

So there was a lot of interest in this for the specialist but I struggled with the style. One day someone will be able to explain Enigma to me but this book certainly came nowhere near doing that.

September 2015; 249 pages

A better (but still not perfect) explanation of Enigma is given by Alan Turing: the Enigma by Andrew Hodges

"The Watchers" by Stephen Alford

This is a history of the Elizabethan espionage services. Because Elizabeth I continued her father's breakaway from Roman Catholicism and because she never had a clearly nominated successor there were many attempts to replace her by assassination, coup or invasion. The pope called for her replacement, branding her a heretic and a bastard with no legitimate right to the throne and therefore exonerating in advance any Catholic who might kill her. Mary Queen of Scots, who was for 29 years the next in line for the English throne and who was a member of the ultra-RC Guise family, was the focus for a number of attempts to replace Elizabeth, even when a deposed Queen under quite strict house arrest in England. Philip II of Spain, once King of England as the husband of Elizabeth's elder sister Mary, always threatened even though it was not until 1588 that he managed to launch the Great Armada invasion attempt (and there was a second Armada in 1596 which was wrecked by a storm off Finisterre before the English discovered it was on its way). And there were a number of assassination attempts (though some might have been more due to the zeal of rival intelligence services to discover plots than actual attempts). So there was a need for England to have people involved in what we know call espionage but they then called spiery.

First Sir Francis Walsingham ran a very successful intelligence service which, amongst other things, 'discovered' (or maybe manufactured or provoked) evidence for the Babington Plot in which Mary Queen of Scots appeared to assent to a plot to kill Elizabeth. After his Walsingham's death in 1590 the Earl of Essex and Sir Robert Cecil ran rival intelligence services (Cecil's prevailing and eventually, although this is after the book finishes, preventing the Gunpowder Plot).

This book chronicles the spies who worked for them, decoding ciphers, collecting information, penetrating conspiracies, acting as double agents and agents provacateur and disseminating disinformation. Some of these shadowy spies are working for ideals, others for money, others because they are fascinated by aspects of a life where one is never whom one seems to be. Many of them are turncoats and one often wonders how any spymaster could be certain that his men would not turn their coats a second time.

Alford's book has moments of extraordinary interest, especially when he describes the spies in the shadows. Concentrating on the characters as he tends to does mean that sometimes the narrative is not chronological and it is sometimes a little confusing when he repeatedly returns to an event to describe it again from a different point of view. Furthermore, not all of the spies are as interesting as their colleagues and there are moments when the story drags. I also would have liked more details about the spycraft; it would have been fun to have learned more about the ciphers used (Simon Singh's The Code Book has a fascinating chapter on the Babington code cipher which shows how a technical discussion of code-breaking can be very readable).

Overall, however, Alford's book keeps the interest going and throws light on what must be one of the murkiest areas of history. April 2014; 325 pages