Enigma News

October 4: From the Telegraph:

'Kate was fine - if a little scruffy'

Mavis Batey's memories of code-breaking were invaluable to Kate Winslet in her role in the film Enigma. Cassandra Jardine meets her.

Among the pile of fan letters Kate Winslet received this week for her performance in the film Enigma, is one that will both delight and puzzle her. It comes from Mavis Batey, an 80-year-old who lives in Bognor Regis, and it ends with a series of incomprehensible words written in capital letters. "I'm sure she can crack it," says Mavis, who has faith in Winslet as a code-breaker. And when, earlier in the letter, she says she "really identified" with Winslet in the film, it might be because Mavis was a role model for Winslet's character, Hester Wallace. It was she who told the actress about life among the code-breakers at Bletchley Park.

Batey is full of praise for Winslet's acting. "She kept her attractiveness well at bay - though perhaps she slightly overdid the dowdiness." Others, now that the true history of Bletchley in winning the war is finally emerging, are equally full of admiration for Mavis. Without people like her, it might have taken a different course. It was she who cracked the Italian naval code in 1941 and ended Mussolini's plans for treating the Mediterranean as "Mare nostrum". She was also instrumental in decrypting the German intelligence messages that led to the success of D-Day. Even so, when Dougray Scott (who plays the troubled mathematician Jericho in the film) embraced her at last week's premiere and announced: "Without you, I wouldn't be here," she shuddered with embarrassment. "It was team work," she protests. "I mean, what about all those Battle of Britain pilots?"

Describing her work in a new book of essays on the work at Bletchley, Action This Day, she comes across as cool and modest - but razor-sharp. The same is true of her at home, where she sits surrounded by piles of books, about which her husband, Keith - a distinguished mathematician who also worked at Bletchley - teases her constantly.

Mavis was the obvious choice to guide Winslet in Enigma and, early on in the production, she had tea with the producer, the director and Dougray Scott to discuss the project. Keith came, too: "I think they wanted to see what a mathematician looked like," she says.

The Bateys represent the two pincers of the movement that cracked the enemy codes. Keith, who was seconded from Cambridge, favoured the technical approach, while Mavis, a linguist, looked at human elements and word patterns. "It is just like driving a car," she says. "We can both do it, but Keith understands what goes on under the bonnet."

Their different approaches coloured their reactions to the new film. Keith was upset by factual errors, while Mavis was enchanted by the way it captured the mood of Bletchley and her feeling of being very young and working on something of great importance.

She has some criticisms. "I've been doing a lot of Pole-soothing," she says. The Polish role in cracking Enigma was overlooked in the film, she believes, as it is in Robert Harris's novel. "It is only fiction," she tells her Polish friends.

It baffles her that Enigma wasn't made at Bletchley Park itself and she would rather they hadn't shown a traitorous Pole working on code-breaking - which added insult to injury. "No Pole worked there, even the great mathematician Rejewski, as it might have revealed the code-breaking centre."

Some details, such as the reward of Scotch whisky for the first to crack the code, also struck discordant notes. "In my section, we were never given deadlines - we needed to be calm. Nor was anyone ever singled out. When our work led to the destruction of the Italian fleet at Matapan, we shared two bottles of wine."

In the film, Hester's complaint that women are given only dull jobs didn't ring true with Mavis, either. "It looked that way, because the only men at Bletchley were specialists who had been head-hunted. The rest of the staff were women because the men were called up."

Mavis Lever, as she then was, was certainly not underemployed when she went to Bletchley, aged 19. A convent-educated girl from south London with, by her own admission, a very good memory, she was already in the middle of a German degree at University College, London when war broke out. She wanted to be a nurse, but was told to use her German. "I rather fancied being a secret agent, seducing Prussians, but neither my German nor my legs were good enough," she jokes, so she went into MI5. There, she distinguished herself. "They were trying to work out where messages were coming from and had decoded one station as STGOCH. Everyone was scracthing their heads trying to find the village of St Goch. I looked at the original letters and wondered why we were assuming the capitals were S and G. If you took them to be S and C - it could have been Santiago, Chile."

That display of lateral thinking was sufficient to get her picked for The Cottage at Bletchley, the centre where unbroken codes were tackled. There, she worked under Dillwyn (Dilly) Knox, a classical linguist and interpreter of papyri who had cracked the German naval flag code during the First World War. "Dilly would be so absorbed in thought that he would stuff his sandwich in his pipe by mistake, and he never found the door when he left the room; he always walked into the cupboard. I was one of Dilly's girls."

On Mavis's first day in The Cottage, Dilly handed her a bunch of encoded Italian naval messages and a pencil and told her to get on with it. Looking at the meaningless letters - which had emerged from the complicated wheels and cross-wires of the Enigma machines - she looked for "cribs"; words that might have been encoded. Working backwards, she tried to discover how the machines had been set.

One starting point, she was told, was that messages often began "Per", meaning "to" in Italian. Mavis had an idea. Perhaps, she thought, the word was "Personale" - personal. Working on that basis, she broke the code soon afterwards, in 1940. And Bletchley were ready when a message came through in March saying that the Italians were planning something big in three days. Working round the clock, the Allies located the Italian fleet and Admiral Cunningham fooled the Japanese counsel (and spy) in Cairo by playing golf on the eve of battle.

As engrossed as she was, Mavis still found time to strike up a romance with Keith Batey, whom she married while at Bletchley - and she dismisses those who say Enigma is inauthentic because, they claim, no one had time for romance. Together, the Bateys worked on decrypting the messages sent out by the Abwehr, the German intelligence service, which used a more sophisticated version of Enigma. "I used the psychological approach. To test the day's settings, the Germans sometimes used their girlfriends' names and dirty words; it was a great shame when they were stopped, as we enjoyed the dirty words."

When the war was over - two years before it might have been, it is now said, thanks to Bletchley - Mavis and Keith started a family and Keith joined the Civil Service, before becoming treasurer of Christ Church, Oxford. Mavis's new life was "just as much fun" as Bletchley, but habits of cryptanalysis die hard and she produced a series of books decoding the influences on writers including Jane Austen and Lewis Carroll.

She credits Bletchley with giving her a gung ho approach to life. "Having been told to crack codes with a pencil and a piece of paper, I was never frightened of having a go." Her only regret is that, having been so diligent when she was young (code-breakers were sworn to 30 years of absolute secrecy), she became highly critical of her own fun-seeking daughters. So it was a relief when the veil was lifted and she could tell them what "silly old square mum" had done during the war.

When she and Kate Winslet met for tea in a Holland Park hotel, there was plenty to say. "I told her about the concerts we went to and the nights at the flicks; the way we swapped clothes to go dancing and the hairdresser who charged 3/6d. We only had a couple of coats and skirts, but always looked smart. We knitted jumpers and dressed them up with pearls and earrings. "Kate was very anxious about her bump showing in the film as she was pregnant, but she looked fine, if a little scruffy."

Mavis was so convinced by Kate as Hester that she talks about them as one person. Let's hope Kate does have Hester's gift for decoding. If not, she may be chewing her pencil over Mavis's letter for some time. Should she get stuck, Mavis suggests starting with the one-letter word - I or A? - and assuming that the final five-letter word is Mavis. Winslet may also like to know that another word reads "stunning".

Oct 4: I found this article on ‘This is London’:

‘Who Was Really Who,’ By Hugh Sebag-Montefiore

The historical accuracy of Mick Jagger's film, Enigma, is well-documented. The Bletchley Park codebreakers really were blacked out and this really did lead to multiple sinkings of Allied ships in mid-Atlantic after the Germans altered their naval code. But what has not come out is the authenticity of the main characters.

Like any good novelist, Robert Harris, on whose book the film is based, insists that no single real-life codebreaker is the model for the roles portrayed. But for anyone who has delved into what went on, there are striking similarities between the characters on screen and the real-life personalities.

Codebreakers

Kate Winslet (Hester): the Blonde’s mousey flatmate who outwits the men and breaks the code.

There were not many female cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park. But one of the most successful was Mavis Lever, who at the age of 19 broke the Italian naval Enigma, exploiting techniques she had been taught by her boss, Dilly Knox, one of the codebreaking stars at Bletchley Park.

Mavis is still alive, and advised Kate Winslet about her role. Like Winslet's Hester, Mavis was a young woman with an independent spirit: she demonstrated outside the German Embassy during the late 1930s, she sewed red flags for those fighting the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, and she fasted once a week so she could afford to contribute to the communist cause. But the most significant similarity between the real-life codebreaker and her screen alter ego was that, like Hester, Mavis became close to the man who taught her everything she knew about codebreaking.

Dougray Scott (Tom Jericho): the absentminded codebreaker brought back to break the code after becoming ill.

Tom Jericho's character is partly based on Alan Turing, the best known codebreaker at Bletchley Park, and partly on Harry Hinsley, the young naval intelligence officer who helped Turing break the naval Enigma code by pointing out that unprotected German weather ships must have Enigma codebooks on board as they were being sent Enigma messages. But the closest fit is Dilly Knox, whose techniques were used to break both the Italian and the German secret service Enigmas.

Like Jericho, Knox was eccentric and absent-minded. He would walk around Bletchley Park in his dressing-gown, forgetting he was not dressed, and stuff his sandwiches instead of tobacco into his pipe. Another characteristic shared by Knox and Jericho is that both liked to drive their cars very fast. Knox even created a pseudo-mathematical theory to support his speeding. A very dangerous driver, he was famous for remarking innocently: "It's strange how people are always saying sorry when you nearly run them over." Like Jericho, Knox loved pretty women. He fell for Mavis Lever while teaching her about breaking the Italian Enigma code. Later he was hurt when told she wanted to marry another codebreaker.

Knox also had a battle with the head of Bletchley Park just as Jericho did in the film, the only difference being that Knox would attack his boss in vituperative letters rather than assaulting him physically as Jericho does in the film. Soon afterwards he discovered that he had cancer, and died one of the forgotten heroes of the Second World War on 27 February 1943.

The Blonde -- Saffron Burrows (Claire): the dizzy blonde who loves dancing and having sex with codebreakers.

There were many candidates who could have been the model for Claire among the well-bred young girls at Bletchley Park. The best match was a glamorous codebreaking clerk, nicknamed "Hula" - her exotic looks were thought to resemble those of an Egyptian belly dancer. Like Claire in the film, Hula was very sexy and able to get anything she wanted, whether petrol or clothes, from "blokes" she knew. At a time when nice girls didn't sleep with men before marriage, she lived openly in sin with one of the naval section's administrators, with whom she was suspected of having orgiastic threesomes along with Frank Birch, the head of the German Naval Section.

The Boss -- Robert Pugh (Skynner): the head of the Naval Section who gives the codebreakers a stirring Shakespearean speech before setting them to work on the Naval Enigma.

Skynner is loosely based on Frank Birch, the real head of Bletchley Park's Naval Intelligence Section.

He was an actor before arriving at Bletchley. As well as having a fondness for Shakespeare, Birch played a pantomime dame in the West End. Like Skynner, Birch often became infuriated by the eccentric codebreakers, writing about Turing and his assistant: "They are untidy, they lose things, they can't copy out right, and they dither."

The Admiral -- Corin Redgrave (Admiral Trowbridge): the admiral who visited the codebreakers.

Admiral Trowbridge has the same attitude to Enigma as that adopted in real life by Sir Dudley Pound, the First Sea Lord. Pound didn't understand the subtleties of the Enigma secret, and insisted that Enigma information should be ignored unless it gave absolutely certain intelligence. This led to one of the most infamous and costly errors of the Second World War. In July 1942, he ignored Enigma evidence suggesting that convoy PQ17, carrying weapons to Russia, was not about to be attacked by the German battleship Tirpitz and ordered the ships to scatter. The unprotected ships were subsequently picked off one by one by German U-boats.

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore is the author of Enigma: The Battle for the Code, published by Phoenix/Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Sept 30: The UK Sunday Times Culture magazine includes a feature on the making of the film, written by Enigma novelist Robert Harris:

Yes, it took longer than the second world war... Robert Harris reveals how Mick Jagger and Tom Stoppard finally brought his book to the big screen

Enigma in the Making

There are, famously, two old and golden rules for any writer selling a book to the movies. Number one: take the money and run. Number two: expect nothing, and you will not be disappointed.

It was in this healthily skeptical spirit, nearly six years ago - a time span as long as the second world war - that I accepted an offer from Paramount for an 18-month option on the film rights to my novel Enigma. I didn't think anything would come of it. It rarely does. How many times do you read that X has sold his or her book to Hollywood, and that Julia Roberts or George Clooney - no, really, honestly - will be signed up any day to play the lead? And how often does the movie ever actually get made? I'd guess about one time in 20.

Enigma, if anything, seemed more of a long shot than most. Could one honestly imagine a feature film about a group of British mathematicians, set mostly in a wooden hut, in the blackout, in Buckinghamshire, in 1943? The novel is deliberately, almost defiantly old-fashioned. There's no violence, except for a couple of gunshots towards the end. There's no swearing. The sex scenes are fleeting. There's a lot of arcane stuff about cryptanalysis. Who would put up £17m to make a film out of that?

Besides, although the initial development money was being advanced by Paramount, the impetus for the project came from two unlikely producers. One was Lorne Michaels, known chiefly for Wayne's World and the US television show Saturday Night Live. The other, even more bizarrely, was Mick Jagger, who had decided to try his hand at making films, and had set up a company called Jagged Films.

The irresistible conclusion was that everyone would lose interest and the whole thing would sink into the mysterious land of the living dead that Hollywood calls "turnaround". I took the money. And if I didn't run exactly, I expected nothing.

The first indication that I might be wrong came on a Sunday lunchtime two weeks later, when I was summoned to Chelsea Harbour, to the penthouse apartment of Tom Stoppard. My host gave me a glass of white wine from Fortnum & Mason (ominously, he took nothing himself) and directed me to a low blue sofa, before taking up station behind a desk high above me. Stoppard, I knew, was a friend of Mick Jagger. And Jagger, I'd been told, wanted him to write the screenplay. This would put Enigma into an entirely different category. Stoppard scripts are eagerly read by directors and actors.

Stoppard scripts, unlike most, tend to get filmed.

He looked down at me over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles. He had, he said, a six-month gap at the beginning of next year when he could fit in writing a screenplay. He had read my novel not once, but three times. He liked it, but he felt there were problems. Many problems. He had made a list. He showed me several pages, densely filled with alarmingly tiny handwriting.

For two hours, he cross-examined me. Why did a character do this and then do that? Was this scene credible? Would someone really have thought that then? "Oh, come on," he said at one point, "that's bollocks, isn't it?" Although his tone was one of unrelenting, if good-humoured, antagonism, it gradually dawned on me that he wouldn't be going to all this trouble if he hadn't more or less made up his mind to do it. The poor chap obviously had caught the same bug I had. There is something about the story of what happened at Bletchley Park that gets under your skin. I'm not sure what it is exactly: something to do with brains overcoming muscle, with the idea of all these ill-assorted people - the debutantes and the grammar-school boys, the chess players and the scholars of medieval romance - thrown together in a country house and changing the course of history.

At three that afternoon, he sent me on my way in a taxi, still noncommittal. At 10 that evening, suddenly full of enthusiasm, he rang to say he'd write the script.

Bletchley Park (or BP, or The Park, or Station X, as it was variously known) is an unprepossessing red-brick mansion surrounded by dilapidated huts in what is now the outer suburbs of Milton Keynes. At its peak, it employed 10,000 people, with another 30,000 servicing it from outstations and listening posts around the world. I first went there in 1992, when I started researching Enigma. By the time the book was finished, I had spent many hours there, wandering around alone.

The broad outline of the Enigma secret had been public for nearly 20 years by then: that reading the Nazis' codes had enabled the allies to beat Rommel in North Africa, to divert convoys around the U-boats in the Atlantic, and to be assured that the D-Day landings would be unopposed; it's reckoned to have shortened the war by two years. But what I needed to write a novel was not the grand strategy. I needed to know what a code-breaker physically did: what was the procedure? Where did he hang his hat and coat in the morning? What did the place feel like in the darkness, with 3,000 people going on shift at midnight, and 3,000 people heading home?

This information is easy to find now, but a decade ago, people were still surprisingly wary of talking. There's a famous story about a woman who knew the Enigma secret and who suffered a brain hemorrhage in the early 1970s: her chief concern as she was carried off to hospital was that, in her delirium, she might start babbling about Bletchley Park. Once that level of security-consciousness has become ingrained, it's very hard to erase it.

My great advantage was that a few of the key figures were still alive: Harry Hinsley, who had pioneered the art of signals traffic analysis and had ended up as master of St John's College, Cambridge; Stuart Milner-Barry, chess correspondent of The Times, who had been head of Hut 6, in charge of decoding Germany army and Luftwaffe Enigma; and Joan Murray, one of the few women cryptanalysts, who had briefly been engaged to Alan Turing. ("One day he told me he was homosexual. It didn't matter to me, but it did to him.") All helped me; all, alas, have since died.

I decided to set my novel during one of the most dramatic episodes in Bletchley's history: the week, in the spring of 1943, when the German navy changed one of its code books and the cryptanalysts briefly lost the ability to break Shark, the cipher of the U-boats - a catastrophe that occurred exactly as the two largest convoys of the war left New York. Around this, I built a fictional story of a code-breaker whose former lover vanishes. He discovers that she has been stealing undecoded intercepts.

If he can break the messages, he can find out what has happened to her - and whether her disappearance is connected to the loss of Shark. I didn't want Enigma to be a wham-bam thriller. I wanted it to be a mystery, on several layers, the unraveling of which would mirror the cracking of the code.

Trying to write it was probably the worst experience of my professional life. It took me three years, full time. Mathematics and ciphers are intractable things. They don't fit easily into a readable narrative. But at least I had the luxury of 400 pages to play with, and the comfort of knowing that my readers could go back and study a paragraph twice. That's not possible for a cinema audience, watching a film in which everything is crammed into two hours. No wonder Stoppard had been nervous.

About three months after our first meeting, he rang and asked if I could show him round Bletchley Park. Michael White, the British producer who had been responsible for involving Lorne Michaels, also came along. So did Mick Jagger. We met beforehand in a local pub for one of life's more memorable ploughman's lunches - Jagger's arrival, complete with bodyguard, in the busy public bar provoking one of those stunned silences that usually only happen in westerns.

He was not at all what I had expected. My vague prejudice that he was just a rock star indulging himself in a new hobby was dispelled almost from the moment he opened that famous mouth. For one thing, he seemed to have read every important book that had been published about Enigma. And he was serious. When we arrived at the Park - to the astonishment of a visiting busload of pensioners - he produced a video camera and filmed everything he was shown: the huts, the wireless sets, the replica of Colossus (the first computer), an Enigma machine.

It took Tom 12 weeks to write the script. One weekend, he came to stay with us in the country, arriving on the Saturday night, bearing as a gift for the children a mechanical parrot that repeated the last few words that were said to it. I came down to breakfast the next morning to find him already at the table, with the children and the parrot all gabbling away in a kind of parody of a Stoppardian scene.

His working schedule, to judge by the time of his phone calls to me (which were almost daily), started late and extended deep into the night. He was far more protective of the novel than I was, agonising over possible changes. Should the film open in November 1942, when Bletchley started reading Shark, or in the spring of 1943, when they lost it? Should there be a pretitle sequence showing the two British seamen, Fasson and Grazier, who died retrieving the vital Enigma code books from a sinking U-boat? And then there were the details to get right. Would my hero, a Cambridge mathematician, have had a room or rooms at university? Could an Enigma machine have been hooked up to a car battery? And so on.

The first draft was finished in May: brilliant and complicated - more complex even than the novel - like a fugue, or a game of 3-D chess. But was it filmable? The consensus was that it would need to be simplified before Paramount would give the production the green light. The Cambridge opening was dropped. A more thrillerish end was devised.

In the autumn, Tom rang to say that John Goldwyn, the executive producer assigned to the project by Paramount, had declared that he liked the new script so much, he was urging Sherry Lansing, the boss of the studio, to go ahead and assign a director. The chances of Enigma being made, Tom estimated, had accordingly risen from roughly 4% to 51%. Shooting could conceivably begin in the spring.

That was five years ago.

In December 1996, Mick Jagger and his then wife, Jerry Hall, gave a party at their house on Richmond Hill. It was just a small affair: 100 guests, a string quartet, Elton John and Richard Gere, a private army of bodyguards and a scrum of photo- graphers. The flash of the cameras every time a celebrity arrived lit the drawing room as if by lightning.

My function was to chat up the Australian director Phillip Noyce, one of a number of big-name directors - the others included Michael Mann and Sydney Pollack - to whom the screenplay had been sent. Noyce, a shambling, ursine figure, had directed two of the Tom Clancy movies, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. He was in the middle of making The Saint. He had been intrigued enough to make several pages of notes on the script, but in the end, he said, it wasn't for him. It was too complex, too English. He wasn't sufficiently attuned to the social nuances. In his view, the film would need a British director.

Of course, he was right. In this respect, looking back on the long struggle to get the film made, Mick Jagger's celebrity may have been a two-edged sword. Almost any director or actor in the world would return his calls. But in the end, they wouldn't make the film: Enigma wasn't really a Hollywood product.

Yet he wouldn't give up. I remember, that night, Jagger introducing me to Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer. "So you're the f***er who's responsible," he said to me. "I'm sick of hearing about f***ing Enigma. It's all he ever talks about - who says what to who in what scene where."

As I was leaving, I met a smooth, handsome man who had just flown in from Los Angeles. This was John Goldwyn, the Paramount executive, who loved us - loved the script, loved the story, loved everything. He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me in the eyes. "Have faith," he said, in a read-my-lips voice. "We. Will. Make. This. Movie."

"Now I know we're in trouble," said Tom afterwards.

Ridley Scott turned the film down. Peter Weir passed. Mike Newell declined. The general election of 1997 came and went. Paramount pulled out (with losses, I was told later, of £2m). Mick Jagger started touring Hollywood studios trying to sell Enigma, and another pet project, based on the life of Dylan Thomas's wife, Caitlin. One executive told him they liked it a lot, but could they make her the poet instead of him?

This is fairly standard Hollywood procedure: shift the location and alter the characters until whatever it was that had made the story interesting in the first place is buried. Tom Stoppard knew of a screenplay based on the true story of a black GI who, driven mad by racial prejudice, had gone on the rampage and killed three people in wartime England; the producers made the GI white, describing this as "a slight shift of emphasis". Perhaps Enigma might go the same way: filmed in Kansas, and set during the Korean war?

Amid the gloom, there were two faint sources of hope. One was the interest of a film sales company, Intermedia, which took over from Paramount. The other was the arrival of an enthusiastic director. Michael Apted was not only experienced (Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist), not only British (responsible for Granada's Seven Up television series), he was even born during the war, not far from Bletchley. If anyone was attuned to the story, Apted was.

In October 1997, he finally met Tom Stoppard in Los Angeles, and they agreed on yet more changes to the script. Five months later, Tom finished the third version of the screenplay. How much he was by now wishing he'd never set eyes on me, he was always too polite to say. In the summer of 1998, he and Apted had another meeting in London to discuss the revised script, and a speakerphone was rigged up so I could join in from home. Their voices were hollow. It was difficult for me to hear. "You sound as though you're at the bottom of a lavatory," I said.

"Metaphorically," said Tom, "that's roughly where we are."

The script was sent to Winona Ryder. She turned it down. Inter- media was finding it hard to raise the money to finance the film, now budgeted at about £13.5m: cheap by Hollywood standards; a fortune for an independent company, without the backing of a studio, trying to sell a movie with limited box-office appeal in the United States.

In November 1998 - three years to the day since I had first been approached to sell the film rights - a crisis meeting was called at Blakes Hotel in South Kensington. Apart from me, there were four others in the room: Jagger and his partner in Jagged Films, Victoria Pearman; Tom, who was fretting about the transfer of his latest play to the Haymarket Theatre; and Michael Apted, who had just accepted an offer to direct the new James Bond film.

This was my first meeting with the preternaturally calm Apted. If he looked, for once, slightly strained, he had good reason. The Bond film was due to open in precisely a year's time, and there was as yet no script and no title (it later became The World Is Not Enough). All he knew for certain was that it would involve blowing up an oil refinery in Baku.

So, although we now had a script, we still had no star and no money, and now the director would be out of commission for at least 12 months.

Another year passed.

On the night of Wednesday, November 24, 1999, I went to the Naval and Military Club in St James's Square for the Literary Review Bad Sex Award. I was not a contestant, I hasten to add: it was just a famously good party, benignly presided over by Auberon Waugh.

Unexpectedly, in the packed and sweaty mass, I ran into Tom Stoppard, who cupped his hand to my ear and shouted an extraordinary piece of news. The commercial and technical success of the new Bond film had suddenly made Michael Apted a much more "bankable" director. A German company, Senator Films, had agreed to put up almost all of the budget. (This is one of the great paradoxes about Enigma: not a penny of British money has been invested in this quintessentially British movie.) Shooting would begin in May. They had even found a star.

"Who?"

"He's called Dougray Scott."

"I've never heard of him."

"Well, neither have I, actually. But he's big. Or he's going to be. He's going to play the villain opposite Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2." Tom paused. "You don't mind if we call the movie Enigma: Mission Impossible 3, do you?"

"No."

"Good. I didn't think you would."

Suddenly, the luck that had been running against us for four years began to turn in our favour. There are four big parts in Enigma. There is Tom Jericho, the code-breaker, who is trying to break the U-boat code and at the same time find his missing girlfriend: he would be played by Scott, who took the part so seriously, he spent several months researching Bletchley. There is the icily beautiful girlfriend, Claire: to play her, Apted eventually settled on the model and actress Saffron Burrows. There is the smooth and duplicitous intelligence officer, Wigram - in many ways the best part in the movie - which went to Jeremy Northam.

And then there is Hester, Claire's dowdy but spirited best friend. She is a key character, more so in the film than in the novel, because it is her relationship with Jericho that becomes the main motor of the story. In February 2000, the part was offered to, and accepted by, Natasha Little. Then the producers heard that Kate Winslet was pregnant, would have to pull out of a long-term project she was involved in, but would be free to do something immediately, provided the filming was over by May, when the baby would begin to show.

She was sent the script of Enigma: read it, liked it. Natasha Little was paid her full fee, and the part of Hester went instead to Kate. This may seem ruthless and unfair; in many ways, it was. But by this time, everyone connected with Enigma had learnt the hard way that the whole process of getting a movie made is ruthless and unfair.

Kate Winslet is a star. I write that, although I'm not at all sure that I know what makes a star exactly - some larger-than-life compound of talent and glamour, some quirk of the bone structure or liveliness of the face that the camera catches - but whatever it is, if you get a chance to attach your movie to one of these heavenly phenomena, you cannot let it pass. Certainly, whatever other deficiencies Enigma may have suffered from, one thing it has never lacked since she became involved is publicity.

The shooting of Enigma started in April last year, not at Bletchley Park - which was felt, in that peculiar way of the movies, to look insufficiently like itself - but at a nearby mansion, Chichely Hall. By June, the filming was more or less finished, and one Saturday night a group of us, including Winslet, Northam, Scott and Apted, gathered in Jagger's study to watch a 20-minute rough assembly. (In true movie-mogul fashion, a screen descended from the ceiling.)

I liked what I saw, and have gone on liking it more and more ever since, as assemblies of rough footage have given way over the months to cast screenings, private screenings and premieres. I don't think it's perfect, any more than the novel is. In a curious way, it has many of the characteristics of Bletchley Park itself.

Enigma is not merely an old-fashioned British film: it is an unfashionable British film. There are no sawn-off shotguns. No heads are blown off. Vinnie Jones is nowhere to be seen. It is peopled almost entirely by white, middle-class, well-educated intellectuals. Its story is elusive, even serpentine. It demands more concentration than the average blockbuster. Yet it has plenty of Buchanesque touches: a moonlit cottage, a car chase down a country lane, a fight on a steam train. It has a wonderfully melodic and haunting soundtrack by John Barry: how recherché can you get?

I wouldn't like to predict what people will make of it. Maybe they'll simply be baffled by it. Or maybe, in these suddenly dark and uncertain times, it will provide a nostalgic reminder of a different, more united, more communal experience of war: of blackouts and Benny Goodman, of double helpings of whalemeat in canteens thick with cigarette smoke.

The one thing that has surprised me is how emotionally involved with it I've become. The glib cynicism of six years ago - "Take the money and run", etc - has given way to gratitude for all the talent that has gone into it, and respect for the sheer determination that eventually got it made. Whatever its fate at the box office, it will, I think, last - introducing a whole new generation to the extraordinary achievement of the code-breakers of Bletchley Park. The only pity is that there aren't more of them alive to see it.

Sept 16: From The Mail on Sunday:

To The Rest Of The World, We Were An Enigma: After 50 Years Of Secrecy, A Major Film Is Set To Reveal The Story Of A Band Of British Heroes Who Saved Thousands Of Lives

By Kathryn Knight

Churchill called them his 'Golden geese' - the dedicated young men and women who laboured around the clock to crack Hitler's codes during the Second World War. For more than half a century, their heroic work remained a secret that many of them took to their graves.

Now their extraordinary experiences have been turned into a major film which brings to life the previously shrouded world of the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. For most of us, Enigma, starring Dougray Scott, Kate Winslet and Saffron Burrows, will afford a rare glimpse into the past. For 80-year-old Marie Bennett, however, the film will see her private memories revealed for the first time.

Like Winslet's character, Hester Wallace, Marie worked in Bletchley's Hut 6, where the Enigma codes were broken and she helped decipher the enemy's deadly messages. Her efforts helped to shorten the war and saved the lives of thousands of Allied servicemen.

The all-British, Pounds 3 million film, produced by Mick Jagger and with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard, is based on the best-selling book of the same name by Richard Harris. It tells the story of Tom Jericho, a Cambridge student who is recruited to Bletchley for his mathematical skills. There, he becomes infatuated with the mysterious Claire (Saffron Burrows), but as her loyalty is cast in doubt, he falls for the more homely charms of code clerk Hester, played by Kate Winslet.

Harris spent weeks at Bletchley researching the stories of Marie and those like her to create the character of Hester. The resulting screenplay, says Marie, is an accurate portrayal of her life then. 'I've seen some of the film and it looks very realistic,' she says. 'It's odd seeing my experiences on film because it was such a unique time, and secrecy was so ingrained in me that for so many years I never talked about what I did, not even to my husband. Now everyone can finally see what we achieved. It's very emotional.'

In 1939, Marie was an 18-year-old accounts clerk from North London who had volunteered to join the ATS, the women's branch of the Territorial Army. Her work in the ATS was unremarkable until, at the end of 1941, she was mysteriously ordered to go for an interview at a government office in Piccadilly. She recalls: 'I had no idea what it was about. But I recognised that the officers who were interviewing me all wore Intelligence Corps badges, so I realised something was afoot.'

Two weeks later, and with no idea of what her mission was, she was sent to Leicester. 'We signed the Official Secrets Act and were set to work in a huge mansion filing huge card indexes inscribed with incomprehensible groups of letters,' says Marie. 'It all seemed very strange. Later, I realised we were building up a reference book of the German call signs, which was vital to help interpreting the nature of the messages.'

On May 4, 1942, she was sent to Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire. Like Hester, Marie was assigned to Hut 6, where much of the codebreaking took place. 'It looked so ordinary it's hard to imagine such important work was going on,' she says.

In fact, behind this anonymous facade were assembled some of the finest brains in Britain, dedicated to cracking the encrypted messages passing between Hitler and his forces. The Nazis believed many of the codes were unbreakable, but with the help of electromechanical machines called bombes, the teams at Bletchley unravelled much of the chilling dialogue, and revealed vital information about enemy movements.

Marie was unaware of most of this. Working day and night in a cold, damp hut lit by a single bulb, she pored over thousands of German morse code messages picked up by listening stations all over the country. The messages were incomprehensible to the untrained eye. But for Marie, schooled in frequencies and code, they were manuscripts waiting to be interpreted. 'We were looking for clues and patterns,' she says. 'A lot of the time we were looking for mistakes. Each German station was supposed to change its call sign at midnight. If they forgot, we could help break the code for the day.' Of what took place around her, Marie knew little. 'No one did. No one talked to each other about their work. You could be risking someone's life.'

Indiscretion was not tolerated. Marie recalls an officer talking about her work in a pub. She was never seen again. But the young workers still made the best of their time. 'We were dedicated, yes, but we were young and we did what young people do,' Marie recalls with a chuckle. 'There was a hectic social life. There were drama clubs, cricket clubs and, of course, we had regular dances. On days off, we took off to London, hitching a lift with lorries and booking into bed-and-breakfasts. We didn't get any sleep, but who needed sleep?' As in the film, there were plenty of dalliances. 'I had a few romances, although nothing serious,' says Marie. 'We were no different from young people now... and there was a sense of urgency about everything. To me, it felt like it wasn't real time, as if time was suspended until the war ended.' There was, however, little privacy. The codebreakers were billeted with local families or assigned unfurnished rooms in deserted mansions.

Marie was on leave when the war ended. When she returned to Bletchley Park two days later, her operation had ended. 'Already people were destroying all evidence of everything that had taken place. It was a strange atmosphere, but there was a sense of 'We've done it! We've won the war.'

That's what it was all about, after all.'

She left the Army, became a teacher and had two children. For years, she told no one about her war work. But she kept in touch with many of those whose lives were bound together by their time at Bletchley. Each year, dozens of them hold a reunion. 'Sometimes people I haven't seen for 50 years turn up but I always recognise them. I think we worked so closely together that their voices and mannerisms are absolutely familiar,' she says. 'When we get together, it feels like we're 20 years old all over again.'

Many of them helped campaign to save Bletchley for the nation when it was due to be demolished. Nine years ago, it was turned into a museum: Marie's uniform is one of the exhibits.

With Enigma set to be a box-office hit 60 years after Marie arrived at Bletchley Park, her story - and that of hundreds of others - is finally being told. But she still has no idea why she was handpicked to help change the course of the war. 'I don't think we thought what we were doing at the time was important. There were people out there fighting, after all,' she says. 'But I'm glad I was there. They were some of the best years of my life.'

Enigma is released nationwide on September 28

Thanks to my pal Sylvia of Dougray Scott in Focus for the above two items!

Sept 9: The Sunday Telegraph has an article about Jeremy Northam:

"Just Doing What Comes Naturally"

Jeremy Northam plays a chilly, superior spymaster in his new film, "Enigma".
How does he feel about being seen as a suave English bastard?
Demetrios Matheou finds out.

When asked to name his favourite war film, the actor Jeremy Northam immediately comes up with a little-known 1941 spy yarn called Pimpernel Smith. It starred Leslie Howard, whose character had a pipe which was actually a gun. I remember - I must have been six or seven when I saw it - thinking 'this is fantastic', and imagining myself as him.

More than 30 years later Northam finally gets to play his old-fashioned spy, in another Second World War film, Enigma. He may not have a lethal pipe among his props, but there's no doubt that the part is a perfect fit.

To his admirers, this will come as no surprise. Northam, 39, is one of the few contemporary stars (Rupert Everett is another) who possesses the kind of panache that we associate with the 1930s and '40s. Although he frets about such comparisons, there is no shame in having a touch of the verbal virtuosity, subtlety and grace of a Howard, or a Robert Donat, or even a Cary Grant. Thus armed, Northam has proven a natural for such films as Emma (as Gwyneth Paltrow's Mr Knightley), The Winslow Boy and An Ideal Husband - period films that are lifted above their costume-drama category by their shared concern with moral and motivational ambiguity.

It's a mode at which the honey-voiced, sly-eyed Northam excels, hence his apt casting in Enigma as the machiavellian spymaster, Wigram. Adapted by Tom Stoppard from Robert Harris's best-selling novel, and directed by Michael Apted, the film is set in Bletchley Park, where British boffins cracked the Nazi codes and hastened the end of the war. While Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet canter around the countryside chasing suspected traitors, Northam's character hovers over proceedings, in his words muddying the soup.

Northam sees Enigma as an overdue celebration of the work of Bletchley's codebreakers, whose contribution to the war effort has long been obscured by the Official Secrets Act. These people were not conventional wartime heroes, says Northam, "a lot of them were academics - linguists, mathematicians - who were thrust into this odd situation. I think what they did at Bletchley was amazing. I'm a great one for believing that heroism is not recognised in the people in whom it should be recognised. And these were unsung heroes."

As a British film star, Northam himself is something of an unsung hero. In the past five years he has co-starred with an enviable crop of Hollywood's leading ladies - Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, Sharon Stone, Uma Thurman - and worked with directors of the calibre of Steven Spielberg, David Mamet, James Ivory and Robert Altman. And yet despite the company he's kept, Northam does not have, nor seem to want, the kind of fame granted to Ewan McGregor or Jude Law, expertly avoiding the pitfalls of celebrity. When I ask if we can start to talk about him, rather than his films, he immediately says no - before relenting, Only if I can pinch one of your fags.

We are at his Soho club, where he appears tousled, unshaven, with blue jeans, a largely unbuttoned checked shirt, sockless. There is something almost raffish about him. And having furnished me with my own bottle of wine (he is on Pimms), we proceed to get agreeably drunk.

He mugged up on the Enigma period, he explains, by quizzing his father - a distinguished academic who interrupted his undergraduate studies to join the RAF during the war. His experiences gave Northam valuable insight into the class consciousness that permeates the film.

"My dad comes from a south-east London working-class background. He was a scholarship kid. I remember him saying to me that he thought after the war, 'hold on, where's the brave new world?' There was a huge popular swing towards a different kind of society, and yet the old forces were reasserting themselves. There is a sense of that in Enigma. Wigram represents that old school, the all-seeing eye, that patronising, arrogant thing of saying 'You're from the wrong class and the wrong background but you'll do what is useful for us and when it's all over you'll be nobody'."

Northam is, he tells me, very proud of his father for doing his bit to undermine this attitude in his Cambridge college, Clare. As a senior tutor in the 1960s, he urged the college to broaden its intake of students from all backgrounds; which was not traditionally the way that Cambridge colleges had done things. He wasn't the only person to do so, but he made great inroads in making that idea an ethical necessity of a place which had, indeed, done extremely well by him.

All of which begs the question: how does Northam feel about being regularly cast as upper-class? His mother taught domestic science, presiding over a family home which Northam remembers fondly as full of books, full of conversation, full of music - a middle-class idyll, in short. My query seems to throw him.

"It's always been a source of some disturbance to me that people think I'm a public schoolboy," he replies, with exasperation. "I went to a grammar school which became an independent, but that's as near as it gets. I have never thought of myself as part of a crusty world, I don't know much about 'society'. So I'd be the first to say I wouldn't want to be stereotyped as the upper-crust, suave English bastard. Yet he does keep on taking the roles when they come up..." Yes, Wigram is a role in that tradition, he concedes. But it's a very good one.

Northam admits that his father's profession - he taught drama, specialising in Ibsen - may have influenced his own choice of career, but he also cites the family's move to Bristol in the late 1970s, where his head was turned by the productions he saw at the Old Vic.

A year's work as a stagehand - on everything from pantomime to Welsh National Opera to The Tempest - sealed his fate. After reading English at Bedford College, London, he returned to Bristol and the Old Vic's theatre school.

His rise was swift. After a couple of years in rep, he found himself starring in a string of plays at the National (where he famously stood in for the troubled Daniel Day-Lewis, as Hamlet, and won an Olivier Award as Most Promising Newcomer for The Voysey Inheritance) and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

His move into films was equally seamless: days after arriving in Los Angeles, he was cast in his first substantial role, the lead opposite Sandra Bullock in the Hollywood thriller The Net.

Since then Northam has combined big studio films with low-budget independents, America with Europe, period with contemporary. The trio of films he has made since Enigma illustrate his range: in Possession, an adaptation of A.S. Byatt's novel, he plays a Victorian poet; Company Man is a futuristic conspiracy thriller; Gosford Park, Robert Altman's first film in England, is a 1930s country-house murder mystery with an ensemble that reads as a Who's Who of Britain's finest. Altman has cast him as Ivor Novello, a role which revisits the class theme touched on in Enigma. "I'm there as a device in the story, as somebody who moved between upstairs and downstairs," he says. "It's not based on fact, but 'what would happen if?...' And it's potentially fertile ground. Novello suffers the scorn of the upstairs people because he's not quite one of them, he's 'an entertainer', and the admiration of the below-stairs staff because he comes in and starts singing songs for them" Northam describes the role as scary -t here's piano-playing as well as singing - and although it's hard to imagine such a pro losing too much sleep about a couple of extra skills, he does look genuinely anxious.

Actorish self-deprecation or something else? His mother, he recalls, was always the first to say of herself 'I'm no good' at whatever it was that she was really rather good at. It must run in the family.

Enigma opens on Sep 28.

Thanks to my pal Sylvia of Dougray Scott in Focus for the tip on the article.