This article in the January 1986 issue of Cryptologia by leading expert Ralph Erskine reveals how code-breakers were recruited just before WW2 broke out. In the summer of 1939, due to the fact that throughout the 1930s the
Government Code & Cypher School (GCCS) had been starved of funds, there were hardly any cryptologists who could rise to the challenge of deciphering the German codes. So when, in early September 1939, war was looming, the Director of the GCCS, Commander Alastair Denniston, was forced to recruit an emergency team of supposedly large brained cryptologists. Denniston wanted 'men of the Professor type' , which in 1939, social and intellectual snobbery being what it was, meant academics likely to possess degrees in German, mathematics or classics from Oxford or Cambridge.
It made sense, sort of. Academics with a specialised knowledge of the German language would have been especially valued, as would mathematicians, and, one might suppose, classicists -- though I’ve never been able to accept that a person skilled in interpreting a short passage in Latin or ancient Greek should be regarded as having more brain power than someone who has wrestled over Anglo-Saxon, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese or indeed Elizabethan court hand, and many branches of physics, but there you are. Classicists were and still are, it would seem, officially ‘brainy’.
For some reason too, past or present Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, were especially favoured by the selection committee. Six of the men chosen had attended the college. These were Alan Turing, an 'eccentric and genius', according to Erskine
