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70 BLETCHLEY PARK AND BEYOND
countryside. Barbara Abernethy, who had worked as Denniston's
personal assistant, rec.alls: 'We just closed down the huts, put
all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the
last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gate and took the
key down to Eastcote. That was it: 68 Much of the machinery
was broken up, including examples of the mighty 'Colossus'
computational machine. However, Professor Max Newman, who
had been central to its development, managed to secure two
'Colossus' machines for his new computing department at
Manchester University. These were transported by the Ministry
of War Transport at the price of thirty-four shillings a ton.
Newman offered to send a junior university lecturer down 'to
sit on the van' to make sure that the precious machines were
not damaged in transit. 69 In fact, this was not quite the end of
Bletchley Park's active life in sigint, since GCHQ continued to
use it for training courses as late as the 1960s.
The intention behind GCHQ's post-war move to London was
to service the centres of power in British government.
Accordingly, in the autumn of 1945 Travis took the opportunity
to look at how the sigint product - the 'blue jackets' or
'BJs'- circulated around Whitehall. The Foreign Office was a
big customer, receiving three sets of BJs daily. One set stayed
with Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary and his warweary
Permanent Under-Secretary, Cadogan, 'for their immediate
information'. Another went to the Services Liaison
Department, which worked closely with the JIe. The third went
to the main departments. Virtually everyone in the operational
core of the Foreign Office habitually saw BJs, but they were
always kept separate from other documents in special boxes
which were locked up overnight. 70
In MI5, the ritual of sigint security was closely observed.
Distribution was presided over by the redoubtable 'Mrs
Arbuthnot', who recorded everything meticulously in her log.
Security of BJs seems to have been at its most lax inside SIS,
where batches of them circulated around sections for as long
as six weeks before being returned. Nor were they properly