Hugh Foss
Dance Deviser & Cryptanalyst
by Charlie Todd
Facebook - 23rd December 2022
HUGH FOSS is a name known to most Scottish dance band musicians and certainly to all Scottish Country dancers. His fame though was derived from his achievements during WW2 at what was then called the Government Code and Cypher School located at Bletchley Park (in present day Milton Keynes).
Bletchley had been acquired by the Admiralty in September 1938 and initially the staff numbered less than 150. By 1945 there were around 9,000 working in a multitude of huts surrounding Bletchley and nearby satallite stations, three-quarters of these being female. At the top of this pyramid were the codebreakers Alan Turing, Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox, John Tiltman, Gordon Welchman, Joan Clarke, Bill Tutte, Hugh Foss and many others supported by an army of WRENS (Womens Royal Naval Service), WAAFs (Womens Auxiliary Air Force) and Foreign Office civilian employees who carried out the huge amount of clerical work to decipher the intercepted wireless transmissions from Germany, Italy and Japan. After the war the school would be renamed GCHQ, massively downsized, relocated to Eastcote and start working on Russian codes (or more likely continue working on Russian codes!)
Before I hand over to Google, for a very interesting summary of Hugh's life and times, let me quote a few sentences from a book entitled 'The Debs of Bletchley Park' by Michael Smith. Most of the codebreakers had a background in mathematics, albeit at a very high level, Cambridge Dons etc, and it's worth bearing in mind that the the dividing line between genius and insanity can be a fine one!
Page 228 - "Hugh Foss was a brilliant codebreaker who'd done some pioneering work on Enigma long before Dilly Knox took it on. But he had a somewhat quirky personality and his cousin Elizabeth Browning, who also worked in the Japanese Naval Section, recalled that this eccentricity was vividly reflected in his household arrangements. His wife Alison struggled to cope with their two small children and managing the house so Hugh would go home every day at half past four to put the children to bed and cook the evening meal.
'An example of their modus vivendi was the highly complicated arrangement for washing up (dreamed up, needless to say, by Hugh). Every article was supposed to be washed in a particular order - saucers first (as least poluted by human lips), then teaspoons, then side plates, then pudding plates, soup bowls, main course plates, knives, glasses, cups, forks, pudding and soup spoons and finally saucepans. As these were usually stacked on the floor the dogs were a great help.
While the theory behind this might have been logical to Hugh's highly ordered mind, housework wasn't seen as a high priority in the Foss household and there were usually several days' worth of plates and dishes piled up in and around the sink.
If one tried to help there would be shrieks of "Oh, you mustn't do the cups yet, saucers first." There was also in theory some weird arrangement so that things Hugh was supposed to put away were located at distances appropriate to his great height and long arms, while Alison, who was small and dumpy, had a shorter range. But in practice things ended up pretty well anywhere."
Today I imagine we would call Hugh OCD. It's taken me years to get round to looking up Google for his history and it certainly fills in a lot of the gaps - born in Japan, buried in in Scotland etc.
From Google
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Foss was born in Kobe, Japan, one of five children of the Rt Revd Hugh Foss, Bishop of Osaka and his wife Janet Ovans. As a child of a missionary family stationed in Japan he developed fluency in Japanese from an early age.
Foss was later educated at Marlborough College and graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1924.
Foss's elder brother Charles Calveley Foss was awarded the Victoria Cross in the First World War.
CAREER AS A CRYPTANALYST
In December 1924 he joined the Government Code and Cipher School. He recalled learning of two models of the Enigma machine in 1926: the large non-reciprocal typing B model, and the small index C model. In 1927 Edward Travis gave him a small (reciprocal) machine to examine, and he wrote a paper, "The Reciprocal Enigma", on solving the non-plugboard Enigma. The small [C Model] Enigma was developed by the German services; the standard World War II British Typex machine was also developed from it. In September 1934 Foss and Oliver Strachey broke the Japanese naval attaché cipher. In November 1940 he was the first person to break a day's worth of the German Enigma code, deciphering 8 May 1940 by the method of Banburismus. In honour of this feat, 8 May is referred to as "Foss's Day".
At Bletchley Park in World War II, Foss headed the Japanese Naval Section (Hut 7) from 1942 to 1943. In December 1944 he went to Washington and worked with U.S. Navy cryptographers on Japanese ciphers. A sandal-wearer, he was known as "Lend-lease Jesus". Gordon Welchman was told that Foss was highly esteemed by the Americans, and says that "before the war he was one of the most brilliant of the professional cryptographers of the Government Code and Cypher School".
Foss' paper "Reminiscences on Enigma", written in 1949, is included as chapter 3 in Action this Day.
DEVISER OF SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCES
Foss devised many Scottish country dances, including Fugal Fergus, John McAlpin, Polharrow Burn and The Wee Cooper o'Fife. He published several volumes of these from his own imprint, Glendarroch Press.
LATER LIFE
Foss retired from GCHQ in 1953 to live at Glendarroch in St. John's Town of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. He died in 1971 and is buried with his wife Alison in Dalry Kirkyard.
Bletchley had been acquired by the Admiralty in September 1938 and initially the staff numbered less than 150. By 1945 there were around 9,000 working in a multitude of huts surrounding Bletchley and nearby satallite stations, three-quarters of these being female. At the top of this pyramid were the codebreakers Alan Turing, Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox, John Tiltman, Gordon Welchman, Joan Clarke, Bill Tutte, Hugh Foss and many others supported by an army of WRENS (Womens Royal Naval Service), WAAFs (Womens Auxiliary Air Force) and Foreign Office civilian employees who carried out the huge amount of clerical work to decipher the intercepted wireless transmissions from Germany, Italy and Japan. After the war the school would be renamed GCHQ, massively downsized, relocated to Eastcote and start working on Russian codes (or more likely continue working on Russian codes!)
Before I hand over to Google, for a very interesting summary of Hugh's life and times, let me quote a few sentences from a book entitled 'The Debs of Bletchley Park' by Michael Smith. Most of the codebreakers had a background in mathematics, albeit at a very high level, Cambridge Dons etc, and it's worth bearing in mind that the the dividing line between genius and insanity can be a fine one!
Page 228 - "Hugh Foss was a brilliant codebreaker who'd done some pioneering work on Enigma long before Dilly Knox took it on. But he had a somewhat quirky personality and his cousin Elizabeth Browning, who also worked in the Japanese Naval Section, recalled that this eccentricity was vividly reflected in his household arrangements. His wife Alison struggled to cope with their two small children and managing the house so Hugh would go home every day at half past four to put the children to bed and cook the evening meal.
'An example of their modus vivendi was the highly complicated arrangement for washing up (dreamed up, needless to say, by Hugh). Every article was supposed to be washed in a particular order - saucers first (as least poluted by human lips), then teaspoons, then side plates, then pudding plates, soup bowls, main course plates, knives, glasses, cups, forks, pudding and soup spoons and finally saucepans. As these were usually stacked on the floor the dogs were a great help.
While the theory behind this might have been logical to Hugh's highly ordered mind, housework wasn't seen as a high priority in the Foss household and there were usually several days' worth of plates and dishes piled up in and around the sink.
If one tried to help there would be shrieks of "Oh, you mustn't do the cups yet, saucers first." There was also in theory some weird arrangement so that things Hugh was supposed to put away were located at distances appropriate to his great height and long arms, while Alison, who was small and dumpy, had a shorter range. But in practice things ended up pretty well anywhere."
Today I imagine we would call Hugh OCD. It's taken me years to get round to looking up Google for his history and it certainly fills in a lot of the gaps - born in Japan, buried in in Scotland etc.
From Google
EARLY LIFE AND EDUCATION
Foss was born in Kobe, Japan, one of five children of the Rt Revd Hugh Foss, Bishop of Osaka and his wife Janet Ovans. As a child of a missionary family stationed in Japan he developed fluency in Japanese from an early age.
Foss was later educated at Marlborough College and graduated from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1924.
Foss's elder brother Charles Calveley Foss was awarded the Victoria Cross in the First World War.
CAREER AS A CRYPTANALYST
In December 1924 he joined the Government Code and Cipher School. He recalled learning of two models of the Enigma machine in 1926: the large non-reciprocal typing B model, and the small index C model. In 1927 Edward Travis gave him a small (reciprocal) machine to examine, and he wrote a paper, "The Reciprocal Enigma", on solving the non-plugboard Enigma. The small [C Model] Enigma was developed by the German services; the standard World War II British Typex machine was also developed from it. In September 1934 Foss and Oliver Strachey broke the Japanese naval attaché cipher. In November 1940 he was the first person to break a day's worth of the German Enigma code, deciphering 8 May 1940 by the method of Banburismus. In honour of this feat, 8 May is referred to as "Foss's Day".
At Bletchley Park in World War II, Foss headed the Japanese Naval Section (Hut 7) from 1942 to 1943. In December 1944 he went to Washington and worked with U.S. Navy cryptographers on Japanese ciphers. A sandal-wearer, he was known as "Lend-lease Jesus". Gordon Welchman was told that Foss was highly esteemed by the Americans, and says that "before the war he was one of the most brilliant of the professional cryptographers of the Government Code and Cypher School".
Foss' paper "Reminiscences on Enigma", written in 1949, is included as chapter 3 in Action this Day.
DEVISER OF SCOTTISH COUNTRY DANCES
Foss devised many Scottish country dances, including Fugal Fergus, John McAlpin, Polharrow Burn and The Wee Cooper o'Fife. He published several volumes of these from his own imprint, Glendarroch Press.
LATER LIFE
Foss retired from GCHQ in 1953 to live at Glendarroch in St. John's Town of Dalry, Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotland. He died in 1971 and is buried with his wife Alison in Dalry Kirkyard.