"The Enigma" lyrics

[Juliet Stevenson:]
1938
The Enigma Machine was the central problem that confronted British intelligence
But they believed it was unsolvable
Alan Turing made his fateful decision to begin his long association with the British government
He had, for the first time, surrendered a part of his mind
With a promise to keep the government's secrets

1939
He reported on the fourth of September to Bletchley Park
Something quite new was required
And this was where Alan Turing played his first crucial part
Mechanising a search for logical consistency

Beautiful machines made a noise like that of a thousand knitting needles
As the relay switches click their way through the proliferating implications

Alan was allocated Hut 8
In which to head the work on the naval Enigma signals
In the British amateur tradition, he took out his pencil box
And set to work

They deciphered the innermost secrets of the U-Boat operations
Alan Turing's work denied the ocean lanes to Germany
And secured them for the United States

The arbitrary dispensations of the German cryptographic system
Had brought something like this into being
A sense of dialogue with a machine
The line between the mechanical and the intelligent was very, very slightly blurred
They were having a wonderful time seeing the history of the future

Those who knew transferred it to a sealed compartment of the mind
Winston Churchill used to refer to the Bletchley workers as
The geese who laid the golden eggs and never cackled
Alan was the prize goose