 | Studies in bibliography |  |
War-Time Intelligence
Bletchley Park was a crucial experience for Foxon, socially and intellectually.
It allowed him to mix freely with a variety of gifted, if
eccentric, academics, mostly from Oxford or Cambridge, at an early age
(he was only nineteen when he went); it gave him training in codebreaking;
and it introduced him to his future wife, June (`Jane') Jarratt.
After five weeks in Aberdeen with the Gordon Highlanders (in theory
the Bletchley workers were seconded from their units), Foxon was sent
to Bletchley, where, after training, he eventually took over from Sydney
Easton in charge of a small section deciphering Italian submarine codes;
his future wife was a member of the unit. Intercepted messages were
translated and then passed on to naval intelligence, who plotted the
movements. The work was not exciting but the training was significant
for Foxon's later career. A relish for puzzles (and for setting up puzzles),
the ability to recognize and interpret patterns, the habit of working
from established knowledge (a code book captured on a commando raid)
to gain new knowledge, and the sense of intellectual activity as a cooperative
venture, all stayed with Foxon and influenced his subsequent
work. It can hardly be a coincidence that across the Atlantic, Fredson
Bowers, Charlton Hinman, and William H. Bond were members of a
naval communications group engaged, as Foxon was shortly to be, in
cracking Japanese ciphers.[11]
Foxon's transfer to Japanese intelligence came after the fall of Italy.
The major tasks in this operation fell to the Americans, with the British
in a supplementary role, but one of the British responsibilities was an
intercept station in Ceylon and Foxon was sent out there in the summer
of 1944, just before D-Day. His was essentially a desk job as co-ordinator
of cryptographic intelligence, largely from the Americans. During his
time in Colombo, problems with Foxon's health that had plagued him
at school resurfaced. He was capable of working very intensely for short
periods, but he rapidly became exhausted; it was as though he had difficulty
in sustaining the high levels of energy and activity that demanding
work generated in him. Although various specialists had been consulted,
there was no diagnosis, and Foxon had to learn to manage his energies
and ration their output. This was a matter of serious sympathetic concern
to Hugh Alexander, later director of GCHQ at Cheltenham, when
he came out to Ceylon on a visit in 1944, but there was no solution to
the problem, and these periods of exhaustion continued throughout
Only in the mid-eighties, after Foxon's retirement in 1982, did a
research programme incidentally reveal that he had an adrenalin abnormality,
exceptionally high levels of adrenalin accounting for both
the periods of high-level activity and the subsequent exhaustion.
Colombo allowed Foxon to develop his interest in music. Though
never a star performer, and untrained in musical theory, Foxon had
developed his enthusiasm for music at Kingswood School and played
the piano as a relaxation. When the War made the piano inaccessible,
he bought a Dolmetsch treble recorder and took it with him to Ceylon.
In Colombo, Ronald Johnson, later head of the Scottish Office, had become
the focus of musical activity among local musicians and service
personnel, and, through his friendship with Johnson, Foxon became
involved in chamber music, lieder singing, and choral music. In particular,
he was able to develop his interest in music of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries (especially Purcell and Handel)
which was particularly suited to his new recorder. Music became a lifelong
love, and record-collecting Foxon's major hobby.
| Studies in bibliography | |