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
Foxon's working life, resisting treatment through drugs or psychoanalysis. 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.
