Stuart Milner-Barry

Sir Philip Stuart Milner-Barry (20 September 1906 – 25 March 1995) was a British chess player, chess writer, World War II codebreaker and civil servant.

He represented England in chess both before and after World War II.

He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, and was head of "Hut 6", a section responsible for deciphering messages which had been encrypted using the German Enigma machine.

He was one of four leading codebreakers at Bletchley to petition the then-Prime Minister Winston Churchill directly for more resources for their work.

After the war he worked in the Treasury, and later administered the British honours system.

In chess, he represented England in international tournaments, and lent his name to four opening variations.

Born in Hendon, London, Philip Stuart was the second of six children to a schoolteacher, Edward Leopold Milner-Barry, who died in 1917, and his wife, Edith Mary.

A talented chess player, he won the first British Boys' Championship in 1923.

He was a pupil at Cheltenham College, and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained firsts in classics and moral sciences.

He represented Cambridge in chess.

At Cambridge, he befriended another chess player, C.H.O'D. (Hugh) Alexander, and composed a number of chess puzzles.

Between 1929 and 1938 he was a city stockbroker, although he was unhappy with the work.

He made his debut in international-class chess at the strong London 1932 tournament, which World Champion Alexander Alekhine won.

Milner-Barry's best results in international competition were achieved in three straight years at the Margate tournaments from 1937 to 1939, and at Hastings 1938.

In all four events he finished just above the middle against strong fields, with performance ratings (as calculated by Chessmetrics) between 2538 and 2565.

This places him at a solid Grandmaster standard, although he never received this title.

He represented England in chess, and played in the international Chess Olympiads of 1937 and 1939.

From 1938, he was the chess correspondent for The Times, succeeded in 1945 by Harry Golombek.

The latter tournament, held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, coincided with Britain's declaration of war on Germany in September 1939.

Milner-Barry, with teammates who included Hugh Alexander (at that time the British chess champion) and Harry Golombek, abandoned the tournament unfinished, and returned to Britain.

His full Olympiad results are listed later in the article.

Upon their return, all three soon joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.

Milner-Barry was recruited by mathematician Gordon Welchman, who had been his contemporary at Trinity College; in turn Milner-Barry recruited Hugh Alexander.

Arriving in early 1940, he joined Welchman's "Hut 6" section, whose task was to solve the Enigma cipher machine as used by the German Army and Air Force.

In autumn 1940, Milner-Barry was put in charge of the "Crib Room".

He was billeted with Alexander, who was working in Hut 8, the counterpart to Hut 6 working on German Naval Enigma.

Their close friendship let them easily resolve the competing needs of their sections for the limited available bombe time.

He reached as high as No. 65 in the world between June and August 1941, according to Chessmetrics, which ranks historical chess performances retrospectively, using modern algorithms.

By October 1941, he was deputy head of Hut 6 under Welchman.

At this time, Bletchley Park was experiencing a shortage of clerical staff which was delaying the work on Enigma, and the management of GCCS appeared unable to obtain the resources needed.

This affected both Hut 6 and Hut 8, which was run by mathematician Alan Turing with Hugh Alexander as his deputy.

Together, Welchman, Milner-Barry, Turing and Alexander bypassed the chain of command and wrote a memorandum directly to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, outlining their difficulties.

It fell to Milner-Barry to deliver the message to 10 Downing Street in person, on 21 October 1941.

The next day, Churchill responded, "Action this day: Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done."

Within a month their needs were being met.

In autumn 1943, Milner-Barry Took over as head of Hut 6, which by that time had grown to over 450 staff, Welchman having been appointed the Assistant Director of Mechanisation at Bletchley Park.

In 1993, Milner-Barry wrote that "to this day I could not claim that I fully understood how the machine worked, let alone what was involved in the problems of breaking and reading the Enigma cipher".

Nonetheless, with his knowledge of the German language, he made a study of the decrypts and found that they contained stereotyped patterns and forms of address that could be exploited as "cribs" – reliable guesses for the plain language message that matched a given piece of encrypted text.

Finding reliable cribs was a critical task for Hut 6, as Enigma was broken primarily with the aid of "bombes", large electromechanical machines which automatically searched for parts of the correct settings.

Bombes were reliant on a suitable crib in order to succeed.