Obituaries
Obituary: Rolf Noskwith 1919 - 2017
A German-born linguist and mathematician who was rejected for British Army service but played an invaluable rôle as a Bletchley Park codebreaker
January 31, 2017 17:33
By, GLORIA TESSLER
3 min read
A German-born linguist and mathematician who was rejected for British Army service but played an invaluable rôle as a Bletchley Park codebreaker
January 31, 2017 17:33ByGloria Tessler, GLORIA TESSLER
His story had all the elements of wartime danger, espionage, codebreaking and inevitable tragedy. The cryptographer Rolf Noskwith, who has died at the age of 97, was one of the mathematicians working in the famous Hut 8 at Bletchley Park under the ill-fated father of modern computing, Alan Turing, who took his own life after being revealed to be a homosexual.
The story of Bletchley Park and Turing's part in it was the subject of the Oscar-nominated film The Imitation Game. Turing, whose role in intercepting German military codes helped win the war, was portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch.
Under Turing’s supervision, Noskwith and his fellow cryptographers and number-crunchers intercepted thousands of high-level enemy communications every day, sometimes within an hour of transmission. So enthralling was the work, that the analyst finishing his shift would be unwilling to “hand over the workings”, as Noskwith observed in Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park. Noskwith’s fluent German was an added asset to the team when assessing encrypted enemy messages.
There were victories but also tragedies. According to Martin Sugarman, chair of the Hackney Anglo-Israel Twinning Association, Noskwith was deeply distressed by the tragedy of the Struma, a ship carrying Jewish refugees to Palestine in 1942, which was sunk with all its 800 passengers including many children. But he successfully deciphered a major German code; a system of coloured flares used to communicate between the enemy’s naval HQ and U boat commanders at sea. Noskwith’s achievement enabled the Allied Navy to know the Nazi military positions.
Noskwith was born in Chemnitz, Germany, to Chaim (Charles) and Malka née Ginsberg, East-European Jews who had a textile business in Germany. As political and economic conditions deteriorated, the family left Germany for England in 1932, transplanting their textile company Charnos to Ilkeston, Derbyshire. Noskwith was educated at Nottingham High School, honing his future codebreaking talents through a love of crosswords, He then read maths at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Three times rejected for the British army because of his German background, Rolf Noskwith also failed to find work as a linguist but he was eventually accepted, with other Jewish maths students at Cambridge, at Bletchley Park, the former home of Jewish financier and Liberal politician, Sir Herbert Samuel Leon, which housed the headquarters of Winston Churchill’s secret intelligence. Noskwith was initially interviewed by scientist C P Snow and chess champion Hugh Alexander, and was recruited on his 22nd birthday in June 1941 to work as a translator and cryptographer. He focused on the German navy’s Enigma machine, decrypting the Kriegsmarine’s coded wireless traffic from 1941-45, later working on other cyphers.
Noskwith’s biggest accomplishment there was breaking the Naval Enigma Offizier settings, allowing the Allied forces to read German messages between Kriegsmarine officers. Having signed the Official Secrets Act, he kept the story of his work at Bletchley a secret for 30 years. When the war ended he was assigned to Japanese and Yugoslav secret writings, meeting fellow codebreaker Walter Eytan in 1947. Eytan was working at the time as a diplomat for the emerging Jewish state. Noskwith offered to work with him there but was turned down: “Codebreakers we have plenty of,” he was told.
Instead, he returned to civilian life, chairing the Charnos hosiery firm set up by his father in 1936. After his father died in 1952, his entrepreneurial skills took over and the company introduced the first seam-free stocking in 1961, at the same time expanding into lingerie, collaborating with designers like Zandra Rhodes and Bruce Oldfield. The company employed some 3,000 people at its peak, opening factories all over England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Noskwith retired in 2002, selling the brand.
Although he kept silent about his work at Bletchley for 30 years, he described the happy, collegiate atmosphere of people working with a common sense of purpose. Believed to have been the last surviving cryptographer at Bletchley, he received an honorary doctorate of law from the University of Nottingham in 2013. Broxtowe Borough Council is now considering ways to honour the life of the Nottingham code-breaker who, with Alan Turing and others helped shorten the Second World War. (In the wake of a long campaign led by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, Alan Turing, known as “the prof”, was granted a posthumous royal pardon in 2013, 60 years after his death.) Rolf Noskwith is survived by his wife Annette and son Adrian.
gloria tessler
Rolf Noskwith: Born June 19, 1919. Died January 3, 2017.
