Hanslope Park Delilah project papers, 1939 - 2020
Scope and Contents
The papers contain published and unpublished writings by AMT, off-prints of articles by AMT and by other authors with annotations by AMT, his Fellowship Dissertation, and correspondence. Section H contains papers related to the work he did at Hanslope Park on the Delilah project.
Most of the papers in Sections B, C, and D refer to AMT’s work from c. 1940 until his death in 1954. There are a few references in the correspondence to his work in the 1930s, but no remaining drafts or working papers. During the Second World War, AMT worked at the Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, from where several of the letters in Section D were written. AMT was awarded the OBE for his work on ‘Enigma’ and other codes at Bletchley. The material on morphogenesis, C/24-27 represents a substantial addition to the documentation of AMT’s work and thinking on this topic, left incomplete at his death. Section D contains photocopied letters and calculations exchanged by AMT and I. J. Good (D/6-10), and some original letters by AMT (D/11-14), most of them addressed to P. Hall. Section E contains video recordings, and typescript copies, of lectures given at the Turing Celebration Day held at the Lady Mitchell Hall, and afterwards in King’s College, Cambridge, on 1 Oct. 1997.
Dates
- Creation: 1939 - 2020
Creator
- From the Fonds: Turing, Alan Mathison, 1912 - 1954 (computer scientist) (Person)
Biographical / Historical
Donald Bayley (1921-2020) worked with Alan Turing on the World War Two project ‘Delilah’ at Hanslope Park during 1943-45. The project produced a working prototype machine, light enough to be used by soldiers in the field, for encrypting voice data, sending it securely by long short-wave radio or telephone, and reproducing it at the other end.
Extent
.5 archive box(es)
Language of Materials
English
Arrangement
No sense of ‘original order’ could be trusted, not least because the documents may have been rearranged by potential bidders viewing them at the auction house. Some of the notes had readily assignable titles and were described separately for the auction catalogue, sometimes by format, a classification that is not supported by archival cataloguing standards.
The cataloguing archivist made a best guess as to whose hand a document was in (usually agreeing with the Bonham's description), and arranged the documents according to those that are likely to have been created during the Delilah work, and those that pre- or post-date it. All of the loose notes felt likely to have been created during the Delilah project were placed in one folder (AMT/H/1/2) and listed as individually as possible.
Bayley kept his notes recording Turing’s lectures in a binder with his university lecture notes. It was decided at accession to remove the Turing lecture notes because it could easily be done without risking the paper, it would make the notes safer to consult in the reading room, and on the principle of producing the minimum necessary upon request by researchers.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Donald Bayley kept the Delilah papers, stored with some of his university lecture notes. He died in 2020 and his family sold the papers by auction in November 2023. An export licence was applied for and declined under the Waverley criteria. The papers were purchased by King’s in March 2025 under the export licence bar scheme.
Date information
The papers are mostly undated and probably originate principally from 1943 to 1945, with some earlier lecture notes taken by Bayley while at University, some newspaper cuttings probably 1994-2013, and some undated explanatory notes by Bayley which may have been written as late as 2020.
Repository Details
Part of the Archive Centre, King's College, Cambridge Repository
Archivist
King's College
Cambridge CB2 1ST United Kingdom
+44 (0)1223 331444
archivist@kings.cam.ac.uk