Patrick Beesly was born on 27th June 1913 and was educated at Oundle School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History and was Captain of 1st Trinity Boat Club. Private education at Bonn, Vienna and Brussels followed. In June 1939 he joined the RNVR as a Sub-Lieutenant (Special Branch) and was appointed to NID 2, the French, Spanish and Low Countries Section. In July 1940 he transferred to the Operations Intelligence Centre (OIC) as Assistant to Lieutenant-Commander (later Vice-Admiral Sir Norman) Denning. There he first specialised in the field of Armed Merchant Raiders, but in 1941 He moved to the critically important Submarine Tracking Room as Deputy to Commander (later Lord Justice) Rodger Winn with whom he remained until the end of the war. After the defeat of Germany he was appointed Staff Officer Intelligence to the Commander-in-Chief, Germany, and served at Flensburg and Minden in the rank of Lieutenant-Commander. He was demobilised in December 1945 and received the American Legion of Merit (Degree of Legionaire); but surprisingly he received no British recognition of his work. He then joined Henry Hope & Sons Ltd., metal window manufacturers in Birmingham, finally becoming Managing Director in 1967. After retiring in 1974 he boldly decided that, as the ban on publishing anything about cryptography and cryptanalysis had been partially lifted, he would produce an account of the work of the OIC. The first fruit of that decision was the book titled Very Special Intelligence (Hamish Hamilton 1977 and Sphere Books paperback 1978) which was outstandingly successful. He followed up with a biography of Vice-Admiral John Godfrey, the DNI under whom he first worked during the war, titled Very Special Admiral (Hamish Hamilton,1980), which also achieved well-deserved success