Background

Francis Harry Hinsley was born on November 26, 1918, in Walsall, United Kingdom to the family of a wagoner Thomas Henry Hinsley and school caretaker Emma Adey.

Education

After attending the local elementary school, Harry Hinsley went to Queen Mary's Grammar School. In 1937 Hinsley won a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, to read history. A talented student he found himself interviewed by Alastair Denniston, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) in July 1939. He was recruited the same year before graduating. Harry Hinsley earned his Master of Arts at St. John's College in 1946.

Career

Harry Hinsley was an undergraduate at St. John's in 1939 when the British Foreign Office recruited him for its code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park. He became involved with what became known as "traffic analysis". This was defined as looking at all the evidence relating to enciphered messages which could not be read and reaching a conclusion on what the enemy was doing.

The experience of those days Hinsley later recorded in Codebreakers: the inside story of Bletchley Park, the volume he edited with Alan Stripp in 1993, whilst the achievements of "BP", since they were chronicled by him as editor-in-chief of the monumental British Intelligence in the Second World War (1979-90), and the contribution to the Allies' military operations provided by the breaking of the Enigma cipher, are now common knowledge.

At the end of the Second World War, Hinsley returned to St John's College, Cambridge, where he taught history. He also published Power and the Pursuit of Peace (1963) and Sovereignty (1966). In 1969 he became a professor of the history of international relations and served for 35 years as a research fellow, tutor, and lecturer in history and for 10 more years as the Master of St. John's College. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1985. He retired in 1989 but remained active at the university almost to the last.

Frederick Winterbotham, who had worked at Government Code and Cypher School during the war, approached the government and asked for permission to reveal the secrets of the work done at Bletchley Park. The intelligence services reluctantly agreed and Winterbotham's book, The Ultra Secret, was published in 1974. Permission was now given to Francis Harry Hinsley, to publish his five-volume British Intelligence in the Second World War (1979-1990). He also published Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchley Park (1993), which served to add the flesh and blood excluded from the official account.

Sir Francis Harry Hinsley died of lung cancer at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, on 16th February 1998. He was cremated, and his family buried the ashes privately in Cambridge.

Achievements

• Harry Hinsley played a significant role within a remarkable intelligence effort that was made by the specially recruited group of scholars at Bletchley Park during World War II. He was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1946 for wartime service in the Foreign Office and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1985.
  
  Hinsley is also renowned as a historian and educator who wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Hitler's Strategy

    (Here, with full documentary evidence, is the unfolding of...)

    1951
  • The New Cambridge Modern History, Volume 11: Material Progress and World-Wide Problems, 1870-98

    (Volume XI covers a period of contrasts in European and Wo...)

    1962
  • British Intelligence in the Second World War Volume III Part I

    (British Intelligence in the Second World War provides the...)

    1984
  • British Foreigh Policy under Sir Edward Grey

    (Until 1970 it would have been premature to attempt a comp...)

    1977
  • Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park

    (This is a colourful and authentic account of daily life a...)

    1993
  • Power and the Pursuit of Peace

    (In the last years of the nineteenth-century peace, propos...)

    1967
  • Decisions For War, 1914

    (This authoritative and comprehensive collection of essays...)

    1995
  • British Intelligence in World War II Volume V

    (The story of allied deception plans in World War 2 from r...)

    1993
  • British Intelligence in the Second World War Volume II

    (The volume covers the period 1941 - 1943. As with all the...)

    1981
  • British intelligence in the Second World War Volume I 1979
  • British Intelligence in the Second World War Volume IV 1990
  • British Intelligence in the Second World War Volume III Part II 1987
  • Sovereignty 1966
  • South Africa in its international context: Some historical reflections 1986
  • Nationalism and the International System 1973

Personality

Hinsley was a strikingly rich character, almost a phenomenon of nature, in contrast to his bespectacled and physically slight appearance. He had a strong analytical skill so honed at Bletchley Park.

Quotes from others about the person

• "A slight, bespectacled young man with wavy hair. I can remember quite well showing Harry some of the sorting and how delighted he seemed when he began to recognise the different types of signals. If I was in difficulty, I knew I could go to Harry. It was a pleasure because he was always interested in everything and took great pains to find out what it was and why. Those were very enjoyable days indeed. we were all very happy and cheerful, working in close cooperation with each other." - Phoebe Senyard, Hinsley's first chief at Bletchley Park.
  
  "His powers as an interpreter of decrypts were unrivalled and were based on an ability to sense that something unusual was afoot from the tiniest clues. Hinsley became the leading expert on the decryption and analysis of German wireless traffic, and, particularly after the capture of German Enigma code machines and materials, which allowed their settings to be broken, played a vital role in supplying the Admiralty with crucial intelligence analysis derived from Admiral Doenitz's signals." - Richard Langhorne, Hinsley's biographer.
  
  "He was a great teacher, an important writer, and a notably competent administrator. Countless generations of undergraduate historians at Cambridge remembered the extraordinarily vivid way in which he taught them, but the research school in the history of international relations that he established in the 1960s and 1970s was one of his greatest achievements." - Richard Langhorne, Hinsley's biographer.

Connections

On April 6, 1946, Harry Hinsley married Hilary Brett-Smith, a graduate from Somerville College, Oxford, who had also worked at Bletchley Park, in Hut 8. They had two sons, Charles and Hugh, and a daughter, Clarissa.

Father:

Thomas Henry Hinsley

Mother:

Emma Adey

Wife:

Hilary Brett-Smith

Son:

Charles Hinsley

Son:

Hugh Hinsley

Daughter:

Clarissa Hinsley

colleague:

Alan Turing

Hinsley worked together with Turing at Bletchley Park.

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 166 This volume of Contemporary Authors contains biographical information on approximately 300 modern writers.
  1998