See What I Mean? More criticism of 'The Imitation Game'

Last week I got into the usual trouble for pointing out that a popular film was cavalier with the facts.  People wrote crossly to me to say I was wrong to call 'The Imitation Game' laughable. I’m never sure why critcising these films for fooling with history is such a  terrible sin in the eyes of so many. These films are not, usually, Shakespearean in quality, and won’t endure as art. But in a world ignorant of real history, their accounts will stick in people’s minds and influence their view of the present.

 

This was particularly serious in the case of ‘The King’s Speech’, a film based upon a real memoir and real events, but which veered away from the truth so much that it was, in my view, utterly misleading both about King George VI and about the monarchy’s political role in late 1930s Britain.   Far more people will have seen this film than will have read the detailed accounts of the events involved. I just think this is plain wrong. What’s more the film would have been better if it had been more accurate. A less-than-adulatory portrayal of Winston Churchill (who gravely damaged his standing when he foolishly supported Edward VIII in the Abdication crisis, though the film shows him taking the other side) is long overdue. So is a general understanding that appeasement of Hitler in 1938 was a hugely popular policy (just as appeasement of Stalin would become very popular in the 1941-45 period) . Both policies were of course products of our military and political weakness, a state of affairs we have long concealed from ourselves, but can surely cope with now, 70-odd years afterwards.

 

Anyway, I wrote of ‘the Imitation Game’ :

 

 ‘And I objected strongly to the portrayal of the Bletchley Commanding Officer,  Commander Alastair Denniston, as nothing but an obstruction. Can this really have been true?

 

‘Once again, the clothes are right but the portrayal is wrong. Commander Denniston is shown wearing the distinctive wavy rank stripes of a Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) Commander, which he was. The RNVR was in fact known as ‘The Wavy Navy’ because of its very different uniform. But he is made by the scriptwriters to refer to himself as being part of the ‘Royal Navy’, which I doubt very much an RNVR officer would have done, the RNVR having its own pride, and its members being reluctant to claim to be regulars.’

 

Well, in today’s Daily Telegraph , at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/11256138/Letters-State-schools-suffer-because-the-most-demanding-parents-go-independent.html

Commander Denniston’s descendants write :

 

SIR – While the much-acclaimed film ‘The Imitation Game’  rightly acknowledges Alan Turing’s vital role in the war effort, it is sad that it does so by taking a side-swipe at Commander Alastair Denniston, portraying him as a mere hindrance to Turing’s work.

We, his descendants, prefer to remember his extraordinary achievements in the First and Second World War, as well as his unstinting devotion to Britain’s security for more than 30 years. Cdr Denniston was one of the founding fathers of Bletchley Park. On his final visit to Poland in the summer of 1939, he was briefed by Polish mathematicians on the electrical equipment they had developed to break the German cipher machine, Enigma. The Enigma machine that Denniston took back to Bletchley ultimately allowed Britain to read the German High Command’s coded instructions. Such was the secrecy surrounding his work that his retirement in 1945, and death in 1961, passed virtually unnoticed, and he remains the only former head of GC&CS (the precursor to the intelligence agency GCHQ) never to have been awarded a knighthood.

It was he who recruited Turing and many other leading mathematicians and linguists to Bletchley, where he fostered an environment that enabled these brilliant but unmanageable individuals to break the Enigma codes. The GCHQ of today owes much to the foundation he created there.

Nick Denniston 
Dr Susanna Everitt 
Libby Buchanan
Judith Finch
Simon Finch
Alison Finch
Hilary Greenman
Candida Connolly 
Clifton-upon-Teme, Worcestershire’

 

The paper’s leader column further notes : ‘As Sir Harry Hinsley, his [Denniston’s] fellow cryptanalyst wrote , Denniston by his “trust in subordinates and his charm, set his stamp on the character of Bletchley Park”. Depicting him as a hindrance is a cruel caricature’.

 

Personally, I can’t see why this depiction was in any way necessary to the plot, or improves the film. Must the whole past be portrayed as a struggle between the enlightened liberal (Turing, supposedly) and the obstructive, stupid conservative? It seems so.