Served in World War II; Eventually Major, Intelligence Corps. Excellent linguist. Worked on Enigma/Ultra material in Hut 3 (probably the German Book Room) at Bletchley Park during WWII where he met MJC-J. Hut 3 kept it’s name despite moving to a new site Block D.. He retired from the position of Group Personnel Manager with Albright and Wilson (the then Chemicals Company) at the age of 58. Member of the Industrial Appeals Tribunal. On death of his mother ESJ sold Trevalyn Hall. Also sold Godmund Hall, Burneside, Kendal a gift from his father. Principal hobby carpentry at which he excelled.

Married by Michael Gresford-Jones then Vicar of St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, City of London. Reception at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Originally surnamed Jones, then name changed by his father in 1927/28 to Clement-Jones whilst he was at prep school.70

Both he and and MJC-J are on the Bletchley Park roll of honour. See

http://rollofhonour.bletchleypark.org.uk/search/?s...gender=&location=

This is NTC-J’s summary of what he has discovered of his father’s war service:

“ When Dad graduated jobs were very scarce and he went, in 1938 to work for Birds Custard  in Aston, Birmingham and paid £5 a week. War was declared in September 1939 and Dad tried to enlist shortly thereafter. On account of his eyesight he was refused but was ordered to take up a teaching job which he did -at Malvern College. The rules on eyesight were later relaxed and Dad was called up in July/August 1940. Dad joined the Pioneer Corps in August 1940 and was sent to Ilfracombe, Devon . Arthur Koestler was clearly the only person worth talking to. He was there until February 1941. When he finished he was a corporal and for a short time at the end an acting sergeant.

The story about being plucked from the ranks by Lord Reading is almost certainly apocryphal. He certainly met Lord Reading and on one occasion acted as a translator for a French man-ex-legionnaire - on a drunk and disorderly charge! Reading was the presiding officer and clearly spoke good French although not as good as Dad's.

Apparently a friend of Grannie and Grandpa's wrote to Lord Reading suggesting that Dad should get a commission directly from the Pioneer Corps. In the event that did not happen but it is clear that it helped get him on to the officers’ course.(the OTCU) Even at this stage he was hoping to get into the Intelligence Corps but they had him down for a machine gun regiment and a possible transfer at a later date.

Dad then went to Droitwich in March 1941 to join OCTU and then to Lanark from where he was commissioned in September 1941. Sadly there are no letters thereafter.

I am still perplexed as to what he did from then until Bletchley Park which I was told was January 1943. Maybe he did do a spell with the infantry regiment. Alternatively he may have been with the Intelligence Corps but not at BP.”

TCJ transcribed and published MLC-J’s letters to his mother as a family book entitled “A Pioneer Corps Private Progrsss” in 2015


From Wikipedia:

Hut 3 was a wartime section of the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park tasked with the translation, interpretation and distribution of German Army (Heer) and Air Force (Luftwaffe) messages deciphered by Hut 6. The messages were largely encrypted by Enigma machines.

Located initially in one of the original single-story wooden huts, the name “Hut 3” was retained when Huts 3, 6 & 8 moved to a new brick building, Block D, in February 1943.[1] Then the decodes from Hut 6 for Hut 3 which had been sent in a wooden tray from one hatch to another via a wooden tunnel between the huts were sent from the Hut 6 Decoding Room by a conveyor belt that “never stopped”

Operation

The Enigma “Red” cypher was the main cypher used by the Luftwaffe in every theatre where they operated. Red had been broken sporadically from the beginning of 1940, and from 22 May BP overcame some changes to the Enigma machines. From then on, Hut 6 broke Red daily to the end of the war, and it became the “constant staple” of ULTRA. Calvocoressi wrote that later in the war “we in Hut 3 would get a bit tetchy if Hut 6 had not broken Red by breakfast time.” [3]

Initially there were only four people in Hut 3, and there were serious personal frictions between them. They were the original leader Malcolm Saunders (Squadron Leader, RAF), Robert Humphreys (senior liaison officer with the Air Force), Captain Curtis (senior liaison officer with the War Office, who knew no German), and Cambridge academic F. L. Lucas who had been in the Intelligence Corps in WWI.[4] Humphreys was “an excellent German linguist, but no team player. He wanted to get his own way. He found this difficult to do if only because Saunders had a mind of his own. Nigel de Grey described the situation as 'an imbroglio of conflicting jealousies, intrigues and differing opinions'. Initially Travis moved the three out of Hut 3 and put a small committee including Eric Jones in charge. As this did not work, Jones was made sole head in July 1942. Just over a year after he took over, H. S. Marchant was made his deputy, and the pair were in charge to the end of the war.” [5]

Army and Air Force Ultra was distributed by the SLUs (Special Liaison Units)] set up by Frederick Winterbotham. By the end of the war there were about 40 SLUs to 40 commands. Signals were given a priority from Z to ZZZZZ (the highest of 5), and about 100,000 signals were sent to commands during the war [6]

The rules of interpretation for Hut 3 were that if the text was not explicit the Hut 3 officer could not add his interpretation without qualification; for a 1944 SS Panzer message where the placename had been missed or corrupted when received, the officer did not say simply “Dreux” but would say “slight indications Dreux” or “fair indications Dreux” or “strong indications Dreux”.[7] They could also add glosses preceded by the word “Comment”.[8]

The Air Index had “hundreds of thousands” of cards about 5 by 9 inches; so important that they were photographed and stored in the underground stack of the Bodleian Library in Oxford in case they were destroyed by bombing. Run by “about two dozen girls” and a man who was a “strange genius”, it had cards for every individual, unit, place or equipment so that any previous reference to (say) Major So-and-So could be found. There were two card indexes, 3A & 3M.


Unsung Bletchley Park hero whose role in D-day was equal to Turing’s
The Observer
Second world war
Eric Jones is finally to be unmasked as the ‘king of calm’ in Hut 3 who channelled the work of the wartime codebr
Vanessa Thorpe
Sun 7 Apr 2019 09.00 BST

No contemporary war reports from the German front mention the name of Eric Jones. And there is not much information about him online – in fact there is more about a Welsh climber of the same name. But the Eric Jones who worked in secret at Bletchley Park in the 1940s is soon to be declared a figure of equal importance to Alan Turing.

Recently declassified documents show that Jones, the son of a Macclesfield textile manufacturer, was the man responsible for interpreting and prioritising all the covert intelligence that came into Britain from Nazi-occupied Europe and from spies working near the frontline.

They also show that his decision to force Britain’s rival military forces to work together may well have won the war and it certainly laid the groundwork for success on D-day. And what is more, Jones later went on to become the first head of the government’s listening station at Cheltenham, GCHQ.

According to David Kenyon, research historian at Bletchley Park, Jones can now at last be unmasked as “the spider in the centre of the information web”.
“It has become apparent from my research that Jones’s skill at putting together all the information coming in was crucial,” Kenyon told the Observer this weekend, ahead of the opening this week of a D-day exhibition at Bletchley Park. The exhibition will highlight for the first time a man known to his admiring circle of secret operatives as the “king of calm”.

“We can also now show that Bletchley was not working in monastic isolation, concentrating only on numbers and breaking codes,” said Kenyon. “It had to feed the right information out to politicians and to commanders in the field.”
The new immersive exhibition, D-day: Interception, Intelligence, Invasion, which opens on Thursday at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, will use film and memorabilia to focus on the meticulous preparations for the D-day landings. It will also, Kenyon said, shed fresh light on a time when, without Jones’s vital interpretation and cataloguing system, the vast amounts of intercepted and decoded enemy intelligence available once Turing and his team had cracked the German Enigma code would still have counted for nothing.

“What we have uncovered is a story of collaboration, and this is the first time it has been told anywhere,” said Peronel Craddock, head of collections and exhibitions at the wartime heritage attraction. “We really can say that Jones, by leading his team inside Hut 3, was at least equally important to Turing in this part of the story. And there we are talking about someone recently declared by the BBC as Britain’s leading icon.”
D-day documents that have now been examined for the first time in 75 years show the extraordinarily detailed briefings the invading forces had been given, not only about the level of resistance they were likely to meet, but also about the location of land mines and the height of fences.

As an example of the way information was brought together in Hut 3, Kenyon picks out news that came through, in spring 1944, that a German SS unit had been moved into Belgium. This was cross-checked against reports coming in from the ground of sightings of SS officers in a Belgian town and the evidence of covert aerial photography.
“When the story about Bletchley first broke in the 1970s, much of the detail stayed in the background,” said Kenyon. “What we can now see is the level of efficiency Hut 3 developed. It had to handle a huge organisational problem once there were thousands of messages coming in.

“After all, there is no point just breaking codes; you have to store them and then find them when you need them. On their own, the Enigma messages were just meaningless 250-word bulletins.”

Jones, who attended King’s School in Macclesfield, is thought to have learned how to handle people well during time he spent working at his father’s silk factory in Manchester, before he joined the RAF reserves and was seconded to the intelligence branch of the Air Ministry.

“He was not from a mathematical or cryptographic background,” said Kenyon, whose book, Bletchley Park and D-Day, out next month, is the first book on the subject since 1979. “It was his quick thinking and people skills that were really important.”

Jones was first sent to Bletchley Park in early 1942 at the age of 35 because it was in crisis. Rivalries between the allied forces’ espionage divisions were threatening the whole intelligence effort.

“Jones was sent in to investigate and wrote a report recognising there needed to be a multi-services approach. It is a report that won the war in many ways,” said Kenyon. “They asked him to stay on to implement his findings and then from around October and November they started to gear up for an invasion at some point.”

Further evidence of Jones’s talents came on the eve of D-day. Aware that many of his staff felt guilty about their lives not being at risk because they were so far from the action, he wrote a memo to all of them underlining how important their jobs were in saving lives. And the streamlined system he set up allowed the team at Bletchley to decrypt intelligence and share it with frontline commanders in Normandy within three hours.
Staff at Bletchley were referred to as “boffins and debs”. but in fact were drawn from across the population. They Included:
Bill Tutte A gifted mathematician from Newmarket, Suffolk, he deciphered the Nazis’ Lorenz code.
Jane Fawcett A debutante who later became an opera singer, she worked long hours in Hut 6, a women-only decoding room. In May 1941, she decoded a message about the German battleship Bismarck that led to its sinking.
Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox A Cambridge University papyrologist turned master codebreaker originally from Oxford, he worked on ancient Greek papyruses before the war and at Bletchley worked on the Enigma code until his death in 1943 at 58.

Sophie Clement-Jones writes on 9th April 2019

Eric Jones was Mum and Dad’s overall boss in Hut 3. There's a picture of him in one of the rooms in the Park itself and when I asked Mum whether she remembered him after the first time I went to Bletchley she said she did. He was obviously a good boss and Dad got on with him. They never talked much about those days as they'd signed the Official Secrets Act and were fairly shocked of course when people started writing about it all in the 80's. Mum used to listen with headphones to Morse signals coming in, cut off the strips and take them through to Dad where he'd try and decipher them. Four hours on, eight hrs off, four hours on, eight hours off, round the clock.... a work shift devised by Dad as it was so stressful.


Times leader of 2nd September 2019

The Times view on Bletchley Park veterans: Code of Honour

They made a crucial contribution to the defeat of Nazi tyranny and are owed undying gratitude and recognition

Roy Jenkins, among the leading figures of modern British politics, recalled in his memoirs his wartime service at Bletchley Park: “We tried extremely hard, feeling that it was the least we could do as we sat there in safety while the assault on the European mainland was launched and V-1s and V-2s descended on London.” The least that Jenkins and other codebreakers could do was immense. The Bletchley Park Government Code and Cipher School, forerunner of Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), made a crucial contribution to the Allied powers’ defeat of Nazi tyranny.

Some 80 surviving veterans of Bletchley Park assembled yesterday, on the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland and hence of the outbreak of the Second World War. Owing to the passage of time, it will have been among the very last opportunities to record memories of a once top-secret and ever heroic enterprise. Now oral historians are diligently recording for posterity the accounts of those who worked there.

This too is vital work, not only for historical researchers of the period but also for future generations, to give gratitude to some of the best and brightest of the brains who helped to crack German wartime codes. The role they played only became public knowledge in the 1970s, with survivors receiving an award from the government ten years ago.

Almost 9,000 staff were stationed at the centre during the war, working around the clock. Secrecy was so tightly maintained that the Nazi high command were unaware their messages were being read throughout the war. There are even accounts of marriages in the postwar years where husband and wife had both worked at Bletchley but never told each other. The sacrifice and ingenuity of the codebreakers should ever be honoured.