After service in the Royal Air Force, I spent most of my working life in computing. One of my jobs was as the I.T. Manager for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC). That body was set up to bring the new city of Milton Keynes, midway between London, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge, into being.
I have walked in the countryside all of my life. Sometimes I cycle. During fifty years of walking and cycling in the northern Home Counties, I have come across many Second World War sites; often related to communications, computing, spies, the RAF and the special forces. Some sites were grand mansions, others just a hut or two in a field, or a lone aerial.
I’m nosy and love to know why things are as they are; quirks, places, people – local stuff; but as I discovered how the treasure trove of sites that I came across were linked together; and how they related to Europe and America, my perspective widened – as did my eyes. Local history became national history; even world history.
I began to realise that the area between London, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge had been the birthplace of an Intelligence Revolution which was fully as important in the story of man as the Industrial Revolution in the North of England had been a couple of centuries earlier. It seemed to me that I had stumbled across - sometimes through - a story of enormous importance. Here was a saga of great power. It had its villains, its heroes and heroines, its drama and tragedy, often even humour - and all of it was true. The more I looked into it, the more all-engrossing it grew. The story of The Intelligence Zone was, I thought, perhaps the greatest story never told.
Hyperbole? Exaggeration? No; for here was born… but I will let the covers of the books speak for themselves.
