Annotated Japanese-English dictionary from Hut 7 by a Bletchley Park code breaker - a colleague of Alan Turing’s - who used this book to assist him in working on intercepted Japanese naval ciphers. 5 inches thick across the spine, this brick of a dictionary takes us straight into the heart of Bletchley Park in the winter of 1944/5 where its owner Hubert Trevor Forrester was seconded from Cambridge University first to the Admiralty - ‘we were taken down into the bowels of the building, lectured on security, and required to sign the Official Secrets Act. We were then put on a coach and... not told where we were going’ (his description in an interview given decades later). Forrester’s destination was the super-secret Station X where he was issued with this 1942 edition of the famous Kenkyusha Japanese-English dictionary. With Turing and others working close by, this volume was inside Hut 7 in Bletchley where he added substantial marginalia, often highly significant in subject matter - ‘bullet’, ‘diplomatic relations’, ‘reversal’. Forrester has highlighted other specialist terms, notably those to do with code-breaking, specifically the terms for 'to intercept', 'recyphering table' and many others. There are also annotations for military terms, e.g. 'ammo' and 'landing place'. 'Chinese Comm[unist] Party' is another nice note.
Forrester’s story is told on the Bletchley website which records a later interview with him recalling the time in Hut 7: ‘On the floor above... a cryptographer was working also on his own and we often got together if traffic was light during the night; he instructed me in the mysteries of cryptanalysis and I put in my twopenn’orth of language knowledge, and we proved mutually useful. I always felt that our most useful work was done the night, when we were totally undisturbed and when the traffic seemed to be more urgent.’
DESCRIPTION: Octavo-sized book, bound in faded olive cloth, speckled edges. ‘H T Forrester’ inscribed on flyleaf, pp2294, dated 1942. The book appears to have been rebound in this nondescript unlettered binding, seemingly after Forrester made most of his annotations some of which are trimmed slightly.
