Alfred Ewing and 'Room 40'

Abstract

The following paper is the text of a lecture given by Sir Alfred Ewing (F.R.S. 1887), then Principal of Edinburgh University, to the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution on 13 December 1927, under the title ‘Some Special War Work’. The text was not published at the time because of security objections by the Admiralty; Ewing was, however, ‘certain that the narrative had enough historical value to justify its existence in print’ ( The Life of Sir Alfred Ewing , p. 246), also commenting ‘it would be nice for the grandchildren to have later’. Through the courtesy of his great-grandson, Mr D. J. Wills, a copy of the lecture text has recently been made available to Notes and Records : it is reproduced here because of its value as a personal account by Ewing of the initiation and development of the famous Room 40 of the British Admiralty in World War I, leading to the decrypting of the Zimmermann telegram in 1917, of which David Kahn wrote in The Codebreakers in 1966: ‘never before or since has so much turned upon the solution of a secret message’ for it was decisive in bringing the United States into the war.