Dilly Knox
Alfred Dillwyn 'Dilly' Knox (
23 July 1884 –
27 February 1943) was a
British codebreaker and
classical scholar at
King's College, Cambridge. He was a member of the
World War I Room 40 codebreaking unit, and later at
Bletchley Park he worked on the cryptanalysis of the
Enigma machine until his death in 1943.
Dillwyn Knox, the fourth of six children
[Mavis Batey, Knox, (Alfred) Dillwyn (1884–1943), in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004], was the son of
Edmund Arbuthnott Knox, and the brother of
Ronald Knox,
E. V. Knox and
Wilfred. L. Knox.
Dillwyn, known as "Dilly", Knox was educated at Summer Fields School, Oxford, and then
Eton College. He studied classics at
Kings College,
Cambridge, and was elected a fellow in
1909.
To break non-
steckered Enigma machines, Knox used a system known as
rodding, a linguistic as opposed to mathematical way of breaking codes. This technique was applied successfully against the Enigma used by the
Italian Navy and the German
Abwehr.
Knox was one of the British participants in the
July 25,
1939, Polish-French-British conference held at the Polish
Cipher Bureau facility at
Pyry, south of
Warsaw,
Poland, in which the Poles disclosed to their French and British allies their achievements in
Enigma decryption. Knox was chagrined â€" but grateful â€" to learn how simple was the solution of the Enigma's
entry ring (standard
alphabetical order). After the meeting, he sent the Polish cryptologists a very gracious note in Polish, on official British government stationery, thanking them for their assistance, and enclosing a beautiful scarf featuring a picture of a Derby race, and a set of paper
batons that he had presumably used in his attempts to break the German Enigma.
*
Penelope Fitzgerald,
The Knox Brothers, New York: Coward, McCann, & Geoghegan, 1977; revised edition, Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2000.
*
David Kahn,
Seizing the Enigma, 1991, pp. 25-26, 84-85
* Mavis Batey, "Marian and Dilly", pp. 67-74 in
Marian Rejewski 1905–1980, Living with the Enigma Secret, 2005.
*
Władysław Kozaczuk,
Enigma: How the German Machine Cipher Was Broken, and How It Was Read by the Allies in World War Two, edited and translated by
Christopher Kasparek, Frederick, MD, University Publications of America, 1984.
*
Knox in the history of Bletchley Park
