Three England chess players from 1939 Olympiad became Bletchley codebreakers

Three members of the 1939 English Chess Olympiad team, Hugh Alexander, Stuart Milner-Barry and Harry Golombek, went on to work as codebreakers at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. The team had left the Buenos Aires Olympiad after Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Germany won the tournament. At Bletchley, the trio helped break the German Enigma code, alongside mathematicians like Alan Turing.

Alexander became Alan Turing’s deputy in Hut 8, which decrypted German naval signals, and later took over the section. Milner-Barry led a group in Hut 6 searching for 'cribs', guessed plaintexts used to test possible encryption settings. Golombek worked on naval Enigma before moving to another section. Their chess-honed skills, concentration, pattern recognition and patience, proved useful in narrowing down possibilities, though the codebreaking effort relied on thousands of people across many fields.

After the war, Golombek became a chess writer and arbiter, Milner-Barry joined the Treasury, and Alexander stayed in signals intelligence, eventually leading GCHQ. Their work at Bletchley remained classified for decades. The story is detailed in a column by India’s 93rd Grandmaster Aarav Dengla.