Alec Naylor Dakin

Alec Naylor Dakin (3 April 1912 – 14 June 2003) was a Fellow of Oxford College, a cryptologist at Bletchley Park, an Egyptologist and schoolmaster.

Alec Dakin was born in Mytholmroyd in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1912, the son of inventor and sawmaker, Bertram Alexander Dakin and his wife Annie Louise Naylor who were married in 1908 in Todmorden. He came from an inventive family since his father, who was born in 1879, was an inventor (of carving knives, saws, pan handles and wall coatings). He won a scholarship to Heath School, Halifax.

At school he won a second scholarship, this time to Queen's College, Oxford. There he read Greats and took walks with his fellow Yorkshire scholarship-boy and Nonconformist, Harold Wilson. Alec's tutor, Oliver Franks encouraged him to begin the study of Egyptology, and he was also guided by Professor Battiscombe Gunn, an English Egyptologist and philologist who had published his first translation from Egyptian in 1906 and, in 1934, was appointed Professor of Egyptology at the University of Oxford just a few years prior to Alec's time there where Battiscombe devoted himself to his pupils and his classes, at the expense of his own research. In 1936 at the age of 24, Alec became a Fellow of University College Oxford.

During his studies Alec had acquired fluent German, which would later turn out to be extremely advantageous to his career. He was clearly destined for a distinguished career as an Oxford Egyptologist but just two years later in 1940, his life took an unexpected turn when he was recruited by her Majesty's government to work as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park - to assist the war effort. He worked in complete secrecy in hut 4, alongside many others at Bletchley, including the well known cryptographer, Alan Turing who was put in charge of all of them by Winston Churchill.He later described this period as the happiest time of his life and especially enjoyed the challenge of the early days, before the Colossus computer took over the decrypting.

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