Small Worlds: Vic Edwards and the Bletchley Park Photograph

UNSW Vic Edwards was a man whose stories you didn’t always believe. He had too many of them, they were too good, and they connected too neatly. You’d sit there nodding, smiling, quietly filing it under “classic Vic.” And then, without fail, the story would turn out to be true.

To be fair to Vic, the facts of his own life were already extraordinary enough to breed suspicion. He was born in Shanghai, where his father was a stockbroker and accountant for British American Tobacco. The family sailed to Australia when Vic was five. He went on to run two CSIRO divisions, one in fisheries and one in irrigation research, before becoming the foundation head of a university business school, then an executive in financial services, and finally, back in academia, the director of the Asia Pacific Financial Research Centre at UNSW, where he spent fifteen years working on the very Chinese financial markets whose roots lay in the city of his birth. It was a career built on improbable arcs, which may be why his stories always sounded a little too good to be true.

The best one happened in my village.

Vic came to visit me in Antony Passage, a tiny hamlet in Saltash, Cornwall, about as far from the corridors of UNSW as you can get. We called on a friend of mine, Judith, and over tea the conversation turned to her father, who had worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War on the Colossus computer, the machine that helped crack the German Lorenz cipher and, by most reckonings, shortened the war by years.

Vic leaned forward. “My boss in Australia,” he said, quite casually, “was at Bletchley Park as well.”

I thought, here we go. Another one of Vic’s tall stories.

He explained that before joining UNSW, he had worked at the CSIRO in Canberra, and that his boss there, a man called Eric Hoare, whom the staff affectionately nicknamed “Eehaw”, had worked at Bletchley Park before emigrating to Australia to work in water irrigation. Many of the Bletchley veterans did this, he said. After the war, bound by the Official Secrets Act and unable to speak about what they had done, they dispersed quietly into new lives and remarkable careers across the world.

Judith stopped him. “Eehaw?” she said. “My father talked about Eehaw. I remember the name.”

I looked at Vic. Vic looked at me.

Then Judith stood up and took a photograph down from the wall. It was a group portrait, men and women sitting outside Bletchley Park, taken during or just after the war. She pointed to her father. And Vic, without a moment’s hesitation, pointed to another face in the photograph.

“That’s him,” he said. “That’s Eric Hoare. I’d recognise him anywhere.”

Here we were, in a living room at the edge of Cornwall, and a connection that had lain dormant for half a century had surfaced over a cup of tea. Two men who had worked together at one of the most secret installations in history, one who stayed in England, one who sailed to the other side of the world, linked again through their children’s generation, by pure chance, in a village of a few dozen houses.

I stood corrected. It was not a tall story.

But Vic wasn’t the sort of man who simply enjoyed a coincidence and moved on. He obtained a copy of the photograph from Judith and carried it back to Australia, where he presented it to Eric Hoare’s family in New South Wales, a souvenir from England, a piece of their father’s wartime history that had crossed the world to find them.

That was Vic. He didn’t just tell stories. He made connections between people that would otherwise have been lost to time.

The visit produced one more revelation, because with Judith, there was always another layer. She mentioned, almost in passing, that her father, a handsome man in his day, had been good friends with Henry Royce, the co-founder of Rolls-Royce. Royce had given him a Rolls-Royce motor car. When her father died, the company bid for the car at his funeral and placed it in the Rolls-Royce showroom as an antique.

By this point, I had stopped doubting anyone.

Vic Edwards died in August 2026. He was a scholar, a mentor, a friend, and the finest teller of true stories I have ever known. The world is smaller without him, though as he proved that afternoon in Cornwall, it was always smaller than any of us thought.

The Bletchley veterans knew this better than anyone. Bound by silence, they scattered after the war into remarkable second acts: one to a CSIRO irrigation station in Canberra, one to a quiet house in Cornwall. Others went further still. Walter Ettinghausen, an Oxford don who had supervised the translation of German messages at Bletchley and launched a Zionist Society among the Park’s staff, sailed to Palestine in 1946 and, as Walter Eytan, became the first director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The intelligence tradition born in those Buckinghamshire huts runs, through a chain of quiet migrations, all the way to Unit 8200 and the listening posts of the Negev. Bletchley’s truest legacy was never a machine. It was a generation of people who carried their secrets to the far corners of the earth and never quite lost one another.