Nicholas Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (born 5 March 1955) is a British writer. He trained as a barrister before becoming a journalist and then a non-fiction writer.
He has published two books on the history of the Second World War, of which the first was Enigma: The Battle for the Code in 2000 and concerned the breaking of the German Enigma machine code at Bletchley Park. [1] In 2006, Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man came out.
He was among the signatories of the 2007 open letter to the BBC against the closure of the Timewatch documentary series, published in The Guardian . [2]
In 2016, Somme: Into the Breach appeared in time for the 100th anniversary of the Somme Offensive during the First World War.
He has been married since 1989 to Aviva Burnstock, the head of the Department of Art Conservation & Technology at the Courtauld Institute in London. His brother Simon Sebag Montefiore is also a writer, besides being an historian. His cousin Denzil was a platoon commander at Dunkirk. [3]
Through his paternal grandmother Audrey Haldinstein, he is a great-great-grandson of Herbert Leon, who owned Bletchley Park until he sold it to the British government in 1938. [4]
Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, the author's great-grandfather, committed suicide after serving with the Royal Engineers on the western Front of World War I. [5]
Montefiore's father, Stephen Eric Sebag-Montefiore, was descended from a line of wealthy Sephardic Jews who were diplomats and bankers all over Europe. At the start of the 19th century, his great-great uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore, became a banking partner of N M Rothschild & Sons. [6] His mother, Phyllis April Jaffé, comes from a Lithuanian Jewish family of poor scholars. Her parents fled the Russian Empire at the turn of the 20th century; they bought tickets for New York City, but were cheated, being instead dropped off at Cork, Ireland. During the Limerick Pogrom of 1904 they left Ireland and moved to Newcastle, England. The father of his namesake, Bishop of Birmingham Hugh Montefiore, was the great-great-nephew of Sir Moses. [7]
Bletchley Park is an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), that became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. The mansion was constructed during the years following 1883 for the financier and politician Herbert Leon in the Victorian Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque styles, on the site of older buildings of the same name.
Irving John Good was a British mathematician who worked as a cryptologist at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing. After the Second World War, Good continued to work with Turing on the design of computers and Bayesian statistics at the University of Manchester. Good moved to the United States where he was a professor at Virginia Tech.
In cryptanalysis, gardening is the act of encouraging a target to use known plaintext in an encrypted message. It was a term used at the British Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, England, during World War II, for schemes to entice the Germans to include particular words, which the British called "cribs", in their encrypted messages. This term presumably came from RAF minelaying missions, or "gardening" sorties. "Gardening" was standard RAF slang for sowing mines in rivers, ports and oceans from low heights, possibly because each sea area around the European coasts was given a code-name of flowers or vegetables.
Alfred Dillwyn "Dilly" Knox, CMG was a British classics scholar and papyrologist at King's College, Cambridge and a codebreaker. As a member of the Room 40 codebreaking unit he helped decrypt the Zimmermann Telegram which brought the USA into the First World War. He then joined the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS).
Colonel Donald John Dean was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.
Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, was an English intelligence officer and historian. He worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War and wrote widely on the history of international relations and British Intelligence during the Second World War. He was known as Harry Hinsley.
HMS Whitshed (D77/I77) was an Admiralty modified W-class destroyer of the Royal Navy. She was ordered from Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson Ltd under the 14th Order for Destroyers in the Emergency War Program of 1918–19. She was the first ship to carry the name.
Maksymilian Ciężki was the head of the Polish Cipher Bureau's German section (BS–4) in the 1930s, during which time—from December 1932—the Bureau decrypted German Enigma messages.
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and author of history books and novels, including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2003), Jerusalem: The Biography (2011), The Romanovs 1613–1918 (2016), and The World: A Family History of Humanity (2022).
John William Jamieson Herivel was a British science historian and World War II codebreaker at Bletchley Park.
Reservehandverfahren (RHV) was a German Naval World War II hand-cipher system used as a backup method when no working Enigma machine was available.
Hugh William Montefiore was an English Anglican bishop and academic, who served as Bishop of Kingston from 1970 to 1978 and Bishop of Birmingham from 1978 to 1987.
Rolf Noskwith was a British businessman who during the Second World War worked under Alan Turing as a cryptographer at the Bletchley Park British military base.
Sir Herbert Samuel Leon, 1st Baronet was an English financier and Liberal Party politician, now best known as the main figure in the development of the Bletchley Park estate in Buckinghamshire.
Mavis Lilian Batey, MBE, was a British code-breaker during World War II. She was one of the leading female codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
Sir Moses Haim Montefiore, 1st Baronet, was a British financier and banker, activist, philanthropist and Sheriff of London. Born to an Italian Sephardic Jewish family based in London, after he achieved success, he donated large sums of money to promote industry, business, economic development, education and health among the Jewish community in the Levant. He founded Mishkenot Sha'ananim in 1860, the first Jewish settlement outside the Old City of Jerusalem.
Adam S. Montefiore is a British-born Israeli wine trade veteran, wine critic, wine writer and author.
Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore was a British banker, stockbroker and politician.
Thomas Ralph Erskine CB was a senior Northern Ireland government lawyer and historian of wartime codebreaking.
Action This Day was a 1941 memorandum sent to Winston Churchill personally, to advise Churchill that the Bletchley Park (BP) codebreaking establishment was short of staff in some critical areas. Their requirements were small, but as a small organisation their management did not have priority. Four senior heads of sections ("Huts") and their deputies wrote to Churchill, who had visited "BP" on 6 September 1941, where he made a speech saying he appreciated their work.
The author's own cousin, Denzil Sebag-Montefiore, may have been one of the few Jewish platoon commanders on those gruesome beaches...
The author's own great-grandfather, Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, we learn, killed himself after serving with the Royal Engineers on the western front.