page_title: Alan Gordon Finlay
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Alan Gordon Finlay / Second World War
context_page_description: Alan Gordon-Finlay was a British engineer and inventor of Scottish descent born in Australia. He is best known for having co-created the Filene-Finlay simultaneous interpretation system at the League of Nations in Geneva after the First World War, the first of its kind and the fore-runner to modern interpretation systems in use throughout the world today. A patent was purchased by IBM in 1930, taking it to global production.
context_section_description: In the 1930s, Finlay commuted between his house just outside of Lausanne and his London apartment in Kensington Court. He had managed to secure a more permanent contract with English Electric working with the Marconi teams with a good annual salary.  By the end of the decade with war looming again, Finlay was working with Naval scientists to develop a degaussing system to protect shipping against magnetic naval mines.  As conflict in Europe deepened, he would be away from home for long periods but in 1939, his Army commission was reinstated the day after war was declared by the United Kingdomand he was assigned a “unit car and driver”.  Not long after, Finlay joined Maurice Buckmaster from a secret address at Fountain Court in Belgravia.  Finlay does not appear in the published lists as an SOE operative but his "War Substantive" skills with radio and languages were well known to those with whom he worked.  At the same time, Reginald Victor Jones started making regular calls to Finlay's Kensington Court apartment, becoming a close family friend.  In October 1940, the apartment was destroyed by a bomb, causing the family to scatter, staying with relatives or on assignment.
  By October of 1943, Finlay was sent to Bletchley Park, possible as early as the spring of the same year, apparently brought in by, and in collaboration with, Jones.  He is thought to have made at least three parachute drops behind enemy lines at this time but it is unlikely that these were run out of Bletchley.  Early in 1944, his first daughter June, who had joined the WRNS, transferred to Bletchley to work on Enigma.  Father and daughter were working in the same location under completely different commands. In June of that year, his wife Florence and his second daughter, Dione, were catastrophically buried in the remains of the house they were living in at Beckenham after it was hit by a V-1 flying bomb.  Hours later, the only survivors of the explosion, Florence and Dione were dug out, having fallen from the kitchen in to the cellar under the rubble of a three-storey house and spent the next few weeks recovering in hospital. In 1944 the family were able to live together for the first time since 1940 in an apartment in Thornton Hall, one of two apartments, which had been made available to Bletchley Park staff.  Finlay’s last known operation was to disrupt the V-2 rocket programme at  Peenemünde but the mission was cancelled the day before the intended drop.  Finlay finally left Bletchley in 1946.
caption: The first hut at Bletchley Park, built in 1939 allegedly used to house the Wireless Station for a short time
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