An article on The Guardian's website, dated Sunday 7 April 2019, described "Unsung Bletchley Park hero" Eric Jones as "a figure of equal importance to Alan Turing." And he was from Macclesfield!
Although born in Buxton, Eric Jones was the son of a Macclesfield textile manufacturer, and attended King's School. The Guardian reported that "Recently declassified documents show that Jones ... was the man responsible for interpreting and prioritising all the covert intelligence that came into Britain from Nazi–occupied Europe and from spies working near the frontline. They also show that his decision to force Britain's rival military forces to work together may well have won the war and it certainly laid the groundwork for success on D–day. And what is more, Jones later went on to become the first head of the government's listening station at Cheltenham, GCHQ."
The Guardian said that an exhibition celebrating the 75th anniversary of D–Day, which was scheduled to open at Bletchley Park on Thursday 11 April, would "shed fresh light on a time when, without Jones's vital interpretation and cataloguing system, the vast amounts of intercepted and decoded enemy intelligence available once Turing and his team had cracked the German Enigma code would still have counted for nothing." It quotes Peronel Craddock, head of collections and exhibitions at Bletchley Park: "We really can say that Jones, by leading his team inside Hut 3, was at least equally important to Turing in this part of the story. And there we are talking about someone recently declared by the BBC as Britain's leading icon."
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