[3] He entered on the "modern" side and studied German ("the most exotic language available", in his later words), Latin, French, arithmetic, and elementary mathematics, among other subjects, with middling results.
[3] Hatto met more academic success at King's College London, where his father, refusing to see his son "loll on a Sixth Form bench", sent him in 1927.
"[4][note 1] In an effort to improve his German, Hatto left in 1932 for the University of Bern, where he taught as a Lektor for English; beforehand, John Rupert Firth helped coach him in how to teach the subject.
[7] While in Bern, Hatto also studied under Helmut de Boor and Fritz Strich, taught himself the local dialect Bärndütsch, and played the rural Swiss sport hornussen.
[7] In 1934, King's College awarded Hatto a Master of Arts with distinction for his thesis, "A Middle German Apocalypse Edited from the Manuscript British Museum, Add.
[13] Hatto's appointment at Queen Mary College had scarcely begun when, in February 1939, he was recruited, on the recommendations of Maurice and Norman, to work in the cryptographic bureau in Room 40 at the Foreign Office.
[13] As a "nursery for Germanists", Bletchley Park included in its ranks Bruford, Leonard Forster, Kenneth Brooke, Trevor Jones, C. T. Carr, D. M. Mennie, R. V. Tymms, Dorothy Reich, William Rose, K. C. King, F. P. Pickering, and H. B.
[13] Hatto was well-suited to the task of cryptography, given his philological background and his fluent German; rare amongst his Bletchley Park colleagues, he was able to decrypt even messages that had become corrupted.
[15] Wartime duties kept Hatto busy until 1945, although from 1944 onward he was allowed to lecture in Medieval German at University College London one day a week.
[21] Following the translation of Tristan, published as a Penguin Classic in 1960, Hatto received an invitation from a professor of German at the University of Auckland to visit for several months in 1965.
[22] The ensuing trip around the world took Hatto to Istanbul, Delhi, Kathmandu, Bangkok, Auckland, Wellington, Fiji, Hawaii, California, the Grand Canyon, and New York, where he acquired a Kirghiz-Russian dictionary.