Millions Like Us (21 page)

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As male fitters and engineers left the factories and depots for training camps and battlefields, their places were filled by women like Doris Scorer.

Doris, a sunny-tempered,
fashion-conscious teenager, was seventeen when war broke out; she and her widowed mother, a charlady, were living in Islington. She spent her days in the Canda Manufacturing Company – better known as C. & A.’s – off City Road, machining dresses. Work continued through the Blitz, the wail of sirens and the clatter of guns which interrupted production sending the girls scurrying for the basement. When the all-clear sounded it was back to loading bobbins on to the buttonhole machine, or working the pedals on the press stud machine. Nights, Doris and her mother spent in the public shelter, huddled in blankets, doing their best to sleep on the damp concrete floor. But the shelter saved their lives.

In common with thousands of other Londoners, they crawled out from the protecting earth one morning, as usual aching and longing for a cup of tea, and discovered the damage. The way into their street was barred by ropes. Mrs Scorer’s tiny two-room flat was part of a house which now stood exposed to the elements, with daylight pouring through a huge crack running from top to bottom. Wardens had taken over the site:

‘Sorry Missus, yer can’t go in there.’

‘But me ’ome’s up there,’ said Mother, looking distraught and pointing to the cracked and shattered upstairs windows.

Doris pleaded. She had to collect her work overall – for woe betide any employee who turned up at C. & A.’s without it – and they were
allowed to dash in and get their things. Inside, everything was spattered with oily dirt. There was no time to wash or put on lipstick; they rescued the terrified cat and grabbed their birth certificates and a shoebox with their family photographs. ‘We didn’t take the family silver ’cos there wasn’t any.’ Then, leaving Mother to deal with compensation forms at the Town Hall, Doris hurried off to work.

Homeless now, they were effectively refugees. After one night lying on the floor of a reception centre off the New North Road with a huddle of tearful, bombed-out families, Mother decided to throw herself on the mercy of her sister Elsie at New Bradwell, near Wolverton, in Buckinghamshire. A telegram came by return: ‘Come to us at once’. By the time they got off the train at Wolverton the next day they were exhausted.

We headed slowly for Auntie’s house, our possessions in a battered old suitcase, our underwear and other garments tied up in a tablecloth with the ends knotted, gasmasks slung around our shoulders, while Mother had the cat under one arm.

Two bag ladies: forty years after they were bombed out, Doris White (née Scorer) did her own illustration of herself, her mum and the cat heading for Auntie’s house.

Doris and her mother now became resident with Auntie Elsie, and life settled to ‘a semblance of order’. Doris, who loved to sew, soon got work at a dress factory in Wolverton, and to her delight the same firm took Mother on as tea lady. Bert Alston was a good employer. Those were contented days; over ‘Music While You Work’ the machinists had lots to gossip about, whether it was boyfriends in the forces or the latest couple seen smooching in the cinema. But in 1941 all that came to an end.

A letter came for me, ‘Please report to the works office’. It was for an interview for essential war work. I had the choice … join the Land Army (wot and leave me mum), clean out train boilers (a filthy job), be a porter on Bletchley railway station (mmmm), munitions worker (and blow meself up) or be an aircraft worker. Now that had appeal, that would surely suit my seven stone frame. Reluctantly I gave my notice in to Bert.

And so in 1941 Doris found herself, along with a host of women of all ages, kitted out in a denim boiler suit, hair neatly turbaned, ‘ready to win the war’. As Fitter 111, Grade 3, her job was as ‘mate’ to a man who was a Fitter Grade 1. The Wolverton Works was geared up to repair and maintain damaged aircraft. Doris was trained on the job by her mate, handing him five-eighth drills, fetching castle nuts and split pins, collecting blueprints. She soon graduated to the greater skill of drilling out ‘skins’ of aluminium used to patch the wings of shelled Typhoons, filing down the irregularities and holding rivets in place while her mate gunned them into the metal, sending a searing sensation into her fingers. Sometimes, if the rivets needing to be held in place were particularly large, her mate would do this job, while allowing her to do the gunning. The work required great skill and delicacy of touch. Doris’s conscientious approach won her the confidence of her mate, and sometimes he would even send her to cut aluminium – ‘not many were allowed to do this dangerous job.’ When completed, each repaired aircraft went before an inspector, who examined it in detail while Fitter 111 and her mate stood by, anxious that their work had made the grade. The inspectors were gentlemen, and Doris held them in respect.

But, despite the large numbers of women now employed at the Wolverton Works (40 per cent of aircraft employees were women), it remained an uncompromisingly male environment – a place where
‘bugger’ and ‘ ’ell’ punctuated every sentence, where burping and farting were tolerated, where grown men behaved like ten-year-olds. There was the anti-social man who ate raw onions for lunch, the joker who jammed the drawer containing the girls’ belongings by driving a nail through the runner and the idiot who booby-trapped the shelf where Doris kept her handbag: when she reached up for it she was showered with nuts and bolts. The girls got their share of taunts, caterwauls and wolf-whistles.

Nevertheless, Doris became fascinated by her work. It was absorbing, responsible and dangerous at times. She took pride in the finished product and, above all, she knew it was important.

Cheap Wine, Pink Gin

In her time off Doris enjoyed the weekly dances at the Science and Arts Institute in Wolverton. At these, she often noticed a group of girls accompanied by officers gathered round a table in the corner: ‘[They] looked immaculate and very stand-offish.
Their
nails were like an advert for Cutex … they did not mix much.’ Who were they? The centre of code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park just six miles away was shrouded in secrecy. Doris and her factory friends speculated about what ‘
they
’ did ‘over there at the Park’, but never found out. ‘It was very hush-hush. They kept to the Secrets Act as they were supposed to, for as the posters said – “Careless talk costs lives” and “Walls have ears”.’ Locally, the Bletchley girls were recognised as being a race apart, distinctive for their air of elegance and education. Doris was in awe of their desk skills and evident intelligence. ‘We could see that they came from good backgrounds, while we were what was termed “born on the wrong doorstep” … They were billeted in the better houses in Wolverton, some of these lucky enough to have a bathroom, which was a rare feature in these times.’

Twenty-one-year-old Mavis Lever
was one of them; she had arrived at Bletchley Park in 1940. Mavis had discovered a passion for Germany’s language and literature while still at school in the 1930s and was deep into her studies on German Romanticism at University College London when war broke out. The college then evacuated to Aberystwyth. At this point, despite her passion for Aryan culture,
Mavis decided that she didn’t want to read German poetry in Wales with a war on. Her first thought was to take up nursing but, encouraged by her professors, she went for an interview at the Foreign Office.

First of all I thought I was going to be a spy; then I thought it was going to be a job in censorship. In fact we weren’t allowed to be told what it was. We were just told it was very important. Initially I was at the Ministry of Economic Warfare opposite St James’s Underground Station, checking commercial codes, finding out who was supplying certain important minerals to the Germans. Then in summer 1940 I moved to Bletchley.

Mavis herself would have agreed with Doris that girls like her were privileged:

We were paid £2 10s a week, a guinea of which had to go on one’s billet. I lodged in a grocer’s shop, which meant I had bacon for breakfast! Later I was moved to a manor house, where I was waited on by a manservant who produced spam on a silver salver – but then the manservant was called up …

Well I absolutely adored the job. I was under the code-breaker Dilly Knox – we were quite famous in Whitehall as ‘Dilly’s girls’. In fact everyone was in at the deep end. There was no book you could read about the history of code-breaking, and there was no professor to consult.

Today, Dillwyn Knox’s contribution to the cracking of the Enigma code is recognised as having been crucial. Knox, an eminent papyrologist, had had a classical training and had studied literary papyri. He had the ability, and intuition, needed to recognise the metrical and rhythmic patterns of ancient poetry, and he brought these qualities to his cryptographic work. As Mavis explains, it was this approach that gave Knox the edge over a more mathematical system for code-breaking – and it was one that, with her literary background, she shared:

There are so many ways of setting an Enigma machine – millions and millions of them – that quite often the mathematically minded were reduced to questions of probability, as in ‘What are the
chances
of getting this out?’ But we just floundered in head-first and hoped for the best. One woman in my section dreamt the combination, and she turned out to be right! We worked by intuition, and strokes of imagination. But also, importantly, by psychology. For example, the Enigma machine has little windows, and you have to set the wheels to four different letters, and of course the operators were told to set them at random, but they never did. Instead they used dirty German four-letter words, or their girlfriends’ names. Well, we quite often knew our operators. So instead of having to work out the probability of what the setting of the wheels would be, we knew they had a girlfriend called Rosa, and it would work out. And so we built up all kinds of little tricks. Maths doesn’t really get you anywhere. It’s really much more like a game of Scrabble. You’ve got to have inspired guesses. And really that is a female quality.

To give you an example: Keith Batey, my husband, had trained to be a mathematician; we met at Bletchley. And I remember one occasion when I was tackling something. Keith looked over my shoulder and he said, ‘The chances of you getting that out are four million to one against you.’ Well at coffee time I walked over to him, and with the greatest of pleasure I told him: ‘That came out in five minutes.’

Mavis knew that her job was one of extreme importance but, ironically, it was rare that she was able to appreciate what a difference her work made.

You’re only given a part of the message to decrypt, and then it’s got to be translated and analysed, before they decide where it has to be sent on to: the Defence Ministry or the Admiralty or the Secret Service or what-have-you. There was the strict principle of ‘need to know’: you only knew what you genuinely
needed
to know, because if you’re captured they’ll learn the lot.

So we never knew what was going on in the bigger picture.

But there was one occasion when Dilly’s girls got a real sense of how their work could change the course of history.

Early in 1941 conflict in the Balkans was hotting up; British convoys bearing forces were coming in from Alexandria to bolster Greek defences against the Axis, but first they would have to encounter the Italian navy. The sea engagements which followed, in March 1941, were crucially affected by the work of the women and men based in Buckinghamshire.

Soon after Mavis’s arrival at Bletchley, Knox and the girls successfully broke the Italian naval Enigma. In principle this code was easier to crack than the German one, since the machine in use was more
elementary. But because its message traffic was also far less busy, decoding it proved correspondingly challenging. There just wasn’t much to go on. However, on 25 March Mavis and the team were able to decipher messages warning of an impending Italian naval operation in the eastern Mediterranean:

The one time when we really saw the bigger picture was when we got an Italian message that said ‘Today Is The Day Minus 3’. So – what were the Italians going to do? You see, this was an occasion when you had to break the whole message in order to decipher it. And then it came out: it was the Battle of Matapan.

The next day two further messages came through. The urgency of their content prompted a ‘jumbo rush’, and Dilly, Mavis and her colleague Margaret Rock worked flat out decrypting them. The information pointed incontestably towards an imminent Italian naval thrust in the Aegean. With hindsight, it appears that Italian naval command underestimated British forces in the Mediterranean, believing them to have only one operational battleship. In reality they had three. Moreover, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet Andrew Cunningham was an expert in night-fighting. Based on the information he now received from Bletchley via the Admiralty, Admiral Cunningham deployed cruisers and air forces to the south of Crete. They torpedoed the Italian cruiser
Pola
. Back at Bletchley on the 27th, more decrypted messages showed that the Italians still thought the British fleet was in Alexandria. In this belief, they sent a squadron of cruisers and destroyers to rescue the
Pola
and were taken completely unawares when, acting on the intercepted intelligence, Cunningham’s battle fleet ambushed them after dark off Cape Matapan on the Peloponnese. The British sank three cruisers and two destroyers. Three air crew were lost. Of the Italians, 2,400 sailors were killed, missing or captured.