The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (2 page)

The Great War, as Phoebe and her colleagues would still have called it, and the use of the new ‘wireless apparatus’ for military communications, revived the need for codebreakers.
Wireless messages could be intercepted by the enemy, so the important ones had to be sent in code. Both the Royal Navy and the British Army set up wireless sites to intercept German messages and
recruited university professors to decode them. Commander Denniston was in charge of Room 40, as the Admiralty codebreakers were known, from the room in the Old Admiralty Buildings that they
occupied. Dilly Knox, a noted classical scholar, was one of its leading lights, decoding a lot of important German messages, including the one that brought the Americans into the war in 1917.

When the Great War came to an end, the army and navy codebreaking organisations were combined into the
Government Code and Cypher School and began breaking American,
Japanese and Russian codes. The American and Japanese navies were seen as the main threat to Britain’s domination of the seas and the Russians were dangerous Bolsheviks intent on overthrowing
Western democracy. The Germans didn’t feature in the codebreakers’ list of targets. They were assumed to have been beaten once and for all. It was only after Adolf Hitler came to power
in 1933 that Dilly began to work on the Enigma codes. He managed to break the Spanish and Italian versions, but the German Enigma messages were impossible to crack.

By now the Code and Cypher School had been taken over by Admiral Sinclair and was based just across the road from St James’s underground station in the headquarters of the Secret
Intelligence Service, soon to acquire the title of MI6. The vast majority of the actual codebreakers were men, with women like Phoebe involved in menial tasks such as the basic registering of
messages, typing or filing. There were a couple of female codebreakers, one of whom, Joan Wingfield, a pretty 26-year-old from Sheffield, had spent the early 1930s in Italy living with her Uncle
Claude, the Lloyd’s agent (and the MI6 man) in Livorno. Joan soon became fluent in Italian. But in 1935 Uncle Claude was thrown out of Italy for spying and joined the Code and Cypher School
as an Italian expert, bringing Joan in with him. She was soon decoding messages between Italian ships and their shore bases. But she was very much an exception. By and large the most responsible
job given to a woman was as a translator. They were also paid substantially less than the men, around £200 a year for a junior civil
servant compared to the male salary
of £250. This was regarded as perfectly normal within the Civil Service and across industry at that time. The men would have families to support; the women didn’t need so much
money.

Barbara Abernethy joined at the age of sixteen, which meant she earned even less. She was from Belfast but had been educated at a convent in Belgium and was fluent in French, German and Flemish.
In August 1937, when Commander Denniston was looking for a typist, she was transferred from the Foreign Office to Broadway where she was paid the grand sum of 31 shillings and 6d a week, just under
£82 a year.

‘I was posted over there not knowing what I was doing and told that it was strict secrecy. I was there for a week and they apparently approved of me because I was kept on and I stayed
there.’ Barbara worked with Phoebe and liked her a lot. ‘She was very pretty, a very good-looking woman. She seemed terribly old to me but she must have been in her forties. Very nice,
very pleasant face, very confident, everybody liked her.’

Not everyone was so universally liked as Phoebe. Many of the older codebreakers were eccentric personalities and difficult to handle, not least Dilly Knox, who threatened to resign at the
slightest change in routine. When one of the codebreakers committed suicide, throwing himself under an underground train at Sloane Square station, Admiral Sinclair decided that working such clever
men too hard ‘overstrained their minds’, and he ordered Commander Denniston to cut back their hours. They didn’t have to start work until ten o’clock in the morning, had
ninety
minutes for lunch, and finished on the dot at five o’clock. Despite her low pay, Barbara thought it was wonderful.

‘Life was very civilised in those days. We stopped for tea and it was brought in by messengers. I was very impressed by this, first job I’d ever had and it seemed paradise to me.
Nice people and very interesting work. I thought, well, this is the life, isn’t it. Thank God I’m not back in the Foreign Office.’

Many of the young women working for the Code and Cypher School were, like Barbara and Joan, from relatively well-to-do families, recruited because they knew someone who worked there, and were
therefore deemed to be trustworthy. Diana Russell-Clarke’s father Edward had worked with the codebreakers during the Great War; at the beginning of 1939, with war with Hitler on the horizon,
she decided she needed to do something to defend Britain. Naturally, the first person she turned to for help in finding the right job was her mother. It was simply the normal thing for a young
woman of Diana’s class to do.

‘My mother simply rang up Commander Denniston, whom we called Liza because we’d known him all our lives, and asked him: “Have you got a job for Diana?” He said,
“Yes. Send her along.” So that’s where I started. We were decoding. But it was very, very boring, just subtracting one row of figures from another. We were on the third floor.
There were MI6 people upstairs. They were always known as “the other side”. We didn’t have any truck with them.’

Concerned that his staff would be at risk if the Germans bombed London, the admiral had bought a country estate and mansion at Bletchley Park, far enough away from
London
to be safe but linked to Whitehall via the main telephone communications cables that connected the capital with the far north. This was to be the ‘War Station’ for Britain’s spies
and codebreakers.

Phoebe, Joan, Barbara and Diana were among just over a hundred codebreakers who travelled to Bletchley Park in August 1939. Many went by train, instructed to make sure that they only bought a
ticket that was ‘of the appropriate class’ for their status within the Code and Cypher School, which for Phoebe and Barbara was very definitely third class. A few, like Diana, were
lucky enough to have cars and were encouraged to take them so they could help ferry people into work each day.

‘A great friend lent me his Bentley for the duration of the war because he decided it was better for it to be driven than be put up on blocks. So I had this beautiful grey Bentley and of
course the private cars were useful because we used to collect people to come into work and then drop them home afterwards.’

Initially they were all put up in pubs or hotels, where the mix of secretive elderly men and very young women, most of them much younger than Phoebe, scandalised the hotel staff, who assumed
they must be up to no good. They weren’t alone. The codebreakers weren’t allowed to tell even their own family where they were, leading Barbara’s mother to worry what her
eighteen-year-old daughter might be doing.

‘My mother didn’t know where I was and I was reasonably young. She had to sort of trust. I told her these people were very respectable.’

The codebreakers were instructed to inform any locals inquisitive enough to ask that they were working on plans for the air defence of London. The servicemen attached to
the Code and Cypher School’s naval, military and air sections were ordered to wear civilian clothes. Bletchley Park was now to be known simply as ‘Station X’, not as a sign of
mystery but simply the tenth of a number of stations owned by MI6 and identified by Roman numerals. All mail was to be sent to an anonymous Post Office box number in Westminster from where it would
be collected and delivered to Bletchley by MI6 courier.

It wasn’t just Phoebe who was promised they weren’t going to be at Bletchley for very long. Barbara was told not to bring any more clothing than she would need for a two-week
stay.

‘It was pretty well organised. I was in the Bridge Hotel, Bedford. None of us quite knew what would happen next. War had not been declared and most people thought and hoped that nothing
would happen and we would all go back to London.’

The Naval Section moved into the library and the loggia, a conservatory on the left-hand side of the mansion as you looked at it from the front. Phoebe’s German section was in a corner of
the library with two tables, a steel locker and a telephone with a direct line to the Admiralty. There were just two chairs, one each for her and Commander Crawford, but with the work piling up she
soon had reinforcements.

‘On 28 August 1939 we were joined by Misses Doreen Henderson and Cherrie Whitby and I need hardly say how welcome they were, for up to this time, we had only been
helped by casual labour, some of it of the most doubtful kind, so that when they came we breathed a sigh of relief. Miss Whitby was as dark as Doreen was fair and they formed absolute
contrasts to each other in appearance. Doreen came to help me with the registering and we became submerged under the spate of German intercepted signals which came pouring in, whilst Cherrie Whitby
worked with Mrs Edwards, who was one of the temporary helpers. Both Doreen and Cherrie were excellent workers and were of great value to the section. We were very lucky in having such
help.’

Admiral Sinclair paid for a good chef from one of the top London hotels to cook for them in the mansion and ensure they were properly fed. Despite concerns over her mother, Phoebe loved the
‘wonderful lunches’ the chef provided. ‘Bowls of fruit, sherry trifles, jellies and cream were on the tables and we had chicken, hams and wonderful beef steak puddings. We
certainly couldn’t grumble about our food.’

Most of the codebreakers were from upper-class or upper middle-class backgrounds and were used to the fine dining and relaxed well-to-do atmosphere of the country estate. But for young women
like Barbara, who by the standards of the day came from a relatively well-off family, it was a completely new experience, something she’d only read about in Agatha Christie novels.

‘It was beautiful: lovely rose gardens, amaze, a lake, lovely old building, wonderful food.’ For those brief two weeks in August 1939, Bletchley Park really did have the relaxed air
of a weekend party at an English country mansion.

Then on Friday 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on the pretext of retaking German territory lost in the Great War and the Second World War began. Britain was not yet
at war with Germany. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain mobilised British troops and gave Hitler an ultimatum. Withdraw from Poland or Britain would declare war. Hitler had until eleven
o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September to respond. At a quarter past eleven that Sunday morning, the codebreakers clustered around the wireless set in the mansion dining room to listen
to what Mr Chamberlain had to say. He informed the nation that he was talking to them from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street.

‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11am that they were prepared at once to withdraw their
troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

The Prime Minister told the nation that he had fought for peace but Hitler wasn’t interested in peace, only in the use of force, and as a result force was the only way to stop him. The
situation in which no people or country could feel themselves safe in the face of German aggression had become intolerable and ‘now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will
all play your part with calmness and courage’. There would be ‘days of stress and strain’ ahead but it was vital that everyone pulled together and did their job.

Many of those listening were like Phoebe. They remembered the Great War, now forever destined to be known as the First World War, and they knew at first hand the sacrifices
they had made, the loved ones lost. That was one of the reasons Chamberlain had bent over backwards in an attempt to avoid another war. The gist of his address to the nation that quiet Sunday
morning was that Hitler had given them no choice. Britain might not want war, but it was doing the right thing. Quite unfairly, Chamberlain’s name would become a byword for appeasement of
Hitler. He was certainly not a man capable of rousing the nation in the manner of Winston Churchill, who would succeed him as Prime Minister the following May, but at the time his address was seen
as both honest and, in its own modest way, suitably inspiring. He finished with the words: ‘Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting
against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

Britain was at war but it remained far from clear what the codebreakers’ contribution might be. Dilly Knox still hadn’t broken the German Enigma codes, although he was now very close
to success, thanks to the Poles.

The Enigma cipher machine had been invented by a German company in the early 1920s, originally for use by banks and other commercial organisations that needed to keep data
confidential. It was adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and two years later by the German Army. The machine itself looked rather like a typewriter encased
in a wooden box. It
had a keyboard and on top of the machine was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for every letter, laid out in the same order as the keyboard. The main internal mechanism was made up of three
metal rotors, each with twenty-six electrical contacts around its circumference, one for every letter of the alphabet.

In order to encode the message, the operator set the rotors in a predetermined order and position, known as the settings. He then typed each letter of the message into the machine. The action of
pressing the key sent an electrical impulse through the machine which passed through each of the rotors and lit up the encoded letter on the lampboard.