The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (23 page)

‘I got the impression practically everyone in my draft was already earmarked to go to Bletchley because we certainly had no choice and we had no particular interview or anything. We were
just told we were all going to the same place and they couldn’t tell us where it was or anything about it because we simply weren’t allowed to know. So that was it.’

Maggie worked as a registrar in the Newmanry’s Registry Office where the messages coming in from Knockholt printed out on perforated paper teleprinter tape and were prepared for use on
Colossus. Two identical tapes would be spliced together with glue, using a heated clamp, to make a loop which would run through the computer repeatedly.

‘The messages were transferred in duplicate. You had to first of all make sure that there were no mistakes, that the two tapes were identical, and then however long or short the message
was, the two ends were spliced together in a machine that sort of stamped them together so that they didn’t come apart.’

There were two Wren registrars working in the Registry
Office, keeping a record of every tape that came in, the time that it was run through Colossus, how long the run
took and where exactly every tape was located after being run.

Jean Thompson was just nineteen when she was posted to Bletchley in 1944 to work on Colossus; she spent most of her time working on the computer itself. Two Wrens would operate the machine under
the direction of a duty officer, one of the codebreakers, all of whom were male.

‘If the pattern of the wheels was already known you put that up at the back of the machine on a pinboard. The pins were bronze, brass or copper with two feet and there were double holes
the whole way down the board for cross or dot impulses to put up the wheel pattern. Then you put the paper tape on round the wheels with a join in it so it formed a complete circle.’

The number of wheels used depended on how long the tape was. The tape was placed behind the computer’s photo-electric cell and held secure by a clip, then the movable pulley wheels were
adjusted to make sure the tape was taut.

‘At the front there were switches and plugs. After you’d set the thing you could do a letter count with the switches. You would make the runs for the different wheels to get the
scores out, which would print out on the electro-matic typewriter. We were looking for a score above the random, and one that was sufficiently good you’d hope was the correct setting. When it
got tricky, the duty officer would suggest different runs to do.’

Marigold worked in both the Registry Office and on
Colossus, which generated a lot of heat and smelled of hot oil. It was a mindless task that didn’t require either
mathematics or an intellect. They had to log every tape and how long it had taken to run the job.

‘It was very hot and we wore our blouses with the sleeves rolled up. But we were young and it was the war. We didn’t give a stuff about that sort of thing.’

They also knew that they were doing something very valuable to the war effort. Mr Newman held regular briefings for the Wrens to make sure they knew the importance of doing the work as quickly
as possible and that they were actually having an effect on the war.

‘He had the imagination to realise that young people would work better if they were kept informed – which we were, amazingly – of some of the effects of what our spying had led
to – because it was a form of spying. Once a fortnight, he would give us a résumé of what was happening.’

Perhaps most surprising of all, given the tight security at Bletchley, with no one allowed to know what other sections at the Park were doing, Mr Newman didn’t restrict himself to the
successes produced by the breaking of the Newmanry and the Testery, even talking about the successes resulting from Hut 8’s breaking of the naval Enigma.

‘He told us at Christmas 1943 about the sinking of the
Scharnhorst
being directly related to Bletchley. I’ll always remember being told about this, also from time to time
about the sinking of German U-boats. We were given quite specific information but I don’t think there was any thought that we would disclose it. He would talk to us and trust us. He was a
rather remarkable person and he treated
us with great respect even though we were just doing this rather mindless task as we saw it.’

They were billeted in Woburn Abbey. Marigold’s ‘cabin’ was in one of a number of wooden huts in the parkland around the house.

‘They were called cabins because we had to speak navy talk all the time. We went in through the front door where there was a very fierce woman called the regulating officer, a terrifying
blonde lady.’

Maggie slept in the old maids’ quarters in the attic along with a number of other girls from the Newmanry. They were squeezed into double bunks which had wire-mesh bases that you could
feel through the very thin mattress.

‘It was bitterly cold in winter and diabolically hot in summer. They could just about fit in four double-decker bunks so there were eight of us squashed in, with very little space. We all
worked on the same watch, which was essential. If you had night watches, you were asleep during the day – you couldn’t have people rushing in and out. We all got on very well together.
The cabin became our little social group.’

There were four watches, A, B, C and D, working round the clock. When Marigold first arrived in the late summer of 1943, before the arrival of Colossus, there were just seventeen Wrens in the
Newmanry. By mid-1944, with one Colossus computer up and running and several more on the way, there were eighty-six Wrens there with around twenty on each watch. A week of nights was followed by a
week of evening shifts, then a week of days and then a week when the members of the watch filled in on other
shifts and had the weekend off, during which they would go home
or take trips to London.

Marigold used to go to London to meet up with friends from Oxford, all of whom seemed to have had more of their wits about them. They hadn’t been pushed by their mothers into the Wrens and
were now doing ‘interesting things’ at the Foreign Office.

‘We would go in twos and threes to the theatre or to have dinner with some sad brother or boyfriend, which was the height of glamour. Of course, we fancied men like mad but there was a
definite cut-off point. We were told very early on, in my mother’s words, “no man will marry a girl who is shop-soiled”, a horrible image, but it worked. Most of us were virgins
when we married.’

The trips involved quick-change operations from Marigold’s naval uniform at the next station on from Bletchley on the slow train to London.

‘I clearly remember getting out in my Wren uniform with a little bag, going into the cowshed, changing my clothes and putting my uniform in the manger, then catching the next train up to
London in my glad-rags. When we got back we would change back into our uniform, roll up the evening dress and stuff it in something and arrive back at work as a Wren.’

They weren’t allowed to stay away overnight; if they had, they would have been deemed to be ‘adrift’, another uniquely naval expression, in this case for being absent without
leave, and they would have been hauled before the regulating officer.

‘I was longing to be asked, “Where were you when
you were adrift?” so that I could say, “Clinging to a buoy, ma’am.” It would have been
so wonderful, but I never got the chance unfortunately.’

Once the settings and rotation of the first row of Lorenz wheels were worked out in the Newmanry, the Testery took over, breaking the messages by hand using pencil and paper.
Once they had cracked them and knew the complete settings of the Tunny machine, they were passed through to Room 27, where ATS operators used teleprinters linked to Tunny ‘emulators’.
The ATS staff pressed buttons to enter the settings for each of the Tunny wheels on the emulator and then typed out the encoded message on the teleprinter. If the settings had been worked out
properly and the message typed in correctly, German text printed out.

Helen Pollard, one of the ATS teleprinter operators, had been working as a typist in Fleet Street (then the base for all Britain’s major newspapers) when war broke out and she was called
up. She worked as an intercept operator in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, during the early years of the war but in the summer of 1942 was picked out for Bletchley and sent to work for Major Ralph Tester in
the Testery, ending up in Room 27, working the teleprinters and Tunny emulators.

‘Even without knowing the language it was easy to recognise German, and just as easy to see that gibberish was coming out when something went wrong. This happened when a letter was missed
out, or one was typed that wasn’t there. The gentle clack of the machines as
they operated became a background to our working lives. The work never got tedious. There
was something about the atmosphere at Bletchley Park that generated an all-pervading excitement.’

Helen fell in love and got married in August 1943 to a young airman, but he was killed ten weeks later. ‘The whole section grieved for me. Peter Hilton, a very sweet man, brought me the
best and clearest message he could find, which would give me no trouble to type. It was his way of bringing me comfort.’

The run-up to D-Day in the Newmanry was dominated by the need to get ready for the arrival of a new improved Colossus and to hone their skills so that every task was carried
out as swiftly and efficiently as possible. The intelligence the codebreakers in the Testery were producing was sent out via Hut 3, like the reports from the German army and air force Enigma
messages. Everyone at Bletchley knew that once the invasion of Europe began, the slightest delay in getting the intelligence to the right people could result in the loss of lives. But the social
life of the Wrens was dominated by what Marigold and her colleagues saw as the section’s ‘great romance’.

Odette Murray, the daughter of a Surrey doctor, had worked in the Home Ambulance Service throughout the Blitz, a harrowing but rewarding task. But after having to have her tonsils removed she
was told she shouldn’t return to working on the ambulances, so she joined the Wrens. Odette was very keen on the idea of being a Wren and travelling to exotic places, so she was extremely
disappointed to be sent to Bletchley.

‘I wanted to be a boat’s crew, I wanted to be going out to places like Colombo. I didn’t want to be stuck in the Midlands at all. We turned up at Bletchley Park where we were
taught to be touch-typists, still not knowing what it was all about, and eventually got into the Newmanry, it was just starting up. I think at the beginning it was just Max.’

When Odette arrived Mr Newman was working in Hut 11, while the Testery was in the mansion, but in November 1943, the two ‘Tunny’ sections moved into the newly built Block F and a
number of other codebreakers joined the Newmanry, including Shaun Wylie, who at thirty was now a veteran and one of the older, more senior, men in the section.

Odette was not only one of the first Wrens to arrive in the Newmanry, at twenty-five she was slightly older than the other girls and as a result was put in charge of one of the watches; Shaun
was her duty officer, the codebreaker who oversaw their work.

‘He was my boss. I was head of a watch and I was given instructions by Shaun and, still not having the remotest idea what I was doing, I worked with a slide rule, produced a lot of figures
and gave it on to the next person, who gave it on to the next person and eventually it was run on a tape on Colossus. But we really didn’t know what it was about.’

Odette also couldn’t understand the younger Wrens’ fascination with Shaun. They were swooning over him, telling her how wonderful he was all the time. As if she cared.

‘The other Wrens thought he was absolutely wonderful:
“Oh, Mr Wylie this, oh, Mr Wylie that.” I couldn’t see what they saw in him. I didn’t
think much of him. However, he thought something of me.’

They began going out, spending a lot of time walking in the grounds of Woburn Abbey. Shaun would cycle down there on their days off to meet Odette.

‘The abbey is a huge, imposing building. There’s an enormous great triangular pediment right up at the very, very top, very high up, and I used to go leaping across two-foot,
three-foot chasms so that I could sit on the top of this to watch Shaun on his bicycle coming up the drive. It was one hell of a climb.’

The other regular place where they would do their ‘courting’ was a pub, the Bedford Arms.

‘The wonderful walks we had in Woburn Park. Most of our courting was in Woburn Park and the Bedford Arms, where there was an old woman who was . . . I suppose you would call her a
waitress. We used to call her droopy drawers. You could always see her pants hanging down under her dress.’

Despite being the watch leader, Odette had no more idea what she was doing in technical terms than Marigold, Jean or Maggie.

‘I knew we were getting something out but I didn’t really know what the something was. When Shaun tried to explain to me exactly what my contribution had been in a successful thing,
I just didn’t understand. I’m not a mathematician. I’m not a linguist. I’m just somebody who’s given instructions and does little funny calculations with a slide rule,
and bingo. A few days later a smiling
Shaun comes in. I don’t know what my contribution is but OK, satisfactory.’

They were married in the early spring of 1944 ahead of the ban on travel introduced for D-Day, but the Wren officers were unhappy that Odette and Shaun would be working together and tried to get
him moved out of the Newmanry. Eventually, a compromise was agreed whereby he was never allowed to supervise Odette’s watch. They were billeted together in the Swan Hotel in Woburn Sands,
which also didn’t go down well with the Wren officers.

‘It was a blasted nuisance. I rather think that they’d expected me back at Woburn, I know I was given a real bottle. I think I slightly blotted my copybook by losing my leave pass
when we had been on our honeymoon, turned up twenty-four hours late or something.’

The extent of the intelligence provided by the teleprinter links broken with the help of Colossus and the Wrens was extraordinary. The Jellyfish teleprinter link between von Rundstedt’s
headquarters near Paris and Berlin carried all the conversations between the German commander in France and Hitler, including von Rundstedt’s plans for how to defend against the impending
Allied invasion, and which plans Hitler had ordered him to change, often leaving weak points that could be exploited by Allied commanders. Jellyfish also gave extensive details of the German
defensive positions and the strengths and capabilities of the 1.4 million German troops waiting for the invasion. Most importantly of all, it confirmed that Hitler himself had been completely
fooled by the Double Cross operation and was convinced that the Allies’ main
invasion force would come ashore around Calais rather than in Normandy.