The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (20 page)

Among his many eccentricities, Alan Turing was known to chain his tea mug firmly to a radiator. According to Andrew Hodges, people would then pick the lock and steal the mug to tease him. Hodges claims that Turing’s logic was impeccable; such mugs during the war were in short supply. So why not take good care of your only good one? This memo places Turing’s mug in its proper context. Clearly he was anxious that it would otherwise be removed by officialdom.

But crockery friction did not end there. Captain Ridley sent out another memo in which he practically levitated with indignation. ‘The breakage and loss of tea-cups, tumblers, knives and forks is taking place on a fantastic scale. The rate of loss is no less than five times that normally experienced in a man-of-war. Tumblers, cups and plates,’ he added crossly, ‘have been found pushed away into the shrubberies and left about in offices, many of them broken.’ Only the most extreme measures would do. ‘The watchmen have orders to stop anyone carrying government crockery away from the dining room.’
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Despite this, Mimi Gallilee remembered of Josh Cooper: ‘When he had his coffee, he used to amble along, in old grey suits, all loose, his hands going in his hair. He would go round the lake, finish his coffee there – and then throw the cup into the lake.’

The wastage of crockery was not the only problem. Tea breaks also raised a matter so serious that a memo came from Alistair Denniston. ‘A considerable time is wasted every forenoon and afternoon by persons congregating in the dining hall for the purpose of taking tea,’ he wrote. ‘Heads of section should arrange that one junior member of their sections is sent to collect jugs of tea, milk etc.’
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His strictures may have caught attention for a while but a year later, the Park’s senior men were forced to return to the subject. ‘Owing to the time taken in collecting afternoon teas,’ one memo went, ‘arrangements are being made to obtain a limited number of tea urns which will be supplied to heads of larger sections … these urns,’ the memo added, clearly for encouragement, ‘have a capacity of about 70 cups.’

For a teenager like Mimi Gallilee, there were other food priorities, which the war made extremely difficult to satisfy. She recalls: ‘Everything was rationed and you couldn’t walk into a sweet shop unless you had some of your sweet coupons left – and need I tell you, mine would go in the first week! That was the month’s worth.’

A couple of veterans recall that in the later stages of the war, a NAAFI van would periodically turn up at the edge of the Park – its arrival would especially be noted by those within the house – to be greeted with enthusiasm similar to that of six-year-olds crowding round an ice cream van. This one, however, specialised in such delicacies as chocolate and cigarettes, both very rare commodities at the time.

Cigarettes were especially sought after; this was a more innocent age in which most adults smoked. The scarcity of tobacco led some to try other brands, sometimes American; but these were deemed inferior to more familiar products such as Black Cat and Passing Clouds.

Eschewing the allure of the canteen, Gordon Welchman would often duck into the town of Bletchley for some fish and chips, which he recalled as being especially good, although thanks to shortages, one sometimes had to provide one’s own newspaper in which to wrap them. Bletchley caterers offered other lures: one could, apparently, procure ox heart at the Station Inn, though it was ‘very pricey’. The railway station itself boasted a buffet – ‘a gloomy place, almost a replica of the film set for
Brief Encounter
’, said Irene Young. And the coffee was akin to snake venom.

Back at the Park, there were comforts other than food on offer. Beer was available from Hut 2. Staff on their breaks could come here and indulge in general (never work) chit-chat – or indeed anything else that might break the knot of tension. In the early days, people also went to Hut 2 for afternoon teas and coffees, while a tiny library was also provided. According to one veteran, as staffing levels at the Park crept up, so Hut 2 became almost intolerably popular: ‘There were times when if one wanted to move down the central corridor, one had to shuffle sideways.’ Eventually, the tea operation was moved to the purpose-built canteen, and the library inside the big house.

Occasionally there were transgressions, such as the time when Alan Turing established a barrel of cider in the corner of Hut 4, and was informed in unambiguous terms that it was not to stay there. Others managed to secrete barrels of beer in their billets and spend summer evenings consuming it by the jug. On top of that, the men tended to favour the very many local pubs in the vicinity, though even here there was rationing and shortages. One veteran recalled how whisky became a rarity and thirsts had to be slaked with sherry instead, a most unsatisfactory substitute.

Sarah Baring vividly recalls how she was introduced to alcohol at Bletchley Park:

The night shifts proved to many to be the most wearing, not only in terms of work but of refreshment. Tea was stewed until bright orange – and milk was often of the ‘dried’ variety, which tended to produce big, unappetising lumps. There were also digestion issues after eating cheese and piccalilli or even prunes in the middle of the night. Jean Valentine found that working to such a strict rota had unexpected side-effects: ‘It’s the disturbing of your stomach. When you wake up in the morning, normally you have breakfast. But after a night shift, you wake up and have your evening meal. In other words, you come off at eight, go to bed, and when you get up at five or six, it’s the evening meal that’s laid on, so you are having an evening meal for breakfast. Most people suffered slightly bumpy tummies.’

But she adds: ‘The food was very good – and compared to what I got later on a boat over to Ceylon [codebreaking in the Far East], it was magnificent, laid out in cafeteria fashion which we had never come across until then. If you went out for a meal, you sat down and somebody served you. Here, you went and served yourself, which I had never seen before. It was a whole new world. Everything was different.’

And whatever the complaints, there was a bright side. Since the war, it has been proved time and again that whatever the privations, and no matter how irksome the shortages of butter, sugar and meat were, the wartime diet was possibly the healthiest that the British have ever consumed.

As the numbers of Wrens at the Park grew from hundreds into thousands, their increasing presence also subtly changed the atmosphere of the place. Photographs of these girls in uniform, taken on what seem to be perpetually sunny days in Buckinghamshire, show not only a freshness, but also a good-humoured, no-nonsense expression in so many of their faces.

Despite the discomforts and privations and the relative lack of freedom – or perhaps because for many working-class girls, this life actually presented
more
freedom – there seemed a general sense of satisfaction, the knowledge that they were fundamentally doing their bit.

For Jean Valentine, who grew up in the Scottish town of Perth, and who turned eighteen in the later years of the war, joining up was a matter of patriotic duty, although she believes that her own recruitment for work on Turing’s bombes was an administrative mistake; for crucially, at just over five foot, she was, according to Bletchley guidelines, too short (indeed, when Jean’s work on the machines began – once she knew the secret, there was no question of opting out – she had to use a special stool to reach the highest drums). Like so many young women during those years, she was
acutely aware of the need to contribute in the most solid and practical way possible. It was not enough to stay at home. She now recalls:

‘I got to be eighteen and I thought, if I don’t hurry up and do something positive apart from a bit of firewatching and working in a soldiers’ canteen … then I might end up in a munitions factory. Or on the land. Neither of which was my cup of tea.

‘So one day, I was going down to Carnoustie, near Dundee, to visit my aunt. I had some time to spare so I wandered off into the city. I saw an office which was a recruiting centre for the navy, so I popped in. They gave me an intelligence test and said, “You’ll be hearing from us.”’

Like linguist Sheila Lawn, Jean Valentine had never before left her native land. Her upbringing was comfortable, middle-class – her father had businesses in Perth, one of which, Valentine’s Motors, is still remembered fondly by the townspeople today. Jean was aware that she was signing up for a life radically different from the one she had known. Thanks to that administrative mix-up, she was heading into a career of helping to crack the Enigma codes. Her rude introduction to that life, however, was a head-spinning culture shock.

‘I got a summons and a railway warrant to go to Tullichewan Castle in Dumbartonshire, which at that time was a training centre for Wrens. And I spent a fortnight there learning to do what you do – marching, saluting, that sort of thing.

‘We were told the castle had just been vacated by workmen. The place was filthy. It was disgusting. There were filthy greasy tables. And the washing facilities, to put it mildly, were primitive. They were huge concrete huts with a concrete floor. The loos did have doors, but there was no lock. And I can’t tell you what the smell was like.

‘There was a bit where people could have a shower – a row of showers on a wall. I was an only child and I wasn’t used to stripping off in front of people and washing myself, but I did it. Some of them kept their swimming costumes on because they were just too embarrassed to strip down to the buff.’

But after these privations – perhaps deliberately spartan – a rather more attractive prospect for some Wrens started to loom. Jean Valentine recalls: ‘On the last day we were all called into a room – forty or fifty of us – and told to sit there, and we would be called one at a time and be told where we were going, what we’d be doing. So when I was called in, I did what I was told, sat down in a chair in front of three or four officers sitting there. “We don’t know what we’re going to be asking you to do. But we have been told to look for people like you. So tomorrow you will go to London.”’

After a short interlude of excitement in the capital, the work in hand soon beckoned. But there was still a little bewilderment to come. ‘Then I went to the Bletchley outstation site in Eastcote, Middlesex,’ says Jean. ‘And I was introduced to the bombe machine.’

However, before long Jean Valentine had more serious concerns, which were to do with the nature of the work opportunities that she could pursue during the war. For any woman who might have been even a little ambitious, working on the bombes seemed a little like factory work. ‘Only Wrens worked the bombes. I assume it was because the boss was naval and veered towards his own “gels”.

‘But we couldn’t get any promotion. I think the theory was that the humbler we looked, the less that anyone from outside would think that we were doing anything of great importance. We were told, if people asked us what we were doing, to say that we were “confidential writers” – or secretaries, in other words.’

The lack of prospects may have been put in place by the military hierarchy as opposed to the Bletchley Park authorities. Unlike the Wrens, the Hon. Sarah Baring did achieve promotion – she was sent to work at the heart of the war establishment in the Admiralty, her role to be a go-between representing Bletchley Park to the naval establishment. ‘I was seconded up to Admiralty from BP at the beginning of 1944,’ she recalls. ‘The Bletchley Park authorities opened an office there, underneath that hideous monstrous
building on the Mall. The Citadel, the one that’s a mass of concrete that people used to call “Lenin’s Tomb”.

‘We got all the Park decrypts concerning the navy,’ she continues. ‘It would come up to us, and we would have to decide what to do with it. So really I was doing the same work as in BP but just in Admiralty. It was Bletchley Park all in one tiny room.’

And the story of the Wrens can also be contrasted with the experiences of female codebreakers Joan Murray and Mavis Batey, who were treated with a respect that was perhaps a little unusual for the time.

Yet not all the Wrens sent to Bletchley were deemed to come up to scratch. In a rather crisp memo to the Admiralty, concerning the quality of the personnel being sent to him, Alistair Denniston addressed the cases of several individuals who had been brought to his attention:

Denniston concluded pointedly: