The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (21 page)

Of course, the Wrens were not the only women drafted in. Also present were six WAAFs whose task it was, from the beginning, to man the telephone exchange. Then there were thirty-six WAAFs who were there to run the teleprinters, with their communications chattering in and out of the Park.

For a lot of the girls who signed up, this life threw up a number of surprises. Felicity Ashbee, of the WAAF, kept sporadic diaries. She recalled signing up and being sent to the nearby town of Leighton Buzzard where she and other WAAF girls were put through parade paces by a male sergeant, who was mortally embarrassed by the whole thing.

They were told that maths and science were not essential subjects for the girls to know about. Miss Ashbee was then posted to Stanmore, where she recalls meeting a lesbian ballet photographer. She did not seem tremendously shocked.

She also recalls the routines that so many hundreds of young women had to get into; in terms of leisure, this meant a sparse diet of books, knitting and chess. The egalitarian spirit of the post-war world was still some way off; even in the WAAF, ranks were discouraged from fraternising with one another. Miss Ashbee recalls having debates in the early 1940s about whether the ‘Commies’ were actually worse than the Nazis.

She was then sent to Bletchley for a while, and had sketchy memories of Josh Cooper, and the disorientating mix of uniforms and civilian dress that mingled around the place. Miss Ashbee recalled just ‘one café’ and (perhaps because she was not tremendously popular) ‘no social life’. She recalled a show being staged there, called
Blue and Khaki
, part of which involved a Cossack song.
²

A number of Wrens were housed in Woburn Abbey, once a splendid private house and after the war to become one of the country’s
premier visitor attractions. For those who now watch the Channel 4 reality show
Big Brother
and marvel at how complete strangers can live in such close proximity for so long, it’s worth having a look at the life that was led at the Abbey. Given the gruelling nature of the work and the slog of the hours, this rhyme from one dormitory – entitled ‘Martha’s Prayer’ – rings an amusing chord:

There might also have been an element of Malory Towers about the set-up. Some of the women recalled listening stations high up in the Abbey’s tower room, and a continual problem with bats, which would cause a great deal of high-pitched panic.

Woburn Abbey was also reputedly haunted. According to Jack Lightfoot of the RAF, the young women were talking about the ghost of the ‘Flying Duchess’ – Mary, Duchess of Bedford, who was born in the Victorian age but conceived a fancy for the new pursuit of aviation at the age of sixty-one. But the house also reputedly was haunted by a monk, and there were stories of doors that would not stay shut at night.

There would not have been a lot of time for nocturnal spectral activity though – Bletchley Park, of course, was a 24-hour operation, and workers were transported to and from their shifts by special buses after midnight and before 8 a.m.

There were also Wrens posted a few miles away in a small village called Gayhurst. There, writes Diane Payne,

Highly virtuous! And something, I feel sure, that would have captured the imaginations of many of the male service personnel of Bletchley. As indeed would the stories concerning Wrens sunbathing topless on the roof of Gayhurst Manor.

If for the codebreaking civilians in the huts, the bounds of knowledge seemed limited, then for a Wren they were more limited yet. It was not just the mechanistic nature of the work of bombe operating; it was the commute back to the dormitories. Jean Valentine only realised, upon returning some decades later, how very little of the Park she had ever seen in that brief period during the war. She recalls: ‘Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalised.’

And the restrictions were not purely physical – the methodology of the work was equally hermetically sealed. ‘I worked in that bombe room,’ she continues. ‘And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn’t until all these decades later that I realised we were just calling Hut 6 across the path.’

If they had done their jobs properly, the encrypted message would be typed in and a length of tape would come out in German. ‘Then that went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion.’

There was also an element of culture shock produced for many by being transplanted right into the centre of what was still largely
rural England. She recalls: ‘We used to go to the village hop on a Saturday night if we weren’t working. The whole village used to turn out for this hop. To my absolute horror, one evening, a woman, there with her baby, took her bosom out and stuck it in her baby’s mouth. Now, I had never seen a baby being fed in my life before, and certainly not at a village hop.

‘But it seemed to be the norm. No one else seemed to think anything about this woman casually producing a breast and feeding her baby.’

Sheila Lawn considers that ‘Eighteen-year-olds then were younger than 18-year-olds now in terms of attitudes.’ But this is perhaps something to do with regional divides; it is reasonably well documented, for instance, that in the 1920s and 1930s, people who lived in small communities in the English countryside were more relaxed about such matters as premarital sex than their town counterparts. Even there, many children born out of wedlock were swiftly subsumed into the larger family – the child in question being told in the occasional case that its mother was its ‘sister’.

Regardless of how young the Bletchley recruits felt themselves to be, however, it was obvious that passion – and, indeed, love – were always going to find a way in such intense circumstances. But there was another sort of intensity at Bletchley too – a steadily growing sense of friction caused in part by the ballooning expansion of the Park’s activities, and by the sheer numbers of its personnel. There were to be moments midway through the conflict – in Britain generally, as well as throughout Bletchley Park – when it seemed that morale could not sink any lower.

It’s difficult to listen to Max Miller’s chirpy 1941 ditty now without wincing just a little. Enthusiasm is one thing, but sugary show-business sycophancy? Yet this song, ‘The Grand Old Man’, was something of a hit at the time; not merely because it was a less cynical age but because a colossal number of people felt, as soon as he took over in May 1940, that Britain was extremely lucky to have Churchill’s leadership. (Very few people, for instance, would have agreed with Evelyn Waugh’s later assertion that Churchill was wrong about most things and surrounded himself with crooks.)

For many years after the war, it was asserted that the most common dream5 had by British people was that of the Queen unexpectedly dropping round for tea. In a similar way, the figure of Winston Churchill loomed very large in the minds of Bletchley Park
operatives, and not merely because they found him an inspirational figure. The psychology seems to run deeper than that. Is it possible to hear, through various accounts, a yearning for proper recognition?

Gordon Welchman recorded the day in September 1941 when Churchill paid a visit to Bletchley Park. Welchman’s account, in his book
The Hut Six Story
, appears to have a pleasing dimension of wish-fulfilment to it:

Winston, indeed! Not to mention the ‘grand’ schoolboy wink, which seems to have the effect of placing both men on the same level – a level above the officious-seeming Travis. Welchman added, more appropriately: ‘We were fortunate in having an inspiring national leader in Winston Churchill, whose oratory had a powerful effect.’

But Churchill’s relationship with Bletchley Park was of the greatest importance. It was not simply a question of the grand old man granting the codebreakers extra resources for machinery or staff, or even bestowing upon them a fresh tennis court. It was a crucial question of respect. Respect that, one senses occasionally through various accounts, the Park was not necessarily receiving in other
parts of Whitehall, or from the intelligence services.

Churchill had been fascinated by the business of cryptography, and indeed of secret intelligence, since before the First World War. He had seen ingenious espionage ploys and counter-ploys in action during his youthful exploits in different parts of the Empire; he had a hand in the setting up of the Room 40 cryptography division at Admiralty; in the 1920s, he took a keen interest in the intelligence agents who could glean most information on the Soviets.

So naturally, when he at last became Prime Minister in May 1940, just two weeks after Bletchley Park broke into the German air force Enigma, Churchill had no doubts how vital the operation was. From the moment he arrived in Downing Street, he insisted on having a daily buff-coloured box of intercepts sent on to him – a box that was sometimes delivered personally by ‘C’, the head of the SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies. The key to this box was kept on Churchill’s key-ring.

Only a handful of other people – military and civilian – were permitted to know from where these decrypts emanated, and if ever they should have cause to refer to them, they used the obscuring term ‘Boniface’. Churchill himself sometimes referred to these bundles of intelligence as his ‘eggs’, a reference to the Bletchley ‘geese that never cackled’. For everyone else – generals and ministers alike – the source was, to all intents and purposes, a number of fictional spies. It was only in 1941 that the intelligence produced from the decrypts started to be known by the term ‘Ultra’.

This intense secrecy could prove a source of vexation to other government departments such as the Foreign Office, and indeed to the military top brass. The Prime Minister was ‘liable to spring upon them undigested snippets of information of which they had not heard’. Added to this irritation, from the outset of the war there were those high up in military command who were sceptical of the extent to which Bletchley Park could provide serious, usable, useful information. These tensions grew as the Park expanded its remit and started producing intelligence, as opposed to simply raw
decrypted messages.

On the day of that unforgettable visit, in September 1941, Churchill also inspected the Hollerith machine installation in Hut 7. As one breathless eyewitness account stated:

Churchill’s tour also took him into Hut 8, to meet Alan Turing; according to his biographer Andrew Hodges, Turing was ‘very nervous’.

The Prime Minister then gave a short address outside Hut 6 to a group of gathered codebreakers, in which he said: ‘You all look very innocent – one would not think you knew anything secret.’ It was here that, famously, he went on to describe his audience as ‘the geese that lay the golden eggs – and never cackle’.

John Herivel, in a lecture given to Sidney Sussex College in 2005, seemed a little less romantic and slightly more clear-eyed about this manifestation than Gordon Welchman had been. Nevertheless, his account still conveys something about the aura of true leadership: