The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (38 page)

For Roy Jenkins’s fellow ‘Tunny’ codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts, his military role was not to end for some time, an experience common to many. Immediately after Bletchley, he was seconded into War Crimes work.

‘I regarded my time in War Crimes as a great nuisance,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t demobilised until 1947. And looking back, I regard it as the only time in my life where I didn’t make progress and didn’t
contribute an awful lot. But shortly after that, I met a middle-aged Belgian lady. Her husband had been a lawyer, and during the war, they had sheltered British airmen, or Allied airmen, shot down, and trying to make their way back to Britain to join the air force again.

‘She had written a diary – they actually had an airman hidden in the house when the Gestapo came to call. The Gestapo searched up and down, but didn’t find him, and went away disappointed. So the airman emerged and everybody congratulated themselves. And the Gestapo came back. Because that is what they did, that was their trick. This Belgian woman never saw her husband again. She got away by pretending to be doolally. The president of her tribunal was a civilised man and let her go.

‘But she had this diary and she wanted someone to translate it. So I did that and it was published as a book.’

After that, though, Captain Roberts found that he had to find a career that was rather more diverting than the one that he had originally planned: ‘When I studied German, at University College, London, it had been with the purpose of joining the Foreign Office. I am eternally grateful that I never joined the Foreign Office. I went into market research side of an international advertising agency.’ The work took him all over the world at a time when not many British people travelled at all. ‘And for the rest of that time,’ he says, ‘it was market research, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had my own company in the 1970s. The travel was very welcome!’ It was also sufficiently absorbing to counter the frustration of never being able to talk about Bletchley.

Similarly, for Gordon Welchman, who had brought so many invaluable innovations and systems to Bletchley Park, the end of the war marked a turning point; the prospect of returning to his old, academic life in Cambridge seemed utterly impossible. Towards the end of the war, and with his enthusiasm for the nature of organisations, he had began to help in drafting the future of Government Communication Headquarters – what was later to become GCHQ.

His belief – one that flew in the face of established civil service
practice – was that talented cryptologists should be able to reach the highest salary rung without also having to undertake administrative work. This was based on his experience in Hut 6, when he saw at first hand the benefits of mutual co-operation, freeing up time for thinking.

However, he found himself up against more stubborn attitudes. On top of this, Welchman believed that the British computer industry was fatally held up by the government’s reluctance to fund research – the attitude seemed to be that the government would wait until such technology was developed commercially, and then find a use for it.

He recalled that by then, he was a changed person who had been ‘thoroughly shaken out of my old academic way of life by my challenging experiences at Bletchley Park and in the United States, and it seemed impossible to return to what I had been doing before the war’. With appropriately golden references from Hugh Alexander, Welchman took up his colleague’s old post as Director of Research at the John Lewis Partnership. While being a very fine position, this does leave one wondering whether the years that immediately followed the war seemed a little anti-climactic. In 1948, Welchman discarded the department stores and set sail with his family to America, to work in the burgeoning field of computer technology. Later he joined the organisation MITRE, looking into such matters as battlefield communications systems.

For in one sense, the war hadn’t ended at all. The conflict had simply become frozen. Britain, America, and western Europe were facing an opponent every bit as implacable as Nazism. Welchman had joined the strategic struggle against the forces of the Warsaw Pact, and of Soviet military might.

Indeed, Welchman’s preference for the American way of doing things led him, eventually, to take on American citizenship. One now senses that his view of the British authorities was a little stronger than that of simple distaste. ‘People have a tendency to filter out what they do not want to hear,’ he wrote of the pre-Second
World War government. ‘An appeasement-minded government in England filtered out the information on Hitler’s Germany that they were receiving from their Secret Service.’

But for other key players from Bletchley Park, life in the immediate post-war years lost that lustre of intensity. John Herivel – whose flash of inspiration one night in 1940 had had an incalculable effect upon the war effort – first went into teaching. He returned to his native Belfast, joined a school there and pretty soon found the rowdy boys absolutely intolerable. So he returned to academia and found, despite his mathematical background, that history was his real passion. He was to go on to write a history of Newton’s
Principia
, among many other subjects. ‘And I found that I just didn’t think about Bletchley Park,’ he says.

Messenger and typist Mimi Gallilee, who of course was so very young when she started work at Bletchley, found the immediate aftermath to be rather unsatisfactory by comparison. She says: ‘I think there were about 1,700 people left, and we went off to Eastcote, in Middlesex. We went into the quarters where the bombes were, and I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes. None of us knew. Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t know. So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the directorate …

‘Commander Loehnis was the head by then. That was in 1946. And a lot of Forces people were still at Bletchley Park. I don’t think any Forces people went down to Eastcote.’

The move to London provided Mrs Gallilee with the first dusty taste of post-war austerity; even the matter of a daily Tube fare could put a serious dent in one’s weekly living wage. Life was a constant effort to scrimp.

‘I was living in Bayswater and I would have to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,’ she says. ‘On such a low salary. I don’t think I stayed there for longer than six months. They tried to do something for me in the way of an increase in pay but you just didn’t have that
kind of system and I had so long to wait until I was twenty-one. The Civil Service was very rigid, and there were no such things as merit awards in those days. The government wouldn’t have had the money to pay us anyway.’

So, after the relative comfort and even romanticism of Bletchley Park, this new prospect of dull work for low wages began to gnaw at her. ‘I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London,’ she says. ‘So I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.

‘But after maybe just a couple of days, I thought – I can’t stand this. I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.

‘I used to say, “I feel as though I’m in a different world altogether.” I saw a job advertised in the
Telegraph
, for BOAC [the British Overseas Airways Corporation, a precursor of British Airways]. I applied there, and got that, and I stayed with them from 1947 until about 1953. I was married by then.’

For two of the codebreakers, there was a move, conscious or not, towards helping to rebuild both the nation and its remaining colonies. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I left Bletchley Park in August 1945. I decided – wrongly, I think now, though it seemed right at the time – that I wasn’t going to go on with mathematics, so I tried for the administrative Civil Service. I got in, so for some reason I opted for the Dominions Office.

‘I had six months in the Foreign Office while I was waiting for the Civil Service exam, in the South American department. I was working with Victor Perone, who had finished a very successful career as Her Majesty’s Representative in the Vatican. A typically Edwardian gentleman, very portly, with a great gold chain across his chest. The man I really did like – I being a junior dogsbody, of course – was the
chairman of the Bank of London and South America. He was Samuel Hoare – and a more polite, considerate and charming chap I have never met.’

But there was an element of an upper-class world that already seemed to be vanishing fast. Hoare, it seems, was slightly bewildered by the provenance of this new Foreign Office recruit. In the years before the war, many of those who worked for the Foreign Office very often came from the grander, titled families; they tended to have substantial private incomes, upon which they were expected to live. This was not the case with Keith Batey.

‘Samuel Hoare was puzzled,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He couldn’t understand how there could be anyone in the Foreign Office whose name he didn’t recognise. He would call me Mr Beety.’ But it was Batey who was emblematic of the future, not Sir Samuel Hoare. Mr Batey and his generation were helping to forge a new era of administration in which old school contacts were not the most important thing.

Similarly, for Oliver Lawn, the Civil Service seemed the logical career path. ‘I had a very frantic one-term lecturing in mathematics at Reading University in September 1945,’ he says. ‘By that time, I had more or less forgotten all my mathematics, in five years of doing codebreaking.

‘Then I took the Civil Service exams in the spring of 1946. I could have gone scientific or administrative civil service. I was successful in both but I decided, on the whole, to go for the administration, rather than the specialist science as a mathematician. I joined the civil service around July 1946.’

As he says, Mr Lawn was ‘directed’, as indeed was everyone else after the war. Despite the fact that almost any occupation would seem drab after the pressurised life he had been leading, this was also the correct thing for a young man of his upbringing and background. Britain was smashed to pieces, bankrupt, fading and peeling and shabby. It needed clever, expert administrators; not politicians, but men who really knew how things worked. It was Mr
Lawn’s generation that was to exert the real influence in Britain in the coming years, in everything from the rebuilding of inner cities to the dismantling of Empire.

For the women who were to become their wives, this was still an era in which ladies were not expected to go out to work, despite the mass mobilisation of the female population throughout the war. When a wife became pregnant, it was understood that her career was over and that she would become a mother and a homemaker.

Having said all that, it would clearly have been a travesty if the women of Bletchley Park had led their intellects slide into abeyance. Happily, for both Sheila MacKenzie and Mavis Lever, this was emphatically not the case.

Sheila continued academically. However, her original plan to teach on the continent was still looking extremely uncertain. What shape would that continent now be taking? How much of it would be subsumed by the heavy mass of the Soviet Union? The war forced a geographical change of Sheila’s plans. She had to confine herself to British opportunities.

‘I did what you can do in Scotland, a general degree,’ Mrs Lawn says. ‘Based on the previous subjects I had done. That was quite hard work over the year. And then I did a year in Birmingham University, a post-graduate diploma in Sociology and then I went in for personnel management. A complete change. It still wasn’t easy to get abroad.’

She and Mr Lawn felt the full icy blast of austerity Britain in their first two winters after the Park. It is one of those periods which now, with some distance, is almost as difficult to imagine as the war itself. As Sheila recalls: ‘Oh, but it was cold. There was very little fuel and very little hot water. That was even worse than during the war. Everything was rationed, including potatoes and bread. And clothes were rationed until 1952, I think. When Oliver and I were married, we could only get dockets for basic furniture. But Oliver had a great-aunt who died and some of her beautiful furniture came to us. So we got a bedroom and a living room from that.’

The scrimping that went on for Sheila and Oliver’s wedding day now seems almost unthinkable. ‘My mother made do and mended. She was very good with her needle. For instance, out of two beautiful silk jumpers of the 1920s, which she had kept in a trunk, my mother was able to make three jumpers; I had two and she had one. And she remade some of her frocks for herself and for me. And my going-away – I was married in borrowed clothes, very successfully.

‘I had a lovely veil which belonged to our minister’s wife and had come through her family. I went away in army blankets, dyed a lovely maroon colour. They were made by a cousin of mine who was learning to be a tailoress. And with the tailoress she was working with, she made a suit for me – skirt, waistcoat and coat. I wore it for years. It was much admired. My undies were parachute silk. Gorgeous stuff to use. It was “make do and mend’‘ with a vengeance!’

Mavis Batey also felt certain that her future was of an academic nature, though the duties of bringing up a young family with her new husband Keith came first. ‘We were in Oxford, we went back to Christ Church, and I didn’t really get back into any kind of intellectual activity until my three children were grown. After that, I could go to the Bodleian Library every day. So I eventually picked up.’

But what of the Park’s most famous innovator and presiding genius? For Alan Turing, still only thirty-four at the end of the war, technology was drawing closer and closer to enable him to realise his concept of a ‘Turing Machine’; equally, though, his homosexuality, and the British establishment’s attitude towards it, were to contribute to his tragic – and wholly pointless – death.

The transition from war to peace seemed, initially, to make little difference to Alan Turing’s working life. After his removal as head of Hut 8 and his return from the United States, he came back to intense research. But we might also see that the post-war world outside the hermetically sealed atmosphere of Bletchley – a country with a shifting, faintly neurotic moral climate – was one in which it would be extremely difficult for him to thrive.