The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (40 page)

Those years also saw the introduction of the paperback book, which instantly made literature affordable for many more people. Previously, most had to rely upon their public libraries; wonderful though these institutions once were, you could only borrow a book for two weeks at a time. If you could actually buy it, and own it, your time spent studying it was limitless.

We learn through the diaries of Mass Observation that the war years brought an even greater enthusiasm for cinema, and in particular the glossy, expensive escapism of Hollywood. We also learn, though, through some of these day-to-day diaries that most people seemed to have a highly tuned critical faculty, and that some films that we would regard today as classics were dismissed sharply at the time as nonsense by these diarists.

For the young people of Bletchley, this sense of intellectual openness and curiosity was strong. Even for those who were not drawn directly from university, there had been a sense of culture in the air. Mimi Gallilee recalls with especial fondness the library within the house itself. Others had brought their libraries with them.

‘We were much into Freud,' recalls Mavis Batey. ‘Pelican published sixpenny editions of
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
. If you had been an undergraduate, as we were, then you were pretty much
bound to have had one.' Bletchley Park codebreaker (Lord) Asa Briggs subsequently saw his
Social History of England
published by Pelican. In many ways, the imprint was a synecdoche for a younger generation eager to absorb as much as they could. From economics to psychology to linguistics, those blue spines were signifiers of educational aspiration, a generation before Jennie Lee brought the Open University into being.

Like a surprising number of young people of the time, Mavis Batey had, just before the war, spent a little time on the continent for the purposes of study. ‘I was much better acquainted than anyone else with Freud because I went to Zurich University,' Mrs Batey says. If one was a linguist, one normally had to go for a term in a German university. But since this was 1938, and the Germans had already moved into Czechoslovakia, she instead had to go to one that was German-speaking. ‘And I actually heard Freud's disciple Carl Jung.'

One always imagines that the work of Bletchley Park would be enough of an intellectual demand on the young people who were working there. Yet as we have seen, aside from the odd lightning flash of genius, the business of decoding communications was more a question of patience, trial and error. Also, this particular generation of young people had hinterlands. Just because they had particular abilities in their own fields – mathematics, linguistics, the classics – didn't mean that their interests were circumscribed in any way.

‘This is another thing you hear: that we were more or less incarcerated in Bletchley,' continues Mavis Batey. ‘That isn't true at all, we could do anything in the town, and I enrolled for the Cambridge extra-mural course on psychology and used to go there with the townsfolk.'

She also recalls: ‘Lord Briggs always said to me, as he did to a few other people: “It was our university, Mavis.” Those five years are tremendously important at that age … what it did for me, that I was very grateful for, we were all thrown in at the deep end.'

Mrs Batey credits Bletchley Park with giving her a certain measure of confidence. ‘I always wanted to be a historian – so I am a historian now – and I got into a particular field of landscape history as pioneered by W.G. Hoskins,' she says. ‘He was my great guru.

‘As time went on, I found myself on heritage committees, landscape heritage, National Trust. And because it was a new subject, I didn't have to know what Professor X or Professor Y had said – I was quite happy to have a bash at it, and then read what the others said after I had got some ideas myself. And that was what I realised was a gift, a legacy of Bletchley. You either do it or you don't, but no one else is going to do it if you don't.'

Similarly, Sheila Lawn was summoned to Bletchley before she had the chance to finish her degree. But the atmosphere of the Park suited her extremely well, as she recalls: ‘It was stimulating to meet people, and to talk to them. I had friends, about my age group. I think I was the only half-baked MA, they all seemed to have completed theirs. They came from different universities, different parts of the country, different experiences, different subjects. Yes, that was the collegiate feel, all the different disciplines.'

The Hon. Sarah Baring had been educated only by governesses. Nevertheless, Bletchley Park seemed to her at times to have a distinctly campus feel: ‘Of course the cryptographers were all brilliant mathematicians. And they were a class apart. Quite mad, some of them, quite potty, but very very sweet.

‘I never went to university but here, I was lucky to be right at the centre of things and the people I worked with were so wonderful. And to have met Turing and all those sorts of people was just great.'

Another veteran, Gwen Watkins, recalled wanting to immerse herself totally in this strange intellectual whirlpool. And afterwards, when Bletchley Park was packed up and she was facing, like everyone else, the austere grind of post-war Britain, she felt a certain measure of gratitude to have been working in such a place. For in
a sense, Bletchley Park gave her a grounding: ‘To be with people for whom books, music, art, history, everything like that, was a daily part of their lives, it was an absolute blossoming for me.'
²

Meanwhile, Mimi Gallilee had been given the chance to see how some of a generation's greatest minds disported themselves in everyday circumstances. What she witnessed are scenes that – if there hadn't been a war – might have been commonplace in Oxford or Cambridge, and which otherwise she would never have seen.

‘Like, for instance, Alan Turing,' recalls Mimi. ‘All of my memories of him are of seeing him walking along the path and turning left at Hut 9, always with his head down. He was a very intense young man, and he always looked worried.

‘That's how people were there. You would have been frightened by Josh Cooper if you met him. He was a big man, and he was cumbersome. When he walked along, he would exclaim things like: “Pincers!”'

Josh Cooper's eccentricity did not end there. One story that did the rounds of Bletchley concerned the evening when he walked out of the Park gates with his hat clasped in his hand and a briefcase somehow balanced upon his head. One might easily imagine such a thing happening in an Oxford quad. As Mimi Gallilee says, ‘We accepted it as normal. You didn't laugh at him really. You got used to it. There were so many like that. Brilliant people, in their own sphere.'

Elsewhere among the huts, there had also been perceived sexual eccentricity – again, the preserve of the older universities – which Mimi Gallilee says was viewed from a radically different point of view. And this in itself was an education to the young woman, doing much to colour her post-war view of such matters: ‘When we were young, we were very ignorant, because we didn't know about homosexuality. If somebody seemed a bit effeminate, we'd just have a little giggle, but we didn't think beyond that. Was it innocence or ignorance? And you didn't hear that kind of thing being talked
about anywhere – you certainly wouldn't hear it at home – so you really didn't know very much about anything.'

Being in the grounds of Bletchley Park was then, for someone as young as Mimi Gallilee, an education in itself. She says that she would sometimes look at these sophisticated people and know that she would not be able to casually drop into their conversations. ‘The kind of conversations you would overhear would all be on a higher scale. If you overheard things in the cafeteria, they would be talking, discussing – obviously nothing about their work, but wider subjects – and it was a rarefied atmosphere.

‘The majority of them were from university,' she adds. ‘And now I can say that they wouldn't have sniggered and laughed at things that the ignorant would – such as I. They wouldn't perhaps have pointed and laughed at certain people, for instance. The more I think back, the more rarefied I realise it was.'

In the later years of the war, when Bletchley Park's numbers had multiplied and the Colossus decrypting machines had turned code-breaking almost into an industrial process, some were nevertheless keen to see the collegiate atmosphere continue. Professor Max Newman encouraged his senior staff to take time off ‘to think'. He opened up ‘research books', available should any member of staff be hit by a bright idea and wish to record it there and then. This book was open not just to mathematicians and linguists but to Wrens as well. And if enough people expressed interest in an idea, they could all be gathered together to discuss it at what would be termed ‘a tea-party'.

Finally, a quick overview of how many Bletchley Park veterans dispersed in the post-war years gives us a vivid flavour of its intellectual and artistic mettle.

Jane Fawcett, who had worked in Hut 6, managed after the war to pursue a similarly academically satisfying career in architectural history that took in running the enormously influential Victorian Society (of which John Betjeman was so prominent a member) and the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Actress Dorothy Hyson not only returned to the West End; in 1945, she joined John Gielgud's Haymarket Company, newly formed and immediately set to become highly prestigious. In 1947, she went on to marry her second husband and sometime Bletchley colleague Anthony Quayle (her first husband, Robert Douglas, had died not long before). Not long afterwards, she retired from the stage in order to concentrate on bringing up their two children, while he became one of the most recognised faces on the cinema screen, going on to be knighted.

Writer Angus Wilson, who had found Bletchley so psychologically stressful, had his first volume of short stories,
The Wrong Set
, published in 1949. These were chilly portraits of contemporary upper-middle-class life. He was to achieve real fame with his first novel
Hemlock and After
, published in 1952. Wilson's colleague and friend Bentley Bridgewater subsequently became Secretary of the British Museum.

Meanwhile, reluctant ‘Tunny' codebreaker Roy Jenkins was, after an unsuccessful attempt in Solihull, to win his first seat in Parliament – Southwark Central, in 1948. The seat soon disappeared in boundary changes, but Jenkins won another, Birmingham Stechford, in 1950. He went on to become one of the most influential politicians of his generation, rising in the 1960s to become Home Secretary and in 1967 Chancellor of the Exchequer. Like a great many politicians of that era who fought in the war – Edward Heath was another – Jenkins was very much in favour of the then Common Market. For greater economic union between member European states would help to ensure that no conflict like it could ever happen again.

Keith Batey's fellow billetee Howard Smith was later to become Ambassador to Moscow and head of MI5. David Rees went on to become a tremendously eminent Professor of Mathematics at Exeter University.

Elsewhere, the extraordinary musical traditions of Bletchley Park were upheld proudly in codebreaker Douglas Craig's subsequent
career as an opera baritone, a creative executive at Glyndebourne and later Director of Sadler's Wells theatre. Colin Thompson, one of the men who later helped to crack the Italians' alternative cipher machine, the C 38M, went on to become curator of the Scottish National Gallery. Meanwhile, naval Ultra veteran James Hogarth eventually became a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, while his colleague J.H. Plumb became a professor of history.

This brief run-down demonstrates that even though the central work of the Park may not have been directly stimulating, those young men and women who had applied themselves to the most intractable and daunting of problems had finally emerged from the institution ready to take their rightful places in government, the civil service, the arts, as though they had just matriculated from Oxford or Cambridge. Compared to their military equivalents, the young people of the Park had scarcely paused at all in their pursuits.

Unlike their military equivalents, however, they were not permitted the luxury of relating what they had achieved in the war. Exactly the reverse: with family, with spouses, with offspring – no Bletchley Park operative was allowed to say a single word about those extraordinary years.

‘My father died in 1951,’ says John Herivel. ‘And of course, he never heard anything about my war career. Although he knew I had been at Bletchley Park, he had no idea about what I had been doing. And there was a point, shortly before he died, when he experienced this tremendous frustration.

‘I was a son who had promised great things after his school career, and who then seemed, to him, to be doing nothing during the war. And this frustration spilled out. My father said: “You’ve never done anything!”’

The Official Secrets Act, says Herivel, was so deeply impressed upon everyone who signed it that even under this terrible weight of provocation, he could not imagine himself breaking it. ‘I did think he was perhaps not long for this world,’ Herivel says of his decision not to tell his father anything, ‘but really, out of all those people who had signed that act, I wasn’t going to be the one who broke it.’

It was not just parents. There were also children who had to be kept in the dark, as Mavis and Keith Batey were to find. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s and 60s, their children could not be told the slightest detail of what their parents had done throughout the war. And yet those tiny details could escape in the most surprising ways.

Mavis Batey says, for instance, that even the numerical positioning of each letter within the alphabet became ingrained to an extent that might have raised suspicions. She gives an amusing example: ‘Some years ago, my daughter was working in the Bodleian Library, right down in J Floor. Ten floors down, I said, that’s a long way. And she said “How do you know J is ten floors down?” I changed the subject. Little things like that could give you away.’