The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Read online

  THE DEBS OF

  BLETCHLEY PARK

  and Other Stories

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 The Biggest Lunatic Asylum in Britain

  2 Breaking Enigma

  3 Sink the Bismarck

  4 The Wrens Arrive

  5 Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  6 Turing and the U-boats

  7 Dilly’s Girls

  8 The World’s First Electronic Computer

  9 The JappyWaaf

  10 An Extraordinary Army of People

  Endnote

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Roma Davies lives in Bower Mount Road, to the west of Maidstone. It’s one of those spacious tree-lined streets of elegant Edwardian villas that the estate agents like to call desirable. Roma has lived here for most of her life, ever since she and Mike finally got married.

  They met at the end of the war. He’d been on the Arctic convoys taking food and equipment to Russia, sailing around the north of Norway to Archangel. They lost sixteen Royal Navy ships and eighty-five merchant vessels to the U-boats. God knows how many men. If you went into the sea it was so cold you were dead within minutes. Roma was in the navy herself back then, a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, known to all and sundry as the Wrens.

  ‘Mike and I wanted to get married but we didn’t for ages because his mother said no.’ Roma laughs. ‘We were ruled by our parents. It’s extraordinary to think of it now. I’ve never been able to be the boss. My daughters say, “You must be joking, Mum!” But I never was the boss.’

  When she left the Wrens, she wanted to work in horticulture. She loves plants. Her father didn’t think that was a proper job for a young woman and sent her on a Pitman’s secretarial course. Working as a typist was the sensible thing to do; it would bring in money straightaway. So Roma got a job at the Alliance Building Society offices on London’s Park Lane.

  When she and Mike did eventually get married in 1951, they moved into a rented cottage at the southern end of Bower Mount Road. When their first daughter was two, with Mike working as an engineer on reasonably good money, they bought one of those elegant Edwardian villas with large bay windows, beautiful arched porches and the longest garden you could ever imagine. It was to be Roma’s home for more than fifty years.

  ‘It was a lovely house: lovely big garden; lots of happy memories; lots of friends. Sadly, they’re all dying off now.’

  Mike’s heart gave way in 1996 and after Roma’s second stroke, her daughters persuaded her she couldn’t live on her own. She moved into the Grove, another of those Edwardian houses that line Bower Mount Road, and even more spacious than Roma’s house. The Grove is a residential home for the elderly.

  Roma sits in a tall-backed armchair in her room. It’s about the size of a small hotel suite. There are photographs of her family, a few small pieces of furniture, and some paintings and ornaments she brought from her old home. They include two beautiful Royal Doulton figurines and a pretty watercolour of her grandmother’s old house that reminds Roma of her childhood. She smiles a lot. She seems happy and the people at the Grove are kind and caring. A chirpy, friendly carer pops in to bring her tea and a piece of cake. It’s someone’s birthday. The two women laugh at a misunderstanding over the sugar, comfortable in each other’s company. Roma is definitely happy here, you can tell. She’s smiling a lot, and laughing.

  Even so. The Grove might be in Bower Mount Road, but it isn’t Roma’s home. Not her real home. Not that the old house she and Mike lived in is hers any more – it was sold to pay for her care. It’s someone else’s now, to do with as they please. For a brief moment, the smile disappears.

  ‘They’ve completely destroyed my front garden. The house was built in 1906. It’s more than a hundred years old. There were all sorts of treasures in that garden, a hundred years of treasures, and they’ve just ripped them out and made a huge car park.’

  The smile, though, is never far away. There’s a photograph of a pretty young woman in Wren’s uniform. She’s standing outside an old country house, smiling at the camera, a very pretty smile. Her hands are clasped contentedly in front of her. She looks happy . . . and very proud.

  ‘I was determined to be a Wren from when I was at school. I couldn’t wait to get into the Wrens. I wanted to do my bit. We were brought up to be patriotic.’

  Roma’s family lived in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex, before the war. Roma’s mother loved being by the sea, as did Roma. In the summer, she and her brother would rush out of school at lunchtime and take a taxi down to the beach to have a picnic with their mother before taking another taxi back to school. But in the summer of 1939, everybody knew there was going to be a war with Hitler’s Germany. Roma’s father thought the Thames Estuary would be the first place to be bombed, so he packed the entire family off to Devon.

  ‘Three days before war broke out we moved down to my great-aunt’s in Exeter. There was my brother, my sisters, my grandmother, two aunts and their children. It was a huge house, but we soon filled it up.’ She laughs again and then the smile is back, the same pretty smile in the photograph. ‘I was very sheltered. It wasn’t until we went down into town that I even realised we were at war.’

  As soon as she was seventeen, Roma rushed down to the local WRNS recruiting office to sign up, returning dejected to school after being told that seventeen wasn’t old enough. You had to be seventeen and a half.

  Six months later, Roma was a Wren. She trained at Mill Hill in north London, expecting to be posted somewhere by the sea, but to her disappointment she was sent just a few miles down the road to a new base at Eastcote where everything was secret. She was working with a lot of other Wrens on weird machines, with no real idea of what any of them were doing, or why. Except everything they did had to be done very quickly. Lives depended on it, so they did precisely what they were told.

  ‘I had no idea of the overall picture and no notion of what my friends were doing,’ she recalls.

  When they had days off, they took the Tube into London and had fun, or simply something to eat that was different from navy rations.

  ‘We were often treated because we were in uniform. The manager of a cinema would say: “Oh, let them in.” We’d go to the Variety Club, and see comedians, dancers and singers – decent ones. We’d eat in Lyons Corner Houses, nothing special, baked beans on toast, that sort of thing. We were paid the princely sum of nine shillings [45p] a week. We had quite a few meals each week on that nine shillings. Incredible really how we made it last.’

  After a few months, they told Roma they had a new job for her, somewhere north of London. She’d be living in much more comfortable conditions, in an old country mansion, and she’d be working at somewhere very, very secret, even more secret than Eastcote. Roma was to be one of the thousands of young women who spent their war carrying out work vital to the war effort, but never able to confide in anyone about it.

  She would be working at Bletchley Park.

  1

  The Biggest Lunatic Asylum in Britain

  Phoebe Senyard was not very happy. She was packing up all the office files and equipment into tea chests. Phoebe had only just returned from a holiday with her mother to be told she was being sent to the ‘War Station’ at Bletchley Park the very next day. She and Commander Crawford were to be the entire German naval codebreaking section. They weren’t the only ones going, of course, but the Navy had insisted that the Government Code and Cypher School’s real German Naval Section must stay in London, sat in the Admiralty, so she
and Commander Crawford were going to be the only German naval ‘experts’ at Bletchley. Phoebe was no codebreaker and she certainly wouldn’t regard herself as a German expert. She didn’t understand how anyone would. She’d originally been recruited as a clerk and knew very little about the German ‘Enigma’ codes. Not that anyone else seemed to understand them either.

  It was August 1939. Everybody knew that a war with Hitler was just around the corner. But no one had done much about the German codes. Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who as chief of the secret service was in charge of the spies and the codebreakers, didn’t believe the German codes would be broken. They were too modern, too complex. Ciphers produced by a machine, not by people. How could you break them without the machine? Commander Alastair Denniston, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School, agreed with the admiral. He usually did. Only Dilly Knox seemed to believe that Enigma could be broken. Phoebe was in no position to say whether the admiral or Mr Knox was right. She’d been picked out as one of the clerical workers who might be capable of doing a bit more, and once a week or so, if she was up to date with her own work, she helped Miss Yeoman register the naval Enigma messages. But there was very little else that anyone could do with them other than note down the main details, put them in the right order and then stack them away in a filing cabinet. No one thought there would ever be a chance of breaking them. Not even Mr Knox, and he was the Enigma expert. They were far too complex, even more complex than the German army and air force Enigma messages. Well, that’s what Sheila Yeoman said.

  But the more pressing problem was her mother. Who would look after her? Phoebe was forty-eight, a member of that generation of women who’d watched the men they loved march off to the trenches, some never to return. For many, it signalled the end of any hope of raising a family of their own. All Phoebe had now was her mother – and her younger brother Henry – and Mother was in her seventies. That’s why the job at Broadway Buildings had been so handy, a short train trip from Peckham Rye to Victoria and then a five-minute walk into work. Bletchley was much further away. Phoebe knew, of course, that if there was a war, there would have to be sacrifices. But she had responsibilities. Her father had died three years earlier, leaving just the three of them. But Henry was still a young man and if there was another war he was bound to be called up. What would become of Mother then? So it was with some trepidation, or as Phoebe put it, ‘fear and trembling’, that she agreed to go.

  ‘I did try to protest but I was told that it was only for a fortnight so I gave in.’ Not only was she going to have to leave Mother on her own but no one seemed able to tell her what she would be doing. ‘A great deal of secrecy had to be observed, of course. I think Commander Crawford was overawed by the secrecy and was afraid to discuss the work with me at all.’

  Secrecy and codebreaking went hand in hand. The British had been breaking the codes of their enemies, and very often their friends as well, since the fourteenth century. Letters sent back to Paris, Madrid and Rome by the ambassadors of France, Spain and the Vatican were intercepted and read on the orders of King Edward II. The British intercept operations were secret but the ambassadors soon realised what was going on and began writing their letters in code. Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham wasn’t going to let that stop him finding out what the Queen’s enemies were planning. He set up a codebreaking operation run by the Queen’s astrologer John Dee, whose predictions suddenly became so accurate that the Spanish Governor of the Netherlands complained that his reports for the King of Spain were being read in London before they even reached Madrid.

  Oliver Cromwell went further, placing a ‘Secret Man’ in the Post Office to intercept and read the letters of suspected opponents of his government, with Parliament backing the scheme ‘to discover and prevent many dangerous and wicked designs’. Before long, the ‘Secret Man’ had become a ‘Secret Department’ controlled by the Foreign Office with its own ‘Secret Deciphering Branch’, but when news of its extensive operations inside Britain emerged in the mid-1800s it was closed down.

  The Great War, as Phoebe and her colleagues would still have called it, and the use of the new ‘wireless apparatus’ for military communications, revived the need for codebreakers. Wireless messages could be intercepted by the enemy, so the important ones had to be sent in code. Both the Royal Navy and the British Army set up wireless sites to intercept German messages and recruited university professors to decode them. Commander Denniston was in charge of Room 40, as the Admiralty codebreakers were known, from the room in the Old Admiralty Buildings that they occupied. Dilly Knox, a noted classical scholar, was one of its leading lights, decoding a lot of important German messages, including the one that brought the Americans into the war in 1917.

  When the Great War came to an end, the army and navy codebreaking organisations were combined into the Government Code and Cypher School and began breaking American, Japanese and Russian codes. The American and Japanese navies were seen as the main threat to Britain’s domination of the seas and the Russians were dangerous Bolsheviks intent on overthrowing Western democracy. The Germans didn’t feature in the codebreakers’ list of targets. They were assumed to have been beaten once and for all. It was only after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 that Dilly began to work on the Enigma codes. He managed to break the Spanish and Italian versions, but the German Enigma messages were impossible to crack.

  By now the Code and Cypher School had been taken over by Admiral Sinclair and was based just across the road from St James’s underground station in the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, soon to acquire the title of MI6. The vast majority of the actual codebreakers were men, with women like Phoebe involved in menial tasks such as the basic registering of messages, typing or filing. There were a couple of female codebreakers, one of whom, Joan Wingfield, a pretty 26-year-old from Sheffield, had spent the early 1930s in Italy living with her Uncle Claude, the Lloyd’s agent (and the MI6 man) in Livorno. Joan soon became fluent in Italian. But in 1935 Uncle Claude was thrown out of Italy for spying and joined the Code and Cypher School as an Italian expert, bringing Joan in with him. She was soon decoding messages between Italian ships and their shore bases. But she was very much an exception. By and large the most responsible job given to a woman was as a translator. They were also paid substantially less than the men, around £200 a year for a junior civil servant compared to the male salary of £250. This was regarded as perfectly normal within the Civil Service and across industry at that time. The men would have families to support; the women didn’t need so much money.

  Barbara Abernethy joined at the age of sixteen, which meant she earned even less. She was from Belfast but had been educated at a convent in Belgium and was fluent in French, German and Flemish. In August 1937, when Commander Denniston was looking for a typist, she was transferred from the Foreign Office to Broadway where she was paid the grand sum of 31 shillings and 6d a week, just under £82 a year.

  ‘I was posted over there not knowing what I was doing and told that it was strict secrecy. I was there for a week and they apparently approved of me because I was kept on and I stayed there.’ Barbara worked with Phoebe and liked her a lot. ‘She was very pretty, a very good-looking woman. She seemed terribly old to me but she must have been in her forties. Very nice, very pleasant face, very confident, everybody liked her.’

  Not everyone was so universally liked as Phoebe. Many of the older codebreakers were eccentric personalities and difficult to handle, not least Dilly Knox, who threatened to resign at the slightest change in routine. When one of the codebreakers committed suicide, throwing himself under an underground train at Sloane Square station, Admiral Sinclair decided that working such clever men too hard ‘overstrained their minds’, and he ordered Commander Denniston to cut back their hours. They didn’t have to start work until ten o’clock in the morning, had ninety minutes for lunch, and finished on the dot at five o’clock. Despite her low pay, Barbara thought it was wonderful.

&nbs
p; ‘Life was very civilised in those days. We stopped for tea and it was brought in by messengers. I was very impressed by this, first job I’d ever had and it seemed paradise to me. Nice people and very interesting work. I thought, well, this is the life, isn’t it. Thank God I’m not back in the Foreign Office.’

  Many of the young women working for the Code and Cypher School were, like Barbara and Joan, from relatively well-to-do families, recruited because they knew someone who worked there, and were therefore deemed to be trustworthy. Diana Russell-Clarke’s father Edward had worked with the codebreakers during the Great War; at the beginning of 1939, with war with Hitler on the horizon, she decided she needed to do something to defend Britain. Naturally, the first person she turned to for help in finding the right job was her mother. It was simply the normal thing for a young woman of Diana’s class to do.

  ‘My mother simply rang up Commander Denniston, whom we called Liza because we’d known him all our lives, and asked him: “Have you got a job for Diana?” He said, “Yes. Send her along.” So that’s where I started. We were decoding. But it was very, very boring, just subtracting one row of figures from another. We were on the third floor. There were MI6 people upstairs. They were always known as “the other side”. We didn’t have any truck with them.’

  Concerned that his staff would be at risk if the Germans bombed London, the admiral had bought a country estate and mansion at Bletchley Park, far enough away from London to be safe but linked to Whitehall via the main telephone communications cables that connected the capital with the far north. This was to be the ‘War Station’ for Britain’s spies and codebreakers.

  Phoebe, Joan, Barbara and Diana were among just over a hundred codebreakers who travelled to Bletchley Park in August 1939. Many went by train, instructed to make sure that they only bought a ticket that was ‘of the appropriate class’ for their status within the Code and Cypher School, which for Phoebe and Barbara was very definitely third class. A few, like Diana, were lucky enough to have cars and were encouraged to take them so they could help ferry people into work each day.