The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Page 5
No one in Hut 6 was in any doubt as to how important their work was. Those who lived in the big cities had been home and seen how many people’s houses had been turned to rubble, knew people who had lost loved ones. Some had even lost close relatives themselves in the bombing. Even if you didn’t live in a big city, you would see the impact of the bombing on your days off when you visited London. But, like all the Enigma codes, there were days when the Brown Enigma simply couldn’t be broken. In November 1940, for four straight days, Hut 6 failed to unravel it. One of those days was 14 November. Diana came on shift at four o’clock that afternoon.
‘It was a day when they hadn’t broken the code. Quite late in the day, sometime in the evening, all these German bombers started streaming over so we knew someone was being blown up and we hadn’t been able to alert them.’
The German bombers were heading for Coventry, which lay undefended by RAF fighter aircraft. The raid destroyed large parts of the city, including the cathedral, and killed 600 people. A myth grew up that Bletchley had known the raid was going to take place and that Coventry was the target, but that the Prime Minister ordered them not to say anything to prevent the Germans realising that British Intelligence had decoded the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. It wasn’t true. Why if it were would he have allowed them to warn other cities like Birmingham, or Manchester, or Cardiff, or Liverpool, that they were going to be attacked? But the accusation stuck, unfairly tainting the reputations of both Mr Churchill and Bletchley.
The codebreakers’ ability to crack Enigma dramatically improved in late 1940 when a new machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman was installed in the Park. The Bombe was based on an idea by the Poles, who before the war had linked several Enigma machines together to try to test out possible settings faster than you could by using just one machine. The Poles had called their machine the Bomba, or bomb, because it made a ticking noise like a time bomb.
The British machine was much larger and noisier than that. It was a huge electro-mechanical machine set in a bronze cabinet six and a half feet high, more than seven feet wide and two and a half feet deep. It contained a series of thirty rotating drums, designed to replicate the action of ten Enigma machines. The codebreakers in the Machine Room tried to break the code using a stream of plain German text, known as a ‘crib’, which they believed was hidden somewhere in the encoded message. Once they had worked out where they thought it was, they created a program for the Bombe. It was known as a ‘menu’ and linked the encoded letters and the letters of the German together. This menu was given to the Bombe operators who set up the machine according to the menu. The Bombe then ran through all the possible options much faster than a human being could have done and helped to speed up the codebreaking process. The first Bombe that worked properly was introduced in August 1940. It was given the name Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) but was swiftly nicknamed Agnes, or Aggie for short.
There wasn’t much time off for anyone in Hut 6 but a Bletchley Park Recreational Club was set up with a small library, a drama group, musical and choral societies as well as bridge, chess, fencing and Scottish dancing sections. Jane and Diana joined the choral society. Jane’s father had been an accomplished singer, who had performed with Vaughan Williams, and she was something of a singer herself.
‘We gave concerts, of course, the usual kind of thing. I wouldn’t say it was a very high standard of music that we put out. I remember us inspiring each other because it was so wonderful to sing.’
She and Diana also joined the Scottish dance group organised by Hugh Foss, one of the pre-war codebreakers, who was an established authority on Scottish country dancing and famous back in Scotland for having devised a number of new dances. Before the war, he had helped run the Chelsea Reel Society of which Commander Denniston had been another of the leading members. Jane thought Mr Foss was delightfully eccentric.
‘He had wonderful brogues that were knitted all the way up the front of his legs. He was very tall and certainly looked very eccentric, but he was a very good reel dancer. I suppose he’d spent his whole life at it and he was very keen to get more and more members so it became quite big. We all attended regularly because we all enjoyed it.’
There were very occasional weeks of leave but in the early days these were few and far between. Nevertheless, it was possible to save up days off and between a run of night shifts and a run of evening shifts they could come off the night shift first thing in the morning of one day. The following day would be their day off and they would then come back on shift on the evening of the next day, effectively giving them more than two days off. Most of Pam’s family were back home in Scotland but her father was working in London.
‘I would save up my days together and go and see him, or save up more time and go up to Scotland to see the rest of the family. So I wasn’t very often in the billets, except just to feed and to sleep. I was quite fortunate that my father worked for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway so I had free travel.’
Jane and her friends sometimes took the train but often hitchhiked down Watling Street into London and, when her boyfriend Ted, an officer in the Royal Navy, was not at sea, she would leave her friends and make a beeline for the HMV record store in Oxford Street to meet up with him.
‘They had these wonderful little listening capsules with two little seats and you turned on your favourite Mozart and just sat there in complete privacy for as long as you wanted. So we had the most wonderful time in HMV, listening to a lot of beautiful music and having a few precious moments together. But of course, all too soon we had to hitch a lift from a lorry back to Bletchley.’
Mair Thomas, from Pontycymer in the Welsh valleys, was at Cardiff University studying music when she was recruited to work at Bletchley in a scene that could have come from a spy novel. She was sat in the university library when a man tapped her on the shoulder. He had a posh English accent and told her he was from the Foreign Office. Somehow, he’d heard she was good at languages and liked solving puzzles. They needed people like her for hush-hush work. So she’d have to be able to keep a secret.
‘He was the classic tall, dark stranger. It sounded important, serious, and if I’m honest, a little bit glamorous. He said I’d be solving problems and using my language skills for the country. I should write to the Foreign Office in Whitehall and express my interest. With that, he turned and left.’
Mair wrote to the Foreign Office describing the encounter with the tall, dark stranger and saying that she wanted to apply for the post he’d mentioned, even though she’d no idea at all what the post was. She was called up to London, to the Foreign Office, where she was interviewed and told the bare bones of the job, including the fact that it involved breaking the German codes, before being made to sign the Official Secrets Act. She arrived in Hut 6 in August 1941, aged twenty-three, and despite having just spent a couple of years at university was struck by the informality of the place.
‘There were people scurrying around busily, some in uniform, although most were dressed in civilian clothes. This also varied enormously. I saw men in dark suits, but I also saw quite a few in jumpers and even corduroy trousers. The women were on the whole smartly dressed in frocks and jackets, but many of them wore colourful stockings. Every day witnessed an array of colourful and sometimes gaudy leg adornments and they served to raise spirits in an intense and generally serious atmosphere.’
A few weeks after she arrived, Mr Churchill visited the Park, standing on a pile of rubble to address those who were working, thanking them for all their hard work and ending by telling them that they were ‘the geese who laid the golden egg but never cackled’. The applause was deafening. He toured Hut 6 and stood behind Mair, saying that it must be very difficult to use the big, clunky Typex machine.
‘My mind turned to soup; I couldn’t think of anything to say. I may even have curtseyed out of embarrassment. Thankfully, Mr Welchman could see I was struggling and explained to him the complexity of the German Enigma and how th
ey changed their code settings every day. On their way out Mr Welchman touched my arm and told me not to worry, that all of us were feeling nervous with the PM about.’
Mair found her new colleagues friendly, but as a devout Christian there was one aspect of life in the Park which Mair didn’t like at all. Women of that era were brought up very strictly and were often fairly innocent, even ignorant, of sexual matters. But the dangers and uncertainties of war, the freedom of being away from home, and the mix of so many young men and women together, inevitably led some to live for the day.
‘Quite honestly people’s morals were very loose; men and women swapping partners all the time, it seemed to me. Quite a number of the men were married, but this didn’t stop them forming secret relationships. This was one of the dark sides of Bletchley.’
Many of the women in Hut 6 had boyfriends in the forces and were not interested in the male codebreakers, but Diana was free and single and determined to make the most of it.
‘We all had a marvellous time, all these young men, not attached. We had a very gay time going out to pubs for supper together when we were free. A lot of romance went on, very definitely a lot of romance. The whole thing was absolutely tremendous fun. It’s rather awful in the middle of the war. We had to be there, it was an emergency and I think we all put our hearts into it. But I think we all enjoyed being there.’
Diana was particularly taken by one man. She wasn’t the only one to regard Dennis Babbage, one of the brightest of the mathematicians, as a bit of a catch. Although Jane was in love with her naval officer and not interested in other men, she too thought Mr Babbage rather good-looking. Diana was very keen on him and it was not long before they were married. But it was soon clear that it was a disaster.
‘Babbage was a very attractive man but we had no sexual intercourse on the whole of our honeymoon so I could just have had the thing annulled but of course I didn’t. He was a charming person.’
There was something of a minor scandal when shortly after they arrived back at Bletchley, moving into a house together in Woburn Sands, one of Diana’s friends began pursuing Mr Babbage. Jane was unaware of the problems on the honeymoon and was quite shocked by the speed at which it all happened.
‘This girl pinched him from his very new wife. He was only married a while before he got into her clutches. It might have been a few weeks. It felt like a very short time. Dennis was a great scholar but he was rather good-looking, that was probably one of the reasons that he got snapped up so quickly.’
Diana took it in her stride, remaining friends with Dennis and going on to marry the slightly older Geoffrey Barraclough, a renowned medieval historian, who was working as a senior intelligence officer in Hut 3. But another love tangle was to have far more serious effects.
One of the girls in Hut 6, Mary, a young Glaswegian woman, had been dating someone in Hut 8 (the naval Enigma section), but he had also been seeing a lot of Gillian, another of the Hut 6 girls. The rivalry exploded in the canteen, where the boring if filling nature of the food ensured that all the attention was on the row between the two young women.
Mary was particularly upset at what she clearly saw as a threat to her own relationship with the Hut 8 codebreaker and told Gillian that he’d shared lots of secrets about codes that had been broken and gave some examples in an attempt to try to demonstrate that it was her he was really keen on. Gillian’s response, claiming that he had passed on other even more important secrets to her, and naming some of them, only escalated the row.
Mair was sat at the same table watching and listening in horror. She liked both girls although she’d been worried before by their willingness to chat about work in a way which they’d been told never to do. But this was far worse than anything they’d done before.
‘Everyone froze and went silent. Both girls realised that they had taken this too far and I looked around the crowded canteen to see if anyone was coming to tell them off. After a few moments, Mary looked as if she was going to reply but I piped up and told them both not to say any more or they would be in serious trouble. We all dispersed and made our way back to the hut.’
But that wasn’t the end of it. No sooner had they got back into Hut 6 than they started all over again, each claiming more secrets that the other girl hadn’t been told. Suddenly, one of the female supervisors stormed into the room. She’d received a complaint from someone who’d heard the row in the canteen.
‘I cannot believe what I’ve just heard,’ she said. ‘Or the gossip you indulged in during lunch. You have signed the Official Secrets Act. You have said things that should never have been said or repeated and you’ve disgraced yourselves.’
They were both graduates and had been employed in Hut 6 because of their supposed intelligence and discretion but they had broken that trust and she had no choice but to tell them they were being dismissed immediately. Mary tried to plead with her but she was wasting her time and within minutes they’d both left Hut 6 and were on their way out of Bletchley Park, never to return. Mair felt ill and frightened by the sudden way in which the axe had fallen on two friends and colleagues.
‘I had never seen anything like this before. There was absolutely no mercy shown, no second chance offered. They had broken the rules and they must pay for it. I tentatively looked around the room and everybody else looked bewildered and anxious. I think we were all close to tears.’
3
Sink the Bismarck
Sally Norton’s first contact with Nazi Germany came in 1937 when her parents sent her to Munich to improve her German. She’d been brought up at her mother’s Scottish ancestral home, Gilmerton House, a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion around twenty miles east of Edinburgh. It was a very comfortable childhood. Her grandfather was the 5th Lord Grantley and, like many young girls from upper-class families, Sally – whose formal name was the more refined Sarah – didn’t go to school. She was taught German, French and Italian by a succession of governesses and hated them all. ‘But I think they gave me a pretty good education, especially in languages.’
Despite her ability to speak German, Munich was the very last place Sally wanted to go. She was seventeen, had a mind of her own, and didn’t share the obsession with Hitler of some young, upper-class women – Unity and Diana Mitford being perhaps the best-known examples. She couldn’t see how going to Nazi Germany could improve anyone.
‘I went reluctantly and with bad grace because I really wanted to go to Italy. My innocent mind was full of fantasies of romantic Italian boys, but my mother dismissed them as unsuitable for my tender age and I was dispatched to Germany forthwith.’
She was sent to stay with a Bavarian Graf and Gräfin, a duke and duchess, who were kind and welcoming to her, although they pretended they couldn’t speak English in order to force Sally and the two other British girls who were staying with them to speak German. ‘They were very anti-Nazi, although of course they didn’t admit it openly, and they were lovely. I hated everything else about Germany. The streets were full of people in uniforms strutting around in jackboots.’
As their understanding of the language improved, the girls became very angry over the behaviour of the Nazis. It was to lead to a minor diplomatic incident that would see Sally sent home in disgrace. She and her friends were particularly incensed with the ‘odious’ anti-Jewish newspaper Der Stürmer, which even top Nazis like Herman Göring criticised – it was not allowed in any of the departments he controlled. Der Stürmer was read by a small minority of largely ill-educated people, but because it had Hitler’s support it was pinned up in glass-covered display cases in every city for everyone to read. Munich, the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, was no exception. Sally and her friends were shocked by its virulent attacks on the Jews.
‘It was both vicious and destructive. Myself and other like-minded English girls also studying the language were outraged by this obscenity and the seventeen-year-old energy was detonated by the unjust and atrocious persecution of the Jewish people.’
‘The plan, hardly a plot, was to secure a hammer, sneak out at night, smash the glass and tear down the offensive publication from its frame. The stage was set nearby in Durchstrasse. The scene, a street corner. We struck the glass in the display case in the middle of the frame, pulled down and tore up the filthy newspaper and went on to the next target. That was when the fun began.’
The noise of shattering glass that had nothing to do with their own attacks on Jewish shops and businesses alerted a gang of baton-wielding Stormtroopers who chased the girls around the streets, but their jackboots were a hindrance and the young girls, all wearing gym shoes, ran off in different directions, evading them easily.
‘After a few nights of this hedonistic action, the glass was suddenly replaced by wire mesh, which was a slight hindrance but overcome by purchasing a pair of wire cutters from an ironmonger in another district; this process of removal took longer and scouts had to be posted at intervals.’