The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Read online

  4

  The Wrens Arrive

  Morag Maclennan was one of the first Wrens to arrive at Bletchley Park in early 1941 as the number of recruits needed forced the authorities to spread their net far wider. They were no longer simply taking academics and young women from ‘good families’ who could be trusted to keep the secret. They were looking for young women from any background so long as they had the necessary intelligence and ability to ‘keep Mum’.

  Eight Wrens were brought in as a trial measure to work in Hut 11 operating the Bombes, the top-secret machines that tested various Enigma settings potentially being used by the Germans. These machines were vital if Hut 6 and the naval codebreakers in Hut 8 were to be able to break the codes quickly enough to get the intelligence to British military and naval commanders in time.

  Morag and her friends had joined the Wrens because they wanted to do their bit and liked the idea of being near the sea. There was, of course, the added attraction of meeting young sailors. For Morag herself, the navy was in her blood. Her brother was a marine engineer and already in the navy, as were a number of her cousins.

  ‘We used to go up to the Clyde a lot and go round on Clyde steamers so I was very enthusiastic about ships and the sea. There was a long lag between when I applied, several months I was waiting, looking forward to it and reading snippets about things that were happening and thinking, gosh, this is going to be interesting, being in a port and big ships and all that kind of excitement – that’s what I was looking forward to.’

  The Women’s Royal Naval Service was initially set up during the First World War and disbanded when the war came to an end. But as the prospects of another war with Germany increased in 1938, the Wrens were re-formed, with advertisements for volunteers drawing in large numbers of women, including some who had served during the First World War and had persuaded their daughters to join as well. Like the other women’s services, the WAAF and the ATS, the Wrens really took off after conscription for women was introduced in 1941.

  There were three separate sites where all Wrens received their basic training: Mill Hill in north London, Wesley College at Headingley in Leeds, and Tullichewan Castle by Loch Lomond in Scotland. There were only three weeks to train each ‘draft’ so the instructors concentrated on testing the girls’ ability to obey orders and making them feel that even though they weren’t allowed to go to sea they were still part of the Royal Navy. As at Bletchley, everything had a naval term, based on the concept of being on a ship. The Wrens slept in ‘cabins’ on ‘bunks’ not beds. The floor was the ‘deck’. The kitchen was the ‘galley’, the dining room the ‘mess’, or for officers the ‘wardroom’. Time off was ‘shore leave’.

  Morag was told to report to the railway station and only then to open her travel warrant to find out where she was going.

  ‘I was hoping it would be Portsmouth or Plymouth or somewhere, so to find that it said Bletchley was a terrible disappointment. We got off at the station and somebody met us. We went up a little gravel path straight into Hut 11 and there were all these machines there and we were told what we were going to do, and it was quite obvious that there was no escape.’

  The Bombes were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM). There were only four Bombes in Hut 11 when Morag arrived and up until that point they had been operated by BTM staff co-opted into the RAF. But the codebreakers knew they would need many more and had ordered an initial batch of seventy. That would need around 700 people to run them and BTM didn’t have that many men to spare. They needed them to build the machines, which is why Bletchley Park had been forced to call in the Wrens.

  Initially, Morag and the other Wrens were allowed to wear civilian clothes to blend in with the rest of the staff at Bletchley, most of whom were civilians, a lot of them young academics or former students who wore very casual clothes. So all the members of the armed forces who worked at Bletchley wore civilian clothes, whatever rank they were. Rank meant very little among the codebreakers in any case. Everyone was treated on the basis of the job regardless of whether they were an officer, a sergeant or just a basic airman, sailor or soldier. Then an admiral came to visit Bletchley and wanted to know where all his Wrens were. When a number of young women in civilian clothes were pointed out to him, he blew his top. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘My Wrens should be jumping up, hands down seams of skirts.’ He went back to London on a mission, determined to sort out the lax discipline at Bletchley, and from then on everyone in the armed forces was forced to wear uniform to work.

  The Bombes were proving their worth and more and more were needed, along with more and more Wrens to operate them. Dozens of Bombes were installed in country houses around Bletchley Park which were specially requisitioned as bases for the machines themselves and as accommodation for the hundreds of Wrens who would be operating them. Some of these country mansions were very beautiful, others were close to derelict. The first five, at Steeple Claydon, Walton Hall, Crawley Grange, Wavendon House and Gayhurst Manor, were all taken over by Bletchley in 1942.

  Soon the authorities were forced to look further afield, creating a custom-built site capable of housing more than 60 Bombes and 600 Wrens at Stanmore, north of London. The need for more staff to run the Bombes was acute and the authorities began to advertise for Wrens ‘for interesting and extremely important work . . . necessitating the operating of light electrical machinery. Girls should be of good physique and education, quick, accurate and keen, with good powers of concentration.’

  Colette St George-Yorke became a Wren in October 1943 when just seventeen and a half, the earliest age at which you could join up. Colette had been brought up in Harrogate in Yorkshire and went to the local convent school. Her father was a timber merchant, but because of the war the government had taken over all the buying and selling of timber and he was working for the Ministry of Aircraft Production. When Colette left school she was mad keen on becoming a Wren but she was only sixteen and had to do something else until she was old enough to join up.

  ‘The chap who lived next door to us in Harrogate was the managing director of the Yorkshire Dyeware and Chemical Company in Leeds and he said there was a job for me. I could be a lab assistant. So I was there for a year until I was seventeen and a half and could officially apply to join the Wrens.’

  Colette signed up and was given a medical and sent home. A couple of weeks later she was called forward to the training and drafting depot at Mill Hill.

  ‘And I thought it was absolutely marvellous. They had a quarterdeck and a white ensign. You couldn’t walk across the quarterdeck. You had to go at the double. If you went across the quarterdeck you had to salute the white ensign.’

  The Wrens were organised into different divisions, each given the name of a famous naval hero. Colette was in Howe Division, named after the eighteenth-century Admiral of the Fleet Richard Howe who defeated the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June. The young Wrens had two weeks of training as a probationer, during which time they wore navy blue overalls and could leave if they didn’t like it. Colette was told she wouldn’t be given the smart navy blue uniform she’d joined up to wear until the third and final week of training, once she’d committed to staying in the Wrens.

  ‘They got us up in the morning at half past four with a klaxon and we used to have to scrub the floor of the corridor and then we would have a great big mug of tea and some bread and dripping. I thought this was fantastic. And I made friends with a girl there who came from Yorkshire as well, Sheila Tong. Anyway, eventually we were called up for an interview on what we were going to do. There were only three categories left: cooks, stewards, or Pembroke Five.’

  Pembroke merely indicated it was a shore station – at that stage Wrens weren’t allowed to serve on board ships – but it didn’t tell them anything about what the job was. The two girls looked at each other and then at the petty officer who was advising them.

  ‘What’s Pembroke Five?’

  ‘Can’t tell you
.’

  ‘Ooh, that sounds interesting. We’ll do that.’

  They spent another two weeks at Mill Hill, having to wait long after everyone else on their draft had been posted away because they needed to be vetted to make sure they weren’t a security risk.

  ‘Finally the day came when we were given our uniforms. We got into a coach and off we went. I can remember Sheila saying, “Isn’t this exciting. I wonder where we’re going.”’

  About twenty minutes later they pulled into another new Bombe base at Eastcote, just ten miles west of Mill Hill. It was a depressing anticlimax. This was the secret base? They’d been hoping for some sort of top-secret intelligence organisation hidden away and they’d ended up at a muddy building site a few miles down the road. Colette couldn’t hide her disappointment.

  ‘It looked awful. They were still building it.’

  The girls were taken first into the accommodation, one of two parallel rows of large wooden huts, known as ‘cabins’, each housing around fifty Wrens sleeping in bunk beds. Each of these ‘cabins’ housed a complete shift or ‘watch’ of Wrens. They were built close together with water and sewage pipes running down the gap between the two rows. Each row had a central corridor linking the series of huts and at each end of each hut was a ‘single cabin’ for the petty officer in charge of the watch. The huts were all named after famous warships. Colette’s was HMS Orion, after one of the ships which defeated the French at the Battle of Trafalgar, still regarded as the Royal Navy’s most glorious victory. Colette was beginning to wonder if she’d made the right decision.

  ‘Someone had said to us, this is Pembroke Five. You’ll never get out of it. You’ll be here ’til the end of the war, unless you drop dead. We had to put the bunks up. We had to put them together and we were scrubbing and cleaning the hut and the corridor and then finally we were taken to Block B where the Bombes were, and introduced to them.’

  Pembroke Five was the unit name for all the Wrens working for Bletchley wherever they were based. The Bombes were huge, bronze machines more than six foot high, seven foot wide and two and a half foot deep (1.8m x 2.1m x 0.8m) set in rows of three, with a dozen Bombes, sometimes more, in each of the rooms or ‘bays’. The new Wrens were told that they would be helping to break the German codes and that the Bombes were checking for possible settings. Each Bombe contained thirty rotating drums, every one of them replicating the action of an individual Enigma rotor. The girls had to load the drums and wire them up at the back according to instructions on the ‘menu’ they were given. The wires had plugs on them which Colette and the other Wrens plugged into sockets alongside the drums.

  ‘We were shown how to plug up the back. It was very complicated, it really was. It took some learning. The drums went round at different revolutions. I can remember the noise, clackety-clackety-clackety-clack, and having your sleeves rolled up, working hard and so much stretching. They said they wanted girls not less than five foot eight inches. I was five foot eight and a half tall and even I had to stretch. It was very noisy – the clackety-clack sound. Filthy mess and stench, hot black oil dripping onto the floor.’

  They worked in pairs, one of them plugging up the Bombe and the other sitting beside the Bombe at a machine designed to replicate the action of Enigma, checking the results to see if they produced German language. Colette always did the plugging up, following a ‘menu’ worked out at Bletchley on the basis of a piece of German text the codebreakers thought might be somewhere in a particular encoded message.

  ‘You’d put the drums up, and then go around the back and plug them up according to the menu. The menu was brought in to us. We had a Wren petty officer in charge of us and she would hand out the menus.’

  Once it was set up, the Bombe would be switched on and go through its cycle with the drums turning round, taking just under a quarter of an hour to find the first possible setting for a string of encoded letters that would fit the menu devised by Bletchley.

  ‘When the whole thing stopped we would take the reading from the side of the Bombe and that would go in to the girls who were doing the checking. I remember the joy of hearing the shout “job up” from the checking room, which meant that the “stop” that you’d got made sense and gave them the words they were looking for and would be bunged through on the scrambler phone to Bletchley.’

  There were a lot of ‘bad’ stops where the checkers found the settings the Bombe had thrown up didn’t work. This was usually because the little wire brushes in the back of each of the drums had got too close together and the electricity had ‘shorted’ across between the brushes, making a false connection.

  ‘There were little metal brushes inside the drums and they could come together and cause a short. If it was a “bad stop” we knew there was a short somewhere and that meant we had to take all the drums out and move the brushes. We used to spend all the time while the thing was running with a pair of tweezers going over these brushes on the other drums.’

  When the job was up, they always felt a bit of pride that what they were doing might have helped somehow. When they were working on an actual job they were told which of the German armed forces the code belonged to. They used codewords to identify whether it was a navy, army or air force message: porpoise for the navy, wolf for the army and eagle for the air force. When each job was finished, the chief petty officer in charge of the watch would shout, ‘Job up. Strip.’ As the person setting up the Bombe, it was Colette’s job then to unplug the wiring and take out all of the drums as quickly as possible ready for the next menu.

  ‘I do remember it was very hard work and there was a real sense that you were doing something important. It was a strange time, difficult to replicate really, everyone living on a knife edge. We were very well aware that we had to win the war or else. What was going to happen to us was going to be worse than anything that had been seen on the continent. There was an air of urgency about things.’

  Anne Zuppinger was nineteen when she arrived at Bletchley in early 1941, in the first batch of Wrens. Her father was a corn merchant in London, a business he’d inherited from his father, a Swiss national who’d come to London in the late 1870s and married a local woman. Despite her young age, Anne was spotted early on as someone capable of carrying responsibility and earmarked as a potential officer. She understood the importance of the work and the need for total secrecy. So when Commander Denniston complained that the Wren training bases were sending them the wrong type of girls she was commissioned and sent out to the training bases to select the type of people needed by Bletchley and its outstations.

  The training staff at Mill Hill, Headingley and Tullichewan made an initial selection on the basis that the Wrens sent to Bletchley had to have a good education, but they also had to be someone who wasn’t going to be a security risk. They had to be dependable and prepared to do what could at times be an extremely boring job knowing that it was important to the country. They also needed to be a certain height, because the Bombe machines were quite tall, and they had to be fit and have extremely good eyesight. All this might seem easy to determine but the staff at the training bases advising the Wrens on the various jobs they could do had no idea what was going on at Bletchley, which made it difficult for them to know who would be best for the job. Anne had operated the Bombes, learning how to do it from scratch. She knew the people doing it – who was good and who was not so good. She would have a much better idea than the training staff of which Wrens to select.

  ‘I was working with the Bombes and therefore knew exactly what was needed, whereas they had people recruiting from the various training centres who didn’t know what the girls were required to do.’

  Initially, Anne was just looking for people capable of working on the Bombes, but soon she was also selecting Wrens to work in the Naval Section in Hut 4 and in other roles, including working inside Hut 6. Amid concern that the Wrens were not getting the status their role deserved, all Wrens working for Bletchley whether on the Bombes or in other areas were
given the intriguing job title of ‘Writer Special Duties (X)’.

  ‘When I went up to interview them, I used to try to make quite sure that the person that I was seeing would realise that this was a very vital job they were doing but also that it was going to be something that they would not be able to talk about at all.’

  The extent of the secrecy at the time is difficult to imagine in today’s world. Audrey Wind, from Folkestone in Kent, was only eighteen when she was picked out by Anne to operate the Bombes. A week after arriving at Tullichewan in the early summer of 1944, she and five other trainees were told to report to the administrative offices in the actual castle.

  ‘We racked our brains to think what we had done wrong but could think of nothing.’

  They were ordered to sit quietly outside the office and wait. They would be seen in alphabetical order. So the girls agreed among themselves that the first who went in would come out and tell the others what it was about.

  ‘The first Wren was called in and we waited with bated breath for her to come out and tell us what we were there for. But when the door opened she marched straight past us and out of the castle.’

  The other five wondered what on earth was going on, but as each of them went in to be briefed by Anne, they came out obeying her instructions that they must not discuss it with anyone else. Audrey was fifth to go in (there was a girl behind her whose surname was Wright). Anne told her only that there was some very secret work to do that was vitally important if they were going to win the war. She couldn’t be told what the actual work was until she’d agreed to do it. In the meantime, she mustn’t say anything about it to anyone else.

  ‘I was then told “About turn” and marched out of the room, straight past poor Wren Wright.’

  Anne heard about the girls’ consternation later and laughed. So far as she was concerned it simply showed that she’d made the right choices when she selected those particular Wrens. They were told not to talk about it and they didn’t, and all of them agreed to take the job. Anne never stopped drumming in the secrecy aspect, which was repeatedly stressed when the girls were in their various ‘Wrenneries’ doing the job.