The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Some veterans recalled their utter dismay upon arriving at Bletchley; the railway station itself was frowsy, and the small town that it served did not look much more promising. Architectural historian Jane Fawcett, MBE, recalls simply that Bletchley was “a dump.” Even the first prospect of the Park itself—which from 1939 was surrounded with wire fencing, “like Whipsnade Zoo,” as veteran Diana Plowman put it—might not have seemed especially enticing. One or two of these young people, when being sized up for their new duties, had imagined that their top secret missions would involve them being parachuted in behind enemy lines. Drab, dreary, provincial Bletchley seemed a long way from such excitement.

  Indeed, for a few, such as Scot Irene Young, the initial impressions of their new surroundings were downright depressing. Directly upon arriving, she recalled,

  I fell on the gravel, severely grazing my knee and what was worse, ruining one of my two pairs of stockings.… The matron of Sick Bay, a formidable lady by the name of Mrs. de Courcey-Meade, painted my wound (unwashed) with gentian violet, and I had to suffer the embarrassment of meeting my colleagues with a tattered and fluorescent leg. It duly went septic.

  I found no great welcome. People seemed quite oblivious of my arrival, and no doubt it was unconscious arrogance to expect it to be otherwise.3

  Not everyone recruited was an expert. The place, after all, needed a certain amount of mundane work doing, such as the role of messenger. And it was to fourteen-year-old Mimi Gallilee that one such role fell. Indeed, the very nature of the job that she did then—and the duties to which she was later promoted—gave her an almost uniquely broad view of the people, and of the Park. For everyone else, there was strict compartmentalization; but a girl like Mimi could roam everywhere, and saw more than most.

  As a schoolgirl, she had been evacuated from Islington, north London, the year before, and had eventually been joined by her mother and sister. School, for all these extra children imported into the Buckinghamshire countryside, consisted of cobbled-together lessons and improvised schoolrooms. Young Mimi couldn’t stand it.

  Her mother, a bookkeeper by profession, had been desperate for work of any sort and had been taken on as a canteen waitress at the Park. As such, she had a quiet word with one of the Park’s directorate concerning her daughter.

  “My mother knew Commander Bradshaw,” says Mrs. Gallilee. “She must have been talking to him about me and saying, ‘Mimi’s fourteen now, she’s learning nothing, she doesn’t seem interested in what’s going on’…

  “Commander Bradshaw said to my mother, ‘Bring her up to see me.’ He talked to me and the result was that I was offered a job at Bletchley Park as a messenger. You could hardly call it an interview. He just talked to me. I started work there the following day.

  “All of the messengers were girls and I was the youngest at the time. We had to deliver anything and everything to the Huts. In those days, there were only—I think—Huts 1 to 11a, no blocks yet. And that was my job, going around and delivering the mail, messages—everything of course was in big envelopes and we weren’t even interested in knowing what was inside them.”

  Gordon Welchman himself reflected a little on the need to enlist as many good women as men. “Recruitment of young women went on even more rapidly than that of men,” he wrote. “We needed more of them to staff the Registration Room, the Sheet-Stacking Room, and the Decoding Room. As with the men, I believe that the early recruiting was largely on a personal-acquaintance basis, but with the whole of Bletchley Park looking for qualified women, we got a great many recruits of high caliber.”4

  Life was to acquire a terrific intensity, not all of it generated by the sometimes nightmarish pressure of breaking codes or the sheer feats of hard work required. There was a great deal more to life at Bletchley Park than that.

  4 The House and the Surrounding Country

  When talking to veterans of Bletchley Park now, one looming background visual feature of their lives seems to polarize opinion rather sharply, and that is the house itself.

  A grand structure had stood on the site for a long time; there is apparently mention of some kind of property there in the Domesday Book. The Victorian house was acquired in 1883 by Sir Herbert Leon and his wife, Fanny. With them came an extravagant building program that saw the house expand and also embrace a bewildering array of architectural styles.

  The Leons were enthusiastic travelers and their journeys throughout Europe seemed to guide their aesthetic whims. As well as mock-Gothic twirls, there were Italian pillars by the entrance, rococo detailing on the ceiling of the ballroom, and a copper dome, inspired again by Italy, and jammed rather awkwardly onto the roof on the left of the house.

  The building itself—all dark paneling, faux stained glass, little passageways, and oaken stairs—stands as an interesting example of the general architectural confusion of the period, when heavy Victorian Gothic was starting to give way to the more natural contours that would be found in the Edwardian age. Some of the older landowners in the area, with their charmingly decayed honey-stone properties, might also have regarded Bletchley Park as having a nouveau feel to it—the modern house, with all the modern comforts of a man who had finally arrived into wealth and was keen for the world to know.

  “It’s a nightmare. It’s hideous,” says Sarah Baring with some feeling. “We called the house the Victorian Monstrosity.” The detailing of the house’s interior was, she felt, equally off-putting. The ornate plasterwork on the ballroom ceiling, she says, “looked like a cascade of drooping bosoms.” Others look more kindly upon the property as a form of brave architectural experiment. And for some, it was the sort of stately home that they never imagined they would be working around.

  Although from the beginning it had been clear that the house was not remotely big enough for the recruits either to live or work in (though during the 1938 “rehearsal,” those few who covered night shifts were permitted to sleep there), it would be a place in which, in the years to come, leisure hours could be spent, either in the library or at musical events held in the ballroom.

  A suite of rooms on the first floor, initially the domain of the Secret Intelligence Service, were eventually used by Alistair Denniston, Edward Travis, and Nigel de Grey for administrative purposes. Colonel John Tiltman, the veteran cryptographer and head of the military section, had an office right upstairs that had not long ago been the nursery to one of the Leon children. The walls of Tiltman’s office were still decorated with Peter Rabbit wallpaper.

  Having started working at Bletchley Park as a young messenger, Mimi Gallilee was within a couple of years promoted to secretarial work within the house itself. Mrs. Gallilee recalls the high, decorative ceilings and the big, light windows which looked out over the lawn, and beyond that on to the pretty lake, fringed with trees. As the war went on, and as the activities of Bletchley multiplied, there was soon much more to the Park than that. “I never realized the grounds were so extensive,” says Mrs. Gallilee. “Or that they had all those RAF camps there. It was all shaded off.”

  For a very young person such as Mimi, the house had a somewhat overbearing air, which would be reflected in the personalities of those she worked for—not merely the austere ways of her immediate superior Miss Reed, secretary to Nigel de Grey, but also what Mrs. Gallilee calls the “forbidding” manner of de Grey himself.

  De Grey had previously been president of the Medici Society, Miss Reed his assistant. When he was called to Bletchley, de Grey ensured that the very strict Miss Reed came too. “Not that Nigel de Grey was at all unpleasant,” Mrs. Gallilee recalls. “But you had to know your place. You’d never have joined in with a conversation. You would never butt in. People were very respectful.”

  Directly outside the front door of the house was a path that led, both left and right, to various huts. Mrs. Gallilee recalls often seeing Alan Turing “walking along the path—intense—always looking worried. People thought he was a bit of a weirdo.”

  The front lawn of the ho
use was, in the early days of 1939, used for sporting activities. The journalist and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, who in his capacity as an intelligence operative passed through the Park a few times himself, recalled these contests in one of his volumes of memoirs:

  Every day after luncheon when the weather was propitious, the cipher crackers played rounders on the manor house lawn, assuming the quasi-serious manner dons affect when engaged in activities likely to be regarded as frivolous or insignificant in comparison with their weightier studies. Thus they would dispute some point about the game with the same fervor as they might the question of free will or determinism, or whether the world began with a big bang or a process of continuing creation.1

  Beyond the lawn was the lake. In the depths of winter, it would gratifyingly freeze over, allowing ice-skating; in the sultry nights of midsummer, it would occasionally play host, as one veteran recalls, to a number of young RAF men, splashing about, nude and laughing. There were some geese that apparently felt rather proprietorial about the lake; one veteran recalled how some young women—clearly townies—were intimidated by the birds “hissing at them.” There was also an abundance of frogs, which during the blackout were occasionally accidentally trodden upon.

  The house had originally boasted a tennis court, which had to be removed to make way for the construction of a new hut. When Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid a visit a little later in the war, he was dismayed to learn that ball games were restricted to rounders alone; the PM authorized the construction of new tennis courts.

  “Churchill was very horrified to find that the staff in the early days played rounders for exercise,” says Sheila Lawn, laughing. “Churchill said: ‘This isn’t good enough.’ And he is reputed to have ordered the tennis courts.” Indeed, in the years to come, the Bletchley Park Tennis Club was very popular. A surviving memo in the archives shows that its members were even permitted to use the Summer House as a temporary changing room.

  By the side of the main house lay the ice house; beyond that, the stables and the cottages. In the earliest days of Captain Ridley and his Shooting Party, there was also a fine yew maze and a couple of rose gardens. But when the time came to start building the huts, these were sacrificed.

  Reactions to the estate tended largely to depend on where each recruit had come from. For some young people, this was their first close-up view of a large, well-appointed property, and it thus acquired a sort of sub-Brideshead glamour; for other, posher recruits, it was nothing more than a nondescript provincial pile set just outside the most provincial of English towns.

  According to Irene Young, the house was “irretrievably ugly” and its style was a form of “lavatory-Gothic.” In the view of codebreaker and, in later years, historian Peter Calvocoressi, it had “a lot of heavy wooden paneling enlivened here and there by Alhambresque (Leicester Square, not Andalusia) decorative fancies.”

  Later, an American recruit, soon-to-be-prominent architect Landis Gores, almost fainted with distaste. “A maudlin, monstrous pile probably unsurpassed,” he said, “though not for lack of competition in the architectural gaucherie of the mid-Victorian era…hopelessly vulgarized by extensive porches and solaria…inchoate, unfocused, and incomprehensible, not to say indigestible.”2

  Even for the most delicate aesthete, however, the grounds gave few causes for complaint. And for some recruits, the gardens, with the backdrop of the house, had a slightly collegiate feel, although those recruited from Oxford and Cambridge would have found it several steps down in aesthetic terms from the beauty that they had left behind.

  But in wartime Britain, particularly as the years went on—with all the rationing, the taped windows, the blackouts, the peeling paint, the fading, drab color and, in many cities, the increasing number of bomb sites—Bletchley Park and innumerable other requisitioned country houses like it must have offered some kind of psychological respite. Certainly a number of the veterans recall that in the summer months, both the gardens of Bletchley and the countryside around acquired the most colorful and beguiling life.

  As more and more young recruits came flooding in, the house and its immediate grounds seemed to reflect this colorful life. One veteran recalls that “it was a village confined on the grounds…countless people passing in and out of the main gate, strolling, talking, and sitting around. There was a great seething of people—always movement—comings and goings. The whole thing reminded me of a bustling London railway terminus.”3

  It was a railway terminus that bustled for twenty-four hours a day. Nigel de Grey remarked of the young new recruits fresh off the trains from Oxford and Cambridge that they were “dropping in with the slightly unexpected effect of carrier pigeons.” Throughout the early 1940s, when the numbers of workers rose from hundreds to thousands, the shift system meant that people came in and out of the main entrance gates at all hours.

  Inside the fences, recalls one veteran, were signs reminding the young recruits that this was no campus talking shop and exhorting them to the highest discretion at all times. But outside the fences, in the summer months, and well away from the brickworks that pocked the town’s edges, there were shades of prelapsarian innocence about the green countryside around the house. Men and women would go for long bike rides along quiet country lanes. This, of course, was England before motorways. And in wartime, motor traffic was also extremely restricted by the strict rationing of petrol. “Very few people at Bletchley Park had cars,” says John Herivel. “Only the most important.”

  So on leaving the house, perhaps at the end of a shift, and climbing on to a bike either to return to a billet or simply to get some fresh air among the fields, the young codebreakers, after only a few minutes’ cycling, would have seen and heard a countryside that we would scarcely recognize today.

  The fields would still have been small and manageable, as opposed to the vast industrial-farming prairies that are the hallmark of the contemporary English landscape. And apart from the buzz of insects, the lowing of cattle, distant church clocks, and faraway train whistles, the lanes would have been rich with a quality of quietness difficult to find nowadays within a 100-mile radius of London.

  “I bought a third-hand cycle,” says Sheila Lawn. “The second person who owned it, who worked at the Park, must have been very brainy, but somehow she could not learn to ride the bicycle. So I bought it. It was a very strong bicycle. I called it Griselda. I had it for years. And if I was on a day off, and I didn’t have any people to meet, or any plans, I used to cycle.

  “Of course the countryside around Bletchley was totally different from the countryside in the Highlands. It was a contrast. And I just loved it.”

  These young recruits, as we have seen, were drawn from all across the country; many had left home for the very first time. The curious thing about the house at Bletchley Park, and the chalky lands around, was that they offered a calming backdrop to the deathly serious task in hand.

  “I was very interested in natural history,” recalls Hut 6 codebreaker Oliver Lawn of some of the recreational pursuits that quickly took root at Bletchley. “And there was bird watching and butterfly collecting.” Of the brickworks immediately outside the town, says Mr. Lawn, they “gave a scent, a smell, to the place. With brickworks, you take the clay out and make the bricks and it leaves great holes in the ground. Some of those holes filled with water, naturally. Some of them didn’t. The dry ones we used for shooting practice in the Home Guard. And the wet ones we used as swimming pools.”

  And as the war went on, this oddly proportioned house was also to play a central role in some of the livelier recreational activities—nude outdoor bathing aside—enjoyed by the codebreakers.

  5 1939: How Do You Break the Unbreakable?

  From the day war was declared, the whole of Britain was, in a sense, mobilized. It was not merely the men waiting for their call-up papers. Everyone was set to do precisely as they were instructed by government officials, from giving homes to evacuee schoolchildren to taking jobs in factories.
This sense of a total unity of purpose stretching across millions of people might seem a little difficult to imagine. What makes it easier is to bear in mind the very real, and acute, fear of invasion.

  Austria, Czechoslovakia, and now Poland had fallen to the Germans’ unprecedentedly swift and shockingly ruthless military machine. The young people of Britain found it all too easy to envisage those same ineluctable forces crossing the twenty-two-mile distance across the Channel. For many, the very idea was literally the stuff of nightmares.

  It was quite simple, explains Ruth Bourne, who was to become a Wren at Bletchley and elsewhere during the war. “More than anything else in the world, you didn’t want the Germans to win. Particularly me with my Jewish antecedents—I would not have wished anyone remotely connected with the Nazi situation to win.”

  And in those first few weeks—amid the darkly ominous quiet that took hold in Britain during the so-called “Phoney War”—the directorate at Bletchley Park knew that one of the most urgent priorities was to secure a break into the German navy’s Enigma messages. The prospect was a daunting one: that of cracking an enemy code system that was universally considered unbreakable.

  In times of conflict, an island nation becomes uniquely vulnerable; if the enemy gains mastery over the seas, it will swiftly find ways to cut supplies of food and equipment to that island’s shores. And it was immediately clear that the German navy, with its U-boats, would aim to strangle Britain’s lifelines. It was for that reason that Bletchley Park’s director, Alistair Denniston, had taken the precaution of surrounding himself with so many of the cryptography experts with whom he had worked since the First World War.