The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Like linguist Sheila Lawn, Jean Valentine had never before left her native land. Her upbringing was comfortable, middle class—her father had businesses in Perth, one of which, Valentine’s Motors, is still remembered fondly by the townspeople today. Jean was aware that she was signing up for a life radically different from the one she had known. Thanks to that administrative mix-up, she was heading into a career of helping to crack the Enigma codes. Her rude introduction to that life, however, was a head-spinning culture shock.

  “I got a summons and a railway warrant to go to Tullichewan Castle in Dumbartonshire, which at that time was a training center for Wrens. And I spent a fortnight there learning to do what you do—marching, saluting, that sort of thing.

  “We were told the castle had just been vacated by workmen. The place was filthy. It was disgusting. There were filthy greasy tables. And the washing facilities, to put it mildly, were primitive. They were huge concrete huts with a concrete floor. The loos did have doors, but there was no lock. And I can’t tell you what the smell was like.

  “There was a bit where people could have a shower—a row of showers on a wall. I was an only child and I wasn’t used to stripping off in front of people and washing myself, but I did it. Some of them kept their swimming costumes on because they were just too embarrassed to strip down to the buff.”

  But after these privations—perhaps deliberately spartan—a rather more attractive prospect for some Wrens started to loom. Jean Valentine recalls: “On the last day we were all called into a room—forty or fifty of us—and told to sit there, and we would be called one at a time and be told where we were going, what we’d be doing. So when I was called in, I did what I was told, sat down in a chair in front of three or four officers sitting there. ‘We don’t know what we’re going to be asking you to do. But we have been told to look for people like you. So tomorrow you will go to London.’”

  After a short interlude of excitement in the capital, the work in hand soon beckoned. But there was still a little bewilderment to come. “Then I went to the Bletchley outstation site in Eastcote, Middlesex,” says Jean. “And I was introduced to the bombe machine.”

  However, before long Jean Valentine had more serious concerns, which were to do with the nature of the work opportunities that she could pursue during the war. For any woman who might have been even a little ambitious, working on the bombes seemed a little like factory work. “Only Wrens worked the bombes. I assume it was because the boss was naval and veered towards his own ‘gels.’

  “But we couldn’t get any promotion. I think the theory was that the humbler we looked, the less that anyone from outside would think that we were doing anything of great importance. We were told, if people asked us what we were doing, to say that we were ‘confidential writers’—or secretaries, in other words.”

  The lack of prospects may have been put in place by the military hierarchy as opposed to the Bletchley Park authorities. Unlike the Wrens, the Honorable Sarah Baring did achieve promotion—she was sent to work at the heart of the war establishment in the Admiralty, her role to be a go-between representing Bletchley Park to the naval establishment. “I was seconded up to Admiralty from BP at the beginning of 1944,” she recalls. “The Bletchley Park authorities opened an office there, underneath that hideous monstrous building on the Mall. The Citadel, the one that’s a mass of concrete that people used to call ‘Lenin’s Tomb.’

  “We got all the Park decrypts concerning the navy,” she continues. “It would come up to us, and we would have to decide what to do with it. So really I was doing the same work as in BP but just in Admiralty. It was Bletchley Park all in one tiny room.”

  And the story of the Wrens can also be contrasted with the experiences of female codebreakers Joan Murray and Mavis Batey, who were treated with a respect that was perhaps a little unusual for the time.

  Yet not all the Wrens sent to Bletchley were deemed to come up to scratch. In a rather crisp memo to the Admiralty, concerning the quality of the personnel being sent to him, Alistair Denniston addressed the cases of several individuals who had been brought to his attention:

  Wren Kenwick is inaccurate, very slow and not a bit keen on her work, not very intelligent…

  Wrens Buchanan and Ford are unintelligent and slow and seem unable to learn. Wren Rogers suffers from mild claustrophobia and cannot work in a windowless room.

  There seems to be some mistake in regard to Wren Dobson, we have never so far as I am aware complained of her work which is satisfactory, and now that I have informed her that she cannot have a transfer, she appears to have the intention of putting her back into the job, in which case she may well equal our best.

  The remainder of the Wrens are doing most excellent work, none of them have so far given the slightest trouble.

  Denniston concluded pointedly:

  I think perhaps you might ask the Deputy Director to impress upon the selectors the importance of the work on which these Wrens are employed and not to send us too many of the Cook and Messenger type.1

  Of course, the Wrens were not the only women drafted in. Also present were six WAAFs whose task it was, from the beginning, to man the telephone exchange. Then there were thirty-six WAAFs who were there to run the teleprinters, with their communications chattering in and out of the Park.

  For a lot of the girls who signed up, this life threw up a number of surprises. Felicity Ashbee, of the WAAF, kept sporadic diaries. She recalled signing up and being sent to the nearby town of Leighton Buzzard where she and other WAAF girls were put through parade paces by a male sergeant, who was mortally embarrassed by the whole thing.

  They were told that maths and science were not essential subjects for the girls to know about. Miss Ashbee was then posted to Stanmore, where she recalls meeting a lesbian ballet photographer. She did not seem tremendously shocked.

  She also recalls the routines that so many hundreds of young women had to get into; in terms of leisure, this meant a sparse diet of books, knitting, and chess. The egalitarian spirit of the post-war world was still some way off; even in the WAAF, ranks were discouraged from fraternizing with one another. Miss Ashbee recalls having debates in the early 1940s about whether the “Commies” were actually worse than the Nazis.

  She was then sent to Bletchley for a while, and had sketchy memories of Josh Cooper, and the disorientating mix of uniforms and civilian dress that mingled around the place. Miss Ashbee recalled just “one café” and (perhaps because she was not tremendously popular) “no social life.” She recalled a show being staged there, called Blue and Khaki, part of which involved a Cossack song.2

  A number of Wrens were housed in Woburn Abbey, once a splendid private house and after the war to become one of the country’s premier visitor attractions. For those who now watch the reality show Big Brother and marvel at how complete strangers can live in such close proximity for so long, it’s worth having a look at the life that was led at the Abbey. Given the grueling nature of the work and the slog of the hours, this rhyme from one dormitory—entitled “Martha’s Prayer”—rings an amusing chord:

  God bless Marie and grant that she

  May not drop things and wake me

  And grant that Marjorie’s heavy feet

  May not disturb my slumbers sweet

  And when they go to bed at four

  Oh God, don’t let them slam the door.3

  There might also have been an element of Malory Towers about the set-up. Some of the women recalled listening stations high up in the Abbey’s tower room, and a continual problem with bats, which would cause a great deal of high-pitched panic.

  Woburn Abbey was also reputedly haunted. According to Jack Lightfoot of the RAF, the young women were talking about the ghost of the “Flying Duchess”—Mary, Duchess of Bedford, who was born in the Victorian age but conceived a fancy for the new pursuit of aviation at the age of sixty-one. But the house also reputedly was haunted by a monk, and there were stories of doors that would not stay shut at
night.

  There would not have been a lot of time for nocturnal spectral activity though—Bletchley Park, of course, was a 24-hour operation, and workers were transported to and from their shifts by special buses after midnight and before 8 a.m.

  There were also Wrens posted a few miles away in a small village called Gayhurst. There, writes Diane Payne,

  … another 150 Wrens lived and worked on the premises…cold rooms, no transport and, I am told, swallows nesting in the house and flying in and out of the broken windows. There too, mice abounded, and one lunchtime a dead one turned up in the gravy boat.

  It was a beautiful place dating back to 1086, and Sir Francis Drake owned it in 1581. The Wrens used the old church in the grounds every Sunday, and my friend remembers dutifully pumping the organ.

  Highly virtuous! And something, I feel sure, that would have captured the imaginations of many of the male service personnel of Bletchley. As indeed would the stories concerning Wrens sunbathing topless on the roof of Gayhurst Manor.

  If for the codebreaking civilians in the huts, the bounds of knowledge seemed limited, then for a Wren they were more limited yet. It was not just the mechanistic nature of the work of bombe operating; it was the commute back to the dormitories. Jean Valentine only realized, upon returning some decades later, how very little of the Park she had ever seen in that brief period during the war. She recalls: “Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalized.”

  And the restrictions were not purely physical—the methodology of the work was equally hermetically sealed. “I worked in that bombe room,” she continues. “And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn’t until all these decades later that I realized we were just calling Hut 6 across the path.”

  If they had done their jobs properly, the encrypted message would be typed in and a length of tape would come out in German. “Then that went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion.”

  There was also an element of culture shock produced for many by being transplanted right into the center of what was still largely rural England. She recalls: “We used to go to the village hop on a Saturday night if we weren’t working. The whole village used to turn out for this hop. To my absolute horror, one evening, a woman, there with her baby, took her bosom out and stuck it in her baby’s mouth. Now, I had never seen a baby being fed in my life before, and certainly not at a village hop.

  “But it seemed to be the norm. No one else seemed to think anything about this woman casually producing a breast and feeding her baby.”

  Sheila Lawn considers that “eighteen-year-olds then were younger than eighteen-year-olds now in terms of attitudes.” But this is perhaps something to do with regional divides; it is reasonably well documented, for instance, that in the 1920s and 1930s, people who lived in small communities in the English countryside were more relaxed about such matters as premarital sex than their town counterparts. Even there, many children born out of wedlock were swiftly subsumed into the larger family—the child in question being told in the occasional case that its mother was its “sister.”

  Regardless of how young the Bletchley recruits felt themselves to be, however, it was obvious that passion—and, indeed, love—were always going to find a way in such intense circumstances. But there was another sort of intensity at Bletchley too—a steadily growing sense of friction caused in part by the ballooning expansion of the Park’s activities, and by the sheer numbers of its personnel. There were to be moments midway through the conflict—in Britain generally, as well as throughout Bletchley Park—when it seemed that morale could not sink any lower.

  16 1941: Bletchley and Churchill

  He’s the grand old man

  For us he’s doing all that he can

  It’s difficult to listen to Max Miller’s chirpy 1941 ditty now without wincing just a little. Enthusiasm is one thing, but sugary show-business sycophancy? Yet this song, “The Grand Old Man,” was something of a hit at the time; not merely because it was a less cynical age but because a colossal number of people felt, as soon as he took over in May 1940, that Britain was extremely lucky to have Churchill’s leadership. (Very few people, for instance, would have agreed with Evelyn Waugh’s later assertion that Churchill was wrong about most things and surrounded himself with crooks.)

  For many years after the war, it was asserted that the most common dream had by British people was that of the Queen unexpectedly dropping round for tea. In a similar way, the figure of Winston Churchill loomed very large in the minds of Bletchley Park operatives, and not merely because they found him an inspirational figure. The psychology seems to run deeper than that. Is it possible to hear, through various accounts, a yearning for proper recognition?

  Gordon Welchman recorded the day in September 1941 when Churchill paid a visit to Bletchley Park. Welchman’s account, in his book The Hut Six Story, appears to have a pleasing dimension of wish-fulfilment to it:

  Winston Churchill himself came to visit us. Travis took him on a tour of the many Bletchley Park activities. The tour was to include a visit to my office, and I had been told to prepare a speech of a certain length, say ten minutes. When the party turned up, a bit behind schedule, Travis whispered, somewhat loudly, “Five minutes, Welchman.” I started with my prepared opening gambit, which was “I would like to make three points,” and proceeded to make the first two points more hurriedly than I planned.

  Travis then said, “That’s enough, Welchman,” whereupon Winston, who was enjoying himself, gave me a grand schoolboy wink and said, “I think there was a third point, Welchman.”1

  Winston, indeed! Not to mention the “grand” schoolboy wink, which seems to have the effect of placing both men on the same level—a level above the officious-seeming Travis. Welchman added, more appropriately: “We were fortunate in having an inspiring national leader in Winston Churchill, whose oratory had a powerful effect.”

  But Churchill’s relationship with Bletchley Park was of the greatest importance. It was not simply a question of the grand old man granting the codebreakers extra resources for machinery or staff, or even bestowing upon them a fresh tennis court. It was a crucial question of respect. Respect that, one senses occasionally through various accounts, the Park was not necessarily receiving in other parts of Whitehall, or from the intelligence services.

  Churchill had been fascinated by the business of cryptography, and indeed of secret intelligence, since before the First World War. He had seen ingenious espionage ploys and counter-ploys in action during his youthful exploits in different parts of the Empire; he had a hand in the setting up of the Room 40 cryptography division at Admiralty; in the 1920s, he took a keen interest in the intelligence agents who could glean most information on the Soviets.

  So naturally, when he at last became Prime Minister in May 1940, just two weeks after Bletchley Park broke into the German air force Enigma, Churchill had no doubts how vital the operation was. From the moment he arrived at Downing Street, he insisted on having a daily buff-colored box of intercepts sent on to him—a box that was sometimes delivered personally by “C,” the head of the SIS, Sir Stewart Menzies. The key to this box was kept on Churchill’s key-ring.

  Only a handful of other people—military and civilian—were permitted to know from where these decrypts emanated, and if ever they should have cause to refer to them, they used the obscuring term “Boniface.” Churchill himself sometimes referred to these bundles of intelligence as his “eggs,” a reference to the Bletchley “geese that never cackled.” For everyone else—generals and ministers alike—the source was, to all intents and purposes, a number of fictional spies. It was only in 1941 that the intelligence produced from the de
crypts started to be known by the term “Ultra.”

  This intense secrecy could prove a source of vexation to other government departments such as the Foreign Office, and indeed to the military top brass. The Prime Minister was “liable to spring upon them undigested snippets of information of which they had not heard.” Added to this irritation, from the outset of the war there were those high up in military command who were skeptical of the extent to which Bletchley Park could provide serious, usable, useful information. These tensions grew as the Park expanded its remit and started producing intelligence, as opposed to simply raw decrypted messages.

  On the day of that unforgettable visit, in September 1941, Churchill also inspected the Hollerith machine installation in Hut 7. As one breathless eyewitness account stated:

  The visitor was presented with a scene of intense activity. There were 45 machine operators in action at as many machines. Then all the machines were halted at the same instant, and in the complete silence that followed, Mr. Freeborn [the man in charge of the Hollerith section] gave an introductory explanation.… At the conclusion of the demonstrations, all machines were brought back into action as the visitor was conducted to the exit, but all brought to rest as Churchill paused on the threshold to make his farewells.2

  Churchill’s tour also took him into Hut 8 to meet Alan Turing; according to his biographer, Andrew Hodges, Turing was “very nervous.”

  The Prime Minister then gave a short address outside Hut 6 to a group of gathered codebreakers, in which he said: “You all look very innocent—one would not think you knew anything secret.” It was here that, famously, he went on to describe his audience as “the geese that lay the golden eggs—and never cackle.”

  John Herivel, in a lecture given to Sidney Sussex College in 2005, seemed a little less romantic and slightly more clear-eyed about this manifestation than Gordon Welchman had been. Nevertheless, his account still conveys something about the aura of true leadership: