The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  Nevertheless, it was perfectly obvious that the work was important. And the success of Bletchley was also being reflected, late in 1942, to the extent that it appeared to be expanding physically. There had come a point when all those wooden huts, with their attendant discomforts, were no longer sufficient for the task. And so the Blocks—plain constructions of brick and steel, some two stories high, and explosive-resistant—started to appear. In Block A, Josh Cooper’s Air Section got the first floor, while Frank Birch’s Naval Section was moved to the ground floor.

  There were more blocks to follow, up to D. Block A was equipped—in one of those nice little touches that always seemed to bring an element of the quotidian into the Bletchley effort—with a pneumatic tube system previously used in John Lewis stores and employed at Bletchley for zipping messages on paper between rooms. It was a step up from the hatchway/tray/pulley arrangement that had previously been a feature of inter-hut communication. The pneumatic system was brought in by Hugh Alexander, who before the war had been Chief Scientist to the John Lewis chain.

  Despite such innovation, working conditions were still far from luxurious. For example, the conveniences, or lack of them, were sometimes a talking point. In February 1943, an agitated Frank Birch wrote a letter to the works manager, Mr. MacGregor:

  Sorry to bother you again, but I should be very grateful to know the latest developments as regards the plan for extending the congested portion of Block A, as the problem is getting more and more acute.

  I went over Hut 7 this morning to see how my chaps fitted in. It all seemed very comfortable and the light was very good indeed, but they really are in a bad way about lavatories—I think there is only one for men and one for all the women, which is not enough for the 200 authorized.

  Notwithstanding the delicacy of the subject, Birch continued:

  Mack told me some time ago that you were going to build a lavatory between the main building and the hut. If this could be incorporated in a passage, it would remove also the remaining disadvantage, namely having to go through the open air in the hot or the cold or the dark to reach another part of the section.19

  But even with these and a great many other physical discomforts, the institution was running with great efficiency. Hugh Alexander, who succeeded Alan Turing as Head of Hut 8 in 1941, was a formidable and rather frightening intellect. He was also something of a heartthrob with the ladies. Diana Plowman described him thus: “Alexander was my boss, and we all thought he was crazy. Tall, blond, huge blue eyes, never stopped talking, a terrible energy…”

  It was this man, with his huge blue eyes, who had, with the greatest gentleness, eased Turing out as head of Hut 8. There was no malice involved—simply a recognition that the job had to be done by someone with more of a sense of everyday practicality. As a brilliant mathematician, Turing was a rather vague and disorganized administrator. Moreover, the Bletchley authorities understood that he would work a great deal more effectively if he took a step back from the daily duties of hut work.

  In fact, Alexander had slowly been doing more and more of the job in any case. And his admiration for Turing, as he later testified, was utterly untrammeled:

  There should be no question in anyone’s mind that Turing’s work was the biggest factor in Hut 8’s success. In the early days, he was the only cryptographer who thought the problem worth tackling and not only was he primarily responsible for the main theoretical work within the Hut (particularly the developing of a satisfactory scoring technique for dealing with Banburismus) but he also shared with Welchman and Keen the chief credit for the invention of the Bombe…the pioneer work always tends to be forgotten when experience and routine later make everything seem easy and many of us in Hut 8 felt that the magnitude of Turing’s contribution was never fully realized by the outside world.20

  The intransigence of the “Shark” U-boat key was by November 1942 the source of acute anxiety in the War Office. The OIC sent a message to the Bletchley authorities. The Battle of the Atlantic, it said, was “the one campaign which BP are not at present influencing to any marked extent—and it is the only one in which the war can be lost unless BP do help.”

  Help was to come very soon afterward. Spotted sailing off the coast of Palestine, U-559 was depth-charged by HMS Petard; and thanks to the terrific bravery of the two British crew members who swam the sixty yards to the stricken vessel, a vital discovery was made.

  The U-boat’s crew had abandoned ship—the vessel was sinking. By the time Lieutenant Anthony Fasson and Able Seaman Colin Grazier swam to it, followed by sixteen-year-old Tommy Brown, only its conning tower was visible above the waves.

  Despite the fact that the U-boat was about to be submerged, Fasson and Grazier boarded the vessel. Some lights were still on inside. And what they found was the four-rotor Enigma machine that had defeated Bletchley, along with a book of the current Shark keys.

  With astounding presence of mind, the pair ensured that both the Enigma machine and the keys and the bigram tables were wound securely in waterproof material. They passed the machine and the books to Tommy Brown, who was outside. He in turn passed them to fellow crew members in a whale boat. But it was too late for Fasson and Grazier. U-559 sank, taking them with it into the depths. They had given their lives so that this information could be passed back. Both men were posthumously awarded the George Cross, while Tommy Brown received the George Medal.

  When the machine and the documents reached Bletchley Park a few weeks later, it at last became possible for the codebreakers to crack the “Shark” key. And very shortly afterward, they did. After the dark months of code blackout, the naval Enigma operation was back in business.

  The relief at Bletchley, and throughout Whitehall, was immense. The task ahead was still formidable: ensuring Britain’s survival was not the same thing as winning the war, and the Wehrmacht, embedded throughout much of Europe, right to the edges of the continent, was ferociously resilient. Nevertheless, even if no precise details were known by most individuals at Bletchley Park, it was now possible for those who worked there to sense the impact that their work was starting to have; to have an inkling of how the German war machine, which two years before had seemed utterly indestructible, was now being harried on various sides.

  The rise in personnel numbers demanded by the work also led, with a certain warm inevitability, to the formation of more and more romantic relationships. It is an aspect of Bletchley life that one might have expected the authorities—for the reason of “careless talk”—to patrol with the greatest of care. But actually, for many, the course of love ran remarkably smooth.

  19 The Rules of Attraction

  It is perhaps a generational thing, but when one thinks now of what might loosely be termed “wartime romance,” one is struck by two stereotypical images. The first is that of young English roses being swept off their feet by sharp-talking American soldiers with bribes of fancy cigarettes and bubblegum; the second, the agonies suffered by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in black and white at Carnforth railway station in Brief Encounter. In general, the Americans are depicted as forthright sexual vulgarians, whereas the British are every bit as repressed as their stiff upper lips would imply.

  Such clichés, of course, have no value whatsoever, but it is interesting to contemplate the chasm that has opened up between that wartime generation and our own. The Brief Encounter repression may have been overdoing it a bit—according to many contemporaneous accounts, it assuredly was—but a great many stories from within Bletchley Park tell us that wartime romance was in some senses quite different from today’s version.

  It is perhaps the most sweetly inevitable part of the Bletchley Park story: a well-educated community of young people—the women greatly outnumbering the men—and a great number of those young people pairing off romantically.

  Park veteran S. Gorley Putt put it slightly differently, referring to the “hot-house confinement” of the Park, and how it created a fervid atmosphere in which “sexual infatuations�
�became obsessional…nerves tautened to breaking point by round-the-clock speedy exactitude would fumble, in off-hours, for emotional nourishment.”1

  Doubtless so; and given the claustrophobia of the community, added to the tension of the work, perhaps the occasional outbreak of sexual hysteria was inevitable. However, alongside this rather Bloomsbury-esque vision of the Park are the more subtle, though nonetheless pleasing stories of the many relationships formed that did actually continue. What surprises now, though, as one hears various accounts of the beginnings of long, happy marriages, is how remarkably relaxed the Park authorities seemed in matters of the heart.

  Mathematician Keith Batey recalls how one of his very first memories of Bletchley Park was the sight of “nubile young ladies” wandering to and fro. But it was not long before he and Mavis Lever met. He was in Hut 3; she was working with Dilly Knox in the Cottage. One night, she had an operational message to convey to Hut 3. Their eyes met, as both now laughingly recall: “Late one evening, I was in the hut, on the evening shift, and that’s how I met her,” says Keith. “This little girl arrived from Dilly’s outfit with this message or problem—she didn’t know how to solve it.

  “I didn’t see her again for another year,” says Keith, laughing. “And she never admitted it, but it was true.”

  Mr. Batey is not exaggerating greatly about the amount of time it took them to meet again. Those who worked in different huts and different parts of the Park seldom met or crossed over, because the workings of each department were kept closely sealed. If they did meet, any conversation concerning work was forbidden.

  Given this level of concern, one might have thought that the Bletchley Park authorities would look with concern upon the blossoming of any inter-hut relationship. However, as Mavis Batey recalls, things seemed easier than that once she and Keith became an item: “There were no rules against ‘courting’. We thought we had been very secretive—but when we announced our engagement, we were told that there were bets on when we would. The person who handled booking for the lunch sittings had noticed that we always made sure we had the same allocation.”

  In other words, despite their efforts to remain unnoticed, Keith and Mavis were fully clocked, but in an apparently wholly benevolent way. Mavis recalls that Dilly Knox jokingly tried to warn her that “mathematicians are very unimaginative.” She assured him that hers was just fine. The engagement went ahead and marriage followed not too long after. Mavis Batey continues: “It was only when we were married that we were required by the regulations to work in different rooms. But that was plain civil service rules and nothing to do with the Secret Service.”

  Sheila and Oliver Lawn not only found a similarly promising and benign atmosphere, but also realized, long before they met, just how conducive to romance the Bletchley Park setup was. On top of this, they had observed the growing tenderness between Keith Batey and Mavis Lever. Says Oliver Lawn: “There was quite a bit of romance. There were several in Hut 6 who married while they were at Bletchley. There were the Bateys, of course. Sheila and I married later, because Sheila had to go off and finish off her qualifications.”

  “Oliver and I met at the Scottish Reels club,” says Sheila. “I had just joined it. I noticed that when Hugh Foss [the Bletchley Park king of reels] was absent, Oliver used to take the class. And I remember this rather nice dancing lad. I suppose we danced together and Oliver thought that I was an adequate partner for him. We also did ballroom dancing and Latin American.”

  It is a treasurable image: the sound, echoing out of the big house, of a gramophone record playing Latin American dances, and the continual rumble of feet on the dance floor. Like the Bateys, Sheila Lawn cannot recall that the authorities had much to say when it became clear that she and Oliver were stepping out: “I don’t think the powers that be could take much control over the issue of relationships because you would meet your people when you were off duty.”

  Besides which, adds Mr. Lawn, there was simply so much of it about: “The other couple I recollect was Bob Roseveare and Ione Jay. He was a mathematician, straight from school. He hadn’t even gone to university. Very brilliant chap from Marlborough. He married Ione Jay, who was one of the girls in Hut 6.

  “Then there was Dennis Babbage, who was a don similar to [Gordon] Welchman. Same sort of age. Babbage married while he was there.”

  It was obviously not always a case of automatic marriage. “Some of our old Bletchley Park flames have come out of the woodwork,” Mr. Lawn adds, laughing. “I had one and Sheila had one. Mine was a lady who I saw for quite a short time. This was long before I met Sheila. We did quite a lot of dancing, I think ballroom dancing rather than Scottish dancing. And this lady and I got quite friendly over the period of a few months. And then she was moved abroad and spent the rest of the war in Singapore, I think it was.”

  Love crossed many barriers at Bletchley. Codebreaker Jon Cohen recalled: “I took up with a girl who I was quite surprised to find was a countess’s daughter. Because with my middle-class Jewish background, that wasn’t the sort of person I would normally mix with. But it was a place where all sorts met and there were dances and parties and we enjoyed ourselves to a certain extent.”2

  Another prominent romance—and indeed subsequent marriage—was that of Shaun Wylie and Wren Odette Murray, both of whom worked in the Newmanry. In 1943, their eyes met across a chuntering Heath Robinson machine; in 1944, they married. Given the not especially romantic backdrop of this vast, noisy machinery, it is a heroically sweet tale. And Shaun and Odette had their moments away from the technology. “Most of our courting was in Woburn Park,” Odette Murray said. “The Abbey is a huge imposing building and the central part has a large podium on top of it, very high up. I used to go casual climbing so that I could sit on top of this to watch Shaun on his bicycle coming up the drive.”

  It seemed also that love could make a leap across the huts. Thinking back to his days in Hut 8, Rolf Noskwith recalled that one of his colleagues, Hilary Brett-Smith, gave him a précis of the sinking of the Bismarck and how the crucial signal had been spotted at the Park by a certain Harry Hinsley. Hilary and Hinsley were later to be married.

  One Anglo-American pairing came with officer Robert M. Slusser and WAAF lieutenant Elizabeth Burberry. She was attached to Hut 3 and, just prior to Slusser’s arrival, had applied for a transfer. They met, romance blossomed, and the application was withdrawn. Nor did the happy Bletchley couple waste much time. They were married on June 27, 1944, just a few days after D-Day. On April 10, 1945, their daughter Elizabeth was born—a child of Bletchley Park.

  On the artier side of things, codebreaker and poet F. T. Prince met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth Bush, at the Park, and poet Henry Reed met Michael Ramsbotham. Meanwhile, historian Roland Oliver fell headlong for Caroline Linehan.

  But perhaps the most poignant relationship at Bletchley Park—not to say the most unexpected—involved Alan Turing. In the summer of 1940, a mathematician called Joan Clarke (later Murray), who had been studying at Cambridge, was recruited to Hut 8. By the spring of 1941, the system of Turing’s bombes, and the punch cards, and the mechanical regularity of the shifts needed to operate the whole procedure, was at the center of Bletchley Park’s work. It was also in the spring of 1941 that Turing and his Hut 8 colleagues made the vital break into naval Enigma. And against this extraordinarily intense backdrop, Turing and Joan Clarke’s friendship started to develop.

  They went to the cinema. They spent days on leave together. During that period, such behavior could only lead to one conclusion. And despite his sexual orientation, Turing clearly felt that he had to fit in with this overwhelming social norm. With surprising swiftness, he proposed marriage to Joan—although with characteristic honesty, he was careful to tell her that it might not be an ideal marriage because he had what he termed “homosexual tendencies.”

  Perhaps such things were not understood quite as they are now, for Joan was apparently not deterred by this confession, and the engagement went ahead.
He met her parents, she met his. There was an engagement ring. Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing’s use of the word “tendency” masked the altogether more sexually active truth, and that if Joan had known this, she would have been shocked.

  But again, this was an age in which such things were never discussed, certainly not in public, or in novels, films, and stage plays. The terms “nancy” and “pansy” were well-known, but such stereotypes as could be found within public discourse were feline mincing characters, extravagantly effeminate and knowingly, insidiously deviant. Clearly Turing did not fit in with these depictions.

  The other essential point about their relationship was that, unlike many of the other non-mathematician girls who came to work at Bletchley, Turing never had to talk down to Joan; her mathematical training was sharp and their exchanges were relaxed. They played chess, they played tennis, they had lengthy discussions concerning the Fibonacci series of numbers and their recurrence in nature, such as in the folds of pine cones.

  But deep down, he knew that it was not going to be. In the summer (since everyone at Bletchley was allowed four weeks’ leave a year), Turing and Joan went off for a holiday in Wales, with bicycles and ration cards. When they came back, Turing told Joan that the engagement was off.

  They did, however, contrive to remain friends, and later, when Turing had returned from a spell in the United States in 1942–3, he brought her back a present of an expensive fountain pen, and dropped vague hints that perhaps they should try the relationship again. Joan, wisely, gave no response to his suggestion.

  *

  Elsewhere—and talking of the many other romances to be found within the “Whipsnade Zoo wire fences” as one lady put it—many Park veterans point out that in terms of matters like premarital sex, this was a different era, as innocent as many presume. It wasn’t simply that the Pill didn’t exist. It was because matters of sex were so rarely, if ever, discussed, that for many young people—or more particularly, young middle-class people—the whole business remained shrouded in mystery. On top of this, there was the real threat of family disgrace. “If, heaven forfend, you were to come home pregnant,” says one Wren now, “your mother would have banished you from the house. It would have been unthinkable.”