The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  In accordance with Treasury regulations, your name has been forwarded to the Treasury for consideration for employment in other Government Departments.4

  This transition was by no means instant, nor was it painless. With personnel leaving, those left behind were juggling new and awkward shift systems to keep up with the remaining work. The Bletchley Park directorate made some proposals concerning weekend leave, which one might imagine would have been welcomed after all those years of seven-day shifts. Curiously, these met with fierce resistance: what worked in peacetime for “family and friends,” as one Park staffer put it, was not right for this organization. At Bletchley, the shifts worked best when the staff could “choose” which days off they wanted. And what, this staffer added, would be the benefit of having every Sunday off?

  “Shopping is impossible on Sundays anywhere,” said the staffer in a memo of protest. “So no shopping would be possible one week in three (according to the BP shift system). In London, shopping is only possible in the forenoon of Saturdays. Those making appointments—hairdressing, dentistry, interviews for jobs—would be severely handicapped.”

  Perhaps even more persuasively, added the staffer, “Entertainment facilities are rare on Sundays and overcrowded on Saturdays. Difficulties would be greatly increased if all BP personnel were free at weekends.” And possibly the clincher? “Billeted personnel are in many cases obliged to be ‘out’ for the midday meal. They are doubly unwelcome on Sundays, when the billetor is himself at home, and on Sunday, it is more difficult than on weekdays to get a meal elsewhere.”5

  John Herivel took a slightly more emollient line in the debate over compulsory weekends off, though he felt that in his own department, he and his colleague Macintosh should carry on as before. “If we were to confine our leave to Saturdays and Sundays,” he wrote in another memo still held in the archives, “there would be some days when neither of us were on. This could be very inconvenient.”6

  Nevertheless, the slow, careful dismantling of the operation was under way. And the image of Bletchley Park in the later months of 1945 seems to be one of once-teeming blocks now lying empty, of sparse huts, and of many of the rooms in the house itself now starting to echo. “It was so strange,” said one veteran. “It was already nearly empty—a ghost town with just a few removal men shifting furniture. Thousands of people just walked out of the gate never to return.”

  Actually the clear-up was a shade more complex than that: given the intense secrecy and security, every square inch of the house, and all the huts, and all the blocks, had to be combed and sifted for any hint of coding material or even machine components to ensure that absolutely nothing had been left behind.

  The operation was largely packed up: some (though by no means all) bombes were dismantled. Some Wrens were gleeful about these acts of destruction, for they had come almost to hate the machines. Now, instead of having to treat them with the utmost care, they let parts drop and fall and roll on the floor, and they shouted with enthusiasm.

  Meanwhile, bonfires of paperwork were made in the grounds of Bletchley Park. The huts, the house, all areas had to be combed for any bits of paper that might have got away. Some decrypts were found jammed into the gap of a window frame; the huts had been so draughty in winter that they were used to muffle the cold.

  The Colossus and Heath Robinson machines were also taken to pieces. Anything that remained was kept either at Stanmore or Eastcote in Middlesex. The bombe machines that remained at Eastcote, however, did not stop, for they now had other sorts of traffic and signals intelligence to decode.

  For most of those who had worked at the Park though, the conflict was over; and many of those young people now had a shattered country to rebuild. One is tempted to look back across the years and see idealism in that enthusiasm; but it might be more accurate to say that this was a time for unflinching realism, and even a certain sense of apprehension.

  26 1945 and After: The Immediate Aftermath

  All the thousands of young cryptographers and linguists and Wrens were at last able to turn their thoughts to the futures that they had planned for themselves, futures that had been held in limbo for the last six years. Yet there was also a destabilizing sense of abstraction, like walking out into a white fog. According to a few of the veterans, there was, surprisingly, no intensive debriefing session. Apart from the instruction that silence was to be maintained at all costs, these young people went out into the world to begin their careers.

  “There was nothing,” says Oliver Lawn of his final days at Bletchley Park. “Nothing at all. You signed the Official Secrets Act.” His wife, Sheila, says: “I don’t remember any final lecture. We had just escaped from this dreadful war, and therefore anything that was secret then was secret now.”

  For Roy Jenkins’s fellow “Tunny” codebreaker Captain Jerry Roberts, his military role was not to end for some time, an experience common to many. Immediately after Bletchley, he was seconded into War Crimes work.

  “I regarded my time in War Crimes as a great nuisance,” he says. “I wasn’t demobilized until 1947. And looking back, I regard it as the only time in my life where I didn’t make progress and didn’t contribute an awful lot. But shortly after that, I met a middle-aged Belgian lady. Her husband had been a lawyer, and during the war, they had sheltered British airmen, or Allied airmen, shot down and trying to make their way back to Britain to join the air force again.

  “She had written a diary—they actually had an airman hidden in the house when the Gestapo came to call. The Gestapo searched up and down, but didn’t find him, and went away disappointed. So the airman emerged and everybody congratulated themselves. And the Gestapo came back. Because that is what they did, that was their trick. This Belgian woman never saw her husband again. She got away by pretending to be doolally. The president of her tribunal was a civilized man and let her go.

  “But she had this diary and she wanted someone to translate it. So I did that and it was published as a book.”

  After that, though, Captain Roberts found that he had to find a career that was rather more diverting than the one that he had originally planned: “When I studied German at University College, London, it had been with the purpose of joining the Foreign Office. I am eternally grateful that I never joined the Foreign Office. I went into the market research side of an international advertising agency.” The work took him all over the world at a time when not many British people traveled at all. “And for the rest of that time,” he says, “it was market research, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I had my own company in the 1970s. The travel was very welcome!” It was also sufficiently absorbing to counter the frustration of never being able to talk about Bletchley.

  Similarly, for Gordon Welchman, who had brought so many invaluable innovations and systems to Bletchley Park, the end of the war marked a turning point: the prospect of returning to his old, academic life in Cambridge seemed utterly impossible. Toward the end of the war, and with his enthusiasm for the nature of organizations, he had began to help in drafting the future of Government Communication Headquarters—what was later to become GCHQ.

  His belief—one that flew in the face of established civil service practice—was that talented cryptologists should be able to reach the highest salary rung without also having to undertake administrative work. This was based on his experience in Hut 6, when he saw at first hand the benefits of mutual cooperation, freeing up time for thinking.

  However, he found himself up against more stubborn attitudes. On top of this, Welchman believed that the British computer industry was fatally held up by the government’s reluctance to fund research—the attitude seemed to be that the government would wait until such technology was developed commercially, and then find a use for it.

  He recalled that by then, he was a changed person who had been “thoroughly shaken out of my old academic way of life by my challenging experiences at Bletchley Park and in the United States, and it seemed impossible to return to what I had been doing before th
e war.” With appropriately golden references from Hugh Alexander, Welchman took up his colleague’s old post as Director of Research at the John Lewis Partnership. While being a very fine position, this does leave one wondering whether the years that immediately followed the war seemed a little anticlimactic. In 1948, Welchman discarded the department stores and set sail with his family to America, to work in the burgeoning field of computer technology. Later he joined the organization MITRE, looking into such matters as battlefield communications systems.

  For in one sense, the war hadn’t ended at all. The conflict had simply become frozen. Britain, America, and western Europe were facing an opponent every bit as implacable as Nazism. Welchman had joined the strategic struggle against the forces of the Warsaw Pact, and of Soviet military might.

  Indeed, Welchman’s preference for the American way of doing things led him, eventually, to take on American citizenship. One now senses that his view of the British authorities was a little stronger than that of simple distaste. “People have a tendency to filter out what they do not want to hear,” he wrote of the pre–Second World War government. “An appeasement-minded government in England filtered out the information on Hitler’s Germany that they were receiving from their Secret Service.”

  But for other key players from Bletchley Park, life in the immediate post-war years lost that luster of intensity. John Herivel—whose flash of inspiration one night in 1940 had had an incalculable effect upon the war effort—first went into teaching. He returned to his native Belfast, joined a school there and pretty soon found the rowdy boys absolutely intolerable. So he returned to academia and found, despite his mathematical background, that history was his real passion. He was to go on to write a history of Newton’s Principia, among many other subjects. “And I found that I just didn’t think about Bletchley Park,” he says.

  Messenger and typist Mimi Gallilee, who of course was so very young when she started work at Bletchley, found the immediate aftermath to be rather unsatisfactory by comparison. She says: “I think there were about 1,700 people left, and we went off to Eastcote, in Middlesex. We went into the quarters where the bombes were, and I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes. None of us knew. Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t know. So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the directorate.…

  “Commander Loehnis was the head by then. That was in 1946. And a lot of Forces people were still at Bletchley Park. I don’t think any Forces people went down to Eastcote.”

  The move to London provided Mrs. Gallilee with the first dusty taste of post-war austerity; even the matter of a daily Tube fare could put a serious dent in one’s weekly living wage. Life was a constant effort to scrimp.

  “I was living in Bayswater and I would have to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,” she says. “On such a low salary. I don’t think I stayed there for longer than six months. They tried to do something for me in the way of an increase in pay but you just didn’t have that kind of system and I had so long to wait until I was twenty-one. The Civil Service was very rigid, and there were no such things as merit awards in those days. The government wouldn’t have had the money to pay us anyway.”

  So, after the relative comfort and even romanticism of Bletchley Park, this new prospect of dull work for low wages began to gnaw at her. “I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London,” she says. “So I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.

  “But after maybe just a couple of days, I thought—I can’t stand this. I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.

  “I used to say, ‘I feel as though I’m in a different world altogether.’ I saw a job advertised in the Telegraph, for BOAC [the British Overseas Airways Corporation, a precursor of British Airways]. I applied there and got that, and I stayed with them from 1947 until about 1953. I was married by then.”

  For two of the codebreakers, there was a move, conscious or not, toward helping to rebuild both the nation and its remaining colonies. Keith Batey recalls: “I left Bletchley Park in August 1945. I decided—wrongly, I think now, though it seemed right at the time—that I wasn’t going to go on with mathematics, so I tried for the administrative Civil Service. I got in, so for some reason I opted for the Dominions Office.

  “I had six months in the Foreign Office while I was waiting for the Civil Service exam, in the South American department. I was working with Victor Perowne, who had finished a very successful career as Her Majesty’s Representative in the Vatican. A typically Edwardian gentleman, very portly, with a great gold chain across his chest. The man I really did like—I being a junior dogsbody, of course—was the chairman of the Bank of London and South America. He was Samuel Hoare—and a more polite, considerate, and charming chap I have never met.”

  But there was an element of an upper-class world that already seemed to be vanishing fast. Hoare, it seems, was slightly bewildered by the provenance of this new Foreign Office recruit. In the years before the war, many of those who worked for the Foreign Office very often came from the grander, titled families; they tended to have substantial private incomes, upon which they were expected to live. This was not the case with Keith Batey.

  “Samuel Hoare was puzzled,” Mr. Batey continues. “He couldn’t understand how there could be anyone in the Foreign Office whose name he didn’t recognize. He would call me Mr. Beety.” But it was Batey who was emblematic of the future, not Sir Samuel Hoare. Mr. Batey and his generation were helping to forge a new era of administration in which old school contacts were not the most important thing.

  Similarly, for Oliver Lawn, the Civil Service seemed the logical career path. “I had a very frantic one-term lecturing in mathematics at Reading University in September 1945,” he says. “By that time, I had more or less forgotten all my mathematics, in five years of doing codebreaking.

  “Then I took the Civil Service exams in the spring of 1946. I could have gone scientific or administrative civil service. I was successful in both but I decided, on the whole, to go for the administration, rather than the specialist science as a mathematician. I joined the Civil Service around July 1946.”

  As he says, Mr. Lawn was “directed,” as indeed was everyone else after the war. Despite the fact that almost any occupation would seem drab after the pressurized life he had been leading, this was also the correct thing for a young man of his upbringing and background. Britain was smashed to pieces, bankrupt, fading and peeling and shabby. It needed clever, expert administrators, not politicians, but men who really knew how things worked. It was Mr. Lawn’s generation that was to exert the real influence in Britain in the coming years, in everything from the rebuilding of inner cities to the dismantling of Empire.

  For the women who were to become their wives, this was still an era in which ladies were not expected to go out to work, despite the mass mobilization of the female population throughout the war. When a wife became pregnant, it was understood that her career was over and that she would become a mother and a homemaker.

  Having said all that, it would clearly have been a travesty if the women of Bletchley Park had led their intellects slide into abeyance. Happily, for both Sheila MacKenzie and Mavis Lever, this was emphatically not the case.

  Sheila continued academically. However, her original plan to teach on the continent was still looking extremely uncertain. What shape would that continent now be taking? How much of it would be subsumed by the heavy mass of the Soviet Union? The war forced a geographical change of Sheila’s plans. She had to confine herself to British opportunities.

  “I did what you can do in Scotland, a general degree,” Mrs. Lawn says. �
�Based on the previous subjects I had done. That was quite hard work over the year. And then I did a year in Birmingham University, a postgraduate diploma in Sociology and then I went in for personnel management. A complete change. It still wasn’t easy to get abroad.”

  She and Mr. Lawn felt the full icy blast of austerity Britain in their first two winters after the Park. It is one of those periods which now, with some distance, is almost as difficult to imagine as the war itself. As Sheila recalls: “Oh, but it was cold. There was very little fuel and very little hot water. That was even worse than during the war. Everything was rationed, including potatoes and bread. And clothes were rationed until 1952, I think. When Oliver and I were married, we could only get dockets for basic furniture. But Oliver had a great-aunt who died and some of her beautiful furniture came to us. So we got a bedroom and a living room from that.”

  The scrimping that went on for Sheila and Oliver’s wedding day now seems almost unthinkable. “My mother made do and mended. She was very good with her needle. For instance, out of two beautiful silk jumpers of the 1920s, which she had kept in a trunk, my mother was able to make three jumpers; I had two and she had one. And she remade some of her frocks for herself and for me. And my going-away—I was married in borrowed clothes, very successfully.

  “I had a lovely veil which belonged to our minister’s wife and had come through her family. I went away in army blankets, dyed a lovely maroon color. They were made by a cousin of mine who was learning to be a tailoress. And with the tailoress she was working with, she made a suit for me—skirt, waistcoat, and coat. I wore it for years. It was much admired. My undies were parachute silk. Gorgeous stuff to use. It was ‘make do and mend’ with a vengeance!”

  Mavis Batey also felt certain that her future was of an academic nature, though the duties of bringing up a young family with her new husband, Keith, came first. “We were in Oxford, we went back to Christ Church, and I didn’t really get back into any kind of intellectual activity until my three children were grown. After that, I could go to the Bodleian Library every day. So I eventually picked up.”