She also recalls: “Lord Briggs always said to me, as he did to a few other people: ‘It was our university, Mavis.’ Those five years are tremendously important at that age…what it did for me, that I was very grateful for, we were all thrown in at the deep end.”
Mrs. Batey credits Bletchley Park with giving her a certain measure of confidence. “I always wanted to be a historian—so I am a historian now—and I got into a particular field of landscape history as pioneered by W. G. Hoskins,” she says. “He was my great guru.
“As time went on, I found myself on heritage committees, landscape heritage, National Trust. And because it was a new subject, I didn’t have to know what Professor X or Professor Y had said—I was quite happy to have a bash at it, and then read what the others said after I had got some ideas myself. And that was what I realized was a gift, a legacy of Bletchley. You either do it or you don’t, but no one else is going to do it if you don’t.”
Similarly, Sheila Lawn was summoned to Bletchley before she had the chance to finish her degree. But the atmosphere of the Park suited her extremely well, as she recalls: “It was stimulating to meet people, and to talk to them. I had friends, about my age group. I think I was the only half-baked MA, they all seemed to have completed theirs. They came from different universities, different parts of the country, different experiences, different subjects. Yes, that was the collegiate feel, all the different disciplines.”
The Honorable Sarah Baring had been educated only by governesses. Nevertheless, Bletchley Park seemed to her at times to have a distinctly campus feel: “Of course the cryptographers were all brilliant mathematicians. And they were a class apart. Quite mad, some of them, quite potty, but very very sweet.
“I never went to university but here I was lucky to be right at the center of things and the people I worked with were so wonderful. And to have met Turing and all those sorts of people was just great.”
Another veteran, Gwen Watkins, recalled wanting to immerse herself totally in this strange intellectual whirlpool. And afterward, when Bletchley Park was packed up and she was facing, like everyone else, the austere grind of post-war Britain, she felt a certain measure of gratitude to have been working in such a place. For in a sense, Bletchley Park gave her a grounding: “To be with people for whom books, music, art, history, everything like that, was a daily part of their lives, it was an absolute blossoming for me.”2
Meanwhile, Mimi Gallilee had been given the chance to see how some of a generation’s greatest minds disported themselves in everyday circumstances. What she witnessed are scenes that—if there hadn’t been a war—might have been commonplace in Oxford or Cambridge, and which otherwise she would never have seen.
“Like, for instance, Alan Turing,” recalls Mimi. “All of my memories of him are of seeing him walking along the path and turning left at Hut 9, always with his head down. He was a very intense young man, and he always looked worried.
“That’s how people were there. You would have been frightened by Josh Cooper if you met him. He was a big man, and he was cumbersome. When he walked along, he would exclaim things like: ‘Pincers!’”
Josh Cooper’s eccentricity did not end there. One story that did the rounds of Bletchley concerned the evening when he walked out of the Park gates with his hat clasped in his hand and a briefcase somehow balanced upon his head. One might easily imagine such a thing happening in an Oxford quad. As Mimi Gallilee says, “We accepted it as normal. You didn’t laugh at him really. You got used to it. There were so many like that. Brilliant people, in their own sphere.”
Elsewhere among the huts, there had also been perceived sexual eccentricity—again, the preserve of the older universities—which Mimi Gallilee says was viewed from a radically different point of view. And this in itself was an education to the young woman, doing much to color her post-war view of such matters: “When we were young, we were very ignorant, because we didn’t know about homosexuality. If somebody seemed a bit effeminate, we’d just have a little giggle, but we didn’t think beyond that. Was it innocence or ignorance? And you didn’t hear that kind of thing being talked about anywhere—you certainly wouldn’t hear it at home—so you really didn’t know very much about anything.”
Being on the grounds of Bletchley Park was then, for someone as young as Mimi Gallilee, an education in itself. She says that she would sometimes look at these sophisticated people and know that she would not be able to casually drop into their conversations. “The kind of conversations you would overhear would all be on a higher scale. If you overheard things in the cafeteria, they would be talking, discussing—obviously nothing about their work, but wider subjects—and it was a rarefied atmosphere.
“The majority of them were from university,” she adds. “And now I can say that they wouldn’t have sniggered and laughed at things that the ignorant would—such as I. They wouldn’t perhaps have pointed and laughed at certain people, for instance. The more I think back, the more rarefied I realize it was.”
In the later years of the war, when Bletchley Park’s numbers had multiplied and the Colossus decrypting machines had turned codebreaking almost into an industrial process, some were nevertheless keen to see the collegiate atmosphere continue. Professor Max Newman encouraged his senior staff to take time off “to think.” He opened up “research books,” available should any member of staff be hit by a bright idea and wish to record it there and then. This book was open not just to mathematicians and linguists but to Wrens as well. And if enough people expressed interest in an idea, they could all be gathered together to discuss it at what would be termed “a tea party.”
Finally, a quick overview of how many Bletchley Park veterans dispersed in the post-war years gives us a vivid flavor of its intellectual and artistic mettle.
Jane Fawcett, who had worked in Hut 6, managed after the war to pursue a similarly academically satisfying career in architectural history that took in running the enormously influential Victorian Society (of which John Betjeman was so prominent a member) and the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Actress Dorothy Hyson not only returned to the West End, in 1945, she joined John Gielgud’s Haymarket Company, newly formed and immediately set to become highly prestigious. In 1947, she went on to marry her second husband and sometime Bletchley colleague Anthony Quayle (her first husband, Robert Douglas, had died not long before). Not long afterward, she retired from the stage in order to concentrate on bringing up their two children, while he became one of the most recognized faces on the cinema screen, going on to be knighted.
Writer Angus Wilson, who had found Bletchley so psychologically stressful, had his first volume of short stories, The Wrong Set, published in 1949. These were chilly portraits of contemporary upper-middle-class life. He was to achieve real fame with his first novel, Hemlock and After, published in 1952. Wilson’s colleague and friend Bentley Bridgewater subsequently became Secretary of the British Museum.
Meanwhile, reluctant “Tunny” codebreaker Roy Jenkins was, after an unsuccessful attempt in Solihull, to win his first seat in Parliament—Southwark Central, in 1948. The seat soon disappeared in boundary changes, but Jenkins won another, Birmingham Stechford, in 1950. He went on to become one of the most influential politicians of his generation, rising in the 1960s to become Home Secretary and in 1967 Chancellor of the Exchequer. Like a great many politicians of that era who fought in the war—Edward Heath was another—Jenkins was very much in favor of the then Common Market. For greater economic union between member European states would help to ensure that no conflict like it could ever happen again.
Keith Batey’s fellow billetee Howard Smith was later to become Ambassador to Moscow and head of MI5. David Rees went on to become a tremendously eminent Professor of Mathematics at Exeter University.
Elsewhere, the extraordinary musical traditions of Bletchley Park were upheld proudly in codebreaker Douglas Craig’s subsequent career as an opera baritone, a creative executive at Glyndebourne, and later
Director of Sadler’s Wells Theatre. Colin Thompson, one of the men who later helped to crack the Italians’ alternative cipher machine, the C 38M, went on to become curator of the Scottish National Gallery. Meanwhile, naval Ultra veteran James Hogarth eventually became a high-ranking official in the Foreign Office, while his colleague J. H. Plumb became a professor of history.
This brief rundown demonstrates that even though the central work of the Park may not have been directly stimulating, those young men and women who had applied themselves to the most intractable and daunting of problems had finally emerged from the institution ready to take their rightful places in government, the civil service, the arts, as though they had just matriculated from Oxford or Cambridge. Compared to their military equivalents, the young people of the Park had scarcely paused at all in their pursuits.
Unlike their military equivalents, however, they were not permitted the luxury of relating what they had achieved in the war. Exactly the reverse: with family, with spouses, with offspring—no Bletchley Park operative was allowed to say a single word about those extraordinary years.
28 After Bletchley: The Silence Descends
“My father died in 1951,” says John Herivel. “And of course, he never heard anything about my war career. Although he knew I had been at Bletchley Park, he had no idea about what I had been doing. And there was a point, shortly before he died, when he experienced this tremendous frustration.
“I was a son who had promised great things after his school career, and who then seemed, to him, to be doing nothing during the war. And this frustration spilled out. My father said: ‘You’ve never done anything!’”
The Official Secrets Act, says Herivel, was so deeply impressed upon everyone who signed it that even under this terrible weight of provocation, he could not imagine himself breaking it. “I did think he was perhaps not long for this world,” Herivel says of his decision not to tell his father anything, “but really, out of all those people who had signed that act, I wasn’t going to be the one who broke it.”
It was not just parents. There were also children who had to be kept in the dark, as Mavis and Keith Batey were to find. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s and ‘60s, their children could not be told the slightest detail of what their parents had done throughout the war. And yet those tiny details could escape in the most surprising ways.
Mavis Batey says, for instance, that even the numerical positioning of each letter within the alphabet became ingrained to an extent that might have raised suspicions. She gives an amusing example: “Some years ago, my daughter was working in the Bodleian Library, right down in J Floor. Ten floors down, I said, that’s a long way. And she said, ‘How do you know J is ten floors down?’ I changed the subject. Little things like that could give you away.”
There were some, of course, who never strictly left Bletchley, but instead stayed with GC&CS through to its move a few years later to Cheltenham when it became GCHQ. Among them were Hugh Alexander and the widely liked Eric Jones, who went on to become head of GCHQ. For others, the silence of Bletchley had set in so far that they did not think about it any more.
Mimi Gallilee got a job in the news research department of the BBC. Although she enjoyed it, the urge to move on was strong. In the 1960s, Mimi went to America. When she came back, she found an odd and rather disconcerting echo of her old life.
“When I went for my interview at Bush House—I used to put on my applications that I worked at Bletchley Park, adding in brackets ‘Foreign Office Evacuated.’ One of the people on the board whom I didn’t know, said, ‘I see you worked at Bletchley Park. What were you doing there?’ So I said, ‘I’m very sorry, I can’t discuss that.’”
“My response to that interview question was a reflex action,” she says. “I hadn’t had time to think what would I say if they asked this. I always put it down openly, but only stating that it was a wartime base for part of the Foreign Office. That man on the board was Hugh Lunghi.”
Lunghi is a very distinguished figure; he was Churchill’s interpreter at the Yalta conference of 1945, and in this capacity met Roosevelt and Stalin. He was also one of the first men into Hitler’s bunker in 1945. It is interesting that when he interviewed Mimi Gallilee, the word Bletchley held such significance. “And that was why I got the job at Bush House,” says Mrs. Gallilee. “I didn’t know then that the department I was going into was also under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act—that was the World Service.”
Some were even more dedicated to keeping the secret. Frederick Winterbotham’s book on Ultra was published in 1974; Walter Eytan (formerly Ettinghausen—he changed his name a few years after the war when he left England for the Middle East, eventually to become an Israeli diplomat), who had worked in Hut 4, recalled: “I was shocked to the point of refusing to read the book when someone showed me a copy, and to this day I feel inhibited if by chance the subject comes up.”1
In later years, especially in the wake of the publication of Winterbotham’s account, Bletchley veterans found themselves frequently bumping into one another. Keith Batey and Oliver Lawn, both senior civil servants by the 1960s, often sat on important government committees together. Meanwhile, Roy Jenkins quite often found himself at functions with people who would say: “Were you at the Park?” Once he met the Honorable Sarah Baring at a glittering party, and there was a moment of amused, complicit acknowledgment. “I’d never met him before but he was a lovely man,” says Sarah Baring. “But I knew. I asked him if the initials BP meant anything to him and he laughed and said yes.”
However, those years of enforced silence also created moments of great family upset for some codebreakers. “You had forcibly to forget for thirty years,” says Mavis Batey. “Now, I have people writing to me saying ‘My husband has died and I never knew what he did at Bletchley Park. Can you tell me?’ Well no, I’m afraid I can’t—not unless they worked in my section.” With all the huts so rigidly demarcated, how could anyone know?
And even after the Bletchley secret was blown open for all to see in 1974, many of Bletchley’s operatives experienced a curious psychological side effect. Although Winterbotham’s book set off a chain of other publications, a number of ordinary Bletchley-ites could not bring themselves to even mention the place, let alone discuss their roles there. The need for secrecy had become ingrained to the profoundest degree. There were a significant number, like Walter Eytan, who felt that Winterbotham himself was a disgrace for having gone into print. Others, even into the 1980s, would steadfastly refuse to disclose a single thing even to their closest family.
One codebreaking veteran in Scotland, a church minister, continued to tell his children that his war had consisted of his religious ministry, although they knew well that he had been ordained after the war. He absolutely would not mention Bletchley. It was simply a case of duty; a promise had been made, and it had to be kept.
In the case of Walter Eytan, the silence remained even in the face of matrimonial pressure: “Security was second nature to us; my wife said she found difficulty in marrying a man who would not tell her what he did in the war. I did tell her that I had spent most of the time at a place called Bletchley, which meant nothing to her.”2 Others were more pragmatic. “I never told a soul,” says Jean Valentine. “It didn’t come up because you didn’t discuss it. I married a man and didn’t ask him about the secret things on the plane that he flew, and he never asked me what I had been doing.” One story concerns a husband and wife who finally, in the late 1970s, told each other what they had done at the Park while the husband was washing the car on a Sunday afternoon.
Then there was Mimi Gallilee’s extraordinary case: she, her mother, and her sister all worked at Bletchley in different capacities. Mother was a waitress, and so rather less secret. But Mimi and her older sister—who worked in one of the huts—never discussed it after the war. Sadly, Mimi’s sister died in the late 1960s. To this day Mimi has no idea what her sister was doing in that hut. There are no official records—so how on
earth is she to know?
There are numerous other poignant stories too, chiefly concerning young people who—like John Herivel—yearned as the post-war years went on to tell their parents what they had done in the war, yet never could, and whose parents then died, never having known. Some found it unbearable that there was no official documentation, as though those years had simply never happened. Sheila Lawn recalls: “What I regretted was that my father died long before I could reveal anything. He died in 1961. My mother died a lot later but by that time she wasn’t very well. I am so sorry my father couldn’t have…he would have been so interested.”
“My parents were the same,” adds Oliver Lawn. “They both died in the 1960s. They were never curious. Many people were in the same situation. Relatives who should have known, but who couldn’t be told. And then died.”
These days, some wonder exactly why everything had to remain so hush-hush for so long afterward. One very simple reason was that the encryption techniques that Bletchley had managed to break into, either via Enigma or “Tunny,” were still current in other parts of the world—far-flung corners of the fast-fading British Empire included. Indeed, in its first few years under Communist rule, East Germany was still using the same Enigma—a fact that was exploited not merely by the British, but also by the East Germans’ Russian overlords.
The second reason was the Cold War: Churchill’s chilling 1945 speech concerning the Iron Curtain falling across Europe: the understandable paranoia when, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict with Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union went back on all its promises and not only swallowed up Poland but a vast chunk of Germany too, bringing the oppressive forces of Communism jutting into western Europe. In terms of the scale of territory, it was a breathtaking seizure; Churchill noted how very close the Soviets were now to France and Britain. Indeed, in a moment of desperation back in 1945, he openly mused about the possibility of flattening Moscow with the newly perfected atomic bomb.
The Secret Lives of Codebreakers Page 31
