A letter came for me, ‘Please report to the works office’. It was for an interview for essential war work. I had the choice … join the Land Army (wot and leave me mum), clean out train boilers (a filthy job), be a porter on Bletchley railway station (mmmm), munitions worker (and blow meself up) or be an aircraft worker. Now that had appeal, that would surely suit my seven stone frame. Reluctantly I gave my notice in to Bert.
And so in 1941 Doris found herself, along with a host of women of all ages, kitted out in a denim boiler suit, hair neatly turbaned, ‘ready to win the war’. As Fitter 111, Grade 3, her job was as ‘mate’ to a man who was a Fitter Grade 1. The Wolverton Works was geared up to repair and maintain damaged aircraft. Doris was trained on the job by her mate, handing him five-eighth drills, fetching castle nuts and split pins, collecting blueprints. She soon graduated to the greater skill of drilling out ‘skins’ of aluminium used to patch the wings of shelled Typhoons, filing down the irregularities and holding rivets in place while her mate gunned them into the metal, sending a searing sensation into her fingers. Sometimes, if the rivets needing to be held in place were particularly large, her mate would do this job, while allowing her to do the gunning. The work required great skill and delicacy of touch. Doris’s conscientious approach won her the confidence of her mate, and sometimes he would even send her to cut aluminium – ‘not many were allowed to do this dangerous job.’ When completed, each repaired aircraft went before an inspector, who examined it in detail while Fitter 111 and her mate stood by, anxious that their work had made the grade. The inspectors were gentlemen, and Doris held them in respect.
But, despite the large numbers of women now employed at the Wolverton Works (40 per cent of aircraft employees were women), it remained an uncompromisingly male environment – a place where ‘bugger’ and ‘ ’ell’ punctuated every sentence, where burping and farting were tolerated, where grown men behaved like ten-year-olds. There was the anti-social man who ate raw onions for lunch, the joker who jammed the drawer containing the girls’ belongings by driving a nail through the runner and the idiot who booby-trapped the shelf where Doris kept her handbag: when she reached up for it she was showered with nuts and bolts. The girls got their share of taunts, caterwauls and wolf-whistles.
Nevertheless, Doris became fascinated by her work. It was absorbing, responsible and dangerous at times. She took pride in the finished product and, above all, she knew it was important.
Cheap Wine, Pink Gin
In her time off Doris enjoyed the weekly dances at the Science and Arts Institute in Wolverton. At these, she often noticed a group of girls accompanied by officers gathered round a table in the corner: ‘[They] looked immaculate and very stand-offish. Their nails were like an advert for Cutex … they did not mix much.’ Who were they? The centre of code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park just six miles away was shrouded in secrecy. Doris and her factory friends speculated about what ‘they’ did ‘over there at the Park’, but never found out. ‘It was very hush-hush. They kept to the Secrets Act as they were supposed to, for as the posters said – “Careless talk costs lives” and “Walls have ears”.’ Locally, the Bletchley girls were recognised as being a race apart, distinctive for their air of elegance and education. Doris was in awe of their desk skills and evident intelligence. ‘We could see that they came from good backgrounds, while we were what was termed “born on the wrong doorstep” … They were billeted in the better houses in Wolverton, some of these lucky enough to have a bathroom, which was a rare feature in these times.’
Twenty-one-year-old Mavis Lever was one of them; she had arrived at Bletchley Park in 1940. Mavis had discovered a passion for Germany’s language and literature while still at school in the 1930s and was deep into her studies on German Romanticism at University College London when war broke out. The college then evacuated to Aberystwyth. At this point, despite her passion for Aryan culture, Mavis decided that she didn’t want to read German poetry in Wales with a war on. Her first thought was to take up nursing but, encouraged by her professors, she went for an interview at the Foreign Office.
First of all I thought I was going to be a spy; then I thought it was going to be a job in censorship. In fact we weren’t allowed to be told what it was. We were just told it was very important. Initially I was at the Ministry of Economic Warfare opposite St James’s Underground Station, checking commercial codes, finding out who was supplying certain important minerals to the Germans. Then in summer 1940 I moved to Bletchley.
Mavis herself would have agreed with Doris that girls like her were privileged:
We were paid £2 10s a week, a guinea of which had to go on one’s billet. I lodged in a grocer’s shop, which meant I had bacon for breakfast! Later I was moved to a manor house, where I was waited on by a manservant who produced spam on a silver salver – but then the manservant was called up …
Well I absolutely adored the job. I was under the code-breaker Dilly Knox – we were quite famous in Whitehall as ‘Dilly’s girls’. In fact everyone was in at the deep end. There was no book you could read about the history of code-breaking, and there was no professor to consult.
Today, Dillwyn Knox’s contribution to the cracking of the Enigma code is recognised as having been crucial. Knox, an eminent papyrologist, had had a classical training and had studied literary papyri. He had the ability, and intuition, needed to recognise the metrical and rhythmic patterns of ancient poetry, and he brought these qualities to his cryptographic work. As Mavis explains, it was this approach that gave Knox the edge over a more mathematical system for code-breaking – and it was one that, with her literary background, she shared:
There are so many ways of setting an Enigma machine – millions and millions of them – that quite often the mathematically minded were reduced to questions of probability, as in ‘What are the chances of getting this out?’ But we just floundered in head-first and hoped for the best. One woman in my section dreamt the combination, and she turned out to be right! We worked by intuition, and strokes of imagination. But also, importantly, by psychology. For example, the Enigma machine has little windows, and you have to set the wheels to four different letters, and of course the operators were told to set them at random, but they never did. Instead they used dirty German four-letter words, or their girlfriends’ names. Well, we quite often knew our operators. So instead of having to work out the probability of what the setting of the wheels would be, we knew they had a girlfriend called Rosa, and it would work out. And so we built up all kinds of little tricks. Maths doesn’t really get you anywhere. It’s really much more like a game of Scrabble. You’ve got to have inspired guesses. And really that is a female quality.
To give you an example: Keith Batey, my husband, had trained to be a mathematician; we met at Bletchley. And I remember one occasion when I was tackling something. Keith looked over my shoulder and he said, ‘The chances of you getting that out are four million to one against you.’ Well at coffee time I walked over to him, and with the greatest of pleasure I told him: ‘That came out in five minutes.’
Mavis knew that her job was one of extreme importance but, ironically, it was rare that she was able to appreciate what a difference her work made.
You’re only given a part of the message to decrypt, and then it’s got to be translated and analysed, before they decide where it has to be sent on to: the Defence Ministry or the Admiralty or the Secret Service or what-have-you. There was the strict principle of ‘need to know’: you only knew what you genuinely needed to know, because if you’re captured they’ll learn the lot.
So we never knew what was going on in the bigger picture.
But there was one occasion when Dilly’s girls got a real sense of how their work could change the course of history.
Early in 1941 conflict in the Balkans was hotting up; British convoys bearing forces were coming in from Alexandria to bolster Greek defences against the Axis, but first they would have to encounter the Italian navy. The sea engagemen
ts which followed, in March 1941, were crucially affected by the work of the women and men based in Buckinghamshire.
Soon after Mavis’s arrival at Bletchley, Knox and the girls successfully broke the Italian naval Enigma. In principle this code was easier to crack than the German one, since the machine in use was more elementary. But because its message traffic was also far less busy, decoding it proved correspondingly challenging. There just wasn’t much to go on. However, on 25 March Mavis and the team were able to decipher messages warning of an impending Italian naval operation in the eastern Mediterranean:
The one time when we really saw the bigger picture was when we got an Italian message that said ‘Today Is The Day Minus 3’. So – what were the Italians going to do? You see, this was an occasion when you had to break the whole message in order to decipher it. And then it came out: it was the Battle of Matapan.
The next day two further messages came through. The urgency of their content prompted a ‘jumbo rush’, and Dilly, Mavis and her colleague Margaret Rock worked flat out decrypting them. The information pointed incontestably towards an imminent Italian naval thrust in the Aegean. With hindsight, it appears that Italian naval command underestimated British forces in the Mediterranean, believing them to have only one operational battleship. In reality they had three. Moreover, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean fleet Andrew Cunningham was an expert in night-fighting. Based on the information he now received from Bletchley via the Admiralty, Admiral Cunningham deployed cruisers and air forces to the south of Crete. They torpedoed the Italian cruiser Pola. Back at Bletchley on the 27th, more decrypted messages showed that the Italians still thought the British fleet was in Alexandria. In this belief, they sent a squadron of cruisers and destroyers to rescue the Pola and were taken completely unawares when, acting on the intercepted intelligence, Cunningham’s battle fleet ambushed them after dark off Cape Matapan on the Peloponnese. The British sank three cruisers and two destroyers. Three air crew were lost. Of the Italians, 2,400 sailors were killed, missing or captured.
Oh we celebrated that all right. Cunningham had gone to the exact spot where they were going to attack the convoys. And yes, we had a drink – amongst ourselves – and I remember we got hold of a very cheap bottle of wine, and wrote Matapan on the label, and then discovered of course that the cleaner would see it, so we had to take it off. One had to be terribly careful about the cleaners! What would they think when they read about Matapan in the paper, and then saw a bottle in the office waste paper basket with Matapan on the label? One had to think fast about that kind of thing.
Soon after we saw Cunningham on Pathé news, and we only wished we could have told our parents that it was all because of these messages we’d deciphered that he’d won the Battle of Matapan.
Later, Cunningham came down to congratulate us, and we all had drinks together. I think the Matapan business really was a high spot of my life – just knowing we had done something that was helpful. But so much had to be repressed and kept secret. I think that is probably the most extraordinary thing about Bletchley – there were about 10,000 people, not just at Bletchley itself, but the Y service people and so on who were doing the intercepting; they all knew this secret – and nobody ever blabbed.
The Italian navy was now in disarray, unable to intervene in the British retreat from Greece and Crete. Victory at Matapan was wisely attributed by the press to good air reconnaissance; thanksgiving services were held, and Admiral Cunningham hailed as unchallengeable master of the eastern Mediterranean. He was a fine naval commander, but it was only just that he thanked the women who had made his position possible. Mavis was not able to tell her own side of the story to a soul for another thirty years.
*
In her eighties, with many later achievements to her name, Mavis Batey (née Lever) is able to look back with satisfaction, aware that her intellect, her intuitive powers and her stamina have been acknowledged. She knows that her work and that of her colleagues, carried out in a chilly hut in Buckinghamshire, enabled men on destroyers in the stormy Aegean Sea to scramble bombers, fire torpedoes, drown enemies. The kind of historic actions which had Nella Last reaching for the ‘off’ button on her radio directly involved many remarkable women, whose contribution was not only important in itself, it changed their lives.
Yet, though crucial to its outcome, the Bletchley girls could only imagine what it was like to live through a battle. Nurses were among the few women who had close-up experience of war in all its frightening, sick, ugly reality. After her narrow escape from France in June 1940, QA Lorna Bradey might have been excused for deciding that front-line nursing was not for her. On the contrary, her appetite for adventure was undiminished: ‘One felt a great urgency to get on with the war – sitting at home was no good.’
She didn’t sit at home for long. Lorna was ordered to join the medical team on board a hospital ship bound for Cape Town. She was thrilled – ‘tremendous excitement everywhere’ – until she discovered that her job was to help care for a rabble of disorderly Australians, most of them, it appeared, injured in street brawls. This ‘loathsome collection of men’ were en route home to Australia. The plan was to jettison their troublesome patients at Cape Town, but it was not to be. Orders were now received that the ship must proceed to Suez, where the men who had recovered would be required to join the desert army against Rommel’s advance. They had just forty-eight hours before departure so, while the Aussies went on a drunken rampage, Lorna and the QAs took advantage of a wonderful welcome by the Cape Town expat community. Then they were back on board for another six weeks. Between theatre duties, deck tennis, bridge, boat drill practice and her new boyfriend (this time, a handsome blue-eyed first officer) the journey passed, but the rebellious Aussies were near boiling point by the time they got to Suez. ‘We were ordered to lock our cabins at night.’ When the troops were finally disembarked and carried off in transports, ‘a silent cheer of relief went up from all of us … That was our first mission done.’
The hospital ship was Lorna’s home for fourteen months. And she was fulfilling an ambition: ‘I would travel, see everything and have plenty of fun.’ Once rid of the Australian soldiers, life began to resemble a cruise as the ship plied between Suez, Aden, the Cape and Bombay; wherever they docked the QAs were welcomed with parties and dances. They ate delicious food, sampled South African wines, bathed and went horse-riding. Folding hills, jacaranda trees, blue bays and moonlit velvety nights completed the picture-postcard quality of those unforgettable months in the southern hemisphere.
But this wasn’t war. We itched to get back to work … 1941 was a bad year for the Allies and we were destined to go into the teeth of the battle at sea.
From January 1941 the deep-water port of Tobruk, on the northern Libyan coast near the border with Egypt, had been in Allied hands. From April, the troops there were besieged by Axis forces, who finally retook this important base in December. During the siege, the Royal Navy provided vital support, bringing in supplies and fresh troops and ferrying out casualties. Lorna’s ship was one of these, under orders to run between Alexandria and Tobruk.
We were to go to Tobruk at top speed – load the wounded from the Lighters and return, operating on the severe cases on the way down. So the ‘Tobruk Splint’ was born – a long plaster of Paris splint to immobilise the wounded and fractured limb until we could get them to base … We took great pride in the time it took us to load the patients and turn around. Tobruk harbour was a mass of wrecks and floating debris and made the entry most difficult. It was always made about 5.00 a.m. We would wait outside the harbour at night and go in … We would be well on our way back by 10.00 a.m.
At last we were being put to the test …
This was no Mediterranean cruise. As winter came on the weather grew cold, grey and stormy. Tobruk was running short of medical supplies, and many of the patients, who had been holding out there for months, were in a lamentable state with festering, gangrenous wounds. The run to Alexandria was
fraught with danger. Their sister ship was torpedoed and sunk. Lorna’s counterpart on this ship, the theatre sister, survived to tell a harrowing tale. The captain had given orders to abandon ship at the moment when the surgical team were in the middle of a serious abdominal operation. In dreadful haste they closed up the patient’s wound, bound him to a stretcher and, holding on to it to the best of their ability, leaped into the sea. When she was picked up the sister still had her operating gown and gloves on, but the patient was never heard of again. Lorna and her medical team were working flat out. Everybody knew that the sea was full of enemies and that they were being ‘watched’; constantly at the back of her mind was the thought that their ship could be next, and the tedious boat drills no longer seemed pointless. Caring for their patients and getting them to safety was paramount, but nursing through a force 8 storm was beset with difficulties. ‘You can imagine taking off stinking plasters in a rough sea!’ Lorna remembered having to break off in the middle of an operation and dash to the side of the ship to throw up. The best cure was pink gin and a slice of ham – apparently it worked.
Stocking Wars, Sex Wars
At home, though the Blitz had abated, a sense of urgency prevailed. Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Aircraft Production, wanted 2,782 new aircraft by December 1941, and it was accepted that women factory recruits like Doris Scorer in Wolverton were essential. For her part, she was starting to become familiar with wearing overalls and putting up with the bad language, sexism and tomfoolery of her male colleagues. She was now regularly working a twelve-hour day helping to get damaged aircraft flying again.
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