The Lost World of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  The point of all these pursuits went far beyond mere leisure; the staff of Bletchley Park were being invited to de-pressurise after gruelling six-day weeks and all-night shifts with pursuits that – while entertaining and diverting – would keep their minds and bodies occupied. It was about physical well-being, but their mental health too. When you have been working under unfathomable pressure, knowing that the job you are doing is vital for saving so many lives, how would it even be possible to sleep properly unless you and your colleagues could find ways to focus fully on something else, like Shakespeare or a comic revue?

  At the end of the war, local Buckinghamshire newspapers regretted that the Bletchley players would be seen no more. The critics never had any idea of the work they did, but they admired their productions.

  Chapter Seven

  BLETCHLEY THE WARTIME TOWN

  Unlike today’s rather drab concrete 1970s rebuild, Bletchley railway station was once a large and lively junction. Wartime recruits would either be picked up by car, or simply walk from there along the side of the adjoining Bletchley Park estate.

  Even throughout the war, hunting remained an integral part of country life near Bletchley; RSS analyst Hugh Trevor-Roper made excuses to visit Bletchley Park so that he could actually ride out with the Whaddon Hunt.

  For some recruits, arrival at Bletchley station in the thick darkness of the blackout was a suspenseful matter: with no lights to guide them, their footsteps would echo on the iron bridge and then they would be met at the station’s booking office by someone who would take them the short distance into the nation’s most intensely secret institution. For others, the first sight of Bletchley was rather more quotidian. One codebreaker recalled how, one afternoon as he got off that train for the first time, he was greeted on the platform by a cheeky young ‘urchin’, who shouted, ‘’Ere, mister, I’ll read your secret writing for ya!’ before running off.

  It was never the most inspirational of towns. ‘I spent a month in Bletchley – last Sunday,’ was one Naval Intelligence wisecrack that did the rounds. Particularly for those who had been recruited from London, there was something of a culture shock. One young woman linguist recalled curtly that the place was ‘a dump’. Bletchley at that time had two industries: the railways and brickworks. The landscape around had been carved out for these works. And the manufactories produced a distinctive smell that would catch the back of the throat on warm summer’s days.

  Into this broadly working-class milieu were thrown hundreds and thousands of mostly middle-class recruits. It is difficult to know who would have found the adjustment harder to make. One young lady spirited down from well-to-do Edinburgh found herself in an outlying satellite village, Wolverton, billeted with a couple who were polite enough but who would inevitably tell her the day after an exhausting night shift, ‘We heard you come in’, as though the young woman had any control over her hours. Another young woman, who was Catholic, was billeted with a family who were Plymouth Brethren, and who would not even allow a radio to be played on the grounds that it was the devil’s work. One Easter, the young woman begged to be able to listen to a performance of The Messiah. She was allowed, but throughout it all the father sang his own choice of hymns.

  The area’s small sweet shops – and the severe rationing – were recalled by veteran Mimi Galillee, who was a teenage messenger with a very sweet tooth.

  Yet we must also see it from the point of view of the billetors taking in these exotic creatures. The novelist-to-be Angus Wilson, whose Pompeiian mood swings were a source of wonder at the Park, dwelt with a kind family in a small house in the village of Simpson. His prodigious consumption of cigarettes caused them, in vain, to make theatrical coughing noises to deter him. But the discomfort worked both ways. The only book anyone in the family ever appeared to read (and re-read) was Bunyan’s Holy War; this must have seemed suffocating to the young writer and it has been suggested that it may have contributed to his ever-deepening depression. In a time when most young men were in uniform, Wilson’s carefully chosen attire – rich blue shirts with apricot-coloured bow ties were a favoured combination – were a local talking point. But the claustrophobia of the billet, of the Park and of the little village bordered by the Victorian canal became too much for him. There was said to have been an incident where he threw an inkpot at a Wren. ‘Angus isn’t really mad,’ said one of his colleagues later. ‘He threw inkpots at all the right people.’ In a wider sense, many in these small towns and villages could not help but disapprove of all these seemingly peculiar young men who did not appear to have proper wartime roles and who were not, as far as anyone could tell, pulling their weight. One local explanation for Bletchley Park was that it was a special lunatic asylum. Recruits such as Wilson would have done nothing to dispel this misconception.

  On top of this, as mentioned, a great many debutantes were recruited to work at Bletchley Park; some of them had been brought up in stately homes. The contrast for them was stark. One recalled the murderous cold of a house with an unheated parlour. Another lodged with a couple – the father worked in one of the brickworks – and their very boisterous children. One young woman – of distinct Bloomsbury leanings – sought to combat the intense pressure of the Bletchley work by retiring to her modest billet in off-duty hours and sitting in bed drinking quantities of gin and orange. A smart card-index girl was posted to a house that, to her relief, had the luxury of a bathroom. However, it did not have the luxury of a lock on the door. The woman of the house told the girl not to worry – she could take baths while the man of the house was out working nights on the railways. That first night, the girl did just that, with some trepidation; just as she relaxed, undressed and got into the bath, the man of the house walked straight in, having managed to bunk off his shift. The girl made arrangements to move to a new billet shortly afterwards.

  Codebreakers recalled that billeting in Bletchley was sometimes spartan but generally friendly. Codebreaker Keith Batey was moved by his widowed landlady’s generosity with rations.

  Bletchley had cafes and fish and chip shops; the British Restaurant was largely shunned except by a few Scottish codebreakers, who liked the plain fare.

  Like most small towns in the war, Bletchley could at least boast two cinemas (codebreakers loved to lose themselves in escapist dramas such as The Song of Bernadette and outlandish horrors like The Ghost of Frankenstein). There was also a British Restaurant (a chain started with the aim of promoting healthy rationing options, but which was remembered by veterans as being many rungs below the local fish and chip shop, the grub in the local pubs, and indeed Bletchley’s very own canteen, which had little enough to shout about itself).

  The town was so determinedly austere that the directorate was initially concerned that smarter recruits from London – used to neon lights and ritzy night-clubs – would sink into depression.

  Bletchley had a good range of shops, from fishmongers to jewellers. And one local hairdresser salon got security clearance to visit the Park twice a week to offer the ladies shampoos and sets.

  Codebreakers such as Hugh Alexander and Stuart Milner-Barry adored the Shoulder of Mutton – the good cheer and the beer were the ideal antidote to the strains of their work. There was a local rumour that codebreakers would converse in Ancient Greek over their pints.

  The high street had the staples: a fishmonger, grocer, pharmacy, two butchers. It also had a hairdressing salon and, on top of this, a small department store. Women, with their clothing ration coupons, generally seemed to find the latter a shade too expensive, and would prefer, when they could, to get the train south into Watford to replenish their wardrobes. Bletchley also had a multitude of pubs; popular among the male codebreakers was the Shoulder of Mutton. As well as the pints and the darts, the landlady there was a gifted cook. At that time, women did not generally frequent pubs and locals were surprised when senior codebreaker Dilly Knox took his young prodigy Mavis Lever to a saloon bar for a gin and tonic. It was obvious by the expression on h
er face after the first sip that she was not an experienced drinker.

  The church did not seem to figure quite as largely in the life of Bletchley as perhaps it did in smaller communities. But there was a thriving Methodist congregation, which was joined by codebreakers Oliver Lawn and Sheila MacKenzie (depending on their work rotas). One local vicar of an outlying village was unwittingly the cause of one of Bletchley’s rare security scares. He had several young codebreakers billeted with him and made it his mission to discover exactly what it was they were doing up at the Park. Naturally, they were forbidden to tell him and his questioning grew both more forceful and more devious, until it reached a point that he was reported. A memo in the archives from the Bletchley directorate recommended the clergyman be given a ‘thorough frightening’: ‘he is not a bad man, but he is a foolish one’.

  Some codebreakers were – to their great irritation – pulled into the Home Guard. They were annoyed by having to ‘run around at night with cork-blackened faces’.

  There was a discreet military presence at Bletchley Park and in the town. But at the Park itself, there was never a sense of military hierarchy. Men in uniform would sometimes to be told not to be so rigid about it.

  Codebreaker Sheila MacKenzie – used to her native Highlands – revelled in her bicycle rides along the quiet local roads. She called her bike ‘Griselda’.

  But if the billets – with their lack of bathrooms, and indeed lack of indoor lavatories – were to some an unexpected trial, the countryside that lay all around came as a pleasant surprise. Those with bicycles would relish the chance to shake off the oppressive pressure of work by taking off on quiet roads to explore. A few of the codebreakers were keen ramblers – this was a time when access to private land was a fiercely fought and rather radical cause – and the landscape was felt to be particularly rewarding for distance walkers. These ramblers also had other enthusiasms, such as for butterflies, and bird-watching. Again, in a time before vast soulless prairie farming, the small fields and gentle hills of Buckinghamshire were a treasure trove. Even the immediate scarred vicinity of the town, with the vast holes carved out of the earth for the brickworks, proved full of interesting wildlife.

  But what of the town itself? An early Bletchley Park internal memo spoke of the Directorate’s anxiety that Bletchley would prove too much of a culture shock for sophisticated young undergraduates swarming in from London, Oxford and Cambridge; that it would have a deadening effect that might sap morale. What they had not counted on was the infinite adaptability of the young, nor indeed the more reflective pleasures to be found in an unassuming town, and indeed the way that it was possible to make their own entertainment. Bletchley’s straightforwardness was clearly, to many, a refreshing contrast to the byzantine complexities and the frequently nocturnal pressure of life within the Park itself.

  For local aristocrats and landowners, pleasure came in the form of the Whaddon Hunt – and indeed, the hunt was frequently joined by senior Radio Security Service man Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was in regular liaison with the Park. The hunt would tear across the Buckinghamshire countryside; on one occasion, the unhappy fox fled straight through military police security and into the grounds of Bletchley Park itself. This was obviously off-limits to the riders; all save one. Trevor-Roper, it has been suggested, had his security pass with him, and was able for a time at least to chase the fox in the hope that it would shoot back out of the gates again.

  When some of the veterans returned to the rescued Park in the 1990s, for the first time since 1945, they found that while the grounds and the house were astonishingly familiar after all these decades, the surrounding landscape was completely changed. Where once were small fields of pasture and arable, and quarries gouged out from the sandy soil, was now a series of roundabouts and glittering office buildings. In the 1960s, the locale was transformed into the new town of Milton Keynes.

  Bletchley was known for its brickworks; codebreaker Oliver Lawn loved to go swimming in the pools left by the clay pits.

  Even up until the 1960s – before nearby Milton Keynes blossomed outwards in all its futurism – the town of Bletchley remained remarkably un-notable. Architectual chronicler Nikolaus Pevsner couldn’t recommend a single feature to his readers.

  Chapter Eight

  THE WORLDWIDE LISTENERS

  Colombo, Sri Lanka. Hundreds of Wrens were sent out here to monitor Japanese codes. A great many of them – who had never before left Britain – were utterly bewitched by the life they found there.

  The pristine white Wren uniforms for the Tropics. On parade in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Nightlife involved sophisticated restaurants and dances.

  Less exotic (but still greatly enjoyed by many Wrens) – a posting to the Isle of Man, where much of the secret interception training work was done.

  In a digital age, where every last breath and the electronic pulse can be instantly recorded and analysed, it is instructive to think back just 75 years, to an age when the web of intelligence and its complex worldwide threads relied almost wholly on the quick-wittedness, intense concentration and nimble fingers of sharp young minds. Morse code is now a dying art, a language as esoteric as ancient Greek. But to thousands of young recruits in the war, signed up and sworn to secrecy to play their roles in the Bletchley codebreaking operation, it became second nature. Even now, there are some veterans who hear a snatch of Morse code in a film and can instantly translate it.

  An operation as vast as Bletchley Park required a dizzying supply of raw material, most of which was encoded messages, sent by German Enigma operators and plucked from the airwaves by dedicated secret listeners. For this work – in Britain and in stations right the way across the world – many thousands of Wrens and male wireless operators were deployed. That lightning ability to translate Morse was the most basic of the qualifications these young people needed. They required prodigious energy and patience; also a certain mental flexibility. Without it, they would have swiftly burned out. More than this: as the war went on, an unprecedented number of young women were despatched to the remoter regions of the earth, to carry out their vital work closer to the front line than any women had been before. Recruits to the ‘Y’ Service – the ‘Y’ was simply a phonetic abbreviation for ‘wireless’ – were brave pioneers in many ways.

  Some years even before the advent of Enigma encoding technology, the science of radio – and the military impact that it could have – had preoccupied all the major powers since the inception of the medium. The ability to transmit messages without the need for wires or cables could add terrific speed and stealth to any military manoeuvre. And it was also vital to be able to hear and interpret the conversations of your enemies. Wireless interception became a staple element in futuristic British thriller novels of the late Edwardian era. In real life, the number of small clandestine stations dedicated to listening to foreign signals – from the base on south London’s Denmark Hill, which intercepted coded traffic from foreign embassies, to larger coastal operations such as the establishment in Scarborough, Yorkshire – were already very focused by the inter-war years. Thanks in large part to Brigadier Gambier-Parry – a radio enthusiast who had been one of the very first press officers for the fledgling BBC in the 1920s – military intelligence was embracing the fast-developing technology. And unlike some other elements in the British military at that time, it was very well prepared when war finally came.

  It helped immeasurably, of course, that Britain still had an empire. From Hong Kong to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), from Bombay to the colour and heat of Egypt, there were not just highly trained operatives chasing ever elusive enemy frequencies; there were also small decryption units, working both on Enigma and other forms of coded messages. In Heliopolis, just outside Cairo, the Combined Middle East cipher operation was based in a disused museum. As the war progressed, the work of the listeners acquired a more mobile dimension: wireless operators out in the desert in specially adapted vans, working through insufferable heat and cold eerie nights, shaking
scorpions out of their boots. They tuned in to Rommel’s forces and at one point they were – triumphantly – relaying so much information back to Bletchley that the British knew more about the German supply line situation than Rommel himself.

  The Bletchley out-station at Kilindini, Mombasa, was based in a beautiful requisitioned 19th century school building. The cryptologists and Wrens worked on increasingly complex Japanese codes in large, airy school rooms and from there liaised with Washington and Melbourne.

  This muted painting of wartime Colombo is juxtaposed with the wild colour that many veterans of HMS Anderson recall; the flowers, the fruit and, at night, the mesmerising fireflies.

  As the war in the Middle East went on, increasing numbers of female operatives, such as the WAAF Eileen Clayton, were posted to listening stations closer and closer to the front line – to the horror of some senior commanders. Clayton in fact had a dramatic war not only in North Africa (where she met General Eisenhower) but also on the besieged island of Malta where, on the way back from one night shift, she was strafed by a Stuka. This was on her 24th birthday, and she was remarkably good-humoured about it. Other women, such as Cherrie Ballantine, who had been sent from Bletchley Park to Cairo in 1940, recalled the dizzying beauty and glamour of life there; the dances in fantastically luxurious hotels, the louche aristocratic ex-pats. She and others were witnesses to a world that was very soon to disappear.