The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  But the Stormtroopers, no doubt imagining that they faced a dangerous student opposition group, were not prepared to be outwitted by young girls.

  ‘In the end, of course, we were caught, giving grounds for embarrassment to our Foreign Office, who were trying to be congenial to the Germans, and were sent home in disrepute.’

  Although she was now fluent in German, the Second World War was still a couple of years away and she had to negotiate the ‘season’, a prospect which did not fill Sally with quite the same degree of dread that it had Jane Hughes. It was, after all, something that she’d always expected to do, even looked forward to. Her grandfather was a peer of the realm, whom her father would succeed in 1943. Her godfather was Lord Louis Mountbatten and her mother’s family, the Kinlochs, were the local lairds in East Lothian. Queen Mary, the King’s mother, was a friend of her grandmother and frequently came to tea at her grandmother’s elegant house in Eaton Place.

  ‘When I was about four years old, I was summoned to the drawing room from our nursery on the fourth floor to meet Queen Mary. Clutching on to Nanny, who had to wait outside the door, I was gently pushed into her presence. As I advanced towards this formidable lady my knickers fell down. Apparently, I calmly stepped out of them as if nothing had happened. Queen Mary laughed with pleasure and poor Nanny was mortified.’

  To ensure there were no such embarrassments when Sally was presented to Queen Mary’s daughter-in-law Queen Elizabeth, she was dispatched to Miss Vacani’s, an expensive and very classy dance school for young women. Miss Vacani had schooled the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the art of deportment; now Sally was to be taught how to curtsey.

  ‘I thought this curtseying business was going to be a doddle. This supposedly easy obeisance to the King and Queen was actually profoundly difficult. You had to bring your left leg behind your right leg, bend the knee almost down to the floor, keeping your head high and eyes straight forward. Going down was not too bad, but coming up was almost impossible without wobbling. Such an error Miss Vacani would not countenance. It took hours of practice to become perfect and I’m not sure I ever got it right, but at least I got rid of the wobble.’

  She was forced to wear a very traditional and very expensive ivory satin dress with a train and puff sleeves. ‘I hated it, but no amount of sulking and remonstrations that it was unfashionable would change my mother’s mind.’ The day of presentation came, with a Rolls-Royce delivering Sally and her parents at the Sovereign’s entrance of Buckingham Palace. The twenty or so young debutantes were shown into an ante-room and told by a gentleman usher that he would call them in one by one.

  ‘I started to shake and feel sick but there was no going back now, no escape. I heard my name called. Chin up, shoulders down, I began to walk forward. I had a blurred vision of a mass of people to my right; presumably my parents were among them. Twelve paces forward and there on the left were the Queen and the King.’

  Sally curtseyed to the Queen first, without a wobble, but when she saw the familiar face of Queen Mary standing behind the royal couple she curtseyed to her grandmother’s friend before curtseying to King George, a breach of etiquette that brought a subsequent reprimand from the head usher.

  ‘The rest of my debutante year remains largely out of focus and seemed to blend into one long dance. On arrival at a dance you were given a small rectangular card which folded, with a small pencil attached by a silken cord. The card was numbered from one to twenty and the men had to ask you if you would dance with them. It seems amazing to me now that we managed to keep going night after night, and it wasn’t just the dances. There were lunches as well, almost every day. We weren’t allowed to dress in a sloppy way. You always wore white gloves to go out to lunch – always.’

  She wore a different dress to each event and they were much more fashionable ones, made for her by Victor Stiebel, one of Britain’s most famous designers, who was so fascinated by the possibilities of Sally’s long legs and 18½-inch waist that he dressed her for free, while her godfather Lord Louis Mountbatten paid for a ‘wonderful’ Coming Out Ball at his Park Lane home.

  The onset of war saw Sally working as a journalist for Vogue magazine, for five shillings a week (which barely covered the cost of travel), while writing dispatches from London for the Baltimore Sun. But eventually she and her close friend and fellow debutante Osla Benning, then regarded as one of the most beautiful women in London, decided to go to Slough and work at the Hawker Siddeley aircraft factory, which was building Hurricane fighter aircraft for the RAF.

  ‘Osla and I wanted to do something really important, and we thought: making aeroplanes. So we trooped off to the Slough trading estate – ghastly place – and said here we are. We want to make an aeroplane.’

  They lived with Sally’s father, Richard, now separated from her mother and working as an executive at Pinewood Studios. He had a cottage nearby and it was here that Sally introduced Osla to a young man who was to be her boyfriend for the next three years. Lord Mountbatten had asked his goddaughter if she could find a girlfriend for his young nephew, Prince Philip of Greece.

  ‘Uncle Dickie said to me: “I don’t think Philip’s got a girlfriend at the moment. I wish you could find a nice girl for him because he doesn’t know anyone.” Osla didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, so I said: “I know, I’ll get them together.”’

  Early in 1941, Sally and Osla, who was also fluent in German, received a letter ordering them to report to Bletchley Park, to Commander Denniston’s deputy Edward Travis. Having spent most of her life in a magnificent country house designed by William Adam, Sally was distinctly unimpressed by the Bletchley mansion – ‘an ugly Victorian monstrosity’ – where Commander Travis welcomed them and told them they would be working in the German Naval Section in Hut 4.

  Probably because of their backgrounds, they were put up in a beautiful Queen Anne house in Aspley Guise eight miles to the east of Bletchley Park. ‘We were very lucky, Osla and I. We were billeted with two darling elderly people who looked after us beautifully. They were marvellous really, very good to us. Kind. They never complained. The large garden was unattended except for vegetables and in the summer the grass grew so long you could sunbathe topless without being seen.’

  Sally and Osla’s initial role was alongside a number of other well-to-do women working in the Index, logging down various details from the decoded messages, such as facts about individual U-boats, on file cards held in what looked like long shoe boxes.

  ‘Each time a signal came in and was translated, you had to put down the salient points in that signal, such as the name of the U-boat commander on one card, the number of the U-boat on another, the coordinates or the person; anything related to that signal went on different cards. Nobody explained anything. Within a couple of days we realised that this information had been obtained by codebreaking but even then we had no idea of the whole picture.’

  The Index had to be operational twenty-four hours a day, so they worked in two shifts, a day shift and a very long night shift. ‘The night watches were pretty awful. They were called watches because we were the Naval Section and the navy has watches not shifts.’

  On their days off, they rushed up to London on the train, making the most of every minute. Sally was going out with Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, one of the most eligible bachelors in the country, who had taken a commission in the Coldstream Guards.

  ‘Sometimes boyfriends would be back from the war and you always managed to keep in touch. The most lovely man, Mr Gibbs, the head hall porter at Claridge’s, knew exactly where all our boyfriends were. He used to say: “Hello, Miss Norton. Lord Hartington’s back. He said he would see you here later. I think he said six o’clock.” So of course I was back there by six o’clock. It was so nice to have a boyfriend.’

  But there was absolutely no way that any of them were prepared to have sex before marriage.

  ‘We just didn’t think of that at all. We were brought up to what my mother us
ed to call “behave nicely”. The boys could kiss you on the cheek, but not much more. We knew what the more daring girls were doing but as far as I was concerned it was all much too frightening for me to do it. You were supposed to go to the marriage bed as a virgin. There was no such thing as birth control so if a girl got pregnant, she married almost immediately.’

  Their favourite haunt was the 400, a nightclub on Leicester Square where you could dance all night. It was very small, but it was members only and there was live music every night.

  ‘As days off were so precious and time so short I usually took the milk train from Euston back to Bletchley at five o’clock in the morning, arriving in time for the 9am watch a bit bleary-eyed and hoping the head of the watch would find my work satisfactory and not notice I was a bit overdressed.’

  The intelligence on the German U-boats and attacks on the Allied convoys was still coming mainly from messages sent in low-level codes and clear text messages analysed by Jocelyn Bostock and Susie Henderson. They’d been joined by a young man called Harry Hinsley, one of the graduates recruited by Commander Denniston from Cambridge.

  Slight and bespectacled, Harry was about as far as it was possible to get in social terms from the well-to-do young women like Sally and Osla who made up a substantial proportion of the early recruits to Bletchley. He came from Walsall in the Black Country, where his father drove a horse and cart, ferrying iron ore and finished metal goods back and forth between the railway and the local ironworks. Phoebe Senyard immediately developed a soft spot for him.

  ‘I can remember quite well showing Harry some of the sorting and how delighted he seemed when he began to recognise the different types of signals. Those were very enjoyable days indeed. We were all very happy and cheerful, working in close cooperation with each other. If I was in difficulty, I knew I could go to Harry. It was a pleasure because he was always interested in everything and took great pains to find out what it was and why.’

  The intelligence analysts in the Admiralty who plotted the movements of enemy shipping had been ignoring Jocelyn and Susie, and the increasing amount of intelligence they were managing to glean from the intercept logs flowing in from the wireless sites at Winchester and Scarborough. The Admiralty analysts weren’t as skilled as Bletchley at analysing radio communications. They didn’t understand how Hut 4 had worked out the intelligence, so they didn’t believe it. There was some hope in Hut 4 that Harry would make a difference, that the Admiralty would listen to a man in a way that they wouldn’t listen to Jocelyn and Susie. But it made no difference at all. Two young girls and a weedy student in corduroy trousers and a pullover knitted by his mother. What could they know?

  The situation came to a head in June 1940. Harry, Jocelyn and Susie had been reporting that the German battlecruisers Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had left the Baltic to track the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet. The Admiralty refused to tell the Home Fleet because their analysts didn’t agree. On Friday 7 June 1940, Harry spent much of the day trying to persuade the duty captain to send out a warning. He refused. On the following day, the Gneisenau and the Scharnhorst attacked the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Glorious and her escorts, the destroyers HMS Acasta and HMS Ardent. All three British ships were sunk in just over two hours, with the loss of more than 1,500 officers and men.

  By the time Sally and Osla arrived in Hut 4 in early 1941, the relationship with the Admiralty had begun to improve, but it didn’t take long for the rows to start all over again. They resurfaced in May 1941, when the Royal Navy was tracking the new German battleship the Bismarck, the pride of the German Navy. On the morning of Saturday 24 May 1941, the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Hood took on the Bismarck and the German heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen in the Battle of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. The Hood was hit and sunk, while the Prince of Wales was forced to withdraw.

  Despite the German victory, the Bismarck was badly damaged and it was soon clear to Harry, Jocelyn and Susie from the Bismarck’s radio messages that it was being controlled from Paris rather than the German Navy’s headquarters in Wilhelmshaven. They’d seen this before and they knew it only happened when a German ship was heading for a French port, in this case almost certainly Brest where it could be repaired. But this had been missed by the Admiralty’s intelligence analysts.

  Harry rang them, winding the handle on the old-fashioned telephone that provided a direct line between Hut 4 and the Admiralty. He eventually got hold of someone who didn’t really want to speak to him. Didn’t he know they were busy? They were trying to find the Bismarck. It was somewhere in the Atlantic, probably making for Norway. No, Harry said. It was definitely heading for France.

  Yet again, as with the Glorious, the Bletchley Park assessment contradicted the Admiralty’s assumptions, so they refused to pass it on to the Royal Navy commanders. It was not until the early evening of Sunday 25 May, following yet another heated telephone conversation between Harry and the Admiralty’s analysts, that they finally accepted that Bletchley was right and told the fleet they should assume the Bismarck was heading for Brest.

  Meanwhile, Jane Hughes had just come on shift in the Hut 6 Decoding Room where she and her colleagues were briefed on the latest situation concerning the Bismarck.

  ‘We all knew that we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than anybody else, and she’d already sunk the Hood. So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.’

  Just over an hour into her shift, Jane was typing out a message on the main Luftwaffe Enigma, the Red. She’d set up her Typex machine to decode the message and a stream of German was coming out. She was typing automatically so she wasn’t actually reading the German. Then suddenly she spotted the word Brest.

  ‘I thought, Brest, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s about.’

  Jane read the message in full and realised that it was from the Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin telling someone important that the Bismarck was heading for the French port of Brest.

  She immediately called in one of the codebreakers, Keith Batey, and explained what it said. A Luftwaffe general whose son was on the Bismarck had asked if he was all right and had been told that the German battleship was heading for France. It was rushed through to the intelligence reporters who immediately sent out an urgent top-secret message: ‘Information received graded A1 that intention of Bismarck is to head for the west coast of France.’

  A1 was the highest grade they could give the intelligence. It meant that there was absolutely no doubt. In a moment of pure drama, the message from Bletchley arrived in the Admiralty just seven minutes after the analysts there finally accepted Harry’s insistence that the Bismarck was heading for Brest. The next day, a Catalina flying boat sent up as a direct result of the intelligence provided by Bletchley spotted the Bismarck. The Royal Navy chased her down and eventually she was sunk. It was an important victory which owed a great deal to Bletchley, and because the work being carried out by Harry, Jocelyn and Susie was not top secret like the work being done in Hut 6, the other codebreakers could be told about that part of it. It was the first time they had seen tangible evidence that their work was having an impact on the war. There was a rousing cheer in the dining room in the mansion when the BBC reported that the Bismarck had been sunk.

  Mavis Lever, who was also working at Bletchley, was Keith Batey’s girlfriend at the time and later his wife. When the film Sink the Bismarck was released in 1960, she took their young son to see it. She saw the ship begin to sink on the screen and had to look away.

  ‘I really did feel quite sick. I was thinking how awful it was that one’s breaking of a message could send so many people to the bottom. But that was war and that was the way we had to play it. If we thought about it too much we should never have been able to cope.’

  By the summer of 1942, Hut 4 was crammed full of people and new conc
rete and brick blocks were being built to rehouse the codebreaking sections. Phoebe couldn’t wait to move. ‘We were very crowded now and had spread to Hut 5 and parts of the house nearest Hut 4. So we were all longing for the day when we should be moving to our new brick-built home by the lake. They were very happy days although we were so huddled together, working so hard and under such difficulties owing to the lack of space, but we seemed to jog along in harmony, everyone being friendly and cooperative.’

  The Naval Section moved into Block A and Block B on the other side of the lake in late 1942. For security reasons they continued to call themselves Hut 4, rather than Naval Section, to disguise the fact that Bletchley was breaking the German Navy’s top codes.

  Sally only got into really serious trouble on one occasion. She was working in the Index Room one morning when she heard footsteps outside and in walked her godfather Lord Louis Mountbatten, now Chief of Combined Operations, followed by a group of harassed-looking Bletchley managers.

  ‘I managed to splutter in my astonishment, “Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?”’

  ‘Oh, I knew you were here and I thought I’d see how you were getting on. Show me the system of your cross-reference index.’

  Sally’s cheeks were bright red with embarrassment as she explained how the Index worked to her godfather, only too aware of the anger of the senior managers behind her at this young woman’s impertinence in disrupting their carefully planned programme.

  ‘I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled.’

  But first thing next morning she was ordered to report to Commander Travis, who tore her off a strip for daring to ask the Chief of Combined Operations to visit the Index.

  ‘I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing of the visit and he was my godfather. Bless him, he lent me a hankie to blow my nose.’

  In August 1943, Sally’s grandfather died and her father became the 6th Lord Grantley, Baron of Markenfield, making her the Honourable Miss Sarah Norton.