The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  ‘One managed to get across that this was a very vital thing and I would always tell them that it was secret work, it was something that was absolutely essential to the war effort, that it was exceedingly boring. But if they were keen to do something for the good of the country, and if that’s what they’d joined up for, well then maybe this was the job for them.’

  Once they arrived at the outstation and began working on the Bombes they were told that their work was vital to helping the codebreakers read the German messages. Occasionally Anne or one of the other officers would brief them on the various triumphs resulting from their work, especially if they had helped the navy.

  ‘We had to be quite sure that their morale was kept up because it was tedious work, very tedious work, and one way was to let them know some of the intelligence that came out of the work they were doing, so that they would realise that it was an absolute priority. I know that when we finally managed to get Bismarck, that was one of our triumphs and they were told about that. They were also told how important it was that we knew where the submarines were in the Atlantic because our food supply was coming across the Atlantic and that was our lifeline, and so it was very vital that we should break the submarines’ codes.’

  Anne made sure her girls realised that while there were many brilliant people at Bletchley breaking the codes, they couldn’t do it without all sorts of other people, particularly the operators intercepting the messages – some of whom were themselves Wrens – and the women operating the Bombes.

  ‘One had many of the tremendous brains in Bletchley Park, but they relied totally on the Wrens to carry out the work they’d done and it wouldn’t have been possible to break these codes unless they had Wrens operating the machines.’

  The Wrens came from all walks of life, from debs to ordinary working-class girls. One of the Wrens working on Colette’s watch was Lady Camilla Wallop, who went on to become a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II but was known as plain Wren Wallop.

  In their time off, Colette and her friends would read or go to the cinema, and since the food was particularly bad at Eastcote, they would visit the local NAAFI restaurant at nearby Ruislip where they could buy beans on toast for fourpence (less than 2p). When they were working days or night shifts they would go into London on the underground, queuing up in Trafalgar Square to buy cheap forces theatre tickets. Roma Davies, at the time lowly Wren Stenning, loved those trips into London from Eastcote.

  ‘We took ourselves out for suppers, to the cinema, and even trips to the West End. It was one shilling and threepence [just over 6p] to spend the entire evening at the Variety Club watching top comedians, singers and dancers. Going into little old cafés and having beans on toast and . . . when you were in uniform people gave you things, the odd meal, or the conductor might let you have a free ride on the bus.’

  London was dangerous though. When Colette and Sheila Tong were drafted to Eastcote at the end of 1943, the ‘mini-Blitz’ was taking place with the German air force firebombing the major cities, and the Wrens were often warned not to venture into the centre of London.

  Not that they were much safer in Eastcote. One night, a German bomber dropped a ‘Molotov Breadbasket’, a rack containing 820 firebombs, on the ‘cabin’ in which Sheila and Colette were sleeping. The air-raid siren had gone off but they never went to the shelters.

  ‘We heard an aircraft overhead. We knew it was a German aircraft. You could always tell from the “whoom, whoom, whoom” sound. All of a sudden it seemed quite low and Sheila said to me, “Let’s get under the bedclothes.” As if that would help! If you can’t see it, you’re safe!’

  Suddenly there was a huge crashing noise and the Molotov Breadbasket came through the roof and destroyed the side of HMS Orion, hitting the water pipes that ran down between the huts.

  ‘There was the most awful bang and a crash and wallop and I could feel the central part of the hut was coming in. Then there was absolute silence and the sound of water pouring in. It was like one of those wartime films of ships being torpedoed with the sea rushing in.’

  One of the girls broke the silence, shouting: ‘Abandon ship.’ There was nervous laughter from some of the girls but it shook them out of the shock and made them realise they had to move. The incendiary bombs hadn’t gone off but they might at any minute. Colette grabbed her gas mask, largely because her secret store of chocolate was hidden inside its case.

  ‘We got out of our bunks and took our service respirators and clambered out over this thing. It hadn’t opened completely. Some of the bombs had burned their way out and landed somewhere else on the camp, but the rest were still there and could have gone off. We just clambered over them and got out.’

  The Wrens had a four-day ‘stand-off’ once in every four weeks. They would work one week of days, the second week was evenings and the third week was working through the night. They came off the final night and then worked that evening from four to midnight. Then they had four days off. Most of the girls went home to see their families (and sometimes, if they were home on leave, their boyfriends) in trains that were always packed with troops.

  ‘I used to go up to Harrogate and Sheila used to go to Hull, standing most of the time. Many’s the time I’ve gone all the way up to Harrogate sitting in the guard’s van on a bicycle.’

  Colette was lucky. Her boyfriend Graham was based in the UK so could often come up to Harrogate to see her. They’d met because he had been a pupil of Colette’s aunt at St Francis Xavier’s College in Liverpool.

  ‘He came to Harrogate to see Aunt Em. She lived in Liverpool but there were terrible air raids there. Terrible. So she came to Harrogate to live with us, and that’s how we got to know Graham.’

  Graham Murray’s father was Scottish but like Colette he had an Irish mother. He was an RAF pilot warrant officer. His job was to drop secret agents into France and other occupied countries. Here was a man who could match up to Colette’s father, who had won the Military Cross on the Somme during the First World War. Graham’s job was highly dangerous but he was based at RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire, so whenever he had days off at the same time as Colette they would meet up at her parents’ home.

  ‘He was one of these chaps dropping agents. He flew Halifax aircraft and they used to have to fly at 800 feet to drop the agents and the supplies. The supplies didn’t all come down by parachute, sometimes they were just dropped.’

  Colette moved to Stanmore shortly before D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe. The Wrens weren’t briefed on when and where it would happen – the detail of the Allied assault had to be kept very tight among a few people who were specially briefed or, in the jargon used by those in charge, ‘bigoted’. But Colette and her colleagues knew it was coming. They were banned from going on leave and on the day itself they saw the sky black with Allied bombers and knew immediately what was happening.

  But while D-Day seemed to take the Allies a step closer to victory, there was bad news for Colette. Graham was reported missing while dropping supplies to resistance fighters in the Ardennes in preparation for the invasion.

  ‘Nobody quite knew what that meant because in those days missing could mean he was a prisoner of war and that was often the case.’

  There was nothing for it but to get on with the work, and even if you were in the UK you were still under threat, especially if you worked in a big city like London. The Germans responded to the D-Day invasion by firing the V1 flying bombs at London from launchers along the French and Dutch coasts. The British called the V1s doodlebugs because of the humming noise they made. The Germans fired up to a hundred a day at London and southeast England between June 1944 and March 1945. They were very frightening – silent killers. You could hear them going over and then the engine stopped and the bomb would drop wherever it cut out.

  The British responded by trying to fool the Germans into thinking that they were hitting the wrong targets, so the sirens that warned of impending bombers were not used. Instead, at Stanmore there was an
old man with the same type of rotating sign they used for traffic control around roadworks. Instead of saying ‘Stop’ on the red side of the sign and ‘Go’ on the green side, the sign said ‘Alert’ on the red side and ‘All Clear’ on the green.

  One night Sheila and Colette were alone in the hut. There was a stand-off and most people had gone home, but it wasn’t the normal four-day break, so there wasn’t enough time for the two girls to go up to Yorkshire. Sheila had gone down to the washroom and Colette was getting into her bunk.

  ‘I heard this bloody thing. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm . . . and when it got lower and lower and louder it suddenly stopped. And I remember jumping out of my bunk and trotting down the concrete corridor in my bare feet to join Sheila, thinking to myself, I don’t want to die alone. That’s what I was thinking, and she was lying flat on the floor.’

  Although Colette still had no word of Graham, she at least was safe and was soon moved away from the dangers of London to work on the Bombes in Hut 11 at Bletchley Park. She was quartered in a ‘Wrennery’ at Crawley Grange, ten miles northeast of Bletchley. The utility buses – dubbed ‘liberty ships’ after the boats that transport sailors from their ship and into port – took half an hour to ferry Colette and the other Wrens into work.

  ‘We were bussed in and bussed out. We never saw any of the other people at Bletchley. We never had contact with any of them. We were completely self-contained and we did our eight hours and back to Crawley.’

  Crawley Grange was a beautiful Elizabethan house which had once belonged to Thomas Wolsey, who as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII was the second most powerful man in the country. But Wolsey fell from favour after he failed to obtain the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon that would allow the King to marry Anne Boleyn, and Crawley Grange was taken away from him. Colette thought it was absolutely gorgeous.

  ‘It had a great ballroom, panelled from the floor to the ceiling, with two bay windows, and it was haunted. The place looked perfect with the utility forces furniture in it, just right, the plain tables and things. Once a week we would go into Bedford and probably get something to eat, beans on toast or something. The rest of the time we sat in this great panelled room.’

  This was their ‘fo’c’sle’. Mostly they just sat and chatted, played cards or board games, or simply read, but it would have been a waste not to make full use of a beautiful ballroom and they held dances and social evenings to which they invited American or RAF airmen from the nearby bases at Molesworth and Cranfield. The Wrens who were working in the Naval Section at Bletchley also invited other members of Hut 4 to the dances. The influx of a large number of young servicewomen dramatically improved the social life for those who, like Barbara Abernethy, were lucky enough to be invited to the dances.

  ‘All of a sudden there were lots of soldiers, Wrens and WAAFs. The Wrens used to have rather good dances. To be invited to a party at one of the Wrenneries as they were called was something to be looked forward to and enjoyed. They had very good dances.’

  The Americans reciprocated and the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band, the most popular orchestra of the time, and based just a few miles away in Bedford, frequently played at the US dances.

  On one occasion, a bus-load of Wrens and Hut 4 staff were invited to a dance in a hangar at a nearby American base where Glenn Miller’s band was playing. They included Adrienne Farrell, a civilian translator working in Hut 4.

  ‘The hangar was crowded and in semi-darkness, lit only by swirling coloured spotlights and resounding with the superb but deafening noise of the band. As each of us entered we were grabbed by one of the waiting line of airmen. After the first dance, I looked eagerly round for my next partner. Alas, we were expected to stay with the same person all evening. I think my partner was as disappointed as I was. On the way home, I noticed with some puzzlement that the bus was half empty.’

  Barbara Quirk, from North Cheshire, joined the Wrens in early 1943 at the age of eighteen and after a spell at Stanmore moved to Crawley Grange. She loved the countryside around the house and frequently went riding or walking across the fields.

  ‘Crawley Grange is I think one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen. There were fields, endless fields, and I remember one day I was walking alongside a hedge and I had my hacking jacket over my shoulder and a pheasant flew into my jacket. I was very glad when it flew away because I didn’t quite know what to do with it. The fields and hedgerows were full of every shade of violet in creation, huge big lovely-smelling violets, so every Wren cabin you went into at Crawley Grange had pot after pot of beautiful violets and primroses and cowslips. Glorious, heavenly country.’

  One weekend, Barbara’s watch decided to hold a dance in the ballroom, but they were told by the senior officer in charge of them at the time, who was based in Essex, that they couldn’t have any alcohol in the grounds of Crawley Grange.

  ‘So we got some of the men who were coming from one of the camps around – they might have been Americans, they might have been British, I can’t remember now – to bring some beer. They brought a mobile bar on a jeep and parked it outside the Wrennery and when the chief officer found out, we were all gated [restricted to quarters] for a month.’

  Barbara also worked on the Bombes at Bletchley. The watches ran from 8am to 4pm, from 4pm to midnight, and from midnight to 8am. The night shifts were the worst because there was often much less to do once the most common codes were broken.

  ‘It could be a bit slower than in the daytime and some Wrens used to go and sit in the off-duty quarters and fall asleep and eventually it was said that no one was to sleep when at Bletchley so when we had a break for coffee or a roll or something we would cut the crossword out of the previous day’s Times that was hanging up in the mansion and take it back with us and shout clues to each other from our respective Bombes.’

  Colette was completely absorbed with the work and worries about Graham and many of the Wrens also had boyfriends away in the war, but there were still plenty of unattached Wrens and no shortage of young servicemen willing to attend the dances and social evenings.

  ‘We had wonderful dances and evenings. I can remember the lawn in front of it covered in bicycles, chaps on bicycles. But somehow it wasn’t that important. We were so hard at it all the time. We were kind of living for that stand-off. It was a very hard grind indeed.’

  When they finished the final evening shift before the stand-off they would leave as soon as possible, taking trains packed with troops back home.

  ‘The Admiralty were very good to us, we were the first women services to be given handbags, quite primitive shoulder bags, but an absolute boon for a woman. This was wonderful for our make-up and combs.’

  They were also allowed to wear their own underwear rather than the standard long black ‘apple-catcher’ knickers that other servicewomen had to wear. Colette bought a remnant of beautiful, pale-blue satin during one of their trips on the bus into Bedford and took it home with her on the next stand-off so her mother could use it to make her some French knickers.

  ‘My mother used a button to fasten them because elastic was in short supply and one time I was going home on leave and standing in the middle of the corridor as the train was packed as usual. I had to change at Kettering and I jostled to get out of the train with all my bags, stepped onto the platform, looked down and found my pale-blue satin knickers around my ankles with the platform full of American Army Air Corps. What else could I do but step out of them, put them in my pocket and ride the rest of the way home with no knickers on.’

  Joan Read married her boyfriend Edward Baily in early 1942 after he joined the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, but her father was in the Royal Navy and she and her sister Joyce decided to join the Wrens. It would be the right thing to do, they thought, and they would have a more attractive uniform than if they joined the WAAF or the ATS. Joan was twenty-one and Joyce was twenty. They were selected for ‘Special Duties (X)’ and followed their orders to report to the mysteri
ous Station X with some apprehension, not having the faintest idea what they would be doing. They were put to work in Hut 11 and billeted initially at Crawley Grange and then at Gayhurst Manor, which was once home to Everard Digby, one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 to blow up King James I.

  ‘The owners of Gayhurst Manor were still in residence, Sir Walter and Lady Carlisle; occasionally we caught a glimpse of them and Lady Carlisle always had a sack tied around her waist for some unknown reason. If we were on the night watch we had to sleep during the day, of course, and I remember they had problems with an RAF aircraft flying low over Gayhurst. We found out afterwards it happened to be because my sister was sunbathing on the roof with nothing on.’

  Occasionally, inevitably, one of the girls would fall pregnant, at which point a glass of milk would be put out for her each night in the galley, sparking gossip as to who it was. Once the bump began to grow they would be sent away for six months or so to have the baby before returning to the job. Sadly, unless a girl’s parents looked after the baby, it was taken away and put up for adoption, a procedure that remained common for single mothers well into the 1970s.

  Many of the girls were away from home, and the watching eyes of their mothers, for the first time. But while the knowledge that their boyfriends might be sent off to die at any time induced many to go further than they would have done before the war, for others the strict moral codes of the time held sway. It had been drummed into them that ‘nice girls’ did not do such things until they were married. Barbara Quirk remembered that as a young Wren working in Stanmore she would go up to the West End whenever she had an evening off.

  ‘You really worked solidly for the eight hours you were on duty but there was ample time off and we all enjoyed ourselves, it was great fun. I had a very good war, I had a ball. But you must remember in those days that there was no such thing as an overnight stay. You went and had dinner. You enjoyed yourself immensely. You might even have gone somewhere dancing and when the time came for good little Wrens to go home you shook hands and said goodbye.’