The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  ‘The second day they were there I said to the one who was most intelligent: “What happened to Theo today, Teddy?” and Teddy said: “Aw gosh, the heck, Pam. He’s been shot.” I was absolutely horrified. What sort of country was this that could shoot people just like that, and I looked at him for a bit and then I said: “What for?” And he said: “Oh you know, all these illnesses we’re supposed to get when we go to Europe.” He meant he’d been inoculated and I quite seriously thought he’d been shot.’

  The mutual misunderstandings came to a head in the summer of 1942, during the 4 July Independence Day celebrations, when the Americans challenged the ‘Brits’ to a game of rounders. Barbara organised it but the Americans turned out to have a limited understanding of the rules of the game.

  ‘They nearly went home. Now in the United States, where you play baseball, you don’t need to get all the way home in one go to score. As long as you get all the way home eventually you score. Now our rules for rounders, of course, were very tough. You had to go all the way round in one go.’

  If you didn’t go round in one go, you didn’t score a ‘rounder’. It was impossible for the Americans to grasp the idea that you had to go right round the circuit to score a single run so they assumed that Barbara’s explanation of the rules couldn’t be right.

  ‘It was a lovely day, we all played well, and at the end of the game we all sort of clapped each other on the back and the Americans said: “Well, we’re sorry we beat you,” and the British captain said: “I’m sorry, but we beat you.” The Americans were a little touchy. They were convinced that they’d won and it took a bit of explanation on somebody’s part to soothe ruffled feathers. It all ended with drinks all round; actually we agreed we’d won by our rules and they’d won by their rules. So that was all right. But they never asked us to play again.’

  Despite Jean’s doubts, and the arguments over the rules for rounders, the working relationship between the British and American codebreakers was exceptionally close. The leading US experts were the equals of their British counterparts and both sides pulled their weight. There was a very good bond between the two sides throughout the war.

  Christine spent her time off preparing for the post-war era. She was very conscious of the fact that the people she was working with were far better educated than she was and she was determined to go to university. So she was studying for her Higher School Certificate in English, History, Latin and French.

  ‘I called it my first university because I arrived there so ignorant, so uneducated, and there I was thrown in with all these toffs and scholars and so on. I didn’t know as much about literature and other things as I later came to know or as the people around me knew. They were all interested in the things that I wanted to know about.’

  The Bletchley Park Club ran an increasing number of sections and many of Christine’s new colleagues took part, particularly in the chess and music sections. Christine’s supervisor Jean Alington had been a member of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company before the war but she was by no means alone in her abilities. The number of top musicians joining the Park was staggering. Jean was part of a lively opera group run by James Robertson, later musical director of Sadler’s Wells; the standard of the choir had improved dramatically since Jane Hughes and Diana Russell-Clarke first joined it and it was now conducted by Sergeant Herbert Murrill, future head of music at the BBC. Another future BBC musician was the bassoonist Michael Whewell, who would go on to take charge of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The many professional musicians included the Welsh composer Daniel Jones, the violinist Ludovic Stewart, and the singers Jill Medway and Douglas Craig (then known as Douglas Jones), who was subsequently the company manager at Glyndebourne.

  James Robertson was also the choirmaster in the local church. Ann Lavell and Julie Lydekker, two of the WAAFs working in the main Air Section, were members of his choir.

  ‘There was a little church just behind the Park and they did a little Sunday service for the workers and Julie and I sang in that. James Robertson was a really well-known conductor, so it was quite an excitement being in his choir.’

  Christine was too busy studying at this point to take much notice. She would cycle in from her billet with a textbook open on the basket in front of her, sat reading textbooks on her breaks, and was forever walking into Hut 3 with her head in a book.

  ‘I didn’t have a great social life because I was working for Oxford and Cambridge entrance. I was still worried about my education. I had to stop in the end because life was too difficult with shift work and so on.’

  The pace of the war was hotting up. During 1942, British soldiers were fighting huge battles across the deserts of North Africa where the German General Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, had pushed them back to the Egyptian border. Hut 6 and Hut 3 were working hard to produce the intelligence needed to help regain the lost ground. Shortly after General Bernard Montgomery took charge of the British 8th Army, the so-called Desert Rats, Bletchley decoded the message that turned the tide. Rommel sent a long report to Hitler explaining what he planned to do next; it was encoded using the Red Enigma and read almost immediately in Hut 6.

  But it wasn’t the only important message the codebreakers were reading. Hut 6 had broken the German Air Force Enigma code used by the aircraft escorting Rommel’s supply ships across the Mediterranean and the Naval Section in Hut 4 was reading the main Italian naval codes, which also carried details of the supply convoys. This allowed the Royal Navy and the RAF to intercept the German supply convoys and sink them, leaving Rommel without the fuel and the spare parts he needed to keep his tanks moving across the desert.

  Montgomery knew Rommel’s plans and he knew Rommel’s weaknesses, ensuring a series of victories first at Alam Halfa, then at El Alamein, the British Army’s first real victory of the war, achieved with a great deal of assistance from Bletchley Park. Those left behind in Britain had something to cheer. Nobody in Hut 3 minded when Montgomery claimed the victory was the result of his tactical brilliance and grabbed the glory. Everyone knew they had to keep the Enigma secret, and anyway it was the soldiers at the front line who were doing the difficult, dangerous stuff. But there was an ‘explosion of fury’ in the Watch when Montgomery ignored Hut 3’s subsequent reports showing that Rommel’s forces were on their knees with only eleven tanks able to move. Montgomery sat still rather than go in for the kill. Lives would be lost as a result, and it wasn’t the only time it would happen. Throughout the war, there were irritating moments when naval, army or air force commanders ignored the codebreakers’ intelligence at their cost. Nevertheless, the stranglehold the British now had on Rommel’s supply of fuel, parts and food – thanks to Bletchley Park and the intelligence on his plans – ensured that the Germans were driven out of North Africa.

  Christine had impressed in the Air Index where her research had produced a huge chart detailing every major German unit and its location, which Jean pinned to the wall; all the intelligence reporters consulted it. Christine was developing a good reputation as a useful intelligence analyst and was moved to a new section liaising between the Hut 3 Air and Military Sections.

  ‘We had to analyse the German messages and try to work out a priority list for the cryptographers in Hut 6 and for the intercept stations, which frequencies to concentrate on and which keys to try to break first. That was much more interesting.’

  Jean also moved to the new section, which was located behind a map partition in Hut 3 and called 3L. It examined all of the material coming into the hut to decide which Enigma codes and which frequencies were the most productive and so needed to take priority. It was a role that Jean enjoyed because of the increased responsibility it gave her.

  ‘It was a cold winter, so we were warmed by a paraffin stove, which was kicked over. The ensuing flames nearly put an end to us, our venture and the whole hut. We built a door to keep others out and George Crawford wrote above it in Greek, “Let no one enter here who is not primarily interested in mathematics.”�
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  There were blackboards on the walls on which Christine drew the network diagrams of the radio networks that were the most important priority. They called the network diagrams ‘Stars’ because the control station was drawn in the middle with the other radio stations located around and linked to it by straight lines, making the diagram look like a star. The aim for Jean was to ensure maximum efficiency in terms of intercepting and decoding the most important messages.

  ‘We were sent into Hut 6 to familiarise ourselves with the machines working there, we liaised with the traffic analysis log readers; we also made time and study assessments of how to speed up the flow of decodes to the Watch. We tried to get better conditions for personnel working in appalling discomfort and became agony aunts for the miserable and uncomfortable.’

  The section was dominated by women: Jean, Christine and Leslie Tyrell, who read every Enigma message that passed through Hut 3, grading them according to importance.

  ‘We each prepared a weekly news sheet for Mr Churchill on the areas we were covering. We swapped areas frequently so that we should be competent in all of them.’

  Christine was soon made the chief liaison officer with the Fusion Room, which looked at all the raw material, gathering intelligence from the intercepted plain-language conversations between the enemy operators, tracking their locations and finding information that would help make sense of the decoded messages. Christine might have thought she wasn’t clever enough. Her superiors clearly didn’t agree.

  ‘I was promoted quite quickly, I was flight officer quite soon. I felt a sense of responsibility, but at the same time that there was a great gap between what I felt I really was, which was totally ignorant, and what was needed to do this exciting job, and it really was very exciting.’

  Rodney Bax, an Intelligence Corps captain working in the Fusion Room, began chatting to Christine. He’d studied at the Royal School of Music before the war and wanted to become a composer. He was ‘tall and straight’, paid her a lot of attention and they went out on dates to the cinema. The relationship appeared to blossom, although Christine wasn’t at all sure she wanted it to go anywhere.

  The numbers of people coming into Bletchley were rising rapidly, with more than five thousand people working there in August 1943 compared to the hundred or so who had first arrived outside the mansion four years earlier in August 1939. The wooden huts were too small to house so many staff and Hut 3 and Hut 6 moved into a new purpose-built concrete and brick building known as Block D; they confusingly kept their hut names. It was safer to continue to call them Hut 3 and Hut 6 than come up with a name that might give away the fact that Bletchley had broken the Enigma codes. Rodney had now been attached as Fusion Room liaison officer on the Hut 3 Watch. Christine’s relationship with him was getting very close, and Rodney seemed infatuated. He had even devised his own ‘secret signal’ to remind her he was there. As he walked past her office, he would whistle a piece of music by Mozart.

  The numbers of staff at Bletchley were now far too large to be housed in billets and Ann Lavell was one of a large number of WAAFs who were moved into a new barracks built behind the mansion on Church Green. There were a lot of very basic Nissen huts, with round corrugated-iron roofs.

  ‘We were hauled out of our billets, many of us wailing and screaming mightily, and by this time we were all dressed up as flight sergeants. A flight sergeant is really quite somebody in an ordinary RAF station but we were nobodies. We were put into these frightful huts that took about twenty-four people and had these dangerous cast-iron stoves in them that got red hot and sent out smoke everywhere.’

  A similar barracks was built for the soldiers, including the army’s female service, the ATS, at Shenley Road, also behind the Park. There were major problems because the officers running the new camps didn’t understand the unique atmosphere at Bletchley, which Ann believed was a key factor in why the codebreakers were so successful.

  ‘You did have this rather happy atmosphere of tolerance. Very eccentric behaviour was accepted fairly affectionately and I think people worked and lived there who couldn’t possibly have worked and lived anywhere else. People who would obviously have been very, very ill at ease in a normal air force camp with its very strict modes of behaviour and discipline were very happy, very at ease in Bletchley.’

  The camp authorities couldn’t understand why the girls were not subject to normal military discipline. They also resented the fact that they had so little control over them and no idea what they were doing once they crossed into Bletchley Park itself.

  ‘There was a terrible feeling between the camp authorities and the Bletchley Park people. They couldn’t bear it because they didn’t know what we did and because we could get in past the sentries. The guards actually said: “Halt, who goes there?” If you arrived at night, they did the bit about “friend or foe” and you said “friend” and they said “advance, friend, and be recognised”. The camp people absolutely hated not knowing what was going on and some of the officers tried to bully out of the junior people what they were doing.’

  Barbara Mulligan was one of the WAAF teleprinter and wireless operators communicating with the people on the front line who needed the intelligence. She remembered the huts on the Church Green camp as being very basic, and freezing cold in winter, a problem that wasn’t helped by the inadequate heating and the fact that WAAF rules insisted that one window always had to be open. But they were young. The country was at war. They just got on with it.

  ‘There were dozens of huts and we were in Hut 59. No toilets. There were special toilet huts, quite a long way from the huts. If you wanted the toilet, you had to march across a field. Finding your way in the middle of the night wasn’t funny. One particular night I tripped over a couple. We just accepted it.’

  The girls spent a lot of their time with the other people in the hut in which they lived, not all of whom worked in the same part of Bletchley Park as they did. Barbara and the other girls read, knitted or just chatted.

  ‘When we only had a couple of hours spare we would just have a gossip or queue up to have a bath because you were only allowed a couple a week. It was like one big family, just a couple of dozen girls in one big hut on these funny beds. Three biscuits they called them. A mattress, a couple of sheets and a blanket and that was it and we just accepted it – that was war.’

  Between a series of shifts they had two days off and Barbara would never stay on camp. Usually she’d meet up in London with her sister Gill, who was also in the WAAF and based the other side of London.

  ‘We met up in Euston all the time and I was waiting in Euston Station for Gill and a woman came up to me and said, “Get off my pitch!” Needless to say, I did. We’d get up very early so that we could go to Lyons Corner House for breakfast and in those days a lot of big organisations would give free seats to people and we went to the opera for the very first time – free.’

  Once the US Air Force base at Bedford heard there were a lot of young servicewomen at Bletchley Park, they started inviting them to their dances, sending an open-backed army truck to pick them up.

  ‘So every Saturday night, anybody who was off-duty would be taken over to Bedford and we would be allowed to dance with the men or have a drink and go to their canteen. We all had American friends, of course, and it was great fun. (I had been engaged but my fiancé had been shot down.) They would take us in a lorry and the lorry would bring us back; elegant travel – standing in the back of a big lorry.’

  Unlike Christine, Barbara Mulligan and the other girls who worked with her had no real idea of what they were doing. They certainly didn’t know that Bletchley Park had broken top German codes like Enigma and they only had a hazy idea of what effect their work might be having on the war.

  ‘We knew it was all hush-hush, and somehow it was impressed upon us that we must keep our mouths shut so I never talked to anybody about anything. I never even told my family what I was doing. Every now and then we were told that we were anticipati
ng or were taking part in some big push that led to a battle but that was all we ever knew. We knew that we were doing good work and that was great.’

  In May 1943, the US Army sent some officers to work in Hut 3. Most of them were chosen by Jim Rose who’d been sent to Washington to interview potential candidates, but the first one was a young American lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Telford Taylor. Christine had to introduce him to the work that was done on the indexes and in her own section.

  ‘Telford had first arrived on his own and I was detailed to explain things to him. It was quite an odd experience because he was much too high-up to be interested in this kind of routine work.’

  With the strains of the job making it impossible to keep up her studies, Christine began to take more interest in the social activities at Bletchley. Bill Marchant, the deputy head of Hut 3, ran the annual Christmas revues, so it was hard for members of Hut 3 not to become involved in some way, even if it was only as supporters, and Christine loved them.

  ‘There were a lot of people with talent there who wrote bits and there were a few actors doing their bit for the war and a lot of amateurs. It was like a university revue, like Footlights. We thought they were splendid. I’ve no idea if they really were. The performances may not have been so great but I think the scripts were fairly good because there were a lot of very bright people there.’

  Musical performances, plays and films took place in the assembly hall on a regular basis and with so many professional musicians around there were frequent trips to see performances in the West End.

  ‘We would go up to London to see a play or a concert. There were people like Peter Calvocoressi who would give musical evenings in their billets. I remember Bryn Newton-John, an RAF officer in Hut 3 whose daughter Olivia became a well-known pop star, would sing German Lieder. People went cycling around the countryside and there were a lot of love affairs going on.’