‘With three or four teenagers in the same room things could sometimes get a bit silly. The Seniors didn’t really know how to cope with four girls lying on their backs kicking their arms and legs in the air like overturned beetles.’
It was during this frustrating period of occasional breaks that Alan Turing and Joan Clarke began going out together to the cinema or for the occasional drink. They enjoyed each other’s company and Joan seems to have been the first woman outside of his immediate family with whom he was able to make a connection.
‘Turing wrote an account – Prof’s Book – of Enigma Theory and methods which were still largely new to me. I was the guinea pig to test whether his explanation and examples were understandable.’
She realised that their relationship was different to the one he had with the male codebreakers but she was pleasantly surprised when he revealed quite how different their relationship was.
‘I suppose that the fact that I was a woman made me different. We did do some things together, perhaps went to the cinema and so on. But certainly it was a surprise to me when he said; I think his words probably were: “Will you consider marrying me?” But although it was a surprise I really didn’t hesitate in saying yes, and then he leaned by my chair and kissed me, though we didn’t have much physical contact.’
The following day, Alan Turing told her about an issue that was troubling him. It didn’t affect his feelings for her, but she needed to know about it.
‘I suppose we went for a bit of a walk together after lunch. He told me that he had this homosexual tendency and naturally that worried me a bit because I did know that was something that was almost certainly permanent, but we carried on.’
Alan Turing told Shaun Wylie, an old friend from Cambridge who had joined the Seniors’ Room, but no one else in the hut knew and Joan didn’t wear a ring. At any event, there were soon other causes for celebration. The pattern in the key tables captured in the Lofoten raid allowed them to work out the entire set of keys and Harry Hinsley found a reliable source of cribs in weather reports broadcast to the U-boats. He also realised that the weather ships that sent out the reports would need to have the same Enigma codes but would be much more vulnerable to capture than a warship.
A series of raids followed in which two German weather ships were captured – in addition, in May 1941 a U-boat, the U-110, was forced to surface off Iceland with a complete machine, its rotors and the key tables. This, and the extensive selection of cribs they now had, provided all the information that Hut 8 needed to break the Dolphin code from the late summer of 1941 right through to the end of the war.
Eileen Plowman arrived in the Big Room just before they started breaking the code every day. Eileen was young, only nineteen, and from Eastbourne. She’d been working for the Royal Army Service Corps records office in Hastings since she left school, which was how she came to be spotted for Bletchley.
‘I had to do something to do with the war because of my age. They sent for me through the records office. I did German at school. I think that could have had a bearing on things. They told me to come for an interview to London, which I did. I didn’t know London so my mother came with me. Things went from there. They wanted to know all about you. Almost why you were born. Where you were born. Everything about you.’
A few weeks later, she was sent a rail warrant and told to report to Bletchley Park.
‘I had no training and I had no idea what I was going to do when I got here. I went straight into Hut 8. We were still breaking the code back then, September 1941. The code hadn’t been completely broken. It was really working on breaking the German naval code. It was the professors who actually broke the codes, the real big brains. We helped them, doing what they told us to do.’
Mr Turing was living in the village pub in Shenley, the same village that Eileen was billeted in, but she barely knew him and he seemed a lot older than the girls in the Big Room who were supervised by Pat Wright and Evelyn Whatley.
‘We used to get most of our instructions from Miss Whatley and Miss Wright – “Wrightie”, as we used to call her. She was beautiful, very generous towards us.’
There were other more mature women in the Big Room, including the classical singer Jill Medway and Dorothy Hyson, the American actress, who had appeared in a number of popular British films. But Evelyn Whatley was the mother figure in overall charge of ‘Miss Whatley’s Girls’.
The impact of the ability to break the Dolphin Enigma was astonishing. Between March and June 1941, the U-boats had sunk as many as a hundred Allied ships a month. From July, the figure dropped to around forty and by November to just two, with the breaking of the Dolphin Enigma and the ability it gave the Admiralty to route the convoys around the wolf packs being the main reason. It allowed Britain’s vital supplies to be replenished and kept the country going through the worst period of the war.
Despite the brilliance of people like Alan Turing, the naval Enigma could not have been broken without the Bombes. Colette St George-Yorke remembered that on one occasion while she was home on leave, she and her father went to the cinema and watched a film about the Atlantic convoys.
‘I remember my father saying: “I don’t understand how they knew where those U-boats were,” and I had to say nothing. It was surprising how you managed to get into the habit of not saying anything about your work when you went home.’
Morag Maclennan and her friends couldn’t help but feel better when they were working on ‘a porpoise job’ dealing with the naval Enigma for Hut 8.
‘Unless you were very lucky your eight-hour watch wouldn’t necessarily produce a good stop that broke a code. Sometimes you might have a good day and two of the jobs you were working on would break a code and that was a great feeling, particularly if it was a naval code. Obviously, we hoped to do it for everybody. But there was an extra little surge of pride if it was a navy one.’
Joan Clarke even went to the trouble of spending a week working alongside the Wrens on the Bombes so she could better understand how they did their job in the hope it might help her improve the way Hut 8 provided them with cribs.
Shortly before they managed to break into Dolphin on a regular basis, Joan and Alan Turing had spent the week’s leave they were allowed every three months cycling and walking in North Wales. It was then that he finally decided that a relationship with a woman would never work for him, breaking the news to her on their return. They agreed it was best to break off the engagement. He came off shift work so they didn’t have to see each other so often and although both were hurt by the experience, Joan’s knowledge of his reasons – the only person in the hut, probably the only person at Bletchley, who knew of his homosexuality – formed a bond between them.
Joan’s salary of little over £2 a week was ridiculous for someone performing the sort of work she was doing so she was promoted to linguist; this had nothing to do with her linguistic ability and was just a way of trying to get her, as a woman, more pay.
‘I enjoyed answering the questionnaire with “grade – Linguist, languages – none”, rather than mentioning school French and a smattering of German and Italian from reading mathematical books. My next promotion was apparently harder to negotiate, possibly because of my sex. Commander Travis stopped me in the corridor to say that they might have to put me in the WRNS to be adequately paid.’
By September 1941, there were around four hundred men and a thousand women at Bletchley, including around two hundred women with honours degrees or their Cambridge equivalents who were graded as linguists, earning anything between £104 a year to £195, while men doing comparable jobs were on the next grade up, junior assistant, earning between £300 and £400 a year.
The Treasury had agreed to increase the money paid to ‘lady linguists’ to between £150 and £234 but was resisting promoting all bar a very few women to junior assistant, even though that would still give them less than the men on the same grade, with female junior assistants paid around £50 a year less than their male
counterparts. The Treasury was adamant.
‘If it is desired to recommend any women for promotion to Junior Assistant, full particulars of their work (a) academic or other qualifications, (b) details of the work on which employed and (c) a good reason why upgrading as a linguist at £234 a year is insufficient should be given.’
Despite their low pay, the linguists were paid better than most of the women at Bletchley who were graded as temporary clerks on anything from 30 shillings and sixpence (£1.52½) to 64 shillings (£3.20) a week. Inevitably the duller, more routine work was carried out by women. Most men had to serve on the front line and only those bright enough to break the codes or write the intelligence reports were allowed to work at Bletchley Park rather than be posted to fighting units, said Joan Clarke.
‘At one time there was a move to increase the pay of those who had qualifications which were not relevant, which I knew about through hearing some of the girls discussing whether one of them might benefit as a trained hairdresser; but I never heard the result.’
By now the women in Hut 8 were working flat out. The hut was divided into four sections. The Registration Room, where the traffic arrived and was sorted by young women; the Banburismus Room, where the Seniors tried to cut the number of possible keys using a system of punched paper Banbury sheets; the Crib Room, where the codebreakers worked out possible cribs for use on the Bombes; and the Big Room where female clerks punched up the messages on the Banbury sheets and decoded the messages using the Typex machines modified to work like Enigma machines. The vast majority of the girls in the Big Room were like Pat Wright, in their late teens or early twenties, but whereas before Dolphin was broken there had been time to have a laugh, she and the girls were now working nonstop.
‘Sometimes we had to wait a long time. Sometimes it was done quickly. But there was always a backlog of work. So we were never not doing anything.’
Nancy Harrison had been trained as a nurse immediately after leaving school in the summer of 1939 and joined the Red Cross, working in a Voluntary Aid Detachment nursing wounded soldiers at a military hospital on Salisbury Plain.
‘I was no good at languages or mathematics; I loved acting and sang in the choir but I wasn’t at all clever scholastically.’
But when she left the Red Cross in 1942, she was called to the Foreign Office and was made to sign the Official Secrets Act before being sent to Bletchley along with her younger sister Patricia, who was a FANY driving the shooting brakes.
‘My first billet was in Bedford and I came to Bletchley by train; I was with a nice family without a bath. We all bathed in the kitchen. My father wrote to Bletchley about that! I was summoned to the billeting officer who told me off and said: “Do remember there is a war on, Miss Harrison!” Then I moved to Stony Stratford, a very nice couple who looked after me very well; I was so lucky, they were such a nice couple – and they had a bath!’
Nancy was set to work punching Banbury sheets, which were used for an ingenious system invented by Alan Turing which reduced the number of possible rotor orders that had to be tested from 336 to as little as six, making it easier for the Bombes to find a crib. The Banbury sheets, so named only because they were printed in Banbury, were about ten inches wide and several feet long. They had columns of alphabets printed vertically on them, giving horizontal lines of As, Bs, Cs, etc. Nancy punched the letters of each message into a sheet and then the Seniors in the Banburismus Room placed them over each other and matched up the punched holes to work out the possible rotor orders. Like many of the women working at Bletchley, Nancy had no idea how her work fitted into the overall picture – she just knew it was important she did what she was told to do.
‘I was doing a strange job working on Banburies – enormous long sheets filled with little alphabets A to Z. I knew nothing about them and they made no sense whatsoever; I think there were comparisons, letters that had to be knocked through and compared, all the little A’s and B’s were gathered. I can remember running down the corridors with them in a great rush.’
For the Seniors, working in the Banburismus Room was highly enjoyable, like working out a complex puzzle, with the added reward that if you solved it you were well on the way to breaking the code. Joan found it ‘enthralling’ and since she cycled to and from work and didn’t have to wait for transport she would frequently stay on well beyond her shift to solve a Banbury puzzle.
But on 1 February 1942 it all came to a halt. The U-boats introduced a new Enigma machine which had four rotors instead of three. Hut 8 had no chance of breaking the new system, codenamed Shark. The vital intelligence the Admiralty was using to re-route the Atlantic convoys around the wolf packs disappeared. Alan Turing was working on other things so Hugh Alexander took over as head of Hut 8. Hugh Alexander was one of the leading codebreakers at Bletchley, but even he couldn’t break Shark.
Fortunately for Britain, during the first half of 1942 the U-boats concentrated on attacking US ships off the US coastline, but in August they resumed their attacks on the Atlantic convoys with eighty-six U-boats – four times as many as they’d had before – sinking eleven Allied ships in a single attack.
Over the next two months the U-boats located a third of the Allied supply convoys, sinking forty-three ships, and in November, with the number of supply ships sunk close to the hundred mark for that month alone, the Admiralty came close to accusing Hut 8 not only of not doing its job but of not understanding that this wasn’t about solving interesting puzzles. If Bletchley didn’t break the Shark Enigma, Britain could lose the Battle of the Atlantic and the vital supply lines from America.
The tensions were understandable but the criticism was unfair. Everyone from Hugh Alexander right down to the girls in the Big Room was working as hard as they could to break the code. No one in Hut 8 was under any illusion that thousands of sailors’ lives and quite possibly Britain’s ability to keep the war going was under threat. The ‘Shark Blackout’, as it was known at Bletchley, was to be one of the most depressing times for anyone at the Park. Pat Wright remembered it as a terrible time.
‘The Atlantic convoys coming across were being sunk and we were told that if they could just keep decoding these messages then they would keep the submarines away from the convoys.’
She and the even younger girls like Eileen Plowman felt their responsibility very heavily. They didn’t need to be told that lives were being lost; many of them had boyfriends or brothers who were putting their own lives at risk. Eileen was in no doubt about how important it was that everyone in Hut 8 worked as hard as they possibly could.
‘We used to find it very nerve-racking. We used to get uptight about it all. The responsibility of it. I wasn’t very old. I think at that time I was very King and country. It was something that was important.’
But despite the frustrations in the Admiralty and Hut 8, the solution was already in hand. At the end of October 1942 the crew of the U-559 scuttled the submarine in the Mediterranean after being attacked by the British destroyer HMS Petard. The Petard’s first officer, Lieutenant Anthony Fasson, and Able-Seaman Colin Grazier swam to the U-boat and passed the codebooks out to sixteen-year-old Naafi boy Tommy Brown, but before the seamen could get out the U-559 sank, taking them down with it. They were awarded the George Cross posthumously. Brown received the George Medal. Their heroism was vital in helping to end the blackout.
The codebooks were for lower-grade German naval codes but the messages they were used to encode were also sent to other ships that only used the Shark code. If they could track identical messages they should have a crib that would get them back into the U-boat codes.
Shaun Wylie took over the codebreaking shift in Hut 8 at midnight on 12 December 1942. They worked through the night trying to match the messages broken with the codebooks against Enigma messages without luck. Next morning, a frustrated Shaun Wylie was having breakfast in the new canteen that had replaced the restaurant in the mansion when someone from Hut 8 rushed in and grabbed him excitedly:
&n
bsp; ‘We’re back into the U-boats.’
Shaun Wylie was elated and relieved. In a measure of how important it was not just to Bletchley and the Admiralty but also to the country itself, he was under orders to ring Commander Travis, who had taken over from Commander Denniston as the head of Bletchley Park, immediately the code was broken, day or night. Commander Travis had exactly the same instructions from his own boss, Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, and Menzies had been left in no uncertain terms that he was to inform Mr Churchill immediately.
The girls in the Big Room were soon dealing with a flood of messages to decode as the codebreakers began cracking first the day’s code and then the settings for previous days. Huge numbers of messages had piled up and it was important to track the latest position for each of the different U-boats. Eileen Plowman remembered the messages coming through thick and fast.
‘It got more intense once it was broken. They used to say they were breaking “the day”. We would set the machines up and then all the messages – there were lots and lots of messages – came through and everybody went mad with all the decoding and it all came out in German. Where I came in useful was that I knew German, because it was all positions of the U-boats and we had to get that right and send up to Admiralty. The next thing you’d hear was that a U-boat had been sunk.’
Within hours, the Admiralty was once more routing the Atlantic convoys around the wolf packs and from then on Hut 8 had no problems breaking the U-boat codes.
The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories Page 13
