The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  Once the code had been broken and Pat and the other girls in the Big Room had typed out the strips of German and stuck them on the back of the original messages, they were passed through to Phoebe in Hut 4 and handed on to the naval intelligence reporters. The Z Watch, which wrote the intelligence reports on all the German naval Enigma messages, was run by Walter Ettinghausen, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis with his family and become an Oxford academic. He joined the British Army in September 1940, but since he was one of the leading German scholars in the country it was not long before he was sent to Bletchley.

  The reports would come into the Z Watch in batches in wire trays and the distribution of the messages was controlled by two Wrens. One of them, Diana Spence, was twenty-two when she arrived at Bletchley. She was astonished to find that her billet was the ‘majestic’ Woburn Abbey and her ‘cabin’ was in a room that had once been the Duke of Bedford’s private bedchamber; it was covered with beautifully ornate and obviously antique Chinese wallpaper. Diana and the other Wren sat at a small table in the Z Watch waiting for batches of messages decoded by the girls in the Big Room to come in.

  ‘We gave them out to members of the Watch, who were all interpreters, on the big table. When they’d translated the German we sent the handwritten messages back down to the typing room. The important part of our work was to check the messages when they were sent back again typed in English against the handwritten translations, in case there were any mistakes.’

  The teleprinter operators typing out the reports were WAAFs rather than Wrens, but it was Diana and her fellow Wrens who controlled the messages and made sure that the often untidy handwriting of the intelligence reporters was typed out properly by the WAAFs before it was sent to the Admiralty. Unlike the women in Hut 8, they were reading reports in English and could understand what was going on. So the nine Wrens who worked in the Z Watch were in a very privileged and unusual position for women working at Bletchley in that they could see the war from very close up.

  ‘We were always reading messages sent by U-boat commanders saying they had sighted a convoy and were about to attack. The air force would be alerted and then very often we would read a message from the same U-boat commander saying he couldn’t surface to attack as the RAF were overhead. If we did not spot a mistake by a typist – in perhaps a degree of longitude or latitude – it could be vital.’

  There was good communication between the reporters in the Z Watch and Hut 8 to ensure that Pat and the other girls in the Big Room didn’t waste time typing out messages that were irrelevant or had no intelligence value.

  ‘We would say, “Shall we go on with this?” And they would say: “Yes, keep going,” or “No, don’t bother.”’

  So many teenage girls had now been called up by the Foreign Office to go to Bletchley that a number of mothers were becoming concerned at what might be happening to their daughters. Peter Loxley, the senior Foreign Office official dealing with MI6 and the rest of the secret world of intelligence, wrote to Alan Bradshaw, the head administrator at Bletchley, explaining that one anxious mother had written to the head of the Foreign Office:

  ‘She said that she and a number of other mothers were worried about the lack of supervision exercised over the many young girls who are now working at Bletchley. There seemed to be nobody who had general charge of their welfare, and she had heard several accounts of girls who were cracking under the strain.’

  Commander Travis set up a Women’s Committee in the spring of 1942 to look after the well-being of all women working at Bletchley, but he made it clear that ‘it will not deal with questions concerning work or pay’. The committee included representatives of all the main departments and the women’s services, as well as the MI6 section that encoded secret messages to its agents abroad, which was still based at Bletchley. Their representative was the very glamorous Lady Cynthia Tothill, who was well known as the ‘face’ of Pond’s beauty creams in all of its advertisements.

  The committee – whose members included Evelyn Whatley, representing all the women in Hut 8 – dealt with a number of problems ranging from the deteriorating standard of coffee served in the canteen to the theft of watches and the ‘ever-increasing amount of artistry’ in the ladies’ cloakrooms and toilets; the problem that almost certainly most concerned the anxious mothers was presumably left to the representatives of the various sections on the committee to deal with privately.

  Christmas 1943 was notable for a major triumph within Hut 8, the tracking of the Scharnhorst. This was the German battlecruiser that had sunk the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Glorious with the loss of 1,500 men in 1940 after the Admiralty ignored Harry Hinsley’s warnings.

  During the days leading up to Christmas, Hut 8 was on full alert with numerous indications in the messages encoded in the naval Enigma code that the Scharnhorst was about to attack a Royal Navy Arctic convoy taking supplies to the Russians, and that she was backed up by a number of other German warships and a wolf pack of eight U-boats. Christmas Day brought confirmation from the U-boats that they had found the convoy. What the Germans didn’t know was that they were heading into a British trap. Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser, commander of the Home Fleet, who had himself captained Glorious, was deliberately trying to draw out the Scharnhorst. But it might all go worryingly wrong, and things were tense in Hut 8 as they worked hard to produce the latest intelligence for Admiral Fraser. Pat Wright had been working the day shift, typing out the messages from the U-boats reporting their sightings of the convoy.

  ‘I finished work at four o’clock and went back to my billet. Christmas dinner was over by now but Mrs Tomlin said, “Hello, duck, saved you a bit of Christmas pudding. Here you are. This’ll make your shit black.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or what to do. So I said thank you very much and ate it.’

  It was a touch of humour amid the worries over the convoy. Next day Pat was back in the office on the day shift as Admiral Fraser’s trap was sprung in the Barents Sea north of Norway. From shortly after nine o’clock in the morning of Boxing Day 1943, the Scharnhorst was repeatedly attacked by Royal Navy ships and was finally sunk just before seven in the evening.

  Admiral Fraser came to Bletchley to thank the codebreakers and to explain how vital their work had been. There was a ballot to hear him talk and a number of the girls in the Big Room won tickets, sitting and listening to the results of their work with a mixture of awe and pride.

  By now the Americans, with more financial and manufacturing resources, had built many more Bombes than Bletchley could afford and had taken over the bulk of the work protecting the Atlantic convoys. But Hut 8 remained busy. The Allies were about to invade France. There was a great deal of concern over the damage that the U-boats could do to the Allied invasion force as it crossed the Channel, and a special team of Wren intercept operators were brought to Bletchley to provide Hut 8 with the messages as quickly as possible.

  It was clear from the restrictions on travel that D-Day was coming but Pat and the other girls didn’t know when until the evening of 4 June 1944 when they went into work and were told the invasion would be launched overnight.

  ‘They told us they wanted every message decoded as fast as possible. But then it was postponed because the weather was so bad and that meant we girls knew it was going to take place, so we had to stay there until D-Day (for security reasons). We slept where we could, and worked when we could, and of course then they set off on 6 June, and that was D-Day.

  ‘The next day I went back to my billet and Mrs Tomlin said, “Where the bleedin’ hell have you been? We’ve invaded France, don’t you know!” I said I’d been working so I hadn’t heard the news.’

  7

  Dilly’s Girls

  Dilly Knox was deeply unhappy when the Enigma codes were taken away from him at the start of 1940. The new boy Gordon Welchman had set up Hut 6 to break the German army and air force Enigma codes and Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had gone off to work on the German naval Enigma, leaving Dilly with nothi
ng to do. He’d been at the heart of British codebreaking successes since the start of the Great War, when he’d pieced together and decoded the charred fragments of messages from a giant German Zeppelin airship destroyed by the Russians. Without codes to break, Dilly was like a fish out of water.

  When it came to piecing together fragments of secret codes, Dilly was a genius. He’d proved that when deciphering the British Museum’s Greek papyrus found in an Egyptian cave and with his greatest First World War triumph, breaking the German diplomatic codes, unlocking the 1917 telegram from the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmerman to the Mexicans that offered them parts of the United States if they’d join the war on Germany’s side. Breaking that code was one of the most important intelligence coups of the Great War, bringing the Americans into the conflict and ensuring the Allied victory.

  Dilly had broken the Italian and Spanish Enigma codes before the war and he was the only British codebreaker who’d truly believed the German Enigma codes could be broken. Finally, with a bit of help from the Poles, he’d done it. He’d have preferred to have managed it on his own, of course, but his methods – and his confidence – had been proven correct. They’d even made him chief assistant on the back of his success. In theory he was the head codebreaker, and yet he now found himself cast aside, his work on Enigma taken from him by the new boys. The Cottage Enigma codebreaking section had been closed down, his staff hived off to Hut 6 or the Naval Section, and he was hidden away on his own in a tiny office in the Park’s old plum shed.

  Inevitably, a resignation letter followed, complaining at the way in which the Enigma codes had been ‘stolen’ away from him. Just as inevitably, Commander Denniston refused to accept Dilly’s resignation, rightly telling him that he had unique qualities vital for the war effort. He should put his talents to work breaking new codes and leave Hut 6 to do the day-to-day grind.

  The son of a bishop, Dilly was in his mid-fifties and so wildly eccentric as to put his fellow codebreakers in the shade. He wore horn-rimmed glasses without which he could see nothing and frequently stuffed them into his tobacco pouch rather than his spectacles case by mistake. Dilly was tall, thin and bald. His trousers and jackets were too short, as if he had bought them some years earlier and outgrown them by several inches, and his face always looked drawn, as if he hadn’t eaten in days.

  Dilly was so absent-minded that he forgot to invite two of his three brothers to his own wedding in 1920. He had so many of his best ideas while relaxing in the bath that during the First World War he had a bathtub installed in his office in the Admiralty. At one point, his fellow codebreakers became concerned and, thinking something must have happened to him, broke into his office, only to find him sat in the bath with the plug pulled out and both taps full on while he stared at the wall deep in thought, trying to solve a coding puzzle.

  Commander Denniston reopened the Cottage and put Dilly in charge of a research section looking into unbroken machine codes that Hut 6 didn’t have time to deal with. Manning the section would be a problem. Although Dilly had liked and trusted Alan Turing, Peter Twinn and Tony Kendrick, he clearly had little patience with the new young men who were coming in with their own ideas of how the work should be done. They all seemed to want to make their names, to prove themselves. Dilly was naturally a loner. He was certainly not prepared to work with anyone arrogant enough to believe they could teach him how to do his job. So Denniston agreed to recruit a team of young women to help Dilly. They would swiftly become known as ‘Dilly’s Girls’.

  The first recruits were the daughters of two members of Denniston’s golf club, Joyce Fox-Male and Claire Harding, who at twenty-seven was to be office manager. As well as clerical support, Dilly needed someone to manage his codebreaking work and Denniston was keen it should be a mathematician. Margaret Rock was ideal. She was thirty-six, so just a bit older than the other girls, and had studied at Bedford College, London, before becoming a statistician. She had precisely the sort of ordered mind that Dilly needed to complement his madcap ideas, and arrived in the Cottage in April 1940.

  Dilly had very clear ideas of what girls he needed in his research section. A mathematician was one of the most obvious requirements, and another was at least one German linguist, if not more. He certainly didn’t want any debs whose daddies had persuaded a friend at the Foreign Office to find them a place at Bletchley. He wanted women with ability whatever their background.

  Mavis Lever was already working for the Code and Cypher School when the Cottage was reopened but she was not based at Bletchley Park. Mavis was breaking commercial codes at the pre-war headquarters in Broadway Buildings in London. She’d been born in May 1921 in Dulwich, south London; her father worked in the local postal sorting office and her mother was a seamstress. Mavis attended Coloma Convent School in West Croydon where she studied German as one of her languages. As a child she and her parents traditionally took their holidays in Bournemouth but in the 1930s Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, had created a programme of cheap holidays to Germany under the title of Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) and in 1936 at the age of fifteen Mavis persuaded her mother and father that this year they should go to the Rhineland.

  ‘We bought cheap tickets for a steamer trip along the River Rhine. We joined crowds of happy German workers with free tickets. They were to be indoctrinated into the myths and legends of German heroes. Wagner’s blonde Rhine Maidens were with us constantly and the band struck up as we passed the Lorelei. I lapped it all up and when I got back decided to opt for German literature in the sixth form.’

  Mavis earned a place at University College London studying German Romanticism under Professor Leonard Willoughby, one of Dilly’s closest colleagues in Room 40 during the First World War. Mavis was due to go to Tübingen University in Germany for a term in 1938 but, with war increasingly likely, she was switched to Zurich University instead.

  ‘I stayed there until war was imminent and by the time I got home the Siegfried Line between France and Germany was being manned so I just got back to UCL in time and found they were evacuating to Aberystwyth. I wanted to do something better for the war effort than read poetry in Wales, so I said I’d train as a nurse, but I was told: “Oh, no you don’t. Not with your German.”’

  Mavis was interviewed at the Foreign Office and selected as an ideal candidate for a job in intelligence but her suitability for secret work was put briefly under the spotlight after two German ‘Jewish’ refugees she had sponsored at UCL, helping them to find work at a country house in Kent, were arrested as spies. Eventually she was cleared of anything but naivety and sent to the MI6 headquarters at 54 Broadway, opposite St James’s underground station.

  ‘I was getting rather excited. I thought I might be going to be a spy, Mata Hari, seducing Prussian officers. But I don’t think either my legs or my German were good enough because they sent me to the Government Code and Cypher School.’

  She sat in London examining commercial codes and perusing the personal columns of The Times for coded spy messages, but in May 1940, after showing promise with a piece of smart lateral thinking that uncovered the origin of an illegal shipment to Germany, Mavis was plucked out and sent to Bletchley to be the German linguist in Dilly’s new research team. His welcome was typical of the way he threw new recruits in at the deep end and Mavis’s response immediately endeared her to him.

  ‘I reported to Commander Denniston and Barbara Abernethy, his secretary, took me over to see Dilly. He was sat by the window wreathed in smoke. He said: “Hello. Have you got a pencil? We’re breaking machines.” I hadn’t a clue what he meant. He handed me a pile of utter gibberish and said: “Here, have a go.” It was covered in his purple inky scrawls. “But I’m afraid it’s all Greek to me,” I said. Dilly burst into delighted laughter and said: “I wish it were.” I was very embarrassed later to discover that he was a distinguished Greek scholar.’

  There was more to Dilly’s choices than excluding any hint of masculine competitiv
eness from the research section. All the girls were carefully chosen for their capabilities. Commander Denniston had picked Claire Harding for her administrative ability. Margaret Rock, the mathematician, and Mavis Lever, one of several German linguists, were joined by speech therapist Joyce Mitchell, and three actresses, all of whom were selected by Dilly because their training would give them an understanding of the rhythms of the messages. Mavis was adamant that it was nothing to do with Dilly wanting to be surrounded by pretty young women. He was no womaniser.

  ‘He put women on pedestals. He was a great admirer of Lewis Carroll and for me Dilly was Alice’s White Knight, endearingly eccentric and always so concerned about one’s welfare. The girls he chose had a background connected with linguistics or phonetics or literature. It was all a question of linguistic patterns of syllables for him. Others provided by Commander Denniston had secretarial training and acted as registrars.’

  Dilly had a unique knack of using his imagination to open up codes.

  ‘He would stuff his pipe with sandwiches instead of tobacco he was so woolly-minded. But he was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. It just seemed to come naturally to him. He said the most extraordinary things. “Which way does the clock go round?” And if you were stupid enough to say clockwise, he’d just say: “Oh no it doesn’t, not if you’re the clock, it’s the opposite way.” And that’s sometimes how you had to think about the machines. Not just to look at them how you saw them but what was going on inside. ’

  Dilly’s unusual views on training left new recruits to sink or swim but ensured that Mavis, along with Margaret and the other girls, developed their ability to think laterally. Very often, Dilly would sleep in the Cottage, working late into the night, surviving on black coffee and chocolate and only returning to his home at Courns Wood, thirty miles south of Bletchley, at the weekend. While the young girls were frustrated by Dilly’s inability to explain things simply, they clearly adored him, none more so than Mavis.