The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  During one of the most popular plays they put on, Mary took the lead role of Cecily Harrington in Love from a Stranger, based on the Agatha Christie short story Philomel Cottage.

  Betty Vine-Stevens worked on Japanese military codes. She and her sister hadn’t gone to school; their mother, a music teacher, taught them at home in the small village of Richard’s Castle, near Ludlow in Shropshire. Betty’s mother had spent a year in Germany during the First World War, so the girls grew up speaking both English and German. In 1937, Betty was sent to Germany to spend three months with a family at Herrnhut, near Dresden.

  ‘I attended school with the two daughters. We were obliged to stand to attention and give the Hitler salute at the beginning and end of every class. I didn’t fully comprehend the German threat but felt it was diplomatic to join with the class requirement to salute. The girls’ father did try to convey to me the local anxiety about the situation and the Hitler regime but my German wasn’t good enough to understand what he was saying.’

  Back in England, Betty went to a domestic science college near Shrewsbury but in the summer of 1941 she decided she was wasting her time learning how to cook sausage rolls and that she ought to be doing something to help King and country.

  ‘Things were getting very hard on the war front and four of us decided we’d had enough of domestic science and all joined up. I went into the Auxiliary Territorial Service, which was the women’s army, one went into the Wrens and the other two went into the WAAF.’

  The first female equivalent of the Army, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, had been established during the First World War but disbanded afterwards. As tension with Germany increased in the summer of 1938, a new women’s army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), was set up. The basic training was longer than for the other two women’s services. New recruits had to do six weeks of marching, physical training and acclimatisation to service life. They were given equal military status with regular soldiers in 1941, but pay for Betty and the other ATS women was only two-thirds of that for the men, even when they were doing exactly the same job.

  ‘We got ten shillings and sixpence during basic training but there were no deductions for rent or food and that took us quite a long way – we were able to go to the pictures and buy our own toiletries. We didn’t want for anything. Basic training was a complete culture shock after a very sheltered life in the country. We had women instructors mostly but I remember one male instructor smacking me across the backside. I said: “How dare you?” And that was the end of that!’

  At the end of her army training Betty was sent to Devonshire House in London’s Piccadilly, where the Intelligence Corps recruited its personnel. She had an interview in what was fairly simple German and passed with flying colours. They didn’t waste any time. She was given a rail warrant to Bletchley and sent off immediately. It was late by the time she got there and she and another ATS girl were taken straight to their billet. But they were forced to share a bed and next morning asked to be moved. Betty was eventually settled in a large house in Loughton, five miles northwest of Bletchley Park.

  ‘I was very happy there. It was a lovely family in a very big house. There were five of them and three of us and it was very comfortable. They had a very big garden where they produced their own fruit and vegetables. So compared with what other people had to put up with as far as rations were concerned, we were extremely well fed.’

  Betty was given a security lecture in the mansion by an Intelligence Corps captain who placed his gun on the desk in front of her while she read and signed the Official Secrets Act. Then she was taken upstairs and put to work in the Military Section, working on intercepted German police messages. Sometime around the end of 1943, she was moved to the Japanese Military Section in Block F where her job was to rewrite decoded messages so that it wasn’t obvious they’d been produced by breaking the codes. They had to look as if they’d come from some other source like a human spy.

  ‘One was given these messages and you had to put them into different wording so that it could be put out in this disguised form. Everything went out under a double-envelope system with different addresses. There were a lot of numbers on the outside one so that the dispatch rider could tell where it was supposed to go and then someone else opened it and sent it on to the address on the inside envelope. But as with everything we did, we knew very little of the next step.’

  Although she was dealing with the actual messages, Betty was never aware of what impact any of them might have had on the war. The strict rules on not discussing anything relating to what they were doing left her entirely in the dark as to how important her own role might be.

  ‘But while small-fry like me didn’t fully understand the importance of our own input, we did understand that it was imperative that we kept at it and that we did so in the utmost secrecy.’

  No one was in any doubt about the importance of winning the war and even in the relative safety of Bletchley Park it sometimes impinged on their lives in a very distressing way. Not only did many of the women have boyfriends or husbands away at war, there was always the risk that close relatives living in the major cities might become victims of the German bombing. Mark Glover, an army sergeant working with Betty, became very worried when he couldn’t get hold of his wife.

  ‘He’d been telephoning or trying to telephone his wife without success. So he asked if he could have time off to go and see her and his son and make sure they were safe. I shall never forget that poor man coming back into the office and saying: “All I found was my boy’s tie.” His house had been destroyed by a doodlebug, with his wife and son inside.’

  Mark’s brother-in-law was the pianist Jack Byfield, who visited Bletchley to give a recital, one of a number of prominent musicians who performed in the assembly hall. Betty’s mother had instilled a love of music in her daughters and Betty was a member of several music sections.

  ‘Social life at Bletchley was very good. We had the Bach choir under Herbert Murrill, which I had the audacity to join, a gramophone group and the Madrigal Society. That was always good fun, sometimes singing outdoors, sometimes indoors, and of course once the camp was built we had darts and table tennis. The plays were put on once every three months and were always extremely good and there was an orchestra run by David Warwick. Despite the sometimes boring duties, the atmosphere was happy and relaxed, with the usual services humour. We worked hard and we played hard.’

  Once the Shenley Road camp was built, Betty had to move out of her billet into one of the newly constructed wooden huts. They had bitumen floors, which camp commandant Colonel George Fillingham, irritated by his lack of control over the young ATS women who lived in his camp, insisted they tried to polish.

  ‘The huts we slept in were thrown up in a great hurry and had thin walls so in the winter one’s flannel would be frozen by the morning. They were very, very basic conditions, but we were young, we didn’t mind. I was a sergeant by then. We had our own mess. It was typical army rations, dried egg, a certain amount of vegetables, I don’t remember very much meat. It was a case of survival, really, and you just accepted what was put in front of you.’

  Once Mary had got the call-sign index up to date, she was moved on to tracking the Japanese Army Air Force’s ‘order of battle’, where each unit was based and how it fitted into the overall structure.

  ‘Our tools were fairly basic. Paper and pencil. That was our equipment. There were no windows in the blocks. We had huge maps on the walls with pins and flags for our order-of-battle work. There were just thin glass ventilators high up near the ceiling.’

  On one particularly hot day, Mary decided to open the ventilators. She stood on the desk and looked out through the glass at a stud farm on the other side of the perimeter fence.

  ‘I saw for the first time these wonderful horses in the field next to the block and, having got up there, realised there was a nice shelf which I decided to use for my pending tray. The summer was very hot so I opened the ventilator a
nd thought nothing of it.’

  A couple of days later, a security officer came into her office clutching some very dirty-looking pieces of paper. They were from Mary’s pending tray and had blown out of the ventilator and into the field.

  ‘He told me that I must never leave traffic by an open window or ventilator and I said I was very sorry. He gave the sheets back to me – they stunk of manure. The horses had done their worst. They obviously didn’t like what they’d read.’

  Most of the sections dealing with Japanese Army material were staffed by a mixture of ATS, Intelligence Corps and Foreign Office civilians, and most did even more repetitive work than that done by Betty or Mary. Gladys Sweetland was sent to the mysterious ‘Station X’ as a young ATS corporal after being selected at an anonymous set of offices in Praed Street near London’s Paddington Station.

  ‘We were there for several days being interviewed by lots of different people, most of them officers. Then finally we were told we were being transferred to Bletchley. It was really rather weird.’

  Once she arrived at the Park, Gladys was sat down in a hut and told to copy out a series of messages in different-coloured inks underneath each other on large sheets of graph paper.

  ‘I know it sounds ridiculous but we never asked what they did with the sheets of messages. It was all so secret. Even with the other girls in the ATS we only ever asked: “Where do you work?” And they’d say: “Oh, Hut 6” or “Block F” or whatever. We never asked each other what we actually did.’

  The first woman Gladys was billeted with had two young children and wanted her to stay in and look after them all the time so she could go out. Fortunately, Gladys was moved to a much nicer woman’s house.

  ‘She was middle-aged. She had a son in the RAF and her attitude was that if she could treat people billeted with her kindly, then perhaps other people would treat her son the same way. She would insist on bringing me breakfast in bed after I’d worked the late shift.’

  The work might be unrewarding, other than in the knowledge that it must in some way be helping the war effort, but as with many of the young women from working-class backgrounds, Gladys was introduced to a world she would never have otherwise known.

  ‘Bletchley Park was a wonderful location and sometimes we just sat in the grounds in fine weather for our break. There was a whole group of us who used to go around together to pubs and concerts.’

  Gladys acquired a lifelong love of opera and ballet after seeing both for the first time in the assembly hall just outside the gates when the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and the Ballet Rambert performed for the codebreakers. She also took part in the Bletchley Park Recreational Club gramophone section, discussing the merits of various pieces of music she would never have heard had she not been sent to Bletchley Park.

  ‘I shall never forget the comradeship and meeting all those different types of people who were there. I never thought, leaving school at fourteen and a half, that I would be able to have a proper conversation with a university professor.’

  By now the breaking of the Japanese codes was being done at so many locations – in India, Ceylon, Washington, Australia, Hawaii and on the front line in Burma and across the Pacific islands – that it was impossible for the codebreakers at Bletchley to know which piece of intelligence was produced where. So there was very little of the satisfaction that those working on the German codes had from their successes.

  But one series of messages sent by the Japanese and broken at Bletchley was to be vitally important to the preparations for D-Day and the Allied invasion of Europe, almost as important as Dilly Knox’s break into the ‘Spy Enigma’. In October 1943, Oshima Hiroshi, the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, toured the German fortifications along the French coast, the so-called Atlantic Wall. The Germans showed him everything and briefed him on their plans to repel the Allied invasion, which they expected to come around the northeastern French port of Calais.

  Oshima sent back a detailed report of everything he had learned to Tokyo. The British were able to intercept the report, which was sent using the international commercial teleprinter circuits, and the Japanese Diplomatic Section, based in Elmer’s School on the south-western edge of Bletchley Park, used the Purple machine supplied by the Americans to decode it.

  The Japanese ambassador had provided a detailed rundown of German forces in both France and Belgium, listing the number of divisions, where they were based and how they were controlled. He also listed the reinforcements that would take place in the event of an Allied invasion, which included three top SS armoured divisions. Oshima provided the first authoritative figure for the number of German forces in France, which he put at 1.4 million, and confirmed that the Germans believed the Allied forces would come ashore around Calais. That knowledge would be absolutely vital to the D-Day deception plan that the British were putting together to confuse the Germans over where the invasion would take place.

  The gaps in Oshima’s report – and there seemed at the time to be very few – were more than filled in by Colonel Ito Seiichi, the Japanese military attaché in Berlin, who made his own tour of the entire German coastal defences, sending a highly detailed 32-part report back to Tokyo. This was encoded using the Japanese military attaché code that had been broken by John Tiltman, and was decoded in Block F. Colonel Ito gave a comprehensive description of every part of the fortifications, detailing everything from the heaviest artillery battery to the smallest collection of flame-throwers.

  The RAF had been flying aerial reconnaissance operations along the French and Belgian coastline for several years, taking photographs of every inch of the Atlantic Wall, but the intelligence provided by Bletchley was far more comprehensive and allowed intelligence chiefs to send the RAF aircraft back so that more photographs could be taken of areas highlighted in the two reports.

  The codebreakers expected the Japanese naval attaché in Berlin, Rear Admiral Kojima Hideo, to make his own tour of the defences as well, but they were struggling to break the Coral machine cipher he used for his reports to Tokyo. A joint British-American operation to try to unravel the system was under way using methods pioneered by Hut 8 in the breaking of the German naval Enigma, but they were struggling to make any progress. In February 1944, Hugh Alexander flew to Washington to lead the attack there and Joan Clarke and other members of Hut 8 stepped up their efforts at Bletchley. Finally, in March, they cracked it.

  Just a few weeks later, the Japanese naval attaché went ahead with his inspection of the German defences and his report back to Tokyo was decoded at Bletchley. It was more authoritative than Oshima’s and critically – given that D-Day was only a couple of weeks away – Admiral Kojima was briefed by General Erwin Rommel, who was now commanding the German forces defending the French coast, on how he planned to respond to an Allied invasion. Rommel made it clear that he intended ‘to destroy the enemy near the coast, most of all on the beaches, without allowing them to penetrate any considerable distance inland’.

  The Allies were just a couple of weeks away from D-Day and – thanks to the codebreakers – they knew where the Germans thought they would attack, they knew the Germans believed the Double Cross deception plan, they knew every detail of the German defences, they even knew precisely how the Germans intended to respond to the invasion. Everything they did could be tailored to make maximum use of this information to catch the Germans on the wrong foot. It was to prove vital to the success of the D-Day invasion.

  Marion Graham was recruited to work on the Japanese codes in early 1944. She’d been born in Bombay where her grandfather had been one of the engineers who built the Great Indian Peninsula Railway. Her father worked for the railway and Marion was sent home when she was five to live with her aunt in Breconshire. She was fifteen when war began and after leaving school she helped with refugees while waiting to go to secretarial college.

  ‘It was called Mrs Hester’s Secretarial College. It was quite famous. They’d been going for years and they always got you top jobs. The
college had been evacuated from London to Lincolnshire.’

  After completing the course, Marion took a job while she was waiting to be called up. She’d volunteered for the Wrens so was rather surprised when she was summoned to the Foreign Office, which unbeknown to her was in touch with Mrs Hester’s looking for likely recruits for Bletchley.

  ‘Bletchley couldn’t just recruit from the Labour Exchange, of course, so at first they had to recruit the director’s friends, get admirals’ daughters, generals’ daughters and suchlike, but then the net had to be spread wider and the Foreign Office was in touch with the secretarial colleges.’

  There were a number of old ‘Hester’s Girls’ at Bletchley, including two of Marion’s best friends from the college, the Glassborow twins, Valerie and Mary.1 Initially, Marion was in a terraced house in Stony Stratford with a working-class family. It was not at all what she was used to. The lavatory was down the end of a very narrow back garden.

  ‘But they were a good family. The house was spotlessly clean. You could skid on the lino. Outside loo. No bathroom. It was simple. But they were a very decent family. Then they had family troubles and I had to move to Bedford, which I didn’t really like because it was such a long way. But the people there were a very nice family too so I was very fortunate with my billets.’

  Marion started out working in Block F typing up Japanese messages that were being sent to Washington and Colombo, mostly about Japanese troop movements. Around the end of 1944, she was moved to a unit called Clinical Monitoring of Y, or CMY, based in the old Hut 6, where her job was reading the intercepted Japanese messages to make sure that the intercept stations, which were also known as the ‘Y’ Stations, were taking all the messages from the various networks they were monitoring. Different stations on the Japanese networks frequently transmitted on different frequencies so an operator at an intercept station monitoring a specific frequency would only hear what one of the stations said. The responses were on a different frequency again and it was important that the operators found both frequencies so the intelligence analysts and reporters could see everything that was being said.