The Secret Life of Bletchley Park
Sinclair McKay writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday and has written books about James Bond and Hammer horror for Aurum. His next book is about the Overseas Listening Service during World War II, to be published by Aurum in 2012. He lives in London.
‘Recreate[s] the unique atmosphere of this extraordinary place … remarkable’
Daily Telegraph
‘… a portrait of one of the most remarkable brain factories the world has ever seen’
Max Hastings
‘Revealing and entertaining’
Mail on Sunday
‘This very readable and competent book captures well the extraordinary atmosphere of eccentrics working hard together in almost complete secrecy’
Guardian
‘Amazingly, this is the first oral history of life at the Buckinghamshire country house’
Oldie
‘This book is a fitting tribute to a very British kind of genius’
Waterstones Books Quarterly
‘An interesting and amusing book’
Britain at War
Acknowledgements
With a great many thanks, first of all, to Kelsey Griffin, Director of the Museum at Bletchley Park, for introducing me to such brilliant people. Among all those, and other, brilliant people, thanks are also due to the Honourable Sarah Baring, to Mavis and Keith Batey, Ruth Bourne, Mimi Gallilee, Simon Greenish, John Herivel, Oliver and Sheila Lawn, Trudie Marshall, Geoffrey Pidgeon, Veronica Plowman, Nicolas Ridley, Captain Jerry Roberts, Sarah and John Standing and especially to Jean Valentine. Thanks also to the Bletchley Park Trust – which has made the museum such an invaluable and fascinating draw for generations to come.
Contents
Praise
Title Page
Acknowledgements
1 Reporting for Duty
2 1938–39: The School of Codes
3 1939: Rounding Up the Brightest and the Best
4 The House and the Surrounding Country
5 1939: How Do You Break the Unbreakable?
6 1939–40: The Enigma Initiation
7 Freezing Billets and Outdoor Loos
8 1940: The First Glimmers of Light
9 1940: Inspiration – and Intensity
10 1940: The Coming of the Bombes
11 1940: Enigma and the Blitz
12 Bletchley and the Class Question
13 1941: The Battle of the Atlantic
14 Food, Booze and Too Much Tea
15 1941: The Wrens and their Larks
16 1941: Bletchley and Churchill
17 Military or Civilian?
18 1942: Grave Setbacks and Internal Strife
19 The Rules of Attraction
20 1943: A Very Special Relationship
21 1943: The Hazards of Careless Talk
22 Bletchley and the Russians
23 The Cultural Life of Bletchley Park
24 1943–44: The Rise of the Colossus
25 1944–45: D-Day and the End of the War
26 1945 and After: The Immediate Aftermath
27 Bletchley’s Intellectual Legacy
28 After Bletchley: The Silence Descends
29 The Rescue of the Park
Notes
Index
Copyright
1 Reporting for Duty
Sarah Baring – and her good friend Osla Henniker-Major – received the summons by means of a terse telegram. She remembers that it read: ‘You are to report to Station X at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, in four days time. Your postal address is Box 111, c/o The Foreign Office. That is all you need to know.’
These two aristocratic young women arrived one evening in the spring of 1941, having travelled by rail from Euston. Their journey had been rendered a little fraught by a male fellow passenger sitting opposite in their compartment, apparently manipulating himself obscenely through his trouser pockets. After some whispered conference, the two outraged young women decided that Osla should deal with the grubby man by reaching up to the luggage rack and then ‘accidentally dropping their case of gramophone records’ on his lap. The man got the message and ‘fled up the corridor’.
Just over an hour later, they were there. ‘We decanted ourselves from the train at Bletchley station,’ recalls the Honourable Sarah Baring, ‘and then, weighed down by our luggage, we staggered up a rutted narrow path. On the side of the tracks, there was an eight foot high chained fence. It was topped by a roll of barbed wire.’
The boundary of the Bletchley Park estate is adjacent to the railway station. The two women struggled with their suitcases through the twilight along this long, quiet path, up a gentle slope running along the fenced side of the wooded grounds, until they reached the short driveway and the concrete RAF sentry post that stood on the road towards the house. The sentry on duty swiftly established that these incongruously elegant ladies were expected.
Then they caught their first view of the big house itself, with the lake before it, the thick branches of a Wellingtonia tree obscuring some of the windows. One or other of them raised an eyebrow at the prospect. For these two young women – both of whom would have been familiar with grander properties – initial impressions were not remotely favourable. ‘It was a bit of a shock,’ says Sarah Baring lightly now. ‘We thought the house was perfectly monstrous.’
Scattered around outside the mansion, on its lawns, were spartan-looking single-storey wooden huts, with little chimneys coughing out thick, inky smoke, and windows covered for the blackout. Round to the side of the house were what had been the old stables, and a sturdy red-brick outbuilding referred to as ‘the Cottage’. The paving around the house, and on the concrete driveway, was in a state of disrepair, with potholes.
It was difficult to see beyond this, but the grounds went on further, much further; there were meadows filled with more huts, and concrete blocks. ‘And there were,’ Sarah Baring says, ‘men and women emerging from all these huts, giving the impression of a labyrinth from which there was no exit.’ She also immediately noted a disconcerting ‘absence of people in uniform’.
The front of the house, looking across the pretty ornamental lake and beyond into the gloaming, down the hill, faced towards the town; but any glimpse of Bletchley was obscured by trees. The only reminder of the outside world was the distant shrieks of train whistles echoing in the spring air.
Once through the door of the big house – which bustled with more intense-looking young men and women in civilian clothes – the two young women were pointed up the stairs, and presented themselves on the first floor to the man who had sent them the telegram: Commander Travis, Deputy Director of Bletchley Park.
Travis immediately asked the two bemused young women to sign the Official Secrets Act. He then told them of a temporary billet in town – a hotel – in which they would be staying, and added that their duties would begin the following morning. ‘He said to me, “I hear you’ve got the German,”’ says Sarah Baring, ‘which at that moment I thought was rather funny because I thought he meant a man.’ At that point, Commander Travis told the two women very little of what their duties would entail; only that the need for secrecy was absolutely paramount.
And after this faintly dreamlike introduction, Sarah and Osla’s years at Bletchley Park began.
Other recruits to the Park often arrived late at night. During the blackout, there would have been no lights visible from the dowdy Buckinghamshire town; these people would not have been able to make out through the murk a single detail of the small red-brick houses, or the long terraced streets, or the pubs. ‘In the early hours of the morning, I alighted on the station platform, and was met by
an army captain,’ said one veteran. ‘I might as well have found myself in Outer Mongolia.’
‘I got to Bletchley around midnight,’ recalled another veteran. ‘Everything was in darkness. There were some iron steps going over the bridge. There wasn’t a soul about.’
There is, perhaps, a touch of the Graham Greene thriller about this image: the steam train drawing away, its red rear lights disappearing into the black distance; then a thick silence, broken only by the click of solitary footsteps pacing in the deep shadows of an unlit platform, waiting for the mysterious contact to arrive. ‘A system of passwords has been instituted to enable authorised persons to circulate in the grounds after dark,’ stated an early Bletchley Park memo in October 1939. ‘[It will] enable them to identify themselves to the military police when challenged.’1
Many of those who reported for duty at Bletchley Park recall that suspense; the anticipation and excitement of not knowing what kind of work they were about to step into. For those who arrived on a winter evening, or even in the small hours, the total darkness around the station acquired a chillingly metaphorical depth.
And even for the others who reported for duty in more conventional, brighter daylight, the introduction to Bletchley Park was no less disorientating. The experience of another veteran, Sheila Lawn (née MacKenzie), just nineteen years old at the time, was not untypical.
Sheila was a young nineteen, too; she had never previously left her native Scotland. She had received the summons in some bewilderment, uncertain how anyone would have known about her, or who might have recommended her. She embarked upon a deeply uncomfortable eleven-hour train journey from Inverness to Bletchley (trains during the war were often jammed, and people would often have to sit on their suitcases in the corridors, and try to do without the lavatories, which were gothically horrible); eleven hours with the tension – and the thrill – of having no idea what was coming next.
She now recalls: ‘When I arrived at Bletchley station, I had been instructed to find a phone, which I did. The voice at the other end said: “Ah, yes, Miss MacKenzie, we are expecting you.” And a car came down to take me up there. How could I really speculate about what I was getting into? This was a very secretive business, you see.’
The most secretive business there could be. Years before the outbreak of the Second World War, one branch of the Foreign Office was acutely aware of the immense challenge it was facing; a challenge that would require not merely diamond-sharp minds, but also young people with the energy and the character to face exhausting trials of patience. Recruits with the strength to focus every single day upon tasks of stunning complexity, without letting the pressure undermine their mental well-being.
Upon arrival, most of the young recruits to this establishment immediately gathered that they were to be engaged upon intelligence work of the most crucial nature. There were sharp, serious warnings about total secrecy; glimpses of former university tutors, in civilian clothing; then the swift, giddying realisation that they were now close to the nerve centre of the British war effort.
Here, in these grounds fifty miles to the north of London, they would be introduced to the gravest secret of the war. Every intercepted enemy message, every signal from every captain, commander, military division, battleship, U-boat; all these encrypted communications, jumbled up into seemingly random letters in groups of four and five, and transmitted by radio, were gathered in by the many listening posts around the British coastline. And they were all assiduously sent on to Bletchley Park. It was here, in these nondescript huts, that the most powerful intellects of a generation struggled with a proposition that German High Command considered completely insoluble: that of outwitting – and mastering – its ingenious Enigma encoding technology.
The Enigma machines – compact, beautifully designed devices, looking a little like typewriters with lights – were used by all the German military forces; these portable machines generated the countless millions of different letter combinations in which most coded German communications were sent.
In the early stages of the war, when the Nazis had conquered much of western Europe, Britain looked alarmingly vulnerable – relatively ill-prepared and underarmed. From the beginning, the desperate need to break the Enigma codes was about much more than simple tactical intelligence. It was about survival.
To unlock the secrets of Enigma would mean penetrating to the heart of the enemy’s campaign; it would allow the British to read the encoded messages from U-boats, from Panzer divisions, from the Gestapo. It would allow them to read Luftwaffe messages, with their clues about bombing targets, and even to read messages from High Command itself. The codebreakers of Bletchley Park aimed at reading the enemy’s every message, and in so doing potentially trying to anticipate his every move.
And in the initial push to find some incredibly abstruse mathematical way into these constantly changing codes – all the settings were changed every night, at midnight – it was immediately apparent to the few who knew the secret that this intelligence was much more than getting a head start on the enemy. This was intelligence that could help decide the course of the war.
Most people these days are vaguely aware that the work of Bletchley and its supply of intelligence – codenamed Ultra – helped, in the words of President Eisenhower, to shorten the war by two years. Indeed, according to the eminent historian – and Bletchley Park veteran – Professor Sir Harry Hinsley, the figure should be three years. Prominent critic and essayist George Steiner went further: he stated that the work done at Bletchley was one of ‘the greatest achievements of the twentieth century’.
From the Battle of Britain to the Blitz; from Cape Matapan to El-Alamein; from Kursk to the V-1 rockets, to D-Day and Japan, the work of Bletchley Park was completely invisible, yet right at the heart of the conflict. It was a key player whose presence, at all times, had to be kept utterly hidden from the enemy. For if even a suggestion of what was happening at Bletchley were to reach German High Command, all the cryptography efforts could have been ruined. The effect on the war could have been catastrophic.
‘When you think that about nine or ten thousand people worked in all the various sections of Bletchley Park,’ says Park veteran Mavis Batey, ‘it is really quite incredible that the secret never got out. Imagine so many people keeping such a secret now.’ More than this, though. The austere wooden huts on the lawns and in the meadows played host to some of the most gifted – and quirky – individuals of their generation. Not only were there long-standing cryptographers of great genius; there were also fresh, brilliant young minds, such as Alan Turing, whose work was destined to shape the coming computer age, and the future of technology.
Also at Bletchley Park were thousands of dedicated people, mostly young, many drawn straight from university. Some came straight from sixth form.
As the war progressed, numbers grew. Alongside the academics, there were platoons of female translators and hundreds of eager Wrens, there to operate the fearsomely complicated prototype computing machines; there was also a substantial number of well-bred debutantes, sought out upon the social grapevine, and equally determined to do their bit.
A surprising number of people at Bletchley Park were either already famous, or would become famous not long after their time there. These ranged from glamorous film actress Dorothy Hyson (with occasional appearances from her paramour, actor Anthony Quayle) and novelist-to-be Angus Wilson (who was to become renowned at the Park for his stretched-out nerves, extravagantly camp mannerisms, wild temper tantrums, and richly coloured bow ties) to future Home Secretary Roy Jenkins (a ‘terrible code-breaker’). James Bond’s creator Ian Fleming, then working in London on naval intelligence, would drop by on a regular basis.
The comparative youth of most of the recruits was to colour the atmosphere of the establishment quite deeply. They worked with tremendous vigour and intensity, but they also brought a sharp, lively creativity to their off-duty hours. These young people – many of whom were part of an emerging, str
engthening middle class – found that rather than being a ‘pause’ in their educations, Bletchley Park was to form its own peculiar kind of university experience.
There was also to be a great deal of romance, perhaps unsurprisingly in what one veteran described as ‘the hothouse atmosphere’ of Bletchley Park. Many who fell in love at Bletchley stayed happily married for many years afterwards. Some are still married today.
Yet this ‘hothouse’ also imposed an extraordinary burden. The oaths of secrecy that the recruits were made to swear lasted for many decades beyond the end of the war. Husbands and wives were forbidden to discuss the work they had done there; they could not tell their parents what they had achieved, even if their parents were dying. They were not allowed to tell their children.
Which is why, since the silence lifted in the late 1970s, the recollections of Bletchley Park veterans seem to have a special vividness and clarity; they have not been smoothed out or transformed or muddled by endless retelling. Added to this, there was a focus and intensity about life at the Park that would burn itself on to the memory.
Architectural historian Jane Fawcett MBE, who was recruited to the Park as a young woman in 1940, recalls the almost unfathomable sense of pressure that they were under. ‘We knew that what we were doing was making all the difference,’ she says. ‘We knew that it really did depend on us.’
‘It would get too much for some,’ says one veteran. ‘The strain really did tell.’ Another veteran, S. Gorley Putt, commented: ‘One after another – in one way or another – we would all go off our rockers.’2
Gorley Putt was exaggerating a little. Not everyone went off their rockers. Indeed, many Bletchley Park veterans now look back at their experiences – the frustrations, the exhausting night shifts, the flashing moments of insight and genius, even the outbreaks of youthful, high-spirited laughter – as a formative experience that they were uniquely privileged to enjoy.
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