The Secret Lives of Codebreakers

by Sinclair McKay

  “As for Dilly going around picking out girls, that is totally untrue. We were all interviewed by this dreadful Miss Moore, a fierce lady in the Foreign Office.”

  There is another possibility too; that Dillwyn Knox had somehow found that women had a greater aptitude for the work required—as well as nimbleness of mind and capacity for lateral thought, they possessed a care and attention to detail that many men might not have had. This, of course, is just speculation; the other possibility, and one that seems likely considering the scratchiness of many of Knox’s personal dealings, was that he simply did not like men very much.

  As the war effort intensified, new recruits would be given a statutory three-week induction period to be taught the nuances of codebreaking. Later still, recruits were sent to Bedford for a few weeks, to sit in a dusty, anonymous office where they learned the rudiments of Japanese, in order to be able to crack the Japanese codes.

  But for that first wave of recruits, Bletchley Park as an institution had what some have described as a peculiarly English air of improvisation, of simply diving in and getting on with it. Perhaps there was no other way. For in the face of a challenge like the Enigma keys and without, at least at first, the technology to be able to attack them mechanically, the Park would need as many original, quirky, lateral thinkers as it could get, and then give them as free a rein as possible. This created a unique atmosphere that was to be remembered, despite the nature of the conflict in which they were so deeply involved, with the utmost fondness by everyone who served there, even if they were not allowed—under the strictest oaths of secrecy—to discuss even the smallest detail of it for decades afterward.

  7 Freezing Billets and Outdoor Loos

  “This was Bletchley,” says one veteran. “A very small railway town some fifty miles out of London. This town was expected to house all these people. And very few of these houses had baths.”

  Even in the earliest days of Bletchley Park, before the crowds descended, it had not been considered practical or feasible to use the big house itself for accommodation. There had been a suggestion that the first wave of staff could somehow be housed in an underground shelter beneath the old headquarters of Broadway Buildings in London. The idea, as Alistair Denniston was swift to point out, was extremely unattractive; was it really sensible to cram people engaged in the most sensitive cerebral work together in this way? Though Alan Turing sometimes slept in the Cottage, Dilly Knox would make his way back to his own home in the Chilterns, while from the start senior personnel had been billeted in local hotels and inns.

  As the new young recruits began making their way to the Park, it was clear that the townsfolk of Bletchley would have to put roofs over their heads. Some recruits made their way straight to rooms above inns; others to neat, terraced little houses; yet others to grander accommodation just outside the town. Perhaps this added a further dimension to the feeling that this was, in some ways, a university; all these students, classicists, mathematicians, and scientists taking rooms in humble digs and doing their best to stay out of their landlady’s hair. Before long, however, billets had to be found in all the villages and hamlets within a wide radius.

  Baroness Trumpington had less than fond memories of the first place that she was sent. She recalled: “My billet was with a chap who worked on the railways, and I noticed when his wife showed me around, that there was no lock on the bathroom door. She said, ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry about that—when you’re in the bath, my husband will be working on the railway lines.’ Well, I found differently on the very first night. So I changed my billet.”1

  Another billet-changer was Keith Batey. “My first landlady was a horror,” he says. “I didn’t stay with her for more than a month, I think it was. She wanted an assurance from the Park that I wasn’t a conscientious objector. Well, she didn’t ask again after that.”

  This may have been quite a common problem for male Bletchley recruits. If a young man was not in uniform, and was still roaming around the place, then how was he to explain exactly what he was doing?

  The experience of his wife, Mavis, billeted on a local farm, was a little different. “I looked after children, I babysat, I helped on the farm, I did my own washing,” she says. “We did as much as we could and were always doing things with the children. But the landlady would insist on bringing us up a cup of tea in the morning. One day, she suddenly said: ‘I shan’t be here next week, my aunt will be coming to look after you. Actually, I’m having a baby.’ We felt so awful that we had let her wait on us and we had no idea. She just laughed and said: ‘You know, you’re not the only ones who can keep a secret.’”

  Keith Batey moved on to a rather more agreeable billet, as he recalls: “I stayed at the house of Mrs. Bidwell, much later. She was admirable. The widow of a metropolitan police sergeant—who knew how to feed men.”

  Mr. Batey adds: “Tell you who was billeted with me: Howard Smith. He became ambassador in Moscow and head of MI5. But the billet was a scandal really, in the sense of the strain that it put on Mrs. Bidwell. As well as us, Mrs. Bidwell had her mother living with her, and some invalid in a back room, and I suspect we had half their ration.”

  For some lucky chaps at the start of the war, one’s billet could also mean highly congenial access to beer and billiards. This certainly was the case for Stuart Milner-Barry. He wrote that he found himself installed “at the Shoulder of Mutton Inn, Old Bletchley, about a mile from the entrance to Bletchley Park. Here Hugh [Alexander] and I were most comfortably looked after by an amiable landlady, Mrs. Bowden. As an innkeeper, she did not seem to be unduly burdened by rationing, and we were able (among other privileges) to invite selected colleagues to supper on Sunday nights, which was a great boon.”2

  Jane Fawcett, MBE, who was later to head the Royal Institute of British Architects, was a little taken aback by the aesthetic prospect that awaited her in Bletchley. She says: “I lived in a council house under the chimneys of the London Brick Company. It was a young family with two noisy boys. I couldn’t sleep, especially after night shifts. And after about a year of this, my parents…became aware of the situation. Our family had friends who were at Liscombe Park. I was invited to stay there, in the staff wing.”

  Angus Wilson, who worked at the British Museum with his friend and lover Bentley Bridgewater, had a head start in terms of rural relocation; in 1939, he had removed himself from London to live in the relative bucolic peace of Bishop’s Stortford. When he was recruited to Bletchley, he was billeted two miles away from the Park in a village called Simpson. He lived in a council house occupied by the local milkman and his wife, who would emit little coughs in order to try and discourage Wilson’s enormous consumption of cigarettes. She was also on hand to save him from embarrassment when one day, he set off to work at Bletchley in his pajamas.

  But not everyone’s domestic arrangements were quite so stable. Sheila Lawn, who had never before left her native Scotland, recalls that throughout the war, she found herself being shifted around between homes quite a bit.

  “When I first got to Bletchley, I was supposed to be put up in Newport Pagnell, which was eight miles away,” Mrs. Lawn says. “But when I arrived, they hadn’t got a billet for me, and for three weeks, I was in the hostel. I met some charming girls there, delightful girls, a lot of them were secretarial, and they were so nice to me and they would come out with us in the evening. And then I was moved to my first billet, with people called Hobbs.

  “It was delightful. They had a boy, Michael, bright as a bee, he was about twelve. And I was there for five very happy months. But unfortunately, Mrs. Hobbs had leg trouble and the doctor said to her, ‘You’ve got to rest that leg.’ It was very painful and swollen. So I had to move on.

  “And then,” Mrs. Lawn continues, “I went on to an elderly lady and her little dog. Quite obviously she wanted someone who would sit with her, and perhaps share in a little bit of knitting and that sort of thing. But we got on very well. In the end, though, she had to let the authoriti
es know that she really thought it was too much. I was on shifts, a lot of them running from four p.m. to midnight, and midnight to eight a.m. And this lady was finding the pattern of the shifts difficult, in terms of me going in and out.”

  The tough and rigid shift patterns of the Park caused problems in a great many households. Imagine, if you are the landlord, perhaps with small children, and your tenant is either coming back in well after midnight, or coming in just after 8 a.m. and needing to sleep throughout the day. Added to this, your tenant also requires food and drink. In a small, cramped house, and at all hours of day and night, such demands are not always easily met.

  Sheila Lawn remembers her last billet. “It was a very simple billet—outside loo, which most of us had, you know—but they were very pleasant people indeed, never asked me any questions. And they had a daughter of fifteen. She was a little bit of a tearaway. But they were so kind to me. I stayed there for the last eighteen months of the war.”

  A fellow Scot, Irene Young, found billeted life rather more of a trial. In some ways, it appeared to have been rather a shock. Her landlady, a Mrs. Webster, had “a sharp nose” and “a thin mouth” and her day-to-day clothing always involved “a crossover apron.” Conditions in the small house were every bit as spartan as those encountered by Sheila Lawn. “The WC…was outside,” wrote Irene, “and I used to indulge in a small secret smile when, having crept out on a freezing night to the little ‘necessary house’, I must needs sit facing an outdated calendar showing a picture of ‘A Sunny Haven.’”

  And if that wasn’t bad enough, life indoors apparently verged on the Dickensian:

  I had a room to myself, but because fuel was rationed, there was no heating in it, and so in my time off I was forced to sit with Mr. and Mrs. Webster. He was a gentle man, happily dominated by his competent wife. I used to find my bed set at an angle from the wall and though I straightened it, it was always moved back into this odd position. Eventually Mrs. Webster explained that she had had an evacuee before me who had “breathed on the wall,” and she did not want me to do likewise.3

  For Captain Jerry Roberts, who joined the Park later to work on Colossus, the successor to Alan Turing’s bombe machine, life in a billet meant that any romantic possibilities were frequently smothered with a cold, damp towel: “It was difficult to be too social. In my billet, I had half the house. There were two bedrooms, and Mr. and Mrs. Wells had one and I had the other. There were two sitting rooms. They had the kitchen, if you like. And I had the parlor. Which they would normally never have used, they lived in the kitchen. Now it was not too easy to develop romances in that sort of situation. Not that that bothered me at that time, I have to say.”

  *

  In March 1940, the Bletchley Park authorities felt obliged to send out a stern memo on the subject of billeting:

  Any amenities provided by the householder are purely voluntary. The householder is not bound by law to do more than provide breakfast, an evening meal, sleeping accommodation, and reasonable facilities for personal cleanliness.

  There is, for instance, no obligation to provide baths, fires, or allow those billeted to use the householder’s sitting room. Nor is it at all certain that those billeted could insist on having their bedrooms cleaned, beds made, etc.

  A great many householders are, in fact, providing such amenities without extra payment and it is therefore incumbent on persons billeted to do what they can in these circumstances to make the householder feel that his or her co-operation is appreciated and not just taken for granted.4

  This might have been particularly addressed to those who approached life in this small town from the more rarefied end of the social scale. One veteran recalls with glee the privations inflicted upon “the debs,” the glamorous upper-class girls drafted in through family connections and suddenly finding themselves having to live in suffocating little houses near a main railway line, “where the occupiers kept their coal in the bath.”

  “Let’s not forget,” says Geoffrey Pidgeon, who was working with the signals intelligence Y Service at the time, “you have the situation of ‘girls of quality’ going into a room with a twenty-five watt bulb, and the instruction that they are to have only one bath a week. And there is lino everywhere.”

  But one should never underestimate the fortitude, and indeed the impeccable manners, of that generation of upper-class “gels.” Certainly, the Honorable Sarah Baring seems now to have fond memories of the scenario that she found herself in. “We were very lucky, my friend Osla and I, we were billeted with a lovely old couple in a village,” she says. “We used to be driven backwards and forwards to work from the billet. And it was a nice house, a very pretty house near Woburn Sands.

  “I think it was the manor house of the village. I’m not sure—we hardly spent any time there. We were either sleeping or eating or going off to work again. So we didn’t really get to know the village very much. But our landlords were very good to us, very kind. They never complained, they just fed us, which was very decent of them. They had extra rations of course.”

  Indeed, she only recalls one source of tension about her domestic arrangements, and that concerned one of her fellow billetees: “We weren’t the only ones, Osla and I. There was one of the cryptographers. We didn’t like him very much, we thought he was frightfully pompous. So we weren’t very nice to him.”

  One other small problem, remembered by many other people during that period, concerned the simple business of getting out of bed on a dark morning in the depths of winter. “It was always cold in the war,” says Sarah Baring. “I can remember getting up to go on to day-watch and we just had a small electric fire. The cold! Getting out of bed! Freezing. Because no one had central heating or anything like that.”

  For the townspeople of Bletchley, it was not just this extraordinary collection of quasi-academics that had to be assimilated, there was also the occasional question of evacuated children to be dealt with. One such was thirteen-year-old Mimi Gallilee, later to work at the Park itself, who found herself fetching up in Bletchley quite unexpectedly. The town—and its collection of little shops and limited amenities—is still imprinted vividly in her memory.

  “Before the war broke out, during the last couple of weeks in August—all the schools were on holiday—we were called back to school in Islington,” Mrs. Gallilee says. “We were talked to just in case there was a war and the parents had an opportunity to put their children’s names down for evacuation.

  “I was evacuated with the school, and we were sent to what was the lovely old Hemel Hempstead, Boxmoor Hill. It was beautiful there. But I was so homesick for my mother—I had only been there eleven days. And so she was sent to Bletchley. And she came and took me, found somewhere for me to live close by her.” But Mimi’s mother had to find somewhere to work. Bletchley Park was where she ended up. Her young daughter followed a little while later, and remembers the town itself in those days:

  “The first shops, such as they were, started beyond the railway bridge. And you had three or four little shops in a row. A fish shop. There was a jeweler and a WH Smith. Rustons the chemist. A sweet shop—well, it sold sweets when it actually had sweets in. A public house, the Duncombe Arms. There were two or three pubs. I didn’t go in them, obviously, so I would never know what they looked like inside.

  “I never quite realized at that age that the town was really rather small,” she continues. “The library was within the local big school and all of the books were hidden from sight of the children in the classroom. They had shelves you could lock. I would go to the library a couple of times a week.

  “There was the British Restaurant, where you could go and buy a meal at lunchtime. And no meal was allowed to cost more than half a crown. Half a crown was a very posh meal. That was a great deal of money.”

  Some have less than fond memories of the town. During the pitch darkness of the blackouts, Jane Fawcett used to make her way to the Park with a hammer in her bag. “You never knew who you might meet,” s
he observed crisply.

  No one in Bletchley was immune from the depredations of rationing. Mimi Gallilee recalls how, for the women especially, the task of finding new or replacement clothing could turn into rather a quest. “If you had to do shopping, you took the train to Bedford or Northampton and on a rare occasion, to Watford. That’s if you wanted to buy clothes. Furniture was all on dockets and people didn’t have the money anyway. You waited until your clothing coupon ration came around, I think twice a year. You got twenty-six at a time. A fully lined ladies’ coat would cost you eighteen of those coupons and you see from that how little you could buy.

  “And a pair of socks or stockings would be one coupon. So you couldn’t have loads of anything. Shoes: if you had a hole, or if something started going, they were taken to the repairer, you didn’t just sling them out as you do now.

  “Towards the end of the war,” she adds, “a dress shop opened in Bletchley. It was close to the Studio Cinema.” Beyond that, she says, there was “the butcher, the baker, the Co-op grocery store, and then the department store. And if you could afford to buy things in there, you were rich.”

  And so it was that Bletchley and its inhabitants found itself growing steadily more populous as fresh young faces were drawn in from across the country, and from a variety of different backgrounds. If there was fervid speculation as to the provenance of these youngsters, the townspeople were good enough (and patriotic enough) to keep it to themselves. Nevertheless, rather like that of the Park workers themselves, this act of conscious mass discretion is one that still surprises. To this day, many Bletchley veterans are lost in admiration not merely for the hospitality shown to so many of them, but also for the fact that the people of Bletchley were careful never to ask what exactly went on up at the Park.