The Lost World of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  There were also small mobile units operating in Greece. When the Germans launched their invasion of 1941, the wireless operatives found themselves in a desperate race both to stay ahead of the enemy, and also to protect their secret equipment. This then applied all over again with the invasion of Crete. For a few, such as Edgar Harrison, evacuation was an extremely close-run thing, and involved days of hiding out in caves before it was possible to mount a sea rescue.

  In 1942, the ‘Y’ station on Singapore was in even greater jeopardy. One Wren recalled how even beforehand, it was never the easiest posting. The humidity and temperature were frequently unbearable, and the sweat ran into her shoes. And despite their round-the-clock monitoring, it was difficult for them to know exactly what the enemy was planning next – not because of a failure in codebreaking, but because the Japanese tended to use abstract keywords for their operations, an obstacle which no amount of codebreaking could ever surmount. When the invasion came, the ‘Y’ team and their cryptology experts only just managed to get out with mere hours to spare. Capture was unthinkable, and this applied equally to operatives in the Middle East and the Mediterranean: if, under torture, any hint of Bletchley Park’s success had been disclosed, the consequences would have been incalculable. The operatives simply could not allow themselves to fall into enemy hands.

  Long after the gruelling siege is over, ‘Y’ Service operatives gather on the cliffs of Malta.

  Wireless operators often came from a background in the Post Office. When the war broke out, some were too young to join up; but they honed their wireless skills against the day that the call-up came. Many young men were taken off to training centres based in requisitioned holiday camps. Remembered as being particularly chilly and uninviting was the Skegness branch of Butlins, Bob Hughes recalled how they slept in chalets, in double beds with thin boards down the middle – to stop recruits ‘getting at one another’ in the night. But it was so freezing cold that they got rid of the boards and slept close for warmth anyway. He also recalled how, after so many weeks of deeply immersive Morse training, enabling them to reach speeds of 30 words per minute, they were then deployed across the world. The contrast between grey Britain and the stark beauty of Alexandria or Sardinia was breathtaking. A few veterans – recruits who had never even seen a swimming pool before – recalled their delight at being able to plunge into the rich blue of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea.

  Taking leave in the Cocos (Keeling) Islands – boat trips out into the azure sea to watch manta rays and sharks.

  Unlike severely rationed Britain, those working in Colombo had unlimited access to delicious tropical fruit –including much sought-after pineapple and bananas.

  The ‘Y’ Service was life-changing too. Many veteran Wrens were later to confess that, determined as they were to do their bit for the war effort, they were also keen to do so with work that was interesting and absorbing and made more demands of them than being cooks or drivers or mess waitresses. Some had an awareness of what was required for interception work, and made sure that they had learned the basics of Morse before their interviews. They were summoned before panels – many featuring unsmiling older women – and given intelligence and aptitude tests. Some women were recruited for their deftness in Morse; others for the range of their linguistic skills. Like the men, they were packed off to training centres. One, on the Isle of Man, was remembered with especial fondness by many veterans. The work was tough but the island seemed to be a cornucopia of foodstuffs – from fresh eggs to fish – that were severely rationed elsewhere. Other recruits were sent to Soberton Towers in Hampshire, remembered for its Malory Towers atmosphere.

  But then came the real experience for so many of these women: embarking aboard troop ships, with only the faintest idea of where they were being sent. A few were dispatched to Mombasa on the coast of East Africa, where there was a base established in an old school-house, which was dealing with Japanese codes. A couple of Wrens, when they got leave, took the opportunity to climb Mount Kilimanjaro.

  A great many other ‘Y’ Service operatives, women and men, endured gruelling voyages to be sent to HMS Anderson, a huge station outside Colombo in Ceylon. After the tension of a long voyage through U-boat infested waters, arrival was a relief. One veteran from Weybridge in Surrey recalled his wonder when looking out at the night sky and seeing ‘millions of fireflies’. Meanwhile, women who had had to deal with nothing larger than money spiders suddenly found themselves in a world of snakes, lizards and outsize tarantulas – all of which they quickly adapted to with high good humour.

  Out here, the wireless interceptors were listening in on the Japanese forces, in addition to tracking their shipping and submarines by means of Direction Finding. Veterans recall their speedy tutorials in the basics of Japanese language and culture, the better to help them relay intelligence back to Britain. And in the off-duty hours, Colombo was really quite the place to be. The swimming was excellent, the food a source of terrific pleasure after the meagre and limited diet back home; and the night-life was extraordinarily exotic, especially to women aged 18 or 19 who had never before even left their home towns. And aside from several bombing raids in 1941, the atmosphere was relatively tranquil. The only regular disturbances, especially for women working alone on night shifts in huts fretted with palms, were spectacular thunderstorms. They might have been glorious to watch but when sitting with earphones clamped on, trying to listen to enemy frequencies, the crackling and the interference was sometimes agonising. Many Wrens found after the war that their hearing had been permanently damaged.

  For some of these young people, the work opened up vistas they could never before have imagined. The experiences of 19-year-old Peter Budd, a Bristol boy who had previously considered Calais as distant as Timbuktu, left an indelible mark – he was sent to the absurdly remote Cocos Islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, some 2,000 miles from any mainland. He and 18 other colleagues, who were looked after by a tiny community of Malay people, conducted their wireless work in a place that he considered heaven: fine white sand, mesmerising amethyst sea, manta rays, beer and gramophone records on the beach. His 18 months there had an edge of the surreal: no one was allowed to know where on the planet he was, not even his parents. The location of the station was so sensitive, owing to its proximity to the Japanese, that it was even removed from official maps. To all intents and purposes, Budd and his colleagues were working on an island that didn’t exist. Aside from the menace of lethal caterpillars that could cause total paralysis, and the occasional fright from a shark, these islands represented a paradise that he never found again.

  Wrens adjusted quickly to tropical life at HMS Anderson – even to the mighty midnight storms that would bring deafening rain pouring down on the woven leaf roofs as they attempted to transcribe codes.

  Less exotic, but central to Bletchley’s efforts, were the listening stations dotted all around the coast of Britain, from Dover to Wick. On the south coast, these stations, which ranged from the extensive base at Dover to more extemporised locations – cottages, a lighthouse, even an old caravan – were not only picking up encoded messages, but also the conversations of German pilots. In the early days of the war, before radar was properly working, these listeners were pretty much the human equivalent, relaying the conversations between pilots and controllers just seconds after they had happened. Speed and accuracy were key, and this is why the work required such young recruits. Veterans recalled how some, only in their thirties, simply could not match the nimbleness and innate cheerfulness of their younger counterparts, and would burn out.

  Sailor and Morse specialist Peter Budd was aged 19 when he was sent out first to Colombo, and then the remote Cocos Islands. He managed to take camera film with him courtesy of his girlfriend’s chemist father.

  Budd was listening in on enemy communications, and also tracking submarines. Those stationed on the island had to translate and transcribe coded messages from Morse at very high speeds. He recalled that night
shifts on a lonely island could be eerie; and there was constant watchfulness in case of a Japanese attack.

  The German pilots were only too aware that they were being overheard, and they would sometimes address jokes and greetings to the invisible women who were listening in. This sometimes created a curious sort of intimacy. Some Wrens recalled the feeling of sickness when these high-spirited young pilots were eventually shot down out of the sky, and they were forced to listen to their final terrified cries.

  Closer to home, the south coast of England was also a serious target: it was known as ‘Hellfire Corner’ with good reason. A couple of Wrens remembered how they would pick up messages from across the Channel about the launch of missiles only, just seconds later, to realise the missiles were heading in their direction. In Scarborough, the Wrens were doing the vital work of tracking and monitoring U-boats, and relaying the encoded messages back to Bletchley Park. In the beautiful Suffolk seaside town of Southwold, meanwhile, the men and women of the ‘Y’ station there found that life alternated between pleasant tranquillity and bombardment, either from German shipping or from enemy bombers dropping the last of their explosives on the way back after missions.

  At 19th-century Beaumanor Hall in Leicestershire, ‘Y’ Service operatives worked round the clock in huts, rather like their Bletchley counterparts, although the atmosphere was less happy. The task was more perspiration than inspiration; the effort of staying awake on quiet night shifts was so great that listeners would occasionally have to jab their wrists with lit cigarettes. For those few who didn’t smoke, the tobacco fug was almost unendurable. Yet the work was pivotal; the material that Beaumanor was relaying to Bletchley was remarkable in its pinpoint accuracy and speed. A few miles away from Bletchley at Chicksands Priory there were some personnel difficulties, caused chiefly by the fact that so many of the young women working there had never before left home, and were finding it tricky to adjust to a working life filled with abstract dots and dashes, faint frequencies, and no clue whatsoever about the effect or the importance of their tasks. One young woman punched her superior officer out cold; a psychiatrist drafted in to write a report about the entire establishment found it seething with stress, and wondered if there might not be some way, outside of the Official Secrets Act, of letting the women know how crucial their roles were.

  ‘Y’ Service station Beaumanor Hall, in Leicestershire, intercepted German Enigma signals for Bletchley and had a very similar collegiate atmosphere. The house is now a conference centre.

  Some women were drafted to the most northern Scottish bases. There was a tremendous amount of curiosity on both sides, with the Scottish girls asking them about the impossible pace of London life, and the English women adjusting to this bleak world of gorse and knife-sharp winds. As with Bletchley, it seems that the cure-all for any malaise was a good dance, and there were a great many in the far north. Scarborough too became renowned for the quality of its off-duty life. Down south in Hampshire, at the on-shore base HMS Flowerdown, the wireless-intercept Wrens lived for their nights out, particularly with the advent of American soldiers. They would pick the Wrens up in trucks and motor through the countryside around Winchester. Though many veterans insist that this really was a far more innocent age and that, in general, they would never have dared to get into serious relationships with these smooth interlopers, obviously there were exceptions to this. In Bletchley Park alone, there were a couple of notable long-term pairings between English women and American codebreakers. Some wireless-intercept Wrens and GIs – those who had not had affairs – kept their platonic relationships alive long after the war.

  For many young Wrens who had never before left the UK, life overseas could be glamorous, with civilised teas among the palms, caring for injured servicemen. This particular gathering was hosted in Alexandria, Egypt.

  But local fauna – from reptiles to mosquitos – could be trying. Wrens acclimatised quickly in Algeria (ABOVE) and Colombo (BELOW).

  Intelligence analysts had another fantastically useful, top-secret army – the VIs, or Voluntary Interceptors. Sixteen-year-old Ray Fautley was madly enthusiastic about the science of radio from his early boyhood and worked for Marconi. One evening in 1941, at home with his parents, he received a visit from the Man From The Ministry. Would young Mr Fautley be interested in carrying out highly confidential war work? Would he ever! Ray was required to install a large receiver in his parents’ front parlour, hidden within a bureau. And when he got home each evening, he would be expected to do two hours’ interception work, tuning in to prescribed frequencies. Having noted down all the Enigma-encoded Morse traffic on specially provided stationery, he then had to send the results, in a special sealed envelope, to PO Box 25, Barnet. The work was so secret not even his parents were allowed to know what he was doing. On one occasion, his girlfriend walked in on him with the receiver and instantly assumed he was a spy. His interceptions – and those of some 1,500 volunteers right the way across the country – ended up in a handsome villa in north London, where Lord Sandhurst, Hugh Trevor-Roper and their team would subject all the traffic to detailed analysis and by doing so were able to build up a remarkably detailed portrait of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and its various activities worldwide.

  For a great many men in the ‘Y’ Service – either out in the field with innovative equipment or back at base working with quicksilver speed and accuracy – satisfaction came from demonstrating their prowess with the technology; the brain-scrambling ability to translate Morse coming in through one ear while tracking directions and positions with the signals came through the other. The job needed intelligence and initiative, but more than this: as some veterans recalled, it saved many of the recruits coming through from getting stuck with more routine mechanical or maintenance roles. This was wartime work that – although top secret, and intended to remain so for many years – would actually stand them in good stead for a post-war world of ever-increasing electronic innovation. For the women, the ‘Y’ Service was a boon on many levels: the chance to take on a job that had a tangible impact – even if the work was secret, congratulations would still filter through if their interceptions had helped save a convoy. Then there was the extra satisfaction of doing work that was formerly considered to be purely the domain of men. For veterans who recalled mugging up on Morse code before being called up – or getting brothers and fathers and uncles to teach them – the effort and the hard work that followed was very much worth it. Added to this was an element that caused many veterans to laugh when recalling: the Wrens’ uniform itself. It was considered by some distance to be the most glamorous of all the service options available. Certainly when they were all lined up on parade in the tropical light of Colombo, it was clear to see they wore these uniforms with a combination of pride and pleasure. For the Wrens, as for so many of the Bletchley codebreakers back in England, the war had opened up vistas and possibilities that afterwards would dramatically influence the course of their lives. It is only really now that the importance of their work is finally being properly celebrated.

  The ‘Y’ Service work was exacting but much sought after. Many young women purposefully learnt Morse in order to be recruited. Nor did they lose the skill in the years after.

  A fitting memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum to the brilliant work done by thousands of young Wrens and sailors at intercepting the enemy’s every message.

  Chapter Nine

  BLETCHLEY PARK’S FAMOUS FACES

  Actress and Bletchley recruit Dorothy Hyson, seen here with co-star George Formby in Spare A Copper (1940). It was rumoured that Formby tried to seduce her. She also starred opposite Boris Karloff in The Ghoul (1933).

  Lord Jenkins of Hillhead – pictured when he was Labour Home Secretary in 1968 – was wry and modest about his time at Bletchley, and about how much (or how little) he achieved when working on the Tunny codes.

  Given the freewheeling ethos of Bletchley Park, it was only to be expected that the recruitment net eve
ntually spread rather wider than Oxbridge mathematicians. As the Park grew, so too did the range of codebreakers, and the disciplines from which they were drawn. A talent for linguistics, and even the very structure of language itself, was a qualification. And so it was that among the calculus experts and the chess champions, there soon appeared poets, novelists, and young politicians, too. As we have seen, there also seemed to be a strong predilection towards musicians and actors. Some who worked at Bletchley were already very well known; others would go on later to become highly prominent and influential public figures.

  Many veterans, for instance, recalled with fondness Baron Jenkins of Hillhead – Roy Jenkins when he was drafted into Bletchley Park in 1943. Born in Wales in 1920, Jenkins had already made an impact at Balliol College, Oxford, by pulling off a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He had a brilliant mind but one that was not best suited to the particular discipline of codebreaking, with its emphasis on mathematical flair, along with the patience to run through endless combinations during the middle of the night. Given these drawbacks, Jenkins acquitted himself as best he could, apart from one period of a few weeks when, by his own admission, he was almost completely useless. He had originally been called up in 1942 to serve with the West Somerset yeomanry; there is a suggestion that he was pulled into Bletchley’s orbit via the influence of A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol College.