The Spies of Winter

by Sinclair McKay

  Which makes the work sound rather tranquil; the truth was different, especially during the war years. Gwendoline Gibbs was an ATS girl with the Y Service who had been posted to Garats Hay in 1944 and who stayed on a little after the war’s end, as the interception targets were reconfigured. She recalled the crushing pressure she and all her colleagues had been under. It was not simply a matter of transcribing signals; they were also battling against interference and jamming, knowing that the messages they were taking down could mean the difference between life and death. On top of this, the hours were murderous: long shifts, followed by uneasy sleep. There were a few nervous breakdowns. Operators were moved to different posts, different shift patterns – but when on leave, they still alarmed their families, looking as they did like the living dead. Of course, the work during – as well as after – the war was very strictly under the Official Secrets Act; no-one in the Y Service could tell a soul what it was that they were doing.

  That said, Gwendoline Gibbs also recalled that the young atmosphere of Garats Hay – the Regency house surrounded by utilitarian Nissen huts – could often make people combust with hilarity. At the end of the war, the focus of her work swiftly shifted to the monitoring of Russian signals. The intensity was undimmed; but youthful energy sought other outlets too. As with HMS Flowerdown, and the intermingling of young women and men, there were outbreaks of romance everywhere. Yet these were also more innocent times. ‘As one girl said, at a later reunion,’ recalled Gwendoline, ‘if someone had said “rape”, I would have thought that they meant cattle food.’7

  Amazingly, at a time when the nation was still struggling on the tiniest rations of butter, meat and sugar, the food at Garats Hay was extremely good. ‘The cooks were first class,’ wrote Gwendoline. ‘We had plenty of salads, with chopped raw cabbage, dried apricots and apples as well as fresh fruit. One of the cooks made superb pastry – we all looked forward to her apple pies.’ The women of Garats Hay also became adept at adapting the less flattering aspects of their uniforms. Especially hated was the army regulation underwear. ‘Most of us had cut off the long legs of the khaki knickers, the “passion killers”,’ remembered Gwendoline Gibbs, ‘and sewn the bottoms so that they resembled French knickers – so much sexier!’8

  There was also more of that Anglo-American co-operation. Gwendoline recalled that until the end of 1945, there was a trio of ‘American intelligence chaps’ who proved very popular. There was ‘Forbes Sibley, Fred Allred and “Mac”, a charming trio,’ she said, ‘one of whom, Mac I think, was reputed to have a little black book containing all the names of the girls he’d been out with.’

  In 1946, in common with so many other grand properties at the time, Beaumanor Hall was put up for sale: the passing of the owner, W Curzon Herrick, had left the family and estate with unsupportable death duties to pay. They could no longer afford the place. Landed gentry were hardly the priority for Clement Attlee’s post-war government. The Loughborough Monitor reported: ‘Mansion bought by the War Office. It is remembered that the Mansion was taken over by a Radar Station (sic) during the war and considerable money was laid down on equipment and permanent fixtures. It is still used as a radar centre and the War Office have already stated that the building will be maintained in its present state so as to preserve the beauty of its setting.’

  The end of the war was also bringing prodigious leaps in technology: at Bletchley, codebreakers had been working with pioneering electronic decryption techniques and at Garats Hay, there would be similar preparation for a new era of what would be termed ‘elint’ – that is, electronic intelligence. Which, once again, would prove catnip to new young recruits fascinated by this world of secret communications.

  In this new environment, Commander Travis had faced another important consideration: large numbers of academics – the professors and scholars who had been so essential and innovative in their codebreaking work – were now returning to Oxford, Cambridge and the other universities from which they had been drawn. Obviously, since they had all signed the Official Secrets Act, there was no fear of any indiscretions. Equally, though, it was important that they should understand that their secret expertise could well be called upon in the future. Strong and congenial links were to be maintained. Indeed, such links served the double purpose of giving the codebreakers a form of occasional informal consultation, and the academics the supreme flattery of knowing that their superior intellects were still confidentially required.

  Among the younger academics who had worked in those Bletchley huts, mathematicians Shaun Wylie and Irving ‘Jack’ Good were examples of men who either were kept closely in the loop on matters cryptological or indeed were hauled back into it full-time (as was the case with Good).

  So it was that Commander Travis, when in discussion with the Treasury about the sort of personnel this brand new branch of intelligence would need, was swift to pay the academics proper tribute. ‘The war proved beyond doubt that the more difficult aspects of our work call for staff of the highest calibre,’ he wrote in a memo. ‘The successes by the Professors and Dons among our temporary staff, especially perhaps the high grade mathematicians, put that beyond doubt.’9 These were the sorts of minds that he wanted to carry on attracting. Curiously, there was to prove a strong line of continuity in terms of personality types, running from the nascent Government Code and Cypher School, through Bletchley Park and now into this computerised future: in other words, the new generation of codebreakers were to prove every bit as focused yet whimsical and quietly eccentric.

  Chapter Three

  ‘The Merest Indication of Corpses’

  It had never been Brideshead; there were few who could have sighed with piercing nostalgia over halcyon hours spent beneath its gables. Yet the eccentric architecture of Bletchley had come in some curious way to reflect the ungovernably quirky codebreakers. The move was inevitable though: the directorate understandably wanted to return to London. The country location had only ever really been a Blitz precaution. Gradually, over a period of some months into early 1946, the red-brick mansion was abandoned by the codebreaking directorate and the remaining cryptologists, and they moved into their new base on the green, hilly fringes of London.

  The district of Eastcote, situated at the north-western end of the Metropolitan and Piccadilly Underground lines, was an incongruous location, though. From the start, there was something almost comical about the contrast between the sharp lightning-fast intelligence work shaping the contours of a new Cold War geopolitics and the wide leafy somnolent suburban avenues in which this work was being carried out.

  Eastcote was well-to-do and still had imitations of village life: the white wooden signposts, carved fingers pointing west to Uxbridge and Ruislip, east to Harrow and Stanmore; the village green and the war memorial; the dainty high street, with its little shops and dressmakers. The railway had first come to Eastcote in 1905, and reached proper frequency by the 1920s and 1930s, at the point when London was beginning its last great expansion outwards. And with the transport direct to the city came charming whitewashed villas with green-tiled roofs, windows and fanlights with red and indigo stained-glass designs. Their architects took ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement.

  There were the grander properties still dotted around: Eastcote House and Highgrove Hall were two notable estates, which had provided much of the local employment at a time when the area was still largely agricultural. Then in early 1940, when the War Office acquired some of the local land, there came a new institution, housed in a series of monotonous grey single-storey concrete blocks. The initial purpose of this new establishment was to have been a military hospital. Swiftly, though, other uses were found. The name of this new establishment was HMS Pembroke V – or, as it was to become later, RAF Eastcote. You would never have known it was there if you had not gone looking for it. Obscured on one side by a thick wood, and from another by a charming 1930s housing estate – at the end of which it lay – HMS Pembroke V was not far from the main street of Eas
tcote. By 1942, it was in operation as an important out-station of Bletchley Park. The bombe machines – the hulking, wardrobe-sized creations of Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and engineer Harold Keen – were fantastically successful at sorting through thousands of possible code combinations. As a result, in the early days when there were few of the machines, there had been a great deal of friction about which departments could use them the most, with naval and military sections arguing fiercely that they had to have priority.

  When more bombe machines were built, there was then the question of where to put them. Bletchley could not be expected to house all of them and nor, in the case of a bombing raid, would the authorities anyway have wanted so much invaluable technology all gathered together in the same place. This fairly rudimentary base about 30 miles (50 kilometres) south of Bletchley seemed ideal.

  However, right from the start, Eastcote never seemed hugely popular with the young women – the Wrens – who were posted there. There was a long badly-lit path that ran between the grey concrete blocks of the base, and in the middle of the night, when shifts were changing, or as young women ventured out for a brief break from tending to these temperamental machines, there was often a sense of unease. Male personnel worked at the base too and there had been stories of attacks upon young women made on that long, dim, unwelcoming path. It was only a little after the war that this new codebreaking HQ began to acquire a slightly more congenial atmosphere, livened up with everything from jazz concerts to cricket and tennis societies.

  The Eastcote operation, if one had gone looking for it, presented a formidable prospect from the outside – forbidding fences and rolls of barbed razor wire. Security was intense, even within the base – those whose work centred around Block A would have no idea at all of what was going on in Block B. To get in, one needed an identification card with a photograph on it. One of the administrative staff who made the transfer from Bletchley to Eastcote in the new era was secretary Mimi Gallilee. An evacuee from Blitz-torn London, Mimi had first worked at Bletchley as a messenger girl, leaving school at the age of 14 to do so. She was mentored by Bletchley’s senior personal assistant Doris Reed and in time came to work with her in the office of Nigel de Grey, who was now deputy director of the new post-war codebreaking operation.

  When the war ended, Mimi agreed to the transfer, having not given much thought by that stage to other career opportunities. However, after the large house and lake and grounds of Bletchley, these new suburban surrounds were, she felt, markedly drearier.

  ‘At Eastcote, we went into the quarters where the bombe machines were,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘And I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes.’ (This had been because of the extraordinarily tight compartmentalisation at Bletchley – even some of those working in the Directorate would have had no idea precisely how those Enigma codes were being broken.) ‘Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t have known,’ she says. ‘So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the Directorate.’

  Mrs Gallilee felt quite strongly, even as a very young woman, that she did not want to live on the fringes of London: she wanted to be close to the colour and life of the centre of town. This however, caused some practical difficulties. ‘I was living in Bayswater and I had to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,’ she says. ‘On such a low salary.’ The London of 1946 was still in a twilight of bomb damage: in parts it had been utterly destroyed after the Blitz and the onslaught of V-1 and V-2 missiles. Even once-elegant districts like Bayswater were straitened and peeling, formerly grand houses now subdivided into murky flats with cold shared bathrooms. The brutal truth was that after the romanticism of Bletchley – certainly to a girl in her teens, mesmerised by the aristocratic young women and the brainy young men roaming what seemed to her like a university campus – this new world of secret work was, for Mimi Gallilee, simply exhausting and drab. ‘They tried to do something for me in terms of an increase in pay,’ Mrs Gallilee says, ‘but you just didn’t have that kind of system.’ In the civil service pay structure, Mimi’s youth counted against her – she would have to wait a couple of years until she was 21 before she could be considered for a suitable wage boost.

  ‘And there were no such things as merit awards in those days,’ she adds. ‘Besides, the government wouldn’t have had the money to pay us anyway. I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London. And I don’t think I stayed at Eastcote for more than six months. I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.’

  There was a twist though. ‘After maybe just a couple of days,’ says Mrs Gallilee, ‘I thought: “I can’t stand this.” I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.’

  Indeed, that sense of rupture was felt quite keenly by many who had worked at Bletchley and who had streamed out of the place to take up positions of academic or administrative importance. There was one other factor too: the authorities gave Mimi Gallilee and all others departing an intensive debriefing reminder that the work that they had done – and indeed, perhaps any work that they might do on similar lines in the future – was very strictly classified. They were not to breathe one syllable – even to one another. And so it was later in life that Mimi, on the point of joining the BBC, found herself being interviewed by someone whose face she had recognised from Bletchley. On her application, she had written simply that her war had been occupied with work for the Foreign Office. Her interviewer, although recognising her, made no comments at all.

  One of the charming and perennial fascinations of even the most incredibly secret and pivotal organisations in Britain is the careful bowler-hatted bureaucracy that surrounded their urgent work. The move to Eastcote, for instance, meant a certain financial readjustment. ‘I am directed by Mr Secretary Bevin,’ ran a 1946 letter to Barclays Bank from the Foreign Office, ‘to request that the Foreign Office account maintained with your Bletchley branch may be closed at the close of business on the 30th March 1946 and that the balance may be transferred to Barclays Bank at Eastcote to be placed to the credit of the Foreign Office account “Government Communications Headquarters”.’1 At this stage, various departments referred to the codebreakers under varying titles. Although this was an early use of the term ‘GCHQ’ (the use of which would come to be discouraged in official correspondence for security reasons), Eastcote was also known as the London Signals Intelligence Centre.

  There were also careful memos – strictly within Civil Service rules – to do with selecting recruits. Interviews were to be carried out. ‘Generally speaking, selection will be made on the basis of the forms of application for Post-War employment which have been completed and which contain recommendations by the Heads of Section,’ ran an order from the Directorate from late 1945. ‘It should be clearly understood by individuals that selection under the above scheme is no guarantee of an offer of permanent employment. Such an offer can only be made when approval for numbers, grades, etc of the signals intelligence centre have been given by the Treasury. Recommended civilian candidates will continue to be employed as temporary civil servants pending the establishment of the Signals Intelligence centre on a peace-time basis.’2

  There were obviously to be special cases, including those returning from the field. Added to this would be a continual alertness to the brightest intellects of the coming generation, though this new establishment at Eastcote was – for the moment – only a fraction of the size of Bletchley. The codebreakers numbered in the hundreds, rather than thousands. In the coming years, as Commander Travis constructed this regenerated institution, that position would be reversed.

  As well as this, there was a new element of centralisation – one of th
e factors that strengthened the codebreakers’ case to be a wholly new service, independent and answering to the Foreign Office. All the different cryptology branches that had emerged from the main Bletchley operation were now to be pulled back in and overseen by the Eastcote directorate. ‘The transfer of certain sections (to Eastcote) will commence in November,’ ran another internal memo. ‘This includes sections now at Bletchley Park, Berkeley Street, Aldford House and Queens Gate. Oxford may not move for some months after the other sections…’ The numbers were being settled, too. ‘The proposed peace-time establishment of the Sigint Centre totals 1,017, exclusive of personnel attached from the Service Ministries and “domestic” staff. The present war-time establishment is being reduced to approximately that figure by 31 Dec 45, the total being made up of the following groups: a) cryptographic (including tabulating and machine sections) 475; b) Intelligence 83; c) Traffic Analysis 180; d) Technical (incl Communications etc) 93; e) cypher security 150; f) administration 36.’3

  No matter how exceptionally so many women had performed at Bletchley Park, civil service rules – which had ensured that they never received any kind of parity in terms of pay – were still very much in force. Added to this, if they got married, they were required to leave the service altogether. This was considered quite usual. A married woman’s duty – no matter how towering the intellect of that married woman – was to make a home for the working husband. The Eastcote codebreakers, conscious of how much brilliant work had been done by women like Mavis Batey, tried to find some kind of fix for this, rather than slam the door on so much vital talent. ‘Although, under present regulations, married women cannot be considered for “establishment” in the civil service,’ ran one Director’s memo, ‘they may be employed as temporary civil servants.’4 Nonetheless, it was still insanity: as a means of illustration, if Joan Clarke and Alan Turing had gone ahead with a wedding, and had, despite Turing’s true orientation, remained married, then Clarke – one of Hut 8’s most dazzling codebreakers – would only have been permitted to continue her brilliant codebreaking work as a temp.