The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  ‘A great friend lent me his Bentley for the duration of the war because he decided it was better for it to be driven than be put up on blocks. So I had this beautiful grey Bentley and of course the private cars were useful because we used to collect people to come into work and then drop them home afterwards.’

  Initially they were all put up in pubs or hotels, where the mix of secretive elderly men and very young women, most of them much younger than Phoebe, scandalised the hotel staff, who assumed they must be up to no good. They weren’t alone. The codebreakers weren’t allowed to tell even their own family where they were, leading Barbara’s mother to worry what her eighteen-year-old daughter might be doing.

  ‘My mother didn’t know where I was and I was reasonably young. She had to sort of trust. I told her these people were very respectable.’

  The codebreakers were instructed to inform any locals inquisitive enough to ask that they were working on plans for the air defence of London. The servicemen attached to the Code and Cypher School’s naval, military and air sections were ordered to wear civilian clothes. Bletchley Park was now to be known simply as ‘Station X’, not as a sign of mystery but simply the tenth of a number of stations owned by MI6 and identified by Roman numerals. All mail was to be sent to an anonymous Post Office box number in Westminster from where it would be collected and delivered to Bletchley by MI6 courier.

  It wasn’t just Phoebe who was promised they weren’t going to be at Bletchley for very long. Barbara was told not to bring any more clothing than she would need for a two-week stay.

  ‘It was pretty well organised. I was in the Bridge Hotel, Bedford. None of us quite knew what would happen next. War had not been declared and most people thought and hoped that nothing would happen and we would all go back to London.’

  The Naval Section moved into the library and the loggia, a conservatory on the left-hand side of the mansion as you looked at it from the front. Phoebe’s German section was in a corner of the library with two tables, a steel locker and a telephone with a direct line to the Admiralty. There were just two chairs, one each for her and Commander Crawford, but with the work piling up she soon had reinforcements.

  ‘On 28 August 1939 we were joined by Misses Doreen Henderson and Cherrie Whitby and I need hardly say how welcome they were, for up to this time, we had only been helped by casual labour, some of it of the most doubtful kind, so that when they came we breathed a sigh of relief. Miss Whitby was as dark as Doreen was fair and they formed absolute contrasts to each other in appearance. Doreen came to help me with the registering and we became submerged under the spate of German intercepted signals which came pouring in, whilst Cherrie Whitby worked with Mrs Edwards, who was one of the temporary helpers. Both Doreen and Cherrie were excellent workers and were of great value to the section. We were very lucky in having such help.’

  Admiral Sinclair paid for a good chef from one of the top London hotels to cook for them in the mansion and ensure they were properly fed. Despite concerns over her mother, Phoebe loved the ‘wonderful lunches’ the chef provided. ‘Bowls of fruit, sherry trifles, jellies and cream were on the tables and we had chicken, hams and wonderful beef steak puddings. We certainly couldn’t grumble about our food.’

  Most of the codebreakers were from upper-class or upper middle-class backgrounds and were used to the fine dining and relaxed well-to-do atmosphere of the country estate. But for young women like Barbara, who by the standards of the day came from a relatively well-off family, it was a completely new experience, something she’d only read about in Agatha Christie novels.

  ‘It was beautiful: lovely rose gardens, amaze, a lake, lovely old building, wonderful food.’ For those brief two weeks in August 1939, Bletchley Park really did have the relaxed air of a weekend party at an English country mansion.

  Then on Friday 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on the pretext of retaking German territory lost in the Great War and the Second World War began. Britain was not yet at war with Germany. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain mobilised British troops and gave Hitler an ultimatum. Withdraw from Poland or Britain would declare war. Hitler had until eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September to respond. At a quarter past eleven that Sunday morning, the codebreakers clustered around the wireless set in the mansion dining room to listen to what Mr Chamberlain had to say. He informed the nation that he was talking to them from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street.

  ‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11am that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

  The Prime Minister told the nation that he had fought for peace but Hitler wasn’t interested in peace, only in the use of force, and as a result force was the only way to stop him. The situation in which no people or country could feel themselves safe in the face of German aggression had become intolerable and ‘now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage’. There would be ‘days of stress and strain’ ahead but it was vital that everyone pulled together and did their job.

  Many of those listening were like Phoebe. They remembered the Great War, now forever destined to be known as the First World War, and they knew at first hand the sacrifices they had made, the loved ones lost. That was one of the reasons Chamberlain had bent over backwards in an attempt to avoid another war. The gist of his address to the nation that quiet Sunday morning was that Hitler had given them no choice. Britain might not want war, but it was doing the right thing. Quite unfairly, Chamberlain’s name would become a byword for appeasement of Hitler. He was certainly not a man capable of rousing the nation in the manner of Winston Churchill, who would succeed him as Prime Minister the following May, but at the time his address was seen as both honest and, in its own modest way, suitably inspiring. He finished with the words: ‘Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

  Britain was at war but it remained far from clear what the codebreakers’ contribution might be. Dilly Knox still hadn’t broken the German Enigma codes, although he was now very close to success, thanks to the Poles.

  The Enigma cipher machine had been invented by a German company in the early 1920s, originally for use by banks and other commercial organisations that needed to keep data confidential. It was adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and two years later by the German Army. The machine itself looked rather like a typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a keyboard and on top of the machine was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for every letter, laid out in the same order as the keyboard. The main internal mechanism was made up of three metal rotors, each with twenty-six electrical contacts around its circumference, one for every letter of the alphabet.

  In order to encode the message, the operator set the rotors in a predetermined order and position, known as the settings. He then typed each letter of the message into the machine. The action of pressing the key sent an electrical impulse through the machine which passed through each of the rotors and lit up the encoded letter on the lampboard.

  The machine didn’t print anything out and it didn’t send the message itself. The operator simply noted down the encoded letter from the lampboard and typed in each of the other letters until he had a completely encoded message which he sent via wireless, normally using Morse code.

  As a letter was typed in the first rotor moved forward one position. After that rotor had moved a certain number of times, the second rotor moved forward once, and after the second rotor had moved a number of times, the third rotor moved once. As a result, the code was constantly changing with every letter. The Germans
added a plugboard providing an additional level of security which they believed made Enigma unbreakable.

  But they were wrong. The Poles, who shared a border with the Germans and had never stopped seeing them as a threat, had begun trying to break Enigma shortly after the Germans first started using it. The Polish codebreaking organisation, the Bureau Szyfrow, employed a group of mathematicians led by a young man called Marian Rejewski, who used mathematics to work out the internal wiring and mechanism of the German Army Enigma machine. He was helped by a spy inside the German War Ministry, an army colonel who provided the French with the Enigma settings and operations manual in return for money and sex; the French shared this intelligence windfall with the Poles. It certainly gave the Polish mathematicians the start they needed, but reconstructing the machine mathematically remained an amazing achievement.

  For several years, the Poles managed to keep breaking Enigma, but as war approached and the German security systems improved it became increasingly difficult to decode and they approached the British, hoping they might be able to help. It took a while before the two sides trusted each other enough to share what they knew, but once Marian Rejewski and Dilly Knox were left alone to discuss their different methods of breaking codes, cooperation began in earnest.

  Dilly Knox had in fact got very close to breaking the German Enigma messages himself. The main thing stopping him, the one thing he’d been unable to work out, was the way in which the letters of the keyboard were connected to the internal rotors. If he could only work that out, he would be able to read the German Enigma codes. One female codebreaker, a ‘Mrs B’, suggested that the simplest way to do it would be A to A, B to B, C to C, and so on. But that was a ridiculous idea. Scrambling the connections would make the code far more secure. Any sensible person would want the links between the keyboard and the rotors to be completely random, making it far more difficult for people like Dilly to break. The Poles, however, had one of the German Army machines and Marian Rejewski was able to tell Dilly that it was in fact A to A, B to B, C to C . . . Mrs B had been right all along. The Germans had decided that since the electrical wiring was soldered into the machine by hand it would be too much of a risk to make the connections random. It would be too easy to make a mistake in the wiring. If it was as straightforward as A to A, B to B, there would be no doubt as to how the machine should be wired up. Given the extra security the Germans had put in place, knowing this still wasn’t enough to get Dilly into the Enigma codes, but he knew now that he was very close.

  Commander Denniston, who had travelled to Poland with Dilly to meet the Polish mathematicians, was understandably impressed by the Polish mathematicians’ success in breaking Enigma. Dilly was a brilliant codebreaker, who had unravelled the mysteries of the bawdy comedies of the Greek poet and playwright Herodas from fragments of papyrus scrolls found in an Egyptian cave. He had shown himself adept at breaking every kind of code, including the Spanish and Italian Enigma codes, but when it came to the German Enigma he had not been as adept as the Poles.

  In the months leading up to the war, Commander Denniston had toured Britain’s universities, looking for professors and lecturers who might make good codebreakers. Initially, he targeted linguists and classicists, but after meeting the Poles he began to interview mathematicians. One of the first he recruited was a young Cambridge academic called Alan Turing who was making a name for himself with his ideas for ‘a universal computing machine’. Admiral Sinclair authorised Commander Denniston to recruit fifty senior academics, both men and women, and thirty female language graduates. Although the tilt towards more women might seem a positive move, it was actually done on purely practical grounds. Young men were likely to be needed by the armed forces and women were far cheaper to employ.

  All the academics were given some training in codebreaking and made to sign the Official Secrets Act. They were told to keep a ten-shilling note in their pockets at all times for a railway ticket and to wait for a telegram saying simply that ‘Auntie Flo is unwell’. On receipt of the message, they were to make their way to Station X.

  In the days following Chamberlain’s declaration of war, the messages went out and the dons began arriving at Bletchley. The original codebreakers moved out of the hotels and into ‘billets’. Local people with spare bedrooms were required to let them stay there in return for a guinea (£1.05) a week. Barbara Abernethy was put into a house belonging to the owner of a large chain of car dealerships.

  ‘I was in a very nice billet to start with in a place called Great Brickhill and the dons were all in one pub up there called The Duncombe Arms. Since I lived in Great Brickhill, I was exposed to them more than most people early on. There were a lot of dons staying at the pub, about six or eight of them, all of them having such a jolly time that they called it the Drunken Arms.’

  The first few months after September 1939 were known as the Phoney War. Nothing seemed to be happening. British troops were sent to France but they weren’t involved in any fighting. The Royal Navy did have a number of clashes at sea with German ships but at Bletchley only those people working on German material like Phoebe were busy.

  ‘We were deluged with intercepted German messages which we still continued to register, although we really could not cope with it and were days behind. However, we struggled valiantly with it, each of us taking it in turns.’

  Things began to turn around for Phoebe when Frank Birch, an actor and comic who had been in Room 40 during the First World War, arrived to take charge of the German Naval Section and had the rest of the section sent up from London.

  ‘From then onwards everything began to be properly organised and to take shape. In no time, we were filing, sorting, making and receiving reports. We had been joined by Miss Bostock, who later became Mrs Kerslake. More staff were needed for the work we were doing and we could only obtain them in ones. None of us specialised. We all had to help one another and all who came to the section did a bit of everything.’

  Dilly Knox and the new young mathematicians working with him in a cottage – which became known as ‘the Cottage’ – behind the mansion were also very busy, trying to break into Enigma. But other sections had far less to do. The Italians and the Japanese hadn’t entered the war yet.

  Barbara helped organise games of rounders after lunch to wear off the effects of the food and keep people amused.

  ‘We had a tennis ball and somebody managed to commandeer an old broom handle, drilled a hole in it and put a leather strap in it. It was all we had, things were getting a bit tough to get. If it was a fine day, we’d all say rounders at one o’clock, we’d all go out and play, just to sort of let off steam. Everybody argued about the rules and the dons just laid them down, in Latin sometimes. We used trees as bases. “He got past the deciduous,” one would say. “No he didn’t,” another would argue. “He was still between the conifer and the deciduous.” That was the way they were.’

  As more people arrived to deal with the German codes, Commander Denniston realised he had a problem. There was nowhere to put them all. MI6 was occupying the entire top floor of the mansion. The Naval Section was still crammed into the loggia and the library. The Air Section was in the large panelled room to the right as you went in through the door. The Military Section was also on the ground floor, and the Diplomatic Section, the other main department of the Code and Cypher School, had been moved into Elmer’s School, an old private school just outside the grounds.

  The admiral decided that wooden huts should be put up around the mansion to house the naval, air and military sections. There were already three huts which had been built for some of the MI6 sections before the codebreakers arrived. Hut 4 was constructed just outside the library, replacing the beautiful rose garden that had so entranced Barbara Abernethy. The new hut was designed to house the Air Section, but when they’d moved in and there were still a few empty rooms at one end, the German Naval Section was moved in there too, much to Phoebe’s relief, initially at least.

  ‘We had be
come very cramped in our quarters; files were increasing and the numbers of our personnel were slowly mounting so that the amount of space at our disposal had dwindled to such a degree that Jocelyn Bostock and I were working together on a small kitchen table and getting very much in one another’s way, as one can imagine. Even the floor was used to sort signals and it must have been amusing to see us on all fours doing this job. It needs no great effort of the imagination to realise how very delighted we were to hear that we were to move into Hut 4.’

  There might have been more space to work in the huts but, with their thin wooden walls and floors, they were far from comfortable and very cold. The glass of the windows was taped up to protect against bomb blasts and covered in blackout curtains. They were lit by bare light bulbs and kept warm at best by paraffin heaters, at worst by cast-iron coke stoves which Phoebe found impossible to light or control.

  ‘They were awful. When the wind was high, long flames would be blown out into the room, frightening anyone nearby. Alternatively, the fire would go out and smoke would come billowing forth, filling the room with a thick fog and, with all the windows open to let out the smoke, the shivering occupant would be dressed in a thick overcoat, scarf and gloves, endeavouring to cope with his work.’

  Across Britain there was very much a patriotic spirit, inspired by the Prime Minister’s address to the nation. There was a genuine feeling that Britain was doing the right thing, taking on the evil of Hitler and the Nazi regime. Women inevitably had much more of a role in society than they had become used to between the wars. Even for those whose fathers, husbands or sweethearts were not already serving in the forces, there was a realisation that it would be inevitable and, as had been the case during the First World War, women would have to keep the country running while the men went abroad to fight. The Women’s Voluntary Services for Air Raid Precautions was set up in early 1938, working in close association with the Women’s Institute. Amid fears of German bombing raids on the major cities, young mothers often experienced the effects of war before their husbands, suffering the emotional turmoil of having their children evacuated to the countryside. When their husbands were called up they found themselves looking for some way of ‘doing their bit’.