The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  Most women felt very patriotic and proud of their male relatives who were joining the forces. Young women in particular really wanted to be part of the war effort, often seeing it not just as a patriotic duty but as an opportunity to escape from the confines of the family home. The combination of romance and usefulness of being a nurse in wartime meant no shortage of volunteers for the Voluntary Aid Detachments, set up across Britain to care for people injured in the bombing, or the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY), which despite its name carried out a number of other roles apart from nursing, including providing drivers for Bletchley Park. Women also became ambulance drivers, worked in factories, on farms, or joined the fire service or the police. Female equivalents of the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force had all been set up during the First World War but then disbanded in the early 1920s. In the run-up to war, they were re-formed. The Women’s Royal Naval Service, commonly known as the Wrens, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force or WAAF, and the female equivalent of the Army, the Auxiliary Territorial Service or ATS, became the most common organisations in which young women sought to serve their country, along with the weapons factories and ‘the Land Army’ of female farm workers.

  Despite all this patriotic enthusiasm, recruitment of extra staff for Bletchley was initially slow. There was very little money available, and that was likely to remain the case unless the codebreakers could find a way into the German Enigma codes and begin to prove their worth, but morale remained remarkably high. As Christmas approached, Phoebe naturally wanted to spend it at home with her mother, but someone had to stay behind and keep track of the German messages.

  ‘It was impossible for us all to be away together so we arranged among ourselves who should stay. Jocelyn and I drew lots and I lost and resigned myself to a miserable Christmas, the first one for some years that I had spent away from home. When the day arrived I found there were more people at BP than I had thought there would be.’

  There was a ban on travel over the Christmas period so even some of those who had got time off couldn’t get home. Frank Birch invited Phoebe and the other members of the German Naval Section who were on duty for drinks in the office.

  ‘I arrived afterwards in the dining room for lunch feeling quite happy and, being rather late, to find the hall decorated magnificently with everyone sitting down wearing the peculiar paper hats one gets from Christmas crackers and blowing whistles which shot out a terrific length of paper. Every seat was occupied with the exception of one seat round the corner but there I sat quite happily with a wonderful lunch in front of me. All the Christmases which I spent in Bletchley were extremely good, everyone going all out to make everyone else enjoy themselves.’

  By now Dilly Knox and Alan Turing, working in the Cottage, had begun to realise there was something wrong with the information the Poles had given them on the Enigma machine. Fortunately, the Polish mathematicians had escaped ahead of the advancing German troops and were now in France. Early in the New Year, Mr Turing went to visit them at the chateau east of Paris where the French codebreaking organisation was based to collect the correct information from the Poles. Shortly after Turing came back, Dilly broke into the German Army’s main administrative Enigma code. A few weeks later, he managed to solve the main operational Enigma code of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.

  One of the newly recruited mathematicians who had been sent to work on Enigma with Dilly Knox was Gordon Welchman, a 33-year-old mathematics lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He’d realised very quickly that once Enigma was broken they would need a very efficient system to decode the German messages, produce intelligence reports on what the messages said, and then pass that intelligence on to the commanders who could make use of it as quickly as possible.

  Mr Welchman, a studious, pipe-smoking man who was far more dynamic than his academic appearance suggested, decided they would need two sections right next to each other: one full of codebreakers breaking the German messages and the other full of intelligence officers writing the reports for the generals and Whitehall.

  Even before his idea was backed by his bosses, Mr Welchman had begun recruiting his own people to man the codebreaking section, which was to be based in the newly built Hut 6 and would deal with the German army and air force Enigma codes. Welchman’s codebreaking section would be known only as Hut 6, for security reasons. No one was to know they were breaking Enigma.

  Stuart Milner-Barry, the 33-year-old chess correspondent of The Times and formerly a fellow undergraduate of Gordon Welchman’s at Trinity College, Cambridge, was one of the first to join Hut 6 as Mr Welchman’s deputy. When the war broke out he had been in Argentina playing chess for Britain, along with his friends, Hugh Alexander and Harry Golombek. They too soon agreed to join Mr Milner-Barry, as did the Scottish chess champion J.M. ‘Max’ Aitken and another mathematician, Dennis Babbage from Magdalene College, Cambridge. The sort of men and women who could think through a chess puzzle were soon seen as precisely the right people to work out how to break a complex enemy code.

  In the meantime, it was the people working on the lower-level codes in the naval, air and military sections who were producing the main intelligence coming out of Bletchley. Phoebe, Jocelyn Bostock and Doreen Henderson, who had become known as Susie, were gathering important intelligence for the Royal Navy from what was called ‘traffic analysis’, just reading the transcripts from the Navy’s wireless intercept sites at Scarborough and Winchester and working out what the German ships and submarines (U-boats) were doing from that.

  Something similar was going on in the Air Section at the other end of Hut 4, where they were breaking low-level Luftwaffe codes and analysing the radio networks to gather intelligence which was passed direct to the Air Ministry in London – for the first couple of years of the war, however, this ministry seemed to ignore anything Bletchley said. The section was headed by Josh Cooper, who had joined the Code and Cypher School in the 1920s and was a very experienced codebreaker, but he was also regarded as slightly eccentric by some of the new recruits.

  His personal assistant Ann Lavell, an eighteen-year-old WAAF, thought he was permanently distracted because there was so much going on in his mind. On one occasion, standing looking at the ducks on the lake, while eating a sandwich with one hand and holding a mug of coffee in the other, Mr Cooper finished most of the sandwich and, although presumably intending to feed the rest of it to the ducks, threw the mug not the sandwich into the lake. It was the sort of behaviour, common among some of the older codebreakers and newly employed university professors, which made the younger recruits think that people like Josh Cooper were, in Ann’s words, ‘absolutely mad’.

  ‘When I got to know him I got quite fond of him. But he was not really one of us. He was on another plane, I think. He’d get awfully embarrassed and worried when he felt he wasn’t acting like an ordinary human being. There was one time when he kicked over a fire extinguisher and it started foaming and he didn’t know what to do and he picked it up, rushed to and fro, and a friend of mine went and took it from him and put it out of the window. He wasn’t very practical but once you knew him and got over the slightly forbidding exterior he was very nice and very kind. I’ve got a rather delightful caricature of him, doing this very familiar gesture of right hand behind head and scratching his left ear.’

  The impression that all these strange intellectuals were rather eccentric took hold. When Gwen Davies was sent to Bletchley Park as an eighteen-year-old member of the WAAF, she was told initially that she was being posted to nearby RAF Chicksands. ‘When I arrived at Chicksands I was taken into the administration office where there was a driver waiting and he said with perfect seriousness: “Do we blindfold her or do we use the covered van?” and ultimately they used the covered van. I was shut into the back of a blacked-out van and taken to Bletchley.’

  She was dumped with her luggage outside the gates of the Park and told by a young guard that she couldn’t come in because she didn’t have a pass. ‘I w
as by this time hungry, thirsty and very, very annoyed. “Look,” I said, “I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” “Come to the right place then,” said the guard, “most of ’em here look as if they didn’t know where they was and God knows what they’m doing.”

  ‘An elderly guard told him to leave me alone, and said that I was to go to the hut at the left of the gates. “Somebody will come and see to you,” he said, “and if you want to know where you are, you’re at Bletchley Park.” “And if you want to know what that is,” added the younger guard, sniggering, “it’s the biggest lunatic asylum in Britain.”’

  2

  Breaking Enigma

  Jane Hughes told all her friends she was lucky to get out of St Moritz with her virginity intact. It was the late summer of 1938. Jane was still only seventeen. She’d spent an idyllic year at Sadler’s Wells, training to be a ballet dancer, sharing the studios with a new, up-and-coming young dancer called Margot Fonteyn. But just as Jane’s career seemed to be taking off, Ninette de Valois, the head of the school, hit her on the back during class.

  ‘That back’s too long and you’re too tall. I’m afraid we can’t use you.’

  Jane, who’d given up everything to be a ballet dancer, was distraught. So, to help her get over it, her parents sent her and a friend to spend six months learning German with a highly respectable doctor in the dull Zurich suburb of Rüschlikon. Not long after arriving there, Jane saw a poster of skiers on the snow-covered Alps at St Moritz at the city’s railway station.

  ‘So I immediately rang up my parents and said: “We’re off to St Moritz.” What was the point of being down in Rüschlikon when we could be up there?’

  They replaced the respectable doctor from Rüschlikon with a new, more interesting doctor in St Moritz who was very happy to take in young lady lodgers and teach them German. It turned out to be a far more educational experience than Jane’s parents had planned.

  ‘I didn’t really understand what was happening, of course, but he kept snuggling closer and closer to me on the sofa and I just thought he was feeling rather cold or something. Not a bit of it. Apparently, he was a well-known womaniser. Anyway, we still went on learning German. Probably learned it better up there than we did down in Rüschlikon . . . Then came the dreaded season.’

  Jane’s mother called her back to London, insisting it was now time for her to ‘come out’. After leaving school, young women of a certain class, known as debutantes, would spend the summer months in a whirl of cocktail and champagne ‘coming-out’ parties, dances and social events like Ascot and Wimbledon at which they would be introduced to young men who were deemed to be suitable husbands. The ‘season’, as it was known, would begin with all of the ‘Debs’ being presented to the Queen at court. Jane regarded it as a complete waste of both her parents’ money and her precious time. Given the limits of a tan acquired on the ski slopes, she was also deeply embarrassed at being forced to wear a strapless gown.

  ‘My face was very, very dark brown because I’d been in the sun for so long but my shoulders were absolutely white, so it was the most ludicrous sight and I cried and cried when I was put into this ridiculous outfit and told I’d got to go off to my first dance.’

  Jane wasn’t alone in hating the whole thing and it seemed to her that, while some of the girls clearly enjoyed the partying, the people who got the most fun out of it all were the mothers, competing with each other to host the best parties and secure the most promising husbands for their daughters.

  ‘Most of the girls were rather resentful at being made to waste some of their lifeblood on it. There were lots of very vapid boys who were called “Debs’ Delights”, who tried to lure everybody under the staircases. They didn’t get too far because you had to be chaperoned everywhere you went, so you had your mother or somebody else sitting around. There was always somebody on watch.’

  Then out of the blue, a letter arrived from Elizabeth Blandy, one of Jane’s closest friends from Miss Ironside’s, the high-class Kensington school for young ladies which, while providing them both with a good education, had taken a rather sniffy view of the usefulness to a girl’s future of exams or university.

  ‘Elizabeth’s father was in wine and bananas in Madeira, rather a wealthy man. She was at this curious little school with me in South Kensington so I’d known her all my life.’

  It was February 1940, just a few weeks after Dilly Knox had made the first breaks into the Enigma codes. Elizabeth had been recruited to work in the newly created Hut 6 where those first successes against Enigma suddenly meant there was a great deal of work to do. But recruitment for Bletchley was still very slow, hamstrung by the fact that so few people knew they were breaking the German codes, by the armed forces having the pick of all the brightest young men, and by the continuing belief that only a certain type of person could be trusted to keep the secret. Elizabeth had been recommended by friends of her father and now, like all the young women in Hut 6, she was asked if she knew anyone else who might be available and able to keep a secret. Naturally, she turned to Jane.

  ‘Elizabeth wrote and said: “Well, Jane. I’m at Bletchley and it’s perfectly frightful. We’re so overworked, so desperately busy. You must come and join us.” She invited me to come to lunch.’

  Despite the unpromising tone of the letter, Jane accepted the invitation and, after lunch in the mansion, was taken into Hut 6 and interviewed by Stuart Milner-Barry, who’d only arrived a couple of weeks earlier himself. Jane was still only eighteen. She was impressed to find Mr Milner-Barry working there because she knew he was rather a famous chess player, but wasn’t quite so impressed by his confidence around women.

  ‘I don’t think he’d ever given an interview in his life, certainly not to a young girl. Desperately shy. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say and I couldn’t think of anything to say to him because I wasn’t supposed to say anything.’

  After five minutes of silence interspersed with Mr Milner-Barry’s efforts to work out whether Jane was suitable, he told her he was taking her to see ‘the boss’, Commander Edward Travis, the deputy head of Bletchley Park, who had just as much difficulty talking to her, albeit for slightly different reasons.

  ‘He started trying to tell me about what was happening there, but of course they couldn’t say anything. But he did say that there was an important job to be done and that everybody ought to do it if they were able to because it was so vital.’

  By now, Jane had decided that, despite Elizabeth’s gloomy letter and the uninformative interviews with the Bletchley bosses, there was clearly an interesting job to be done and she had no doubt that she was the right sort of person to do it. She signed the Official Secrets Act and agreed to report for work the following Monday.

  ‘I went off home and told my parents: “I’ve joined the Foreign Office.” They were rather amazed and said: “Well, where are you going?” I said Buckinghamshire, which they didn’t find very convincing. Anyway, I packed up my bags and turned up on Monday morning at the gate, had a bit of trouble with the sentries, and eventually got in.’

  She was told that the Germans were using a complex machine called Enigma to encode their messages. The settings for the machine, which were also known as the keys, changed every day and Hut 6 was trying to break the German army and air force versions. There were a number of wireless stations around the UK intercepting the German messages. The operators at these stations wrote down the messages on pre-printed forms. These were then rushed by motorcycle courier to Bletchley, to Hut 6.

  There were only thirty people working in Hut 6 when Jane arrived. Most of the rooms were almost entirely manned by young male mathematics graduates recruited from Cambridge and a few other universities deemed to be producing good mathematicians. Only the room where Jane was to work was completely staffed by women.

  The hut itself was made up of four main sections, the first being the Registration Room: here messages were sorted into types, the key elements like
the wireless frequency it was sent on were noted down and attempts made to work out which units were part of the various radio networks that were being intercepted. They were looking for any information that might help crack the code.

  The Intercept Control Room talked to the intercept stations to make sure they were taking the messages that would be the best ones to break and that each German network was being intercepted by the station which could hear it most clearly. It was absolutely vital that the intercept operators got every letter right.

  The main codebreaking took place in the Machine Room, so-called because the young mathematicians working there had a real Enigma machine which they could use to test out their theories of what the day’s settings for each code might be.

  The Germans were using a number of different types of Enigma code, with each part of the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, using their own system. The different Enigma codes were identified in Hut 6 by colours because they used different-coloured crayons to record their progress against each Enigma system on paper charts pinned to the wall.

  Once the codebreakers in the Machine Room had broken the daily settings for one type of Enigma, they moved on to another. They didn’t decode the messages. That was done by the young women in the Decoding Room where Jane and Elizabeth worked.

  The Decoding Room didn’t have any real Enigma machines. They had British cipher machines, called Typex, which had been converted to work in the same way as an Enigma machine. When the mathematicians had broken the day’s keys for one of the Enigma codes, they passed them on to Jane or one of the other girls in the Decoding Room. They then set up their machines using those keys and typed up all the messages encoded using that particular system.