The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  But while Jane and the others were happy to work extremely hard to try to help win the war, they suffered from very poor working conditions which weren’t helped by the smoky atmosphere in the hut. It seemed almost obligatory for the young mathematicians to smoke a pipe while they were working out their puzzles, and the ventilation was very poor. Jane wasn’t used to these types of conditions at all.

  ‘It was very bad accommodation. Very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. No insulation of any kind except for blackout curtains. We had horrid little trestle tables, which were very wobbly, and collapsible chairs, which were also very wobbly, very hard. There was very poor lighting; single light bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. So we were really in semi-darkness, which I expect is what the authorities wanted, better security.’

  The converted Typex machines fed out decoded messages in lines of text on strips of paper tape, like the tape used for old-fashioned telegrams. The girls had to check that it was in German and then glue the paper tape with the decoded message onto the back of the original message.

  When Diana Russell-Clarke first arrived at Bletchley she was still in the Naval Section and had started out in the library working on Italian messages, but because Hut 6 was desperate for women who spoke German to work in the Decoding Room, she was transferred over to there. Diana had been taught by a German governess so she could tell if the settings worked out by the mathematicians were working and the messages were coming out in German.

  ‘But a lot of it was not particularly clear because of course it gets rather jumbled up coming over the air, but one knew quite a lot of what it was. Of course, a lot of the stuff was very routine, orders to people in the Luftwaffe and things, but occasionally you got this great excitement.’

  The messages, still in German, were put into a cardboard box and pushed through a makeshift wooden tunnel with a broom handle into Hut 3 next door where they were turned into intelligence reports and sent to London.

  Given the difficulties finding enough good young mathematicians, and the success in recruiting more women for the Decoding Room, Mr Milner-Barry decided to staff the Registration Room with women as well. The young male mathematicians could then all be put in the Machine Room to concentrate on the actual codebreaking. He went back to Cambridge, to the women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham, where his sister had been vice-principal, to recruit a number of young female graduates.

  Joy Higgins was twenty-one and studying English Literature at Cambridge. Her father was the headmaster of a school in Newport Pagnell, about eight miles north of Bletchley Park, so an invitation to work there was attractive. She’d already visited the mansion before the war, when the estate was put up for sale. The contents of the house were being auctioned off and her mother wanted to buy some of the high-quality porcelain and glassware.

  ‘Now the Park was surrounded by a high perimeter fence, with a military guard at the entrance gates. I was to report to a small hut outside these gates, and it was here that I was interviewed by Frank Birch, a recalled First World War expert, and Harold Fletcher, who had been a distinguished Cambridge mathematician. Unorthodox as ever, the former was wearing a pea-green shirt and a Breton beret.’

  Mr Fletcher, who was dressed more conservatively, was in charge of all the Hut 6 sections that were now to be staffed by women. Joy thought him charming. He and Mr Birch asked her a lot of odd questions and gave her a piece of Italian text to translate which she stumbled through somehow. When they asked her if she expected to get a First, she crossed her fingers and said she hoped so.

  ‘They couldn’t tell me what the work involved because of its secret nature, but they thought I was a suitable candidate, and soon afterwards a letter arrived at home inviting me to work at Bletchley Park as a technical assistant, once I came down from Cambridge.’

  On the Monday after Joy finished her degree, she arrived at Bletchley, signed the Official Secrets Act, was given a pass and told she’d be paid £195 a year plus ten shillings (50p) a week war bonus. She was then taken into the Registration Room, which was already full of young female graduates, mostly from Cambridge, but some from Oxford and Aberdeen.

  ‘It was a good place to start as it began to give a general picture of what happened in Hut 6, and an overall idea of the work of Bletchley Park as a whole. People did go to immense lengths to explain things to us, always within the strict bounds of security. The questions of my interview made sense now. Certainly they needed the trained minds and the discipline of the graduate; but they also needed an attention to detail, a sense of order – and much enthusiasm.’

  Each of the women working in the Registration Room was allocated to one specific Enigma system. The lists of messages they compiled were known as B-Lists, so the new female intake swiftly became known as the ‘Blisters’. The German messages were sent using Morse code in groups of five letters but at the beginning of the message the operator sent a number of things like time of origin and the settings. This was called ‘the preamble’ and was the part of the message they had to concentrate on.

  Pamela Draughn, another 21-year-old, had been studying French and German at Royal Holloway College when she was recruited to be a Blister.

  ‘All the time I was at college I was always discouraged from going into the forces. I wasn’t frightfully keen to but I just wanted to be doing something useful and Old French and Middle-High German, I used to think, was the most useless thing I could be doing.’

  So she applied to the Foreign Office for a job, thinking she would be travelling the world, and after successfully passing the interviews was told to report to London from where she and another young female recruit were driven to Bletchley Park. They were met by Mr Fletcher, who told them what they would be doing and, as part of a long lecture on the need for complete secrecy, informed them that they were now banned from leaving the country for the duration of the war. They couldn’t risk anyone being captured by the Germans and giving the secret away. It was not quite what Pam wanted to hear, but she bit her lip and got on with it. Fletcher sent her to join Joy in the Registration Room.

  ‘You had a sheet which was called a B-List on which you analysed each message which came in which was believed to be in your code. You put down the number of letters, the origin and the frequency. Occasionally there was a third group of letters used.’

  One of the most important things Pam had to note down was the number of groups in each message.

  ‘If you saw exactly the same-length message sent out at the same time you could think that it might be a re-encodement from one code into another and that would help enormously because if you’d broken one code you could break the other code.’

  During the early spring of 1940, Hut 6 stopped being able to break Enigma. The main code they’d been working on was a Luftwaffe system which allowed the German Air Force to talk to the two other services. The codebreakers called this the Red and used red crayons to chart their progress against it. It was already clear from the time when they had been breaking it that if only they could decode it, there was a lot of intelligence to be had, but they just couldn’t get back into it. When the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway in April they used a completely different Enigma code, which Hut 6 called Yellow. It was much easier to break than the Red and produced lots of details of German operations and plans, but there was very little that could be done with the intelligence. British troops could do nothing to stop the Germans invading Norway and the ineffectual response led in early May to Mr Chamberlain’s resignation as Prime Minister and his replacement by Winston Churchill. The new Prime Minister told Parliament that he had nothing to offer the British people ‘but blood, toil, tears and sweat’ and that they had no choice but to win the war. The nation’s very survival depended on it.

  There might not have been much blood spilled at Bletchley, but there was certainly toil, sweat and tears. The invasions of Norway and Denmark, and the certain knowledge that Holland, Belgium and France would be next, forced Hut 6 to work round t
he clock, with two or three people working in each room overnight. But plans to put the Blisters and the Decoders on night shifts alongside the men were blocked by senior civil servants worried about what young men and women working together through the night would get up to.

  The bosses wanted to put three women on the Hut 6 night shift, since this was all that was needed to keep the B-Lists up to date and do the decoding. The Civil Service bosses insisted there must be six women on shift. Mr Milner-Barry said sarcastically that this was probably because the men would be ‘overworked’ trying to keep so many women happy. Three women had to be brought in from another hut to sit on the night shift doing nothing in order to protect the other three girls’ morals. Given the shortage of staff across the Park, this stupidity was dispensed with after a couple of weeks.

  Most of the women were in billets with people they’d never met before, some of whom were welcoming, some of whom were definitely not. They had to pay their own rent, which was set at a guinea a week. Joy Higgins was lucky.

  ‘I explained that I could live at home and every week I religiously paid my mother the statutory one guinea for my board and lodging.’

  Others weren’t so fortunate, although most eventually found somewhere reasonable to stay. Ailsa Macdonald was reading economics at Edinburgh when she was recruited. She and two other girls were placed in a house in Wolverton, where a large number of the young women were billeted. It was a pretty disastrous couple of months.

  ‘We shared a small bedroom, three of us. They had a bathroom but we weren’t allowed to use it. After quite a short time we were moved. I was sent to a new housing estate and it was a modern house. They had a small child and I was very happy there. But I was lucky because I think a lot of people had billets where the sanitary facilities were not very good.’

  Jane was billeted in a lorry driver’s house right in the middle of Bletchley itself. He drove for the London Brick Company and their works were just behind the house. They were overshadowed by large brick chimneys ‘belching out horrible raucous smoke’, one of which towered right above them. ‘It really was disgusting.’ The town itself was a major railway junction and the fast trains to and from Scotland shook the whole house. The lorry driver and his wife were kind and hospitable but with Jane frequently working night shifts, she found it impossible to sleep.

  ‘The room they gave me was a cupboard really with a tiny window. They had two little boys who were quite noisy and I, of course, was on the night shift a lot of the time. So I couldn’t really sleep when the boys were at home and it was about as uncomfortable a place as I’ve ever slept in.’

  As the work in Hut 6 built up, Jane found herself increasingly tired and soon became very run-down. Her father was very worried about her and eventually one of his friends, Sir Reginald Bonsor, said his country home wasn’t that far from Bletchley. Most of the servants had been called up so they had plenty of spare rooms. Why didn’t Jane come and stay with them?

  ‘I was transferred to this very grandiose Elizabethan house and they happened to have rather a lot of rooms empty because they had lost pretty much the whole of their staff. So I was able to move in about half a dozen of my friends, and that became much more jolly, of course.’

  The mansion was at Liscombe Park, eight miles south of Bletchley. Jane and her friends, along with all the other people living in billets, were taken into Bletchley at the start of each shift by buses or large estate cars, known as shooting brakes, which were driven by members of the FANY, or the Motor Transport Corps, a volunteer organisation made up of young women. Barbara Abernethy’s ability to organise the early entertainment like the rounders matches had been spotted and she’d been moved from the Naval Section into administration, coordinating things like transport.

  ‘The Motor Transport Corps drivers were really very attractive girls. They were usually quite wealthy and they had to buy their own uniforms, which were beautifully cut, and they were all very pretty. But they worked very, very hard.’

  The only problem with living in a country mansion for Jane and her friends was that when they were going on the night shift they had to wend their way along a dark drive and even darker country lanes shrouded in high hedges and trees to get to the transport pick-up point.

  ‘So one had to get to the right place and be confident that the driver had been told by the previous driver exactly where they were to pick you up. We felt a bit vulnerable and I was accused of taking a hammer with me, although actually it was a torch which was far more useful.’

  They then did the rounds of surrounding villages picking up other people in various houses, cottages and pubs, which took a considerable time and cut into the amount of time they had off.

  ‘But otherwise it was a wonderful place to live. We had lovely rooms, of course, and very beautiful gardens, and one was able to relax in a quite different extent to being in the heart of Bletchley.’

  Occasionally, Lady Bonsor invited them down for proper dinner parties. Pretty young women were always welcome when young officers back from the war were being feted.

  ‘That was quite a do, because they had a cook left behind when all the others were called up, so they had very good food and we really enjoyed ourselves. Very unlike a lot of people who were in rather horrible billets.’

  The invasion of France in May 1940 was to bring a swift victory for the Germans and a humiliating defeat for the French and British forces, but it provided Bletchley with a major success that would help win many more battles in the future. As the Germans swept through Holland, Belgium and into France, they sent more than a thousand Enigma messages a day and at times the entire hut was overwhelmed, with many of the staff, including the young women in the Registration and Decoding Rooms, working nonstop and not going home. Diana remembered snatching a few precious moments’ sleep on the floor of the Decoding Room.

  ‘There was a time when we were working certainly forty-eight hours on end because there was a lot of traffic coming through and they hadn’t really got enough staff and the stuff perhaps would stop for a bit and we just used to put our coats under our head and lie on the floor and go to sleep.’

  But the large number of messages being sent by the Germans helped the bright young codebreakers in the Machine Room break back into the Red, in large part due to some extremely clever thinking by John Herivel, one of the Cambridge mathematicians. He put himself into the mind of a German Enigma operator and worked out a mistake that tired operators might make. Ten days into the battle, several operators all made that very same mistake and Hut 6 was back into the Red Enigma, guaranteeing that they would produce good intelligence for the rest of the war. Everyone in the Machine Room was cheering and shouting and the elation was felt throughout the hut.

  MI6 sent communication experts and intelligence officers out to France to pass on the codebreakers’ reports to the British commanders but the Allied forces were overwhelmed and it had little effect. The British troops had to be evacuated from Dunkirk by several dozen Royal Navy ships and a volunteer armada of small boats from England’s southern ports which helped to lift the soldiers off the beaches. Just as the codebreakers had listened in the mansion to Mr Chamberlain telling them on the BBC they were at war with Germany, so in June 1940 they listened to Mr Churchill saying that they would ‘ride out the storm of war, and outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone’.

  It was stirring stuff. Britain would never surrender, the Prime Minister said. ‘We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches and on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills.’ The staff at Bletchley listened and, despite their worries, they were proud. They knew Britain was now alone, but they also knew that they had the opportunity, a unique opportunity, to help to win the war.

  Britain collectively waited for what seemed the inevitable German invasion. Bletchley Park set up its own rather odd-ball ‘Dad’s Army’ Home Guard detachment, with
Alan Turing as one of the unlikely defenders, and plans were made to set up a mobile codebreaking team that would be evacuated if the Germans invaded to keep breaking the codes and provide the vital intelligence. Phoebe Senyard was bemused by the reaction of some of the codebreakers.

  ‘The war situation was now becoming very grim for us. The air was electric with feeling. Those who had been chosen were in a sense excited by the prospect before them, although no doubt dismayed by the reason for their evacuation. I was surprised by the number of people whose feelings were hurt because they had not been included on the list.’

  In another rousing speech, Mr Churchill told the nation that while the Battle for France had been lost, the Battle of Britain was about to begin. They should brace themselves to do their duty so that if Britain, its Empire and its Commonwealth were to last for a thousand years, men would still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’

  The Germans attempted to intimidate Britain ahead of Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation Sea Lion, testing the ability of the RAF to defend the skies above southern England. RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires circled the skies, taking on the German Messerschmitt fighters in Mr Churchill’s Battle of Britain. When that failed, Hitler launched a campaign of mass intimidation, the Blitz, the bombing of Britain’s cities and ports. This was the moment that Hut 6 had its first major impact on the war. They broke the Enigma code used by the Luftwaffe to direct its bombers to their targets. The wireless network which used what Hut 6 called the Brown Enigma controlled the radio beams that guided the German pilots to their targets and, around midday every day, it named the targets for that night’s raids. The codebreakers sent the targets straight to London so that RAF fighter aircraft could be sent up to wait in ambush for the German bombers and the authorities in the cities concerned could start making preparations. A number of ‘safe’ cities were always warned as well as the real targets, to protect the Enigma secret. The breaking of the Brown Enigma meant the air defences were ready. It substantially reduced the damage done on the ground, saving factories that were producing goods vital to the war effort. But just as importantly, it saved many lives. The authorities were able to get people safely down into the air-raid shelters before the German bombers arrived.