The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  ‘It got out that I was an honourable and I was frightfully embarrassed by this. Somebody came up to me: “I hear that you’re an honourable.” I was fed up to the back teeth with it. I said, “No I’m not. I’m very dishonourable, so shut up.”’

  The actress Pamela Gibson, also a German linguist, worked alongside Sally and Osla in the Hut 4 Index.

  ‘I had a letter from a rather interfering godmother who said she was sure I was doing splendid work entertaining the troops but she knew a girl who had just gone to a very secret place and was doing fascinating work and they needed people with languages. That made me feel I was fiddling while Rome burned. So I wrote off to the address they sent me and thought no more about it. I had just been offered a part in a play when I got a telegram from Frank Birch asking me to meet him at the Admiralty. He gave me several tests and said, “Well, I suppose we could offer you a job,” and I said, “Well, you know about the stage, what would you do if you were me?” He said: “The stage can wait, the war can’t.” So I went to Bletchley.’

  The Index had started off with a few shoe boxes and by the end of the war, by which time Pamela was in charge of it all, had expanded to fill three large rooms. But initially, she found the work depressing. She’d expected the offer of a role in naval intelligence to be more interesting than cross-referencing the numbers of the U-boats and the names of German naval officers.

  ‘I slightly resented it, giving up the stage where I was enjoying myself and doing what I really wanted to do, because I thought that I was going to be doing something a bit more exciting than indexing. I thought I was going to be dropped in France or something.’

  Like many people at Bletchley, she sought an escape from the frustrations of her work in the social life of the Park and in particular the musical and dramatic clubs, where her professional expertise made her one of the stars, albeit among a number of other prominent people, including other actors and several leading musicians and writers.

  ‘We gave what we thought were splendid parties. A girl called Maxine Birley, the Comtesse de la Falaise as she became, was a great beauty and mad about France and I remember her giving a party at which we all had to be very French. People would change partners quite a lot. We were rather contained in a way-out place and you could only travel if you managed to get transport so there was a good deal of changing of partners.’

  The drama and musical clubs combined at Christmas to put on a revue, which was always very popular because of the standard of the writing, the music and the performances. It was while working on the revue for Christmas 1943 that Pamela met and fell in love with her future husband, Jim Rose; he was one of the intelligence reporters and wrote a sketch in which she took the female lead. Jim was due to be away on duty when the revue took place so he was allowed to watch the rehearsal.

  ‘No one was allowed to go to rehearsals but at that time I was going to Washington just before Christmas so I was allowed in and this glorious vision of loveliness stepped down from the stage and said: “Your sketch isn’t bad.”’

  Phoebe, now in charge of the distribution of all the various messages that were coming into Hut 4 – very far from the basic secretary she had been when she first started work at Broadway Buildings before the war – encouraged the junior staff in her section to put up Christmas decorations.

  ‘Mr Birch gave a wonderful luncheon party to the heads of sub-sections and all the old staff. Mr Birch, Susie and I, being the veterans of the sections, had a special little ceremony all to ourselves in a corner of the room where we toasted the Naval Section and anything else which came into our heads. It was great fun and it was our own special celebration. By the time we went into the room where the luncheon was served, we were almost prepared for anything, but not for the wonderful sight that met our eyes. The tables were positively groaning with Christmas fare. They were arranged in a T-shape, the table which formed the top of the T was loaded with turkey, geese and chicken whilst the table down the centre at which we all sat was decorated with game pie, and fruit salad, cheese and various other dishes. Each person had a menu, which was afterwards signed by everyone there, and we set to and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I know that I was still beaming at the end of the day and feeling exceedingly happy.’

  Meanwhile, Prince Philip was spending the Christmas period at Windsor Castle, where the seventeen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and he enjoyed a mutual attraction. Shortly afterwards, he and Osla split up. On the rebound, she became engaged to a diplomat, but it didn’t last. Unsurprisingly for two young women in their early twenties, with many young male friends all going off to war, and the intensity of their relationships heightened by the possibility that they might never come back, the love lives of both Osla and Sally enjoyed numerous ups and downs with what Sally described as ‘magnified highs and lows, either enraptured or suicidal’. Osla had come back from leave with a large emerald engagement ring given to her by the diplomat.

  ‘Two months later, the despicable cad changed his mind,’ said Sally. ‘Osla tearfully returned the ring swearing she had never liked green stones anyway. I got engaged to a handsome officer in the Coldstream Guards, but was soon disengaged by both families who thought we were too young and anyway it was wartime. What that had to do with it escaped me, but my heart was broken for the first time.’

  The handsome Coldstream Guards officer was her longtime boyfriend Billy Cavendish. After the break-up enforced by their parents, he fell in love with Kathleen Kennedy, the sister of John F. Kennedy, the future US President, and married her. Sally’s heart was broken a second time.

  ‘I felt it would never survive the anguish and when he was killed in France the misery was compounded.’

  But there were lighter moments. One afternoon, when their watch was over and they were waiting for transport to take them back to their billets, Osla and Sally decided to send their friend Jean Campbell-Harris down one of the long corridors, which ran downhill, in one of the laundry baskets the decoded messages were delivered in.

  ‘We launched it down the corridor where it gathered momentum by the second. To our horror, at the T-junction, Jean suddenly disappeared, basket and all, through some double swing doors.’

  Sally would dine out on the claim that the basket carrying a giggling Jean had careered into the gents’ loo, but in fact it burst into the office of Commander Geoffrey Tandy, the head of technical intelligence, who had already shown his irritation at the girls’ willingness to enjoy themselves when there was a lull in the work. Jean took the brunt of his anger.

  ‘Geoffrey Tandy had already decided he did not like me and now he was absolutely furious. As a punishment the three of us were taken off the same shift and it took us three weeks to get back together again.’

  Jean had arrived a few months after Sally and Osla, but although the need for more people was becoming urgent, recruitment was still largely targeting people who were known to come from reliable families.

  ‘They were really frightfully snobbish about the girls who worked there. A friend of my father’s said: “Maybe when Jean’s finished her secretarial course she would like to go to a place called Bletchley.”

  ‘Sally and I were great pals but I think Osla was my dearest friend. She was a delight. Spoiled rotten, but adorable and loved by everyone. She had dark hair and fair skin and was simply beautiful. Her mother had no home but lived in a permanent flat in Claridge’s and had had five husbands.’

  Geoffrey Tandy, who was in his early forties, was in charge of captured enemy documents. He was a former curator at the Natural History Museum and had access to special materials used in the preservation of old documents. An officer on the Royal Naval Reserve, he had been sent to Bletchley Park because he was an expert in cryptogams, not – as the Admiralty clearly assumed – encoded messages, but mosses, ferns, algae, lichens and fungi.

  Peggy Senior, who worked alongside Mr Tandy translating the documents, was recruited aged twenty-one as a Foreign Office linguist, having studied German a
t Girton College, Cambridge. The Admiralty might have made a mistake in its interpretation of Tandy’s skills but so far as Peggy was concerned it was a good decision to send him to Bletchley.

  ‘They couldn’t have done a better thing for him because he found it a romantic thing altogether. It really thrilled him generally. It was like a small boy. My friend and I were typing up the message that was sent to all the German fleet and he said: “If you don’t feel romance now, God help you.” So, strange as he was, he was a romantic at heart.’

  Tandy’s Technical Intelligence Section also kept track of the latest detail of all the various U-boats and Peggy was in charge of a log-book which included any information they could find in the intercepted messages about every submarine. It created an odd connection between the women extracting the detail from the messages and the individual U-boats, almost like sports fans following a specific team.

  ‘The thing I look back on with pleasure is my U-boat log. You wrote on each U-boat’s page its number and its type, name of its commander, what torpedoes it had fired. Did they hit the target? Did they sink it? And what stocks had they got left? So I got to know quite a bit about the submarine war. You got quite interested in individual U-boats for no reason at all. A particular number took your fancy and you wanted to know how it got on. We all had our favourite U-boats.’

  Commander Travis’s daughter Valerie was in charge of the library containing all the captured documents, known as ‘pinches’ because they’d been ‘stolen’ from the enemy. Some were codebooks and operator instructions that would help to break other codes while others were technical documents that provided the correct terms for new or obscure pieces of equipment that would help the people translating the messages.

  ‘It was the only way of finding the German terms for all their extraordinary torpedoes and things and finding out a bit about them, so as I had Italian and German, I was given the job of collating all these documents and listing them. We had P numbers for the pinches: PG numbers for the German and PI for the Italian, and of course eventually we had a Japanese as well.’

  With people who spoke good German at a premium, Sally was promoted to the German Operational Watch, translating the lower-level naval messages. Her new boss was a Royal Navy commander who was a good deal older than the women working for him.

  ‘He was very nice and he tried to keep us under control. Wasn’t always easy for him, but he did. At that age you do get very mischievous, I’m afraid. That kept morale high and the work did too because you knew what you were translating was terribly important. I make it sound as if we were silly little girls but actually we weren’t and we did work incredibly hard.

  ‘You were translating German decrypts and you’d really got to know how to do them pretty quickly if you had the lingo. So we were reading lots about U-boats and that sort of thing, Atlantic convoys in such danger. It was a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. It brought an edge of urgency to the work. I remember thinking, I’m not going to go one by one by one until I get to the bottom. I’m going to find the ones about the U-boats first. Because the U-boats were always signalling to each other where they were so it was very important the Admiralty got that.’

  Sheila Mackenzie was in her second year at Aberdeen University in 1943 reading modern languages. She was already on a reserved list to teach French and German, which prevented her being called up for the armed forces, but she didn’t want to be stuck teaching when all her friends were off ‘doing something about Hitler’. So she took her name off the teaching list, and within a couple of weeks received a letter from the Foreign Office inviting her to an interview in London.

  ‘At the age of nineteen coming up to twenty, I’d never been out of Scotland. Money was scarce, travelling was not encouraged. Things were very, very difficult. So I rejoiced to go down to London and I had my interview and I saw as much of central London as I could in the time allowed and shortly after that I got another letter asking me to report to Bletchley, and when I got there I was to telephone, and the voice at the other end said: “Ah, yes, Miss Mackenzie, we’re expecting you.” And that was it.’

  She was sent to work in Hut 4 on low-level German codes, which were relatively easy to break and involved messages for heavy German guns and radar stations along the French, Belgian, Dutch and Mediterranean coasts. ‘I remember thinking, this is interesting. They got a lot of messages in. I just collected them from the teleprinter room once or twice daily and worked my way through them. I decoded them and translated them. It was weather reports, sightings of ships, sightings of aircraft, just warning the radar stations and gun emplacements what was happening. I would have liked to have known more but you couldn’t. It was impressed on me that security was absolutely essential. I didn’t ask too many questions. It was not the done thing.’

  In her spare time, Sheila joined the Scottish Reels Club and it was there she met the love of her life. Oliver Lawn was one of the Hut 6 codebreakers and often stood in for Hugh Foss when he was away. ‘I first saw Oliver at the Reels Club. I used to love reels and I noticed that when Hugh Foss was absent, Oliver took the class. And I remember this rather nice lad. He was tall, elegant and danced beautifully. I suppose we danced together and Oliver thought that I was an adequate partner for him.

  ‘We went down to Stratford on one occasion and we went to a play and then we went for a picnic on the river. I remember I couldn’t buy much but I bought lettuce and things to eat and I think my billeter had given me something and we had a picnic on the river and of course the clouds came over and we had a terrific thunderstorm come down and I was absolutely soaked. He asked me if I was all right. I said: “No I am not.”’

  As the need for staff grew, it was no longer possible to get enough women from the upper classes who spoke German to fill the various roles. But the introduction of conscription for women gave the Admiralty large numbers of additional members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, and when they began arriving at Bletchley in 1941, it was only natural that some of them would be sent to work in the Naval Section.

  Jean Tocher had spent a year at Darmstadt studying German before the war. When she joined the Wrens she was sent to Bletchley to work on the Naval Section’s ‘Allied Plot’, which was a chart of the world covering all four walls of one room on which a number of Wrens plotted the movement of all the Allied ships and their German, Italian and Japanese counterparts.

  ‘These huge charts were being used to plot where the German ships were and where the U-boats were going to attack our ships, so that the RAF could be sent out or evasive action taken – it was the sharp end of the naval war that we were, in our very small way, involved in.’

  Initially, the women working on the Plot reported any potential threats direct to the RAF by scrambler phone. But the Admiralty didn’t like Hut 4 talking directly to the RAF about naval issues, so by the time Jean arrived the threats were being reported by phone to MI6, which passed them on to the RAF as intelligence reports. Jean was twenty-five and a bit older and more confident than the other Wrens so she was appointed as the head of one of the watches.

  ‘We got secret and top-secret messages and every day we were hastily plotting all the convoys. We had a colour code: blue for cruisers, green for destroyers, purple for frigates and pink for corvettes, and there were other pins which had a piece of white cardboard in the middle and on that we would put the number of the convoy. It had to be absolutely accurate and quick so that, when a German code had been cracked, you could see U-boats moving towards a convoy.’

  Like many of the Wrens working at Bletchley Park, Jean was based at Woburn Abbey, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford, which had been taken over by the government for the duration of the war, and bussed into Bletchley for each watch. They used naval terms for everything they did, so the shifts were watches, their dormitories were cabins, their living quarters were the fo’c’sle, and the area in front of the Abbey was the quarterdeck.

  ‘We were billeted in the servants’ quar
ters, eight double bunks to a room, the bats flew in and the condensation dripped off the ceilings. There were about four bathrooms and you couldn’t have a bath in privacy, because there weren’t enough places to wash – there were enamel basins on a shelf, so you had to leave the door open so other Wrens could use the basins to do their washing while you were having a bath, it was all a bit like boarding school.’

  In late 1944, Sally was selected for a new top-secret job. The difficulties dealing with the Admiralty simply wouldn’t go away. Frank Birch called Sally into his office and told her she was to be part of a team charged with improving relations with the Admiralty. It would be based right inside the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre and would be staffed by four young women, with one of them on duty at all times, and part of their job would be to ‘smile prettily’ at the admirals in order to get them onside.

  ‘I managed to blurt out: “Sir, are you giving me this job for my brains or my exceptionally good legs?” To which he replied, “A bit of both will come in handy.”’

  Sally would be based in London, just a taxi ride away from the clubs and hotels where all her friends met, and could live in the flat of a great-uncle who had moved out for the war. It was ‘a dream come true’ – a flat just off Piccadilly, just around the corner from the Ritz, and looking out over St James’s Park.

  ‘The Admiralty was about the best job any girl could have. The responsibility was awesome – you were alone in this room, completely responsible for every decrypt that came from Bletchley and you had to decide who saw it. No one was allowed into our room, not even an admiral. All the telephones were scramblers and I had a direct line to the Prime Minister. Four girls and one nice man called Bill, who was really our boss, working round the clock, and all those lovely sailors in the passages.’