The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  Shortly after D-Day, Anne Zuppinger got married to Alan Hill, an RAF officer she’d met at one of the dances. Clothing was rationed and she didn’t have enough clothing coupons to get the material for a wedding dress. It looked as if she would be forced to get married in uniform. But Anne’s bridesmaid had managed to get a wedding dress and was getting married before Anne, so she said Anne could borrow the wedding dress once she’d worn it.

  ‘Then her wedding was put off because her husband was in the navy and he was on active service and my future husband had to arrange for our wedding to be in between operations over France, so my wedding was before hers. So I wore her wedding dress before she wore it herself. I think that was a wonderful friendship and Wrens formed a guard of honour for us. So it really was a lovely occasion.’

  Five weeks later, Alan was reported missing in operations over France, his aircraft shot down by the Germans. He’d named Anne’s father as his next of kin because he didn’t want her to get the fairly blunt telegram that was sent out when someone was missing.

  ‘He was a master bomber in the Pathfinder force and the master bombers were the only ones that were sending radio messages. So they were always shot down, which I hadn’t realised. I think he’d kept that to himself, so he knew that the chances of him getting through would be very slim.’

  Anne’s father received the telegram reporting his son-in-law missing and got in touch with Edith Blagrove, the commanding officer for all the Wrens working at Bletchley and its outstations, and she went to see Anne personally to break the bad news to her gently. Despite Alan’s considerate precautions it was never going to be a happy time for Anne.

  ‘When I heard that Superintendent Blagrove was coming to see me I pretty well knew what it would be. But I was very, very fortunate because within a couple of months he was back again, having been hidden by the underground and brought back to England.’

  Alan had been back in England for some time before Anne heard the good news. He’d assumed that Anne would have been told the minute he arrived back in Britain, but because he’d come down an escape line it had to be kept secret until after he’d been debriefed. Anne couldn’t be told.

  ‘So the first I knew was when he telephoned me. I was at Steeple Claydon. He phoned the Wren officers’ mess at Walton Hall and they thought they recognised his voice and told him to ring Steeple Claydon. When I answered the telephone, I was so overcome that I had to hand the telephone over to one of the other officers there to make arrangements about going to see him but it was a wonderful moment. I was one of the lucky ones. That didn’t happen to all of our Wrens, of course.’

  Barbara Quirk had taken her friend Pam, one of the petty officers, home and introduced her to her mother. When Barbara’s brother John was killed, her mother wrote to Pam and asked her to break the news. Barbara recorded in her diary for 25 July 1944 that she had worked a day shift and returned to Crawley Grange at six o’clock in the evening.

  ‘Pam took me outside to give me some bad news. John has been killed. There seems no point in saying any more. I don’t think I really took it in. We walked round the fields and she was quite marvellous. Thank God I had her. It would have been quite unbearable alone.’

  Colette had still not heard what had happened to Graham. Had he escaped like Anne’s husband? Maybe he’d been captured by the Germans and was being held as a prisoner of war? The news was slow in coming through. Eventually, they heard that his aircraft had been shot down over Holland on its way back from dropping the supplies to the Resistance. Three of the crew had managed to escape down the lines. Graham wasn’t one of them. He’d been too badly wounded. Pilot Warrant Officer Graham Murray was just twenty-three when he died.

  ‘I think Mum rang me and I always remember running up the street, crying. I didn’t know where I was going, what I was doing. I was distraught. It was awful really. But it was happening to all sorts of people. It took a couple of weeks but I picked myself up, dusted myself down and got on with it. But it’s always stayed there. It’s always there.’

  5

  Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off

  Once the Wrens had found the settings on the Bombes for a particular Enigma code like the Red or the Brown the results were fed back to Hut 6. Jane Hughes and the other women in the Decoding Room put the settings onto the replica Enigma machines and started to type in all the messages that were in that code. The plain German text came out on strips of paper which were then stuck onto the back of the original message and passed through the wooden tunnel to the intelligence reporters in Hut 3.

  Very few of the actual intelligence reporters – known as the Watch – were women, largely because there were only a few people on the night shift and Civil Service rules would not have allowed one woman to work in such close proximity to men at night in case something happened between them.

  But women did take on a lot of very responsible backroom roles within Hut 3, analysing and reporting on the German army and air force messages. The Civil Service rules might have been steeped in misogyny but so far as Mair Thomas was concerned there was no sexism at Bletchley in the way young women were treated.

  ‘No one looked down on me or patronised me and I would say there was also equality between the sexes. There were more women than men, so the men had to watch their step. For the first time, I was judged purely on my ability and not my gender. I was paid well and had an independence I have probably not enjoyed since.’

  There was a great mix of the different classes which had dominated British society as well. The debs represented a different era and the traditions they cherished would soon disappear once the war was over, while many of the young academics recruited from the universities already knew that – despite their general admiration for the Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill – they would be voting for Labour at the next election. Yet the issue of class never raised its head. There was an astonishing level of mutual respect which Mair felt was unique to Bletchley.

  ‘It was a marvellous atmosphere in many ways because you weren’t aware of class or background. We were there to do a job and that’s all that mattered. All the differences that normally exist between people came tumbling down. There was something about the community in Bletchley Park that I haven’t seen since. We were all doing the same work; sharing frustrations and confronting impossible challenges.’

  Christine Brooke-Rose was just eighteen when she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in 1941. She’d had an unusual childhood. Her British father, a former Benedictine monk and convicted thief, had married a Swiss-American woman. So Christine was born in Geneva and her first language was French, although the family also spoke English and German. Christine’s parents separated when she was six and she stayed in England with her father, but when he died in 1934 she went to live with her mother in Brussels. In 1938, at the age of fifteen, Christine was sent to Germany to improve her spoken German, staying in a Schloss (castle) near Ulm with a baroness whose family worshipped Hitler. A year later plans for her to go to teach English at a school in Rosenheim, Bavaria, were only thwarted by the outbreak of war.

  Like the Wrens, the WAAF had originally been set up during the First World War but was disbanded shortly afterwards. It was recreated in June 1939 and from very early on had a strict rule that all officers had to have been in the ranks before they could be commissioned, an equality that was unknown in any of the other services. They were given four weeks’ training and, unlike the Wrens, had their uniforms from the very start. The training was focused on drill, physical fitness and understanding of how the RAF worked so that each WAAF could go on to train for the actual job she would be doing ‘without feeling awkward or bewildered’.

  Despite being fluent in German, Christine was sent to work in the Operations Room at RAF Thornaby-on-Tees, a coastal command station on the Yorkshire coast, where she spent her time writing up flight records. When the station education officer heard she spoke German he asked her to teach the bomb disposal staff since i
t would help them to understand what was said on the unexploded bombs. Christine agreed but never got the chance. Now her bosses realised she spoke German so well she was not going to be wasted filling in forms for RAF Coastal Command.

  ‘The WAAF commanding officer at Thornaby called me in. There must have been a search for people who knew German at the time. I was told I was being commissioned immediately and sent to an officer training unit at Loughborough.’

  Christine was promoted to assistant section officer and called to London, to Broadway Buildings, for an interview with the head of the MI6 Air Section, Group-Captain Frederick Winterbotham, and Wing-Commander Robert Humphreys, who was in charge of air intelligence inside Hut 3. Winterbotham gave Christine a card with some highly complex German text written on it and told her to tell him what it said.

  ‘I was asked to translate a piece of very technical German and I somehow floundered through it and I found myself in Bletchley Park as a young officer of eighteen knowing absolutely nothing.’

  In fact, the only word Christine ‘floundered’ over was the extremely obscure Klappenschrank, a minor part of an army field telephone. Winterbotham was impressed. Christine was given a first-class rail warrant from Euston to Bletchley and told to report to Humphreys at the Park the very next day. When Christine arrived at Bletchley she was given a security briefing, made to sign the Official Secrets Act and shown to Hut 3, which nestled around the end of Hut 6 that was farthest away from the mansion, turning in a right-angle around and behind the codebreakers’ hut. Christine walked down a narrow corridor with small offices on either side. The door to one of the offices was open, with a number of girls in civilian clothes and a teleprinter rattling away.

  ‘I’m looking for Wing-Commander Humphreys.’

  ‘Down the corridor and turn right.’

  The corridor led past a number of rooms, one full of army officers, another containing RAF officers and civilians, then into a long, wide room with a number of women in civilian clothes working on several tables covered in long boxes containing filing cards. One large wall of the room was covered in maps of various parts of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Wing-Commander Humphreys was sat at one of the desks. He jumped up when he saw Christine and introduced her to his secretary Beatrice Shields, who showed her around the hut.

  The first place Beatrice showed her was a square room with a large horseshoe-shaped table at which a number of men, who were called the Watch, were sat working away on pieces of paper. These were the decoded messages shoved through the hatch from Hut 6. They worked out what the message said, usually having to ‘emend’ it, which meant filling in gaps and correcting spellings to find the right words and make sense of the message. They then had to disguise it to make it look as if it had come from a report from a British secret agent behind enemy lines. One of the most common tricks was to say that the source had found a note or a document in a waste-paper basket in the German headquarters.

  Hut 3 couldn’t be honest about where the message had come from. It was vital that the Germans didn’t know the British were breaking the Enigma codes, so only a very few people were allowed to know what Bletchley had achieved. Large numbers of senior officers, civil servants and politicians had no idea. The reports were sent out as if they were genuine MI6 reports from secret agents who’d managed to infiltrate German military headquarters or government offices. Christine was impressed with how clever everyone seemed to be.

  ‘All the people in Hut 3 were people who had to emend these texts which we intercepted and would sometimes arrive in very corrupt form. You had to know German extremely well to guess what it might be. So we had some of the best German scholars there.’

  The reports were sent by teleprinter to London and the other people who were ‘in the know’ by young women known as ‘Teleprincesses’. These were usually WAAFs who operated most of the large number of teleprinters that linked Bletchley to the outside world, but some of them were civilians employed by the Foreign Office, like the first girls Christine had met when she arrived in Hut 3.

  ‘We were all jumbled up. Nobody cared if you were in the air force or in the Foreign Office or what.’

  Beatrice took Christine back to Humphreys’ office and introduced her to Jean Alington, who as a shift leader in charge of the girls working on the index cards would be Christine’s immediate boss.

  ‘I was to be in the Air Index, just indexing information from the teleprints we sent up to Whitehall.’

  All the intelligence reports sent out by Hut 3 were also sent to the Air Index where Jean and the other shift leaders marked up everything that needed to be recorded in pink and the rest of the shift made up the index cards or added the information to a previous card on the same subject. It could be anything from the name of a soldier or airman and what his job was to details of fuel supplies, or the routes and timings of rail or naval convoys. One of the things Christine had to note down on the cards was the repeated references to the new secret weapon being developed at Peenemünde in northern Germany – this would turn out to be the V1 flying bombs, the doodlebugs. It was worrying for her at times to think of how many secrets she and her colleagues were trusted to keep.

  ‘I remember being so frightened. I was so young, I had no experience of any kind and I was so frightened of saying something by mistake off-duty that I stopped reading the newspapers altogether and stopped listening to the wireless because then I would know that everything I knew was secret that I had read that day in messages.’

  The period when Christine arrived at Bletchley also saw the arrival of a group of people who would change the lives of a number of the women, including both Christine and Barbara Abernethy. Barbara was now in charge of Commander Denniston’s office and in early 1941 he said he needed her to stay late that night.

  ‘Commander Denniston said he had something important to tell me. “There are going to be four Americans who are coming to see me at twelve o’clock tonight,” he said. “I require you to come in with the sherry. You are not to tell anybody who they are or what they will be doing.”’

  The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would bring the Americans into the war was still ten months away but already the British and American codebreakers were preparing to work together to share their resources and abilities to break the German, Italian and Japanese codes. Waiting outside for her boss’s signal to come in, Barbara tried to work out how she was supposed to manhandle the cask of sherry into his office on her own.

  ‘It came from the Army and Navy Stores and was in a great big cask which I could hardly lift. But Commander Denniston rang the bell and I struggled in and somehow managed to pour glasses of sherry for these poor Americans.’

  It was something of an amazing experience for Barbara. The work she’d been involved in both at Broadway Buildings and at Bletchley was top secret, but this was somehow even more momentous. Despite having worked for the Code and Cypher School for nearly four years, she was still only nineteen. It felt as if she was taking part in something extraordinary. She couldn’t take her eyes off the American officers.

  ‘I’d never seen Americans before, except in the films. I just plied them with sherry. I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing there, I wasn’t told. But it was very exciting and hushed voices. I couldn’t hear anything of what was said but I was told not to tell anybody about it. I guess it wasn’t general knowledge that the Americans had got any liaison with Bletchley. It was before Pearl Harbor, you see, and presumably President Roosevelt wasn’t telling everybody there was going to be any liaison at that stage.’

  Once the Americans entered the war in December 1941, the first of what would be several hundred codebreakers from the US Navy and the US Army began arriving at Bletchley. There was a mixed reception, with some of Christine’s colleagues in Hut 3 very wary of the Americans. Jean Alington couldn’t hide her distrust.

  ‘I remember with horror the American invasion when every section had an American. We believed they had no sense
of security and were terrified that material they took out of the Hut would go astray. We felt strongly that they would never have come into the war but for Pearl Harbor.’

  That attitude was common and not really surprising. Britain had been fighting with its back against the wall. The Americans had provided immense help with vital supplies and financial backing but there was still resentment at the way in which they’d dragged their feet while the Nazis rampaged across Europe. Britain was weighed down by two years of war, the Americans seemed to act as if they owned the place, and Jean was wrongly convinced they weren’t going to be capable of pulling their weight.

  ‘They were different animals, and the English they spoke had different meanings. They were fat, we were emaciated. They were smart (eleven different sorts of uniform), we were almost in rags. They were rich, we were poor. They brought in alcohol: “Have a rye, sister.” “We don’t drink here.” We were overworked and exhausted, and having to teach people who barely knew where Europe was, was the last straw.’

  Pamela Draughn was in charge of a shift in the Duddery in Hut 6, using captured Enigma machines to try to work out what was wrong with ‘dud’ messages, messages that wouldn’t decode properly using the Enigma settings that the Hut 6 codebreakers had worked out for that particular radio network. Some of the more junior Americans were allocated to her shift.

  ‘The Americans were all very nice. They were very anxious to please. The ones I got, there were half a dozen, some from state university, nothing like as intelligent as our graduates, and two from Princeton and Harvard, both very intelligent.’

  But as with the then popular song ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’, sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the two sides found themselves divided by a single language.