The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  Rodney Bax and Christine soon became engaged, although she was unclear how this had happened and felt as if she was being rushed towards marriage by both Rodney and her mother. An attempt to break off the engagement failed and she and Rodney were married in Kensington in early 1944, not long after her twenty-first birthday. A brief honeymoon in the Scilly Isles did nothing to reassure Christine that she’d made the right decision, but she just got on with it.

  The arrival of the Americans had added to the social life with their penchant for hard drinking, particularly of whisky and other spirits. Christine found it hard to believe that they could drink so much and yet seemed to stay relatively sober.

  ‘It was astonishing. I don’t know if it was just the war or me being terribly innocent. I remember my husband and I being invited to dinner at the local hotel in Leighton Buzzard where all the Americans were billeted, and after dinner, all the Americans, each one, would order another whisky and another Drambuie and another round. It was absolutely amazing and we had to cycle back to the billet where we were living and I remember being really very zigzaggy. It wasn’t that they were alcoholics. It was just the war atmosphere. They did drink far more. That was the American culture.’

  Telford Taylor was in the office across the corridor from Christine’s and with the Americans classified as an independent US unit he was able to obtain unlimited supplies of coffee and sugar. With sugar rationed and real coffee virtually unavailable in wartime Britain, it was only natural that Taylor would share these riches with the pretty girl in the office across the corridor from his own.

  ‘He was in charge of the American Liaison Section, which was just opposite where we were in Hut 3, so they would all come in for coffee and I knew them quite well. He was very handsome, he looked like the film star Gary Cooper, and he was a very interesting person.’

  Christine was in an unhappy marriage; Telford Taylor was away from his wife and family for the duration. When Rodney was taken into hospital with pneumonia, what followed seemed inevitable. Christine and Telford began an affair, spending time in hotels in London to avoid any gossip in Bletchley. Christine was sanguine about the affair. She expected no more of it than she expected of her marriage.

  ‘It was just one of those things. I was twenty-two and he was in his late thirties. I don’t know how these things happened. He had quite a good sense of humour. He was a nice man, a lawyer. He liked to tell me all about the American law system. But he was very musical.’

  When Rodney came out of hospital, Christine told him about the affair.

  ‘He was very, very British and he and Telford talked together. Telford was terribly amused afterwards because he thought my husband was so British, shaking hands and saying that everything was all right, which of course it wasn’t. It just made him laugh because Americans don’t face things the way gentlemen used to.’

  Rodney clearly hoped that Christine’s affair with Telford was a passing infatuation and would all blow over, and even though Christine knew he was probably right, she also knew that her marriage to Rodney was not going to work either. After a miserable and very lonely first Christmas together as man and wife, she finally made the break and told Rodney it was over.

  6

  Turing and the U-boats

  Phoebe Senyard spent the first week or so of April 1940 cramming files into cupboards and squeezing the desks in Hut 4 even closer together to make space for Alan Turing to attempt to break the German Navy’s Enigma codes. No one believed that even he could do this. The main German naval Enigma, codenamed Dolphin, was far more complex than the German army and air force codes they were breaking in Hut 6. But Mr Turing was determined to do it, although from what he said that was only because ‘no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it to myself’.

  It didn’t seem a very sensible reason to waste time trying to break an unbreakable code – the Dolphin Enigma had a choice of three out of eight rotors instead of the three out of five on the army and air force Enigmas and used much more complex settings – but the German U-boats were attacking the British ships bringing supplies of oil, machinery and food across the Atlantic. Britain depended on those supplies. If the new section succeeded it would help the supply convoys to avoid the U-boats, more supplies would get through and that would help win the war. So Phoebe set about reorganising the office yet again.

  ‘We put our backs into it in order to welcome the newcomers, by tidying up our files and papers, binding and storing into cupboards all signals and books not in current use. Everyone who could be spared temporarily from their jobs was pressed into service and room was made for it, but it was a tight squeeze. We almost felt as if we ought to all breathe in together.’

  It was tight but it was worth it. No sooner had Alan Turing and his friend and fellow mathematician Peter Twinn moved in than they received two important ‘pinches’. A German U-boat was trapped and sunk while trying to lay mines in the Firth of Clyde and two of the rotors for the Dolphin Enigma were recovered. More importantly, the German naval patrol boat Schiff 26 was captured and coding documents found on board showed how the system worked.

  Now they had a real chance of breaking the Dolphin Enigma, Messrs Turing and Twinn were given their own offices in Hut 8. They’d been part of the pioneering three-man team helping Dilly Knox to break Enigma, brilliant minds but not very good at organising themselves. They were untidy and kept losing things. It worried Frank Birch, head of the German Naval Section.

  Alan Turing was widely regarded as eccentric, largely because he just thought at a different level to most people. He had difficulty dealing with most women and often spoke very fast, more out of enthusiasm than anything else, giving people the false idea that he had a stutter. He cycled into work wearing a gas mask to stop the pollen sparking off his hay fever, chained his coffee mug to a radiator and converted his life savings into silver bars as insurance against a collapse of the pound caused by the costs of the war. Having persuaded his bank, with a great deal of difficulty, to get him the silver bars, he buried them, working out an elaborate set of instructions so he could find them once the war was over and the danger to the currency had passed. But he never did find them again.

  Frank Birch knew that Alan Turing was the right person to lead the attempts to break the Dolphin Enigma but he also knew he was the wrong person to run the actual hut. He and Peter Twinn had been given another codebreaker, Tony Kendrick, the other member of Dilly’s original team, so he was someone they were very comfortable working with. Mr Kendrick, who was badly crippled as a result of having polio as a child, had been head boy at Eton and was a brilliant codebreaker in his own right. Another codebreaker was due to arrive shortly. What they really needed now they had their own offices were their own equivalents of Phoebe to make sure everything was organised properly.

  Pat Wright came from a working-class family in Woolwich, on the border between southeast London and Kent. Pat, the daughter of a machine-fitter, was seventeen and had just left school. She was on a secretarial course when she received a letter out of the blue telling her to report to the Foreign Office in London.

  ‘I was just approaching my eighteenth birthday. I had a letter asking if I would go for an interview at the Foreign Office. There were several other girls there. They told us they wanted us to do something but they couldn’t tell us what it was and that we’d be hearing from them. So I went home and my mother said: “What did they want you for?” and I replied: “I haven’t the faintest idea.”’

  Eventually another letter arrived, this time with a train pass to go to Bletchley. Other girls from the secretarial college were going too. They took the train from Euston to Bletchley and were picked up at the station and taken up to the mansion, where they were lectured by ‘a very ferocious-looking security officer’ and made to sign the Official Secrets Act.

  ‘It was then read out to us in no uncertain terms that on no account were we to tell anybody what we were doing. Nor were we to say we were on secret work. It
wasn’t secret. We were the evacuated office of the Foreign Office and we were copy typists.’

  They were then told what they would actually be doing. It was very secret. They would be decoding messages.

  ‘Well everybody knows the Foreign Office has codes. It didn’t seem very secret. We trailed over to Hut 8 where they said: “Well, the thing is, it’s German naval codes, we’ve broken the codes and we want you to do the decoding” – collapse of several young ladies in a heap. None of us were fluent German speakers.’

  Once in Hut 8, which still looked quite bare, they were shown into a big room. It seemed the obvious description of the room, so from then on that became the name of the office in which the girls worked – the Big Room.

  ‘It was explained to us that the German codes had been broken by this super machine that had been invented. At the same time every day, the Germans transmitted this weather message beginning exactly the same way. This was, of course, not anything that we lesser mortals had to worry about. This was the brainy boys’ department.’

  The Big Room had a number of modified Typex machines in it which, like those in the Hut 6 Decoding Room, were designed to work just like the Enigma machine.

  ‘There were three wheels out of a box of eight which were put into the machine and then turned to the right letter of the alphabet, and then there was a plugboard with plug leads that went everywhere. You started off typing and then with a bit of luck you suddenly saw something you could recognise as German.’

  It was hard, tiring work, and surprisingly messy. The keys on the modified Typex machines were very stiff and had to be pressed down very hard and sprang back up with a loud clunk.

  ‘Anybody who works a computer now that has this light touch would be horrified. It was very, very noisy. We had to grease the wheels of the machine from a big tub of Vaseline and it got all over your clothes, so by the end of the day they looked a bit tatty.’

  The machines printed the text of the German messages onto a long strip of sticky tape which they cut into lengths of half a dozen words and stuck to the back of the original message. It was passed to the Naval Section in Hut 4, carried across the Park by messengers who reported to Phoebe.

  The new codebreaker was a bit of a surprise – a young woman a week off her twenty-third birthday and straight out of university. At this stage all the codebreakers devising ways to break Enigma, both in Hut 8 and in the Hut 6 Machine Room, were men.

  Joan Clarke was the daughter of a Church of England clergyman. She was born and brought up in West Norwood, south London, where she went to Dulwich High School before obtaining a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. She’d been recruited earlier that year by Gordon Welchman, who’d been one of her tutors, and had agreed to join Hut 6 once she’d completed her degree course.

  She didn’t know her results at this stage but she would take a double first, as Mr Welchman knew she would. She’d done all the work, got far better marks than many of her male contemporaries at Cambridge, but she wouldn’t be awarded an actual degree because, while Cambridge allowed women to study at the women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and take exactly the same exams as the men who were reading the same subjects, it did not award degrees to women, and would not do so until 1961.

  ‘I arrived at Bletchley Park on 17 June and after the routine administrative matters I was collected by Alan Turing to work on naval Enigma in Hut 8, instead of with Welchman in Hut 6, because of the documents taken from the German patrol boat.’

  Messrs Turing, Twinn and Kendrick were known as ‘the Seniors’ by the rest of Hut 8 and Joan officially became the first female ‘Senior’ a few days after she arrived when Turing had an additional table placed in ‘the Seniors’ Room’ just for her.

  ‘I think it was Kendrick who said, “Welcome to the Sahibs’ Room” – the only time that I met that term for it. Kendrick, exceptionally, never progressed beyond calling me Miss Clarke, and himself was known only by his surname. Another exception to the general use of Christian names was Turing, but this was not because of any need of formality with the head of Hut 8; he was widely known by his nickname, Prof, even during the short time when an actual university professor was working with us.’

  After a ‘sketchy’ introduction from Alan Turing, who was not very good at explaining things, largely because he found it difficult to relate to people who didn’t know things that he took for granted, Joan was set to work using the documents found on board the Schiff 26 to find a way into the Dolphin Enigma. She was put on night shifts very quickly. Civil Service regulations about men and women working together on nights didn’t apply to Seniors. There was only one person on a night shift in the Seniors’ Room.

  The captured documents enabled them to break the Dolphin Enigma messages for six days from April but the information wasn’t enough to break them on a daily basis. It proved they could be broken and it gave them a good idea of how to do it but it wasn’t enough.

  The occupation of France had given the Germans new submarine bases on the western French coast, which made it much easier for them to attack the Allied convoys crossing the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the Germans were doing their own codebreaking. They’d broken the British Merchant Navy code so they could read all the convoys’ messages and knew the precise routes they were taking. The German U-boats operated in ‘wolf packs’. They lined up from north to south across the shipping routes. Once one of the U-boats spotted an Allied convoy it would shadow it, sending out homing signals to draw in the other members of the pack. When all the U-boats were assembled, they would pounce en masse.

  The Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre needed Bletchley to tell them where the U-boats were so they could route the Atlantic convoys around the wolf packs, but Hut 8 couldn’t get anywhere near breaking the codes used on a regular basis. They desperately needed more pinches.

  Ian Fleming, who after the war would go on to write the James Bond books, worked in naval intelligence, liaising with MI6 and Bletchley Park. He dreamed up what his boss Admiral John Godfrey, the Director of Naval Intelligence, described as a ‘cunning scheme’ to try to obtain a German naval Enigma machine with all of its rotors and settings.

  Ian Fleming’s elaborate plan to get the ‘pinch’ from a German ship required a captured German bomber. ‘I suggest we obtain the loot by the following means,’ he wrote before outlining a plan that had all the feel of a first, tentative blueprint for the fictional hero who was to make him famous. Those taking part in Operation Ruthless should each be ‘tough, a bachelor, able to swim’, he wrote, pencilling in his own name in brackets alongside one of the positions. ‘Pick a tough crew of five, including a pilot, wireless operator and word-perfect German speaker (Fleming). Dress them in German Air Force uniform, add blood and bandages to suit.’

  They would wait until the next German air raid on London and, as the bombers returned home, take off and hide among the other aircraft. On the French side of the Channel the bomber would send out an SOS. It would then switch off one engine, lose height fast, ‘with smoke pouring from a candle in the tail’, and ditch in the sea. The team would then put off in a rubber dinghy, having ensured that the bomber sank before the Germans could identify it, and wait to be rescued by the German Navy. Fleming’s plan continued: ‘Once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring boat back to English port.’

  Frank Birch thought it was a ‘very ingenious plot’ and gave it Bletchley’s backing. But Operation Ruthless was called off, causing immense disappointment at Bletchley Park. ‘Turing and Twinn came to me like undertakers cheated of a nice corpse yesterday, all in a stew about the cancellation of Ruthless,’ Birch told Fleming. ‘The burden of their song was the importance of a pinch. Did the authorities realise that there was very little hope, if any, of their deciphering current, or even approximately current, Enigma for months and months and months – if ever – without a pinch.’

  During this period there was not much for the girls to do but sit
and wait. There were very few messages being broken and none of them were broken until sometime after they had been transmitted. Pat Wright spent a lot of time sitting by the lake thinking, but she rarely spoke to any of the people from the other huts.

  ‘The lake was a place you went for peace and quiet. There was a landing stage there and a boat and you didn’t think anything of it if when you were coming off shift at midnight you saw a young man in the boat in the middle of the lake. They were just taking time to think.’

  Pat was billeted in Bletchley itself, a short ten-minute walk away from the Park. Bletchley was an important railway junction and there were a lot of railway employees in the town. Len Tomlin was an engine driver and his wife Nessa, who was in her forties, was not one to mince her words, as Pat soon found out.

  ‘She was a very capable woman with a range of language I had never encountered before. I had been brought up fairly strictly and she used words I hardly knew the meaning of. I remember it was the first house I had come across that had a toilet in the garden and I spent five minutes of my first evening there with my toilet bag touring around looking for the bathroom. But Mrs Tomlin was very good to me. She had an engine driver husband and a fireman son and she never took the tablecloth off. She always had food on the table.’

  In her time off, Pat would meet up with other girls from Hut 8 and sit in the buffet at the station. If she had more than a day off at a time she would go home to Woolwich to see her parents. They were curious as to what she did but her father clearly knew better than to ask and when her mother asked why she worked so many nights she told her it was because of the wartime shortage of typewriters. She had to work nights to get access to a typewriter.

  With the U-boats sinking several hundred Allied ships between June and October 1940, Hut 8 came under increasing pressure to break the Dolphin Enigma. It wasn’t until the early spring of 1941 that they began to see the light. The first of a series of pinches of Enigma key tables that would turn the tide was obtained in a commando raid on a German armed trawler, the Krebs, off the Norwegian Lofoten Islands in March. This allowed Bletchley to break some old messages but nothing new that would have provided useful intelligence. Pat Wright remembered it as a very quiet, boring time. If nothing was happening, she and the other girls in the Big Room tended to mess about a bit just to liven things up and keep themselves amused.