The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  Herbert Sichel, a member of a family of genuine and very famous wine merchants, had begun working for MI6 before the war, setting up his own wine importers, distinct from the family business, and using it to gather intelligence on Germany and Italy. The various branches of his shops were employed as fronts for MI6 operations and for the recruitment and payment of spies.

  ‘There was a wine shop on one side and then when you went through the door there was a large place full of people, desks and things. I was told to go upstairs and at the top of the stairs there was an office. There was a senior officer sat behind a desk and a row of coloured telephones and he was talking into two different telephones in two different languages.’

  Eventually, he put one of the phones down and a short while afterwards ended the other telephone conversation. He then asked Mary some fairly innocuous questions before telling her she would have to go before a full selection board. She was called back to London a couple of weeks later and in a more formal setting sat before a board chaired by a senior RAF officer but made up mostly of people who seemed to be civilians, including at least one woman.

  ‘They were terrifying people, eight or nine of them. The questions were extremely varied. They asked me about French poetry. They asked me about German philosophy. They asked me about all sorts of things but then came that awful question. They asked me what I thought about the art of the Ming dynasty.’

  Mary struggled for what to her seemed ages but was probably not much more than ten seconds. She was fed up with all the stupid questions that couldn’t possibly have any relevance to what was going on in the war, and for a brief moment the only way out seemed to be flippancy.

  ‘I think it’s slightly different from the Ting.’

  There was a deathly silence. Everyone seemed to be looking at her as if she was a stupid young girl who didn’t understand how serious everything was.

  ‘My answer was so frivolous and ghastly that I thought as soon as I said it, you idiot, what on earth did you say that for? That’s put the lid on everything. And then to my great surprise, someone sniggered, and then they all laughed, and the chairman said: “Thank you. That will be all.”’

  Mary was certain she’d messed it up, but a few weeks later she received a letter ordering her to report to the School of Oriental and African Studies in Russell Square, in the centre of London’s Bloomsbury district, to study Japanese. She wasn’t the only one. There were six other WAAFs on the same course: Eileen Clarke, Evelyn Curtis, Cicely Naismith, Denise Gifford-Hull, Margaret Brabbs and Peggy Jackson.

  They hit it off immediately, seven young women living in London in RAF quarters off Harley Street, learning Japanese together, testing each other with cards depicting the various Japanese Kana syllables on their way to college, to the bemusement of the other passengers on the red No. 14 double-decker bus. The girls had no idea why they were learning Japanese, although the fact that they seemed to be learning only words related to the use of aircraft gave them a clue. But they were young women, most of them away from home for the first time, growing up quickly together. They bonded in an astonishingly inseparable way, calling themselves ‘the JappyWaaf’, although none of them could quite remember who suggested the title or why.

  It was supposed to be a six-month course, but three months in Mary was pulled out, leaving the others behind, and told she was needed urgently. Even then no one told her where she was going. She was just given a railway warrant and told to take a certain train from Euston Station and get off at the third stop. The third stop was Bletchley Junction.

  ‘There was an RAF person on the platform waiting for me. I was taken up to Church Green barracks, put in a hut, given a bed and told that I was to report to Joe Hooper, the head of the Japanese Air Section, in Block F the next day.’

  Britain had been breaking Japanese codes since the 1920s, first in Shanghai, then Hong Kong, and from August 1939 in Singapore. Most of the codes were broken initially in England by John Tiltman, the head of the Bletchley Park Military Section, a man so bright that he’d been offered a place at Oxford at the age of thirteen. Tiltman broke the main Japanese army code in September 1938 and the main Japanese naval code JN25 within weeks of its introduction in the summer of 1939. The results were then sent out to Singapore, where they continued breaking the codes on a daily basis using the methods Tiltman had devised.

  But initially it was the Japanese diplomatic messages that were more important to Bletchley, and in particular the messages sent by the Japanese ambassador in Berlin, Oshima Hiroshi, who had direct access to Hitler and senior figures within the Nazi regime. Oshima reported back to Tokyo on everything the Germans were doing, using a machine cipher that the Allies codenamed Purple. The British codebreakers hadn’t cracked it, but the Americans had, and when they arrived at Bletchley Park in February 1941 to drink sherry with Commander Denniston they brought a Purple machine with them to exchange for the British expertise in breaking the German Enigma codes.

  Purple was one of the US codebreakers’ greatest contributions to the Anglo-American cooperation in breaking the wartime codes. It allowed Bletchley to read all the top-secret messages between Japan’s embassies around the world and Tokyo, most importantly Oshima’s reports from Berlin on what Hitler planned to do next.

  When the Japanese invaded Malaya in December 1941, the British Far Eastern codebreakers had to flee Singapore, moving first to Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and then, in April 1942 to Kilindini, near Mombasa, in what is now Kenya but was then known as British East Africa. From 1941 onwards they were supported by a number of Wrens. Some intercepted the messages, others helped in the codebreaking process or analysed the Japanese communications to gather intelligence. The Wrens also operated Hollerith electro-mechanical data-processing machines, precursors of the computer. The Hollerith machines sorted cards on which data was punched using a system of rectangular holes. Operated almost entirely by women, they were a key part of the codebreaking process at Bletchley itself, initially in Hut 7 and from late 1942 in the newly built Block C. Marjorie Halcrow, a 22-year-old graduate from Aberdeen University, was one of those working there.

  ‘The cards were punched up on a machine about the size of a typewriter. There was a room containing about twenty or thirty of them called the punch room where girls copied the coded messages onto these punch cards. The main room contained much larger machines – about the size of a small piano – called the sorting machines, which could read the cards and sort the hundreds of thousands of messages into different categories. There were loads of sorters and there were collating machines that were even larger. The whole department was filled with machinery. It was a very noisy place, banging on all night and day.’

  Once the Hollerith machines moved into Block C, a Japanese Naval Section was set up in Hut 7 under Hugh Foss. It was the first of what would become a large number of dedicated Japanese sections. Hugh’s team worked on all the naval codes in close collaboration with Kilindini.

  Hugh Foss was a brilliant codebreaker who’d done some pioneering work on Enigma long before Dilly Knox took it on. But he had a somewhat quirky personality and his cousin Elizabeth Browning, who also worked in the Japanese Naval Section, recalled that this eccentricity was vividly reflected in his household arrangements. His wife Alison struggled to cope with their two small children and managing the house so Hugh would go home every day at half past four to put the children to bed and cook the evening meal.

  ‘An example of their modus vivendi was the highly complicated arrangement for washing-up (dreamed up, needless to say, by Hugh). Every article was supposed to be washed in a particular order – saucers first (as least polluted by human lips); then teaspoons; then side plates; then pudding plates; soup bowls; main course plates; knives; glasses; cups; forks; pudding and soup spoons; and finally saucepans. As these were usually stacked on the floor the dogs were a great help.’

  While the theory behind this might have been logical to Hugh’s highly ordered mind, housework wasn
’t seen as a high priority in the Foss household and there were usually several days’ worth of plates and dishes piled up in and around the sink.

  ‘If one tried to help there would be shrieks of: “Oh, you mustn’t do the cups yet, saucers first.” There was also in theory some weird arrangement so that things Hugh was supposed to put away were located at distances appropriate to his great height and long arms, while Alison, who was small and dumpy, had a shorter range. But in practice things ended up pretty well anywhere.’

  The Japanese Naval Section included a number of Wrens like Rosemary Calder, who worked in the Traffic Analysis Section run by the Cambridge historian Sir John Plumb.

  ‘I was interviewed by Jack Plumb who told me “we analyse traffic”. I had no idea what this meant. I had this picture in my mind of people sat on camp stools by the side of the road counting lorries.’

  Angus Wilson, later a famous novelist, was in charge of the actual room in which Rosemary worked. He was openly homosexual in a way which would never have been allowed in most top-secret establishments in wartime Britain.

  ‘Angus was a great darling who spoiled us all and we spoiled him in return. He called us all “ducky” and he had this special friend called Bentley Bridgewater who later went on to become Secretary of the British Museum. Angus was brilliant but crazy. He’d had at least one nervous breakdown before I got there and was still going to Oxford to see a psychiatrist. But he was very good-natured most of the time and if he started getting agitated, we would just give him a copy of Vogue or Tatler and he could go off and sit down by the lake flicking through it and come back as happy as a sandboy.’

  The entire section was very egalitarian; everyone was treated as if they had as much intellectual capability as anyone else and encouraged to use their own initiative.

  ‘Any of us could do any of the jobs in the office. It was a very democratic place, Wrens mixed up with civilians. We might as well have not been in uniform. We were having a marvellous time. It was like being back at college.’

  When Olive Humble was called up at the beginning of 1943 she wanted to join the Wrens but she was sent to the Foreign Office and packed off to Bletchley to work for Hugh Foss. After leaving school, Olive had worked in an insurance office in the City and, like the majority of the young women at Bletchley, had never left home before.

  ‘I arrived at Bletchley Parkand, to my great consternation, was escorted to the billeting office by an armed soldier. I was parcelled off to a Commander Thatcher, a fierce naval man who put the fear of God into me. He informed me that from then on I would not be allowed to leave the Park other than through death or disablement, that if I said one word of what I or anyone else was doing, even to my nearest and dearest, I would get thirty years without the option. He stood over me while I digested the Official Secrets Act and dutifully signed it.’

  Olive’s first billet was in Bedford where the woman of the house was very unhappy at being forced to take a tenant and insisted Olive couldn’t stay around the house during the evening.

  ‘For the few months I was there she made my life miserable. I was turned out in the evenings as I was in the way.’

  There was a large American barracks in Bedford and at night the town was full of American troops, so a woman on her own was the subject of constant unwanted attention.

  ‘I was petrified. Later I made a friend in my section and we joined forces and went to another billet, again in Bedford, to a Mr and Mrs Buick, who had two children. They were completely and absolutely magnificent, never probed, always there for us.’

  Olive was put to work in the section dealing with Japanese merchant ships. Her section was split into two, one half manned by civilian women and the other half by Wrens and Royal Navy officers.

  ‘I found myself sitting at a table with six to eight Wrens. In the centre of the room was the boss, Major H.E. Martin. He was older than us, of course, and looked after his youngsters like a benevolent father. At the other end were three or four navy boys, all young and bright. I was quite happy, as I’d really wanted to join the Wrens.’

  The codebreakers in Kilindini had broken the Japanese merchant navy code, which was made up of blocks of five figures each representing a Japanese term or syllable. So many messages were being sent by the Japanese merchant ships, known as ‘Maru’, transporting troops and supplies around the Indian and Pacific Oceans that Kilindini had been able to recreate the entire codebook. Olive, the Wrens and the navy officers they worked with used this to decode the messages.

  ‘We put the five-figure blocks, typed on flimsy paper, into clear English letters and constructed clear messages, such as: “Otaru Maru leaving Manila at 0200 hrs for Singapore arrives such and such.” These messages were then passed to Major Martin. We didn’t know what was happening in any other part of the section: the need-to-know syndrome was very much to the fore.’

  Olive didn’t get involved in the social life at Bletchley because her billet in Bedford was too far away, and being on shifts all the time didn’t help.

  ‘When I did get time off, I would remain in Bedford, sometimes with a Wren, whose name I have forgotten but who introduced me to Mozart. She would drag me into her favourite music shop, and we would land in the booths and listen to records. My recollection of hearing Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for the first time is still very vivid.’

  The many odd characters Olive met at Bletchley made a very firm impression on her, like one clever young man who could only work if he had a bottle of whisky beside him. It was rumoured that the Foreign Office supplied him with a bottle a day until he had a breakdown and had to be taken away.

  ‘I remember passing him in the corridors, always dressed in a pin-stripe suit, papers under his arm, muttering to himself, and a strong smell of malt wafting by with him. Another bright specimen divested himself of all his clothing and galloped round the lake with the army in hot pursuit, cheered on by us spectators on the banks, and the Wrens rowing lustily on the lake.’

  In late 1943, with the Japanese retreating, the codebreakers in Kilindini began moving back to Colombo, a move that was to lead to tragedy. Eight Wren Typex operators en route from Kenya to Ceylon were killed in February 1944 when their ship, the Khedive Ismail, was sunk by a Japanese submarine.

  With Italy now out of the war after surrendering in September 1943, more resources were thrown into the war against Japan and several hundred Wrens were trained at Bletchley Park before being posted to Colombo. Dorothy Robertson was a traffic analyst, studying the radio messages for hints of what the Japanese were planning to do. After several weeks of training, during which they lived in Woburn Abbey, Dorothy and sixty other Wrens were shipped out to Colombo.

  ‘We must have had several submarine scares, as we often zigzagged en route, but life was so exciting with only some sixty Wrens and forty female army nurses on board and with five to six thousand servicemen. We really had a marvellous time.’

  The troops’ access to the women was ‘rationed’, with different batches allowed to chat to them at different times and dancing on deck with a new batch of men every night. Things started to hot up when they reached the Suez Canal.

  ‘We began to notice a lot of landing craft moving towards us filled with men in white helmets. As they came alongside, one helmet looked upwards at us and emitted a loud cry: “Gee, dames!” Whereupon the whole flotilla of landing craft looked up and bawled: “Gee, dames!” Over the following days, the Yanks were also rationed to meet us, but somehow they seemed to appear here and there on our deck. They were often very amusing and terrible flirts. Our British lads were absolutely furious and used to surround us, four or five to one Wren, as an anti-Yank bodyguard.’

  The Wrens were quartered in the grounds of Kent House, a large colonial house; whitewashed huts with thatched palm leaf roofs provided cabins for around five hundred Wrens. They worked at the HMS Anderson intercept site half an hour away in the middle of the jungle. There were around a thousand men to every girl on the island and there wer
e always plenty of invitations to dances in the messes of the various units based in Ceylon.

  ‘The favourite evening spot was the little nightclub, the Silver Fawn, where we’d be taken for a really glamorous evening’s dinner-dancing, the live band playing favourite dance tunes, the lights low, flowers for one’s dress, gorgeous food.

  ‘You can imagine how spoiled we were, and we loved it. It was incredibly heady stuff for girls of our age. We were only in our early twenties, and there was usually the knowledge that the boyfriend would be leaving for India or Burma soon, perhaps never to return. How different and naive we were; one never heard of any misbehaviour. We had all been brought up so much more strictly then.’

  Back at Bletchley, John Tiltman continued to lead the way in breaking Japanese codes. He’d broken the Japanese military attaché code in mid-1942 and the main Japanese Air Force code in early 1943. By the time Mary Wisbey arrived at Bletchley in late 1943, there were so many Japanese sections in Block F that the long corridor running through it was known as ‘the Burma Road’ after the 700-mile-long British supply route from Burma into southwest China. Mary was put into a sub-section of the Japanese Air Section.

  ‘The first job I had to do was extremely boring: the call-sign index was terribly behind as no one had worked on it for some time. I had to work so terribly hard to bring it up to date. It took quite a long time as I was doing it on my own.’

  The rest of Mary’s JappyWaaf soon arrived but were put into separate departments and, although they were all working on Japanese codes in Block F, and most were working in different sub-sections of the Japanese Air Section, none knew what any of the others were doing. But they still socialised together. The JappyWaaf were virtually inseparable.

  ‘In our spare time we’d hare off to London to get away from Bletchley. All sorts of nice things like dancing and theatres and entertainment and decent food. You had to have an antidote to the work. I played a lot of tennis, on the famous Bletchley tennis courts, and acted in the Bletchley Park players.’