The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  ‘Reams of paper used to come in and then you had to check it all off. It was incredibly tedious but there were a jolly nice lot of girls there. We just made the best of it, and the Glassborow twins were on the same shift as me, which was good because they were fun.’

  The Allies were by now aware that a sizeable faction within the Japanese government would be prepared to sue for peace, but the messages being decoded at Bletchley showed that, despite horrific losses, the Japanese military remained determined to fight on.

  The only man capable of bringing the Japanese Army to heel was the Emperor himself. On 12 July 1945, the Allies intercepted a Purple message from Tokyo to Japan’s ambassador in Moscow ordering him to hand the Russians an urgent plea for peace from Emperor Hirohito. The message was sent just days before the Potsdam Conference at which Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was to meet with Winston Churchill and Harry Truman, the new US President.

  Truman was already on his way to Potsdam when Hirohito’s peace approach was decoded. Allied intelligence had advised that if the Emperor ordered the Japanese armed forces to surrender they would obey but that if ‘unconditional surrender’ meant the Emperor must lose his throne and be treated as a war criminal, the Japanese would fight to the last man.

  Four days after Emperor Hirohito’s message was intercepted, the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert. For reasons which remain inexplicable, and despite an acceptance by both America and Britain that the Emperor would have to be retained in order to control post-war Japan, no attempt was made privately to reassure the Japanese that he would not be forced to stand down. America and Britain issued an ultimatum to Japan. If there was not an immediate and unconditional surrender, it would lead to ‘the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland’.

  Lacking any assurances over the future of the Emperor, the Japanese were never likely to surrender. At 8.15 local time on the morning of 6 August 1945, a United States B29 bomber dropped an atomic bomb on the southwestern Japanese port of Hiroshima, flattening two-thirds of the city. Three days later, a second bomb exploded over the port of Nagasaki, razing it to the ground. More than 200,000 people died as a direct result, with the number of deaths from the long-term effects of radiation impossible to calculate.

  Even before the news that the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima was officially announced, the messages arriving in Bletchley Park provided Rosemary Calder with a terrifying vision of what had taken place.

  ‘I was on a day watch by myself and all this stuff came in and it was total gibberish. I didn’t know the bomb had been dropped but you could tell from the disruption of all the messages that something terrible had happened. You could just feel the people standing there screaming their heads off.’

  The dropping of the atomic bombs led the Japanese to sue for peace. Only then were they told that – despite the insistence on ‘unconditional surrender’ – the Emperor was always going to be allowed to keep his throne. Had they been told that two weeks earlier, the war would almost certainly have been ended without recourse to the atomic bomb, and the countless loss of life.

  Marion Graham and the Glassborow twins were on duty in the Clinical Monitoring Section on the morning of 15 August 1945 when their boss Commander Williams came in and said: ‘Well done, girls. A signal’s been intercepted and it does appear that the Japanese are about to surrender.’

  Marion and the rest of them just sat there not sure what to say. Commander Williams shuffled about a bit looking embarrassed, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next. Then he said: ‘Well, you bloody well get on with your work now,’ before adding that he would come back if he heard anything more. Marion and her friends didn’t have long to wait.

  ‘About half an hour later, he came back and said: “The war’s over.” It was quite a moment. Of course, I wasn’t the first but I must have been one of the first to know and he did say that a message had gone to the King and to the Prime Minister, so it was tremendously exciting.’

  The girls didn’t have anything else to do so they just got on with their work, pointless though it now seemed, and when they went home on the transport they didn’t say anything to anyone about it, unsure whether it was all still secret. When Marion got back to her billet one of the family asked her if she’d heard the news. The war was over.

  ‘I couldn’t say, “Yes, I know,” so I just said: “How wonderful.” And that was it.’

  10

  An Extraordinary Army of People

  Sally Norton was working the night shift in the Admiralty Citadel on Horse Guards Parade when the news came through from Bletchley that Germany had surrendered. It made for a very busy night and she still hadn’t managed to collect her thoughts when she left work that morning and headed home to her flat.

  ‘I was too tired to be deliriously happy and just felt a deep contentment, but as I walked along the Mall the sound of church bells began to peal out all over London. We had not heard those bells for five and a half years. I went back to my flat and fell asleep, too tired to take my clothes off.’

  That evening, at a party to celebrate victory in Europe, Sally met her future husband Bill Astor, a Conservative politician and the future 3rd Viscount Astor. Afterwards she joined the throngs of people celebrating in Trafalgar Square and along the capital’s streets. She’d had a wonderfully rewarding job but it was coming to an end and she wasn’t sure that anything she did would ever be quite so exciting again.

  ‘Looking back to VE Day, reliving the happiness and relief that the conflict was over, I remember a feeling of being forgotten. No campaign ribbons. Not that we deserved any. No certificate such as our colleagues in the Red Cross received. Just nothing. Even a pat on the back might have elevated the psyche, but if you work for Special Intelligence that’s what you must expect and on reflection it was well worth it.

  ‘We formed great bonds with the people we worked with. There was an extraordinary army of people there from all walks of life. Wrens, girls like me, people in uniform, army, navy, air force, Americans. All walks of life, all classes of life, especially among the Wrens. Literally walk down any street in London, you’d see the same mix of people.’

  Sally and Bill Astor had one son, William, later the 4th Viscount Astor, but were divorced in 1953 and she then married Thomas Baring. They had one adopted son, Edward, and were divorced in 1965. Sally never remarried. She died in 2013, a couple of weeks after her ninety-third birthday.

  Colette St George-Yorke and some of her fellow Bombe operators were standing on the balcony at the small ‘Wrennery’ in Steeple Claydon when the bells on the little village church of St Michael started ringing. They didn’t stop.

  ‘Someone came up and said the war’s over. We just stood there in the window and cried.’

  The next day they were sent back to Stanmore to dismantle the Bombes. Roma Davies, or Wren Stenning as she then was, was at Eastcote, also dismantling the Bombes. Nothing was to remain of them, supposedly on Mr Churchill’s orders. It was imperative that no one found out they’d been breaking the Enigma codes. Whether the decision to destroy the Bombes was made by the Prime Minister is a moot point, but Roma and the other Wrens undoubtedly believed it was.

  ‘We were always told Mr Churchill was the only one to know our secret, so naturally it was very easy to believe that he ordered the dismantling of the machines. I was one of the people who helped to take them to bits, right down to very tiny bits. We had huge bonfires to destroy all the paperwork. We demolished every bit of evidence of our ever being there.’

  Roma was then sent to Bletchley to work on the Japanese codes until the war in the Far East came to an end. Dorothy Robertson was still out in Colombo when Japan surrendered. She found herself doing what would be the most moving and at the same time most satisfying job of her life. Thousands of prisoners of war released from camps across the Far East were being brought back to Britain, stopping off in Colombo for a period of rehabilitation.

  ‘Three of us sorted mail for incoming ex-
PoWs and helped any who wanted to send a message home. It was hard to remain dry-eyed when a lad would open and read the first letter he had had from home for several years, from a mother, wife or sweetheart. One chap read out to me: “She says, I am still waiting,” as he broke down and wept.’

  They weren’t all members of the forces. Expatriate Britons, many of them women, had been swept up by the Japanese and subjected to appalling brutality in the camps. The women were taken to a ‘beauty parlour’ set up by the Wrens, where they could take a shower, have their hair cut and styled, and make-up put on their faces for the first time in four or five years.

  ‘It was good for their morale but to see their worn and gaunt skin underneath was sad. We were all very moved and felt immensely humble in the presence of the PoWs who had suffered so much and for so long.’

  Finally Dorothy was sent home on a troopship, much more crowded and far less exciting than the one she’d gone out on. Britain was effectively bankrupt, beholden to the United States for the cash needed to keep the country going, with every penny having to be watched.

  ‘Life afterwards in post-war Britain was really grey and cheerless. There were innumerable shortages, and ration cards and clothing coupons were to continue for some time yet. People had gone through a ghastly time, but the knowledge that we – incredibly – had won this six-year war, when at times it seemed impossible, was everything.’

  The Government Code and Cypher School moved to the Eastcote site under its new name of the Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. Most of the temporary Foreign Office staff recruited during the war were being laid off. Pre-war staff like Barbara Abernethy and Phoebe Senyard were told they could keep their jobs, but others were being made redundant with just one week’s wages. Barbara was left to close up the Park.

  ‘The General Post Office was going to take the place over. So we just left everything as it was. We closed down the huts, put all the files away and sent them down to Eastcote. I was the last person left at Bletchley Park. I locked the gates and then took the key down to Eastcote. That was it.’

  It was an emotional departure for Barbara. That midnight meeting between Commander Denniston and the Americans had changed her life. Barbara fell in love with one of the US naval officers sent to Bletchley as a liaison officer. Joe Eachus already had a wife back in America, but he was soon to be divorced and, in 1947, Barbara was transferred to the GCHQ liaison office in the United States, where she and Joe were married. After leaving GCHQ in 1956, she worked at the British Consulate in Boston and became a vice-consul in charge of media liaison. Barbara was appointed MBE as a result of her work in the consulate rather than for her work at Bletchley, and retired from the Consular Service in 1986. Joe had two sons from his previous marriage but Barbara and Joe never had any children of their own. Joe died in 2003 and Barbara in 2012.

  Betty Vine-Stevens and Julie Lydekker flew to America at the end of the European war and spent the next few months working with the Americans on Japanese codes, enjoying the complete contrast to the depressing austerity of wartime Britain. They had every weekend off and enjoyed a variety of foods they’d never seen before, including inch-thick fillet steaks and real ice cream.

  At the end of the war against Japan, they returned to Britain and were demobbed. Betty took a secretarial course ‘for young gentlewomen’ in London and then went home to Richard’s Castle near Ludlow, but found it very difficult to get a job.

  ‘I tried, of course, but you’d go to a prospective employer and they’d ask what you were doing during the war and you’d say you couldn’t tell them. I just said I was not at liberty to say. Faces went blank. They didn’t understand and they were quite shirty.’

  Then she applied for a job as secretary to the headmaster at Ludlow Grammar School. When he interviewed her they both realised that they had seen each other at Bletchley, so she didn’t have to explain, and she got the job, although neither of them ever said anything about their work in the war.

  ‘That was before the veil of secrecy was lifted. We didn’t say anything about it. We just knew that we’d both been there. But we didn’t ever talk about it.’

  Betty later joined the Territorial Army and worked as an administrative officer for a number of years before getting married in 1970 at the age of forty-seven; sadly, her husband Alfred died seven years later. Bletchley remains very close to her heart and she now gives talks about the work there.

  ‘It has not always been easy to talk about it but once you are able to talk about something like that it all comes gushing out. It was a very important thing. I feel very much that I’ve been privileged to be involved in it.’

  As one of the pre-war staff of the Government Code and Cypher School, Phoebe Senyard moved to Eastcote with Barbara Abernethy, travelling into work from Peckham each day on the Tube. Both Phoebe’s mother and her brother Henry survived the war. Phoebe retired in August 1951, with GCHQ then in the process of transferring to Cheltenham. She, her mother and Henry moved to Croydon, where she settled down in retirement with many happy memories of her time at Bletchley Park.

  ‘They were happy days. The people that I knew in the German Naval Section were a very kind, cooperative crowd; nothing was too much trouble for them to do and I could never wish to work with finer people. They were a grand crowd.’

  Phoebe’s mother died a year after they moved to Croydon. Phoebe herself died in 1983, aged ninety-one. She never married.

  Mavis Batey (née Lever), Joan Clarke and Margaret Rock all went to Eastcote with GCHQ to work on Russian codes. Margaret was appointed MBE at the end of the war and continued working at GCHQ until her retirement in 1963. She never married and died in 1983 at the age of eighty, having never spoken about anything she did either at Bletchley or for GCHQ. Joan Clarke was appointed MBE in 1947 and continued to work for GCHQ until 1952 when she married Jock Murray, one of her colleagues at Cheltenham. She rejoined GCHQ in 1962 and retired in 1977. She had no children and died in 1996, aged seventy-nine.

  Mavis left GCHQ in 1947 to start a family and when Keith was appointed to a post at the High Commission in Ottawa she went with him. They had two daughters and a son, and Mavis stayed at home to bring them up. Then in the 1960s, Keith became ‘Secretary of the Chest’ at Oxford University, the chief financial officer of the university. The Bateys lived in a house in the grounds of the university-owned Nuneham Courtenay estate and Mavis began work on the restoration of the eighteenth-century gardens. It led to a pioneering role in garden history that she said was heavily influenced by her former boss Dilly Knox.

  ‘Working for an eccentric genius, whose motto was “Nothing is impossible”, during the most formative years of my life made a lasting impression.’

  The post-war period of the 1950s and 1960s were times of great change in Britain, much of it positive but a lot of it detrimental. The slogan ‘new lives, new landscapes’ was current and historic parks and estates were being destroyed by the construction of new roads. Mavis always insisted that it was Dilly’s insistence that ‘nothing is impossible’ and the way that women were treated equally at Bletchley – in all aspects apart from pay – which gave her the confidence she needed for the fight to protect historic gardens and parks.

  ‘Women who worked at Bletchley Park have much to be grateful for. It was a remarkable community where neither rank nor status counted and a girl of nineteen with a bright idea would be encouraged to take it forward, long before any official equality for women. Throughout Bletchley Park and its outstations all that mattered was getting the job done.’

  Mavis was appointed MBE for her work on protecting historic gardens, having received no honours for her many achievements at Bletchley. She wrote many books on garden history including Jane Austen and the English Landscape and Alexander Pope: The Poet and the Landscape, and also an affectionate and much-needed biography of her old boss, Dilly: The Man Who Broke Enigmas. Keith died in 2010 and Mavis in 2013.

  When Jane Hughes left Bletchley she took up a s
cholarship at the Royal Academy of Music and trained as a professional singer, marrying her Royal Navy officer fiancé Ted Fawcett and having her two children while she was studying.

  ‘I went to my final exam with one of my children inside me and the other one asleep in a carrycot and the examiners kept asking me if I wanted to sit down because I was seven months pregnant.’

  Jane spent fifteen years as a professional singer, performing a lot of opera and recital work of which the most prominent roles were Scylla in Scylla et Glaucus, as the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas and singing ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ (‘Since I Saw Him’) from Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und -leben Opus 42 (A Woman’s Love and Life).

  It was ‘a very exciting time’ in her life but it meant touring and too much time spent away from her children, so in 1963 she gave up professional singing and took a job as the secretary of the Victorian Society, set up five years earlier to prevent the demolition of old Victorian buildings and their replacement with the characterless concrete and glass popular in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Despite Jane becoming what was effectively the chief administrator, it was not a lucrative position as the society had little money. When Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the society’s director, wrote offering her the post, he said he was glad to tell her that ‘the ill-paid job for the enthusiast has gone to you’.

  Working from home on her own portable typewriter, Jane joined Pevsner in a whirlwind campaign to prevent the destruction of the country’s great Victorian buildings. It was a remarkable pairing. The biggest battle was with British Rail, whose executives had just sparked a public outcry by knocking down the main arch in front of Euston Station when Jane appeared on the scene. They now found themselves frustrated at every turn by the woman they took to calling ‘The Furious Mrs Fawcett’.