The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

by Michael Smith

  The most dramatic victory came in 1967, when with the assistance of Prince Philip and John Betjeman the society succeeded in ensuring the listing of the St Pancras locomotive shed and the station’s Midland Grand Hotel, both of which British Rail had been determined to knock down. It was a campaign of which Jane was very proud.

  ‘The fact that St Pancras is intact is one of my special achievements. Not only the train shed but the hotel. I never thought it would be a hotel again. But it is. It’s quite remarkable and it retains so many original features. It is a magnificent building by any standards.’

  Jane stepped down in 1976 and was appointed MBE for her services to conservation as well as being elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. As with Mavis Batey, a close friend of both Jane and her husband, the refusal to give up engrained at Bletchley had served her well in her post-war careers.

  ‘It was a very exciting period. They were exhausting days because we always seemed to be in a minority. It was a big undertaking to turn over a whole nation from one attitude towards architecture to another.’

  Marigold Philips stayed in the Wrens for a while after leaving Bletchley. She was sent to a base in Cornwall to teach sailors about Shakespeare, which was supposed to help them adapt back to civilian life.

  ‘It was tremendous fun but totally pointless. All they did was look at my black-stocking-clad legs as I stood on the platform.’

  The majority of young Wrens simply wanted to get back to their ordinary lives, and for most that meant finding a husband and settling down with a young family. Despite her previous determination to get herself a university education, Marigold was no different.

  ‘All we wanted was “normality”; to have, in this order, a husband, a baby, a house and a car. I had no ambitions and I think that was very common. It had seemed so unnatural, the life we had led, that we swung too far the other way and of course a great many people bitterly regretted it.’

  The marriages that took place during the war or in its immediate aftermath frequently fell apart. Marigold was lucky. She married David, an army officer, and because he was posted to a succession of overseas bases, she had the opportunity to work as a teacher in schools for servicemen’s children, so she had a rewarding job. Most were not so fortunate.

  ‘We all heard stories of the young mothers with good brains who suddenly found they had a husband at work all day and two small children at home and went nearly batty with frustration. It was a quite severe social problem after the war.’

  Marigold and David had two sons and a daughter but eventually the marriage crumbled and she married another army officer, Harold Freeman-Attwood. She didn’t tell either of her husbands what she’d done in the war and when the news emerged in 1974, when the former head of the MI6 Air Section Frederick Winterbotham published The Ultra Secret, she was shocked. Neither she nor any of her friends who had worked with her were happy that the story they were told must never be revealed was now the subject of a bestselling book by one of the senior officers in charge of keeping it secret.

  ‘It was horrible. We hated it. We didn’t like the secret coming out. It was like having a bit of skin that had grown over something peeled off. The secrecy was so engrained that even now talking about it still feels like you’re gossiping to someone. I still hate talking about it.’

  But like the vast majority of the thousands of women who worked at Bletchley, Marigold regards her small part with great pride. At its peak some 12,000 people worked at Bletchley and the Bombe outstations, more than 8,000 of them women.

  It was hugely important for me, and I think it must have been for everybody who was there. Whether you liked it or not you were one of the geese who laid the golden eggs and in your lowest moment, when you’re feeling like shit, at least you can say: “I played my part. I did my bit to help win the war.”’

  Most of the Bletchley veterans were determined to keep the secret until they died. They’d been indoctrinated into staying quiet forever, so the Winterbotham revelations were a great shock. Joy Higgins met her first husband Hugh at Bletchley. He worked in the Naval Section in Hut 4. Even though both of them had worked at Bletchley Park, Joy never told him what she did and he never told her what he’d done.

  ‘People without our common background at Bletchley found it much more difficult to accept a partner’s refusal to discuss the work there. It must have been hard for them.’

  Hugh died in 1967, nine years before the government’s decision to allow former codebreakers to tell their relatives what they did in the war, so even now Joy has only the vaguest idea of what her husband did; but she knows that, like her, he loved working at Bletchley.

  ‘Nothing would ever compare with it. It had been a wonderful place to work: a classless society where brains, application and enthusiasm were the criteria. The ethos of Bletchley meant that women were treated as equals – years ahead of any “politically correct” diktats; that new schemes for tackling a job were never snubbed; it meant new ideas and not accepting old standards without question; it meant informality; it meant talking the same language with like-minded people, whether it was serious discussion or witty repartee.’

  But for many years afterwards their work at Bletchley Park conditioned their lives. Joy felt for her husband, whose pre-war contemporaries had returned full of stories of bravery in the face of danger, of battles with the Germans or the Japanese. They had medals to prove that they had done their bit.

  ‘They hadn’t much respect for civilians who’d spent the war years as civil servants in the Foreign Office, not on active service. Things were not made easier by our reluctance to say anything at all. People were quick to label our evasions as rudeness.’

  Maggie Broughton-Thompson had stayed in the Wrens after the war, becoming an officer and only leaving in 1952 when she married a naval officer. She never told him about Bletchley Park and was horrified one day to see a television documentary telling the story of how they broke the codes.

  ‘I was sitting at home and my husband was watching a programme. I happened to glance up and at that precise moment there was a picture of the mansion and they were talking about it and I was so absolutely horrified. It was such a shock, I was jolly nearly sick.

  ‘I sat there pointing at the television shouting, “No, No, No.” He thought I’d gone mad, I think. It really was the most awful shock. We really were staying quiet for life. We were prepared to stay silent until our dying day.’

  Mary Wisbey found herself caught in a tug-of-war after Japan surrendered. She was posted to London to work in air intelligence but Joe Hooper insisted on her returning to work for him in the Russian Air Section at Eastcote.

  ‘I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay in air intelligence. It was much more interesting work. I wanted to broaden my view.’

  Eventually, she got herself posted to an air intelligence job in the RAF’s Middle East headquarters in Egypt and after two years was offered the choice of a permanent commission in the WAAF or a job in MI6. She chose MI6 and worked for them in Germany and the Middle East. It’s a period that even more than fifty years later she cannot discuss. Mary married John Every, a former RAF officer, in 1971 and they had fifteen very happy years together before he died. She’d kept in touch with all the other members of the JappyWaaf – Eileen, Evelyn, Cicely, Denise, Margaret and Peggy – and from the 1980s onwards they held annual reunions. They were so close that every time they met up it was as if they had only just seen each other the previous day in the Bletchley canteen.

  ‘On the fiftieth anniversary of the day we met on the Japanese course we had a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon and celebrated fifty years of friendship during which time we’d never had the slightest quarrel or any kind of difficulty.’

  They’d also been taken aback when the truth about Bletchley Park emerged in 1974 and it was not until that anniversary weekend at Stratford-on-Avon in 1992 that any of them talked about what they’d done during the war.

  ‘That
was the first time we discussed it, because at Bletchley Park none of us ever worked in the same office so I never knew until then what anybody else did. I had no idea. It is very difficult for people who didn’t work at Bletchley to realise what pressure we were under because we had to bottle it all up. It affected the rest of our lives. I never did tell my husband what I did during the war and my parents also never knew what I did.’

  Mair Thomas went back to the valleys to marry her childhood sweetheart Russ, a conscientious objector who had spent the war training to be a Baptist minister. She died in 2013, but not before penning a beautiful memoir of her time at Bletchley with her son Gethin Russell-Jones, in which she spoke of how proud she was of her war work.

  ‘I had the most wonderful time in Bletchley. From the first time I went into Hut 6 I felt special; privileged to be there. There were plenty of things I found difficult and hard at the time, but that’s life anyway. To think that I rubbed shoulders with some of the most brilliant men that Britain has ever produced and played a part in cracking the Enigma code is a source of daily amazement. To this day, I’m not sure how a girl from a quiet Welsh valley ended up in the centre of the action, but I am so thankful that it happened. Despite the shift pattern and the exhaustion and disorientation, there was exhilaration to it all. I remember someone saying to me that we were on the intellectual front line.’

  Susan Wenham never married and only rarely discussed her work in Hut 6 breaking the Enigma codes, but right up until her death in 2009 at the age of ninety-seven, she recalled ‘the mixture of nuttiness, angst, hard slog, and euphoria’ at Bletchley.

  ‘Little things return to mind, the identical twins, wide cheeks and hair piled high and with an “important” folder of documents tucked under the arm, who were deputed to instruct newcomers about Enigma – although I felt they didn’t understand it much better than I did.’

  She remembered John Monroe, a ‘brilliant’ barrister and codebreaker who was deeply upset that ‘with all that knowledge in his head’ he was not allowed to fight alongside his contemporaries on the front line, and John Manisty, head of maths at Winchester, who had a fascination with trains and an encyclopedic knowledge of Bradshaw’s, the national railways timetable, freely advising all and sundry on which trains they should take to get home as quickly as possible. He once told Susan how to get her horse back to Surrey without suffering any jolting stops that might lead to injuries.

  ‘Among the Blisters I remember a lively half-French woman called Yvette, Mary Penney, who longed to get back to her career as a violinist, and a jolly, bouncy girl who relished bawdy jokes and left to become a nun. After the war it was bliss to go to bed every night at a sensible time and gradually lose the tiredness which had become a part of me, but it was many years before I lost the recurrent dream of a message with a strange frequency which I couldn’t recognise.’

  For many of the women who worked at Bletchley Park or on the Bombes the most distressing thing was never being able to tell their parents, to give them a sense that their daughter was doing something worthwhile, to make them proud of what they had achieved.

  Olive Humble was on leave when Japan surrendered and when she got back to Bletchley she was given a week’s pay, told she was no longer required and hauled back up before Commander Thatcher to be warned that if she ever said anything she would face thirty years in jail or the firing squad.

  ‘I said farewell to the navy and to Major Martin, who gave me a glowing reference, including words like “National Importance”. The Foreign Office one was even better: “Employed on important and highly specialised work of a secret nature. The Official Secrets Act precludes any information in connection with these duties.” Heady stuff! Even better than navy cocoa.’

  Olive immigrated to South Africa in 1947 with Doris Ward, one of her colleagues in the Japanese Naval Section, although neither of them knew what work the other had done at Bletchley. Olive married a couple of years later and had three children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. For many years her daughters thought she must have been a spy during the war. Olive eventually persuaded them otherwise but she and they still remain extremely proud of what she did at Bletchley.

  ‘One didn’t really realise what one was doing until afterwards, but we worked hard and we did help win the war. I know I was only a small cog but I remain tremendously proud of what we did.

  ‘There is one thing I regret deeply. I was an only child, and on my first day home my father at dinner said, “What do you do at the Foreign Office?” I replied, “I cannot tell you. Sorry. Please don’t ask me again.” And he didn’t; nor did my mother at any time. She died in the early 1960s and he in 1976, before I realised the silence had been lifted. I think they would have been so very proud.’

  Christine Brooke-Rose went to Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war to carry out assessments of how successful the Allied bombing had been. On her return, she achieved her wartime ambition of going to university, reading English at Somerville College, Oxford. The feeling she had when she first arrived at Bletchley that she was somehow not up to the intellectual standard of those around her in Hut 3, never shared by her colleagues, drove her on to great intellectual heights. She married the Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz and obtained a doctorate in medieval literature at University College, London, before becoming an award-winning novelist and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Paris. One of her many highly praised experimental novels, Remake, was autobiographical and recorded her life at Bletchley, including the affair with Telford Taylor, with whom she remained friends right up to his death in 1998. Christine married three times but had no children and died in 2012 aged eighty-nine.

  At the end of the war, Marion Graham and the Glassborow sisters were sent to GCHQ’s Berkeley Street offices in London’s West End to work on diplomatic codes. They lived in a hostel in Eaton Place and had plenty of time to attend the theatre or go to parties. They were told their temporary contracts were ending in April 1946, and Marion went to work for the British Council, promoting British culture abroad. She studied for a while in Perugia in Italy and then worked in Geneva for a year.

  ‘I found it was quite difficult to settle in London after all that but eventually I got a job as a secretary to John Hall, the Conservative MP for Wycombe, and spent eight years working in the House of Commons.’

  It was during that time that she met another Conservative MP, Richard Body. They married in 1959 and had a son and a daughter. Richard gave up politics for a while to return to the legal profession but in 1966 was re-elected as an MP and in 1985 knighted for political services, making his wife Lady Marion Body. Her husband’s position as a prominent Eurosceptic often led to controversy.

  ‘It’s never been boring. The European issue has always been a big thing for him. He wasn’t always toeing the party line, so it hasn’t been dull.’

  One area has never been a matter for debate between them so far as Marion is concerned. She has always refused to discuss her work at Bletchley with her husband.

  ‘We knew we could never speak about it for the rest of our lives and even now I still find it rather difficult. It was thirty years after the war when that Winterbotham book was first published and Richard had been in Hatchards and he bought that book and came home with it and he came through the door and said: “Well, now will you tell me what you did during the war?” And I just said: “No.”’

  Colette St George-Yorke didn’t know what to do with herself after she left the Wrens. Eventually, she decided to go back to Harrogate to train as a State Registered Nurse, and then joined the Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service.

  ‘I hated being demobbed. I wanted to rejoin the forces. I wasn’t old enough to join the naval nursing service as you had to be twenty-five, so I joined the RAF. Flying Officer St George-Yorke. It’s the only time I’ve had a suit made to measure by a tailor in Mayfair.’

  She married an RAF doctor, but he was posted
to Iraq for two years and when he came back he seemed a changed person. She became pregnant with her son Peter but, for reasons she’s never really understood, their marriage fell apart. In truth, he would always have been only second best. A part of her was still attached to Graham Murray, the handsome young pilot she lost during the war.

  ‘He was a one-off. I’d moved on by the time I got married but I’d never forgotten him. You don’t, you know. It was a long, long time after, but you never forget them, never.’

  There is a small photograph in Colette’s purse. A young man in RAF uniform is sat on the wooden platform of a tiny railway stop somewhere on a prairie in Canada. He looks tired. He’s resting against a wooden trailer and alongside him are some milk churns. There’s very little else to see in the picture – a single track and a line of telegraph poles stretching out into an endlessly flat distance. He’s on his way to a training base to be taught how to drop agents behind enemy lines. On the back, that same young man has written: ‘Waiting for a train en route to Moose Jaw 14th May 1942,’ adding underneath: ‘That’s my parachute I’m sat on.’ That’s it. There is nothing more to the photograph, but it clearly hasn’t stayed hidden away in the purse. The years of remembering have left a thousand tiny cracks across its once shiny surface.

  In 2013, Colette’s son Peter and his family took her to the war cemetery at Bergen-op-Zoom in Holland, just across the border from the spot in Belgium where Graham was shot down. For the first time, she saw his grave.

  ‘It’s the most peaceful place. I could have sat down there forever. It was the loveliest place ever. I don’t know how people can forget. I only have to hear that music, Glenn Miller, “That Old Black Magic”, and I’m back.’

  Jane Fawcett has lived an astonishingly varied life. Looking back on it, and on her greatest memories, she is proud of performances as a professional singer. The fight to save the Midland Grand Hotel and other magnificent Victorian buildings, changing attitudes towards architecture along the way, was a great personal triumph for her as much as for her boss Sir Nikolaus Pevsner.