The Secret Life of Bletchley Park

by Sinclair McKay

  Klugman was suspected by some of having secretly influenced the government decision to back the partisans, despite the fact that Tito and his supporters were Communist sympathisers, and almost certain to take post-war Yugoslavia down a Communist road. It was felt that the governance of the country would be best left to its people; but in the meantime, the government would support the side that appeared best placed to fight Hitler’s armies.

  Documents uncovered in the 1990s appeared to show that information sent from Bletchley Park to Downing Street and the relevant Whitehall departments concerning the complex layers of the Yugoslav situation was somehow not reaching the people that it should. An anonymous Bletchley operative came forward and said:

  I was at Bletchley Park with the job of preparing a weekly summary of the Yugoslav situation for Churchill. At the time I wasn’t particularly suspicious that our information didn’t seem to be acted upon, but have become so since. I now wonder if many of our reports were sent to the section where people like Philby were working. Certainly Klugman seems to have played a more important role than was thought. Two former communist wartime agents assured me that he did, but they didn’t elaborate.5

  Of course, Britain had its own agents out in the field, and its own elaborate plans for counter-espionage coups. One came in 1940, when Alan Turing and Peter Twinn had still to crack the impossibly complicated naval Enigma. A young lieutenant-commander from Naval Intelligence came to Bletchley Park to discuss possible means of tricking Germans out of their key settings.

  That young commander was Ian Fleming, and the man he conferred with was Dilly Knox. Fleming’s eventual plan had the working name ‘Operation Ruthless’. It involved the use of an ‘airworthy German bomber’ to be obtained from the Air Ministry; a ‘tough crew of five, including a pilot, WT operator and word-perfect German speaker. Dress them in German Air Force uniforms, add blood and bandages to suit’. The plan was to ‘crash the plane in the Channel after making SOS to rescue service’ and, justifying the operation name, ‘once aboard rescue boat, shoot German crew, dump overboard, bring rescue boat back to English port.’

  The idea, of course, was to snaffle the ship’s Enigma key settings. Fleming himself volunteered for the mission, although there was no chance that he would be accepted for it; anyone with any knowledge of the Enigma operation, and of the work being done at Bletchley Park, would never be allowed out into the field for fear of capture by the enemy and subsequent torture, leading to top secret information being revealed.

  Unfortunately, the weather conditions and other circumstances were never quite right for ‘Operation Ruthless’, it seemed, and eventually it was shelved. Alan Turing and Peter Twinn apparently looked like ‘undertakers cheated of a nice corpse’ at the news.6

  This scheme aside, Fleming would be a regular sight at the Park, liaising between the codebreakers and Naval Intelligence. ‘About once a fortnight I visited Bletchley Park,’ he said. It has been wrily noted by Mavis Batey in her monograph on the subject that his creation James Bond would have enjoyed no such privilege, and indeed would not have made it past the sentry post – access to the secret of Ultra and Enigma was granted, outside the Bletchley Park staff, to very few.

  On top of this, it might also be noted that two of Fleming’s Bond novels – From Russia with Love (published in 1957) and You Only Live Twice (1964) – are more explicit than any of the other 007 adventures when it comes to codes and codebreaking. In From Russia with Love, the complex plot revolves around a Soviet enciphering machine called LEKTOR. In You Only Live Twice it is a Japanese deciphering system called ‘MAGIC 44’. There is no mention of Bletchley; after all, Fleming had signed the same Official Secrets Act as everyone else. But, as he once said of his own work: ‘Everything I write has a precedent in truth.’

  Perhaps the reason we have heard so little about security breaches at the Park is because such information remains sensitive today. There was one dramatic episode in 1942 which showed, however, that Britain’s code encipherments had in fact been penetrated by the Nazis.

  Given the amount that the British knew about Enigma right from the start of the war, it was obvious that they should develop a different, more advanced system: this was Typex (Or ‘Type X’). Thanks to Bletchley, rigorous orders on the use of this system were given out: for instance, that no proper names should be used within the coded message itself (such inclusions, as had been discovered with Enigma, made cribs easier to find).

  Nevertheless, for a while during the North African campaign in 1941, Rommel appeared to have an almost supernatural sense of Montgomery’s every move, and was outmanoeuvring the British with seeming ease. Frustration and anxiety mounted. British Intelligence knew that it simply had to be a security breach. And they were right.

  Bletchley Park decrypted an Italian message stating that Rommel owed all his good fortune to the fact that an American cipher sent from Cairo was being read regularly. Churchill was informed, and the Americans were swiftly on to the case. The unfortunate leaker was one Colonel Fellers, who had simply been sending news of British positions back to his superiors in Washington. An enquiry found that he was innocent of treachery; the problem was that the code he had used was too easy to crack.

  The men and women of Bletchley would have to live with the effects of this intense and obsessive secrecy for decades to come. But at the time, with the tremendous pressures that they were all facing, what sort of pressure valves were there? One extraordinarily fruitful one was the Park’s artistic life: what had started in the early days with little clubs and societies forming was, by 1943, a wide-ranging mix of classical music, opera, dancing and amateur dramatics. Hard as Bletchley’s people worked, they knew on some level that it would be necessary to play hard too, in order to keep their minds fully refreshed. And the nature of the cultural activities that they engaged in tells us much about the aspirations of a smart young generation.

  23 The Cultural Life of Bletchley Park

  When one listens now to wartime songs and entertainers, one is generally listening to the material that was performed to the troops, and played into the dance halls and the factories: Flanagan and Allen; George Formby; Tommy Trinder; Arthur Askey; the Andrews Sisters; Anne Shelton; Billy Cotton and his Band; Jack Buchanan; Vera Lynn. The tone was ceaselessly uplifting and ceaselessly uncomplicated, from George Formby’s risqué suggestions of knowing what to do with his gas-mask to Vera Lynn and her white cliffs. This is not to say that such entertainments were naive, or even simple; merely that they were pitched at a certain emotional level that could be enjoyed by all – popular culture at its best.

  Tellingly, though, the sort of culture that the denizens of Bletchley Park went in for was, from the start, markedly more highbrow. One senses that this was not in any way deliberate; it was simply that many of the young codebreakers and linguists had been pulled away from their university lives (and in an age when fewer than five per cent of young people in any one year would attend university), and part of their education had been to inculcate an interest in the arts.

  Indeed, outside the Park, even for those who had had relatively rudimentary primary educations – such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who recalls, as he became a teenager during the war, how he would be suffused with a desire not only to hear the finest classical music, but also to see the best theatre – the arts were becoming seen as something that all should aspire to appreciate and enjoy, as opposed to being the preserve of a wealthy metropolitan elite. Inside the Park, they managed to enjoy an extraordinary range of cultural – and indeed, entertainment – pursuits.

  Oliver and Sheila Lawn have especially fond memories of the way that Bletchley-ites contrived to use their leisure time: ‘There was music,’ says Mr Lawn, ‘Play readings. And play actings. Quite a bit of amateur dramatics. And concerts of all kinds.’

  ‘Some very gifted people were there,’ adds Mrs Lawn. ‘Some concerts were given by people who were already there.’

  Specially invited artistes woul
d make the journey up to Buckinghamshire as well. Says Oliver Lawn: ‘I remember Myra Hess coming. And one or two – at that time, well-known – quartets came.’ One wonders quite how much – if anything – these artistes were told about the nature of the audience they would be facing. Some musicians were told nothing at all. They would travel up in vans, clamber out with their instruments, perform to great acclaim, and then be driven back to London without having the faintest clue from whom they had received this acclaim.

  Sheila Lawn adds, ‘A little later the authorities built an assembly hall outside the Park, where we could have dances, meetings, all sorts of things, so that other people from Bletchley could enjoy some of that too.’

  Both Oliver and Sheila had an abiding passion for the pursuit of Highland dancing. Unlikely though it may seem, the Park had its own home-grown expert in this pursuit, in the shape of Japanese codebreaking genius Hugh Foss. As well as being renowned for his good-humoured, easy manner, he was also apparently a fantastically elegant figure on the dance floor. ‘Highland Reels was one of the very active social clubs,’ says Mr Lawn.

  ‘He was tall, elegant, danced beautifully,’ adds Sheila. ‘But of course we had no idea what he did.’

  Oliver Lawn goes on to evoke an amusing and rather lovely image of those evenings when the dancing took place: ‘We did our Scottish reels first of all in the hall of the mansion. It was a long hall, which was ideal for Scottish reel dances. And when they built the assembly hall outside the Park, we moved there. And then in the summer, when the weather was good, we danced by the lake, on the croquet lawn.’

  Another veteran recalls how Hugh Foss would practise during lunch hours and hold ‘more elaborate dances every three to six months with a full dress dance on St Andrew’s nights. We wore out his record of Circassian Circle and had a collection to buy him a new one.’

  Dancing seemed to be one of the great overriding passions at Bletchley. One codebreaker recalled being so keen to get to a dance that he managed, by dint of getting the date wrong, to turn up an entire week early. It also broke out in amusingly informal ways. One Wren recalled: ‘The kitchen at BP House was so large that one could dance. During supper break I taught one of the men to waltz. We only had one record – “Sleepy Lagoon” [now better known as the theme tune of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs].’

  Even Bletchley’s fiercest figures could not resist the call of the hop. Mimi Gallilee recalls that her boss Miss Reed – so severe and so unyielding – was nevertheless transformed completely when it came to her leisure hours: ‘Doris Reed used to go to the dancing. The Highland reels. And she would always go during her lunch hour.’

  Lucienne Edmonston-Lowe, who worked in Hut 6’s Registration Room from 1942 to 1945, also had extremely warm memories of these entertainments. ‘If one was involved in a play or a concert, there were rehearsals and so the shift-list was very much referred to if one was on night or evening shift,’ she recalled. ‘I remember a song from the first Christmas revue I ever went to – sung by three smart girls. It went something like this:

  “Six days out of seven we do penance,

  In this awful God-forsaken place,

  Six days out of seven we do penance,

  For a single day of grace,

  Cast aside what our mothers knit us,

  Put on clothes that really fit us,

  Sophisticated black is de rigueur,

  And a smart hat a woman’s cri de coeur.”’1

  Even the Soviet spy/fellow traveller John Cairncross expressed an admiration for the creative side of Bletchley life. In his memoir, he wrote:

  The … high spots I recall on our limited social life were a concert of German Lieder sung by a colleague, and the Christmas pantomime where we were regaled with such items as a Russian partisan in a fur cap singing about his life, and revue items with cracks such as ‘working and partly working’ – courtesy of T.S. Eliot – and saving water by having baths à deux.2

  For young Mimi Gallilee, whose age would have precluded some of the straightforward socialising opportunities, this array of activities was extremely beguiling to behold. ‘There were lots of different clubs,’ she says. ‘There was country dancing, morris dancing, different kinds of music, and you’d sit and listen to gramophone records in those days. One of the rooms at the front of the house became like a lounge really. There was a library. And the people within the huts – they formed their real groups of friends, in their own huts. And so you knew these people and there were plenty of people for you to know, within your own realm.

  ‘They started to form these clubs within about a couple of years. That was how I went to some of the music recitals. They were with records in the big main lounge, the club lounge. Once they had built the cafeteria, I believe then they built a concert/dance hall at the end of the road.

  ‘The revues were usually put on once a year and I went to a number of those. They were marvellous, fantastic – the people were so mad.’

  Another great admirer of the seasonal revues was Hut 4 veteran Diana Plowman, who recalled: ‘At Christmas time, all these great beings put on a revue. I’ve never seen anything like them before or since – wit, colour, eloquence, beauty, breathtaking …’

  Bletchley Park’s revues were also noted for their professionalism. Other veterans recall the care that went into the writing and performance of shows such as The Naming of Parts. And in this, we hear an echo of what might have been for these young people; in a university career uninterrupted by war, they might well have been performing in the Cambridge Footlights and similar undergraduate shows. Certainly these variety shows were pitched at a higher brow than those entertaining the troops in ENSA.

  But it wasn’t just revues, and Dorothy Hyson and Frank ‘Widow Twankey’ Birch were not the only theatrical talent; according to Mimi Gallilee, ‘There were many acting professionals at Bletchley.’ Despite the 24-hour shift system and the constant grind of work, the Bletchley Park inmates – prominent among them gifted mathematician Shaun Wylie, who became head of the Bletchley Park Dramatic Club – also contrived to stage theatrical productions such as French Without Tears, Much Ado About Nothing, Candida, Gaslight and J.B. Priestley’s They Came to a City.

  This last play, almost never seen now, seems to have been one of the most popular and fashionable works of the war years. In essence, it is a Utopian fantasy: nine people arrive from nowhere into a city where poverty and hardship and prejudice are unknown; these people are from different walks of life and all respond to this dream city in different ways, with five of them eventually finding themselves quite unable to stay there. It is a sort of quasi-socialist middle-class vision of a type that was to prove extremely popular in the post-war period, examples being the productions of Ealing Studios and the richer imaginings of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.

  It is equally beguiling to see these serious young codebreakers and linguists throwing themselves with the same gravity into amateur dramatics. Some suggested that it was simply a valve for releasing all the tension of work, a means of forgetting the nature of their working lives. But it was not simply escape on stage. The amateur dramatic companies also produced professional-looking programmes for their performances; and in the photographs that survive, one can see the astonishing ingenuity that went into both the costumes and the stage design. In a production of By Candlelight, a young John de Grey is clearly portraying a footman of some sort – but where the Dickens did he get hold of that elaborate eighteenth century-style coat? And the set behind the two elegant ladies in simulation of an elegant drawing room has been styled and painted with bewildering attention to detail.

  Not everyone joined in with the amateur dramatics. Indeed, Captain Jerry Roberts, busy trying to crack the ‘Tunny’ decrypts in the later years of the war, felt distinctly out of it. He recalls: ‘I didn’t get much of a sense of culture. But other people I knew did. Perhaps the reason was that I had a long walk home to the billet. I used to go to cinema meetings in the town, and the Wren
s who worked in the Newmanry used to have dances occasionally out at Woburn Sands. They would invite us to a dance and we would have a coach to take us out there and bring us back. But it was difficult otherwise to be too social.

  ‘There were plenty of clubs: chess club, drama club,’ he continues. ‘And people who lived nearby, or had bicycles, tended to go to that sort of thing. If you lived half an hour’s walk away, you weren’t going to walk all the way back again from the drama things.’

  This was a memory echoed by Irene Young, although she did recall managing to get to the 1942 Christmas revue, despite being wholly dependent on local buses: ‘Enjoying this recreation, I could not banish the occasional thought that although work at BP was undeniably of vital importance, we were living a comparatively sheltered life.’3 The show clearly did not succeed in lifting her out of herself. Clearly, however, a walk of half a day would not have deterred a lot of the young codebreakers, and perhaps the more senior ones too.

  There was also an enthusiasm for keeping fit and outdoor pursuits. In 1942, one L.P. Wilkinson, chairman of the Bletchley Park Recreational Club, sent this wheedling memo to Commander Bradshaw: ‘It would be a great convenience if the Summer House beside the tennis courts could be used as a changing room for tennis players. It would require little or no alteration. May we have your permission for this?’ The gracious answer was a yes.

  There were other clouds on the tennis players’ horizons: not only a shortage of balls (a wonderfully polite surviving letter in the National Archive from manufacturer Dunlop regrets the inevitability of this), but indeed a struggle to keep the court itself smooth and even. A specialist firm – En Tout Cas – ‘The largest makers of hard lawn tennis courts in the world’ – was consulted by Commander Bradshaw over the matter of the cost of putting these faults right.4

  Emboldened, the Bletchley Park Recreation Club also put in a request for ‘a radiogram’ and Commander Bradshaw investigated the cost of getting a good one. The model favoured cost £45 – at the time an extraordinary sum of money. But a further technological innovation had caught the eye of the Recreation Club: ‘a combined television radiogram’ which would have cost an eye-watering 65 guineas. Sadly the records do not disclose if this item was ever purchased.