Women Wartime Spies

by Ann Kramer

  Despite the difficulties, there was official recognition of the work that women had done. Following the war former MI5 women formed The Nameless Club, which kept old members in touch with each other. Miss Lomax was President and they produced a type of old girls’ magazine, The Nameless Magazine. The March 1920 edition listed the names of fifteen women who had been mentioned in the London Gazette, five of them on 1 September 1918 and ten on 18 August 1919, for ‘valuable War Services’, and a letter from Vernon Kell to Miss Lomax in which he said: ‘I was so pleased to see in today’s Gazette [18 September 1919] that ten of our ladies had been mentioned for valuable War Services in connection with the War. Please give them my congratulations. With a staff like yours, which one and all have done such splendid work, it is always difficult to make a selection.’

  Once the war was over, women who had worked in British intelligence, like women in all other areas of war work, were either dismissed or encouraged to go back into the home. Some women did manage to remain with MI5, and many were recruited once more when the Second World War began twenty or so years later. Several women went on to carve impressive careers: Hilda Matheson, for instance, who worked for MI5 during the First World War, and subsequently became Nancy Astor’s political secretary, was headhunted by the BBC in 1926. She became the BBC’s first Director of Talks, introducing individuals such as H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Vita Sackville-West to the airwaves and in 1929 initiated The Week In Westminster, which was initially planned to inform women – who in 1928 finally achieved equal voting rights with men – about the workings of Parliament and featured women MPs as speakers. During the Second World War she ran the Joint Broadcasting Committee.

  Station X

  Secrecy continued to underpin women’s work in intelligence. In 1919 Room 40 was deactivated and its work was merged with the British Army’s Intelligence Unit, MI1b, to form a new grouping, the Government Code and Cipher School (GCCS), later the Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ). Despite its name, GCCS was certainly not a school: it was a highly secret organization whose stated purpose was ‘to advise as to the security of codes and ciphers used by all Government departments’ but it was also secretly ordered to ‘study the methods of cypher communication used by foreign powers’. This meant that its staff worked to break these ciphers. During the 1920s GCCS, under the aegis of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), or MI6, was mainly concerned with deciphering Soviet Union diplomatic communications but once the Second World War began, its work was directed at cracking the enemy’s secret codes, particularly those of the German Enigma machine.

  As war approached, and with it the fear of bombing raids, GCCS moved out of London and set up headquarters at Bletchley Park, a huge Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire some 50 miles (80km) northwest of London. Bletchley Park was given the cover name Station X, being the tenth of various stations that MI6 acquired for its wartime operations and its head, until 1942, was Alastair Denniston, a code-breaker and head of GCCS. The first code-breakers began to arrive in earnest in August 1939, masquerading as a shooting party. At first there were about 150 people working at Bletchley Park but as the volume of coded enemy traffic increased, more people were needed. It was not possible for all of them to be housed in the main building so a veritable small town of wooden and concrete ‘huts’, each with its own code number and purpose, were built to accommodate the increasing numbers of personnel. By 1942 some 3,500 people were working at Bletchley Park and by 1945 there were more than 10,000, many of whom were women. Some were civilians, while others came from the armed forces. Most of the labour force was British but they also included American, French and Polish personnel. The British government drafted in some of the most remarkable minds of the time to work on breaking the Enigma code. They included academics, mathematicians, including the brilliant Alan Turing, whose work in creating a code-breaking machine led to the production of the world’s first programmable computer, crossword enthusiasts – being able to crack the difficult Daily Telegraph crossword within twelve minutes was a highly desirable skill – linguists and chess players. Often described as ‘boffins’, some of them were extremely eccentric. Interviewed by The Observer newspaper in November 2010, code-breaker Rozanne Colchester remembered that being at Bletchley ‘was so intense – there were such a lot of very clever and eccentric people shut away in this strange isolation.’ As well as code-breakers and cryptanalysts, staff included decoders, translators, machine operators, wireless and teleprint operators, clerks, secretaries and a host of other related staff members. All worked isolated from the rest of the world in conditions of total secrecy.

  Bletchley Park – or Station X – was one of the British Government’s best-kept wartime secrets. Eventually it was effectively the hub of a nationwide intelligence gathering and decoding network. Telephonists and wireless operators, many of them women and usually WRNS (Women’s Royal Naval Service), intercepted encrypted enemy Morse signals at isolated listening stations, known as Y-stations, which were dotted around Britain and abroad. Working night and day, they transcribed the messages and sent them, initially by motorbike messenger but subsequently by teleprinter, directly to Bletchley, where they were decoded and the resulting information, known as Ultra (for ultra secret), was passed on to wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill and selected Allied commanders.

  One of the many WRNS working at the Y-stations was Shirley Cannicott (née Gadsby). She spoke ‘fairly fluent French and adequate German’ and when conscription for women was introduced in 1941, was initially called up for the ATS (Auxiliary Territorial Service) but was sent to the Admiralty where she was told that because she spoke German she would be wanted in the WRNS. Following training, she was sent to a Y-station in Torquay, where ‘we were on watch twenty-four hours a day in shifts of varying length… Headphones on, set on, swivel the dial ever so slowly forward and back, forward and back, overlapping a portion of the dial each time, until the whole sweep was covered… and then the same all over again, hoping – or hoping not? – to hear a noise, a voice, something other than the swish of what is known as “radio silence”. We were a generation of young people who had done this same thing nightly on our parents’ wireless sets, searching for foreign stations with dance music late into the night… When you did hear that voice, it was all systems go… You wrote down everything you could of what you heard, at the same time ringing a bell for assistance… What you took down was sent to the nearest Intelligence Centre.’

  Enigma

  At Bletchley cryptanalysts and code-breakers worked non-stop to unlock the secrets of Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine as well as other Axis codes. Enigma was Nazi Germany’s greatest asset and the Germans believed its ciphers were completely unbreakable. Enigma had been marketed for commercial reasons during the 1920s but in 1926 the German navy adopted one version, and the German army later adopted another. By 1935 Enigma machines were standard issue for all the German armed forces and were used to encode military messages before sending them over the radio as Morse code. Incoming messages could also be decoded with Enigma. Enigma was an extraordinarily clever machine. Looking rather like a typewriter, it consisted of a keyboard for typing in plain letters, a scrambling unit of three or more alphabetical rotors that turned the plain letters into code, and an illuminated board that displayed the enciphered letters. There was also a plug board below the keyboard, consisting of six cables. For each plain text letter typed in a coded letter lit up and was noted down. Each rotor had a set of twenty-six input and twenty-six output contacts, one for each letter of the alphabet. These were cross-wired so any input letter would be transformed to a different output letter as it passed through each rotor, so scrambling each letter three times. To make matters more complex, rotors could be arranged in different orders, aligned in any position and set to rotate at different speeds. Cables too could be plugged into many different combinations. Settings were changed daily according to a monthly codebook. The result was that Enigma was able to encipher messages in li
terally millions of different ways very rapidly.

  The job of cracking Enigma had begun as early as 1929 when Polish cryptanalysts began working on it. In 1932 a Polish engineer, Marian Rejewski, who was working on the project managed to figure out the wiring of the German military Enigma and in 1938 had invented an electro-mechanical Enigma simulator, known as a Bomba. Just weeks before the war began, the Polish passed their knowledge onto Britain and France, and from then on the cryptanalysts and code-breakers at Bletchley continued the work. Given the complexity of Enigma, cracking the code was not just a one-off occurrence; with the constant changes in settings, codes needed to be broken again and again, and as the war progressed, the volume of intercepted signals increased dramatically. According to Fred Winterbotham, who was responsible for distributing the intelligence obtained at Bletchley, at the height of the war, more than 2,000 enemy signals were flooding into Bletchley every day, and probably more. Each had to be decoded, translated, collated and forwarded to the appropriate commander in the field as speedily as possible. The pace of work was relentless.

  Destination unknown

  Women made up more than 80 per cent of the staff at Bletchley. They worked as secretaries, typists, filing clerks, wireless, teleprinter and cipher machine operators, decoders, interpreters and cryptanalysts. They included civilians, some of whom were recruited straight from university, particularly those who had studied languages, or recruited from secretarial colleges as the need for fast efficient typists and teleprinter operators increased. They also included women who had worked in banks, post offices and the civil service. Many women though came from the armed forces, mainly from the WRNS, known popularly as Wrens, but also from the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) and the ATS. Wrens staffed the massive Bombe machines, which were eventually housed in five outstations: Eastcote, Stanmore, Adstock, Gayhurst and Wavendon. Of these Eastcote, given the security name HMS Pembroke V, although it was in a London suburb and nowhere near the sea, housed 110 bombes. From 1943 women also worked on Colossus, the earliest digital computer, ten of which were built for use at Bletchley to break the German Lorenz cipher, known as Tunny.

  Given the immense security surrounding Bletchley, staff could not be recruited openly. Instead likely candidates were approached or directed towards Bletchley. Only certain people were suitable: recruits needed to be intelligent, adaptable, ideally with language skills, but above all, they needed to be able to keep a secret. No one was allowed to talk about their work, not even to their family. Often new recruits were not told what their work would be, or in some cases, where they were actually going.

  Ruth Bourne, for example, who joined the WRNS straight from sixth form in 1944 was put on a train and sent up to the north of Scotland where she did a fortnight of ‘square bashing’, scrubbing, cleaning, learning to march and being taught naval technology. At the end of her training she, together with a small group of other Wrens, was told she was going to join HMS Pembroke V and would be doing S/D X (Special Duties X): ‘When I asked “what’s X?” people said “Well, it’s not Y”.’ It was to be thirty years before she understood the reference: Y being the Y-stations around the coast where Wrens worked as wireless interceptors, picking up encoded enemy Morse signals, which they took down before sending them off to Bletchley. At the time however Ruth thought ‘at least I’ll be by the sea with lots of handsome sailors’. However, this was not to be: far from being at sea, HMS Pembroke V was just ‘an umbrella name to cover the activities at Bletchley’, and specifically one of Bletchley’s outstations, where to take secrecy a bit further the foreground was referred to as the ‘quarter deck’, and the Wrens’ sleeping quarters were called ‘cabins’.

  Helen Currie who worked at Bletchley Park on the Tunny code, often asked herself ‘How was it… that I was sent to Bletchley Park and worked there for almost three – momentous – years?’ She had joined the ATS in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, having just reached the age of 18. Previously she had been working as a typist in London’s Fleet Street. As a Territorial she was called up when war started, listing ‘typist’ as her occupation. In 1942 she volunteered to train as a signals operator:

  ‘…and was sent to the Signals School in Trowbridge. I was trained as a wireless operator to do intercept work; basically that meant finding a German station on a wireless set by means of its call sign and then writing down (in five-letter blocks) the Morse signals that were being sent by the German operator. It was difficult work. I was promoted to Lance Corporal – richly deserved, I thought!’

  Following her training, Helen was sent to London:

  ‘…to be interviewed by an awe-inspiring gentleman. I remember only two of the questions that he asked me. Would I like to work in the country? Could I keep a secret? I answered ‘yes’ to the first and ‘I think so’ to the second. My young life had not so far tested me greatly in this respect.’

  Rather puzzled by this, Helen Currie returned to Trowbridge to await developments. About three weeks later, with one other ATS young woman, Helen travelled to Bletchley railway station where the two of them were met by a ‘genial’ Sergeant ‘Tubby’, whose real name she never learned.

  Often recruits set off from London or elsewhere with little idea of where they were going. One young woman remembered arriving at Euston with twenty-two other Wrens and asking the engine driver where the train they were boarding was actually going. He told them that ‘the Wrens get out at Bletchley’. Another young woman was told she was going to BP (as staff often called Bletchley Park) to attend a course on poison gas. On arrival at Bletchley Park new members of staff were told in no uncertain terms that the work they would be doing was absolutely top secret. Rozanne Colchester’s father drove her down to Bletchley and humorously told her that if she ever mentioned to anyone what she was doing, she would be shot. It was a joke but even so every person who worked at Bletchley read and had to sign the Official Secrets Act and were warned that they were to tell no one, not even family members, about their work or where they were stationed. The consequences of doing so, they were told, would be dire.

  First impressions of Bletchley varied enormously. Many women remembered ‘countless people’ wandering around, some dressed very casually in civilian clothes, others in full uniform. There was, however, little time to become acclimatized: new recruits had to start work immediately. There being far too many people to be employed in the main house, most people worked in one or more of the many ‘huts’ that were built during the war years. There were perhaps as many as fifty huts, with numbers 3, 4, 6 and 8 being the main code-breaking huts. Women at Bletchley remember that each hut was effectively a world in its own right; people did not communicate with personnel in other huts, nor did they visit or spend time in other huts and, of course, no one spoke to anyone about what they were doing. As a result, isolation was a common feeling.

  Working on the bombes

  Many Wrens worked on the bombes, huge intricate deciphering machines that reproduced the workings of Enigma. One of the women was Cynthia Waterhouse, who later wrote a piece about her experiences entitled Bombe Surprise. She had joined the Wrens in 1943 and, after a ‘strenuous fortnight learning naval etiquette, squad drill and scrubbing floors’, was sent to Stanmore where she was trained for Special Duties X, a category known as P.5 (Pembroke V), then went to Wavendon House near Woburn Sands where Wrens were literally stabled in a converted stable: ‘four Wrens to each stable, meant for one horse!’

  Cynthia Waterhouse, together with other Wrens, worked on the bombes in a hut in the grounds that was connected directly to Bletchley Park. The machines were kept running twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week; the noise was incredible. Women worked on a four-week shift rotation: 8.00 am – 4.00 pm the first week, 4.00 pm until midnight during the second work, and midnight until 8.00 am the third week, then ‘a hectic week of eight hours on/eight hours off, ending with a much needed four days leave.’ The bombes:

  ‘The breaking of the German Enigma cipher messages… h
as been much publicized… The human side of the story of the WRNS involved in the vital work on the monster deciphering machines has not been told in any detail.’

  (Cynthia Waterhouse, Bombe Surprise)

  ‘Unravelled the wheel settings for the Enigma ciphers… They were cabinets about 8 feet tall and 7 feet wide. The front housed rows of coloured circular drums each about 5 inches in diameter and 3 inches deep. Inside each was a mass of wire brushes, every one of which had to be meticulously adjusted with tweezers to ensure that the circuits did not short. The letters of the alphabet were painted round the outside of each drum. The back of the machine almost defies description – a mass of dangling plugs on rows of letters and numbers.

  ‘We were given a menu which was a complicated drawing of numbers and letters from which we plugged up the back of the machine and set the drums on the front. The menus had a variety of cover names – for instance silver drums were used for Shark and Porpoise menus for naval traffic, and Phoenix – an army key associated with tank battles at the time of El Alamein.