by Sue Black
We get funding
After years of trying and failing to find funding, it was wonderful to finally get not only the financial backing for BCSWomen to run the Women of Station X project, but also the moral support and buy-in from established organisations and people. It gave me a great buzz when I found out that that others felt the same way I did about something important to me and wanted to help me make it happen.
Finally, I could get going with the project: we had £10,000 to work with. Unfortunately, the funding came through just as I was starting a new job. I had worked at London South Bank University full-time for about eight years, but in the summer of 2006 I got a job at the University of Westminster in Harrow as Head of the Department of Information and Software Systems. I was due to start at the beginning of 2007. It was my first management role and I was very excited about being able to make a real difference to students and to staff, but I was also worried about how I would manage the Women of Station X project at the same time. How could I run the project when I’d just started the most demanding role of my whole career?
Luckily Jan Peters, then working for the BCS, came to the rescue and offered to run the project. She found an interviewer, Ann Day, and put together a plan for the project. She got in touch with Bletchley Park to find out if they were happy to put us in contact with the female veterans. The plan was to interview a few female veterans in depth to find out about their experience of working at Bletchley Park.
Since first finding out about the thousands of women working there, I had wanted to make sure that their stories were captured for posterity. I was well aware that the veterans who were still around were aged 70 plus and weren’t getting any younger. Everything that had happened at Bletchley Park was kept secret for such a long time – everyone who worked there had to sign the Official Secrets Act – and there had been almost nothing recorded about what happened there and what life was really like. There were a few stories floating around, but I knew there were more to be found. For one thing, I wasn’t just interested in what the veterans had done at work, I was also interested in their lives outside of work. Many of them were only teenagers when they started working at Bletchley. Thousands of teenage girls carried out essential wartime work, so I knew there had to be some great stories there and I wanted to hear them and share them with the world.
Jan managed to persuade Bletchley Park to send around a letter to the female veterans asking them if they were happy to be interviewed by us. We then recorded several in-depth interviews, and Conrad Taylor made a short film about the women of Station X narrated by Sarah Winmill – a great friend and BCSWomen committee member.
Presenting The Women of Station X oral history project to the veterans in the Ballroom at Bletchley Park; my first talk at Bletchley Park
Bombe rebuild switch on
On 17th July 2007, John Harper and his team’s rebuild of the Bombe machine was complete and ready to be officially switched on. I was invited up to Bletchley Park along with others from BCSWomen and the BCS. My good friend Professor Wendy Hall had been invited to give a talk about the Women of Station X project, which she did with all of her usual intelligence and charm.
After Wendy’s talk and the reception that followed, we went down to see the Bombe rebuild, which the Duke of Kent switched on. John Harper and his team had done a fabulous job of rebuilding the Bombe, and seeing it work was incredible. It had taken many people several years to build and was a remarkable feat of engineering. Hearing the sound of it working for the first time was very evocative. The loud, rhythmic clicking of the drums rotating on the Bombe machine made me wonder: “What must it have been like for the women working there during the war?” It must have been so noisy, day after day, month after month, working in a temporary hut full of machines. The sound reminded me of the journey from Wickford to Chelmsford when I started grammar school in the 1970s. I remembered being 11 years old, sticking my head out of the window to drink in the sunshine and look at the fields, listening to the rhythmic sound of the train going over the tracks as we flew past cows, crops and the odd tractor.
From L to R: Leah Black, me, Jo Komisarczuk, Daisy Bailey (veteran), Jill Dann and Lucy Hunt; all except Leah and Daisy Bailey are BCSWomen committee members
The women of Station X
Every September the Enigma Reunion is held at Bletchley Park, bringing veterans from all over the UK and the world together to catch up, have dinner and listen to a few lectures. In September 2007, while the Women of Station X project was running, I was invited to Bletchley Park to speak about the project.
I gave my talk in the lovely wood-panelled Mansion House Ballroom at Bletchley Park. I was so excited; it was the first time I had really had the chance to speak to any of the veterans. I spoke about my first trip to Bletchley Park, finding out how many women had worked there and wanting to do something to raise the profile of those women. How wonderful for me to now be standing in front of some of the very women that I had so looked forward to meeting. After I had finished speaking, several veterans came up to tell me how much they had enjoyed my talk and how grateful they were that I was seeking to highlight their contribution. I was so delighted to meet them, and we had the first of many discussions about what it was like working there during the war. It also drove home the point that many of these women had been teenagers when they had worked at Bletchley, and that going to work there had been the first time that they had left home. One woman told me how, wanting to do her bit for the war effort, she had gone along to the local office to sign up for whatever it was they thought she was suitable for. It was only upon leaving the office that she realised she was the only one there wearing Clarks sandals – she had been wearing schoolchildren’s shoes.
Talking to the veterans reinforced my feeling that we really had to do more to help tell the full story of what happened at Bletchley Park. I left Bletchley that day feeling more resolved than ever to do my own bit to get the story out to the world.
Bletchley Park Veterans Day
bcs.org
23 September 2007
Several members of BCSWomen, the BCS group with 800+ women studying and working in IT, visited Bletchley Park on 23 September 2007 to attend the veterans day.
Dr Sue Black, founder and chair of BCSWomen, as part of the special talk to veterans, told the audience that she had first visited Bletchley Park some five years ago and been absolutely fascinated by its history.
But, when wandering around the Park she had been surprised to find that even though more than half of the people working there during WWII were women, there was almost no information at Bletchley about this. She went home determined to do something about it, to make sure that there was fair recognition for the contribution of the women that worked at Bletchley.
Funding was secured in 2006 from the BCS 50th Anniversary fund and the UKRC for Women in Science and Technology, and an oral history project is now underway recording the memories of women that worked at Bletchley.
Dr Ann Day and Dr Jan Peters have been working on the project this year and are currently working to produce a website and other resources in collaboration with Bletchley Park Trust to make sure that these stories are passed down to future generations and that the contribution is not forgotten.
02
“That is all you need to know”
“There was this song around at the time that went, ‘We joined the Navy to see the sea, and what did we see? We saw the sea.’ The Wrens sang a different version. We sang, ‘And what did we see? We saw BP.’”
—Jean Valentine WRNS
When 18-year-old Anne Pease[1] arrived at “BP” in July 1940, she had no real idea of where she was or why. All she knew was that a telegram had ordered her to report to a railway station to catch a particular train to somewhere called Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. The telegram had ended with the slightly ominous words “That is all you need to know”. She later found that she was one of hu
ndreds of young women who’d received similar mysterious requests. Some had been told even less than she had. One Wren[2] says that, “On arrival at Euston, we had no clues as to our journey so we enquired from the engine driver where he was going. He replied with a broad grin and told us that ‘the Wrens get out at Bletchley.’”
“I travelled with three other newly fledged Wrens, all equally bewildered as to why we should have been sent about as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in this country,” says Anne. “When we arrived at Bletchley station we were met by a Leading Wren and marched up to a perimeter fence with sentries standing guard. We were then taken to an office in a grand Victorian mansion. We were told that the work we were going to be doing was of the utmost secrecy and vital to the war effort, and we were required to sign the Official Secrets Act. One was left with the distinct impression that contravening it would mean a spell in The Tower at the very least.”[3]
The grand Victorian mansion in question was Bletchley Park, a country house and 58-acre estate in Buckinghamshire, some 50 miles north-west of London.
“We weren’t told where we were going,” says Lorna Fitch. “We just had a piece of paper saying catch this, do that, wait there and change trains here, and you just did. I was collected from the station and taken to Woburn Abbey where I was to be billeted. Then I was put on a coach to Bletchley Park. I had no idea what was going on.” One Wren reports that, for her and some colleagues, things were even more mysterious than that: “Six of us were put in an enclosed van and driven away . . . ”
Irene Humby was also quite alarmed by all of the secrecy, especially after being warned that if she ever mentioned anything about her work, there would be “someone on the train keeping a lookout”. It made her feel nervous during every journey she took thereafter. Daisy Phillips was told that she would receive a minimum prison term of two years if she broke the Official Secrets Act.
We can only imagine how these young women – mostly aged between 17 and 21 – felt as they passed through the gates of Bletchley Park and walked up the drive towards the rather ugly and imposing Mansion House within. For many of them, it was their first experience of being away from home. In her memoir, Irene Young says that, “The establishment was ringed with barbed wire and guarded by men of the RAF Regiment whose NCOs kept discipline by threatening their men that misdemeanours would result in their being sent ‘inside the park’, as if it were some sort of madhouse.”
The fact that BP was only ever referred to as “BP” or “Station X” by the staff on site must have added an additional flavour of melodrama to their situation.
Even the selection criteria that had brought them, and the thousands that were to follow, to BP was something of a mystery. Jean Valentine recalls, “After initial [Naval] training in Scotland, I was called in to find out what I’d be doing, expecting to be a driver or cook or steward or something. But they said, ‘We won’t be telling you what you’re going to be doing because we haven’t been told what to tell you.’We’ve just been asked to look out for people like you. They were looking for linguists, mathematicians, people who could think laterally. I’d put cryptic crosswords down in my list of hobbies.” The very next day, Jean found herself heading to London for a further briefing. Shortly afterwards, and apparently solely because of her interest in puzzles, she received her instructions to travel to BP.
As the first young women started to arrive, they would have seen intense activity going on inside the grounds. Around the Manor House and its outbuildings, concrete roads were being laid, as were the foundations for a series of large wooden huts and a telephone exchange that would be built at the expense of a mature rose garden and a maze. A new water main was being installed along with miles of electricity and telegraph cables. Evidently, something very big and very important was going on. Security was watertight. Joan Eastman recalls that it was, “. . . a dreary, wet Monday morning and Bletchley was not the prettiest of places, not back then. I can remember very well going through the gates and all of the security guards.” On her second day at BP, Margaret Broughton-Thompson was so tired that she forgot her pass and was held in a guardroom until someone could identify her. She didn’t forget her pass again. No one was left in any doubt that, whatever it was that was happening at Station X, their position there was not to be taken lightly.
Some were not told what was happening, even when they got there. One Wren recalls that, “For six weeks I was kept in limbo at BP, quite free to move wherever I wanted, but no work – I was being vetted along with two other women with me. Then we were all admitted to the Park . . .” Some suspected that there were people spying on them and on their families, like Irene Humby’s “someone on a train”. In between selection and being sent to BP, one Wren says that, “There were questions asked around my mother-in-law’s place – by an insurance man . . . ”
Vetting complete, and after signing the Official Secrets Act, the young women were told that not only could they not tell friends and family about their work, but that they could never tell anyone. This wasn’t going to be simply a change in their career paths; this was something that was going to affect the rest of their lives. Doreen Spencer, a BP wireless operator, says in her memoirs that, having learned Morse code with her father, her biggest sorrow was keeping him in the dark. “How I wish I could have told him,” she says. “He died in 1982 never knowing what I did or where I really was.” Margaret Hamlin found herself having to lie to her parents: “My father was very interested in what I was doing and he used to make various guesses as to what he thought it was. But I couldn’t tell him. He became convinced that it was something to do with the work in France, with spies and the secret service. I had to lie to him, in a way, by saying that what I was doing was secret and secretarial. He never did find out what I did.”
Other veterans still refuse to talk about their experiences to this day. Sheila Deasy says, “We were told when we came here that if we talked about it, we would be shot. So we never ever talked about anything, even with each other, let alone anyone else. Even now it seems terribly wrong to talk about it. I suppose that it became so instinctive that you didn’t ever mention it. I made a promise that I wouldn’t say anything, and as far as I’m concerned, I will keep that promise.”
“You have to remember that every single one of us had someone we loved who was fighting at the front,” explains Jean Valentine. “The thought that letting something slip might harm them or get them killed kept us silent.” And, if that were not enough, the authorities were there to ensure that you did. Joan Reed recalls how a young Wren who talked in her sleep suddenly disappeared one day, presumably because her bosses were worried about “careless words”.
Men were arriving at Bletchley Park too; often middle-aged, tweedy men with the kinds of curious habits and eccentricities that marked them as academics and original thinkers. Some of them seemed unperturbed by the security or secrecy and gave the impression that this was a world that they were used to. Indeed, it transpired that some had been doing the kind of work they would now be expected to do for some time. A few of them had even done so during World War I. Others were slightly more nervous, having been recruited from universities, banks and the General Post Office (GPO) and being unused to military life.
The new arrivals at Bletchley Park were soon to discover that they had been selected because they had skills that might prove useful in code breaking. Germany and its allies – the Axis Powers as they came to be known – were using complex forms of encryption in order to pass secret messages among their senior staff, their armies, navies and air forces. A network of wireless listening stations along the south and east coasts – known as “Y Stations” – intercepted such messages and sent them to BP by way of motorcycle courier at a rate of 40 messages per hour.[4] It was Station X’s job to try to break the encryptions and decipher the messages. In order to do so, it needed staff that had shorthand and typing skills, efficiency with the telegraph and Morse code,
and the ability to think laterally and solve complex puzzles. Some recruits had even been identified by way of specially placed prize crosswords in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
But not everyone could be a codebreaker and, in fact, the vast majority of the staff – particularly the women recruited to BP – were there in a vital support capacity to the codebreakers. And they would have to learn to be excellent multitaskers. “We learned to firefight and become first-aiders and a rescue squad,” says one veteran. “We were warned that if we were bombed we would have to look after ourselves. Our job was so secret, no one would come to our rescue. So we had to be big brave girls from the start.” Another recalls the training: “They used one of the huts with duckboards across it. We had to crawl over on our stomachs with a stirrup pump – the smoke created with burning oily rags – to find the fire. Funny thing is, in films you see people coughing and coughing, but really you’re like a vacuum cleaner, gasping for air.” Others received specialist training in everything from driving three-ton lorries to reading Morse code.
It turned out that the rather sinister sounding code name “Station X” was, in fact, simply a numerical designation. Bletchley Park was number ten in a network of communications stations receiving foreign radio and telegraph messages.[5] However, where Station X differed from other stations was that it rapidly expanded to become the hub of all such activity. The name “Station X” had originally applied to just the wireless station built into the Bletchley Park water tower, but it soon came to mean the entire complex. The use of the code name in all official communications became mandatory from the start.