Saving Bletchley Park

by Sue Black

  Sue Black

  @Dr_Black

  Phew. Home at last from #amp09. If I didn’t talk to u abt Bletchley Park pls visit savingbletchleypark.org #bpark follow @bletchleypark

  11:56 PM – 24 Feb 09

  Building with Pride

  One of the great things about Twitter is that once you have built up a community, you can spread a message really quickly. I was starting to appreciate this fact; I was also learning that sometimes, if you’re looking, amazing opportunities just come along and present themselves. One of these opportunities was the Building with Pride competition, which was run by Wickes in 2009 to find the building in the UK that people felt most proud of.

  When the shortlist was announced, we were thrilled to find out that Bletchley Park was on it, and we immediately started tweeting about it, asking our community to spread the word and, crucially, to vote.

  Sue Black

  @Dr_Black

  RT @bletchleypark: http://bit.ly/10w7XS please click &, if you agree, vote Bletchley Park as the building Britain is most proud of. #BPark

  8:47 PM – 24 Feb 09

  We tweeted over and over and over. I remember spending several lengthy sessions on Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else I could think of, trying to get people to vote for Bletchley Park.

  Our efforts resulted in a thrilling few days when we were neck and neck with The Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles had played, and the Needles Old Battery on the Isle of Wight. It was a great team effort. I’d only really been using Twitter for the campaign effort for a few weeks, but I already felt that I was a part of something very exciting: a movement of people who felt the same way that I did about a cause. We were all passionate about Bletchley Park and desperate to make sure that it was both appreciated and given the respect and funding it deserved.

  In March, The National Museum 0f Computing received a great boost when Bletchley Park Capital Partners and its associates donated a grant of £100,000 to the museum. That month we also learned that our efforts to get people to vote for Bletchley Park as the building Britain is most proud of had not been in vain: Bletchley Park had won the 2009 Building with Pride award! This was one of the earliest examples of the people that cared about Bletchley Park working together via Twitter to both spread the word about something and actually get something concrete to happen. People had been voting for two months, the rankings had changed several times, and it had been neck and neck at various points. Many of us had put in lots of time and effort into getting everyone tweeting about the competition, asking our followers to retweet a link to the web page and to vote for Bletchley.

  It was awesome to see such a positive result. Twitter is a great medium for finding people or organisations who have shared interests or common goals and starting a dialogue with them – but there’s also a very fine line between asking people to help with a cause and pissing them off. I’m always conscious of this and have asked a few times if my behaviour on Twitter annoys anyone. A few people, including friends, have said that it does from time to time. But in general, most people have been happy with my sometimes ridiculously excited ubertweeting. It was certainly gratifying to know that, in the case of the Building with Pride competition, all of that tweeting had helped make a tangible difference! In response to the result, Matthew Critchley of Wickes said:

  “The public have really taken this search to heart and have chosen a building that holds an incredibly important place in the British psyche. Bletchley Park has come to signify British ingenuity, courage and pride. I can’t think of a more worthy winner of the first ‘Building with Pride’ award.”

  Help! We need your MP

  I now quite often had people contacting me via Twitter asking me what they could do to help with the campaign. It wasn’t always easy to know what to say to them. Although I seemed to have become a campaigner over the last few years, I didn’t really think of myself as one. I’m very passionate about certain issues that matter to me, so I suppose I have always been a campaigner at heart, but I don’t think that in 2009 I would have identified with the term. As with my interest in raising the profile of women in computing, which led to me setting up the BCSWomen and other online networks for women, the Bletchley Park campaign still seemed in many ways like a (very time-consuming) hobby to me. Campaigning wasn’t something I had ever learned about or thought of investigating – I just got carried away with wanting change to happen and started doing whatever popped into my head as a good idea. In terms of organising and planning, I did almost nothing at all; I just followed my gut feeling about the best way to achieve my goals.

  So when anyone asked me what they could do to help with the campaign, my answer would usually be to tell them what we wanted to achieve in big picture terms and then ask them if they could think of something that they could do to help achieve that aim. It may not have been very planned or strategic, but it did mean that we got the best out of people, and also that no one was under any pressure to do anything they didn’t want to do – they just came in and contributed in whatever way they could, and in so doing became part of the push to raise awareness that gradually started to build up and permeate the public consciousness.

  A good example of this is the letter to MPs that Chris Campbell produced. Chris had contacted me saying that she really wanted to help with the campaign. I told her all about what we were trying to achieve and she suggested putting together a letter that anyone could send to their MP , asking them to help. Chris also sent me the link to add to my blog post so that we could point people towards their MP’s contact details if necessary. Every little helps!

  The first John Ivinson award

  In September 2009 I was delighted to receive the first BCS John Ivinson award for my contribution to supporting women in computing and Bletchley Park. John Ivinson was a previous president of the BCS, and also a friend and mentor, so it was especially poignant to receive an award in his name.

  First BCS John Ivinson Award Goes to

  Dr Sue Black

  6 October 2009

  BCS

  BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT has presented its inaugural John Ivinson award, which recognises the outstanding services of an individual member, to Dr Sue Black.

  Dr Black is a founding member and immediate past chair of the 1,200-strong BCSWomen specialist group, which practically supports women working in IT. She is also a member of BCS Council and is a BCS Fellow and member of BCS Elite. Earlier this year Dr Black, currently Head of Department of Information and Software Systems at the University of Westminster, fronted a national media campaign to help preserve the fabric of the buildings at Bletchley Park Trust. Last week it was told it had been awarded a heritage lottery grant of £460,500 to help it develop its £10m restoration plans. Dr Black was also instrumental along with others in supporting a special BCS ceremony at Bletchley in 2007 that recognised the contribution of the Bombe WRNS operatives and the role they played in helping the park’s cryptographers during the Second World War.

  In March 2009 I sent 519 tweets

  13

  Churchill visits

  “Sweet Boadicea chariot, swing low

  To waft Miss Wingfield where she has to go.”

  —From a comic poem

  by Patrick Wilkinson

  about personalities at BP

  Following his election to Prime Minister in May 1940, Winston Churchill received a buff-coloured box of decoded messages from Bletchley Park every day. These messages allowed him and a very small and select group of confidantes to make strategic decisions about troop deployments and future planning of offensive operations. As far as everyone else was concerned, the information that Churchill was privy to came from a brilliant MI6 network led by the spy codenamed Boniface. So valuable was the intelligence coming out of Station X that Churchill decided to pay the site a visit. And so, in September 1941, he did just that.

  Details of the day are sketchy – n
aturally, there were no press reports, no photographs and no publicity – but we know that he made a tour of the huts, met various staff members and then gave a morale-boosting address to a representative group of people outside Hut 6. “You all look very innocent – one would not think you knew anything secret,” he said. He then went on to describe them as “the geese that lay the golden eggs – and never cackle”.

  It was after this visit that Gordon Welchman, Alan Turing, Stuart Milner-Barry and Hugh Alexander wrote directly to Churchill to ask for more resources. Staffing levels grew rapidly from that point on.

  Every day, the workforce would be bussed into Bletchley Park from their billets, many in requisitioned country houses such as Woburn Abbey and Crawley Grange. And at the end of their eight-hour shifts, they’d be bussed home and the next shift would take over, three per day, seven days a week. The work was so demanding that many of the staff worked voluntary, unpaid overtime on occasions, just to keep on top of it. “I recall being desperately tired most of the time,” says Margaret Broughton-Thompson, a Colossus operator. “It was very hot with the blackout and electric lights. We had meal breaks but the food, especially at night, the reheated meals were revolting.” Sometimes there were not enough vehicles available to take the staff home and they would hitch-hike. “It helped being in uniform,” say teleprinter operators Eleanor Mulligan and Iris Rattley. “The lorry drivers in those days were marvellous. They’d stop and buy you a cup of tea and never a word out of place.”

  But the effort was starting to pay dividends. Week after week, the successful decoding of messages aided the Allies in their efforts. The cracking of German Naval codes in 1941 led to victories against German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. “We know that in that second half of 1941 their shipping successes were cut back to 120,000 tons a month average,” explains Harry Hinsley. “That has to be compared not with the monthly average of 280,000 tons a months in the four months before June ’41 but with the sinkings they would have achieved with their greater number of U-boats. It has been calculated that the Ultra saved about one and a half million tons in September, October, November and December ’41.” Elsewhere, Rommel’s plans were scuppered on the eve of the Battle of Alam el Halfa in 1942; BP code breaking helped destroy the German war effort in Africa. Work by Station X also helped the Russians win a decisive victory at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, halting the German Eastern advance. It has also been said that D-Day might not have happened, or would have had far less a chance of success, without intelligence provided by Bletchley Park.

  Life at the park was sometimes tough. The huts were poorly heated and ventilated, and the staff worked long hours. Some were very cold. Others, like Hut 11A – a concrete add-on – quickly earned the nickname of “the hell hole” because of the heat being created by the decoding equipment. In the huts where machines like the Bombes were operating, there was the additional discomfort of noise. On the BBC People’s War website, Sgt Carol West, a WAAF, describes work in the teleprinter section: “There were 30 to 40 teleprinters back-to-back to a hut, with a moving belt above to take out the enormous volume of work coming in. We worked in Huts 3, 4 and 6; the noise was deafening and the amount of paper spewed out unbelievable. My memory is of working underground but the huts probably had blacked-out windows and we worked in artificial light. We certainly had sun lamp treatment to combat this.” There are stories of people’s health – both physical and mental – being affected. “We did hear a story about a man who drew ducks on a blackboard and then started feeding them. He had to be carried off,” says Margaret Reardon, a wireless operator. “The work really got to you. You had to put your hand up if you wanted to go to the loo or if you wanted something to eat. It was all about discipline.” Anne Wyndham describes the work as hell: “I remember the smell. It was oil. Hot oil. There were at least six machines in there, very poor light, frightful noise. And we were there for eight solid hours. You can’t say that was fun. It was like factory work.”

  The staff, though isolated by the very nature of their work, were often kept apprised of events at the front by way of bulletins and messages written on chalkboards. Occasionally, the visceral realities of war became all too real. “Most of us among the lower ranks never knew what went on at BP,” says WAAF Sgt Gwen Watkins. “The only time I realised what we were actually doing was when I was shown a codebook which had just been captured and rushed to Bletchley from a captured plane. Of course we had no plastic envelopes or anything then, the poor thing was just given to me as it was and I was horrified to see the stains on it. The blood around the edges was drying but the blood in the middle was still wet. And I realised then that somewhere was this German aircrew bleeding, still bleeding while I was writing their codebook out in modern German. And that did bring the war very close.”

  The war also came very close on the 20th and 21st of November 1940, when three German bombs fell on Bletchley Park. One of them was so powerful that it shifted Hut 4 by two feet. However, work inside the hut continued even as it was being winched back onto its hard standing. And, as it turned out, the bombs had probably been intended for the nearby railway station.

  But that isn’t to say that there wasn’t some fun and a social life at BP. Morale was important. The difficulty was that, although some staff were housed on-site, many more were living in isolated billets all over the Buckinghamshire countryside with little or no opportunity to get together. Therefore, an assembly hall was built just outside the perimeter of Bletchley Park to encourage off-duty activities such as dances and concerts, plays and variety shows.

  Bombe supervisor Nigel Forward recalls: “We had one Christmas review in which I mimed the part of Johnny in Frankie and Johnny to gramophone records. I was the hapless Johnny who was caught with Nellie Bligh. You know ‘I don’ wanna tell you no story/ I don’ wanna tell you no lie/ I saw your Johnny about an hour ago/ with a girl called Nellie Bligh.’ I was in a very satisfactory clinch with Nellie Bligh. She was a girl called Olivia whom I’ve not been in touch with since. I was really a dreadful rookie, rather unskilled in the amorous side of life.”[27]

  “Bletchley Park civilians from time to time put on plays and I still have a photograph of the full cast on stage when I was in Saloon Bar,” says Carol West. “One of the WAAFs was Kate Karno[28] who put on musicals, drilling us like a professional stage director. The Glenn Miller Band was stationed at a US Army camp near Bedford and a few of us were invited to the dances they gave. The US Army, of course, had much better and more plentiful food than we. Those invited to the dances would take ‘doggie bags’ along to fill up and take back to share with the others living in the same hut.”[29]

  It was quite common for string quartets and other small orchestras to visit BP to put on a show. The musicians were, of course, told nothing at all about their destination, often arriving in windowless vans and lorries and going away in the same clandestine fashion.

  Boredom was a constant enemy, but people found ways to amuse themselves. Naida Bentley and Brenda Laing (Naval section) recall that there was a Chief Petty Officer called Southey who had been a teacher of music and got people to sing: “We had a wonderful choir and used to go down to Woburn Abbey church.” Dilly Knox would write humorous poems, often spoofing his favourite author Lewis Carroll.[30] Ann Lavell, initially a typist but later PA to Josh Cooper, head of the German Air Section, recalls that the Beer Hut (NAAFI) was “quite a haunt”. She and her friend Julie Lydekker wrote comic verses about life on the estate.[31] However, the poems had to be passed around from hand to hand within BP; the collection was classified for years as top secret, even though most of them were about entirely mundane issues such as the size and quality of food portions. It’s curious to think that lines like: “Now what is this upon my plate, of microscopic size?” might technically be coded as “Ultra”.32

  Japanese codebreaker Hugh Foss was an accomplished Highland dancer and organised a very popular social club for those who fancied learn
ing. The dancers would perform in the long hall of the manor or, in good weather, on the croquet lawn near the lake. And while Ann Lavell recalls with horror “early morning performing physical jerks to the strains of ‘Teddy Bears’ Picnic’,” Margaret Ross has happier memories of playing rounders on the lawn in front of the house during lunch hour.

  One of the most popular facilities were the tennis courts, built at the express orders of Winston Churchill himself. “In May 1941 he visited us and thanked us for our work and told us that we had just sunk the Bismarck, the biggest boat of the German fleet. It was a key turning point in the war when Hitler changed his ideas of invading England. I had only been at Bletchley for a few months. ‘It’s just another boat,’ we thought. It just shows we knew nothing of what was going on,” explains Naval Section translator Gwen Paxton, who was recruited after graduating from Cambridge. “By the lawn where we were standing, Churchill could see some of the men playing basketball and he said, ‘Basketball? An American game? Fancy playing that here. They must have some tennis courts.’ So he arranged for us to have two tennis courts built that are still there now. And that’s typical Churchill.”[33]

  Many staff were placed with families or at places like local vicarages. “In those early days I was billeted with a Mr and Mrs Bunce who lived about eight miles away,” explains Anne Pease. “Mr Bunce was a retired railway worker and his wife was a very kind, homely little lady. It must have been an upheaval for them to have me and another Wren, also called Anne [Marcel], invading their home and having to produce meals for us at strange times. I particularly remember breakfast when Mrs Bunce would give us huge doorsteps of fried bread like nothing I’d ever had before. They were delicious. At Christmas, the first one I’d ever spent away from my family, the other Anne must have had leave, and I must have been on evening or night watch, because I remember that while Mrs Bunce cooked the Christmas lunch, Mr Bunce took me to the pub – another first, for me. When he asked me what I would drink I hadn’t a clue what to ask for, so ordered something I knew my mother sometimes drank, gin and orange. After several of these I don’t think I remembered much about Christmas lunch.” Nigel Forward found himself billeted with a brickmaker and his family: “The brickmaker knew I was working at the Park; it was a kind of mystery enclave for him that was meant to have some hairy eccentrics. But he knew nothing else.”