The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (10 page)

In her spare time, Sheila joined the Scottish Reels Club and it was there she met the love of her life. Oliver Lawn was one of the Hut 6 codebreakers and often stood in for Hugh Foss when he was
away. ‘I first saw Oliver at the Reels Club. I used to love reels and I noticed that when Hugh Foss was absent, Oliver took the class. And I remember this rather nice lad. He was tall,
elegant and danced beautifully. I suppose we danced together and Oliver thought that I was an adequate partner for him.

‘We went down to Stratford on one occasion and we went to a play and then we went for a picnic on the river. I remember I couldn’t buy much but I bought lettuce and things to eat and
I think my billeter had given me something and we had a picnic on the river and of course the clouds came over and we had a terrific thunderstorm come down and I was absolutely soaked. He asked me
if I was all right. I said: “No I am not.”’

As the need for staff grew, it was no longer possible to get enough women from the upper classes who spoke
German to fill the various roles. But the introduction of
conscription for women gave the Admiralty large numbers of additional members of the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, and when they began arriving at Bletchley in 1941, it was only
natural that some of them would be sent to work in the Naval Section.

Jean Tocher had spent a year at Darmstadt studying German before the war. When she joined the Wrens she was sent to Bletchley to work on the Naval Section’s ‘Allied Plot’,
which was a chart of the world covering all four walls of one room on which a number of Wrens plotted the movement of all the Allied ships and their German, Italian and Japanese counterparts.

‘These huge charts were being used to plot where the German ships were and where the U-boats were going to attack our ships, so that the RAF could be sent out or evasive action taken
– it was the sharp end of the naval war that we were, in our very small way, involved in.’

Initially, the women working on the Plot reported any potential threats direct to the RAF by scrambler phone. But the Admiralty didn’t like Hut 4 talking directly to the RAF about naval
issues, so by the time Jean arrived the threats were being reported by phone to MI6, which passed them on to the RAF as intelligence reports. Jean was twenty-five and a bit older and more confident
than the other Wrens so she was appointed as the head of one of the watches.

‘We got secret and top-secret messages and every day we were hastily plotting all the convoys. We had a colour code: blue for cruisers, green for destroyers, purple for
frigates and pink for corvettes, and there were other pins which had a piece of white cardboard in the middle and on that we would put the number of the convoy. It had to be absolutely
accurate and quick so that, when a German code had been cracked, you could see U-boats moving towards a convoy.’

Like many of the Wrens working at Bletchley Park, Jean was based at Woburn Abbey, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford, which had been taken over by the government for the duration of the
war, and bussed into Bletchley for each watch. They used naval terms for everything they did, so the shifts were watches, their dormitories were cabins, their living quarters were the
fo’c’sle, and the area in front of the Abbey was the quarterdeck.

‘We were billeted in the servants’ quarters, eight double bunks to a room, the bats flew in and the condensation dripped off the ceilings. There were about four bathrooms and you
couldn’t have a bath in privacy, because there weren’t enough places to wash – there were enamel basins on a shelf, so you had to leave the door open so other Wrens could use the
basins to do their washing while you were having a bath, it was all a bit like boarding school.’

In late 1944, Sally was selected for a new top-secret job. The difficulties dealing with the Admiralty simply wouldn’t go away. Frank Birch called Sally into his office
and told her she was to be part of a team charged with improving relations with the Admiralty. It would be based right inside the Admiralty’s Operational Intelligence Centre and would be
staffed by four young women, with
one of them on duty at all times, and part of their job would be to ‘smile prettily’ at the admirals in order to get them
onside.

‘I managed to blurt out: “Sir, are you giving me this job for my brains or my exceptionally good legs?” To which he replied, “A bit of both will come in
handy.”’

Sally would be based in London, just a taxi ride away from the clubs and hotels where all her friends met, and could live in the flat of a great-uncle who had moved out for the war. It was
‘a dream come true’ – a flat just off Piccadilly, just around the corner from the Ritz, and looking out over St James’s Park.

‘The Admiralty was about the best job any girl could have. The responsibility was awesome – you were alone in this room, completely responsible for every decrypt that came from
Bletchley and you had to decide who saw it. No one was allowed into our room, not even an admiral. All the telephones were scramblers and I had a direct line to the Prime Minister. Four girls and
one nice man called Bill, who was really our boss, working round the clock, and all those lovely sailors in the passages.’

Morag Maclennan was one of the first Wrens to arrive at Bletchley Park in early 1941 as the number of recruits needed forced the authorities to spread their net far wider. They
were no longer simply taking academics and young women from ‘good families’ who could be trusted to keep the secret. They were looking for young women from any background so long as
they had the necessary intelligence and ability to ‘keep Mum’.

Eight Wrens were brought in as a trial measure to work in Hut 11 operating the Bombes, the top-secret machines that tested various Enigma settings potentially being used by the Germans. These
machines were vital if Hut 6 and the naval codebreakers in Hut 8 were to be able to break the codes quickly enough to get the intelligence to British military and naval commanders in time.

Morag and her friends had joined the Wrens because they wanted to do their bit and liked the idea of being near the sea. There was, of course, the added attraction of meeting young sailors. For
Morag herself, the navy was in
her blood. Her brother was a marine engineer and already in the navy, as were a number of her cousins.

‘We used to go up to the Clyde a lot and go round on Clyde steamers so I was very enthusiastic about ships and the sea. There was a long lag between when I applied, several months I was
waiting, looking forward to it and reading snippets about things that were happening and thinking, gosh, this is going to be interesting, being in a port and big ships and all that kind of
excitement – that’s what I was looking forward to.’

The Women’s Royal Naval Service was initially set up during the First World War and disbanded when the war came to an end. But as the prospects of another war with Germany increased in
1938, the Wrens were re-formed, with advertisements for volunteers drawing in large numbers of women, including some who had served during the First World War and had persuaded their daughters to
join as well. Like the other women’s services, the WAAF and the ATS, the Wrens really took off after conscription for women was introduced in 1941.

There were three separate sites where all Wrens received their basic training: Mill Hill in north London, Wesley College at Headingley in Leeds, and Tullichewan Castle by Loch Lomond in
Scotland. There were only three weeks to train each ‘draft’ so the instructors concentrated on testing the girls’ ability to obey orders and making them feel that even though they
weren’t allowed to go to sea they were still part of the Royal Navy. As at Bletchley, everything had a naval term, based on the concept of being on a ship. The Wrens slept in
‘cabins’ on ‘bunks’ not beds. The floor
was the ‘deck’. The kitchen was the ‘galley’, the dining room the ‘mess’,
or for officers the ‘wardroom’. Time off was ‘shore leave’.

Morag was told to report to the railway station and only then to open her travel warrant to find out where she was going.

‘I was hoping it would be Portsmouth or Plymouth or somewhere, so to find that it said Bletchley was a terrible disappointment. We got off at the station and somebody met us. We went up a
little gravel path straight into Hut 11 and there were all these machines there and we were told what we were going to do, and it was quite obvious that there was no escape.’

The Bombes were built by the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM). There were only four Bombes in Hut 11 when Morag arrived and up until that point they had been operated by BTM staff
co-opted into the RAF. But the codebreakers knew they would need many more and had ordered an initial batch of seventy. That would need around 700 people to run them and BTM didn’t have that
many men to spare. They needed them to build the machines, which is why Bletchley Park had been forced to call in the Wrens.

Initially, Morag and the other Wrens were allowed to wear civilian clothes to blend in with the rest of the staff at Bletchley, most of whom were civilians, a lot of them young academics or
former students who wore very casual clothes. So all the members of the armed forces who worked at Bletchley wore civilian clothes, whatever rank they were. Rank meant very little among the
codebreakers in any case. Everyone was treated on the basis of the job
regardless of whether they were an officer, a sergeant or just a basic airman, sailor or soldier. Then
an admiral came to visit Bletchley and wanted to know where all his Wrens were. When a number of young women in civilian clothes were pointed out to him, he blew his top. ‘It’s
disgraceful,’ he said. ‘My Wrens should be jumping up, hands down seams of skirts.’ He went back to London on a mission, determined to sort out the lax discipline at Bletchley,
and from then on everyone in the armed forces was forced to wear uniform to work.

The Bombes were proving their worth and more and more were needed, along with more and more Wrens to operate them. Dozens of Bombes were installed in country houses around Bletchley Park which
were specially requisitioned as bases for the machines themselves and as accommodation for the hundreds of Wrens who would be operating them. Some of these country mansions were very beautiful,
others were close to derelict. The first five, at Steeple Claydon, Walton Hall, Crawley Grange, Wavendon House and Gayhurst Manor, were all taken over by Bletchley in 1942.

Soon the authorities were forced to look further afield, creating a custom-built site capable of housing more than 60 Bombes and 600 Wrens at Stanmore, north of London. The need for more staff
to run the Bombes was acute and the authorities began to advertise for Wrens ‘for interesting and extremely important work . . . necessitating the operating of light electrical machinery.
Girls should be of good physique and education, quick, accurate and keen, with good powers of concentration.’

Colette St George-Yorke became a Wren in October 1943 when just seventeen and a half, the earliest age at which you could join up. Colette had been brought up in Harrogate
in Yorkshire and went to the local convent school. Her father was a timber merchant, but because of the war the government had taken over all the buying and selling of timber and he was working for
the Ministry of Aircraft Production. When Colette left school she was mad keen on becoming a Wren but she was only sixteen and had to do something else until she was old enough to join up.

‘The chap who lived next door to us in Harrogate was the managing director of the Yorkshire Dyeware and Chemical Company in Leeds and he said there was a job for me. I could be a lab
assistant. So I was there for a year until I was seventeen and a half and could officially apply to join the Wrens.’

Colette signed up and was given a medical and sent home. A couple of weeks later she was called forward to the training and drafting depot at Mill Hill.

‘And I thought it was absolutely marvellous. They had a quarterdeck and a white ensign. You couldn’t walk across the quarterdeck. You had to go at the double. If you went across the
quarterdeck you had to salute the white ensign.’

The Wrens were organised into different divisions, each given the name of a famous naval hero. Colette was in Howe Division, named after the eighteenth-century Admiral of the Fleet Richard Howe
who defeated the French at the Battle of the Glorious First of June. The young Wrens had two weeks of training as a probationer,
during which time they wore navy blue overalls
and could leave if they didn’t like it. Colette was told she wouldn’t be given the smart navy blue uniform she’d joined up to wear until the third and final week of training, once
she’d committed to staying in the Wrens.

‘They got us up in the morning at half past four with a klaxon and we used to have to scrub the floor of the corridor and then we would have a great big mug of tea and some bread and
dripping. I thought this was fantastic. And I made friends with a girl there who came from Yorkshire as well, Sheila Tong. Anyway, eventually we were called up for an interview on what we were
going to do. There were only three categories left: cooks, stewards, or Pembroke Five.’

Pembroke merely indicated it was a shore station – at that stage Wrens weren’t allowed to serve on board ships – but it didn’t tell them anything about what the job was.
The two girls looked at each other and then at the petty officer who was advising them.

‘What’s Pembroke Five?’

‘Can’t tell you.’

‘Ooh, that sounds interesting. We’ll do that.’

They spent another two weeks at Mill Hill, having to wait long after everyone else on their draft had been posted away because they needed to be vetted to make sure they weren’t a security
risk.

‘Finally the day came when we were given our uniforms. We got into a coach and off we went. I can remember Sheila saying, “Isn’t this exciting. I wonder where we’re
going.”’

About twenty minutes later they pulled into another
new Bombe base at Eastcote, just ten miles west of Mill Hill. It was a depressing anticlimax. This was the secret base?
They’d been hoping for some sort of top-secret intelligence organisation hidden away and they’d ended up at a muddy building site a few miles down the road. Colette couldn’t hide
her disappointment.