The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (12 page)

‘We got out of our bunks and took our service respirators and clambered out over this thing. It hadn’t opened completely. Some of the bombs had burned their way out and landed
somewhere else on the camp, but the rest were still there and could have gone off. We just clambered over them and got out.’

The Wrens had a four-day ‘stand-off’ once in every four weeks. They would work one week of days, the second week was evenings and the third week was working through the night. They
came off the final night and then worked that evening from four to midnight. Then they had four days off. Most of the girls went home to see their families (and sometimes, if they were home on
leave, their boyfriends) in trains that were always packed with troops.

‘I used to go up to Harrogate and Sheila used to go to Hull, standing most of the time. Many’s the time I’ve gone all the way up to Harrogate sitting in the guard’s van
on a bicycle.’

Colette was lucky. Her boyfriend Graham was based in
the UK so could often come up to Harrogate to see her. They’d met because he had been a pupil of Colette’s
aunt at St Francis Xavier’s College in Liverpool.

‘He came to Harrogate to see Aunt Em. She lived in Liverpool but there were terrible air raids there. Terrible. So she came to Harrogate to live with us, and that’s how we got to
know Graham.’

Graham Murray’s father was Scottish but like Colette he had an Irish mother. He was an RAF pilot warrant officer. His job was to drop secret agents into France and other occupied
countries. Here was a man who could match up to Colette’s father, who had won the Military Cross on the Somme during the First World War. Graham’s job was highly dangerous but he was
based at RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire, so whenever he had days off at the same time as Colette they would meet up at her parents’ home.

‘He was one of these chaps dropping agents. He flew Halifax aircraft and they used to have to fly at 800 feet to drop the agents and the supplies. The supplies didn’t all come down
by parachute, sometimes they were just dropped.’

Colette moved to Stanmore shortly before D-Day, the Allied invasion of Europe. The Wrens weren’t briefed on when and where it would happen – the detail of the Allied assault had to
be kept very tight among a few people who were specially briefed or, in the jargon used by those in charge, ‘bigoted’. But Colette and her colleagues knew it was coming. They were
banned from going on leave and on the day itself they saw the sky black with Allied bombers and knew immediately what was happening.

But while D-Day seemed to take the Allies a step closer to victory, there was bad news for Colette. Graham was reported missing while dropping supplies to resistance
fighters in the Ardennes in preparation for the invasion.

‘Nobody quite knew what that meant because in those days missing could mean he was a prisoner of war and that was often the case.’

There was nothing for it but to get on with the work, and even if you were in the UK you were still under threat, especially if you worked in a big city like London. The Germans responded to the
D-Day invasion by firing the V1 flying bombs at London from launchers along the French and Dutch coasts. The British called the V1s doodlebugs because of the humming noise they made. The Germans
fired up to a hundred a day at London and southeast England between June 1944 and March 1945. They were very frightening – silent killers. You could hear them going over and then the engine
stopped and the bomb would drop wherever it cut out.

The British responded by trying to fool the Germans into thinking that they were hitting the wrong targets, so the sirens that warned of impending bombers were not used. Instead, at Stanmore
there was an old man with the same type of rotating sign they used for traffic control around roadworks. Instead of saying ‘Stop’ on the red side of the sign and ‘Go’ on the
green side, the sign said ‘Alert’ on the red side and ‘All Clear’ on the green.

One night Sheila and Colette were alone in the hut. There was a stand-off and most people had gone home, but it wasn’t the normal four-day break, so there wasn’t
enough time for the two girls to go up to Yorkshire. Sheila had gone down to the washroom and Colette was getting into her bunk.

‘I heard this bloody thing. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm . . . and when it got lower and lower and louder it suddenly stopped. And I remember jumping out of my bunk and trotting down the concrete
corridor in my bare feet to join Sheila, thinking to myself, I don’t want to die alone. That’s what I was thinking, and she was lying flat on the floor.’

Although Colette still had no word of Graham, she at least was safe and was soon moved away from the dangers of London to work on the Bombes in Hut 11 at Bletchley Park. She was quartered in a
‘Wrennery’ at Crawley Grange, ten miles northeast of Bletchley. The utility buses – dubbed ‘liberty ships’ after the boats that transport sailors from their ship and
into port – took half an hour to ferry Colette and the other Wrens into work.

‘We were bussed in and bussed out. We never saw any of the other people at Bletchley. We never had contact with any of them. We were completely self-contained and we did our eight hours
and back to Crawley.’

Crawley Grange was a beautiful Elizabethan house which had once belonged to Thomas Wolsey, who as Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII was the second most powerful man in the country. But Wolsey
fell from favour after he failed to obtain the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon that would allow the King to marry Anne Boleyn, and Crawley Grange was taken away from him.
Colette thought it was absolutely gorgeous.

‘It had a great ballroom, panelled from the floor to the ceiling, with two bay windows, and it was haunted. The place looked perfect with the utility forces
furniture in it, just right, the plain tables and things. Once a week we would go into Bedford and probably get something to eat, beans on toast or something. The rest of the time we sat in this
great panelled room.’

This was their ‘fo’c’sle’. Mostly they just sat and chatted, played cards or board games, or simply read, but it would have been a waste not to make full use of a
beautiful ballroom and they held dances and social evenings to which they invited American or RAF airmen from the nearby bases at Molesworth and Cranfield. The Wrens who were working in the Naval
Section at Bletchley also invited other members of Hut 4 to the dances. The influx of a large number of young servicewomen dramatically improved the social life for those who, like Barbara
Abernethy, were lucky enough to be invited to the dances.

‘All of a sudden there were lots of soldiers, Wrens and WAAFs. The Wrens used to have rather good dances. To be invited to a party at one of the Wrenneries as they were called was
something to be looked forward to and enjoyed. They had very good dances.’

The Americans reciprocated and the Glenn Miller Army Air Force Band, the most popular orchestra of the time, and based just a few miles away in Bedford, frequently played at the US dances.

On one occasion, a bus-load of Wrens and Hut 4 staff were invited to a dance in a hangar at a nearby American
base where Glenn Miller’s band was playing. They
included Adrienne Farrell, a civilian translator working in Hut 4.

‘The hangar was crowded and in semi-darkness, lit only by swirling coloured spotlights and resounding with the superb but deafening noise of the band. As each of us entered we were grabbed
by one of the waiting line of airmen. After the first dance, I looked eagerly round for my next partner. Alas, we were expected to stay with the same person all evening. I think my partner was as
disappointed as I was. On the way home, I noticed with some puzzlement that the bus was half empty.’

Barbara Quirk, from North Cheshire, joined the Wrens in early 1943 at the age of eighteen and after a spell at Stanmore moved to Crawley Grange. She loved the countryside around the house and
frequently went riding or walking across the fields.

‘Crawley Grange is I think one of the most beautiful houses I have ever seen. There were fields, endless fields, and I remember one day I was walking alongside a hedge and I had my hacking
jacket over my shoulder and a pheasant flew into my jacket. I was very glad when it flew away because I didn’t quite know what to do with it. The fields and hedgerows were full of every shade
of violet in creation, huge big lovely-smelling violets, so every Wren cabin you went into at Crawley Grange had pot after pot of beautiful violets and primroses and cowslips. Glorious, heavenly
country.’

One weekend, Barbara’s watch decided to hold a dance in the ballroom, but they were told by the senior officer in charge of them at the time, who was based in Essex, that
they couldn’t have any alcohol in the grounds of Crawley Grange.

‘So we got some of the men who were coming from one of the camps around – they might have been Americans, they might have been British, I can’t remember now – to bring
some beer. They brought a mobile bar on a jeep and parked it outside the Wrennery and when the chief officer found out, we were all gated [restricted to quarters] for a month.’

Barbara also worked on the Bombes at Bletchley. The watches ran from 8am to 4pm, from 4pm to midnight, and from midnight to 8am. The night shifts were the worst because there was often much less
to do once the most common codes were broken.

‘It could be a bit slower than in the daytime and some Wrens used to go and sit in the off-duty quarters and fall asleep and eventually it was said that no one was to sleep when at
Bletchley so when we had a break for coffee or a roll or something we would cut the crossword out of the previous day’s
Times
that was hanging up in the mansion and take it back with
us and shout clues to each other from our respective Bombes.’

Colette was completely absorbed with the work and worries about Graham and many of the Wrens also had boyfriends away in the war, but there were still plenty of unattached Wrens and no shortage
of young servicemen willing to attend the dances and social evenings.

‘We had wonderful dances and evenings. I can remember the lawn in front of it covered in bicycles, chaps on bicycles. But somehow it wasn’t that important. We were
so hard at it all the time. We were kind of living for that stand-off. It was a very hard grind indeed.’

When they finished the final evening shift before the stand-off they would leave as soon as possible, taking trains packed with troops back home.

‘The Admiralty were very good to us, we were the first women services to be given handbags, quite primitive shoulder bags, but an absolute boon for a woman. This was wonderful for our
make-up and combs.’

They were also allowed to wear their own underwear rather than the standard long black ‘apple-catcher’ knickers that other servicewomen had to wear. Colette bought a remnant of
beautiful, pale-blue satin during one of their trips on the bus into Bedford and took it home with her on the next stand-off so her mother could use it to make her some French knickers.

‘My mother used a button to fasten them because elastic was in short supply and one time I was going home on leave and standing in the middle of the corridor as the train was packed as
usual. I had to change at Kettering and I jostled to get out of the train with all my bags, stepped onto the platform, looked down and found my pale-blue satin knickers around my ankles with the
platform full of American Army Air Corps. What else could I do but step out of them, put them in my pocket and ride the rest of the way home with no knickers on.’

Joan Read married her boyfriend Edward Baily in early 1942 after he joined the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, but her father was in the Royal Navy and she and her sister
Joyce decided to join the Wrens. It would be the right thing to do, they thought, and they would have a more attractive uniform than if they joined the WAAF or the ATS. Joan
was twenty-one and Joyce was twenty. They were selected for ‘Special Duties (X)’ and followed their orders to report to the mysterious Station X with some apprehension, not having the
faintest idea what they would be doing. They were put to work in Hut 11 and billeted initially at Crawley Grange and then at Gayhurst Manor, which was once home to Everard Digby, one of the
conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 to blow up King James I.

‘The owners of Gayhurst Manor were still in residence, Sir Walter and Lady Carlisle; occasionally we caught a glimpse of them and Lady Carlisle always had a sack tied around her waist for
some unknown reason. If we were on the night watch we had to sleep during the day, of course, and I remember they had problems with an RAF aircraft flying low over Gayhurst. We found out afterwards
it happened to be because my sister was sunbathing on the roof with nothing on.’

Occasionally, inevitably, one of the girls would fall pregnant, at which point a glass of milk would be put out for her each night in the galley, sparking gossip as to who it was. Once the bump
began to grow they would be sent away for six months or so to have the baby before returning to the job. Sadly, unless a girl’s parents looked after the baby, it was taken away and put up for
adoption, a procedure that remained common for single mothers well into the 1970s.

Many of the girls were away from home, and the
watching eyes of their mothers, for the first time. But while the knowledge that their boyfriends might be sent off to die
at any time induced many to go further than they would have done before the war, for others the strict moral codes of the time held sway. It had been drummed into them that ‘nice girls’
did not do such things until they were married. Barbara Quirk remembered that as a young Wren working in Stanmore she would go up to the West End whenever she had an evening off.

‘You really worked solidly for the eight hours you were on duty but there was ample time off and we all enjoyed ourselves, it was great fun. I had a very good war, I had a ball. But you
must remember in those days that there was no such thing as an overnight stay. You went and had dinner. You enjoyed yourself immensely. You might even have gone somewhere dancing and when the time
came for good little Wrens to go home you shook hands and said goodbye.’