The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (22 page)

For security reasons the sections working on Enigma continued to use their original titles, even though they were now in the new brick- and concrete-built blocks. People
had become comfortable in the old wooden huts and were not necessarily happy to move. Sally Norton complained of transferring ‘from Hut 4, which we loved, into a horrible concrete
building’. Mair Thomas had similar feelings.

‘In all truth our new block was a bit of a dump. Even though it was brand new and built for the new workers it was grim and functional. It felt a bit like working in a factory or a battery
farm. I didn’t like the inconvenience of moving; it was disorientating. The old hut, with all its shabbiness, was familiar and settled.’

The facilities for women also increased. A local hairdresser set up a salon in the Park charging a shilling (5p) for a trim and three shillings and sixpence (17½p) for a shampoo and set.
With too many of the billets having limited washing facilities, a bath house was built beside Block F and, amid concern that the lack of natural light in the new blocks was taking its toll on the
health of some of the young women, a ‘Sun Ray Clinic’ was set up.

Commander Denniston had successfully established the idea that Bletchley should have first call on mathematicians, and to a certain extent linguists, in the early years of the war, but with far
more fighting going on around the world there was now an increasing need for men on the front line and good reason why German and Japanese linguists were needed in other parts of the war effort.
Women had to make up the bulk of the staff and even the four sections breaking the Enigma messages and reporting on them to
London and to front line commanders were
increasingly involving women in work that during the early years of the war had been the exclusive preserve of the men.

Hut 3 got around the Civil Service regulations on women working alongside men on the night shift by setting up an entirely female reporting shift for the Watch, who carried out all of the
immediate intelligence reporting. Both Hut 3 and Hut 6 brought in large numbers of army intelligence analysts, the majority of them women, and Hut 6 split the main codebreaking section, the Machine
Room, into two. The Hut 6 codebreakers who did the initial work looking for ways into the Enigma codes formed a new section, which like its Hut 3 equivalent was called the Watch. The Machine Room
was turned into a completely female section, giving some of the women from the old Decoding Room and a number of smaller sections of Hut 6 some of the codebreaking work. The women taken out of the
Decoding Room were largely replaced by female Typex operators who typed the messages out mechanically and had no need to understand German.

The men on the Watch worked out the cribs and passed them through a hatch into the Machine Room where a female codebreaker worked out the menus for the Bombes, liaised with the Wrens running the
Bombes, and tested out the settings thrown up by them on captured Enigma machines.

Ann Williamson was one of a very few female mathematicians in the country at that time. When she’d said at school that she wanted to specialise in that area her headmistress had told her
she couldn’t because ‘mathematics
is not a ladylike subject’. Fortunately, Ann’s parents overruled the headmistress and eventually Ann earned a place
reading mathematics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

‘When I went up to Oxford in 1940, there were five women in the whole university who were reading maths that year. We were very scarce.’

After completing her degree, the Oxford University appointments board sent Ann and Hilary Brett-Smith, another of the five female maths graduates, to interviews at Bletchley Park and a few weeks
later they received letters from the Foreign Office appointing them as temporary assistants at a salary of £150 a year and telling them to report to Bletchley. Hilary joined Hut 8; Ann went
into the new female Machine Room.

‘We had to go through the Watch to get to the Machine Room and just by the door connecting the two was a table with pieces of paper laid out on which people in the Watch had written some
of the jumbled nonsense that came through the air waves and then underneath they’d written what they thought it might be saying in German. We would pick up one of these pieces of paper and
make a menu, connecting these letters we received to the letters they should have been saying. I loved that work making menus. It was very like doing crosswords, joining a chain of
letters.’

The menus were sent through to the Wrens coordinating the work that the various Bombe outstations would carry out via a Lamson pressurised air communications system. The menu was put into a
canister which was then inserted into a tube connecting the Machine Room with the Bombe
Control Room. A partial vacuum in the tube system drew the canister in and routed it
through to the Bombe Control Room. Ann and the other girls called it the ‘spit and suck’ because the pressurised air system sucked the capsule in and ‘spat it out’ at the
other end.

‘The Wrens working on the Bombes would set them up and then telephone us when they got a stop, which would be the position at which the Bombe stopped where all the chains on your menu were
accurate.’

The women in the Machine Room then set up an Enigma machine with the right rotors and settings thrown up by the Bombe and typed in the letters of the message to see if the letters lighting up on
top of the Enigma machine produced German text. If they did, then the settings would be passed through to the Decoding Room where the women set up their modified Typex machines and typed out all
the messages from that particular German network. Ann and her fellow female codebreakers had a far more interesting job than any of the women in Hut 6 had enjoyed before.

‘The most important code for us was the Red. There were ten or so of us working in the Machine Room. It sounds much more complicated than we found it at the time. It was fascinating, all
these messages coming out in German. I loved it.’

The expansion of the whole process into what was effectively a factory production line, impossible without the increased numbers the women provided, was essential if the
codebreakers were to keep track of German troops
during the invasion of Europe, but by now Bletchley had broken a code that was even more complex. The messages they decoded
would tell Allied commanders precisely what Hitler and his generals planned to do next.

All the main front-line command posts were linked to Hitler’s command posts in Berlin and Rastenberg in Poland by teleprinter links on which the messages were automatically encoded by the
Lorenz SZ40 device. There was an SZ40 between the teleprinter and the transmitter and another at the other end between the receiver and the teleprinter. The operator at one end simply typed the
German message in, the SZ40 encrypted it, and the transmitter sent out the encoded message. At the other end the encoded message passed through another SZ40 which decoded it, and the message then
typed up automatically in plain German text on another teleprinter.

The codebreakers gave the Lorenz system the codename Tunny, after the fish more commonly known as tuna. Each of the teleprinter links between Hitler and the various generals on the front line
was given the name of a different fish. The two most important ones for British commanders were between Hitler and the German commander in France, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, which Bletchley
codenamed Jellyfish, and the link between Hitler and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, the German commander in Italy, which they called Bream.

The Lorenz SZ40 had twelve wheels, ten to encipher the message (paired in two separate rows of five) and two drive wheels. The movement of the second row of wheels was highly complex, making it
difficult to break. But in
1942, in an extraordinary piece of codebreaking, John Tiltman and Bill Tutte, a recently recruited chemistry and mathematics graduate, did just
that and two new sections were set up to work on it.

The first section, run by Max Newman and called the Newmanry, worked out how the first row of wheels were set and how they rotated. The second section, led by Ralph Tester and called the
Testery, used the stream of letters produced by the Newmanry to work out the action of the second set of wheels and decode the actual messages.

Newman, who had been Alan Turing’s tutor at Cambridge, realised that the work in his section could be done much faster by the sort of ‘computing machinery’ that his former
student had already envisaged building. This didn’t yet exist. It was just a series of ideas in Turing’s mind. But Newman put his ideas to the head post office research engineer Tommy
Flowers and explained precisely what the ‘computing machinery’ needed to do. By the end of 1943 Mr Flowers and his team had produced Colossus, the world’s first electronic digital
computer, an astonishing, ground-breaking achievement that, because of the secrecy surrounding the work of the codebreakers, would go unrecognised for decades. Colossus did not break the messages.
This still had to be done by hand. But it made the process of working out the settings of the first row of wheels far quicker.

The encoded German teleprinter messages were intercepted at Knockholt, near Sevenoaks in Kent, and printed out on perforated paper teleprinter tape. The tape of the messages was run through
Colossus, which read it
electronically and worked out the wheel settings and the way in which the wheels moved. It needed two people to operate it, quite aside from the
codebreakers who were working out
how
it should be operated. Given the success of using the Wrens to operate the Bombe machines, it was no surprise that they turned to them to operate
Colossus.

Marigold Philips was born in Etwall, near Derby, to members of what was then known as the ‘County Set’. Her father was the managing director of a Manchester warehousing company and
while the family had no aristocratic links they regarded themselves, and were regarded locally, as country gentry.

‘If you owned property you were somebody in those days. We lived in a medium-sized country house where the horses and dogs were much more interesting than the people. I was the odd one out
in that I wanted to think and have ideas whereas most young female members of the country gentry just wanted a rich husband and more horses.’

Although Marigold regarded her mother and father as good parents, it was not a very close relationship. While children were not regarded as being as low down in the scale of importance as
servants, they were certainly kept out of the way most of the time, minded by nursemaids when they weren’t being taught to read and write by their nanny or later given more extensive
education by a governess.

‘Children were something you had that lived somewhere else in the house and were expected to grow up and conform. We weren’t the apple of anyone’s eye. Children
were children. Speak when you’re spoken to. Live your own life in the nursery. I had a nanny and then a governess before I went away to school, which I was longing to
do.’

Marigold went to Downe House School at Cold Ash in Berkshire as a boarder. It was a very good school and at the time emphasised the need for ‘low living and high thinking’ – a
total change from what she was used to at home.

‘It’s now seen as very trendy, but it was then seen as a very intellectual school. We were serious-minded, gently feminist and expected to have careers.’

During the school holidays, Marigold’s mother made sure she and her sister were tightly chaperoned. They were only allowed to go out with young men if the cook went with them, so they
became quite adroit at getting round the restrictions.

‘It was terribly easy. You dropped the cook off at the nearest pub, gave her some money for a drink and picked her up on the way back. But the interesting twist is that in those days at
sixteen or seventeen we didn’t really know what we were being chaperoned for, because we didn’t know what the hidden dangers with young men were.’

It wasn’t until she went up to Oxford to read English Literature at Somerville College, then an all-women college, that she learned the facts of life.

‘I was sexually ignorant and a young don’s wife put me right on certain things. She was appalled to find that I didn’t know. This was typical of young girls from our privileged
but fairly un-intellectual background.’

When she finished her ‘wartime degree’, restricted to
two years so the students could leave and contribute to the war effort, Marigold’s mother told her
to join the Wrens. It was an entirely pragmatic social decision and, despite having been to university, Marigold was still not twenty-one and so was given no choice.

‘My mother thought it was time I came off my intellectual high horse and the Wrens were thought to be where young ladies were more likely to meet suitable husbands, i.e. naval officers,
heaven help us.’

After three weeks at Mill Hill scrubbing floors to make sure she was willing to follow orders, Marigold was interviewed and asked if she liked crossword puzzles – she didn’t. How
about maths? She insisted she was hopeless at it. They didn’t seem to care. She was sent first to Eastcote for a period of induction into the world of codebreaking and then, in August 1943,
to Bletchley to work in the Newmanry.

‘I realised subsequently that they didn’t give a damn about what your qualifications were, if you were a nice young girl from a decent family you were not likely to rat on
them.’

Dorothy du Boisson, a 23-year-old from Edmonton, north London, arrived a couple of months before Marigold and was given a talk by Max Newman on what the work involved.

‘Mr Newman was a very quiet man, reserved and not at ease with girls. He walked up and down in front of us with his eyes on the ground, talking about a machine with twelve wheels. When he
had gone we were none the wiser. Later we discovered that he thought we had been told
what the section did. Mr Newman decreed that everyone, except himself, be called by
their first name. This was a wonderful idea. At once we were a team.’

Maggie Broughton-Thompson, an eighteen-year-old vicar’s daughter from Little Aston in Staffordshire, joined the Wrens straight from school. She’d been due to go to Mill Hill to do
her basic training but a doodlebug had hit it, putting it briefly out of action, and she was sent instead to Tullichewan Castle.