The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (29 page)

Most of the Bletchley veterans were determined to keep the secret until they died. They’d been indoctrinated into staying quiet forever, so the Winterbotham revelations were a great shock.
Joy Higgins met her first husband Hugh at Bletchley. He worked in the Naval Section in Hut 4. Even though both of them had worked at Bletchley Park, Joy never told him what she did and he never
told her what he’d done.

‘People without our common background at Bletchley found it much more difficult to accept a partner’s refusal to discuss the work there. It must have been hard for them.’

Hugh died in 1967, nine years before the government’s decision to allow former codebreakers to tell their relatives what they did in the war, so even now Joy has only the vaguest idea of
what her husband did; but she knows that, like her, he loved working at Bletchley.

‘Nothing would ever compare with it. It had been a wonderful place to work: a classless society where brains, application and enthusiasm were the criteria. The ethos of Bletchley meant
that women were treated as equals – years ahead of any “politically correct” diktats; that new schemes for tackling a job were never snubbed; it meant new ideas and not accepting
old standards without question; it meant informality; it meant talking the same language with like-minded people, whether it was serious discussion or witty repartee.’

But for many years afterwards their work at Bletchley Park conditioned their lives. Joy felt for her husband, whose pre-war contemporaries had returned full of stories of
bravery in the face of danger, of battles with the Germans or the Japanese. They had medals to prove that they had done their bit.

‘They hadn’t much respect for civilians who’d spent the war years as civil servants in the Foreign Office, not on active service. Things were not made easier by our reluctance
to say anything at all. People were quick to label our evasions as rudeness.’

Maggie Broughton-Thompson had stayed in the Wrens after the war, becoming an officer and only leaving in 1952 when she married a naval officer. She never told him about Bletchley Park and was
horrified one day to see a television documentary telling the story of how they broke the codes.

‘I was sitting at home and my husband was watching a programme. I happened to glance up and at that precise moment there was a picture of the mansion and they were talking about it and I
was so absolutely horrified. It was such a shock, I was jolly nearly sick.

‘I sat there pointing at the television shouting, “No, No, No.” He thought I’d gone mad, I think. It really was the most awful shock. We really were staying quiet for
life. We were prepared to stay silent until our dying day.’

Mary Wisbey found herself caught in a tug-of-war after Japan surrendered. She was posted to London to work in air intelligence but Joe Hooper insisted on her
returning to work for him in the Russian Air Section at Eastcote.

‘I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay in air intelligence. It was much more interesting work. I wanted to broaden my view.’

Eventually, she got herself posted to an air intelligence job in the RAF’s Middle East headquarters in Egypt and after two years was offered the choice of a permanent commission in the
WAAF or a job in MI6. She chose MI6 and worked for them in Germany and the Middle East. It’s a period that even more than fifty years later she cannot discuss. Mary married John Every, a
former RAF officer, in 1971 and they had fifteen very happy years together before he died. She’d kept in touch with all the other members of the JappyWaaf – Eileen, Evelyn, Cicely,
Denise, Margaret and Peggy – and from the 1980s onwards they held annual reunions. They were so close that every time they met up it was as if they had only just seen each other the previous
day in the Bletchley canteen.

‘On the fiftieth anniversary of the day we met on the Japanese course we had a weekend in Stratford-on-Avon and celebrated fifty years of friendship during which time we’d never had
the slightest quarrel or any kind of difficulty.’

They’d also been taken aback when the truth about Bletchley Park emerged in 1974 and it was not until that anniversary weekend at Stratford-on-Avon in 1992 that any of them talked about
what they’d done during the war.

‘That was the first time we discussed it, because at Bletchley Park none of us ever worked in the same office
so I never knew until then what anybody else did. I had
no idea. It is very difficult for people who didn’t work at Bletchley to realise what pressure we were under because we had to bottle it all up. It affected the rest of our lives. I never did
tell my husband what I did during the war and my parents also never knew what I did.’

Mair Thomas went back to the valleys to marry her childhood sweetheart Russ, a conscientious objector who had spent the war training to be a Baptist minister. She died in 2013,
but not before penning a beautiful memoir of her time at Bletchley with her son Gethin Russell-Jones, in which she spoke of how proud she was of her war work.

‘I had the most wonderful time in Bletchley. From the first time I went into Hut 6 I felt special; privileged to be there. There were plenty of things I found difficult and hard at the
time, but that’s life anyway. To think that I rubbed shoulders with some of the most brilliant men that Britain has ever produced and played a part in cracking the Enigma code is a source of
daily amazement. To this day, I’m not sure how a girl from a quiet Welsh valley ended up in the centre of the action, but I am so thankful that it happened. Despite the shift pattern and the
exhaustion and disorientation, there was exhilaration to it all. I remember someone saying to me that we were on the intellectual front line.’

Susan Wenham never married and only rarely discussed her work in Hut 6 breaking the Enigma codes, but right up until her death in 2009 at the age of ninety-seven, she
recalled ‘the mixture of nuttiness, angst, hard slog, and euphoria’ at Bletchley.

‘Little things return to mind, the identical twins, wide cheeks and hair piled high and with an “important” folder of documents tucked under the arm, who were deputed to
instruct newcomers about Enigma – although I felt they didn’t understand it much better than I did.’

She remembered John Monroe, a ‘brilliant’ barrister and codebreaker who was deeply upset that ‘with all that knowledge in his head’ he was not allowed to fight alongside
his contemporaries on the front line, and John Manisty, head of maths at Winchester, who had a fascination with trains and an encyclopedic knowledge of Bradshaw’s, the national railways
timetable, freely advising all and sundry on which trains they should take to get home as quickly as possible. He once told Susan how to get her horse back to Surrey without suffering any jolting
stops that might lead to injuries.

‘Among the Blisters I remember a lively half-French woman called Yvette, Mary Penney, who longed to get back to her career as a violinist, and a jolly, bouncy girl who relished bawdy jokes
and left to become a nun. After the war it was bliss to go to bed every night at a sensible time and gradually lose the tiredness which had become a part of me, but it was many years before I lost
the recurrent dream of a message with a strange frequency which I couldn’t recognise.’

For many of the women who worked at Bletchley Park or on the Bombes the most distressing thing was never being able to tell their parents, to give them a sense that
their
daughter was doing something worthwhile, to make them proud of what they had achieved.

Olive Humble was on leave when Japan surrendered and when she got back to Bletchley she was given a week’s pay, told she was no longer required and hauled back up before Commander Thatcher
to be warned that if she ever said anything she would face thirty years in jail or the firing squad.

‘I said farewell to the navy and to Major Martin, who gave me a glowing reference, including words like “National Importance”. The Foreign Office one was even better:
“Employed on important and highly specialised work of a secret nature. The Official Secrets Act precludes any information in connection with these duties.” Heady stuff! Even better than
navy cocoa.’

Olive immigrated to South Africa in 1947 with Doris Ward, one of her colleagues in the Japanese Naval Section, although neither of them knew what work the other had done at Bletchley. Olive
married a couple of years later and had three children, seven grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. For many years her daughters thought she must have been a spy during the war. Olive
eventually persuaded them otherwise but she and they still remain extremely proud of what she did at Bletchley.

‘One didn’t really realise what one was doing until afterwards, but we worked hard and we did help win the war. I know I was only a small cog but I remain tremendously proud of what
we did.

‘There is one thing I regret deeply. I was an only child, and on my first day home my father at dinner said, “What
do you do at the Foreign Office?” I
replied, “I cannot tell you. Sorry. Please don’t ask me again.” And he didn’t; nor did my mother at any time. She died in the early 1960s and he in 1976, before I realised
the silence had been lifted. I think they would have been so very proud.’

Christine Brooke-Rose went to Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war to carry out assessments of how successful the Allied bombing had been. On her return, she achieved
her wartime ambition of going to university, reading English at Somerville College, Oxford. The feeling she had when she first arrived at Bletchley that she was somehow not up to the intellectual
standard of those around her in Hut 3, never shared by her colleagues, drove her on to great intellectual heights. She married the Polish poet and novelist Jerzy Pietrkiewicz and obtained a
doctorate in medieval literature at University College, London, before becoming an award-winning novelist and Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Paris. One of her
many highly praised experimental novels,
Remake
, was autobiographical and recorded her life at Bletchley, including the affair with Telford Taylor, with whom she remained friends right up
to his death in 1998. Christine married three times but had no children and died in 2012 aged eighty-nine.

At the end of the war, Marion Graham and the Glassborow sisters were sent to GCHQ’s Berkeley Street offices in London’s West End to work on diplomatic codes. They lived in a hostel
in Eaton Place and had plenty of time to attend the theatre or go to parties. They were told
their temporary contracts were ending in April 1946, and Marion went to work for
the British Council, promoting British culture abroad. She studied for a while in Perugia in Italy and then worked in Geneva for a year.

‘I found it was quite difficult to settle in London after all that but eventually I got a job as a secretary to John Hall, the Conservative MP for Wycombe, and spent eight years working in
the House of Commons.’

It was during that time that she met another Conservative MP, Richard Body. They married in 1959 and had a son and a daughter. Richard gave up politics for a while to return to the legal
profession but in 1966 was re-elected as an MP and in 1985 knighted for political services, making his wife Lady Marion Body. Her husband’s position as a prominent Eurosceptic often led to
controversy.

‘It’s never been boring. The European issue has always been a big thing for him. He wasn’t always toeing the party line, so it hasn’t been dull.’

One area has never been a matter for debate between them so far as Marion is concerned. She has always refused to discuss her work at Bletchley with her husband.

‘We knew we could never speak about it for the rest of our lives and even now I still find it rather difficult. It was thirty years after the war when that Winterbotham book was first
published and Richard had been in Hatchards and he bought that book and came home with it and he came through the door and said: “Well, now will you tell me what you did during the
war?” And I just said: “No.”’

Colette St George-Yorke didn’t know what to do with
herself after she left the Wrens. Eventually, she decided to go back to Harrogate to train as a
State Registered Nurse, and then joined the Princess Mary’s Royal Air Force Nursing Service.

‘I hated being demobbed. I wanted to rejoin the forces. I wasn’t old enough to join the naval nursing service as you had to be twenty-five, so I joined the RAF. Flying Officer St
George-Yorke. It’s the only time I’ve had a suit made to measure by a tailor in Mayfair.’

She married an RAF doctor, but he was posted to Iraq for two years and when he came back he seemed a changed person. She became pregnant with her son Peter but, for reasons she’s never
really understood, their marriage fell apart. In truth, he would always have been only second best. A part of her was still attached to Graham Murray, the handsome young pilot she lost during the
war.

‘He was a one-off. I’d moved on by the time I got married but I’d never forgotten him. You don’t, you know. It was a long, long time after, but you never forget them,
never.’

There is a small photograph in Colette’s purse. A young man in RAF uniform is sat on the wooden platform of a tiny railway stop somewhere on a prairie in Canada. He looks tired. He’s
resting against a wooden trailer and alongside him are some milk churns. There’s very little else to see in the picture – a single track and a line of telegraph poles stretching out
into an endlessly flat distance. He’s on his way to a training base to be taught how to drop agents behind enemy lines. On the back, that same young man has written: ‘Waiting for a
train en route to Moose Jaw 14th May 1942,’ adding underneath: ‘That’s
my parachute I’m sat on.’ That’s it. There is nothing more to the
photograph, but it clearly hasn’t stayed hidden away in the purse. The years of remembering have left a thousand tiny cracks across its once shiny surface.

In 2013, Colette’s son Peter and his family took her to the war cemetery at Bergen-op-Zoom in Holland, just across the border from the spot in Belgium where Graham was shot down. For the
first time, she saw his grave.