The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (6 page)

They then did the rounds of surrounding villages picking up other people in various houses, cottages and pubs, which took a considerable time and cut into the amount of time they had off.

‘But otherwise it was a wonderful place to live. We had lovely rooms, of course, and very beautiful gardens, and one was able to relax in a quite different extent to being in the heart of
Bletchley.’

Occasionally, Lady Bonsor invited them down for proper
dinner parties. Pretty young women were always welcome when young officers back from the war were being feted.

‘That was quite a do, because they had a cook left behind when all the others were called up, so they had very good food and we really enjoyed ourselves. Very unlike a lot of people who
were in rather horrible billets.’

The invasion of France in May 1940 was to bring a swift victory for the Germans and a humiliating defeat for the French and British forces, but it provided Bletchley with a
major success that would help win many more battles in the future. As the Germans swept through Holland, Belgium and into France, they sent more than a thousand Enigma messages a day and at times
the entire hut was overwhelmed, with many of the staff, including the young women in the Registration and Decoding Rooms, working nonstop and not going home. Diana remembered snatching a few
precious moments’ sleep on the floor of the Decoding Room.

‘There was a time when we were working certainly forty-eight hours on end because there was a lot of traffic coming through and they hadn’t really got enough staff and the stuff
perhaps would stop for a bit and we just used to put our coats under our head and lie on the floor and go to sleep.’

But the large number of messages being sent by the Germans helped the bright young codebreakers in the Machine Room break back into the Red, in large part due to some extremely clever thinking
by John Herivel, one of the Cambridge mathematicians. He put himself into
the mind of a German Enigma operator and worked out a mistake that tired operators might make. Ten
days into the battle, several operators all made that very same mistake and Hut 6 was back into the Red Enigma, guaranteeing that they would produce good intelligence for the rest of the war.
Everyone in the Machine Room was cheering and shouting and the elation was felt throughout the hut.

MI6 sent communication experts and intelligence officers out to France to pass on the codebreakers’ reports to the British commanders but the Allied forces were overwhelmed and it had
little effect. The British troops had to be evacuated from Dunkirk by several dozen Royal Navy ships and a volunteer armada of small boats from England’s southern ports which helped to lift
the soldiers off the beaches. Just as the codebreakers had listened in the mansion to Mr Chamberlain telling them on the BBC they were at war with Germany, so in June 1940 they listened to Mr
Churchill saying that they would ‘ride out the storm of war, and outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone’.

It was stirring stuff. Britain would never surrender, the Prime Minister said. ‘We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches and on the landing
grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills.’ The staff at Bletchley listened and, despite their worries, they were proud. They knew Britain was now
alone, but they also knew that they had the opportunity, a unique opportunity, to help to win the war.

Britain collectively waited for what seemed the inevitable German invasion. Bletchley Park set up its own rather
odd-ball ‘Dad’s Army’ Home Guard
detachment, with Alan Turing as one of the unlikely defenders, and plans were made to set up a mobile codebreaking team that would be evacuated if the Germans invaded to keep breaking the codes and
provide the vital intelligence. Phoebe Senyard was bemused by the reaction of some of the codebreakers.

‘The war situation was now becoming very grim for us. The air was electric with feeling. Those who had been chosen were in a sense excited by the prospect before them, although no doubt
dismayed by the reason for their evacuation. I was surprised by the number of people whose feelings were hurt because they had not been included on the list.’

In another rousing speech, Mr Churchill told the nation that while the Battle for France had been lost, the Battle of Britain was about to begin. They should brace themselves to do their duty so
that if Britain, its Empire and its Commonwealth were to last for a thousand years, men would still say: ‘This was their finest hour.’

The Germans attempted to intimidate Britain ahead of Hitler’s planned invasion, Operation Sea Lion, testing the ability of the RAF to defend the skies above southern England. RAF
Hurricanes and Spitfires circled the skies, taking on the German Messerschmitt fighters in Mr Churchill’s Battle of Britain. When that failed, Hitler launched a campaign of mass intimidation,
the Blitz, the bombing of Britain’s cities and ports. This was the moment that Hut 6 had its first major impact on the war. They broke the Enigma code used by the Luftwaffe to direct its
bombers to their targets. The wireless network which
used what Hut 6 called the Brown Enigma controlled the radio beams that guided the German pilots to their targets and,
around midday every day, it named the targets for that night’s raids. The codebreakers sent the targets straight to London so that RAF fighter aircraft could be sent up to wait in ambush for
the German bombers and the authorities in the cities concerned could start making preparations. A number of ‘safe’ cities were always warned as well as the real targets, to protect the
Enigma secret. The breaking of the Brown Enigma meant the air defences were ready. It substantially reduced the damage done on the ground, saving factories that were producing goods vital to the
war effort. But just as importantly, it saved many lives. The authorities were able to get people safely down into the air-raid shelters before the German bombers arrived.

No one in Hut 6 was in any doubt as to how important their work was. Those who lived in the big cities had been home and seen how many people’s houses had been turned to rubble, knew
people who had lost loved ones. Some had even lost close relatives themselves in the bombing. Even if you didn’t live in a big city, you would see the impact of the bombing on your days off
when you visited London. But, like all the Enigma codes, there were days when the Brown Enigma simply couldn’t be broken. In November 1940, for four straight days, Hut 6 failed to unravel it.
One of those days was 14 November. Diana came on shift at four o’clock that afternoon.

‘It was a day when they hadn’t broken the code. Quite late in the day, sometime in the evening, all these German
bombers started streaming over so we knew
someone was being blown up and we hadn’t been able to alert them.’

The German bombers were heading for Coventry, which lay undefended by RAF fighter aircraft. The raid destroyed large parts of the city, including the cathedral, and killed 600 people. A myth
grew up that Bletchley had known the raid was going to take place and that Coventry was the target, but that the Prime Minister ordered them not to say anything to prevent the Germans realising
that British Intelligence had decoded the supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. It wasn’t true. Why if it were would he have allowed them to warn other cities like Birmingham, or Manchester, or
Cardiff, or Liverpool, that they were going to be attacked? But the accusation stuck, unfairly tainting the reputations of both Mr Churchill and Bletchley.

The codebreakers’ ability to crack Enigma dramatically improved in late 1940 when a new machine designed by Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman was installed in the Park. The Bombe was based
on an idea by the Poles, who before the war had linked several Enigma machines together to try to test out possible settings faster than you could by using just one machine. The Poles had called
their machine the
Bomba
, or bomb, because it made a ticking noise like a time bomb.

The British machine was much larger and noisier than that. It was a huge electro-mechanical machine set in a bronze cabinet six and a half feet high, more than seven feet wide and two and a half
feet deep. It contained a series of thirty rotating drums, designed to replicate the action of ten Enigma machines. The codebreakers in the
Machine Room tried to break the
code using a stream of plain German text, known as a ‘crib’, which they believed was hidden somewhere in the encoded message. Once they had worked out where they thought it was, they
created a program for the Bombe. It was known as a ‘menu’ and linked the encoded letters and the letters of the German together. This menu was given to the Bombe operators who set up
the machine according to the menu. The Bombe then ran through all the possible options much faster than a human being could have done and helped to speed up the codebreaking process. The first
Bombe that worked properly was introduced in August 1940. It was given the name
Agnus Dei
(Lamb of God) but was swiftly nicknamed Agnes, or Aggie for short.

There wasn’t much time off for anyone in Hut 6 but a Bletchley Park Recreational Club was set up with a small library, a drama group, musical and choral societies as well
as bridge, chess, fencing and Scottish dancing sections. Jane and Diana joined the choral society. Jane’s father had been an accomplished singer, who had performed with Vaughan Williams, and
she was something of a singer herself.

‘We gave concerts, of course, the usual kind of thing. I wouldn’t say it was a very high standard of music that we put out. I remember us inspiring each other because it was so
wonderful to sing.’

She and Diana also joined the Scottish dance group organised by Hugh Foss, one of the pre-war codebreakers, who was an established authority on Scottish country
dancing and
famous back in Scotland for having devised a number of new dances. Before the war, he had helped run the Chelsea Reel Society of which Commander Denniston had been another of the leading members.
Jane thought Mr Foss was delightfully eccentric.

‘He had wonderful brogues that were knitted all the way up the front of his legs. He was very tall and certainly looked very eccentric, but he was a very good reel dancer. I suppose
he’d spent his whole life at it and he was very keen to get more and more members so it became quite big. We all attended regularly because we all enjoyed it.’

There were very occasional weeks of leave but in the early days these were few and far between. Nevertheless, it was possible to save up days off and between a run of night shifts and a run of
evening shifts they could come off the night shift first thing in the morning of one day. The following day would be their day off and they would then come back on shift on the evening of the next
day, effectively giving them more than two days off. Most of Pam’s family were back home in Scotland but her father was working in London.

‘I would save up my days together and go and see him, or save up more time and go up to Scotland to see the rest of the family. So I wasn’t very often in the billets, except just to
feed and to sleep. I was quite fortunate that my father worked for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway so I had free travel.’

Jane and her friends sometimes took the train but often hitchhiked down Watling Street into London and, when her boyfriend Ted, an officer in the Royal Navy, was not
at
sea, she would leave her friends and make a beeline for the HMV record store in Oxford Street to meet up with him.

‘They had these wonderful little listening capsules with two little seats and you turned on your favourite Mozart and just sat there in complete privacy for as long as you wanted. So we
had the most wonderful time in HMV, listening to a lot of beautiful music and having a few precious moments together. But of course, all too soon we had to hitch a lift from a lorry back to
Bletchley.’

Mair Thomas, from Pontycymer in the Welsh valleys, was at Cardiff University studying music when she was recruited to work at Bletchley in a scene that could have come from a
spy novel. She was sat in the university library when a man tapped her on the shoulder. He had a posh English accent and told her he was from the Foreign Office. Somehow, he’d heard she was
good at languages and liked solving puzzles. They needed people like her for hush-hush work. So she’d have to be able to keep a secret.

‘He was the classic tall, dark stranger. It sounded important, serious, and if I’m honest, a little bit glamorous. He said I’d be solving problems and using my language skills
for the country. I should write to the Foreign Office in Whitehall and express my interest. With that, he turned and left.’

Mair wrote to the Foreign Office describing the encounter with the tall, dark stranger and saying that she wanted to apply for the post he’d mentioned, even though she’d no idea at
all what the post was. She was called up to London,
to the Foreign Office, where she was interviewed and told the bare bones of the job, including the fact that it involved
breaking the German codes, before being made to sign the Official Secrets Act. She arrived in Hut 6 in August 1941, aged twenty-three, and despite having just spent a couple of years at university
was struck by the informality of the place.

‘There were people scurrying around busily, some in uniform, although most were dressed in civilian clothes. This also varied enormously. I saw men in dark suits, but I also saw quite a
few in jumpers and even corduroy trousers. The women were on the whole smartly dressed in frocks and jackets, but many of them wore colourful stockings. Every day witnessed an array of colourful
and sometimes gaudy leg adornments and they served to raise spirits in an intense and generally serious atmosphere.’

A few weeks after she arrived, Mr Churchill visited the Park, standing on a pile of rubble to address those who were working, thanking them for all their hard work and ending by telling them
that they were ‘the geese who laid the golden egg but never cackled’. The applause was deafening. He toured Hut 6 and stood behind Mair, saying that it must be very difficult to use the
big, clunky Typex machine.