The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (7 page)

‘My mind turned to soup; I couldn’t think of anything to say. I may even have curtseyed out of embarrassment. Thankfully, Mr Welchman could see I was struggling and explained to him
the complexity of the German Enigma and how they changed their code settings every day. On their way out Mr Welchman touched my arm and told me not to worry, that all of us were feeling nervous
with the PM about.’

Mair found her new colleagues friendly, but as a devout Christian there was one aspect of life in the Park which Mair didn’t like at all. Women of that era were
brought up very strictly and were often fairly innocent, even ignorant, of sexual matters. But the dangers and uncertainties of war, the freedom of being away from home, and the mix of so many
young men and women together, inevitably led some to live for the day.

‘Quite honestly people’s morals were very loose; men and women swapping partners all the time, it seemed to me. Quite a number of the men were married, but this didn’t stop
them forming secret relationships. This was one of the dark sides of Bletchley.’

Many of the women in Hut 6 had boyfriends in the forces and were not interested in the male codebreakers, but Diana was free and single and determined to make the most of it.

‘We all had a marvellous time, all these young men, not attached. We had a very gay time going out to pubs for supper together when we were free. A lot of romance went on, very definitely
a lot of romance. The whole thing was absolutely tremendous fun. It’s rather awful in the middle of the war. We had to be there, it was an emergency and I think we all put our hearts into it.
But I think we all enjoyed being there.’

Diana was particularly taken by one man. She wasn’t the only one to regard Dennis Babbage, one of the brightest of the mathematicians, as a bit of a catch. Although Jane was in love with
her naval officer and not interested in other men, she too thought Mr Babbage rather good-looking.
Diana was very keen on him and it was not long before they were married. But
it was soon clear that it was a disaster.

‘Babbage was a very attractive man but we had no sexual intercourse on the whole of our honeymoon so I could just have had the thing annulled but of course I didn’t. He was a
charming person.’

There was something of a minor scandal when shortly after they arrived back at Bletchley, moving into a house together in Woburn Sands, one of Diana’s friends began pursuing Mr Babbage.
Jane was unaware of the problems on the honeymoon and was quite shocked by the speed at which it all happened.

‘This girl pinched him from his very new wife. He was only married a while before he got into her clutches. It might have been a few weeks. It felt like a very short time. Dennis was a
great scholar but he was rather good-looking, that was probably one of the reasons that he got snapped up so quickly.’

Diana took it in her stride, remaining friends with Dennis and going on to marry the slightly older Geoffrey Barraclough, a renowned medieval historian, who was working as a senior intelligence
officer in Hut 3. But another love tangle was to have far more serious effects.

One of the girls in Hut 6, Mary, a young Glaswegian woman, had been dating someone in Hut 8 (the naval Enigma section), but he had also been seeing a lot of Gillian, another of the Hut 6 girls.
The rivalry exploded in the canteen, where the boring if filling nature of the food ensured that all the attention was on the row between the two young women.

Mary was particularly upset at what she clearly saw as a threat to her own relationship with the Hut 8 codebreaker and told Gillian that he’d shared lots of secrets
about codes that had been broken and gave some examples in an attempt to try to demonstrate that it was her he was really keen on. Gillian’s response, claiming that he had passed on other
even more important secrets to her, and naming some of them, only escalated the row.

Mair was sat at the same table watching and listening in horror. She liked both girls although she’d been worried before by their willingness to chat about work in a way which they’d
been told never to do. But this was far worse than anything they’d done before.

‘Everyone froze and went silent. Both girls realised that they had taken this too far and I looked around the crowded canteen to see if anyone was coming to tell them off. After a few
moments, Mary looked as if she was going to reply but I piped up and told them both not to say any more or they would be in serious trouble. We all dispersed and made our way back to the
hut.’

But that wasn’t the end of it. No sooner had they got back into Hut 6 than they started all over again, each claiming more secrets that the other girl hadn’t been told. Suddenly, one
of the female supervisors stormed into the room. She’d received a complaint from someone who’d heard the row in the canteen.

‘I cannot believe what I’ve just heard,’ she said. ‘Or the gossip you indulged in during lunch. You have signed the Official Secrets Act. You have said things that should
never have been said or repeated and you’ve disgraced yourselves.’

They were both graduates and had been employed in Hut 6 because of their supposed intelligence and discretion but they had broken that trust and she had no choice but to
tell them they were being dismissed immediately. Mary tried to plead with her but she was wasting her time and within minutes they’d both left Hut 6 and were on their way out of Bletchley
Park, never to return. Mair felt ill and frightened by the sudden way in which the axe had fallen on two friends and colleagues.

‘I had never seen anything like this before. There was absolutely no mercy shown, no second chance offered. They had broken the rules and they must pay for it. I tentatively looked around
the room and everybody else looked bewildered and anxious. I think we were all close to tears.’

Sally Norton’s first contact with Nazi Germany came in 1937 when her parents sent her to Munich to improve her German. She’d been brought up at her mother’s
Scottish ancestral home, Gilmerton House, a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion around twenty miles east of Edinburgh. It was a very comfortable childhood. Her grandfather was the 5th Lord
Grantley and, like many young girls from upper-class families, Sally – whose formal name was the more refined Sarah – didn’t go to school. She was taught German, French and
Italian by a succession of governesses and hated them all. ‘But I think they gave me a pretty good education, especially in languages.’

Despite her ability to speak German, Munich was the very last place Sally wanted to go. She was seventeen, had a mind of her own, and didn’t share the obsession with Hitler of some young,
upper-class women – Unity and Diana Mitford being perhaps the best-known examples. She couldn’t see how going to Nazi Germany could improve anyone.

‘I went reluctantly and with bad grace because I really wanted to go to Italy. My innocent mind was full of fantasies of romantic Italian boys, but my mother
dismissed them as unsuitable for my tender age and I was dispatched to Germany forthwith.’

She was sent to stay with a Bavarian
Graf
and
Gräfin
, a duke and duchess, who were kind and welcoming to her, although they pretended they couldn’t speak English in
order to force Sally and the two other British girls who were staying with them to speak German. ‘They were very anti-Nazi, although of course they didn’t admit it openly, and they were
lovely. I hated everything else about Germany. The streets were full of people in uniforms strutting around in jackboots.’

As their understanding of the language improved, the girls became very angry over the behaviour of the Nazis. It was to lead to a minor diplomatic incident that would see Sally sent home in
disgrace. She and her friends were particularly incensed with the ‘odious’ anti-Jewish newspaper
Der Stürmer
, which even top Nazis like Herman Göring criticised
– it was not allowed in any of the departments he controlled.
Der Stürmer
was read by a small minority of largely ill-educated people, but because it had Hitler’s support
it was pinned up in glass-covered display cases in every city for everyone to read. Munich, the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, was no exception. Sally and her friends were shocked by its
virulent attacks on the Jews.

‘It was both vicious and destructive. Myself and other like-minded English girls also studying the language were outraged by this obscenity and the seventeen-year-old
energy was detonated by the unjust and atrocious persecution of the Jewish people.’

They began a crusade against the Nazis, initially walking around the main Odeonsplatz square ignoring Nazi salutes, but given that they were young girls, and foreigners to boot, there was little
anyone felt inclined to do about that. Since no one seemed to care about their refusal to make Nazi salutes, they soon gave up on that tack and launched a campaign against the
Der
Stürmer
display cases.

‘The plan, hardly a plot, was to secure a hammer, sneak out at night, smash the glass and tear down the offensive publication from its frame. The stage was set nearby in Durchstrasse. The
scene, a street corner. We struck the glass in the display case in the middle of the frame, pulled down and tore up the filthy newspaper and went on to the next target. That was when the fun
began.’

The noise of shattering glass that had nothing to do with their own attacks on Jewish shops and businesses alerted a gang of baton-wielding Stormtroopers who chased the girls around the streets,
but their jackboots were a hindrance and the young girls, all wearing gym shoes, ran off in different directions, evading them easily.

‘After a few nights of this hedonistic action, the glass was suddenly replaced by wire mesh, which was a slight hindrance but overcome by purchasing a pair of wire cutters from an
ironmonger in another district; this process of removal took longer and scouts had to be posted at intervals.’

But the Stormtroopers, no doubt imagining that they faced a dangerous student opposition group, were not prepared to be outwitted by young girls.

‘In the end, of course, we were caught, giving grounds for embarrassment to our Foreign Office, who were trying to be congenial to the Germans, and were sent home in
disrepute.’

Although she was now fluent in German, the Second World War was still a couple of years away and she had to negotiate the ‘season’, a prospect which did not fill Sally with quite the
same degree of dread that it had Jane Hughes. It was, after all, something that she’d always expected to do, even looked forward to. Her grandfather was a peer of the realm, whom her father
would succeed in 1943. Her godfather was Lord Louis Mountbatten and her mother’s family, the Kinlochs, were the local lairds in East Lothian. Queen Mary, the King’s mother, was a friend
of her grandmother and frequently came to tea at her grandmother’s elegant house in Eaton Place.

‘When I was about four years old, I was summoned to the drawing room from our nursery on the fourth floor to meet Queen Mary. Clutching on to Nanny, who had to wait outside the door, I was
gently pushed into her presence. As I advanced towards this formidable lady my knickers fell down. Apparently, I calmly stepped out of them as if nothing had happened. Queen Mary laughed with
pleasure and poor Nanny was mortified.’

To ensure there were no such embarrassments when Sally was presented to Queen Mary’s daughter-in-law Queen Elizabeth, she was dispatched to Miss Vacani’s, an expensive and very
classy dance school for young women. Miss Vacani had schooled the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret in the art of deportment; now Sally was to be taught how to curtsey.

‘I thought this curtseying business was going to be a doddle. This supposedly easy obeisance to the King and Queen was actually profoundly difficult. You had to bring
your left leg behind your right leg, bend the knee almost down to the floor, keeping your head high and eyes straight forward. Going down was not too bad, but coming up was almost impossible
without wobbling. Such an error Miss Vacani would not countenance. It took hours of practice to become perfect and I’m not sure I ever got it right, but at least I got rid of the
wobble.’

She was forced to wear a very traditional and very expensive ivory satin dress with a train and puff sleeves. ‘I hated it, but no amount of sulking and remonstrations that it was
unfashionable would change my mother’s mind.’ The day of presentation came, with a Rolls-Royce delivering Sally and her parents at the Sovereign’s entrance of Buckingham Palace.
The twenty or so young debutantes were shown into an ante-room and told by a gentleman usher that he would call them in one by one.

‘I started to shake and feel sick but there was no going back now, no escape. I heard my name called. Chin up, shoulders down, I began to walk forward. I had a blurred vision of a mass of
people to my right; presumably my parents were among them. Twelve paces forward and there on the left were the Queen and the King.’

Sally curtseyed to the Queen first, without a wobble, but when she saw the familiar face of Queen Mary standing behind the royal couple she curtseyed to her grandmother’s friend before
curtseying to King George, a breach of etiquette that brought a subsequent reprimand from the head usher.

‘The rest of my debutante year remains largely out of focus and seemed to blend into one long dance. On arrival at a dance you were given a small rectangular card
which folded, with a small pencil attached by a silken cord. The card was numbered from one to twenty and the men had to ask you if you would dance with them. It seems amazing to me now that we
managed to keep going night after night, and it wasn’t just the dances. There were lunches as well, almost every day. We weren’t allowed to dress in a sloppy way. You always wore white
gloves to go out to lunch – always.’

She wore a different dress to each event and they were much more fashionable ones, made for her by Victor Stiebel, one of Britain’s most famous designers, who was so fascinated by the
possibilities of Sally’s long legs and 18½-inch waist that he dressed her for free, while her godfather Lord Louis Mountbatten paid for a ‘wonderful’ Coming Out Ball at his
Park Lane home.