The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (8 page)

The onset of war saw Sally working as a journalist for
Vogue
magazine, for five shillings a week (which barely covered the cost of travel), while writing dispatches from London for the
Baltimore Sun
. But eventually she and her close friend and fellow debutante Osla Benning, then regarded as one of the most beautiful women in London, decided to go to Slough and work at
the Hawker Siddeley aircraft factory, which was building Hurricane fighter aircraft for the RAF.

‘Osla and I wanted to do something really important, and we thought: making aeroplanes. So we trooped off to the Slough trading estate – ghastly place – and said here we are.
We want to make an aeroplane.’

They lived with Sally’s father, Richard, now separated from her mother and working as an executive at Pinewood Studios. He had a cottage nearby and it was here that
Sally introduced Osla to a young man who was to be her boyfriend for the next three years. Lord Mountbatten had asked his goddaughter if she could find a girlfriend for his young nephew, Prince
Philip of Greece.

‘Uncle Dickie said to me: “I don’t think Philip’s got a girlfriend at the moment. I wish you could find a nice girl for him because he doesn’t know anyone.”
Osla didn’t have a boyfriend at the time, so I said: “I know, I’ll get them together.”’

Early in 1941, Sally and Osla, who was also fluent in German, received a letter ordering them to report to Bletchley Park, to Commander Denniston’s deputy Edward Travis. Having spent most
of her life in a magnificent country house designed by William Adam, Sally was distinctly unimpressed by the Bletchley mansion – ‘an ugly Victorian monstrosity’ – where
Commander Travis welcomed them and told them they would be working in the German Naval Section in Hut 4.

Probably because of their backgrounds, they were put up in a beautiful Queen Anne house in Aspley Guise eight miles to the east of Bletchley Park. ‘We were very lucky, Osla and I. We were
billeted with two darling elderly people who looked after us beautifully. They were marvellous really, very good to us. Kind. They never complained. The large garden was unattended except for
vegetables and in the summer the grass grew so long you could sunbathe topless without being seen.’

Sally and Osla’s initial role was alongside a number of other well-to-do women working in the Index, logging down various details from the decoded messages, such as
facts about individual U-boats, on file cards held in what looked like long shoe boxes.

‘Each time a signal came in and was translated, you had to put down the salient points in that signal, such as the name of the U-boat commander on one card, the number of the U-boat on
another, the coordinates or the person; anything related to that signal went on different cards. Nobody explained anything. Within a couple of days we realised that this information had been
obtained by codebreaking but even then we had no idea of the whole picture.’

The Index had to be operational twenty-four hours a day, so they worked in two shifts, a day shift and a very long night shift. ‘The night watches were pretty awful. They were called
watches because we were the Naval Section and the navy has watches not shifts.’

On their days off, they rushed up to London on the train, making the most of every minute. Sally was going out with Billy Cavendish, the Marquess of Hartington, one of the most eligible
bachelors in the country, who had taken a commission in the Coldstream Guards.

‘Sometimes boyfriends would be back from the war and you always managed to keep in touch. The most lovely man, Mr Gibbs, the head hall porter at Claridge’s, knew exactly where all
our boyfriends were. He used to say: “Hello, Miss Norton. Lord Hartington’s back. He said he would see you here later. I think he said six o’clock.” So
of course I was back there by six o’clock. It was so nice to have a boyfriend.’

But there was absolutely no way that any of them were prepared to have sex before marriage.

‘We just didn’t think of that at all. We were brought up to what my mother used to call “behave nicely”. The boys could kiss you on the cheek, but not much more. We knew
what the more daring girls were doing but as far as I was concerned it was all much too frightening for me to do it. You were supposed to go to the marriage bed as a virgin. There was no such thing
as birth control so if a girl got pregnant, she married almost immediately.’

Their favourite haunt was the 400, a nightclub on Leicester Square where you could dance all night. It was very small, but it was members only and there was live music every night.

‘As days off were so precious and time so short I usually took the milk train from Euston back to Bletchley at five o’clock in the morning, arriving in time for the 9am watch a bit
bleary-eyed and hoping the head of the watch would find my work satisfactory and not notice I was a bit overdressed.’

The intelligence on the German U-boats and attacks on the Allied convoys was still coming mainly from messages sent in low-level codes and clear text messages analysed by
Jocelyn Bostock and Susie Henderson. They’d been joined by a young man called Harry Hinsley, one of the graduates recruited by Commander Denniston from Cambridge.

Slight and bespectacled, Harry was about as far as it was possible to get in social terms from the well-to-do young
women like Sally and Osla who made up a substantial
proportion of the early recruits to Bletchley. He came from Walsall in the Black Country, where his father drove a horse and cart, ferrying iron ore and finished metal goods back and forth between
the railway and the local ironworks. Phoebe Senyard immediately developed a soft spot for him.

‘I can remember quite well showing Harry some of the sorting and how delighted he seemed when he began to recognise the different types of signals. Those were very enjoyable days indeed.
We were all very happy and cheerful, working in close cooperation with each other. If I was in difficulty, I knew I could go to Harry. It was a pleasure because he was always interested in
everything and took great pains to find out what it was and why.’

The intelligence analysts in the Admiralty who plotted the movements of enemy shipping had been ignoring Jocelyn and Susie, and the increasing amount of intelligence they were managing to glean
from the intercept logs flowing in from the wireless sites at Winchester and Scarborough. The Admiralty analysts weren’t as skilled as Bletchley at analysing radio communications. They
didn’t understand how Hut 4 had worked out the intelligence, so they didn’t believe it. There was some hope in Hut 4 that Harry would make a difference, that the Admiralty would listen
to a man in a way that they wouldn’t listen to Jocelyn and Susie. But it made no difference at all. Two young girls and a weedy student in corduroy trousers and a pullover knitted by his
mother. What could they know?

The situation came to a head in June 1940. Harry, Jocelyn and Susie had been reporting that the German battlecruisers
Gneisenau
and
Scharnhorst
had left
the Baltic to track the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet. The Admiralty refused to tell the Home Fleet because their analysts didn’t agree. On Friday 7 June 1940, Harry spent much of the day
trying to persuade the duty captain to send out a warning. He refused. On the following day, the
Gneisenau
and the
Scharnhorst
attacked the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
and her escorts, the destroyers HMS
Acasta
and HMS
Ardent.
All three British ships were sunk in just over two hours, with the loss of more than 1,500 officers
and men.

By the time Sally and Osla arrived in Hut 4 in early 1941, the relationship with the Admiralty had begun to improve, but it didn’t take long for the rows to start all over again. They
resurfaced in May 1941, when the Royal Navy was tracking the new German battleship the
Bismarck
, the pride of the German Navy. On the morning of Saturday 24 May 1941, the British
battleship
Prince of Wales
and the battlecruiser
Hood
took on the
Bismarck
and the German heavy cruiser
Prinz Eugen
in the Battle of the Denmark Strait between
Iceland and Greenland. The
Hood
was hit and sunk, while the
Prince of Wales
was forced to withdraw.

Despite the German victory, the
Bismarck
was badly damaged and it was soon clear to Harry, Jocelyn and Susie from the
Bismarck
’s radio messages that it was being
controlled from Paris rather than the German Navy’s headquarters in Wilhelmshaven. They’d seen this before and they knew it only happened when a German ship was heading for a French
port, in this case almost certainly Brest where it could be repaired. But this had been missed by the Admiralty’s intelligence analysts.

Harry rang them, winding the handle on the old-fashioned telephone that provided a direct line between Hut 4 and the Admiralty. He eventually got hold of someone who
didn’t really want to speak to him. Didn’t he know they were busy? They were trying to find the
Bismarck
. It was somewhere in the Atlantic, probably making for Norway. No,
Harry said. It was definitely heading for France.

Yet again, as with the
Glorious
, the Bletchley Park assessment contradicted the Admiralty’s assumptions, so they refused to pass it on to the Royal Navy commanders. It was not
until the early evening of Sunday 25 May, following yet another heated telephone conversation between Harry and the Admiralty’s analysts, that they finally accepted that Bletchley was right
and told the fleet they should assume the
Bismarck
was heading for Brest.

Meanwhile, Jane Hughes had just come on shift in the Hut 6 Decoding Room where she and her colleagues were briefed on the latest situation concerning the
Bismarck
.

‘We all knew that we’d got the fleet out in the Atlantic trying to locate her because she was the Germans’ most important, latest battleship and had better guns and so on than
anybody else, and she’d already sunk the
Hood
. So it was vitally important to find where she was and try to get rid of her.’

Just over an hour into her shift, Jane was typing out a message on the main Luftwaffe Enigma, the Red. She’d set up her Typex machine to decode the message and a stream of German was
coming out. She was typing automatically so she wasn’t actually reading the German. Then suddenly she spotted the word Brest.

‘I thought, Brest, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s about.’

Jane read the message in full and realised that it was from the Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin telling someone important that the
Bismarck
was heading for the French port of
Brest.

She immediately called in one of the codebreakers, Keith Batey, and explained what it said. A Luftwaffe general whose son was on the
Bismarck
had asked if he was all right and had been
told that the German battleship was heading for France. It was rushed through to the intelligence reporters who immediately sent out an urgent top-secret message: ‘Information received graded
A1 that intention of
Bismarck
is to head for the west coast of France.’

A1 was the highest grade they could give the intelligence. It meant that there was absolutely no doubt. In a moment of pure drama, the message from Bletchley arrived in the Admiralty just seven
minutes after the analysts there finally accepted Harry’s insistence that the
Bismarck
was heading for Brest. The next day, a Catalina flying boat sent up as a direct result of the
intelligence provided by Bletchley spotted the
Bismarck
. The Royal Navy chased her down and eventually she was sunk. It was an important victory which owed a great deal to Bletchley, and
because the work being carried out by Harry, Jocelyn and Susie was not top secret like the work being done in Hut 6, the other codebreakers could be told about that part of it. It was the first
time they had seen tangible evidence that their work was having an impact on the war. There was a rousing cheer in the dining room in
the mansion when the BBC reported that
the
Bismarck
had been sunk.

Mavis Lever, who was also working at Bletchley, was Keith Batey’s girlfriend at the time and later his wife. When the film
Sink the Bismarck
was released in 1960, she took their
young son to see it. She saw the ship begin to sink on the screen and had to look away.

‘I really did feel quite sick. I was thinking how awful it was that one’s breaking of a message could send so many people to the bottom. But that was war and that was the way we had
to play it. If we thought about it too much we should never have been able to cope.’

By the summer of 1942, Hut 4 was crammed full of people and new concrete and brick blocks were being built to rehouse the codebreaking sections. Phoebe couldn’t wait to
move. ‘We were very crowded now and had spread to Hut 5 and parts of the house nearest Hut 4. So we were all longing for the day when we should be moving to our new brick-built home by the
lake. They were very happy days although we were so huddled together, working so hard and under such difficulties owing to the lack of space, but we seemed to jog along in harmony, everyone being
friendly and cooperative.’

The Naval Section moved into Block A and Block B on the other side of the lake in late 1942. For security reasons they continued to call themselves Hut 4, rather than Naval Section, to disguise
the fact that Bletchley was breaking the German Navy’s top codes.

Sally only got into really serious trouble on one
occasion. She was working in the Index Room one morning when she heard footsteps outside and in walked her godfather Lord
Louis Mountbatten, now Chief of Combined Operations, followed by a group of harassed-looking Bletchley managers.

‘I managed to splutter in my astonishment, “Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?”’

‘Oh, I knew you were here and I thought I’d see how you were getting on. Show me the system of your cross-reference index.’