The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (29 page)

After an extraordinary chase through the black northern waters involving many warships –
Sheffield, Norfolk, Belfast, Duke of York
– while the
Scharnhorst
took repeated evasive action, changing course desperately, it was finally run down.
Duke of York
scored a palpable hit, and shortly, torpedoes from the other ships were searing through its hull. Thanks to the continuous stream of communications being decrypted at Bletchley – and instantly passed on to the Admiralty – the mighty
Scharnhorst
sank beneath the waves on 26 December 1943.

In the spring of the following year came a renewed Allied attack on the last of the great German marauders,
Tirpitz
, after other attempts had ended in failure. The ship was harboured, once again, at Altenfjord. Guided by Enigma decrypts concerning the time it intended to set sail, an Allied bomber raid was unleashed one dawn in March. While extensive damage was done – and a great many sailors were killed – it wasn’t quite enough. And this, it seemed, was also a very near miss for Bletchley.

‘It was as well,’ noted John Winton, ‘that the Germans remained absolutely confident that the Enigma was inviolate. Even the least suspicious … might just have wondered why, after
Tirpitz
had been so many months under repair, a powerful and clearly well-briefed and trained force of enemy aircraft should just happen to arrive overhead, not only on the day but at the hour, even at the very minute, when
Tirpitz
was putting out to sea.’
¹¹

Nevertheless, information from Enigma decrypts meant that
Tirpitz
was dogged as closely as if she had been bugged. Her final battle came a few months later, once more off the coast of Norway.
This time she sank, taking over 1,000 of her sailors with her.

But the secret of Bletchley could so easily have been deduced by the Germans. Indeed, it still remains a matter of some wonder that it was not; manoeuvres and battles of this sort would always carry that inevitable risk. But the authorities at Bletchley – with thousands now working at the Park – faced an equally pressing and constant anxiety. Regardless of the Official Secrets Act, and the need for utter secrecy being impressed hard upon all those who came into contact with the place, what could the Park do in the event that the secret was accidentally blurted out? Or worse, deliberately revealed by means of espionage?

In Robert Harris’s best-selling 1995 novel
Enigma
, the core of the story concerns a spy at work at Bletchley. The tension mounts inexorably because the consequences are so utterly unimaginable. For if the Germans gain one whisper or one inkling that the British have cracked their encoding system, then they will make that system infinitely more complex – and with that, they will be almost impossible to defeat. It is one of those rare thrillers where the publisher might say with some justification that the fate of the world depends upon the novel’s heroes.

Some Bletchley veterans are fans of the novel; they admire the way that Harris skilfully evoked life at the Park while adding a thriller element. But that very element, they say, while entertaining, is in fact extremely implausible. Secrecy and security, according to some, was woven into the texture of life at Bletchley to an extent that it became almost pathological. Some veterans were to recall that security at the Park was heavy and unremitting. There are stories of women who worked there who refused even to have medical operations carried out for fear of blurting indiscretions out under anaesthetic. There was a story concerning a lady academic at Cambridge attending parties in London, getting drunk
and boasting about her work … and she was never heard of again. Intriguingly, there were other slips – accidental, unintentional – that were to demonstrate just how vulnerable the Park was to careless talk.

When western Europe shockingly fell to the Germans with such speed in 1940, the popular belief in Britain that the country would suffer a similar fate had been extremely strong. As Mimi Gallilee recalls, everything possible was done to confuse potential invaders: ‘everyone had to stay quiet about everything then – for instance, all railway station names were removed from platforms.

‘And all directions were deliberately muddled – so that if we were invaded, or if there were people who shouldn’t be in this country – they couldn’t find their way easily by signposts.’

But this was not just a matter of marauding soldiers or cunning foreign spies; it was a matter of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, any one of whom might be plotting away with secret wireless sets. It was around this point that the notion of the ‘fifth columnist’ – the outwardly normal citizen secretly working with the enemy to undermine society – seized the national imagination. German propagandists played upon this anxiety in broadcasts to Britain, in which they would, for instance, announce that the church clock in Banstead, Surrey, was running five minutes slow. How, people wondered, could they acquire such information unless such places were crawling with fifth columnists? But the Germans might not have had to work all that hard to create conditions of paranoia. In every city and every town, any transgressive or unusual behaviour was noted and reported.

What Bletchley Park veterans tend not to refer to now are the episodes when the Park was itself caught up in espionage dramas – not merely the cunning British transmissions of false information and black propaganda from the riding stables of nearby Woburn Abbey (by means of a fake German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, which specialised in smears about Nazi officials), but murkier episodes that across the years have provoked allegation and
counter-allegation. As we shall see, there were instances where careless talk
was
talked – by Wrens, by lieutenants, by mechanically minded clever-dicks – and on these occasions, the Bletchley authorities were swiftly on the case. There was no shortage of voluntary surveillance in Britain at that time.

But while the necessity of keeping the secret was obviously vital above all else, it seems that the Park hierarchy was largely remarkably trusting of its young recruits. For the ordinary young men and women, the very notion of espionage or indeed of spies moving among them rarely even occurred.

Teenage runaround Mimi Gallilee – just fourteen when she was taken on as a messenger in this top-secret establishment – recalls her induction very well. ‘There was the Official Secrets Act to sign. There wasn’t a lecture – I can’t even remember if they said “This is the Official Secrets Act.” I didn’t know what kind of a place I was going to work in. I didn’t know what my mother did there. And there was no reason for me to have ever asked. I just know that I had signed the Act. And of course we were told that we mustn’t breathe a word to anybody of where we were working.’

The nature of her job meant that she could at least attach names to certain huts, which is a good deal more than any of the cryptographers or linguists could do. But, she says, this was a period in which all natural curiosity was numbed. ‘You just accepted everything you saw and you didn’t ask. If there was a need to know, you were told. Because of the job, I used to walk around all day. The Park used to get deliveries of messages, communications – a minimum of four deliveries a day each, which I then had to make to the huts.

‘And that entailed knowing where everything and everybody was – including who was in charge of the huts – but you weren’t allowed to roam around the house.

‘And some huts you weren’t allowed to go into at all. For instance, there was Hut 11 – where you had to ring the bell outside. Then one of the Wrens or someone – who were locked in – opened
up and you just handed across the doorway what you were carrying.’

The odd technological glitch could result in alarms being triggered. In May 1943, H. Fletcher of Hut 6 sent this warning memo to his superiors: ‘I think it should be seriously considered whether the fitting of scramblers is necessary. A Wren, using a public call box in Newport Pagnell, and conversing with her mother in a trunk call, was able to overhear a menu being telephoned to [the Bletchley Park outstation at] Gayhurst. Her mother also heard this conversation and remarked on its curious nature.’
¹

What seems rather striking now to the Hon. Sarah Baring is the fact that she cannot remember what the penalty would have been for any slip of the tongue. ‘The people I worked with in Hut 4, we could talk between each other,’ she says. ‘We were doing the same thing. I’d be translating, another friend would be doing something else. So we could talk. But only within your hut. You never talked outside your hut.

‘But the awful thing was they couldn’t give you the sack. Because you knew too much. So God knows what they would have done if anyone did talk. And nobody ever did.’

Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘There was certainly absolute secrecy in that sense, that you didn’t talk about your work to anyone outside your section. Some people have criticised that, saying that it was unnecessarily blinkered. We should have been able to be a little freer in knowing what was going on. It would have helped our work.’

Even though recruits might maintain secrecy within the establishment, however, the question arises: how could Bletchley Park security be expected to police those who were on leave? When these codebreakers and linguists and clerks went home for time off, what did they tell their families, their friends, their neighbours, their local communities, about the nature of the work they were doing?

This was a particularly germane issue for the young men, for it would be natural for many people to think of them: ‘Why is he not
in uniform?’ Gordon Welchman recalled in his memoir that the issue became a source of acute discomfort for some:

Conversely, some of the codebreakers appeared to live in communities that either valued discretion, or had a sense of what it was that the homecoming lad was really doing. This seemed to be the case for Keith Batey whenever he got leave: ‘As to going home, and lack of uniform: no one found it odd. People knew that everything was pretty strict. This business about call-up, reserved occupations and what you were doing. Everyone was directed to what they were doing. No question about that. And no one asked me what I was doing.

‘Though there was my brother … he wasn’t in Bletchley,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He was younger than I and was still at Oxford in the middle of the war. Then he went to the RAE, then after the war he became a parson. Many years later – quite recently in fact – he said to me: “It was pretty obvious what you were doing. There were you, a mathematician, and Mavis speaking German. There was never a doubt.” So you can see that lots of people put two and two together and sometimes got the right answer.’

From the moment one left the Park and embarked upon a train journey, one was under an infinitely intensified version of the
phrase: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But for some, there seemed to be little in the form of stern lectures or admonitions. Nor were there any restrictions on leave, or where that leave might be spent. It was understood from the start by the Park’s administrative authorities that after the exhausting focus of the work, after all the concentration and the unremitting shift system, these young people would need their breaks simply to maintain their sanity.

But for the others, it was all a matter of self-discipline. A prevailing sense of anxiety that Germany might after all win the war helped enormously. One veteran recalls how she hated to drink even the smallest amount off-duty, because she was terrified that if she got drunk, she would blurt out confidential information that could be overheard by anyone. Another veteran developed a fear that she might talk in her sleep.

Sheila Lawn recalls her own regular journeys home to the far north of Scotland, and how, as soon as she walked through the gates of Bletchley Park to the railway station, she was under her own jurisdiction. She also recalls what for many of us would be a trying journey, even now.

‘Of course, the trains were more reliable then,’ she says smiling. ‘We used to get a week’s holiday four times a year. They paid your fare, third class, which for me was a great matter because I went up to Inverness to see my parents to have a nice few days there. You’d go down to the station, you’d try to make it a suitable shift, you’d walk down with your case to the station, and usually the trains were absolutely crowded in that area, and so often I was shovelled in with a great lot of Forces chaps, and hopefully find a seat, though sometimes it was a case of sitting on your case in the corridor.

‘And then sometimes the trains would be rerouted. Whether it was because of difficulties on the line because of bombing, I do not know … so sometimes, you would be pretty late in getting up to Inverness. But they got there. In those days, once you got to the lowlands of Scotland, they changed the engines, they put a double engine on, to draw you up over the Highlands.

‘I always used to be a bit dirty with the flakes from the engine. They would fly into the carriage through the window. So first thing on getting home, I used to have a shower, or a bath, I can’t remember which, and mother would have a hot drink for me, and she always asked me what I wanted for lunch, so I’d tell her, and it would be all ready for me. This would be luxury.’

And luxury, indeed, with no one asking her anything about the nature of the work that she was engaged upon down in Buckinghamshire.