The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (14 page)

The period when Christine arrived at Bletchley also saw the arrival of a group of people who would change the lives of a number of the women, including both Christine and Barbara Abernethy.
Barbara was now in charge of Commander Denniston’s office and in early 1941 he said he needed her to stay late that night.

‘Commander Denniston said he had something important to tell me. “There are going to be four Americans who are coming to see me at twelve o’clock tonight,” he said.
“I
require you to come in with the sherry. You are not to tell anybody who they are or what they will be doing.”’

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that would bring the Americans into the war was still ten months away but already the British and American codebreakers were preparing to work together to
share their resources and abilities to break the German, Italian and Japanese codes. Waiting outside for her boss’s signal to come in, Barbara tried to work out how she was supposed to
manhandle the cask of sherry into his office on her own.

‘It came from the Army and Navy Stores and was in a great big cask which I could hardly lift. But Commander Denniston rang the bell and I struggled in and somehow managed to pour glasses
of sherry for these poor Americans.’

It was something of an amazing experience for Barbara. The work she’d been involved in both at Broadway Buildings and at Bletchley was top secret, but this was somehow even more momentous.
Despite having worked for the Code and Cypher School for nearly four years, she was still only nineteen. It felt as if she was taking part in something extraordinary. She couldn’t take her
eyes off the American officers.

‘I’d never seen Americans before, except in the films. I just plied them with sherry. I hadn’t the faintest idea what they were doing there, I wasn’t told. But it was
very exciting and hushed voices. I couldn’t hear anything of what was said but I was told not to tell anybody about it. I guess it wasn’t general knowledge that the Americans had got
any liaison with Bletchley. It was before Pearl Harbor, you see, and presumably President Roosevelt
wasn’t telling everybody there was going to be any liaison at that
stage.’

Once the Americans entered the war in December 1941, the first of what would be several hundred codebreakers from the US Navy and the US Army began arriving at Bletchley. There was a mixed
reception, with some of Christine’s colleagues in Hut 3 very wary of the Americans. Jean Alington couldn’t hide her distrust.

‘I remember with horror the American invasion when every section had an American. We believed they had no sense of security and were terrified that material they took out of the Hut would
go astray. We felt strongly that they would never have come into the war but for Pearl Harbor.’

That attitude was common and not really surprising. Britain had been fighting with its back against the wall. The Americans had provided immense help with vital supplies and financial backing
but there was still resentment at the way in which they’d dragged their feet while the Nazis rampaged across Europe. Britain was weighed down by two years of war, the Americans seemed to act
as if they owned the place, and Jean was wrongly convinced they weren’t going to be capable of pulling their weight.

‘They were different animals, and the English they spoke had different meanings. They were fat, we were emaciated. They were smart (eleven different sorts of uniform), we were almost in
rags. They were rich, we were poor. They brought in alcohol: “Have a rye, sister.” “We don’t drink here.” We were overworked and exhausted, and having to teach people
who barely knew where Europe was, was the last straw.’

Pamela Draughn was in charge of a shift in the Duddery in Hut 6, using captured Enigma machines to try to work out what was wrong with ‘dud’ messages, messages
that wouldn’t decode properly using the Enigma settings that the Hut 6 codebreakers had worked out for that particular radio network. Some of the more junior Americans were allocated to her
shift.

‘The Americans were all very nice. They were very anxious to please. The ones I got, there were half a dozen, some from state university, nothing like as intelligent as our graduates, and
two from Princeton and Harvard, both very intelligent.’

But as with the then popular song ‘Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off’, sung by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the two sides found themselves divided by a single language.

‘The second day they were there I said to the one who was most intelligent: “What happened to Theo today, Teddy?” and Teddy said: “Aw gosh, the heck, Pam. He’s been
shot.” I was absolutely horrified. What sort of country was this that could shoot people just like that, and I looked at him for a bit and then I said: “What for?” And he said:
“Oh you know, all these illnesses we’re supposed to get when we go to Europe.” He meant he’d been inoculated and I quite seriously thought he’d been shot.’

The mutual misunderstandings came to a head in the summer of 1942, during the 4 July Independence Day celebrations, when the Americans challenged the ‘Brits’ to a game of rounders.
Barbara organised it but the Americans turned out to have a limited understanding of the rules of the game.

‘They nearly went home. Now in the United States, where you play baseball, you don’t need to get all the way home in one go to score. As long as you get all
the way home eventually you score. Now our rules for rounders, of course, were very tough. You had to go all the way round in one go.’

If you didn’t go round in one go, you didn’t score a ‘rounder’. It was impossible for the Americans to grasp the idea that you had to go right round the circuit to score
a single run so they assumed that Barbara’s explanation of the rules couldn’t be right.

‘It was a lovely day, we all played well, and at the end of the game we all sort of clapped each other on the back and the Americans said: “Well, we’re sorry we beat
you,” and the British captain said: “I’m sorry, but we beat you.” The Americans were a little touchy. They were convinced that they’d won and it took a bit of
explanation on somebody’s part to soothe ruffled feathers. It all ended with drinks all round; actually we agreed we’d won by our rules and they’d won by their rules. So that was
all right. But they never asked us to play again.’

Despite Jean’s doubts, and the arguments over the rules for rounders, the working relationship between the British and American codebreakers was exceptionally close. The leading US experts
were the equals of their British counterparts and both sides pulled their weight. There was a very good bond between the two sides throughout the war.

Christine spent her time off preparing for the post-war era. She was very conscious of the fact that the people
she was working with were far better
educated than she was and she was determined to go to university. So she was studying for her Higher School Certificate in English, History, Latin and French.

‘I called it my first university because I arrived there so ignorant, so uneducated, and there I was thrown in with all these toffs and scholars and so on. I didn’t know as much
about literature and other things as I later came to know or as the people around me knew. They were all interested in the things that I wanted to know about.’

The Bletchley Park Club ran an increasing number of sections and many of Christine’s new colleagues took part, particularly in the chess and music sections. Christine’s supervisor
Jean Alington had been a member of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company before the war but she was by no means alone in her abilities. The number of top musicians joining the Park was staggering.
Jean was part of a lively opera group run by James Robertson, later musical director of Sadler’s Wells; the standard of the choir had improved dramatically since Jane Hughes and Diana
Russell-Clarke first joined it and it was now conducted by Sergeant Herbert Murrill, future head of music at the BBC. Another future BBC musician was the bassoonist Michael Whewell, who would go on
to take charge of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The many professional musicians included the Welsh composer Daniel Jones, the violinist Ludovic Stewart, and the singers Jill Medway and Douglas Craig
(then known as Douglas Jones), who was subsequently the company manager at Glyndebourne.

James Robertson was also the choirmaster in the local church. Ann Lavell and Julie Lydekker, two of the WAAFs working in the main Air Section, were members of his
choir.

‘There was a little church just behind the Park and they did a little Sunday service for the workers and Julie and I sang in that. James Robertson was a really well-known conductor, so it
was quite an excitement being in his choir.’

Christine was too busy studying at this point to take much notice. She would cycle in from her billet with a textbook open on the basket in front of her, sat reading textbooks on her breaks, and
was forever walking into Hut 3 with her head in a book.

‘I didn’t have a great social life because I was working for Oxford and Cambridge entrance. I was still worried about my education. I had to stop in the end because life was too
difficult with shift work and so on.’

The pace of the war was hotting up. During 1942, British soldiers were fighting huge battles across the deserts of North Africa where the German General Erwin Rommel, known as
the Desert Fox, had pushed them back to the Egyptian border. Hut 6 and Hut 3 were working hard to produce the intelligence needed to help regain the lost ground. Shortly after General Bernard
Montgomery took charge of the British 8th Army, the so-called Desert Rats, Bletchley decoded the message that turned the tide. Rommel sent a long report to Hitler explaining what he planned to do
next; it was encoded using the Red Enigma and read almost immediately in Hut 6.

But it wasn’t the only important message the codebreakers were reading. Hut 6 had broken the German Air Force Enigma code used by the aircraft escorting
Rommel’s supply ships across the Mediterranean and the Naval Section in Hut 4 was reading the main Italian naval codes, which also carried details of the supply convoys. This allowed the
Royal Navy and the RAF to intercept the German supply convoys and sink them, leaving Rommel without the fuel and the spare parts he needed to keep his tanks moving across the desert.

Montgomery knew Rommel’s plans and he knew Rommel’s weaknesses, ensuring a series of victories first at Alam Halfa, then at El Alamein, the British Army’s first real victory of
the war, achieved with a great deal of assistance from Bletchley Park. Those left behind in Britain had something to cheer. Nobody in Hut 3 minded when Montgomery claimed the victory was the result
of his tactical brilliance and grabbed the glory. Everyone knew they had to keep the Enigma secret, and anyway it was the soldiers at the front line who were doing the difficult, dangerous stuff.
But there was an ‘explosion of fury’ in the Watch when Montgomery ignored Hut 3’s subsequent reports showing that Rommel’s forces were on their knees with only eleven tanks
able to move. Montgomery sat still rather than go in for the kill. Lives would be lost as a result, and it wasn’t the only time it would happen. Throughout the war, there were irritating
moments when naval, army or air force commanders ignored the codebreakers’ intelligence at their cost. Nevertheless, the stranglehold the British now had on Rommel’s supply of fuel,
parts and
food – thanks to Bletchley Park and the intelligence on his plans – ensured that the Germans were driven out of North Africa.

Christine had impressed in the Air Index where her research had produced a huge chart detailing every major German unit and its location, which Jean pinned to the wall; all the
intelligence reporters consulted it. Christine was developing a good reputation as a useful intelligence analyst and was moved to a new section liaising between the Hut 3 Air and Military
Sections.

‘We had to analyse the German messages and try to work out a priority list for the cryptographers in Hut 6 and for the intercept stations, which frequencies to concentrate on and which
keys to try to break first. That was much more interesting.’

Jean also moved to the new section, which was located behind a map partition in Hut 3 and called 3L. It examined all of the material coming into the hut to decide which Enigma codes and which
frequencies were the most productive and so needed to take priority. It was a role that Jean enjoyed because of the increased responsibility it gave her.

‘It was a cold winter, so we were warmed by a paraffin stove, which was kicked over. The ensuing flames nearly put an end to us, our venture and the whole hut. We built a door to keep
others out and George Crawford wrote above it in Greek, “Let no one enter here who is not primarily interested in mathematics.”’

There were blackboards on the walls on which Christine drew the network diagrams of the radio networks that
were the most important priority. They called the network
diagrams ‘Stars’ because the control station was drawn in the middle with the other radio stations located around and linked to it by straight lines, making the diagram look like a
star. The aim for Jean was to ensure maximum efficiency in terms of intercepting and decoding the most important messages.

‘We were sent into Hut 6 to familiarise ourselves with the machines working there, we liaised with the traffic analysis log readers; we also made time and study assessments of how to speed
up the flow of decodes to the Watch. We tried to get better conditions for personnel working in appalling discomfort and became agony aunts for the miserable and uncomfortable.’

The section was dominated by women: Jean, Christine and Leslie Tyrell, who read every Enigma message that passed through Hut 3, grading them according to importance.

‘We each prepared a weekly news sheet for Mr Churchill on the areas we were covering. We swapped areas frequently so that we should be competent in all of them.’

Christine was soon made the chief liaison officer with the Fusion Room, which looked at all the raw material, gathering intelligence from the intercepted plain-language conversations between the
enemy operators, tracking their locations and finding information that would help make sense of the decoded messages. Christine might have thought she wasn’t clever enough. Her superiors
clearly didn’t agree.