The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (15 page)

‘I was promoted quite quickly, I was flight officer quite soon. I felt a sense of responsibility, but at the same time
that there was a great gap between what I felt
I really was, which was totally ignorant, and what was needed to do this exciting job, and it really was very exciting.’

Rodney Bax, an Intelligence Corps captain working in the Fusion Room, began chatting to Christine. He’d studied at the Royal School of Music before the war and wanted to become a composer.
He was ‘tall and straight’, paid her a lot of attention and they went out on dates to the cinema. The relationship appeared to blossom, although Christine wasn’t at all sure she
wanted it to go anywhere.

The numbers of people coming into Bletchley were rising rapidly, with more than five thousand people working there in August 1943 compared to the hundred or so who had first arrived outside the
mansion four years earlier in August 1939. The wooden huts were too small to house so many staff and Hut 3 and Hut 6 moved into a new purpose-built concrete and brick building known as Block D;
they confusingly kept their hut names. It was safer to continue to call them Hut 3 and Hut 6 than come up with a name that might give away the fact that Bletchley had broken the Enigma codes.
Rodney had now been attached as Fusion Room liaison officer on the Hut 3 Watch. Christine’s relationship with him was getting very close, and Rodney seemed infatuated. He had even devised his
own ‘secret signal’ to remind her he was there. As he walked past her office, he would whistle a piece of music by Mozart.

The numbers of staff at Bletchley were now far too large to be housed in billets and Ann Lavell was one of a large number of WAAFs who were moved into a new barracks
built
behind the mansion on Church Green. There were a lot of very basic Nissen huts, with round corrugated-iron roofs.

‘We were hauled out of our billets, many of us wailing and screaming mightily, and by this time we were all dressed up as flight sergeants. A flight sergeant is really quite somebody in an
ordinary RAF station but we were nobodies. We were put into these frightful huts that took about twenty-four people and had these dangerous cast-iron stoves in them that got red hot and sent out
smoke everywhere.’

A similar barracks was built for the soldiers, including the army’s female service, the ATS, at Shenley Road, also behind the Park. There were major problems because the officers running
the new camps didn’t understand the unique atmosphere at Bletchley, which Ann believed was a key factor in why the codebreakers were so successful.

‘You did have this rather happy atmosphere of tolerance. Very eccentric behaviour was accepted fairly affectionately and I think people worked and lived there who couldn’t possibly
have worked and lived anywhere else. People who would obviously have been very, very ill at ease in a normal air force camp with its very strict modes of behaviour and discipline were very happy,
very at ease in Bletchley.’

The camp authorities couldn’t understand why the girls were not subject to normal military discipline. They also resented the fact that they had so little control over them and no idea
what they were doing once they crossed into Bletchley Park itself.

‘There was a terrible feeling between the camp authorities and the Bletchley Park people. They couldn’t bear
it because they didn’t know what we did and
because we could get in past the sentries. The guards actually said: “Halt, who goes there?” If you arrived at night, they did the bit about “friend or foe” and you said
“friend” and they said “advance, friend, and be recognised”. The camp people absolutely hated not knowing what was going on and some of the officers tried to bully out of
the junior people what they were doing.’

Barbara Mulligan was one of the WAAF teleprinter and wireless operators communicating with the people on the front line who needed the intelligence. She remembered the huts on the Church Green
camp as being very basic, and freezing cold in winter, a problem that wasn’t helped by the inadequate heating and the fact that WAAF rules insisted that one window always had to be open. But
they were young. The country was at war. They just got on with it.

‘There were dozens of huts and we were in Hut 59. No toilets. There were special toilet huts, quite a long way from the huts. If you wanted the toilet, you had to march across a field.
Finding your way in the middle of the night wasn’t funny. One particular night I tripped over a couple. We just accepted it.’

The girls spent a lot of their time with the other people in the hut in which they lived, not all of whom worked in the same part of Bletchley Park as they did. Barbara and the other girls read,
knitted or just chatted.

‘When we only had a couple of hours spare we would just have a gossip or queue up to have a bath because you were only allowed a couple a week. It was like one big
family, just a couple of dozen girls in one big hut on these funny beds. Three biscuits they called them. A mattress, a couple of sheets and a blanket and that was it and we just
accepted it – that was war.’

Between a series of shifts they had two days off and Barbara would never stay on camp. Usually she’d meet up in London with her sister Gill, who was also in the WAAF and based the other
side of London.

‘We met up in Euston all the time and I was waiting in Euston Station for Gill and a woman came up to me and said, “Get off my pitch!” Needless to say, I did. We’d get up
very early so that we could go to Lyons Corner House for breakfast and in those days a lot of big organisations would give free seats to people and we went to the opera for the very first time
– free.’

Once the US Air Force base at Bedford heard there were a lot of young servicewomen at Bletchley Park, they started inviting them to their dances, sending an open-backed army truck to pick them
up.

‘So every Saturday night, anybody who was off-duty would be taken over to Bedford and we would be allowed to dance with the men or have a drink and go to their canteen. We all had American
friends, of course, and it was great fun. (I had been engaged but my fiancé had been shot down.) They would take us in a lorry and the lorry would bring us back; elegant travel –
standing in the back of a big lorry.’

Unlike Christine, Barbara Mulligan and the other girls who worked with her had no real idea of what they were doing. They certainly didn’t know that Bletchley Park
had broken top German codes like Enigma and they only had a hazy idea of what effect their work might be having on the war.

‘We knew it was all hush-hush, and somehow it was impressed upon us that we must keep our mouths shut so I never talked to anybody about anything. I never even told my family what I was
doing. Every now and then we were told that we were anticipating or were taking part in some big push that led to a battle but that was all we ever knew. We knew that we were doing good work and
that was great.’

In May 1943, the US Army sent some officers to work in Hut 3. Most of them were chosen by Jim Rose who’d been sent to Washington to interview potential candidates, but
the first one was a young American lawyer, Lieutenant-Colonel Telford Taylor. Christine had to introduce him to the work that was done on the indexes and in her own section.

‘Telford had first arrived on his own and I was detailed to explain things to him. It was quite an odd experience because he was much too high-up to be interested in this kind of routine
work.’

With the strains of the job making it impossible to keep up her studies, Christine began to take more interest in the social activities at Bletchley. Bill Marchant, the deputy head of Hut 3, ran
the annual Christmas revues, so it was hard for members of Hut 3 not to become involved in some way, even if it was only as supporters, and Christine loved them.

‘There were a lot of people with talent there who wrote bits and there were a few actors doing their bit for the war
and a lot of amateurs. It was like a university
revue, like Footlights. We thought they were splendid. I’ve no idea if they really were. The performances may not have been so great but I think the scripts were fairly good because there
were a lot of very bright people there.’

Musical performances, plays and films took place in the assembly hall on a regular basis and with so many professional musicians around there were frequent trips to see performances in the West
End.

‘We would go up to London to see a play or a concert. There were people like Peter Calvocoressi who would give musical evenings in their billets. I remember Bryn Newton-John, an RAF
officer in Hut 3 whose daughter Olivia became a well-known pop star, would sing German
Lieder
. People went cycling around the countryside and there were a lot of love affairs going
on.’

Rodney Bax and Christine soon became engaged, although she was unclear how this had happened and felt as if she was being rushed towards marriage by both Rodney and her mother. An attempt to
break off the engagement failed and she and Rodney were married in Kensington in early 1944, not long after her twenty-first birthday. A brief honeymoon in the Scilly Isles did nothing to reassure
Christine that she’d made the right decision, but she just got on with it.

The arrival of the Americans had added to the social life with their penchant for hard drinking, particularly of whisky and other spirits. Christine found it hard to believe that they could
drink so much and yet seemed to stay relatively sober.

‘It was astonishing. I don’t know if it was just the war or me being terribly innocent. I remember my husband and I being invited to dinner at the local hotel
in Leighton Buzzard where all the Americans were billeted, and after dinner, all the Americans, each one, would order another whisky and another Drambuie and another round. It was absolutely
amazing and we had to cycle back to the billet where we were living and I remember being really very zigzaggy. It wasn’t that they were alcoholics. It was just the war atmosphere. They did
drink far more. That was the American culture.’

Telford Taylor was in the office across the corridor from Christine’s and with the Americans classified as an independent US unit he was able to obtain unlimited supplies of coffee and
sugar. With sugar rationed and real coffee virtually unavailable in wartime Britain, it was only natural that Taylor would share these riches with the pretty girl in the office across the corridor
from his own.

‘He was in charge of the American Liaison Section, which was just opposite where we were in Hut 3, so they would all come in for coffee and I knew them quite well. He was very handsome, he
looked like the film star Gary Cooper, and he was a very interesting person.’

Christine was in an unhappy marriage; Telford Taylor was away from his wife and family for the duration. When Rodney was taken into hospital with pneumonia, what followed seemed inevitable.
Christine and Telford began an affair, spending time in hotels in London to avoid any gossip in Bletchley. Christine was sanguine about the affair. She expected no more of it than she expected of
her marriage.

‘It was just one of those things. I was twenty-two and he was in his late thirties. I don’t know how these things happened. He had quite a good sense of
humour. He was a nice man, a lawyer. He liked to tell me all about the American law system. But he was very musical.’

When Rodney came out of hospital, Christine told him about the affair.

‘He was very, very British and he and Telford talked together. Telford was terribly amused afterwards because he thought my husband was so British, shaking hands and saying that everything
was all right, which of course it wasn’t. It just made him laugh because Americans don’t face things the way gentlemen used to.’

Rodney clearly hoped that Christine’s affair with Telford was a passing infatuation and would all blow over, and even though Christine knew he was probably right, she also knew that her
marriage to Rodney was not going to work either. After a miserable and very lonely first Christmas together as man and wife, she finally made the break and told Rodney it was over.

Phoebe Senyard spent the first week or so of April 1940 cramming files into cupboards and squeezing the desks in Hut 4 even closer together to make space for Alan Turing to
attempt to break the German Navy’s Enigma codes. No one believed that even he could do this. The main German naval Enigma, codenamed Dolphin, was far more complex than the German army and air
force codes they were breaking in Hut 6. But Mr Turing was determined to do it, although from what he said that was only because ‘no one else was doing anything about it and I could have it
to myself’.

It didn’t seem a very sensible reason to waste time trying to break an unbreakable code – the Dolphin Enigma had a choice of three out of eight rotors instead of the three out of
five on the army and air force Enigmas and used much more complex settings – but the German U-boats were attacking the British ships bringing supplies of oil, machinery and food across the
Atlantic. Britain depended on those supplies. If the new section succeeded it would
help the supply convoys to avoid the U-boats, more supplies would get through and that
would help win the war. So Phoebe set about reorganising the office yet again.

‘We put our backs into it in order to welcome the newcomers, by tidying up our files and papers, binding and storing into cupboards all signals and books not in current use. Everyone who
could be spared temporarily from their jobs was pressed into service and room was made for it, but it was a tight squeeze. We almost felt as if we ought to all breathe in together.’

It was tight but it was worth it. No sooner had Alan Turing and his friend and fellow mathematician Peter Twinn moved in than they received two important ‘pinches’. A German U-boat
was trapped and sunk while trying to lay mines in the Firth of Clyde and two of the rotors for the Dolphin Enigma were recovered. More importantly, the German naval patrol boat
Schiff 26
was captured and coding documents found on board showed how the system worked.