The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (5 page)

The main codebreaking took place in the Machine Room, so-called because the young mathematicians working there had a real Enigma machine which they could use to test out their theories of what
the day’s settings for each code might be.

The Germans were using a number of different types of Enigma code, with each part of the
Wehrmacht,
the German armed forces, using their own system. The different Enigma codes were
identified in Hut 6 by colours because they used different-coloured crayons to record their progress against each Enigma system on paper charts pinned to the wall.

Once the codebreakers in the Machine Room had broken the daily settings for one type of Enigma, they moved on to another. They didn’t decode the messages. That was done
by the young women in the Decoding Room where Jane and Elizabeth worked.

The Decoding Room didn’t have any real Enigma machines. They had British cipher machines, called Typex, which had been converted to work in the same way as an Enigma machine. When the
mathematicians had broken the day’s keys for one of the Enigma codes, they passed them on to Jane or one of the other girls in the Decoding Room. They then set up their machines using those
keys and typed up all the messages encoded using that particular system.

But while Jane and the others were happy to work extremely hard to try to help win the war, they suffered from very poor working conditions which weren’t helped by the smoky atmosphere in
the hut. It seemed almost obligatory for the young mathematicians to smoke a pipe while they were working out their puzzles, and the ventilation was very poor. Jane wasn’t used to these types
of conditions at all.

‘It was very bad accommodation. Very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer. No insulation of any kind except for blackout curtains. We had horrid little trestle tables, which were
very wobbly, and collapsible chairs, which were also very wobbly, very hard. There was very poor lighting; single light bulbs hanging down from the ceiling. So we were really in semi-darkness,
which I expect is what the authorities wanted, better security.’

The converted Typex machines fed out decoded messages in lines of text on strips of paper tape, like the tape used for old-fashioned telegrams. The girls had to check that it was in German and
then glue the paper tape
with the decoded message onto the back of the original message.

When Diana Russell-Clarke first arrived at Bletchley she was still in the Naval Section and had started out in the library working on Italian messages, but because Hut 6 was desperate for women
who spoke German to work in the Decoding Room, she was transferred over to there. Diana had been taught by a German governess so she could tell if the settings worked out by the mathematicians were
working and the messages were coming out in German.

‘But a lot of it was not particularly clear because of course it gets rather jumbled up coming over the air, but one knew quite a lot of what it was. Of course, a lot of the stuff was very
routine, orders to people in the Luftwaffe and things, but occasionally you got this great excitement.’

The messages, still in German, were put into a cardboard box and pushed through a makeshift wooden tunnel with a broom handle into Hut 3 next door where they were turned into intelligence
reports and sent to London.

Given the difficulties finding enough good young mathematicians, and the success in recruiting more women for the Decoding Room, Mr Milner-Barry decided to staff the Registration Room with women
as well. The young male mathematicians could then all be put in the Machine Room to concentrate on the actual codebreaking. He went back to Cambridge, to the women’s colleges of Girton and
Newnham, where his sister had been vice-principal, to recruit a number of young female graduates.

Joy Higgins was twenty-one and studying English Literature at Cambridge. Her father was the headmaster
of a school in Newport Pagnell, about eight miles north of Bletchley
Park, so an invitation to work there was attractive. She’d already visited the mansion before the war, when the estate was put up for sale. The contents of the house were being auctioned off
and her mother wanted to buy some of the high-quality porcelain and glassware.

‘Now the Park was surrounded by a high perimeter fence, with a military guard at the entrance gates. I was to report to a small hut outside these gates, and it was here that I was
interviewed by Frank Birch, a recalled First World War expert, and Harold Fletcher, who had been a distinguished Cambridge mathematician. Unorthodox as ever, the former was wearing a pea-green
shirt and a Breton beret.’

Mr Fletcher, who was dressed more conservatively, was in charge of all the Hut 6 sections that were now to be staffed by women. Joy thought him charming. He and Mr Birch asked her a lot of odd
questions and gave her a piece of Italian text to translate which she stumbled through somehow. When they asked her if she expected to get a First, she crossed her fingers and said she hoped
so.

‘They couldn’t tell me what the work involved because of its secret nature, but they thought I was a suitable candidate, and soon afterwards a letter arrived at home inviting me to
work at Bletchley Park as a technical assistant, once I came down from Cambridge.’

On the Monday after Joy finished her degree, she arrived at Bletchley, signed the Official Secrets Act, was given a pass and told she’d be paid £195 a year plus ten shillings (50p) a
week war bonus. She was then taken into
the Registration Room, which was already full of young female graduates, mostly from Cambridge, but some from Oxford and Aberdeen.

‘It was a good place to start as it began to give a general picture of what happened in Hut 6, and an overall idea of the work of Bletchley Park as a whole. People did go to immense
lengths to explain things to us, always within the strict bounds of security. The questions of my interview made sense now. Certainly they needed the trained minds and the discipline of the
graduate; but they also needed an attention to detail, a sense of order – and much enthusiasm.’

Each of the women working in the Registration Room was allocated to one specific Enigma system. The lists of messages they compiled were known as B-Lists, so the new female intake swiftly became
known as the ‘Blisters’. The German messages were sent using Morse code in groups of five letters but at the beginning of the message the operator sent a number of things like time of
origin and the settings. This was called ‘the preamble’ and was the part of the message they had to concentrate on.

Pamela Draughn, another 21-year-old, had been studying French and German at Royal Holloway College when she was recruited to be a Blister.

‘All the time I was at college I was always discouraged from going into the forces. I wasn’t frightfully keen to but I just wanted to be doing something useful and Old French and
Middle-High German, I used to think, was the most useless thing I could be doing.’

So she applied to the Foreign Office for a job, thinking
she would be travelling the world, and after successfully passing the interviews was told to report to London from
where she and another young female recruit were driven to Bletchley Park. They were met by Mr Fletcher, who told them what they would be doing and, as part of a long lecture on the need for
complete secrecy, informed them that they were now banned from leaving the country for the duration of the war. They couldn’t risk anyone being captured by the Germans and giving the secret
away. It was not quite what Pam wanted to hear, but she bit her lip and got on with it. Fletcher sent her to join Joy in the Registration Room.

‘You had a sheet which was called a B-List on which you analysed each message which came in which was believed to be in your code. You put down the number of letters, the origin and the
frequency. Occasionally there was a third group of letters used.’

One of the most important things Pam had to note down was the number of groups in each message.

‘If you saw exactly the same-length message sent out at the same time you could think that it might be a re-encodement from one code into another and that would help enormously because if
you’d broken one code you could break the other code.’

During the early spring of 1940, Hut 6 stopped being able to break Enigma. The main code they’d been working on was a Luftwaffe system which allowed the German Air Force
to talk to the two other services. The codebreakers called this the Red and used red crayons to chart their
progress against it. It was already clear from the time when they
had been breaking it that if only they could decode it, there was a lot of intelligence to be had, but they just couldn’t get back into it. When the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway in
April they used a completely different Enigma code, which Hut 6 called Yellow. It was much easier to break than the Red and produced lots of details of German operations and plans, but there was
very little that could be done with the intelligence. British troops could do nothing to stop the Germans invading Norway and the ineffectual response led in early May to Mr Chamberlain’s
resignation as Prime Minister and his replacement by Winston Churchill. The new Prime Minister told Parliament that he had nothing to offer the British people ‘but blood, toil, tears and
sweat’ and that they had no choice but to win the war. The nation’s very survival depended on it.

There might not have been much blood spilled at Bletchley, but there was certainly toil, sweat and tears. The invasions of Norway and Denmark, and the certain knowledge that Holland, Belgium and
France would be next, forced Hut 6 to work round the clock, with two or three people working in each room overnight. But plans to put the Blisters and the Decoders on night shifts alongside the men
were blocked by senior civil servants worried about what young men and women working together through the night would get up to.

The bosses wanted to put three women on the Hut 6 night shift, since this was all that was needed to keep the B-Lists up to date and do the decoding. The Civil
Service
bosses insisted there must be six women on shift. Mr Milner-Barry said sarcastically that this was probably because the men would be ‘overworked’ trying to keep so many women happy.
Three women had to be brought in from another hut to sit on the night shift doing nothing in order to protect the other three girls’ morals. Given the shortage of staff across the Park, this
stupidity was dispensed with after a couple of weeks.

Most of the women were in billets with people they’d never met before, some of whom were welcoming, some of whom were definitely not. They had to pay their own rent, which was set at a
guinea a week. Joy Higgins was lucky.

‘I explained that I could live at home and every week I religiously paid my mother the statutory one guinea for my board and lodging.’

Others weren’t so fortunate, although most eventually found somewhere reasonable to stay. Ailsa Macdonald was reading economics at Edinburgh when she was recruited. She and two other girls
were placed in a house in Wolverton, where a large number of the young women were billeted. It was a pretty disastrous couple of months.

‘We shared a small bedroom, three of us. They had a bathroom but we weren’t allowed to use it. After quite a short time we were moved. I was sent to a new housing estate and it was a
modern house. They had a small child and I was very happy there. But I was lucky because I think a lot of people had billets where the sanitary facilities were not very good.’

Jane was billeted in a lorry driver’s house right in the
middle of Bletchley itself. He drove for the London Brick Company and their works were just behind the house.
They were overshadowed by large brick chimneys ‘belching out horrible raucous smoke’, one of which towered right above them. ‘It really was disgusting.’ The town itself was
a major railway junction and the fast trains to and from Scotland shook the whole house. The lorry driver and his wife were kind and hospitable but with Jane frequently working night shifts, she
found it impossible to sleep.

‘The room they gave me was a cupboard really with a tiny window. They had two little boys who were quite noisy and I, of course, was on the night shift a lot of the time. So I
couldn’t really sleep when the boys were at home and it was about as uncomfortable a place as I’ve ever slept in.’

As the work in Hut 6 built up, Jane found herself increasingly tired and soon became very run-down. Her father was very worried about her and eventually one of his friends, Sir Reginald Bonsor,
said his country home wasn’t that far from Bletchley. Most of the servants had been called up so they had plenty of spare rooms. Why didn’t Jane come and stay with them?

‘I was transferred to this very grandiose Elizabethan house and they happened to have rather a lot of rooms empty because they had lost pretty much the whole of their staff. So I was able
to move in about half a dozen of my friends, and that became much more jolly, of course.’

The mansion was at Liscombe Park, eight miles south of Bletchley. Jane and her friends, along with all the other people living in billets, were taken into Bletchley at the start of each shift by
buses or large estate cars, known as shooting
brakes, which were driven by members of the FANY, or the Motor Transport Corps, a volunteer organisation made up of young women.
Barbara Abernethy’s ability to organise the early entertainment like the rounders matches had been spotted and she’d been moved from the Naval Section into administration, coordinating
things like transport.

‘The Motor Transport Corps drivers were really very attractive girls. They were usually quite wealthy and they had to buy their own uniforms, which were beautifully cut, and they were all
very pretty. But they worked very, very hard.’

The only problem with living in a country mansion for Jane and her friends was that when they were going on the night shift they had to wend their way along a dark drive and even darker country
lanes shrouded in high hedges and trees to get to the transport pick-up point.

‘So one had to get to the right place and be confident that the driver had been told by the previous driver exactly where they were to pick you up. We felt a bit vulnerable and I was
accused of taking a hammer with me, although actually it was a torch which was far more useful.’