The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories (9 page)

Sally’s cheeks were bright red with embarrassment as she explained how the Index worked to her godfather, only too aware of the anger of the senior managers behind her at this young
woman’s impertinence in disrupting their carefully planned programme.

‘I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled.’

But first thing next morning she was ordered to report to Commander Travis, who tore her off a strip for daring to ask the Chief of Combined Operations to visit the Index.

‘I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing of the visit and he was my godfather. Bless him, he lent me a hankie to blow my nose.’

In August 1943, Sally’s grandfather died and her father became the 6th Lord Grantley, Baron of Markenfield, making her the Honourable Miss Sarah Norton.

‘It got out that I was an honourable and I was frightfully embarrassed by this. Somebody came up to me: “I hear that you’re an honourable.” I was fed up to the back teeth
with
it. I said, “No I’m not. I’m very dishonourable, so shut up.”’

The actress Pamela Gibson, also a German linguist, worked alongside Sally and Osla in the Hut 4 Index.

‘I had a letter from a rather interfering godmother who said she was sure I was doing splendid work entertaining the troops but she knew a girl who had just gone to a very secret place and
was doing fascinating work and they needed people with languages. That made me feel I was fiddling while Rome burned. So I wrote off to the address they sent me and thought no more about it. I had
just been offered a part in a play when I got a telegram from Frank Birch asking me to meet him at the Admiralty. He gave me several tests and said, “Well, I suppose we could offer you a
job,” and I said, “Well, you know about the stage, what would you do if you were me?” He said: “The stage can wait, the war can’t.” So I went to
Bletchley.’

The Index had started off with a few shoe boxes and by the end of the war, by which time Pamela was in charge of it all, had expanded to fill three large rooms. But initially, she found the work
depressing. She’d expected the offer of a role in naval intelligence to be more interesting than cross-referencing the numbers of the U-boats and the names of German naval officers.

‘I slightly resented it, giving up the stage where I was enjoying myself and doing what I really wanted to do, because I thought that I was going to be doing something a bit more exciting
than indexing. I thought I was going to be dropped in France or something.’

Like many people at Bletchley, she sought an escape from the frustrations of her work in the social life of the
Park and in particular the musical and dramatic clubs, where
her professional expertise made her one of the stars, albeit among a number of other prominent people, including other actors and several leading musicians and writers.

‘We gave what we thought were splendid parties. A girl called Maxine Birley, the Comtesse de la Falaise as she became, was a great beauty and mad about France and I remember her giving a
party at which we all had to be very French. People would change partners quite a lot. We were rather contained in a way-out place and you could only travel if you managed to get transport so there
was a good deal of changing of partners.’

The drama and musical clubs combined at Christmas to put on a revue, which was always very popular because of the standard of the writing, the music and the performances. It was while working on
the revue for Christmas 1943 that Pamela met and fell in love with her future husband, Jim Rose; he was one of the intelligence reporters and wrote a sketch in which she took the female lead. Jim
was due to be away on duty when the revue took place so he was allowed to watch the rehearsal.

‘No one was allowed to go to rehearsals but at that time I was going to Washington just before Christmas so I was allowed in and this glorious vision of loveliness stepped down from the
stage and said: “Your sketch isn’t bad.”’

Phoebe, now in charge of the distribution of all the various messages that were coming into Hut 4 – very far from the basic secretary she had been when she first started work at Broadway
Buildings before the war – encouraged the
junior staff in her section to put up Christmas decorations.

‘Mr Birch gave a wonderful luncheon party to the heads of sub-sections and all the old staff. Mr Birch, Susie and I, being the veterans of the sections, had a special little ceremony all
to ourselves in a corner of the room where we toasted the Naval Section and anything else which came into our heads. It was great fun and it was our own special celebration. By the time we went
into the room where the luncheon was served, we were almost prepared for anything, but not for the wonderful sight that met our eyes. The tables were positively groaning with Christmas fare. They
were arranged in a T-shape, the table which formed the top of the T was loaded with turkey, geese and chicken whilst the table down the centre at which we all sat was decorated with game pie, and
fruit salad, cheese and various other dishes. Each person had a menu, which was afterwards signed by everyone there, and we set to and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, and I know that I was still
beaming at the end of the day and feeling exceedingly happy.’

Meanwhile, Prince Philip was spending the Christmas period at Windsor Castle, where the seventeen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and he enjoyed a mutual attraction. Shortly afterwards, he and Osla
split up. On the rebound, she became engaged to a diplomat, but it didn’t last. Unsurprisingly for two young women in their early twenties, with many young male friends all going off to war,
and the intensity of their relationships heightened by the possibility that they might never come back, the love lives of both Osla and Sally enjoyed numerous ups and
downs
with what Sally described as ‘magnified highs and lows, either enraptured or suicidal’. Osla had come back from leave with a large emerald engagement ring given to her by the
diplomat.

‘Two months later, the despicable cad changed his mind,’ said Sally. ‘Osla tearfully returned the ring swearing she had never liked green stones anyway. I got engaged to a
handsome officer in the Coldstream Guards, but was soon disengaged by both families who thought we were too young and anyway it was wartime. What that had to do with it escaped me, but my heart was
broken for the first time.’

The handsome Coldstream Guards officer was her longtime boyfriend Billy Cavendish. After the break-up enforced by their parents, he fell in love with Kathleen Kennedy, the sister of John F.
Kennedy, the future US President, and married her. Sally’s heart was broken a second time.

‘I felt it would never survive the anguish and when he was killed in France the misery was compounded.’

But there were lighter moments. One afternoon, when their watch was over and they were waiting for transport to take them back to their billets, Osla and Sally decided to send their friend Jean
Campbell-Harris down one of the long corridors, which ran downhill, in one of the laundry baskets the decoded messages were delivered in.

‘We launched it down the corridor where it gathered momentum by the second. To our horror, at the T-junction, Jean suddenly disappeared, basket and all, through some double swing
doors.’

Sally would dine out on the claim that the basket carrying a giggling Jean had careered into the gents’ loo, but in
fact it burst into the office of Commander
Geoffrey Tandy, the head of technical intelligence, who had already shown his irritation at the girls’ willingness to enjoy themselves when there was a lull in the work. Jean took the brunt
of his anger.

‘Geoffrey Tandy had already decided he did not like me and now he was absolutely furious. As a punishment the three of us were taken off the same shift and it took us three weeks to get
back together again.’

Jean had arrived a few months after Sally and Osla, but although the need for more people was becoming urgent, recruitment was still largely targeting people who were known to come from reliable
families.

‘They were really frightfully snobbish about the girls who worked there. A friend of my father’s said: “Maybe when Jean’s finished her secretarial course she would like
to go to a place called Bletchley.”

‘Sally and I were great pals but I think Osla was my dearest friend. She was a delight. Spoiled rotten, but adorable and loved by everyone. She had dark hair and fair skin and was simply
beautiful. Her mother had no home but lived in a permanent flat in Claridge’s and had had five husbands.’

Geoffrey Tandy, who was in his early forties, was in charge of captured enemy documents. He was a former curator at the Natural History Museum and had access to special
materials used in the preservation of old documents. An officer on the Royal Naval Reserve, he had been sent to Bletchley Park because he was an expert in cryptogams,
not
– as the Admiralty clearly assumed – encoded messages, but mosses, ferns, algae, lichens and fungi.

Peggy Senior, who worked alongside Mr Tandy translating the documents, was recruited aged twenty-one as a Foreign Office linguist, having studied German at Girton College, Cambridge. The
Admiralty might have made a mistake in its interpretation of Tandy’s skills but so far as Peggy was concerned it was a good decision to send him to Bletchley.

‘They couldn’t have done a better thing for him because he found it a romantic thing altogether. It really thrilled him generally. It was like a small boy. My friend and I were
typing up the message that was sent to all the German fleet and he said: “If you don’t feel romance now, God help you.” So, strange as he was, he was a romantic at
heart.’

Tandy’s Technical Intelligence Section also kept track of the latest detail of all the various U-boats and Peggy was in charge of a log-book which included any information they could find
in the intercepted messages about every submarine. It created an odd connection between the women extracting the detail from the messages and the individual U-boats, almost like sports fans
following a specific team.

‘The thing I look back on with pleasure is my U-boat log. You wrote on each U-boat’s page its number and its type, name of its commander, what torpedoes it had fired. Did they hit
the target? Did they sink it? And what stocks had they got left? So I got to know quite a bit about the submarine war. You got quite interested in individual U-boats for no reason at all. A
particular number took
your fancy and you wanted to know how it got on. We all had our favourite U-boats.’

Commander Travis’s daughter Valerie was in charge of the library containing all the captured documents, known as ‘pinches’ because they’d been ‘stolen’ from
the enemy. Some were codebooks and operator instructions that would help to break other codes while others were technical documents that provided the correct terms for new or obscure pieces of
equipment that would help the people translating the messages.

‘It was the only way of finding the German terms for all their extraordinary torpedoes and things and finding out a bit about them, so as I had Italian and German, I was given the job of
collating all these documents and listing them. We had P numbers for the pinches: PG numbers for the German and PI for the Italian, and of course eventually we had a Japanese as well.’

With people who spoke good German at a premium, Sally was promoted to the German Operational Watch, translating the lower-level naval messages. Her new boss was a Royal Navy commander who was a
good deal older than the women working for him.

‘He was very nice and he tried to keep us under control. Wasn’t always easy for him, but he did. At that age you do get very mischievous, I’m afraid. That kept morale high and
the work did too because you knew what you were translating was terribly important. I make it sound as if we were silly little girls but actually we weren’t and we did work incredibly
hard.

‘You were translating German decrypts and you’d really
got to know how to do them pretty quickly if you had the lingo. So we were reading lots about U-boats and
that sort of thing, Atlantic convoys in such danger. It was a nightmare. An absolute nightmare. It brought an edge of urgency to the work. I remember thinking, I’m not going to go one by one
by one until I get to the bottom. I’m going to find the ones about the U-boats first. Because the U-boats were always signalling to each other where they were so it was very important the
Admiralty got that.’

Sheila Mackenzie was in her second year at Aberdeen University in 1943 reading modern languages. She was already on a reserved list to teach French and German, which prevented her being called
up for the armed forces, but she didn’t want to be stuck teaching when all her friends were off ‘doing something about Hitler’. So she took her name off the teaching list, and
within a couple of weeks received a letter from the Foreign Office inviting her to an interview in London.

‘At the age of nineteen coming up to twenty, I’d never been out of Scotland. Money was scarce, travelling was not encouraged. Things were very, very difficult. So I rejoiced to go
down to London and I had my interview and I saw as much of central London as I could in the time allowed and shortly after that I got another letter asking me to report to Bletchley, and when I got
there I was to telephone, and the voice at the other end said: “Ah, yes, Miss Mackenzie, we’re expecting you.” And that was it.’

She was sent to work in Hut 4 on low-level German codes, which were relatively easy to break and involved messages for heavy German guns and radar stations along
the
French, Belgian, Dutch and Mediterranean coasts. ‘I remember thinking, this is interesting. They got a lot of messages in. I just collected them from the teleprinter room once or twice daily
and worked my way through them. I decoded them and translated them. It was weather reports, sightings of ships, sightings of aircraft, just warning the radar stations and gun emplacements what was
happening. I would have liked to have known more but you couldn’t. It was impressed on me that security was absolutely essential. I didn’t ask too many questions. It was not the done
thing.’