The Debs of Bletchley Park and Other Stories

Michael Smith

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781781313879
• eBook ISBN: 9781781313893
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

For Winston Churchill the men and women at Bletchley Park were ‘ the geese the laid the golden eggs’ , providing important intelligence that led to the Allied victory in the Second World War.

At the peak of Bletchley’ s success, a total of twelve thousand people worked there of whom more than eight thousand were women. These included a former ballerina who helped to crack the Enigma Code; a debutante working for the Admiralty with a direct line to Churchill; the convent girl who operated the Bombes, the top secret machines that tested Enigma settings; and the German literature student whose codebreaking saved countless lives at D-Day. 

All these women were essential cogs in a very large machine, yet their stories have been kept secret.

In  The  Debs of Bletchley Park  author Michael Smith, trustee of Bletchley Park and chair of the Trust’ s Historical Advisory Committee, tells their tale. Through interviews with the women themselves and unique access to the Bletchley Park archives, Smith reveals how they came to be there, the lives they gave up to do ‘ their bit’ for the war effort, and the part they played in the vital work of ‘ Station X’ .

They are an incredible set  of women, and this is their story.

1

The Biggest Lunatic Asylum in Britain

Phoebe Senyard was not very happy. She was packing up all the office files and equipment into tea chests. Phoebe had only just returned from a holiday with her mother to be told she was being sent to the ‘War Station’ at Bletchley Park the very next day. She and Commander Crawford were to be the entire German naval codebreaking section. They weren’t the only ones going, of course, but the Navy had insisted that the Government Code and Cypher School’s real German Naval Section must stay in London, sat in the Admiralty, so she and Commander Crawford were going to be the only German naval ‘experts’ at Bletchley. Phoebe was no codebreaker and she certainly wouldn’t regard herself as a German expert. She didn’t understand how anyone would. She’d originally been recruited as a clerk and knew very little about the German ‘Enigma’ codes. Not that anyone else seemed to understand them either.

It was August 1939. Everybody knew that a war with Hitler was just around the corner. But no one had done much about the German codes. Admiral Sir Hugh Sinclair, who as chief of the secret service was in charge of the spies and the codebreakers, didn’t believe the German codes would be broken. They were too modern, too complex. Ciphers produced by a machine, not by people. How could you break them without the machine? Commander Alastair Denniston, the head of the Government Code and Cypher School, agreed with the admiral. He usually did. Only Dilly Knox seemed to believe that Enigma could be broken. Phoebe was in no position to say whether the admiral or Mr Knox was right. She’d been picked out as one of the clerical workers who might be capable of doing a bit more, and once a week or so, if she was up to date with her own work, she helped Miss Yeoman register the naval Enigma messages. But there was very little else that anyone could do with them other than note down the main details, put them in the right order and then stack them away in a filing cabinet. No one thought there would ever be a chance of breaking them. Not even Mr Knox, and he was the Enigma expert. They were far too complex, even more complex than the German army and air force Enigma messages. Well, that’s what Sheila Yeoman said.

But the more pressing problem was her mother. Who would look after her? Phoebe was forty-eight, a member of that generation of women who’d watched the men they loved march off to the trenches, some never to return. For many, it signalled the end of any hope of raising a family of their own. All Phoebe had now was her mother – and her younger brother Henry – and Mother was in her seventies. That’s why the job at Broadway Buildings had been so handy, a short train trip from Peckham Rye to Victoria and then a five-minute walk into work. Bletchley was much further away. Phoebe knew, of course, that if there was a war, there would have to be sacrifices. But she had responsibilities. Her father had died three years earlier, leaving just the three of them. But Henry was still a young man and if there was another war he was bound to be called up. What would become of Mother then? So it was with some trepidation, or as Phoebe put it, ‘fear and trembling’, that she agreed to go.

‘I did try to protest but I was told that it was only for a fortnight so I gave in.’ Not only was she going to have to leave Mother on her own but no one seemed able to tell her what she would be doing. ‘A great deal of secrecy had to be observed, of course. I think Commander Crawford was overawed by the secrecy and was afraid to discuss the work with me at all.’

Secrecy and codebreaking went hand in hand. The British had been breaking the codes of their enemies, and very often their friends as well, since the fourteenth century. Letters sent back to Paris, Madrid and Rome by the ambassadors of France, Spain and the Vatican were intercepted and read on the orders of King Edward II. The British intercept operations were secret but the ambassadors soon realised what was going on and began writing their letters in code. Elizabeth I’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham wasn’t going to let that stop him finding out what the Queen’s enemies were planning. He set up a codebreaking operation run by the Queen’s astrologer John Dee, whose predictions suddenly became so accurate that the Spanish Governor of the Netherlands complained that his reports for the King of Spain were being read in London before they even reached Madrid.

Oliver Cromwell went further, placing a ‘Secret Man’ in the Post Office to intercept and read the letters of suspected opponents of his government, with Parliament backing the scheme ‘to discover and prevent many dangerous and wicked designs’. Before long, the ‘Secret Man’ had become a ‘Secret Department’ controlled by the Foreign Office with its own ‘Secret Deciphering Branch’, but when news of its extensive operations inside Britain emerged in the mid-1800s it was closed down.

The Great War, as Phoebe and her colleagues would still have called it, and the use of the new ‘wireless apparatus’ for military communications, revived the need for codebreakers. Wireless messages could be intercepted by the enemy, so the important ones had to be sent in code. Both the Royal Navy and the British Army set up wireless sites to intercept German messages and recruited university professors to decode them. Commander Denniston was in charge of Room 40, as the Admiralty codebreakers were known, from the room in the Old Admiralty Buildings that they occupied. Dilly Knox, a noted classical scholar, was one of its leading lights, decoding a lot of important German messages, including the one that brought the Americans into the war in 1917.

When the Great War came to an end, the army and navy codebreaking organisations were combined into the Government Code and Cypher School and began breaking American, Japanese and Russian codes. The American and Japanese navies were seen as the main threat to Britain’s domination of the seas and the Russians were dangerous Bolsheviks intent on overthrowing Western democracy. The Germans didn’t feature in the codebreakers’ list of targets. They were assumed to have been beaten once and for all. It was only after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 that Dilly began to work on the Enigma codes. He managed to break the Spanish and Italian versions, but the German Enigma messages were impossible to crack.

By now the Code and Cypher School had been taken over by Admiral Sinclair and was based just across the road from St James’s underground station in the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service, soon to acquire the title of MI6. The vast majority of the actual codebreakers were men, with women like Phoebe involved in menial tasks such as the basic registering of messages, typing or filing. There were a couple of female codebreakers, one of whom, Joan Wingfield, a pretty 26-year-old from Sheffield, had spent the early 1930s in Italy living with her Uncle Claude, the Lloyd’s agent (and the MI6 man) in Livorno. Joan soon became fluent in Italian. But in 1935 Uncle Claude was thrown out of Italy for spying and joined the Code and Cypher School as an Italian expert, bringing Joan in with him. She was soon decoding messages between Italian ships and their shore bases. But she was very much an exception. By and large the most responsible job given to a woman was as a translator. They were also paid substantially less than the men, around £200 a year for a junior civil servant compared to the male salary of £250. This was regarded as perfectly normal within the Civil Service and across industry at that time. The men would have families to support; the women didn’t need so much money.

Barbara Abernethy joined at the age of sixteen, which meant she earned even less. She was from Belfast but had been educated at a convent in Belgium and was fluent in French, German and Flemish. In August 1937, when Commander Denniston was looking for a typist, she was transferred from the Foreign Office to Broadway where she was paid the grand sum of 31 shillings and 6d a week, just under £82 a year.

‘I was posted over there not knowing what I was doing and told that it was strict secrecy. I was there for a week and they apparently approved of me because I was kept on and I stayed there.’ Barbara worked with Phoebe and liked her a lot. ‘She was very pretty, a very good-looking woman. She seemed terribly old to me but she must have been in her forties. Very nice, very pleasant face, very confident, everybody liked her.’

Not everyone was so universally liked as Phoebe. Many of the older codebreakers were eccentric personalities and difficult to handle, not least Dilly Knox, who threatened to resign at the slightest change in routine. When one of the codebreakers committed suicide, throwing himself under an underground train at Sloane Square station, Admiral Sinclair decided that working such clever men too hard ‘overstrained their minds’, and he ordered Commander Denniston to cut back their hours. They didn’t have to start work until ten o’clock in the morning, had ninety minutes for lunch, and finished on the dot at five o’clock. Despite her low pay, Barbara thought it was wonderful.

‘Life was very civilised in those days. We stopped for tea and it was brought in by messengers. I was very impressed by this, first job I’d ever had and it seemed paradise to me. Nice people and very interesting work. I thought, well, this is the life, isn’t it. Thank God I’m not back in the Foreign Office.’

Many of the young women working for the Code and Cypher School were, like Barbara and Joan, from relatively well-to-do families, recruited because they knew someone who worked there, and were therefore deemed to be trustworthy. Diana Russell-Clarke’s father Edward had worked with the codebreakers during the Great War; at the beginning of 1939, with war with Hitler on the horizon, she decided she needed to do something to defend Britain. Naturally, the first person she turned to for help in finding the right job was her mother. It was simply the normal thing for a young woman of Diana’s class to do.

‘My mother simply rang up Commander Denniston, whom we called Liza because we’d known him all our lives, and asked him: “Have you got a job for Diana?” He said, “Yes. Send her along.” So that’s where I started. We were decoding. But it was very, very boring, just subtracting one row of figures from another. We were on the third floor. There were MI6 people upstairs. They were always known as “the other side”. We didn’t have any truck with them.’

Concerned that his staff would be at risk if the Germans bombed London, the admiral had bought a country estate and mansion at Bletchley Park, far enough away from London to be safe but linked to Whitehall via the main telephone communications cables that connected the capital with the far north. This was to be the ‘War Station’ for Britain’s spies and codebreakers.

Phoebe, Joan, Barbara and Diana were among just over a hundred codebreakers who travelled to Bletchley Park in August 1939. Many went by train, instructed to make sure that they only bought a ticket that was ‘of the appropriate class’ for their status within the Code and Cypher School, which for Phoebe and Barbara was very definitely third class. A few, like Diana, were lucky enough to have cars and were encouraged to take them so they could help ferry people into work each day.

‘A great friend lent me his Bentley for the duration of the war because he decided it was better for it to be driven than be put up on blocks. So I had this beautiful grey Bentley and of course the private cars were useful because we used to collect people to come into work and then drop them home afterwards.’

Initially they were all put up in pubs or hotels, where the mix of secretive elderly men and very young women, most of them much younger than Phoebe, scandalised the hotel staff, who assumed they must be up to no good. They weren’t alone. The codebreakers weren’t allowed to tell even their own family where they were, leading Barbara’s mother to worry what her eighteen-year-old daughter might be doing.

‘My mother didn’t know where I was and I was reasonably young. She had to sort of trust. I told her these people were very respectable.’

The codebreakers were instructed to inform any locals inquisitive enough to ask that they were working on plans for the air defence of London. The servicemen attached to the Code and Cypher School’s naval, military and air sections were ordered to wear civilian clothes. Bletchley Park was now to be known simply as ‘Station X’, not as a sign of mystery but simply the tenth of a number of stations owned by MI6 and identified by Roman numerals. All mail was to be sent to an anonymous Post Office box number in Westminster from where it would be collected and delivered to Bletchley by MI6 courier.

It wasn’t just Phoebe who was promised they weren’t going to be at Bletchley for very long. Barbara was told not to bring any more clothing than she would need for a two-week stay.

‘It was pretty well organised. I was in the Bridge Hotel, Bedford. None of us quite knew what would happen next. War had not been declared and most people thought and hoped that nothing would happen and we would all go back to London.’

The Naval Section moved into the library and the loggia, a conservatory on the left-hand side of the mansion as you looked at it from the front. Phoebe’s German section was in a corner of the library with two tables, a steel locker and a telephone with a direct line to the Admiralty. There were just two chairs, one each for her and Commander Crawford, but with the work piling up she soon had reinforcements.

‘On 28 August 1939 we were joined by Misses Doreen Henderson and Cherrie Whitby and I need hardly say how welcome they were, for up to this time, we had only been helped by casual labour, some of it of the most doubtful kind, so that when they came we breathed a sigh of relief. Miss Whitby was as dark as Doreen was fair and they formed absolute contrasts to each other in appearance. Doreen came to help me with the registering and we became submerged under the spate of German intercepted signals which came pouring in, whilst Cherrie Whitby worked with Mrs Edwards, who was one of the temporary helpers. Both Doreen and Cherrie were excellent workers and were of great value to the section. We were very lucky in having such help.’

Admiral Sinclair paid for a good chef from one of the top London hotels to cook for them in the mansion and ensure they were properly fed. Despite concerns over her mother, Phoebe loved the ‘wonderful lunches’ the chef provided. ‘Bowls of fruit, sherry trifles, jellies and cream were on the tables and we had chicken, hams and wonderful beef steak puddings. We certainly couldn’t grumble about our food.’

Most of the codebreakers were from upper-class or upper middle-class backgrounds and were used to the fine dining and relaxed well-to-do atmosphere of the country estate. But for young women like Barbara, who by the standards of the day came from a relatively well-off family, it was a completely new experience, something she’d only read about in Agatha Christie novels.

‘It was beautiful: lovely rose gardens, amaze, a lake, lovely old building, wonderful food.’ For those brief two weeks in August 1939, Bletchley Park really did have the relaxed air of a weekend party at an English country mansion.

Then on Friday 1 September 1939, Hitler invaded Poland on the pretext of retaking German territory lost in the Great War and the Second World War began. Britain was not yet at war with Germany. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain mobilised British troops and gave Hitler an ultimatum. Withdraw from Poland or Britain would declare war. Hitler had until eleven o’clock on the morning of Sunday 3 September to respond. At a quarter past eleven that Sunday morning, the codebreakers clustered around the wireless set in the mansion dining room to listen to what Mr Chamberlain had to say. He informed the nation that he was talking to them from the Cabinet Room in 10 Downing Street.

‘This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11am that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’

The Prime Minister told the nation that he had fought for peace but Hitler wasn’t interested in peace, only in the use of force, and as a result force was the only way to stop him. The situation in which no people or country could feel themselves safe in the face of German aggression had become intolerable and ‘now that we have resolved to finish it, I know that you will all play your part with calmness and courage’. There would be ‘days of stress and strain’ ahead but it was vital that everyone pulled together and did their job.

Many of those listening were like Phoebe. They remembered the Great War, now forever destined to be known as the First World War, and they knew at first hand the sacrifices they had made, the loved ones lost. That was one of the reasons Chamberlain had bent over backwards in an attempt to avoid another war. The gist of his address to the nation that quiet Sunday morning was that Hitler had given them no choice. Britain might not want war, but it was doing the right thing. Quite unfairly, Chamberlain’s name would become a byword for appeasement of Hitler. He was certainly not a man capable of rousing the nation in the manner of Winston Churchill, who would succeed him as Prime Minister the following May, but at the time his address was seen as both honest and, in its own modest way, suitably inspiring. He finished with the words: ‘Now may God bless you all. May he defend the right. It is the evil things that we shall be fighting against – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution – and against them I am certain that the right will prevail.’

Britain was at war but it remained far from clear what the codebreakers’ contribution might be. Dilly Knox still hadn’t broken the German Enigma codes, although he was now very close to success, thanks to the Poles.

The Enigma cipher machine had been invented by a German company in the early 1920s, originally for use by banks and other commercial organisations that needed to keep data confidential. It was adopted by the German Navy in 1926 and two years later by the German Army. The machine itself looked rather like a typewriter encased in a wooden box. It had a keyboard and on top of the machine was a lampboard with a series of lights, one for every letter, laid out in the same order as the keyboard. The main internal mechanism was made up of three metal rotors, each with twenty-six electrical contacts around its circumference, one for every letter of the alphabet.

In order to encode the message, the operator set the rotors in a predetermined order and position, known as the settings. He then typed each letter of the message into the machine. The action of pressing the key sent an electrical impulse through the machine which passed through each of the rotors and lit up the encoded letter on the lampboard.

The machine didn’t print anything out and it didn’t send the message itself. The operator simply noted down the encoded letter from the lampboard and typed in each of the other letters until he had a completely encoded message which he sent via wireless, normally using Morse code.

As a letter was typed in the first rotor moved forward one position. After that rotor had moved a certain number of times, the second rotor moved forward once, and after the second rotor had moved a number of times, the third rotor moved once. As a result, the code was constantly changing with every letter. The Germans added a plugboard providing an additional level of security which they believed made Enigma unbreakable.

But they were wrong. The Poles, who shared a border with the Germans and had never stopped seeing them as a threat, had begun trying to break Enigma shortly after the Germans first started using it. The Polish codebreaking organisation, the Bureau Szyfrow, employed a group of mathematicians led by a young man called Marian Rejewski, who used mathematics to work out the internal wiring and mechanism of the German Army Enigma machine. He was helped by a spy ins...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1 The Biggest Lunatic Asylum in Britain
• 2 Breaking Enigma
• 3 Sink the Bismarck
• 4 The Wrens Arrive
• 5 Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off
• 6 Turing and the U-boats
• 7 Dilly’s Girls
• 8 The World’s First Electronic Computer
• 9 The JappyWaaf
• 10 An Extraordinary Army of People
• Endnote
• Sources
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyright