My Secret Life in Hut Six

One woman's experiences at Bletchley Park

Mair Russell-Jones, Gethin Russell-Jones

• Publisher: Lion Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745956657
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The story of the World War 2 de-coders of Bletchley Park continues to fascinate.

How did Mair Thomas, a musician brought up in the Welsh valleys, find herself in the rarefied atmosphere of Hut Six, surrounded by hundreds of others, all desperately trying to break the German Enigma Code?

Sworn to secrecy and working in cramped and uncomfortable conditions, Mair discovered her degree in German and Music was just what was needed. Drawn from the public schools and Oxbridge her background was very different to that of most of her colleagues and she didn't immediately fit in. This captivating memoir unpacks her daily life and explores the relationships she built.

My Secret Life in Hut Six provides a fascinating insight into one woman's battle against Nazi Germany vividly capturing an era of danger, strain and day to day difficulties that were brightened occasionally by visits from the top brass, such as Winston Churchill.

CHAPTER 1

JANUARY 1941 A Personal World War

As she recounted her story, my mother always returned to the day when her life changed for ever.

She was dead; I just knew it. I had a sickening hunch that something was dreadfully wrong and my friend had become a victim of the bombing of Cardiff. I can’t explain why I had this sixth sense, but the smell of death was in the air that morning. The empty space next to me was filling with memories. Before the official announcement was made, grief was already numbing me. Poor Helen. I sat in the lecture theatre with my head reeling and thought about her short life, blown apart by a human-hating bomb.

That was the morning when it became my war. Until then it was something that was happening over there, to somebody else. But that day it rudely interrupted my life and murdered my friend. I was now involved, whether I liked it or not.

Helen’s father was a university professor in the philosophy department. She was quiet, softly spoken and very good at languages, a dedicated student, tipped to get a First. We had become good friends over the past year and I really liked her company, although I can’t say we were like sisters; some people are part of your life without the relationship being particularly deep. But on this day she was late arriving, which was most unlike her. I tended to be the one always dashing to get to lectures and generally arriving a few minutes late. In fact, I had noticed there were a few absentees that morning.

This is how 1941 begins for Mair. Back in Cardiff after a bleak Christmas break, she is glad to be back in the city. Her mother’s death a few years earlier has left a chilly atmosphere at home as family members struggle to come to terms with this untimely loss. A pall of grief still hangs over her father, Dada, and Aunty Lucy’s backhanded comments are becoming ever more caustic. In more normal times, the university term would start later in the month, but the war is playing havoc with scholastic seasons.

Britain has suffered months of aerial attack during the Battle of Britain, the German attempt to wipe out the RAF, and then the beginning of the Blitz. It has been exposed to months of carefully targeted bombardment. Dozens of cities have been bombed, tens of thousands of people killed, and many fear that it’s only a matter of time before the nation will be under German occupation.

This bombing campaign had been going on for months, and we’d hoped that it would fizzle out before the New Year began. But 1941 certainly started with a bang, even though chapels and churches had been praying that this misery would be over soon. The war was now into its second year: we had been told it would be over within a few months.

I went back to Cardiff in time for the start of the new term. Everyone was on edge, constantly looking at the skies, expecting to see swarms of German aircraft. The train was crowded and any seasonal atmosphere had disappeared. You could sense an all-prevailing mixture of anger, distraction and determination. Air raid sirens were constantly going off, their wails adding to the prevailing mood of anxiety. The weather was bright and clear – just right for bombing, one of my friends said. Everyone in my hall of residence was nervous, even the girls who before Christmas were so blasé about war and saying they would drink their way through it all.

It all began on New Year’s Day. By the time it was dark the tension was unbearable, tempered a little by the black humour and camaraderie of the other girls. At ten o’clock the bombs started falling… That’s far too tame, makes it sound like snow or drizzle; these weapons of death were screaming and whining madly before that sickening thud and blast indicated they’d landed. I’d never heard anything like it before. I’d read about the London bombings only a few days before and seen some of the photographs, but somehow none of it seemed real. But this was frightening and we had no control over any of it.

I thought I was going to die or be horribly wounded. Along with a few others, we huddled in a little cwtch [cupboard] in the basement of Aberdare Hall, the university’s hall of residence for women. For some reason we didn’t have an air raid shelter so the residents cramped together for safety and comfort in this little hideaway. It was terrifying, hearing the loud roar of the planes; it felt like they were just outside, scraping the tops of the buildings.

The incendiary bombs were the worst and, curiously, the prettiest. For a brief few moments after they landed, everywhere was bathed in a magical blue light and there was no noise. Then came an explosion and a sudden eruption of flames. Death by burning. I think the incendiary device was followed by some kind of rocket that blew everything up. It was the kind of creative genius that was so pointless. Its only use was destruction and death. All that noise and colour meant that someone somewhere had been maimed, disfigured for life, or killed. I hoped Dada and my sister Beti were safe and unharmed.

The ten-hour air raid, during a full moon, begins in early evening, just after 6:35 p.m. Grangetown is the first area to be hit by a hundred German aircraft and bears the brunt of the attack, which continues for several hours before the planes head westwards. This isn’t the first time that Cardiff is bombed, but it’s one of the heaviest nights of fire in the capital city. A chapel in Llandaff Cathedral is also hit. The bakery owned by the Hollyman family on the corner of Stockland Street and Corporation Road is bombed and thirty-two people are killed, including at least five members of the Hollyman family. This large group is taking shelter in a nearby cellar when the bomb falls, leaving an 8 ft pile of rubble. In nearby Blackstone Street, seven relatives who have been to a funeral earlier in the day are also killed during the strike. Another fifty people lose their lives in Riverside’s De Burgh Street. The toll is heavy. More than 427 people are seriously injured and nearly 350 homes are either destroyed or so severely damaged that they have to be demolished.

The planes then roar west, passing over Bridgend and the Garw Valley before discharging the rest of their load over Swansea. This town, over forty miles west of Cardiff, sees the most furious assaults, with much of the town centre turned into burning rubble.

As she walks to the lecture theatre the following morning, Mair sees the impact of the night terrors. There is debris everywhere.

The air was smoky and acrid, you could taste it. I became used to this taste during the war years. It was a vile sensation of something poisonous and gritty at the back of your throat and nose that you couldn’t shift.

In spite of the bombing, Cardiff is open for business. The university welcomes students and staff to a new term; shopkeepers greet their customers and the streets are full of pedestrians on their way to work.

I made my way to the German department, unsure whether I should be there or not. The city had been pummelled during the night; the pounding and exploding had gone on and on. The university itself was unharmed but some of the buildings on Park Place looked as though they’d been damaged. The atmosphere was eerily quiet; people were getting on with their business, but in their own worlds. Students, lecturers, other members of the public were locked in their silence, processing the events of the past twelve hours, wondering what the day might bring. We were all living with shock and fear; dealing with the reality of random and brutal destruction. Roads were closed to traffic.

Everyone was so down; you could almost taste the depression. The lecture was half-hearted and pointless. We were meant to be learning about the poetry of Goethe, but the atmosphere was turgid and heavy. Everyone, including the lecturer, was too distracted by the bombing to concentrate. His words were drowned out by my frightened thoughts; I could barely hear what he was saying, even though he was only a few feet away.

Rumours were abounding about the number of students killed in the strikes; especially the ones missing in the lecture theatre that morning. We gathered for comfort; the lecture was unimportant. It might as well have been about zoology for all the difference it made to us. We were all dazed; shaken by the horrid realization that this was our war. Until this point, most of my friends had associated this conflict with something happening “out there”, but this changed everything. After half an hour, Helen still hadn’t arrived and I longed for her to come into the room and make everything normal. I kept looking at the door, hoping that she would be the next person to come in.

Gossip and rumour abounded all day, worsening as every hour passed. But in the afternoon the dreadful news came through – Helen had died in the bombing. And not only Helen, but her entire family had been killed in the attack. They lived near the university; Column Road, I think. This bookish, quiet household was blown to eternity by a stray missile or maybe an incendiary device. This news shook me. It wasn’t the first time I’d experienced the death of someone I knew, but this event fed the grief I still felt for Mama. The last time I saw Helen had been only a few weeks previously; just before Christmas. She was happy, looking forward to graduating, and thinking about taking a post-graduate degree in German, possibly at another university. And now she’d been killed by a German bomb. It was too vile for words.

This event still affects Mair, who is biting back tears as she tells the story. Even though it happened over seventy years ago, it’s still fresh enough to induce immediate grief. Her relationship with Helen barely went beyond the weekly routine of lectures, seminars and a few social visits, but the attachment is real enough to endure.

CHAPTER 2

1917–36 Rough Valley

The year 1917 is one of revolution, war, secrecy and bloody mindedness. It is also the year of Mair’s birth. She is born on 17 October, a day which intersects with some of the year’s most visceral events. On 15 October in Paris, dancer and socialite Mata Hari is shot by a French firing squad for spying for Germany. The evidence against her includes material gathered from a secret code breaking service run by British intelligence. The First World War is still raging, and on 17 October, pilots of the British Royal Flying Corps carry out their first bombing raid on German civilian targets, when two flights of de Havilland bombers attack the Burbach iron works and nearby railway lines near Saarbrücken. And on 25 October, exiled radical Vladimir Lenin takes over the leadership of the Bolshevik party, who then remove the provisional government from power and seize control of Russia. The ambitious Bolsheviks agree to a humiliating treaty with Germany, which enables the exhausted Russians to bow out of the war, by ceding vast tracts of land to the Germans. This in turn allows the German army to throw everything into its last attempt to win the war. They nearly succeed: but the following year, 1918, sees the final German capitulation. And in a quiet street in a distant Welsh valley, Mair Eluned Thomas is born. She is happily unaware that warfare with Germany and espionage will later dominate her life.

Her place of birth is 31 Albany Road, Pontycymer. This village lies at the head of the Garw Valley, one of the many in South Wales. Garw is a Welsh word meaning rough, even severe. Far from reflecting the cramped living conditions of its twentieth-century inhabitants, the word describes the rugged mountains and forests that dominate the valley. Unlike most of the other industrial valleys, it is more or less a cul-de-sac, except for a narrow lane which leads to the top of Blaengarw and on, treacherously, to the Rhondda and Afan valleys.

Like everywhere else in the region, coal is king; and its production employs thousands of men. It is a village, indeed a valley, of well-attended nonconformist Welsh and English-speaking chapels. It also boasts an abundance of burgeoning drinking houses with a different clientele. There are workmen’s halls, libraries, literary and music societies and, of course, eisteddfodau. These cultural festivals, entirely in Welsh, demand the highest standards from all participants, even though many of them are still only young children. From their earliest years, Garw Valley children will become familiar with poetry, music, literature and performance. But this is no monoculture.

All kinds of people lived in Pontycymer. Work was scarce in those days and a lot of people came to work in the mines. They settled down and had their own families. I remember a great number of Irish people in the valley as well as Scots, and plenty from the north of England. I also had friends at school whose parents came from Somerset and Devon. And, of course, there were lots of Italians about the place. Most of the cafés were run by Italian families; I loved the gurgling, frothing sounds of those places and the steamy, cosy atmosphere you found inside. These families were well known and loved in the valley; they’d probably been there since the end of the last century. I was told that they were all from the same part of Italy, and had come to Wales in search of work at the time of a great depression in their homeland. They were amazingly enterprising, establishing cafés and fish and chips restaurants. One of the cafés in Pontycymer was Palledri’s, and they sold the most amazing ice cream I’d ever tasted; deliciously sweet and creamy. At a time when there wasn’t a lot of money about, the Italians somehow managed to make the most ordinary food taste exotic and different. Mama took me there once for cheese on toast and it was unlike anything we’d ever had at home.

The house of Mair’s birth sits at the top of a steep hill, connected to a cluster of large semi-detached houses. Opposite are terraced cottages, built for socially mobile coal miners who have gained various promotions in the nearby pit. But the right-hand side of the street is populated by teachers, solicitors and doctors. (Local residents still refer to these dwellings today as the doctors’ houses, even though that class moved to greener and more affluent pastures a long time ago.)

Mair is the first child to Thomas Thomas and Agnes Thomas. Agnes has three sisters: Ellen, Janet and Edith. Thomas is from a larger family. He has three brothers: Benjamin, David and Evan, and three sisters: Jane, Julia and Lucy. Both families are affluent by the standards of this overwhelmingly working-class area. Both sets of grandparents have died by the time Mair is born.

Thomas Thomas is a winding engineer in the nearby Ffaldau Colliery; a position of senior management and well paid. Agnes is a seamstress and has owned a ladies’ fashion shop in Pontycymer, where she sold her own handmade dresses, produced on her sewing machine. In 1921, a second child is added to the Thomas family, Beti.

Mair’s father ha...