The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (17 page)

‘If you had a day off, you scurried up to London by the train,’ says the Hon. Sarah Baring. ‘Boyfriends or friends would be back from the war, and we’d always manage to keep in touch. And I tell you who used to do it for us. There was the most lovely man called Gibbs, who was the head hall porter at Claridges. And he knew exactly where all our boyfriends were. He used to say: “Hullo Miss, so-and-so is back, he was in yesterday.” That’s how we kept in touch.’

It is an image that one cannot help relishing for its cheering incongruity; in the middle of the blackout, the doorman of London’s smartest hotel is still keeping the glittering gay young things informed of the whereabouts of their peers. It also prompts one to wonder how such blithe carryings-on were regarded by friends and colleagues of different backgrounds.

The personnel of Bletchley Park were initially drawn either from the intellectual or the social elite; young Cambridge mathematicians working alongside girls in pearls. According to Josh Cooper, some of the very first pearled girls were not at all suitable: ‘There was an elderly and very imposing typist secretary whom the Section immediately nicknamed “Queen Mary”. And a younger and rather promising recruit who made her position impossible, scandalising
her Bletchley billetors by saying to all and sundry that the only friends she had ever had were Germans.’
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Of course, owing to outbreaks of Mitford foolishness in the 1930s – plus the recurring suspicion that certain members of the royal family were not quite so anti-German as they ought to be – the upper classes had more cause than most to be sensitive to other people’s feelings on that subject. Generally, though, the first wave of titled girls and debutantes, including Sarah Baring, were staunch, occasionally flinty, patriotic in every degree and determined – possibly even more determined than anyone else, with a sharpened sense of noblesse oblige – to do their very best. Sarah Baring herself has lost none of that sense of the duty she felt she owed.

They also brought some rather colourful distraction. There was the example of Maxine Birley, later to become the Comtesse de la Falaise, who according to one Park veteran held ‘unmissable parties … I remember her giving a party at which we all had to be very French.’

As numbers at the Park began to expand, a draft recruiting document (now in the archives) was drawn up for new staff. The intention was to send it out to ‘all regional controllers’ who had access to the Central Register. Not only does it give a fascinating insight into the way the Park was portrayed for security reasons, it opens an unintended window on to all sorts of thorny questions about class, and about how upper-class recruits should be treated:

As soon as the document crossed his desk, Alistair Denniston was swift to countermand it: ‘The question of social status can now be disregarded as we have people from every type of life.’ He added, perhaps as a slight giveaway: ‘I should not like to stress our social amenities, though great efforts are made to help people pass their spare time as pleasantly as possible in such a place as Bletchley.’
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The Hon. Sarah Baring’s own recollection is that in the Park at least, the different social classes rubbed along quite happily: ‘Perhaps before the war, debutantes were never asked to do anything serious,’ she says. ‘When you land yourself in a place like that, it’s pretty overpowering. There were people from all walks of life. There were Wrens, there were girls like me, people in uniform, army, navy, air force and later on, of course, Americans. All classes were represented. Especially among the Wrens.’

She remembers the outburst of excitement that rippled outwards when her title was discovered: ‘In terms of class tension, there was absolutely no trouble about that whatsoever. I’d been there about a year and a half at least when it got out that I was an Honourable. And I was frightfully embarrassed about this. Somebody came up to me and said: “Sarah! You’re an Honourable!” I said, “No, I’m not really, I’m very dishonourable.”

In what might be a reference to the Mitford girls, Sarah Baring
recalls thinking about the way that she was vetted for working at the Park: ‘I presume that they must have done a little bit of work on one’s background. Make sure that you weren’t a … Because there were a lot of young girls at that time who were mad about going to Germany and thought that Hitler was really rather wonderful. Silly girls. I think they probably wanted to know that we weren’t like that.’

If the community of Bletchley Park was ever taken as a cross-section of young British society of the day, then it does offer up some fascinating insights into the class structure of the time. These days, it is widely assumed that the end of deference, and the declining power of the old school tie, only began to manifest itself in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet there was clearly a humorous scepticism directed towards the ruling classes long before that. In the 1930s, P.G. Wodehouse’s aristocratic dilettante Bertie Wooster was hugely popular among a wide readership, not because his readers wanted to doff their caps to him, but because he fitted precisely the popular perception of the upper-class idiot. The 1930s had given rise to an expanding middle class, and their intelligent children were now at Bletchley Park, exploring the shifting contours of this new class landscape. The posher ladies tended to end up doing some of the most fundamentally unglamorous and unstimulating work.

But, says middle-class Oliver Lawn, social status was not a subject that impinged greatly: ‘I was not aware of it at all. I think a number of people – girls in Hut 6 – whom I got to know were probably of fairly high-class social standing. One or two of the people I worked with were probably towards the debs’ class. But I wouldn’t have known except that it is likely that they would have come in through that sort of influence or channel.’

Yet the opulent lives of the upper classes continued to exert – possibly against their will – a certain glamorous fascination, even if it was not consciously acknowledged. ‘I was with a girl whose father was a lord or something but she was just one of us,’ says Jean Valentine. ‘Yet you did meet people from both above and below
you, as it were, and it was OK. One girl had been evacuated to America at the start of the war, but when she reached eighteen, she came back in order to join up.

‘There were others who were clearly a little more working-class. On the whole, it was a pretty middle-class society.’

That was not always the case. There was the extremely rare instance of social mobility, and at breakneck pace: this applies especially to MI6 agent Hugh Trevor-Roper, who often had dealings with Bletchley Park. A few years ago, in an interview, Trevor-Roper conjured an amusingly irritating image with his account of his visits to the Park: ‘I went on hunting right through the early years of the war. Occasionally, when I had a staff car, I found it compatible with my conscience to make my visits to the Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park coincide with my hunting days with the Whaddon.’
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In Bletchley, class tension did occasionally make itself evident. As Marion Hill records, one deb was particularly bemused by the class of girls who were sent to her for secretarial duties. ‘I was given four or five girls as copy typists. One said when I was interviewing her, “Well, me name’s Maudie, but I like being called Queenie. I did used to work at Fletton’s but then I thought I’d better meself so I threw up the brickworks and went into the Co-op.”’
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Balancing that was the occasional outbreak of what can only be described as jolly-hockey-sticks behaviour. One incident still makes the Hon. Sarah Baring laugh.

‘At that young age, you do get very mischievous, I’m afraid,’ she says. ‘Specially when you’re doing something which you think is a bit dreary at the time. We had a great friend called Jean Campbell Harris, who is now Lady Trumpington, she’s in the House of Lords. She was always up for some merry larks and one night shift, we didn’t have very much to do.

‘The signals used to arrive in enormous laundry baskets. And we’d taken them all out and got them pretty well finished, but the Watch wasn’t quite over yet. So we said: “Jean, get in the laundry
basket now it’s empty and we’ll give you a ride down to the loos.” They were at the end of this terrible passage.

‘And so she got in,’ she continues, ‘and of course, we lost her because she was quite heavy, darling Jean, and she went straight down this long corridor, straight into the gents’ loo. The embarrassment! Though I think it must have been much more embarrassing for the gentlemen.’

Having said that, she emphasises that high jinks went hand in hand with a deep seriousness of purpose: ‘We really were conscious of what we were doing, we knew how important it was. We were pretty good actually. I’m making out that we were silly little girls. But actually we weren’t. We did work incredibly hard.’

Elsewhere, for some at the Park, outward appearances were important, although not to the same degree as they are today. ‘We were never scruffy, we kept up appearances, and that was true of everyone during the war,’ says Mavis Batey. (Not quite: the men, such as Turing and Cooper and Knox, were allowed all sorts of sartorial transgressions, from intense scruffiness to the wearing of pyjamas in the office. One Bletchley contemporary recalls Turing looking ‘like a tramp’, with trousers held up not with a belt but a striped necktie. His grooming too was on the neglectful side: he had a permanent five o’clock shadow caused by his reluctance to shave with anything other than an old electric razor; his fingernails were chewed to a point where small scars would be left on the very tips of his fingers; and even though he did not smoke, he none the less contrived to have yellow teeth. Angus Wilson in contrast had his blue shirts and apricot bow-ties, as well as artistically long hair; quite the thing in raffish Hampstead, where he had lived for a while, but the cause of a little local consternation in this small country town.)

But how exactly did Mrs Batey and all those other women keep themselves looking presentable and respectable? Bletchley was a small town – frock shops and hairdressers were extremely thin on the ground.

When it came to matters of hair, a salon called E. & G. Wesley, of High Street, Woburn Sands (several miles away), was rather cunning about cornering the Park market. After a period of correspondence with the Bletchley authorities, they set up a new branch of the salon in Hut 23.

It was open ‘weekdays 10 a.m. – 5.45 p.m. (not Wednesdays)’. Men could have a simple haircut, or a shampoo too, for one shilling. For women, there was the choice of a simple trim, a “shampoo and set”, or a “Trim, shampoo and set”, which would have cost four shillings and sixpence for civilians, and three shillings and ninepence for those in uniform.

Customers, however, had to provide their own towels. ‘The position regarding towels is very serious,’ wrote Mr Wesley to Commander Bradshaw. ‘The shortage being very acute.’
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Hairdresser Mr Wesley presumably had to undergo security vetting as thorough as everyone else. But the idea of bringing such a service into the Park was ingenious; even the nearest salons were scattered around the countryside, and in towns such as Bedford which were a step or two too far away.

Everything, of course, was in short supply, especially clothes. Mimi Gallilee recalls with horrified vividness the occasion on which she borrowed her older sister’s smart frock, hoping to be able to put it back afterwards without her sister realising that it had gone. This turned out to be a forlorn hope – Mimi had to deliver a message to Hut 10, where her sister worked, and her sister saw her wearing it. The ensuing row was volcanic. Given that clothing was so severely rationed, and that the coupons barely bought synthetic stockings, let alone dresses, the possessiveness is quite understandable.

There was something levelling about ‘make do and mend’, at least in theory – though the girls from more privileged backgrounds had more material to work on in the first place. Nevertheless, many of these upper-class girls were keen not to be seen as ostentatious; they wanted people to see that they could hunker down with everyone else and accept their duties – and attendant privations –
without complaint. It was a fine national moment of class cohesion – or at least, as close as Britain would ever get to it. For as soon as the war ended, the change was astonishingly rapid.

One might argue that in Britain at any rate, the Second World War was the last high tide of the aristocracy. From the young Princess Elizabeth joining up with the ATS and getting under the bonnet of a truck, to the double-barrelled young ladies with pearls quietly going about their administrative duties at Bletchley and in the Admiralty, this was a time when family name and connections opened every door imaginable. That is not to say that this does not happen now; of course it does. But one would very rarely now hear such privileged people being described anywhere as ‘the quality’, and one would also rarely hear that they were noted for their abiding sense of duty and loyalty to the nation.