The Secret Life of Bletchley Park (27 page)

They went to the cinema. They spent days on leave together. During that period, such behaviour could only lead to one conclusion. And despite his sexual orientation, Turing clearly felt that he had to fit in with this overwhelming social norm. With surprising
swiftness, he proposed marriage to Joan – although with characteristic honesty, he was careful to tell her that it might not be an ideal marriage because he had what he termed ‘homosexual tendencies’.

Perhaps such things were not understood quite as they are now, for Joan was apparently not deterred by this confession, and the engagement went ahead. He met her parents, she met his. There was an engagement ring. Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing’s use of the word ‘tendency’ masked the altogether more sexually active truth, and that if Joan had known this, she would have been shocked.

But again, this was an age in which such things were never discussed, certainly not in public, or in novels, films and stage plays. The terms ‘nancy’ and ‘pansy’ were well known, but such stereotypes as could be found within public discourse were feline mincing characters, extravagantly effeminate and knowingly, insidiously deviant. Clearly Turing did not fit in with these depictions.

The other essential point about their relationship was that, unlike many of the other non-mathematician girls who came to work at Bletchley, Turing never had to talk down to Joan; her mathematical training was sharp and their exchanges were relaxed. They played chess, they played tennis, they had lengthy discussions concerning the Fibonacci series of numbers and their recurrence in nature, such as in the folds of pine cones.

But deep down, he knew that it was not going to be. In the summer (since everyone at Bletchley was allowed four weeks’ leave a year), Turing and Joan went off for a holiday in Wales, with bicycles and ration cards. When they came back, Turing told Joan that the engagement was off.

They did, however, contrive to remain friends, and later, when Turing had returned from a spell in the US in 1942–3, he brought her back a present of an expensive fountain pen, and dropped vague hints that perhaps they should try the relationship again. Joan, wisely, gave no response to his suggestion.

*

Elsewhere – and talking of the many other romances to be found within the ‘Whipsnade Zoo wire fences’ as one lady put it – many Park veterans point out that in terms of matters like premarital sex, this was a different era, as innocent as many presume. It wasn’t simply that the Pill didn’t exist. It was because matters of sex were so rarely, if ever, discussed, that for many young people – or more particularly, young middle-class people – the whole business remained shrouded in mystery. On top of this, there was the real threat of family disgrace. ‘If, heaven forfend, you were to come home pregnant,’ says one Wren now, ‘your mother would have banished you from the house. It would have been unthinkable.’

Perhaps, like many aspects of British life, this might have more to do with class and background than anything else. It is not a great exaggeration to suggest that in the countryside, sex tended – and probably still does tend – to happen sooner than in the overcrowded cities, for the very simple reason that there is the freedom to take off and find privacy. It is also easy to suspect that reticence about sex was much more prevalent among the middle classes; women who knew just how precious one’s reputation was, and how easily it was lost. One might say that for upper classes and working classes alike, there was less to be lost in this way, and as such things were a little more relaxed; whereas for the young middle class, one’s good name was crucial when it came to maintaining one’s hard-won social standing. In some ways, the middle years of the twentieth century were more censorious than the famously repressed Victorian era.

There were always rumours, including stories of unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births; it was said that one Wren at RAF Chicksands gave birth but the baby died soon after. She attempted in her distress to hide the little body but the authorities found it. The girl was then taken away, and no one knew what became of her. Yet when it came to sex, one former Wren interviewed by Marion Hill responded with a curious blend of worldliness and innocence: ‘There were a lot of romances going on. Of course you couldn’t
actually share a room with a man in a hotel. They asked to see your marriage certificate first. But where you will, you find a way. There was plenty of opportunity for walks in the countryside, bike rides. I can remember drinking Champagne on hilltops with young men.’
³

They must have been very wealthy young men. Champagne in wartime north Buckinghamshire cannot have been very abundant. And the mention of hotel rooms illustrated perfectly what young suitors were up against; nevertheless, for many, the very idea of trying to get such a room in the first place wouldn’t have been countenanced.

Another Park veteran recalled: ‘BP contained a network of long-standing relationships … The Section would ensure that arrangements for shift-working took due account of them … for it was difficult to do much “carrying on” with someone on a different shift.’ Equally, if a romance was starting to wither, ‘it might have been advisable to reshuffle the shifts. On the whole, the system worked pretty well.’

Young Mimi Gallilee too could see romance all over the Park, but she succinctly expresses the innocence that was very much a keyword at the time: ‘There were lots of marriages. Other liaisons,’ she adds, ‘you didn’t know about.’

The idea that a close partnership between Britain and the United States was forged during the Second World War has become one of the abiding assumptions of our political landscape. They gave us the tools, and we finished the job. What we lacked in material resources, we more than made up for with bulldog pluck; a pluck that earned the admiration of Uncle Sam, and created a bond between the two mighty nations that has remained strong until today. It is a stubbornly enduring image. The war, it is believed, shifted the relationship between the two countries irrevocably from one of mutual suspicion to one of mutual respect.

Yet it is obviously not that simple, and indeed seemed very far from being the case throughout the war itself, according to several historians who have written recent studies on the subject. Walter Reed believes that while the rapport between Churchill and Roosevelt was very strong, the opposite was the case for the military advisers and ministers beneath them; as Reed sees it, Congress and the US Treasury viewed Britain with immense suspicion during the war.

According to historian Michael Howard:

Some of these tensions were reflected in miniature by the workings of Bletchley Park, both before December 1941, when the USA entered the war, and after. Suspicion in some corners persists to this day that Bletchley Park learned from decrypts in early December 1941 about the forthcoming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and that Churchill suppressed the passing of intelligence in order to ensure that the bombing would go ahead, thus ensuring that the Americans would join the war. But even in 1940, over a year before America entered the war, both countries were, at best, tentative with regard to the sharing of information and intelligence. Although it was clearly understood that Britain and America should co-operate in terms of ciphers, the extent of this co-operation soon became a cause of ill-will. According to the Bletchley official history: ‘In the British archives there is no intelligence of any importance that was not available to the Americans.’ Nevertheless, the mere fact that such a suspicion could arise is telling. And from the start, the relationship between Bletchley and American Intelligence was far from easy.

In December 1940, a full year before America entered the war, an agreement was signed in Washington between Britain and the USA which would mean both countries having a full exchange of technical information concerning German, Italian and Japanese codes.

A month later, a small party of four American cryptographers – two army and two navy – sailed over to England to see the Bletchley operation for themselves.

Having been greeted at the docks by the then Deputy Director Edward Travis and Colonel John Tiltman, they were driven to Bletchley, where they met Alistair Denniston at midnight. Denniston’s personal assistant, Barbara Abernethy, recalled:

Throughout the several weeks the American party spent in England, they were put up in the nearby manor house of Shenley Park, and as well as Bletchley Park, were shown U-boat tracking stations and radar stations. One of the key elements of their visit was their mutual interest in cracking the Japanese codes. The elegant Scotsman Hugh Foss, together with Oliver Strachey, had penetrated the Japanese diplomatic code machine in 1934. Moreover, Colonel Tiltman had cracked Japanese military codes as far back as 1933, and the new army ciphers in 1938. Such expertise was naturally going to be of interest to the Americans, who had been monitoring the Japanese closely.

Meanwhile, the Americans had succeeded by 1940 in getting their own decryption machine, devoted to Japanese codes, working. The machine was called ‘Purple’. The American cryptographers brought one such machine over with them to England, where they presented it to Bletchley Park. By all accounts, British and US code
breakers got on tremendously well in an atmosphere of mutual respect and excitement.

Only in the weeks after the visit did this cordial relationship start to grow bumpy and sour. For there were some on the American side who considered that the British had not reciprocated the invaluable gift of the Purple machine. No matter that Bletchley Park had sent the Americans detailed documents about Enigma and the cracking thereof, and even parts of Alan Turing’s notes on the same; what the Americans wanted was a bombe machine. And British Intelligence, as well as Alistair Denniston, was determined that the US should not have one.

On the face of it, this seems a puzzling denial; why shouldn’t an ally have full access to any technology that could help in the wider conflict? Was it simply – as American cryptographers suspected – a jealous possessiveness on the part of Bletchley Park? Was it a symptom of Bletchley Park’s neurotic insistence on maintaining control?

Or could there have been fear on the British side? Some have suggested that Bletchley Park was deeply reluctant to let the Americans anywhere near the bombes because thus far, American security had been relatively lax. If the Americans latched on to the British technology, the reasoning went, there was always the grim possibility than an enemy agent in the USA would find it very easy to fathom what they were doing, and pass the information back to Germany.

There was also the fact that in 1940, there were just six bombes in operation, and these were working at full stretch. Bletchley Park could not afford to lose even one of these machines. MI6 told Bletchley that they should not cite this reason, however, in case the Americans suggested that the bombe blueprint should be sent instead so that they could build their own.

The American reaction was – perhaps not unreasonably – an angry one. Crucially, though, this diplomatic frostiness did not affect the personal relationships between the senior cryptographers themselves. Alistair Denniston struck up a warm and enduringly
useful friendship with senior American cryptographer William Friedman; in turn, it has been written, Friedman greatly admired and respected Denniston.

Though Bletchley refused to give up its bombes, it tried to help the Americans in various other ways. In November 1942, for instance, it sent the United States Alan Turing in person. He crossed the Atlantic on the
Queen Elizabeth
at a time when all such shipping was intensely vulnerable to the all-pervasive menace of the U-boats. Turing had been in America before, in the 1930s, and had friends there; this visit was with the purpose of creating new ones. In essence, Bletchley was lending out his intellectual expertise to their formidably wealthy ally, in the hope that his genius combined with their technological knowhow and unlimited resources would create further breakthroughs.

Having arrived at Communications Supplementary Activities (Washington), known as CSAW, Turing moved from department to department of the American cryptography operation, with an understanding that he was there by permission not of the army or navy, but of the White House itself. He was allowed complete access to all the new systems that the US cryptographers were working on, and his skills began to pay dividends. The positions of the Atlantic U-boats were at last trackable once more.

He next set to work in Bell Laboratories in New York where a top secret new idea was being developed. It was concerned with speech encipherment and call scrambling, using devices such as the Vocoder, which was being developed in Dollis Hill back in London. Known within this community as England’s top cryptographer, he based himself in Greenwich Village for work on this and other military security systems which involved twelve-hour days.