As the numbers of Wrens at the Park grew from hundreds into thousands, their increasing presence also subtly changed the atmosphere of the place. Photographs of these girls in uniform, taken on what seem to be perpetually sunny days in Buckinghamshire, show not only a freshness but also a good-humored, no-nonsense expression in so many of their faces.
Despite the discomforts and privations and the relative lack of freedom—or perhaps because for many working-class girls, this life actually presented more freedom—there seemed a general sense of satisfaction, the knowledge that they were fundamentally doing their bit.
For Jean Valentine, who grew up in the Scottish town of Perth, and who turned eighteen in the later years of the war, joining up was a matter of patriotic duty, although she believes that her own recruitment for work on Turing’s bombes was an administrative mistake; for crucially, at just over five foot, she was, according to Bletchley guidelines, too short (indeed, when Jean’s work on the machines began—once she knew the secret, there was no question of opting out—she had to use a special stool to reach the highest drums). Like so many young women during those years, she was acutely aware of the need to contribute in the most solid and practical way possible. It was not enough to stay at home. She now recalls:
“I got to be eighteen and I thought, if I don’t hurry up and do something positive apart from a bit of firewatching and working in a soldiers’ canteen…then I might end up in a munitions factory. Or on the land. Neither of which was my cup of tea.
“So one day, I was going down to Carnoustie, near Dundee, to visit my aunt. I had some time to spare so I wandered off into the city. I saw an office which was a recruiting center for the navy, so I popped in. They gave me an intelligence test and said, ‘You’ll be hearing from us.’”
Like linguist Sheila Lawn, Jean Valentine had never before left her native land. Her upbringing was comfortable, middle class—her father had businesses in Perth, one of which, Valentine’s Motors, is still remembered fondly by the townspeople today. Jean was aware that she was signing up for a life radically different from the one she had known. Thanks to that administrative mix-up, she was heading into a career of helping to crack the Enigma codes. Her rude introduction to that life, however, was a head-spinning culture shock.
“I got a summons and a railway warrant to go to Tullichewan Castle in Dumbartonshire, which at that time was a training center for Wrens. And I spent a fortnight there learning to do what you do—marching, saluting, that sort of thing.
“We were told the castle had just been vacated by workmen. The place was filthy. It was disgusting. There were filthy greasy tables. And the washing facilities, to put it mildly, were primitive. They were huge concrete huts with a concrete floor. The loos did have doors, but there was no lock. And I can’t tell you what the smell was like.
“There was a bit where people could have a shower—a row of showers on a wall. I was an only child and I wasn’t used to stripping off in front of people and washing myself, but I did it. Some of them kept their swimming costumes on because they were just too embarrassed to strip down to the buff.”
But after these privations—perhaps deliberately spartan—a rather more attractive prospect for some Wrens started to loom. Jean Valentine recalls: “On the last day we were all called into a room—forty or fifty of us—and told to sit there, and we would be called one at a time and be told where we were going, what we’d be doing. So when I was called in, I did what I was told, sat down in a chair in front of three or four officers sitting there. ‘We don’t know what we’re going to be asking you to do. But we have been told to look for people like you. So tomorrow you will go to London.’”
After a short interlude of excitement in the capital, the work in hand soon beckoned. But there was still a little bewilderment to come. “Then I went to the Bletchley outstation site in Eastcote, Middlesex,” says Jean. “And I was introduced to the bombe machine.”
However, before long Jean Valentine had more serious concerns, which were to do with the nature of the work opportunities that she could pursue during the war. For any woman who might have been even a little ambitious, working on the bombes seemed a little like factory work. “Only Wrens worked the bombes. I assume it was because the boss was naval and veered towards his own ‘gels.’
“But we couldn’t get any promotion. I think the theory was that the humbler we looked, the less that anyone from outside would think that we were doing anything of great importance. We were told, if people asked us what we were doing, to say that we were ‘confidential writers’—or secretaries, in other words.”
The lack of prospects may have been put in place by the military hierarchy as opposed to the Bletchley Park authorities. Unlike the Wrens, the Honorable Sarah Baring did achieve promotion—she was sent to work at the heart of the war establishment in the Admiralty, her role to be a go-between representing Bletchley Park to the naval establishment. “I was seconded up to Admiralty from BP at the beginning of 1944,” she recalls. “The Bletchley Park authorities opened an office there, underneath that hideous monstrous building on the Mall. The Citadel, the one that’s a mass of concrete that people used to call ‘Lenin’s Tomb.’
“We got all the Park decrypts concerning the navy,” she continues. “It would come up to us, and we would have to decide what to do with it. So really I was doing the same work as in BP but just in Admiralty. It was Bletchley Park all in one tiny room.”
And the story of the Wrens can also be contrasted with the experiences of female codebreakers Joan Murray and Mavis Batey, who were treated with a respect that was perhaps a little unusual for the time.
Yet not all the Wrens sent to Bletchley were deemed to come up to scratch. In a rather crisp memo to the Admiralty, concerning the quality of the personnel being sent to him, Alistair Denniston addressed the cases of several individuals who had been brought to his attention:
Wren Kenwick is inaccurate, very slow and not a bit keen on her work, not very intelligent…
Wrens Buchanan and Ford are unintelligent and slow and seem unable to learn. Wren Rogers suffers from mild claustrophobia and cannot work in a windowless room.
There seems to be some mistake in regard to Wren Dobson, we have never so far as I am aware complained of her work which is satisfactory, and now that I have informed her that she cannot have a transfer, she appears to have the intention of putting her back into the job, in which case she may well equal our best.
The remainder of the Wrens are doing most excellent work, none of them have so far given the slightest trouble.
Denniston concluded pointedly:
I think perhaps you might ask the Deputy Director to impress upon the selectors the importance of the work on which these Wrens are employed and not to send us too many of the Cook and Messenger type.1
Of course, the Wrens were not the only women drafted in. Also present were six WAAFs whose task it was, from the beginning, to man the telephone exchange. Then there were thirty-six WAAFs who were there to run the teleprinters, with their communications chattering in and out of the Park.
For a lot of the girls who signed up, this life threw up a number of surprises. Felicity Ashbee, of the WAAF, kept sporadic diaries. She recalled signing up and being sent to the nearby town of Leighton Buzzard where she and other WAAF girls were put through parade paces by a male sergeant, who was mortally embarrassed by the whole thing.
They were told that maths and science were not essential subjects for the girls to know about. Miss Ashbee was then posted to Stanmore, where she recalls meeting a lesbian ballet photographer. She did not seem tremendously shocked.
She also recalls the routines that so many hundreds of young women had to get into; in terms of leisure, this meant a sparse diet of books, knitting, and chess. The egalitarian spirit of the post-war world was still some way off; even in the WAAF, ranks were discouraged from fraternizing with one another. Miss Ashbee recalls having debates in the early 1940s about whether the “Commies” were actually worse than the Nazis.
She was then sent to Bletchley for a while, and had sketchy memories of Josh Cooper, and the disorientating mix of uniforms and civilian dress that mingled around the place. Miss Ashbee recalled just “one café” and (perhaps because she was not tremendously popular) “no social life.” She recalled a show being staged there, called Blue and Khaki, part of which involved a Cossack song.2
A number of Wrens were housed in Woburn Abbey, once a splendid private house and after the war to become one of the country’s premier visitor attractions. For those who now watch the reality show Big Brother and marvel at how complete strangers can live in such close proximity for so long, it’s worth having a look at the life that was led at the Abbey. Given the grueling nature of the work and the slog of the hours, this rhyme from one dormitory—entitled “Martha’s Prayer”—rings an amusing chord:
God bless Marie and grant that she
May not drop things and wake me
And grant that Marjorie’s heavy feet
May not disturb my slumbers sweet
And when they go to bed at four
Oh God, don’t let them slam the door.3
There might also have been an element of Malory Towers about the set-up. Some of the women recalled listening stations high up in the Abbey’s tower room, and a continual problem with bats, which would cause a great deal of high-pitched panic.
Woburn Abbey was also reputedly haunted. According to Jack Lightfoot of the RAF, the young women were talking about the ghost of the “Flying Duchess”—Mary, Duchess of Bedford, who was born in the Victorian age but conceived a fancy for the new pursuit of aviation at the age of sixty-one. But the house also reputedly was haunted by a monk, and there were stories of doors that would not stay shut at night.
There would not have been a lot of time for nocturnal spectral activity though—Bletchley Park, of course, was a 24-hour operation, and workers were transported to and from their shifts by special buses after midnight and before 8 a.m.
There were also Wrens posted a few miles away in a small village called Gayhurst. There, writes Diane Payne,
… another 150 Wrens lived and worked on the premises…cold rooms, no transport and, I am told, swallows nesting in the house and flying in and out of the broken windows. There too, mice abounded, and one lunchtime a dead one turned up in the gravy boat.
It was a beautiful place dating back to 1086, and Sir Francis Drake owned it in 1581. The Wrens used the old church in the grounds every Sunday, and my friend remembers dutifully pumping the organ.
Highly virtuous! And something, I feel sure, that would have captured the imaginations of many of the male service personnel of Bletchley. As indeed would the stories concerning Wrens sunbathing topless on the roof of Gayhurst Manor.
If for the codebreaking civilians in the huts, the bounds of knowledge seemed limited, then for a Wren they were more limited yet. It was not just the mechanistic nature of the work of bombe operating; it was the commute back to the dormitories. Jean Valentine only realized, upon returning some decades later, how very little of the Park she had ever seen in that brief period during the war. She recalls: “Everything was so brilliantly compartmentalized.”
And the restrictions were not purely physical—the methodology of the work was equally hermetically sealed. “I worked in that bombe room,” she continues. “And when we got an answer from the machines, we went to the phone, to ring through this possible answer to an extension number. It wasn’t until all these decades later that I realized we were just calling Hut 6 across the path.”
If they had done their jobs properly, the encrypted message would be typed in and a length of tape would come out in German. “Then that went to the pink hut which was just opposite to the entrance of Hut 11, not six steps away. There the translators changed it into English. And the analysts decided who was going to get this information. This was all happening in this tiny little square. I saw nothing of Bletchley Park except that grass oval in front of the mansion.”
There was also an element of culture shock produced for many by being transplanted right into the center of what was still largely rural England. She recalls: “We used to go to the village hop on a Saturday night if we weren’t working. The whole village used to turn out for this hop. To my absolute horror, one evening, a woman, there with her baby, took her bosom out and stuck it in her baby’s mouth. Now, I had never seen a baby being fed in my life before, and certainly not at a village hop.
“But it seemed to be the norm. No one else seemed to think anything about this woman casually producing a breast and feeding her baby.”
Sheila Lawn considers that “eighteen-year-olds then were younger than eighteen-year-olds now in terms of attitudes.” But this is perhaps something to do with regional divides; it is reasonably well documented, for instance, that in the 1920s and 1930s, people who lived in small communities in the English countryside were more relaxed about such matters as premarital sex than their town counterparts. Even there, many children born out of wedlock were swiftly subsumed into the larger family—the child in question being told in the occasional case that its mother was its “sister.”
Regardless of how young the Bletchley recruits felt themselves to be, however, it was obvious that passion—and, indeed, love—were always going to find a way in such intense circumstances. But there was another sort of intensity at Bletchley too—a steadily growing sense of friction caused in part by the ballooning expansion of the Park’s activities, and by the sheer numbers of its personnel. There were to be moments midway through the conflict—in Britain generally, as well as throughout Bletchley Park—when it seemed that morale could not sink any lower.