It is perhaps a generational thing, but when one thinks now of what might loosely be termed “wartime romance,” one is struck by two stereotypical images. The first is that of young English roses being swept off their feet by sharp-talking American soldiers with bribes of fancy cigarettes and bubblegum; the second, the agonies suffered by Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in black and white at Carnforth railway station in Brief Encounter. In general, the Americans are depicted as forthright sexual vulgarians, whereas the British are every bit as repressed as their stiff upper lips would imply.
Such clichés, of course, have no value whatsoever, but it is interesting to contemplate the chasm that has opened up between that wartime generation and our own. The Brief Encounter repression may have been overdoing it a bit—according to many contemporaneous accounts, it assuredly was—but a great many stories from within Bletchley Park tell us that wartime romance was in some senses quite different from today’s version.
It is perhaps the most sweetly inevitable part of the Bletchley Park story: a well-educated community of young people—the women greatly outnumbering the men—and a great number of those young people pairing off romantically.
Park veteran S. Gorley Putt put it slightly differently, referring to the “hot-house confinement” of the Park, and how it created a fervid atmosphere in which “sexual infatuations…became obsessional…nerves tautened to breaking point by round-the-clock speedy exactitude would fumble, in off-hours, for emotional nourishment.”1
Doubtless so; and given the claustrophobia of the community, added to the tension of the work, perhaps the occasional outbreak of sexual hysteria was inevitable. However, alongside this rather Bloomsbury-esque vision of the Park are the more subtle, though nonetheless pleasing stories of the many relationships formed that did actually continue. What surprises now, though, as one hears various accounts of the beginnings of long, happy marriages, is how remarkably relaxed the Park authorities seemed in matters of the heart.
Mathematician Keith Batey recalls how one of his very first memories of Bletchley Park was the sight of “nubile young ladies” wandering to and fro. But it was not long before he and Mavis Lever met. He was in Hut 3; she was working with Dilly Knox in the Cottage. One night, she had an operational message to convey to Hut 3. Their eyes met, as both now laughingly recall: “Late one evening, I was in the hut, on the evening shift, and that’s how I met her,” says Keith. “This little girl arrived from Dilly’s outfit with this message or problem—she didn’t know how to solve it.
“I didn’t see her again for another year,” says Keith, laughing. “And she never admitted it, but it was true.”
Mr. Batey is not exaggerating greatly about the amount of time it took them to meet again. Those who worked in different huts and different parts of the Park seldom met or crossed over, because the workings of each department were kept closely sealed. If they did meet, any conversation concerning work was forbidden.
Given this level of concern, one might have thought that the Bletchley Park authorities would look with concern upon the blossoming of any inter-hut relationship. However, as Mavis Batey recalls, things seemed easier than that once she and Keith became an item: “There were no rules against ‘courting’. We thought we had been very secretive—but when we announced our engagement, we were told that there were bets on when we would. The person who handled booking for the lunch sittings had noticed that we always made sure we had the same allocation.”
In other words, despite their efforts to remain unnoticed, Keith and Mavis were fully clocked, but in an apparently wholly benevolent way. Mavis recalls that Dilly Knox jokingly tried to warn her that “mathematicians are very unimaginative.” She assured him that hers was just fine. The engagement went ahead and marriage followed not too long after. Mavis Batey continues: “It was only when we were married that we were required by the regulations to work in different rooms. But that was plain civil service rules and nothing to do with the Secret Service.”
Sheila and Oliver Lawn not only found a similarly promising and benign atmosphere, but also realized, long before they met, just how conducive to romance the Bletchley Park setup was. On top of this, they had observed the growing tenderness between Keith Batey and Mavis Lever. Says Oliver Lawn: “There was quite a bit of romance. There were several in Hut 6 who married while they were at Bletchley. There were the Bateys, of course. Sheila and I married later, because Sheila had to go off and finish off her qualifications.”
“Oliver and I met at the Scottish Reels club,” says Sheila. “I had just joined it. I noticed that when Hugh Foss [the Bletchley Park king of reels] was absent, Oliver used to take the class. And I remember this rather nice dancing lad. I suppose we danced together and Oliver thought that I was an adequate partner for him. We also did ballroom dancing and Latin American.”
It is a treasurable image: the sound, echoing out of the big house, of a gramophone record playing Latin American dances, and the continual rumble of feet on the dance floor. Like the Bateys, Sheila Lawn cannot recall that the authorities had much to say when it became clear that she and Oliver were stepping out: “I don’t think the powers that be could take much control over the issue of relationships because you would meet your people when you were off duty.”
Besides which, adds Mr. Lawn, there was simply so much of it about: “The other couple I recollect was Bob Roseveare and Ione Jay. He was a mathematician, straight from school. He hadn’t even gone to university. Very brilliant chap from Marlborough. He married Ione Jay, who was one of the girls in Hut 6.
“Then there was Dennis Babbage, who was a don similar to [Gordon] Welchman. Same sort of age. Babbage married while he was there.”
It was obviously not always a case of automatic marriage. “Some of our old Bletchley Park flames have come out of the woodwork,” Mr. Lawn adds, laughing. “I had one and Sheila had one. Mine was a lady who I saw for quite a short time. This was long before I met Sheila. We did quite a lot of dancing, I think ballroom dancing rather than Scottish dancing. And this lady and I got quite friendly over the period of a few months. And then she was moved abroad and spent the rest of the war in Singapore, I think it was.”
Love crossed many barriers at Bletchley. Codebreaker Jon Cohen recalled: “I took up with a girl who I was quite surprised to find was a countess’s daughter. Because with my middle-class Jewish background, that wasn’t the sort of person I would normally mix with. But it was a place where all sorts met and there were dances and parties and we enjoyed ourselves to a certain extent.”2
Another prominent romance—and indeed subsequent marriage—was that of Shaun Wylie and Wren Odette Murray, both of whom worked in the Newmanry. In 1943, their eyes met across a chuntering Heath Robinson machine; in 1944, they married. Given the not especially romantic backdrop of this vast, noisy machinery, it is a heroically sweet tale. And Shaun and Odette had their moments away from the technology. “Most of our courting was in Woburn Park,” Odette Murray said. “The Abbey is a huge imposing building and the central part has a large podium on top of it, very high up. I used to go casual climbing so that I could sit on top of this to watch Shaun on his bicycle coming up the drive.”
It seemed also that love could make a leap across the huts. Thinking back to his days in Hut 8, Rolf Noskwith recalled that one of his colleagues, Hilary Brett-Smith, gave him a précis of the sinking of the Bismarck and how the crucial signal had been spotted at the Park by a certain Harry Hinsley. Hilary and Hinsley were later to be married.
One Anglo-American pairing came with officer Robert M. Slusser and WAAF lieutenant Elizabeth Burberry. She was attached to Hut 3 and, just prior to Slusser’s arrival, had applied for a transfer. They met, romance blossomed, and the application was withdrawn. Nor did the happy Bletchley couple waste much time. They were married on June 27, 1944, just a few days after D-Day. On April 10, 1945, their daughter Elizabeth was born—a child of Bletchley Park.
On the artier side of things, codebreaker and poet F. T. Prince met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth Bush, at the Park, and poet Henry Reed met Michael Ramsbotham. Meanwhile, historian Roland Oliver fell headlong for Caroline Linehan.
But perhaps the most poignant relationship at Bletchley Park—not to say the most unexpected—involved Alan Turing. In the summer of 1940, a mathematician called Joan Clarke (later Murray), who had been studying at Cambridge, was recruited to Hut 8. By the spring of 1941, the system of Turing’s bombes, and the punch cards, and the mechanical regularity of the shifts needed to operate the whole procedure, was at the center of Bletchley Park’s work. It was also in the spring of 1941 that Turing and his Hut 8 colleagues made the vital break into naval Enigma. And against this extraordinarily intense backdrop, Turing and Joan Clarke’s friendship started to develop.
They went to the cinema. They spent days on leave together. During that period, such behavior 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 United States 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 rumors, 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.”