‘There was an awful lot of nonsense involving codebreakers having to join the Home Guard,’ says one veteran, recalling that it was the only time in the war that he was required to put on a military uniform. For some of the more cerebral, bespectacled young men, the very notion of taking part in all-night exercises – with cork-blackened faces, or hooting like owls, or shimmying over security fences, or simply running around with rifles and attempting to hit targets – was a cause for irritation, especially when such exercises got in the way of valuable thinking time.
Others, however – including Alan Turing – found such duties and manoeuvres amusing and diverting. But the notion that it was compulsory goes to the heart of one of Bletchley Park’s most beguiling, ambiguous and disorientating qualities.
As we have seen, the establishment was neither wholly military nor wholly civilian. Although in its earliest days, the directorate included a couple of senior military figures, such as John Tiltman, Bletchley Park was under the ultimate control of Sir Stewart Menzies, head of MI6, which itself answered to the Foreign Office and directly to the Prime Minister. The recruitment drive, moreover, was angled almost completely towards civilians. And unlike any military establishment, there were no drills, no parades, no training sessions – and crucially, no orders.
When one thinks now of the war, one’s natural assumption is that practically the whole of society was in some sense militarised. Certainly, if individuals received orders from the government that they were to join up, or join another service, there was rarely any question of disobedience. How was it then that a set-up of the nature of Bletchley Park – handling crucial, top secret information – lacked what one might think would be essential military discipline? From the very beginning, who would these young code-breakers and linguists answer to? And what of the army of Wrens who were to descend on the place? Were they to answer to civilian or military orders?
‘This place was very strange,’ says former Wren Jean Valentine. ‘There were the men’s services, the women’s adjoining services, and civilians. How could you impose any kind of discipline? It wouldn’t have been fair, whatever you had done. If you had set the civilians above or below the rest of us, it wouldn’t have been right. So I think the only way was just to run it … everyone was equal.’
Fellow Wren Ruth Bourne also recalls the seemingly casual air, in contrast to her later work at Eastcote, the Bletchley Park outstation in Middlesex: ‘In BP there was everybody: civilians, ATS, Wrens, WAAFs walking around. No saluting. Everybody was the same. There was no hierarchy. Eastcote was much more structured to the naval module. You saluted your officers. Whereas at Bletchley Park it was all mixed.’
Oliver Lawn found from the start that he had an extraordinary amount of freedom: ‘As far as I was concerned [the job] was absolutely self-regulating.’ Indeed, adds Mr Lawn, the work of code-breaking could not have been further from the military ethos if it had tried. He recalls: ‘Our chain of command was just the head of Hut 6. First of all, that was Gordon Welchman. Then he moved – went partly transatlantic and took a rather wider remit so we saw rather less of him.
‘Stuart Milner-Barry succeeded Welchman as the head of Hut 6. And a very good head he was. He wasn’t really a cryptographer, but he had a very good brain and a very good management and manner to look after us. And then at around the same time,’ Mr Lawn adds, ‘they had a chap called Fletcher who was a pure lay manager, and he was concerned with getting our equipment. He was concerned with the mechanics of making the bombes on time. And orders and that sort of thing. Supplies officer, in effect.
‘But Milner-Barry was the father figure that we took instructions from. Now and again we had meetings and so on and discussed with him – but it was a very loose sort of management structure, as suited academe. It was a Common Room situation. It wasn’t a service thing at all.’
In his Bletchley memoir, Peter Calvocoressi also recalls this occasionally bewildering ambiguity concerning who to report to, and in what manner:
Bletchley Park was a very unmilitary place. It paid scant attention to the hierarchies of either military rank or the civil service. Its chiefs were civilians on the payroll of the Foreign Office and there were also the pre-war veterans, most cryptographers. But these were vastly outnumbered by the wartime intake which proved to be very much greater in numbers than anyone had ever imagined. If unconsciously, Bletchley Park took its tone from them.
He continued with a fascinating insight into the minds and aspirations of those young people who were serving, and of what, in the early days, they had expected from the war:
Those of us who were commissioned officers wore uniform only when we felt like it – or when some top brass was expected on a visit. Bletchley Park was not a place where people went around saluting one another. Rank might be coveted for the extra pay or, in the latter part of the war, as a mark of recognition, but it did not affect personal relations. It never seemed quite real, partly because the war itself never seemed to be anything but an interlude.
Looking back, I remember no talk about how long the war was likely to last but I do not think that anybody felt that it was going to last long enough seriously to divert the course of our lives … This was subconsciously important. It meant there was very little jockeying for position among us. Our futures and our war work were unrelated.1
Keith Batey recalls that the arrangement, and the general mix-up of civilian and military, did not appear to cause any difficulty: ‘As far as Hut 6 and Dilly Knox’s outfit were concerned, there weren’t any service people at all. Service people were in the Intelligence section, Hut 3 and Hut 4, the Naval Section. But of course the best cryp-tographer – certainly – was Tiltman, who was a regular officer. His sidekick Morgan was also an army man.’
A naval officer seconded to the Park, Edward Thomas, also recalled this curious atmosphere:
We naval newcomers were at once impressed by the easy relations and lack of friction between those in, and out, of uniform. Despite the high tension of much of the work, a spirit of relaxation prevailed. Anyone of whatever rank or degree could approach anyone else, however venerable, with any idea or suggestion, however crazy.
This was partly because those in uniform had mostly been selected from the same walks of life as the civilians – scholarship, journalism, publishing, linguistics and so forth – and partly because these were the people who saw most clearly what stood to be lost by a Hitler victory … Service officers served gladly under civilians, and vice versa. Dons from Oxford and Cambridge worked smoothly together.2
As regards the general question of hierarchy, it is worth remembering that the British had a very long tradition of looking to the ‘intellectual amateur’ when it came to matters of intelligence. In some ways, Dilly Knox and his fellow individualists in Room 40 were the perfectly logical culmination of a historically long-standing British approach.
If one reaches back to the sixteenth century, for instance – Elizabeth I’s court, and the frightening proto police-state activities of Sir Francis Walsingham’s ‘Star Chamber’ – one already sees the trope of clever young men being hired from Oxford or Cambridge for intelligence activity. The prime example is playwright Christopher Marlowe. He was recruited to travel through Europe, reporting back on suspected papist plots against the Protestant Queen.
As the years and centuries wear on, we continue to see that British intelligence is partly a military affair, but remains mostly one involving talented civilians. Historian Rebecca Ratcliff cites Lord Baden Powell, founder of the Scout movement, drawing pictures of butterfly wings that concealed diagrams of Turkish fortresses. And in popular fiction of the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, the heroes of William Le Queux’s astonishingly successful spy thrillers were all gifted amateurs; smart, well-connected, well-educated men who would be called upon by friendly faces in the Foreign Office to investigate the diabolical schemes of enemy powers. Perhaps even more pertinently, there is the archetype of the gifted eccentric: what figure in English culture better fits this description than Sherlock Holmes?
And so, as we have seen through the amiable ramshackleness of the Admiralty’s Room 40 throughout the First World War, it was clearly felt in the late 1930s to be important that the ‘boffins’ had space and freedom to think their brilliant thoughts. This meant that they were to be unencumbered by the restrictions and discipline imposed on everyone else.
In terms of taking charge of one’s day-to-day work, there was the matter of who would be in charge of the various codebreaking and translating activities. The huts would have their ‘heads’; but the sense of hierarchy was a great deal looser than that, as Mavis Batey recalls. She also remembers how, when a group of American soldiers came to visit the Park prior to a team of them working there, they were rather taken aback by what seemed to be an almost stereotypical British attitude: ‘There was no one really to consult. You could ask Dilly – but he wasn’t very good at explaining. And in any case, a newcomer with a bright idea could be just as good as anyone.
‘And that is the beauty of the whole ethics and background of the Park and its work … it just so happened that I was in charge the day one of the Americans came round,’ Mrs Batey adds. ‘He couldn’t believe that he was being told how to break codes by a nineteenyear-old – but I had got a corner into the work and I knew what I was doing.’
According to Rebecca Ratcliff’s scholarly account, there was something of the commune about the way everyone worked at the Park:
Co-operation began within each hut. The Watch, responsible for translation and forwarding of decrypts, encouraged collaboration. Members translated their decrypts around a table and frequently consulted each other on challenging difficulties. This encouragement of exchange included the clerical staff. One secretary described the ‘Soviet’ meetings, ‘where any grievance was aired and any suggestion was examined,’ whoever the speaker. This collaborative attitude ‘did away with any underground feeling of dissent’.3
Perhaps there were outbreaks of resentment, as opposed to dissent – some service personnel regarded the civilians as being rather spoiled and pampered, with their games of tennis and their picnics, and suspected them of having somehow dodged their duty.
Later in the war, there were those, such as Captain Jerry Roberts, who although in the Service, were deemed more valuable working (as he did) on the ‘Tunny’ codes. But did Captain Roberts never feel a pang of frustration that his orders were to remain in the Park?
‘I suppose I should have been unhappy that I wasn’t fighting the true fight but this never bothered me,’ Captain Roberts now says. ‘One knew that this was immensely more important than any other single contribution that you could make as a soldier, or as an officer.’
But by 1942, the understandable harrying of the cryptographers by the services – with inevitable conflict about whether the navy or the military should be accorded more time for their respective codes to be run through the bombe machines – was never-ending. Some kind of a solution was eventually reached. ‘A sudden demand by Hut 8 for a large number of machines would seriously disrupt the programme and the question of how many bombes for Naval, and how quickly, was often a difficult one to answer satisfactorily,’ recalled one veteran. ‘Moreover, only the technicians could answer it; the intelligence sections could lay down orders of priority in general terms, but the detailed decisions depended upon technical considerations. A body of five bombe controllers was therefore formed and a rota arranged, so that one of us was always on duty and available to act as bombe controller.’
Those men in civvies at Bletchley Park had their chance to fulfil a certain kind of service obligation, chiefly in the form of the Home Guard. For some, this proved to be an onerous distraction. Keith Batey recalls: ‘I’d be engaged on breaking a cipher or something, and then had to put it down and pretend to go and be a … it was bloody silly, especially in 1944 when there was no danger of invasion. It was organised, we all had to do it, and we all had these stupid uniforms too. It really was fatuous.’
Conversely, Oliver Lawn found this dash of military experience provided some welcome light relief away from the serious businessof cracking ciphers. ‘We all joined the Home Guard, where we had fun and games. And we went out on to the fields beyond Bletchley and watched to see if any German parachutes came in overnight.
‘Academics in the Home Guard were great fun,’ he adds. ‘You can imagine, Dad’s Army, some of them, the most brilliant, were the most extreme … Though one or two had army backgrounds. There was one chap called Michael Bannister, whose father was in the army. Bannister was very much the army type, and he tried to bring in all the army stuff, but without success. So he was the exception. We were very lame.’
Alan Turing was initially rather taken with the idea of Home Guard duty, as it was an opportunity to learn how to shoot; and his shot, as it turned out, was much more accurate than a lot of people’s. However, Turing’s interest in this activity waned sharply once his shot had been perfected, and around 1942, when after several years of anxiety, the prospect of a Nazi invasion of Britain had receded, he began to absent himself from parades.
The authorities were irritated by Turing’s apparently casual approach, insisting that since he had signed up for Home Guard duties, he was under military law. Turing calmly pointed out to the furious officers in question that he was no such thing, and that he had stated as much on the form that he had signed. One of the questions on the form was: ‘Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard, you place yourself liable to military law?’ Turing had written his answer: ‘No’. Naturally, no one had noticed.
Despite the fact that the women, including the Wrens, at the Park greatly outnumbered the men, there was still the fact that the men were of course very firmly in charge. In the case of the Wrens, there would always be a male officer somewhere. For the civilian women, it was a matter of answering to the heads of huts, be they Gordon Welchman or blond, blue-eyed ‘knockout’ Hugh Alexander.
In matters of uniform too, there were the views of the ladies to consider. The Hon. Sarah Baring says that the presence of a military man always perked things up a little in the section in which she worked: ‘There were very few service people, mostly civilian. But there were a few uniforms, which we thought was terribly exciting. If you saw a naval uniform, or an air force uniform, it was lovely. For instance, word would get round that someone from the navy had dropped in. And that was very exciting because it was quite rare.’
In terms of hierarchy, Sarah Baring gives a vivid account of that very lack of structure – a tale that contrives to combine military, civilian and class sensibilities into one imbroglio. ‘One morning, I was working as usual in the Index Room when I heard many footsteps outside. The door opened and in walked my godfather. At that time, he was Vice Admiral, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Chief of Combined Operations and naturally privy to Ultra. He was accompanied by a lot of top brass and harassed looking Bletchley staff.
‘I managed to splutter in my astonishment: “Uncle Dickie, what are you doing here?” “Oh,” he said, “I knew you were here and thought I would see how you’re getting on; show me the system of your cross reference index.” Pink with embarrassment, I showed him, conscious of the waves of anger behind from the learned code-breakers …
‘I was awfully pleased to see Uncle Dickie and, as the Index was considered fairly lowly work, all of us on watch were thrilled,’ she adds. ‘Doom descended the next morning with a peremptory demand to see Commander Travis forthwith. He asked me how I had dared to ask the Chief of Combined Ops to visit the Index. I assured him, eyes full of tears, that I knew nothing about the visit and that he was my godfather. He believed that I spoke the truth and, bless him, lent me a hankie to blow my nose.’
For Mimi Gallilee, promoted from messenger girl to clerical duties within the house itself, it was immediately clear that it was the figures in the house who held sway. Her sixteen-year-old self was a little in awe of these men, with their smart secretaries: ‘I went to work directly under Nigel de Grey’s secretary,’ she says. ‘And she taught me all sorts of little things. Everything from that point of view was more interesting, because it was in codes, or about things that I didn’t understand.’
Mrs Gallilee also recalls that for all the apparent lack of military structure, this was still an age in which one did not speak out of turn. Especially not if one was very young: ‘Sometimes I used to do Mr de Grey’s bits of typing, and anything that he wanted. Take tea and coffee into him. He was a very silent man. Grim. Forbidding. I was afraid of him. I wouldn’t have dared to put a foot wrong. One was terribly respectful of him.
‘Others, like Harry Hinsley – well, he was one of us. He was lovely and we called him Harry and I believe he was the only boss there that we called by his Christian name. Certainly not Commander Travis or Captain Hastings or the rest of them. Colonel Tiltman was always Colonel Tiltman. We would never have thought to call them by their first names.’
Mimi Gallilee had authority issues of her own, and they concerned her own immediate boss, Miss Reed. For the senior women in administration had a reputation for ferocity very much more intimidating than the men. Mimi recalls: ‘Miss Reed used to train me and coach me in the right way to present myself to the world. She said to me once: “I must have a talk with your mother some day, she really ought to know about some of these things that you’ve been doing.” What she meant was the way that I was behaving in the office.
‘And at the end of the day, I’d get home and I’d say to my mother: “Please let me leave. I hate her, I hate her!” Poor Miss Reed. It was only after the war that I realised what a gem she was.’