In Robert Harris’s best-selling 1995 novel Enigma, the core of the story concerns a spy at work at Bletchley. The tension mounts inexorably because the consequences are so utterly unimaginable. For if the Germans gain one whisper or one inkling that the British have cracked their encoding system, then they will make that system infinitely more complex – and with that, they will be almost impossible to defeat. It is one of those rare thrillers where the publisher might say with some justification that the fate of the world depends upon the novel’s heroes.
Some Bletchley veterans are fans of the novel; they admire the way that Harris skilfully evoked life at the Park while adding a thriller element. But that very element, they say, while entertaining, is in fact extremely implausible. Secrecy and security, according to some, was woven into the texture of life at Bletchley to an extent that it became almost pathological. Some veterans were to recall that security at the Park was heavy and unremitting. There are stories of women who worked there who refused even to have medical operations carried out for fear of blurting indiscretions out under anaesthetic. There was a story concerning a lady academic at Cambridge attending parties in London, getting drunk and boasting about her work … and she was never heard of again. Intriguingly, there were other slips – accidental, unintentional – that were to demonstrate just how vulnerable the Park was to careless talk.
When western Europe shockingly fell to the Germans with such speed in 1940, the popular belief in Britain that the country would suffer a similar fate had been extremely strong. As Mimi Gallilee recalls, everything possible was done to confuse potential invaders: ‘everyone had to stay quiet about everything then – for instance, all railway station names were removed from platforms.
‘And all directions were deliberately muddled – so that if we were invaded, or if there were people who shouldn’t be in this country – they couldn’t find their way easily by signposts.’
But this was not just a matter of marauding soldiers or cunning foreign spies; it was a matter of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, any one of whom might be plotting away with secret wireless sets. It was around this point that the notion of the ‘fifth columnist’ – the outwardly normal citizen secretly working with the enemy to undermine society – seized the national imagination. German propagandists played upon this anxiety in broadcasts to Britain, in which they would, for instance, announce that the church clock in Banstead, Surrey, was running five minutes slow. How, people wondered, could they acquire such information unless such places were crawling with fifth columnists? But the Germans might not have had to work all that hard to create conditions of paranoia. In every city and every town, any transgressive or unusual behaviour was noted and reported.
What Bletchley Park veterans tend not to refer to now are the episodes when the Park was itself caught up in espionage dramas – not merely the cunning British transmissions of false information and black propaganda from the riding stables of nearby Woburn Abbey (by means of a fake German radio station called Gustav Siegfried Eins, which specialised in smears about Nazi officials), but murkier episodes that across the years have provoked allegation and counter-allegation. As we shall see, there were instances where careless talk was talked – by Wrens, by lieutenants, by mechanically minded clever-dicks – and on these occasions, the Bletchley authorities were swiftly on the case. There was no shortage of voluntary surveillance in Britain at that time.
But while the necessity of keeping the secret was obviously vital above all else, it seems that the Park hierarchy was largely remarkably trusting of its young recruits. For the ordinary young men and women, the very notion of espionage or indeed of spies moving among them rarely even occurred.
Teenage runaround Mimi Gallilee – just fourteen when she was taken on as a messenger in this top-secret establishment – recalls her induction very well. ‘There was the Official Secrets Act to sign. There wasn’t a lecture – I can’t even remember if they said “This is the Official Secrets Act.” I didn’t know what kind of a place I was going to work in. I didn’t know what my mother did there. And there was no reason for me to have ever asked. I just know that I had signed the Act. And of course we were told that we mustn’t breathe a word to anybody of where we were working.’
The nature of her job meant that she could at least attach names to certain huts, which is a good deal more than any of the cryptographers or linguists could do. But, she says, this was a period in which all natural curiosity was numbed. ‘You just accepted everything you saw and you didn’t ask. If there was a need to know, you were told. Because of the job, I used to walk around all day. The Park used to get deliveries of messages, communications – a minimum of four deliveries a day each, which I then had to make to the huts.
‘And that entailed knowing where everything and everybody was – including who was in charge of the huts – but you weren’t allowed to roam around the house.
‘And some huts you weren’t allowed to go into at all. For instance, there was Hut 11 – where you had to ring the bell outside. Then one of the Wrens or someone – who were locked in – opened up and you just handed across the doorway what you were carrying.’
The odd technological glitch could result in alarms being triggered. In May 1943, H. Fletcher of Hut 6 sent this warning memo to his superiors: ‘I think it should be seriously considered whether the fitting of scramblers is necessary. A Wren, using a public call box in Newport Pagnell, and conversing with her mother in a trunk call, was able to overhear a menu being telephoned to [the Bletchley Park outstation at] Gayhurst. Her mother also heard this conversation and remarked on its curious nature.’1
What seems rather striking now to the Hon. Sarah Baring is the fact that she cannot remember what the penalty would have been for any slip of the tongue. ‘The people I worked with in Hut 4, we could talk between each other,’ she says. ‘We were doing the same thing. I’d be translating, another friend would be doing something else. So we could talk. But only within your hut. You never talked outside your hut.
‘But the awful thing was they couldn’t give you the sack. Because you knew too much. So God knows what they would have done if anyone did talk. And nobody ever did.’
Oliver Lawn recalls: ‘There was certainly absolute secrecy in that sense, that you didn’t talk about your work to anyone outside your section. Some people have criticised that, saying that it was unnecessarily blinkered. We should have been able to be a little freer in knowing what was going on. It would have helped our work.’
Even though recruits might maintain secrecy within the establishment, however, the question arises: how could Bletchley Park security be expected to police those who were on leave? When these codebreakers and linguists and clerks went home for time off, what did they tell their families, their friends, their neighbours, their local communities, about the nature of the work they were doing?
This was a particularly germane issue for the young men, for it would be natural for many people to think of them: ‘Why is he not in uniform?’ Gordon Welchman recalled in his memoir that the issue became a source of acute discomfort for some:
Some of the young men who were sent to Hut 6 because of their brains found themselves trapped there by the demands of security. They longed for active service in the air force, the navy, or the army, but they knew too much about our success with the Enigma for their capture by the enemy to be risked.
They were doing an exhausting job, and it was obviously helping the war effort, but many of them longed to play an active part in the fighting. There was, too, the inevitable feeling that not being at the front was somehow dishonourable; one young man received a scathing letter from his old headmaster accusing him of being a disgrace to his school.2
Conversely, some of the codebreakers appeared to live in communities that either valued discretion, or had a sense of what it was that the homecoming lad was really doing. This seemed to be the case for Keith Batey whenever he got leave: ‘As to going home, and lack of uniform: no one found it odd. People knew that everything was pretty strict. This business about call-up, reserved occupations and what you were doing. Everyone was directed to what they were doing. No question about that. And no one asked me what I was doing.
‘Though there was my brother … he wasn’t in Bletchley,’ Mr Batey continues. ‘He was younger than I and was still at Oxford in the middle of the war. Then he went to the RAE, then after the war he became a parson. Many years later – quite recently in fact – he said to me: “It was pretty obvious what you were doing. There were you, a mathematician, and Mavis speaking German. There was never a doubt.” So you can see that lots of people put two and two together and sometimes got the right answer.’
From the moment one left the Park and embarked upon a train journey, one was under an infinitely intensified version of the phrase: ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But for some, there seemed to be little in the form of stern lectures or admonitions. Nor were there any restrictions on leave, or where that leave might be spent. It was understood from the start by the Park’s administrative authorities that after the exhausting focus of the work, after all the concentration and the unremitting shift system, these young people would need their breaks simply to maintain their sanity.
But for the others, it was all a matter of self-discipline. A prevailing sense of anxiety that Germany might after all win the war helped enormously. One veteran recalls how she hated to drink even the smallest amount off-duty, because she was terrified that if she got drunk, she would blurt out confidential information that could be overheard by anyone. Another veteran developed a fear that she might talk in her sleep.
Sheila Lawn recalls her own regular journeys home to the far north of Scotland, and how, as soon as she walked through the gates of Bletchley Park to the railway station, she was under her own jurisdiction. She also recalls what for many of us would be a trying journey, even now.
‘Of course, the trains were more reliable then,’ she says smiling. ‘We used to get a week’s holiday four times a year. They paid your fare, third class, which for me was a great matter because I went up to Inverness to see my parents to have a nice few days there. You’d go down to the station, you’d try to make it a suitable shift, you’d walk down with your case to the station, and usually the trains were absolutely crowded in that area, and so often I was shovelled in with a great lot of Forces chaps, and hopefully find a seat, though sometimes it was a case of sitting on your case in the corridor.
‘And then sometimes the trains would be rerouted. Whether it was because of difficulties on the line because of bombing, I do not know … so sometimes, you would be pretty late in getting up to Inverness. But they got there. In those days, once you got to the lowlands of Scotland, they changed the engines, they put a double engine on, to draw you up over the Highlands.
‘I always used to be a bit dirty with the flakes from the engine. They would fly into the carriage through the window. So first thing on getting home, I used to have a shower, or a bath, I can’t remember which, and mother would have a hot drink for me, and she always asked me what I wanted for lunch, so I’d tell her, and it would be all ready for me. This would be luxury.’
And luxury, indeed, with no one asking her anything about the nature of the work that she was engaged upon down in Buckinghamshire.
The Hon. Sarah Baring – that cheery habituée of Claridges and other smart London spots – remembers the strategies she would employ to bat off unwelcome queries about what she was doing so far outside the capital, and why she was spending so much time doing it: ‘When you were on leave, people would say to me: “What are you doing?” It was difficult. I used to say: “Oh, nothing much, frightfully boring job.” “Oh. Well, what is it?”, they’d say. And I’d say: “I’m a typist, would you believe it?” I would then add: “I could tell you more if you want …” Then they would back away and say: “Oh no thank you, we don’t want to hear about typing.”
‘And that was it. Quite easy after that. You could see them thinking: “Don’t ask Sarah what she does, she’s so boring about it.” If you’re boring enough, they stop asking you.’
Even at home, in the bosom of one’s family, Sarah Baring says that somehow it became second nature not to pry: ‘My family didn’t ask me. My father just used to say – my mother had died, unfortunately: ‘You all right, darling?’ And I would say: ‘Yes, poppa, I’m fine, don’t worry.’ My brother was fighting in Anzio at the time – he wouldn’t have talked either. The information somehow becomes so precious. It’s the lives of your comrades, isn’t it.’
There were lapses of discretion, however. Some came about for the most touching and innocent and human of reasons. Take this incident, reported by a J.B. Perrott to Bletchley Park’s administrator, Nigel de Grey. Perrott, in Signals, had this formal complaint to make, still to be found in the archives today:
On 18 Feb 1943, I met [Wren] Gwen Knight at a Harpenden Gramophone Society recital. Afterwards, on Harpenden station, she stated that she knew what work was being done by this unit, and mentioned types of discriminant, such as ‘shark’, ‘cockroach’, ‘chaffinch’, as well as the expression ‘BP’ … I ascertained that she was in some way connected with deciphering … to the best of my knowledge, Wren Knight is satisfactory on security grounds – her parents would seem to have no knowledge of the nature of her work, she is ostensibly training as a ‘writer’. I consider that the unnecessary remarks made on February 18th were solely to impress me.3
Wise Nigel de Grey was inclined to take this view of the matter too. He wrote back to a Colonel Wallace with these remarks:
I have personally interviewed the Wren in question and I do not think she will transgress again. I gave her the name of the officer who reported her and I think that alone may cause the friendship to cool off a bit. She made the fatal mistake of thinking that anyone connected with our services was entitled to the same information as she has herself …
It is always extremely useful to me to know where people have gone wrong.4
Sometimes, worryingly, it seemed that word had seeped out even wider than Wrens and Signals men. There was this anxious report to de Grey from a Mr Fletcher of Block D:
Mr Chicks, one of the British Tabulating Machine employees, engaged upon the final assembly of the bombes, was recently at home in Chelmsford where his father is a works manager. His father told him he’d met a man, an Air Ministry inspector, who, on hearing that his son worked at BTM Letchworth, said: ‘Oh I know what they do there. They make decoding machines.’ Chicks neither confirmed nor denied this to his father but told him it would be as well if he didn’t talk about it.
This case presented de Grey with a little difficulty, as he revealed in his reply: ‘the matter is one which I think will have to be followed up, though Travis wishes me particularly to emphasise the delicacy of allowing even MI5 into the bombe secret …’5
A little later on, and a small number of American officers also apparently found it difficult not to hint at what they were doing. One Lieutenant Skalak seemed alarmingly garrulous when among British officers, or at dances with Wrens. Indeed, such was the fright he caused that Bletchley Park prevailed upon the FBI to investigate his background thoroughly. Skalak’s loyalty was beyond doubt. He had simply been behaving rather overenthusiastically. This also seemed true of a young Letchworth machine operator who had been dropping hints in social situations about the importance of his work. ‘He seems a decent young fellow,’ wrote one colonel after a full investigation. ‘All the same, a little salutary fear won’t do him any harm.’6
One Park veteran recalled the day when one of the lower-scale administrative staff was apprehended: ‘I remember John Harrington, because he disappeared. When I went into the Accounts Office, I had the shock of my life. There were two burly MI5 men either side of him. He was such a clever man and I had asked Miss Molesworth why someone so clever was doing this sort of job. But he seemed to know a lot about everything, so I told Miss Molesworth and that’s how he was picked up – he was a spy.’
But in general, it appears that if indiscretion was suspected, action was swift and low-key. One gets the sense that the Bletchley method of securing silence was mostly a visit from an Intelligence operative to put the frighteners on the offender. ‘The trouble about taking any drastic action,’ wrote Colonel Vivian to Nigel de Grey, ‘is that it is often likely to draw attention rather than to conceal.’
Despite the intense seriousness and constant tension surrounding all questions of security, isolated cases were in their own odd way slightly amusing. There were accidental indiscretions in the most startling places: in school and parish magazines. Occasionally, famous Old Boys or parish notables would be written up, together with the news that they were working at Bletchley Park.
And the case of one billetor near Bletchley, a Reverend Harry L. Clothier, was brought to the attention of Nigel de Grey. The reason? Unlike most other people in Bletchley, he was constantly trying to catch his younger billetees out for information about what they were up to. At first sight, this looked rather sinister, but it became clear that the reverend gentleman thought he was playing some sort of game. ‘As a host, Reverend Clothier is very kind,’ wrote Colonel Vivian to de Grey. ‘I think the time has now come when he will have to be officially warned to keep his mouth shut. In fact I think he wants a thorough frightening … he is not a bad man, but a foolish one.’
Intriguingly, MI5 became concerned about the possibility of hypnosis being used to extract information about Bletchley’s activities. This was specifically because of one officer who had suffered a nervous breakdown. The officer’s doctor, based on the Isle of Man, came under Intelligence scrutiny when it became apparent that he was using hypnotism as a means of helping the officer to recovery. There was no evidence of anything more sinister than that. But the very idea of this sort of treatment was regarded by some within MI5 as black magic, and the notion of its potential use in espionage undeniably grabs the imagination.
In the directorate, there was a constant concern about the inherent danger of drunkenness. There were flurries of disquiet if, for instance, people were heard to be speaking too loudly at smart drinks parties about subjects which they should not know that much about. Another source of anxiety was what they termed ‘superior persons’ – for example, senior university dons who felt that the stringent confidentiality ‘didn’t apply to them’. Added to this, personal letters were scrutinised and censored as a matter of course. Wrote one intelligence officer: ‘I enclose six letters which I think require looking into.’
There were also discussions about the potential trouble that could be caused by marriage. Nigel de Grey stated that the ‘best plan is to warn young women. Very specially against talking to her future husband on the subject of her work.’7 This precaution proved, across the decades, to be phenomenally successful. Wives said nothing to husbands, and it worked the other way around too. Meanwhile, vulnerable young Wrens were to be warned against ‘confidence tricksters’ – plausible-seeming American soldiers, for instance – who would dupe them into talking with such lines as ‘I know all about your show.’
In 1942, a striking communiqué was sent around all GC&CS employees, appealing to their sense of personal, rather than institutional, responsibility. It read:
Secrecy. This may seem a simple matter. It should be. But repeated experience has proved that it is not, even for the cleverest of us; even for the least important. Month after month instances have occurred where workers at BP have been heard casually saying things outside BP that are dangerous. It is not enough to know that you must not hint at these things outside. It must be uppermost in your mind every hour that you talk to outsiders.
Even the most trivial-seeming things matter. The enemy does not get his intelligence by great scoops, but from a whisper here, a tiny detail there …
It went on in a manner calculated to bring a blush to the cheeks:
There is nothing to be gained by chatter but the satisfaction of idle vanity, or idle curiosity: there is everything to be lost – the very existence of our work here, the lives of others, even the War itself.
Some of these breaches were rather sad. Particularly poignant was the incident in which a shop girl in Knightsbridge sparked a security alert at Bletchley Park when a couple of Wrens went into the shop, bought some clothes, and gave the address for them to be sent on to. The shop girl, seeing their address, immediately became very chatty about Bletchley and asked the Wrens if they were working on bombes.
The reason the shop girl knew so much about it was that she herself had worked at Bletchley, and in an extremely rare case had been discharged owing to ‘ill-health and incompatibility’. After this incident, she was ‘duly cautioned’ by MI5.8
In his account, Peter Calvocoressi was fascinating on that crucial point of secrecy: that, in the vast majority of cases, once a recruit was in on the purpose of Bletchley Park, there would be no way for them to back out and go elsewhere.
The Ultra community at BP saw itself as – perhaps was – an elite within an elite. Many of the things which made it successful made it also intense: the narrow catchment area, the smallness … of its cryptographic and intelligence sections, the edgy pressures of relentless work around the clock, the sense of responsibility and achievement, and the fact that there was no escape.
The rule, dictated by security, was: once in, never out. And this rule was rarely broken. There was a board or committee to which an inmate of BP might address a plea for a posting elsewhere. An application to this board would be followed by an interview and, almost invariably, the rejection of the plea.
A girl who had broken her heart and wanted to get away to give it a chance to mend might find sympathy, but she would not get release. The only transients on the Ultra side were officers who came to BP to be indoctrinated and trained before going to intelligence staffs in the field where they would handle Ultra material.9
Against this careful security, however, there were always fears among the administrative hierarchy. They were perfectly justified, it would seem. For instance, some now suggest that an unidentified spy, with the codename of ‘Baron’, operated within the Park in the early years of the war – a spy, crucially, feeding information not to the Germans but to Britain’s Russian allies. One name put forward is Leo Long, who worked in the War Office. In May 1941, he leaked a raw decrypt from Bletchley Park concerning the Germans’ forthcoming Barbarossa campaign against Russia.
Conversely, those who chose to help Russia on their own account were more alarmingly slapdash about the methods that they employed.