When one listens now to wartime songs and entertainers, one is generally listening to the material that was performed to the troops, and played into the dance halls and the factories: Flanagan and Allen; George Formby; Tommy Trinder; Arthur Askey; the Andrews Sisters; Anne Shelton; Billy Cotton and his Band; Jack Buchanan; Vera Lynn. The tone was ceaselessly uplifting and ceaselessly uncomplicated, from George Formby’s risqué suggestions of knowing what to do with his gas-mask to Vera Lynn and her white cliffs. This is not to say that such entertainments were naive, or even simple; merely that they were pitched at a certain emotional level that could be enjoyed by all – popular culture at its best.
Tellingly, though, the sort of culture that the denizens of Bletchley Park went in for was, from the start, markedly more highbrow. One senses that this was not in any way deliberate; it was simply that many of the young codebreakers and linguists had been pulled away from their university lives (and in an age when fewer than five per cent of young people in any one year would attend university), and part of their education had been to inculcate an interest in the arts.
Indeed, outside the Park, even for those who had had relatively rudimentary primary educations – such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who recalls, as he became a teenager during the war, how he would be suffused with a desire not only to hear the finest classical music, but also to see the best theatre – the arts were becoming seen as something that all should aspire to appreciate and enjoy, as opposed to being the preserve of a wealthy metropolitan elite. Inside the Park, they managed to enjoy an extraordinary range of cultural – and indeed, entertainment – pursuits.
Oliver and Sheila Lawn have especially fond memories of the way that Bletchley-ites contrived to use their leisure time: ‘There was music,’ says Mr Lawn, ‘Play readings. And play actings. Quite a bit of amateur dramatics. And concerts of all kinds.’
‘Some very gifted people were there,’ adds Mrs Lawn. ‘Some concerts were given by people who were already there.’
Specially invited artistes would make the journey up to Buckinghamshire as well. Says Oliver Lawn: ‘I remember Myra Hess coming. And one or two – at that time, well-known – quartets came.’ One wonders quite how much – if anything – these artistes were told about the nature of the audience they would be facing. Some musicians were told nothing at all. They would travel up in vans, clamber out with their instruments, perform to great acclaim, and then be driven back to London without having the faintest clue from whom they had received this acclaim.
Sheila Lawn adds, ‘A little later the authorities built an assembly hall outside the Park, where we could have dances, meetings, all sorts of things, so that other people from Bletchley could enjoy some of that too.’
Both Oliver and Sheila had an abiding passion for the pursuit of Highland dancing. Unlikely though it may seem, the Park had its own home-grown expert in this pursuit, in the shape of Japanese codebreaking genius Hugh Foss. As well as being renowned for his good-humoured, easy manner, he was also apparently a fantastically elegant figure on the dance floor. ‘Highland Reels was one of the very active social clubs,’ says Mr Lawn.
‘He was tall, elegant, danced beautifully,’ adds Sheila. ‘But of course we had no idea what he did.’
Oliver Lawn goes on to evoke an amusing and rather lovely image of those evenings when the dancing took place: ‘We did our Scottish reels first of all in the hall of the mansion. It was a long hall, which was ideal for Scottish reel dances. And when they built the assembly hall outside the Park, we moved there. And then in the summer, when the weather was good, we danced by the lake, on the croquet lawn.’
Another veteran recalls how Hugh Foss would practise during lunch hours and hold ‘more elaborate dances every three to six months with a full dress dance on St Andrew’s nights. We wore out his record of Circassian Circle and had a collection to buy him a new one.’
Dancing seemed to be one of the great overriding passions at Bletchley. One codebreaker recalled being so keen to get to a dance that he managed, by dint of getting the date wrong, to turn up an entire week early. It also broke out in amusingly informal ways. One Wren recalled: ‘The kitchen at BP House was so large that one could dance. During supper break I taught one of the men to waltz. We only had one record – “Sleepy Lagoon” [now better known as the theme tune of Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs].’
Even Bletchley’s fiercest figures could not resist the call of the hop. Mimi Gallilee recalls that her boss Miss Reed – so severe and so unyielding – was nevertheless transformed completely when it came to her leisure hours: ‘Doris Reed used to go to the dancing. The Highland reels. And she would always go during her lunch hour.’
Lucienne Edmonston-Lowe, who worked in Hut 6’s Registration Room from 1942 to 1945, also had extremely warm memories of these entertainments. ‘If one was involved in a play or a concert, there were rehearsals and so the shift-list was very much referred to if one was on night or evening shift,’ she recalled. ‘I remember a song from the first Christmas revue I ever went to – sung by three smart girls. It went something like this:
“Six days out of seven we do penance,
In this awful God-forsaken place,
Six days out of seven we do penance,
For a single day of grace,
Cast aside what our mothers knit us,
Put on clothes that really fit us,
Sophisticated black is de rigueur,
And a smart hat a woman’s cri de coeur.”’1
Even the Soviet spy/fellow traveller John Cairncross expressed an admiration for the creative side of Bletchley life. In his memoir, he wrote:
The … high spots I recall on our limited social life were a concert of German Lieder sung by a colleague, and the Christmas pantomime where we were regaled with such items as a Russian partisan in a fur cap singing about his life, and revue items with cracks such as ‘working and partly working’ – courtesy of T.S. Eliot – and saving water by having baths à deux.2
For young Mimi Gallilee, whose age would have precluded some of the straightforward socialising opportunities, this array of activities was extremely beguiling to behold. ‘There were lots of different clubs,’ she says. ‘There was country dancing, morris dancing, different kinds of music, and you’d sit and listen to gramophone records in those days. One of the rooms at the front of the house became like a lounge really. There was a library. And the people within the huts – they formed their real groups of friends, in their own huts. And so you knew these people and there were plenty of people for you to know, within your own realm.
‘They started to form these clubs within about a couple of years. That was how I went to some of the music recitals. They were with records in the big main lounge, the club lounge. Once they had built the cafeteria, I believe then they built a concert/dance hall at the end of the road.
‘The revues were usually put on once a year and I went to a number of those. They were marvellous, fantastic – the people were so mad.’
Another great admirer of the seasonal revues was Hut 4 veteran Diana Plowman, who recalled: ‘At Christmas time, all these great beings put on a revue. I’ve never seen anything like them before or since – wit, colour, eloquence, beauty, breathtaking …’
Bletchley Park’s revues were also noted for their professionalism. Other veterans recall the care that went into the writing and performance of shows such as The Naming of Parts. And in this, we hear an echo of what might have been for these young people; in a university career uninterrupted by war, they might well have been performing in the Cambridge Footlights and similar undergraduate shows. Certainly these variety shows were pitched at a higher brow than those entertaining the troops in ENSA.
But it wasn’t just revues, and Dorothy Hyson and Frank ‘Widow Twankey’ Birch were not the only theatrical talent; according to Mimi Gallilee, ‘There were many acting professionals at Bletchley.’ Despite the 24-hour shift system and the constant grind of work, the Bletchley Park inmates – prominent among them gifted mathematician Shaun Wylie, who became head of the Bletchley Park Dramatic Club – also contrived to stage theatrical productions such as French Without Tears, Much Ado About Nothing, Candida, Gaslight and J.B. Priestley’s They Came to a City.
This last play, almost never seen now, seems to have been one of the most popular and fashionable works of the war years. In essence, it is a Utopian fantasy: nine people arrive from nowhere into a city where poverty and hardship and prejudice are unknown; these people are from different walks of life and all respond to this dream city in different ways, with five of them eventually finding themselves quite unable to stay there. It is a sort of quasi-socialist middle-class vision of a type that was to prove extremely popular in the post-war period, examples being the productions of Ealing Studios and the richer imaginings of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
It is equally beguiling to see these serious young codebreakers and linguists throwing themselves with the same gravity into amateur dramatics. Some suggested that it was simply a valve for releasing all the tension of work, a means of forgetting the nature of their working lives. But it was not simply escape on stage. The amateur dramatic companies also produced professional-looking programmes for their performances; and in the photographs that survive, one can see the astonishing ingenuity that went into both the costumes and the stage design. In a production of By Candlelight, a young John de Grey is clearly portraying a footman of some sort – but where the Dickens did he get hold of that elaborate eighteenth century-style coat? And the set behind the two elegant ladies in simulation of an elegant drawing room has been styled and painted with bewildering attention to detail.
Not everyone joined in with the amateur dramatics. Indeed, Captain Jerry Roberts, busy trying to crack the ‘Tunny’ decrypts in the later years of the war, felt distinctly out of it. He recalls: ‘I didn’t get much of a sense of culture. But other people I knew did. Perhaps the reason was that I had a long walk home to the billet. I used to go to cinema meetings in the town, and the Wrens who worked in the Newmanry used to have dances occasionally out at Woburn Sands. They would invite us to a dance and we would have a coach to take us out there and bring us back. But it was difficult otherwise to be too social.
‘There were plenty of clubs: chess club, drama club,’ he continues. ‘And people who lived nearby, or had bicycles, tended to go to that sort of thing. If you lived half an hour’s walk away, you weren’t going to walk all the way back again from the drama things.’
This was a memory echoed by Irene Young, although she did recall managing to get to the 1942 Christmas revue, despite being wholly dependent on local buses: ‘Enjoying this recreation, I could not banish the occasional thought that although work at BP was undeniably of vital importance, we were living a comparatively sheltered life.’3 The show clearly did not succeed in lifting her out of herself. Clearly, however, a walk of half a day would not have deterred a lot of the young codebreakers, and perhaps the more senior ones too.
There was also an enthusiasm for keeping fit and outdoor pursuits. In 1942, one L.P. Wilkinson, chairman of the Bletchley Park Recreational Club, sent this wheedling memo to Commander Bradshaw: ‘It would be a great convenience if the Summer House beside the tennis courts could be used as a changing room for tennis players. It would require little or no alteration. May we have your permission for this?’ The gracious answer was a yes.
There were other clouds on the tennis players’ horizons: not only a shortage of balls (a wonderfully polite surviving letter in the National Archive from manufacturer Dunlop regrets the inevitability of this), but indeed a struggle to keep the court itself smooth and even. A specialist firm – En Tout Cas – ‘The largest makers of hard lawn tennis courts in the world’ – was consulted by Commander Bradshaw over the matter of the cost of putting these faults right.4
Emboldened, the Bletchley Park Recreation Club also put in a request for ‘a radiogram’ and Commander Bradshaw investigated the cost of getting a good one. The model favoured cost £45 – at the time an extraordinary sum of money. But a further technological innovation had caught the eye of the Recreation Club: ‘a combined television radiogram’ which would have cost an eye-watering 65 guineas. Sadly the records do not disclose if this item was ever purchased.
Of course there was live music too. Bletchley had tremendous choral societies; Gordon Welchman’s fond memories of code-breakers singing madrigals on a summer evening by the side of the Grand Union Canal were but a single example.
Again, some of the Bletchley staff had a specialised interest in their civilian lives. One was a director of music with the BBC, while by 1942, one team was led by opera singer Jean Alington, and various categories and files in Bletchley Park huts came to be named after composers and conductors. These more musical Bletchley-ites would give recitals of Brahms, and of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. Added to this, they were able to draw specialised artistes to the Park to give performances. Oliver Lawn is not the only veteran to recall the occasion when world-famous pianist Myra Hess came to give an evening performance. Opera singer Peter Pears also went to the Park.
Equally impressive was the fact that Bletchley Park organised a couple of ballet performances, again bringing professionals up from London. When one looks at the opening scene of Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes – a jostling crowd of young people desperate to get into the Covent Garden opera house to see the premiere of a new, specially composed and choreographed ballet – one thinks about a generation starved of this sort of artistic stimulation. One can easily envisage how the young of Bletchley eagerly leapt on these highbrow diversions as a means of forgetting their vital but otherwise often very repetitive and grinding work.
As the war went on, there also emerged a Cinema Club, again presumably in stark competition with the two commercial cinemas that graced Bletchley town centre. This was, of course, a period in which cinema attendances in Britain were still enormously high; most people would go once, if not twice a week. Oliver Lawn recalls catching such epics as Song of Bernadette at the Bletchley Odeon.
One film from that period not only tells us much of the national mood at the time, but also illustrates this thirst, manifested so clearly at Bletchley Park, for something a little better. In 1944, Laurence Olivier left the navy and went to great trouble to film Shakespeare’s Henry V. Commentators have long noted how the political motivations of Henry were toned down for this film, so that the audiences might not miss the patriotic echoes of what they saw on screen: English soldiers preparing to fight on French soil, behind a charismatic leader.
But this Henry V is far beyond a simple tub-thumping exercise in morale-boosting fervour just months and weeks before the D-Day landings; its determination is to take Shakespeare’s language – and by extension, the heritage of the audience, the culture for which they had been fighting – and make it live fully. With its score by William Walton, it was almost self-consciously a film designed to proclaim the indomitability and brilliance of English art and culture.
At Bletchley, the Park inmates were keen cineastes, though their tastes, it seems, did not run so much to Will Hay as to more specialised productions. The Bletchley Park Cinema Club was, as one veteran recalls, more likely to show productions like Night Train and even the odd vintage German film. Bear in mind that this was a good fifteen or twenty years before cinema even began to be regarded as an art form.
There were language classes too (quite apart from the more formal lessons held in Japanese at Bedford for those working on ‘Purple’); these would include not only the usual modern languages, but also Latin.
Clubs were not just academic. There were more traditional forms of socialising too. ‘In Newport Pagnell,’ says Sheila Lawn, ‘we formed a very informal club. It was more a walking club, serving coffee and tea. Anyone could come in and we met people from the same village, we were all billetees together.
‘And then on your days off,’ she continues, ‘if one of your friends or companions had the same day off, you might agree to go away with them: be it a visit to London, if you could afford it, or into the country for a walk. When I met Oliver, I remember we went down to Stratford, by train, on one occasion and we went to a play.’
Towards the end of the war, the dancing craze was the unlikely source of a security panic at Bletchley Park. For the time and effort put by the Bletchley authorities into providing special dancing facilities had somehow reached the ears of a London journalist. He was called Harry Procter, and he worked for the Daily Mail. In fine investigative style, Procter was now hot on the trail of the story, inspiring a terse and rather desperate Bletchley memo:
a) The telephone exchanges at BP to be warned to be on a look-out for a call from Harry Procter of the Daily Mail. Procter will probably ask for ‘Bletchley’ or ‘for the country branch of the F.O.’ and will wish to speak to the Club Secretary.
b) Should such a call come through, the operator will reply after some delay that the Club Secretary is out and ask for Mr Procter’s number to ring him back.
c) The ‘magnificent dance hall’ will be laughed off and we will explain that the truth is that we have built a small temporary room in the office enclosure for recreation.5
It is nice to see, with this gambit, that the practice of ‘spin’ is a little older than many now assume.
But not all press coverage of Bletchley’s out-of-hours pursuits was deemed so hostile. Among the townsfolk of Bletchley and the surrounding districts, the dramatic theatrical productions seem to have made a considerable impact. Indeed, right at the end of the war, the Bletchley Gazette reported with some regret that the Bletchley Park Drama Group was producing its last play, and looked back fondly over the last few years of productions. The newspaper’s un-bylined reporter wrote:
The Group in the early days were in great demand in the district, and they roamed about the countryside in BP transport, giving entertainments in conjunction with The Musical Society, in village halls … subsequently, the demands became so heavy that this could not be continued …
The Group was indebted to the people and particularly to the traders of Bletchley who have always given lots of support – such as the loan of cutlery and furniture and, in one case, last minute gargles!
One of the ways the Group was able to repay was in undertaking the make-up for the Co-Operative Pageant, when something like 600 faces were made-up …
This newspaper report pointed up the accusations raised by a few local townspeople concerning the cushy nature of the Park’s recruits’ lives – for such an apparently intensive programme of theatrical excellence must surely have taken up rather a lot of time. The reporter sided with the Park, at the same time giving no hint about what actually went on there:
A suggestion that the Park people had plenty of time for rehearsal … was quickly killed. Life at the Park had not been fun. Transport to and from their billets; awkward working hours; the strangeness of communal life; and the Drama Group had been the means of saving a lot of people from a mere ‘work, sleep and eat’ existence.6
But there was more to it than that. It was to do with the spontaneous creativity of young people who, despite the terrific responsibility of their wartime roles, were equally earnest about the importance of art and culture – things that would be vital when the war had ended and the nation was to be rebuilt and remodelled.