‘My father died in 1951,’ says John Herivel. ‘And of course, he never heard anything about my war career. Although he knew I had been at Bletchley Park, he had no idea about what I had been doing. And there was a point, shortly before he died, when he experienced this tremendous frustration.
‘I was a son who had promised great things after his school career, and who then seemed, to him, to be doing nothing during the war. And this frustration spilled out. My father said: “You’ve never done anything!”’
The Official Secrets Act, says Herivel, was so deeply impressed upon everyone who signed it that even under this terrible weight of provocation, he could not imagine himself breaking it. ‘I did think he was perhaps not long for this world,’ Herivel says of his decision not to tell his father anything, ‘but really, out of all those people who had signed that act, I wasn’t going to be the one who broke it.’
It was not just parents. There were also children who had to be kept in the dark, as Mavis and Keith Batey were to find. As the 1940s gave way to the 1950s and 60s, their children could not be told the slightest detail of what their parents had done throughout the war. And yet those tiny details could escape in the most surprising ways.
Mavis Batey says, for instance, that even the numerical positioning of each letter within the alphabet became ingrained to an extent that might have raised suspicions. She gives an amusing example: ‘Some years ago, my daughter was working in the Bodleian Library, right down in J Floor. Ten floors down, I said, that’s a long way. And she said “How do you know J is ten floors down?” I changed the subject. Little things like that could give you away.’
There were some, of course, who never strictly left Bletchley, but instead stayed with GC&CS through to its move a few years later to Cheltenham when it became GCHQ. Among them were Hugh Alexander and the widely liked Eric Jones, who went on to become head of GCHQ. For others, the silence of Bletchley had set in so far that they did not think about it any more.
Mimi Gallilee got a job in the news research department of the BBC. Although she enjoyed it, the urge to move on was strong. In the 1960s, Mimi went to America. When she came back, she found an odd and rather disconcerting echo of her old life.
‘When I went for my interview at Bush House – I used to put on my applications that I worked at Bletchley Park, adding in brackets “Foreign Office Evacuated”. One of the people on the board whom I didn’t know, said, “I see you worked at Bletchley Park. What were you doing there?” So I said, “I’m very sorry, I can’t discuss that.”
‘My response to that interview question was a reflex action,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t had time to think what would I say if they asked this. I always put it down openly, but only stating that it was a wartime base for part of the Foreign Office. That man on the board was Hugh Lunghi.’
Lunghi is a very distinguished figure; he was Churchill’s interpreter at the Yalta conference of 1945, and in this capacity met Roosevelt and Stalin. He was also one of the first men into Hitler’s bunker in 1945. It is interesting that when he interviewed Mimi Gallilee, the word Bletchley held such significance. ‘And that was why I got the job at Bush House,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘I didn’t know then that the department I was going into was also under the auspices of the Official Secrets Act – that was the World Service.’
Some were even more dedicated to keeping the secret. Frederick Winterbotham’s book on Ultra was published in 1974; Walter Eytan (formerly Ettinghausen; he changed his name a few years after the war when he left England for the Middle East, eventually to become an Israeli diplomat), who had worked in Hut 4, recalled: ‘I was shocked to the point of refusing to read the book when someone showed me a copy, and to this day I feel inhibited if by chance the subject comes up.’1
In later years, especially in the wake of the publication of Winterbotham’s account, Bletchley veterans found themselves frequently bumping into one another. Keith Batey and Oliver Lawn, both senior civil servants by the 1960s, often sat on important government committees together. Meanwhile, Roy Jenkins quite often found himself at functions with people who would say: ‘Were you at the Park?’ Once he met the Hon. Sarah Baring at a glittering party, and there was a moment of amused, complicit acknowledgement. ‘I’d never met him before but he was a lovely man,’ says Sarah Baring. ‘But I knew. I asked him if the initials BP meant anything to him and he laughed and said yes.’
However, those years of enforced silence also created moments of great family upset for some codebreakers. ‘You had forcibly to forget for thirty years,’ says Mavis Batey. ‘Now, I have people writing to me saying “My husband has died and I never knew what he did at Bletchley Park. Can you tell me?” Well no, I’m afraid I can’t – not unless they worked in my section.’ With all the huts so rigidly demarcated, how could anyone know?
And even after the Bletchley secret was blown open for all to see in 1974, many of Bletchley’s operatives experienced a curious psychological side-effect. Although Winterbotham’s book set off a chain of other publications, a number of ordinary Bletchley-ites could not bring themselves to even mention the place, let alone discuss their roles there. The need for secrecy had become ingrained to the profoundest degree. There were a significant number, like Walter Eytan, who felt that Winterbotham himself was a disgrace for having gone into print. Others, even into the 1980s, would stead-fastly refuse to disclose a single thing even to their closest family.
One codebreaking veteran in Scotland, a church minister, continued to tell his children that his war had consisted of his religious ministry, although they knew well that he had been ordained after the war. He absolutely would not mention Bletchley. It was simply a case of duty; a promise had been made, and it had to be kept.
In the case of Walter Eytan, the silence remained even in the face of matrimonial pressure: ‘Security was second nature to us; my wife said she found difficulty in marrying a man who would not tell her what he did in the war. I did tell her that I had spent most of the time at a place called Bletchley, which meant nothing to her.’2 Others were more pragmatic. ‘I never told a soul,’ says Jean Valentine. ‘It didn’t come up because you didn’t discuss it. I married a man and didn’t ask him about the secret things on the plane that he flew, and he never asked me what I had been doing.’ One story concerns a husband and wife who finally, in the late 1970s, told each other what they had done at the Park while the husband was washing the car on a Sunday afternoon.
Then there was Mimi Gallilee’s extraordinary case: she, her mother and her sister all worked at Bletchley in different capacities. Mother was a waitress, and so rather less secret. But Mimi and her older sister – who worked in one of the huts – never discussed it after the war. Sadly, Mimi’s sister died in the late 1960s. To this day Mimi has no idea what her sister was doing in that Hut. There are no official records – so how on earth is she to know?
There are numerous other poignant stories too, chiefly concerning young people who – like John Herivel – yearned as the post-war years went on to tell their parents what they had done in the war, yet never could; and whose parents then died, never having known. Some found it unbearable that there was no official documentation, as though those years had simply never happened. Sheila Lawn recalls: ‘What I regretted was that my father died long before I could reveal anything. He died in 1961. My mother died a lot later but by that time she wasn’t very well. I am so sorry my father couldn’t have … he would have been so interested.’
‘My parents were the same,’ adds Oliver Lawn. ‘They both died in the 1960s. They were never curious. Many people were in the same situation. Relatives who should have known, but who couldn’t be told. And then died.’
These days, some wonder exactly why everything had to remain so hush-hush for so long afterwards. One very simple reason was that the encryption techniques that Bletchley had managed to break into, either via Enigma or ‘Tunny’, were still current in other parts of the world – far-flung corners of the fast-fading British Empire included. Indeed, in its first few years under Communist rule, East Germany was still using the same Enigma; a fact that was exploited not merely by the British, but also by the East Germans’ Russian overlords.
The second reason was the Cold War: Churchill’s chilling 1945 speech concerning the Iron Curtain falling across Europe; the understandable paranoia when, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict with Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union went back on all its promises and not only swallowed up Poland but a vast chunk of Germany too, bringing the oppressive forces of Communism jutting into western Europe. In terms of the scale of territory, it was a breathtaking seizure; Churchill noted how very close the Soviets were now to France and Britain. Indeed, in a moment of desperation back in 1945, he openly mused about the possibility of flattening Moscow with the newly perfected atomic bomb.
Against this backdrop it was decided that the secrets of Bletchley must remain inviolate. In one sense, the conflict was not yet at an end. Throughout the campaigns of the early 1940s, Churchill had sanctioned careful releases to Stalin of information gleaned from Bletchley, while at the same time endeavouring as far as possible to disguise the source. It was deemed best that the Russians should have no idea what sort of decrypting advances had been made.
Speaking of the Soviets, for Mimi Gallilee, work at BBC World Service in the 1970s offered a few faint echoes of the time that she had spent at the Park. ‘We were keeping a watch on world communism. We weren’t spies but we had a lot to do with dissidents. Solzhenitzyn came over. My boss was the first to have an interview and to befriend him here in the UK.
‘By the 1970s,’ she adds, speaking of her own attitude to the past, ‘Bletchley Park was dead. Nobody would have known what I was talking about. It wouldn’t have meant anything to anybody.’
Even the physical fact of the place itself seemed a little abstract to her, until one day in the 1970s, she decided upon a day trip. By this time, Bletchley was little more than a satellite to the gleaming new town of Milton Keynes. She went there with a friend whom she had known since after the war. That friend did not have any inkling.
‘At this stage, I still didn’t know about the Enigma. The only term I knew was Ultra. I knew what it meant, though not in connection with anything else …
‘So we drove along Wilton Avenue, got to the gate, and I said to my friend: “I used to work here during the war.” She said, “Would you like to go in and have a look?” I said, “I’d love to.” But there was no one there – not that I could see, at any rate.
‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘one day, after the Winterbotham book was out, it was mentioned on the TV news, and my friend was watching. They talked about what was going on at the Park. My friend rang me and said, “I felt so proud, I heard this thing on Bletchley Park and you never said what you did there!” And I said, “Well, there was nothing to say really …”’
The physical fact of the town might have helped as a visual reminder, keeping certain memories strong, but even the smallest changes could suddenly make memory more distant. ‘I did not think Vicarage Walk could have changed a great deal, but it had,’ wrote Gwen Watkins of the little lane in which she had been billeted during her time as a Luftwaffe codebreaker. ‘It was full of parked cars and expensive bicycles lying about in the lane.’
Gwen Watkins had remembered an utterly quiet little lane, where the windows of the house were never opened and the front door was only ever used for special visitors and occasions. Now she saw a house with windows wide open, chintz curtains, music playing loudly from within. ‘I only wish that it had not changed,’ she wrote. ‘I turned away, and never went there again.’3
Curiously, as Oliver and Sheila Lawn recall, there was little in the way of official pressure to keep this silence after their time at Bletchley. It was just understood. ‘It was subconscious,’ says Sheila Lawn, ‘I just never thought about talking. You’d just say that it was war work.’
When the house and grounds were saved in 1991, they found themselves not only overwhelmed with memories, but also able to talk further with one another about all that they had done – some fifty years after the war had ended. They decided in the early 1990s to make a trip to see the Park once more. Just the sight of it was a curiously emotional experience for both of them.
‘They had altered a lot since then,’ says Mr Lawn. ‘Buildings had been taken down. But there was much there that we remembered. It was like double vision. And I couldn’t believe having forgotten everything. It was like having a bit of your life shown to you again.’ Having made themselves known to the recently set up Bletchley Park Trust, the Lawns found that their connections to the place were firmly – and amusingly – re-established.
The Lawns, and thousands of others, had had a unique experience. Poet Vernon Watkins, who had served at Bletchley, said of his time there that it was ‘a situation, an era and an excitement which cannot be repeated’. And one anonymous codebreaker, a few years ago, summed his own feelings just as acutely: ‘No work I have ever done in my life,’ he said, ‘has been more fascinating or given me greater satisfaction.’