It had never been Brideshead; there were few who could have sighed with piercing nostalgia over halcyon hours spent beneath its gables. Yet the eccentric architecture of Bletchley had come in some curious way to reflect the ungovernably quirky codebreakers. The move was inevitable though: the directorate understandably wanted to return to London. The country location had only ever really been a Blitz precaution. Gradually, over a period of some months into early 1946, the red-brick mansion was abandoned by the codebreaking directorate and the remaining cryptologists, and they moved into their new base on the green, hilly fringes of London.
The district of Eastcote, situated at the north-western end of the Metropolitan and Piccadilly Underground lines, was an incongruous location, though. From the start, there was something almost comical about the contrast between the sharp lightning-fast intelligence work shaping the contours of a new Cold War geopolitics and the wide leafy somnolent suburban avenues in which this work was being carried out.
Eastcote was well-to-do and still had imitations of village life: the white wooden signposts, carved fingers pointing west to Uxbridge and Ruislip, east to Harrow and Stanmore; the village green and the war memorial; the dainty high street, with its little shops and dressmakers. The railway had first come to Eastcote in 1905, and reached proper frequency by the 1920s and 1930s, at the point when London was beginning its last great expansion outwards. And with the transport direct to the city came charming whitewashed villas with green-tiled roofs, windows and fanlights with red and indigo stained-glass designs. Their architects took ideas from the Arts and Crafts movement.
There were the grander properties still dotted around: Eastcote House and Highgrove Hall were two notable estates, which had provided much of the local employment at a time when the area was still largely agricultural. Then in early 1940, when the War Office acquired some of the local land, there came a new institution, housed in a series of monotonous grey single-storey concrete blocks. The initial purpose of this new establishment was to have been a military hospital. Swiftly, though, other uses were found. The name of this new establishment was HMS Pembroke V – or, as it was to become later, RAF Eastcote. You would never have known it was there if you had not gone looking for it. Obscured on one side by a thick wood, and from another by a charming 1930s housing estate – at the end of which it lay – HMS Pembroke V was not far from the main street of Eastcote. By 1942, it was in operation as an important out-station of Bletchley Park. The bombe machines – the hulking, wardrobe-sized creations of Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman and engineer Harold Keen – were fantastically successful at sorting through thousands of possible code combinations. As a result, in the early days when there were few of the machines, there had been a great deal of friction about which departments could use them the most, with naval and military sections arguing fiercely that they had to have priority.
When more bombe machines were built, there was then the question of where to put them. Bletchley could not be expected to house all of them and nor, in the case of a bombing raid, would the authorities anyway have wanted so much invaluable technology all gathered together in the same place. This fairly rudimentary base about 30 miles (50 kilometres) south of Bletchley seemed ideal.
However, right from the start, Eastcote never seemed hugely popular with the young women – the Wrens – who were posted there. There was a long badly-lit path that ran between the grey concrete blocks of the base, and in the middle of the night, when shifts were changing, or as young women ventured out for a brief break from tending to these temperamental machines, there was often a sense of unease. Male personnel worked at the base too and there had been stories of attacks upon young women made on that long, dim, unwelcoming path. It was only a little after the war that this new codebreaking HQ began to acquire a slightly more congenial atmosphere, livened up with everything from jazz concerts to cricket and tennis societies.
The Eastcote operation, if one had gone looking for it, presented a formidable prospect from the outside – forbidding fences and rolls of barbed razor wire. Security was intense, even within the base – those whose work centred around Block A would have no idea at all of what was going on in Block B. To get in, one needed an identification card with a photograph on it. One of the administrative staff who made the transfer from Bletchley to Eastcote in the new era was secretary Mimi Gallilee. An evacuee from Blitz-torn London, Mimi had first worked at Bletchley as a messenger girl, leaving school at the age of 14 to do so. She was mentored by Bletchley’s senior personal assistant Doris Reed and in time came to work with her in the office of Nigel de Grey, who was now deputy director of the new post-war codebreaking operation.
When the war ended, Mimi agreed to the transfer, having not given much thought by that stage to other career opportunities. However, after the large house and lake and grounds of Bletchley, these new suburban surrounds were, she felt, markedly drearier.
‘At Eastcote, we went into the quarters where the bombe machines were,’ says Mrs Gallilee. ‘And I think there was only one bombe left. I didn’t know anything about the bombes.’ (This had been because of the extraordinarily tight compartmentalisation at Bletchley – even some of those working in the Directorate would have had no idea precisely how those Enigma codes were being broken.) ‘Those of us who had nothing to do with it wouldn’t have known,’ she says. ‘So we just moved in to where the Wrens had worked. I of course stayed within the Directorate.’
Mrs Gallilee felt quite strongly, even as a very young woman, that she did not want to live on the fringes of London: she wanted to be close to the colour and life of the centre of town. This however, caused some practical difficulties. ‘I was living in Bayswater and I had to pay the full fares all the way to Eastcote,’ she says. ‘On such a low salary.’ The London of 1946 was still in a twilight of bomb damage: in parts it had been utterly destroyed after the Blitz and the onslaught of V-1 and V-2 missiles. Even once-elegant districts like Bayswater were straitened and peeling, formerly grand houses now subdivided into murky flats with cold shared bathrooms. The brutal truth was that after the romanticism of Bletchley – certainly to a girl in her teens, mesmerised by the aristocratic young women and the brainy young men roaming what seemed to her like a university campus – this new world of secret work was, for Mimi Gallilee, simply exhausting and drab. ‘They tried to do something for me in terms of an increase in pay,’ Mrs Gallilee says, ‘but you just didn’t have that kind of system.’ In the civil service pay structure, Mimi’s youth counted against her – she would have to wait a couple of years until she was 21 before she could be considered for a suitable wage boost.
‘And there were no such things as merit awards in those days,’ she adds. ‘Besides, the government wouldn’t have had the money to pay us anyway. I hadn’t got enough money to live and stay in London. And I don’t think I stayed at Eastcote for more than six months. I said I’d take the first job that I could get as long as it paid more money. And the first job I went after was as a copy typist for Burroughs Wellcome, the research chemist outfit. They took me on. I earned a pound a week more, straight away. That was a hell of a lot of money.’
There was a twist though. ‘After maybe just a couple of days,’ says Mrs Gallilee, ‘I thought: “I can’t stand this.” I felt as though I had been dropped from one world into another. It was nothing like anything. Perhaps I thought everywhere would be like Bletchley Park.’
Indeed, that sense of rupture was felt quite keenly by many who had worked at Bletchley and who had streamed out of the place to take up positions of academic or administrative importance. There was one other factor too: the authorities gave Mimi Gallilee and all others departing an intensive debriefing reminder that the work that they had done – and indeed, perhaps any work that they might do on similar lines in the future – was very strictly classified. They were not to breathe one syllable – even to one another. And so it was later in life that Mimi, on the point of joining the BBC, found herself being interviewed by someone whose face she had recognised from Bletchley. On her application, she had written simply that her war had been occupied with work for the Foreign Office. Her interviewer, although recognising her, made no comments at all.
One of the charming and perennial fascinations of even the most incredibly secret and pivotal organisations in Britain is the careful bowler-hatted bureaucracy that surrounded their urgent work. The move to Eastcote, for instance, meant a certain financial readjustment. ‘I am directed by Mr Secretary Bevin,’ ran a 1946 letter to Barclays Bank from the Foreign Office, ‘to request that the Foreign Office account maintained with your Bletchley branch may be closed at the close of business on the 30th March 1946 and that the balance may be transferred to Barclays Bank at Eastcote to be placed to the credit of the Foreign Office account “Government Communications Headquarters”.’1 At this stage, various departments referred to the codebreakers under varying titles. Although this was an early use of the term ‘GCHQ’ (the use of which would come to be discouraged in official correspondence for security reasons), Eastcote was also known as the London Signals Intelligence Centre.
There were also careful memos – strictly within Civil Service rules – to do with selecting recruits. Interviews were to be carried out. ‘Generally speaking, selection will be made on the basis of the forms of application for Post-War employment which have been completed and which contain recommendations by the Heads of Section,’ ran an order from the Directorate from late 1945. ‘It should be clearly understood by individuals that selection under the above scheme is no guarantee of an offer of permanent employment. Such an offer can only be made when approval for numbers, grades, etc of the signals intelligence centre have been given by the Treasury. Recommended civilian candidates will continue to be employed as temporary civil servants pending the establishment of the Signals Intelligence centre on a peace-time basis.’2
There were obviously to be special cases, including those returning from the field. Added to this would be a continual alertness to the brightest intellects of the coming generation, though this new establishment at Eastcote was – for the moment – only a fraction of the size of Bletchley. The codebreakers numbered in the hundreds, rather than thousands. In the coming years, as Commander Travis constructed this regenerated institution, that position would be reversed.
As well as this, there was a new element of centralisation – one of the factors that strengthened the codebreakers’ case to be a wholly new service, independent and answering to the Foreign Office. All the different cryptology branches that had emerged from the main Bletchley operation were now to be pulled back in and overseen by the Eastcote directorate. ‘The transfer of certain sections (to Eastcote) will commence in November,’ ran another internal memo. ‘This includes sections now at Bletchley Park, Berkeley Street, Aldford House and Queens Gate. Oxford may not move for some months after the other sections…’ The numbers were being settled, too. ‘The proposed peace-time establishment of the Sigint Centre totals 1,017, exclusive of personnel attached from the Service Ministries and “domestic” staff. The present war-time establishment is being reduced to approximately that figure by 31 Dec 45, the total being made up of the following groups: a) cryptographic (including tabulating and machine sections) 475; b) Intelligence 83; c) Traffic Analysis 180; d) Technical (incl Communications etc) 93; e) cypher security 150; f) administration 36.’3
No matter how exceptionally so many women had performed at Bletchley Park, civil service rules – which had ensured that they never received any kind of parity in terms of pay – were still very much in force. Added to this, if they got married, they were required to leave the service altogether. This was considered quite usual. A married woman’s duty – no matter how towering the intellect of that married woman – was to make a home for the working husband. The Eastcote codebreakers, conscious of how much brilliant work had been done by women like Mavis Batey, tried to find some kind of fix for this, rather than slam the door on so much vital talent. ‘Although, under present regulations, married women cannot be considered for “establishment” in the civil service,’ ran one Director’s memo, ‘they may be employed as temporary civil servants.’4 Nonetheless, it was still insanity: as a means of illustration, if Joan Clarke and Alan Turing had gone ahead with a wedding, and had, despite Turing’s true orientation, remained married, then Clarke – one of Hut 8’s most dazzling codebreakers – would only have been permitted to continue her brilliant codebreaking work as a temp.
And despite the fact that the new establishment was facing up to the prospect of a grim and profoundly uncertain world, there were soon to be yelps of indignation over other outbreaks of perceived short-changing. ‘Rates of Pay,’ began one incendiary communication. ‘It is pointed out, particularly for the guidance of junior staff, that as Eastcote is a “provincial” area, the rates of pay will be on the same scale as those of Bletchley Park.’5 But as a few people were to point out – Mimi Gallilee included – working in and living near Eastcote very much involved London prices. There were rows to do with relocation and re-accommodation; even in 1946, London was not cheap. Indeed, the scale of the bombing over the last few years had put a strain on the housing market. ‘A billeting office is being established,’ declared a November 1945 Eastcote memo. The idea was partly to circumvent the kind of disputes that tended to result in triplicated letters of complaint. Originally – as Mimi Gallilee recalled – there had been a rather stark option of staying in a hostel near Notting Hill Gate. Then that was discontinued; there was an idea that another hostel, nearer Eastcote, might be established. But as the memo stated, this was not intended as a ‘permanent base of residence’.
Others turning up for duty at Eastcote were similarly dismayed at what they found. According to Professor Richard Aldrich, in ‘June 1946, William Bodsworth, a British codebreaker, returned from a period in America to the cold and rain of an English summer to take over GCHQ’s Soviet section. He found his first sight of Eastcote ‘frankly shattering’. Expecting a ‘nice old country house’, instead he found it to be ‘more cheerless than any of the temporary buildings I have seen in this racket either here or abroad’.6
William Bodsworth had a good excuse for his gloom: the year previously he and a small number of other codebreakers had been posted to Washington DC as a liaison team; quite apart from the thrill of being right at the centre of pan-global intelligence operations, there was also the great abundance of fresh food, coffee, even the fruit juices that were quite unknown in Britain. Even tomato juice from a tin was then regarded by the British as impossibly sophisticated. To huge numbers of young people in Britain throughout the war, America symbolised the future; this younger generation danced to swing and yearned for the perceived classless style and cool of their transatlantic cousins. Imagine, then, William Bodsworth sailing back to sad, rain-swept, bitterly cold England, and taking up his new work behind the barbed wire of what looked like a Soviet-style correction camp.
Yet curiously, as 1946 progressed, this most secret site – or at least a disused part at its northern extreme edge, separate from the codebreakers, an area which had once housed some army personnel – proved mightily attractive to others. The gaping holes left all over London where once there had been homes had created a terrible shortfall which, despite the government’s best efforts with pre-fabricated bungalows, had not been solved. There were thousands of families desperate for somewhere decent to live. And so – aided in part by former soldiers who knew the sites well – there began a London squatters’ movement which focused on what had been bustling military and air bases. The vast acreage at Eastcote became one such target. Prospective squatters and their families noted the group of now disused military buildings, a little distance away from the barbed-wire enclosed blocks of the cryptographers. Indeed, just weeks before the squatters moved in, there had been a question raised in the House of Commons to the housing minister about what might be done with some of the spare huts in the compound. The squatters soon provided an answer.
Today, such an incursion would meet with a very shrill response from politicians and journalists. In 1946, the reaction was more measured. Possibly because the first man to move in to the squat was himself a former officer.
Especially interested in this phenomenon were those running Mass Observation, the vast social research project which aimed to catalogue the everyday life of British people. ‘The squatters are half middle and half artisan class,’ the MO man reported. ‘One man is a master builder, another a school master and another a factory worker. All are ex-servicemen. Two of them have cars. And some could afford to buy a house but have been unable to do so. They live the typical suburban middle class life as far as they are able. There is no sign of any violent political enthusiasm among any of them.’7 Mass Observation noted that the Eastcote incursion was started by a former pilot officer, living with his family in rented rooms nearby, who noticed that the officers’ mess on the site was disused, and would make rather more suitable accommodation. Word then spread among friends, and more families came to join them on the site. The electricity meter was kept fed, and the officers concerned raised rent money, should anyone ever actually ask for any. No-one did.
And unlike those instances in grander Kensington, where in 1946 squatters took over unoccupied private property, the police were notably relaxed about this incursion too. As for the codebreakers, their part of the camp was firmly and hermetically sealed, those rolls of barbed wire remaining in place. Nonetheless, it is a striking image – it is very difficult now to imagine unauthorised personnel being allowed to set up camp anywhere near GCHQ’s current base in Cheltenham.
Yet this is not to say that Clement Attlee’s government was perfectly relaxed: these middle-class squatters, however subliminally, were tweaking the tail of authority. They clearly could not be permitted to stay where they were. Cunningly, the matter became one not for the security services, but the Ministry of Health; in other words, were former military sites suitably safe places to bring up young children? The Ministry of Health thought not. Moreover, even though the sites concerned happened to be empty at that point, that did not mean that the government regarded them as spare. These buildings might soon be needed, it was argued, for refugees from other countries, or Polish airmen who had no desire to return to their ravaged country.
So while this was going on in one corner of Eastcote, in the other, work of the most clandestine degree was being undertaken. Although most of the bombe machines had been dismantled – there were bombes at Eastcote dedicated to chewing through codes from each region of the earth – a number were retained, and continued working in the immediate post-war period. Indeed, it has been observed that they (and their human operators) worked ever more efficiently. On top of this was the arrival at Eastcote of the machines that were to shape the future.
Captain Gil Hayward had – as a very young man – been part of the Dollis Hill General Post Office research team. Throughout the war, he served with the Intelligence Corps in Egypt. He returned in 1944, came to Bletchley and very quickly became proficient not merely with the revolutionary Colossus machine but also the Tunny. This was the astounding British re-engineering – almost a re-imagining – of the German Lorenz SZ42 cyphering machine. It was instrumental in cracking messages that had come from the desk of Hitler himself. Come 1946, and the final clearance of the Bletchley site, Captain Hayward was part of the highly delicate operation to remove two Colossus machines to the Eastcote site. Accompanying them were two of the Tunny machines.
Also involved in this move was a very young engineer called John Cane. He understood at the time that the technology was still perfectly crucial and indeed still so revolutionary that very few could have guessed at the advances. He remembered recently, however, that the Eastcote site was not perhaps as purely secure as it could have been.
‘One of the blocks we installed this marvellous top secret equipment in had a three foot wide hole in the wall,’ he said. ‘And the [local] children used to climb through that hole and pinch our tools.’ Yet John Cane understood very well the importance of that post-war role. ‘The way I looked at it was that we’d done a job, enjoyed ourselves doing it and been quite safe. No-one was dropping bombs on us or anything like that.’8
The site at Eastcote was large enough to allow the space for such technological marvels; but was there the feeling that Commander Edward Travis and the dapper Nigel de Grey would have preferred to have been located at a rather smarter address near Westminster, a walk away from the War Office and the Cabinet? Before the war as mentioned, the Government Code and Cypher School had occupied premises in St James’s Park; by contrast, this pleasant but very faintly boring suburb must have seemed – just in the obvious terms of status – rather a comedown. MI5 and MI6 would never have been based so far away from where the key decisions were being made: surely such a distance left Travis, de Grey and all their colleagues rather out of the loop?
Yet it worked the other way around too. There was in those first few post-war months a continuing tension about who should assume ultimate authority over the work of the codebreakers. MI6 still clearly felt that the department fell under their purview. Travis disagreed: his codebreakers and his worldwide network of secret listeners had to have operational independence to be effective. The department should not be subordinate to MI6 but, rather, should function as its equal. Quite apart from anything else, the new era of computers was changing the very nature of intelligence. There was an entire world to monitor. Any insistence from MI6 that it should in some way perform all analysis on GCHQ’s intelligence – acting in essence as a filter before such intelligence was relayed upwards towards the War Office and the prime minister – might cloud or even distort the meanings of millions of messages.
‘In the brave new world,’ one hand-written Eastcote memo of the time ran, ‘we have got to be prepared to follow trouble around the globe – vultures ready to take wing at the merest indication of corpses.’9
So, as the vultures settled in, in early 1946, some of the senior Eastcote personnel found themselves places to live nearby; there were even quainter spots not too far off, such as the village of Chalfont St Giles.
And after a few weeks spent working with the John Lewis Partnership (in that time of austerity, it is difficult to imagine that these department stores had much vim or colour), Hugh Alexander, the champion chess player and former architect of Hut 8’s great cryptological triumphs, returned to the codebreaking fold. In those anonymous single-storey offices (by some accounts at least bright, nicely carpeted, and with plenty of sunlight pouring through the windows of the long corridors or ‘spurs’), he, together with Frank Birch, Eric Jones, Joan Clarke, Arthur Bonsall and a range of other piercing Bletchley intellects, settled in to survey the new world before them. Within walking distance, housewives hung their washing out, husbands mowed their lawns, and the trains of the Metropolitan Line carried wholly unsuspecting locals to their rather less dramatic jobs in town. The incongruity could not have been more English.
Yet there was another consideration: next to the vast sums that the Americans were pumping into their intelligence structures, the former Bletchley personnel must now have been finding that their own funding was becoming more of a struggle in a country which was to all intents and purposes bankrupt. How could the codebreakers – listening to the creaking strains and stresses of nations around the world, and the thunderous rumbles of looming conflicts – impress upon the new Labour government the fact that the world was now, in some ways, even more dangerous than before, and needed lightning intellects to respond to lightning strikes?