Pamela Rose
Deb and actress plucked from the stage and appointed to a senior position at wartime Bletchley Park
PAMELA ROSE, who has died aged 103, was a pre-war actress who broke off a promising career to become one of the most senior women working at the wartime codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park. Recruited by Frank Birch, head of Naval Section Hut 4, who had himself been an actor and theatre producer during the inter-war years, Pamela Gibson (as she then was) worked alongside fellow Germanspeaking “debs” on the section’s index of data on the German Navy.
The authorities initially recruited debutantes to work at Bletchley because it was believed that young women from privileged establishment families would never betray the Enigma secret. Their task was to write down all of the salient elements of the deciphered enemy messages on file cards.
“They thought that if they took in girls from families they knew something about, they were less likely to be German spies,” Pamela later recalled. “I thought I was going to be dropped in France or something. I was very disappointed when I learnt that my job was copying words on to index cards. I slightly resented giving up the stage, where I was enjoying myself and doing what I really wanted to do.”
With German U-boats attacking the convoys bringing food, fuel and military equipment to Britain from America, the data gathered by Pamela and others was vital in helping to break the German Enigma ciphers used by the U-boat “wolf packs”, so as to report their positions and steer the convoys around them.
There was a card for every U-boat, every German ship, every German officer, and every port and procedure they mentioned, Pamela said. “There was a separate card for each battleship, another for the port it was leaving, another for where it was arriving. We started off in a few shoe boxes in a small wooden hut. It was several shoe boxes by the time I arrived. It expanded to fill three large rooms.”
She took easily to the job and was soon put in charge of the entire index, modestly claiming that this was because she could not type and, at 24, she was the oldest there. The work was vital in breaking the Enigma ciphers which helped to win the Battle of the Atlantic. “Some days it was incredibly exciting,” she recalled. “But mostly it was quite dull.”
By the end of the war, she was in charge of Naval Section’s entire records department and one of the most senior women at Bletchley Park, attending the daily meetings of Naval Section’s departmental heads and privy to the intelligence from the breaking of German and Japanese naval codes, the details of which were available to very few people even within the Admiralty.
Susan Pamela Gibson, always known as Pamela or Pam, was born on November 29 1917 in Knightsbridge, west London, the daughter of Thornley Gibson, a stockbroker, and his wife Elisabeth. At the age of six Pam was sent to Broadstairs Preparatory School as a boarder, promoting a lifetime of self-reliance, and then to Westonbirt School near Tetbury in Gloucestershire.
Her father had been an opera singer before the First World War and her parents would hold what they called PWES (“Pleasant Wednesday Evenings”), during which they would entertain their friends to operatic arias, or German lieder.
“They would ask about 50 friends who would sit on gold chairs,” Pamela recalled. “They would perform, and their musical friends would perform too.” After she left school, they persuaded her to take part in the Season as a debutante, but, already determined to go on the stage rather than marry a “suitable” man, she left early to cycle to Paris where the Moulin Rouge singer Yvette Guilbert, whose portrait had been painted by Toulouse-lautrec, taught her French and cabaret performance.
She then stayed with family friends in Munich, learning German – and oblivious, as she later admitted, to the anti-semitism on show – before returning to London to train as an actress at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art.
She soon acquired a good reputation, playing roles at the Mercury Theatre just off the West End. They included the lead female role of Pegeen Mike opposite Cyril Cusack in The Playboy of the Western World which led the Times critic to single out her performance for praise: “Miss Pamela Gibson rightly refrains from laying on Pegeen tints that would make a conventional heroine of her. She has vigour and a healthy country simplicity, but there is no suggestion of any innate superiority to her surroundings.”
At the start of the war, she joined the Entertainments National Service Association (Ensa), performing for the troops and in early 1942 was “thrilled” to be offered her first West End role in the play
at the Aldwych Theatre, but “a rather interfering Godmother” intervened.
She wrote to Pamela saying that while “she was sure I was doing splendid work entertaining the troops, she knew a girl who had just gone to a very secret place and was doing fascinating work and they needed people with languages. That made me feel I was fiddling while Rome burnt.”
She was interviewed at the Admiralty by Birch, a prolific actor renowned for an infamously risqué 1931 performance as Widow Twankey in Aladdin at the Hammersmith Lyric, and told him about the offer of the West End part.
“He gave me several tests and he said at the end: ‘Well I suppose we could offer you a job’ and I said: ‘Well you know about the stage. What would you do if you were me?’ and he said: ‘Well the stage can wait, the war can’t.’ So I went to Bletchley.”
Despite the often tedious nature of the job, Pamela and her colleagues, who included Sarah Norton, later Sarah Baring, and Jean Campbell-harris, subsequently Baroness Trumpington, went out of their way to have fun. Pamela herself refused to be housed with local families in a billet, preferring the independence she had enjoyed since she left school, and rented a caravan in a field nearby.
“We gave what we thought were splendid parties,” she said. “We had dances. People would change partners quite a lot. We were rather contained in a way-out place and you could only travel if you managed to get transport, so there was a good deal of changing of partners.”
She also took a full part in Bletchley Park’s thriving amateur dramatic society, which benefited from the presence of a number of professional actors, writers and musicians: that was how she came to meet her husband Jim Rose, an RAF officer who worked in Hut 3 writing intelligence reports on the deciphered German air force messages.
“We had a brilliant chap called Bill Marchant who was deputy head of Hut 3 who was a minor C B Cochrane [the impresario] and created a revue every Christmas,” Wing Commander Jim Rose recalled.
“I wrote a sketch and Pam was acting in it. No one was allowed to go to rehearsals, but at that time I was going to Washington just before Christmas so I was allowed in, and this glorious vision of loveliness stepped down from the stage and said: ‘Your sketch isn’t at all bad.’ ”
Their first date was dinner at the Savoy, during which Jim Rose showed some ingenuity in ensuring that it went ahead, Pamela recalled: “It was very difficult to get a table, so he posed as an Irish peer who he knew was not in London.”
They married in January 1946 and moved to Kensington. Her husband took a job as literary editor of The Observer, but was unhappy at the idea of his wife resuming her pre-war career in the theatre. “He said: ‘If you go back on the stage, you’ll be going out to work just as I am coming in.’ So, I gave up acting.
“I wanted to spend my life with Jim and I thought, you can’t have everything. I doubt I would’ve thought like that now, but one is conditioned by the way others think and I was a product of my time.”
After the birth of their two children, her husband became founder-director of the International Press Institute in Zurich, and the family spent most of the 1950s in Switzerland.
When they returned to London in the early 1960s, Pamela Rose became a school counsellor at a secondary school in Paddington, looking after the welfare of children whose parents had arrived from the Caribbean as part of the so-called Windrush generation.
She retired at 60 and became a trustee of the NSPCC, serving as vice-chairman (1988-93), before going on to become chairman of the Stroke Association.
In the late 1990s, after the truth about what happened at Bletchley Park became known, Pamela and her husband gave interviews for the Channel Four television series Station X, revealing for the first time what they had done. Jim Rose died in May 1999, a few months after the series aired.
Pamela Rose then finally returned to the stage, following what she laughingly described as the longest period of “resting” in theatre history, and in 2002 was cast by Sir Peter Hall as Lady Jedburgh in Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan at the Theatre Royal, Bath, alongside Vanessa Redgrave and Googie Withers.
“It was wonderful to get back on the stage after 60 years,” she said. “Acting helped me get over losing Jim. I loved being on the stage. It was terrifying, but great fun. I would have continued acting if it wasn’t for my poor sight. I am an exhibitionist and I think that helps in old age.”
She is survived by a son and a daughter.
Pamela Rose, born November 29 1917, died October 17 2021